Popi did not try to make sense of what Niki was saying.
“Are you still angry with Tjaart?” Niki asked.
“I do not want to be angry with Tjaart. I do not want to be angry with anyone.”
“At least now you do admit that you have some anger in you.”
“I told you, I react to his anger. I become angry at his anger. Perhaps I have gone overboard with my anger. Perhaps when the people of Mahlatswetsa made me angry by calling me names, I took it out on him.”
“Remember, my child, anger eats the owner.”
This sounded very much like the message that Jacomina and her father were trying to transmit to Tjaart Cronje. If Popi had ridden her Christmas rickshaw to the Cronje household, she would have found Cornelia Cronje, Tjaart Cronje, Jacomina Cronje and the Reverend François Bornman sitting on the veranda, enjoying their coffee and brandy after a lunch of roast quail with berry sauce, and trying to talk Tjaart Cronje out of his anger.
As usual Cornelia was fussing over Tjaart, to the annoyance of Jacomina. Cornelia always fussed over Tjaart as if he was a child. Did you have enough, Tjaart? Don’t you want another piece of this. or that? It irritated Jacomina even more that Tjaart allowed himself to become a baby whenever Cornelia was around. Is Tjaart warm enough?. Don’t allow him to go out in the cold like that, Jacomina. Did Tjaart eat before he left. Oh, my child this. my child that!
Jacomina had once complained: “You won’t be there to pick up the pieces when Tjaart gets thoroughly spoilt, Cornelia.”
She called her mother-in-law Cornelia, as she had always done before she married her son.
Cornelia Cronje had mumbled something to the effect that Jacomina did not know how to look after a man properly. That was why her first husband had left.
“I heard that,” Jacomina had screamed.
Cornelia kept silent as Jacomina and the dominee discussed her son’s anger. It was not doing him any good, they said. He had turned thin and twisted because his anger was eating him up, they observed. Cornelia observed in her mind, without voicing her thoughts out of respect for the dominee, that her son had become thin and twisted because Jacomina was not feeding him properly.
“Every time he returns from the town council meetings he can’t even eat because of anger,” said Jacomina.
“It is that Popi who needles him all the time in the council,” Cornelia burst out in defence of her son, unable to contain herself any longer. “Everyone in this town knows that that girl would like to see my child dead.”
Tjaart Cronje admitted that his little tiffs with Popi were indeed affecting his health.
“I am fighting a lonely war on many fronts,” explained Tjaart Cronje. “It is Popi on one front, who always wants to take the first opportunity to annoy me. But there is a broader and bigger front, where I fight for the rights of the Afrikaner — rights which are being trampled upon every day.”
“We agreed, Tjaart, that you would not talk politics at home,” said Jacomina.
“You started the subject, not me,” said Tjaart Cronje.
“So now he can’t even express an opinion in his own house?” asked Cornelia.
“Politics only makes him unhappy,” explained Jacomina.
“Perhaps in the next local elections in November he shouldn’t stand,” advised the dominee.
“I certainly won’t stand,” said Tjaart resolutely. “Let the black people take this town and ruin it. I’ll focus on my butchery, and on planning for the return of the Afrikaner to his rightful place.”
“We do not need to be sombre,” said the dominee, getting up from his garden chair and going to the table, which was laden with drinks and fruit. “It is Christmas! Let us have some more of your wonderful brandy, my boy.”
The Christmas rickshaw left them to their Christmas cheer and returned to Niki and Popi.
They were sitting silently, listening to the bees. Niki unwrapped the turban from Popi’s head and exposed the locks that flowed to her waist. She caressed her daughter’s hair.
“While you are at it, why don’t you scratch my scalp,” said Popi. “It is always itching.”
“It is because of dandruff. It is all over your head like flakes of snow. You don’t wash your hair often enough.”
“This hair is a curse,” said Popi. “I never know what to do with it.”
After thirty years, she had still not learnt how to deal with her hair. Even as a young girl she had always regretted the fact that she could not do the things that other girls her age did with their hair. She could not use the trendy hair straighteners like Dark-and-Lovely and Sta-sof-fro — all the way from America — because her hair was already straight. She had watched with envy as other girls relaxed their hair by frying it with chemicals or with red-hot copper combs. She herself was deprived participation in that ritual as her hair did not need relaxing. She could not be part of the camaraderie of braiding either. Once she had tried braiding her hair, but had had to undo it immediately when she saw her split ends sticking out all over the braids like a badly made raffia rope. She could not use extensions because her hair was already naturally extended. She had watched with envy as grease dripped down her friends’ ears after a perm. She had drooled at their cornrows. At their dreadlocks. And most recently at their closely cropped kinks that had been dyed blonde. Her hair remained flowing locks. She alone, among her friends, could flip her head like a white woman. This became necessary whenever activity or the wind blew some of her locks across the front of her face. The turban, therefore, continued to be her saviour.
“Your hair cannot be a curse, Popi,” said Niki quietly. “God cannot create a curse on your head.”
“The pain of my whole life is locked in my hair,” said Popi bitterly.
“Hair is just hair, Popi. Hair or no hair, you are a beautiful person, Popi. A very beautiful person.”
VILIKI WAS grateful. So was Niki. From the outrage of rape (that’s what we called it in our post-apartheid euphoria), our mothers gave birth to beautiful human beings. As beautiful as the Seller of Songs, who could create beautiful things. As beautiful as Popi, who could not create, but who knew how to love beautiful creations like the trinity’s Christmas cart that took her and her mother back to Mahlatswetsa Location that evening, after spending a comely Christmas Day with the bees.
31. SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID
SHE IS NOT a madonna. Although she sits like one. There is no baby in sight. Her golden-brown body is illuminated by red streaks of light. She is naked, except for the veil of lace that flows from her head to the blue floor on which she sits. Black outlines reinforce her fullness. She looks away from the window on which the shadow of a voyeur is cast. Between her open legs is a red bowl. In front of her, two white doves are foolishly pecking at the flowers on the lace. Soon they will discover the life-lessness of the flowers and will hop to peck at the blackness of her pubes, where life throbs.
Colour goes haywire. Once more a beautiful madness. Life throbs in the green field where two black reapers cut green wheat with their invisible scythes. They put it over their shoulders, where it immediately assumes a yellow ochre colour with tinges of red. One bends to cut the wheat. He wears blue overalls and black gumboots. A wide-brimmed red hat protects him from the absent sun. Another one stands to stretch his tired back. He wears a red Basotho blanket. A black conical Basotho hat protects him from the absent sun. A black donkey pulls a red cart in the field, trampling the crops: A black man and a black child sit in the cart. Not black as in black, but black as in Payne’s grey. A black hat protects the black man from the absent sun. The field is not only green. It has broad strokes of titanium white. Strokes of yellow ochre. Strokes of naphthol crimson. Green, white, yellow and crimson strokes extend to the cobalt blue sky.