as the present.
I become more and more like a child as I grow older, or like a firm-breasted ntombi, sometimes, and inside my mouth my tongue speaks the language of my mama and tata. At times I am frightened because I cannot remember all the words. Then I tell my heart, it is only because you have been away from your people a long time. You are not that ntombi any more, Thandeka – you are someone else.
This is true.
It is fifty-three years ago that I came to Umbrella Tree Farm, far away from the round house of my childhood. The house with the beautiful patterns my mama painted around the doors and windows, with berry juice, yellow river mud and nightshade extract. She told me a hadedah left me under the sweet thorn at sundown and she wrapped me in her red blanket and ran inside the house before the tokoloshe could get me.
My mama, my mama …
I can smell the cow dung she rubbed on the mud floor, hear her voice fill the yard with a song while she crushes the corn. But it’s all a long way away and some things have grown dim. There are many things you forget in fifty-three years but you never forget how to pray in your mama’s tongue. And when great sorrow overtakes you, then you cry in the language of your childhood.
Many twists on the road of life have brought me to this place, where I sit by the fire with a heart that bleeds because a white man has died.
When I took Samuel Malgas for my husband, my people were unhappy because he was a coloured man. They were unhappy even though they knew he had been to school and was raised in a good home on white people’s land, the farm where my people went to buy food from the trading post on Saturdays. When the shop was busy, Samuel helped out behind the counter, a pencil stuck behind his ear. Quick he was, with adding and subtracting. That was where he and I started looking at each other. Times were different, then; people didn’t just pay court to this one and that. And everyone knew that when Samuel Malgas was a child with the mumps the swelling in his neck went to lie in his groin. My people said I would be a poor woman one day, with no children to look after me when I was old.
Samuel was such a beautiful biblical name. I could tell that the tawny man had a clever head and that his eyes saw the world differently. They seemed to see further than where the mountain ended. And even if he could give me no children he could take me over that mountain and show me new things. When his donkey cart and his donkeys were ready, he said, he would be on his way to see the world.
On the reed mat in my mama’s round house I cried about Samuel who was leaving to see the world. And I stopped going to the store.
But one Sunday afternoon he came all the way to find me.
‘Thandeka, why don’t I see you at the store any more?’ he asked. ‘And why are you crying?’
I stood up and picked up the water bucket. ‘Let’s go fetch water from the river.’
At the river I broke off a reed and told him to make a whistle and think of me whenever he played it.
‘Won’t you come with me, Thandeka? We can get married out of your tata’s house. There’s enough money in my bank book for three lobola cattle … Then together we’ll go see what lies on the other side of the mountain.’
So I took him, because he wanted me. And because I wanted to see the other side of the mountain.
I did have one child, from Abel. And she has taken good care of me all these years.
The red blanket warms my knees and legs. But the cold never seems to leave my backbone, those tiny bones that cradle my marrow, and it stays cold inside my heart. Because Samuel died a long time ago.
And now Abel is dead.
Soon it will be my time. Abel always said if my time came he would lay me to rest on Umbrella Tree Farm, right next to Samuel. He would have a headstone made that would run from my end of the grave to Samuel’s. And he would have my name and my years written on it.
Thandeka Malgas.
Born 30 March 1935, until the day Nkosi our God came for her.
Abel was still a strong man, fifty-eight years old. I am fifteen years older, and almost blind. I should have gone first.
That Gertruidah had them buried in the town cemetery, that I understand. But time passes. Your anger mellows, and your sorrow grows. Then it is too late to open the graves and dig fresh holes. Maybe the wind will carry my breath to the town cemetery so he will hear me when I say: Have a safe journey, Abel …
No one but Thandeka Malgas knows who Abel Strydom really was or how the bones fell for him.
Samuel and I travelled many roads in our donkey cart. How those roads brought us to Umbrella Tree Farm I no longer remember. The donkeys were tired and Samuel said it was time to settle down and make a home.
Abel was only about five years old, a beautiful child. Except for his clothes you had to look closely to see he wasn’t a girl. I cooked the food and rubbed the floors. Did the washing and ironing. There were beds to make, windows to wash, the stoep to sweep. And lots of other jobs Abel’s mama gave me to do.
She was a good person. She always said, take half the eggs or the leguan will eat them. That is what a leguan does; he sneaks around the chicken coop once he has sucked out the cow with his blue and yellow tongue. Don’t tell the old man, she said. Because he was a difficult one. Not an old man in years but with a heart that was old and black. Left deep marks on Abel, I will swear before God to this day.
I helped keep an eye on the children. Three boys and I had a soft spot for Abel because he was the smallest. With soft little feet so I had to give him a piggyback across the devil’s thorn. Then one day a cobra came into the house and bit his mama who was busy in the kitchen with a bowl of green figs and the pricking needle. No matter how hard we sucked to get the poison out of her, by sunset the cobra poison had squeezed out her final breath.
It is hard growing up without your mama.
It is even harder if your papa pushes you away. It can twist a child’s eyes, so the world squints back at him. There were many mornings when I dragged the wet mattress to the back of the pit lavatory where the old man wouldn’t see it. Because if he saw, his tongue would become sharp as a knife blade, ready to draw blood. Time passes and the child becomes a soft-bearded young man who trembles before his papa. By the time that man has grown, everything inside his head has become twisted.
The next time Gertruidah comes here I must tell her what her father and I agreed. That she must tell the headstone people to write Samuel’s name and his years on his end of the stone. And that on my side they must write that my name means ‘good person’.
There are times when I’m good.
Times when I’m bad.
Times when I’m in the middle somewhere between good and bad.
My name is easy to say, but my surname feels uneasy on my tongue. Malgas. It doesn’t click like Noqobo, the clan name of my tata. But it is the name Samuel gave me and I must honour it like I honour his memory.
Samuel and Anthony died on the same day, the day the truck went over the cliff. Anthony was ten years old. If Mabel had not gone to fetch kindling, she would have gone over the cliff with them. Just thinking about it makes my blood run cold. Today she is almost thirty-two years old, and I thank Nkosi for His mercy.
