A wide-eyed girl stands against a deep blue wall. The whites of her eyes are white and the pupils are black. She hides a subtle smile in her blue and green face. She stands between two reliquary figures. One is dressed in white and the other is bare-breasted. Nothing else. No other detail. Just the questions that remain in her eyes.
The same questions were in Popi’s eyes as she moved from one canvas to another. What did it all mean? Did it matter that she did not understand what it all meant? Was it not enough just to enjoy the haunting quality of the work and to rejoice in the emotions that it awakened without quibbling about what it all meant? Why should it mean anything at all? Is it not enough that it evokes? Should it now also mean?
She tried very hard to identify the Flemish expressionist influence that she had read about in the oversized books in the library. The trinity had clearly strayed away from that early influence. All for the better. His work had a robustness that had escaped the Flemish expressionists. Perhaps it was the broad strokes, some of which were created with palette knives instead of the usual broad brushes. And the multiple glazes that seemed to suck her into the canvases, making her walk the same soil that the trinity’s subjects walked.
She had finally come to Tweespruit. To the mission station where the trinity had been based since leaving Thaba Nchu many years ago. She had found the trinity hard at work. Not painting. At eighty-three, he was too old to mess around with pigments. Perhaps his eyes could no longer distinguish the different colours. Or he was too frail to survive the excitement of mixing different colours of oil paints, and of acrylics, to create feasts of new colours. He was hard at work spraying fixative onto a charcoal drawing of a girl reading a book in the candlelight. He was covering his nose with a dirty rag to protect himself from the fumes that assailed the crisp air.
Charcoal drawings. That was all he was capable of creating now. A world in black and white.
The trinity had led her into the living room. The walls were filled with many of his old paintings. They re-created the ambience of his studio in Thaba Nchu. It was as if she had been here before. As soon as she had entered and cast her eyes on the walls, memories of previous visits to Thaba Nchu had flooded her. She had recalled with nostalgia the visits that had made her see everybody’s life through the eyes of the trinity’s works.
At first, the trinity had thought she was one of the women who had come to model for his nudes. She had stood there for a while, feeling very uncomfortable. The trinity had smiled, and looked her over. Then he had told her that he no longer painted nudes. He no longer painted anything. Jokingly, he had added that even if he were still in his painting prime, she would not qualify as a model. She did not have enough flesh on her body. She was tall and slender like the models of the city. Not like the trinity’s buxom models. She had felt naked as he inspected her. It was as though her yellow and blue floral dress, her fawn petticoat and matching knickers, and her red turban had disintegrated. But with the naked feeling, she was no longer uncomfortable. She had been naked here before. Many times. She had fixed her blue eyes on the trinity’s. Both she and the trinity had smiled. And then he had shaped a donkey from the pages of a magazine and had emitted two brays as he gave it to her. She had known at once that he had remembered who she was.
Popi had caught a minibus taxi to Tweespruit, twenty-nine kilometres from Excelsior, on the pretext that she was going to ask the trinity to donate a painting for the library in Mahlatswetsa Location. But as she bathed herself in the light of the canvases, she knew that that was not the reason she had come. She did not even mention the donation. She just walked from one canvas to the next. Over and over again. The trinity watched her silently for a while, and then went back to his charcoal drawings.
The works exuded an energy that enveloped her, draining her of all negative feelings. She felt weak at the knees. Tears ran down her cheeks. She did not know why she was crying. She had to go. She walked out of the living room, and out of the mission station, without even saying goodbye. She had not uttered a word to the trinity throughout her visit. Yet she felt she had been healed of a deadly ailment she could not really describe.
In the taxi back home, weakness was replaced by a great feeling of exhilaration. There was no room for anger and bitterness in her any more. Yet an emptiness remained in what she imagined to be her heart. Anger had dissipated and left a void.
How was she to fill the void?
32. PROFOUND NOSTALGIA
ALL THINGS ARE bright and beautiful. Even the smile on the man straddling the light brown donkey. In the summer heat he wears a blue and white woollen cap, blue overalls and brown boots. He holds a giant white candle to illuminate his path in the bright daylight. The donkey is burdened not only by the man, but also by its huge head and tall ears. And the white brush strokes on its behind. It walks tiredly on the blue and yellow ground. A giant sunflower follows it. Strokes of white clouds rise in the cobalt blue sky. Like smoke signals to a world beyond.
Even bright beautiful days come to an end. The yellow sandstone hills of the Free State changed into dark mounds that loomed on the horizon. Fires began to burn outside some homesteads. Children sang songs of the evening. Boys and girls played hide-and-seek. Finding hiding places where they could tickle one another without being discovered. Smoke from coal stoves and braziers hovered above Mahlatswetsa Location. Over the years, some of us had gradually moved from cow-dung to coal.
The Pule Siblings sat at a brazier in front of their mother’s shack. Viliki sat on an empty beer box and Popi sat on a pile of bricks. They were waiting for the coal to change from black to red-hot before taking the brazier into the shack. By which time the smoke that was billowing to the sky would be gone. Only the fumes would remain. None of them liked to breathe in the fumes from burning coal. They were used to the gentle smoke of dry cow-dung. But Niki’s homestead no longer had sufficient supplies of cow-dung, now that she spent most of her time with the bees instead of gathering cow-dung. And, of course, Popi was busy with her library and council meetings. She had no choice but to buy coal from Sekatle’s coal-yard and carry it home in a battered washing basin.
The Pule Siblings sat as they used to sit when they were a little boy and a little girl. They roasted dry maize on the cob on the side of the brazier where a big hole displayed the coal that was beginning to turn red. Once one side of the cob was roasted, Viliki took it from the brazier and with his thumb plucked out a row of corn, which he crunched with relish. He passed the cob to Popi, who did the same. Then she put it back on the brazier to roast another side.
They sang songs that they used to sing during the struggle. The chimurenga songs of the Zimbabwean war of liberation that Viliki had taught Popi whenever he came back home from the underground. The songs of the Frelimo cadres of Mozambique. They did not understand the languages of these songs. It was possible that they were not even pronouncing the words correctly. But it did not matter. The haunting harmonies were good enough to evoke a feeling of deep nostalgia. As did the songs whose languages they understood very well. The songs that the cadres of the Movement sang, that Viliki had also brought home for Popi’s pleasure. They sang these with a new passion. The passion of those who had fought battles and won, but had not survived the victory.