Popi’s favourite corner was the one that had oversized glossy books on art. She paged through the colourful paintings, and read more about the European artists called Flemish expressionists who had influenced the trinity’s early work. She gained a clearer understanding of what the trinity was trying to do with his distorted figures, and was no longer bothered by the fact that they were distorted. In fact, when she came across books with figures that were not distorted, that captured life as people saw it with their eyes, she was not moved. Such works, she felt, were lacking in emotion.
The library became the new thief that stole Popi from cow-dung collecting expeditions. Niki missed her. She saw her only in the evenings when she came home to sleep. Sometimes she returned only after Niki was already asleep and left early before Niki woke up. They saw very little of each other. Yet Niki continued to loom large in Popi’s life. She felt Niki’s presence all the time. Whether she was debating in the council chamber, fondling books in the library, or singing for the dead at funerals, Niki’s aura was always with her. She could smell it. Sometimes she even felt that she was seeing everything through Niki’s eyes.
Serenity had now descended upon Niki. She spent her mornings collecting cow-dung. And her afternoons sitting on a grass mat, watching worker bees fly in and out of the two hives that she had constructed in her backyard. Her face was scarred and cracked like a dried-up swamp experiencing a prolonged drought. Her cheeks had become very hard and discoloured even as serenity set upon her. Black and blue chubaba patches blotched the rough terrain. The hair that peeked from under her doek was grey and spiky. The whites of her eyes had lost their whiteness and turned yellowish-brown.
Serenity rested on her shoulders like a heavy log.
28. IMMERSIONS
THESE BROWN PEOPLE ARE less distorted than the trinity’s usual people. Perhaps it is because they carry a load of sorrow contained in a blue coffin. A small coffin that two brown men hold in their arms close to their chests. Dark brown jackets. Light brown pants. Their eyes are closed and their brown-haired heads touch as they bow above the coffin. They have to walk sideways stepping carefully on the brown ground with their bare feet. A small crowd of brown women and children follow them. Eyes closed. A barefoot girl in a brown blanket. An older girl in a blue dress. A young woman in a white dress. Two women in brown blankets. One wearing a blue doek. A grandmother in a brown blanket and blue dress. Age has cut her height to that of the barefoot girl. The brown and blue roofs of township houses stretch to the light brown sky behind the funeral crowd.
Popi’s voice rose above all voices. Its undulations carried from the cemetery to the houses of Mahlatswetsa Location a kilometre away, sending tremors of comfort even to those who had not bothered to attend the funeral. Those who had become nonchalant about funerals. They needed to be comforted, too. It was their death as much as it was that of the little boy who lay in the coffin, and of the bereaved mother who sat on a mat next to the mound that would cover her son, listening to the pastor of the Methodist Church reading the last rites.
Death lived among the people of Mahlatswetsa every day. In days gone by, a funeral was a rare occasion that everyone talked about. That everyone attended. Death was something that happened to the men who worked in the mines of Welkom, who were brought home in pine coffins after their lungs had been eaten by phthisis. Or after “the table” had collapsed on them in the dark holes where they ferreted for the gold that made white women beautiful and glittery. Death was something that happened to the aged who had lived their time on earth.
But these days death was, as the Basotho people put it in their adage, the daughter-in-law of all homesteads. Young men came home to die after being eaten by AIDS. Young women infected their unborn babies, who died soon after reaching toddlerhood. The little boy for whom Popi was singing had been more fortunate. He had reached the age of six before the disease had reduced him to a living skeleton that could not move from the bed. It was a relief for his mother when he finally gave up and breathed his last. She knew too that soon it would be her turn. Like him, she would be reduced to bones. She would be laid to rest in this very cemetery. And hopefully Popi would sing for her as well.
Popi was indeed kept busy singing at funerals. Sometimes in a single Saturday there would be three funerals, one after another. And she would sing at them all. She did not sing only at the funerals of the Methodists. She sang at Roman Catholic funerals. And mastered their hymns, which she thought lacked the liveliness and the danciness of Methodist hymns. She sang at Dutch Reformed Church funerals. And at the funerals of the Zionist Independent Christian Churches. Once she even sang at a funeral for white people. A whole family had been wiped out. Father, mother, a son and two daughters. It was one of the tragedies that had become part of the Afrikaner tradition, in which the father — faced with financial ruin and unpaid Land Bank loans — killed his whole family and then himself. Lizette de Vries, who since becoming mayor had been working closely with Popi, took her to this funeral. All eyes were on the coloured “girl” who sang Afrikaans hymns with such a heavenly voice. The Reverend François Bornman, who conducted the funeral service, stared at her and remembered Stephanus Cronje. What would he have made of this sweet-voiced creature?
Popi sang at funerals only on Saturdays. Or on Sundays, when they spilled over to the next day. During the week she immersed herself in the work of the council. Especially the library. When there were no council meetings, she spent all her days in the library, paging through books and caressing them. She took it as a blessing that she was no longer a member of the Movement since Sekatle had finally succeeded in getting her and Viliki expelled for bringing the Movement into disrepute. The Movement’s patience with the Pule Comrades had finally run out when they had voted Lizette de Vries into the mayorship. After an investigation had been conducted by the big guns of the provincial executive council, Popi and Viliki were both kicked out of the Movement, without any hearing where they could defend themselves. The Pule Comrades became plain Pule Siblings, for comradeship was reserved only for those who belonged to the Movement.
The Pule Siblings would, however, remain town councillors until the next local elections. Not that Sekatle had not tried to get them kicked off the council as well. Unfortunately, the constitution of the land did not allow him to do so. Only the people who had elected them to the council could remove them through the ballot box. Popi thought it was pathetic the way Viliki insisted that he was still a member of the Movement, whether Sekatle and his allies liked it or not. He had worked for this Movement to make it what it was in the rural areas of the Free State. He was going to die a member of the Movement.