The Housemaid's Daughter (41 page)

Ah, child, I wanted to say. I remember when you ran with your black friends here in Cradock, when you tried to be more black than you were in order to fit in with them. I said one day they will turn on you for being different. It is the same with whites, even if you are pale enough to match them. And, please God, don’t try the thing I have read about in the newspapers concerning coloureds as pale as you. Don’t try to cross over, don’t attempt to live as a white. Don’t ‘try-for-white’ – you’d have to leave behind your black family and never see us again. You’d have to cultivate whites and hope they will never betray you to the police. You’d have to pretend every moment of the day.

But I can’t say the words. Why is it that those we love are the hardest to question? Is it because we are too afraid of the answers we might get?

‘Don’t worry, Mama.’ She wriggled out of bed, defiance making way for tenderness, and came to lie alongside me, just as she used to as a child. ‘I’ll be fine. Jo’burg is different from here, but it’s my home. Like Cradock House is yours.’

* * *

I don’t remember how many winters ago it was that Dawn came. Just like I don’t remember when it was that I lost my job. Or rather, the new headmaster told me there was no more money for a music teacher.

‘But, sir,’ I said, holding my stiff arm with my good hand, ‘I don’t need money from you. I will still teach if you wish to have me.’

He looked at me warily. He is a new headmaster, Mr Dumise is retired, and so are Veronica and Mildred and even Sipho who loved numbers. Only Dina remains, her turbans ever more colourful, her anger with whites unabated.

‘There will be a reckoning,’ she hisses, ‘and when it comes, when it comes…’

Aside from Dina and myself, the school is now staffed by new teachers who will do as they are told. Bantu Education rules the curriculum, policemen patrol the grounds, soldiers sit in their Casspirs on the township edge, and only the students have no fear.

‘Liberation!’ they yell, to the watching skies. ‘Liberation before education!’

I do not mind being unpaid, I have enough money sitting at the bank. In fact, because I am not an official member of staff, my classes are not official either. So I open them to anyone who wants to come. I have only one rule: I refuse to allow political chants or protest songs. Not because I have lost sympathy for the struggle, but because I’ve reached my limit.

‘I’ve been arrested before,’ I shout above the noise at the first lesson of a new term. ‘If I’m arrested again, I know I won’t survive. I have this arm,’ I hold up my lame arm, ‘and this hand,’ I hold up my ever-swollen hand, ‘from being in jail. If you want to keep me here, playing for you, then you have to protect me from the police who listen at the door.’

So they agree. And, once again, we find escape in all manner of music. ‘Halleluja!’ they sing joyously from the
Messiah.
‘Halleluja! Halleluja! Ha-lay-e-lu-ja!’

‘Unforgettable,’ they wail, like Nat King Cole, ‘that’s what you are…’

I hope Mrs Cath hears this music too.

And, as I limp home at the end of the day, the youngsters take turns to walk with me to make sure I am safe. I don’t let them walk alongside me, because the police still watch me even though I’m old, so they walk behind me, or at the side of me.

It is not just the police that are the threat, it’s other blacks, too. Something called a ‘necklace’ has arrived in Lingelihle, although it has been known in Johannesburg for some time. Dawn has told me of it. It is another example of a word that can be persuaded to take on a new mood. In this mood, the necklace is no longer a strand of jewellery to be treasured but a means of neck adornment that is lethal. To make it, a tyre is put over the head of a traitor and petrol is poured into its rubber cavity. Then a match is thrown, and both tyre and wearer are set alight. This is the new kind of necklace. I have seen this horror close to me. I have heard the screams. I have torn my gaze away from the burning, writhing victim and watched the oily smoke curl towards the
koppie
where the outdoor church used to be.

Where are you, God? I weep to the ironstone rocks that look down upon us without expression. Why do You allow such things to happen? I never understood why You took Phil so soon but this horror is surely not Your will? When will You decide who is right and who is wrong in this war and strike down the guilty party?

* * *

There have been several tenants in Cradock House since Mrs Cath died. Most have been kind, most have welcomed me inside to play the piano and to cook in the kitchen. Some have been less inviting, and I’ve had to buy my own paraffin stove for the
kaia,
and the Zimmerman in the alcove has lain silent and unplayed.

At the same time, the opposite of a boom has fallen upon the Karoo. Many farmers have sold their sheep and left the land, while the earth itself has dried up, as if to prove that the Great Flood was indeed a rare thing and that the Karoo is a growing desert that may one day become another Sahara. Dina says it is indeed God the Father’s punishment for the ongoing sins of apartheid. After all, Steve Biko is dead, Mandela has been in jail for twenty years, and still the whites do not relent.

The opposite of a boom is a recession and recession has found its way to Cradock House. Lately there have been no tenants. I dust the house and play the piano every day for Mrs Cath. Cheerful pieces, polonaises, marches, waltzes, especially waltzes. The gentle Brahms in A flat, Chopin’s
Grande Valse Brilliante,
Weber’s
Invitation to the Dance
– they stream out of the piano to fill the empty corridors and build chord upon chord, phrase upon phrase, until the house is replete. I’ve known emptiness in Cradock House before, and I don’t want it to return. While playing for Mrs Cath, I can keep the house alive for Miss Helen.

The lawyer sends someone to cut the lawn. People come and view the house, but they don’t choose it. There are more modern houses for rent in the newer parts of the town, higher up beyond Market Square, further away from the threat of another Great Flood. The house next door is also empty, and the
kaia
beyond the plumbago hedge is silent. Mrs Pumile has finally gone to the Transkei. I hope the man she knew possessed patience and was still waiting for her when she arrived.

And then the lawyer dies, and the new person who manages Cradock House forgets about it. And forgets about me. One day the locks on the house are changed and my back door key no longer fits. I put on my best dress and my shoes with heels – although they are hard to walk in – and I limp along to the lawyer’s office overlooking the Dutch Reformed Church.

‘Good morning, Ma’am. I am a beneficiary of Mrs Harrington’s estate,’ I tell the lady at the front desk. ‘I take care of Cradock House for her granddaughter Miss Helen Harrington. But someone has changed the locks and I can’t get in.’

I wait on a couch, holding myself upright. They let me sit on the same couch as the white customers. This is unusual.

‘Can I help you?’ A young man with slicked-back hair stands in front of me.

I repeat my story. He sits down at my side.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he says, his young forehead creasing. ‘Miss Helen Harrington appears to have left the country. We’re unable to contact her. And her mother died last year. So, for safety’s sake, we’ve decided to close up the house. There’s no market for such old places these days anyway.’

‘But, sir, I’m supposed to care for it until she tells you what to do. It was in Mrs Cath’s will.’

‘It doesn’t need anything done to it,’ the young man asserted. ‘And without tenants, it’s costing us money just to keep an eye on it. Better to lock it up until there’s a resolution.’

I stared out of the window. The aloes in the Karoo Gardens still poked their orange heads to the sky. The benches still remained for whites only. ‘It is my home,’ I said.

Don’t you know, young sir, that the apricot tree carries me in its sap? That the banisters know my polishing of them, and the piano gives me back more than I can ever put into it?

The young man spread his hands. ‘I believe you inherited funds from Mrs Harrington. You could buy your own house in Lingelihle. It would be for the best.’

I left Cradock House once before, crossed the Groot Vis, and headed for a township future. And then returned to Cradock House, and to a life divided between the two places. I value this divided life. It is the Cradock House half that keeps me strong for the township half. But this time, surely, if I leave, there will be no return. I’ll be sucked for good into the noise, the fear, the casual violence, the struggle. There will be no escape. It will own me, from when I go to fetch water in the Karoo dawn to when I try to sleep in the shouting, dog-barking, gunshot-torn night …

I left the lawyer’s office and walked back from Market Square. Dundas Street slept in the waning afternoon sun. Poor Miss Rose, gone now as well. She didn’t love Cradock House, she saw no need to preserve it. I went in through the back gate as I always do, and stopped in the doorway of my
kaia
and thought about what the young man had said. Across the garden, past the apricot tree, the house lay silent and dark. Yet when I’m inside, I hear Mrs Cath, or Phil, or Mama calling to me! They laugh with me, Phil teases me, I hear Mama’s hands knocking down bread dough in the kitchen. Here, from where I stand, the only sound is the chafing of the kaffirboom leaves, one against the other, in the autumn wind. Soon some of the leaves will fall and crunch under my feet.

There are some things that I know, even if my brain is not as sharp as it used to be. I have gathered such knowledge by reading, and through a lifetime of hard experience, and built it into a pyramid of knowing – and unknowing – that has become my particular wisdom. For example, I know that wills cannot be broken. And I know that I’m correct about Mrs Cath’s will. I have the right to stay in the
kaia
until Helen sells the house. If that happens, then I must leave. But until that time, no one can evict me. A suggestion by a young man with smooth hair does not have the force of the law behind it.

I’ve also learnt some practical things: I will be able to continue drawing water from my tap. If I only use a small amount, it will be below the level for which payment is required. So it will be possible to manage in the
kaia
without having access to the house.

I stepped into the garden and walked slowly past the washing line and the tumbling granadilla vine, then round to the front of the house. The grass had grown long and wispy, with the kind of nodding seedheads that I used to touch when I walked into the veld with Dawn. Grass will not behave like lawn unless it’s cut regularly. It would rather bolt and rush to seed and try to outgrow its neighbour.

There is, of course, my duty.

Duty once tricked me and gave me a life beset with shame, but this time my duty is right and honourable. I have promised Mrs Cath to take care of Cradock House until Helen no longer wants it. Even if I can’t get inside, I must stay on the property. If I leave, squatters could move in. I will not allow this to happen. I will guard Cradock House. I will guard it with my life.

I tell no one about my conversation with the new lawyer. And I begin to be careful about how I behave. Although I have an electric light in my
kaia,
I now revert to candles so that it may not become known to the lawyer that someone is using electricity on the property. Although I can do nothing about the grass, I can use my scissors to keep the shrubs from getting untidy, and I can sweep the
stoep
from time to time and perhaps even clean the outside of the windows. I want to keep Cradock House looking as if it is tended enough to deter squatters or robbers, but not enough to make the young lawyer curious if he happens to drive by.

Chapter 56

Dearest Mama

It is the winter here. It is colder than in Cradock and your funeral coat is not warm enough when I come home from dancing, so a friend has bought me a new coat made of wool! Remember we used to talk about the wool from Karoo sheep that we could never afford to buy? Well, now I know why white people like wool. It’s warm, and it doesn’t crease. Mama, you must take some money out of the bank (I know you have enough!) and go down to Anstey’s Fashions and see if they have a wool coat in the window and then buy it, Mama. Buy it! If they see you’ve got the money they will sell it to you even if you’re not white. In Johannesburg this happens all the time.

Everyone gets sick in the winter. There is so much smoke from cooking fires, and the air is very dry and gives bad coughs. There is also another illness here, something that must come from working in the mines, because it is mostly men that die from it.

Send my love to Lindiwe. Please take care, Mama. I will be back to visit you someday. It’s been five years since I was last in Cradock! You must go to the clinic if your head is still bad. All my love,

Dawn

S
ometimes, in the evening, when the painted sunset has faded and the
koppies
are grey shadows against the horizon, I creep out of the
kaia
and go round to the front of the house and sit on the
stoep
with Mama’s blue shawl about me. The shell chairs are no longer there, they have been locked away in the garage since the house became vacant, so I sit on the wooden floorboards with my back against the front door.

I listen for the owl that used to hoot in the kaffirboom when I was a child, and sometimes I hear it again. And I watch for bats – dark spirits of my ancestors – and I watch for possible intruders. Sometimes I think I hear something, but often it is only the creak of the red tin roof as it loses heat, or the rustle of a mouse in the overgrown grass. Mostly, though, I go there because the house calls me to do so. It needs company. I flex my fingers in my lap and pretend to be playing the piano. A
fantasie impromptu
in C sharp minor. Hands at full stretch, the bounding notes giving way to a sly melody that hangs in the air, waiting to be caught …