Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree

by Niq Mhlongo

  The following day, when Lulama went to work at her boutique in Clearwater Mall, Ousie Maria and Mohapi went to fetch Gogo Mpiyakhe, from Zola, in Soweto, to come and heal her sickness, and also to cleanse the house of bad luck.

  It was Gogo Mpiyakhe who had helped Ousie Maria to find a job within three days of leaving Swaziland to come to South Africa. Back then, Ousie Maria didn’t know anyone in the country. Gogo Mpiyakhe had given her some amazing medicine. It was the brain of a vulture that had been dried and powdered and then mixed with powdered herbs such as peeled serokgwe root. This, according to Gogo Mpiyakhe, produced good luck and good dreams. Gogo Mpiyakhe told her that vultures hunting for their food are regarded as good dreamers. They are also considered lucky birds. Soon after taking the medicine, Ousie Maria landed her job with the Phalas, and she has believed in the powers of Gogo Mpiyakhe ever since.

  “She’s a great medicine person. What she does not know about African medicine is really not worth knowing about,” Ousie Maria said with deep conviction during the car ride to Soweto. “Every­thing will go back to normal, you’ll see.”

  “I trust you,” Mohapi said.

  Gogo Mpiyakhe lived in a typical four-roomed Soweto house with an outside toilet. There was a small thatched hut, an indumba, at the corner next to the toilet. This was where she conducted her consultations with clients. She welcomed her visitors with a smile. Her forehead shone with sweat, and she was barefoot. When she walked, she bent slightly forward, as if her back pained her. A few bracelets, mostly white and red, jangled on her wrists and ankles as she walked. Lots of red and white beaded necklaces adorned her long neck. Her two large round earrings looked like bottle caps. She wore a dress in red, black and white. Mohapi and Ousie Maria had to remove their shoes before entering the indumba. Inside, they were engulfed by a powerful smell of traditional medicines. “Gogo Mpiyakhe,” Ousie Maria began, “we need your help.” And she proceeded to explain the Phalas’ predicament.

  Gogo Mpiyakhe listened carefully and then agreed to come to the Phalas’ home. Back at the house in Forest Town, she gave Mohapi some dried monepenepe. They burnt the long cylindrical pods by the swimming pool in order to chase the evil spirit.

  “The evil spirit has entered the household through the swimming pool water where the cat drowned. The water must be drained while all the family members inhale the smoke of the monepenepe,” Gogo Mpiyakhe explained.

  She also gave both Ousie Maria and Mohapi a sekgopha. Ousie Maria knew that crushed Aloe castanea is used to treat both high blood pressure and chase evil spirits and bad dreams at night. They were instructed to mix it with the roots of mulibatsha.

  “When burnt, the smoke smells very strong so as to chase bad spirits,” Gogo Mpiyakhe said.

  When Lulama came home that evening she found that her husband’s usual smooth charm had gone. He seemed agitated. There was a strange burnt smell in the air. The doors had been opened as if to let out the smell. What was he hiding? Angrily, Lulama removed her jacket and dumped it over the sofa.

  “What is this smell now?”

  Mohapi squared his shoulders. “We have decided to consult a healer, and all of us have to use sekgopha.”

  “What do you mean we decided to consult?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “Ousie Maria took me to a healer today.” He enunciated the name Ousie as if learning a new word.

  “Since when is she making important decisions in this house with you and without me? She works for us, not the other way round.”

  Her tone conveyed her irritation. She waited patiently, looking casually around the dining room the way partners do when they have an argument in front of the children.

  Mohapi snorted.

  “Go and call your Ousie Maria,” she commanded.

  “You have to work with me on this matter.”

  She deliberately watched his mouth as he talked. Rivulets of sweat were trickling down his face. “I made the decision as the man of the house, and it’s final.”

  “Is that so?” she said, mocking him. “Let me teach you a thing about what the man of the house should do. He must take the final decision with his wife rather than listening to an illiterate domestic worker. There’s a letter from school that says your children are not doing well. It is from their three teachers. That’s what you should be attending to instead of burning muthi inside our house. The headmaster will soon find an excuse to suspend them. I was forced to sign a warning today when you were busy consulting a sangoma.” She spoke slowly, and gesticulated before every word.

  Lulama’s retort seemed to have stung Mohapi. When he didn’t say a word, she walked out of the house to Ousie Maria’s cottage. Without wiping her feet on the mat as usual, she tried the door, ready to stomp in. Locked. Lulama had noticed that, ever since the cat died, Ousie Maria was afraid to be alone in an unlocked room. Every sound gave her a fright. She became afraid of the darkness and never turned the lights off. It was as if she was afraid that something bad might happen to her in the split second of darkness.

  Lulama paused, listening before knocking. She felt a sudden unconcealed dislike for Ousie Maria. After a third knock, the door opened. Ousie Maria looked at Lulama intently.

  “I came to understand what gave you the right to take my husband to your sangoma without telling me. What’s going on here between you two?”

  “I was only trying to help,” said Ousie Maria. “I thought he would tell you. Well, I didn’t offer him instructions on what to do. I was merely giving him advice. He was free not to take it at all.”

  “We brought you here to help with the cleaning and washing. Not to plan my family behind my back.”

  “How can you talk to me like that? I’ve been with you for the past fifteen years, even before your children were born.”

  “That’s my point exactly. I think you have overstayed your welcome. Now the children are old enough to take care of themselves.”

  Ousie Maria took a breath, seemingly to calm herself, before saying, “Let me tell you this before I grant you your moment of outrage. I’m the one who helped you with the traditional medicine so that you could conceive. I helped you bring back that radiant expression of joy to your face.”

  “I’m sorry, you will have to leave,” Lulama insisted. “I can’t have someone stay who acts like my husband’s first or second wife. There will no longer be trust between us.”

  “Do your children and husband know that you’re chasing me away?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I will sort it out.”

  Lulama looked around the room. The bed she had given Ousie Maria was sitting on bricks. She arched her eyebrows and looked pointedly at the bricks. This mad Ousie Maria is even afraid of imaginary tokoloshes when she is sleeping in her bed. No, she will definitely have to go, Lulama knew. For a long moment, she looked at Ousie Maria, and held her hands clasped in front of her. She didn’t know how to say what she wanted to say. She stormed out of the cottage and banged the door behind her.

  After Lulama had gone, Ousie Maria paced up and down in her room. When she got into bed, she could not sleep until the early hours of the morning. When sleep finally caught up with her at dawn, the violent seizures of a nightmare afflicted her. She dreamt Bonaparte was licking her all over her face. This time he was white. The cat walked backwards towards the swimming pool. By the pole under the shade netting he arched his back to a strong taut bow and yawned. He kept a steady gaze on her face, then purred loudly, the tip of his tail jerking back and forth.

  Ousie Maria kept on jerking and twisting in her sleep. The cat crouched back and licked its lips and washed its face and whiskers. Its tail stretched out straight and flat to the floor. Then it flicked the last inch of its tail while smelling the ground.

  She woke up in a cold sweat the next morning, shivering all over. Throwing her blanket off, she went to the toilet where she flushed and watched thoughtfully as the water whirled down the bowl.

  She remembered how she had mixed butter with ch
illies and spread it on the edges of the swimming pool the day the cat drowned. They were the same chillies that Mohapi put in the engine of his car to discourage snakes and rats from sleeping inside the engine at night. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She recalled the day she tried to chase Bonaparte out of the children’s room with a broom and how the cat had leapt out of reach. Then he sat down and licked the pads of his raised paws before attacking her.

  She wiped her tears away and started to pack her things.

  MOVING LANDMARK

  In the park, you see things. But not what I saw for the past three months. My friend Phiwe and I sort of owned a car wash at the Meadowlands Zone Two park behind the clinic. It was not a proper car wash, as we might have wished. What happened is that when we saw a car parked, we would approach the owner and ask to wash it for forty rand. We didn’t have fancy car-wash equipment like a vacuum cleaner or car polish. We were poor and just trying to make ends meet. Being unemployed for four and a half years is not easy. You have to find a way to survive if you want to buy yourself basic things like underwear, cigarettes and alcohol.

  At first, none of my friends took notice of the homeless man walking around like a bored chameleon. They were busy playing soccer on the mini soccer field in the park. Phiwe was the goalkeeper for our amateur team that day, and I was out injured. We played soccer, washed cars or braaied at the park every third day. The homeless man walked past the goalposts towards Hekroodt Street. He was much older than us. I could tell that he was once lighter-skinned but was now darker from not bathing. From time to time a soft whistling spray of spit squirted from between his yellowing teeth. At the same time he uttered slurred sounds that were not actually words.

  It was not the first time I had seen him. I lived up the road along Sechele Street, not far from that spaza shop owned by a Pakistani man. On Mondays, when we took our rubbish bins out to the road, the man would be one of the first to rummage through the bins for scraps of food before the refuse truck emptied them at about eleven. There seemed to be no flesh on his body, and the skin was stretched tight over the bones of his face. His thin-lipped mouth had deep lines on either side. He was a drifting wreck, a swollen corpse, his eyes and lips eaten away by hunger and poverty.

  On several occasions, my aunt Salome tried to give him food, but he refused. He would never accept anything from anyone. One morning my aunt insisted on giving him a loaf of bread, and she was offended when he retorted: “Who told you I’m poor? Who told you I want food?” He didn’t even look at her as he spoke.

  “But I see you eating from the rubbish bin every week.”

  “That’s none of your business. I don’t want you to poison me,” he said, closing the bin. He walked away carrying an old plastic bag filled with rotten food.

  “I was only trying to help you.”

  “Help yourself first and leave me alone.”

  You see, my aunt is a staunch member of the Church of the Resurrection at the corner of Modjadji and Van Onselen streets, not far from our house. You can guess how she felt on that day when she tried to be nice to the poor guy. She felt offended that he seemed to mistrust her openness and kindness. But she never gave up trying to help him.

  “I guess it’s only here in Soweto that beggars can also be choosers,” I tried to console her when she told me of her encounter with the strange homeless man.

  “All I was trying to do was to help him,” my aunt said, and she sounded sad. “He doesn’t seem to understand that in winter many homeless people die.”

  “I think he is just mentally challenged, aunty.”

  “I think you were still young when two bodies were discovered one winter,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You see that space between the Pick n Pay, the magistrate’s court and the police station in front of the abandoned Lily General Dealer shop and bioscope?” she pointed in the general direction. “They once found the bodies of two men there who had died from the winter cold in July.”

  “That’s really bad.”

  At her age, my aunt was preoccupied with death. When someone died on our block, she was the one responsible for collecting from each house contributions of twenty rand towards the funeral costs. She was also worried that I didn’t attend funerals that much. She always warned me that if I didn’t attend funerals, no one would come to mine.

  “I don’t care because I will be dead anyway,” I once told her.

  “People are watching you. If the Lord decides to take me to heaven, you and your mother will bury me alone. No one will attend my funeral because you also don’t attend other people’s funerals.”

  “Don’t worry, aunty. I will hire people to come and cry at your funeral.”

  “You’re talking nonsense. People won’t even eat the food you will cook for them. They will come and bury, and then leave without eating. The food will be wasted and rot.”

  “Aunty, you won’t die now, not until I get a job. Your death at the moment is the least of my worries. Besides, the nyaope addicts will definitely come and eat the food if the mourners can’t.”

  “So, that’s the reason you don’t attend other people’s funerals. You want me to be buried by the nyaope addicts. I want a decent and dignified funeral when I die, and I will get it. I have joined three funeral covers, and I made the mistake of including you.”

  Soon after, I saw the homeless man again at the park. This time he was sitting not far from where we washed the cars. He lay down on his back on the grass next to a tree, his plastic bundle beside him. He rested his head on his crossed hands, and his forearms were pressed against his ears. He then sat up, following the move­ment of the cars on Van Onselen and Hekroodt streets with the sway of his body and head. I saw him jump up suddenly as if an ant had run down the inside of his greasy jeans. He quickly reached for the irritant, and seemed to crush it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he untied the knot of his plastic bag and took out an opened tin of fish. After sucking the last vestiges from the tin, he rubbed his dirty fingers together and wiped them on his jeans. He ran his fingers through his unkempt hair before rolling on the lawn and lying on his back, his legs folded in the air.

  When I came back home that evening, I told my aunt about the homeless man. I wanted to convince her that he was mad, so that she would forget about helping him.

  “God loves us all, my son,” she said as we sat in front of the tele­vision. “You must always count your blessings that you still have us, your people, around you. Otherwise that man could have been you, your own father, or your own blood brother. You have been unemployed for about five years now. Just imagine if you didn’t have anyone supporting you and giving you hope. Where would you be? You’d probably be dead, in jail, or in some park as well, doing what that homeless man is doing.”

  I didn’t answer her. I just looked at the plate of pap and mogodu she had given me. I knew I had to wait for her to pray before I could dip my fingers into the food.

  “Our Heavenly Father, we are indeed grateful this evening for the little that You’re giving us. We are thankful for the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ. We pray for this township and the world that is without God, without Christ, without hope of going with Jesus when He comes. May the Holy Spirit speak and warm our hearts, including the heart of my nephew who has been unemployed for so long. May the Word of God encourage us, may the homeless man in the park be healed and saved, and those discouraged be encouraged. Amen.”

  When we started to eat, the mogodu was getting cold and the gravy was turning white. I couldn’t warm it in the microwave because I thought it would be rude. I knew my aunt. She would say that I was ungrateful. She was a very strict woman. My mother had left me in her care when she married my stepfather, and they live in Snake Park with my five siblings.

  “I have an early church errand tomorrow, so I’m going to bed now,” my aunt said as she took her empty plate to the kitchen. “Don’t forget to lower the volume of the TV and to switch that heater off.”

  One Friday, there was
a hint of approaching winter in the air. Phiwe and I were busy scouting for cars at the park. We had two twenty-litre buckets of water, washing rags and a bottle of Sunlight liquid. The homeless man stopped at the low wall along the park. He snorted and then rubbed the tip of his finger against the wall and licked it. Then he smiled as if the dirt was somehow sweet to his taste. A minibus taxi stopped on Van Onselen Street to offload a few passengers, and the man’s tired eyes stayed with it as if it attracted his longing heart. He watched until the taxi disappeared towards Meadowlands High School. Turning his head towards the goalposts in the park, he muttered under his breath, as if remembering something important that he had overlooked. He started to walk backwards and count very loudly, as if his steps were money.

  “Three hundred rand, four hundred rand, nine hundred rand . . . one thousand rand, half a million, one point five million.”

  Aunt Salome was standing at the corner near the Pakistani man’s spaza shop. With her were three women from her church, and I could tell they were talking about the homeless man, as one of them pointed at him. Just two days ago she had suggested that we report him at Meadowlands police station. He was definitely not from Soweto, according to her. Unlike most Sowetans, the man spoke good English that was not mixed with tsotsitaal, isiZulu or Sesotho. She was concerned that winter was coming and the man was still homeless. She said if we didn’t report him, he might die in the park, and God would punish us for abandoning him.

  I promised to ask around about him, but never did. I was not interested anyway. Maybe it’s because the homeless man was not an easy person to help. His moods and behaviour were constantly shifting. It looked as if time and place had become meaningless to him. Every time I saw him he looked like he had settled himself contentedly in the comfortable universe of his own fantasies where no one was allowed to bother him.