Friday
A return to Ladismit, this time with the Professor, my father and my sister. Cloud was falling over the coastal mountains beyond Barrydale. The sky was open and blue above us but the Swartberge were under cloud, Towerkop missing. I thought it would be raining in Ladismit but it wasn’t. The backpackers lodge called Kicks (“get your kicks on… route 62”) was trying to pull off another of their music festivals, after two confirmed follies in two years. The first and most impressive failure, I fondly remember, was called the Ladismit Apricot Makietie Festival, or Rocktober, on the few wind tattered posters I saw around Cape Town. It boasted a star line-up, including rock-jawed Arno Carstens and his earnest new band, who were not able to set aside their professionalism for a second, even before twenty pissed teenagers from around and about. This third installment had been named Wakka Wakka, and looked just as forlorn as the first, with the wind building for rain.
We arrived and had tea looking out over the lavender bushes, which had put out their useless florets (acting on misinformation, T had planted the field below the house with a variant that does not produce the oil that is used commercially).
T and I went to fetch the bus from Oom Kotie’s autoshop, which is housed in a showground shed. There the bus has been sanded down and painted municipal yellow, all but a section of the roof that nobody will see. T refers to it as ‘our livelihood’ whenever anybody asks. He hopes to take it up and down the R62, to festivals and cultural occasions, selling preserves and crafts from roadside lots like a latter day smous. This is to be the age, then, in which the nagosiewa launches into popular culture, the way that Ronnie’s Sex Shop relaunched the country bar (Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer put to work in the age of internet porn).
There does not, however, seem to be any chance that the bus will succeed in the same way. Like Ronnie’s Sex Shop, T’s mobile store idea was hatched from a joke (the word ‘sex’ on the wall of ‘Ronnie’s Shop’, was painted on the wall by a friend after a night of drinking). I can imagine T and his new friends in Ladismit cheering and laughing the idea of the bus (which he has named the Kannabus, it being Kannaland and all) into being on successive summer evenings. Of course it had to be a ford truck with a bus chassis, the old American school bus model, and sprayed banana yellow. The same friends helped tear the seats out, fitted cupboards, installed air vents. T and I had previously spent an entire afternoon sawing through a piece of metal that joined the cockpit shell to the framework, so that a blind could be fitted over that first window. That was eight months ago. Now the thing was painted. T had tried to pick it up earlier but Oom Kotie was not in, and neither was the bus anywhere to be seen. This was because the job had been completed two months later than it should have been, and T had suggested he might take as long to pay. Oom Kotie had hidden the bus in a nearby barn as a precaution. His assistant sheepishly told T that this was because of the rain. When we returned that afternoon the bus was where it should have been, and there was no show-down, though when we drove out the bus snagged a big banner advertising the Wakka Wakka Festival, ripping it away from the showground entrance.
*
With the bus parked in its roofless lot in the farm yard, and already a swipe of creosote on the fender from where T hit a pole on the way in, the memorial service now rushed up on us. I scratched down a short ‘letter’ from the grandchildren. I practiced it down in the lavender, knowing that the direct form of address—’Dear’, and ‘Love’, and somehow the use of my siblings’ names—would bring forth a rush of tears. The lavender was alive with small daytime moths and the swallows feeding on them.
Reverend Ronald _, who everyone calls Revvie Ron, arrived and set up a small altar at the back of the house, facing the row of icebergs. Of his own initiative he had blown up and framed in gold the old man’s ID photograph. It was a remarkably serene picture for one taken so late, possibly the last picture of his face before it was altered by the Palsy. I remember an episode concerned with that photograph. The old man’s application for a South African ID had been returned to him because he had cut the pictures too small. This blew aside the temporary veil of self-control and amenability he had drawn over his misery after being ejected from his home, his country, and he ranted and raved in the lounge. I remember my mother patiently cutting out new photographs and placing them with the application before readdressing it and sealing the envelope before him.
People arrived, parked around the yellow bus, came crunching into the yard over the gravel. They all brought platters of food (butter-heavy sandwiches mainly), took prayer books from a neat stack on the garden stairs, and chose a place to sit from the mish-mash of seats we had arranged on the green grass. They were an elderly lot, and mostly members of the Anglican congregation ministered to by the revvie. I remember that some of the early services were held in the tiny clubhouse of the golf club. Now a deal has been struck with the council for use of the grand Otto Hager church at the entrance to the town, though they share space with the information centre (delimited by fold away felt boards exhibiting sepia photographs of the Laingsburg floods of ’81). Soon work will begin on their very own church, which will be sited on open ground opposite the desanctified synagogue in which T attends exercise classes. The old man’s ashes will be amongst the first interments (three other congregation members have died this month, including a young mother, crushed by a truck) in the planned memorial wall.
Revvie began the service by talking about the old man with a jarringly dramatic familiarity, saying how he had held his hand and received his wish for peace, ‘to go to the big kraal in the sky’. After that T, clearly far from ready to speak about his father, who bossed him up for most of his life, broke down. He started by saying, ‘most of you here only knew my father as a sick old man,’ and ended with a bitter swipe at ‘African politics’. My mother spoke and emphasized the old man’s love of his grandchildren, his achievements as a sportsman and farmer. She broke down afterwards with L in the spare room. Throughout the service the big woolly Alsatian, whose nerve the land occupations in Zimbabwe had shattered, kept shuffling to the kitchen door to check on events, and the house sparrows took advantage of the congregation’s immobility to raid the feeder above my head.
