Читать книгу For The People - Anelia Schutte - Страница 11

Chapter 1

Going home

My mother is in the passenger seat in front of me, my father next to her, driving. I’m in the back of the Volkswagen Jetta with a bright-pink gift bag of treats on my lap.

‘Just a little something to snack on till we get home,’ says my mother.

There’s dried mango and guava, and big, fat raisins still on their stems. My hands reach first for the biltong and drywors, the dried meat and sausage that I crave in London every time I feel homesick.

I’m not really hungry, just tired. It took an eleven-hour flight from London, a six-hour stopover in Johannesburg and a two-hour domestic flight to get to George, the nearest airport to Knysna. But Knysna isn’t our next stop. My mother, as always, has managed to squeeze some work into the day. While she was going to be in George anyway, she thought she’d get a radio interview out of the way for Epilepsy Week, a major event on the Epilepsy South Africa calendar.

My mother has been a social worker at the Knysna branch of Epilepsy South Africa for twenty years now. When she first joined it was called the South African National Epilepsy League, or SANEL. For most people in Knysna it will always be SANEL and the people who live there, most of whom have brain damage from epilepsy, will always be ‘Sanellers’. A big part of my mother’s job is raising awareness of the condition, hence the stop at Eden FM.

My father and I listen to the interview in the car outside the radio station as my mother reassures Eden’s audience that people with epilepsy can live normal lives. She sounds confident as she answers the questions she scripted for the DJ last night, but her answers are very much unscripted.

‘People can tell when you’re just reading it,’ she said before she went in. ‘It sounds insincere.’

My mother’s smiling, alto voice works well on the radio. These days I’m more used to hearing it over faint phone lines to the UK, so it’s strange to hear it resonating through the stereo speakers in the back doors of the car. She sounds younger than sixty-four.

Fifteen minutes later, my mother is back. Just one more stop, she promises. My aunt, who lives in George, recorded the interview and we need to pick up the tape.

When we get to my aunt and uncle’s, I notice an electric gate where there was no gate, electric or otherwise, before. ‘They were burgled,’ my mother says matter-of-factly. ‘While they were in the house, sleeping. And all they’d left open was a small kitchen window.’

Had my aunt and uncle still had Snorretjies, their yappy little lapdog with his titular whiskers, the burglars might have been scared off. In South Africa, dogs are man’s best alarm system and as a result, most white families have at least one.

My parents’ last two dogs, Lulu and Nina, were what my father calls ‘township specials’. Drive through any township and you’ll see Lulus and Ninas everywhere: medium-sized mongrels with short, golden hair and white chests. My father’s theory is that this crossbreed of dog has developed in such dire conditions that it can withstand almost anything. ‘So your vet’s bills are lower,’ he says. ‘And your dog lives much longer than the neighbours’ pedigree Alsatians and Dobermans.’

Putting his theory to the test, my father got Lulu and Nina from the local townships where he took them off the hands of whichever family’s dog had delivered a litter that week.

Lulu and Nina are long dead now, and my parents haven’t bothered to get a new dog. They don’t have the time or the energy to walk a dog any more, they say. I’ve been nagging them to at least consider getting a little dog that wouldn’t need much exercise, but they won’t listen.

Finally we’re on the road to Knysna. I’m on the edge of the back seat, partly to hear my parents over the grumble of the car engine, partly from the usual anticipation I feel when I’m so almost home.

The sixty-kilometre drive from George to Knysna is a scenic journey through the Garden Route, as this coastal stretch of South Africa is known. Against a backdrop of mountains, forests, lakes and sea, the N2 highway winds and climbs, dips and falls.

The Jetta climbs one last hill and there it is, the momentary glimpse of water through an opening in the trees. Down the hill and… I’m home.

As we come round the final bend, the hillsides part to reveal the Knysna Lagoon. It’s not actually a lagoon, it’s an estuary, as my father told us time and time again when we were little. He was a biology teacher then, and he’s always been a stickler for detail.

Situated on the south coast of South Africa in the Western Cape, Knysna is ‘the heart of the Garden Route’ according to the brochures and websites, and ‘South Africa’s Favourite Town’ three years running.

The White Bridge – named as imaginatively as the nearby Red Bridge – carries us over the lagoon. To our left, the Knysna River feeds the lagoon with fresh water from the mountains, while in the distance to our right, two sandstone cliffs known as the Heads let through the sea.

I’m arriving in the run-up to the Oyster Festival, a two-week celebration of food, drink and sport cunningly designed to draw in tourists in July, the middle of the wetter winter months. In summer, there’s no need for such gimmicks. South Africans and foreigners drive here in droves to spend their rands, pounds, dollars and euros on lagoon cruises, seafood platters, quad-biking and abseiling. Or at least, they used to. My mother says they’re coming less and less.

As we drive through the centre of town, she points out all the restaurants and shops that are closing down. Even Jimmy’s Killer Prawns – eat as many prawns as you like – has gone under, but my mother doesn’t mind that one so much. Jimmy had taken over the vet’s old building and my mother always refused to go there as a result. How could she eat there, she argued, when it was where all our dogs were put down?

Thankfully, some things haven’t changed. After thirty-nine years in Knysna, my parents still live on the same street in the same house where I grew up. As we turn into the driveway, I notice that my parents – unlike my aunt and uncle in George or, indeed, most of my parents’ neighbours – still don’t have an electric gate or even a proper fence. I’m glad they feel safe enough not to cage themselves in like canned lions, but at the same time, it makes me uneasy. Crime has turned violent, even in Knysna. People don’t just get burgled any more, they get tied up, knifed, assaulted, raped.

I ask my parents whether it’s a good idea leaving the house so open.

‘Oh, Annie,’ says my mother. ‘What difference does it make?’

She tells me about a friend of hers who lives not far from here who was burgled recently. The friend was assaulted at knifepoint by one burglar while another emptied out her safe. ‘And she had a big gate and a dog,’ my mother says.

They’re after laptops and jewellery these days, she tells me. Gold, especially.

‘That’s why I don’t go around wearing fancy rings and things,’ she says, tugging at the ceramic beads around her neck. ‘Let’s face it, if they break into our house they’d be very disappointed.’ She laughs. I don’t. My hand tightens around the straps of my laptop bag.

My parents have never been materialistic. ‘Money is nice, but it’s not essential,’ is my mother’s motto. So although the house is big – five comfortable bedrooms over three floors and a pool in the back garden – it’s well lived-in, crammed full of trinkets and pictures and mementoes that have no real value beyond the sentimental.

Even the TV would be unlikely to appeal to a would-be burglar, being so old it doesn’t have a remote control. Not that it’s ever stopped my father changing channels or adjusting the volume from his armchair – ever inventive, he uses a metre-long dowel and some precision aiming to adjust the manual buttons and slide controls.

When I walk into the house, I feel the warm familiarity of home.

Greeting me in the kitchen is a rusty old fridge that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s covered in pictures and newspaper cuttings, even more than I remember. Now, alongside a photo of my grandfather in hospital before he died, there are pictures from my and my two brothers’ weddings in Knysna, London and Barcelona. Next to a faded, laminated poster of a pig (‘Those who indulge, bulge’) that’s been there for as long as I can remember, there’s a postcard of Picasso’s Weeping Woman that I sent my mother from Paris. And next to a fridge magnet of an Irish blessing is another carrying a bible verse: ‘Be strong. Be courageous.’

One new addition to the fridge gallery that catches my eye is a newspaper clipping. It’s a photo of a black man in a wheelchair, his arm and leg in plaster casts. He’s being pushed along by another black man on crutches, both his arms and one leg also in plaster.

Everywhere I look in the house, there are memories. In the dining room, the old upright Otto Bach piano on which I learned to play is now covered in candles, many of them gifts from family and friends around the world. My mother insists on burning those candles, all of them, when she and my father have guests over for dinner, and there are multicoloured dribbles and drops of wax all over the piano lid.

The wall opposite is a shrine to times gone by. Antique keys, medals, fob watches and hair curlers are stuck onto the wall with putty that has hardened into a cement-like bond after thirty-odd years. An old cast-iron meat grinder is stuffed full of porcupine quills and attached to a sturdy old cashier’s till. A wiry spectacle frame that has long since lost its lenses brings back memories of school plays.

But it’s a simply framed cheque that takes pride of place at the top of the wall: a cheque for one hundred and three rand, made out to ‘Nobantu’ and dated 15 October 1984.

On a white border around the cheque are two headings, ‘Vulindlela’ and ‘Thembalethu’, in my mother’s handwriting. Under each heading are the committee members’ signatures.

Some of the signatures are spidery, like my grandmother’s handwriting in the years before she died. Some are elegant and considered, others are childlike and laboured. One Thembalethu committee member started signing under the Vulindlela heading, realised her mistake halfway through her first name, scratched it out and started again. But they’re all there. All twenty-two women. All four men.

Elsewhere on the wall, there are more recent acknowledgements of my mother’s work. A Certificate of Merit from the Rotary Club of Knysna thanks her for ‘outstanding and invaluable services rendered in the community’. On another certificate, the Knysna Municipality names her a ‘Woman of Worth’.

But while those newer accolades are squeezed in between the bits of junk on the wall, the cheque to Nobantu from 1984 hangs above them all.