A worried look now replaced the blank look on Biasse’s face. It seemed O’D’s interrogation was getting him deeper and deeper into trouble.
“Cows? I dunno what …”
Thunderstruck by this new denial, especially of an animal that ambled all over the African continent and one that everyone living in Africa knew, O’D opened his mouth. He looked like a volcano about to explode, especially when he caught sight of my grinning face.
Smothering my laughter, I came to the rescue. “Mombes, Biasse,” I explained. “Millick from mombes. The Master wants to know if we have enough millick for the weekend.”
A smile of relief lit up Biasse’s wrinkled face as understanding dawned. “Aaah … millick from mombes! Yes, Madam. We have plenty millick.”
I left the farm at the end of January for Zimbabwe and the plane at Harare Airport that would take me to South Africa. As we drove away from the house in the pickup, I glanced out of the back window and caught a glimpse of Biasse standing forlornly on the verandah. He made a lonely little figure in spotless white.
Yes, I was going to miss him ... and the easy life I had lived on the Tabex farm.
CHAPTER SIX
A GHASTLY AND A GHOSTLY EXPERIENCE
February 1995
There was no friendly welcome to South Africa this time when I arrived at Jan Smuts Airport. I was last off the plane and last in the queue and when I finally stood in front of the counter where a fair young Immigration Officer was sitting, I made a mistake. Fumbling in my bag, I inadvertently pulled out my South African Identity Document as well as my British passport and handed them both over to him. I could tell I had done something wrong by the theatrical start he gave when he saw the little green South African book.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, looking at me with a stern, cold Afrikaner eye.
It was a long story and I wondered how to cut it short. Thinking that O’D and I would be living in South Africa in 1992, I’d gone about organising the right papers for myself to live and work there. I had filled in all the forms I’d been told to fill in and then I’d been told to pay a visit to the Mossel Bay police. At the Police Station, some constables had divested me of my British Driving Licence and had told me that a South African one would be issued to me instead, inside the new little green book I’d been given by the Home Office. Then, O’D had gone to work and live in Mozambique. Caught in a bureaucratic tangle that would have been impossible to untangle from Mozambique and not wanting to be stuck without a driving licence, I’d left it all to be dealt with later. And now, it seemed that later had arrived.
“It was issued to me by the Home Office,” I began, “when I thought I was going to live in South Africa. But then I went to live in Mozambique …”
Abruptly, the young man swivelled around in his chair and turned his back on me, cutting me short. He’d heard enough. Now facing his computer, he tapped something out on his keyboard. He waited for a while to see what would appear on the screen and then turned back to me, grim-faced.
“You are not allowed to have South African documents if you have a British passport!” he told me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that.” This was true. Nobody at the Home Office in George had said anything to me about passports at all when I had submitted my application to them for a Residence Permit.
“You have committed an offence,” he went on, “an offence against the South African government!”
His words made me blanch. There were worse crimes, I knew, than owning a South African I.D. as well as a British passport but he was, I could see, gearing himself up into turning a molehill into a great big bureaucratic mountain. If this went on for much longer I was going to miss my plane to George! I only had half an hour in which to get through Immigration, collect my suitcase from the baggage room and check in at the Domestic Terminal. I began to panic.
“I’m going to miss my next plane!” I cried, “Look, if I’m not allowed to have a South African Identity Document, why don’t you just take it. Just take it … and give me your name … and I’ll contact the Home Office and explain everything to them.”
A glitter came into his eyes and he glared at me. There was no name tag on his uniform and it seemed I had made another blunder by asking him to tell me who he was.
“Now you’ve done it!” he said threateningly. Snatching up my two offending documents, he jumped off his stool behind the counter and rushed across the floor of the vast and empty Arrivals Hall towards a room. He disappeared into the room and I heard voices, raised and incredulous.
When he reappeared, he had a companion with him. This was an older, brown haired man with a face as hard as flint. They both looked furious as they strode towards me, heels hammering ominously on the floor.
The brown haired man waved my little green book in front of my face.
“What makes you think you have a right to South African citizenship?” he barked.
“Well,” I said, taken aback by his aggressive manner, “I was born here, and so were my …” but before I could go on to say “and so were my parents and grandparents and great grandparents and so on,” he interrupted me with a sneer, repeating my words and mangling them with his guttural Afrikaans accent.
“Because you were BORN here!” His voice rose up higher with incredulity. “Because you were BORN here! I don’t think Dr. Buthelezi, the Minister of Home Affairs, will think you have a right to South African citizenship just because you were BORN here!”
He opened my passport, angrily scribbled something on one of the pages with a pen and then thrust it and the little green book out towards me. “You have committed a very serious crime and because you have been ECKSTREEMELY aggressive … ECKSTREEMELY … you are not allowed, you are FORBIDDEN, to leave this country until you have reported to the Home Office!”
Aghast by this unexpected turn of events, I stared at him for a second, taking in his dead reptilian eyes and his close-cropped hair on his bullet shaped head and feeling very much as if I was in the grip of a Nazi Gestapo rightwing fascist. I wondered what he would do if I said something to him in his own language. That would shake him! I racked my brains for some appropriately rude remark in Afrikaans - I was already in so much trouble that a little more really wouldn’t matter - but the only Afrikaans word my dim memory could dredge up was “totsiens!” (goodbye!) and so, without saying anything at all, I grabbed my passport and my South African Identity Document from him and ran out of Arrivals, down the corridor and into the baggage hall. I had ten minutes to catch my flight.
On the plane to George, I sat next to a plump, middle-aged Afrikaans woman with blonde hair piled up on top of her head. We didn’t talk until I surprised her, as well as myself, by suddenly bursting into tears.
“Ag, what is this now?” the woman asked, looking up from her ‘Rooi Rose’ magazine and turning to me with concern all over her motherly face. “Why are you crying? What is the matter?”
I pulled a long strip of Mozambican loo paper out of my bag and sobbed into it. “I’m crying because those Immigration Officers have just told me I’ve no right to be South African … even though I was born in Port Elizabeth … and my parents were born here … and my grandparents and …”
The woman looked indignant. “They had no right to tell you that, no right at all!” she cried. “Born here, your parents, grandparents … you should report them to the newspapers! Imagine telling someone who was BORN here that they have no right to be South African! I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life!”
Although I had recovered a little from my encounter with Afrikaner bureaucracy, I was still smarting when the plane landed at George. On the drive to Kleinbrak, I gave Jenny and Paul a detailed description of the ill treatment I had endured at Jan Smuts Airport.
“I’ve told you before never to volunteer any information to those turkeys,” Paul drawled. “Only tell them things if they pull your nails out.”
“I didn’t volunteer anything,” I s
aid gloomily. “The S.A. I.D. somehow got stuck in the middle of my Brit passport in my handbag.”
Jenny and Paul also had some news for me - and rather unsettling news it was. Apparently, Paul’s partner in the boat works had become addicted to gambling and had frittered all their profits away by playing roulette and black jack in Casinos all along the coast. The boat works had gone bankrupt and Paul and Jenny would be moving to Cape Town to look for work. My mother and father would be staying on at Kleinbrak and if someone could be found to rent the house, my parents would live in one of the cottages in the back garden.
It soon became apparent that the timing of my visit had been quite fortuitous for my parents.
My father had looked well when I had arrived, but a few weeks later there was a sudden deterioration in his health.
On the morning he drove my mother and me to the Home Office in George to sort out my passport problems, he seemed fine, although very quiet. He sat in the car outside the small building and waited while Mom and I went inside and explained everything to the two plump and middle-aged Afrikaans women manning the counter.
We didn’t keep him waiting for long. Soothed by my mother’s South African accent and reassured by her presence that it had all been a bureaucratic muddle on my part and not a terrible crime, they issued me with a temporary document allowing me to leave South Africa.
Back at the car, my father’s complexion had turned grey with tiredness and so we all crossed the road and sat at a café with refreshing cups of tea.
“You drive home,” my father told me and pushed his car keys across the café table towards me.
A few days later, he took to his bed, telling us that he felt too weak to move around or to drive the car. From that day on, he lay in bed reading, listening to the radio, watching television or sleeping. He spent a lot of time sleeping.
As he wasn’t able to drive anymore, he depended on Jenny and Paul or me to take him to the hospital for his visits to the doctor and for the prescriptions he needed.
This dependence worried me. How were my parents going to manage when Jenny and Paul moved to Cape Town and I returned to Mozambique? How would they shop for food, go to the bank for money or visit the doctor? There was no public transport from Kleinbrak to Mossel Bay and my mother, unfortunately, had never learnt to drive.
I would not, I knew, be able to leave them alone in the house in Kleinbrak when Jenny and Paul left.
My quandary concerning my parents was solved temporarily when O’D telephoned on a crackly line from Mozambique. He told me that conditions at the sawmill were still rough and that it would be better for everyone if I stayed on in Mossel Bay and out of their way.
“Okay,” I said. “And how is David getting on there with you?”
Arlene and Horst’s clothing company had run into trouble in Zimbabwe and had had to close down. While David was trying to work out his next move, he had come down to the Nhamacoa to help O’D.
“Everything broke down,” O’D told me, “almost as soon as David arrived.”
“Uh oh,” I replied. My brother had deep psychological hang-ups about the African bush and it didn’t take much to bring these to the surface. His bad bush experiences had started early in his life on my grandfather’s farm in Namibia. When he’d still been a little baby, a mad Herero woman had snatched him out of his pram, thinking that he was her own dead baby. Fortunately, he’d been rescued pretty quickly but then, a few years later, he had given himself another fright by wandering off from the rest of us during a walk and getting lost in my grandfather’s mealie field. Even more traumatic had been the time an Ovambo, with teeth filed into points, had playfully picked him up like a chicken by his neck and told him that he ate little white boys like my brother. Was it any wonder that being trapped in the Nhamacoa had sent David fleeing back to the safety of the city?
“So, what happened?” I asked O’D.
“Well, first of all,” he replied, “Chuck blew up the Gaz engine when he was driving it because he didn’t notice an oil leak. I had to find a replacement engine. Then, while Chuck was repairing the Gaz, the tractor developed a fault and stopped working and then the Land Rover decided to break down as well. So, without any transport at all, we were all imprisoned in the forest for twelve days.”
“How did David take this?”
“As soon we got a vehicle working, he hot-footed it back to Harare.”
It was just as well that I stayed on in Mossel Bay because in April, the end came for my father.
One early morning, Dad was overcome with a terrible coughing fit and then began to vomit.
“We’ve got to get him to the hospital right away,” my mother told me. “Bring the car to the front door and help me to put him into it.”
“No, Mom,” I said, remembering all those long hours my father had had to sit in a queue, waiting to be attended to by a doctor. “I’m going to phone for an ambulance and that way he’ll get to see a doctor immediately.”
The ambulance arrived within minutes. The driver got out and helped my father to walk slowly over to the vehicle and to get into it and to lie down on a stretcher. Then the driver shut the door and drove off, very fast, with the siren screaming. In our car, my mother and I followed, more slowly.
By the time we arrived at the hospital, my father was already in a small room with a young Afrikaans doctor and a nurse. They were bustling around him urgently and at one stage, when the doctor left the room to get something and my father began to vomit again, the nurse thrust a bowl into my hands and also ran out of the room. I wondered what they could possibly be doing, but I helped my father as best as I could.
When they returned, the doctor told us he was going to keep Dad in the hospital and that it would be best if we came back the following day.
On Saturday afternoon, we drove over to the hospital again to visit my father. We found him in a ward with several other people and were relieved to see how much better he was looking. Pink in the face and complaining that his hair looked a mess, he joked that the nurses were refusing to comb it.
While we were sitting with him, two coloured men came into the ward and asked us if they could say a prayer for my father. They told us that they came every weekend to the hospital to pray for the patients at their bedside and as we thought it was a kind thing for them to do, my mother and I agreed. Even my father, who always said he was an atheist, seemed grateful that someone was praying to God for him.
When visiting hours ended, we said goodbye to my father. We kissed him on one of his healthy looking pink cheeks and told him we would come and see him the next day.
My mother and I were just on the point of locking the front door and driving off to the hospital on Sunday, after lunch, when the phone rang.
My mother answered it. It was someone from the hospital. They didn’t talk for long and when my mother slowly put the phone down, there was a stunned expression on her pale face.
“Your father’s … just died,” she told me.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, and put my arms around her and held her close.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, over and over again. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
At the little hospital, a nurse showed us into what appeared to be a storeroom. The room was filled with a jumble of medical equipment and in the middle of all of this we saw a trolley. The trolley was covered with a drab green sheet and underneath this sheet lay the shape of a body.
“I’ll leave you alone with him now,” the nurse told us.
She left the room and my mother and I stared at the trolley. Finally, my mother spoke. “I still can’t believe he’s dead,” she said. “I want to see for myself.” She walked over to the trolley and slowly pulled the sheet off my father’s face and chest.
Completely unprepared for what she had revealed, we both started back with shock.
My father’s skin was the colour of grey blue metal and it made me think of the horror movies I had seen where mouldering dead people with gree
ny blue skin had climbed out of their graves and frightened living people half to death.
We were still standing and gazing numbly at this terrible looking corpse, which had once been my father, when the nurse came back into the room. “Lack of oxygen,” she explained, noticing the expression on our faces. She glanced down at my father and noticed something else, something we had completely overlooked. “Oh,” she said, “you’ll want these, won’t you,” and grasping hold of his limp greeny blue right hand, she removed his signet ring from his finger and his watch from his wrist and gave them to my mother.
The nurse briskly pulled the sheet back over my father’s face again and asked us when we were going to remove his body from the hospital. They didn’t have a morgue, you know.
Shaken by the suddenness of his death and the sight of him, this new development overwhelmed me. I hadn’t even had time to get to grips with everything that had happened and now I was expected to take my father’s body away! “But … what are we going to do with him?” I asked, appalled. I looked at my mother for some ideas. She was at a loss as well. “I don’t know what to do! I’ve never dealt with a death before!”
“Speak to the hospital receptionist,” the nurse told us, “and she’ll give you the Undertaker’s phone number. Arrange with him to come and collect the body. As soon as possible.”
Back at the house in Kleinbrak, I picked up the phone and dialled the Undertaker’s number. His line was busy and so I had to try over and over again. I began to panic. What if I couldn’t get hold of him today? What if he’d gone away for the weekend? Or away on holiday! What was I going to do with my father’s body … his decomposing body?
At last, a young Afrikaans girl answered my call. She told me she was the Undertaker’s receptionist and had no idea whatsoever where he was. I told her that my father had just died and there was no morgue and please, could she try her very best to get hold of the Undertaker as soon as possible. It was urgent!
“Oh, really,” she said in a tone of voice that suggested she had rolled her eyes at the ceiling at my idiocy, “what do you expect me to do? Get out a ouija board and call up the spirits to find him for you?” She gave a loud cackle of laughter at her joke. “I don’t know the spirits THAT well!”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 14