The Madonna of Excelsior (34 page)

“You know that I do not need a man in my life, Niki.”

Niki shook her head pityingly.

“I need something more substantial than a man to fill the gaping hole in my heart,” added Popi.

“Sometimes I think you miss being a town councillor,” said Niki.

“I do not miss being a town councillor. The only thing I am sorry about is that I left the council before we could have a festival of our own in Excelsior. And I miss running the library. Of course I can still go there to borrow books like any other patron.”

“Anyway, it is a useless council. All they know is how to eat our money.”

Popi laughed and asked how her mother knew anything about that.

“People talk,” said Niki. “Maria and Mmampe always come with strange stories of how they eat. They say now the spout of the kettle is facing their direction. It is their turn to eat. They say my children were foolish not to eat when the spout of the kettle was facing in their direction.”

“At least as a coloured person I can complain that in the old apartheid days I was not white enough, and now in the new dispensation I am not black enough,” said Popi jokingly. “What about you, Niki? You are black enough, but you are not one of those who eat. What is your excuse?”

Niki laughed. For the first time in many years. She laughed for a very long time. Popi just stood there in amazement. She had not thought her joke was all that funny. Niki laughed until tears ran
from her eyes and disappeared into the cracks of her face. Popi was getting worried.

“Are you all right, Niki?” she asked.

“Oh, Popi!” cried Niki. “I am so happy that at last you are so free of shame about being coloured that you can even make a joke about it.”

“My shame went away with my anger, Niki,” said Popi quietly.

“You are free, Popi, and you have made me free too. For a long time, I felt guilty that I had failed you . . . that I had made you coloured! Every time they mocked and insulted you, it ate my heart and increased my guilt.”

“God made me coloured, Niki, not you. You have no business to be guilty about anything.”

Popi and Niki embraced and laughed and cried at the same time. They were not aware of the bakkie that had stopped outside their gate. The roly-poly frame of Johannes Smit rolled out of the bakkie and up to the gate.

“I am sorry to break up this Kodak moment, ladies, but I have an urgent message for Popi,” said Johannes Smit, flashing a broad smile.

The message was that Tjaart Cronje wanted to see Popi. She was taken aback. She couldn't imagine why her mortal enemy would want to see her. The temerity of it all was that he expected her to go to his house.

“He wants to see me, so he must come here,” said Popi. “He cannot just summon me as if he is the baas.”

“He is sick, Popi,” explained Johannes Smit. “Very sick. He wants to talk to you.”

“He wants to make peace with you, Popi,” said Niki. “I think you must go.”

“How do you know he wants to make peace with me?” asked Popi.

“His ancestors are telling him to make peace with you, Popi. You can't go against the wishes of the ancestors.”

Popi laughed and said, “White people don't have ancestors, Niki.”

Niki offered to go with her. But Johannes Smit said Cornelia Cronje would not be pleased to see Niki in her house. Popi said that if her mother was not welcome, then she would not go either. Johannes Smit relented and allowed Niki to accompany her daughter.

Niki sat in the front of the bakkie with Johannes Smit while Popi sat in the back.

“This is a good opportunity to speak with you, Niki,” said Johannes Smit as he drove out of Mahlatswetsa Location. “Why don't you join our mentoring scheme with your bee-keeping project? It could benefit you a lot.”

Niki did not answer.

“I think we must declare a truce,” pleaded Johannes Smit. “We can't live in the past forever. Bygones should be allowed to be bygones, Niki.”

“This is a strange way of asking for forgiveness,” said Niki. “I do not understand all this nonsense about a truce. I don't remember any war between us. You, Johannes Smit, wronged me. You stole my girlhood. And now you talk of a truce?”

It was Johannes Smit's turn to be silent. He held his peace until they reached the Cronje homestead.

He led the two women through the kitchen door, as was the custom. He asked them to wait on a bench while he went to look for Jacomina. Niki's eyes ran around the room. It had not changed. The varnished oak cupboards and the cast-iron pots and pans that hung on the wall were as she remembered them. So were the wooden table and the six heavy wooden chairs in the centre of the room. The antique coal stove was still there. But it was no longer in use. There was a cream-white electric stove and a matching fridge. These were the only new additions.

Jacomina came and led the women to the bedroom, without greeting them. Tjaart Cronje was lying in the antique metal bed. Niki recognised the bed at once. She shivered slightly as she remembered
lying on it. It was possible that Popi had been conceived on that bed. If not in the sunflower fields. Or in the barn. The white bed still looked like a hospital bed to her. And the fact that a gaunt Tjaart was lying in it, covered with a white sheet, enhanced its hospitalness. The atmosphere in the room reeked of a hospital.

“Niki, you came too?” said Tjaart Cronje, his eyes brightening. “You are lucky my mother is at the butchery. Otherwise you would not leave this house alive.”

Then he laughed weakly at his own joke. No one else laughed. Jacomina left the room. Johannes Smit gestured to Niki that they too should leave. But she did not move. Her eyes were fixed on the framed portrait on the wall. A dashing Stephanus Cronje, frozen in a perpetual state of youthfulness. Johannes Smit gently took Niki's arm and led her out. Popi's eyes remained fixed on the portrait.

“I wish you had known him, Popi,” said Tjaart Cronje in a quivering voice.

“Known him?” asked Popi.

“Our father,” responded Tjaart Cronje. “He was not a bad man.”

“
Your
father.”

“Our
father. Surely you know that by now.”

“I have heard whispers.”

There was an uneasy silence for a while. Then Tjaart Cronje made some small talk about their days on the council. He did not talk about their fights. He recalled only some of the funny moments when the joke had been on him. Self-deprecating moments. Soon Popi was laughing. An uneasy kind of laughter. After a while, Tjaart Cronje said he was tired and wanted to sleep. He thanked her for coming. But as she was about to walk out of the door, he called her back.

“I have a little present for you,” he said, giving her a container of Immac hair remover. “It is a cream that will make your legs smooth.”

For a moment, anger flashed across Popi's face. Her hand did not move to take the insensitive gift from his shaking hand. But
when she saw the earnestness of his face, she took it and said, “I don't shave my legs, Tjaart.”

“You are a beautiful woman, Popi. Very beautiful. That cream is going to enhance the beauty of your long legs,” he said.

Popi smiled and whispered, “I do not shave my legs, Tjaart.”

“But you must,” cried Tjaart Cronje. “You are a lady. A beautiful lady.”

Popi was blushing all over. No one outside Niki and Viliki had ever called her beautiful before. At least, not to her face. Apparently she never knew how we used to gossip about her beauty, grudgingly praising it despite our public denunciations of her being a boesman.

“Lizette de Vries told me that progressive women don't shave their legs,” she said. “Not even their armpits.”

“Lizette de Vries is an old-fashioned old fart,” he responded, chuckling at his own joke again.

“I'll take the cream, Tjaart, because in my culture they say it is rude to refuse a present. But I will never use it. I love my body the way it is.”

Once more she bade Tjaart Cronje goodbye and left the room. Niki was waiting for her in the passage.

“I wonder what is eating him,” Popi whispered to Niki.

“Anger,” Niki whispered back. “It is as I told you, Popi. Anger does eat the owner.”

“He didn't say much. I wonder why he wanted to see me?”

Johannes Smit and Jacomina were waiting for them in the kitchen.

As they walked back to Johannes Smit's bakkie, they heard Jacomina whispering to Johannes Smit: “She looks so much like Tjaart.”

It was a season of whispers.

T
HE REAL NEW MILLENNIUM
has dawned. Four women with pointed breasts walk in single file. Their long necks carry their multicoloured heads with studied grace. Their hair is white with age, but their faces glow with youth. They do not lose their way, even though they undertake their journey with closed eyes. They walk straight and rigidly, their brown shoes hardly leaving the naphthol crimson ground. Their profiles foreground a white and yellow sky. The woman in front wears a green dress. Her face is pink and blue and green. She holds a bunch of white cosmos. The second woman wears a red dress. Her face is blue and orange. She holds a bunch of violet cosmos. The third woman wears a brown dress. Her face is blue. She carries a bunch of pink cosmos. The fourth woman wears a green dress. Her face is brown and pink. She holds a bunch of white cosmos.

It was the time of the cosmos. And of the yellowness in the fields and the sandstone hills. Niki walked among the cosmos between the sunflower fields, collecting cow-dung in a sisal sack. She walked along the path that bordered Johannes Smit's farm. She could see from a distance the barn that she used to know so well. Although it had fallen into disuse, its skeleton stood proudly as a
monument to a breathless past. She could see with yesterday's eyes the barn assuming the shape of a wanton temple, with female supplicants walking into it. She could hear with yesterday's ears moans and groans escaping through its cracks and drenching the whole valley. Echoes of pain and pleasure relayed throughout the eastern Free State.

Niki was pleased that Popi had remained at home that day. Otherwise she would have had to explain the sudden change in her breathing. It had become fast and furious.

She had wanted Popi to come with her. But Popi had been very busy admiring herself in the mirror. Lately Popi spent all her mornings looking at herself in the mirror, admiring her blue eyes, and brushing her long golden-brown hair. She no longer hid it under huge turbans. She wondered why she had been ashamed of it all these years, why she had never noticed its beauty. She brushed it and combed it over and over again. It was so long that it reached behind her knees when she stood up straight.

She did not only admire her hair and her eyes. She loved her yellow-coloured face and her long neck that had the spot where the skin continued to peel off. She loved her body and everything about it. She had taken to wearing the isigqebhezana, the micro-miniskirts of the new millennium, displaying her long yellow-coloured legs that bristled with golden-yellow hair. She was no Barbie doll: she would not shave her hairy legs. Her hairy arms. Even her armpits. She rejoiced in her hair and in her hairiness.

She enjoyed her own beauty and celebrated it.

When Niki returned with the cow-dung, Popi was still admiring her beauty in the full-size mirror that she had placed against the corrugated-iron wall.

“It is a beautiful thing to love yourself, Popi,” said Niki. “But don't you think you are overdoing it now? Preening yourself in front of the mirror all day long?”

“I am making up for lost time, Niki,” giggled Popi. “Let's go to the bees.”

“We must eat first,” said Niki.

She took out the wobbly pan from the cupboard and fried eggs on the Primus stove. Popi knew that it was a special day. Niki only used the wobbly pan on special days. Memory days. It was the only thing left that linked her to Pule. It and the velveteen on the headboard that had become black and shiny with dirt, and tattered with age. The pan, especially, brought Pule very much alive in the shack.

After a meal of eggs and stiff maize porridge, Popi and Niki walked through the town of Excelsior to the hives by the road. Niki carried her white plastic chair on her head. She refused when Popi wanted to help her with the load.

Popi smiled back at those of us who looked at her with strange eyes. We had not yet gotten used to her wearing the narrow strips that passed for skirts. The red one she was wearing today with a white blouse hugged very tightly and gave us a full view of her long slim thighs and legs.

Popi remarked as they passed Adam de Vries's office: “Viliki would have been in there had he not decided to give himself to the world.”

“Even Adam de Vries . . . I do not see him any more,” said Niki. “Is he still up and about in that organisation they wanted me to join?”

“I think he is old and tired now,” said Popi.