You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

by Zoe Wicomb

  ‘But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth.’

  ‘But you’ve used the real. If I can recognise places and people, so can others, and if you want to play around like that why don’t you have the courage to tell the whole truth? Ask me for stories with neat endings and you won’t have to invent my death. What do you know about things, about people, this place where you were born? About your ancestors who roamed these hills? You left. Remember?’ She drops her head and her voice is barely audible.

  ‘To write from under your mother’s skirts, to shout at the world that it’s all right to kill God’s unborn child! You’ve killed me over and over so it was quite unnecessary to invent my death. Do people ever do anything decent with their education?’

  Slumped in her chair she ignores the smell of burning food so that I rescue the potatoes and baste the meat.

  ‘We must eat,’ she sighs. ‘Tomorrow will be exhausting. What did you have at Cissie’s last night?’

  ‘Bobotie and sweet potato and stamp-en-stoot. They were trying to watch the television at the same time so I had the watermelon virtually to myself.’

  She jumps up to take the wooden spoon from me. We eat in silence the mutton and sousboontjies until she says that she managed to save some prickly pears. I cannot tell whether her voice is tinged with bitterness or pride at her resourcefulness. She has slowed down the ripening by shading the fruit with castor-oil leaves, floppy hats on the warts of great bristling blades. The flesh is nevertheless the colour of burnt earth, a searing sweetness that melts immediately so that the pips are left swirling like gravel in my mouth. I have forgotten how to peel the fruit without perforating my fingers with invisible thorns.

  Mamma watches me eat, her own knife and fork long since resting sedately on the plate of opaque white glass. Her finger taps the posy of pink roses on the clean rim and I am reminded of the modesty of her portion.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she announces, ‘we’ll go on a trip to the Gifberge.’

  I swallow the mouthful of pips and she says anxiously, ‘You can drive, can’t you?’ Her eyes are fixed on me, ready to counter the lie that will attempt to thwart her and I think wearily of the long flight, the terrible drive from Cape Town in the heat.

  ‘Can’t we go on Thursday? I’d like to spend a whole day in the house with the blinds drawn against the sun, reading the Cape Times.’

  ‘Plenty of time for that. No, we must go tomorrow. Your father promised, for years he promised, but I suppose he was scared of the pass. Men can’t admit that sort of thing, scared of driving in the mountains, but he wouldn’t teach me to drive. Always said my chest wasn’t good enough. As if you need good lungs to drive.’

  ‘And in this heat?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, child, it’s autumn and in the mountains it’ll be cool. Come,’ she says, taking my arm, and from the stoep traces with her finger the line along the Matsikamma Range until the first deep fold. ‘Just there you see, where the mountains step back a bit, just there in that kloof the road goes up.’

  Maskam’s friendly slope stops halfway, then the flat top rises perpendicularly into a violet sky. I cannot imagine little men hanging pegged and roped to its sheer sides.

  ‘They say there are proteas on the mountain.’

  ‘No,’ I counter, ‘it’s too dry. You only find proteas in the Cape Peninsula.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she says scornfully, ‘you don’t know everything about this place.’

  ‘Ag, I don’t care about this country; I hate it.’

  Sent to bed, I draw the curtains against huge stars burning into the night.

  ‘Don’t turn your light on, there’ll be mosquitoes tonight,’ she advises.

  My dreams are of a wintry English garden where a sprinkling of snow lies like insecticide over the stubbles of dead shrub. I watch a flashing of red through the wooden fence as my neighbour moves along her washing line pegging out the nappies. I want to call to her that it’s snowing, that she’s wasting her time, but the slats of wood fit closely together and I cannot catch at the red of her skirt. I comfort myself with the thought that it might not be snowing in her garden.

  Curtains rattle and part and I am lost, hopelessly tossed in a sharp first light that washes me across the bed to where the smell of coffee anchors me to the spectre of Mamma in a pale dressing gown from the past. Cream, once primrose seersucker, and I put out my hand to clutch at the fabric but fold it over a saucer-sized biscuit instead. Her voice prises open the sleep seal of my eyes.

  ‘We’ll go soon and have a late breakfast on the mountain. Have another biscuit,’ she insists.

  At Van Rhynsdorp we stop at the store and she exclaims appreciatively at the improved window dressing. The wooden shelves in the window have freshly been covered with various bits of patterned fablon on which oil lamps, toys and crockery are carefully arranged. On the floor of blue linoleum a huge doll with blonde curls and purple eyes grimaces through the faded yellow cellophane of her box. We are the only customers.

  Old Mr Friedland appears not to know who she is. He leans back from the counter, his left thumb hooked in the broad braces while the right hand pats with inexplicable pride the large protruding stomach. His eyes land stealthily, repeatedly, on the wobbly topmost button of his trousers as if to catch the moment when the belly will burst into liberty.

  She has filled her basket with muddy tomatoes and takes a cheese from the counter.

  ‘Mr Friedland,’ she says in someone else’s voice, ‘I’ve got the sheepskins for Mr Friedland in the bakkie. Do . . . er . . . does Mr Friedland want them?’

  ‘Sheepskins?’

  His right hand shoots up to fondle his glossy black plumage and at that moment, as anyone could have predicted, at that very moment of neglect, the trouser button twists off and shoots into a tower of tomato cans.

  ‘Shenton’s sheepskins.’ She identifies herself under cover of the rattling button.

  The corvine beak peck-pecks before the words tumble out hastily, ‘Yes, yes, they say old Shenton’s dead hey? Hardworking chap that!’ And he shouts into a doorway, ‘Tell the boy to get the skins from the blue bakkie outside.’

  I beat the man in the white polystyrene hat to it and stumble in with the stiff salted skins which I dump at his fussy directions. The skin mingles with the blue mottled soap to produce an evil smell. Mr Friedland tots up the goods in exchange and I ask for a pencil to make up the outstanding six cents.

  ‘Ugh,’ I grunt, as she shuffles excitedly on the already hot plastic seat, her body straining forward to the lure of the mountain, ‘How can you bear it?’

  ‘What, what?’ She resents being dragged away from her outing. ‘Old Friedland you mean? There are some things you just have to do whether you like it or not. But those people have nothing to do with us. Nothing at all. It will be nice and cool in the mountains.’

  As we leave the tarred road we roll up the windows against the dust. The road winds perilously as we ascend and I think sympathetically of Father’s alleged fear. In an elbow of the road we look down on to a dwarfed homestead on the plain with a small painted blue pond and a willow lurid against the grey of the veld. Here against the black rock the bushes grow tall, verdant, and we stop in the shadow of a cliff. She bends over the bright feathery foliage to check, yes it is ysterbos, an infallible remedy for kidney disorders, and for something else, but she can’t remember other than that the old people treasured their bunches of dried ysterbos.

  ‘So close to home,’ she sighs, ‘and it is quite another world, a darker, greener world. Look, water!’ And we look up into the shaded slope. A fine thread of water trickles down its ancient worn path, down the layered rock. Towards the bottom it spreads and seeps and feeds woman-high reeds where strange red birds dart and rustle.

  The road levels off for a mile or so but there are outcroppings of rock all around us.

  ‘Here we must be closer to heaven,’ she says. ‘Father would’ve loved it here. What a pity
he didn’t make it.’

  I fail to summon his face flushed with pleasure; it is the stern Sunday face of the deacon that passes before me. She laughs.

  ‘Of course he would only think of the sheep, of how many he could keep on an acre of this green veld.’

  We spread out our food on a ledge and rinse the tomatoes in a stone basin. The flask of coffee has been sweetened with condensed milk and the Van Rhynsdorp bread is crumbly with whole grains of wheat. Mamma apologises for no longer baking her own. I notice for the first time a slight limp as she walks, the hips working unevenly against a face of youthful eagerness as we wander off.

  ‘And here,’ I concede, ‘are the proteas.’

  Busy bushes, almost trees, that plump out from the base. We look at the familiar tall chalice of leathery pink and as we move around the bush, deciding, for we must decide now whether the chalice is more attractive than the clenched fist of the imbricated bud, a large whirring insect performs its aerobatics in the branches, distracting, so that we linger and don’t know. Then the helicopter leads us further, to the next bush where another type beckons. These are white protea torches glowing out of their silver-leafed branches. The flowers are open, the petals separated to the mould of a cupped hand so that the feathery parts quiver to the light.

  ‘I wonder why the Boers chose the protea as national flower,’ I muse, and find myself humming mockingly:

  Suikerbossie’k wil jou hê,

  Wat sal jou Mamma daarvan sê . . .

  She harmonises in a quavering voice.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘how we sang? All the hymns and carols and songs on winter evenings. You never could harmonise.’ Then generously she adds, ‘Of course there was no one else to sing soprano.’

  ‘I do, I do.’

  We laugh at how we held concerts, the three of us practising for weeks as if there would be an audience. The mere idea of public performance turns the tugging condition of loneliness into an exquisite terror. One night at the power of her command the empty room would become a packed auditorium of rustles and whispers. And around the pan of glowing embers the terror thawed as I opened my mouth to sing. With a bow she would offer around the bowl of raisins and walnuts to an audience still sizzling with admiration.

  ‘And now,’ she says, ‘I suppose you actually go to concerts and theatres?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you in lace and feathers eating walnuts and raisins in the interval. And your hair? What do you do with that bush?’

  ‘Some perfectly sensible people,’ I reply, ‘pay pounds to turn their sleek hair into precisely such a bushy tangle.’

  ‘But you won’t exchange your boskop for all the daisies in Namaqualand! Is that sensible too? And you say you’re happy with your hair? Always? Are you really?’

  ‘I think we ought to go. The sun’s getting too hot for me.’

  ‘Down there the earth is baking at ninety degrees. You won’t find anywhere cooler than here in the mountains.’

  We drive in silence along the last of the incline until we reach what must be the top of the Gifberge. The road is flanked by cultivated fields and a column of smoke betrays a hidden farmhouse.

  ‘So they grow things on the mountain?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she says pensively, ‘someone once told me it was fertile up here, but I had no idea of the farm!’

  The bleached mealie stalks have been stripped of their cobs and in spite of the rows lean arthritically in the various directions that pickers have elbowed them. On the other side a crop of pumpkins lies scattered like stones, the foliage long since shrivelled to dust. But the fields stop abruptly where the veld resumes. Here the bushes are shorter and less green than in the pass. The road carries on for two miles until we reach a fence. The gate before us is extravagantly barred; I count thirteen padlocks.

  ‘What a pity,’ she says in a restrained voice, ‘that we can’t get to the edge. We should be able to look down on to the plain, at the strip of irrigated vines along the canal, and the white dorp and even our houses on the hill.’

  I do not mind. It is mid-afternoon and the sun is fierce and I am not allowed to complain about the heat. But her face crumples. For her the trip is spoiled. Here, yards from the very edge, the place of her imagination has still not materialised. Nothing will do but the complete reversal of the image of herself in the wicker chair staring into the unattainable blue of the mountain. And now, for one brief moment, to look down from these very heights at the cars crawling along the dust roads, at the diminished people, at where her chair sits empty on the arid plain of Klein Namaqualand.

  Oh, she ought to have known, at her age ought not to expect the unattainable ever to be anything other than itself. Her disappointment is unnerving. Like a tigress she paces along the cleared length of fence. She cannot believe its power when the bushes disregard it with such ease. Oblivious roots trespass with impunity and push up their stems on the other side. Branches weave decoratively through the diamond mesh of the wire.

  ‘Why are you so impatient?’ she complains. ‘Let’s have an apple then you won’t feel you’re wasting your time. You’re on holiday, remember.’

  I am ashamed of my irritation. In England I have learnt to cringe at the thought of wandering about, hanging about idly. Loitering even on this side of the fence makes me feel like a trespasser. If someone were to question my right to be here . . . I shudder.

  She examines the padlocks in turn, as if there were a possibility of picking the locks.

  ‘You could climb over, easy,’ she says.

  ‘But I’ve no desire to.’

  ‘Really? You don’t?’ She is genuinely surprised that our wishes do not coincide.

  ‘I think I saw an old hut on our way up,’ she says as we drive back through the valley. We go slow until she points, there, there, and we stop. It is further from the road than it seems and her steps are so slow that I take her arm. Her fluttering breath alarms me.

  It is probably an abandoned shepherd’s hut. The reed roof, now reclaimed by birds, has parted in place to let in shafts of light. On the outside the raw brick has been nibbled at by wind and rain so that the pattern of rectangles is no longer discernible. But the building does provide shelter from the sun. Inside, a bush flourishes in the earth floor.

  ‘Is it ghanna?’ I ask.

  ‘No, but it’s related, I think. Look, the branches are a paler grey, almost feathery. It’s Hotnos-kooigoed.’

  ‘You mean Khoi-Khoi-kooigoed.’

  ‘Really, is that the educated name for them? It sounds right doesn’t it?’ And she repeats Khoi-Khoi-kooigoed, relishing the alliteration.

  ‘No, it’s just what they called themselves.’

  ‘Let’s try it,’ she says, and stumbles out to where the bushes grow in abundance. They lift easily out of the ground and she packs the uprooted bushes with the one indoors to form a cushion. She lies down carefully and mutters about the heat, the fence, the long long day, and I watch her slipping off to sleep. On the shaded side of the hut I pack a few of the bushes together and sink my head into the softness. The heat has drawn out the thymish balm that settles soothingly about my head. I drift into a drugged sleep.

  Later I am woken by the sun creeping round on to my legs. Mamma starts out of her sleep when I enter the hut with the remaining coffee.

  ‘You must take up a little white protea bush for my garden,’ she says as we walk back to the bakkie.

  ‘If you must,’ I retort. ‘And then you can hoist the South African flag and sing “Die Stem.’”

  ‘Don’t be silly; it’s not the same thing at all. You who’re so clever ought to know that proteas belong to the veld. Only fools and cowards would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become what people think they inject into it. We know who lived in these mountains when the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What they think of the
veld and its flowers is of no interest to me.’

  As we drive back we watch an orange sun plummet behind the hills. Mamma’s limp is pronounced as she gets out of the bakkie and hobbles in to put on the kettle. We are hungry. We had not expected to be out all day. The journey has tired her more than she will admit.

  I watch the stars in an ink-blue sky. The Milky Way is a smudged white on the dark canvas; the Three Kings flicker, but the Southern Cross drills her four points into the night. I find the long axis and extend it two and a half times, then drop a perpendicular, down on to the tip of the Gifberge, down on to the lights of the Soeterus Winery. Due South.

  When I take Mamma a cup of cocoa, I say, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I came back to live in Cape Town again.’

  ‘Is it?’ Her eyes nevertheless glow with interest.

  ‘Oh, you won’t approve of me here either. Wasted education, playing with dynamite and all that.’

  ‘Ag man, I’m too old to worry about you. But with something to do here at home perhaps you won’t need to make up those terrible stories hey?’

  GLOSSARY

  assegai

  spear

  bakkie

  small truck

  bobotie

  spiced dish of meat and fruit

  Boerjongens

  country bumpkins

  Boeta

  addressed respectfully to a brother

  boskop

  frizzy head of hair

  braaivleis

  barbecue

  brakhond

  mongrel dog

  bredie

  stew

  canna

  flowering plant

  crimplene

  inexpensive synthetic fabric

  dagga pils

  marijuana joint

  Dankie Meneer

  Thank you, sir