Look At Me. Nataniël
sides of the house, it’s a wide porch full of couches covered in blankets, shelves of jars without lids, rows and rows of pot plants (each pot is different and most are cracked or have sacrificed a big chip), garden boots and bunches of dried herbs. The side of the house faces the street, the front looks out over the vineyard to our home. On this side of the porch stands a wooden table with a jug of ice-cold lemonade and a patterned plate of ginger biscuits. (On later visits, I realised that lemonade was always waiting, always ice-cold, even when guests weren’t expected. The biscuits – which looked exactly like ginger biscuits should look, not too flat or too pale or with too few cracks, exactly right – were always fresh from the oven. How was that possible?)
On that first day, the front door is open. This door consists of a series of wooden frames filled with crinkly glass and is never closed again, for as long as we live in our house; through wind and weather, heat and hail, day or night it is open. Tall and slender with a dark braid and a straight, ankle-length dress of copper velvet, that’s what she looks like, the oldish woman who is waiting for us. She greets us warmly, kisses my baby brother on his forehead and takes my face in her hands.
What a lovely boy! she says. And look at those golden curls!
Yes, we have no idea where this hair suddenly came from, says my mother, Definitely not from the family.
Come in, the woman says, My sister is in the kitchen, you can’t get her out of there.
We walk down a passage full of strange objects, globes on silver stands, birdcages with open doors, lamps without light bulbs and upright containers full of pitch-black umbrellas with wooden handles carved into faces. The kitchen is big and full of food, almost as much food as in Grandmother’s kitchen. There are high, cheerful windows with crocheted curtains, the walls in between are overgrown with narrow shelves buckling under rows and rows of glass jars, every fruit and vegetable you can think of has been preserved. Tins without lids display mountains of rusks, a tray is loaded with fruit loaf and pots steam on a big stove.
The sister is round as a ball and also oldish. Her light-pink dress is wrinkled, she’s lost a button, one sleeve is unravelling and most of her snow-white hair has already escaped a crooked bun. She is holding on to a chair and does not look at my mother or my little brother: she is talking just to me.
You must be hungry, she says in a shaky voice, Sit down, what do you like? We have pies and pancakes and I’ve bottled some peaches.
We have everything, laughs the tall woman, She never stops.
I stayed and ate until my mother said we have to go now. After that I was there every second day, or as often as my mother allowed. The Stoepsusters (one was always on the porch, the other never) asked questions, listened, cried, sang, warned, fed and called each other Sister. I talked, ate, laughed a lot and wondered even more.
Many years later, I was grocery shopping one day with Grandmother in Wellington. We were on our way to the car, two women came out of the butchery, one was tall, the other short, both dressed in long dresses from another era. Unsteady on their feet, they held on to each other. One woman’s shoes were worn through, the other’s hair was a mess, one held a packet wrapped in brown paper; on her finger was an unusual ring with a big stone, on the other’s shoulder was a sprinkling of fine sequins like she was at a concert or a wild party.
I looked at Grandmother.
Yes, she sighed. That’s what happens when fairies eat meat.
Our Fence
Our World and the Whole World were separated only by silver chicken wire. The holes were big and the wire was thin, the kind that wouldn’t keep anything in or out, it was just there, stretched tightly between thin silver poles, a shoulder-high, almost invisible fence, where else should silver wire go? The fence ran along three sides of the erf, at the front by the road, on one side along the empty erf between the Gagianos and us, and on the other side alongside the vineyard that belonged to nobody. There was no fence at the back of the erf. There was a back yard with a shed full of tools, and a cement laundry block, complete with a high tap and a deep basin. Trees, some fruit-bearing and others not, stood around like creatures that were unwilling to either chat or queue. Long grass and single reed stalks showed that the erf had come to an end, here there was a small vlei, sometimes a trickle of water burbled quietly.
I never questioned the purpose of the fence, it wasn’t for safety, what danger could there be? And at the back it was unnecessary, beyond the vlei there was nothing, the Whole World ended there, as it did two streets away on the other side of town, as it did at the end of our friends’ erf downtown. (Our Whole World was called a town, there were other towns too, those existed only when we went there. The rest of the time they were their own Whole Worlds.)
On hot days I stood on the front porch and watched the fence glitter in the sun, it was a spider’s web without a fly, with a small front gate, also glittering, and a big gate for cars. The brilliant shine was because the fence had been painted, why and by whom a fence made of chicken wire had been painted was a mystery, it was covered in the shiniest paint anyone had ever seen. And it was neat. And because it was neat, nothing grew on it, not a single climber stretched out a tendril, the spider’s web hung there, empty and clean.
And here a child could do what has long since become impossible: even early in your life you could open the small gate and step into the Whole World. You could walk on your own down the road, right in the middle, traffic was scarce and it was quiet. Grandmother said you could hear a motor car the moment it left the factory, you would know when you had to make way.
The Whole World was called Riebeek-Kasteel. And when you stood at the gate and looked to your left, up the hill, you saw The Stoepsusters’ house, the stop street and the crossroad. On the other side were orchards full of shadows and a sheltered house where someone with a title lived, Reverend, Sergeant, Magistrate, the kind of man whose wife was never seen without a brooch. I liked looking to the right. There the downward slope levelled out, you could walk to the corner erf. Here I often played. I have no idea who lived there, but I knew the garden well, an exceptionally big, empty yard without a single blade of grass, only rose bushes, millions of them, in between were fountains and benches. The house was in the middle of all the roses, a long, flat house with Venetian blinds, repulsive and always shut, I can’t remember ever going inside.
When you turned right, a tennis court and an empty square were on your left, this was the centre of town. Here farmers parked their bakkies. I knew what farmers were and that they lived on farms and that their children also lived there and disappeared from the town every afternoon after school, but as long as the town was the Whole World, I didn’t feel like thinking about it or trying to understand where the farms fitted in.
As soon as the police station appeared on your right, you could turn left to the shops. This was a concoction of buildings, porches, alleys, courtyards and a few houses, all connected. First was the haberdashery, it belonged to a friendly woman, she was as thin as a rail and every day her long, pitch-black leg hair was flattened by stockings, people called it blanket legs. There was a post office and next to it an alleyway with doors to rooms where single people lived, also a back yard full of the middle shop owner’s children. I played here occasionally, but when I had 20c in my hand I walked straight into the shop. The middle shop’s inside was made of wood. Counters with glass fronts wound through the entire space and displayed the contents of their drawers. Screws, sweets, gloves, blue soap, polish, cooldrink glasses, socks, ties, toys, apricot sweets, marshmallow fish, pocketknives, nappies, fly poison, clothes pegs, tomato sauce, envelopes, writing pads, pencils, curtain hooks, hinges, sunglasses and headache powders, all in a row.
In this shop I discovered that a day without possibility, even the smallest explosion of deliciousness, was an unbearable greyness. As soon as I knew the way, I begged my mother to send me there, and she did, two or three times a week, to buy something, always two things at a time: a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. Or a bag of tomatoes and a newspaper. Or orange squash and brown paper. Then there was 5c left over. With this I could buy myself two things: a vienna and a small bag of chips. I was a rich man’s child! Add Saturday’s hot dogs and Sunday’s pudding, and there was seldom a day without a highlight.
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