Читать книгу The Keeper of the Kumm - Sylvia Vollenhoven - Страница 8

The rituals are not for the benefit of the gods. The rhythm of the dance holds threads in place so the Ancestors can do their work.

In the ’50s and ’60s Wynberg is an affluent island in a sea of growing apartheid chaos. The coloured people here can’t be moved because they own the land. Stories abound about how they manage to hang on to title deeds when black people are being dispossessed all around. The one heard most often is about Martha, the 19th-century freed slave who married a British earl, inherited his fortune and purchased a huge piece of farm land here on the southern slopes of the Table Mountain range.

The descendants of Martha and the freed slaves have always made their landed privilege and mixed blood work for them in this suburb cut off from the world of the Cape Flats by white neighbourhoods, main roads and a railway line. The title deeds are the glue that has bonded the enclave to the exclusion of all else. There are the Wynberg coloureds and then there are ‘the rest’.

When Claudie is nowhere to be found, I wander down the road towards the house called Shalom, in search of other play options. My mother will soon marry Freddie Vollenhoven so she doesn’t mind if I go there. If I’m lucky, I’ll find Noelene. When there are no other friends around, she’ll play with me for a while. I walk right into the patriarch of Shalom, Chrisjan Vollenhoven. Freddie’s father is a religious fanatic. All the kids in Brentwood Road know that before you go into his house you have to say, “Only Jesus.”

His wife calls him “Mal Chrisjan”. The grown-ups in Brentwood Road talk about how much he used to drink and sing loudly in the road. But now he has ‘found the Lord’ and is ‘saved’. He preaches several times a week from the pulpit of the Baptist Church in Castletown Road. He always wears brown suits and a fedora to match. When he walks down the road, he seems to be praying. Head bent forward slightly, leaning into the wind, holding on to his hat. I’m terrified of this man. I wish he would go back to singing drunken songs like my Uncle Tienie in Swellendam. He looks at me as if I’ve done something horribly wrong and it’s only a matter of time before he finds out what it is. His voice always sounds the same whether he’s talking to me or conversing with God.

When I push open the heavy wooden garden gate, Chrisjan is standing on the stoep waiting for the password. There are miles of pathway and large brick steps to climb before I get to the red front porch and the gargoyle with the folded arms who guards Shalom. I hope that today he will let me pass.

“Only?” says Chrisjan looking at me, expecting me to finish the phrase.

I can’t make the sound come out of my mouth. My breath disappears as he grabs my arm.

“Only?”

“God, Chrisjan, los die kinners uit. Dis Eileen se kind. Sy soek seker vir Noelene.”

After his wife Maggie’s intervention, I whisper “only Jesus” several times while he grips my arm. I’m allowed up the wide steps onto the red polished stoep.

“Noelene speel daar agter,” Maggie calls over her shoulder in a loud voice.

This house is much larger than the one we live in. Everyone here has their own bedroom. They speak only Afrikaans and talk about me as if I’m deaf. The house is almost as fancy as the places of the white people where my grandmother works. The people in the road say it’s because Chrisjan is a French polisher, restoring the antique furniture of white customers. My mother says it’s because Maggie is almost-white.

When King George and his Queen came to South Africa, Maggie and Chrisjan were invited to a royal ball in the Drill Hall. They still have the invitation beneath the glass top of the sideboard in the lounge. Curly letters that announce His Britannic Majesty’s wishes.

Except for Freddie, who Maggie and Chrisjan adopted, the Vollenhovens look almost like white people.

In Cape Town’s unspoken hierarchy my mother is marrying up.

“Die kind praat skaars. Is sy reg in haar kop? Het jy gesien hoe loop sy rond met daai mal Claudie?”

Maggie Vollenhoven is small with a face so pale it’s almost ghostly. She has a gruff voice for a woman. She says fokken and blerrie in almost every sentence. She is the only old woman in the road with very, very short hair who never wears a doek. She hardly ever goes to church.

“Chrisjan, hier’s jou vrete,” she shouts when she has dished up Mr Vollenhoven’s supper.

I’m not allowed to use the word vrete and I’ve never seen plates piled so high with food. A mountain of rice next to a mountain of stew. Chrisjan makes the mountains disappear in no time at all. When Maggie drinks her tea her throat bobs up and down, making a loud gulping noise. Together they look like the baddies in of one of my fairy tale books, the kind who would eat you if there were no stew mountains.

My mother has bought me a book that has photos of the 1947 royal visit. I wonder what these people with all their ribbons and crowns and jewels thought of Maggie and Chrisjan. But Ma says the royals were not actually at the ball in the Drill Hall and that it was a special dance for the coloured soldiers who fought in World War II.

“Hey Sylvia, come ’n help us. We’re moving Sybil out of the back room,” says Noelene, who is going to start school next year.

Sybil is Maggie’s daughter and Noelene is a kid who lives here because her mother is ‘in service’ for white people on the other side of the railway line. They all call Maggie “Mamma” and her husband Chrisjan “Derra”.

“Sybil is moving her things out of the garage, so your mother can come and stay with us because she’s pregnant,” says Noelene, with a knowing look in her eyes. I don’t know precisely what pregnant means so I just keep quiet and help her carry Sybil’s clothes. Noelene knows I’m confused so she makes fun of me and asks:

“Do you know where babies come from?”

“Hei jy Klaas Vakie! Your mommy is gonna have a baby and she’s not even married,” says Sybil when she overhears the one-sided conversation. She comes closer, smoking a cigarette, and points a menacing red fingernail at no one in particular.

When I drop Sybil’s clothes in the duck pond, on the way from the garage to the main house, she chases me away.

Back at Privet Villa I want to show off with my newfound knowledge.

“Noelene says you’re going to stay in their garage cause you’re gonna have a baby. What’s getting married?”

“Ek het vir jou gesê daai mense is a klomp skinnerbekke. Van die begin af het ek glad nie van die Freddie jong gehou nie. Van die begin af! Maar jy’t jou bed gemaak en nou moet jy in hom lê.”

We’re sitting in our little shack, which the children call a pondok. It’s the first time I see my mother cry and my grandmother so angry. In between tears my mother shouts back. I don’t understand much of the Afrikaans. When my mother slams the door and runs down the lane into the street, still weeping, I am afraid I might never see her again.

“Babatjie, I think we have to go and stay at my work,” says Ma as she puts an arm around me.

“I want my mummy,” I say, giving way to the flood of tears that have been gathering in my throat. When people are upset or excited I feel everything they feel. I push my grandmother away and run down the road to Shalom. I love Ma but without my mother it is lonely and cold.

At Shalom, Sybil is still taking her things into the main house. My mother helps her. They shove a large wardrobe away from the wall. Noelene is standing between the wall and the cupboard. They don’t see the big wooden box that tumbles from the top of the cupboard towards Noelene. I run forward to try to catch it before it hits her.

It lands on my head. It’s a hollow box with round holes and it contains a collection of pegs. Sybil used it for therapy to regain the use of her hand after she had polio. The pegs fly all over the room. A sharp corner of the box crashes into my skull. I hear Sybil swearing.

“She’ll be okay. Just make sure you bring her back to have the stitches removed next week,” says Dr David Shockett.

I like Dr Shockett. I see him often after that. He always smiles, gives me medicine that tastes like sweets and puts gentian violet on anything that hurts, including my private parts.

The hole in my head never ever closes up completely.

My mother says some nights I can sleep with her in the converted garage behind the Vollenhoven house. My wooden cot now stands in the corner of the room. At night Sybil and her boyfriends sit in Mr Samuels’ taxis – old Chevies – that he parks here as it is the only spacious yard in the road. They drink and sing, smoking long cigarettes.

Sybil never marries and for a long time after she died I remember her singing “Blue Moon” in her flared nylon dresses. Everybody says over and over, “She was so young.” Nobody talks about why she died.

The day of my mother’s wedding the whole street comes out to watch Mr Samuels take my mother and Freddie to the registry office in his black Chevy. He usually drives only white people around.

“I want to go to the wedding,” I wail at my grandmother.

“You can’t go anywhere with that huge bandage on your head. The doctor says you have to stay inside. Don’t cry. He says you shouldn’t get upset or excited.”

I hear Lorna and Valerie, Auntie Gracie’s daughters, shouting excitedly outside.

“Here they come! Come Sylvia, come and see!”

I run outside, bandaged head bobbing.

Mr Samuels has polished the chrome on his Chevrolet taxi. It sparkles in the autumn sunshine as he drives slowly down Brentwood Road. My mother looks like a movie star, drifting above chrome flashes. I stand at the gate of Privet Villa with Auntie Gracie and her daughters. Freddie and my mother wave as they drive past.

When they come back from the registry office, they take photos in the garden down at Shalom. I am not in a single photo. A few of my mother’s friends from the Monatic shirt factory have come for tea. My mother is wearing a stylish not-quite-white two-piece. The tailored jacket has a frill at the bottom and the skirt is so narrow she can hardly walk. Her hat sits at an angle, adorned with a beautiful flower that matches the one on her jacket and the posy in her hand.

“She’s lucky she’s so thin and that frill hides a thousand sins,” says Valerie, Auntie Gracie’s eldest daughter.

That night Ma and I sleep alone for the first time. It feels strange without my mother. I worry about her sleeping in the unfriendly Shalom place. I dream about sitting in the big black Chevrolet. It is driving too fast and I’m scared.

“Wake up, wake up! I have to change everything now.”

I have wet the bed and my grandmother is stripping the sheets in a fury.

“Your mother is right. You have to sleep on your own. This is the second time this week!”

Things are very different now that my mother is married. I miss her pretty dresses and the way she laughs at Ma’s Afrikaans grumbling. Sometimes Freddie fetches us to go on outings with them. When he stands at the entrance to our shack, he fills the whole frame and the room becomes a bit darker. He is the tallest man I have ever seen. Fat, smelling of cigarettes and motor car grease. His glossy hair flops onto his forehead in a thick Brilliantine curl. People say he has a Tony Curtis hairstyle.

“Môre Mama, hoe gaan dit?”

He no longer calls my grandmother Mrs Petersen. She doesn’t seem to like the new Mama title and she hardly looks at him when they speak.

Freddie now goes everywhere with my mother. Sometimes they take me along to musical evenings with the Eoan Group in the City Hall. There is a thick white rope halfway across the hall. We always sit behind the rope. Only white people sit at the front. As soon as the singers start, I fall asleep on my mother’s lap.

When the singing is done, everyone stands up and claps. Freddie has to carry me to Cape Town station. My mother always lets me give the tickets to the white conductor on the train. I like the way he repeats “Thank-you-dankie” as if it’s one word, over and over:

“Thank-you-dankie …”

I love the sound his clipping machine makes as he punches a hole in the ticket so that we can’t use it again. The ticket with the hole makes me feel proud. I’ve been somewhere important.

When we finally get back to Brentwood Road, my mother puts me to bed in the shack at the back of Auntie Gracie’s house and goes to the Vollenhovens’ garage with Freddie. I’m glad I don’t have to go and live with Mal Chrisjan, the swearing Maggie and dronk Sybil, singing “Blue Moon” in the ‘wedding’ Chevy.

Our relatives, spread out on the Cape Flats and in Swellendam, hardly ever come to us in Wynberg. When we visit them, they ask endless questions about the people of Brentwood Road. Mama Donaldson, Ma’s sister in Athlone, takes out her best tea cups from the display cabinet in the lounge and chases me out of the kitchen.

Wynberg teaches me much about Cape Town class and status but it is a very long time before I am able to give voice to these unspoken lessons.