Chapter two
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Everyone says this
The correct wording for a grasshopper storm, Breggie Petersen tells her class in the yellow brick school on the edge of the Paal’s colored township, is a swarm of locusts.
Years ago, when they hit the village and the colored township next to it, the huge monsters ate plants, spiders, carpets, books, paintings, curtains, any bleddy thing. They were bigger than the fat black caterpillars living on the spicy Karoo bush the sheep love so much.
“I was young and working at Dot se winkel when they came,” Breggie tells her class. “I remember the swarm made the scary sound of a hailstorm and flickered white like a poplar tree when the wind turns its leaves. Everyone who stayed on the Paal tried to help stop them. We burned vaalbos and dry sheep dung, but the smoke didn’t stop them. In the veld jackals ran in circles, catching and crunching locusts in their jaws. On the highest koppies the baboons leapt into the sky and grabbed locusts with their four hands. It didn’t stop the swarm. They only flew away when there was bleddy nothing left to eat.”
Breggie wanted to write when she was working for Auntie Dot. She loved reading and read every book she could beg, borrow or steal. But what were the chances of a colored girl just out of high school in a nowhere place like the Paal? Packing tinned foods on shelves and helping with the till was the only work she could find.
But she was bright and pretty. With the support of a good man she escaped from the Karoo, studied to be a teacher and wrote short stories. She finished her studies, tried to write a book, but then the good man died and the people close to her died. It was in the dark time of Aids and the evil illness did what a mighty swarm of locusts couldn’t: it ate families.
Breggie died a little herself, drank brandy and smoked far too much, felt she was harming herself and decided to do something of value like bleddy teach. She gave up the drinking and the dagga smoking, went back where she came from and got a job teaching children.
She loves it, even though teaching children from dysfunctional families are hard; their parents often drink and smoke dagga and have given up looking for good jobs.
The Paal’s village gossips, the most wicked of Greek Choruses, describe a good job in the Karoo as follows:
Something lekker nice, pays well but bleddy hard to find around here, everybody wants it but no-one is sober enough to learn how to bleddy do it.
Breggie is still writing her first book, the history of Breipaal and its people, but only in the evenings when she doesn’t have to mark schoolwork. Forty years old in January this year, still unmarried. She teaches at the school she herself went to, in the big township on the other side of Whatshername Koppie, the colored side. Most of the colored people – except those who live and work on sheep farms in the district – still stay there in little houses or shacks, not many have managed to move into the dorp. The old race laws are gone, people are allowed live wherever they can afford to. That is the problem, of course, most of them still have to live cheaply in the township, and it’s not exactly the prettiest place around here.
That was where Breggie rented a small room until the day she walked into Dot se winkel for half a bread and a short milk, where she found her old friend Leah Haasbroek standing by Dot at the till, laughing and smoking, saying she just moved back to the Paal.
Twenty two years! What happened to the time? What happened to them?
They talked until midnight in the old Haasbroek house, Leah smoking and drinking wine while Breggie sipped coffee, both sharing secrets, not playing the Paal’s denial game about the past.
Of course they did not talk about Leah shooting a man who raped and killed girls and almost got away with it, and how she fled from the Karoo to escape the law. That worked out bleddy strange: the local police, in the shape of the Paal’s religiously honest Captain Kaptein, knew the killer deserved to die, and never came after Leah.
Captain Kaptein. How weird is that? Born sixty years ago in the Paal’s colored township and baptized Johannes Paulus Kaptein, he became what his surname says he is: a captain, eventually posted to the police district of Breipaal, his hometown. He has remained the captain of police around here for forty years, and both his sons have become policemen.
Leah admitted to Breggie she’s staying away from Captain Kaptein, just in case. She never married either, had one bleddy ridiculous affair after another, got to see Europe, the Far East, Australia and so on and so forth; managed to survive some of the world’s horrors by doing every menial job she could find and then, to her surprise, actually did well in a very difficult trade.
“I buy and sell art on the internet,” she told Breggie. “Not all that original when Mum’s a lekker hot painter up in Johannesburg. She hates what I trade in, far too weird for her, but it pays the rent and it’s mainly good stuff, sometimes a bit indifferent, but never really bad.”
“Nothing like Flight to Egypt?” Breggie smiled.
Leah laughed. “We still have that one, you believe it? Hanging in Dad’s bedroom, I still tease him Mary’s donkey looks like a goat but he won’t let me take it down. You never throw away a gift from the heart, and so on and so forth. She was a terrible painter but a very nice lady.”
“What happened to her?”
“Suicide, I think.” Leah pulled a face. “Lost contact after she moved to Capetown. Our bad, Mum still owes her an e-mail.”
“There’s a fairly new incomer here, calls herself a sculptor and painter. I don’t think so. Why do the bad ones come here?”
“Anna Appel, I met her. Why are we surprised? Good painters go where the bucks are, rejects to places like the Paal and I don’t just mean painters. Old Giel Swiegers still calls himself a plumber and builder, and he’s next to useless. Tony Fivaz is the only real bleddy professional around here and he just plants people.”
“I need to pee,” Breggie said.
“You know where it is.”
Breggie walked the creaking pine floor of the wide corridor to the bathroom, opened the door and saw Meester in his wheelchair at the wash basin, scowling at her in the mirror. He was seriously trying to shave and not at all pleased to see her.
“Sorry,” she said, “I need to pee.”
He snorted and disappeared into the mirror.
“I notice Meester is still around here,” she told Leah when she came back from the bathroom.
Pouring the last of the cheap red she was drinking on her own, Leah smiled and said, “He makes it feel like home in a way, I just wish I could have pets. I tried, a dog and a cat. Poor things went insane when they saw him and then he sulked for a whole bleddy week.”
The very next Saturday Breggie moved in. Leah insisted she take the sunny bedroom looking out on the yellow stretch of sandveld where a dictator of a meerkat rules over his large family in a town of tunnels, and occasionally sacrifices a family member when the old geelslang from Whatshername Koppie comes slithering along.
Through Leah’s strong binoculars Breggie has watched the snake hunt, strike and eat. It stays with you for a while.
Leah has taken the guest bedroom, not the enormous master bedroom where her parents used to sleep. That bedroom must remain available to Leah’s dad. Breggie hasn’t seen him yet.
“Dad pops in when Gertjie’s off buying rams, baling wool and so on and so forth,” according to Leah. “He’ll never love sheep like she does, but he’s great with figures and the farm always gets tax money back. She loves that, I still think he’s too old for her but it works nicely for them.”
Breggie hopes she’s away at school when Charles Haasbroek pops in. It could be awkward. She’s living in what is still his house and doesn’t pay rent, Leah won’t hear of it, and she remembers he did Dot Volschenk’s business taxes and Auntie Dot used to say that incomer can squeeze a bleddy fifty cent coin until the copper jumps off. After the Haasbroeks moved here from Johannesburg they were considered incomers for a long time, at least ten years before people born and bred around here started calling them locals. An incomer has to earn the right to say I stay on the Paal.
Kortjas Uys, a sweet gay man who owned the Paal’s only Bed & Breakfast for years, was still called that bleddy incomer when he left the Karoo and moved to Capetown. He took Breggie’s best brother with him and they both died of Aids down by the sea. Auntie Dot bought the Bed & Breakfast for peanuts, but when Breggie walks past the house it looks almost empty.
She tells Leah, “That silly sign is not at the gate anymore.”
“I own the place now,” Leah says. “Dot got tired of tenants who dodge the rent then Troffel had to throw them out. I moved people from Bloemfontein in there, don’t have to pay rent, they’re helping me build the shop.”
“What shop?” Breggie frowns.
Leah grins. “The competition Dot doesn’t know about yet.”