by Shani Krebs
Unlike other families, we didn’t employ domestic helpers and so, as soon as we were old enough, my sister and I were required to help with the chores around the house. We became domesticated. Personal hygiene was of particular importance to my mother and was vigorously administered. I often found myself subjected to one of her severe scrubbing sessions, and as a result I hated taking a bath. She would go to work on me with one of those huge brushes whose bristles were so hard they left scratch marks on your skin.
At the time I was too young to understand this, but my mother was a woman of exceptional faith, who had secretly embarked on a spiritual path of her own. Although as children we were well acquainted with stories from both the Old and New Testaments, we had a limited knowledge of other faiths outside of Christianity. Religion, in the traditional sense of worship and adherence, was never practised in our home but was rather enforced by the more fundamental principles of what was morally right or unethical and wrong, as set down in the Ten Commandments.
Although Katalin might to outsiders have appeared to be complacent and happy, she was strict in her ways. Beneath what she allowed to appear on the surface there lurked a deeply sad soul. Every year, in the private confines of her bedroom, my mother would light candles, cover her head with a shawl and pray. Although I was intrigued by this ritual, I was too preoccupied with being a child to give it much thought, and I couldn’t really have been bothered with what I saw as one of my mother’s eccentricities. Nor did she offer any explanation. It was only years later that I learnt my mother was lighting a Yahrzeit candle in memory of her dearly loved family, who had all perished at the hands of the Nazis in Budapest during 1944.
My memories of my early years are patchy. Although I couldn’t have known it at the time, it became evident that I was ‘different’ and destined not to have a normal life. I do recall suffering from terrible nightmares, when I would wake up crying hysterically to the point of being inconsolable. I developed an intense fear of the dark and had acute claustrophobia. In addition, I was already showing symptoms of the insomnia that would be a problem for me all my life. My sister Joan, whom we called Babi, was quite the opposite: she was a sleepwalker and an adventurous little girl who, besides often roaming around the house in her sleep, was on occasion found strolling in the streets at all hours of the night – fast asleep.
One memory that does still live with me, vividly so, is of an incident that occurred when I was about four years old. I must have just started primary school. My stepfather Janos had transformed the back yard of the property we lived on into a regular animal kingdom. We had chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys and even a couple of pigs, with their squealing piglets running around. His pride and joy, however, were his racing pigeons.
I was given the task of tending to his birds. This primarily entailed ensuring that they had water and cleaning their cages, and also making sure that the gate leading into their enclosure was bolted at all times. Janos himself took care of feeding them. I guess this had something to do with the master bonding with his birds.
One afternoon, our neighbour’s cat managed to get over the 2m-high wall that separated our properties and somehow worked the bolt on the pigeons’ cage free from the latch. The cat then proceeded methodically to devour a couple of Janos’s most prized birds.
Janos routinely checked all the animals just before dusk.
I was peacefully sorting through my silkworm boxes in my room when I heard Janos repeatedly shouting my name. At first I pretended not to hear him, but when my mother told me that my father required my attention I had no choice. I couldn’t fathom what on earth Janos was going on about, as I generally fulfilled all my duties as he instructed. But there was no mistaking from his furious tone, firstly, that something was seriously wrong and, secondly, that I was in trouble. I was frightened, but I reluctantly went to find him.
I walked through the kitchen and out the back door. I passed beneath the mulberry tree where our two German shepherds were stretched out in the late afternoon sunshine. For a moment I wished I could have traded places with one of them. They looked at me soulfully, almost as if they understood what was about to happen. It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds that I allowed my mind to drift. I was just standing there, gazing up at the sky, when Janos’s shriek startled me back into reality.
Trembling, I hesitantly approached him. He yelled all sorts of profanities at me in Hungarian – even now I would be embarrassed to repeat them. Next, in a single motion, he grabbed me by my collar, lifted me into the air, and proceeded to shove my face against the fence, pointing with his free hand at the dismembered bodies of the dead pigeons, the remains of which were scattered over the floor of the cage. He accused me of negligence and even threatened to kill me. In his anger he had tightened his grip around my throat and I could feel myself choking and then beginning to black out. All of a sudden, he hurled me to the ground. The next thing I knew I was being punched and kicked repeatedly, and then Janos was beating me with a wooden plank. Half-unconscious, I could hear our dogs barking like crazy. If they hadn’t been chained to their kennels, I think they would have ripped Janos to pieces. Those dogs were my best and only friends.
Alerted to the commotion coming from the yard, my mother came running out of the house.
‘Leave him alone!’ she screamed. ‘Have you lost your mind, beating a defenceless child?’
Thank G-d my mother intervened when she did, or I might very well have met the same fate as those wretched pigeons that day. Many years later, when my mother related the incident to me, she told me that I was beaten so badly that I soiled and wet my pants. She kept me at home in bed for nearly a month before I made a full recovery, while my stepfather went about his daily routine as if nothing had happened. The only difference was that from then on he took responsibility for his stupid birds.
I couldn’t understand his fascination with his racing pigeons. We would load them into specially designed bird crates and drive in whatever direction for about 30km. Then he would release the birds and, while driving, watch them head directly back home. What was the big deal? I could never get it.
Janos had devised some sort of plan to catch the cat, a ginger tom, that had caused all the trouble, and he waited patiently for it to appear. One afternoon it returned, and Janos’s eyes lit up with excitement. He dashed out of the house and went to the shed, where he pulled on a pair of elbow-length asbestos gloves. Then he took a corn sack and stealthily made his way to the cages, where the cat had already found a way into the coop.
Driven by a mixture of rage and revenge, Janos swooped down on the unsuspecting feline. After what seemed like quite a struggle, he subdued and bagged the shrieking cat. Once inside the sack, the poor animal went berserk. It made me think of a game my sister and I would play in our parents’ double bed; we would crawl under the blanket from the bottom end and race to see who could reach the top of the bed first. Sometimes my sister would only pretend to participate and then, as I crept under the blanket, she would pounce on top of me, holding and pressing the blanket down while I wriggled frantically beneath it. The feeling of being trapped was horrible and I would be overcome with claustrophobia. I imagined that was what the poor cat must have been feeling. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for it and wondering what awful fate awaited it.
Noticing me watching from a distance, Janos gave me a sort of complacent, psychotic grin that sent a chill up my spine. He walked towards me, holding the sack in one hand, and gestured to me to follow him. As we walked, he said to me in an almost paternal tone that I shouldn’t worry, as the cat would never devour another pigeon again. He put his arm round my shoulder, dragging the squirming sack along the gravel behind him. At four years old, I interpreted this unusual display of affection as my being exonerated for the loss of his pigeons. I had no idea what Janos planned to do with the cat.
Janos had two cars. Usually he drove one of his slick, pearl-white two-door Zodiacs, but he had also recently acquired a bakkie
. I walked with him into the garage, where he hurled the doomed cat into the back of the bakkie. Then he picked up a 5-litre jerry can of petrol and placed it alongside the sack. We both climbed into the bakkie and Janos drove to an abandoned mine dump. By now it was virtually dark and I could barely make out the surroundings. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I remember feeling desperately uncomfortable. There was something eerily quiet about this place. Without warning Janos slammed on the brakes and the bakkie came to a lurching halt in a cloud of dust. I just about hit my head on the dashboard.
While we waited for the dust to settle we could hear the muffled sounds of the cat still desperately trying to free itself. Janos got out of the bakkie, ordering me to sit tight and wait. Then he removed the jerry can and seized the hessian sack. I watched as he strolled about 5m ahead of where we were parked, directly in my line of vision. He threw the sack onto the ground with violent force. Then he slowly doused it with petrol, struck a match and let it fall.
I watched in fascinated horror as the match seemed to descend in slow motion. I saw the flicker of the flame on contact, and then a huge fireball, so sudden and so big it almost caught Janos’s face. The next instant there was the most ghastly screeching from the sack, and after that – silence. Janos stood by, tittering and grunting to himself, while I sat in the cab, frozen in shock and disbelief. In the days, weeks and months that followed, the images of that night never left my mind.
Our house in Orkney was close to all the local amenities. Diagonally opposite us was the predominantly English-speaking Vaal Reef Primary School, which Joan and I attended. A further 100m up the road was the Afrikaans high school, General Smuts Hoërskool. It was massive, and boasted about 1 500 pupils, as well as two rugby fields and an Olympic-size swimming pool.
One of the few boys I made friends with in the neighbourhood lived just up the road from me. His name was Dantjie, and of course Janos, being a great tease, called him ‘donkey’. Dantjie was slightly older than me, quite tall and hardly spoke a word of English. Although I spoke fluent Hungarian, my command of English was still shaky, but I knew enough Afrikaans to be able to communicate with him. As we were both bent on getting into mischief at every available opportunity, we made a great team. One of our preferred stunts was shooting our catapults at street lights, road signs and birds.
It goes without saying that the odd human being made an enticing target for us, too, and that in most instances, I’m afraid to say, it would be an elderly African man plodding home with his bicycle. Armed with our catapults, we would roam through the open areas of bush at the back of the two schools and follow the dozens of well-worn footpaths that stretched for miles. As we became bolder and more adventurous, Dantjie and I would follow these paths for hours. For the most part we encountered wild rabbits, occasional snakes and meerkats, and we’d pass many Africans travelling by foot from the farms and mines in the area, going to the shops for supplies or visiting friends or relatives in the towns.
Back in those days, security was not as rigorous as it would be today. My school was enclosed by a 2.5m-high perimeter fence of a type typical of the average home at that time. The rear of the school looked onto the bush, which provided refuge for the occasional vagrant and served as a thoroughfare for a constant flow of foot traffic. To prevent intruders from entering the school premises, a barbed-wire barrier, similar to those used by mining companies and factories, was erected on top of the fence. The only other deterrents were a security guard and bold red and white warning boards announcing ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’ attached to the fence at 50m intervals around the whole of the property.
I knew of one particular classroom in the primary school where all sorts of interesting things were kept. These ranged from antique silver and wooden objects to stuffed animals and jars containing preserved reptiles, and included a vast collection of unfamiliar insects. The place fascinated me, and I’d described the room to Dantjie on a few occasions. One Saturday, as we were heading home after an uneventful excursion into the neighbouring fields, I brought up the subject again. If we could somehow get into that classroom, I suggested to Dantjie, there was a possibility of hidden treasures. The prospect of finding something valuable was all the motivation Dantjie needed.
Unperturbed by the possibility of being caught, we breached the property’s defences with relative ease. Once we were inside the empty and quiet building, we made our way to what was actually the biology laboratory. The guard who regularly patrolled the school grounds was nowhere to be seen. Once we reached the classroom, we pressed our faces and hands against the window, hoping that the door might have been left unlocked. As we anticipated, though, it was locked, and none of the windows had been left open either. I knew that Dantjie always carried a penknife with him. Half in English and half in Afrikaans, I urged him to hand it to me. He looked a bit puzzled, but handed it over. I then motioned him to keep lookout and to warn me if he saw anybody coming. With the bigger blade of the penknife I began to remove the putty around the edge of the window that secured the pane of glass to the metal frame. The putty was so dry it came away easily.
Although at the age of five or six I had a fairly good idea of what was right and what was forbidden, I could never have foreseen that this, my first act of breaking and entering, innocently naughty as it was, would be my first step along the path to a life of crime. I guess fate has its way of securing the course that our lives are to follow.
Within a few minutes I had removed the pane of glass. I reached inside and opened the window. Dantjie and I climbed through and then each of us went in our own direction. My attention was drawn to a display of butterflies. I remember being overcome with sadness, seeing these beautiful creatures reduced to lifeless ornaments. I had never seen a butterfly close up before and I was fascinated by the intricate patterns and brilliant colours of their wings.
I was so spellbound by the various things exhibited around the classroom that I completely lost track of time. Then, as if from a distance, I heard Dantjie’s voice telling me in a hushed tone that we had to leave. When I turned around I was astonished to see him clutching tightly in his arms a fairly large replica of a Voortrekker wagon, probably just like the one his ancestors had travelled in. Seeing my expression of disbelief and disapproval, Dantjie’s features became set in a mixture of defiance and national pride. It was as if stealing the wagon would, in a sense, be retrieving a part of the heritage that had been surrendered to the English at the turn of the century. Shaking his head in a swift motion, and without saying a word, my friend’s resolve was clear. He was asserting ownership of the wagon, irrespective of how I felt.
And who was I to argue? In my child’s mind it seemed only fair now that I, too, should help myself to something. Besides knowing full well that if I was caught I would get a severe beating from my parents, I also knew that I was contemplating breaking one of the Ten Commandments. The excitement of taking some sort of a trophy away with me outweighed the fear of being beaten, and any moral sense instilled by my discipline-minded parents vanished in an instant. And, of course, there was the likelihood that we might even get away with it. The criminal mind is not much more than a trained opportunist.
My eyes darted around the classroom looking for something I could take as a souvenir. My attention was caught by a fluffy, snow-white rabbit skin. Without giving it a second thought, I grabbed it and stuffed it down the front of my khaki shorts. Then my friend and I left the school property unnoticed. Before parting ways to go to our respective homes, we shook hands and swore each other to secrecy. No matter what, we told each other solemnly, we would never tell anybody what we had done. Satisfied by our agreement, we went our separate ways and home to supper.
During the day our front door was hardly ever locked, so getting into the house was easy, but traversing the oak floors without making a noise was another story altogether. As light-footed as I was, I had barely taken a few steps when the floorboards squeaked loudly.
‘Is that
you, Shani?’
Unfortunately for me, my mom had acute hearing. Nothing escaped her ears.
‘Yes,’ I responded innocently, although my heart was thumping. Without paying much attention to me, she told me to go get washed up. Normally, when I returned from one of my escapades in the veld, I would be dirty and my clothes would be covered in the needle-sharp blackjacks that clung to your socks and jersey when you brushed through them. I rushed to my bedroom and hid the rabbit skin under my mattress.
The evening passed without incident. Joan and I ate supper together at the dining room table while my mother waited on us. That night it was Hungarian goulash, a beef and vegetable stew flavoured with red paprika – one of my favourite dishes. Delicious though it was, my mother had a habit of dishing up huge quantities of food, which we almost always found impossible to finish. One of the rules in our house, however, was that we children had to eat everything on our plates, down to the last morsel, before we could be excused from the table. I recall one time when I had eaten so much I was literally choking, and before I could dash to the bathroom I vomited into my plate. My mother forced me to eat the remainder of the food on my plate, along with what I had just regurgitated. I never looked forward to meals, especially supper. Sometimes they felt like torture.
The next day, Sunday, just before lunch, I was in the back yard playing with our Alsatians, my head in the clouds as usual. Yesterday’s event was the furthest thing from my mind. By now my rabbit skin was safely stashed away in the old servants’ quarters on our property, which had been transformed into a makeshift storeroom.
The people of Orkney were predominantly God-fearing folk who worked on the mines. The town had more churches than supermarkets. Every Sunday, at exactly 10am, the sound of church bells could be heard from every direction. I remember being told by my mom that if I was asked at school what religion we were, to say we were Roman Catholics. Apparently, I had been baptised a Catholic, although we practised no religion in our home. It struck me as strange that neither of my parents nor any of their Hungarian friends ever attended church, but I assumed it was just part of the white South African culture. No Africans worshipped in the white people’s churches either.