Zebra Horizon

by Gunda Hardegen-Brunner

  *

  On Saturday morning all 3 kids and Mrs Vleega climbed into my bed and we had a detailed discussion about why rainbows are arcs and what is the real colour of chameleons. Pearly morning light crept through the window and painted the dancing shadows of wind shaken trees on the wall. Doves’ cooing and hadeda screams mingled with the rustling of the leaves. Threads of fresh made coffee scents wafted through the salty smell of the sea.

  “Today at the yacht club I’m going to put all my 3 Sprays in the water,” Joshua announced. He stuck a finger up his nose and dug out an enormous snarly. The future solo circumnavigator inspected his find with great interest and declared generously: “You girls may come and watch the launch.”

  While Opheibia dished up breakfast, Julie said that she’d take Greta and Lolo to the shops to buy them some clothes before joining Ludwig, Joshua and me at the yacht club. Opheibia placed a dish with sausages on the warming tray and said: “Madam, I need a new uniform, my yellow one is vrot. They make nice ones now with little flowers on them…and Madam, I think blue suits me best; it goes well with my complexion.”

  Julie swallowed a smile. “Ok Opheibia, I’ll have a look at that yellow uniform later.”

  I searched my cupboard for some suitable stuff to wear for my first visit to a yacht club. In movies, yacht club people always seemed to dress up quite seriously. Dark blue blazers with polished brass buttons, special skipper caps with golden cords…a pipe clamped between their teeth and their fingers clasping a glass of whisky. I wondered if my best Bermuda shorts and my only white polo shirt would be up to the occasion. Personally, I couldn’t give a hoot about my outfit but I didn’t want to disgrace my host parents.

  Ludwig said: “You look very smart, my girl,” and he even winked at Julie. Ludwig himself was wearing some every day shorts and an unspectacular T-shirt.

  He’s probably got all his smart stuff at the club.

  The harbour was closed off by something that looked like a concentration camp fence. We came to a gate with a barrier and a customs official who asked if we had anything to declare.

  “Just going to the yacht club,” Ludwig said.

  The official peered through the car windows. “Alrrright.” He made a sign and a black man in uniform opened the barrier.

  “Gee whiskers, this place doesn’t look very welcoming,” I remarked.

  “Well, there are customs in any harbour of the world and the rest is part of the measures against terrorists,” Ludwig said.

  “What terrorists?”

  “Various underground organisations. The ANC for example has a military wing called Umkhonto we Sizwe. Means The Spear of the Nation. Their aim is to regain power for the black people. They might want to throw a bomb in here, especially at the oil storage tanks over there.” He pointed at some monstrous steel tanks further down the road. “These tanks are guarded by the army and have special fences around them. If somebody shoots off a rocket the fence detonates it before it gets to the oil.”

  Phhh…one can’t get away from politics in this country.

  “Isn’t it normal for the blacks to want their power back?” I asked. “This is Africa after all and they are the majority.”

  “Ja, if things don’t change, they’ll sooner or later klobber the hell out of us whites. The government tells us it has everything under control and it will never happen…but I don’t know, it’s like living in a pressure cooker, one day the lid will blow off.”

  The harbour was a labyrinth of bumpy roads, railway lines, docks lined with big sheds and enormous cranes, and empty lots covered in bush. Boats of all shapes and sizes were sitting in the harbour basin, and on the hard parking some coloureds painted a fishing boat a sunflowery yellow. In the dry dock the blue flames of welding torches hissed around a steel vessel, adding to the cacophony of harbour noises. Machines screamed, motors chugged, cranes screeched, hammers banged. We wound our way through pungent fish-, oil-, coal- and weird chemical smells. Fishing nets and buoys were lying in the sun and Indian Mynahs, seagulls and cats fought for eatable scraps. We drove through an empty lot where stacks of railway sleepers and heaps of rusty junk stuck out of the grass. A bumpy road led past some old abandoned sheds and changed abruptly into a sand track. Ludwig stopped next to a big fig tree. Joshua jumped out of the car like a flash. I thought he needed a pee.

  “Wind up your window, Mathilda,” Ludwig said. “It’s safer to lock up the car.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “To your left, my girl, is the Victoria Bay Yacht Club.”

  “I can only see something that looks like a double garage.”

  “That’s it, my girl; all great things start off small. We are in the process of building the club house.”

  Mich laust der Affe.

  I looked down my snow white shirt and my crisply ironed marine blue shorts. Ludwig opened the boot. He chucked a packet at me and grinned. “Julie packed this here for you. Might come useful.”

  The packet contained some paint stained shorts, an ancient pink T-shirt and a frayed out straw hat.

  “Why did nobody tell me?”

  “Oh, different strokes for different folks,” Ludwig said. “You do what you want.”

  “You can get changed in the ladies’ loo,” Joshua suggested.

  “You guys don’t know how fortunate you are that I can take a joke,” I declared with dignity.

  Inside, the clubhouse to be had a bare concrete floor and one white washed wall. The other walls were partly plastered. The corrugated iron roof sat on some dark brown beams. There was no ceiling to keep the temperature within an acceptable range. Already it felt like the inside of an oven. Some folding chairs and a bench were grouped around a wooden table, with ashtrays and paraffin lamps on top. A forgotten doll lay between an ancient gas fridge and a grey metal locker. Dinghies, fishing rods, a generator and tools took up the rest of the space. I got changed in the loo, a separate little building with lizards all over the show and a frog in the basin.

  A white bakkie arrived. It was laden with 3 coloured men, a heap of planks and a big cooler box. 2 blond boys and their fishing gear tumbled out of the passenger door. A guy in his 30s jumped out of the driver’s seat, radiating cool class in spite of his frayed, paint stained outfit. He turned out to be Dylan Collins the Rotary president’s son, the doctor who had treated Marieke after her stroke.

  “I’m pleased to meet the heroine at last,” he greeted me. “Marieke would be much worse off if you hadn’t acted so fast.”

  “And how is she doing?”

  “Jolly well. She has to learn again how to use her body and she is making good progress. It was quite a shock for Hannes of course. The poor old chap turned from grey to white overnight.”

  The coloureds unloaded the bakkie, chatting in the typical Cape coloured sing song manner. “Blerry hot,” one of them said. “Tjaaa jirra, a man needs a dop to make up for all that sweat pouring out of his body.” The third guy agreed and they trundled off to the clubhouse.

  Dylan’s boys were about the same age as Joshua and ready to catch the biggest fish in the harbour. Joshua couldn’t wait to launch his boats.

  This part of the harbour was formed by a dredged channel. On our side there was a sandy beach with a small jetty. Upstream the channel narrowed into the Crocodile River, which came down a wild, bush covered valley. Down channel was a little island. About a dozen yachts and a thing that looked like a floating shed were moored in a row. The floating shed was the size of a medium caravan, with a porch around it. A long time ago it had been given coats of paint, but now the multi coloured flakes of the different layers screamed neglect. The porch sagged dangerously towards the bottom of the ocean. That didn’t stop a couple of dogs from chasing each other across the warped planks. Some cats were sleeping on the crooked railing and on the ridge of the roof, seabirds sat like a row of movie spectators.

  Must be the local version of Noah’s Arc.

  We launched the Sprays from the jetty. Joshua
said that he was happy with Spray II’s improved bowsprit, but that Spray III could do with more ballast.

  A choir of disharmonic howls rose from Noah’s Arc. The door opened and a man emerged. He climbed with some difficulty into a clapped out dinghy tied to the porch gate. The dogs and cats jumped in with him. The man shouted something and a grey heron came flying from the opposite bank and landed elegantly on the bow of the dinghy. The guy started rowing and all the birds from the roof followed him like a feathery cloud.

  Wow, the nautical version of the Piper of Hamlin.

  “Check that,” I said to Joshua.

  My host brother tore his eyes from the Spray III for a second. “That’s Gordon. He can talk to animals.”

  The feathery cloud above the dinghy grew during the short crossing with birds joining in from all directions. When he got near the jetty Gordon threw a waterlogged rope at me. I tied it to a metal ring. The dogs and cats leaped out of the boat. Gordon was a small, thin man all sinew and bone, with a dark tan. He cast a critical look on my knot and untied it, mumbling something into his big grey beard. The dogs and cats watched his every movement. Even the birds, who were sitting on the jetty and on the dinghy now, seemed to keep a close watch.

  “Bowline,” Gordon mumbled as he did some loops and fancy things with the rope. “You can’t go through life without knowing your knots.”

  I went back to the clubhouse to see what was going on there. Some more cars were parked in the shade of the trees and the dinghies had been moved onto the grass. A tall, sturdy guy a bit older than Ludwig was walking around with a roll of paper in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. He told jokes, clapping everybody on the back and laughing like a horse. He approached me with a friendly grin and introduced himself as Sam, architect and weekend sailor. He unrolled the papers, which were plans, and pointed to solid and dotted lines in various colours, explaining something or telling another joke, I didn’t know because I didn’t understand half of what he said with his British accent. He burst out laughing again.

  Must have been a joke.

  Sam looked at me. “Are we experiencing a little language problem here? Or is it a lack of appreciation of the British humour?” He took a pull of his pipe. “Foreign languages! Not easy, my girl. I’m talking from own experience. Learning Xhosa.” He pronounced it Kosa without the click. “Trying to impress the locals. Encourages collaboration. At least that is what some of the whiteys say.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and called “gunjani” to 3 blacks unloading a bakkie.

  “Ninjani,” I said. The plural is…”

  Sam stuck the pipe in his face again. “Always perfectionists these Germans. Must be ingrained in their genes. “He grinned. “Nothing wrong with that. You guys invented aspirin and the X-ray machine, after all.”

  I grinned back. “I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

  “Why does your Yacht Club look like a garage? Couldn’t it be a bit more…sophisticated?”

  Sam sighed, his shoulders drooped and I thought he was going to collapse. But he straightened up again and growled: “It’s that bloody harbourmaster, that wood headed bureaucrat. He doesn’t want a yacht club here.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you find that out, my girl, you’ll know more than all of us. I suspect it’s a psychological dog in a manger kind of thing. This bastard just doesn’t want other people to enjoy themselves.”

  “And there is nothing you can do? Talk to the mayor or something?”

  Sam snorted. “Railways and Harbours! You are talking about sacred government property, girlie. The ground you are treading upon is under his high and mighty harbourmaster’s command. Finish and klaar. There is nothing you can do…except what we are doing now. We told him we needed a shed to store our dinghies. A utilitarian thing. That he could take. Of course he doesn’t know that we have got a nice little bar in our ‘shed’; that reminds me, it’s about time for a dop. Let’s go and see what we have got.”

  Inside, Dylan and 2 blacks were trying to assemble Dylan’s heap of planks into a shelf. The generator was howling. Sam switched it off. “Hell guys, I don’t want to lose my hearing, now that I’ve reached a man’s most prolific years.”

  Dylan put his drill down. “I wish we had electricity. But with our present harbourmaster there ain’t no hope for such luxuries.”

  “I think I’ll have a little chat to the harbour electrician,” Sam said. “One can go far with some bottles of brandy in this country.”

  A short, stocky man was rummaging in the gas fridge.

  “Got some beers in there Steve?” Sam called over to him.

  The man turned round. “Just brought in 2 cases of quarts and there are still a couple of cold pints.” A T-shirt showing the Big Five bulged over his pair shaped torso and he wore thick glasses and ironed jeans with creases.

  “Jolly good,” Sam smacked his lips. “We better send the darkies outside. One shouldn’t drink in front of them. Sets a bad example.”

  While they started to discuss if one should have a warm Castle Lager or a cold Black Label or maybe mix the 2, I went outside to look for Ludwig. I found him kneeling on the ground with one of the coloureds, floating a floor on the short side of the ‘garage’.

  2 blacks were mixing sand, cement and water with shovels. The straps of Ludwig’s kneepads were cutting in his flesh.

  “If you cut off your circulation like that you’re bound to end up with varicose veins,” I warned him.

  Ludwig got up. “Don’t worry about my blood vessels. I come from very healthy Swiss pioneer stock.”

  The blacks shovelled the concrete mix into a wheelbarrow and tipped it out where the coloured was working.

  “Ok Japie, you and these 2 guys carry on here,” Ludwig said to him.

  “All right Master,” the coloured answered. He had green eyes.

  Ludwig took his kneepads off. “We’re slowly but surely enlarging our clubhouse. This will first be a stoep and then a stoep with a roof, and by the time we put the walls up the current harbourmaster might have kicked the bucket and we can get cracking at full speed.” He gave his kneepads to Japie and washed his hands at the outside tap. “I thought you could paint the window frames if you want to do some work, Mathilda. Old Alistair has donated about a gallon of Prussian blue.”

  “Ja, I can do that. Who is old Alistair?”

  “Our oldest member and a teetotaler. Never touches any booze. He’s a bit scatterbrained though. Had to go back home because he forgot to bring the paint brushes.”

  We went to join the guys inside. Ludwig had a cool Black Label and I some mango juice.

  “Where’s Gordon?” Steve asked. Nobody knew. Steve opened another beer for himself. “If anybody sees him I brought some scraps from the restaurant for his zoo. We had a wedding anniversary last night. A golden wedding! Can you imagine it!” Steve took a big schluck. “Jesus. I wonder how they did it. My marriage only lasted 26 months.”

  “You are not the only one,” Ludwig said. “We have the highest divorce rate in the world, pal.”

  Sam grinned at me. “You better not look for a husband among the South Africans, Mathilda.”

  “Never planned to.” I put my glass down. “Actually I don’t think I’ll ever get married. Marriage is just one of those society things. Who needs a piece of paper to share her life with another person?”

  Sam emptied his pipe into an ashtray. “Hell girl, how on earth did you end up as an exchange student? I thought they only choose the tame ones.”

  Alistair arrived. He looked like an ancient spider; long limbs and a lot of silvery hair all over his body, except his head. He poured himself stuff out of a thermos flask and said: “There is nothing like rooibos tea. Excellent against heart diseases and old age ailments.”

  “Same as whisky,” Sam said.

  I asked Alistair for the paint brushes. He blinked pensively behind his black-rimmed glasses. “Hm…uh…let me think. Didn’t I bring them
in? Cor blimey. Thought I put them right here on the table. Hm…maybe in the car. Hm. On the back bench. “

  “Have a whisky,” Sam suggested. “Stimulates the flow of blood to the brain.”

  “No no. I must look for those paint brushes,” Alistair got up.

  “I think I’ll have another juice then,” I said. “May I take one out of the fridge?”

  “Go right ahead,” Steve said. “If you want ice there should be some in the deep freeze compartment.”

  The fridge was mainly filled with bottles and cans but there was also an ancient looking piece of butter, a lump of some unidentifiable stuff – mebbbe bait – several tubes of glue in the egg shelf and a cake in the top shelf. I opened the deep freeze section and started to laugh.

  “What’s up?” Ludwig asked.

  “I always thought the Germans have a strange sense of humour,” Sam said. “You tell them our hottest British jokes and they don’t turn a hair, but they split their sides when they look into a fridge.”

  Hahaha.

  “Alistair,” I yelled, “Alistair, the search is over.”

  “What search?” Steve asked.

  “The paint brushes. He put them in the deep freeze.”

  I went outside and got cracking on a window. Ludwig came and asked Japie how things were going. The coloured meticulously straightened out a quarter square metre of concrete, put down his plank and cast his eyes to heaven. “Jirra Master, we could be finished by now, but these Kaffirs are lazy bastards. Takes them hours to mix a bit of concrete.”

  I nearly dropped the paint brush.

  Nobody in Germany is going to believe this. The oppressed don’t stick together.

  At lunchtime we had a braai under the trees. Julie arrived with the girls, a huge basin full of potato salad and 3 freshly caught Red Roman. Steve dug about 3 metres of boerewors out of his coolbox and a fowl marinated in a sauce, which had been a family favourite ever since Steve’s great-grandmother had invented it during the time of the Seventh Kaffir War.

  Sam’s wife, Nadine, arrived, looking like a smiling bird, with her sharp nose and penetrating eyes. She inspected the place and said: “Well done, well done,” and then she asked me to help her butter the rolls.

  Phhhh

  I looked at the half drum where the meat was sizzling over the embers of bushveld wood. The braaing was done by the guys again of course.

  Phhhh

  I swallowed any protest since I was a guest and because of people’s tendency to generalize. I was representing the entire population of Germany, after all.

  Dylan’s boys had only caught an old shoe and a tangled piece of tape measure.

  “Pollution is getting worse by the day,” Dylan commented.

  “Just wait until they’ve built this new iron ore berth,” Ludwig said “There’ll be so much iron ore dust in the air that you won’t be able to see the island from here anymore.”

  “Ja, I guess you’re right,” Dylan said. “But at least the country will get in some foreign currency by exporting the stuff.”

  “I thought South Africa is boycotted by just about the whole world,” I said.

  “All propaganda,” Steve growled. “Where do you think the Yanks get the space age metals for their space program from? From us, my girl, from us. Horrible old South Africa.” He angrily chucked his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it with his heel. “They are a bunch of bloody hypocrites out there. Not only do they pretend not to do any business with us because of apartheid, but look at the way people are treated all over the world. I’ll give you just one example. Arab women. They don’t even get their own ID books, let alone the vote. And who is boycotting Arab oil, hey?”

  A cloud of birds approached from the west. Alistair glanced up at the sky. “Looks like Gordon is coming. One can always tell by the birds.”

  Some minutes later Gordon schlentered along the road, the dogs copying their master. A couple of cats joined the trek. Gordon greeted us with a toothless smile.

  “Come and join us,” Ludwig invited him.

  Gordon sat down on a wire chair and accepted a cold beer. The birds descended into the trees, except the heron, which stood like a one-legged statue close by. Everybody watched in silence how the dogs and the cats settled in a circle around their human friend.

  “Here we go,” Steve dropped 2 bulging plastic packets into Gordon’s lap. “Golden wedding anniversary left overs. Only the best for the beasts.”

  Nadine nudged my arm. “Watch. You won’t often see something like this.”

  Gordon slowly got up from his chair. The dogs wagged their tails, the cats got up and stretched, the birds cried excitedly. Gordon walked a couple of metres away. He chucked a bone to each dog and each cat, mumbling something in a secret language. The birds took off from the branches and landed on Gordon’s outstretched arms, picking morsels out of his hands. The heron approached in a graceful stalk and grabbed his share with his long beak.

  “St Francis of Assisi,” Nadine whispered, “in flesh and blood”.

  After the braai Gordon had a digestive cigarette and a digestive dop. Then he excused himself. He had an important appointment at the Seafarers’ Club.

  “Here goes a tragic figure,” Julie said as Gordon disappeared and only the cloud of birds was still to be seen in the sky.

  “One can’t put him in a drawer,” I said.

  “Uh?” All of a sudden I had all eyes fixed on me.

  “Don’t try to put him in a drawer,” Alistair said. “He might charge you with assault.”

  “What do you mean, Mathilda?” Dylan asked.

  “Ehm, we’ve got a saying in German. Translated directly, it is to put somebody into a drawer. It means to classify somebody…or mebbe in English it’s to categorize…and if you can’t put somebody into a drawer, you don’t know where that person fits into society. Something like that.”

  “I think I get your point,” Dylan said.

  “So you reckon one can’t put Gordon into a German drawer,” Steve chuckled.

  “I can’t. He looks like a hobo yet he talks like a gentleman. His fingernails are broken and dirty yet he’s got table manners fit to eat with the Queen.”

  “You are quite right,” Julie said.

  “Shame, the poor man,” Nadine sighed.

  “Ja, a it’s terrible story,” Dylan said. “Amazing that he didn’t end up in the loony bin or hasn’t drunk himself to death. You see Mathilda, Gordon once was one of our most brilliant biologists. He taught at the University of Cape Town and wrote papers about things we normal mortals don’t even know how to pronounce. Then he got married to an Afrikaans girl by the name Dalene van Rensburg.”

  “That’s when the trouble started,” Steve commented.

  “Well I don’t know,” Alistair said. “She was quite a bit younger than him but that doesn’t necessarily end in disaster.”

  “That’ not the point,” Ludwig said. “She came from one of those very conservative Afrikaaner families in the Transvaal and Gordon from an English family, who arrived here with the 1820 settlers. Old man van Rensburg just couldn’t stomach that his daughter married a bloody rooineck instead of a nice boereseun. He told his daughter he never wanted to see her again. In good old Boere tradition that means nobody of her family was allowed to contact her, and when the patriarch speaks you listen because it’s all taken from the Old Testament. In spite of that Gordon and Dalene seemed to lead quite a happy life. They had a boy and a girl and much later another little girl called Vicky.”

  “That’s when the trouble started,” Steve said.

  “Why, was something wrong with the kid?” I asked.

  “Hell yes,” Sam said. “She was born a darkie.”

  “Dalene got involved with a black man,” Nadine said.

  “We don’t know,” Dylan said. “According to the official version it was a genetic throw back from one of her ancestors.”

  “I still maintain Dalene had a go with a black guy,” Nadine insisted. “H
er first 2 kids were as white as any of us; blond hair, blue eyes. And all of a sudden a brown skinned, dark eyed child with curly black hair. Something doesn’t ring true.”

  “Genetically a throwback is possible,” Dylan said. “And after all, what percentage of Afrikaaners have got black blood in their veins although they’d never admit it?”

  “Bunch of bloody hypocrites,” Sam growled.

  “Dalene came from a background where everybody believed 100% in white supremacy,” Ludwig said. “She shot herself. Couldn’t handle the fact that she had given birth to a coloured child. Must have been a hell of a thing, but Gordon somehow managed to get over the death of his wife and his kid’s colour and carried on with his life. He sent the 2 elder children to a boarding school where nobody knew they had a dark sister. At home the maid looked after the little one.

  When Vicky was 7 she was officially reclassified ‘coloured’. Parents of the children in her school had complained that she wasn’t white. Vicky was removed from the school and stayed at home.”

  “Poor kid,” Julie said. “Just imagine, not belonging anywhere, no friends…”

  “Absolutely awful, Nadine sighed.

  “When she turned 8 Vicky had had enough,” Ludwig carried on. “She swallowed a packet of rat poison. From that day on Gordon was never the same again. He left his job at the university without notice, locked up the house without packing anything and trundled along the coast until he ended up in that floating shack over there. He surrounded himself with animals and refused for years to have anything to do with any human being. When we first started building here he wouldn’t even acknowledge us. Only after weeks of leaving plastic packets full of leftovers for his animals did he accept us. It was his ‘sociable’ day today. He doesn’t often stay that long. The only other place he ever goes to is the Seafarers’ Club.”

  The barman there gives him dops on the house,” Steve said.

  “What happened to Gordon’s other kids?” I asked.

  “When Vicky died both of them were already at varsity,” Nadine said. “Brilliant students. The boy specialized in astro physics. As far as I know he’s living in the States now. And the daughter is doing research on primates in Borneo. Seems to be quite an authority in her field.”

  “One wonders what Vicky would be if she had been born in a different country,” I said.

  “We’ll never know,” Ludwig answered, “But one thing I do know is that this country will stand for ever guilty in the centuries to come for a social engineering attempt based on some crack pot Hollander – Verwoerd – who’s forbears couldn’t even run a decent half way stop at Cape Town in the 1600s.”

  I finished painting the windows and went down to the jetty. The kids were absorbed in a game that involved the building of sandcastles and a lot of water splashing. The sun beamed golden rays from a pristine sky and the sea gleamed in ripples of silver and blue. The milkwood trees in the Crocodile River Valley shone like a pond of emeralds and the breeze carried flowery scents. The childrens’ laughter filled the hot afternoon air.

  Such beauty in such a fucked up country.