In the middle of my second-last year at university I went to visit my then girlfriend, Alexandra, in the recently liberated Zimbabwe. It was wonderful to be in a free country and almost all the whites were happy about the way Mr Mugabe was conducting himself – at the time. It felt so good, in fact, that I couldn’t wait to get back to my back room and my little turquoise Olivetti. So I left Alex, came back into prison and landed up at Pretoria Station, where I took the first train of the day, passing the weekend siding of Fountains, stopping at the second station, Kloofzicht, then disembarking at the hard, functional Sportpark. It was a trip the old man had done thousands of times.
I had walked up Cantonments Avenue, a section of which had once caved in as deep as a house on the corner of Monument Avenue, and picked my mother a bunch of flowers, giving it to her while the old man smiled in the background. She, who so loved it when her darling son went travelling, as she did. He, who never stood in our way but spent sleepless nights worrying about us; who would never go anywhere else again except to see his sisters in KwaZulu-Natal once a year, forever.
He, who now looked ready for a fight, standing at the gates, following me to the back. Before he could say anything, however, I said “Happy birthday for yesterday, Dad” as I closed the Civic’s door.
“Agh,” he said, making as if his eighty-ninth birthday on St Patrick’s Day was an irrelevant irritation.
“Come on, Dad. It’s a big thing. Most people don’t make it to seventy, and if they do they don’t look half as good as you.”
“Do you know why that is?”
I told him exactly why that was so and he replied that we shouldn’t really be celebrating his birthday.
“What do you mean?” I said for about the seven hundred-thousandth time.
“Because I had nothing to do with it. It was my mother’s doing. If anyone should be getting a present it’s her. She’s the one who carried me for nine months and gave birth to me.”
“But she’s been dead a long time now.”
“Ja, and do you know what?”
“No,” I lied, too hungover to offer much resistance.
“I forgot her birthday one year and I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“I’m sure she forgave you,” I said, not even bothering to apologise for not calling him the day before.
But he would have none of it and I remarked that he and Nelson Mandela had been born in the same year – full of useless sub’s info, I – but he was more interested in regretting forgetting and I wondered what these two very different men would talk about. I imagined that he would probably have the now-retired politician in stitches with his childlike candour, as he often did my friends when they met him. But then meeting someone once and seeing them regularly for four decades are two very different creatures.
“Here’s your present, Dad,” I said, giving him a block of Peppermint Crisp.
“You shouldn’t have,” he said, outraged.
“Why not?”
“Do you know it’s my favourite?” he said, close to tears.
“Hell, no.”
“Hey?”
“Shall we have some coffee?”
“Good idea,” he said and we crossed the cement apron, ascended the trio of steps into the kitchen and went through his coffee-mug-bargain-and-how-many-people-choose-the-mug-with-the-circles-around-it routine.
When I put five spoons of his Ricoffy into my mug he wanted to know what I was doing and I made a mental note of bringing a bottle of my own, better poison next week.
“You’ll kill yourself,” he said.
“Shall we go and sit outside?”
“Ja,” he said, and we went out and down the steps and onto the apron and sat at the table, which had to be restabilised before we had our bad coffee and crisply fresh Lemon Creams, which I made the mistake of remarking upon.
“Take them home with you.”
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“I got a whole lot on special yesterday.”
“It’s fine,” I said, wondering whether Kay had been deliberately leading me up the garden path while surveying the back lawn, which used to be an orchard. But the old man had hated cleaning up the leaves and after Ma had died he’d cut down most of them. The apricots, peaches, plums, pears and quinces – all gone. The loquat had been given to my mother by “some man” who sang with her in the opera and it, too, had gone the way of most flora after she’d died. The avocado tree, which had once overshadowed a large part of the back lawn and in whose branches I’d smoked my first vile but determined cigarette, had been hacked down to make way for the parking canopy. The six trees that remained were two umbrella-like evergreens in the middle of the lawn, trees whose names I didn’t know and never bothered to find out. There was also a struggling lemon that produced a few fruits for the occasional Vitamin C tea a season, the fig, and pines that had grown from seedlings to a pair of giants overshadowing the main bedroom, “mucking up” its section of the roof with thousands of small, sticky needles.
The quarter-acre yard had been veld when he’d bought the property, and he’d dug up numerous jagged rocks from that rich but dolomitic Highveld soil. The smaller ones he’d used to make flower beds, but the larger rocks he’d rolled to the bottom border. The massive one in the corner, however, he’d rolled from the veld when the school opposite us hadn’t existed yet. It had taken him the whole night to do so.
Beyond this rocky boundary there was a slight incline and topping it, in all its dumb, generic glory, a grey Vibracrete wall. On the other side of it you could see the neighbours’ wide, corrugated roof and tall syringa with its poisonous, mustard-yellow pods, which had made excellent ammunition for my catapult in days gone by. Through its branches we could see the Waterkloof Air Base hangars in the distance because between us and it there was the Lyttelton valley. Above it all was a sky Jacob Hendrik Pierneef could have painted every day, so large, billowing and varied were its clouds. Gliding through that, right now, was the underbelly of a Boeing, silent and white, a little like a whale, I imagined.
“God, that’s beautiful,” the old man said.
“So where does a father fit into a birthday arrangement,” I wondered, wary of flying.
“You know, my father was on the ship, in Durban harbour, all ready to go to World War One when they pulled him off.”
“Why,” I said, for about the six-hundred-thousandth time.
“Because he had a German surname, obviously.”
“Right,” I said, remembering a dark oval frame with a photograph in it in my Eshowe aunt’s living room. The man is sitting upright in a cane chair, legs crossed, wearing riding boots, khaki police uniform, twirly moustache and ruddy cheeks, possibly studio-enhanced, his pale brown eyes looking slightly unhinged.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Well, he was a big game hunter, a sportsman and, boy, did he have a temper. He had a real German temper.”
“What do you mean?” I said, wondering what an unreal German temper would be like.
“One day I complained that my sisters had more food than me and he got so furious he fell off the chair!”
“What did you do?”
“I went and hid in the orchard.”
“So you were scared of him.”
“Scared? I was terrified! He hit me when I was naughty, and I often was …”
“But?”
“Sometimes he just hit me,” he said, as if he’d never thought about it before.