The Madonna of Excelsior (29 page)

“I'll wait until he's free,” said Viliki, raising his voice so that it would sneak into Adam de Vries's office.

“Is that Viliki?” shouted Adam de Vries from his office. “Tell him I'll be with him just now.”

Viliki contemplated the portrait on the wall. The old codger was stern-faced. And pensive. Yet Viliki imagined him bursting into laughter. A long self-fulfilled laughter. Until tears ran down
the furrows of his salty face. A laughter of sorrow. But the ancestor remained unmoved. And stared as he had been staring over the years.

A young Afrikaner woman in blue denim jeans and her son of about four, walked out of Adam de Vries's office. She greeted Viliki in the polite singsong voice of Basotho women, “Dumelang.” Viliki responded, “Dumela le wena, mme.” Greetings to you too, mother.

In Sesotho, every woman is “mother”. Even when she is younger than your younger sister.

“You can come in now, Viliki,” shouted Adam de Vries.

Viliki looked at the schoolmarm and gave her a triumphant smirk. She frowned and went back to pounding the keys of the old Remington typewriter. He walked into the office. Adam de Vries pointed him to a chair.

“Divorce,” he said. “I don't know what is happening with young people these days. They marry today, and the next day they part. I hate handling divorce cases, especially when the custody of children is involved.”

“I thought lawyers didn't get their personal feelings mixed up with business,” said Viliki.

“Lawyers are human beings too.”

“Lawyers have no scruples, Meneer. They defend anyone who can pay.”

“A person is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law, Viliki,” explained Adam de Vries. “When a lawyer takes your case, at that stage you are innocent. Only a court of law can determine otherwise. And it does so only after the case.”

Viliki had no answer for this. Somehow it did not sound right. But Adam de Vries had a way of twisting things so that he did not know how to respond. He decided to be wicked. To provoke him about his professed role in the anti-apartheid struggle.

“Hey Meneer, at your congress in Marquard so many years ago, what made you suggest that your people should negotiate with the heathens?”

“I was merely quoting the Bible when I talked of heathens,” said Adam de Vries defensively. “You are not going to take me to the Human Rights Commission for racism, are you?”

“Well,” said Viliki light-heartedly, “I can call them heathens too as they kicked me out of my own Movement. But what I want to know is, what created your doubts about apartheid?”

“I think they had their genesis in the Immorality Act case of 1971,” said Adam de Vries. “I began to question some of our laws.”

Adam de Vries had boasted about his old cases to Viliki before. Including the case of the Excelsior 19. And Viliki did not mind when this case was discussed, even though his mother had been one of the accused. He even joked that had it not been for the capers of those days, he would not have had a sister as beautiful as Popi.

It was obvious to Viliki that Adam de Vries was a bored man. He looked back with nostalgia to the days when he handled some of the most exciting cases of Excelsior. Today most of his business involved what he called chamber work, drawing up wills and transfer deeds. A little bit of conveyancing here; a little bit of notarial work there. Once in a while, the odd divorce case, for which he normally briefed advocates in Bloemfontein. The days of courtroom drama were gone. He could only relive them in his stories to Viliki.

“Yes, that was the greatest case of all time,” said Adam de Vries. “But I tell you, Viliki, those women were bribed to frame the white men.”

“And I suppose their children made themselves,” said Viliki, without any enthusiasm. He had heard this version of the Excelsior 19 case so many times that he was prepared to let it pass.

“But I tell you, we were ready for them,” continued Adam de Vries, ignoring Viliki's comment. “We were going to win that case. It was going to be very bad for the country. That was why John Vorster instructed Percy Yutar to withdraw the case.”

“You say as a result of this case, you began to question your
laws,” said Viliki, “but you remained in the party for the next thirty years. Why?”

“To change it from within. People like de Klerk and I changed the National Party from within. That is why today the National Party is the party that brought about the new dispensation in South Africa.”

Viliki laughed for a long time. Until Adam de Vries got irritated.

“So it's really you who brought us this freedom we are enjoying today?” asked Viliki, still laughing. “All this time we thought it was the Movement and the other organisations. What were we doing fighting for freedom in the underground when you and de Klerk were here all along to free us?”

“Listen,” said Adam de Vries, not bothering to hide his annoyance, “I am busy. I cannot sit here all day listening to your idle talk. Don't you have any work to do at the council?”

“You know, Meneer,” said Viliki as he made to go, “these days it is very difficult to find a white person who ever supported apartheid.”

We watched Viliki walk out of Adam de Vries's office. We knew that whenever he was bored, whenever he had had his fill of the Seller of Songs' music that tingled in his veins, making his body hot to the point of explosion, he sauntered off to Adam de Vries's office in town. We wondered what it was that had drawn these two together. At least Popi and Lizette de Vries were drawn together by their work. But Viliki and Adam de Vries?

When the inquisitive quizzed him about it, Viliki would only say, “He is a nice guy, although a white man will always be a white man.”

The likes of Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit said that Adam de Vries was Viliki's puppet. It was not enough that his party had sold out the Afrikaner; Adam de Vries was now dancing to the tune of the blacks who were taking the country down the sewer. Otherwise what would an Afrikaner lawyer have in common with an unschooled township boy?

The people of the Movement said de Vries was the puppeteer
and Viliki the puppet. The Pule Siblings no longer represented the interests of the people of Mahlatswetsa Location in the council chamber, but those of the rich Afrikaners of Excelsior.

We, on the other hand, were not bothered by these friendships. We put them down to the old love affair between black people and Afrikaners that the English found so irritating. Even at the height of apartheid, blacks preferred dealing with Afrikaners to the English-speaking South Africans. The English, common wisdom stated, were hypocrites. They laughed with you, but immediately you turned, they stabbed you in the back. The Afrikaner, on the other hand, was honest. When he hated you, he showed you at once. He did not pretend to like you. If he hated blacks, he said so publicly. So, when you dealt with him, you knew who you were dealing with. When he smiled, you knew he was genuine. One could never trust the smile of an Englishman.

We never questioned what informed these generalisations.

V
ILIKI WALKED
aimlessly down the main street of Excelsior, which was really the only street of note in the town. The rest of the streets were lined with residential houses. The street was bustling with excited people. There was a carnival atmosphere as men, women and children walked from one shop to the next with plastic bags full of groceries. Other people gathered at the Greek café, which was really a Portuguese café, to treat themselves to Russian sausages and chips.

It was payday in Excelsior. The aged who were on old-age pensions had received their monthly grants. And their children and grandchildren were out to spend the money on both necessities and luxuries. Payday always caused such excitement. Even children knew when it was payday, because most families depended on the money that the government gave to the aged for being old. The most fortunate families were those that had one or two mentally or physically disabled members. Their disability grants, paid on the same day as the old-age pensions, fed entire families.

Viliki became part of the buzz of excitement, joining some friends from Mahlatswetsa Location who wanted to have a few beers at the off-sales liquor outlet, or bottle store, adjacent to the only hotel in town. They bought the beers and sat on the window ledge outside the bottle store, as was the custom. The owner allowed them to sit on the inside window sill in front of the counter when the weather was not conducive to imbibing outdoors.

They watched as Afrikaner men and women walked in and out of the pub at the hotel. Viliki and his friends had never been inside that pub. The thought never even entered their heads to drink there. It was the domain of the Afrikaners of Excelsior. And everyone left it at that.

Viliki saw Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit climb out of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, singing boisterously. Jacomina followed, reprimanding them for making too much noise. They only laughed at her and sang even louder, dancing clownishly around her as they walked into the pub.

Viliki had not seen Johannes Smit for quite some time. Since the time he had burst into the council chamber to complain about the increase in rates a year ago. To cheers of derision from the Movement council members and of admiration from Tjaart Cronje, and to the bemusement of the National Party members, he had stood up in the gallery, and had shouted out of turn, “I am a farmer! I feed South Africa! The very Mandelas and Mbekis cannot survive without me!”

Viliki sipped his beer from the one-litre bottle and wondered why people like Tjaart Cronje and Johannes Smit were so angry. Were people like Viliki, Popi and Niki not the ones who should be angry? Were they not entitled even to a shred of anger? Why should the Afrikaner hoard all the anger?

S
TREET SIGNS INDICATE
that this is a crossroad. He pulls the two-wheeled unhooded cart across the crimson soil like a rickshaw man. His red hair has been tied into a big bun that hangs like a cap over his face. It is a small delicate face connected by a thick neck to a small delicate body clad in golden-yellow overalls. His grey boots have patches of red from the soil. His body is bent slightly forward from the weight of the cart. He pulls it among golden-yellow sunflowers. On the cart sits a brown Mother Mary with a brown Baby Jesus in her arms. She looks like a nun in a blue veil. Three giant candles burn in the cart: one in front, two at the back. A white giant star of Bethlehem spreads its white light between the puller of the cart and its riders. Sunflowers flourish on the crimson soil. Three giant sunflowers grow out of the blue and white sky.

Kersfees in die Karretjie. Xmas in the Small Cart. By: Father Frans Claer-houut
. Popi read the bottom of the postcard and laughed. She had never noticed before that they had misspelt the trinity's name. They had added an extra
u
, which served him right, as he had mastered the art of distorting everything. Houses. People. Donkeys. Rickshaws. Sunflowers and cosmos. Even holy personages
like Jesus and Mary. It was poetic justice that the printer had distorted his name too. A man who could be possessed by such beautiful madness that he placed road signs in the middle of a sunflower field deserved to have his name distorted.

It was Christmas in Excelsior, too. Popi had taken out her exercise book to look at the postcards. She wondered if the trinity would be painting on Christmas Day. Maybe the picture on the postcard was created on Christmas Day. She remembered her last visit to the trinity's studio many years ago. As a fourteen-year-old freckled girl. Before she became a woman of thirty whose tall slender frame was burdened with anger. She felt an urge to go to the mission house in Tweespruit to see him again. To bathe her troubled soul in the colourful canvases that surrounded him.

Christmas had lost the festive aura it used to have when she was a little girl. Those days, girls wore their new taffeta dresses and went to show off at church in the morning. Boys also dressed up in colourful new shirts, even when the pants of those whose parents could not afford new outfits were the old Sunday pants. Christ-mases were feasting days. Families used to cook special meals. After a big lunch of rice, chicken, cabbage, beetroot, tomato and onion gravy, jelly and custard, and home-baked hard cakes with ginger beer, the children would take a songful stroll to the houses of white people in town. There they would stand at the gate of each house and ask for a “Christmas Box.” The white folk would send their children or maids to the gate with sweets and cookies. Late in the afternoon the children would sing their way back to Mahlatswetsa Location, where they would divide the spoils amongst themselves.

But these days, Christmas had lost its lustre. Children did not seem to care any more. They spent the whole day in their old clothes. Parents still maintained the tradition of buying new clothes. But the children refused to wear them on Christmas Day. They kept them in their boxes to wear during the year when no one would know they had been bought for Christmas.