The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories

by Diane Awerbuck

  His father stands there watching him.

  Doron writhes.

  Hubert says: ‘This war will be fought even in our own homes. It will be unlike anything the world has ever seen.’

  The Embrace

  Bronwyn Douman

  I woke up that day and I was feeling worried about something. But I can’t say what it was – I just had this feeling, you know. That feeling you get when something bad is going to happen. But I freed myself from those thoughts – and I went down on my knees and prayed, and I said, Liewe Vader, please protect me.

  I rode the train, do you remember? You still sat in first class and I couldn’t, so I sat in third. You wanted to pretend to be white, because your skin was a few shades lighter than mine. The European people mos thought you were a white man. But that was during the apartheid jare – now a thing of the past. That day I put on a nice red blouse: Jannie, you know that one, the one that you bought me by the flea market. I had it on with my mother’s beautiful diamond brooch and my white coat, they mos say at work that I keep me like a madam but I like to look nice, I don’t know what’s their problem. Aai, ma daai’s maar hoe mense is.

  When I think back, I can still remember the sound the train was making. I’d never noticed that sound before. But that day, it bothered me. The sound of the train was like a clock, strict tick tock. Tick tock.

  It was so irritating, I thought of something else. Smittie and her dirty jokes; she can really talk a whole lot of crap! But she makes us laugh, aai dai Smittie. She’s different, such a nice girl. I don’t like the smell of this train, I thought that day. It smells like stinkvoete. My mother always used to say to me, no matter how poor you are you should make sure that you are neatly dressed and remember that cleanliness is next to godliness.

  I don’t like to travel third class, you know that, because there are always a lot of people and sometimes you can’t even get a decent seat. I wanted to sit near the entrance so I could get out first, but that seat is broken. Somebody must fix it, I thought. When they came around to check the tickets I told the man that he must get somebody to fix it, but he couldn’t have cared less about it. So I maar just took a seat on the opposite side of the train. The train was not so full that morning, so I could get a seat easy.

  There was a young man sitting opposite me, who kept looking at me. It was like he was watching me, so I turned away. I didn’t want him to think I was the sort of woman who made eyes at men in trains. He got up and came over and sat right next to me and the moment he did that, I knew, hier kom ʼn ding. I just got this warm feeling in my heart and the next minute I felt the pinch of the cold knife against my side. I wanted to shout for help but before I could, his hand was already over my mouth. He breathed here all in my neck and told me to shut up and do as he said or he’d kill me. I tried to stay calm and he didn’t hold me so tight any more. I kept thinking to myself, Would this have happened to me if I’d sat in first class? Then I thought about my mother’s diamond brooch. It was given to my mother by a European man who came to South Africa and fell in love with my mother and so, before he left, he gave her this grand, diamond brooch. I felt so stupid because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be wearing any valuables on me because of the people who rob you so quick on the train, but I forgot that day that I had it on. I can mos think that I can’t parade around with expensive jewellery and not get robbed by skollies.

  Out of the blue, he starts to hold me, almost like he was hugging me but in a different way. Like the way Oom Piet touched a person. So snaaks, man. Do you remember him, Jannie? He mos used to molest Marie’s children. Those children were still so young. I always said if Oom Piet had tried something with me or our children, I’d break his neck.

  This skollie in the train put his hands tight around my waist. I was stuck. He pretended to embrace me because he wanted to distract the other people on the train, so he told me to make it look like we were lovers. That’s the way he held me, like we were lovers. I sommer felt dirty. I felt like a nothing. The worst part was he looked like a nice boy. He was dressed nice, but was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. So he made like he was kissing me on my neck and touched my breast when he tore off the brooch. I was so in shock, all I did was hold my breath.

  Then I remembered. That morning, a few months before. When I couldn’t get all the children’s socks clean. Every time when I was finished with the washing, my hands burned. It felt like the whole world’s responsibilities were resting on my shoulders. I had too much to do. I walked to the washbasin and the next moment, I just collapsed. I couldn’t stop crying. Do you remember that day, Jannie, the day I cried so? You came to stand beside me at the basin. The damp material slipped out of my hands. Then you turned me around and held me tight. I was just overflowing with feelings of hopelessness and you held me tighter. When you held me I felt so at ease, veilig. I could hear your heart beating in your chest. The beat of your heart was so calm, so I started to calm down just listening to it. You knew why I was so heartsore, I didn’t even have to say anything. You just showed me you understood.

  ‘Get up! We moving, antie!’ the skollie said. He made me move with him to the next train carriage when the train stopped. It was full of young people, making a lot of noise, and paying us no attention. He kept the knife against my back and told me to open my bag. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I was like a machine just doing what he told me. He didn’t find anything he wanted to steal in my bag. I begged him to give me the brooch back; I told him it was the only thing I had left of my mother after she died. ‘Shut up!’ he said, ‘I’ll use this knife to cut your throat.’

  I was getting tired of his threats. I wanted to grab that bladdy knife from him and cut his throat, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. When the train doors opened at Bellville Station he walked out like nothing had happened. I was so upset but I didn’t cry. Not at first. I watched the train doors close. From afar, I heard a group of youngsters laughing. Niemand on the train had even stopped to help me. They saw him holding me, and I know I didn’t look like I liked it, but they just sat there and nobody said anything. No one tried to help me. Every one of them just looked at me and turned the other way.

  I was still staring at the train doors; I sat so still I could actually feel the movement of the train shifting my weight from side to side. I had a klier in my throat, that lump you get when you’re so upset and you want to cry but you try to fight back your tears. But I couldn’t fight them. Salty tears rolled down my cheeks. I felt so stupid crying in front of these strangers. In my heart I felt like I wanted to scream and shout and tell them what he’d done to me. But who would have cared enough to listen? Maybe someone, maybe nobody. So I just sat there and stared into the distance, watching the train passing the fields.

  Sometimes I dream about what happened, and in my dream I scream and call out and do everything I should have done in real life. So much was going through my mind. I thought about you, my husband and our children at home. That morning before the train, you and I had a falling out. Do you remember, Jannie? If I had died, I knew you would have carried that guilt around with you your whole life. And I would have died for what? To be on time for a bladdy job. Money can’t be a mother for my children. My children needed me. They were still so young. Ek was bang vir my lewe.

  Ja, Jannie, you weren’t there with me that morning I needed you on the train. But that time in the badkamer with the washing and my tears, you were. You were there, and I was with you.

  All in a Day’s Work

  Wanjiru Koinange

  Raha rolled off the thin mattress and let the dull pain from her uterus carry her onto her hands and knees. Pressing her mouth into her shoulder, she stifled a cry. When the pain passed, she sprung into action. She limped out of the mabati house that she shared with her family and lit the paraffin stove to prepare breakfast. She woke her eldest son up.

  ‘Mugambi, go to Maina’s kiosk and buy me some airtime,’ she said, pressing a ten-shilling coin into her slee
py son’s palm. ‘Hurry. You mustn’t be late for school.’

  She retrieved her old cellphone from under the mattress and switched it on. It cost a hundred shillings to charge the battery at Maina’s kiosk, so she preserved the battery for special occasions and emergencies. As the screen came alive, her son returned with the airtime and she called her midwife.

  ‘Mama Wambui, please come today. The baby is coming,’ she whispered so not to stir her sleeping husband. Mama Wambui was filling in for a nurse at Pumwani Maternity Hospital so she was only available to assist Raha with her delivery over her lunch hour.

  ‘Make sure you have my money when I come. No more credit!’ the midwife instructed before the line got disconnected and the Safaricom operator notified Raha that she had reached her call limit.

  The morning went by in a haze as Raha blocked out all feeling below her neck. Mugambi got his siblings into their school uniforms while she rationed porridge into three metal cups and handed one to each of them. She filled a fourth cup to the brim, placed it by her sleeping husband and shook him gently. He grunted and rolled over. She hoped that he would be gone before she got back from walking the children to school. Raha and her husband had a silent covenant: he only discovered that Raha was pregnant when her belly began to bulge, and he discovered she was not when he came home to find their little person nestled next to her.

  Mugambi carried his youngest sister as Raha walked with them. They walked past their neighbours, emerging from their tin homes to begin their morning rituals as Raha had done a few moments ago. When they got to a huge, garbage-filled gully, Mugambi waited patiently for his mother to struggle across on the slippery rocks that served as a bridge. She explained to Mugambi that she would be unable walk them home after school and that he would need to be extra-careful as he crossed the busy highways. Her son nodded dutifully and asked where his new brother or sister would sleep.

  ‘Nenda! You have too many questions today,’ was Raha’s response as she shooed her three children off through the school gate and perched her youngest on her hip. Mugambi wrapped his skinny arms around his mother’s bloated body and ran off.

  Before she returned home, she passed by the hair salon where she occasionally worked as a shampoo girl, to inform her employer that her baby was coming.

  ‘You just go on giving birth. There are many girls who are hungry for this work,’ her boss kept her eyes on the recycled weave she was sewing on to a client’s head. Raha considered putting in an hour’s work before the baby came but she was sure she would never get her job back if she went into labour while at work. So she smiled politely and continued her slow journey home, stopping often to let the pain swoop past.

  She passed by Maina’s to buy a razor blade for the umbilical cord and when she got home, she began to prepare the evening meal, certain that she would be unable to do so post-delivery. Her water broke as she hung her children’s school uniforms out to dry, but she was relieved that they now had a clean set. As she poured a cup of diluted milk into her youngest’s bottle, she glanced at the clock, panicked by the increased pressure of life emerging from within her.

  The midwife was coming in just over an hour. Her baby was coming now.

  She laid her youngest down to sleep, pulled the tin door shut, and spread a sheet of polythene out on the floor next to her sleeping child. She knelt down with her knees spread over the polythene bag, and braced herself until the shrill cry of her newborn child signalled that it was over. She wrapped the child in a sheet and waited, paralysed by the miracle of birth.

  The midwife arrived to find Raha sitting on the floor in a pool of afterbirth and she sucked her teeth in disgust. ‘You should have told me you’d already done it. I would not have come.’ She pushed the door open and began to boil some water. ‘You must still pay me now that I am here. I don’t want your stories.’ Raha sat stoically watching the woman move swiftly around her, cleaning this and sterilising that. She checked the time.

  She checked the time on her phone every minute until her screen read: Battery empty.

  Auschwitzland

  Dina Segal

  I took a Valium on the plane to Poland. I had run into an old friend at the airport and he gave it to me. I hadn’t planned on taking it, until I heard the girl next to me say to her neighbour, ‘So, do think it’ll be like, you know, like sad?’

  ‘I guess so. Do you like my hair like this?’ her neighbour replied.

  I recognised them both from the barbeque at the rabbi’s house in Johannesburg a few weeks before. It had been an opportunity for all the people going on the tour to meet and get to know one another. I had sat on my own on a plastic chair, picking at a piece of chicken. The plastic fork kept bending backwards and the paper plate folding, spilling coleslaw onto my knee. Everyone seemed to know one another, and the groups of girls would squeal with delight and kiss the air around one another’s cheeks, looking over their shoulders to see who was watching. The guys were a bit more awkward, shaking hands and standing in tense circles, holding their Polystyrene cups.

  The group had flown to Tel Aviv together, and spent the morning in Jerusalem before returning to the airport to fly to Warsaw. The plane landed in Poland, but everything was a bit blurry. The Valium was stronger than I expected. It was Sunday morning. We were going to be travelling around the country for five days, visiting sites of genocide and death. We would return to Israel in time for Shabbat. The tour had been organised by a global Jewish organisation.

  We waited at the baggage claim. I had a small backpack with enough supplies to last me five days. The others eyed me as I stood back while they lugged giant suitcases off the conveyor belt. I hadn’t realised that you needed to match your shoes to your handbag to enter Auschwitz, or choose the perfect outfit to visit mass graves hidden in fairytale forests.

  ‘We’re just waiting for yours now,’ said the rebbetzin accompanying us. Her husband, a rabbi who worked for the Johannesburg branch of the organisation offering the tour, was our chaperone. I pointed to the pack on my back, and told her that it was my luggage. The rebbetzin looked shocked. How would I survive five days in Poland without my ghd hair iron and a wide selection of clothing?

  Outside the airport we boarded a shiny black bus and were introduced to our tour guide, Avi. He was tall and blonde, with a British accent. ‘Welcome, South Africans. We’re just waiting for the other group,’ he told us. We were being joined by a group of American college students. They arrived after fifteen minutes. As the fourteen women and two men boarded the bus, we were assaulted by loud American twangs and too much perfume. The South African guys surreptitiously examined the girls as they boarded.

  Before I left I went to see my grandmother, who had been born in Poland. She came to South Africa in 1936, before the war. Most of her family were not so lucky.

  ‘Don’t go there,’ she had said. ‘Every step you take you’ll be walking on the blood of my family.’ I defied her wishes, but her ominous warning, along with the knowledge acquired during my years of schooling and the stories and images the very word raised in my mind, made me nervous. How would an extended tour to sites of the genocide and murder of my ancestors affect me?

  My first shock was at the mild beauty of so many of the places we saw. I was amazed to see that Poland has summer, with trees and leaves and birds and colourful flowers. I was expecting the snowy black and white expanses of Schindler’s List, and every photo in every holocaust museum I have visited.

  In the public toilets at Auschwitz, I stood washing my hands, not wanting to go outside. We had driven by the tall guard towers and seen the train tracks leading into the camp, designed to look like they continued into the distance, to fool the passengers into thinking that this wasn’t their final destination.

  It was sunny outside the window and there was a cool breeze. Two of the American girls were next to me at the basins. ‘Oh, my Gawd. Your hair looks wunnerful.’

  ‘Really? I totally overslept and just threw on this bandanna.’ She adju
sted it in the mirror, flirting with herself. ‘We stayed out so late drinking last night. It was really fun.’

  This conversation finally propelled me outside. We walked along the platform and I was able to see the notorious train tracks up close. I bent down and picked up a stone and slipped it in my pocket.

  We walked across a green field to some ponds and stopped at the edge of one of them. They were populated by luminous frogs, camouflaged by the matching brightness of the algae in the water. There must have been hundreds of them and their croaking filled the air, drowning out all other sounds. If I really concentrated on them, I could almost ignore the brick chimney looming in the distance. Their natural beauty, the grace in their movements which made them visible for a moment until they disappeared into the green once again, distracted me from the forest of birch trees behind me that gave this place its name: Birkenau.

  I was brought back to reality as Avi explained that these ponds were artificial. A place was needed to dump the ashes from the crematorium. This pond was built to receive these remains.

  Avi continued to describe the events that took place here, as we walked through to the other half of the camp, Auschwitz. ‘There we were stripped of our clothing; here the famous Dr Mengele separated us from our parents, our children. Here we were sent to be deloused.’ He pointed and gestured as he spoke, describing events as he had been all along, his use of pronouns forcing us to identify with the victims.

  ‘The ends justify the means,’ a friend of mine insisted when I saw her in Israel the next week and described the propagandistic techniques Avi used in his narration. She worked for the Jerusalem branch of the organisation. ‘When you think about the spiritual holocaust of intermarriage that plagues us today, you realise that we’re losing more souls than we did in World War Two. So if he could get those students to have a sense of their Jewish identity by whatever means, then he must. Then they can go to their colleges and get involved in Israel advocacy.’