Stargazer
Jan van Tonder
Human & Rousseau
Readers who think they recognise themselves
and others in this book are making a mistake.
A story isn’t life.
To
Deon Visser
and
my sisters Magda, Ronél, Annette, Elna and Marietjie for the snippets of life I witnessed by spying on them as a boy.
To the woman who worked in our home for so many years; to her I dedicate the Gladys character to make up for the fact that I no longer know her Zulu name and surname. And in the hope that she and her family are well.
Also to Marietjie Coetzee, who has been trying to save me from my worst darlings for the past twenty years; to Tineke, who read and reread the manuscript so tirelessly; to Suzaan, who never allowed me to lose faith in Roepman.
Posthumously to my brother, Andries, who unfortunately never wrote down his wonderful stories. Also to my father and mother, Andries and Anna, who managed to raise us all with a lot of help from Above.
1
“Life isn’t a story, Timus, how often do I have to tell you?”
You could see Pa wasn’t used to being barefoot. His toes kept trying to escape from the grass. They were almost as white as the plaster cast on my arm.
“Do you hear me, Timus?”
“Yes, Pa.”
“What did I just say?”
“That life isn’t a story, Pa.”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
It was hard to look at Pa when he was angry. Ordinarily his eyes were light blue. But when he was angry it was almost impossible to see where the white ended and the blue began. I always expected to find one eye fixed on mine, with the other one looking me over from head to toe, searching for something else that might be wrong.
It was bad enough not liking what you saw every time you looked in the mirror. The good Lord had chosen me to be left behind. All my friends were ahead of me. Miles ahead. Voices broken, hair all over their armpits and faces, huge willies. But it was better to avoid that subject altogether.
“How you expect us to believe a single word you say, I can’t imagine. The stuff you come up with . . . We lie awake about you at night, Timus, your mother and I.”
Pa wasn’t one to tell a lie, but that bit I didn’t believe: him lying awake about me! Ma, yes, but not him. “Stop worrying, Vrou, children grow up by themselves,” he said when Ma imagined the worst possible tragedies, as she always did. She said he was asleep before his head touched the pillow, and he woke up only after he’d taken his first sip of morning coffee. That was because his conscience was clear, Pa said.
“You don’t exactly make things easier for us, Timus.”
I nearly told him it was Joepie’s mom who’d made things difficult for us this time, not me. She was the one who wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.
When Pa and the others came back from the farm and saw my broken arm, Braam was quick to say: “He was just running and he fell, Pa.” Braam is my brother. He’s a lot older than me. Ma shook her head: “You’ll be the end of me yet, Timus. Why must you be so wild?” Pa said children’s broken limbs mend fast, she needn’t worry.
No one mentioned it again till Joepie’s mom turned up, doek over her curlers, apron still tied around her waist. When Ma saw her at the garden gate, she took one look and said you could just see that woman’s tongue was itching, she was so keen to pass on some or other story. Ma might as well have given me permission to eavesdrop.
Joepie’s mom wouldn’t even sit down. A hurried greeting and she plunged straight in. “I’m here to do my Christian duty, Abram. You know I don’t usually stick my nose into other people’s business, but I just couldn’t bear this burden on my own any longer. For the past two weeks, ever since you came back from the funeral, my conscience has been giving me no rest.”
She told Pa how she’d seen me come running home, covered in blood, clothes torn, with a broken arm. From the direction of the vlei. And who knew what had happened to me there. And on a Sunday as well.
Pa rapped on my cast with the knuckle of his middle finger. “The only reason why I’m not going to give you a hiding is that the Lord has already punished you. When are you going to learn some responsibility, Timus?”
I blinked. Again. Could it be? The pupil of one eye remained fixed while Pa’s other eye was moving: down, down, till it reached my feet, then up to my broken arm, then back to my face. So he’d finally managed it, after all this time.
“Timus,” he said, “what are you thinking right now?”
“I’m concentrating on your words, Pa.”
“What did I just say?”
“That you have a clear conscience, Pa.”
“What?” He was furious. “Go to the bathroom! I see words are wasted on you!”
The bathroom meant a hiding. Ma would’ve said there’s no two ways about it. And all I’d done was tell the truth about how I’d broken my arm. Not that it had been my idea in the first place.
Pa sent you to the bathroom and then watered the lawn while he thought about how many strokes would be a suitable punishment. He didn’t want to strike you in anger, he said. While you were waiting, you thought about all kinds of things just to try and forget where you were and why. Much later Pa came in and closed the door and sat down on the lavatory lid. First he looked you in the eye and talked to you. Then he thrashed you.
You could scream all you liked, he never gave in – he delivered as many strokes as he’d decided on. But on those occasions when he’d made up his mind not to give you a hiding, he’d look at you and look at you until you wished he’d rather just thrash you and get it over with. And when he left, you locked the door and sat on the rim of the bathtub for half an hour, too ashamed to come out.
The waiting was always the worst for me. Everyone in the house knew what was coming, and so they were quiet, like people at a funeral. You could hear the locomotives and electric units at the loco, and from other backyards you heard the laughter of children who weren’t waiting for a hiding, and sometimes Riempies would brush against your legs, completely unaware that soon those very legs would be on fire.
There was nothing to do in the bathroom. It was easy for Pa: he was outside with the garden hose in his hand. If he liked, he could put his finger across the tip and spray the water so that you could see a rainbow against the sun. Or he could see how far he could make the water spurt. I knew how far: past the topmost branches of the wild fig in our back yard. I’d never seen such strong water anywhere else. It was because we lived in a hollow, Braam said. If you walked from our place up to where Lighthouse Road met Bluff Road at the top, and then carried on along Bluff, up the hill, right up to the top where it began to descend towards Wentworth, you came to a water tower. It was an enormous thing – you could see it clearly from below. That was where our water came from, along a thick pipe that passed under the road, and from there thinner pipes brought the water to the houses. If you left the hose on the ground and you opened the tap wide, a jet of water spurted out that made the hose swing from side to side, standing up and falling down like a thing about to strike.
We would jump over it and duck and try not to get wet, but often the hose would twist suddenly and then you’d be hit by an icy blast. When Ma saw this, she’d shut off the water. “It’s only people who don’t do their own washing who’ll play in the water like this,” she’d remark.
In the evenings after supper Gladys fetched hot water for her bath. There was only a cold shower in her kaya. First she fetched her food and stacked the dirty dishes in the oven to wash them the next morning. Otherwise her day was too long, Ma said.