Van Riebeeck Festival has made us proud of our country,’ Frans Louw MP is saying, ‘proud of the fine civilisation that a small group of white settlers were able to establish on a dark, uncivilised continent, proud to be Afrikaans!’
‘Hear, hear!’ a few of the young men shout.
Now the father of the bride hits his stride. His phrases get longer, his pauses fewer. He expresses the belief that this exceptional couple will in the years to come make us even prouder to belong to an exceptional nation with a God-given destiny. He predicts an exceptionally bright future for them and their children …
‘Children by the dozen!’ a cheeky young man interjects, which makes everyone laugh and the bride blush.
Colette hears her tummy rumble with hunger, and drains the rest of the sparkling wine in her glass. The second groomsman fills her glass again. Every time he looks at her, his face assumes the same amused expression it wore in the church. It really isn’t the reaction she had hoped to elicit from her brother’s older and more worldly-wise friends at this wedding celebration.
At last the father of the bride has said his piece, and everyone has raised their glasses one more time. Now for the groom’s speech, then the eating and dancing can begin. Although she has no idea who the wretched third bridesmaid is supposed to dance with. Her father will have to dance with her mother, of that her mother will make sure, and her older brother isn’t much of a dancer. Once he has got the obligatory first waltz with his bride out of the way as quickly as possible, he will feign generosity by giving all the male guests a chance to dance with the bride. Kleinboet is a good dancer, but with so many pretty girls present he isn’t likely to waste his time with his sister. And she holds out little hope of being asked by any other attractive young men, not in this bridesmaid’s dress that makes her look like a canary with jaundice.
The atmosphere in the stifling hall changes the instant Ouboet gets to his feet. A wave of excitement ripples through the younger guests like wind through a wheat field. Ouboet has barely opened his mouth when Pietman starts to roar, ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, and right away a chorus of male voices joins in the singing. Ouboet waits patiently, with a forced smile, before he tries again.
‘Everyone warned me this was going to be the most difficult speech of my life …’
No one hears another word, because Pietman has started singing ‘Why was he born so beautiful’. This time Ouboet tries to continue speaking before the last voices have died away. Which only provokes a repeat of the chorus: He’s no bloody use to anyone, he’s no bloody use at all. And again and again. Every time Ouboet manages a phrase, the jolly good fellows are back with their thundering chorus. Some are beating their fists on the tables and others stamping their feet on the floor, and the noise becomes completely deafening.
Across the table from Colette Kleinboet is singing at the top of his voice. He must enjoy being able to shut up his pedantic older brother for a change. Next to her Hannes is also revelling in Ouboet’s dilemma. The second groomsman isn’t an unattractive fellow, not as forward as Pietman and not as pious as Ouboet either. The only person present who appears to feel sorry for Ouboet is Mammie. She is sitting at the main table, half-hidden by a bunch of yellow and pink roses, watching Ouboet with the anxious expression she usually gets when she urgently needs to pee. Or maybe she does in fact need to pee. In that case there is no one in the hall who pities the groom.
Out of the corner of her eye Colette sees Sina in an old floral-print dress of Mammie’s standing right at the back of the hall next to the crippled Mister Giuseppe with his heavy camera. It occurs to her that the little Italian is darker skinned than Sina with her sallow complexion. And she cannot help wondering what these two outsiders, these two rare birds of another feather, must think of the God-given destiny of the Afrikaner.
Re: Contact!
• Colette Niemand 17/8/2007
I am thinking of you, my precious, I think of you all the time. While I endure the cold Cape winter, I am riding alongside you in Lisbon’s cheerful yellow trams. Then I forget all about being cold, and old, and almost manage to feel young and hopeful again. Until I hear the rain tapping on my bedroom window and see the bare trees in the garden. Then I remember where I am and how late the hour. Then I get off the tram, come and lie down on my bed, and think of long ago, of how badly I had wanted to get away before it was too late, and then I wonder why I came back at all. And then I think about you once more. I think of you all the time, sweetheart.
TEACHER
The smell of chalk, blue ink and adolescent sweat hangs heavily in the stuffy classroom. It is the hottest, sleepiest hour of the school day, shortly before the final bell, in the hottest, laziest week of the year, the last week before the long summer holiday.
The only sounds are those of fountain pens scratching on paper, pages being turned, a buzzing blowfly trapped in a corner high up against the ceiling. Outside, in the shimmering white light, the shrill voices of primary school children who have been let out early. Inside, the occasional self-pitying sigh from a pupil who, half asleep, clutches his desk like a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood with his last remaining strength.
Shame, Colette thinks, if the heat is so dreadful for her in a cool summer dress in the front of the class, it must be unbearable for them in their school uniform. The boys’ strangulating ties and long grey socks, the thick, dark fabric of the girls’ gyms, the lace-up shoes constricting sweaty toes and rough heels. These children from the wheat farms and dusty small-town streets grow up barefoot. They can run without shoes across a field of devil’s thorn, just like her cousins on Somerverdriet did when she was small, the soles of their feet tough as leather.
They must surely be more accustomed to the stifling heat than their young English teacher who spent her own school years in a milder climate. Primary school on the rainy back slope of Table Mountain, high school in the shelter of the city bowl. Like a mother who blows on a bowl of food before feeding it to her child, that is how Cape Town’s soft sea breezes blow away the worst heat. Except of course when the southeaster comes tumbling down the mountain to lift you right off your feet. Nothing maternal about the Cape Doctor.
On still, sweltering days such as these among the pale yellow wheat fields, the longing for Cape Town becomes like a stomach ulcer devouring her from the inside. A heart ulcer, she muses, feeling her eyelids grow heavy. But actually, there is much besides Cape Town that she longs for. She yearns for the cosmopolitan world cities she has only ever seen in photographs, for overseas art treasures and cathedrals she has only read about, for strange languages and exotic foods, for excitement and adventure. Storybook places, that is what she has dreamed about the entire year she has lived in a boarding house in Piketberg and tried to teach English to farm children.
An unexpected crack startles her out of her daydreams, back to the reality of a small-town classroom with pictures of Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay and both queens Elizabeth, the first and the second, stuck on the walls. On the blackboard behind her, written in her own tidy teacher’s script, is the standard eights’ essay topic for today: I shall always remember 1955 as the year when …
‘Sorry, Miss Cronjé,’ a brawny lout grins in the back row. ‘I had to make dead this fly.’ The class sniggers as he holds his large hand with the shiny green blowfly he has just crushed towards her.
At moments such as these she wonders why she still bothers. A young man like Leendert van Niekerk, at least two years older than most of his classmates because he has repeated at least two standards, will never learn to appreciate the language of Shakespeare. And why should he? He will soon take over
