It isn’t two children. It’s a man and a woman. Not so young. Two grown-up children. The man is wearing an old tracksuit; the woman a skirt and a jersey with stretched sleeves.
The man notices me and jogs over, pushing the car in front of him. “B’rrrr’m,” he goes, making a sound like a car engine. “B’rrr’mmmm.” He turns sharply in front of me and sends the gravel flying from under the wire car’s wheels, which are made from old shoe-polish tins. He gives me a toothless smile. “I Attie. Hello.” The words sound hollow in his mouth.
The woman is banging two stones against each other and mumbles something I can’t quite make out. He points at her. “Poppie.”
Attie and Poppie.
They’ve made paths that crisscross the open space right next to the N1, the two of them have built a whole lot of enclosures made from bricks. In one, a battalion of empty bottles is lined up, waiting. In another, it’s a piece of galvanised wire and a rusty sardine tin.
The cars whiz by. Do the people inside them notice us? And what would they see?
“Oupa.” Attie points to one of the houses. An elderly man comes out the front door and crosses the empty yard. Klaas Romp. He used to be a labourer on the railways but he’s retired now and has been living in Prince Albert Road for years. He’s not Attie and Poppie’s real grandfather. “They’re my wife’s sister’s children. Their mother died and now they live here with us.” He waves his arm to where they’re still playing. “They’re not well, you see. They were born slow. They play like this every day, there next to the road. Sometimes they understand what you say to them but sometimes they get difficult, especially when they’re playing there and I call them home.” Silence. “But you know, sir, they’re on their own journey. That’s all.”
Both Attie and Poppie get a monthly disability pension. R1 080 x 2 = R2 160.
The small crowd still hasn’t left the burnt-down house on the other side of the railway line. Two men carry a couch out the front door. As soon as they put it down in the yard it collapses on one side.
We stand and watch, Klaas Romp and I, as Attie and his wire car race across the open veld again.
“Yesterday was our AllPay day, you see,” says oom Klaas. “A young guy burnt to death in that house.”
6.
Between twelve and fifteen million people in South Africa depend on government grants.
7.
Why do I keep thinking of the bank robbery in Pofadder?
At first I thought it was funny: a bank robbery in Pofadder! Ha! Small-dorp drama! Five robbers, a hysterical teller, a flabbergasted police force. Just like an American noir movie, as if Pofadder weren’t real and only existed for the sake of the story.
And it’s possible that some people – especially city people – do see Pofadder as the prototype of a dorp, rather than an actual dorp. To those people, every backwater miles from the city is a Pofadder.
Daniëlskuil, the little place in the Northern Cape where I grew up, is one of those towns, far from everything and close to itself. Life in these towns isn’t idyllic and innocent. They also experience theft and rape, and, yes, sometimes people are even murdered in anger. But a robbery is something else.
A bank robbery is something daring, something calculated, something that happens in the big city with its gangs and syndicates. A bank robber hardly ever lives near the bank he robs. He comes from somewhere else, nameless and faceless, leaving behind fear and uncertainty.
Those five men robbed Pofadder of more than money.
Just past Prince Albert Road station, at Leeu-Gamka, I leave the N1 and turn onto the R353. This is the road to Pofadder, which is about four hundred kilometres north of here, past Fraserburg and Williston, in Bushmanland. If all goes well I’ll be sleeping in Brandvlei, in the Brandvlei Hotel, where I met Mozart the tame meerkat on a previous trip.
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