Once more she bade Tjaart Cronje goodbye and left the room. Niki was waiting for her in the passage.
“I wonder what is eating him,” Popi whispered to Niki.
“Anger,” Niki whispered back. “It is as I told you, Popi. Anger does eat the owner.”
“He didn’t say much. I wonder why he wanted to see me?”
Johannes Smit and Jacomina were waiting for them in the kitchen.
As they walked back to Johannes Smit’s bakkie, they heard Jacomina whispering to Johannes Smit: “She looks so much like Tjaart.”
It was a season of whispers.
35. FROM THE SIJVS OF OUR MOTHERS
THE REAL NEW MILLENNIUM has dawned. Four women with pointed breasts walk in single file. Their long necks carry their multicoloured heads with studied grace. Their hair is white with age, but their faces glow with youth. They do not lose their way, even though they undertake their journey with closed eyes. They walk straight and rigidly, their brown shoes hardly leaving the naphthol crimson ground. Their profiles foreground a white and yellow sky. The woman in front wears a green dress. Her face is pink and blue and green. She holds a bunch of white cosmos. The second woman wears a red dress. Her face is blue and orange. She holds a bunch of violet cosmos. The third woman wears a brown dress. Her face is blue. She carries a bunch of pink cosmos. The fourth woman wears a green dress. Her face is brown and pink. She holds a bunch of white cosmos.
It was the time of the cosmos. And of the yellowness in the fields and the sandstone hills. Niki walked among the cosmos between the sunflower fields, collecting cow-dung in a sisal sack. She walked along the path that bordered Johannes Smit’s farm. She could see from a distance the barn that she used to know so well. Although it had fallen into disuse, its skeleton stood proudly as a monument to a breathless past. She could see with yesterday’s eyes the barn assuming the shape of a wanton temple, with female supplicants walking into it. She could hear with yesterday’s ears moans and groans escaping through its cracks and drenching the whole valley. Echoes of pain and pleasure relayed throughout the eastern Free State.
Niki was pleased that Popi had remained at home that day. Otherwise she would have had to explain the sudden change in her breathing. It had become fast and furious.
She had wanted Popi to come with her. But Popi had been very busy admiring herself in the mirror. Lately Popi spent all her mornings looking at herself in the mirror, admiring her blue eyes, and brushing her long golden-brown hair. She no longer hid it under huge turbans. She wondered why she had been ashamed of it all these years, why she had never noticed its beauty. She brushed it and combed it over and over again. It was so long that it reached behind her knees when she stood up straight.
She did not only admire her hair and her eyes. She loved her yellow-coloured face and her long neck that had the spot where the skin continued to peel off. She loved her body and everything about it. She had taken to wearing the isigqebhezana, the micro-miniskirts of the new millennium, displaying her long yellow-coloured legs that bristled with golden-yellow hair. She was no Barbie dolclass="underline" she would not shave her hairy legs. Her hairy arms. Even her armpits. She rejoiced in her hair and in her hairiness.
She enjoyed her own beauty and celebrated it.
When Niki returned with the cow-dung, Popi was still admiring her beauty in the full-size mirror that she had placed against the corrugated-iron wall.
“It is a beautiful thing to love yourself, Popi,” said Niki. “But don’t you think you are overdoing it now? Preening yourself in front of the mirror all day long?”
“I am making up for lost time, Niki,” giggled Popi. “Let’s go to the bees.”
“We must eat first,” said Niki.
She took out the wobbly pan from the cupboard and fried eggs on the Primus stove. Popi knew that it was a special day. Niki only used the wobbly pan on special days. Memory days. It was the only thing left that linked her to Pule. It and the velveteen on the headboard that had become black and shiny with dirt, and tattered with age. The pan, especially, brought Pule very much alive in the shack.
After a meal of eggs and stiff maize porridge, Popi and Niki walked through the town of Excelsior to the hives by the road. Niki carried her white plastic chair on her head. She refused when Popi wanted to help her with the load.
Popi smiled back at those of us who looked at her with strange eyes. We had not yet gotten used to her wearing the narrow strips that passed for skirts. The red one she was wearing today with a white blouse hugged very tightly and gave us a full view of her long slim thighs and legs.
Popi remarked as they passed Adam de Vries’s office: “Viliki would have been in there had he not decided to give himself to the world.”
“Even Adam de Vries. I do not see him any more,” said Niki. “Is he still up and about in that organisation they wanted me to join?”
“I think he is old and tired now,” said Popi.
Indeed, Adam de Vries sat all day long in his office, drawing up the last wills and testaments of his fellow citizens.
That afternoon we saw Niki sitting on her white chair among the hives of different colours. Popi was sitting on the grass, her head resting between Niki’s knees. The wind was blowing very hard. In its whines, they could hear the songs of Viliki and the Seller of Songs that the wind carried from distant villages and farmsteads. They could also hear their moans of pleasure coming from distant fields of sunflowers.
And then the bees began to swarm. They buzzed away from one of the hives in a black ball around the queen. And then they formed a big black cloud. We saw Niki and Popi walking under the cloud, following the bees. Or were the bees following them? We did not know. We just saw the women and the bees all moving in the same direction. Until they disappeared into a cluster of blue-gum trees a distance away.
We knew that the bees had succeeded in filling the gaping hole in Popi’s heart. Popi, who had been ruled by anger, had finally been calmed by the bees. The bees had finally completed the healing work that had been begun by the creations of the trinity.
Yet the trinity never knew all these things. His work was to paint the subjects, and not to poke his nose into their lives beyond the canvas.
FROM THE SINS of our mothers all these things flow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this novel was made possible by a generous grant from the National Arts Council of South Africa.
I would like to thank four lovely women — Debe Morris (Toronto, Canada), Sara Gonzalez (Barcelona, Spain), Berniece Friedmann (Cape Town, South Africa) and NomCebo (from my childhood world of Orlando East) — who read each chapter as soon as I finished writing it and e-mailed me flattering remarks. In the manner of true muses they nourished my imagination.
Zakes Mda