*
In the mornings Ludwig dropped off Joshua at Dolphin Bay Primary, Greta at St Anna School for Girls and then me at Protea High.
“You know, it would be much easier for everybody if I had a bicycle,” I said to Ludwig one day. “I’d just cut through the back roads, turn at the Chinese shop and roll down the hill to school.”
“And in the afternoon you’d pedal all the way up the hill again.”
“I don’t mind hills. Where I come from it’s hilly all over the show. I’m used to that.”
Ludwig seemed quite astounded, but he was more open minded about girls riding bikes than Hannes. “Ok. If you are really prepared to do it you can use my old bike. It’s standing in the garage collecting dust.”
After school Kim and I went shopping for the school fete. Ma Jameson dropped us off at Victoria Bay’s biggest supermarket where one could get everything – except booze. The first aisle we walked down was packed with toy guns made out of plastic. I found it was disgusting. Kids shouldn’t play with guns. And what had happened to all the wooden toys and the creative stuff? Kim didn’t have an opinion. She gestured to a cooler shelf. “There is the cottage cheese. Do you want low fat or normal?”
I took some kilo buckets with the labels I liked best, chose the cheapest butter and heaped packets of nuts and raisins into the trolley. We walked past the veggie section where coloureds weighed the customer’s purchases and where one could buy single tomatoes in little polystyrene punnits wrapped in meters of plastic foil. At the spices I didn’t remember the English word for Nelken and spent quite a while sniffing out different packets until I found some cloves.
There was a long row of tills. Everyone was worked by a white lady. A black lady packed our stuff into a generous amount of plastic packets. I watched some cleaners washing the floor in a leisurely manner. A white woman, dressed in the supermarket uniform, came along and inspected their buckets.
“What’s she doing?” I asked Kim.
“Checking if they’ve pinched anything.”
A customer behind us in the queue commented: “I’ve seen them hide 10 kg of cheese in their water buckets. You can’t trust these blacks. They are born thieves and liars and they are as lazy as sin.”
An iodine laden breeze chased some big white clouds across the sky and the sea danced with choppy, silvery waves. The scent of subtropical flowers rose from the gardens and mingled with the perfume of eucalyptus trees. At last I had a bike! I cycled around a tortoise.
It’s great to be in Africa!
It felt as if my whole body smiled.
It’s amazing to be surrounded by palm trees and hibiscus and dolphins in the sea; smell strange smells; see exotic birds…even the colour of the sky is different here – more intense. Ja, that’s what it is – everything is more intense.
After the Chinese shop the traffic became denser. I was still pondering about the phenomenon of increased intensity, when I realized that just about everybody in the street looked at me.
Something the matter with my gym or what?
We had just changed from winter to summer uniforms. Girls wore white shirts with blue and white checkered collars, khaki skirts and white socks now and boys the same kind of shirt and short grey pants. I checked and could find nothing wrong. I tucked the gym a bit tighter under my bum, just in case the South Africans with their different perception in certain things had a problem with a flying skirt.
Along the pine forest a gang of about 15 road workers were hacking up the tar. They were all dressed in yellow overalls and worked in a row several metres away from each other. Only 2 of them really moved their pickaxes. The others just stood and discussed something in Xhosa with far carrying voices. One of them had organized a fire and stirred something in a big, 3 legged iron pot. As I came closer all activity stopped and everybody stared at me.
This is really getting creepy.
I checked my gym again. Everything was okay – or was it?
At the school gate Peggy waved at me. “Jeez,” she said. “Are you looking for a new host family now?”
“Huh?”
“Hell, your new host family really treats you like the Russians,” Steven, the dog stoner declared.
“Eh eh, what are you talking about?” I asked. “The Winters are great people. I like them and…”
“They could at least give you some bucks for the bus if they can’t organize a lift,” Peter interrupted.
“But I don’t want to take the bus. One can’t even sit where one wants to in a bus.”
“Come on, don’t be stupid,” Norma said. “Do you really want to sit next to a muntu who hasn’t washed for a week and is full of fleas?”
“Oh, and that’s why you have your house cleaned by a maid and your meals cooked by a maid who is dirty and full of fleas.”
Norma turned her eyes to heaven.
“My mom can drop you off at your place after school,” Kim suggested. “We can load the bike in the back of the bakkie.”
“But I want to ride on the bike, hells bells. There is nothing wrong with that? In Germany I ride to school every day except in winter, of course, and I love it.”
“But girls don’t ride bicycles to school,” Norma protested. “Not here, anyway.”
“Why not?”
Nobody had an answer.
During assembly Mr Martin announced that the decoration of the gym for the school fete had to be finished and that the kitchen would be free for baking the cakes.
I gave some last touches to the Bavarian Beer garden. Mr Thompson the art teacher came in. He was a stick of a man with grey yellowish hair and big feet. He walked around squinting his eyes and humming various sounds. “Not bad, not bad,” he mumbled after a thorough inspection. “But you can’t have a purple sky. Doesn’t look right, just doesn’t look right. Put a decent blue there, my girl.”
Phhh. Ever heard of the Impressionists?
Later, while the rest of the class learned to sing Kommt ein Vogel geflogen with Mrs Davies, Kim, Liza and I got cracking in the school kitchen to bake the cakes. Mrs Koekemoer, the domestic science teacher, was there to do some supervising. She had a bum like a carthorse and a face to go with it and advised every girl in the school to upgrade her cooking skills with a ‘Bonne Cuisine’ cooking course, the infallible recipe to catch a decent husband. Mrs Koeks was in her middle 40s and had caught 3 so far. The school’s opinion if this signified a defeat or a triumph for ‘Bonne Cuisine’ was divided.
Mrs Koeks opened fridges, drawers and cupboards and ordered us to put our aprons on. She grabbed a huge folder and waddled over to a big table in the middle of the kitchen. “Let’s compare recipes,” she puffed. “Where is your cooking book, Mathilda?”
“Oh, I’ve got it all in my head,” I said, opening the lids of the cream cheese pots.
“You should always write everything down, Mathilda, otherwise you might forget an essential ingredient in the heat of the battle,” she said with a big frown. “Now let’s see here, Linzer Torte and cheesecake.” In her folder each recipe was neatly stuck in a transparent plastic envelope, all in alphabetic order. “Let’s start with the Linzer. It says here: 3 cups of flower, 1 cup of sugar…” and she rattled down all the other items mentioned on her list. “Is that like your recipe?”
“Don’t know. We usually don’t measure in cups but in grams.”
“I see. German system. So how many grams of flower do you put in?”
“Dunno, I always do it by eye.”
“That’s not serious baking, Mathilda. You’ll never get the same cake twice.”
Kim and Liza were eating almonds and raisins, listening mildly interested to our conversation.
“And what is the ginger for?” Mrs Koeks looked at me with her hazel horse eyes. “I can’t find ginger as an ingredient for Linzer or for cheesecake in my notes.”
“I find ginger makes the Linzer taste more interesting.”
“Don’t tell me you just put it in without any reference to
the book.”
I expected her to start frothing at the mouth like a distressed horse, and because I couldn’t possibly stroke her nose or offer her a lump of sugar, I tried to think of some other way to calm her down. “I know ginger is not really mentioned in the books,” I told her. “But there is this new movement in Germany. It’s called kreatives Kochen. Very popular. Creative cooks use the recipes as a sort of technical guide to get the basics right and then they…uh… adapt them to their personal tastes and needs and so on. Makes it more… uh… individual.”
“Hm, sounds interesting,” Mrs Koeks admitted. “Ja, I know we are always quite far behind European trends.” She cheered up visibly.
I guess a whole new world of possibilities of how to catch another husband opened up in her mind’s eye.
While Kim was grinding the almonds and Liza separating eggs, I stuck my finger in the cream cheese to have a taste. I nearly keeled out of my socks.
The stuff is salty!
I knew by now that butter in this country was usually salted – but cream cheese! I couldn’t possibly disappoint Mrs Koeks newly found interest in creative cooking.
I’ll just put in a lot of sugar and a heap of raisins, mebbe a good shot of cinnamon as well.
Mrs Koeks left to check something in the office. That gave me a chance to experiment with the ingredients. I ate at least a pound of the mix until it had a decent flavour.
Kim was kneading a big ball of Linzer dough sampling pieces of it at an amazing rate.
“Hey, stop eating so much,” I said to her.
“Ok, just a last morsel, Mathilda. It’s sooo lekker. She broke off a chunk the size of my fist.
“Gee Kim, you are as greedy as a pig,” Liza said licking raspberry jam from a spoon.
“I don’t give a hoot if you have a bum like Mrs Koeks one day,” I declared. “But what really pisses me off is that we have to make some more dough now. Are there any nuts left?”
“Ja, a whole packet,” Liza poured the nuts into a bowl.
“What are those little black things in there?” I asked her. “Looks like pieces of liquorish.”
“I’ll have to disappoint you there,” Liza said. “I think it’s rat shit.”
“Oh come on, how would rat shit get into a sealed packet?”
“I don’t know but it sometimes happens. I’ll throw that whole lot away.”
“What a waste.”
“Well, you can’t possibly use it, Mathilda,” Kim said.
“Mebbe I can.”
They both looked at me flabbergasted.
“Are you crazy?” Kim screamed. “Do you want to poison the whole school?”
“If this is how you guys go about preparing food I’ll never eat any German stuff again,” Liza said disgustedly. “I always thought that….”
“Calm down,” I interrupted. “I thought the dassie might eat it.”
“Now she is completely off her rocker,” Liza said. “Where on earth are you going to find a dassie?”
“The Winters have got one at home.”
“Oh really?” Kim said and absentmindedly stuck some more dough into her mouth. “Where did they get it from?”
“Some friends of theirs found an abandoned little one on their farm in the Karoo and gave it to Greta as a pet.”
“Hm,” Kim frowned, “doesn’t it pee all over the show?”
Liza finished licking another helping of jam from the spoon. “Did you know that the Boere use it as a muti?”
“What?”
“Dassie pee. It’s white and they scrape it off the rocks.”
“Come off it Liza,” Kim said.
“But Liza was adamant. “The Boere call it Dassie Pis and it’s for fever.”
Kim wiped her sticky fingers on her apron. “I only know that the dassie is the closest relative to the elephant.”
“Hahaha, you must be joking,” I said. “The one I’m talking about is the size of a small rat, and even though he’s still a baby he’ll never be bigger than a rabbit…and he’s got tiny little ears and no trunk at all.”
“It’s true, the dassie is the closest relative to the elephant,” Liza said and Kim nodded.
These 2 are pulling my socks.
I chucked the nuts into the garbage bin.
Kim watched and asked: “What about the dassie?”
“I’ll let you know a secret,” I whispered to her. “This was an experiment. I’m an undercover scientist to study the South Africa psyche…”
Kim choked on some raisins.
“…and you know who I am working for? The KGB.”
Ludwig was whistling in the big wooden shed at the back of the Winters’ property. He spent a lot of his spare time in there building a 35 foot gaff rigged cutter. I parked the bike under the lemon tree and went to have a look. Ludwig was standing on top of the keel hitting a nail into a plank. His shorts and his faded T-shirt were covered in saw dust. When he had finished he said to his labourer: “Alpheus, pass me a lag bolt and the 17mm hex spanner, please.” Alpheus rummaged in a wooden box. Ludwig started to whistle Ol’ Man River and screwed the bolt into a big beam across the keel.
“Hi everybody,” I said.
“Hi Mathilda.” Ludwig took another bolt from Alpheus. “Had a good day?”
“It could have been better.”
“Tell me more about it.”
“I arrived at school on a bike and all hell popped loose because apparently girls are not supposed to do that here,” I said angrily. “I painted a purple sky and was told to change it into a ‘decent’ blue, but I didn’t do it. I baked 3 cheesecakes and 3 trays of Linzer with recipes out of my head and was told that wasn’t the proper way to do it.”
Ludwig gave a last turn to the bolt. Then he jumped down from the keel. “You know Mathilda, there is no need to fight everything all the time. It’s good to have your own ideas and dreams, to ask questions and to realize that there is a lot of brainwashing going on, but it’s not worth it to get so worked up about everything; you’ll end up with an ulcer or something. One must just accept that people have different ideas about things, but that doesn’t mean everybody is against you.”
I don’t think that…or do I?
I kicked a piece of wood. “And you know what, Ludwig?”
“What?”
“On top of all that the girls who helped me in the kitchen tried to take the Mickey out of me. They told me that dassies are the closest relatives to elephants. They think just because I come from Germany they can tell me any shit and I’ll believe it.”
Ludwig grinned. “You know Mathilda, Africa is an amazing continent. There is nothing soft and gentle about it. There is either a flood or a drought, burning heat or icy cold, there are swarms of locusts and poisonous snakes, veld fires and hailstorms, deserts and jungles. Africa is full of extremes and so are its people; and it’s full of surprises and the dassie is the closest relative to the elephant.”
Oh…
“Life is an adventure and not a perpetual battle, my girl. Just relax and enjoy it. How about getting a coke for all of us to start off with?”
I went into the house. Doodles was sleeping on the kitchen table and Dodger the dassie sat between the 2 little horns of the carved giraffe in the passage. In my room I took that damn school uniform off and put on an old pair of dungarees and a crumpled shirt.
One probably has to be 40 like Ludwig to be an individual and to be able to compromise at the same time.
I strolled into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of coke and 3 glasses. Then I stuck the glasses back into the cupboard. Black servants always drank out of tin mugs in this country. I couldn’t possibly give Alpheus a mug and Ludwig and myself a glass.
Why is everything so complicated? Phhh. Where is the borderline between behaving like a guest and compromising like a bloody coward? I really don’t know anymore.
Back in the boat shed I asked Ludwig: “Couldn’t you give me a job here? I’d like to do some real work. You know what I mean
? Something that makes sense.”
Ludwig passed a mug of coke to Alpheus. “Sure Mathilda. See that big piece of tree trunk there? That’s going to be the bowsprit. You can paint it with raw linseed oil out of that white container over there.” He drank some coke and gave me a paintbrush. “Treating wood like this has been done since time immemorial. Boat builders have used whale oil and tallow…it has some sort of a timeless quality. Puts things back into perspective.”
“Like old rocks and the sea,” I said.
I felt the blue eyes on me and heard: “Ja, and like a starlit night in the desert or the world seen from an aeroplane.”