Christmas had lost the festive aura it used to have when she was a little girl. Those days, girls wore their new taffeta dresses and went to show off at church in the morning. Boys also dressed up in colourful new shirts, even when the pants of those whose parents could not afford new outfits were the old Sunday pants. Christ-mases were feasting days. Families used to cook special meals. After a big lunch of rice, chicken, cabbage, beetroot, tomato and onion gravy, jelly and custard, and home-baked hard cakes with ginger beer, the children would take a songful stroll to the houses of white people in town. There they would stand at the gate of each house and ask for a “Christmas Box.” The white folk would send their children or maids to the gate with sweets and cookies. Late in the afternoon the children would sing their way back to Mahlatswetsa Location, where they would divide the spoils amongst themselves.
But these days, Christmas had lost its lustre. Children did not seem to care any more. They spent the whole day in their old clothes. Parents still maintained the tradition of buying new clothes. But the children refused to wear them on Christmas Day. They kept them in their boxes to wear during the year when no one would know they had been bought for Christmas.
Christmas had now become like an ordinary Sunday, except for the fact that the service was a Christmas service; the reading from the Bible was about the birth of Christ, and the preaching was about what that birth meant to the world. After the service, people went home to eat their ordinary Sunday lunches, which looked like the Christmas lunches of old except for the absence of jelly and custard, and cakes and ginger beer. Adults went to get drunk, as they did every weekend, while children just loitered around street corners in small groups.
This Christmas, unlike others, Popi had not cooked any special lunch. Neither had Niki. Popi sat on the bed and stared at the Christmas cart. She wondered why a man instead of the customary donkey was pulling it. She could never figure out the trinity. How his mind worked. Still, she enjoyed his madness, and found it moving.
Niki sat under one of the bluegum trees that lined the road leading into Excelsior. The evergreen melliodora and the black ironbark well beloved by honeybees. She sat on a white plastic garden chair, and watched the worker bees as they flew from the trees laden with pollen and nectar to the hives that she had placed on the ground. Her eyes followed the bees from the hives back to the flowers on the trees and into the hives again. The wooden hives could be seen among the long blades of grass, sometimes peeping above them, along the three-kilometre stretch of road. She had placed them randomly, facing in different directions to make it easier for the bees to find their particular hives. If the hives had been placed in a straight line facing the same direction, this would have confused the bees, as they would not have known to which hive they belonged. She had learnt, at the one-day bee-keeping course on a farm at Ficksburg Viliki had sent her to, that unlike American bees, South African bees did not know how to count.
Some of Niki’s hives were placed in clusters. Four hives to each cluster. Back to back and facing in different directions. Four different colours in each cluster. Red, blue, yellow and green. In the three-kilometre stretch, there were thirty hives.
At the farm, without the knowledge of the farmer, Niki had learnt from the labourers how to construct beehives. Each hive had a honey chamber and a brood chamber. Each chamber had ten frames on which honeycombs hung. In the brood chamber of each hive were the queen and the drones and the eggs and the brood.
Every morning Niki took her white garden chair and a piece of bread wrapped in plastic, and walked the six kilometres from Mahlatswetsa Location through the town to the bluegum trees. There she sat among the hives for the whole day. Listening to the buzzing of the bees. Watching the worker bees doing their work. Sitting still even as some of the bees danced around her, communicating calming messages to her through their airborne hormones. It was as if she shared the same pheromones with the bees.
Whenever she harvested some of the hives, Niki gave the honey away.
The message would be relayed from one mouth to the next: The Bee Woman has honey. We would then walk along the road as if we were on a particular journey. We would see her sitting on the chair among the hives, and would greet her in the sweetest of voices. She would call us to come and get some honey. She would give us honeycombs from the pile in a white plastic bucket in front of her. She did not wonder why we happened to have containers — empty billycans and pots — on our journey. Or why our journey suddenly came to an end and we turned back to the township as soon as she had given us the honey.
Her misguided generosity did not sit well with Viliki, who had helped her with the material to construct the hives in the first place. He had also assisted her with the construction of the catch-boxes that were used to trap swarming bees. Right from the beginning, as the councillor in charge of the parks, he had allowed her to place the hives in the veld near the trees that lined the road. He had even sent her to the farm at Ficksburg to learn more scientific ways of bee-keeping, while Popi was insisting that her mother be left alone to keep bees in her own way, using the wisdom that her ancestors had given her. Clearly her ancestors were talking to her through the bees, and it would be interfering with this communication if she were taught European ways of keeping bees, Popi had reasoned. Viliki had gone to all this trouble because he hoped that Niki would be able to make a living from the bees. Not just give honey away to passers-by.
Viliki once discussed his concerns with Adam de Vries, who went to offer his assistance to Niki.
“I can help you to expand your bee-keeping enterprise and make it financially viable,” he had said.
Niki had thanked him for the offer, but had made it clear that she did not need anyone’s assistance.
Even on Christmas Day Niki sat among the bees. And Popi sat on the bed in her mother’s shack. She was getting bored with the postcards. She could not go to the library on Christmas Day. It was closed. Nor could she go to collect cow-dung. In any event, cow-dung gathering expeditions were only enjoyable when Niki was there. Popi decided to get into the Christmas rickshaw, to sit behind Baby Jesus and Mother Mary, and ride along the dusty road of Mahlatswetsa Location, until it joined the broad tarred road that led to the town, past the closed shops and banks, right up to the stretch of road that was lined with bluegum trees. There she found Niki sitting on her garden chair among the hives.
Niki was pleased to see her daughter. She was always happy when Popi came to visit her. To pay homage to her, as Popi put it. We observed that the motlopotlo that existed between them was very strong. The motiopotlo was the invisible cord that tied the child to the mother. It was the umbilical cord that remained strong even after it had been cut and buried in the ash-heap after the birth of the child. Some mothers were fortunate in that the motlopotlo between them and their children remained strong throughout their lives. The less fortunate mothers had a weak motlopotlo. Their children forgot all about them and disappeared from their lives.
Popi sat on the grass at Niki’s feet. There was silence between them for some time. Then suddenly Niki said, “I did many wrong things in my life.”
“I don’t care what you did in your life, Niki,” said Popi quietly. “I don’t want to know.”
“Yet some of them have had a sweet harvest,” continued Niki, as if she had not heard her. “If I had not done what I did, you would not be here.”