The cathedral bell strikes three in the afternoon as we drive into Grahamstown by minibus. The town sprawls lazily between arid shallow hills. It could easily be South Africa’s Far West. It’s Saturday and winter is in the air, but there are tangerines in the trees. The Africans call them naartjies.
The respectable houses with their respectable front gardens still smell of Queen Victoria. Soul catchers have tossed in a church or two for good measure – the New Christian Church, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, the Rebirth Church... the variant convictions all have their own place of worship. And they’ve also done their best when it comes to education. There are more schools than shops for the town’s sixty-thousand inhabitants, not counting the township population, an unverifiable 180,000 – some even say 500,000 – hungry bellies.
Grahamstown is clean, especially the residential areas. No litter, no stray scraps of paper, not even the tiniest thistle on the well-trimmed lawns. Everything is maintained to perfection. By the blacks. For the whites. Where there’s a need there’s a living to be made. It creates balance and order. And to ensure security, there are surveillance cameras, barbed-wire balconies, well-trained dogs.
The annual theatre festival brings a little extra for everyone, even the abundance of beggars. But when the visitors leave, the town falls back into a deep sleep. In Grahamstown, there’s no future.
Light-headed from lack of sleep, these first impressions slither across my mind’s eye, elusive as blurred photos. But what does it matter? I know why I’m here. I have a perfect plan in my head and a computer in my suitcase. Not to mention a camera, ink, a rubber, paintbrushes, new coloured pencils, a scanner for you-never-know-what, and ten new and expensive Moleskine sketchbooks. We’re talking more than a bit of scribbling here. My citybook promises to be unique in the series. Image and text together in one single narrative. If I can’t say it in words, I’ll draw it and vice versa. I might even come back next year and read it at the theatre festival, in the form of a performance perhaps. Word and image to the music of crickets and vuvuzelas.
I even have a title: The Mothers of Grahamstown. A universal theme, especially in Africa. The jury is still out on the subtitles, but there will definitely be more than one. On the plane, I formulated a series of ten questions about mothers. I also plan to take photos and invite the people I interview to sketch their mother with my new coloured pencils, purchased especially for the purpose. Wow, they’re amazing. No one would dare say no to such a set of pencils.
Everything is running according to plan. Cameras open doors, and people are drawn to mine like flies. Some strike a pose, others do an ‘act’, and all of them want to see their picture. A man tucking into a packed lunch asks if I can take a picture of him with his sandwich. He straightens his back and peers proudly into the lens, like Napoleon after a victory on the battlefield. It’s time to make my move.
‘Tell me something about your mother,’ I ask in my best English.
‘She died.’ The man examines his sandwich as if he’s no longer sure about what he’s stuffing into his mouth.
While I was prepared for this kind of response, I hadn’t thought much about how to handle such situations. I also wasn’t in the mood for tears.
‘Oh,’ I say and ‘uh,’ and move on immediately to the next question.
‘What did your mother look like?’
‘O, she looked so beautiful, soooo beautiful.’ His face lights up, his eyes twinkle, and an excess of teeth fills his smile.
I’m saved.
He takes another bite and tells me with relish about his deceased mother.
‘Her name was Emily, and she was very shy.’ Mother and son hadn’t seen each other for twenty years and ‘when we met again, we both cried all the time. I cried. And she cried. And I cried. Parents should stay with their children. Do you have children?’
I nod and slowly unzip my pencil case. The man’s eyes are even more radiant than his teeth.
‘Can you draw your mother?’
He picks a pencil, concentrates, and sketches his mother, tiny and bald.
This was a good plan.
Wherever I go, my semi-professional camera attracts the curious like flies round a honey pot. People spontaneously begin to tell their story. Beautiful stories about perfect mothers... never speak ill of the dead. But also that one story, about the mother who lives a thousand kilometres away, is good for box of Kleenex. By the evening of a satisfying first day I’ve collected so much material I congratulate myself on my boldness.
It rains at night here. A good thing, the experts say, because the rain cleans the air. The evenings promise to be less nippy and disagreeable. But the following morning it’s still overcast and grey. I’m determined to stick to my tight schedule, so I waterproof my camera, my sketchbook and myself and hit the streets. My head is hidden and unrecognisable under the hood of my thick winter coat.
‘Hey mam,’ someone shouts.
Did I hear that right? Mam?
I turn and look around for the little boys who had used the same term of address the previous day, youngsters with white painted faces who perform their own side show all over the city as a spin-off to the official theatre festival. But there are no begging youngsters to be seen. That’s when I bump into her, the girl from yesterday, the girl with the secret, the first girl that had told me about her mother. She walks up to me and gives me a hug. Was she the one who shouted ‘mam’? ‘Mam’ meaning ‘madam’? Or was it ‘mam’ meaning ‘mom’? Mummy in other words. Whatever the case, my heart starts to race for a moment. A mother’s heart is easily appeased. They’re well aware of that round here.
‘Hello sissie,’ I say, ‘how are you today?’
‘No good business,’ she shrugs her shoulders, ‘rainy day.’
She walks with me, dragging her feet. She has a bag of tangerines hanging from every finger. Her way of surviving. We talk about the weather and she shows me her dog-eared shoes just as the day before.
‘I need new shoes,’ she says.
I gave her 70 rand yesterday because she had been willing to talk to me for so long and had lost ‘business’ in the meantime. She says she’s put the money aside for the school fee.
‘School fee?’ I ask.
She nods.
‘Oh yes,’ I say. I see. What is that exactly?
‘I need money for shoes. Very uncomfortable.’ She pulls back a loose flap of threadbare rubber. Her pink sole curls like a snail in its shell. Ashamed.
‘Bon,’ I say, ‘shoes, alors. Let’s go,’ as if everyone in the African world understands French.
‘Show me where we can find shoes.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I want high shoes,’ she adds and points to my boots.
I briefly consider taking off my boots there and then and handing them to her with a bow and a big heart. The urge to do good is seeping from my every pore. But my West Flemish level-headedness – others call it stinginess – suppresses my missionary zeal just in time.
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘high shoes it is, because you need them for your job.’
We find an all-round shop – specialised shoe shops are few and far between in Grahamstown – but even here supplies are limited and everything smells of plastic and nylon and made in China. There’s a rack full of boots at the back of the shop. Kinky boots. I suddenly understand why I’ve seen so many elegant black women wandering around in uncomfortably high heels. If you can afford high heels you must have money, or a job that expects you to wear high heels. But not my tangerine girl.
‘No high heels, absolutely not,’ I say.
Unfortunately there isn’t much of a choice. It’s either sandals and trainers or high heel boots and pumps. And they’re all made in China. Quality: zero.
‘Maybe we’ll find something over there.’
I point to the children’s department and explain that we’ve more chance of finding flat boots among the children’s things.
‘No, no kid shoes.’ She shakes her head, insulted. She knows what she wants.
We try one shop after the other and then move on to the market. In terms of style and quality we go from bad to worse. This is what they call shoes here, I think to myself in front of a mountain of premoulded plastic. And they have so many animals to skin! The poor people could use leather soles, by the way, since the distance they cover day after day – from the townships to the city and back – is enough to exhaust a step counter.
‘No good shoes,’ I say. I want quality. Because she’s in my company, the girl is even allowed into shops where the sign above the door warns in no uncertain terms: ‘Right of admission reserved.’ But even in these ‘expensive’ stores the shoes still come from China. I do my sums and figure that charity might be one thing but 65 euros is quite another and a little too much for an opening feel-good action. I’m only on my second day and have fourteen more to go. I tell her I think these boots are too expensive. She nods bashfully and we move on. Suddenly she takes my arm. I press it close and my heart swells with satisfaction. You would think we were mother and daughter having fun together on a shopping spree. And I hate shopping. I caress her cheek and notice her deformed ear. She told me about it on the first day. It’s her secret. Poor thing.
‘What do you think of these?’ I ask. ‘Or these?’ I show her a couple of pairs of reasonably priced shoes. She goes for the cheaper pair, but the difference is only 60 rand or thereabouts so I tell her to pick the ones she likes the best.
‘You have to wear them, not me.’ I sound as if I’m talking to my own daughters. ‘These,’ she says.
I pretend to be an expert and carefully examine her choice: sole, lining and heel. They look like my own boots, but in a cheaper, artificial leather finish. Quality has to be important. If they’re shiny and new, the quality will take care of itself, won’t it?
I tell her to try them on. She takes off her tattered footwear. Why is she wearing brown tights?
‘You need socks,’ I say, ‘cotton socks, none of that nylon stuff. Cotton is better for sweaty feet.’ But then I notice that the tights are her own bare skin. The boots are a perfect fit, she says. I’m not convinced, so I squeeze the toes and leave a dent in them that will stay there for the rest of the day. But these are the ones she wants, and for some incomprehensible reason she insists on size six. Two sizes too big. I buy cotton socks to help fill the gap. We head for the cash desk.
The cashier is suspicious and wants to know how we’re related.
‘We’re not,’ I say.
‘Does the girl work for you perhaps?’ Is this an accusation, a warning or a reprimand?
‘No,’ I answer.
‘Oh,’ she says, looking a little miffed, ‘she should be lucky.’
Sadly her luck is out that day. For once I don’t have enough cash on me and my cards refuse to work. I could have returned the boots to the rack and come back for them later, but the girl is already wearing them. Her old sneakers are dangling undisturbed in a plastic bag at her side. While she waits for me in the shop, I leg it back to my room to get some money, dodging some heavy raindrops on the way.
I pass the other vendors in her clan. They smile at me in the hope that they might be the lucky ones the following day. Will they be jealous when they see her later in her new boots? I picture a major scene – with lots of kicking and screaming – in which her girlfriends try to steal the boots. One holds her legs while another pulls them off one by one. I’ll tell the girl to take care of her new shoes and even to polish them every day. The blacks are good at that. Maybe the time has also come for her to look for a better job, something with a more stable income and the chance of a better life.
When I return drenched to the shop, she’s still there on the bench with her new boots on. She smiles and runs to meet me. She walks a bit like a penguin. Not surprising in shoes two sizes too big. The dent in the toe of her left boot grins at me. But it doesn’t bother her.
‘Did you put the socks on?’ I ask. She shows me the unopened duopack I bought for her.
‘You have to put them on,’ I insist, ‘it’s warmer.’
She nods and hands the second pair to me.
‘No,’ I say, ‘both for you.’ I’m tempted to explain that she should change her socks every other day, because these boots are so synthetic. You’re feet will stink after one day. But I bite my lip. The line between doing good and wining paternalistically is dangerously thin. I pay and we leave the shop.
‘These boots are made for walking,’ I laugh, and come close to nudging her. She nods and stares indifferently into space. If they’ve never even heard of Alice in Wonderland in Grahamstown, how are they going to savour my musical one-liners?
‘So what’s next?’ she asks.
‘I have to work,’ I answer, ‘earn money, you know.’ Holy Mother, my Catholic account wastes no time in presenting itself for settlement.
‘I’m hungry,’ she says, ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘you should start looking for a better job. With those cute boots, you’ll be able to find different work anywhere. Try to find something more secure, cleaning perhaps or car security, opening doors at the theatre festival.’ She promises she’ll do her best.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
I make something up.
‘And yours?’
‘I told you yesterday, it’s in your book.’
I laugh embarrassedly.
‘Don’t you have a job I could do?’
I tell her I live in Europe, in Belgium, and that I have two very expensive daughters.
‘I want to go to Belgium one day,’ she says.
‘Very cold there.’
‘You have a pretty coat.’
Cheaper than your boots, I think to myself, I bought it in the sales.
‘I need a warm coat as well.’
I suddenly feel uncomfortable. Is she being smart with me or sly?
‘Come,’ I say, ‘I have to go.’ She agrees to take me to the townships later that day and we arrange to meet at five. We can take the taxi the cleaning ladies use. Seven rand per person and I’m paying.
It’s noon and I hurry back to my hotel for a bite to eat. Football hysteria drones through the open café windows. This year South Africa is hosting the world cup, and even in this quiet corner of the country the vuvuzelas are humming like bees on a butterfly bush. If someone scores a goal, the place erupts. The people in the cafés can follow the games on television, but the people on the street are no less enthusiastic. Even the beggars join in the high-spirits.
Supporters have gathered round a tiny screen in my hotel dining room. It’s almost as if their actions have been directed by a film director. I admire their perfectly timed group choreography. I catch sight of the girl through the window, walking back and forth between the parked cars, bags of oranges dangling from her fingers like heavy buckets of water. She insists on hanging around the front door. It worries me.
At five o’clock she’s waiting for me on the other side of the street. She sees me first.
I wave and cross towards her. She’s wet and her nose is running.
‘You had a nice day?’ I ask.
‘I have a problem,’ she says, ‘come with me.’
We head for the grounds of Rhodes University. The grass is boggy so we look around for a tree trunk to sit on. I notice she’s exchanged the skirt she had on this morning for a pair of jeans. Had she already been wearing them under her skirt? Or did she rush off home to change? Maybe she has another sponsor? We sit side by side on a mouldy chunk of tree, both in jeans and both wearing our black boots. We’re both wearing the same scarf around our neck, a film festival freebie. Hers is slightly damaged. I tried to cut off the logo with the wrong pair of scissors and it went a bit askew. It doesn’t bother her. She wears her scarf with style, fringes neatly to the front, mutilated bit to the back.
‘Come,’ I say, ‘tell me the problem.’
‘I cannot go back now; I need money for the rent. They will kick me out if I don’t pay today.’
‘How much?’
‘150 rand.’
15 euros or thereabouts.
I can feel the money smouldering in my bag.
‘Why do they want it today,’ I ask, ‘can’t they wait?’
‘They want it now, otherwise they won’t let me in.’ The expression on her face is beyond my comprehension. She wipes her nose with her sleeve. Is this rehearsed or is she genuine?
‘I don’t know where I’m going to sleep,’ she says.
Anywhere, I think, except my room. I begin to lose patience.
‘I need money,’ she says a second time.
I ask her what happened to the 70 rand from yesterday.
‘I told you this morning, that’s for school fee.’ She’s annoyed.
Aha, so that’s your game, I think to myself. Fair enough. I get annoyed too.
‘But the school is closed,’ I insist. ‘It’s holiday.’ I feel cheated. I was planning to go to the townships today to gather material for my story. She promised she would take me, but she appears to have forgotten.
‘You have money for the rent?’
I try to explain that she can use the 70 rand from yesterday towards the rent. Then she’ll only owe half.
‘Don’t you have anything on you?’ she asks adamantly. She leers at my jacket pocket, where I stuffed some money before I left to pay for the taxi. Had she noticed the glowing banknotes? Street people see more than we do.
‘No,’ I say, ‘and if I’d known, I’d have given you money for the rent instead of buying those boots.’ Does she get my point? She nods.
‘I’ve used up my money for today,’ I say. ‘Tomorrow I can take some more from the cash machine.’ Cash machine? She looks at me as if I have magic powers.
‘Listen.’ I lay down the line. ‘No money today.’
She seems to get the message.
‘Where do I sleep? I have to pay now.’ She starts to turn on the tears.
‘Don’t you have a girlfriend ...?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘no money, no bed. I’ll have to sleep outside. It’ll be cold and dangerous. What if I’m raped?’
‘Give me some food,’ she says, ‘I am so hungry.’
I suddenly feel hungry myself. It’s five-thirty. My afternoon snack seems ages ago. As if she can read my mind, she tells me that she hasn’t eaten all day, not a single bite. And yesterday was the same. And she has nothing for later. I give her 10 rand for a taxi, that way she can at least get home or wherever her bed is, or her mat on the floor.
‘That’s not enough to buy milk and bread. Please. I am so hungry.’
I’ve had enough and I tell her I can’t be bothered anymore with the townships today. It’s getting dark and the weather has turned nasty. I get to my feet and walk away without looking to see if she’s following me. I see her later between the parked cars with a bag of oranges still hanging from every finger.
‘I am so hungry,’ she mutters. ‘I didn’t sell anything. Buy me an orange.’
I give her another 10 rand. She can keep the oranges. I already have three bags in my room.
I have a hard time sleeping that night.
What if she was telling me the truth?
When I step outside the following morning she suddenly appears at my side. She says she’ll go with me to the townships tomorrow, in the morning at nine. She’s found a free house, but still needs to find some bedding. On top of that, she still has to find the rest of the rent she’s due.
‘But if you have a free house then surely you don’t have to pay any rent,’ I insist.
An uneasy conversation follows.
‘Help me, I need money for blankets.’
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘If I give you 80 rand today, you’ll be back for something else tomorrow, and the next day.’
‘I’ll buy you flowers,’ she says.
‘I don’t want flowers. Do something more useful with your money.’
We make a deal. I give her 80 rand to cover her rent together with the 70 I already gave her. At the end of next week I’ll give her some more money for the school fee. She’s doesn’t seem to get the point at first, but she nods. I give her the money, half a baguette, a packet of biscuits and a chunk of cheese. She promises to take me to the townships the following morning at nine. She’s going to introduce me to her friends, and once I’ve had the chance to talk to them we’ll come back to town together. She promises not to ask for anything else.
‘OK,’ I say, and head off.
She’s not there the following morning when I stick my head out at nine or go out to buy a newspaper at nine-thirty. She’s not there when I get back from the paper shop at ten or when I check again at ten-thirty. I decide to visit the museum instead. Suddenly I catch sight of her standing on the museum steps. For once I see her first and I head in the opposite direction.
‘Mam mam,’ I hear someone shout. A little beggar boy with his face painted white is standing in front of me.
‘I’ve no money,’ I grunt.
‘That lady wants to talk to you.’
‘Not now,’ I say, ‘I’ve work to do.’
Now she’s one step ahead of me. I pop into the supermarket and when I come out I scan the street for her. I recognise the red woolly hat she wears every day between the parked cars in front of my hotel. She’s hanging around my neighbourhood yet again. I duck into a side street and walk round the block. She doesn’t know that my hotel has a night entrance in another street. That way I manage to avoid her for the rest of the day. I picture her waiting for me for hours, bristling with expectation. Is she likely to be bothered that I’m put out? But I’m not in the mood for her today. Perhaps tomorrow.
I wake up screaming in the middle of the night. There’s a shadow in the corner of my room. When I sit up the shadow disappears. That night I make a decision. I plan to go to the townships on my own the next morning. It’s safer during the day. There’s also a parade with giant marionettes. Someone told me it’s only a half-hour walk. I don’t need a guide.
I head out of town at nine the following day. The black area of Grahamstown begins on the other side of the iron pedestrian bridge. It’s stifling, but I’m wearing my heavy coat to discourage attackers. A donkey walks beside me for a bit, the same one I’d seen earlier in the week, at midnight, under the gallery by the market square. The broad streets are abandoned, but I can feel eyes piercing me from behind curtains. The streets gradually narrow and the houses get smaller, until there are only paths left with corrugated iron hovels sprouting right and left. People emerge from their houses on every side, determined to see the giant marionettes. The procession assembles in an open field adjacent to a dump with goats grubbing around in the rubbish. Old ladies dance with babies in their arms. Children want to have their picture taken. Old men badger me for money. A man with a handicapped baby asks if I wouldn’t mind making a sketch of the child. He’s noticed me making sketches now and then in my expensive sketchbook. I’m nervous. What if he thinks it’s ugly. But he’s over the moon. I tear the page from my sketchbook and write the child’s name on the bottom. He heads off towards his prefab container, sketch in hand, trying to keep it from the baby’s clutches. But the child keeps grabbing until she gets what she wants. The sketch disappears in her mouth.
So this is where my orange girl lives. I’m reminded of the tale of woe she told me. How her mother died long ago in a house fire started by her father. He’d smeared the walls with paraffin, and whoof, up it went. Her mother was asleep. How she’d been abused for years by her father, finally fell pregnant and gave birth to a stillborn lump of flesh. How her mother mutilated her ear with a knife when she told her about the abuse. How she had lived with a friend since she was ten. How she wants to look after orphans because she’s an orphan herself. How she wants to finish school. I try to guess where she lives, which of the hovels is her new house. The hills are covered with corrugated iron houses as far as the eye can see. 180,000, some say 500,000 hungry bellies trying to survive. The higher up, the more miserable.
But today the people are in good spirits. There’s music, a feast. A procession of twenty-five giants with flailing arms and swaying bodies is passing through their township, their grinning faces peering head and shoulders above the houses. At the rear of the procession everyone is dancing; men, women, children, even dogs.
The sun stings my back. I swipe a bluebottle from my eye.
Walking through the grounds of the university a few hours later I hear someone call: ‘Hey mam!’
There she is, in a light-blue sweater, no naartjies and no woolly hat. She has thick short curls. Her boots are dirty and covered with dust.
Crusts of congealed blood cover her head and hair. She smiles.
‘Take a seat,’ she says.
I take a seat.
‘Hello sissie,’ I say, ‘there you are again.’
We watch a street entertainer dangling in a tree and say nothing.
And we smile. For a moment, even at each other.
Translated by Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle was born in Scotland in 1956. He has lived in Belgium since 1987 and wandered into academic translation by accident in 1990 while studying in Leuven. After graduation he focused on the translation of literary fiction, literary non-fiction and poetry and has translated several titles, including Pieter Waterdrinker’s The German Wedding, Jef Geeraerts’ The Public Prosecutor, and Christiaan Weijts’ The Window Dresser. His most recent project – Tessa de Loo’s Harlequino or the Book of Doubt – is scheduled for publication in early 2011. In addition to his work as a translator, he teaches Hebrew and Hebrew Biblical Poetry at the K.U. Leuven.
Podcast read by Emma Brown
