and the conversation takes off; he stops calling me Meneer.
He was christened Jacobus Abraham Snyman and moved here from Ladismith in the Cape, as a labourer. In 1977.
“They came to fetch us with a lorry. We were at Seekoeigatdrif near Ladismith. With the Bruwers. But they didn’t have work for all of us. So a few of us came here, with our things on the back of the lorry.” He points to tant Grieta. “She came with.”
“We’ve had our ups and downs,” she says, “but we’re still here.”
Oom Koos’s father, Piet, stayed behind in Ladismith. His brother, Hendrik, also came to the Boland at the time.
A young woman enters the room. She’s Katrina, one of their daughters.
“He’s a Snyman, like us.” Oom Koos points to me. “He came for a visit.”
Katrina gives me a feeble smile, switches on the television, sits on the couch, and starts watching a repeat of some or other soap opera with the sound off. Their other daughter is called Sara, just like Ma.
Oom Koos has lost track of some of the Snymans on his side of the family. Many have died, and the children and cousins have all gone their own way. “We’re all over the place. I know there are still a few in Ladismith.”
Tant Grieta puts two mugs of coffee on the table between us, as well as a sugar bowl and a milk jug that’s covered by a doily with red beads. “Help yourself.” He pushes one of the mugs towards me.
I pour a little milk into my coffee. He pours a little milk into his. “Did the people at the museum up there tell you about me?” he asks. “Every now and then I go to see what they’re doing.”
I add two spoons of sugar to my coffee. He adds two spoons of sugar to his.
“This farm is where we Snymans come from, you know.” He stirs his coffee clockwise. So do I. “It’s where our roots are.”
Tant Grieta opens the top of the stable door and sunlight and the smell of damp earth fill the room. It’s still drizzling outside, but some of the cloud has lifted and a pale sun is shining on the vineyards. Outside, the monkey’s wedding continues as the two of us, oom Koos and I, drink our coffee together.
PART II
Into the country
1.
“Let’s be honest,” says Attie du Plooy as he pushes his can of Stoney ginger beer to one side on the table. “This country is buggered – completely buggered.”
I look at him but say nothing. I barely know him.
When I sat down at the table in the Central Café in De Doorns, on the N1 on the other side of Worcester, Attie was already there. He looks around sixty, perhaps a worn-out fifty. His mop of hair sits on his head like the thatched roof of a rondavel. He’s drinking a Stoney, and on the table in front of him are a handful of Lotto tickets and a Bic pen that’s been chewed white.
At first he wanted to know whether I was on my way to Cape Town, because he was looking for a lift to Kraaifontein. Then a little later, he leaned over and introduced himself: “By the way, I’m Attie.”
By then he’d already told me how he’d lost his job on a wine farm here in the Hex Valley, that the owner of the farm apparently owed him R5 000, that his wife and two little girls were with her sister in Rawsonville, and that the bearings on his Opel Kadett had seized.
He’d apparently also applied for a disability grant months ago – he has a leaky heart and trouble with his back – but he hasn’t yet heard a word from the Department of Social Development.
He doesn’t take his small eyes off me. “I have to beg the government for a pension when there are schoolchildren in the township who get money every month.” He drags the Stoney towards himself across the table. “Nice, hey? You make your first baby in standard 7 and the government pays … There’s a girl – a matric girl! – with three little ones.”
It seems the girl is here in De Doorns.
“Here, my friend. Here. In De Doorns East. Go and ask over there. I s’pose you know why they have so many children? To get more money from the government! Because the government pays per child.”
From the table at the Central Café I have a good view of De Doorns’s main street. I can see the Absa building and Pep Stores and a small brown building with a sign that reads Valley Funerals. Past it, further up the street, is the co-op.
Across the street, at the Central Garage, a petrol attendant is sitting on an upside-down cooldrink crate. He’s holding a cellphone and appears to be SMSing. A clapped-out Mazda bakkie stops in front of Valley Funerals, a man and two women in the cab. There are more people under the canopy in the back. The driver, a little old man wearing heavy black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, gets out and disappears into Valley Funerals. The others wait in the bakkie.
I can’t remember how long it’s been since I last sat at a table in a café like this, having a cooldrink and looking out over the street. Few cafés still have tables to sit at. A café isn’t a place to relax in any more.
This one looks like a relic from a bygone era. Outside, there’s a Coke sign on the gable, and inside, the greyish floor tiles are worn in places. Glass jars with sweets are lined up on the counter: Wilson’s toffees, liquorice, apricot sweets. A hand written sign has been stuck on the magazine rack: No reading.
The man behind the counter could be Portuguese. “One fish and chips!” he shouts towards the kitchen. “With plenty vinegar!”
At the table next to me, Attie starts getting up in his scuffed, black Bronx shoes. He folds the Lotto tickets in half and puts them in his breast pocket along with the pen. “It’s time for me to go. See you. Okay?” He walks off as if we’d never met.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. I’m headed in the opposite direction, north. In all the years I’ve travelled along the N1, I’ve never stopped at De Doorns before. This time I decided to stop, even if only for a cooldrink.
The old man comes out of the door at Valley Funerals. He’s holding a sheet of paper and looks at it intently as he walks to the bakkie. Could it be a quotation for a funeral? He stops behind the bakkie, lifts the canopy’s flap, and talks to the people in the back. Maybe they’re from a township or squatter camp nearby and someone close to them has died.
This is grape country, and each year, I hear, hundreds of people, poor and unemployed, come from as far as Zimbabwe to look for work here in the vineyards. Maybe those in the back of the bakkie are people like this, for it has an Eastern Cape number plate.
I’m tempted to ask the man what they’re doing here. What’s life like for people who go around in a bakkie like that?
Lately it feels as though there are too many things in our country, important things about how people live and die, that I know next to nothing about. I see tired old bakkies full of people, strugglers in scuffed shoes, beggars, queues outside government buildings, and I have no idea what these people’s lives are like. It’s making me feel like a stranger in my own country.
There are other reasons why the country
