Afrika (5 page)

Kim wheeled around: “Afrikaner, you mean.”

“We call them Boer,” Themba said with steely determination. His eyes narrowed as he added: “We lived on this continent for centuries before the Boers and the English came with their armies and laws, making us the
kaffirs
and them the white bosses.”

“What's a kaffir?” she asked.

Themba shot her a look. “Once it was the word for ‘heathen.’ Now it's a swearword.”

Kim looked down at an ostrich egg used by the San as a container for water. She could not think of a single thing to combat Themba's anger. And he was still talking,“You look nothing like your mother,” he said, taking the conversation in a completely new direction.

“Actually I was left on a doorstep. There was a note tucked under my chin and a bottle of Coke in the bottom of the basket.”

She had meant it as a joke, but all the same, Kim was very irritated. She marched away from Themba into another room with pottery and large woven baskets. Who did he think he was? It's true she didn't look anything like her mom, but why should he care? “Let's go,” she said pointing to the exit.

Outside, they waited for Ntombi on the steps
of the museum. Kim couldn't get the image of the Bushman out of her mind. “I want to go home,” she said, shivering.

The awful thing was, she could not go home. Their bungalow in Calgary was two long plane trips away. She was literally on the other side of the world. For a terrifying moment that reality sunk in.

Kim tried to calm herself down. She looked up at the sun above the wide flat mountain to try to judge how late it was. Sunshine made the stone of Table Mountain sparkle as if it had been polished, but the sun would soon set. Her mother had warned her that in Africa the winter sun went down quicker than any place in the world.

She saw Ntombi smoking nearby. Kim was about to run to her and beg that she go back to the cottage where her mom was waiting, when Themba stopped her.

“Kim,” he said apologetically, “just forget that, hey.”

Kim turned and looked into his eyes. “Just forget I even said that,” he added. He paused, as if he wanted to make sure his words sunk in, and then he waved at Ntombi to join them. “I want Kim to see the train station,” he said with enthusiasm.

“Train station?” repeated Kim. She felt a rush of excitement. Her love of trains was much bigger than the loneliness she had felt a few seconds earlier.

“Yes, man, Ntombi,” Themba said rushing up to his aunt. He danced around Ntombi's thin figure.
“Pleeassssse
,” he sang. “Remember the station is beside the dry cleaners and dry cleaners is beside the bus stop.”

“Stop it, man, Themba,” Ntombi said. She had put out her cigarette and was carefully climbing down the stairs in her platform shoes. “What does Kim want, hey?”

“Let's go, yes,” Kim gushed. “I adore trains.”

“Okay,” Ntombi consented. “A few moments only.”

Themba was different from the boys back home. He kept her off-balance, but he also had the ability to make her feel very excited, whether they were playing soccer or having a conversation. No boy had ever made her feel this way. In a flash she forgave him for everything he had said. They practically yanked Ntombi's arm out of its socket as they hurried past the peanut vendors and newspaper boys toward the center of the city.

At the train station Kim and Themba sat on a bench away from the crowd. “You stay put,” Ntombi said, as she went to pick up Riana's blazer from a nearby shop.

“We will.” Kim and Themba watched a train clatter into the station.

“This platform used to be Whites Only,”
Themba said. “My pa and I would sit on the other side. Afterwards, we'd go together to the shops near the Parade. I remember one time, I must have been five or six, Pa couldn't decide on a particular chicken. He lifted each wing and sniffed under it. When he began to lift the legs, the assistant chased us out of there.”

Themba smiled at the memory. Then he shook his head as if to forget it. The noise of the trains vibrated through them.

“I never met my dad,” said Kim. “When my mother got pregnant with me, she decided to split South Africa once and for all.”

“Did he ever write to you? Ask your ma for a baby picture?”

“No,” Kim answered.

“He never tried to ring you?” Themba asked, sitting up very tall on the bench. “Even on your birthday?”

She stiffened. She was surprised by the emotion in Themba's voice.“Why should he?” she asked.

“Because he's your
father!
He should have cared enough to try to find you.”

Kim couldn't believe it. What was Themba's problem? His face was flushed and he was shaking. As far as she knew her father had never tried to contact her. He had never attempted to come to Canada to visit.

“Weren't you angry that he never tried to be a father?”

Kim was afraid to speak. She scanned her brain for a joke, but nothing came.

Kim didn't know why her mother kept the secret of her father so tightly sealed. In Canada she had blamed Riana for the silence. But now she was thinking, really it was her father who had not shown the smallest interest in whether Kim was dead or alive. Themba was right. Why had her father not sent one measly letter or asked one single question about her? Out of curiosity if nothing else!

Kim clenched her hands together and bit her lip. Where was Ntombi? Tears, a girl's biggest curse, were threatening to leak out of her eyes. Not for her father – Kim wasn't going to cry for someone she didn't even know! But each of Themba's questions stirred up the loneliness she had felt on the museum steps. She didn't miss her father, not one bit, but she missed her friends, her home, and her own life.

Kim turned her face toward the sound of the train. She would
not
let this foreign boy see her cry.

After a moment, Themba spoke.“I'll help you,” he said.

He spoke so quietly that she was not sure she'd heard correctly. She turned to look at him.

“If you want to find your father. I'll help you,” he repeated.

I
t was two weeks since Kim had left Canada. Time had passed very quickly. The days had turned cold and rainy and a constant, howling wind made the bare trees scratch and thump across her bedroom window. Often at night, the noise of the branches against the pane jolted Kim awake. For a second, she would forget where she was. Then she would remember how far away she was from her home, and her belly would contract. She'd yank the leopard cloth up to her chin and picture the many ships that had been torn apart while passing the Cape on their way to India.

Kim hadn't seen Themba alone for days. Because of soccer practice, he often stayed nights in his township house. When they spoke last, they had bickered about soccer. Usually he supported her playing soccer, but for some reason he decided to remind her that in his country, in his culture, girls playing soccer were unusual. “Kim! Kim! Don't you understand that girls play field hockey, not soccer?”

As Themba lectured her, the water sloshed down the windows of the classroom. “What sucker told you that,” Kim had responded. “In Canada we play hockey on ice, not on grass, and it is played by both girls and boys.”

What was she doing wasting her breath arguing with Themba? Instead she should be talking to him about finding her father. Today she was determined to speak to him alone, but Riana had arranged a ride home for her with one of the blonde-haired girls from school. This one was called Marjorie, and she could already walk straight-spined in a pair of high heels.

Marjorie found Kim just outside the school. “There you are,” she said. “My mother is waiting in the car.”

“That's all right,” Kim said, glancing around the yard for Themba. She wanted to see if Themba needed a ride back to the cottage but she couldn't spot him anywhere. “I can walk,” she said.

Marjorie opened the front door of a white Mercedes Benz. “You cannot,” she said. “Mummy tell Kim she can't walk home.”

“Girls, get in,” said Marjorie's mother with half a smile, half a scowl. She tossed her hair from side to side with sharp red nails and fumed. “I go mad on the decor and flowers and some black baboon steals the car with the wedding dress in the boot.”

Black baboon? Kim wondered if she had heard correctly

Marjorie registered the shock on Kim's face. “Mummy's a wedding planner,” she explained to Kim. “She doesn't mean a baboon took the car. She means a man stole it.” Marjorie reached back to unlock the door for Kim. “Mummy that's not nice. You can't say those kinds of things about Blacks now. You could be arrested.”

Marjorie and her mom shared a laugh. With disgust Kim flung her canvas knapsack across the leather seat. Two white, spoiled puffs of dogs, who used the backseat as their own private armchair, ran for cover. With a sick feeling, Kim realized that Themba would have been very uncomfortable in the car with them – if he was allowed at all.

They reached Kim's house in all of three minutes. “Thank you,” muttered Kim. She grabbed her knapsack by the scruff of its neck, as if it were one of the spoiled dogs, and jumped out. She could have walked home just as quickly. And she hadn't had a chance to talk to Themba.

Entering through the back door of the cottage, Kim kicked off her rubber boots and hung her umbrella on the back railing. She flung her knapsack down on a kitchen chair. Set in the center of the wooden table, on top of a muddled pile of papers and Riana's other work stuff, was a fat chocolate puff
and a glass of prune juice – no doubt left for her by Riana.

Kim started when she saw the chocolate puff. In Calgary, no matter how busy or disorganized Riana was, she tried to serve health food to Kim.

Kim saw that the red light of the answering machine was blinking. As she ate the chocolate off the outside of the puff, she pressed the button and Uncle Piet's voice filled the kitchen. It was his second message this week “Riana, listen,” he began. “Now I have become this, hey? The go-between for you and Pa. Come on, Bok. The sooner you and Kim come up here the better. Ring me.”

Kim shoved the rest of the puff into her mouth, wound the message back, and left it on the machine for her mom. The kitchen door was closed, but Kim could hear Riana and a few of her colleagues talking in the front room. She could smell cigarettes and hear the clink of mugs. This is why Riana had asked Marjorie's mother to collect her from school. Riana was “working” again.

Ignoring the prune juice, Kim cupped her hands under the kitchen tap, and took six or seven swallows of cold water right from the faucet. Then she listened to the conversation in the living room.

“He did that to another human being, then went for drinks afterwards!” It was Riana. Others
muttered their disapproval, but someone was concerned by Riana's tone of voice.

“Riana, I told you this commission would change you,” Kim heard a woman say. “You have to keep a distance.”

“It hasn't changed me,” Riana exclaimed.

You bet it has
, thought Kim, flicking the water off her hands. At home Riana had been an ordinary journalist. She covered human interest stories and freak events of nature, like avalanches and floods. Covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was different. In fact, Riana had already received hate mail and threats from locals for reporting on the commission. As Oom Piet had warned them, some people didn't like the fact that the Truth Commission was digging up the past. The notes said things like “Go home, foreign bitch,” or “The communists have taken over your mind. Damn your rubbishy lies.” These notes, which Kim saw by accident when she moved a pile of her mom's messy papers, were written in blood-red lettering, and they frightened her.

Kim realized that the work her mother did was harder than anything she had done before. Riana filed two or three stories a day. Riana knew that her Canadian reports were also broadcast in South Africa and that some people would hate her for
what she wrote. But she went on, letting relatives and survivors tell, in their own words, what had happened to them. Just yesterday, she had interviewed a white family who had been bombed in a church two years earlier. The youngest child had been flung from one end of the church to the other and his body was left unrecognizable, even to his mother.

Another mother, a black journalist, had told Riana how her fourteen-year-old son had been arrested in the apartheid days for distributing political pamphlets. He was put in a refrigerator at the police station for half an hour and then given an electric shock. This story made Kim sick and the thought of it kept her awake at night. While she was awake she would worry about her mother.

The Truth Commission stories were so disconcerting that a therapist had been hired to help the journalists. Kim was aware that Riana had spoken a couple of times with the therapist. The therapist encouraged the journalists to talk amongst themselves about the disturbing stories rather than burden their families. Since that time Riana often invited colleagues home with her at the end of the day.

From the back window of the kitchen Kim could see that a storm was building. Not just the sloppy downpour they had had all week. Tonight the rain was noisy and precise, accompanied by a vicious wind. She wondered if she should go into the living
room and warn Riana's colleagues about the deteriorating weather.