*
On the 24th of December at 8 o’clock in the morning it was already over 20ºC in the shade. I thought of Riedberg and my family sitting in the central heated dining room, eating gingerbread men and Stollen for breakfast, accompanied by Pachelbel’s canon, my mother’s ultimate Christmas music. I looked at the glaring African sky and battled to work up a Christmas feeling. In the kitchen one could hardly breathe with the cast iron stove and the gas stove going full blast. The most extraordinary scents were floating through the house, but they were as unfamiliar to me as the American ersatz- Christmas-music, with only the news and ads for a break. Fortunately Ma Saida only wanted Lorah and Sannie in the kitchen, everybody else made her nervous. My host siblings and I spent most of the time swimming in the reservoir. Just before lunch Pa Saida called Hummel to a difficult calving, thank God, that gave me a breather from my host brother’s intensive interest in my lower body regions.
In the afternoon I couldn’t help thinking of my family in Germany going for their pre coffee-time tobogganing session. This was a tradition founded by my Rosicrucian grandmother, who was also an expert in breathing matters. Tobogganing, she said, was the ideal activity to benefit body and soul. First, climbing up the slope, you had to make your muscles work and your heart rate and breathing increased automatically, oxygenating even your most peripheral cells in the process. On top of the hill you were rewarded with a sense of achievement and a beautiful view. The ride itself provided an excellent opportunity to exercise balance and coordination – and to experience the closest one could get to flying, without having to pay for it.
I smacked a mozzie on my leg and thought how nice it would be if I could go home just for an hour or 2. Before I could get too sentimental, Hein called me to the phone.
“Dumela,” Julie said. “Learned any Sotho yet?” After that I got the news of the Winter clan. They had a new maid because Opheibia had vanished with all her things plus the Winters’ kettle and some of their pots without saying anything. Nobody knew where she was – and who knows, maybe Opheibia would pitch up again in a year’s time with a baby strapped to her back, ready to take up where she had left off.
Greta told me that Dodger, the dassie, had bitten her face while she was sleeping and they had given him to the zoo. Joshua said the dinghy was nearly finished and he would take me for a sail before the holidays were over. Lolo said she and Mrs Vleega had learned to swim.
When it was Ludwig’s turn he asked: “Wat gaan aan in die Vrystaat?” And then he said: “There is some fucker listening in.”
I heard a soft ‘click’ and after that there was less echoing on the line.
“That’s better,” Ludwig laughed. “Listen Mathilda, there was a card from the post office in our box. They’ve got a parcel there waiting for you.”
“Wow. Where is it from?”
“Doesn’t say. We’ll go and fetch it as soon as you are back.”
“Ja, in 4 days.”
“Hm.” There was a short pause. “How are you enjoying the great outdoors, my girl?”
“Oh it’s lekker. I’ve seen bushbabies and real wild jackals and been in a storm and to an authentic Boere barn dance.”
“That sounds good. Well, happy Christmas and we’re looking forward to having you back, Mathilda.”
I put the receiver down without telling Ludwig how much I was missing him and his whole family, totally bewildered by the force of my emotions. What was it that made me long for the Winters while I was having a most fantastic holiday in the African veld?
The first of the guests to arrive was Auntie Elspeth, a widow in her 60s, from Ma Saida’s side of the family. Auntie Elspeth was a vegetarian wearing flat leather thong sandals and flowing flowery cotton shirts with matching blouses. She looked like an athletic dormouse with bright brown eyes shining under the rim of a huge straw hat she wore at all times. Debbie said that Auntie Elspeth had a bald patch on top of her head and that was why she never took that hat off, not even when she was sleeping. Auntie Elspeth was accompanied by a tiny bitch dog, which was not a vegetarian.
Next, a big Ford pulled up under the blue gums. Out climbed a pale, sandy haired man, a stylish, busty matron and 4 kids.
“Phhh, the shitty snooty Turvy-Johnsons,” Hein growled without much enthusiasm.
“Hein! One more word and you’ll spend Christmas giving an extra clean up to the rondawel. Welcome your cousins and show them to their rooms.” Pa Saida hurried to embrace the busty matron, who was his sister Jesseye from Jo’burg. The sandy haired guy was her husband William, an attorney ‘with a very respected firm’.Their eldest, Philippa, was plump and 14, Charles was fat and 12. Robert, 9, looked like an angel and carried the biggest plastic gun I’d ever seen in my life, and Daphne, 5, said: “Yuk, I can smell a cow,” as soon as the soles of her patent leather shoes touched Mooifontein ground.
Sarie turned her eyes towards heaven and whispered: “You see what I mean, Mathilda.” She had told me that the Turvey-Johnsons only attended family gatherings because it was a tradition with the Saidas, and Jesseye didn’t want to loose her part of the inheritance, once the grandparents Saida kicked the bucket.
“They are a bloody pain in the butt,” Sarie said. “And they’ve already got stacks of bucks, you just have to look at their car; and they’ve got a holiday house in Knysna and they go skiing overseas every year, and our cousins go to the poshest schools in the country, that’s where they get their larney accent from.”
The maids carried the luggage in and the Turvey-Johnson kids conversed politely with the adults, saying thank you at the end of every sentence. About every 30 seconds Robert exploded into an earsplitting shooting round with his plastic gun, not at all impressed with his father’s “stop it my boy”. Daphne moaned that the ground was too dusty for her precious shoes until her mother piggybacked her into the house.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Hopefully the other guests will be a bit more normal to dilute this crazy lot.
When the next visitors arrived, I knew immediately that the ‘do’ wouldn’t be boring. A barefooted, elderly guy with folds of tanned skin hanging from his bony frame was introduced as Uncle Roy from Rhodesia. In his time Uncle Roy had been a professional hunter but now he concentrated on his cattle ranch close to the Hunyani River. Uncle Roy’s most out standing feature was a luxuriant moustache, which branched like 2 enormous, long used brushes across either side of his face. The Saida men, big and small, surrounded Uncle Roy as soon as he had got out of his mud, dust and shit covered Land Rover, and started a discussion about weapons. Uncle Roy immediately produced a Webley, whose handle he had personally carved and decorated with a white painted bullterrier. A pretty, red-blonde young woman appeared from the passenger side. I first thought she was Uncle Roy’s daughter but she was his girlfriend. She wore designer hippie clothes and lit a cigarillo or something before she even said hello. Her name was Deirdre. She fiddled around in her brightly coloured Indian bag and presented everybody under 15 with a lolly. “Does anybody want a Guinness?” She asked the rest of us. “We’ve got plenty in the cooler box.”
The guys couldn’t tear themselves away from their discussion about weapons, and the maids were cleaning up the bathrooms after the Turvey-Johnsons, so Sarie and I helped carry the luggage in.
“And here is your room, my dear,” Ma Saida proudly opened a door.
Deirdre looked around. “Lovely. I like old fashioned furniture and little flowers on the wall paper…uh…isn’t the bed a bit small for 2 people?”
“This is your room, my dear,” Ma Saida said with determination. “We are a good Catholic family. I don’t want any of that sinful nonsense in my house. Roy will sleep in the orchard rondawel.”
Deirdre looked like a cow when it thunders – as they say in Bavaria. I did my best not to burst out laughing. Sarie held her breath.
Finally Deirdre broke into a grin. “All right, all right.” She fished another cigarillo out of her bag. “May I smoke in my r
oom?”
“You do anything you like, my dear, as long as you do it by yourself.”
It didn’t take long for all hell to pop loose. While Uncle Roy grudgingly settled down in the orchard rondawel, Lazarus reported to Pa Saida that Robert was throwing eggs against the wall of the shed.
“Well pal, I guess it’s your job to sort out your son,” Pa Saida said to William. “I would have thought that fancy boarding school you send your boys to would teach them more respect for God’s creation and other people’s property.”
William’s ears were getting redder by the second. “How do you know that your black labourer is telling the truth? He could be making it all up because he dropped the eggs.”
“Listen pal, this black labourer of mine hasn’t dropped an egg in all the 20 years he has worked on this farm, especially not against the wall of the shed.” Pa Saida’s ears had turned crimson as well. “And don’t you teach me anything about truth. You lawyers are known for specializing in taking the truth and twisting it to suit your fucking purpose.”
“Sidney!” Ma Saida said wringing her hands.
William got up and left the room pulling the belt out of his khaki shorts.
“A thrashing will only make the boy more rebellious,” Aunt Elspeth shouted after him.
Deirdre put her Guinness down. “I hope there are enough eggs left to make some decent egg nogg. Can’t have a decent party without a good shot of egg nogg.”
Over supper Auntie Elspeth started a major discussion about the vices of eating meat. I had heard most of the arguments before, but a new one was, that people who eat ‘dead flesh’, sooner or later look like the animal they consume.
Uncle Roy, who had never in his life spent one day without eating meat, fell around laughing. “Hell woman, where do you get that nonsense from? Look at me,” he hammered against his chest like Tarzan. “Do I look like a buck, hey? I’ve been brought up on venison, and still now on the farm I regularly shoot an impala or a blesbuck for the pot.” He speared a piece of steak with his fork. “And look at Mathilda here. She’s German. Germans eat a lot of pork. Does Mathilda look like a pig?”
“Roy!” Pa Saida banged his fist on the table.
“No offense meant, my girl,” Uncle Roy grinned at me. “On the contrary.”
Deirdre said: “These guys who have lived in the bush half their lives – you can’t teach them any manners.”
“It’s the meat that brings out the savage in them,” Aunt Elspeth declared.
“I dare say,” William began, “since the dawn of civilization…”
“What do you know about civilization?” Jesseye whined. “To belt a child! My poor darling Robert. I’ll bring him some food.”
The Saida kids grinned at each other. That little shit Robert had been banned to his room after his hiding. Served him right!
After Jesseye had exited to feed her poor child, Ma Saida managed to steer the conversation to more neutral grounds, but still, by the time we went to bed I was completely knackered.
Mein lieber Schollie, as an exchange student one sure gets a glimpse into what really goes on in people’s lives.
In the morning we had the giving out of the presents. Sarie’s gift shot out from behind the sisal Christmas tree.
“A puppy!” Sarie picked up the tiny copper coloured furball squealing with delight. “Marietta’s Cappucino had a litter of 13,” Ma Saida said. “They are all over her Haarsalon. We thought you would like to have one of them.”
“Thanks Ma,” Sarie beamed and then her face crumpled. “Do you think Trigger’s dead?”
“It’s very likely, my girlie,” Pa Saida put an arm around his daughter and gave her a squeeze. “But life has got to go on.”
The radio was blasting American Christmas carols while I unwrapped a mug with ‘Kneukelspruit’ written on it from Debbie, a small pocketknife from Hein, a bracelet made of heart shaped tigers’ eyes from Hummel and a blue scarf from Sarie. The scarf was more like a swap than a gift because I had given her my T-shirt with the brightly coloured spirals for it, the one Ma Saida called the ‘hippie rag’. The Saida parents gave me a book about the Freestate and I gave them a book about Bavaria. Robert got a set of little golf clubs from his father, and Uncle Roy couldn’t stop himself from presenting Aunt Elspeth with a packet of his home made buck biltong. “You vegetarians are all anaemic,” he said. “Keep this as an emergency ration; it might save your life one day.”
Uncle Roy’s gift for Deirdre was wrapped in pink paper with little hearts on it. Sarie nudged me in the ribs when Deirdre opened it.
“Gee Roy, another one! I’ve already got more than a dozen,” Deirdre said, holding up a sexy half-transparent nightie.
“Looks like it’s more a gift for Roy himself than for Deirdre,” I said to Sarie. “What do you think?”
“Uh… I dunno…I find it’s quite romantic, but my mother will hit the roof if she sees that thing.”
Sarie needn’t have worried. Her mother was totally engrossed in examining the greatest gift of them all, a TV set the Turvey-Johnsons had brought for their country cousins. William explained the various buttons to a raptured audience. I watched the audience. I had never seen anybody so fascinated by an ordinary thing like a TV set, but then, the Saidas had never seen a TV set in their lives.
“It’s about time that South Africa joins the rest of the world,” Uncle Roy said to me. “Weird place this. They’ve got the most advanced mining technology on the planet but the government keeps TV out of the country because it’s ‘evil’. Who can fathom their logic? I’ve never heard of a bigger load of crap. In Rhodesia we’ve had TV for the last 10 years and we’ve got less evil up there than they’ve got here.”
“Switch it on, switch it on,” Christo shouted excitedly.
“You still have to wait for 2 weeks,” William said. “They only start to broadcast on the 6th of January.”
“Our TV set is much bigger,” Daphne announced, “and I’ve already watched TV overseas.”
“Stupid show-off,” Hein hissed.
“Children, stop fighting,” Ma Saida said. “Today is Christmas.”
Daphne smoothed her pink dress, looked at Ma Saida and said importantly: “It’s just that rich people have got…things.”
“Hell, and that brat isn’t even at school yet,” Uncle Roy barked. “Let’s go and get some fresh air, Deirdre.”
Breakfast was peaceful because the Turvey-Johnsons were in the lounge listening to the Anglican church service, and also because Uncle Roy hadn’t seen Aunt Elspeth distribute his buck biltong to the dogs and to the blacks. That’s how it was done in this country. Things whitey didn’t want went to the dogs and to the blacks.
Hummel, Debbie, Hein and I went for a quick swim in the reservoir. The Saida kids couldn’t stay long; they had to listen to the Catholic church service at 11 o’clock.
One of Ma Saida’s big projects in life was to get her family to midnight mass one Christmas, but she postponed it from year to year because the nearest Catholic church was more than 100 km away. Ma Saida was sure that Mary, Holy Mother of Jesus, would understand that the next best thing the Saida family could do was to dress up, burn some incense and listen to the service on the radio. She had mentioned at breakfast that she would throw in a prayer, that next year the service would be broadcast at a more convenient time; this business of having it in the middle of the day interfered with her preparations for the dinner.
The grandparents Saida arrived in the early afternoon accompanied by Sidney’s sister Helen, her husband Luigi and their 3 months old twin girls.
The dinner table, set with Ma Saida’s best china, looked absolutely splendid. The maids had spent long hours folding the serviettes into flower-like configurations; paraffin lanterns cast small circles of light onto the immaculate white table cloth, and the coloured light bulbs glowed cheerily under the huge canopy of the trees. The crickets had started to chirp and night jars were calling. The only breaker of the peace was that dam
n generator thumping in the shed.
I was sitting between Aunt Elspeth and Luigi. Ma Saida had done her best to keep conflicting people as far away as possible from each other, so Uncle Roy was nearly out of earshot. That didn’t stop him and Aunt Elspeth to get into a heavy discussion about hunting.
“I think we should call our newest calf Jesus ‘cause it was born on Christmas day,” Hein said out of the blue.
Jesseye crossed herself and looked at Pa Saida. “You should teach your children more respect for Holy things, Sidney. This is a severe case of blasphemy.”
“What about teaching your kids more respect for human beings?” Uncle Roy grumbled.
Jesseye didn’t hear him. Roy was sitting too far away and his speech was getting more and more slurred.
“Jesus seems to have been an extremely tolerant man, Jesseye,” Luigi said quickly. “He’d probably be more open minded about the subject than you.”
“Jesus was a vegetarian,” Aunt Elspeth announced.
“Well, we know he ate fish,” Grandpa Saida said.
“He also drank wine,” Uncle Roy said pouring himself another glass. “And what’s that nonsense about giving a calf a bloody name. You give names to horses and dogs; they are a man’s best friends, but a calf…”
“It’s a special calf,” Hein insisted. “Not everybody is born on Christmas day.”
“Not even Jesus,” I said.
“I don’t believe this,” Jesseye crossed herself again.
I don’t want any of that German nonsense in my house,” Ma Saida said.
Phhh, some people just don’t want to know the facts of life.
The food was out of this world although in the weak glow of the orange bulb above me, I couldn’t always work out what I was eating. Aunt Elspeth seemed to have the same problem.
“What are these hard little things in the vegetables?” She asked me crunching several specimens between her teeth.
“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering myself. Mebbe it’s some kind of roasted Lebanese seed or something.”
I asked Luigi.
“What little, hard things? I haven’t got any. Are you…?” He stopped in the middle of the sentence and stared at the orange bulb.
“What’s the matter?”
Luigi stared at my plate and then at the bulb again, murmuring: “Mamma mia.”
I followed Luigi’s stare. A small beetle hit the bulb head on and crashed into my plate. Luigi put his index finger over his mouth for me to be quiet. Aunt Elspeth was also sitting under an orange bulb. Orange seemed to be the beetles’ favourite colour. We watched another one knocking himself out. He landed slap bang in the middle of Aunt Elspeth’s beans.