Johannus Stephanus Muishond.
Charmaine Eloise Muishond.
Elisma Magrieta Muishond.
Beautiful, careful names given to each child by their mother. It makes me a little tearful thinking about it. They aren’t married so I give them their mother’s surname. Fathers seldom stay, mothers never leave.
“This one is for your son, this is for your big girl and this one is for your baby.”
“Dankie, Meneer.”
I fold them and push them into a brown envelope.
This might give them an extra few months of life. I won’t bother with birth certificates for the adults. Identity books are enough.
“Pas hulle op, dis amptelike dokumente,” I say with a stern face.
For the first time the woman’s eyes meet mine and she smiles. The desperation is gone and in its place is joy. She nods.
“Your IDS will be ready in four months. You must come back. September, nè? Do you understand when September is?”
“It is when the veld flowers bloom, that is when we will come back,” she says.
“Yes, when the flowers are in bloom, then you come back, you hear me?”
She wraps the envelope in a doek and pushes it to the bottom of the plastic bag carrying her few things. I can only imagine what those papers will look like by the time these kids reach eighteen.
Miss Oliphant chuckles and whispers, “Mr Hendriks, at least they are in the system.”
The family walks out into the morning sunshine and stands for a few minutes under the tree. The mother and father share a rolled cigarette.
Inside, the queue is long and I summon a chubby pink woman who demands to know when her passport will be ready as she is leaving for her holiday in Europe in a week.
I walk to the filing cabinet to look for it and say a prayer of thanks when I find it. This is one of those rare days when I am actually making people happy.
I look out the window to see the family again, but they are gone.
42 MUIS
The paper is stiff and smells like Jik. Each letter of each name is black on yellow paper.
The letters mean names but I can’t understand them. “J”, like Jan, is Fansie’s name, Johannus Stephanus, the name of his father and the name of my father together. I follow the line with my finger. These papers are my children’s lives. They have faces because the government has written down their names on these papers and made them into people.
“Yes, the clinic can see your baby because she has a birth certificate.”
“Yes, the girl can come to school, thank you for the birth certificate.”
“Yes, you can have All Pay because your child exists.”
“Keep these papers safe, mommy,” the big fat man at Home Affairs says. I want to say, “These are my children’s lives, I will carry them next to my heart.”
He folds them and puts them in a brown envelope. When we are outside, I take the brown envelope in my packet and tie it with string and tuck it inside my shirt.
We don’t go back to the river. After Home Affairs we walk to town because we have the money from Miskiet’s pockets and Kapok says we need supplies. We look for a shop where we can buy a hamper but there are so many shops and so many cars that we don’t know where to go. It is hard, with people bumping into us and cars hooting. Witpop is walking like she is in a dream and I shout at Fansie to hold her hand or she will get lost or knocked over. When we can’t find the right shop Kapok asks a man and he tells us to go to the Chinese.
“They’ve got a hamper shop,” the man says. “Rows and rows of hampers.”
Ja, that’s what we want.
“Where?”
“One block down, this side,” he shows us with his hands and we understand.
When we walk on again, Kapok whispers to me, “He also can’t read, like us.”
I nod. The man doesn’t say, “Left, then right and left again,” because then we will never find our way.
We find the shop and choose a hamper for R200 with flour, sugar and coffee. Sponsie is so excited because when we open it there is a bottle of green cooldrink too. It is a good hamper. There are also four tins of fish, curry powder, fish oil, lemon creams and a packet of candles. The woman at the till is Chinese. I have never seen a Chinese before and, while we are looking through the hampers, I peep at her face. It is interesting to see a white that is so different. She doesn’t look like a Boer. When we pay she takes our money without smiling and gives us change, then sits down on her chair again and stares out the window like before. Her mind is far away, I think, visiting a place where I will never go.
We walk slowly up the main street of Oudtshoorn. People rush past us, shouting to their friends on the other side of the street. Fruit sellers sit on the pavement holding up packets of bananas.
“Come my lady, nice bananas my lady, R5, R5.”
Clothes hang in the windows of shops, shoes, chairs, bicycles: all these things to buy with money. Kapok is sniffing the air like a dog.
“What’s it?”
I sniff too and then it hits me and my stomach squeezes. It is a smell like no other and my mouth begins to water. The pavement where we are standing, sniffing, is busy. Men are loading boxes on to a truck and we need to move out the way.
“It’s inside,” one of them shouts at Kapok.
“Go and buy that skinny chick some food so she can stop drooling.” They all laugh and I stare at them. Fat men with greasy shirts and rolls of stomach hanging over their pants.
Before I can say anything Kapok goes inside. Behind a glass counter are pieces of fried fish, chicken and chips and shining red Russians.
The lady looks at him with a packet in her hands, ready to fill.
“Two Russians and a big chips,” he says, “and a two-litre Coke.”
Behind me Fansie starts laughing when he realises what his pappie is doing and Sponsie claps her hands. Witpop looks at me, her eyes still empty.
The lady smiles at the children as she heaps our food on a sheet of white paper.
“Salt and vinegar?”
She speaks too fast for Kapok to understand, so he just nods. With one hand she shakes salt and with the other she splatters brown vinegar over everything, then she folds the paper over and rolls the hot food into a parcel and hands it to Kapok. He gives her one of Miskiet’s notes and she scratches in her money box for change.
“Dankie, Mevrou,” he says. We walk outside, all of us not believing what has happened. The corner outside the shop is too busy for us to eat there, so we cross the road, walking on for a while to a low wall, near some men who are smoking.
Witpop hasn’t talked since she shot Miskiet and now I take her by the shoulders and say, “Wake up, Witpop, we are going to have Russians and chips, wake up.” She nods but her eyes are dead and I feel a sadness in my heart.
“You must eat because we have a long walk to get back over the mountains.”
Kapok breaks the sausages in half and takes tiny pieces of his own and gives it to Sponsie and Rinkhals. Then he divides the chips into four heaps and each of us eat, enjoying the sharp taste of the vinegar and the grease of the sausage. Sponsie eats a handful of chips and her sausage then she rests her little head on my chest, closes her eyes and sleeps.
“That’s the sleep of a full stomach,” says Kapok, his lips shining from the food.
Kapok wipes his hands on his pants then digs into his shirt pocket for his little orange bag of tobacco. He rolls a skuif from a piece of the chip paper and lights it. After he has drawn in the smoke he hands it to me and he walks over to the men for a chat. They are guarding the whites’ cars, they say. The people give them a R2 when they come back from shopping.
“Who are you guarding it from?”
“Mafelletjies.” Street children.
Kapok nods. Mafelletjies would steal from a car. I think about a time once in Prince Albert when they stole our donkeys in the middle of the night. When the police came to call us they were running in the main
street and we had to go fetch them. It took us a long time to tame the animals after that and Pantoffel had a scar on her face where she had been hit with a brick. It would have been worth it to pay someone a R2 to guard them.
Lucky for them there are no mafelletjies today and the men don’t have to chase anyone.
“This is a lazy way to make money, smoking and talking and then wanting a R2 just for being here,” Kapok tells the oompie. “Jirre, you must work on Baas Jannie’s farm. There a man has to shear four sheep for a R2.”
“It’s good money here,” the oompie says to Kapok. “But hey, this is my place. You can’t come guard here or else it is trouble for you.” We all laugh when he says that, we are in a good mood now, with full stomachs.
“Nee, oompie,” Kapok says, “we don’t want to guard cars. We are going back over the mountain to our place in the Great Karoo.”
“Man, that’s far,” the oompie says.
We will walk over the mountains because we don’t have the donkey cart.
“The road we are taking now is not easy with donkeys,” Kapok says to the man. “This road is called the Swartberg Pass.”
The oompie knows about the Swartberg Pass. “That’s a long way to walk,” he says.
“Yes, they say at Die Top you can see all the way to Fraserburg. That’s where my wife was born.”
I didn’t know you could see all the way to Fraserburg and I wonder if I would be able to see my mother’s house on the farm.
We fall asleep in the sun and, when I open my eyes, Kapok and Fansie are gone. Witpop’s head is resting on my shoulder and she is snoring softly. I don’t move but watch the oompie parking cars and collecting his R2S.
When he sees I am awake he says Kapok will come back soon.
“Hy het net vir hom ’n ietsie gaan koop.” He laughs. Kapok is chasing a dop.
I feel the packet inside my shirt. My children’s identities are safe and they are sleeping because they have eaten. So I rest, with Sponsie on my chest and Witpop at my side.
43 FANSIE
Pappie wants a dop. I know it straight away when I look at his face. That hardegat secret thing is in his eyes, like when he has made up his mind and there is no stopping him.
Mamma is sleeping sitting up straight, with Sponsie on her lap and Witpop leaning against her. I have been sitting warm in the sun, half watching the oompie park cars and half dreaming about taking a dronkie’s money. Witpop has Rinkhals tied to her ankle with a string.
“Fansie, I am going to take a look around,” Pappie says. “You stay here.”
When he gets up, so do I.
“Stay here.”
I don’t say anything but walk after him and he stops and looks at me and makes like he will klap me, but I laugh. When he is looking for a dop he doesn’t fight with me. He shrugs and walks on. The oompie has told him where the bottle store is and now shouts after him, “Hey ou pel, bring vir my ook ’n doppie, man!”
Pappie doesn’t look back. He heads down the road the way the oompie showed him, not caring if I am coming or staying. He is like this when he is chasing a dop. A truck could run us all over and he will just carry on walking to find his wyntjie.
The bottle store is next to a big warehouse that has bakkies loaded with tin cans and sacks of frozen chicken coming and going all the time. It is nice to watch the men throw the packs of cans to each other and stack them. They load bakkies quickly and I see a Ramadaan from the lokasie shop in Prince Albert pointing and arguing with the guys and making them change everything on the back. When he leaves, his bakkie is so loaded it looks like it is scraping on the ground.
Pappie takes a pink note from the money we took off the dead oom and holds it between his thumb and a finger so the people in the bottle store will know he means business and he isn’t in there to steal. Sometimes, when we are in bottle stores without money, for Pappie to enjoy the smell, the security guard will follow us and then take Pappie by the elbows and push him out. At times like that Pappie goes nearly mad from the smell of the dop. Tears chase each other down his cheeks, but there is nothing he can do. The feeling passes after a while but his body cries; it is so thirsty for a wyntjie.
Today he has money and he takes his time, walking up and down looking at the bottles. I stay at the front watching him.
At last he finds what he wants, a big plastic bottle of wine that looks like pee.
He puts it on the till and a white woman takes the R50 and gives him a slip. No change. For a moment Pappie waits then she says, “Dis dit!” He picks up the wine and comes outside.
“Whew, that’s a big one, Pappie.” He looks pleased and I know he can’t wait to have a slukkie.
“Go fetch Mamma and your sisters and I will wait here.”
“Are you going to get drunk here?”
It is a dangerous place to dop, the lady in the bottle store is watching us and a police car will be here soon if we open the bottle.
“There is a parkie a little way up this road. I’ll go dop in a corner there. You know where it is?”
“Come back with me, Pappie.”
“Nee, that oompie will want my wine.”
“Give me a slukkie?”
“Not here, come walk up the road.”
When we are a little way up the road near the park Pappie loosens the white cap and hands me the bottle. It is heavy but I hold it like a man and take a long sluk.
“Hey, hey, don’t drink it all.” He grabs the bottle back and a little splashes on the pavement. The wine burns in my throat, but I smile a big smile and Pappie laughs. It makes me want to vomit and I hold on to a wooden fence, worrying that the Russian and chips are going to come out when I really want them to stay in.
Behind the fence, dogs are barking. Pappie laughs again and I shake my head and then walk slowly up the road thinking that wine really does make a person feel dof.
The oompie is collecting money from a white woman who can’t find a R2. He is standing waiting, watching her while she digs in her bag. I think he is hoping she will drop paper money and then he will slide his foot over it while she carries on looking for a coin.
Mamma is awake and when she sees me she stands up. Witpop is awake too and we pick up our bags and slip away without saying goodbye to the old man.
I take them to the park where Pappie is waiting and Witpop lies down again with Sponsie and Rinkhals in the plants and they go back to sleep.
Pappie and Mamma start drinking and I watch them. First it is that thirsty drinking when they gulp the wine, spilling it and snatching it from each other. After a while Mamma’s eyes stare at the ground and her bottom lip hangs loose. She tries to stand up but just lands up sitting down again. Pappie curls up next to Witpop and Sponsie with the bottle in his arms and falls asleep. Slowly Mamma lies down too and her eyes close. The night is coming and it is cool. I rub my arms to keep warm. We have no fire because we don’t want the whites to see us sleeping in their parkie, using their plants for a soft bed. I watch them for a long time. Sponsie’s baby face is so peaceful, her tiny arms are up above her head. The sore at the corner of Witpop’s mouth is crusty and yellow. She sucks her thumb and I watch her mouth move in her sleep. Pappie is snoring, his legs wide open, a dronkie sleeping who doesn’t care what can happen to him, like mafelletjies putting their hands in his pockets and stealing all his money. Like me. Mamma’s hands are under her cheek and her face is still. Her worn-out shoes are lying in the bushes nearby. Rinkhals looks at me then puts his head down and sleeps.
Pappie wants to walk over the mountains tomorrow. Too many people have seen us, he says. We need to slip away and disappear on the plains. I think about the vlaktes. The koppies shining in the heat. The sound of a windmill pumping out hidden water from the ground. A little duikertjie watching me from its rocky ridge.
I am hungry again and I stand up and walk to the bottom of the road and look up at the Swartberg that we have to cross. Tonight the mountains are far away and very high.
I carry on
walking, thinking I will go back to that lokasie where I stole the bread yesterday.
When I get to the Kentucky in the main street there are boys, like me, sitting against the wall. One of them is working the cars driving up to fetch food. He is trying to score a piece of chicken but most people are chasing him and giving him nothing.
A little one with cheeky eyes sees me and shouts, “Hey, wie’s jy?”
“Nee, wie’s jy?” I answer. I know boys like this. They will have knives. But so do I. Both the oom’s knives are in my pockets and I push my hand in and let my fingers close around one.
The boy laughs. “Boetie! Ek is Boetie.”
“Wie se boetie?”
“Vetkoek se boetie and he is in jail for murder.” He makes his eyes wide when he says this but I can see he is joking and I laugh.
“Ek is Fansie.” And I also know about murder.
“I have seen you before,” says Boetie, “in Prince Albert.”
“You know Prince Albert?” I am surprised.
“My father once worked for Meneer Danie in the Weltevrede.”
I know of Meneer Danie.
“Shearing?”
“No, fences and watermelons.”
“My pappie did shearing for Meneer Clive. Goats.”
“Ja, I know Meneer Clive.”
We are friends now. The other boys are bigger but he is their leader. They are called Klonkie, Kokkerot and Joburg.
“Come sit with us,” says Boetie. I can’t help it but I feel a big smile coming on my face.
That night we don’t sleep. We talk and laugh and I share a skuif with them. When the Kentucky closes, one of the women gives us each a piece of chicken and some burnt chips and we walk off to an empty piece of ground where the other boys sleep and Boetie and I talk.
When the sun rises we head towards the lokasie to look for more food. It is only much later that I remember Pappie and Mamma and my sisters. I wonder if they have started walking. I look at the black mountains but then Boetie calls. The boys have found a dronkie and he has money.
My Children Have Faces Page 13