Before we stood up I tied the gun to her belly, tight, with a long piece of tou I found in the road. I threaded it through the handle around her middle and back again, then I tied a knot. When she runs, it won’t drop out.
I showed her the safety and how to be sure it stayed on so the gun didn’t shoot by itself.
As we walk and Oudtshoorn comes closer, my mouth feels dry and my hands sweat. She has our donkey-gun and now I can go. Pappie didn’t want to carry it. He looked at it but he wouldn’t touch it.
36 MUIS
We are here. The walking wasn’t so bad. It is Sponsie who is hurting my heart. No crying anymore, just half noises that I have heard before. Hunger crying. Fansie has gone but I know he is looking for food. He will come and he will bring us something to eat.
“Fansie is coming, Sponsie. Sshh, sshh. Fansie is coming with food for you. Net nou, net nou.”
Her little head rests between my shoulders and I hear her hungercry again.
Miskiet has not shown his face again. As we walked I thought about what I did wrong. Long ago, when my brother dropped me at the cross-roads on the N1 with Pappa’s donkey karretjie, I did not want a boyfriend. It was food and a place to sleep that I needed, and to get away from Pappa’s hidings. If I could live quietly, in a hok, out of the way. Maybe find a domestic job or picking up rocks for the roads’ people.
I am sorry I made Miskiet angry. I am sorry he killed Jan. I am sorry I ran away with Kapok. That’s me, always scared, always running away from hidings. I am sorry my children are hungry. As I walk I cry for all the things I did wrong.
“Oh Here, Liewe Jesus, help my asseblief.”
I am a nothing person but my heart feels like it is as big as the whole world and it is breaking into small pieces. On and on we walk and, as I walk, each one talks to me. Fansie, Sponsie, Witpop and Meitjie.
“Mamma, who is my father?”
“I am hungry.”
“Can I also go to school?”
“I am cold.”
My children. I want to give these things to you but the veld is our only father. He will feed us and teach us and shelter us. Sometimes this father wants to give us hidings and make us sorry.
Oudtshoorn comes slowly in the first dark of the night. First shacks, then new government houses and then people. On a street corner I stop, not knowing where to go. A woman in smart clothes, maybe a sister from the clinic, sees me looking around and she tells me how to get to the place for identities.
“Down this hill and through the lokasie,” she says, pointing with her whole arm. “Turn at the bottom and go up, you must go up again, past the ostrich abattoir. You will know it’s the abattoir because it stinks.” She wrinkles her nose like she is smelling the old blood right then. “The small green building with a high fence is Home Affairs,” she says. “That is the place where you can sort out your ID books.”
Before she spoke I had watched her coming down the road. She looked like she was going home, a town lady, with a good job. Heavy shopping bags were cutting into her hands. Her head was down, like she was very tired and she was thinking about something important. Then, as she was about to cross the road, she looked up and saw me standing on the corner. I turned away so she wouldn’t think I had been watching her and I went and stood by the fence of a big building. I didn’t mean to look at her; it was only because I didn’t know where to go. She crossed the road and walked towards me and I felt my heart start running. Is she going to klap me? Can you klap a person for looking?
“Where do you come from, mommy?”
The working town lady is talking to me.
I say nothing. She waits for my answer, and, at last, my invisible voice comes and I whisper, “Anderkant die berge, suster.”
“Did you walk from the other side of the mountains?” Her voice is strong like she knows the answer already.
I nod.
“Why are you here? In this place, hey? This is not your place.”
“We are coming for identities.”
“You want an id book?”
I can hear she is used to asking dom people like me questions.
I nod again. That’s when she tells us where to go.
“It’s very easy,” she says.
When she sees I understand she scratches in her handbag for cents but finds a R5 and pushes the shiny coin into my hand.
“Buy your child some milk,” she says.
When I raise my eyes to say thank you she is looking at me. Then she shakes her head and turns away.
“Dankie, suster,” my voice comes out louder now and she stops again and turns to me.
“Good luck, mommy.”
Then she carries on down the road with her packets. Kapok and Witpop are standing in the shadows but they come now to hear what the woman said. We rest then I pick up Sponsie, tie her to my back and we walk down the road, the way the woman said we should go.
When we pass a huiswinkel Kapok goes inside and buys half a loaf of white bread with the R5. I give Sponsie a little piece and she lifts it to her mouth. Witpop eats and Kapok and I share the rest. Fansie will bring more food.
In the dark we find Home Affairs. It is easy to see the green walls because of the streetlights.
“We will come back very early tomorrow,” says Kapok, “before they open the doors. We will be first.”
We walk down the hill behind the Home Affairs building looking for a quiet place to sleep and then, we are very lucky, we find the river. Kapok and Witpop pick up stokkies for a fire and, at last, I can lie down with Sponsie and sleep.
37 FANSIE
Doors hang open but people don’t see me. I watch and wait. Jissie, these town people are easy prey, slow rabbits. Town people don’t notice change around them. They don’t hear me kick a stone or sniff or cough. Even tortoises are cleverer than these people, and this makes me laugh. A slow tortoise knows: keep still, say nothing and nobody will see you.
Rinkhals once sniffed out a puff adder. I would never have known it was there, curled by a rock next to the path, until it moved. When that snake saw me it made as if to be dead and it disappeared again. My foot would have come down right next to it and I wouldn’t have seen it. I poked it with a stick and it did nothing. Then, as I looked around for a rock to klap it, it flew up and went for the stick. I jumped back and screamed, laughing. Jissie that was a slim slang! After that I thought about that snake for a long time and then I knew. If you are still, not talking and not moving, people don’t see you. I tried it out in the veld and it worked. I can catch a dove with my hands. It is easy. I lie still, somewhere near water, and think I am a puff adder. A puff adder that has its whole life to catch one bird. Kurr, kurr, kurr. I listen to the doves talking. Be a puff adder. Bly stil, bly stil. Then in one move I grab it. In my hands I have its tiny brown body with scared black eyes. Birds are so small and soft that if I squeeze too tight I crush their ribs. Sometimes I eat the birds I catch, but most days I let them fly away because they teach me that, if I lie still, I can catch them.
In this place, this Oudtshoorn lokasie, it is easy to find food, much easier than catching birds. I watch an aunty making bread. Flour is mixed with water and a little bit of yeast. Then the lump of dough is put under a lappie to rise in the sun. I could take the dough for Mamma but I leave it to see how the aunty’s bread will come out and if it will taste better than bread cooked on a fire. Later she comes back and tests the dough with her finger. Nice and puffy, just right for baking. She carries it inside, and through her open door I see her pressing it into the baking pans. She opens the stove and pushes the bread pans in. It is a town stove, like the stove at the Seekoegat school. This stove is against the wall and is not a wood stove like the stoves in some farmhouses. Mamma makes our bread on the coals, little roosterkoekies that she turns quickly to stop them burning. They taste best very hot and dipped in coffee. The aunty will have to cut her bread with a knife, into slices, like in a shop. Our knife won’t cut it properly so I think we will break it into pi
eces. With the bread in the stove, the aunty goes next door to talk to her friend, a dik ou tannie. They sit outside drinking coffee and the aunty’s friend tightens the curlers in the aunty’s hair.
After a while, she comes back and takes the bread out and turns it upside down on the table to take it out the pans. My jackal nose sniffs the air and my jackal stomach starts biting me to tell me it is very hungry. I move around the houses, away from the bread, and then back, through the backyard shacks, behind the aunty’s house again. The radio is on, playing Gospel.
“Jesus, Liewe Jesus, oooohh, Here …”
“Grieta, come listen,” the aunty shouts from the door. Her friend is now washing clothes in a bak on top of a black rubbish bin.
“Nee man, come this side,” Grieta shouts back. “Bring the radio so Oupa can listen too.”
An old, old oupa is sitting outside the door, on a red crate with a stick next to him. It looks like he is blind. I must be careful of him. My cousin Kobus’s oupa is blind and he sees me before anyone else. Blind people are the only ones who are awake in a town.
“Blerrie Grieta, now I must unplug the radio,” the aunty says to herself. She walks back to Grieta’s place with the radio and its cable and they go inside to plug it in. I slip into her kitchen. There is nobody in the house. It is one big room with curtains blocking off the sleeping place. This is a rich aunty. She has lots of things pushed into her house, even a tv.
The bread is hot so I wrap it in the lappie she left on the table. There are two loaves but I leave one for the aunty because I don’t want her children to be hungry like me.
Where is she? I look carefully out the door and I can’t see her but I hear her talking to the dik aunty, Grieta, about what music must be on the radio. I slide out the door and walk quickly around the back of her house and between the shacks, and then I run.
Ek het brood, groot, mooi, warm brood. Spit is running out my mouth, my nose is running and my stomach is crying and shouting, “Gee my brood, gee my brood.”
I don’t want to eat it yet. I want to bite and smell it and hug its hot body. But I know people will see I am hungry and they will know this is stolen bread. So I run downhill with the bread wrapped in its lappie. I run all the way to the reeds because I know there is a river. That is where my family will be. They will be very hungry and very happy to eat this beautiful bread.
38 MISKIET
The bakkie stops by a fruit tent where Somalis are selling naartjies, so I jump off. I can see the place where I will wait. The fruit tent is at the entrance to a cemetery where rows of graves cover a hillside. I walk through a fancy gateway that has no gates and no fence on either side. That is lucky. Nobody cares who comes and goes; this is a good place to wait.
Small heaps of hard red dirt show where bodies are buried. Only some have headstones and everywhere there is broken glass from smashed jam-jar vases. All these dead people buried in this dry place with rubbish on top of them.
You know something, Klein Muisie? You are not going to have one of these glass-sprinkled red heaps. When I am finished with you I am going to throw you away, like a piece of rubbish.
The Somalis sell me a bag of naartjies for R5. I am very hungry now and trek up the hill between the graves, looking for somewhere to sit where I can eat. Nobody looks my way. Nobody cares about a man in a blue overall with a packet of naartjies and his head down. From the top of the cemetery I can watch the road. Leaning against a big headstone I sit down to wait. From this spot I will see them coming and which way they will go. It is late now, and the way they are walking, they will come with the dark, but I will see them, little people lit by streetlights.
This is a good place to sit.
To pass the time I take out my new knife, Jan’s knife, and scrape the blade on the headstone until it is sharper than ever. My old knife, the one they stole, had cut the throats of many sheep, it had slaughtered plenty of pigs, it had shut up one of Ting-a-Ling’s yapping dogs and it had killed Jan.
This new knife has done nothing yet, but now it will stop you, Klein Muisie, for being disrespectful.
When I think how you made me suffer, I burn inside. Then a picture of me kicking you comes into my mind and it feels like water being poured on a fire. I want to hear you scream. You can beg me to stop but, this time, I am going to sort you out. First you are going to get a few klaps and then you are going to beg for your life. Like I should have made you do all those years ago.
I plunge the tip of my new knife tip into a naartjie and look at it. It is a good knife, a killing knife.
I want you, even in your laprok and frayed doek, but you think you are too good for me. You have no manners. You go to Jan instead. I know what the two of you are doing. I hear your giggling and whispering on the kitchen floor. If I make a sound, or turn in my bed, you go quiet.
One time, when we are alone, I touch your back with my flat hand, a soft touch, to show you I care, that I also want to whisper in your ear. You go stiff, like wood, and your mouth curls down.
You people live in my house, but you have no respect. It should be Jan listening to the fast breathing on the other side of the thin curtain during the night.
Now I want this thing to be over. Even though I am sitting quietly, my face and body are wet and drops of sweat are falling into the dirt. I put my hand on my heart to slow it down.
I want you to be dead, Muis. Today you will beg me for mercy and I will laugh at you. It will be over and then, after all these years, I can be free.
The best way to gut a sheep, after its throat has been cut, is to hold the knife in your fist and cut backwards. The knife must be sharp. When you slaughter a pig it’s important to plunge the knife straight into its heart so it dies immediately. A pig screams when it dies and the person who is doing the slaughtering must block his ears to the terror. I don’t mind killing a pig – it can scream its head off and I plunge the knife straight in. To end a person’s life slowly, the knife must go into the stomach. That way you can have a conversation and explain things as the person bleeds to death. But tonight I am not in the mood for talking; tonight it will be a cut throat with spraying blood, over and done. She will know why. She doesn’t need any talking.
Your time has come, Muis, and tonight I will be merciful and let you die quickly. All I want is for you to understand that you will die and that I will take the child that is mine.
As the day becomes night, I see her. The shape I have been waiting for all these years. Head down, child tied to her back.
What do you want in Oudtshoorn, Klein Muisie?
It was a wasted walk, Klein Muisie.
All this way for nothing.
Kapok and the girl have caught up and are a few steps behind her. Where is the boy? He is still not with them. They want to make camp now; they’ll need water. For a long time they stand on a street corner not knowing where to go. A woman gives them directions and they move off down the hill, towards the river. It is time to go. I stand up, wipe my knife with my hankie, snap it shut and slip it into place.
It is dark when I find them at the river. The girl has been picking up stokkies and papers and she gets a fire going. They have nothing to eat and the boy should have come back with food by now. I want him to come so that I can explain things to him. He will understand because he is my son. They are waiting for him too. The fire dies down and the night goes quiet. Lights in the windows of houses go out and I stand up and move closer.
When I walk into their camp, they look up at me, woken from a hungry sleep.
“Hullo, Klein Muisie.”
She staggers to her feet. The dog is barking but they have tied him to an old tyre and he can do nothing. Kapok feels around in the dark for his knobkerrie. Ah, no chance of that again. It is there, resting on a rock by the dying coals, and I pick it up and throw it into the reeds. It’s easy this time. I walk around the fire, stepping over the sleeping baby.
“Build up the fire, girl,” I say.
She heaps stokkies and papers i
n the circle of stones and puts a match to it. The flame eats the wood and a circle of light shines on their scared faces. Even the baby is sitting up now, watching me.
I laugh. “You are mine, Klein Muisie. I decide what happens. You should have listened.”
In the end it is so easy. After all her years of running and hiding I can touch her. In the beginning it would have been gentle, but now I grab her shirt and pull her to her feet.
My blade is at her throat. Little drops of blood appear like red beads on a necklace.
“Hold still and come with me,” I whisper in her ear.
I drag her, but even though she is so thin, she makes her knees fold and her body goes pap. Heavy.
“Walk properly.” I push my knee hard into her back and she sucks in air but says nothing.
It is then the boy comes, out of the dark, with bread in his hands.
“Good boy,” I say, “you can make us food.”
He looks at me with blank black eyes, no fear on his face.
“You are my son,” I tell him, pressing the knife to his mother’s throat a little harder. “She took you away from me. Hey Muis? ” Her black eyes look at me and I can feel her shaking.
“Ja Muis? Hey? Tell the boy how you let me become a father and why you have run away from me all this time.”
Ah, blood. A drop of blood runs out her nose and into her mouth. There is going to be more of that now.
We stand still, watching each other. My knife is at her throat, the boy holds the food. Kapok stays sitting on the ground, useless without his stick.
Then, in the dim light, there is a movement on the edge of the circle of light and I see it is the girl. In her hands she has a gun.
“Nee, girlie,” I say.
Her eyes are big and wild but I am not afraid of her.
“Give me the gun.”
39 FANSIE
This morning I saw some boys take an oompie’s money out of his pockets, just like that. Jissie, he wasn’t passed out, but he was very drunk and he tried to fight with them but they just went through his pockets quickly, took his money and left him sitting on his bum in the street, vloeking. They just laughed at him.
My Children Have Faces Page 11