Читать книгу The Keeper of the Kumm - Sylvia Vollenhoven - Страница 7

The girl sees the wind fighting its way across the plains and knows it is an invitation to dance

In a journey from the Sabbath school of the Seventh-day Adventists to an ancestral calling and the exorcism of Femba, it is probably best to begin with the time when things are abundantly clear. When the boundary of my world is a wire mesh fence that separates me from the grown-up children in the school next door to where we live.

I am born in the spring of 1952 at the St Joseph’s Maternity Home on the slopes of Table Mountain. Sylvia Elizabeth Juliana, the illegitimate firstborn of my mother, Eileen Magdalene Petersen. My birth certificate is issued before apartheid officialdom has dreamed up myriad classifications for people who are not white. The ‘Mixed’ tag on the document sets me apart from people born later with more definitive race classifications. I am very proud of this status, especially when it does not appear on the documents of my younger siblings. ‘Mixed’ just feels so much more benign than what came later, in the ’60s and ’70s.

My earliest memories go back to the time when we move to Wynberg because my devout Christian grandmother wants us to cut all ties with the family of my Muslim father, Ebrahim ‘Braima’ Hendricks. This is when the Vollenhoven family enters my life. My mother is dating Freddie Vollenhoven. I recall my forays into their intimidating house in Brentwood Road … but at this stage, they do not loom as large as my own family.

We stay in a wood and iron garden shed next to the school fence in the back yard of Uncle Willie and Auntie Gracie Davids’ run-down house with the fancy name. To this day, ‘Privet Villa’ is still right next to Ottery Road Methodist School.

Jesus loves me, this I know

For the Bible tells me so

Little ones to Him belong

They are weak but He is strong

“Ha’penny High,” says Pa Malfent, Auntie Gracie’s father, who is Welsh. It’s our secret greeting. I don’t know what it means. It feels good that someone has a pet name for me.

“You learn fast,” he says as I finish singing the chorus he has been teaching me.

Every time Pa Malfent comes to visit us my regiment of doll friends stands to attention. He picks each one up in turn, talks to them and somehow makes them answer.

“Ha’penny High, Jack is hungry,” says Pa Malfent before moving onto Raggedy Anne with red, woolly hair and a polka-dot apron. When they have all ‘spoken’, Pa Malfent sets them back down at the small pink wooden table and goes off for his afternoon walk. Sometimes if I’m lucky he invites me along. He is the only one who can see the crowd of people hovering in the corner. During the day they keep a safe distance. At night they sometimes catch up with me and my body shakes with fear. My grandmother tells me: “Pray and they will go away.”

But I think God might not listen to me because I watched my mother kissing her boyfriend Freddie Vollenhoven and I didn’t look away or tell my grandmother. She says upright young women should not allow a man to touch them and I assume this includes kissing.

My mother laughs a lot and more loudly than the other women. I love listening to my mother and her friends laugh and talk about Monatic, the shirt factory up the road where they work. My mother is a supervisor there. I can tell by the way she says the word and the way everyone listens to her that she’s no ordinary factory worker.

I love the soft sounds their wide flared skirts with many layers of stiffening make, especially when they dance in my Auntie Gracie’s lounge.

My mother’s favourite pastime is listening to LPs on Auntie Gracie’s new record player. When they stack them on top of each other, the arm of the record player rears back like a little horse to allow one disc to drop at a time. Then it moves forward shakily to settle on a “Jamaica Farewell”.

The silver arm moves back and forth, releasing tunes that fill the house. It is so much better than playing outside. I’m not allowed to touch the records, ever. On some of the labels, a dog is singing into a gramophone. My mother and her friends listen to their favourites and talk endlessly about the singers … Pat Boone, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole and The Everly Brothers. Sometimes when they play slow songs they hug themselves and dance alone, talking about the boys at the factory. That’s when they chase the children out of the room. I get to stay because they think I don’t understand. I’m so quiet people hardly notice me.

My mother has a beautiful voice and she is often asked to sing at weddings. Her songs explode in very high notes that she can hold much longer than the singers on the gram. When she makes the notes wobble, I sometimes worry that the words will get stuck in her throat.

My Auntie Grace’s daughters, Valerie and Lorna, tease my mother about her boyfriend Freddie who plays the banjo in the St Joseph’s String Band, the Christmas Choir that marches down our road in blue blazers and grey trousers during the festive season.

When Freddie walks down the road, playing his banjo with the string band in their smart outfits, my mother waves and runs into the road excitedly. He’s tall, so he’s always in the last row. My mother walks behind him for a while as if she belongs to St Joseph’s.

“Ha’penny High, come, let’s go find Claudie,” Pa Malfent calls.

He holds out a pale, knobbly hand that makes mine disappear. The rough inside of his palm feels completely safe.

“My daddy bought me a new motorbike. Do you like it?”

Claudie always insists on bringing along his latest bike. He has many motorbikes, each one a different colour. Whenever his father buys him a new one, he brings it round to show me. We walk on the pavement side by side, Pa Malfent and I, with Claudie riding slowly next to us in the road. His legs, much longer than Pa’s, straddle the long length of rope he calls his bike. Spit sprays out ahead of him as he provides impressive sound effects for his brand new machine that only we can see.

“Let’s go up as far as Morris the butcher, then you two can watch the school kids play on the way back,” says Pa Malfent.

Claudie and I love watching the boys and girls in their turquoise uniforms at Ottery Road Methodist School. They play games so absorbing they don’t even notice us peering through the wire that is the end of their world and the beginning of ours. They can’t see us but we can see them. It’s how different worlds work.

At night I pull up the blankets over my head, even when it’s hot, because it’s difficult for those in the other world to get at me when I create a border.

“Ma, please read me a story,” I ask my grandmother.

“It’s late and I’m tired. Some other time. You have to get to bed.”

“Please Ma. The one about Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Okay, but just once. Not over and over.”

When my grandmother reads me a story, she wraps me in my favourite handmade patchwork blanket and puts me on her lap. I love the feel of the different squares of material. Some are rough cotton. Others are silky soft. When I can’t sleep, I tug at the threads until the cotton unravels. Sometimes Ma doesn’t manage to hold onto both book and blanket and halfway through the story, when I start to fall asleep, I slip slowly off her lap and almost onto the floor. A delicious, dreamy tangle of thread, blanket and story.

She enjoys the books in which all the children have yellow hair and pale skins as much as I do.

Ma, Sophia Petersen, comes from the Swellendam wheat-farming district. Her parents were farm labourers. There were no schools for black and coloured children so she has worked in the kitchens of white people since she was a little girl.

“I used to wait until the madam was sleeping or out with the master. Then I’d sit under the window of the schoolroom for the white farm children and listen. I wanted to read so that I could buy myself a Bible one day.”

I love hearing her stories of how she taught herself to read so well that the mysteries of Revelations proved no problem for her.

Only when Ma tells me stories do I fall asleep easily.

Claudie is the one that makes me feel safe during the day. We don’t attract much attention. But one day the whole street is buzzing with talk of our latest escapade.

When I’m not allowed to leave the house, Claudie goes to the shop for me. If we don’t have money, he fetches a few coins from his parents who live behind a high red brick wall. We hardly ever see them. People say it’s because they are white. I want to impress Claudie that I’m smart like he is, so I supply the money for toffees for a change.

Claudie is as big as the grown-ups but he still talks like a baby. Although we don’t talk much, Claudie and I, our conversations last a long time. The adults ignore him completely. Sometimes we sit side by side in the lane next to my aunt’s house for a long time. Suddenly, quietly, Claudie disappears and no matter how hard I look for him up and down Brentwood Road, I can’t find him until he chooses to come back.

Claudie’s eyes have only two expressions. Most of the time, they laugh at everyone and everything. Occasionally his eyes are empty. That’s when I know he is angry or sad.

“Sylvia, come inside here. I don’t want you playing with that mad man! Where did you get money for toffees?” asks my mother, pointing to the Sunrise and Star sweet wrappers lying on the gravel in the lane where we’re sitting.

Large-eyed, Claudie points at me with a limp index finger, sticky drool making its way down his chin. My mother grabs my right arm, lifts me up off the ground. As I sit astride her bony hip, I feel the anger pumping through her body.

My grandmother has a large leather suitcase that she takes with her when she visits relatives outside the city. My mother loosens one of the thick belts holding the suitcase together. She wraps a piece of it around her right hand. I stand looking at her, not knowing what to expect. I’ve never seen her do this before.

“Look at you, you’re so small and yet so defiant! You’re not even sorry that you stole my money.”

I don’t know what she means but things are not looking good so I start crying.

“What are you crying for? I haven’t even touched you.”

Every sentence sounds angrier than the previous one. She talks constantly as she lashes out with the belt. I hold my thin five-year-old arms across my face. I stop crying because I think my crying is making her even angrier.

“I’ve never seen a child so stubborn!”

A frightened Claudie runs home howling. Children from up and down Brentwood Road gather at the gate, discussing mad Claudie and the child who says her dolls can talk and who stole her mother’s money.

When my grandmother comes home from work, she puts me on her lap and rubs Watkins Mentholatum ointment into the welts on my arms and legs. The sting feels delicious as her hands move gently over my bruised skin. When she’s done, she wraps my patchwork blanket around me and sings a soft song.

Siembamba, Mamma se kindjie

Siembamba, Mamma se kindjie …

The innocent ditty and the way she rocks and sings, rocks and sings seems like an attack on my mother. I fall asleep as the pain and caresses blend in a soothing haze of menthol and crooning.

My mother doesn’t like Claudie. She says he’s a bad influence. I don’t know what that means but Claudie is good at so many games we play and he’s kind. I love him dearly.

“Now he’s teaching you to steal. Who knows what it will be tomorrow?”

“Claudie never took Mommy’s money …”

“Keep quiet. Don’t you backchat me. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You’re so small and so full of nonsense.”

When Claudie’s with me, the crowd of terrifying people that hovers around melts into the background. They can’t come near me when there’s someone else.

One night I get out of the bed I share with my grandmother and lift up the blankets, which hang almost to the floor. I look into the large spaces between the cases and boxes. They have made this their home. I hear their breathing. I want to jump back onto the bed but I can’t. They are holding me, threatening to suck me into this space. In the middle, there is the carcass of an animal, dripping blood. Gory ribs stick into the bottom of the mattress. Then I hear moaning. It starts softly and becomes louder and louder.

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying? What are you doing down there? You should be sleeping.”

My mother and my aunt stand in the doorway looking down at me from a very, very long way up. They start giggling. As I grow more and more frantic, they laugh loudly, holding onto each other. I try to tell them that I can’t move, that I need help to get away. But the words are stuck.

“Get back into bed. When I come back you should be asleep!”

As they walk away, the terror and the darkness pull me apart. I try to scream but nothing comes. Eventually some sounds crawl out of my throat and my grandmother runs over from the big house where she was talking to Auntie Gracie. Humming, she wraps me in my patchwork blanket and promises to stay.

Every morning my grandmother washes me, almost pulls my hair out of my scalp to make the tiny, upright stragglers seem neat for a while and then puts me down on a blanket in a corner of the garden. My favourite place.

I head into the road to find Claudie. I don’t know what to do with myself when he’s not around. There’s only one girl in the road with whom I sometimes play, Noelene. Mostly she prefers hanging around with the older children. She lives in the same house as Freddie.

He is a tall man who picks me up to make a fuss of me when he notices my grandmother looking. When I’m in his arms the ground seems so far away. I worry that he might drop me if Ma stops watching.

“So where will they stay when they get married, Sister Sofie?” Auntie Gracie asks Ma one day.

They are sitting in the kitchen and I can hear them from where I am in the yard.

“They’ve been to the council for a house but there’s a waiting list. So they’ll probably move in with the Vollenhovens. Good luck to her with that lot. His sister can’t stand her and his mother says openly she doesn’t know why her son wants to marry a kaffir meid with a kroeskop5 bastard child.”

It sounds like my mother is mixed up with some strange people.

“That house shouldn’t be called Shalom. They fight like cat and dog. Have you heard the way Maggie Vollenhoven talks to her husband? I’ve never heard a woman swear so much,” says my grandmother.

I worry about my mother leaving us to go to live in the Shalom place with the fighting people who don’t like us.

Claudie and Pa Malfent are my only friends. As I grow older I accept that the children of Wynberg are mostly out of my league. They have straight hair, they don’t live in a small shed in someone’s back yard and some of them could pass for white.

I imagine that when I pass through the wire mesh boundary between the lane where I play and the big school, all will be well. I will wear the smart turquoise uniform of Ottery Road Methodist and look at Claudie walking with Pa Malfent to Morris the Butcher. I won’t miss them because I will have ‘big school’ friends.

But until then I am happy in my world. Sometimes Pa Malfent plays his favourite instrument, a zither that has been in his family for a long time. He sings mournful hymns. I love looking at the glossy, black-painted wood as his fingers move slowly over the strings. He lets me touch the zither’s box with the green felt on the inside and the delicate, green flower patterns on the lacquer veneer.

His old man voice is sometimes gruff, sometimes shaky and thin like the sound of the strings.

He laughs and sings me his special song about green valleys in Wales. I don’t understand the fancy English words but the tune puts me to sleep on his bed.

One morning there is a bustle in Auntie Gracie’s house by the time I wake up. An ambulance is parked in the road and I can see a piece of the vehicle’s bulbous white bonnet as I pass the lane to the kitchen. Everyone is crying.

“He looked so good yesterday. He was singing that song of his ’til late,” says Auntie Gracie.

I look into Pa Malfent’s room. The bed is empty, neatly made up. In the lounge the ambulance people are talking with Uncle Willie, Auntie Gracie’s husband.

I don’t cry much when Pa Malfent dies. But a few months later when someone takes the zither out of the green baize box and leaves it lying around in the yard, my heart breaks. I go and sit under the loquat tree in the corner of the garden.

A little while after old Pa Malfent dies and my mother’s wedding, my grandmother and I leave Brentwood Road so that she can live ‘in service’ with the Sonneveld family, Dutch immigrants, in Woodley Road, Plumstead. Now we see my mother only at weekends and people call her Mrs Vollenhoven. It’s confusing because that’s exactly what I call Freddie’s mother Maggie.

When I find out what ‘stepfather’ means I begin to write poems and letters for my real father so that he will know where I am and come to rescue me. He will take me to that world on the other side of the fence where the almost-white Wynberg girls will play with me. Our birth certificates probably all have the tag ‘Mixed’ but living in Brentwood Road, next to the school for the fair kids of the coloured middle-classes, teaches me that some people are less ‘mixed’ than others.