by Niq Mhlongo
“Mara wena, bhuti! Did you really have to say it, mara, huh?” my mother says to Uncle Bhodloza, casting a sharp glance at him.
“It’s okay, mama. I already know the story. It’s fine with me,” says Siya.
Instead of answering my mother, Uncle Bhodloza empties the huge glass of umqombothi, hardly moving his lips. A van slowly passes by in the street; a man sitting in the back is holding a loudhailer. We can’t hear him properly as “Jikijela”, a song by Letta Mbulu, is playing. Uncle Sunday tells us that they are paying people money for old batteries. The gaze of the man in the van takes in our house. The street children are playing frenetically and noisily, their soccer ball in danger of being run over by passing cars. A one-horse cart carrying metal to the scrapyard passes the van. The horse shits in the street while the driver points at its arse. Bruno barks furiously from the gate.
“Jy ken how jou toppie got the name Ten Years, ntwana?” asks Uncle Bhodloza in tsotsitaal, his eyes glistening with the rheum of years. “Every time he was angry with someone he would promise to kill them and bandiet for ten years. One day, jou toppie, oorla Ten Years, had lost a lot of sheld in a game of dice. He had lost about fifty rand which was big zak around that time. He then stabbed the winner, whose twin brother was also playing. When the other twin decided to fight him, he killed him too. Jou toppie was a groot tsotsi, verstaan.”
“I heard so,” says Siya, and he seems to be interested.
My uncle laughs. He also has that rare thing – a rich, heartily ringing laugh. In the street, a boy of about fourteen passes and pulls the visor of his cap down low over his eyes. It is scorching hot, and the clouds are riding high. My uncle sizes up the boy with his eyes.
“Ek dink jy was same age with daai laaitie,” pointing at the boy. “It was around 1975, before Black Power of 1976. Jy ken those were not the first mense that oorla Ten Years killed, but it was the first time he went to danyani for killing. At that time, the apartheid government did not care about black people killing each other using knives. The only problem was when a black person had a gun. If they heard that someone owns a gun, that was the biggest scandal that warranted many years edanyani. They would hunt that person down with more than ten kwelakwelas. They would arrest random mense they find in the streets just to prove a point.” He taps his left thigh nervously as if what he is saying just happened recently. “That’s why jou toppie and my swaer always carried knives. Oorla Ten Years had a big goni with a white handle. He always wore a long brown jacket where he also hid a machete and the jungle. His socks were red and long up to the knees to hide the goni.”
Uncle Bhodloza drinks his beer hurriedly and distractedly before passing the big glass to Uncle Sunday. He belches behind a cupped hand. Uncle Sunday drinks up the remaining beer, and it seems to have soothed the dryness within him as he rubs his neck and chest. Uncle Bhodloza’s eyes refuse to look straight into other people’s eyes. They are so lustreless that, even when he forces himself to look at me, I don’t feel I am looking into the eyes of another human being. Instead, he keeps looking at the ground where long lines of ants have been washed out from an anthill on which he spilled beer.
“One day some tsotsis van Senaoane af found my sister and my brother here at the Chi Town station and robbed them in broad daylight. You can ask them, ek praat die waar. Or ek lieg sester?” he asks, rubbing his eyes and opening them wide while looking at my mother and Uncle Sunday.
“Hey, go ahead,” she answers unconvincingly, looking at him superciliously. “I know you like to exaggerate.”
“Ja, the tsotsis robbed them of the sheld and the groceries they had just bought in Kliptown. They came back home empty-handed. Oorla Ten Years and my swaer were sitting under this apricot tree drinking their favourite VO Brandy, which they called ‘Via Orlando’ in those days. Broer Sunday was bleeding from the head and shoulder where the clever boys het hom gesteek.” He pauses and looks at Uncle Sunday, who throws him an annoyed glance.
Uncle Sunday knows he is under observation, so he picks up the big glass and drinks as if the story is not interesting to him. When he puts the big glass down, my mother looks at him, and the two start laughing like conspiring children.
“No, that’s not exactly how it happened, but jy kan aan gaan, broer. They took some of the zak, but we actually spent the rest.”
“Oorla Ten Years was furious. He asked sester which direction the tsotsis had taken because Bro Sunday was crying. He found the guys there by the ZCC church hill. He killed all three of them and came back with the money and groceries. From then on, our part of Chi Town was feared and Oorla Ten Years was regarded as its protector. No one dared to point out who the killer was, even though the police found the other guy with Oorla Ten Years’ jungle jammed into his neck. The other things that he took was the guys’ fashionable two-tone Florsheim bhathu, a Brentwood ncaza and Viyella shirts. He left one guy with socks and a jockey only.”
There is a trace of amusement in Siya’s eyes. “Way Back Fifties” by the African Jazz Pioneers is playing. The midday sun blazes in the middle of the sky. Uncle Bhodloza lights a cigarette. My mother hates the smell of cigarette smoke, but she always forces herself to stay whenever her brothers smoke. Uncle Bhodloza inhales the first puff of his tobacco greedily. With his cigarette firmly fixed between his teeth, one eye half-closed, he surveys the street. All of a sudden, a smile appears on my mother’s lips as if a pleasant thought had crossed her mind.
“You see your house, Siya?” she asks, pointing to it on our street. “You family is not the first to own it. The original owner was the man who gave you your name, Sipho – Mr Ndlovu. His wife, MaNgubane, and I were very close. We got pregnant in the same year, but you’re older than her daughter by two weeks. One day MaNgubane and I were sitting under this tree. It was before we built this stop-nonsense,” she says, pointing at the wall. “I remember she was cooking mala-mogodu on the Welcome Dover coal stove that day. Mr Ndlovu came home early from work and it was payday. He told her that she must immediately come with him to Johannesburg city, for they needed to buy something urgently.”
My mother pauses, spreads her legs wide and looks up at me with a wide smile.
“MaNgubane forgot to take the pots off the stove. The food burnt. Later on, the house started to burn. At first, we saw a thick smoke rising from the chimney and windows. Before we knew it, that smoke was cleared by the greedy tongue of a hot flame. The community tried to break down the doors, but it was difficult because we used those apartheid steel doors back then. The house burnt down and we couldn’t save anything. The Ndlovus never came back. Apparently when they reached Johannesburg the husband decided there and then that they should go and live in the rural areas in KwaZulu. Some say they were underground political activists and were running away from the apartheid government that was closing in on them.”
She gestures at Siya. “So, you, the Ntulis, were the lodgers after that. You fixed the house and occupied it. The other family that came here at the same time as us are the Makhathinis. They now live in Eldorado Park and call themselves McCarthy. They even speak Afrikaans.” She stops and sits back solidly in her chair like a dropped pumpkin.
“Yeah, my mother once told me that we were lodgers before.”
“Yes, there was a lodger’s permit. And the rent was paid to the municipality and not the owner of the house. The money belonged to the apartheid government because these houses were leased to us by the government. There was nothing you could do with these houses. If you broke a window, for example, you had to report it at the office and get permission to fix it. That was apartheid.”
The morning passes at its usual pace. The shadows of the apricot tree and the people under it grow steadily shorter. There is a small white cloud floating in the sky. The heat of the sun is making my mother sweat. The wrinkles on her face are the mark of her epoch. She plunges once again into her past. This time a song by The Movers is playing.
“When your father came back from jail, Siya, he
found that things had changed. He could not find work. I think that’s when he decided to end his own life.”
“It was tragic. My mother could not cope after that.”
“My son, we all have one foot on the earth and another in the grave. We just don’t know the date. Each sunrise and sunset brings death closer. The present must be savoured as long as one still has strength.”
My mother lays her right arm on Siya’s shoulders. Then she raises her face. Her faraway look ranges beyond the treetop and the asbestos roof of our house.
“Let me tell you a secret that few people know,” my mother says conspiratorially to Siya, clearly aware we are all listening. “I got married to Sipho’s father only two days after we met, thanks to apartheid. He had been married before. He’d been living here for just a month when his wife died mysteriously. Some people say she was bitten by a snake because, as I say, this was a jungle of a livestock farm. His wife was not even buried yet when the apartheid government gave your father twenty-four hours’ notice to vacate the house. That was the apartheid rule, no unmarried or widowed person was allowed to occupy these houses.”
I lean forward intently, as I have never before heard this story. I had no idea that my father had been married before. My mother glances at me. “Your father had to make a plan immediately after the issuing of the death certificate. That’s when he asked me to marry him. I was from Pimville. Your father and I had met on the train to Johannesburg where I used to do domestic work in Rosettenville for a Portuguese family. He used to work at Turffontein racecourse feeding horses. A year later, you were born.”
“So, you didn’t have a man then?” I ask.
“I did, but that night I told my man that I was leaving him, and getting married. He came to my home fuming, threatening to burn my father’s house.”
“Yeah, my broer Tso, his chommies and I moered the shit out of that moegoe,” my uncle interjects. “That’s why sester and I are so close. I came to blom with her for a while after she married. I was checking on your taima if he was going to treat her right. Otherwise I would have moered him too.” He laughs so uproariously at his own words that he nearly chokes.
My mother turns to Siya again. “So, the following day we took a train with your uncle and my mother and father to Kwa-Muhle in Johannesburg city centre where we met my husband and his friend Ten Years – your father, Siya. I remember there was a very long queue at Kwa-Muhle and we spent a whole day there on that Friday. We only signed to be a husband and a wife in the afternoon, around three o’clock. We came here hand in hand as husband and wife.” A triumphant smile lifts the right edge of her mouth as she looks at me. “The following week we buried his wife together at Sharpeville in the Vaal. You have two stepsisters in Evaton and Sebokeng that come from that marriage, Sipho. They were aged three and five when their mother died, and their grandparents took them. They want nothing to do with us, that’s why you never heard of them.”
“What about my father paying lobolo?” I ask.
“Everything was hush-hush. Lobolo was negotiated after the marriage, and that’s when our love grew by leaps and bounds,” she says, shifting uncomfortably.
“That man died owing us lobolo,” Uncle Bhodloza grumbles. “He only paid two hundred rand.”
“But at least he allowed you and Sunday to stay with us rent-free for about six years. And even when Boet Tso got sick I took him to come and stay with me until he died in this same house.” She is making an effort to be clear.
Overwhelmed by these family secrets, I decide to go inside the house to play what used to be Uncle Tso’s favourite song, “Mannenberg” by Abdullah Ibrahim. Were my mother’s marriage and my birth really just accidents of apartheid? Then let me part with mercy from this very day, because mercy always devours its owner. I’m thinking that people live by might and not by right, by favouritism and bias. And they become rich from that.
As I come back, my mother, beside Uncle Sunday, has folded her hands in her lap, as if she has retired into a resistance against weariness. A smile spreads across her lips as she looks at me. Her smile is filled with the pride of achievement more than ever before. Maybe it is the smile that attracted my father, and not an accident of apartheid or his wife’s death, I think. My mother is a kind and generous soul.
“Nou jy dowel, mshana. You’re playing lekker music,” says Uncle Sunday.
“Laat ek vertel jou. This is Dollar Brand. His real name is Johannes Botha,” Uncle Bhodloza says, sounding as if he is challenging everyone in the yard to listen in on something that ought not to be missed. “Yes, Dollar Brand was advised by some jazz critics to change his name from Johannes Botha to Dollar Brand because the name Botha was the hated surname of an apartheid leader.”
The song is making Uncle Bhodloza brim over with happiness and he jumps up with joy. In a loud slurring voice he invites my mother to dance. My mother can barely suppress a smile. As he dances, his tongue is out as if he is gasping for his breath, and it looks like pink sandpaper. I see gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Uncle Sunday tries to control himself, but the urge to laugh is too strong. Siya pops an ice cube into his mouth as he tries not to laugh. The crowd roars with laughter. Uncle Bhodloza’s long face is wet with perspiration. He wipes his forehead with his fingers and continues to dance. My mother stifles her laughter.
“Come on, broer, do you remember this song?” he says, slapping Uncle Sunday jovially on the shoulder.
The afternoon deepens, and people walk up and down the street aimlessly. Patches of shadow fall on the walls, creeping into the yard, devouring the backyard of our neighbour. A man is sprawled in a careless manner next to the wall. He is sleeping on his stomach, undisturbed by the music. His face is turned to the side and his mouth is half open in an unconscious grin. The flies go in and out of his mouth at will. His blue jeans are pale at the knee and seat. He is wearing an old brown shirt stained with gravy. The sleeves are torn from the shoulders and have holes on the elbows.
One by one the people withdraw to their homes, and the shadow of the apricot tree grows longer, wider and darker. Abruptly, Uncle Sunday tries to stand up and immediately falls. He hits himself with a fist on his upper leg, as if to punish his weakness. I try to lift him up, but he is quite helpless. Then he rubs his eyes and slowly raises himself. Bruno stretches his head forward while sticking his tail up stiffly. He drags himself to his kennel, as Siya stands up slowly and stretches.
The evening is darkening fast because there is no moon. A lone bird twitters on top of the apricot tree. The wide branches of the tree sway slowly in the evening breeze. In my mind, I’m thinking that this tree has multiple souls that fill me with wonder every morning and enchant me by afternoon. This tree has bittersweet memories, just like the fruit it bears.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne where I was an Artist in Residence in June 2017. I wrote most of these stories while I was a fellow there.
Summary
“This apricot tree has multiple souls that fill me with wonder every morning and enchant me by afternoon. This tree has bittersweet memories, just like the fruit it bears.”
If the apricot trees of Soweto could talk, what stories would they tell? Acclaimed writer Niq Mhlongo’s second short story collection provides an imaginative answer to this question. It is imbued with a strong sense of place as it captures the vibrancy of the township and its surrounds. Told with his characteristic satirical flair, life and death are intertwined in these tales where funerals and the role of the ancestors feature strongly; where cemeteries are convenient places to meet old friends, show off your new car and catch up on the latest gossip.
Naledi visits a cemetery in search of her father, and Bra Makhenzo, with his kick-and-bhoboza shoes and rising debt, uses a funeral to propagate his politics. A cat’s burial features in one story and in another a missing dog returns when his owner is laid to rest under mysterious circumstances. Then there is the MEC who is fascin
ated by his mistress’s manicure, the zamazamas running underground settlements, a homeless man who does not want to be saved and a mob of soccer fans ready to mete out a bloody justice.
Take your seat under the apricot tree and let a born storyteller enthral you with tales that are both entertaining and thought-provoking.
About the Author
Niq Mhlongo was born in 1973 in Soweto. He has a BA from Wits University, with majors in African Literature and Political Studies. His novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004), After Tears (2007) and Way Back Home (2013), were followed by short story collections, Affluenza (2016) and Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018). Dog Eat Dog was translated into Spanish and awarded the Mar de Letras prize.
Other Publications by Niq Mhlongo, still in print
Affluenza
After Tears
Dog Eat Dog
Way Back Home
Other titles by Niq Mhlongo available in E-book format
Affluenza
After Tears
Dog Eat Dog
Way Back Home
Kwela Books,
an imprint of NB Publishers,
a division of Media24 Boeke (Pty) Ltd,
40 Heerengracht, Cape Town 8001
www.kwela.com
Copyright © 2018 Niq Mhlongo
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