The Year the Gypsies Came Read online

  I find a dictionary that’s new-looking and not dusty sticking out between the old books and look up the word ‘manipulative’. It means ‘someone who manages and controls cleverly’. I place one of the used-up cotton-wool balls that I spy lost in the cuff of my shorts inside the book and mark the place of the word.

  Outside Father’s study window two African hoopoes peck with their curved beaks for beetles in the bushes. One hoopoe is smaller and dull brown, and the other has a bright reddish crown. I wonder about beauty in the bird world, how it’s always the male who’s got the prettier feathers. Mother probably wouldn’t have been too happy being a female bird. I sometimes think she married Father at nineteen because his last name was Iris, and by marrying him she became a double-flower, Lily Iris. Mother likes things that look and sound pretty.

  I’m still in Father’s study when I hear him as he comes in through the front door. The tired slapping of his briefcase against his leg, then a thud as he drops it onto the pinewood living-room floor. Father smokes a lot and seems worried a good deal about things that I can’t see or hear. He spends hours in his study going through papers that have to do with his imported-chocolate business.

  Father comes from Witbank, a small coal-mining town about a hundred miles from Johannesburg. Sometimes, if he’s in the mood, I’ll catch him looking up from his papers and I might get him to tell me a thing or two about being a boy in Witbank. His eyes always look past me when he talks about the faded yellow kitchen where his mother baked him apricot-jam turnovers.

  There’s this picture of Father on the side-table next to the riempie stool in the living room. He’s maybe sixteen and is standing behind the dusty counter in his family’s mining store. Father had lots of curly dark hair then, but his eyes had the same clear and kind of surprised look to them. On the shelves behind him you can see packets of Impala Mielie-Miel, cans of Nestlé condensed milk and long strips of biltong hanging from hooks.

  He left Witbank to go to university in Johannesburg soon after his mother died and hardly ever visited home again once he met Mother there. Mother didn’t like Witbank. She said it smelt bad from the mines and the black soot made her skin look dull.

  I’ve often tried to imagine Witbank and the miners and the soot and the mining store but I can’t. Father has never taken us there. All I can come up with is a place where everything smells either very bad or everything smells wonderful, like hot, freshly baked jam turnovers.

  ‘Emily,’ Father says as I walk past him on my way to Lettie, our black nanny, who is cooking dinner in the kitchen, ‘I have a new chocolate for you to taste. Just came in from the factory in Belgium. Almond-cream soft-centres, they’re quite delicious actually.’ He holds a neatly wrapped dark-brown chocolate out towards me. I unwrap it and I’m about to put it into my mouth, even though I’m sure I’ll like it about as much as I like all his bitter-tasting imported chocolates, when Mother glides by.

  ‘Honestly, Bob. It’s almost dinnertime. Don’t you ever think! She doesn’t need all that sugar, and besides it’s bad for her skin.’ She flashes eyes like a cat that’s about to pounce at him.

  Father sighs, looks over from me to her and stuffs the chocolate into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Tell Lettie to bring my dinner to me in my study,’ he says curtly to Mother. ‘Frankly, I don’t need to come home to be instantly attacked every night.’ He marches past me and mumbles, ‘Sorry, Emmie. I’m too worn out to take on the likes of your mother right now.’ He hands me the chocolate from his pocket. ‘Taste it later, or whenever you please.’ He turns to Mother and shoots her a hard glare, then leaves.

  I feel the chocolate, soft and crumbling, already melting from the heat in his hand. And I feel myself crumbling too, little pieces you can’t see that break off on the inside.

  Later, even though their bedroom door is closed, the yelling wakes me in the dead of night. It’s twenty-two steps from my room to theirs. Fifteen steps from my room to Sarah’s. Sarah’s room is closer to them so she gets to hear their yelling even louder than I can.

  The fights always start with something as small as chocolates and then become something else, something bigger. I can’t hear the actual words, just the sounds of anger. It comes at me from under their door and slams into me so hard that it takes my dreams away. Then, when it gets too loud in my head, I go to Sarah. I tiptoe softly, like a mouse that leaves no footprints on the carpet. Creep to her room that’s as perfect as a picture book. Everything has its place. Pencils lined up straight on her desk, shoes in neat matching rows in the cupboard.

  I stand at the foot of her bed. Sarah’s long red hair, shining like a glow-worm in the dark, is the only part of her I can see. She’s already awake.

  ‘Don’t worry, Em, it’ll soon stop. It always does,’ Sarah says to me, but her voice sounds far off, like an echo that comes from an empty space – a place inside her where the door’s already been shut. She gets out of bed in her ghost-white nightgown, takes me by the hand and brings me back to lie next to her in a warm spot.

  ‘It’s safe in here, Em,’ she whispers as she climbs in beside me. ‘The mess out there can’t reach us in here, can’t reach us at all,’ she murmurs in a sleepy voice.

  I stay very still, keep my body so tight, try to stop the sounds that reach into me through the cracks. Close my eye-holes and cover my ear-spaces with a pillow, until the loud noises that come at me stop.

  Late Afternoon

  I bend to talk to the jacaranda buds that were silly enough to have wanted instant adventure, and now lie quiet and still on our gravel driveway. They look rumpled and sad, so I whisper to them that they are a magical purple carpet and that later, when it’s dark and everyone’s asleep, we’ll fly away to some far-off place together. This, I decide, cheers them up considerably, so I hop painfully from one bare foot to the other, in my shorts and half-muddy school shirt, down the driveway, careful not to step on my purple friends. It’s not a good idea to be barefoot on gravel, with points that bite into the undersides of your feet like fish with teeth. I won’t hurt the buds though; they’ve had enough upsets for one day.

  At the bottom of the garden is Buza, our old Zulu nightwatchman. He sits on his wooden stool and threads coloured beads onto cut pieces of new copper wire that he unravels from a big shiny roll beside him.

  ‘Hai wena, Miss Emily,’ Buza says as I plonk myself down next to him and rub my feet. ‘This old Zulu cannot see too good any more. Ay, it hurts my head.’ He touches his watery eyes with a wrinkled brown hand and puts the half-finished bracelet on the ground next to me.

  Even before I was born, Buza was there at the bottom of the garden. He came with Mother when she left her parents’ house to marry Father and moved to Winslow Lane. Mother would not think of ‘living in that ugly big house, with that frightening forest across the road’, unless Buza came with her to guard the gates.

  Buza’s job is to sit all night on his stool and watch the street and the dark woods and listen for someone or something. He has a knobbly stick, always at his side, cut from the branch of a mopane tree that his grandfather gave him, chopped down in Natal when Buza turned seventeen. This is what protects us all from danger. Buza tells me he’s never needed anything else because the stick has the power of sixty dead Zulu warriors inside it.

  Buza isn’t like anyone else I know. It doesn’t matter if he is quiet or busy threading beads or rolling his stick between his hands, he always listens to what I have to say, and when he looks at me, he looks deep at me, like he’s seeing every scratch on my knee and every mark on my face. He looks down at me that way now as I sit beside him.

  ‘You look to me like you need a story to put into your head, Miss Emily. There is too much frowning on your face today.’

  ‘Tell me warrior stories, Buza. War and fighting stories.’

  ‘Ay, I have forgotten those. I am tired from the stories of great Zulu wars. We fought too many battles. Too much, too much.’

  Buza looks at me with soft brown ey
es that remind me of the milky cocoa that Lettie gives me before I go to bed at night. His hair is curly grey and his earlobes are stretched long and have shiny blue-and-orange corks stuck through them like pinwheels. I think how good it would be if Miss Erasmus, my history teacher, could see him with his gentle eyes and kind voice. At school the pictures in our history books have Zulu warriors with angry painted black faces and sharp assegai spears in their hands.

  Last week in class, Miss Erasmus told us: ‘During the Great Trek, thousands of Zulu warriors were killed by the guns of our brave Afrikaners on the banks of the Ncome River as they trekked north in their ox wagons.’ She peered down at us over her short rubbery snout, then lifted it upward and sniffed the air hard a few times, as if she could smell the sweat of a Zulu in the classroom. When she was satisfied that there was no dangerous black man around, she carried on: ‘Wave after wave of Zulus kept coming until the Ncome ran thick and red with their blood. That is why it is called the Battle of Blood River,’ she said, holding the history book so tight against her chest, like it was some kind of Bible.

  While I listened to her squeaky voice, I could see the Afrikaners kneeling with barrels of gunpowder behind their circle of ox wagons. They had names like Pietrus and Martienus and wore floppy felt hats and were shooting at men with shiny pinwheel earlobes like Buza. I imagined the Zulu warriors’ assegais floating downstream, their spearheads red from their own blood, their beaded necklaces and bracelets lying like buried treasure at the bottom of the river.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Miss Emily? You are too serious today,’ Buza says, picking up the beads and starting to string again.

  ‘I want to take you with me to school one day.’

  ‘Ayzirorie! You are a strange one today.’

  ‘Strange is how I feel.’ I dig my heels back into the ground. ‘Buza, did you ever feel like your inside and your outside don’t fit together? Like they’re separate?’ I ask softly.

  Buza makes a low clicking sound with his tongue.

  I think how angry Father would be if he knew I was talking to Buza about these things inside me. The servants, Father always says, should not know more than they need to know. He says that while they are kind, good people, they aren’t family and that there’s always the possibility of them leaving and going to work for another family. Father insisted that what goes on in our lives is private and is best not discussed with them. But Lettie spoon-fed me porridge and carried me on her back when I was a baby, and Buza taught me to tell the time and knows how I’m feeling without me ever having to say a word. There is nothing I won’t tell Buza, but there are lots of things I won’t tell Father.

  ‘I can’t sleep well. Mother and Father argue too much at night. I get into lots of pieces when they yell so loud,’ I say to Buza.

  ‘Hayikona!’ Buza shakes his head sadly. ‘This is not good. Madam Lily and Master Bob, they must work this indaba out. Come, let me tell you a story, and you can help me put the green beads here and here,’ he says, pointing to the bracelet.

  He begins, slow and soft like a lullaby, note by note, strung like the beads, one at a time.

  ‘Once, Miss Emily, in the land there was a great drought. For a long, long time no rain had fallen. The earth, it was hard and the cornfields dried up. There was, Miss Emily, living in a small village where hunger was the only thing on people’s minds, a young girl called Ma-We. It happened one morning that her father told Ma-We and her brother to go to the place where the guinea fowl sat on its eggs. “Guard it well,” said the father. “Keep away the hyenas. We are going to look for food in the town.”

  ‘Ma-We and her brother watched, throwing stones at the hyenas that came there. When the sun was hot and high above they became very thirsty. The children did not want to disobey their father, but the heat was so strong that they began to feel weak. “We will go,” Ma-We said, “to the waterhole there by the great cave, and when we have drunk we can return very quickly.” ’

  ‘Oh no, they left the eggs, Buza!’ I reach up and take more beads from his wrinkled palm.

  ‘Yes, listen, Miss Emily. It was too hot and they were very thirsty. And when they come back, they see that a big hyena has come out from the bushes; it has eaten the guinea fowl and all the eggs are broken into many pieces. Hai wena!’

  Buza puts the half-finished bracelet on his knee and reaches into a pouch that he carries on a string round his waist. He takes out a small silver tin of black snuff and pours some into his hand and takes a pinch of it up into his nose.

  ‘Power medicine.’ He smiles at me and sneezes loudly twice. ‘To keep my head clear and strong.’ He smacks his hands together like cymbals, to dust the snuff off his hands. ‘Well, Ma-We and her brother were very much afraid, and Ma-We picked up very carefully all the small pieces of the broken shells and put the pieces in her apron. And she cry out, “Who will help me? Who will help me fix these?”

  ‘Now, Ma-We, she is a blessed one, and she hear the cry of a bird, “Pirr-pirr, pirr-pirr.” And she look down and she sees, the i-Nsedhlu bird, the honey-guide bird, its wings caught in the thorn bush. “Pirr-pirr,” it cries. And Ma-We, she bends down and with her hands she frees the honey-guide bird from the thorns. The small bird, it is so happy and it flies up and it sings, “Whit-pirr, whit-pirr,” and it calls to Ma-We, “Because you have been so kind to me, now I will help you. Come, follow me.”

  ‘Now, Ma-We and her brother, they heard their parents coming and they were very much afraid, so they ran down and they follow the honey-guide bird to the deep cave. And Ma-We said, “Let us go into the cave, and then we can enter the Land of the Spirits together.”

  ‘But her brother, he was too frightened and did not follow Ma-We, and he went back to his parents and he say, “My sister, she is gone.”

  ‘The parents they ran quick to the deep cave. And the mother, she cry, “Ma-We, Ma-We, I have no anger for you. Come back! Come back, my daughter!” But Ma-We has gone already into the Spirit Land.’

  ‘Is she dead, Buza?’ I ask.

  ‘Wait, wait, listen nicely, Miss Emily. Inside the cave, the honey-guide shows Ma-We the nest of wild bees. And the honey-guide, he shows her with his beak how to use the beeswax to fix the broken shells together and to put honey into the eggs. And she makes the eggs whole again and full of honey, but having lots of joinings.’

  Buza reaches down and takes my elbow and wrist and pushes them towards each other. ‘Like so,’ he says, ‘like Ma-We’s egg, mntanami.’

  My skin, where Buza has touched, feels warm.

  ‘Listen good, Miss Emily. Ma-We knows how to glue broken things with the wax of wild bees and how to fill it with sweet honey.’

  ‘What happened then?’ The beads glow green in my hand.

  ‘Now, when all the broken eggs were fixed and full with honey the honey-guide bird say to Ma-We, “You must return to your parents and with all these eggs, your family will have much to eat, whit-pirr, whit-pirr.” And Ma-We, she goes with the honey-guide, and when they come to the entrance of the cave they stop. “Here,” the honey-guide bird says, and it lays a very tiny egg into Ma-We’s hand.’

  ‘The honey-guide bird’s own egg, Buza?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Emily. It is so small and very light in colour. So very small that if you sneezed too hard it might be blown all the way to Soweto township.’ Buza holds his fingers just an inch apart in front of me. He pretends to throw the imaginary egg up in the air, a look of surprise on his face as it travels away from him then lands back into his palm. Buza and I laugh at his game before he carries on with the story.

  ‘Then, Miss Emily, the honey-guide says, “Remember the egg – make it whole and you will always be happy, for inside it is full of sweetness.”

  ‘And Ma-We went out of the cave and ran back to her family’s hut, and they were very much pleased to see her. Then the village people filled their bellies with the richness of all the honey-filled eggs that Ma-We had fixed and, Miss Emily, like magic, the honey-filled eggs fed th
em all until the drought was over.

  ‘And for all her life Ma-We lived in happiness. And she kept the honey-guide’s tiny egg close to her heart and she always remembered what the honey-guide had told her, “Make the egg whole, for there is sweetness inside. Whit-pirr, whit-pirr.”

  ‘Kunjalo! I have said so!’

  Buza and I sit quietly in the shadow of the story for a few minutes. His story is like a person who has just left us after a short visit. Ma-We, so real, sitting next to me on the grass. I am not ready to let her go.

  Buza looks down at me, eyes so brown, ‘No sweetness in a broken child, no sweetness in a family with so much cracks.’

  ‘Maybe the wax of wild bees would help.’

  Buza laughs, ‘Ay, Miss Emily you are too smart, too smart.’

  The story is finished and the bracelet is complete in his hands. Buza holds it towards me then puts it on my wrist. It warms me all over, like I’m glued together with honey.

  Saturday

  Mother, Sarah and I are having tea on the front lawn.

  There is so much prettiness around us. Soft, cushiony green grass evenly cut that rolls out for yards and yards in front of us like a flat ocean. On one of its grassy borders is a row of pink blossom trees, while sweet-smelling jasmine falls like white sleet along the length of the far wall. Ahead, at the bottom of the garden, is a big oak tree, its giant branches making huge finger-like shadows across the lawn, and along the driveway towards the gates sway the jacaranda trees, dropping their adventurous purple flowers every time the wind puffs up. But none of this prettiness matters because the meanest of words were just said between Mother and Father before he stormed off into the woods. The angry sentences that they yelled at each other were like enormous scissors that cut away all the loveliness, all the trees and flowers, all the sweet-smelling jasmine, so that lying here on the lawn on the big mauve blanket that Lettie has laid down, half-heartedly playing a game of draughts with Sarah, I feel only dirt and dryness and dead leaves all around me.