The Smell of Apples: A Novel (3 page)

'Handsome is probably a better word,' he said, and smiled at me, and tapped lightly with his fist against my chin. I could smell the Old Spice aftershave he uses for special occasions.

'Handsome,' I said, and, 'I wish we could go with you and Mum.'

'Just wait, my little bull,' Dad said a while later, when we were saying goodbye to them at the front door. 'Your time will come. For tonight, I just want you to take good care of your sister.' He winked at Use who snorted, and turned her eyes up in their sockets. She's forever rolling her eyes when someone speaks to her, and if she wasn't a girl I'd have slapped her ages ago.

'My girl,' said Mum with a frown, 'please keep the doors locked. You know how I worry when you're at home on your own.'

'Enjoy the evening and don't worry about us! Tonight belongs to you and Daddy,' Use said as they got into Dad's white Volvo. The two of us stood on the wide front veranda, waving at them until the car reached the bottom of St James Street at the station, and disappeared down Main Road. On the other side of Smitswinkel Bay, from the direction of Cape Point, the mist was sinking down the mountainside. Main Road was quiet and you couldn't hear anything except the waves breaking on the other side of the railway line.

It was early spring. Soon the oak trees behind the house

Mark Behr

would turn green again, and next to the driveway Ouma Erasmus's gardenias would start making their white curly-head kids. That's what Chrisjan always used to call the white gardenia flowers: wit-katjiekrulkopkinders.

One grows accustomed to the dust. When I opened the last of the ratpacks this morning it took just seconds before everything was covered in a layer of dust. It's useless trying to get rid of it. The radio is positioned beside me on the ground. When I turn the frequency knobs, there i the grinding sound of grains rubbing against metal. We wait for the command to move. And for food. With the food there may be mail. I stroke the leg-pocket of my browns with Mum's last letter.

While Use was writing her big exams, Dad told us about the visitor. Because Dad knows a lot of important people in America and England it's usual for us to have big-shot guests. Dad said that this visitor was also coming from America. But not the real America. He was from South America. Dad met him last year when he visited New York. They had gotten to know each other quite well over there. Dad said that this visit had to be kept a secret, just like some of the others, and that we should just call him Mister Smith. If any of our friends asks who our visitor is, we should say he is Mister Smith who's on business here from New York. Everything considered, he shouldn't stay at our house, Dad said. But because him and Dad became friends overseas, it would only be right for us to show him our hospitality.

'You know now that no one is supposed to know who he really is. I take it as clearly understandable,' Dad said at

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dinner that night, speaking in the way he does to make sure that Use and I won't ever think of telling a soul. Dad always says duidelik verstaanbaar, which means 'clearly understandable', when he's not going to repeat himself.

'When can we expect him, Johan?' asked Mum. Til have to get the guest-room ready and plan for meals. I at least want Doreen better prepared than when the Frenchmen were here in July.'

'He'll be here during the first week of December,' Dad answered, and Use looked up from her dinner and groaned. 'I hope you remember my prize-giving at the beginning of December, Daddy.'

'I wouldn't miss it for anything in the world, my darling,' Dad said, and assured her he'd be there when she became head girl.

Mum said the garden wasn't looking all that great, because the Coloured boy who came in Chrisjan's place doesn't even know a spade from a pick. Mum would have to ask Doreen to look out for someone else, because the garden had turned into a jungle since Chrisjan left. Whenever Mum speaks about Chrisjan, you can see she's still angry with him. Chrisjan worked in the garden ever since Oupa's time. But, a while back, he just stayed away from work and never came back. A few days after he disappeared, while I was looking for the fishing tackle in the garage, I discovered that the fishing kit had vanished into thin air. I looked everywhere, even under the boat's sail, and if I didn't know better I'd have thought it had just grown feet and walked off. I went inside to Mum, at the piano, to ask her whether she had seen it. But even Doreen, who always knows where everything is, couldn't sniff it out anywhere. Because Chrisjan liked fishing, Mum knew immediately that he must have stolen our stuff.

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Mum says that's exactly the way the Coloureds are. You can never ever trust them. After all the years of supplying them with a job and a decent income, they simply turn around and stab you in the back. Just like the Mau Mau in East Africa. 'Thus the viper sucks from your bosom without you even knowing.'

If it wasn't for the visitor, we would be leaving for our holiday-cottage at Sedgefield, day after school ends. Because of the visitor we're going to have to stay on a few days longer. With all his work, Dad usually stays for another week before he comes to join us at the cottage anyway, so I wanted to ask whether he and Doreen couldn't just look after Mister Smith so that we could go ahead. Besides, Doreen doesn't go along to Sedgefield because Mum believes Doreen should also get a vacation. Most of Mum's friends take their maids along to do the washing and make the beds. Gloria goes along every year when Frikkie and them go to Plettenberg Bay. Frikkie says Gloria was so boozed-up at New Year that his mother almost gave her the sack.

The day Mum told Doreen to prepare the guest-room, I thought about the visitor again for the first time. The spare bedroom is right underneath mine. To begin with, it had been one big bedroom, until Dad made it into two. He could do that, because the original room had such a high ceiling. He divided the room in two after Ouma died, and Mum wanted an extra room for guests. They didn't want to wreck Ouma's beautiful garden by building on outside, so instead they turned the room with the high ceiling into two bedrooms.

High up in the passage wall, they made an extra door with a set of yellow-wood stairs with a blackwood banister, and they built a square window with wooden frames into the slanted roof upstairs. So where I used to sleep down-

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stairs, the high ceiling of big white tiles with wonderful patterns, became a low ceiling of knotty pine. I wanted to be in the new room with the roof-window very badly, and when Mum got tired of my nagging, she gave in and let me move upstairs. From then on Use and I have shared the passage bathroom next to the staircase, and Dad and Mum have theirs to themselves.

Our house is at the top of St James Street. On clear days you can stand on the veranda and look out over the whole of False Bay. You can see from the mountains of Cape Point, to where Hangklip hangs over the sea in the south. From my bedroom upstairs the view is even better.

Oupa Erasmus built the house himself when they came to the Union. That was after they came out from Tanganyika when the war started and Oupa sold all his East African properties. Dad says Oupa was a wise man, who predicted well in advance what chaos would come to German East Africa once the blacks took over. So, when the war came, they left Dar es Salaam with bag and baggage for Kenya, and sailed from Mombasa straight down to Cape Town. Before leaving, they sold off all their land and the hotel they owned. The British Consulate bought the house in Dar es Salaam.

At least Oupa was lucky enough to sell his things. Most of the others, like Uncle Samuel and Sanna Koerant's family, really got a raw deal. In the end they got away with nothing except their lives. By the time they left, the blacks hadn't only taken over everything, they had even changed the country's name to Tanzania. From then on, the country just kept going downhill.

Oupa had made lots of money from selling his properties, and also from gold he and Ouma prospected on the Lupa goldfields in Tanganyika. Oupa had even discovered

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rubies. So by the time they left Tanganyika, when Dad was as old as I am now, they weren't struggling as much as when they first got married. Ouma couldn't have any more babies after Dad was born, so he was their only child when they arrived in Cape Town on the Victoria Ship. Oupa decided to buy a piece of land in St James. Originally, they bought the plot of land in St James because Oupa wanted to see the warships coming into Simonstown. Another reason was that the long beach at Muizenberg reminded Ouma of the white sand at Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam means City of Peace and Ouma said that at last this was going to be their place of peace.

With the help of the Kalk Bay Coloureds, Oupa and Dad built the big house right at the very top of St James Street. Building carried on for six months, and Dad was allowed to stay home from school to help Oupa with everything, right until the last bit of painting. When everything was finished, they moved in and our newspaper, Die Burger, took a photograph of the grand house of the Afrikaners from German East Africa. A framed cutting of the photograph, with Oupa, Ouma and Dad on the veranda, hangs in Dad's study. The article with the photograph says that although Dad is only eleven years old, he speaks English and Swahili almost as well as he speaks Afrikaans.

When Dad started going to school at Van Riebeeck, Oupa volunteered to join the navy in Simonstown. They thought the war in Europe would bring lots of ships to the Cape and Oupa wanted to help the war effort in any way he could. It was at that time that Doreen started working in the house for Ouma. At first Ouma asked Oupa whether she couldn't send for her two Wachaggas from Dar es Salaam, because she wasn't used to having a female servant

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in the house. She wanted male servants, like she'd had in Tanganyika. There she'd had two Wachaggas for housekeeping and another three for the garden. But eventually she had to accept having Doreen, because the Cape Coloureds just laughed at the idea of men doing housework. When Ouma started the garden, she got Chrisjan to help with the lawns and the planting.

When Doreen first started working here, she still lived in Newlands and came straight to work every morning by train. But after Oupa died, when we moved into the house with Ouma, she was already living in Grassy Park, where the government built nice houses for all the Coloureds. In the mornings she first catches a taxi to somewhere like Retreat, and from there she gets the train to St James station, right down the hill from us.

When I was four, Oupa Erasmus's fishing-boat capsized in a storm over False Bay, and Oupa drowned. His body never washed up on shore. I was still too small to remember, but Use says it was the most terrible of terrible times for Dad. And also for Oupa's younger brother Uncle Samuel.

Dad and Uncle Samuel combed the coastline for days, searching for the body. Two days after the storm, some fishermen found the wreck of Oupa's boat washed up near Smitswinkel Bay. But there was still no sign of Oupa or his crew. All they found was a piece of cloth on Muizenberg beach that Dad believed was torn from Oupa's fishing jacket.

So they went and cemented it into a little monument they built on the rocks at Smitswinkel Bay. Because some people believed Oupa was still alive, there wasn't much of a funeral. Only his family and Uncle Samuel were there, and Sanna Koerant and the Van der Merwes who had just come down from Tanzania to live in the Transvaal. It had

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hardly been a full year before that Oupa had gone to fetch Uncle Samuel from Rhodesia after Uncle Samuel had escaped from Tanzania. Before Oupa drowned, Uncle Samuel had been hoping that Oupa would be there to celebrate his first apple-harvest from his new farm at Grabouw.

We moved in here to live with Ouma soon after Oupa died. Use and I still shared a room then.

Ouma always complained about backache. She thought it had something to do with Dad's difficult birth, because it was after he was born that her back problems began. When Ouma was complaining about her back again one day, Mum said they should go for X-rays. Mum said she was sure they could fix the problem, what with Chris Barnard already transplanting hearts just up the road and all the modern medicines available these days. If Neil Armstrong could walk on the moon, why on earth wouldn't they be able to do something about a simple backache?

So Mum and Ouma went off to a specialist in Constantia, where all the snobs live. There they X-rayed Ouma's back. Mum told us later how shocked the doctor was when he called her to a separate room to show her the X-rays. There, in the middle of the picture, the cause of all Ouma's suffering could be seen: in her stomach, just below her ribs, was a small pair of scissors.

Because Dad was so big when he was born, he couldn't be born like other babies, and they had to cut Ouma open. After that she couldn't have more babies, even though her and Oupa really wanted to. But all of that we only heard later, when the story about the scissors came out. The doctor who had taken Dad out had left the scissors inside Ouma's stomach, and Ouma had walked around with those stainless steel scissors inside her for all those years. The

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specialist said it was definitely because of the scissors that Ouma could never have another child after Dad.

When Dad heard about the scissors, he was furious. But what could he do? He wasn't even allowed to go back to Tanzania, where he was born. Dad said he would move mountains to see justice done, but who could he take to court? Even if he could go back, the country was in such chaos under the black government that the courts in Tanzania wouldn't even know it was wrong to sew up a pair of scissors in a woman's stomach.

When Ouma went to hospital to have the scissors removed, we all went to Groote Schuur before the operation to visit her. Early the next morning the hospital phoned to say that Ouma had died under anaesthetic. The doctor said it was as though Ouma didn't want to live any more, because she wasn't really ill or even so very old. Mum said it was because Ouma didn't want to live without Oupa. What is left for a woman of Ouma's age once her husband dies? Mum said she could completely understand it, and maybe it was even better that way.