The Keeper of the Kumm. Sylvia Vollenhoven
head into the road to find Claudie. I don’t know what to do with myself when he’s not around. There’s only one girl in the road with whom I sometimes play, Noelene. Mostly she prefers hanging around with the older children. She lives in the same house as Freddie.
He is a tall man who picks me up to make a fuss of me when he notices my grandmother looking. When I’m in his arms the ground seems so far away. I worry that he might drop me if Ma stops watching.
“So where will they stay when they get married, Sister Sofie?” Auntie Gracie asks Ma one day.
They are sitting in the kitchen and I can hear them from where I am in the yard.
“They’ve been to the council for a house but there’s a waiting list. So they’ll probably move in with the Vollenhovens. Good luck to her with that lot. His sister can’t stand her and his mother says openly she doesn’t know why her son wants to marry a kaffir meid with a kroeskop5 bastard child.”
It sounds like my mother is mixed up with some strange people.
“That house shouldn’t be called Shalom. They fight like cat and dog. Have you heard the way Maggie Vollenhoven talks to her husband? I’ve never heard a woman swear so much,” says my grandmother.
I worry about my mother leaving us to go to live in the Shalom place with the fighting people who don’t like us.
Claudie and Pa Malfent are my only friends. As I grow older I accept that the children of Wynberg are mostly out of my league. They have straight hair, they don’t live in a small shed in someone’s back yard and some of them could pass for white.
I imagine that when I pass through the wire mesh boundary between the lane where I play and the big school, all will be well. I will wear the smart turquoise uniform of Ottery Road Methodist and look at Claudie walking with Pa Malfent to Morris the Butcher. I won’t miss them because I will have ‘big school’ friends.
But until then I am happy in my world. Sometimes Pa Malfent plays his favourite instrument, a zither that has been in his family for a long time. He sings mournful hymns. I love looking at the glossy, black-painted wood as his fingers move slowly over the strings. He lets me touch the zither’s box with the green felt on the inside and the delicate, green flower patterns on the lacquer veneer.
His old man voice is sometimes gruff, sometimes shaky and thin like the sound of the strings.
He laughs and sings me his special song about green valleys in Wales. I don’t understand the fancy English words but the tune puts me to sleep on his bed.
One morning there is a bustle in Auntie Gracie’s house by the time I wake up. An ambulance is parked in the road and I can see a piece of the vehicle’s bulbous white bonnet as I pass the lane to the kitchen. Everyone is crying.
“He looked so good yesterday. He was singing that song of his ’til late,” says Auntie Gracie.
I look into Pa Malfent’s room. The bed is empty, neatly made up. In the lounge the ambulance people are talking with Uncle Willie, Auntie Gracie’s husband.
I don’t cry much when Pa Malfent dies. But a few months later when someone takes the zither out of the green baize box and leaves it lying around in the yard, my heart breaks. I go and sit under the loquat tree in the corner of the garden.
A little while after old Pa Malfent dies and my mother’s wedding, my grandmother and I leave Brentwood Road so that she can live ‘in service’ with the Sonneveld family, Dutch immigrants, in Woodley Road, Plumstead. Now we see my mother only at weekends and people call her Mrs Vollenhoven. It’s confusing because that’s exactly what I call Freddie’s mother Maggie.
When I find out what ‘stepfather’ means I begin to write poems and letters for my real father so that he will know where I am and come to rescue me. He will take me to that world on the other side of the fence where the almost-white Wynberg girls will play with me. Our birth certificates probably all have the tag ‘Mixed’ but living in Brentwood Road, next to the school for the fair kids of the coloured middle-classes, teaches me that some people are less ‘mixed’ than others.
A strange house called Shalom
The rituals are not for the benefit of the gods. The rhythm of the dance holds threads in place so the Ancestors can do their work.
In the ’50s and ’60s Wynberg is an affluent island in a sea of growing apartheid chaos. The coloured people here can’t be moved because they own the land. Stories abound about how they manage to hang on to title deeds when black people are being dispossessed all around. The one heard most often is about Martha, the 19th-century freed slave who married a British earl, inherited his fortune and purchased a huge piece of farm land here on the southern slopes of the Table Mountain range.
The descendants of Martha and the freed slaves have always made their landed privilege and mixed blood work for them in this suburb cut off from the world of the Cape Flats by white neighbourhoods, main roads and a railway line. The title deeds are the glue that has bonded the enclave to the exclusion of all else. There are the Wynberg coloureds and then there are ‘the rest’.
When Claudie is nowhere to be found, I wander down the road towards the house called Shalom, in search of other play options. My mother will soon marry Freddie Vollenhoven so she doesn’t mind if I go there. If I’m lucky, I’ll find Noelene. When there are no other friends around, she’ll play with me for a while. I walk right into the patriarch of Shalom, Chrisjan Vollenhoven. Freddie’s father is a religious fanatic. All the kids in Brentwood Road know that before you go into his house you have to say, “Only Jesus.”
His wife calls him “Mal Chrisjan”. The grown-ups in Brentwood Road talk about how much he used to drink and sing loudly in the road. But now he has ‘found the Lord’ and is ‘saved’. He preaches several times a week from the pulpit of the Baptist Church in Castletown Road. He always wears brown suits and a fedora to match. When he walks down the road, he seems to be praying. Head bent forward slightly, leaning into the wind, holding on to his hat. I’m terrified of this man. I wish he would go back to singing drunken songs like my Uncle Tienie in Swellendam. He looks at me as if I’ve done something horribly wrong and it’s only a matter of time before he finds out what it is. His voice always sounds the same whether he’s talking to me or conversing with God.
When I push open the heavy wooden garden gate, Chrisjan is standing on the stoep waiting for the password. There are miles of pathway and large brick steps to climb before I get to the red front porch and the gargoyle with the folded arms who guards Shalom. I hope that today he will let me pass.
“Only?” says Chrisjan looking at me, expecting me to finish the phrase.
I can’t make the sound come out of my mouth. My breath disappears as he grabs my arm.
“Only?”
“God, Chrisjan, los die kinners uit. Dis Eileen se kind. Sy soek seker vir Noelene.”
After his wife Maggie’s intervention, I whisper “only Jesus” several times while he grips my arm. I’m allowed up the wide steps onto the red polished stoep.
“Noelene speel daar agter,” Maggie calls over her shoulder in a loud voice.
This house is much larger than the one we live in. Everyone here has their own bedroom. They speak only Afrikaans and talk about me as if I’m deaf. The house is almost as fancy as the places of the white people where my grandmother works. The people in the road say it’s because Chrisjan is a French polisher, restoring the antique furniture of white customers. My mother says it’s because Maggie is almost-white.
When King George and his Queen came to South Africa, Maggie and Chrisjan were invited to a royal ball in the Drill Hall. They still have the invitation beneath the glass top of the sideboard in the lounge. Curly letters that announce His Britannic Majesty’s wishes.
Except for Freddie, who Maggie and Chrisjan adopted, the Vollenhovens look almost like white people.
In Cape