The Keeper of the Kumm. Sylvia Vollenhoven
again. We lifted her up. We put her in the house. The place became dark and she lay there. She could not breathe.
“Trina de Klerk said /Gui-an Dootje did not want to work, she was laying there from laziness. I who was there, I saw that /Gui-an’s breath had gone. Her heart had fallen. She was insensible. She did not breathe. When the place was night she recovered her breath.”
In the wheat-farming district in the Overberg, where my grandmother was born, stories of white farmers or the police attacking black people abound.
In Swellendam, where the national highway divides the bodorp and onderdorp, segregating the town along racial lines, this cruelty is treated as the norm. During school holidays we go there and the tension when we walk in the white part of town is palpable.
As a young journalist, I write about the attack on my grandmother for a magazine. The descendants of Oubaas Streicher get to read it. They phone my mother and invite us to the farm. My grandmother is not happy that I have embarrassed the Streicher family in this way.
My mother Eileen is the only one eager to make the trip to Swellendam to drink tea with the modern Streichers. For a long time we talk about it, making half-hearted plans. When we finally take up the offer, it is a tense affair with the Streichers eager to show my mother and I the cottage where Ma was born. When we leave they give us a book about their family history.
Nobody refers to the beating that I’ve written about in the magazine.
Longing and belonging
The girl follows the spoor of an old story animal. In the fading light she cannot see but the wind of its passing lifts the hem of her attention.
My grandmother lives to be almost a hundred years old and for most of her life the flu epidemic of 1918 is her only experience of serious illness. But a sickness that tugs at her heart is her longing for Swellendam, the place of her birth. She says homesickness is a disease of the soul.
“As ’n mens so sielsiek is kan niks en niemand jou red nie.”
I know each year when Christmas is getting closer because Ma starts talking non-stop about Swellendam. When I am in primary school, I help her write letters to her only relative who has children who can read. None of Ma’s brothers and sisters went to school. But her sister Auntie Rachel, who lives in Die Dam, as my family calls the Overberg town where the Petersens and Vollenhovens come from, has educated, grown-up children. Her daughters Sienie and Leen are the ones who can read the letters I write on the Croxley notepaper that we buy at Mr Brey’s shop when Ma gets her pension.
“Skryf daar vir jou Auntie Ragel, ‘All is well this side with Eileen, Freddie and the children. How are things with you? Sy hou tog so daarvan dat ons vir haar in Engels skryf.”
Dearest Aunty Ray, we are writing to tell you that all is well with us. We are hoping to hear the same from you. We are planning to come to Swellendam for the festive season and hope this will be in order.
Just a few sentences and my thin-up, thick-down cursive strokes fill the page. The style is straight out of my English lessons. I feel like I am writing to the white people in the books I read at school. There is no place for sharing intimacies in this kind of language but Ma claps her hands with pride when I read it back to her. When the letter arrives at Auntie Rachel’s in Treu Street, Railton, it is propped up behind the glass in the dining room display cabinet to be taken out occasionally for envious neighbours. I doubt whether anyone actually reads it.
“Wake up, Sylvia, we’ll be there any minute now. Here, have some tea.” Ma holds out a Thermos flask with her favourite rooibos herbal drink. On the train to Swellendam we eat breakfast – cream crackers and cheese – from a round cake tin with pictures of proteas on the lid.
The train crosses the Breede River. Soon it is alongside the highway that divides the white bodorp in the shade of the Langeberg from the black onderdorp township of Railton. A collection of matchbox houses sweltering in a treeless expanse on a road to nowhere.
There are many people at the station. Ma struggles with the luggage. The platform is just long enough to service the front end of the train, where white people sit. They step easily onto the platform while we negotiate the long drop from the train to the ground. From where I am standing next to my grandmother I look at the legs of the white people. Pale stockings and grey trousers moving confidently way above us. We wait until they have left the station and then move onto the platform towards the station exit. Nobody tells us to wait, we just do.
I love being in Swellendam. When my grandmother is with her family, they drift between worlds, visible and invisible. The stories jump around like children on a trampoline and I run around trying to catch the threads.
Ma’s family are descendants of the indigenous people, the Khoi and San, and imported slaves. But nobody ever talks about this heritage or the fact that there might be colonial and especially Afrikaner blood running in our veins.
Her brother Oomie Abraham has a pet name for everyone. My Auntie Rachel is Ousus, Ma is Tietie and he calls me moerkoffie. When it comes to his affections, I run a close second to his favourite farm brew. I am very young when I notice that he can’t do without his coffee. So when my aunt asks me one day what I would like, I point to Oomie Abraham and say confidently, “Strong coffee”. So now whenever we arrive from Cape Town he comes out onto the werf in front of their whitewashed farm cottage, holds his arms wide open and says: “Hier kom my strong coffee.” His rolling brogue makes each word sound intimate and warm.
In winter, Swellendam is very cold so we hardly ever go during the mid-year school holidays. In mid-summer, the Overberg is a swirl of red earth, yellow harvested wheat fields, brown haystacks and flowering fynbos. Sunlit sheep hardly move in the heat. The Langeberg mountains sing blue praises all along the edges of this tableau.
Ma is the youngest of her siblings. She had a younger brother but he died in a thunderstorm, struck by lightning when she was left to take care of him in the fields. There is always a blue crocheted baby’s bonnet in her wardrobe. My mother says it’s what her brother was wearing that day as they sheltered from the storm. Ma says it has never been worn because it was intended for a baby boy she miscarried. But whatever it is, it’s her secret albatross and each time we move house she takes it along.
Swellendam is the centre of our world. We are happier here than anywhere else.
Whenever Ma arrives in Swellendam she goes to visit her brother Oomie Abraham first. Then, because the thatch-roofed cottage in Waaihoek in the foothills of the Langeberg is too small for visitors, we make our way down into the valley and across the railway line to her sister Rachel’s house in Railton.
In the Petersen family, Rachel Pekeur is a wealthy woman, although nobody ever talks about the source of her relative abundance. I assume it’s because she married a school principal, Oom Japie Pekeur, and is a cook at the Royal Hotel in the main street.
The people of Swellendam are descended from the great Hessequa or People of the Trees, the indigenous Khoikhoi who the colonials called Hottentots, the San (who today prefer to be known as Bushmen), the slaves who came from the East and other parts of Africa and, of course, from European colonials.
Fair-skinned Auntie Rachel with eyes coloured in a cognac amber has long, curly black hair and is living proof of the complex relationships between the wealthy white folk on the slopes of the mountain, Afrikaners with Dutch ancestry, and the people of the black downtown onderdorp.
Ma attends the Seventh-day Adventist church in the city but here she resorts to the only option, a dour dominee with an unyielding white tie and ‘God help julle’ manel coat.
The dominee’s admonitions come with a hefty fist slammed onto the pulpit. Having worked himself into a frenzy to wake a gently dozing congregation, the dominee says things like:
“En dan sal dit te laat wees om te skree, ‘Vader vergewe ons’, want julle’t een keer te veel met die duiwel gedans en sy musiek het julle gelei tot die deure van die verdoemenis.”
When he finally announces the closing hymn, even