The Madonna of Excelsior

by Zakes Mda

  “I care about all my children, Viliki,” said Niki. “Not only those of my womb.”

  Popi shushed them and continued with her interrupted speech. She thanked God for preserving them until their eyes could see the return of Pule. She called him “our father”. The return of our father. Even though the mines had now eaten his lungs, she was grateful that the Lord had shown him the road back to Mahlatswetsa Location, to be sick in the bosom of his family, to be nursed back to health by those who loved him.

  Viliki whispered to Popi, “Speak for yourself.”

  A loud whisper that everyone heard, but ignored.

  Viliki was not prepared to forgive his father for deserting them for seventeen years. For deserting him. If Pule had a quarrel with Niki, why did he, Viliki, have to pay for Niki’s sins? He was, after all, his son. A child of his blood. What had he done to be hit by stones that should have been aimed only at his mother?

  Pule had returned the week before, a shadow of the man he used to be. A fleshless body that coughed blood. The doctors had diagnosed him with phthisis. As a mzalwane—a born-again Christian—he had put his faith in the Lord. He had consulted faith healers and prophets. But his mouth and nostrils continued to spew blood. Then he had resorted to traditional doctors—the san-gomas and dingaka—who threw their divination bones and prescribed herbs from the mountains of Zebediela. None of which cured him. This went on until most of the pension money he had received from the mining company was gone. When the vat-en-sit woman with whom he had been cohabiting in Welkom left him for those who still had their health and wealth, he had remembered the wife he had left in Excelsior all those years ago. He had gone to town and bought Popi a ready-made dress, Viliki a navy-blue suit and Niki a red two-piece costume. Peace offerings. He had packed his few clothes into a suitcase and had boarded the maroon South African Railways bus to Excelsior.

  Popi had welcomed him with open arms, Viliki with a sour face, and Niki with quiet dignity, bordering on indifference. She had thanked him for the two-piece costume, but had added that unfortunately only the cardboard boxes under her bed would wear it, as she could no longer be seen in such hedonistic clothes. Viliki had threatened to donate his suit to charity. Pule’s pleading eyes had not melted his resolve not to have anything to do with this man who used to be his father.

  “Now that he is dying, he comes back here,” Viliki had grumbled.

  This sickness of Pule’s: it was like that with many men from Mahlatswetsa Location. They worked in the gold mines of Welkom, and when they came back, they were finished. Gold had eaten their lungs. Gold had drained them of all flesh and blood. They were gaunt. They were walking skeletons.

  Popi continued with her speech, ignoring Viliki’s snide remark. The birthday party, she reminded everyone, had been “our father’s” idea. He had also paid for the cake and the cold drink. So, she was also thanking him for the wonderful gesture. For remembering Niki’s fortieth birthday.

  Popi suddenly stopped speaking and cast her eyes at the door. Her expression changed to one of horror when she saw a shadow looming over the threshold. The horror changed to disgust when Sekatie’s head appeared at the door.

  “Where is Viliki?” he asked. “Someone wants to talk to him.”

  “It is Sekatle,” said Popi to Viliki.

  “What does he want?” asked Viliki.

  “Baas Klein-Jan wants you,” said Sekatle.

  “Come out, Viliki,” said a voice that spoke Sesotho with a tinge of an Afrikaans accent. It was Klein-Jan Lombard’s voice. Captain Klein-Jan Lombard. Viliki walked out. Without uttering another word, the captain handcuffed him and led him to the van that was parked in the street. Viliki looked at Sekatle. But his former playmate turned his head and looked the other way.

  It was always a spectator sport when someone was arrested. We crowded around the police van. Children and their parents. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Stretching our necks to take a good look at the day’s culprit. Squawking like mynas in a cage at feeding time. A feeding frenzy. Caged birds bearing witness to their fellow being transferred to another cage.

  They got Viliki . . . Whatfor? . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s for smuggling dagga . . . It must be. They say he goes to Lesotho a lot. People who go to Lesotho a lot are dagga smugglers . . . But the quality of Lesotho dagga is not better than that of Swaziland . . . You see, there is Sekatle. He must have sold him out. They must have been doing this dagga thing together . . . Yes, where do you think Sekatle gets his money?. . . Ja, he works for the system.

  Captain Klein-Jan Lombard bundled Viliki into the back of the van, banged the mesh door closed and locked it with a padlock. The captain and Sekatle climbed into the front. Niki stood at the door and watched as the police van drove away. She sighed and whispered, “They want to take away all my children.”

  WE SAW Pule getting finished as he walked the muddy streets of Mahlatswetsa Location, his skeletal body dragging itself from one house of a mzalwane to the next. He lived on the hymns and prayers of his fellow born-again Christians.

  At night he slept on the high bed in the shack, while Niki and Popi slept on the floor. They could hear his bones rattle as he breathed with difficulty and coughed all night. One morning when everyone woke up, he did not. His soul had escaped his bones in the deep of the night. Deserting it as he had deserted his family.

  As we always did when a member of the community left us, we collected a few rands together and bought him a plain pine coffin. Popi and Niki buried him with dignity.

  THE METHODIST MINISTER agreed to conduct the funeral service for Popi’s sake, even though Pule had not been a member of his congregation. The born-agains gave him a rousing send-off and Popi, resplendent in her Methodist uniform, sang a heartrending solo.

  Viliki could not attend the funeral. He was in detention where the Special Branch policemen were torturing him, demanding a confession. He insisted he had none to make. He would rather die than betray his comrades. The more the electric current ran through his body and his genitals were clamped with a pair of pliers, the more hatred for Sekatle swelled in his body.

  After six months, they released him. “We are watching you,” they warned him when they dropped him in a street in town one night.

  He did not shed a single tear for his father. He chided Niki for wearing a black doek, a black dress and a black cape—the yearlong uniform of widowhood. Why was she mourning for a man who, according to him, had died seventeen years ago when he disappeared from their lives?

  IT WAS a year of blessings. The rains fell. The harvest was good. Pule came home to die.

  POSKAART/POSTCARD 1

  AYELLOW STAR with six points shines on the baby. Baby in a pink jump suit with a row of black buttons. Pink is for girls. Baby in a blue frilled hat. Blue is for boys. Brown baby, eyes wide open to receive the blue and white rays of the yellow star. Baby stretching its arms to touch the breasts of the two women kneeling on either side of it. Kneeling on a green field of flowers. Each woman holding the baby. A black hand. And a white hand. More accurately, a brown hand and a pink hand. Brown hand with blue fingernails. Pink hand with pink fingernails. Pink woman in a light blue nun’s habit. Brown woman in her Sunday best. Purple Sunday felt hat with white cosmos in front and violet cosmos at the back. Cosmos grows from the hatband. Baby and women bathed in the light of the yellow star. Surrounded by hosts of sunflowers and white, violet and blue cosmos. A wild garden floating in a turquoise universe.

  Jesus tussen die Blomme. Jesus among the Flowers. By: Father Frans Claerhout. Popi read the bottom of the postcard with deliberation. Silently to herself. On the side that had space for a message, a vertical line separated the message space from the address space. Both spaces blank. No message. No address. No stamp on the top left rectangle. Blank postcard that she had kept jealously ever since the last time she modelled for the trinity seven years ago. As a freckled girl of fourteen. Now she was a clear-skinned girl of twenty-one. A smooth-skinned light-complexioned woman
who wore a doek all the time to hide her God-given hair. A woman who saw herself as a girl. In the guise of a child.

  Jesus among the Flowers was her favourite postcard among the three she owned. Its celestial blue calmed her when she had had a particularly bad day. That is how the three postcards had survived the years without showing any signs of wear and tear: she took them out only when she needed calming. Or when nostalgia got the better of her. On normal days she hid them in an exercise book that spent its restful days in the bottom of the cardboard box where she kept her clothes.

  She had taken them out today because of a bout of nostalgia. After Niki had mentioned something about the Good Father who had saved them from garden parties having moved from his old mission station to another one in Tweespruit—a reachable twenty-five kilometres west of Thaba Nchu. Her ears had snatched this information from the mouths of Catholic neighbours who attended Holy Mass and baptisms at the church in Tweespruit.

  Popi passed the postcard to Niki. Niki went through the motions of looking at it, but then cast it aside, dropping it on the floor. She had seen it before.

  “Niki, you will make my picture dirty putting it on the floor!” screamed Popi, taking it and placing it between the pages of her exercise book. She was now the screamer and the shouter since Niki had consigned herself to quietness.

  “It is not true, anyway,” said Niki as if to herself. “Jesus was not black. You have seen his photos in church.”

  “This is how the Father saw Him, as a black child,” said Popi.

  “That’s a lie too,” insisted Niki. “He never saw Him. And which one of these women is Mary? If it’s this black woman, how come she is wearing a purple hat and a red dress like the women of today? Jesus didn’t live today. And if it’s this white woman, how come she is a nun, and how come she is white and her child is black?”

  The import of what she had just said hit Niki. She paused and looked at Popi. But nothing had registered.

  Suddenly Niki said, “Anyway, that’s a stupid picture. How can a yellow star shine with such blue and white light?”

  Popi laughed at Niki’s venture into the world of art criticism.

  “How come you remember every detail of it even when you are not looking at it?” she asked.

  “You have forced it on me all these years,” said Niki resignedly.

  “Admit it, Niki,” said Popi, “it has got into you too.”

  They sat silently for a while. Popi looked at the postcard intently, trying to find any traces of foolishness in it. Even in the dim light she could not detect them.

  She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. They were red. They were crying. Not from her inability to find foolishness. Not from pain either. But from the pungent smoke of the cow-dung that was burning in the brazier. Niki and Popi had moved the “kitchen scheme” table to the side of the room, and had put the brazier at the centre, creating a cosy hearth around which they were sitting. Noisily chewing the maize on the cob that they roasted on the embers. They had closed the door and the window to keep the evil air of the night out and the warmth of the brazier in. The warmth did stay in. With it the smoke. And the tears.

  “They got what they were fighting for, didn’t they?” asked Niki out of the blue. “They got what they were fighting for. So now why can’t he stay home?”

  “Why can’t who stay home?” wondered Popi.

  “Viliki. Why can’t he stay home?”

  “They haven’t got what they were fighting for yet, Niki,” said Popi.

  “Free Mandela. Free Mandela, they said. Now Mandela is free. And those others. The ones they released first. Mbeki and Sisulu and Gwala and others. Their names are on the radio every day. But why is Viliki never home?”

  “He did explain, Niki, that now there is even more work to be done. The Boers are still the rulers. Even though his Movement has been unbanned, here in Excelsior we still only enter the hotel as cleaners. At the post office there are still two queues—one for whites and the other for blacks.”

  “Why would you go to the post office, anyway?” asked Niki. “We never receive letters. We never post letters to anyone.”

  Then she looked at Popi, and fear suddenly gripped her. “You are becoming a politician like your brother,” she said admonishingly.

  “These are just the truths that we see, Niki,” said Popi.

  “I fear for my children,” said Niki resignedly.

  “They have released the leaders and the exiles have come home,” cried Popi. “Yet the police still harass Viliki. They just can’t leave him alone.”

  Niki would not have admitted it, but Viliki’s gallivanting had had a positive effect on the family. After one of his forages into the hinterland on Movement business one year, he had brought back a radio. A big ghetto blaster, as Viliki called it, which also played cassette tapes in two places. Hence Niki could now sing the names of Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki and Harry Gwala. Even though these names were popular outside the confines of her shack, for we talked about them everywhere we gathered, Niki was never part of such gatherings. If it were not for the magic of the ghetto blaster, Niki would have remained blissfully ignorant of these names. And of the radio drama series to which she had become addicted. Pale-e-Tswelang-Pele. The story that continues. The Sesotho service of Radio Bantu of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Dramatic stories of heroes who fought against ungodly terrorists in the bush. Stories that extolled the virtues of those who chose to stay in the rural homelands, rather than go to the cities to make a nuisance of themselves there.

  She would have been saved from another addiction: weekly obituary programmes. Every Friday, the announcer read in a soothing voice the names of the departed, the cause of their demise, where and when the funeral would be held, the particular people to whom the message was directed, and the names of those who had sent the message to the radio station. If she were to depart, Niki felt she would be assured permanent residence in Heaven if this particular radio announcer read her name.

  Popi looked at the postcard intently. The figures seemed to assume life in the haziness of the smoke. A teardrop fell on the baby Jesus. She cleaned it off with her thumb. She sneezed as the smoke assailed her nostrils. She rubbed her neck with her forefinger. The skin was peeling off. Scales of dead skin on her neck and on part of her chest. These had been peeling off for as long as she could remember. She did not know why. It was an allergy, a doctor once said. An allergy. But Niki knew that the peeling had begun when she had roasted Popi as a baby. When she had wanted to brown her, only for her to turn into a truly coloured baby. The peeling spot on Popi’s neck and chest should have stayed small as the child grew bigger. But it had grown with her. And had got bigger with her.

  The peeling spot had long become a taboo subject between Niki and Popi. So were Popi’s experiences in the world outside the safety of her shack. She kept her daily flagellation of taunts to herself. Taunts. Taunts. Taunts. Even though on one hand we praised her for being beautiful, and for having a wonderful voice, we continued to laugh at her for being a boesman. As we laughed at other men and women, and boys and girls, who looked like her, and were brave enough to walk the streets of Excelsior. We laughed. Until she lost hope that we would ever accept her. Until she was filled with thoughts of revenge. No one told her that vengeance had a habit of bouncing against the wall, like a ricocheting bullet, and hitting the originator. Look what had happened to Niki when she filled her loins with vengeance! It was because of that vengeance that Popi was now a prisoner of the perpetual doek on her head, of blue eyes and of hairy legs.

  “One day you must send them to someone,” said Niki.

  “Send what to someone, Niki?” asked Popi.

  “That’s what they were meant for, to be posted to someone.”

  “Oh, the postcards? Never!”

  THE SINS OF our mothers were never mentioned at dinner tables. An elaborately laid table, with a vase of red and yellow plastic roses in the middle, would have been at odds with i
dle talk of the misdemeanours of the flesh. Even though the Reverend François Bornman’s empty eye-socket was a constant reminder that they had once been committed. They had once been written in the Big Book where all sins are recorded, although all have since been expunged. Thanks to a forgiving God.

  The socket was empty because Jacomina’s naughty poodle had swallowed the dominee’s marble eye, which he had taken out of its socket for cleaning. After Jacomina had cleaned the eye with Det-tol antiseptic in warm water, she had left it in a saucer on the side table next to her bed to dry. When she came back from another room, she had found the stupid poodle playing with it, rolling it on the carpet with its paws, and then catching it with its teeth. She had shouted at the poodle. It had been so startled that it had swallowed the eye inadvertently, as Jacomina had vouched to her father when she reported the incident.

  Now the dominee’s face looked like that of a naughty old man who had been caught winking at someone’s wife by cruel gods—who had then decided to play a prank on him by making the eye refuse to open again. A brownish jelly oozed out of it and made Cornelia Cronje’s own eyes weep.

  She tried to avoid looking at the dominee. But he was sitting directly opposite her. And was chewing away at the hoenderpastei—the Cape-Dutch chicken pie—oblivious to her discomfort. It was particularly tasty, thanks to the free-range chickens that patiently awaited the occasional guillotine in the dominee’s backyard. And thanks to the cooking skills of Jacomina. Everything that Jacomina touched turned into a culinary wonder that sang in one’s mouth. That was why the guests had not stopped praising the crunchiness of her maize-meal spinach patties and the delicate tanginess of her tomato bredie that had been simmered in a cast-iron potjie over the coals. Or singing paeans to the colourful roasted vegetables that surrounded the brown rack of lamb. Green peppers, red peppers, green courgettes, deep red beetroot, green and white leeks, deep brown mushrooms and light yellow pattypans. And to the saffron samp cooked with sugar beans.