He can still see his father sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, chewing the top end of his pencil. Labouring over that letter. His mother rewrote it carefully in ink when it was finally done. A fucken movie, then already.
After a month they got word: they must come, the Railways were only too happy to help their people.
His mother caught all forty of her geese. She stripped them bare so she could sell the feathers and the down to the Jew trader. Then she slaughtered the raw and featherless pink geese, together with the chickens and the turkeys. She cleaned them and then she took them to town for selling. The cows and sheep and their few pigs had long since been auctioned off.
Those days he still cried for the poultry. He remembers the scene with his turkey, a big old bugger who could go ‘bifff! bifff!’ with puffed-out wings and shake his red wattles, making a ‘cooloo-cooloo-cooloo!’ sound when he felt horny. He watched through the kitchen window as his mother cut off the turkey’s head. It slipped off the block and out of his mother’s hands. Then, with blood spewing from its neck, it began to throw high jinks in the dust, right under his nose. He couldn’t eat for four days after that, not until they were in the city and their father bought them doughnuts at a coolie-shop. Grandpa put the turnploughs, forks and spades together in bundles, and a man from town came to write it all up. Then he loaded the equipment on to his co-operative van and took it away. The house’s movable goods were also on the van. Spot and Buster had to go live with Grandpa and Grandma on another farm in the district, with one of Grandpa’s brothers. Then, already, an inbred lot. He remembers how his Ouma, the first Mol, walked in slow circles around the house with a long-nosed watering can that she’d kept behind. She was spraying the last water from the rain-tank onto her stinkafrikaners. Her African marigolds. ‘Shame, she’s becoming a child again, leave her alone,’ his mother said, and his father wiped his eyes with his arm. ‘So, now the old people are becoming bywoners. Labourers on other people’s land. And the new generation are trekking to Gomorrah,’ he said.
That night, their last on the farm, they all sat around the oil-lamp on the wooden planks of the kitchen floor. By then the chairs were gone, too. In the middle, on a plank, stood a little bucket of milk porridge with cinnamon, and a pot-bread sent over by the woman on the next farm.
Treppie starts. What’s that noise across the road now? It’s that dykemobile with its loose bearings. When those two moved in here, the neighbours also came over bearing trays full of ‘tuisgebak’ for them. A Boer will be a Boer, dyke or no dyke. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His father said he, Treppie, could have his mouth organ, only if he’d eat some of the milk porridge. But he didn’t want to. Later he got the mouth organ in any case. Actually, he inherited it after his father’s death. But he swore he’d never play it. It’s bad luck to play on the instrument of a suicide case. That’s what he said to Old Mol when she kept on so about it.
He actually meant murderer, ’cause Old Pop had beat the life right out of him, to say nothing of the little music that was left in him. So then he said Little Pop could have the mouth organ. Little Pop was musical, he had a good ear and he had the beat. But even though Little Pop learnt fast, playing the songs of old Hendrik Susan’s band, and the Briels and Chris Blignaut and all of them, and even though he once did a solo at the Garment Workers’ Union, he never played anywhere near as well as Old Pop.
Old Pop was a genius on the mouth organ. He remembers how Old Pop could keep a whole farmhouse hop-dancing with nothing but his mouth organ. Later, in Fordsburg, they didn’t have a farmhouse any more and there weren’t any people who wanted to dance with them anyway. But every now and again Old Pop still played. Most of the time he played sad songs or Salvation Army tunes. He used to play Old Mol into tears.
Old Pop played full-mouthed notes, with all kinds of trills and frills inbetween: majors on the out-breaths and minors on the in-breaths, the long notes stretched out on trills and then half smothered as he made a bowl-shape with his two hands, vibrating them on either side of the mouth organ.
Old Pop played all the way to Jo’burg. He played jolly songs. To give them courage for the City of Gold, he said. But Old Mol was already crying. A long day’s journey into night, if you ask him.
The bus took them to the Railways boarding house in Vrededorp, for poor white arrivals. And there they stood, with all their trunks and things, on the front stoep. Before Old Pop could even knock, a fat woman with a cigarette in her mouth opened the door.
‘You must be Mister Benade,’ she said in English, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth. She ignored Old Pop’s outstretched hand. She looked them up and down as they stood there and then she said: ‘Ah, thank God, no small babies. We have enough of them here.’
She took a little bottle from her apron pocket and held it out to Old Mol. ‘Before you do anything else, I want you to take a bath. Use five drops of this,’ she said, pushing the little bottle into Old Mol’s face. ‘I don’t want any vermin in my lodgings.’
Old Pop then said to the woman: ‘We may be poor, but at least we are clean, madam.’ But she said to him: ‘Do as you’re told. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
They did as they were told. First Old Pop and Old Mol shared the bath water, the three children going next. Old Pop was grinding his teeth so hard his cheeks began puffing up. When he put the three of them into the bath, he said: ‘Now we’re being dipped like raw kaffirs.’
They stuck out the boarding house for just three days. Screaming babies kept Pop out of sleep, and the stench of old floor polish and cooked cabbage made Treppie and Mol and Pop so sick they couldn’t eat.
After his third day of looking for a house, Old Pop came home with bright eyes. Oh yes, he’d found them a semi. The people who lived there were moving out in a week’s time ’cause the old woman, a garment worker, was blind, and the man had lost a leg on the Railways. They couldn’t afford the rent any more. The Benades could come straight away and help with the last week’s rent — they could certainly do with a bit of help.
‘What’s a semi?’ Old Mol asked, and his father said it was half a house. Then his mother asked, wouldn’t there be too many of them, living with other people in half a house? But his father said it was temporary — after a week they’d have the whole semi to themselves. Two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.
‘Are you sure?’ Old Mol still asked. She didn’t trust this business at all.
In the end they spent more than three full years sharing half a house with the Beyleveldts. And it wasn’t even a proper half-house. There was a passage linking it to the other half, where three more families lived. All with strapping big children who were so famished they stripped the Benades’ food cupboard bare. So in the end everyone was hungry, and they all stole each other’s food.
Old Pop worked long hours. He was a stoker on the Railways. Mrs Beyleveldt took Old Mol to the clothing factory and presented her there as a replacement for herself. So at least there was some money in the house, even if it was altogether too little to plug the gaps. Old Mol had to take on piece-work: shirts that she repaired until late at night on Mrs Beyleveldt’s old Singer.
They all lived in one room. The children saw everything the grown-ups did. And they heard every word the grown-ups said.
Old Pop and Old Mol fought bitterly. Mostly they fought over the Beyleveldts. Old Mol used to say the offer of the half-house had just been a trick to pick them clean.
They had to pay all the rent on their own, buy all the food and do all the housework, ’cause the blind woman and the one-legged man were incapable of doing anything for themselves. And Old Mol wasn’t allowed to use the sewing machine ‘for nothing’, she had to ‘hire’ it at a ‘per-day tariff’, even though she could use it only at night.