Zoë Wicomb - You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

‘They say there are proteas on the mountain.’

‘No,’ I counter, ‘it’s too dry. You only find proteas in the Cape Peninsula.’

‘Nonsense,’ she says scornfully, ‘you don’t know everything about this place.’

‘Ag, I don’t care about this country; I hate it.’

Sent to bed, I draw the curtains against huge stars burning into the night.

‘Don’t turn your light on, there’ll be mosquitoes tonight,’ she advises.

My dreams are of a wintry English garden where a sprinkling of snow lies like insecticide over the stubbles of dead shrub. I watch a flashing of red through the wooden fence as my neighbour moves along her washing line pegging out the nappies. I want to call to her that it’s snowing, that she’s wasting her time, but the slats of wood fit closely together and I cannot catch at the red of her skirt. I comfort myself with the thought that it might not be snowing in her garden.

Curtains rattle and part and I am lost, hopelessly tossed in a sharp first light that washes me across the bed to where the smell of coffee anchors me to the spectre of Mamma in a pale dressing gown from the past. Cream, once primrose seersucker, and I put out my hand to clutch at the fabric but fold it over a saucer-sized biscuit instead. Her voice prises open the sleep seal of my eyes.

‘We’ll go soon and have a late breakfast on the mountain. Have another biscuit,’ she insists.

At Van Rhynsdorp we stop at the store and she exclaims appreciatively at the improved window dressing. The wooden shelves in the window have freshly been covered with various bits of patterned fablon on which oil lamps, toys and crockery are carefully arranged. On the floor of blue linoleum a huge doll with blonde curls and purple eyes grimaces through the faded yellow cellophane of her box. We are the only customers.

Old Mr Friedland appears not to know who she is. He leans back from the counter, his left thumb hooked in the broad braces while the right hand pats with inexplicable pride the large protruding stomach. His eyes land stealthily, repeatedly, on the wobbly topmost button of his trousers as if to catch the moment when the belly will burst into liberty.

She has filled her basket with muddy tomatoes and takes a cheese from the counter.

‘Mr Friedland,’ she says in someone else’s voice, ‘I’ve got the sheepskins for Mr Friedland in the bakkie. Do. er. does Mr Friedland want them?’

‘Sheepskins?’

His right hand shoots up to fondle his glossy black plumage and at that moment, as anyone could have predicted, at that very moment of neglect, the trouser button twists off and shoots into a tower of tomato cans.

‘Shenton’s sheepskins.’ She identifies herself under cover of the rattling button.

The corvine beak peck-pecks before the words tumble out hastily, ‘Yes, yes, they say old Shenton’s dead hey? Hardworking chap that!’ And he shouts into a doorway, ‘Tell the boy to get the skins from the blue bakkie outside.’

I beat the man in the white polystyrene hat to it and stumble in with the stiff salted skins which I dump at his fussy directions. The skin mingles with the blue mottled soap to produce an evil smell. Mr Friedland tots up the goods in exchange and I ask for a pencil to make up the outstanding six cents.

‘Ugh,’ I grunt, as she shuffles excitedly on the already hot plastic seat, her body straining forward to the lure of the mountain, ‘How can you bear it?’

‘What, what?’ She resents being dragged away from her outing. ‘Old Friedland you mean? There are some things you just have to do whether you like it or not. But those people have nothing to do with us. Nothing at all. It will be nice and cool in the mountains.’

As we leave the tarred road we roll up the windows against the dust. The road winds perilously as we ascend and I think sympathetically of Father’s alleged fear. In an elbow of the road we look down on to a dwarfed homestead on the plain with a small painted blue pond and a willow lurid against the grey of the veld. Here against the black rock the bushes grow tall, verdant, and we stop in the shadow of a cliff. She bends over the bright feathery foliage to check, yes it is ysterbos, an infallible remedy for kidney disorders, and for something else, but she can’t remember other than that the old people treasured their bunches of dried ysterbos.

‘So close to home,’ she sighs, ‘and it is quite another world, a darker, greener world. Look, water!’ And we look up into the shaded slope. A fine thread of water trickles down its ancient worn path, down the layered rock. Towards the bottom it spreads and seeps and feeds woman-high reeds where strange red birds dart and rustle.

The road levels off for a mile or so but there are outcroppings of rock all around us.

‘Here we must be closer to heaven,’ she says. ‘Father would’ve loved it here. What a pity he didn’t make it.’

I fail to summon his face flushed with pleasure; it is the stern Sunday face of the deacon that passes before me. She laughs.

‘Of course he would only think of the sheep, of how many he could keep on an acre of this green veld.’

We spread out our food on a ledge and rinse the tomatoes in a stone basin. The flask of coffee has been sweetened with condensed milk and the Van Rhynsdorp bread is crumbly with whole grains of wheat. Mamma apologises for no longer baking her own. I notice for the first time a slight limp as she walks, the hips working unevenly against a face of youthful eagerness as we wander off.

‘And here,’ I concede, ‘are the proteas.’

Busy bushes, almost trees, that plump out from the base. We look at the familiar tall chalice of leathery pink and as we move around the bush, deciding, for we must decide now whether the chalice is more attractive than the clenched fist of the imbricated bud, a large whirring insect performs its aerobatics in the branches, distracting, so that we linger and don’t know. Then the helicopter leads us further, to the next bush where another type beckons. These are white protea torches glowing out of their silver-leafed branches. The flowers are open, the petals separated to the mould of a cupped hand so that the feathery parts quiver to the light.

‘I wonder why the Boers chose the protea as national flower,’ I muse, and find myself humming mockingly:

Suikerbossie’k wil jou hê,

Wat sal jou Mamma daarvan sê.

She harmonises in a quavering voice.

‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘how we sang? All the hymns and carols and songs on winter evenings. You never could harmonise.’ Then generously she adds, ‘Of course there was no one else to sing soprano.’

‘I do, I do.’

We laugh at how we held concerts, the three of us practising for weeks as if there would be an audience. The mere idea of public performance turns the tugging condition of loneliness into an exquisite terror. One night at the power of her command the empty room would become a packed auditorium of rustles and whispers. And around the pan of glowing embers the terror thawed as I opened my mouth to sing. With a bow she would offer around the bowl of raisins and walnuts to an audience still sizzling with admiration.

‘And now,’ she says, ‘I suppose you actually go to concerts and theatres?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

‘I can’t imagine you in lace and feathers eating walnuts and raisins in the interval. And your hair? What do you do with that bush?’

‘Some perfectly sensible people,’ I reply, ‘pay pounds to turn their sleek hair into precisely such a bushy tangle.’

‘But you won’t exchange your boskop for all the daisies in Namaqualand! Is that sensible too? And you say you’re happy with your hair? Always? Are you really?’

‘I think we ought to go. The sun’s getting too hot for me.’