Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree. Niq Mhlongo
sighed. She suddenly felt very tired. “Oh, why did that cat choose to die in our swimming pool? I thought cats have nine lives.”
Ousie Maria was in the kitchen the next morning cleaning the stove after flicking a fried egg onto a piece of toast waiting on a plate. Mohapi walked in and Ousie Maria dropped the hissing frying pan into the sink before carrying the plate to the table for his breakfast. After greeting her, he put the kettle on to boil water for a cup of tea. Ousie Maria waited until he was seated at the table with his mug of rooibos next to his plate of food before she spoke what was pressing on her heart.
“Baba ka Mbuso, sorry for intruding,” she began while looking at the tag and string of the teabag that dangled over the side of Mohapi’s steaming mug. “What are you going to do with the cat situation? It cannot just die here. There’s a meaning to it.”
Mohapi smiled awkwardly. “Don’t worry, I will get the gardener to clean the pool today.”
“I’m not just talking about cleaning the pool with the chemicals. I’m talking about traditional cleansing.”
“What? We are Christians, Ousie. We don’t believe in that.”
“You must not forget that the traditional healers are older than your Christianity. I didn’t sleep last night. I had a bad dream, and this yard was full of black spiders. One bit a grey cat, and as the cat was trying to run away it became dizzy and fell into the swimming pool. Then several cats appeared out of nowhere and started to whine with their mouths closed.” She paused to catch her breath. “With their heads very straight and ears more pricked up than ever, they came around the swimming pool. All of a sudden it was you, Baba ka Mbuso, floating in the water. All the cats, about nine of them, raised their heads and watched you drown. Their tails were erect and far away from their legs.”
Mohapi’s eyes where wide with shock. “How . . .” His mouth hung open before he seemed to regain control of his lips. “Ousie, I also had a dream last night,” he admitted. “I dreamt of Bonaparte standing on one hind leg next to the swimming pool. He was going to fall over. I tried to scream, but the cat’s head and neck remained poised in the air, unaffected by the movement of the rest of its body.” He thought for a bit. “But in this dream Bonaparte was not a grey cat. He was black. He was standing at a distance at first, but then edged closer and sat next to you, Ousie. His dark-yellow eyes kept moving slowly from you to me, and back again.”
Ousie Maria rubbed her hands over the goose flesh on her arms.
“Suddenly the cat tried to run away, but he kept running on the same spot,” Mohapi continued. “The dream ended with Bonaparte floating in the swimming pool.”
Mohapi’s dream, with the pattern so close to her own, terrified Ousie Maria. Was it just a coincidence, she asked herself.
She looked at Mohapi, but his eyes shot to the mug in his hand. He frowned.
“Let me speak to Lulama about the cleansing first,” he mumbled.
Ousie Maria was quiet while he ate his food and drank his tea. “Yhuu,” she said eventually, “I’ve never seen a person cry so much when nobody has hit them.”
“Who are you talking about?” Mohapi asked, getting up from the table.
“I’m talking about her, Sandra.” Ousie Maria pointed a thumb next door. “She was crying for a dead cat as if her husband had beaten her up. Auntie Nurse who cleans for her tells me that she stares at your house without blinking her eyes. Yhuuu, white people.” She clapped her hands together. “They are very strange people indeed.”
“You know,” Mohapi began thoughtfully, “I remember I once went to buy groceries at the Pick n Pay in Rosebank Mall. This was about a year ago. Anyway, there was an old white woman behind me in the meat section who had also come to buy the meat bones like me. Her trolley was full of dog and cat food, as well as flea powders and a bathtub. While I was trying to compare the prices, the woman tried to strike up a conversation with me. She asked me how old my dog was. I said I didn’t have one. ‘I have a bulldog and a Chihuahua,’ she said. ‘They love these bones.’”
Mohapi looked at Ousie Maria and there was a cold ferociousness in his eyes.
“I only realised after I had left the store that the woman had assumed I was buying the bone meat for a dog. I felt offended because I was buying those meat bones for my samp dish, my favourite Sunday meal.”
Five days have passed since the burial of Bonaparte, and for Lulama they were marked by a growing distance between the Moerdyks and the Phalas. The Moerdyks made it clear they wanted to be left alone, and Lulama could not help feeling a sense of guilt and shame. The Moerdyk children no longer came over to the Phalas to play, and it was clear Sandra was in some spell of unbreakable loneliness. The swimming pool was now covered with a green net. Lulama was not happy about this because she enjoyed swimming with her children. Ousie Maria gave the swimming pool a wide berth. Lulama saw Ousie Maria, slender in the waist and broad in the shoulders, walk round it to get to her little cottage in the yard. Lulama knew that Mohapi was still superstitious about the cat’s death but he was not talking to his wife about it . . .
One day, Mbuso and Buhle came home from school complaining that the message “Cat Killers” had been written on their desks. “Nobody wants to talk to us. Even the teachers are being mean,” Buhle cried.
When Lulama and Mohapi had made the decision to send their children to a nearly all-white school, they had been worried that Buhle and Mbuso might be isolated, but everything had been fine – until now. Lulama had never imagined that the death of a cat would open up a chasm between her children and their white friends. She hoped that the fuss over Bonaparte’s death would blow over soon.
But then a letter arrived from the headmaster, Mr Steyn himself. He informed Lulama and Mohapi that a few parents had lodged a formal complaint with the school saying that their children were afraid of the “cat killers”. They threatened to withdraw their kids if the alleged “cat killers” did not leave the school with immediate effect. The principal and the school governing body were requested to convene an urgent meeting. At the meeting, which the Phalas had deliberately not attended, the parents were agreed that the “cat killers” must go. Mr Steyn asked Mohapi and Lulama to come see him urgently the next day.
“You’ll have to go alone,” Mohapi said when he arrived home and Lulama told him about the headmaster’s summons.
“Why?”
“Because I will be busy organising workers to come and erase the nasty graffiti on our wall outside. Go see for yourself.”
Lulama raced out. Someone had used red paint to scrawl on their wall:
DEVIL WORSHIPPERS, SATANIST CAT KILLERS
CAT KILLING KAFFIRS
Inside the school premises, Lulama tried to walk tall between the blocks of classrooms to the headmaster’s office. She could feel five hundred pairs of eyes silently trained on her. Some of the kids put their hands over their eyes to avoid the sight of her.
Inside the office, the headmaster made Lulama stand for a while before acknowledging her presence. He was scribbling notes on a pad, a cigarette in his mouth. His eyes were screwed up to avoid the smoke as it spiralled past his face. With a wave of a hand he showed her the chair to sit. She interpreted this as a sign to keep her distance. It was clear that the headmaster didn’t want to shake her hand. He had twinkling eyes, a beaked nose and a slightly open mouth. Some little twitches at the corners of his mouth made it difficult for her to determine whether he was smiling or just plain nervous.
“How could you accuse my children of killing a cat?” Lulama blurted out. “They would never do such a thing.”
“So who killed the poor cat? Everyone in the school is pointing the finger at Mbuso and Buhle.”
“How I am I supposed to know who killed the damn cat? Maybe you should do a postmortem. Maybe curiosity killed the cat, who knows? Maybe it’s damn old age. Maybe it was bitten by poisonous