people come into power, the princesses won’t get another invitation soon.’
Deddy and Ouboet grin at each other, just like two crooks who are hatching a plot.
‘Who are our people?’ Colette asks.
‘I’ll go get the dessert,’ Mammie says, and gets up hastily. Discussion over.
After lunch Mammie washes the dishes because Sina isn’t working today. Colette and Kleinboet dry them off and put them away. Colette is rather curious about what Sina does on her free Sundays. The other live-in maids in the neighbourhood are all older and speak English, which Sina struggles to understand, or a Bantu language, which Sina doesn’t even try to understand. Colette suspects that she mostly stays in her outside room paging through the old magazines Mammie saves for her. The last time Colette was in the outside room she helped Sina cut out pretty colour photographs of nature to decorate the bare walls. Deddy put a stop to that. Stick to your own kind, Letty. Deddy is never mean to Sina, he always treats her politely, but he evidently doesn’t consider her the same kind as the Cronjés.
While she packs away the clean glasses, Colette whistles the melody of ‘Jan Pierewiet’, which has been stuck in her head ever since the Youth Rally, until Mammie warns from behind the sink that a whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men. To keep the peace, she switches to humming, although she has never understood why a humming woman is more acceptable than a whistling one. When she bends down to put away a stack of plates in a low cupboard, Kleinboet flicks a wet dishcloth at her bottom.
‘My, my! Could this be a nice sturdy Bushman bottom I see on my skinny little sister? Fighting off the boys yet, Lettylove?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Colette giggles.
‘Well, if they start pestering you, remember you have two older brothers who will protect your honour. That is more than poor Princess Elizabeth can say.’
‘She doesn’t need brothers, she has bodyguards. Who treat her better than my brothers have ever treated me.’
‘Did you hear that, Ma? Haven’t we always treated her like a princess?’
‘Like a princess.’ Mammie smiles at the soap suds in the sink. ‘Our own Princess Lettylove.’
‘But if Ouma Trui could see how tight those pants are across Princess Lettylove’s bottom, she would have a fit.’
‘On the farm I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear pants on a Sunday even if they hung on my body like a sack!’
‘And on any other day it is rather reluctantly tolerated,’ Mammie sighs. Ever since Deddy and Oom Kleingert started arguing about the Ossewabrandwag, Mammie has visited Somerverdriet with a sad and wintry heart. ‘Your grandparents are old, they don’t know any better, you can’t blame them for not understanding the modern world. But that brother of your father’s really has no excuse for being so old-fashioned!’
‘Auntie Wilma is even worse,’ Colette complains. ‘There are so many things you’re not allowed to do on a Sunday. You can’t knit or sew, or you’re putting a needle into the Lord’s eye; you can’t laugh or make jokes because after joy comes sorrow; you’re not allowed to wear pants or lipstick; and don’t ask me why, you’re not even allowed to play with paper dolls! Not that I still want to play with paper dolls,’ she adds quickly before her brother can start teasing her again. ‘I’m just saying. It seems to me that all you’re allowed to do is sit with folded hands and wait for the day to end.’
‘While the servants do all the work,’ Kleinboet says with mock sanctimoniousness. ‘Then they can go to hell instead of the Whites because they’ve desecrated the Sabbath.’
‘No, wait, Kleinboet, now you’re going too far!’ Mammie objects.
‘Are you scared Ouboet will hear me, Ma?’
Mammie scrubs a saucepan so viciously that soap suds splash onto the floor. It is a good thing she has tied an apron around her imitation Claire McCardell dress. They can hear Ouboet’s irate voice from the stoep, probably talking about things Mammie doesn’t want to hear while Deddy sucks on his pipe and nods.
While arranging the heavy silver cutlery they only use on Sundays in the flatware box with the royal blue velvet lining, Colette surreptitiously studies her brother. He looks much older than a matric boy in his khaki trousers and white shirt, with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up, his dark hair oiled and slicked back. Kleinboet is not exactly what she would call dashing; he is too short and stocky, his skin too dark, his nose too big. Yet he fares much better with the opposite sex than Ouboet who is far too serious to flirt, too busy building his Brilliant Future. The secret to making a girl fall in love with you is to make her laugh, Kleinboet believes. He relies on humour to reel in one girl after the other. The way he has reeled in his mother and little sister from childhood.
But Colette is curious about the origin of some of the more serious ideas he has expressed lately. Their older brother used to be his hero – hers too, of course, it was hard not to be impressed by someone for whom Great Things had been predicted almost from birth – but then one day Ouboet said that perhaps Oom Kleingert was right about the Ossewabrandwag after all, and about Deddy being a little too fond of the English because he had an English father-in-law. Kleinboet turned on him like a dog biting its owner. You have an English grandfather, he snarled at Ouboet, and a half-English mother! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? From that day on Kleinboet looked at his older brother differently.
Sometimes the strange things he said seemed calculated to provoke Ouboet.
‘Ouboet is nothing like Oom Kleingert.’ Mammie sounds as if she is talking to herself. She is scrubbing more slowly now, and staring out the window at the fruit trees in the backyard that are starting to show their autumn colours. ‘I don’t always agree with his ideas. But it is not as if he actually belongs to the Ossewabrandwag, is it?’
‘Not as far as we know,’ Kleinboet mumbles.
What Colette knows, and Mammie probably too, is that Ouboet is dying to become a member of another secret organisation for Afrikaans men, some or other bond, but it isn’t one you can just up and join, you must wait until you are asked. Deddy was never asked. Apparently something to do with his half-English wife, but Colette can’t be sure because this is something no one ever talks about. Not in this or in any other Afrikaans household. It is a secret organisation, remember. You don’t talk about secrets.
More silence
• Colette Niemand 13/8/2007
To ?
Coimbra … Heavens, child, you are leading my heart like a stubborn horse back to sweet waters. All I have to do is drop my head and drink deeply.
I wouldn’t have felt at home there. Not in Coimbra or Sintra or Lisbon or anywhere else on your Portuguese route. I have, after all, spent a lifetime convincing myself of that – but ah, when you start sweet-talking me about aloes and bluegums and the like, plants that can take root in more than one place, I catch myself sliding back into doubt and self-reproach.
Sweet waters? Perhaps. But for me there is no peace in those green pastures. The water may be sweet and still, but down below the devils are dancing. Don’t imagine I do not know what I am talking about. The cruellest devil I know goes by the name of Memory, and this past week he has been back to torture me.
I suspect this is another letter
