The hotel was built in 1899 and the bar is an authentic old British pub, complete with a dark wooden counter, wooden floor and piano. I hoist myself onto one of the bar stools and open Venter’s book: After twenty-two years in cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, Windhoek – we wanted to be farmers and to be free … I struggle to concentrate. The guy in the Ferrari jacket is telling the one with the Bloody Mary about the time he gave a woman and her dog a lift to Worcester. It seems the dog was sick and she wanted to take him to a vet. When they got to Worcester, the dog died in the car.
“I said to her: ‘Come, let’s throw the dog away.’” The Ferrari jacket’s seam opens wider as he gesticulates. “But she said: ‘Are you crazy? This dog’s going home with me. I’m going to bury him in my own backyard.’ So I said to her: ‘Hey, I want to do some shopping first, man.’ She said: ‘Go shop. I’ll wait in the car with my dog.’ When we got back that afternoon, the dog stank so much you could have got high, my bra.”
Next door, in the dining room, a bell rings. Dinnertime.
But first I phone Pa. These days he goes to bed early and I know he’ll be wondering if I’ve found a place to sleep for the night.
He picks up almost immediately: “I was going to call you, son. Have you heard the news? They robbed the bank in Pofadder.” Pa’s voice is weary, as if the robbery has affected him personally. “Can you believe it, hey? Now they go as far as Pofadder to rob. It’s because the police’s hands are tied. They do just as they please, these young tsotsis …”
They, they, they. Pa with his unrelenting “they”.
“You say you feel as if you don’t know the country any more. Let me tell you, son, I don’t see any hope for us. We’re going the same way as the rest of Africa. One of these days we’re going to become another Zimbabwe …”
I listen to him but don’t respond. After a while, I say goodnight and hang up. Even I find it difficult to believe: a robbery at the bank in Pofadder!
The dining room is next to the bar, opposite reception. As I enter, I step into a memory from long ago.
What’s happening here is an old-world ritual. One I haven’t been part of for a very long time because you don’t find old-world hotels like this with dining rooms like this any more. Nowadays small-town hotels are turned into lodges and their dining rooms into steakhouses or à la carte restaurants.
There’s a sideboard against one of the walls with an arrangement of dried proteas on it. It stands there like a shrine to good manners. All the tables are covered with white damask tablecloths and all the settings are identical: a sideplate, dinner plate and wine glass. To the left of the dinner plate are two forks, to the right, a knife and a fish knife; above it, a soup spoon and a dessert spoon; all of it, without question, Royal Sheffield silver. A butter knife lies at an angle on the sideplate.
A waiter in a red jacket escorts me to my table and pulls out my chair. Frans, says his name tag. All at once it feels as if Pa and my late Ma are with me and the three of us are sitting in the dining room of the Commercial Hotel in Daniëlskuil on a Sunday after church.
A tender feeling of nostalgia descends slowly, like a curtain, over the reality of bank robberies and AllPay days.
First I pick up the stiff, starched napkin perched like a small boat beside the butter knife on the sideplate, unfold it and drape it across my lap – and almost immediately it slips onto the floor. Almost instinctively, my hand reaches out and takes half a slice of white bread from the small plate in the centre of the table. Then I lift the domed lid of the silver dish next to the salt and pepper cellars. Under it lie small ridged butter balls. I know they’ll break in half if I press too hard on the butter knife.
Frans returns to the kitchen. The door between the dining room and the kitchen has a silver arm at the top that stops it slamming when a waiter comes in or out with plates in his hands. The mechanism makes a ffft sound as the door closes behind Frans.
A waiter in a black jacket comes over. Freddie. “Something to drink?” He presents me with the wine list in a black cover, bends down to the floor and picks up my napkin, which has slid off my lap again, and hands it to me.
“We’ll have the Grünberger Stein,” I hear Pa say before he closes the wine list and returns it to the waiter. “And please bring us some ice too.”
The typed menu on the table is superfluous. It’s impossible to forget. Starters: first soup, then hake. Main course: leg of lamb or chicken with rice, roast potatoes and seasonal vegetables. Dessert: malva pudding and custard.
Frans returns from the kitchen with a soup plate in his hand.
“Ffft,” the door whispers behind him.
He puts the vegetable soup with carrot slices floating in it in front of me, and the napkin slides off my lap again.
“Eyes closed,” says Ma and takes my hand. “Pa wants to say grace.”
“Dear Lord, thank you for watching over us this day,” he prays. “We pray that You will protect us this night too. Bless the food we are about to receive and grant that we will never forget Your name. Amen.”
4.
In 2011 the government allocated R89 billion for social grants. It cost around R2,4 billion to distribute, and AllPay is the name of the company that helps get the money into people’s pockets.
Some 9,8 million women receive a government allowance of R250 per child per month. Some 2,5 million people receive a pension of R1 080 per month. Some 1,2 million people also receive a monthly disability pension of R1 080.
In the dim light of dawn I see these statistics come alive outside the sports grounds near Laingsburg’s town centre. This is where the grants are paid out every month. A hundred or so people have already formed a queue. The old man at the front is wearing his church best. The collar of his cream-coloured shirt is threadbare. Lukas Malgas.
Oom Lukas’s dreams of what he’s going to do with his R1 080 old-age pension aren’t big ones. “I just walk around here.” He points towards the main street. “By the time I get over there, I won’t have much left.”
Then the cars and bakkies start pulling up, a procession of deadbeats. One by one, they get out and start putting up tables and displaying all manner of things: frilly dresses and jackets and shoes, blankets and bedding that look as if they’re meant to match the dresses. Snoek. Vetkoek. Bright plastic wall clocks made in China. Transistor radios made in China. Nail clippers made in China.
Jerome Cupido is stacking packs of toilet paper. He comes from Paarl, more than a hundred and fifty kilometres away, to sell the toilet paper (R14 for a pack of ten) and duvet sets to the AllPay people here.
A man and a woman pull up in an asthmatic Nissan Sentra. The man takes an enormous loudspeaker from the boot, and before long a mournful voice is wafting through the air: “The earth beneath your feet is holy. Oh, take off your shoes. The earth beneath your feet is ho-o-oly …” Each month the couple travels from AllPay point to AllPay point to sell the latest CD from gospel singer André Bayman.
An armoured truck and two official Camrys arrive, pass Jerome’s toilet paper display, and enter at the gate. The security guards who are here to guard the gates get out of another car. No one will be allowed inside without the proper documents. Eight o’clock. The government’s coffers are about to open.
Lukas Malgas is the first to be allowed through the gates, while the queue behind him grows longer and longer. There are girls with babies in their arms and babies on their backs. There’s a baby on the back seat of a Mazda 626. There are babies everywhere: on a woman’s back, in a girl’s arms, in a pram negotiating the gravel on bouncy wheels.
Two men in a not-so-new