you are too young to handle so many ghosts. Perhaps my mother was right all along. Perhaps it is sometimes best to keep quiet. I would rather not send you this letter.
But from far across the sea, from a wintry Cape of Storms, I wish you shining golden summer dreams.
PARTING
Emigrate. It is a word she has heard often, but in the past month it has become a reality. Like a cute little pet you dream of, and then one day there is a hideous mongrel outside your back door demanding that you take care of it.
Mammie’s brother, Uncle David the brave soldier, has returned from the war with the news that he wants to emigrate to Australia. And from the moment Mammie received his letter right up to this afternoon, while she waits with him in the drawing room for Sina to bring the tea, Mammie’s tears have been flowing even more easily than usual. I was so scared that I would lose him in the war, she keeps sniffing, and now I am losing him after the war has ended.
Last week Ouboet said he had an idea Mammie would have preferred it if her brother had died in the war, then at least she could have bragged about what a big hero he had been. In Mammie’s circle, unfortunately, emigration is not considered an act of heroism – especially not to an uncivilised outpost such as Australia. England, now that would have been another story, Ouboet said. After all, Mammie and Uncle David with their English father believed ‘there’ll always be an England’. Then Kleinboet hummed the rousing song Vera Lynn sings so beautifully, his brown eyes bright with fun, while Mammie pretended not to hear him.
Colette thinks Ouboet is just being unnecessarily cruel because Mammie made such a fuss throughout the war about ‘my brave brother the officer’ who was fighting the Nazis. And everyone in this house knows that Ouboet is secretly aggrieved that the blasted English have once again emerged as victors from the battle. It is not that he is trying to exonerate the Germans, Ouboet hedges every time someone mentions the horrors of the concentration camps, but just remember who started the first concentration camps right here in this country.
And who were the first victims of this form of genocide.
Then Mammie’s tears start flowing all over again.
But this afternoon Ouboet isn’t around to make nasty remarks about the rooinekke, nor is Kleinboet to tease everyone, they are in the boys’ hostel in Paarl, at the same school Deddy also attended long ago. And Deddy is on duty at the hospital, so Mammie and Uncle David can drink their tea in peace. They are having ‘a confidential chat’, Mammie says, looking meaningfully at Colette. Colette pretends not to notice the meaningful glance. She avoids her mother’s eyes and looks down at her red sloppy joe jersey, and her suntanned legs and white bobby socks, thrilled to be sitting next to her handsome officer-uncle in the elegant drawing room.
‘Colette.’ Mammie clears her throat. ‘Won’t you go give Sina a hand with the tea tray in the kitchen?’
‘She doesn’t need any help, Mammie, not when you’ve taught her so well,’ she answers, and beams at Uncle David.
‘Imagine your youngest off to high school in a few months’ time, Liz,’ Uncle David says with a shake of his head. ‘How the years have flown.’
‘You can say that again,’ Mammie sighs, and touches her done-up blonde hair.
She spent more time than usual in front of the mirror this morning fixing the two victory rolls above her temples, because she had wanted to look her best for her ‘little brother’. She is even wearing a new dress she made the other day from rayon or viscose or some or other shiny synthetic fabric, white polka dots on a dark blue background. Unfortunately, looking her best is taking a little longer every year, she complained while putting on her red lipstick.
Colette cannot take her eyes off the deep dent the dimple in her uncle’s chin makes when he smiles. Before the war he was almost too good-looking for a man, she has heard Mammie say, but now he has become really dashing with his face tanned golden-brown by North Africa’s desert sun. There is an amazing scar on his cheek caused by glass shards in a bomb explosion, and he walks with a slight limp because his left leg was injured in the same explosion.
But it is still strange to see him without his uniform in a white open-necked shirt, striped sports jacket and loose-fitting beige trousers with pleats below the belt. Not that Colette has ever seen much of him, he has always lived far away from them in Natal. Among the rooinekke, according to Ouboet. And for the past several years he has merely been an almost unknown man in uniform in a photograph Mammie constantly carried in her handbag. That is how Colette has come to think of him. The unknown soldier.
‘Colette,’ Mammie repeats, menacingly this time. ‘Don’t think that because you’re almost in high school I am going to let you eavesdrop on grown-up conversation!’
She gets up meekly and drags her feet to the kitchen.
‘You were just as curious at her age,’ she hears her uncle say, amused.
‘But I was taught curiosity killed the cat. That’s what Mother always said.’
‘And Father said little pitchers have long ears.’ Uncle David laughs, and she cannot hear the rest because the kitchen door swings shut behind her.
She watches Sina carefully pour the boiling water onto the tea leaves in the finest white porcelain pot, exactly the way Mammie taught her, and snatches a home-made ginger biscuit from the bowl that has already been arranged on the embroidered cloth on the silver tray.
‘Shoo, away with you,’ Sina grumbles with an angry frown below her flowered headscarf. ‘There are shop biscuits in the cupboard for you. These ones your mamma baked for Master David yesterday.’
‘This whole big chocolate cake she also baked for “Master David”,’ Colette says, and plonks herself down on the kitchen table next to the tea tray. Bored, she fans out her trainseat-green dirndl skirt about her, and swings her feet back and forth under the table. ‘You would swear she thinks there is no chocolate cake in Australia.’
‘Not the way your mamma bakes it,’ Sina says firmly.
Colette watches Sina as she opens one drawer after the other to take out teaspoons and cake forks, and hunt for the silver tea strainer. She is so small and spare and sinewy it is hard to believe she is already sixteen. The starched white apron tied over her faded work dress wraps almost right around her body and hangs down to her ankles. A pair of old white tennis shoes peeps out below the hem. Colette outgrew them long ago, but they still gape wide around Sina’s tiny feet. And yet, when Colette recalls the slight and timid little girl they fetched from Somerverdriet three years ago, she realises that Sina must have grown several inches already and gained ten times more self-confidence.
Sometimes it seems to Colette as if Sina, although she will probably always be the smallest in the house, is also by far the oldest. When she peers at you with those beady black eyes in her tawny little face, you could swear she was older than Table Mountain, cleverer than Jan Smuts. Bushman blood, Deddy says, mixed with Malay. And of course somewhere along the way a bit of milk in the coffee too. Colette has only recently discovered what Deddy means when he talks about milk and coffee this way. Some things are simply not mentioned by name, that is another thing Colette has learnt at almost thirteen, not in this house. Nor, presumably, in many houses elsewhere in the country.
‘What is so great about Australia anyway?’ she mumbles half to herself.
‘It’s not what, it’s who,’ Sina answers and starts singing
