told her, my eyes on the sugar-cane fields which would soon start shimmering in the heat. ‘Heinrich virtually drooled every time he looked at you.’
‘Sheesh, he’s as much of a used-to-nothing as all the other schoolboys. If you wear a halter top, they know you’re not wearing a bra. It’s enough to give them wet dreams for the rest of the term.’
I had a vague suspicion of what she meant by a wet dream, but it sounded so awful that I didn’t want to believe it.
‘No way do I want to bother with schoolboys any longer.’ She got up and idled back to the glass doors. ‘I’ll leave them to you and Suna. I’m going to call someone to bring us coffee.’
In this house the whites did even less than in any other house I’d ever been in. A battalion of servants in crisp white uniforms moved as soundlessly as ghosts over the wall-to-wall carpets. As soon as you needed one, she appeared before you like Aladdin’s subservient genie. You didn’t even have to make the effort to rub a lamp.
It was a two-storey house which made me feel as if I were acting in a romantic movie, something about war and slaves in the American South. The balcony on which I was sitting, with its copy of Victorian wrought-iron railings smothered in purple bougainvillaea, ran right round the house. In the entrance hall, as big as a school hall’s stage, there was one of those sweeping staircases I’d only seen in the movies. It was the kind on which a beautiful actress in a ballgown would appear, standing like Lot’s wife for a moment before floating down like an angel.
I could see that everything around me had cost money, from the cold marble floor in the bathroom to the shaggy white rug which lay like a lazy polar bear in one of the guest rooms, but I had to admit that I didn’t admire many of the objects. I couldn’t help thinking of my mother and her widow’s jar of axioms. People who have the most money, she liked saying, often have the least taste.
Not that my mother could’ve run classes in good taste. When I’d shown her an interior decorating article in Sarie last year in which ornaments like the three porcelain ducks against our passage wall were disparaged as the ultimate in kitsch, she’d only laughed. But a month later the ducks had gone. Only three dark marks remained, minor monuments to years of motionless flight. My mother tried, after all, even if there were still many things in our house that would’ve driven Sarie’s interior decorator to despair.
But Dalena’s mother had either never read Sarie, or she had enough self-confidence not to be dictated to about what she should have in her home. The walls were hung with pictures of children in ragged clothing, their eyes as large as plates with teardrops like transparent leaves clinging to their cheeks. Or stormy seascapes painted by someone who had obviously never seen the sea, with waves like blue flames topped by spumes like spoonfuls of whipped cream. At first I thought it was modern art, about which I knew nothing. But when I had another look at Dalena’s mother in a family photograph, with a purple haze in her hair and her mouth in a stiff pleat, I decided that she didn’t look like the kind who knew anything about modern art either.
I pulled my writing pad towards me to write to my brother. I would’ve liked to tell him what had happened at the party but I was scared that he would tease me. I would like to tell someone that I got a kiss after all, at the end of the party. And not just an ordinary kiss, mind you, Dalena.
It was while ‘Nights in White Satin’ was playing. We sat outside in the dark and … well, just sat, really. Ben wasn’t chatty, exactly. Not the kind of guy who would tell everyone what he got away with with a girl, I comforted myself. Dalena, of course, would say it was because he hadn’t got away with anything yet. If only Dalena knew!
That’s probably why he says so little, I thought afterwards, as speechless as he was for the first time that evening. He was saving his tongue for better uses. My mouth felt the way it did after I’d chewed too many sticky toffees. But I couldn’t stop smiling.
And my roommate didn’t have to know everything all the time.
London
8 August 1992
Dear Child
All I have to give you today is a small newspaper report. The older I get, the larger are the gaps in my vocabulary. I had thought that the opposite would happen: that in the final analysis I would be able to say everything that could be said, if I only continued to practise.
I had imagined that to put words to paper would be like fishing. The wider the experience, the bigger the catch. Now I know this is not necessarily true. It may happen that your net becomes worn over the years, and full of holes, and that you no longer want to take the trouble to mend it because you no longer care if the small fish get away – only the really big ones are still a challenge.
There are a few things I’m trying to say, just a few, but because I’m finding it so difficult to catch the right words, all the others slip through my fingers these days. I’ve never been good at small talk. I was always a fiasco with a cocktail in my hand among people I didn’t know well, but these days I even have trouble in talking to friends. If I can still speak of friends.
That’s probably why I have a growing need of these letters, to share things with you I can share with no one else, even if it’s only once in a while. (Or is it because I’ve started writing about my adolescence that I’ve developed a teenage need to have some kind of a diary?)
Heimwee. That’s the word I was groping for in my previous letter. Heim as in the German Heimat, wee as in weemoed, that indescribable longing for one knows not whom, where or what. Here is a little tale picked up in an Afrikaans newspaper about heimwee.
Afrikaans? Yes, now that it’s no longer necessary to hang my head in shame because I come from that accursed land, I sometimes dare to walk into South Africa House on Trafalgar Square where I page through old newspapers and magazines looking for – what? Faith? Hope? Love? What I usually find is suspicion, despair and hate.
But sometimes there is something I missed in the local press. Or perhaps I’ve grown so used to reading between the lines in South African newspapers that I can no longer interpret the lines in British newspapers.
London – What do you do when you’re in a strange country and your heart longs for your birthplace in Africa? You build yourself a mud hut in your backyard.
(A mud hut! I thought. And read on avidly.)
That’s exactly what Mrs Desiree Ntolo, a refugee from Cameroon did – to the annoyance of her neighbours and the local council in Dagenham, an industrial area east of London, which has instructed her to demolish the structure within a week. Mrs Ntolo built the hut entirely on her own.
(How? I wanted to know. How do you build a mud hut?)
Using a pick and a spade she dug stones and gravel out of her garden, watered the soil and trampled out strips of mud with her feet. A council spokesman stated that the hut could not be allowed to stand since it contravenes planning regulations, but Mrs Ntolo remains defiant: ‘The mud hut is in no one’s way,’ she said. ‘They must also consider my rights. If I can’t go back to Cameroon, I at least want something that reminds me of it.’
(Can you guess whose side I’m on?)
Love
M.
How will we know which side to choose?
‘So South Africa is finally getting TV,’ Simon grinned behind the
