by SJ Naudé
Her jaw drops when she sees the lunch provided by the college to the students and personnel for the first time. Samp, pap, rice, three varieties of vegetables, three kinds of meat. Deep, steaming pots.
‘Is it all for us?’ Sandrien asks the younger woman next to her.
‘We have to eat, meisie,’ she answers, and prods Sandrien with her elbow. The woman’s earrings sway. ‘Lerato,’ she introduces herself, tucking an extra can of Coke under her arm. ‘I’m a nurse from the Free State.’
The first few days Sandrien sits by herself on the steps. At first, she eats her food with a spoon. Then she starts using her hands, like the others. Why not?
On the third day Lerato joins her. ‘You white girls don’t get very hungry, do you?’
Outside the fence a few half-starved children with snot on their upper lips stand gaping.
When Sandrien hands some of her food to the children through the fence, Lerato clicks her tongue: ‘Stop that!’
‘But look at them! They’re famished.’
‘Just you wait. Tomorrow the whole town’s children will be here.’ Lerato points to the fence. ‘Just behind that fence, all of them, tomorrow.’
‘But then we must feed them. We have enough. More than enough.’
‘Eish, you people.’ Lerato clicks, more loudly this time. ‘I know your type. You’re like the crowd in my hospital. Charity doctors from Scandinavia. They don’t know this place.’
Lerato gets up, her plate still half-full.
‘I’m not from Scandinavia,’ Sandrien says to Lerato’s enormous back, ‘I’m from the banks of the Gariep.’
‘I admire the fact that you are dedicating yourself here; you must have had many other opportunities,’ Sandrien says to Dr Shirley Kgope, the course leader, during morning tea, gesturing with her eyes towards the rows of shacks below the college buildings.
Shirley Kgope, although originally from the Eastern Cape, studied medicine in a drab city in the American Midwest, and is also a microbiologist.
‘Why not?’ says Dr Kgope, sounding weary of this kind of conversation. ‘It is where I am most needed.’ She takes a sip of tea. ‘It would be more interesting to know what brings you here.’
Dr Kgope’s cup tinkles in the saucer. Thick-rimmed porcelain cups, like in a teachers’ common room.
‘Why not?’ Sandrien smiles. ‘By the way, how did it happen that the training college here has such extensive facilities?’
‘It was originally designed as a teachers’ college,’ says Dr Kgope. ‘Everyone knew that all the teachers’ colleges would be closed shortly, but the place was built nevertheless. It stood empty for a few years.’
‘But why?’
Dr Kgope rubs her thumb over her forefinger like a cashier counting money.
‘Bribes?’
‘Draw your own conclusions.’
Dr Shirley Kgope bends down to straighten the lines down the back of her silk stockings. Tea time is over. They pick their way through goats on the veranda to get to the seminar room.
‘We should tell Mr Mabunda to fix the fence,’ says Dr Kgope, kicking goat droppings from the tiles.
‘Why are you here?’ Mrs Nyathi asks with sly, amused eyes when the two of them are drinking brandy alone late that evening.
The three other girls who are boarding at Bella Gardens, all nurses and fellow students, are out somewhere, probably in the shebeen further down in the village. Mrs Nyathi is small with a broad face, substantial thighs and cheeks across which baby skin is stretched beautifully taut. Tonight she is smoking a cigar. Like two gents in a members’ club they sit in deep armchairs.
‘You’re not the first to ask,’ answers Sandrien. ‘For the training, of course!’
Mrs Nyathi shakes her head. ‘No, no, I mean why are you here?’
She gestures with both hands towards Sandrien’s body. Towards her skin colour, in fact.
Sandrien sits back in the armchair. Two months ago, she had returned home to the farm at Dorrebult, her palate shredded by chemotherapy. She had spent three months in Bloemfontein. She stayed on her own in a guest house, within walking distance of the hospital. Her identical twin daughters sometimes came to sit with her in the afternoons after school, but she usually felt terrible and the two surly adolescents had little to say to her. On the first afternoon, after spending all morning in a daze, watching poison dripping into her veins, she even momentarily confused them with each other.
When she returned to Dorrebult, nothing was left of the weaving mill. The tables and looms stood there gathering dust. The yarn – the wool and the mohair – everything, gone. Just a few loose filaments on the cement floor.
‘Where have they all gone?’ She looked at her husband accusingly. ‘Grace, Brenda, Xoliswe, the rest?’
Kobus shrugged. ‘There’s nothing left of the weaving business. What did you expect? You were the heart of it. Surely you know that.’
‘But it was for them, as much as for me. How could they just let go of it?’
Kobus touched her elbow in passing. He put on his hat and drove off to his cattle. In the shafts of sunlight pouring through the windows, his footsteps had stirred up fragments of fibre that kept floating and shimmering.
Sandrien is surrounded by Mrs Nyathi’s fragrant smoke. She is picking at loose threads under her chair cushion.
Over two years she built up the weaving mill. Poured a new concrete floor for the old barn, punched new windows into the walls for light. She went to work at a community weaving project in Grahamstown for a few months, acquainting herself with market size, potential sales points, marketing channels. Back home she met with each of their neighbours to assess attitudes. Most of the farmers were relieved about the opportunity for their labourers to earn an extra income, their burden of responsibility perhaps somewhat lightened. She spoke to the women on each of the farms, made sure the men were not present. The coloured women seemed more enthusiastic than the Xhosa women, but ultimately so many turned up that she could not take all of them.
She taught them what she had learned, weaving shoulder-to-shoulder with them until her hands were raw. Some of the women learned quickly; about half kept at it and became highly adept. Together with the five who remained, she developed the project. Colours and designs were adapted as she received orders from shops in Franschhoek and Dullstroom and Clarens. Blankets in natural, earthy colours; monochrome rugs with subtly varying textures. Handwoven by women from the Eastern Cape on the back of the label, underneath her brand name: Glo-fibre. A paragraph about Glo-fibre’s environmentally friendly practices.
The business started growing; she was getting enquiries from Europe and the Middle East. When she learned the diagnosis, she called Grace in and told her. Grace was the only one of her personnel who had matriculated; she was bright and dedicated.
‘I have to go away for treatment. While I’m gone, you must be the driving force behind the project, Grace, the linchpin.’
Grace promised solemnly, her tall frame tilting slightly forward.
There was little time. For two weeks, she trained Grace in aspects of administration and management. ‘Showing you the ropes, no pun intended.’ Grace did not laugh. Carefully she took Grace through the order books and her list of suppliers, showing her how to make entries, explaining everything.
Mrs Nyathi’s eyes are shining. She is observing Sandrien, as if sharing the memory.
Sandrien considered asking Kobus to take over, but she knew he would not be able to manage it with the cattle. And he would not understand what it was that the mill demanded.
‘Anyhow,’ she said to Grace, ‘it would run counter to the spirit of this if I involved my husband, or one of the other farmers’ wives.’
She looked Grace in the eyes, pressed Grace’s hands against her chest. ‘I have trust in you. In your hearts you know the value of this, what it means.’
Grace arranged for them to sing for her when she left. She was embarrassed; it was not as if she was facing death. Prio
r to the mastectomy and treatment she in fact radiated health. When she got back and found the mill abandoned, it didn’t take long to find out why. She was shocked at how ill Grace was.
She considers expanding on her answer to Mrs Nyathi’s question. ‘For retraining, of course; I’m rusty. Before, I spent years as a nurse in intensive care in a private hospital in Grahamstown. I want to work again. I have to earn money.’
Mrs Nyathi’s screwed eyes are sharp.
Sandrien clears her throat. ‘Perhaps,’ she says and touches her throat, ‘to become acquainted with the textures of loss.’
Mrs Nyathi laughs, her neat feet stir, her cheeks still as lovely as a baby’s.
A thunderstorm wakes her. She pulls away the curtain. Lightning flashes across brown currents descending from the mountain. The currents branch out into a delta, flowing around some of the little houses and straight through others. She opens the windows; the curtains billow into the room. In her nightgown she stands before the storm.
After the incident with the children, Lerato no longer sits with her at mealtimes. Sandrien now heaps the food extra high on her plate every lunch and gives it to the children. She tries to hand them rolled balls of pap through the fence. Later she holds out the plate for them to take the food themselves. Their hands are smaller, move more easily through the tightly woven fence. As Lerato predicted, the numbers have swollen. There is a small crowd. Two of the littler ones have even wriggled through the hole made by the goats. Sandrien looks around. On the veranda a group of her fellow students are watching, hands on their hips. Then Lerato walks towards them, arms swinging, earrings jingling. She hits the fence with an open hand so that it rattles from one corner post to the other. The children scatter in all directions. The two small ones on the inside start crying. ‘Bloody goats and children!’ she shouts, but her anger is really aimed at Sandrien.
The smell of toxic gas enters Sandrien’s nostrils. She walks away without a word, round the back of the classrooms. She will not shed a tear; she won’t. In front of her a furrow has been dug into the hillside, directing water around the building. In the furrow there are two heaps of rubbish. One consists of hundreds of Coke cans, the other of smouldering plastic.
‘I am Walter Mabunda.’
She quickly rubs tears off her cheeks. The man approaches and stands next to her, too close. He takes her hands between his. She stiffens.
‘Why doesn’t someone start a recycling project here?’ she says, her voice more vehement than she intended. ‘It could mean money, jobs.’
‘Perhaps you should do it.’
‘But I’m just here for a few weeks.’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Managing this facility is a demanding task. I have only these two hands.’
She loosens hers from his.
‘I presume you’re staying in Bella Gardens?’
She looks at him. A charming voice. In his mid-fifties, she estimates, a good ten years older than she.
‘Yes, at Mrs Nyathi’s.’
‘Hmm, such a good hostess. But,’ he laughs lazily, ‘she governs that establishment with an iron fist, I tell you. The girls who work there, they toe the line. Ooh, very scary,’ he says in an unexpected alto voice, eyes wide. ‘She can be withering,’ he says, ‘blistering.’ He suddenly strikes her as somewhat camp. Below his beer belly, neat folds have been ironed into his slacks. His shoes are shiny.
‘Mrs Nyathi has been a model of courtesy.’
‘By the way, we must ask you not to lure the children.’ His voice is sympathetic, soothing. ‘They are a nuisance. We cannot take on responsibility for the entire community.’
The storms over Vloedspruit are fiercer than anything Sandrien has known. At night, lightning draws nerve patterns across the skies. Fountains burst from the slopes as if through a dam wall. Lower down, small buildings regularly wash away. The government houses remain standing, but mud is building against their walls. She is getting used to the rhythms here, even the storms. Her daily routine is not devoid of minor joys. Mrs Nyathi’s fatty breakfasts, the morning classes at the college, the teas and lunches, the unpredictable – often perplexing – conversations with Mrs Nyathi at night on the veranda. She is getting used to the maids with their quiet eyes, furiously polishing or scurrying down the corridor, possibly instructed to remain invisible to guests. Her fellow students’ social codes remain a mystery, though. As soon as she thinks she has started forming bonds of friendship, she is excluded again.
Sunday afternoons, when the other girls are out and she is not in the mood for Mrs Nyathi’s company, or when the maids’ unseen presences unnerve her, she goes for long walks. She breathes mountain air deep into her lungs after the rain. Children run naked through puddles and mill around her. They tug at her hands or clothes, search her pockets. She hands out money or sweets. She feels embarrassed, like the Western heroine in a Hollywood African fantasy: hand on the little khaki hat, children’s profiles etched against her linen dress. Cows with bony rumps struggle up the slippery slope. One afternoon she realises most of the village market next to the government houses has been washed away.
Wherever she walks, little dogs run after the children and dart around her feet. They yap and yelp, dodging her footsteps.
‘Why are there only small dogs here?’ she asks Mrs Nyathi one afternoon.
Mrs Nyathi holds up her palms, as if saying: Isn’t it obvious? She makes a gesture, as if bringing food to her mouth. ‘They get eaten, don’t they? The big ones.’
She is reluctant to call home. On a Sunday afternoon she calls Brenda, Grace’s daughter, who is looking after Sandrien’s elderly mother. Brenda is sulky.
‘Missus Karlien is walking around with garden shears, trying to cut flies. She refuses to let me change her bedding. Sometimes she eats off the floor.’
The shadow of one of Mrs Nyathi’s maids flits down the corridor. Sandrien regrets making the call, opening the curtain. Once a week Kobus calls from Dorrebult. He talks about his cattle, about their daughters in Bloemfontein. She invokes platitudes, talks about her accommodation, the nursing course, the storms. She keeps it vague. She wants to keep this place – this respite – separate. They do not talk about the illness, about the time she spent in Bloemfontein. That belongs to the past.
When Sandrien encounters Mrs Nyathi in the dim rooms of Bella Gardens, the same ritual always repeats itself.
‘You still enjoying your wonderful stay, Mrs Gouws?’
Without fail, she answers: ‘I am having the most wonderful time in this establishment of yours, Mrs Nyathi.’
Then Mrs Nyathi laughs, nodding her head as if they share a secret.
But this afternoon she catches Mrs Nyathi unawares. When Sandrien enters, she hears a loud voice in the bathroom. A new voice. It is Mrs Nyathi shouting at one of her maids in Xhosa. When Sandrien quietly passes by in the corridor, Mrs Nyathi turns around and smiles. The girl is in the shadow behind her. Sandrien can see the whites of her eyes. Mrs Nyathi pushes the door shut. Silence. From the bathroom, after a while, the unmistakeable sound of a slap.
The other nurses in Bella Gardens are polite, but keep their distance from Sandrien. In the mornings, when they stroll to the college, they cluster together, chattering. Around the table in the evenings the girls and Mrs Nyathi speak a mix of English, Sotho and Xhosa, so that Sandrien only catches the occasional snippet. On weeknights, they mostly retire to their rooms.
On Saturdays, Mrs Nyathi brings someone in to do their hair extensions in the sunshine on the veranda. At dusk there is chit-chat and giggling in the rooms of Bella Gardens. Vapours of perfume drift down the corridor. The maids sneak by on their toes, trying to get a glimpse of all things shiny and fragrant. With jingling bangles they trip through the lounge on silver heels. They make snake-like movements to the beat of inaudible music, initially ignoring Mrs Nyathi, who is looking on and keeping the rhythm. She keeps nodding her approval, over and over again, animated by an infectious exuberance. Then something strange happens:
the air starts moving differently around the bodies. As if against their will, the girls start dancing to Mrs Nyathi’s beat. They arrange themselves in relation to her, creating a formation with her at the forefront.
The taxi’s hooter breaks the rhythm. To prevent mud getting on stockings, the driver picks up the girls at the end of the paved garden path. Music flows out when the white taxi door opens. Arms hang out of the windows once they’re inside.
‘Yes,’ says Mrs Nyathi, when they are left sitting alone on the veranda, the village lights and fires below them. Her eyes are moist, searching for the taxi, its music fading amongst the houses. ‘When I was a young nurse, there were also good, good times.’
Tonight she is wearing a headcloth, bright textile from West Africa.
‘Where do they go at night?’ Sandrien wants to know.
‘There are places across the border in Lesotho,’ Mrs Nyathi says, ‘where you can have a lot of fun.’ Her eyes widen and her head nods forward. ‘A lot of fun.’
Mrs Nyathi looks askance at Sandrien, sips her brandy.
‘How about you? You’re still young enough. Don’t you sing and dance, don’t you sometimes seek out a little fun, fun, fun?’ Mrs Nyathi shakes her head, pouting her lips as if talking to a baby.
Sandrien turns her head away, as if interrogating the thickening darkness. She uncrosses her legs, crosses them again. ‘No,’ she says slowly, ‘my body refuses music. I only come close to singing when agony is at its worst. Then I make small noises under my breath. When I was ill, I sang like that, if you can call it singing.’