My Children Have Faces

by Carol Campbell

  Mamma just doesn’t want us registered. She wants us to move with her and Pappie over the veld on the donkey karretjie and not go to school.

  “If you go to school then I have to run around finding stokkies for our night-time fire and you all start getting big ideas,” she skels me.

  She says I already have big ideas, wanting school shoes all the time.

  I ride on the karretjie and I think about school shoes and white ribbons and writing my name. Maybe if I went to school my teacher would be a pretty juffrou with high heels and a car. I don’t want an old cross man to be my teacher. I like pretty lady teachers who smile and give you lekkertjies.

  You know what I think? I think Mamma doesn’t want to have us registered because she wants us to be invisible and never be anywhere for long.

  Really, I don’t care what the town children say about me. They know nothing about the veld. Fansie says they would die if they were left alone out here.

  “They just know 50C chips and green cooldrink,” he says. “That stuff is rubbish, it makes your teeth green and your hair fall out.”

  Fansie also doesn’t care about the town children, but when we get to Prince Albert he always disappears to find Oom Poenie who gives him a cigarette. If Oom Poenie’s son from Vredendal is there then Fansie gets a drag on the Mandrax pipe. He likes that, he says it makes him feel really, really lekker. All I know is he lies on the ground like a dead snake, smiling at all of us for the rest of the night.

  We are going to town. Not a big town like Prince Albert, but Leeu Gamka. It’s a place with a school. Pappie said to me before we get there I must wash in the bucket and then the children will play with me. I won’t do it. S’true, I like my smell and I won’t wash in the bucket until they buy me a pink roll-on and a waslappie. I told him that too.

  In Rietbron I do have one friend who lives in a house. She’s Didi, my cousin. Her mamma and pappie have fixed jobs and Didi lives in a real house on the farm, with a TV. When we are in Rietbron I sleep on the floor by Didi’s bed, but Fansie doesn’t like it and he always comes to fetch me and hits my legs with a stick till I run to Mamma crying. But then she shouts, “What are you doing with those people?”

  “I want to watch TV,” I cry. “Really, I want to watch 7de Laan with Didi, please Mamma.”

  When I cry like that Mamma stops skelling and says I must come back to the karretjie and use my time to wash while we are near a tap. But what’s the point of rubbing sand under my arms and making it all mud with cold water? I want a pink roll-on and a lappie. Then I will wash.

  So this time we are going to Leeu Gamka and I feel like it’s different. We have never been here before and Mamma is very, very quiet. Maybe we can get birth certificates and go to school now. I am sure we can. That’s why Mamma is so quiet.

  She knows if we are in Leeu Gamka we can get her an identity and then we can get birth certificates and go to school.

  “Pappie, can we get birth certificates in Leeu Gamka? If we do that then you can get an All Pay grant and buy food and,” I whisper so only he can hear, “a doppie, Pappie.”

  “There is nowhere to get birth certificates in Leeu Gamke. We are going there so we can find a way to eat,” he says, without smiling at me.

  I can see he is thinking about All Pay and a doppie.

  Mamma says nothing.

  4 MUIS

  I hear my children’s names floating on the wind across the veld. They have no papers and they tell me this every day.

  “Mamma, we have no papers.”

  “Mamma, we want to be registered.”

  Why are they so worried about this? Always, all they want is this piece of paper.

  When we come near a town they start again. “Can we get papers in Rietbron?” Seekoegat, Prince Albert, Klaarstroom. Every town it’s the same question.

  They should be registered. I know that. Without government names, who will the police search for if they are lost? And, when they find them, how will they know they are mine?

  That is why I tell Kapok we must keep away from the towns. Under the sun and the moon I can see they are mine and keep them safe. Fansie’s darting eyes, Witpop’s cheeky mouth and Sponsie’s open arms are what I know. In the veld I can see them and keep them safe. From him.

  If he finds us, the first one he will take is Fansie. When the police ask me: “Who is this Fansie?” I will have nothing to show that he is alive or that he is mine.

  He wants my boy. Since before Fansie was born, he has wanted to take him for his own.

  He looks at my tiny baby, his face like a male baboon with sharp teeth, seeing his own flesh and blood.

  Leave him, he is not your child, I think, too scared to speak aloud. You are a murdering bastard.

  Towns are not kind places to my children. I see Witpop trying to play but the children hit her with sticks and throw stones at her. Fansie disappears to smoke a Mandrax pipe and then lies useless in a corner. And me, when I see a town rising up from the veld, a thirst rushes in my blood for a doppie. Just a little wyntjie to let me forget my troubles. Then I can’t stop myself and I have to get into town and find a one litre, quickly. Now we are in Leeu Gamka. It is the one place I never wanted to see again but we have trekked across the plains and we are here. The red houses on the hill are the same. The big road with the hissing and shouting trucks is the same. The Shell Ultra City is the same and, as we come over the hill, I see that the tunnel where Jan died is also the same.

  There will be nowhere to hide here. In my mind I see the shiny flash of his knife. I want to shout to my children, “Run! Hide in the veld!” Small hands and feet must vanish behind a bush or a rock or down a hole. They know how to disappear because I have shown them.

  When a farmer chases us off his land, three sets of little eyes watch, like duikers, ready to run. He thinks it’s only me and Kapok and the donkeys. He does not see them in the aardvarkgat or behind a rock. I make sure then that they do not exist.

  “Hide, hide,” I whisper now.

  “Mamma, we are in Leeu Gamka. We don’t need to hide.” Witpop is laughing at me. “Nee man, Mamma, really. We are in town. We don’t have to hide here.”

  But he is here. Now, more than they have ever been, my children are in danger.

  They are not registered. They don’t exist.

  Long ago, when Fansie was still very small, we went to the school in Seekoegat to ask if he could come to learn his letters and numbers but the principal wanted his birth certificate or his clinic card.

  Straight away we hitched the karretjie and left. Where must I get a clinic card in the middle of the veld? Why can’t they go to school and learn to read and write before we move on again? Always a birth certificate. Always a piece of government paper.

  My daughters were born in the veld under the karretjie. When it was time, I cried out to the mothers and grandmothers of the old time for them to help me bring them into the world. When they came they were small and slippery and, every time, I thought I had given birth to a frog. Kapok cleared their mouths with his finger and, each time, he laid the baby under the blanket next to me.

  “It’s like a lamb,” he told me, “sometimes you have to clean out the lamb’s mouth and make sure it drinks.”

  He tied the cord with tou and then, when it was all over, he cut the baby free with his knife. We kept away from towns so that no word could go back to Leeu Gamka that Muis had daughters. He would want them too. I knew that.

  My Fansie is born in a dark room on a mattress behind a thin curtain in the red brick house in Leeu Gamka. Jan is dead and Miskiet is sure he is my baby’s father. He sits on the other side of the curtain at the kitchen table, smoking while I give birth to my boy, alone, with a lappie in my mouth to stop my screaming. Afterwards, when the baby is in my arms, he comes and looks at him.

  “That is my son,” he says and laughs and walks out of his house.

  When I can, I stand up and wash his coffee mug and empty the chipped bowl of ash from his cigarettes. There
are ten stompies in the bowl. I keep two, with a little tobacco left, for myself.

  He doesn’t touch the baby in the few weeks I stay in his house. All the time we are there he looks pleased. He leaves me alone, knowing there is nowhere I can go. My people are in Fraserburg and I need to be stronger if I am going to walk.

  It is impossible to steal food from him, but every day I scrape a few tablespoons of flour into small pieces of newspaper and roll them in the bundle with my baby. If I am going to walk home to my mother I need food. This flour and the old Boesman ways my mother taught me will keep me alive.

  My mind was filled with plans of escape and my mother when Kapok found me under the pepper tree. Fansie was a month old and I had started to tie him on my back to make him ready for the long journey. I had decided I would hide from the sun and Miskiet in the day and walk with the jackals and the moon at night.

  “Mina is dead from the TB,” Kapok said. “I need a woman to come with me on my donkey karretjie.” I nodded. Mina had been sick for a long time.

  “Come, and I will raise Jan’s son like he is my own.”

  “When?”

  “This malletjie says he is going to Beaufort West for three days next week,” he said, nodding at Miskiet’s house. “There are a lot of them going, to try for government road work. We will go the first night after he leaves, when it’s dark.”

  I looked at him and nodded. Maybe Kapok would take me to my mother.

  “Okay, I will get ready.”

  Now we have come back. Fansie is nearly a man. Many times I think that without him we would not eat. Kapok’s stiff leg makes him too slow to catch anything, but Fansie runs all day with his dog, Rinkhals, coming back to the karretjie with meat he has scraped off the road or a porcupine he has clubbed.

  Kapok will look at what he has brought and say, “No we can’t use it, look at the maggots,” or, “Yes, it’s still clean. We can eat this.”

  When Kapok is happy, Fansie leans in and sniffs, making his nose crinkle and we all laugh. It is me who picks the meat off the skin to make a pot of food.

  He knows what I can use and he bursts with pride when I say, “Dankie vir die kos, my seun.”

  We are here. Right on the edge of the town. “Run! Hide!” I want to shout, but Kapok will not listen; my children don’t understand why I am afraid. They all think we are fine. The donkeys strain, the chain goes loose and I know when Miskiet finds us he will kill me.

  5 MISKIET

  I want to go to their camp and take him for me. The thing is he won’t listen because he doesn’t know me. A boy like that, one who hasn’t been to school, who runs and sleeps and hunts, doesn’t obey his elders. A boy like that does exactly what he wants and thinks only of his own comfort. He will have to be tamed, slowly and with patience, like a wild dog. Food, money and cigarettes. That’s what works on boys like him.

  There is no rush. There is starvation in their faces. Kapok has come to look for work with the Boere who knew him. It won’t be difficult to lure her children. A packet of chips, a five bob. It won’t take much. Fifteen years and she thinks I have forgotten. She is hoping I have forgotten.

  After all this time, Klein Muisie, I have never stopped watching for you. I knew you would be back one day, that you would bring him back to Leeu Gamka, and now you bring me a prize of three children.

  She will have to be punished and, when that time comes, she will understand this must happen. She took my son. Now he will live here and I am looking forward to it.

  “Father and son,” I will tell him. “I can teach you things only a father can teach a son.”

  The two girls can come too and keep the place clean. Washing and cooking, plenty to do. That older one is rough but can be beaten right. Maybe she can be cleaned up and I will allow her to sleep in my bed with me. The little one will learn quickly who is in charge.

  Klein Muisie’s children will have no papers. That is for sure. She had no ID and her children will have no birth certificates. The boy I will register with my name. The government will know he is mine. I will take charge of him and I will draw his All Pay. The girls can be left.

  My son looks fit and his arms are taking the shape of a man who will be strong. She is returning him to me now at a time when he is ready to take over his duties and help his father.

  Tonight, when I go to their camp, I will tell her to walk into the darkness with me. She will come because she has always obeyed and, when we are far enough, I will cut her throat like a sheep. She is lucky, my knife is sharp and it will be over quickly. Kapok is a coward. His silence will guarantee his life. He won’t talk. I remember Kapok, his fear was always bigger than his heart.

  When it is done, the children will come home with me. Before I go to their camp, I will prepare a place for them to sleep in my house and I will be merciful and sharpen my knife on the rock at the back door.

  6 KAPOK

  “Oudtshoorn” is all I hear.

  “We must go to Oudtshoorn.” All these years nothing, and now, when I want to go to Leeu Gamka, she wants to go to blerrie Oudtshoorn.

  That’s the problem with Muis. If a person wants to go one way then you can skiet dice that she will want to go the other way. It’s very blerrie irritating. She wants birth certificates and an ID for her and for the children.

  “We don’t need them,” I tell her. “What are we going to do with papers with the children’s names on them? Hey? What?” Next time she can’t find newspaper to roll a skuif she’ll be ripping off a piece of birth certificate to make a pil.

  Dom blerrie woman. I would give her a klap just to show her who is baas but she’s acting so quiet and strange I am just going to leave it and do what I want. Ek weet nie. Ek is so moeg and my leg is very sore. I don’t have the krag to fight with her about this. “If the government knows about them then he can’t do anything.” She says it so quietly I can hardly hear. “If the government doesn’t know about us he can hurt us. It’s then he can take the children.”

  She says it over and over. It’s that fokken Miskiet again. She is so scared of that bastard that she will have us running backwards and forwards to blerrie Oudtshoorn.

  Muis thinks that while she is nie amptelike nie, with no face, he can slide a knife across her throat and finish her off, finish off a life that never was in the first place. The same goes for the children. They don’t exist because they don’t have birth certificates.

  I tell her the Liewe Jesus knows about us, he will take care of the children, but she looks at me like she doesn’t believe me.

  “Liewe Jesus doesn’t carry a knife. How’s he going to stop Miskiet from doing what he wants to do?” she says.

  Ag jissie, ek is te moeg vir die storie.

  I am not scared of that blerrie bastard. He won’t hurt me. In his eyes I will be just a useless cripple. A useless cripple who stole the woman he wanted and the newborn he had claimed as his son. But I did a good thing for Muis. It’s been a hard life on the vlaktes, but I have seen her laugh and most of the time she has peace in her eyes.

  But, Liewe Jesus, right now I am so moeg of hearing about him coming to get us and that all we can do to stop him is to go to blerrie Oudtshoorn. Sometimes I just want to leave them all sitting at the side of the blerrie road and take my donkeys and go. Maybe then I can have some rest.

  Ja, look, he must have been angry when we disappeared. Hehe hehe! But I felt sorry for the poor girl, sitting under the pepper tree day after day, feeding her baby and not talking. I saw how he watched her and I guessed what happened to Jan. He wasn’t killed by some blerrie darkie truck driver. That’s what Miskiet said, that Jan was dead and the darkie was raping Muis when he found them. The ou ran away and took his knife with him. Miskiet said he was too shocked to chase after him. He saw his brother was dead and his brother’s girl being raped and he was too scared to do anything. Ja-nee, Jissus. Like Miskiet has ever been scared of anything in his life. But he put on a good show.

  “The darkie will come back for me,
” he told the police.

  Muis never said a word but I can guess what really happened. When the police asked her to tell them she wouldn’t talk. And that’s when the skinderbekkies in Rondomskrik on the hill in Leeu Gamka started talking. When the baby came all those many months later, we all knew it was Jan’s child. Poor Jan, to die like that in a filthy tunnel when you have a pretty girl with a baby on the way. Ek weet nie. Life is not fair. Shoo, shoo, shoo!

  I remember how it was for me after Mina died. It wasn’t the same on the karretjie. There is no joy in lighting a fire for one person at night, making coffee and skinning a rabbit with only donkeys to talk to.

  Muis, with her baby in her arms, needed a ride out of town. She was like me, alone, with no one to talk to. I think she was planning to go back to her mother. It would have been a hiding for her if she came to the farm carrying a snot-brat and no man. Her father wouldn’t ask questions, he would just give her a hiding to welcome her and the baby.

  I wanted children but Mina was always too thin or too sick and it never happened. With Muis I saw I could have a woman and a child straight away and I liked the idea. That baby boy never knew his real daddy. It was me who was the lucky one. It is me who he calls Pappie now.

  One thing. My ou Mina didn’t nag like Muis. Oh that woman can moan and complain. Mina was relaxed. We just went day to day, not worrying about tomorrow. When Mandela came I thought about going to Prince Albert to vote but then I said to Mina, “What’s the point? You vote for the darkies it’s going to be the same as if you vote for the whities. They are not worried about giving us karretjiemense houses and cars.”

  Anyway, I like my life. I don’t smaak living in a house in town and riding a bicycle. Mina was good that way; she agreed with me so we didn’t worry about going to vote for Mandela in the end. For many years Mina and I drove our karretjie from farm to farm looking for work and we never went hungry. There was always a pot of something to eat. When I worked with sheep I bought afval which she curried with Karoobossie. Jissie, I can only smack my lips when I think of Mina’s cooking. And a sheep’s head, ek sê!