In the dark night, I stand bent over, my head in the corner of my room. My arms are up at my sides, streamlined like wings. My fingers are stretched like an eagle’s pinion feathers, and I’m turning around so fast, my eyes blur, and I shoot through my bedroom ceiling, through the corrugated-iron roof, rise up into the air until I’m flying free and wild, gliding like an eagle, wheeling and soaring untouchable in the high, empty spaces of the sky.
The flying dream rescues me every night.
I turn around in the corner of my room, pierce through the ceilings and roofs of bad days until I’m up and out – free – fearless as a bird over the cage of the town and all the people in it.
Granny Bobbeh’s Stück Diamond
Granny Bobbeh is waiting for us on her stoep. I run through the open gate, up the cracked cement path, into her arms.
‘Come into the kitchen, say hello to Zeideh,’ she says.
Grandpa Zeideh’s reading a newspaper. He’s always reading. When he looks up, he smiles. He looks just like Pa, only he’s very short and Pa’s very tall, and Grandpa Zeideh’s brown eyes behind his glasses always look sad, not angry like Pa’s.
I love Granny Bobbeh, but not Grandpa Zeideh so much. He’s always grumpy. Ma says that’s just the way he is.
‘Just kiss him hello, then you can go and play,’ she says.
Granny Bobbeh doesn’t want me to call her ‘Granny’. She says I must call her ‘Bobbeh’ and Grandpa’s name is ‘Zeideh’. Those are their names in Yiddish. Ma says it’s okay to call them Granny Bobbeh and Grandpa Zeideh.
Granny Bobbeh smells of apples. Her arms are soft and white. She twists her thick red plaits around her head. At night her hair hangs down to her waist.
‘Mein shveetie dahlink,’ she calls me. ‘Mein Stück diamond.’
There’s a big koppie next to Granny Bobbeh and Grandpa Zeideh’s house.
‘No, mein kind, you mustn’t go there.’ She waggles her finger at me. ‘Tsotsis live there in the wild grass. Bad men.’ She shakes her head. ‘Very dangerous.’
When Pa was a little boy, Granny Bobbeh planted cherry trees in their garden. We don’t visit when the cherries are ripe. Pa doesn’t want to climb the ladder to pick them. He’s got better things to do with his time.
I think Pa’s too scared to climb up high.
Granny Bobbeh makes cherry jam so good and special, only grown-ups are allowed to eat it.
‘Ah,’ sighs Pa, ‘your cherry jam and black tea, Ma … ambrosia of the gods!’
She makes beetroot and walnut jam, too, but I don’t like eating beetroots in jam. Granny Bobbeh picks the walnuts in the orchard at the back of her house. Pa’s hands are so strong he can crack two walnuts in the palm of one hand. The walnut trees grow next to the pen where Granny Bobbeh’s turkeys gobble and rush, their lumpy wattles and snoods wobbling and swaying, their stiff mottled feathers rustling as they stalk the flimsy fence. I don’t like them.
Granny Bobbeh’s got a smoking oven in the wall on the side of her garage. It has a small, green-painted door. It waits there patiently until the turkeys are big and fat. Then she stokes the fire in it until it’s hot and ready.
Pa shouts at Granny Bobbeh on the phone.
‘Why does he shout at her, Ma? I don’t like it when Pa shouts. Doesn’t he love Granny Bobbeh?’
‘Of course he loves her, silly! He does get a bit impatient at times, but he loves her, don’t you worry.’
My skin prickles when Granny Bobbeh’s got a doek on her head; that means she’s got a very bad headache called a ‘migraine’. She puts slices of raw potato inside the doek.
‘It makes the pain better,’ she says.
‘For God’s sake!’ Pa shouts. ‘Stop behaving like a bloody peasant!’
His voice is rough with wishing.
Uncle Sam and Uncle Max are Pa’s brothers. When they speak to Granny Bobbeh and Grandpa Zeideh, their voices are warm with love. Pa’s in-between Uncle Sam and Uncle Max. He shouts at them, too. He doesn’t like his brothers either.
Granny Bobbeh told me that, long ago, she had more children.
‘Where are they, Granny Bobbeh?’
She lifts her shoulders.
‘Dead, mein kind. All gone.’
When she and Grandpa Zeideh came to South Africa with Pa and his brothers, all she brought to remind her of her past were her memories of her dead children and a portrait of herself in an oval wooden frame. In the photograph on the wall above the fireplace in her lounge, she was sixteen years old. She came from a country called Lithuania. That’s very far away from the Free State. She was very beautiful. Pa and Ma say I look like her, but she didn’t have any freckles.
Granny Bobbeh always makes Pa’s favourite food when we come to visit. She likes to spoil him. He’s her boy.
‘He isn’t a boy, Granny Bobbeh,’ I tell her. ‘He’s my pa.’
‘Nehm tsvey,’ she urges, her hand on his shoulder. ‘Take two … noch ah Stückele … another little piece.’ The fork in her hand heaps his plate with smoked and stuffed delicacies.
After we’ve finished our lunch, Pa says he needs a walk.
‘Come on,’ he says, holding his hand out to me. ‘Let’s go to the playground.’
In the park near Granny Bobbeh’s house, there are swings with wooden seats and a roundabout with a splintery floor and red handles. In the middle, a maypole reaches for the sky. When it turns around, wooden seats on chains fly out in a wide, clanking circle. I’m still too little to ride on the maypole. Ma and Pa say I’ll fall off. I don’t mind – I like the slide the most. It’s shiny and very high. I have to climb lots of little steps to get to the top. Every step is covered with small crisscrosses that fill with dew in the night.
‘That’s where the dragonflies come to drink in the mornings,’ I tell Pa. ‘See all the little puddles of water?’
When I get to the top I sit down where the great, silvery curve of the slide begins. I hold on tight to the handles on either side, stretch my legs down the polished slide. If I lean back too far, my bottom starts to slide down. I like to sit at the top of the slide. I turn my feet towards each other; tap my toes together. Pa looks small down there on the ground.
‘Stop dawdling!’ he shouts. ‘Come on, slide down!’
I can see far away. The light is glittery, and in the high grass I can see the cats from the nearby houses flat against the ground, spying on the fat pigeons.
Sometimes I go on the seesaw. Pa leans on the opposite side. When he pushes it down, he tips me up high. My bottom bounces on the rubber seat. When he lets up his side, I drop
