You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (15 page)

The goats that had settled down for the afternoon's rest stir as I approach the trees. I do not have a hat and sit down in the dappled shade where sparse leaves admit dancing flecks of sunlight. Birds flutter through the needle-leafed branches. A donkey brays from behind a further clump of trees, frogs croak and water, if only there were enough, would surely babble its protest from its separate brooks.

I spit and watch the gob sizzle on the hot sand. It is not only an act of exasperation; my sinuses are troublesome today. And what do I expect? Did I not hope that my senses would quiver with receptivity, that all these sights and
sounds would scratch about in the memory like hens in the straw until they found the perfect place to nest. Where in feather-warm familiarity I could be the child once more, young and genderless as I roamed these banks alone, belonging without question to this country, this world.

In the ghanna bushes behind me there is a rustling sound I cannot identify. I remember the words, ‘Beware of snakes,' the red letters of the warning label escaping from Father's lips. It is true that he stumbled over the first syllable in the way that people do when they search for something to say. And muffled by the sound of my chair pushed back, I pretended not to hear. Just as I did this morning when he said, ‘It's no good being so touchy. Just shut yourself off against things around you, against everything, and you'll keep your self-respect. There's something for you to try when you come back.' When he raised his torso from the sawhorse the two suspended flaps of greased hair fell once again into their ordained places, adjacent, without a fraction of overlap, covering the shiny pate completely. If only there were no need to bend. Is it my fault that Father has grown so old?

My hand goes to the crown of my own head. If my hair should drop out in fistfuls, tired of being tugged and stretched and taped, I would not be surprised. Do my fingers run through the synthetic silk with less resistance than usual? What will I do in the damp English weather? I who have risked the bulge of a bathing suit and paddled in the tepid Indian Ocean, aching to melt in the water while my hair begged to keep dry. What will I do when it matts and shrinks in the English fog? Perhaps so far away where the world is reversed an unexpected shower will reveal a brand-new head of hair sprung into its own topiarian shape of one-eared dog.

A whip cracks through the silence. If I keep very still I might not be seen, but the foliage is too sparse. It is Oom Dawid in his ankle-hugging veldskoen and faded khaki shirt, flourishing his whip. My tongue struggles like a stranded fish in the dry cavity of my mouth. Why do I find it so hard to speak to those who claim me as their own? There is nowhere to hide so with studied casualness I walk towards him, but the old man, preoccupied, seems to stumble upon me, squinting before he greets. The stentorian voice has shrunk to a tired rumble and the eyes are milky in their intimate search of my face. The great rough hand shakes mine with faltering vigour and under his smile my mouth grows moist and my tongue pliant once more.

‘Ja,' Oom Dawid says, ‘about time you came home to see us. But I hear you're going over the waters to another world. Now don't stay away too long.'

‘Yes, it's nice to be back. I'm going to England on New Year's Day,' I blurt.

‘Still,' the old man persists, ‘you're home now with your own people: it can't be very nice roaming across the cold water where you don't belong.'

I burrow the point of my shoe in the sand and giggle foolishly.

‘Ja, Ja-nee . . .' Oom Dawid rumbles. ‘So-o, so it goes,' which he repeats after a short silence with the ease of someone offering a fresh diversion in the face of flagging conversation. Then his face breaks out in a network of smiles as he remembers a request he has been nursing.

‘About the Queen,' he announces, ‘you must go and see if she's still young and beautiful.'

I remember the faded magazine picture of the Coronation stuck above his sideboard.

‘Oh, I won't be seeing the Queen of England. I don't care two hoots about her.' I instantly regret the sharp words. But the old man laughs, unperturbed.

‘Then I'll have to go and see for myself one day and tell the Queen about these Boers and how they treat us.'

He looks at me sharply. ‘You have to put your heart with someone. Now you don't want to know about Vorster and you don't care about the Queen and our Griqua chief isn't grand enough for you. It's leaders we need. You young people with the learning must come and lead us.'

The old guilt rises and wrings the moisture from my tongue. Even though I know him to be committed to the slogan of Grown-ups Know Best, that he wouldn't dream of paying heed to anything I have to say.

‘Ja . . . aa . . . so-o,' Oom Dawid reiterates and the old Namaqua eyes narrow amiably. ‘Anyway, you're back with us now, here where you can always see the white stones of our mother's grave on the koppie. And he points to the hills in the distance. ‘And your father grows grey. A man mustn't grow old without his children around him. Old Shenton must write a letter for me to Lizzie's madam in Cape Town. She's got a grand job in Town, a kind of housekeeper for English people, but she must come home now. We're getting too old. Antie Saartjie can't do much now – the legs you know. Ag, you young people are so grand in your motor cars,' he says inexplicably, and turns, deftly pinching his nostrils in turn to propel from each a neat arc of snot.

‘I must go and find these damn mules. Do you remember Bleskop? Very old now, but still goes wandering off to plague me. Yes, I'm after them every day. Like you they've always got somewhere to go. More trouble than they're worth.'

He shakes my hand and walks off, saying, ‘When you get back, come and tell me about the wonderful things across the water. I must tell you about the old days, of how the people trekked from Griqualand', and he stops for a moment, genuinely perplexed, to add, ‘I don't know if the Queen knows about all that.'

I watch him stride across the water to the left bank where the new path winds tortuously around the donga. The crack of his whip echoes across the river bed. If I did not fear his scorn, I would have asked him where the gorra was. But he would have seen it as city affectation. ‘Don't be silly,' he would snort, ‘you've carried water all your life like the rest of us.'

Why did Father not ask me to take a bucket, I wonder, as I walk towards the gorra. I stop to tip the sand out of my shoes but the earth sizzles with heat and I can barely keep my balance hopping on each shod foot in turn. I must find it and get out of this heat.

The wide bank with a sprinkling of Jan Twakkie trees is surely the place. But the bank is a uniformly smooth stretch of sand with no trace of the well. I orientate myself by lining up the great dabikwa tree with the cavern on the left bank. Sitting down, I survey the shape of the gully, unfamiliar at this angle. And move to the left, and move again until the blinding light strikes the fissure where the crabs dig snug holes in the dove-blue clay.

With a twig I draw a circle which is unmistakably where the gorra had been, where it now lies buried under a layer of sand and mud from distant mountains. Or else they have removed it and the wet sand, according to kinetic law, has fallen in piece by piece as it shook off the years of restraint moulded by the cement walls. For the well had been just a six-foot cylinder of cement sunk into the sand and then
evacuated. Here Oom Klonkies from Rooiberg trailed his forked stick, frowning, and pronounced that the water would be less salty. And he was right. The water was brack but thirst-quenching, unlike the bitter-salt running water of the river that parches the throat.

The mouth of the cylinder curved outward for nine inches above the sand level. Here as a child I lay on my stomach to watch my framed face in the water below. And bent down with the cement wedged under my left armpit, I would scoop up the still water with a tin mug and in that vast silence listen to the rhythms of water lilted into tin, hauled up against the cement wall, and warble into the metal bucket. Before the buckets were filled the water supply would run out. And as the level fell the framed portrait faded, grew darker so that I would clasp with both arms the fat cement mouth, straining to see through my mocking image the new growth of water. Unless you whispered, coaxed, the water refused to rise. With my head hanging deep down in the darkness and the blood rushing hither and thither in my veins, I sang my song of supplication until the water spirits gurgled with pleasure and the face framed in the circle of water grew whole once more.

If the well were here still, if I could feel the pitted cement pressing into my naked armpits and stare at my severed head in the water, it would come – the song of supplication that will rouse the appropriate feelings in me.

My head nods to the tune but the words loiter on the tip of my tongue, scratch as they try to scale my slippery throat, and then a bird screams so that they scurry back down. Instead another chant from childhood takes over:

Bucket in the hand

Bucket on the head

Feet in the sand

Wish I were dead. (There was nothing else to rhyme with head.)

Over and over along the track as I balanced my way home with the buckets, stopping only once to change hands.

The traffic of words is maddening. I am persecuted by a body of words that performs regardless of my wishes, making its own choices. Words will saunter in and vanish in a flash, refusing to be summoned or expelled. Just as I cannot summon my heart to beat faster or slower, so the words in conversation could tumble out regardless or refuse to be uttered, betraying or making a fool of me. Thus the water song will not surface while the bucket chant will not be banished.

I follow the track which was once the well-worn path to our house. Half-way along I stop to look back. I can see the old man across climbing the hill. The tops of trees pop up above the straight line cut by the river. Across the river, the hills swell abruptly into a ridge that meets the sky in a straight line horizontal to the fissure of the river. The glaring white pebble crust of the hill lifts pointillistically in the sun, its squat succulents grey stipples in the distance. The railway line at the foot of the ridge parallel to the river has only just been built. I have not yet seen the ISCOR train running along it, its hundred or more trucks a black line of iron and steel drawn across the ridge. Or so Father said in his last letter. That there were a hundred and nine trucks that day, the longest ever to travel between Sishen and Saldanha Bay. Which means that he runs out to the train every other day to count the trucks, for how else would he know and why would he write immediately, a scribbled salutation and then the breathless news of a
hundred and nine trucks, before the guarded demand that I spend the last days at home where everybody, all the family, is coming to see me?

Empty-handed I carry on walking towards the house. They are sitting on the stoep waiting for the breeze that will cool the day. The wind is just rising. On the dead plain, circles of dust are spun and lifted, up, up, spiralling into fine cones that dance teasingly in my path. Grains of sand whirl past and sting my cheeks. The hot breath of this wind brings no relief.

The party on the stoep is watching, no doubt discussing me, my marriage prospects, my waywardness and my unmistakable Shenton determination. There is no point in lingering. There is no concealed approach to the house. A head-on collision with all that consanguinity cannot be avoided. The bosoms of the aunts are mountainous; the men are large like trees. Aunt Nettie has timed the coffee to be ready at my arrival.

‘You've been a long time,' someone says.

I smile, unable to summon a reply.

‘Ag, no,' Father says, ‘let the girl be. She hasn't seen the old place for such a long time.'

‘There's no place like home,' says Aunt Cissie.

‘And home is where the heart is,' Father adds, and then he frowns for that is not quite what he means.

I watch him pour the coffee into his saucer. With lips pouted for the purpose, the liquid is syphoned from saucer to throat. Coffee trickles from his old man's mouth. With the lower lip both protruding and sagging, the liquid has no choice but to drip on to his new crimplene trousers. He rubs the stain with the back of his hand.

‘Ag ja,' Aunt Nettie sighs, ‘a woman's work is never done.' She casts a significant but fruitless look at her older
sister before rising with the tray, her rear following reluctantly.

A conversation buzzes about my ears while the silly bucket rhyme mills through my mind.

‘What do you say, Frieda?'

There is no need to admit that I have not been listening. I do not have to say anything. The question is purely phatic. They have come to see me, to rest their eyes on me, reassured by the correctness of the family gathered here.

‘A person of few words, our Frieda,' says Uncle Gerrie, ‘a sure sign of wisdom.' I remember now, in his pre-gold-teeth days, Uncle Gerrie as a young man in a straw hat, trowel in his hand. ‘Baboon,' he shouted at me. ‘Why is this ugly child always in the way?' And he slap-slapped the cement, levelling off this very stoep. Not that this can really be called a stoep. Merely a two-foot-high block of cement on to which the kitchen door opens, keeping the dust at bay. There is no verandah, and without that protective structure the eyes cannot consume the land in the same way that the colonial stoep allows.