When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (6 page)

In between the Mazibukos’ photographs were some special stones and rocks called crystals, which Auntie Rachel believed in. She was supposed to believe in the God of the Jewish people, but
Swaziland didn’t have a place where a Jewish somebody could go to pray. Mama said Auntie Rachel was out of practice, but Baba said she had rocks in her head.

She came back in now with Benedict’s milk, saying that Lungi was just making her tea.

‘Auntie Rachel, you know hoopoes?’

‘
Ja?
’

‘I heard they’re called King Solomon’s queen.’

‘
Ja
, I’ve heard that. Their crest is supposed to be a crown he gave one of them to thank it for giving him some advice.’

Benedict sipped the delicious, creamy milk. ‘Do you know what advice it gave?’

Leaning forward with a tissue and dabbing at the milk at the corners of his upper lip, she gave him a serious look. ‘Okay, you have to understand that it’s a story from a very long
time ago, long before people learned to respect women.’ He nodded, knowing from Mama that respecting ladies was important. ‘Apparently the hoopoe advised the king that women
mustn’t be honoured, they must be tamed and controlled.’

‘
Eh!
’

‘Exactly!’

Lungi came in with a mug of tea on a tray, carefully stepping over the three young children playing on the floor. She and Benedict exchanged greetings in siSwati before she went back to the
kitchen. Watching her go, Benedict smiled. Lungi always wore black, which a Swazi lady had to do for two whole years after losing her husband, but tucked into the waistband of her skirt at the back
there was always a brightly coloured duster on a stick that looked like the bushy tail of a squirrel all dressed up for a party. She didn’t need to have a duster handy, it was Mavis who
cleaned while Lungi cooked. But still.

Auntie Rachel took a sip of her tea. ‘You lot are clever, hey? You learning siSwati, Titi learning English. How’s she doing, by the way?’

Titi was coming for English lessons with Auntie Rachel in exchange for a bit of childminding. Benedict was fond of Titi. She had been taking care of him since before he had come to live with
Mama and Baba four years ago.

‘She’s doing well,’ he said. ‘She speaks English with Mama every evening while they’re cooking supper.’

‘
Ag
shame, she’s trying hard, hey?’ Auntie Rachel sipped more of her tea. ‘You know, that story about the hoopoe has always bothered me. I mean, King Solomon
wouldn’t have made the hoopoe a queen unless it was a female, so why did a female give him advice like that? Unless it was saying only female
people
needed to be tamed and
controlled.’

Benedict gave it some thought as he finished his milk. ‘Maybe. Wasn’t the female hoopoe
already
tame? I mean, it spoke with King Solomon and it let him put a crown on its
head. You couldn’t do that with a wild hoopoe in the garden.’

‘
Ja
, maybe you’re right.’

Then Mavis came in to say the bath was ready for the small children, and she knelt on the floor to gather up their toys and tidy them away into a plastic crate. Benedict thought Mavis looked
almost small enough to be one of the bigger Mazibuko children, and he often wondered how old she was. But he never asked. He knew from Mama it wasn’t nice to ask about a lady’s age.

When Auntie Rachel stood up to help Mavis to get the little ones upstairs, Benedict said thank you for the milk and left. There was no point in waiting around for Uncle Enock, who wouldn’t
feel like talking to him after his time at the dog orphanage.

Further down the hill, Petros was leading the cows from the milking shed towards the one where they would sleep, his dog by his side. He gave Benedict a small wave, and Benedict returned it
before heading back up the hill.

T
HE SLOPE OF THE STEEP HILL TO WHICH THE FARM
clung lay in almost total darkness. A little further up, not a single light
shone in the other house where the
kwerekwere
family slept, while some distance further down, the hostel for the dairy workers was lit only by a sliver of moon. In the main house, everybody
was asleep – or, if they lay awake, they did so without switching on a light.

It was only in the small servants’ room behind the main house that a light burned, the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling over the narrow space between the bed in which Lungi snored
softly and the one in which Mavis sat, her hands expertly rapid with her crochet hook and a large ball of soft, pale blue wool. When the baby-jacket was done, she would place it with the other
pieces that lay folded neatly in the plastic bag on top of the wardrobe – a child’s jersey striped in yellow and red, a lady’s jacket in black, three hats in different single
colours – ready to take to the friend who would sell them for her at the market in Mbabane. The money would go with the rest, in the cleaned-out Cobra floor-polish tin under her bed.

Cleaning for the Mazibuko family was certainly a good job to have. Madam paid Mavis the same kind of wage that any cleaner in Mbabane might be paid, and she also got this room to live in and
three meals a day, left over after the family had eaten. The family was big, but Lungi cooked a lot of food, and there was always plenty left.

Mavis earned enough money, she didn’t need to crochet for extra. No. She crocheted because she needed something to do whenever sleep fled from her in the night, leaving her suddenly
wide-eyed and restless. When that happened, she would tiptoe from her bed to the door of the room, slide her hand between the wall and the big wardrobe, and press the light switch slowly, careful
not to let it make a sound that might wake Lungi. Then, retrieving from under her bed the old pillow-case that was her crochet bag, she would get back into bed.

Tonight, as she worked, her thoughts went to the other house, and in particular to the maid there. Titi would right now be asleep not just inside the house, but inside one of the bedrooms with
the family.
Eish!
Madam had offered – Mavis had heard her with her own ears – to clear out all the things that were stored in the other servants’ room behind the main
house, the one just the other side of the shower and toilet that Mavis and Lungi shared, the one that Samson didn’t need because he came to work in the garden just two days a week. But
Titi’s madam had said no, Titi would sleep inside, she was part of their family.

Their family had lived in many places and they always took Titi with them, so Titi had already seen the world. She had finished her primary schooling, just like Mavis had, and now she was coming
to Madam for even more learning. Mavis tried to make sure that she was dusting or polishing nearby whenever Madam was teaching Titi, but it wasn’t always easy because the smaller children
needed watching then and Lungi was sometimes too busy watching a pot.

Madam had taught Titi the word
minor
, which meant not grown up, like all the children in the house. That was what a woman was here, she needed a man to be in charge of her or to sign
things for her. Titi had told Madam it was different in her own country, there she was allowed to own cows if she wanted, and also land. But Mavis wasn’t so sure that Titi was telling the
truth. If Titi could own cows and land at home, why was she here with her madam’s family, doing all the cooking and cleaning all by herself? Titi couldn’t be cleaning nice-nice, there
was too much work: the
kwerekwere
family was big, almost as big as the one here, meanwhile this family had both Mavis to clean for them and Lungi to cook for them.

Boys made more mess than girls, every maid in the whole of Swaziland knew that. Here there were only two boys, but at the other house there were three. The two younger ones were always here,
playing in the garden with Fortune then tracking mud and dirt into the house.
Eish!
Mavis shook her head as her fingers worked. She had asked Madam to speak to them about it, and Madam had,
but still they tracked in mud and dirt.

The eldest
kwerekwere
boy was different, he always wiped his feet on the mat before he came inside. There was often soil on his clothes, but that was Titi’s problem, not
Mavis’s, and it was a big problem because the other house didn’t have a machine for washing and Titi had to use her hands. Mavis had had jobs before where she had to wash with her
hands, and it wasn’t until she got this job here and learnt to use a machine that she fully realised how much time and how much work it had always taken to do a family’s wash by hand.
Here there were two machines, the new one in the kitchen that opened with a round door at the front, and the old one outside the back door in the sheltered area where she could hang the washing
when it rained and where Samson kept his mower and his other gardening tools. That machine opened at the top, and she had to fill it with a hose attached to the outside tap. Titi had one like that
back in her country, not one like the nice new one inside.

The eldest boy from the other house was quiet and serious, like the eldest boy in Madam’s house. Vusi wanted his own bedroom, he didn’t want to share with Fortune and Fortune’s
noise and mess. He wanted a desk in place of Fortune’s bed so he could be serious about his schooling. Madam and Doctor had told him maybe next year he could have the downstairs room that was
for visitors, because next year would be his last year of school and he was going to work hard for his exams and do well so that he could make something of his life. Meanwhile, he was supposed to
be a good example for Fortune, and meanwhile Mavis still cleaned Vusi’s nice, tidy part of the room and still picked up all the mess in Fortune’s part so that she could find the floor
to clean.

Vusi was the same age as Petros, who would be asleep now in the dairy-workers’ hostel at the bottom of the hill, unless there was a cow that was sick. Then he would be curled up with the
sick cow inside the shed, with that dog of his that slept in the shed anyway because the other workers didn’t want it inside their hostel, and he would wait there until Doctor came in the
morning to check on the cow. Doctor had offered him schooling but he had said no, he just wanted his job with the cows.

Mavis stilled her hands and rested them on her blanket. Flattening her back against the wall, she closed her eyes tight. She shouldn’t have let her thoughts wander all the way down to the
bottom of the hill. She shouldn’t have let them go to Petros. She should have made them stay inside the main house with Vusi, Vusi who was nothing like her own boy would have been.

Eish
, thoughts about her own boy were sometimes too hard. Sometimes they twisted her stomach tight, in the same way that her own hands used to twist washing before there was a machine to
spin the water out. And sometimes the thoughts spun round and round inside her head until they squeezed water from her eyes.

Sighing quietly so as not to wake Lungi, she opened her eyes and assessed the baby-jacket. In just a few minutes it would be done. She would start another immediately. Meanwhile, she needed
something to help her to still her mind before it started to spin.

Slipping silently out of her bed, she went to the wardrobe, quietly opening the side where there were shelves rather than hanging space. The top two shelves belonged to Lungi, who was taller,
and Mavis needed to sit on the end of her own bed to get at her own two lower shelves. At the very back of the upper of the two, further back than her deodorant and her comb, safely stored behind
her underwear and her thick winter jersey so that they couldn’t accidentally drop and spill, were the two small bottles that Madam had given her, both of them dark brown.

The one called Rescue was for if she was panicking or if she’d had a fright or a shock. She didn’t need that one, not tonight. No. She would just use the other one, the one that was
called Lavender, which was for if she was worrying and finding it hard to go to sleep.

Lying back across her blanket, she held that bottle firmly in her left hand as she stretched her right arm back, just managing to reach the edge of her pillow and pull it towards her. Then,
sitting up again, she put two careful drops from the Lavender bottle on a corner of the pillow-case. It was oil, but that didn’t matter: in the cupboard next to the inside washing machine she
had a special spray to use before washing that was good with oil like this. But it didn’t work so well with dirty oil, like if Doctor had done something to his bakkie and then wiped his hands
on his clothes. That kind of oil needed some of Lungi’s corn flour and then some Sunlight liquid.

Back in her bed, she was about to begin work on the baby-jacket again, when she saw that one of the threads from her blanket was coming loose. It was her own special blanket from home, Lungi had
nothing like it on her bed. Her mother had made it for her from squares crocheted in bright colours, each square outlined in black. It was old now – almost seventeen years – and Mavis
had repaired it over and over, sometimes replacing whole squares. Now a bit of black was unravelling, but she would leave it till tomorrow to fix. Her black wool was under her bed in a supermarket
bag that would make a crinkly noise when she opened it, and she didn’t want to wake Lungi.