Come Sunday: A Novel (34 page)

It was a punishable offense to go snooping about in other people’s business, corporal if the snooping took you to the off-limits quarters of black people. There were laws governing the freedom of movement of people between white and black neighborhoods, and I felt I was breaking every one of them when I walked around Beauty’s room lightly touching each object: lamp, tin cup, television. Her kitchen was a table with a basin, a jug, four stacked cans of beans, and a bread box. I opened the lid and in it, upended, was half a loaf of stale brown bread.

Give us this day our daily bread
. Isn’t that what Beauty had recited as she was driven off in the police van? Had she meant
this
bread? Flipped like a shiny coin, the thought spiraled wildly. Heads or tails? I held my breath and picked up the loaf. Immediately I saw the thing that convinced me that Beauty’s last sentence had not been a prayer but an instruction, for hidden in the gouged-out center of the loaf was a small glass vial.

A rose wants picking, as does a scab or a secret—you cannot help it—which is why, when my mother surged into the tiny room, I was prying from its yeasty bed the little bottle.

“Put that down! PUT THAT DOWN!”

I looked at her, bewildered.

“What in God’s name do you think you are doing, Elizabeth!” she demanded, snatching from me the bottle and then the loaf. “Did you open it?” she yelled, but I was too busy staring at the spectacle of madness before me. “DID YOU OPEN IT?”

“No,” I bleated, but she asked again and a hundred times more. “I didn’t, Ma, I swear.”

After replacing the bottle and the bread in the bread box, she yanked me by the wrist outside and around to the back of the
kaia
where the faucet was. Turning it on full blast, she held my hands beneath the torrent, and rubbed and rubbed with her nightgown till we were both soaked.

So aghast was I by my mother’s uncharacteristic show of emotion and so embarrassed that I had been caught in the unpardonable act of
riffling through someone else’s private belongings that I began to cry. Not to mention the matter of a secret I had discovered, a secret I had been inches away from tasting.

“Don’t you ever, ever, take things that don’t belong to you,” she scolded.

“But I wasn’t—”

“Or touch anything that doesn’t belong to you. And don’t you ever, ever go back in there again! Do you hear me?” I nodded. “I said, do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

She shooed me back into my bedroom and then, trembly and psychotic, went to the bathroom to throw up.

AND HERE I AM AGAIN, touching things that don’t belong to me. I walk back out of Susannah’s
kaia
into the pea soup of the Cape autumn. Around the back of the hut is a double sink with a cold-water tap. A few paces away is the outhouse. I open the door and see the toilet on a wooden box and the doll doily covering the spare roll. The peacocks flutter out of my way when I step back outside. Parading royally down the driveway, they make a sharp right and head for the gap in the fence that divides this property from the neighbor’s.

The bush covering the hillside of the Bredenkamps’ property is singing with insects, a kettle boiling. The hoopoe birds call to one another from telephone poles, and the aroma of my youth, the smell of
renosterveldt
and dung, rises up from the soil. The memories rise up too—my grandmother’s front porch, knitting needles, and the sharp smell of rooibos tea. Only the ghosts slumber.

After heading up the hill to the main house, I go toward the back door like one who has been coming here for years. Susannah looks up from her rosebush and I say, “I’ll take it,” before she asks.

“A hundred rand a night sound fair to you? That includes breakfast,” she asks. “Right, then,” she says, seeing my nod, “Delia will give it a dust and put new sheets on the bed. She will also stock the shelves
with a few dishes and pots and cutlery, and we’ll move in the coffee machine and the electric heater so you won’t freeze to death in the evenings. And don’t worry about the outhouse—Etienne treated it the other day. The only thing is, you will have to take showers in the main house. And you can do that whenever it suits you, except on Sunday mornings, which is when Mother and I go to church and Etienne goes off to the bowling green.”

We drink tea in her kitchen and Susannah asks about living in Hawaii, tells how most of her friends have moved to Canada and Australia. A few luckier ones have moved to Florida.

“My sons are thinking of emigrating and I won’t stop them. It is harder for the younger ones who are just starting out. I keep reminding Etienne that we left when we were their age; we moved to Singapore during the construction boom and Etienne made an indecent sum of money. But we were desperately unhappy and homesick and moved back here after four years. You never know, it might be the same for the boys. Bloom where you are planted, that’s the most important thing, don’t you think?”

“It certainly looks as if that is what you and your family are doing here,” I muse.

“I don’t know if one could call it blooming, but we are certainly planted,” Susannah says. “You are planted in Hawaii, then, or are your roots still here?” It is an unfair question, and instead of answering I look at my watch. If I am to make it to the Perlemoen Hotel, where I checked in for just one night, get my luggage, and make it back here before being charged for another night, I must hurry.

“Where’s your car?” she asks when she escorts me out the front door.

Rental cars are for people with budgets; budgets are for people with money. I don’t say this but rather, “I took the bus most of the way and walked the rest.”

“Well, it’s better than those wretched taxis. Etienne calls them kamikaze taxis. But you shouldn’t walk these parts alone, you know. There have been several incidents recently.” I thank my new landlady, encircled by her panting, chubby dogs, and head down her driveway. I
turn back before the tall pine trees obstruct the view of her house, and she waves imperially once again. I step into the shade of the trees and head off to the bus stop.

HOTEL RATES ARE HIGH in Paarl’s city limits, even for a crusty, outdated relic like the Perlemoen Hotel. I am eager to check out and make my way back to the Bredenkamps’ home on the town’s outskirts. It is not quite two miles from the bus stop to the Bredenkamps’ cottage, but it is all uphill and there is no break from the biting wind once I turn onto the main road. The two-way street is wide. Sidewalks must only exist in America; here gravel flanks the road, quickly wearing holes in children’s Sunday shoes. The traffic is occasional and only a few pedestrians are out this afternoon. A woman in a white robe with blue trim, the uniform of the African Zion Christians, smiles at me and I bid her
“Molo mfazi”
as we pass each other. Farther along, on the other side of the street where it crooks like a fisherman’s hook, is an African boy, not more than ten. He is running, one hand on the raised-wire steering wheel of his homemade car, his breath smoky-cold. He doesn’t see me stop for a rest, switching my suitcase to the other hand. My arms, once accustomed to hoisting Cleo’s thirty-pound frame, have turned to glue.

I have not gone more than a mile when a pickup truck slows down next to me and what looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a tan and a safari suit asks,
“Skies tog, het jy help noodig?”
I tell him no, I don’t need help, that I am just walking up the hill to the Bredenkamps’ place. And he switches quickly to English, heavily accented, and says, “Hop in, let me give you a ride. Too bloody cold to be walking about.” He leans over and pushes open the passenger door. I heave my suitcase into the flatbed and get in, only to hear my mother say, You don’t get in the cars of people you don’t know. Least of all men.

“Karel van der Walt,” he says, rolling his
r
’s and shaking my hand with vigor. His heavy Malmesbury
bry
gives him away as a transplant from the Swartlands. “Pleased to know you.”

“Elizabeth Spenser,” I say, trying not to stare at his front tooth that is no longer there.

He grinds the truck into first gear and it lurches up the hill obediently.

“So you are family of Susannah and them?”

“No, I am renting their cottage.”

“You not from here?” And then he apologizes, “Sorry for my questions.”

“I used to be, but now I live in Hawaii.”

He whistles, “
Jislike! Hawaii Five-O
! You hula-dance?”

“No.” I smile.

“
Ja
. I suppose so. Just like all the foreigners think we have lions and elephants in a
kraal
in our backyards.”

He slows, rolls down his window, and thrusts his hand out to indicate his intention to turn. “You can just drop me off here,” I say. “I can walk up the driveway.”

“No, I take you all the way,” he insists, and we bounce up Susannah’s potholed driveway till we are greeted by the yapping sausages.

Karel jumps out and retrieves my suitcase before I can get to it, and I hear him belt out, “Stupid bloody animals of yours, Etienne; when you going to make
lekker
kebobs out of them?”

Etienne Bredenkamp, a baobab of a man, lumbers toward the car. His immense torso is carried by trunklike legs and his arms are up shading his eyes from the sun.

“Quiet, hounds,” he admonishes, and the yapping miraculously stops. To the kind knight of the rusty pickup he says, “Not until your wife makes mincemeat out of you, van der Walt, which I hear from the villagers will be pretty soon!”

“
Ag
, no need to get personal!” Karel chortles, and they shake hands. Etienne Bredenkamp bends down and says in his perfectly clipped upper-class accent, “And who, may I be so bold as to inquire, are you?”

Before I can answer, Karel says, “
Jislike
, man, she’s your new tenant, all the way from Hawaii Five-O—”

“Abbe Spenser,” I interrupt. “Your wife is expecting me, I believe.”

“Yes, of course,” he says, and extends his hand, which smothers
mine. “Etienne Bredenkamp at your service. Please come in. You too, Karel, only if you promise not to eat my dogs.”

“No, I’m on my way to the shop to pick up a lemon tart for Lavinia—she’s having the preacher over for tea.”

“I am glad to see you have reformed,” says Etienne.

“She says if I am not going to church, she is bringing the church to me.”

“Heard you scared off a couple of burglars from the Venters’ place last week? Well done, lad.” Aside, Etienne explains to me that Karel heads the neighborhood watch association.

“Those two scallywags didn’t scare easily, man! Tell the truth, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them.” He gets in his pickup, leans out the window, and says, “Good luck, Miss Hula,” and then, to Etienne, “Give my best to Susannah,” and he is gone with a cloud of dust following him.

“Please, this way,” Etienne says, and he ushers me through the front door and into the sitting room, which looks as though it has been transplanted from a castle. Filled with antique furniture and pictures hanging in gilded frames, the room is host to half a dozen cats arranged around a paraffin heater. I am afraid to sit in one of the Queen Anne armchairs, so I stand awkwardly.

“Susannah is resting at the moment. She has not been feeling up to snuff this afternoon, I am afraid.” He goes off to call her and I walk to one olive-green wall hosting a series of oil paintings of First World War airplanes. They are all originals, Allied planes flying between golden clouds. One picture captures the triumphant swoop of a plane emerging from a cloud, while below, in the bottom right-hand corner, a fireball trailing a dark line of smoke hurtles downward.

“My grandfather fought in the Royal Air Force,” Etienne says, returning. “He was missing in action, but, I am afraid, his love of airplanes lives on in me.”

“These are quite striking,” I say. “I can’t make out the artist.”

“Yours truly,” he says. “Painted more than thirty years ago. Before I realized I had to make a living, and canvases and paintbrushes weren’t the tools with which one typically accomplishes that.”

“He could have made a living at it,” says Susannah, sweeping into the room wearing a persimmon and black kaftan and cooling herself with a sandalwood fan even though it can’t be more than sixty degrees inside. “But he thought an architect would impress my father more than a struggling artist.”

“Well, now that you have had a brief lecture in the history of the Bredenkamps, my dear,” Etienne says, “let me officially welcome you to this our humble abode. You are going to have to put up with our rather eccentric ways—”

“Not to mention my menopausal moods,” interjects Susannah.

“—but we trust your stay will be a good one.” I half expect him to give a small bow, and as I say a quiet thank-you, Mrs. du Toit hobbles into the room from the adjoining dining room and says, “Etienne, my pipes have stopped working again.”

“Good Lord, Mother, no!” he says in mock horror, and he and Susannah snicker.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, grow up! I’m talking about my
water
pipes,” she barks, shaking her cane at him. They both crack up, Etienne with deep guffaws and Susannah snorting through her nose.