*
When I went to my room that night, moths were circling around the lamps in the passage and the generator was thumping in the shed. I decided to try and sleep without earplugs because I didn’t want to become dependant on artificial things.
I saw the lump under my sheet as soon as I walked into my room.
Phhh. Hein and Ryno probably put a can of shongololos in my bed, the bastards.
Shongololos were dark brown millipedes as thick as my little finger and as long as my hand. They were crawling all over the show outside and some of them had taken up residence in the house. They spent their time walking up the walls until gravity got the better of them and they fell with a dry plopp on the floor, where they’d roll themselves into a spiral. I was already working on a plan of revenge.
Mebbe a dead frog down Hein’s neck and a cow pat on Ryno’s pillow…but that is only going to get me into trouble with Ma Saida.
I carefully pulled the sheet back and couldn’t believe my eyes.
During breakfast the next morning, Debbie said that it was about time to put the Christmas decoration up. Everybody agreed except Hein, who declared that there were more important things to do in life than to stick up glitzy stuff all over the show, to learn how to drive for example.
Pa Saida grinned. “My boy, your persistence will get you far in life.”
“Does that mean you’re going to teach me, Pa?”
“Ja, after you’ve helped me to put tick muti on the dogs.”
“And after you’ve cleaned up all the drolls around Apie’s pole,” Ma Saida said.
“And after you’ve removed your stinky gum boots and that box full of beetles from the bathroom,” Sarie grinned.
“And after you’ve put all your comics in the toilet into one neat pile, so that a person can go and have a wee without falling over the bloody things,” Alicia added.
“Watch your language, my girl,” Ma Saida frowned. “I don’t want to hear any swearwords in this house.”
“Are you going to wash Alicia’s mouth with soap, Tannie Bertha?” Ryno asked with great interest.
“I hope I won’t have to.”
“Alicia could do Apie’s drolls – as a punishment,” Hein suggested. “It would also give her a bit of exercise, it’s good for…”
Alicia’s lower lip began to tremble.
“My boy, if you don’t behave yourself you can forget about those driving lessons.”
Hein dropped his half eaten toast on his plate and got up. “Ok ok, I’ll do all them things right now.”
Alicia produced a triumphant grin and grabbed another scone.
Ma Saida turned to her eldest son. “Hummel, you are very quiet this morning, and you’ve hardly eaten anything. Is your jaw still sore from the dentist?”
“Hm.” Hummel sat there with red ears. I knew he was watching me out of the corners of his eyes, but every time I looked at him he stuck his nose deeper in his bowl.
Ay ay ay, this is getting complicated.
“I bet it isn’t his jaw but his hormones,” Sarie said with great authority. “Makes guys go all bananas. It’s like when lambs start to grow horns and feel their balls for the first time. I read in the Farmers’ Weekly, that…”
Hummel got up and left.
“Sarie, don’t talk like that about your brother,” Ma Saida said. “It’s not easy for a boy to be 14.”
“Ma, it’s not easy for a girl to be 15 either.”
Pa Saida had finished his mieliepap. He took a cheeroot out of a little carved rosewood box and lit it. “I wonder if Hummel took a fancy to one of those chicks he saw in town?”
Hummel lay in wait for me in the honeysuckle hedge. He jumped out of there as I walked past.
“Hells bells Hummel, man. I nearly had a heart attack.”
Hummel’s ears were redder than ever. “Uh…how did you like it, Mathilda?”
Meine Güte, what are the right words to say to a love stricken little boy who puts gifts under your sheets?
“I liked it very much. It was just what I wanted.”
Shit, not too much encouragement.
Hummel beamed. “The guinea fowl is made out of clay. I got it in that little Japsnoet shop close to the dentist. They sell home industry things and stuff. Its beak is a bit chipped off but I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“No no, not at all.”
“And I put it in a little basket full of blossoms ‘cause it looks nice.”
“Very nice. I think it’s a great idea to have put it in my bed.”
Inspiration struck.
“Hummel, where are you going to hide everybody else’s Christmas gifts?”
It looked like Hein’s driving lesson would not really be a great success. His legs were definitely too short.
“You can sit on my lap and take the steering wheel and I’ll do the rest of the doings,” Pa Saida suggested.
Hein pushed out his lower lip. “But Pa, I’ve been steering cars on your lap ever since I was born.”
“It’s that or nothing, my boy, except that this time I’ll let you take the wheel all the way to the top sheep camp and back again.”
Hein’s eyes popped open as big as saucers. “Even up the S-bend over the rocks?”
“Even up the S-bend over the rocks.”
Hein was reconciled with life. He asked generously: “Wanta come for a ride, Mathilda?”
“Thanks for the offer but I promised to help with the Christmas decoration.”
“I’ll come,” Ryno said enthusiastically.
“All right,” Hein was capable of true largesse. “I’m sure Pa will also let you take the wheel.” He thought for a moment. “On a straight, flat piece of road of course, without corrugations and potholes – ‘cause you are only a beginner.”
Ma Saida opened a big blue steel trunk. “Here we go, all the Christmas tinsel. I want the ‘smoking gnome’ and the nutcracker on the side board in the lounge. And don’t put too much of the stuff in your own room, hey Sarie, think of us other mortals too. Remember, Christmas is a time of sharing.”
Sarie cast her eyes towards heaven. “Ja Ma.”
“Last year Sarie’s room looked like a disco,” Hummel said. “She just left us one garland for the rest of the house.”
“Shut your trap,” Sarie snorted, “and get one of the boys to bring us a ladder.”
“You do that yourself ‘cause Philemon and I are going to put up the electric Christmas lights on the stoep.”
“Children, Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace,” Ma Saida said. “Now get cracking. I’ll be in the lounge writing my very last Christmas cards.”
Sarie told me that the nutcracker and the ‘smoking gnome’ were as old as the rocks and had been bequeathed from one generation to the next in the German branch of the Saida family. The nutcracker was a wooden soldier in a blue uniform and the ‘smoking gnome’ looked a lot like the one we had at home – a little man with a big coat, a long beard and a pipe. One could put an incense cone between his boots and the smoke would come out of his mouth.
“We call the ‘smoking gnome’ a Räuchermännchen, I said. “Little smoking man.”
“Oh, in English there isn’t really a word,” Sarie said. “We just made ‘smoking gnome’ up.”
I found out that the English vocabulary concerning Christmas stuff was extremely limited. Everything was tinsel or Christmas decoration or bauble and that was it. I opened a box of red and golden spheres.
“But you must have a special word for these balls one can hang up.”
“Not to my knowledge. But for you we’ll call them ‘hung up Christmas balls’ from now on.”
“Ha ha, very funny. I mean a real word like Weihnachtskugel. That’s what we say.”
Sarie screeched with laughter. “Kugel! That’s great. Just go into a shop here and ask for a Christmas Kugel.” She stuck a silvery pinkish garland to the wall and kept on grinning. “I’m afraid in Kneukelspruit you wouldn’t have much luck in finding a
Kugel. There seems to be quite a shortage of them in this part of the world.”
“Come on, Sarie, tell me what a Kugel is.”
“I thought a German would know.”
“The only Kugels we’ve got are like…balls.”
Sarie nearly fell off her ladder with laughter. When she got her breath back she panted: “Our Kugels have got all sorts of things but if there’s one thing they haven’t got it’s balls.”
“Stop taking the piss out of me.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Sarie chortled. “Your best chances of finding a Kugel in South Africa are in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg. Sandton and Hyde Park and so on, the larney places, you know?”
“No, Idon’t know. Now what the hell is a Kugel?”
“Look it up in your dictionary.”
“I didn’t bring one.”
“I’ll tell you if you give me that T-shirt with the crazy coloured spirals.”
“Your mother will have a fit.”
“She’ll get used to it.”
Phhhhh
”I’ll think about it.
When we had finished decorating, the place looked more like a venue for a carnival party than anything else. It was all quite glitzy and kitschy, except for the nutcracker and the ‘smoking gnome’.
It’s about time the Saidas experience some real Christmas decoration, the genuine food for the soul sort of stuff instead of all that plastic glitter ersatz shit.
I asked Ma Saida if they were going to have a Christmas tree.
“Ja sure, although I guess it’s not quite the kind of tree you are used to.”
It’s bound to be one of those horrible fold-up plastic jobs.
“I could make the decoration for the tree, if you’d like that.”
“I think it’s a brilliant idea Mathilda, just tell me what you need.”
“Can I have some more spinach, Ma?” Hein handed his plate to his mother.
Ma Saida was so surprised that she didn’t even remind Hein, that only blacks and ‘poor whites’, like the ones living on the other side of the co-op, didn’t know how to say please.
“Is it a bet or what?” Debbie asked. “Normally you hate spinach.”
“It’s because of my legs.”
“Huh?” Even Alicia stopped chewing.
“Ja man, everybody says spinach makes kids big and strong, so if I eat a lot of spinach my legs will grow faster and then I can drive the bakkie by myself in the Easter holidays.”
“And me too,” Ryno pushed his plate towards Ma Saida.
“You’ve got it all wrong, guys,” Sarie said.
“Ja,” Hummel agreed. “If you look at Popeye, spinach goes straight into the arms.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Alicia pointed to an untouched helping of spinach on her plate. “I’ll swap you all this for your puddings.”
“Gee Alicia,” Hein said. “If you carry on stuffing your mouth like this you’ll be as fat as a pig before Christmas is over and you can join your mom in that German clinic, where they cut her fat rolls off.”
Alicia screamed that it wasn’t fair and stormed out of the room.
Pa Saida’s fist thundered on the table that the crockery rattled. “No more driving lessons for you, Hein, until you learn to behave yourself.”
“But Pa…”
“No buts, and as a punishment you’ll clean out the old rondawel.”
“But Pa…” Hein’s lips trembled with the unfairness of it all.
“Did you hear me, my boy, or do I have to get my belt out?” Pa Saida roared.
Everybody held their breath.
“‘kay Pa,” Hein whispered with tears in his eyes and he got up from his chair.
Sarie and I and 2 of the dogs were walking along the river to look for Trigger, the puppy. The water level was nearly back to normal but a thick layer of mud with stacks of broken branches covered the banks. We had to climb over fallen trees and walk around areas that were still swampy. The mozzies had half eaten me up already and Sarie pulled a tick off my leg. She crushed it with a rock. “I hope it was not an infected one. If it was, you’ll get tick bite fever with the most horrible headaches you can imagine. Some people even die…”
“Can’t we talk about something else? What’s that story about Ryno and Alicia’s mom having her fatrolls being cut out in a German clinic?”
“Ah, it’s a big secret. Everybody is supposed to think that Alicia and Ryno are staying with us ‘cause their parents are on a great holiday in Bavaria, meanwhile their ma is having a boob reduction job done and they’re also going to cut a couple of kgs of fat off her tummy.”
“Why does she go all the way to Germany? Don’t they do that kind of job here?”
“I guess it’s because nobody is supposed to know about it. And also, they’ve got stacks of bucks. She had the same thing done about 2 years ago. In the same clinic. You know, they could just as well take a heap of Rand notes and burn them, ‘cause it took her only about 6 months to look her old, fat self again.”
The 2 dogs ran towards a big heap of washed up vegetation. They wagged their tails excitedly and tried to climb in between the broken branches.
“Whatever is in there it stinks,” I observed.
“Ja, it’s something dead,” Sarie was white in the face.
One of the dogs had disappeared into the heap and the other one tried to follow him. We removed some of the branches and peeped into the opening.
“It’s a lamb,” Sarie said after a while. “It’s a little lamb that drowned.”
“Come and fetch the Christmas tree with me, Mathilda,” Hummel said for the umpteenth time.
“How many times must I tell you that I’m going to make the decoration for the tree this morning.”
“But it won’t take long, you can make the decoration afterwards.”
“I’m going to start right now, Hummel. Why don’t you get cracking so that the tree is here when we’ve finished.”
Meine Güte. It’s exhausting to have an admirer, ‘specially one you have to watch every word with all the time if you don’t want to be responsible for a childhood trauma that could fuck him up for the rest of his life.
In the kitchen, I explained to my host siblings and Ryno, that we would bake the decoration for the tree. Hein was cleaning out the old rondawel and Ryno went to join him, letting us know that guys must stick together, and that baking was a girls’ job anyway. Alicia refused to come out of her room. She had started a water and dry bread diet and didn’t want to see anybody.
I mixed the ingredients for the dough like I had done in the Advent ever since I could remember. Adding some salt, I thought about the masses of snow they usually had in Bavaria at this time of the year. Sweatpearls were running down my forehead. At 9 o’clock the thermometer on the Mooifontein stoep had shown 21ºC already. Normally it was cool in the house, but the last couple of days the cast iron stove in the kitchen never had time to cool down, because Ma Saida and her team of maids had hardly stopped making preserves, chutneys, jams and cordials on top of all the Christmas baking and cooking.
While we rolled out the dough on the table and cut out stars, pine trees, angels and elephants, I told my host siblings about going to school on cross country skis with a torch attached to your head, because it was pitch dark when you left and not much lighter when you got there.
Sarie stuck an almond onto a star. “Don’t you miss Germany and everything?”
I thought about it for a while. “Not really. I’d sometimes like to see my friends and my family, just to tell them about all the things I’ve been doing here, and I wouldn’t mind a round of tobogganing this afternoon, but I’m not homesick if that is what you mean.”
“I’d never go anywhere without my dogs,” Christo piped up. “And I’d take my pony, and Lorah ‘cause she’s my nanny and Ma and Pa and my sisters and brothers and Vusi and Thabo ‘cause they are my friends.”
Lorah, who was washing up greasy pans and doughy bowls, laughed that her
fat rolls wobbled. “Come here you good boy and give me a hug.” Christo obliged smearing dough and icing all over Lorah’s apron, while most of him disappeared between her huge arms and her enormous bosom.
When we had finished, Lorah and Poppie got stuck into the job we dreaded most at home – to clean up the place from the floor to the ceiling – because as sure as God made little apples, after a Christmas baking session there were pieces of dough and splashes of icing all over the show.
Hummel yelled through the house: “Come and look at the Christmas tree.”
We all trooped to the lounge and there, between the fireplace and the desk on which Ma Saida wrote her eternal last Christmas card, stood the most extraordinary object in a galvanized iron bucket.
“I thought you’d gone to fetch a plastic tree,” I said to Hummel.
“Never. We always have one of those. It’s a real plant. We had the last one for donkey’s years, but the other day Hezekiel smashed it when he drove the tractor out of the shed.”
The plant went right up to the ceiling and had a straight central stem about as thick as a wine bottle. From there, single branches curved upwards in big intervals. There were no leaves, only seedpods on top of the stem and at the end of each branch.
“It looks absolutely gorgeous, like a giant candelabra,” I said. “What’s it called?”
“Sisal,” Hummel said very pleased. “You have seen them outside. These stems grow out of spiky leaves, like pineapple leaves, only bigger.
“Do you know that these 2 cherry trees are in exactly the right distance to each other to put up a hammock?” I asked Sarie.
She spat a cherry pip into the grass. “You’re right. One could lie in the hammock and the cherries would practically fall into your mouth. We’ve got some hammocks somewhere, let me think.” She spat out another pip. “I got it. In the old rondawel Hein and Ryno are cleaning out. Let’s go and have a look.”
We took a narrow path from the orchard to the orphaned lambs’ camp. The veldgrass stood hip high, dotted with orange poppies and little violet flowers on tall, thick stalks. Lizards sat like brooches on hot rocks and armies of ants criss crossed the path with great determination. On the other side of the river, huge cumulus clouds towered above the landscape, throwing their shadows on the glowing red mountains.
The old rondawel had a thatch roof and was surrounded by ancient loquat trees and a lot of khaki bush. Hein and Ryno had carried quite a lot of things outside and the stoep looked like a White Elephant stall. Sarie picked up a double steamer. Its enamel had chipped off in lots of places but one could still recognize the image of a crane flying towards a gnarled tree on each pot.
“Mebbe one could use them as flower pots. What d’you think?” She glanced inside and crinkled her nose in disgust. “This thing is full of mouse corpses.”
“Let’s see.”
There was an adult mouse with 6 babies in the pot.
“All mummified. They must have been in there for ages.”
“Ja,” Sarie chucked the mice into the khaki bushes, “they probably have. The thing is that this rondawel never gets cleaned out properly. It’s a hell of a job and nobody wants to do it, so we always get to do it as a punishment when we’ve committed a major sin. It’s a kind of family tradition.” She wiped a spider web off her face. “If you wanted to clean this place properly it would take at least a week, but we are normally forgiven after one day.” She put the double steamer on top of a pile of drawers filled with rusty nuts and bolts, various pieces of string and ropes and some mouldy exercise books. “I think the last one to get stuck in here was Hummel about 2 years ago. His sin was throwing a bucket full of fowl shit onto Adrian van der Walt’s car.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Dunno. He never told us. Even when Pa said, Hummel wouldn’t have to clean out the rondawel if only he could explain.”
I picked up a wrought iron lamp with a broken glass pane. “If it was me, I’d bribe some blacks to do the job.”
“You mean to tidy up this rondawel?”
“Ja.”
“You could pay them a million bucks, they would never do it.”
“Why not?”
“‘cause of the snakes.”
“Huh?”
“There are always snakes in here, normally completely harmless mole snakes. The blacks are shit scared of them – of any snake. They’d never come near this place.”
We looked in a plastic bag under a couple of springbok horns, as well as in a big drum between a stuffed elephant foot and a pile of old motorcar tyres. We only found dusty curtains and several mildly fucked up mosquito nets and we didn’t see any snakes.
“It’ll take ages to find those hammocks and I don’t feel like going on,” Sarie said and sneezed for the umpteenth time. “Where are the guys anyway?”
There was no trace of Hein or Ryno anywhere near the rondawel.
“They had better come back soon to carry all the stuff from the stoep back inside in case it rains,” Sarie frowned. “Anyway, that’s their problem. Do you want to go to the spruit? It’s not far away from here.”
There was quite a bit of water in the spruit. It gurgled down the mountain in its narrow bed, bordered by grasses and shrubs and a couple of trees here and there. Sarie, who led the way, stopped dead in her tracks all of a sudden and pointed to a group of springbok, drinking on the far side. We watched them until they turned and disappeared into the veld. A bird had started a repetitive 3-note song. Sarie said it was a Piet my vrou and when you heard a Piet my vrou sing it would rain before long.
We were just turning to go back when we got a whiff of a strange, burny smell. Sarie sniffed and searched the horizon. “Can’t be a veld fire at this time of the year.”
“I think it’s coming from those trees over there,” I pointed to a group of shrubs and thorntrees further up. “We should go and check.”
Sarie pulled a face. “Chances are that there are some muntus smoking dagga.”
“Dagga. What’s that?”
“I think you’d call it marihuana,” She bit her lip. “When the muntus get rooked up, they normally also get pissed and anything can happen.”
“We could sneak up there without anybody seeing us, and mebbe it’s something completely different, a piece of glass setting leaves on fire or something.”
“Ok,” Sarie agreed unenthusiastically. “But let’s be careful.”
We crept slowly towards the trees, taking cover in the high grass. The smell became stronger. There was no noise except the Piet my vrou and the soft crunching of our shoes on the ground. The last few metres I hardly breathed. I crawled behind a tree, and Sarie hid in some bushes.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Sarie’s voice exploded into the silence.
Hein and Ryno, perched on a rock, nearly fell into the water beneath them.
“Gee man Sarie, you gave us a fright,” Hein groaned green in the face.
“What are you hiding there behind your backs?” Sarie was merciless.
“Nothing,” the boys said in unison.
“Bullshit. What ever it is, it smokes and it stinks.”
“Promise not to tell Pa,” Hein said.
“And don’t tell Tannie Bertha either,” Ryno said horrified by the thought of it.
“What is it?” I asked intrigued.
“You girls promise not to tell?” Hein insisted.
Sarie winked at me. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“All right.” Hein stretched his right arm out in front of him and revealed what looked like a huge home-made cigarette, consisting partly of a piece of newspaper.
“You’re lucky Pa didn’t catch you,” Sarie said. “He would make you clean that rondawel until the last speck of dust has disappeared, and he would only start giving you driving lessons after you’ve turned 18 – if at all. Did you pinch Pa’s tobacco?”
Hein shook his head, turning greener by the second. Ryno didn’t look so good either.
/> “You didn’t pinch it from the shop, did you? Cause if you did I’m…”
“No man Sarie, we didn’t pinch anything. It’s only horse shit.”
I felt my jaw drop. “You guys are smoking horse shit?”
“Jeez,” Sarie sighed. “Boys! I can’t believe it!”
“What does it taste like?” I asked.
“The first one’s all right…sort of herby,” Hein said. “But after 2 or 3 they loose their flavour. I think I won’t even finish this one. Do you want it?’
“Keep that shit stick as far away from me as you can,” Sarie shrieked.
Ryno dropped his cigarette into the spruit. Hein glanced thoughtfully at his.
“I’ll give it a go,” I said quickly.
He looked at me with big eyes.
“Mathilda, you’re disgusting,” Sarie screeched. “You told me yourself that your Pa is a founder member of the German anti-smoking league. And now this! You’re crazy.”
I took Hein’s ciggy. “That’s what I like about it. It’s a bit crazy. Mebbe it’s my only chance in life to smoke horse shit wrapped into the local rag. I just don’t feel like missing it.” I took a cautious pull.
“What d’you think?” Hein asked eagerly.
“It’s not unpleasant…tastes a bit like burning grass.”
Hein and Ryno grinned while Sarie turned her eyes towards heaven.
“You kids have done a great job,” Pa Saida walked once more around the Christmas tree. “A bit unusual but I like it.” He screwed up his eyes and took a closer look at Christo’s baked aeroplane, dangling from one of the top branches. “Let’s take some photos. Hummel get the Polaroid.”
Ma Saida lit the candles. There were only 3, because out of her German inheritance she had only 3 special Christmas tree candle-holders left, and these candle-holders, which one could clip to a branch like a peg, were, south of the Mediterranian, as rare as rocking horse shit.
Pa Saida liked a thourough job, so half an hour later we had a whole pile of photos. There was the Christmas tree with its baked angels and African wildlife and Christo’s 20th century machines plus Hein’s and Ryno’s ‘Christmas birds from outer space’ made of pine cones and guinea fowl feathers. Pa Saida couldn’t take his eyes off a shot of Sarie’s baked Land Rover. He decided to send it to Rover In England to let the guys there know that their cars were highly appreciated in South Africa, something that would surely cheer them up in that lousy grey weather of theirs.
The photo I liked best showed the Saida family arranged in front of the tree like figures out of a game of chess. In the back row, blond and blue-eyed Ma and Hummel stood between ravenhaired black-eyed Pa and Sarie, and in the front, fair Debbie was sided by Hein and Christo with their dark complexions.
Alicia complained that one could see a pimple on her nose on a shot of her and Ryno. Nobody commented because they were gatvol of having to apologize and clean out the rondawel.
“That’s nice one of you, Mathilda,” Pa Saida pointed to a photo of me and Amarula, the cat. “Send it to your parents that they don’t forget what you look like.”
“D’you think they’ll like your new hairstyle?” Alicia asked.
“Ja, I guess so. I quite like it myself. Marietta has done a great job.”
The photo showed the hairdresser’s oeuvre, mainly aimed at integrating the patch of bristles around my stitches. She had cut everything extremely short ‘but still feminine’, as if it was a question of life and death.