In loving memory
DALENE KOTZE
You bravely took on Europe with me and tried hard not to backseat drive my left hand driving too much. Now, in the year 2025, it has been fifteen years since the cancer took you and I still ask you for answers. I look forward to the day when I can walk in the light of your bright smile again and you will, at last, give me the answers.
Your husband Paul
Prologue
The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.
Robert Edison Fulton
A desert, empty and boring. In the beginning, stretching over a large part of Southern Africa, there was this empty desert, boring to look at, baking hot in summer and frighteningly cold in winter. Called the Karoo, the Khoikhoi word vividly describes the place: it means dry as well as hard.
Yes, it is boring to look at, but like a beautiful woman grown less so with age, it becomes fascinating when you dig deep and and then it grows beautiful once more.
Near a ridge of rock-strewn koppies in the northern Karoo there once stood this tall dead tree, a bloekom, of course: there are, if you really looked closely, other kinds of trees in the desert but none as tall as the bloekom; it is actually an invader from a distant land where a very unoriginal lot called it the bluegum.
Way back then tiny yellow people lived in caves in the koppies. They painted mud pictures of them hunting and dancing on the walls of their caves, and realised they could use the pale naked trunk of the petrified bloekom to soften the skins of animals they killed with poison arrows. The remaining bark of the tree, strips still clinging here and there, they used to color and save the skins against rot. They would then wear the soft, colorful skins or sleep under them.
Years later a group of Cape shepherds followed their sheep up from the south. The sheep did not mind the boring landscape, it was home to the naturally spiced bush they quickly grew addicted to. The hard little bush still covers large parts of the Karoo desert. Since the sheep decided to stay here, the shepherds had to start looking for permanent water, of course. They dug wells and finally struck a strong underground river near the petrified tree. This, they said, is where we will build shelters against the cold winters, and we will call ourselves wool farmers.
The new farmers quickly learnt there were excellent hunters living in the koppies, small yellow men who did not understand the concept of personal property. They saw the sheep as sport for hunting and juicy food kindly provided by their new neighbors. The farmers then proved their rifles could kill a lot faster than poison arrows; an entire people disappeared from the desert, leaving only their cave paintings and the dead bloekom tree the farmers started using to turn sheep skin into leather.
The wool farmers called it tanning, from the Latin word tannum meaning bark, and they thought it a wonderful method invented by their European ancestors. They never caught on the method was basically what the tiny yellow ones had done to turn animal skins into clothing and bedding.
Many decades later, when more houses appeared near the petrified bloekom and grew into a dorp, its people named the village Breipaal. This is the Dutch word for tanning pole, of course, a hard word for the lazy who insisted on shortening Breipaal to the Paal.
“I stay on the Paal,” they would answer if you asked them where they lived. No, they were not really good with words.
About sixty years ago the old bloekom finally perished in a fire caused by lightning. Today some villagers still say “I stay on the Paal” and find it wickedly funny. In the Afrikaans language “I stay on the Paal” has come to mean what “I’m always knocked up” and “I have a bun in the oven” mean in English.
Yes, some of them are still not very good with words.
Chapter one
Everything happens in its time. A windpump can’t go looking for the wind. Karoo saying
First, disaster. And then war. All of it started by a grasshopper. But wait, we must not hurry the story.
The wide tarred road, rushing from Capetown in the south to Johannesburg in the north, glances past the Paal with its twelve streets of dry, hard dirt. The dorp feeds off the road’s mainly truck traffic with a modern petrol station, pay toilets and a hamburger joint. If you are forced, for whatever strange reason, to sleep over here you will find a small hotel with clean rondavels behind the petrol station, in the shade of a copse of tattered bloekoms. Red falcons nest in the trees, and in the sky at sunset their wings turn into fire.
There was a time when every property in the Paal had its own windpump and cement dam, the water pumped from ancient wells dug into the underground river. That was long before treated water arrived through a huge concrete pipe from the distant Gariep River and the Paal’s people reluctantly started paying for it. Today only the Dutch Reformed Church in the middle of the dorp, the Breipaal Hotel and those with land for a few sheep, goats or milk cows have windpumps with dams. The hotel painted its dam bright blue, and calls it the Swimming Pool For Guests Only. School children enjoy the dams in the hot summers, but since a grade two boy drowned in Anna Appel’s dam they have to crawl under fences and quietly sneak into the cool soft water, no loud diving or jumping, of course, they know they will get a beating if caught.
The owner of the drowning dam, Anna Appel, is a sculptor and painter who lives alone. She apparently fled from somewhere to the Paal for reasons she refuses to discuss. Of course, there are many Paal characters like Anna Appel who deny their pasts and claim they left the cities for the wide empty Karoo because they love freezing their backsides off in winter. Village gossips, the most wicked Greek Chorus ever, have their own horrendous theories, of course:
Anna Appel performed backyard abortions and drowned the babies if they still lived, and she managed to get out just before the police arrived.
Anna Appel painted a portrait of Nelson Mandela in which the great man looked like a dumb gorilla and she managed to get out after two attempts on her life, one by drowning.
Anna Appel thought she could make a living as a house painter, but the owner of her first house realised she was color blind when she painted his entire house black, and she just managed to get out before the owner could drown her in his swimming pool.
And so on and so forth, as the preacher Leah Haasbroek likes to say after she’s opened the second bottle of cheap red.
Anna Appel, wracked with guilt, gave the grieving parents of the drowned child a watercolor of Jesus holding a happy little boy, but the boy looked more like an intoxicated monkey and the Jesus not unlike an anorexic Father Christmas asking a drunk dwarf what he wanted for Christmas.
Tony Fivaz, the village undertaker, believes it’s only a matter of time before another drowned child is delivered to him for burial and bereaved parents scream at him over the price and quality of the coffin.
“I don’t want to get weird on you,” Tony Fivaz told last month’s meeting of the Breitaal Homeowners’ Association, “but we have only two choices to prevent another bleddy dam tragedy. One, we teach all our children how to swim properly, not doggy style; two, we force the dam owners to stick their bleddy dams full of rocks and sell the bleddy windpumps for scrap.”
Troffel Fouche quickly stood up at the meeting, towering over the undertaker. “Lekker, nice, Tony, thanks for proving as per usual you only think of us when we’re dead.”
Fivaz sighed. “Trof, this is always the problem with you. I try to help and you get weird on me.”
Troffel is a failed sheep farmer who manages the Breitaal Hotel on behalf of its owner. Fifty years ago he brilliantly played loose forward for his province and very nearly got picked for the national Springbok team, but time has thickened Troffel’s waist and dimmed his rugby star into legend.
“Porra,” he snarled at Fivaz, using the insulting Afrikaans slang word for a Portuguese person, “you’re off-side as per usual. The hotel swimming pool is off limits to unaccompanied children and the likes of you.”
Some of the ladies present asked Troffel to behave himself, the men simply grinned in anticipation of a proper fight.
“Who are you calling a Porra?” Fivaz asked quietly.
Troffel pushed his sunburnt face closer to Fivaz. “Who do you think, Porra? There’s only one Porra staying on the Paal.”
Fivaz picked up his chair and broke it on Troffel’s head.
Meetings of the Breitaal Homeowners’ Association are held in the hotel’s sitkamer where drinks from the bar are served. Readily available alcohol is a nightmare problem around here, but more on that later. The owner of the hotel, Dot Volschenk, also owner of the village shop, deducted the cost of the sitkamer damages from Troffel’s manager pay and refused him her bed for a week. It was supposed to be for three weeks, but an unseasonal snap of early winter forced Dot to reconsider.
“The Lord gave me cold limbs and Troffel a lekker nice warm backside,” was her explanation to the girl who cleaned Dot’s bedroom in the hotel.
Troffel Fouche did win the fight, of course. Most of the damage was caused by the village undertaker’s head as he flew across the sitkamer. Since then Fivaz has taken to wearing his black funeral hat wherever he goes, not only when he’s escorting a coffin to the Long Trees at the side of Whatshername Koppie just outside the Paal. The village clinic’s sister, Sanna Retief, says the stitches will come out soon but the hair on his head will take until Christmas to grow and it’s not even Easter yet.
Whatshername Koppie, a high tumble of red and grey rocks filled with scorpions and snakes and beer cans, was named after a lady who fed the hungry during the war of the Boers against the English. No-one around here thought of writing down the lady’s name, but everyone agrees Whatshername Koppie has a lekker nice mysterious ring to it.
The Long Trees are, of course, the local name for the Breipaal graveyard. The tallest bloekoms in the district stand at the village side of the graveyard, a long line of very long trees. Red falcons nest in the trees and fight black crows and grey owls for perching rights on the branches. The fights can grow so loud the village preacher often has to shout her kind words by an open grave.
The Paal used to have Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed churches. Never a Jewish shul or a Muslim mosque, of course, but the village historians deny that. The Dutch Reformed church, a master builder’s miracle set in white stone at the center of the dorp, is the only church still standing. The others, closed by the Karoo’s economic decline, were first turned into shelters for orphans and the homeless, and finally neglected so badly they became ruins infested by ants, spiders, bats and snakes where only teenage lovers will risk their lives for a quickie.
Bravely facing the economic storms and chiefly supported by the district’s wool farmers, the Dutch Reformed church managed to keep ordained predikante happy with a roomy parsonage, new car and fair salary, but then the wool price slowly started to fall.
And suddenly a grasshopper, an impossible giant with zebra stripes, landed on the till in Dot Volschenk’s shop. At that time it was the only shop around here, simply known as Dot se winkel. Dot nearly swallowed her burning cigarette and tried to kill the monster with a can of Doom. It refused to die. This was not an ordinary grasshopper.
Less than half an hour later a roaring storm of flashing wings came up over the horizon and started eating everything in its way.
The wool price crashed.
The church soon realised it could no longer afford preachers ordained to preach the faith. After sadly burning their fingers with well-meaning yet unordained preachers, the church elders made a desperate decision: Any adult man of the Dutch Reformed faith is welcome to stand up in church, read from the Bible and deliver a sermon. Please do not ask for payment, of course, God will take care of that when your time comes.
Many men tried, all failed. For a believer it was lovely to do a sermon or two or three, but it became a burden if you had family and work and then had to prepare for a sermon every Sunday.
The elders tried to do it themselves, but they were old men with some of them already on their way to a coffin fitting at the hands of Tony Fivaz. The church was in danger of closing permanently.
And then, after leaving the Paal because she shot a man who deserved to die and lost her true love, Leah Haasbroek came back from whatever triumphs and disasters befell her in Johannesburg, London, Paris and the many other points of her personal cross. It took her twenty-two years to find her way back. She reclaimed the empty Paal house her parents had bought all those years ago and then virtually abandoned after their divorce. Yes, the house on the edge of the village, that one right on the edge, facing the vastness of the Karoo and a burning blue flame of sky you cannot look at and remain atheist.
It’s not exactly empty, of course. Meester Hoffman still haunts the Haasbroek house.
Yes, the Paal’s old schoolmaster is a ghost and often delighted to be one. But not always. There are times when Meester makes a grasshopper storm look tame.