with bright balloons bobbing up and down. In the corner of my eye, at the foot of the stairs leading up to their house, I could see an older girl in a wheelchair. Instantly my eyes moved, fixing on her for an immeasurable fragment of time. Confusion took hold of me: I had always thought that walking was everyone’s birthright, not to mention a necessity for survival. It was cruel to deny anyone proper legs. How could anyone carry such a burden? The excited shrieks of the children grew suddenly muffled and remote as a faint sense of familiarity rippled through me and swelled into a wave of recognition. A strange feeling that I had never sensed before tugged at my gut and somehow, in that moment, I felt completely disconnected from myself. But then the ring-a-ring-a-rosies children called out to me to come and hold hands with them and complete the circle. Feeling out of sorts, I reluctantly ran towards the splash of colour in the garden.
After the party, immersed in the day’s last shafts of sunlight, I ran down the hill to our sprawling house. It seemed determined to stand its ground in this harsh landscape. It was a Fifties-style home sandwiched between two hills and cloistered behind fussy white burglar bars that made twists and twirls, reminding me of decorations on a wedding cake. There was a terraced lawn spread out in front of the house and in the flowerbeds was a tangle of petunias, daffodils and geraniums. In fact, just about every conceivable garden flower that was able to withstand the extreme climatic changes had been planted haphazardly, so that I could imagine the lawn being inundated by dandelions and inhabited by all sorts of bush creatures. The piping of a bearded robin echoed across the garden, jolting me out of my sombre mood and catapulting me into a buoyant lightness. I looked up and saw the coppery sheen of a few hadedas, taking leave, in their rasping kind of way, of the wilting sun.
The pewter jewellery box
Inside, the house was a strange mixture of stylistic elements – an eclectic goulash, I now realise. There were kelims from Istanbul, Delft porcelain from Holland, yellowwood furniture from second-hand shops and Indian sari’s used as throws on the sofas and for a table cloth on the dining room table. I could see a cuckoo peeking out of its Austrian clock in one of the rooms and Belgian beer jugs aligned on a shelf in the kitchen. A dresser housed an entire extended family of babushkas. There were so many, in fact, that each one’s alter ego or imaginary playmate probably accompanied it. And a whole array of African masks from the Ivory Coast adorned the walls. The concept of minimalism wasn’t very high on our list of priorities.
That afternoon there were freshly picked flowers on the windowsills, but there was also an acrid smell of burnt dough in the house. My mother flurried out onto the porch in a flowing dress. She looked startled at the Jerusalem thorn tree enshrouded by the darkening dusk in the front garden and said: “When did the night gobble up the day? Was I in never-never land? Sweets, your mother is losing it … I can’t seem to bake biscuits for my own children! What will become of you, my dear Gita?”
Sharing a joke with my mom
Both my parents had an array of nicknames for me. This one made me feel glowing and special.
We went into the kitchen. My mother had been baking sugar biscuits. She had cut the dough into funny flower shapes, moon shapes in various lunar phases and terrifying sun shapes and had decorated the biscuits with pink, yellow and baby blue icing, covering them with little silver balls and colourful sprinkles. As we walked past, she exclaimed: “Sherbet! These biscuits are just for looking at!”
The next moment, a bunch of keys was clattering noisily in the door and my dad, with his untidy beard and ethnic beads dangling round his neck, was making his way towards the table, a whiff of pencil shavings and sweat coming from his clothes. He hurriedly put his faded leather briefcase down – it was unzipped and inside I could see various yellowed pieces of paper in a state of perpetual disarray. His tweed jacket was much too big for him and his unpolished shoes were coming undone. Although he was a respected academic at the university, he played drums for a Caribbean steel band in his spare time, and on this evening he whisked me into his arms and started trying out a new drumbeat on my back, rhythmically chanting: “I don’t drink coffee, I only drink tea.”
My dad was a stirrer and continued illustrating his drumbeat – with me as his makeshift drum set – till I shrieked with laughter. He quickly said: “Jolie, hang in there, don’t move, I think I’ve just started to get the hang of it.” I froze on the spot, desperately trying to control my laughter.
Reading with my dad
My dad could also play guitar and did the most convincing Elvis impersonations in the southern hemisphere. I shared his love of music and together we improvised silly tunes on the piano or played dramatic duets. We were a potent combination! I liked my father’s favourite nickname for me, “Jolie”. It made me feel like a gypsy, without a care in the world. Occasionally, though, he called me “Smorgasbord”. It was way too eccentric for me. Whenever he called me that I would say, indignantly: “It’s much too dramatic and it doesn’t suit me. No thank you!”
Frances
I was six when my sister, Frances, was born. On the day of her birth, the air was bustling with energy. The pink blooms of the doll’s powder-puff had a gossamer feel about them. When I turned my head, I could see the cobalt blue wing of a malachite kingfisher making its descent over the dam on the hill. We went to visit my mom in the Settlers Hospital; my first time in a hospital. When we got to her room, my mom gave me a bewildered look: “Gita, why do you have those puffed cheeks?”
Through clenched teeth, I managed to utter a few barely audible words: “I don’t breathe in hospitals. I’m scared of catching germs …!”
A few days after our visit, my personal porcelain doll, Frances, had arrived home. Miriam Kolosa and I launched into bathing, powdering and holding her tightly.
Miriam had been part of our family for aeons. One Sunday, just before my eighth birthday, I went outside: The early morning air was filled with the rasping sound of cicadas and grasshoppers. Miriam called to me from the far side of the house and her syncopated voice bounced off the maze of walls which formed part of our house: “Sisi, come here to the loquat tree to clean the copper.”
Cleaning the copper pots was not really the primary objective of this excursion to the loquat tree. The real motive was to exchange giggles and a few profound thoughts. The loquats that the tree carried were devilishly sour, and every year a lot of them ended up fermenting prematurely. At the time I was convinced that the secrets that passed between Miriam and me, as well as our (sometimes gory) stories, were absorbed by them in some inexplicable way and abruptly spoiled them. The loquat tree was where our community – consisting of myself, Miriam and a whole array of garden creatures – would seek counsel and connect. Miriam was innately a social being, but had, over the years, learnt to keep to herself. The suburbs of the white people, where she had worked all her life, never had much of a village life.
The loquat tree was neatly planted right there in the middle of the back garden beside the washing line, and the garden was spread out before me like an island, with poinsettias and petunias which my mom continued to plant, claiming that she was entitled to some succour in the dry climate of the Eastern Cape. Miriam had told me that the loquat tree had, even before my birth, always been the point around which everything and everyone associated with our house orbited.
I scuttled across the lawn and Miriam proclaimed loudly (for the umpteenth time): “Lovey, you are much too thin. One of these days, you will disappear into
