Zebra Horizon Read online

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  In the morning there was the twittering of strange birds, the rustling of palm leaves, scissor cutting noises, the clattering of dishes, muffled voices and the barking of dogs. There was the smell of the sea and sweet and spicy exotic plants. Outside little tortoises crawled across the lawn and iridescent, green-purple birds as big as ducks were poking the ground with long, curved beaks. The scissor noises came from the gardener cutting the hedge by hand.

  I better make my bed and a good impression on my hosts.

  Somebody knocked at the door. In came Marieke in blue slippers and a salmon coloured dressing gown. I was a bit surprised. One doesn’t see dignified old ladies one hardly knows in a state of dishabille every morning of one’s life. Marieke cheerily put a tray with coffee and rusks on the night table and asked how I had slept. Fortunately she didn’t kiss me on the lips again.

  “Breakfast is in about half an hour…and don’t make the bed, Paulina, our maid, will do the rooms later.” She checked a curler on her head and said: “If you need anything don’t hesitate to ask. Just feel completely at home.”

  At the breakfast table Hannes said grace. The only ceremony opening a meal in my family was practiced once a year, when the whole clan met for my grandfather’s birthday. We all lifted the huge oak table a couple of centimetres off the floor and everybody yelled 3 times on top of their voice:”Gesegnete Mahlzeit.” Then we let the table go and listened to the clattering of the dishes. We never broke any plates or glasses, but on my granddad’s 61st my uncle Matthias fractured two metatarsals when he accidentally got his foot under a table leg.

  I was presented to Paulina when she served bacon and eggs. Paulina was a Xhosa of amazing dimensions. She wore a pink uniform and old takkies without laces, and her head was covered by a sort of scarf. She greeted me with a mixture of shyness – covering her face with her hands – and total enthusiasm, culminating in an outburst of laughter that made her fat rolls wobble. I shook her hand, something she obviously wasn’t used to. For 30 seconds she looked embarrassed; then she exploded in another mighty outburst of giggles.

  As we munched our way through bacon and eggs and sausages and fried tomatoes and scones with cream, my host parents jumped from English to a weird sounding guttural language and back to English again, sometimes changing lingo in mid-sentence.

  “Jy verstaan Afrikaans, Mathilda?” Marieke asked with her high voice. “Of course you understand Afrikaans, all Germans do.”

  I had to admit that I could only make out a small percentage of what they were saying.

  “You’ll pick it up fast, all Germans do,” Hannes stated as a matter of fact, “because Afrikaans is a Germanic language.” He explained that it was one of South Africa’s 2 official languages together with English, and that it was derived from the Dutch of the first white settlers at the Cape of Good Hope.

  “Afrikaans is the most beautiful taal in the world,” Marieke sighed rolling her Rs.

  I personally thought that it would never win the first prize for elegance but I kept that to myself.

  After breakfast Marieke gave me a guided tour of the house. It turned out to be quite a grandiose affair in the Cape Dutch style, with sweeping gables, sash-windows and a big stoep, which is the same as a veranda. There were several lounges, 6 bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms, a study, a huge dining room and a big kitchen. The floors were Oregon pine and the ceilings enormously high. I quite liked the place; it had a pleasant, old fashioned, lived in feel to it.

  One of the passages was plastered with family photos: daughter Mieke, a tall blonde, in all stages from her first tooth to graduation at medical school; her wedding to a Humphrey Bogart type attorney called Marthinus Bezuidenhout, and their 3 little girls .An old shot of Hannes working on a construction site of some South African bridge. Marieke on a horse on the family farm in the Karoo. A grandfather with a hunting party and an elephant they shot. The tusks were hanging in my host parents’ lounge now. Auntie Hermien with her marlin that won the first prize in the Bazaruto fishing competition. The Dominee uncle, who got bitten by a snake in Matabeleland.

  I explored the garden accompanied by the Wieffering’s 2 dogs. In the front I found a mighty lot of rose bushes and a garage. It had 2 cars inside and space for some more. In the back behind the washing line stood a building that looked like a garage, but it was Paulina’s room. I discovered a swimming pool with a rockery surrounded by palms and hibiscus and some kitschy statues. A lawn edged by flowerbeds stretched to the hedge forming the border with the next door neighbours. Some small tortoises were lying under a huge tree. I didn’t know what kind of tree. Later I found out that it was a kind of fig and that one could get a glimpse of the sea from one of the big branches quite high up. What impressed me most was the tennis court, not because I had never known anybody who had their own tennis court, but because it had been converted into an enormous aviary.

  Hannes believed in regular exercise for people approaching their 70s and asked me if I’d like to accompany him on his daily morning round. Marieke had her own ideas about exercising and rather stayed at home, supervising the gardener and knitting booties for poor Afrikaaner babies.

  The dogs, Shaka and Hintsa, pissed with great dedication on every blue gum and palm tree on the wide, grassy sidewalk. Shaka, a Labrador, was named after the Zulu king who had united the different Zulu clans into one nation in the early 1800s, he had also invented a kind of stabbing spear. Hintsa, a Bouvier, got his name from a Xhosa chief.

  “The blacks pronounce Xhosa like this,” Hannes produced a click sound at the beginning of the word.

  I tried it.

  “Nearly Mathilda, just suck with your tongue quite far back at the side of your mouth.” I practiced while Hannes gave me a lecture on the different population groups in the country: “The Zulus and the Xhosas are the biggest black tribes in South Africa but then you get also the Venda, Ndebele, Sothos, Tswanas, Swazi and a couple of others as well.”

  “And what about the whites?”

  “Well, if you look at the history of this country the first settlement at the Cape of Good Hope was Dutch because the Dutch East India Company decided it would be a good thing to have a supply station for their ships halfway between Europe and Asia. Jan van Riebeeck and his men arrived in 1652.”

  “Did the Dutch meet any indigenous people?”

  “Ja, the Hottentots, who stole all their cattle, and the Bushmen, who tried to kill everybody with their poisoned arrows. These people just weren’t interested in making friends with anybody, so a lot of them were hunted down.”

  Does he really believe that? Sounds like government propaganda to me.

  I crushed some eucalyptus leaves in my hands and inhaled their spicy scent.

  Phhh, I’m supposed to be an ambassador of my country and not to stir up any shit. I’m supposed to behave like a neutral observer.

  I decided not to start any heavy political discussion – anyway, not yet.

  “The British came to settle a bit later,” Hannes carried on. “There has been a lot of fighting between the British and the Dutch or Afrikaaners, as they called themselves later. In the Transvaal and in the Orange Freestate they still don’t get on so well together. And then we’ve also got coloureds, Indians, Chinese and Cape Malays…”

  “I always thought there were only blacks and whites and a couple of coloureds."

  “Oh no Mathilda. It is much more complex than that.”

  We walked past a Portuguese green grocer called Madeira Gardens and a Greek shop, the Mykonos Café. There weren’t many people in the street. Some white dog walkers and joggers and a few blacks on errands for their bosses. On the golf course there wasn’t much movement either. From hole number 8 one could see the sea. It spread smooth and silvery to the horizon, melting into a light blue sky. In the industrial area trucks and cars looking like small ants bustled under a cloud of smoke. On the hills around us V.B.’s suburbs sprawled, roofs of various colours peeping through the shades of green of
the vegetation. I got the knack of the Xhosa click by the time we got to the post office.

  The post office was a small, red brick building surrounded by blue gums and hibiscus bushes. Peacocks paraded next to lush flowerbeds and roosted on the branches of two pines. The post office had 2 entrances. One for blacks and one for whites. Although I had seen photos of apartheid signs, I wasn’t prepared for this. This was real life with real people using the different entrances and everybody behaved as if it was totally normal

  Hell. Maybe my friends in Germany are right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come in the first place.

  ”Why do you have…things …like that?” I asked Hannes.

  My host father said: “Mathilda, it’s always difficult to explain South Africa to foreigners, especially when they come from a first world country and think the only difference between blacks and whites is the colour of their skin. We’ll talk about this when you’ve been here a little bit longer.”

  Bloody coward! He chooses the easy way out.

  Hannes threw a letter in the letter box and we headed back to the house. By the time we reached the Madeira Gardens greengrocer, 3 of the Wieffering’s neighbours had invited me to give a talk to the youth groups of their churches. I said “yes sure” and hoped they would forget about it. Public speeches were the one minus point of being an exchange student.

  Hannes bought a bunch of flowers at the greengrocer and a packet of candy bars at a Chinese shop.

  “Ja, every Friday I buy flowers for Marieke and sweets for Paulina,” he said. “Would you like a candy bar?”

  I took one wrapped in gold and pink. It was so sweet that it hurt my teeth.

  In the afternoon I asked Paulina if I could have a look at her room. She giggled and hid her face behind her apron.

  Oyoyoy. I’ve broken some behavioural code. Maybe it means bad luck in her culture…or maybe white people in this country are not supposed to be interested in black people’s living conditions.

  After a couple of minutes Paulina stopped giggling and seemed quite eager to show me her place. She had a room and a toilet in the building behind the washing line. The most amazing thing was her bed. It stood elevated on bricks more than a metre above the ground.

  “Like that the tokolosh can’t get to you,” she explained.

  “What’s the tokolosh?”

  “Hau, the tokolosh, he is small but he is evil and he comes in the night while you are sleeping.”

  Here we go, African superstition!

  “What does he look like?”

  “The tokolosh? Like a little man. He is tiny…like that,” she gestured with one hand below her knees. “And he has got a lot of hair on his body. And that thing between his legs – aish – it’s double, treble long. He is a very bad man. He makes the women pregnant when their husbands are not at home. You need a strong muti to fight him.”

  “What’s a muti?”

  “Herbs, bones, roots, things…medicine.”

  I was just beginning to think that it was quite amazing that Africans still believed in tokoloshes while the western world sent guys up to the moon, when I remembered Opa Huberschmidt, a farmer at the edge of Riedberg, the village in Bavaria where I came from. Opa Huberschmidt had a vast knowledge about how to influence fate, people, the weather and all sorts of things. Last year his favourite cow died of some infection and in the same week his dog got run over by a car. Opa Huberschmidt worked out that his worst enemy, Herr Kleinhans from the bakery, had cast a spell on him. Opa Huberschmidt got into action. On a full moon night he cut a branch from a 200 year old oak tree and repeated a secret sentence while walking backwards towards the east. He soaked the branch for 10 days in the brook behind his house and at the next full moon he attached the branch to Kleinhans’ house wall between 2 roof trusses, so that nobody would find it. I knew that it all really happened, because Opa Huberschmidt’s granddaughter Friederieke was my best friend in the swimming club, and we even watched Opa, and I heard with my own ears that he mumbled something about bad fortune and 13 snakes. Some time later the health authorities closed down Kleinhans’ bakery. I reckoned they would’ve anyway. His place wasn’t exactly known as an example of hygiene. Frau Maier at the post office said it happened because Frau Kleinhans smashed a mirror and everybody knows that that brings 7 years of bad luck. Other people talked about black cats crossing the street from left to right.

  The only other furniture in Paulina’s room was an old cupboard with a plastic basin on top and a table on which stood a tin mug and a tin plate. There wasn’t much space left to move around. As decoration Paulina had arranged a row of coloured glass bottles on the windowsill. “I found most of those,” she explained, “but the Madam gave me that yellow one and this red one. Ja, the Master and the Madam are very good to me. I’ve been working here for 25 years.”

  A ray of afternoon sun crept over the green carpet in the lounge. Marieke was busy counting stitches on a jersey for a poor black baby in Lesotho.

  I asked her: “Where does Paulina wash? I didn’t see a tap or anything at her place.”

  “She has a basin and she uses the tap in the garden.” Marieke’s knitting needles rattled. “Paulina is a good, hardworking maid, but if she had a tap in her room the water would run all day. When she uses the garden tap we can see if she has turned it off. I don’t know what it is with these blacks, but they just don’t seem to be able to turn a tap off.”

  Hintsa caught a lazy fly and Marieke started a new ball of wool. “By the way,” she said, “Mrs Jameson phoned. “She invited you to go with her family to Dolphin Hoek tomorrow. Some of the Jameson children are in the same school you’ll be going to. It will be nice for you to meet somebody of your own age.”