You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (20 page)

She went back from time to time when Ounooi needed her. But as soon as the children filled out with food she lapsed and shamefully disappointed Ounooi whose self-respect could not allow Meid to stay. Not that Meid did not keep her eyes lowered or keep her voice from rising into a question mark, but the tell-tale dust pressed against a white finger trailed along the sideboard; her quiet yes to all Ounooi's questions curdled in the blandness of the mutton bredie she served up – always a few minutes late.

Back home there were the children, hers again, and the patch of mealies she kept alive with buckets of brack water they carried from the river. The cobs were stunted, but in autumn she listened to the tall stalks rustling like paper in the wind. Then the marriage brought another child and she found herself once again standing at Ounooi's back door, her head bowed.

Skitterboud's figure was a black dot in the distance but little Blom still waved. Meid had gathered clothes in bundles and was now ruining a see-through doekie by weaving through the delicate stuff the thick stem of a faded plastic flower. She had not been allowed to wear it on the day of her marriage. Skitterboud said that it was wrong, that the magistrate would know by just looking that it was stolen. She snorted at the memory. The red-nosed man did not even look at them. His pale eyes were fixed at some point
above their heads, taking instruction from God. Oh, she had not expected him to smile at them, but how could the sin be put right by Him if he, the intermediary, did not know what they looked like? She knew right from the start that the certificate had no power over her; that it was a useless piece of paper and certainly no match for the tokolos. She knew the tokolos would win in the end. She was the first to see him. On a summer's night when they escaped from the heat of the house and the restless children to lie under a white moon, the stunted figure scuttled by, stared boldly and disappeared into thin air as she screamed. Skitterboud, who fortunately had a full bladder, pissed a wide circle around the house to protect them for the night. It was the very next day that Giel arrived.

The children shrieked with delight and she had to bend down for them to touch the frilled edges of the carnation now faded with age.

‘It's horrible like you, like you, like you,' chanted Dapperman at Blom.

‘No it's not, it's beautiful,' said Blom, whose voice quivered uncertainly at the dirty pink of years of dust.

And they were off again, wringing each other dry with taunts. She would leave them to fight it out, wait until Blom, ashen with spent rage, should collapse on her for comfort. Meid waited, propped in the shade against the house. Around her the strange damp circles of just-darkened earth crimped at the edges. The tears of the earth, she thought, the stifled tears that rise mistily by night leaving the grey stain of salt. She watched the shafts of heat sucking up the moisture as the shadow of the house was shoved along by the sun. She burrowed a hand into the delicious cool sand. It crumbled through her fingers and fell into an untidy heap. She should not have disturbed this
shadow of moisture. But things will happen without your consent just as Giel arrived and things could no longer be the same.

She had heard of him, the smart nephew who worked at a garage in the town. He arrived with wonderful tales which he told after much clearing of the throat as everyone gathered around Oompie Piet's fire in the evenings. Of how he had driven cars, of trains with green leather seats and of three months spent in gaol for a crime which he could not tell about or had not yet ascertained. But when he described the red shirts and khaki shorts of the convicts lined up with their sickles to harvest wheat for Baas van Graan, his eyes blazed with anger. He tugged at the spotted neckerchief and looked into the distance and his eyes scaled the hills and seemed to land in the town from where his words came oven fresh.

He had come to shear, then stayed to plough for Baas Karel – there were not many who had learnt to drive a tractor. One day he returned with a sheep from Baas Karel's flock. It was simple, he said, the sheep had collapsed in the heat and they were hungry.

‘Hungry, are we not?' he challenged, but they all remained silent and Skitterboud narrowed his eyes and shook his head and shifted on his haunches saying, ‘It isn't right. Baas Karel will shoot every one of us. The sheep are sacred to him.'

Giel looked at him musingly then waved a reckless hand, ‘Fuck Baas Karel.' He sharpened a knife on a slab of blue stone and she, Meid, was the first to rise. She held a bucket under the animal's throat and watched the hot blood foam into it. She built a fire; the offal had to be scraped that night. Fat from the roasting ribs spluttered on the coals and with the woodsmoke sent a maddening smell into the night
air. No one could resist, and the children asked quietly for more. Later, as she helped him to hang out the meat for drying, their eyes met and clung to the moment. He rubbed his head shyly as if to check that the convict's skull had not reappeared.

Meid rose.

The sand had dried out prematurely with all that raking, leaving the grey stain of salt.

Shit shit shit, she cried into her empty hands. For once the children were quiet, watching her with awe.

Skitterboud's story is yellow with age. It curls without question at the edges. Many years have passed since the events settled into a picture which then was torn in sadness and rage so that now reassembled the cracks remain all too clear. They soften a facial line here and pinch into meanness a gesture elsewhere. A few fragments are irretrievably lost. Or are they? If I pressed even further . . .

Such, however, is my excuse for having constructed this portrait: the original has long since ceased to exist for him; only here is the story given its coherence. I am after all responsible for reassembling the bits released over the days that I sought him out as he moved with the winter sun around the pondok. We shouted above the sound of Boeremusiek crackling from a radio with tired batteries.

I am uneasy. He knows that I am after the rest of the story and there is of course my original reason for seeking him out. I can see no other way of getting through this visit after years away from the place of my birth. The silence of the veld oppresses me. I need dagga. In spite of his crumpled Sunday tie and talk of going to church, I suspect him of rolling a regular dagga pil. On a Saturday afternoon he would strum his tin guitar and beat out a dust outside his
pondok with a truly remarkable shudder of the legs and he would sink down, pooped, saying, ‘Skitterboud, that's what they call me,' his pupils dilated in narcotic bliss. These legs will go on shimmering for years. But you have to dance on your own these days, no one has time to dance anymore, or makes a decent guitar. I don't know what these Namaquas are coming to.

I do not have the courage to ask about the dagga. I am content with the story.

Today he looks tired. His face is a nicotine brown and pillow-down waves helplessly in his hair. I ought to leave him alone; besides, he is wary and will be on the lookout for leading questions.

We measure the efficiency of our eyes. I am amazed at how well he sees from those slits, banked up with wrinkles and sunken behind the high cheekbones that threaten to pierce through the skin. Yes, he can see the blue megalithic outcrop in the distance and the lone thorn tree on the horizon and the clump on the right which he tells me is a flock of sheep. And then I realise that he knows the veld as he does the lines of his hand; no degree of myopia or astigmatism can blur the topography. He had driven the sheep towards Bloukrans himself; he knows from the position of the sun that they will now be resting in the sparse shade of the dabikwa trees. He does not know how much he actually sees. I hand him my spectacles and his face cracks with surprise. Clearly his vision is improved and he mutters with wonderment as he steps around the house to gaze about the veld. He will not tell me of the things he discovers, of how the veld has aged. Have I ruined it for him? This, he says, tapping at the frames, is just precisely what I want. Then he whips them off and balances on his heels as he tells.

‘Those merinos were the death of me. The short-tailed Dorper, that's the sheep for this veld, or even the fat-tailed Afrikaner, but the merino is as wayward as a young woman. No doubt sweating under that hot coat she is always restless, disobedient, leading the others astray. You should see them on shearing day trying to scale the walls like monkeys, even though they like nothing better than losing those heavy expensive coats. Ooh, I may be rickety now, but yes, I was the prize shearer in my day. All of us Septembers of Rooiberg, all the brothers and uncles and cousins, were good shearers, but I was the best, the chief shearer. The Boers would travel miles in their shiny motor cars in search of me.'

He puts on the spectacles and with the right hand shading his eyes he scans the horizon in a pantomime search.

‘Did you find the merinos?' I ask.

‘Which?' He bores a stick into the ground.

‘You know,' I insist, ‘the Boer's.'

‘Which Boer's?' he repeats stubbornly.

I swallow. I will have to use his term. There is no getting round it.

‘Baas Karel's.' And the word Baas drowns in my mouth, flooded with gall. I will not be foxed by him. He is amused by my repugnance at the word Baas. I retaliate with a direct question.

‘I mean the day you were asked to round up the sheep for a count. Did you find the merinos?'

He drags the stick to and fro in the dust before he looks up to say, ‘Yes, it was a long day. I didn't get home till late, and in my bag the puniest piece of kambroo you have ever seen. It was too dry that spring.'

‘And Meid?' I pressed.

‘Gone. They had all gone. Filled the buckets with water and left. That night they all slept under Giel's new roof.'

‘And she had really said nothing?'

‘No, there was no need. But I had hoped. She was a smart one that Meid, nothing could stop her. I think you had better leave these glasses with me. They'll be of greater use here in the veld. If you put your mind to it you could see right over a hill with these, and if that's no good, through the clouds into heaven.'

‘No, they've been made specially for my eyes. You should go and see the doctor and get him to make up a pair to suit you. Pensioners get concessions on such things so it shouldn't cost much.'

‘I saw Dr van Zyl last year. You know Dr van Zyl, always a joke and a slap on the back. Well, he said to me, “Skittie you need a nose to wear glasses. Next time you'll be asking me to replace your baboon's nose.” And that was it. Anyway, I don't have any papers and you need certificates before you're given pension. They say I'm too young, see I move too fast for pension, and the young baas poked about in my mouth and said I had too many teeth left. Now my mamma and tata knew we were there without any papers from a magistrate. They told us to keep away from magistrates, said magistrates bring nothing but trouble. As a young man I thought I knew better, but you should pay heed, my child, to the elders. They know what's right,' and as I snorted he came to the point. ‘I see you'll have to leave these with me.'

‘It's not that I don't want you to have them, they're just no good to you. It will damage your eyes wearing glasses not specially prescribed for you.'

‘But I can see better with them.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘But it is precisely the point.' He looks at me sympathetically. ‘You've been to school for so many years and you still believe everything they tell you. It's those magistrates again, they'll be behind this nonsense for sure. Who can know better than myself whether these glasses are good for me or not?'

‘Well, I can't pretend to know better than you do but there are experts who know,' I insist, placing the glasses firmly on my nose.

‘Yes,' he says pensively, ‘the longer they sit on school benches with chalk and slate, the less they know. Look, I believed all that because they're supposed to be so clever – until I heard what the cleverest man of all had to say. The magistrate. He's supposed to know right from wrong and it was he who said it . . . filth.'

Skitterboud spits vigorously.

‘He knows nothing of right and wrong. All those people he locks up, you can be sure they know more than he does. Oh, they think they know so much but they know nothing, nothing. When I take off my hat and say, “Yes Baas, yes my grootbaas,” and hold my hat to my chest, I have to squint and chew my cheeks to keep from laughing out loud.'

He mimics in a grave voice: “‘Spend your pay carefully, Skitterboud. Here's your bottle of wine, now you won't need any more, and I know you people dance all night but get to church on Sunday, the sheep won't need you then.”

‘I say, “Yes Baas,” and I don't say that no one dances any more, that the young people have left. Ag man, they don't know anything, even with all those important bits of paper. They remember nothing,' and his Afrikaans slows down according to his idea of posh, ‘need to peer over their glasses to check their papers all the time. I was afraid of him all right, of the magistrate who married us. And it was
Ounooi's idea when Meid went with the children. She said, “Skittie, you're a legally married man, a respectable Bushman. This is a case for the court. The Baas-magistrate will get the children back, he'll settle this business for you.”'