Ondjaki: Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret

“Get inside. It looks like rain and you’re out there running around, just asking for an asthma attack.”

The rain fell suddenly, without giving us time to say it was still just starting, with the beautiful odour that washes the dust from the leaves and bothers the bats: on nights like that, they don’t fly, the sounds disorient them. Granma Catarina said that since bats only see through their own cries they’re like radar, like the MiGs when they make night flights to bombard the japie South African troops.

“Does all that rain fit in the sky, Granma?”

“It’s the dead who are crying or laughing. Lots of people are dying out there.”

“Don’t frighten the children, Catarina,” Granma Agnette begged.

“The children aren’t afraid of the truth. Rain cleanses the world. I’m going upstairs to close the windows.”

I went up with Granma Catarina to witness this ritual. In fact, the windows were always closed, but she opened them really wide, glanced out at Bishop’s Beach, or at some neighbour in another house, and pulled the double windows shut with a thump so that nobody could doubt that they had been open. Granma left the room and went downstairs.

I went into the bathroom to close the small window. I stood on the toilet and peeped out at the Mausoleum: in the darkness I saw trucks arriving and lots of boxes being unloaded by military people in those dark green uniforms. I turned out the bathroom light so nobody out there could see me; I’d learned this from a war movie, or someone had told me about it. There were various trucks, many boxes; they put everything in a really big storage shed.

The thunder started, and Granma Agnette’s waterworks, too.

“Children, everyone into the bathroom.”

The cousins arrived and the bathroom started getting crowded.

The electricity went out, but Granma Catarina had already prepared the oil lamp, with its nauseating smell of slow-burning oil. Granma Agnette said this was the safest place in the house if the roof was struck by lightning. Once we were all in there, it was always the same thing:

“Did you cover the mirrors?”

Granma Catarina laughed, unafraid of the thunder or the lightning. She sent Madalena to fetch the bath towels to cover the biggest mirrors: the display cabinet downstairs in the living room, full of antique dishes and a Chinese tea set, then the mirror in Granma Agnette’s room, and a really heavy round one in the hall.

“Girls — Tchissola, Naima,” Granma scolded, “take off those bright red blouses right away. Madalena — bring them a change of clothes.”

Red, on towels, carpets or even blouses, might attract lightning, and it would be terrible if a lightning bolt hit a person because they said that the bolts came full of totally out-of-control electricity. 3.14 told me once that they should use the rocket of the Mausoleum, in all its height, to catch the bolts and then connect it directly to the poles on Bishop’s Beach, and that way we would never run out of light; but they said this wasn’t possible and it might ruin the embalmed appearance of Comrade President Agostinho Neto.

Fortunately, Granma Agnette forgot to close the little window and, along with the noise and the lightning flashes, fresh sea air came in and alleviated the atmosphere of so many people exhaling mixed with the body odour of those who had run to get here.

Granma Catarina stayed in her room on the rocking chair, and seemed to be serving herself “a hot drink,” which might have been whisky or brandy. Then she lay down for a bit on the floor of her room.

“For those who are already gone and await the others…”

The sea breeze carried a heap of smells that you had to keep your eyes closed to understand, as though it were a carnival of colours: mangoes still green and pretty hanging from the trees, mangoes already gnawed by bats, the green smell of the cherimoya fruit, the dust brushed off the guavas that were about to fall, the smell of Surinam cherries blended with that of the loquat tree, the smells of chicken coops and pigpens, the cries of the parrots and the dogs, two or three bursts from an AK-47, a radio that someone had left on during a news broadcast in an African language, the footfalls of people who were running to get home, or at least to get to a place where they wouldn’t get wet, and even if it were already late, the sounds of the bakery that was in the street behind, where they started work so early and worked all night to ensure that the bread arrived hot at the houses of people who spent the whole night sleeping. Which meant that, in the end, the smell of the rain was a difficult thing to describe to someone who wasn’t familiar with the bathroom of Granma Agnette’s house.

“Are you fallin’ asleep, or what?” they asked me.

“Shut your mouth. I’m putting the rain in my thoughts.”

“Oh yeah? When you grow up you’re gonna end up crazy like Sea Foam. Your thoughts’ll be soaked.”

“At least I’ll know how to speak Spanish.”

“You retard. He speaks Cuban!”

A thunder clap like an explosion of dynamite made a blazing light, then burst over us so loudly that we trembled with real fear. Granma Agnette started to pretend that she was praying. Granma Catarina had already told us that Granma Agnette didn’t know how to pray; she’d forgotten all the prayers and was reduced to moving her lips, like when we sang a song in English and improvised with syllables that we set to the rhythm of the music.

Granma Agnette grabbed the face towel and covered the small mirror that was above the washstand. I remembered the word dynamite and thought that those trucks might have been from a hidden convoy, that, after all, they didn’t want the people of Bishop’s Beach to know when they were going to dexplode the houses to enlarge the construction site to complete the Mausoleum.

“Can a lightning bolt ignite a box of dynamite?” I asked an older cousin.

He was really irritated because, at his age, he didn’t believe in stories about lightning bolts coming into people’s houses in search of big mirrors or children dressed in bright red blouses, yet Granma kept herding everyone together in this spot until the rain passed.

A strong wind extinguished the oil lamp and our eyes took a long time to make sense of the darkness. Then there was a knock on the door downstairs.

“Oh my God.” Granma Agnette was afraid.

The girl cousins hugged in a shivering embrace. I was afraid, too, it was just that with my older cousin looking at me, I pretended it was only the cold.

“Who could it be at this time of night?”

“It can only be Father Inácio!” Granma Catarina said.

But though Granma Catarina was joking, it was a serious moment. Nobody wanted to go downstairs and Granma Agnette was kind of a scaredy-cat. She always wanted to send somebody else downstairs.

“Madalena, go see who’s there.”

“Granma?”

“Granma, what? Don’t you understand? Go downstairs and see who’s knocking on the door.”

There was another knock, this time even louder.

“Death always knocks loudly, that’s what I say.” Granma Catarina began to laugh.

We all fell into a silence of fear and darkness, relieved only by the light that came in through the small window. We almost didn’t all fit into the bathroom, and Granma Agnette started to push Madalena very slowly out the door.

Madalena pushed back and grabbed the door to try to avoid being ejected. It all happened in silence, and it looked like a struggle between two ants.

There was another knock. A thick voice spoke a few words that nobody understood.

“What’d he say?” I asked my cousin.

“He said he’s coming to eat you!”

Granma Agnette continued to push Madalena. Since her flip-flops were soaked, she skidded very slowly in the direction of the stairs. Either she decided to walk or she was going to fall down the steps all the way to the bottom.