The rain is still pitter-patting around my silent house, large drops, after the enormous thunderstorm. We drove through it all the way from Birdhaven, it became hectic on Linksfield road where hail began. The hail, which had the little Mathilde and Apolline hysterical with joy as we approached the Airport, was growing bigger with each kilometer. You just don't get that kind of storm in lowlands of the Pas de Calais. The chatter from the back seat matched the cracking sound of the rather large stones hitting the windscreen and the car body.
I felt strangely alien in the swirling crowds of the departure desks, the coffee shops and the stringent controls, the girls were giggling through. They made it with their precarious passports and unabridged birth certificates and a little too much peri-peri sauce from Nando's in the hand luggage. They will have to make their own in St. Omer. Then they were gone, flying to the north.
The pillar of strength, Gaelle who was there through the weeks of the trauma of Aline's pain and death, drove back with me, in near silence punctuated by her knowledgeable navigation commands. Then Gaelle was gone and the house was bereft of chatting people and permanently active, bright little girls and very caring larger ones.
Just a little blue box on the window sill. It seems only a bit lighter than the live person I picked-up in my arms only ten days ago and carried to her bed.
I lit every possible light inside and outside of the house, tidied up a little but not too much, it's better to go slowly. Every candle is burning.
Now is the time to start again.
The beginning of the last lap. Without those familiar sounds and pictures of forty-five years.
If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do…” [Jim Croce]
In exasperation one day, my husband says to me “you have a dysfunctional relationship with time”. The pronouncement of his analysis, his finding, sounds so scientific, so clear, so final, it brooks no argument.
The clocks I have everywhere are ironic evidence that I can’t get enough of it – Time. There are literally three clocks in my study and at least one in every room. I have three simple but expensive swatch watches, chosen because they are lightweight, waterproof, have easy-to-read big faces, thin straps and I can barely feel them on my wrist. But still I remove them whenever I can, and so two are lost and one has a broken strap. So, right now, I do not have one on my wrist.
The reasons stare me in the face. Not the face of the watch. In the wristband. I cannot keep the watch on for more than a short period, perhaps 30 minutes, but mostly not even 10. There is always a good reason for removing it. I have to wash up, or bath the kids, so it might get ruined. Yes, it’s waterproof, but just in case, you know? Or the wristband – it is too tight, or too loose, so I remove it to bring some relief to my wrist. Or it gets too sweaty under it, and I have to give my wrist some air. Or despite how thin it is, it bumps awkwardly onto the laptop or desk as I type or write. So, I have to take it off, for comfort, for release from the pressure.
And so I lose track of time.
But I am extremely conscious of Time and how much has to be done, before it runs out.
Time does run out, like the sand in an old-fashioned, clinch-waisted timer. Each grain of sand is some thing. Some thing to do. And I try to get in as many grains, or get out of as many grains, what it is that I need to get done. Things as weighty as deep thinking, as light as dusting a desk, or picking up a piece of paper from the floor, or a feather left behind on the ground for my grandchild by a bird flying off.
My husband’s pronouncement, however, disturbs me. It rankles. It sounds true; it sounds so clever.
I use many of my left-over grains of time to ponder this. Often. Although it sounds true, I know it isn’t. But I can’t say why.
At last, I think of a comeback for him. It may seem a bit lame, I admit, but there is a grain of truth in it too, I think and smile smugly.
“Perhaps,” I say, “it is YOU who have a dysfunctional relationship with time?”
And my argument? I am an African. A South African, like my husband is. And in Africa, amongst other Africans, (unlike those who, somewhere in their lineage far far back in time, are of German descent – hint, hint, husband), Time is not ‘of the essence’. Rather, what is ‘of the essence’ is savouring, nurturing, feeding relationships with people, with one’s environment, and not with Time. This is what makes the hands of my clock, my grains of sand, move. This is what takes up, deserves, my time. And there is not a clock in the world that can measure this. They just do not have enough Time.
“And so what,” he responds, “if not being ON time, is disrespectful of other people’s time?”
Hmmm. Stumped? No. I realise that there isn’t a simple comeback. I’ll have to ponder a more complex argument. And what could that be? Only Time will tell.
When I am four
I pull the telly over
A black and white monster
Comes crashing to the floor.
1966
The decade in full swing
Mary Quant the very thing
Along with pick-up sticks.
Flashes of that day
Come Instamatic back
Chiefly the resounding thwack
Of carpet meeting cathode ray.
Truly aghast
At what I’ve gone and done
I dread tirade to come
Nuclear trumpet blast.
I think this was
A summer Saturday
Grandstand’s wild wordplay
Making mad Colemanballs.*
My father’s life
Was cricket, sporting stuff
I had already shown
So very little interest in.
So when that day
I grabbed the Rediffusion
I made my feelings clear
In my own childish way.
Already knowing
As children often do
That relationship blues
Were likely in the offing.
Within two years
The die was cast and fate
Made 1968 the date
Of change, divorce and tears.
* Colemanballs is a term coined by Private Eye magazine to describe verbal blunders made by sports commentators.
“We will take the minutes as read,” says the CPF chairperson from his seat, waving two typed pages in the air.
A heavy, solid, silence presses against the words.
It is 1996. This is one of the first CPF meetings to be held in our town. CPF stands for Community Policing Forum.
A table and two chairs are at one end of the room, and several rows of chairs have been set out facing the table. The room is full. Standing room only.
Chairperson, Counselor Pierre Koep, a short, dapper man with a well-trimmed white beard continues diligently…. “Item one on the agenda….”
The secretary, Captain Martin, a policeman, is seated next to him, feigning indifference. They discuss the item with each other for a few minutes.
A hand is raised hand from the floor.
“Tolika”
“What?”
“Tolika!”
“What?”
Someone says: “MamaKota is asking for a translation. She does not speak English.”
There is a moment of surprised silence. Serious consultation in isiXhosa, heads looking around to see who is there. “Bukelwa! Bukelwa will translate.”
Bukelwa moves to the front of the room and stands to one side of the table, hands held in front of her, waiting.
Mr Koep continues his discussion of item 1 of the agenda, politely, obediently, stopping after each sentence for Bukelwa to translate.
A hand from the floor stops the proceedings.
“Will the chairperson please start the meeting with a prayer, because that is the way it is done?”
Koep falters, but nods.
Umfundisi stands, taking off his hat. We all stand. The lengthy translated prayer thanks the Almighty God for this opportunity to meet, and asks Him to be with us in our hearts, as we make the decisions that will have to be made. Amen.
We sit down again.
Koep rises.
A hand goes up.
“Please will the chairperson read through the minutes of the last meeting… from the beginning? Members want to know what happened, who was there, and what was decided.”
The chairperson, trapped between the past and the future of his country, holds tightly onto his patience.
“Minutes of the meeting of the Greater Plettenberg Bay Community Policing Forum held on Tuesday 12 August 1997 at the office of the mayor.”
“Ingxelo yentlanganiso yaCommunity Policing Forum yaGreater Plettenberg Bay, ngolwesibini, 12 ka Ogasti, 1997, e-offisini kwemeyara.”
Sentence by sentence, the minutes are translated by Bukelwa.
The meeting starts coming alive. There are nods, grunts, murmured asides. A sigh of satisfaction rolls around the room as the minutes are finished being read.
The people have been there for over an hour.
Mr Koep asks if the meeting can continue.
There is a hand from the floor.
“RDP policy says that a counselor in the municipality may not also be a chairperson of a civic forum like the CPF. This is because there may be a conflict of interest, as the forum advises the counselors.”
Mr Koep is now overwhelmed. Caught and helpless, he asks if we can “please, just finish this meeting first?”
“No. Mr Koep can come and sit in the audience with us, and Jeffrey Rangula, the vice-chair will take his place.”
Koep storms out of the room.
Jeffrey takes his place at the table.
A member of the audience then proposes that the meeting elect a secretary from the floor, because we do not think the police should hold the secretariat function of this civic forum. The motion is carried.
Capt. Martin leaves the table, slowly.
I am elected secretary. I join Jeffrey.
Jeffrey welcomes everyone to the meeting, thanks the members for their confidence in him, and promises to do his best to lead this important forum on behalf of the whole community.
He returns to the first item on the agenda. The meeting moves forward. Bukelwa continues to translate.
This time from isiXhosa into English, especially for me.
“O sole mio sta ‘nfronte a te…” Mario’ s light tenor voice rings out with desperate longing while singing the old Neapolitan song. We are sitting on the front steps of our house in the gathering dusk, looking for the first stars to make their appearance in the sky above the row of poplars closer to the road. There is a smell of freshly mowed grass, and when the gentle breeze stirs the leaves a little, one can even smell a faint whiff of cow dung coming from the cow sheds. Guiseppe sits one step above us. Like Mario he wears a snow-white short-sleeved vest and long khaki trousers with brown army boots, and he softly sings along. I know the words of most of their songs and when I sing along they smile, look at each other and say “Che bella voce, you be opera singer one day.”
I am curious. “Opera singer? What does an opera singer do?”
“Ah, seeng, of course, and make a lotsa money!”
Mario can scarcely comprehend that anyone in the world does not know what an opera singer is, even if it is an inquisitive seven-year-old girl with long brown plaits on the southern tip of Africa, many miles away from his beloved Bologna. In his quaint English he tells me of the marvels of opera and I listen, enraptured. Could it be that there is a place, far from here, in the wonderful country called Italy where they come from, where you can enthral people with your singing and also make a living from it? My father often reads to us aloud from the Bible about earning your bread by the sweat of your brow, and here Mario tells this incongruous tale of earning a living just by dressing in beautiful clothes and singing on stage. Mario is a great story teller and perhaps this is just one of the stories he tells to amuse me.
By the time Mario sings “La donna é mobile” from Rigoletto, Guiseppe gets up to help my mother prepare supper in the kitchen. He ducks under the strings of laboriously handmade pasta on lines stretching the length of our big kitchen, before he carefully gathers some of it for the big pot of boiling water on the stove. Our Italians do not think much of our local pasta and rather make their own, no matter how much time it takes.
My mother, wearing one of her embroidered aprons, stands in front of the Ellis de Luxe coal stove from where she supervises the kitchen activities. Guiseppe also regularly kneads the dough for the three loaves of brown bread that we need every day, while my mother stands next to him with a white cloth in her hand with which she occasionally dabs the perspiration from his forehead and face. We are all longing for soft white bread, but there is a war raging somewhere, far away, and it is prohibited to use white flour and to eat white bread, so we have to be content with brown bread.
Soon the entire family – my parents, three big brothers, my elder sister, Mario, Guiseppe and I – sit around the big oak table with the golden glow of the oil lamp overhead. From where I sit between my parents I smell the divine aroma rising from the freshly baked bread, the herby pasta sauce and the salad, glistening with the oily dressing that the Italians prefer, even though they bemoan the fact that real olive oil is not available. I can hardly wait for my father to say grace. We all close our eyes, father thanks God for what we are about to receive, the Italians cross themselves and, as one big family, we start our evening meal.
***
“Our Italians” were prisoners of war. They were captured in Somalia and Abyssinia during the Second World War and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp at Zonderwater near Pretoria. My father owned a small dairy at Largo on the edge of the East Rand, and needed to expand the cow sheds and cooling rooms, so he applied for permission to employ some of the prisoners of war from Zonderwater. And that is how Mario and Guiseppe and, after them, Rafaello, Antonio and Peppino became part of our lives and an important part of my youthful thinking and future development.
Gentle Mario was my favourite among the Italians. I liked the way he always sang while working. Singing came to him as naturally as breathing. He had a gentleness about him that matched his soft-grained voice. His brown eyes were rather sad, even though he often smiled showing even white teeth in a healthy sun-tanned face.
Guiseppe was taller, more cynical and sported an Errol Flynn moustache below his elegant Roman nose. Homesick for his hometown of Mantua, he was disgusted by the never-ending war and in broken English told us how San Pietro is waiting for all the world leaders to condemn them to inferno. Teasingly, my father asked him but what about his own leader, Mussolini? Whereupon he became agitated: “Especially Mussolini! Inferno! Inferno! And he will have to walk with no shoes over very sharp nails to get there. Me, Guiseppe Corti, will stand there next to San Pietro to see that it happens.” With an expression of extreme pain on his face he demonstrated on tiptoe how he hoped this mighty leader of his nation would one day suffer.
My father tried to calm him by asking what would happen when he reached the Pearly Gates. Guiseppe’s expression softened: “Ah, mister Deysel, avanti in Paradiso” and with a sweeping gesture of his long arms he swept away all imaginary obstacles on the road to Paradise. My father was thrilled to hear that according to Oracle Guiseppe he would go straight to Paradise. We all laughed and tried to forget that there was a war raging thousands of miles away.
In the mornings Mario would take me, on the frame of our bicycle, to school some distance away and collect me again in the afternoons. Along the way he would tell me opera stories and talk longingly about his wife and baby. At home he showed us photographs of his moglie e bambino, his beautiful young wife and fat baby boy. When the time came for Mario and Guiseppe to return to camp after their allotted time with us, I was in tears. The stables and cooling rooms that they built were like monuments that reminded me of the magical time that they stayed with us.
The other men, Rafaello, Antonio and Peppino, who followed in their footsteps, did not make the same impression on me. After the war we received a few letters and postcards from Italy, but it stopped after a while. Little did Mario know that, with his stories of opera and through listening to their beautiful language and songs, a seed had been planted in my mind that would bear fruit in a wonderful way later in my life.
You can buy Magriet’s book FROM LARGO TO LARMENIER by emailing her here.
The swimming pool is calm and the water is freezing cold, I know this without even putting a finger in there. Such a beautiful setting really. The swimming pool complex smack in the middle of pristine fynbos, rolling up the hills a carpet of green indigenous vegetation, including some red data species all preserved on the farm, a private nature reserve. From the pool, especially from the infinity side of it, the view is simply magnificent. Down below there is the Biesbosch lake, a massive water expanse usually brimming with speed boats and water sport fanatics but not right now, it’s quieted down nicely in the late afternoon. The majestic Langeberg mountains to the back of the lake, rolling away all the way to Jamestown in the distant East and framing the coastline of Jana Bay. In the valley below the pool leading to the Chainoqua river. I remember our outing with a few tourists once. We took them on a ride through the reserve in the Land Rover to plant some trees there. It was quite the little adventure traversing up and through the bossies and protea fields, all huddled inside with our spades and excitement to give back to nature. Bart has done some amazing work in clearing the valley of alien vegetation, and in doing so, helped the water flow freely again from the kloof into the river. Still a long way to go but fantastic progress nonetheless.
As a local boy, I never really understood what all the fuss with the alien trees was all about. Now I know better thanks to Bart. Alien trees and vegetation were brought here, largely thanks to the old Dutch colonial masters, to build their settlement because our part of the world didn’t have many trees, at least none good enough to build their European civilisation in Africa. The trouble with these aliens though, they suck up far too much of the water, leaving the indigenous species far behind and adding to the burden of an already drought-prone country. So, they have to be removed at all cost to preserve our natural landscape, he said. I actually thought it funny or rather ironic that it took an expat Dutchman to teach me about my own land and correcting what the Dutch did to it all those hundreds of years ago.
In the distance to the west of the pool lies the beach, where the river deltas into the Atlantic ocean and where many a bottlenose dolphin can be found. This is the glorious vantage point from the pool and the setting of my world. In more ways than one, like the setting of the sun, so my old life and outlook was about to change for ever.
It’s nearing the end of my shift. Bart has just instructed me to leave my desk and to go to the pool. Guus is waiting there for me. He has been bugging me for the last few days and insisting on teaching me how to swim. He found it so strange that a local, born and bred in a coastal town, didn’t know how to swim. Coming from Amsterdam, surrounded by water where every child is required to pass a formal swimming exam, it was rather strange to him that I couldn’t swim. He made it his personal mission before going back to Holland to teach me and impart his wisdom upon me. And now he also managed to enlist the help of my boss.
I was scared, unsure and insecure. I mean, I barely knew the man! Sure, we’ve been getting along swimmingly while they were my guests in the guesthouse, but this is taking it to the next level. He was such a nice man though. I think we had a liking of each other. Jasper also, but not as much as his partner, Guus, the tall slender Dutchman. Did I mention how tall he was? Prior to this encounter, I’ve never actually met a man taller than two metres. This, apparently, is quite normal back in Holland where, on average, the tallest people in the world reside. Guus had a very distinct deep frown right between his eyes which gave him a rather angry sort of look, even though he is one of the gentlest of people you’ll meet. Strong and highly intelligent this lawyer friend Guus of mine was. Without his horn-rimmed glasses on, his eyes were quite squinty, almost Chinese-looking. He had this way of speaking, almost like someone with a speech impediment and a very heavy Dutch accent. In my ear it sounded like he was swallowing his words and it was rather difficult to follow his conversation or mumbling at times, at least in the beginning this was the case. I later learned that it was considered posh Dutch the way he spoke, like the queen of England but then in English of course.
Bart too had a posh Dutch accent and he later explained to me what they say to people who spoke like that back in Holland. They are called “kakkers” in Dutch, which in my native Afrikaans means something quite opposite to what I imagined posh would be! But there he was, waiting by the freezing swimming pool with his big smile, kitted out in speedos and goggles, shouting in Dutch: “Kom we gaan zwemmen!”, come let’s go swimming!
Growing up in this small town where everyone knows your name and business, where everyone goes to church and believes in the same bible and conservative teachings, I had a rather conventional small town Afrikaans Calvinist upbringing. I have always been the smartest kid in town and school, that’s how I was recognised by everyone. The clever boy with the nice accent. So, it didn’t come as too big a surprise that I got accepted to study at Stellenbosch University. However, after just more than two and a half years of study, it became evident that I was not doing so well. My grades kept going down and I was underperforming so badly that the University eventually decided not to allow me to complete my studies. I got kicked out basically.
So, there I was, proud young man with the weight of the family and an entire community on my shoulders, and I failed. I’ve let everyone down. All that hard-earned money that dad spent on me, that the bursary provided me, that the State poured into me, all for nothing. So much for being clever, for being the smartest kid in town, for getting straight As from sub A and continuing into high school. Although not quite as many As in high school, to be fair. High school was a different monster all on its own. There again I experienced being a first. The first person of colour from my community to enter an historically White Model C school. This was just after the end of apartheid. I remember entering the school in those early days and being able to count the number of non-White pupils on my one hand out of a sea of White children. Even so, I still managed to thrive academically, and while there were quite a number of kids smarter than me, I ended in the top 10 of my matric class.
Overcoming the odds and making the transition successfully, I was ready for Stellenbosch and getting the first ever degree in my family. There was also a deep sense of duty as well, being one of the first recipients of a free South Africa. My sister, 10 years prior, was in the streets marching and fighting for the end of unjust laws. It was their generation’s duty to fight the old system and it was my generation’s duty to build the new system. The weight of the country and of Nelson Mandela also firmly on my shoulders. I failed.
Regression followed. The short but eventful little steps into a new world of opportunity in Stellenbosch and the big city, dashed by my own actions. I have not only failed my family, my town and my country, I have also failed me. The chance to grow, to develop, to change, to escape the confines of conservative small-minded, small-town politics and people. I had to go back. How cruel that self-inflicted fate was. For the next two years I spent life as a recluse, unemployed, supported by parents with no friends or intellectual peers. All I had was my own thoughts and they weren’t very forgiving of my situation and of what I’ve lost through my own fault. The mind is a powerful thing and the negative self-talk soon became a full-blown onslaught on my sanity.
When I got the job as day manager on the farm, it felt like light at the end of the tunnel, though the negative thoughts persisted. I would sit many a day by the swimming pool, alone and weeping. Crying for my fate, for being stuck in the town and mindset. I was desperately yearning for more but not seeing how the more could come. It’s an interesting thing how you can put on a fake smile and appear to be so happy yet feel empty inside.
Compounding this were the personal feelings of attraction to other boys and not feeling free to explore or express that because of my upbringing and conservative Christian beliefs. It was a mess of epic proportions in my mind, slowing eating away inside of me.
And there he was standing by the pool, my tall Dutch saviour. He really did save me. Jumping into the ice-cold swimming pool with him was like washing myself off from all that negativity holding me back. Fighting, kicking and screaming, I jumped in not knowing I was on the cusp of great adventures. Little did I know how things were unfolding for me. Guus was the exact person that I needed to meet and the great facilitator that I required to get me back on track.
I held on to him for dear life as he tried to take me to the deep end. The water was freezing and I was as scared as a little child battling with him and with my fear. It felt strange being so close to another man, an older man, a half-naked older man. And here I was half-naked too and having to cling on to him. Feeling and being so exposed, fear, panic, angst, all these emotions bare. In these sorts of settings, when you have to confront all those negative feelings and then expose them and yourself to another, I think that is what bonds people together. In that moment of completely giving up and putting my life in his hands, that was probably the moment when we sealed our fate together.
Two nights later we went out for dinner in town and then they asked me. In that moment, I knew that my life would never be the same again. There was no hesitation or thinking required on my part, all that was needed was to say yes. I’ve reached a critical stage in my life at that point with the realisation that all the personal hardships and emotional abuse was about to come to an end. My yearning and desire to get away had finally materialised with their invitation to join them in Amsterdam to manage their small bed and breakfast business. And just like that, within six months of their departure back to Amsterdam, I was on a plane leaving behind an old life and jetting towards my new adventures in Holland.