Guava Jam

Knocking on the front door of the Salem Inn on Saturday morning and calling for help, was an old woman, a Gogo, with two small children sitting a few metres behind her on the grassy verge, in nappies. Lily had been alone since Friday lunchtime in the house that Doug had taken over in the eastern cape after leaving Stellenbosch the year before, renting to Patricia and I, while we studied and taught at the university in Grahamstown. Various local drunks and old women had come to the house that morning; one young man was selling chickens, which I declined, only to find out later he had stolen them from his own grandmother to pay for umqombothi. There was a faint singing beneath my window, and I was reluctant to get out of bed again with the house to myself, planning a calm weekend reading alone, but the erratic calls for help persisted accompanied by the sound of crying children.

Set at the corner of a crossroads the Salem Inn is beautiful, a bit dark and lacking a female touch of sorts, but comfortable, quite chilly with thick plastered stone walls, dating from 1854. Doug was trying to find out more about the house with the big book collection he bought for 40,000 Rand a few months ago from a book dealer containing a mass of books from the eastern cape. Sermons, Dugdale, Watson, social experiments and the like, it’s a mine of information for him to sweep through in the dark evenings. In some senses the house is set up as the obvious point of contact for locals who refer to him now as Oupa, as his discomfort at Oubaas was made clear from the beginning.

Lily opened the door to the woman who gestured to the children and speaks in isiXhosa interspersed with English, indicating that they are hungry. The children looked directly at me before dropping their eyes. I observe that this is the first time in

all the years I’ve visited South Africa, that I’ve been directly appealed to for help. My nascent maternal (and long-standing white saviour) instincts lurched sickeningly against the difficulty of interpreting the situation alone without Doug or his domestic worker Nomhle to help me. Was I being taken for a fool? Did they really need my help? Did she know I was alone and perhaps want access to the house for some other reason? And yet my nerves felt coated with a protective layer of zinc, my recent detection of small electrical currents inside me, was not rooted in the move from London, the significant change in geographic location, but in the discovery of another electrical impulse, a second heartbeat, within me that I now guarded fiercely alongside dizzy tiredness and nausea.

Reluctantly I let the trio in to the house and sent an SMS to Nomhle who lived a short walk away.

I fed the children 2 slices of white bread with butter and guava jam each before putting them in the bath quickly to wash off the dust sticking to their legs and tummies. Nomhle brought clean clothes and fresh nappies, so we dressed them and asked Gogo the whole story. She told us the children’s mother had left them with her (their grandmother) for the weekend but that she wanted to go drinking with her new boyfriend and that we must take them back to their mother in Joza. I struggled to contain a smile at her brazen abdication of responsibility. She reminded me of my father’s mother. The cheek and gall of it all.

My white Toyota hire car was parked clearly outside, I prevaricated about whether or not I could take them to Grahamstown and asked Nomhle to translate further to try to understand more.

I thought we could do more than just offer a lift into town, as she said there was no money and she had no benefits - surely this was an issue that needed to be

fixed longer term. Gogo needed to prove her date of birth, which she couldn’t do, but we talked about how she could obtain a birth certificate and I promised that Doug and I would help her to do this on his return. She continued to insist that her daughter was no good and often left the children with her and disappeared. These children were not really hers and should be with their mother, who was lazy and shirking responsibility, she said.

I had picked up hitch hikers before in South Africa, especially on my honeymoon in Kwa-Zulu Natal, when I had a simple ‘no machetes’ rule. I once overshot a turn off north of Umhlanga panicking the women in the back seat who thought I had kidnapped them. More recently, on the way from Grahamstown to Bathurst, I had picked up three women waiting at the side of the road, who I assumed had been to church. They spoke unselfconsciously in isiXhosa while I listened to Algoa FM, until we reached Bathurst. I dropped two of them off in the ‘location’ past Steve Biko Street, an old man standing on the street corner on the right apparently having vomited a milky porridge into his hand and beard and then looked to be sucking it all back up – it’s making me queasy just thinking about that again to write it down – all of us hissed “yoh” and looked away. A cockerel blocked my path briefly and I continued through the township, over the defunct railway tracks, avoiding smashed glass in the middle of the tarmac road and out to the right towards the Port Alfred Road. The lady I left there to continue hitching home, told me a little about her church which was Zionist, but not the ZCC, and how it had helped her those last 15 years. Her husband did not go with her. It cost her 40 Rand, 20 each way if she took a taxi to church on a Sunday, so she asked if I liked pineapple, which I love, so she let me take one of three golden specimens in her plastic bag. I happily accepted and left her in the sandy patch by the general store before turning to go

back home. I liked driving people for pineapples, (it was easier than trying to fix the vast inequalities of apartheid, and quenched some of the guilt).

Though this morning I had little sympathy for this grandmother trying to dump her grandchildren, for a jol with her visiting boyfriend, I drove them all to Grahamstown, as requested.

***

Soon enough there was eight of us squeezed into the air-conditioned car. Gogo, her two grandchildren, and Nomhle joined us to help interpret, her ten-year-old son Thando (the best bush rat catcher this side of the fish river), and two other women from the village who said they needed supplies from Joza.

The road from Salem to Grahamstown is small until the junction with the main road where a christian farm stall sells homemade ginger beer and biscuits, part of a project for homeless men, recovering alcoholics and addicts. The cloudy brew sold by these fragile white-haired men had worked wonders on my morning sickness on the way into town since I had arrived in July. The N2 road plunges down past steep rock faces, escarpment lined with euphorbia, the sky bluer than the bluest eye as we climb back up and over the hill and back down into Grahamstown.

To reach Joza, beyond the town centre, is to divide Grahamstown in half. Taking the road past NELM and following it up the hill behind doesn’t feel like a giant schism between the once British settlement and the township it once was but the division remains tangible. It’s not a split of wealth and squalor, nor the acute separation of race and class it must once have been, but as the hill rises the houses grow smaller, the matchbox designs in plain brick or pastel pinks, greens and blues slot squarely into grids. The scrubland takes over in places, while some gardens

grow maize and pumpkin leaves. Children play outside and men hang over the bonnets of SUVs listening to music and drinking Saturday scuds.

Gogo directs me initially but then we stop to ask where exactly her daughter lives, zig zagging around pot-holes before finally pulling up outside a house with the front door wide open.

Silent throughout the journey the children get slowly out of the car and follow me through the gate to the stoep where I call out “Mholo.”

Their grandmother remains in the car.

“Kunjani” I try, to the woman who approaches the door peering over my shoulder to the car outside.

“Kunjani wena” she asks me in return. An amused, puzzled look on her clear round face.

“Your mother said I should bring the children here, because she doesn’t have money to take care of them this weekend.” I repeat, weakly, registering elements of dismay in her response, feeling caught in a family rivalry I cannot fully understand.

She calls over my shoulder “Ma, …………………..?”

Her mother remains in the car and does not reply.

It’s unclear who else is in the house, another man perhaps, not the children’s father. He is never mentioned. A few people, maybe, here for a Saturday braai?

She walks back inside the house, resigned, the children remain downcast still standing behind me.

I try to explain to them that I’m leaving, and ask if they will be ok here now? They nod shyly, I check again if they are sure before I return to the car.

We left the children at the house in Joza, the look on the boy’s face as we drove away; standing on the path, like an unstable stack of abandoned laundry. An

electrical impulse fired spasmodically in my lower belly, just once. It was too soon for kicks and there was no time to wonder at a quickening that passed almost unnoticed as I walked away conflicted. Unsure whether or not to bundle them back into the car, I released the handbrake and coasted down the street, looking back once to see if anyone had acknowledged the children or brought them inside.

Their Gogo’s voice from the back seat urged me to “Go, just go.” As she slapped the back of the passenger seat. I felt like the getaway car. Nomhle just sucked her teeth and sighed “Aie. Hambo kunya,” as I changed gear.

The three women were in a lighter mood as we pulled away from Joza, and suggested I pull over at the liquor store opposite the petrol station. They asked if I’d buy them their alcohol for the weekend and I flatly refused. I end up giving them 20 Rand and waited while donkey-driven carts overtook us heading for the highway.

We drove back past the settler’s monument, the SPCA animal rescue centre, and a lonely giraffe nibbling a thorn tree in a nature reserve before taking the left turn at the Salem crossroads, the Christians having shut up shop for the evening. We were home before dusk.

***

Alone again back in Salem I ran a bath and got undressed to wash away the sadness of the day. Suddenly noticing blood in my underwear I phoned the on-call doctor in Grahamstown at 11pm in a panic. Grahamstown was twenty minutes’ drive away in the pitch dark, so he said if there wasn't too much blood and there was no pain, rather go to bed and see how you are in the morning. I agreed and hung up, quickly washing in the cooling bathwater and getting under my sheets. Floods of

tears spilt out of me as I phoned my husband in London to tell him what was happening. Late at night his friend answered and assured me the same thing had happened to his wife during her first pregnancy and advised me to stay calm. “These things happen.” Only no-one ever tells you until it does. Their son was born without difficulty in Tokyo. The distance felt incredibly difficult to surmount over the phone, comfort hard to offer on either side. A power cut meant candles were all that illuminated the room, that tiny electrical current in my womb was indistinct, impossible to detect. The light faded on my phone as I tried to sleep.

***

That long difficult night, while the night jars called outside, I recalled a moment at home in London when I’d benignly trusted a stranger and been left unsettled for days…

I allowed a man from Kurdistan to sit with me in my lunch hour while I ate a crayfish and avocado salad and drank much needed hot miso soup (which relaxes my throat, and quickly restores salt). He told me his life story from the first greeting. Some days it's like that, perhaps it's the same with everyone when you take the time to actually listen and observe people. All of London had looked tired and sick at the end of a summer without much sun, but I noticed other small kindnesses as I sat and resolutely refused to go back to the office until the storm had passed and my blood sugar was higher. He was well dressed, not smart but clean, with a gold watch, not ostentatious, with small ruby like jewels at each quarter of the clock, and I had my back to the wall, phone and wallet on the table, absolutely within grabbing distance, but not moved by me to imply trust. He did touch my phone at one point and I found

an excuse to put it in my pocket later so that he wouldn't notice my city savy and be offended, because actually, quite self-consciously, I trusted him completely.

Apparently it was £600 to be smuggled to London from Paris in the back of a lorry and the police in Dover will let you stay if you speak 7 languages and agree to be their translator for a handful of cash and some hot food and coffee. His name was Halo, which made me think he was an angel, for a brief moment, but then he drew a picture on the napkin of the bird it signifies in Iraq, and it turned out to be a vulture, or at least some kind of predator that eats everything "birds, meat, a lot of meat, sometimes dead". Perhaps unsurprisingly I didn't agree to stay in touch with him though I was the third in a series of ‘Doctors’ he'd met in various cafes on his struggle working for money through Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France again. Each woman had befriended him, the first a Zoologist in Germany let him live with her and taught him German until he got his status denied, no sex, just money and housekeeping were all he offered in return and of course friendship. She didn't want him to go when he went to Holland where he met a Pharmacist whose husband had died and who gave him the keys to her house the second time they met. There seemed to be love in his eyes when he said they couldn't marry either when his status was denied and he had to go to Paris.

Now in London for 10 years working as a tyre fitter in Limehouse for a man called Bob who let him sleep in the workshop initially, he was visiting an elderly friend who'd had a stroke at Guys Hospital round the corner. He thought I was pretty, "Not all English girls pretty." "Oh but they are!" I smiled, and he was glad of the seat but also the laughter, as was I the compliment, because I was feeling prettier that day, without my glasses on. He could tell I was intelligent because most people will never stop to talk to you, he said, "people on the bus do not know where

is Iraq and only go out to get drunk every weekend". I encouraged him with my attentiveness, looking him in the eye, which I never do to strangers, because I knew where he was from and wanted to know what he thought of the bomb in Iran now despite the exponential rise in literacy of women in Iran. And also, knowing what British troops have done in that region, one feels a certain amount of responsibility and so guilt propelled me forward. Perhaps too because of all the typing I did at the solicitors' years ago I felt I could connect with him on some level, seeing the patterns in people's narratives enables you to skip between timeframes, countries and political information without need of explanation and get closer to the heart of things.

It was only when we got up to leave and I asked exactly how he spelt his name that I baulked. He wrote down his name for me and then spelt out my name in Arabic and those of my loved ones, the secret name of a past lover, not being sure whether he would recognise them straight off. I should have realised more quickly that the phoneticism of Arabic means that the lack of vowels in the roman alphabet is irrelevant to the beautiful lines that appeared in biro on the cafe napkin. He made me write out the names of his dead brothers and sisters and those left alive to see if I could spell them as he said them and told me how they died - a trick I was actually quite good at having typed audio dictation for a number of different accents in my time: Guleid, Marijam, Goran, Anja. It all impressed him but I denied him the real friendship that a shared email address or mobile phone number would have implied (even if written wrongly by 'accident' to avoid the awkwardness of the situation and let him find out later that the email would bounce, that my mobile wouldn't connect), and instead chose honesty and said I was sorry but I didn't think we would be friends or meet again. He embraced me hurriedly and left, as I did, trying not to slip in my flip flops on the pavement outside and I tried not to worry that it meant anything to

him really, and neither did it to me when he threw the napkin in to the salad box casually with the remains of our lunch.

***

In the morning, after an unsettled night’s sleep, the bleeding had stopped and there was no pain, so the kind doctor advised that I simply stay in bed all day and come to Grahamstown for an ultrasound on Monday. With no-one around to help me or to advise me otherwise, I did as I was instructed, hoping the foetus would remain tethered in my belly a little longer and that this tiny life would be safely cocooned once again if I didn’t move all day.

There was another knock on the front door of the Salem Inn. Again I didn’t answer initially. But after some calls up to my window, I leant outside from the first floor to ask what was up, warily checking for boomslang in the tree full of weaver bird nests before looking down.

“Can you drive us over the hill to fetch a goat (bok meat)?” they called.

“Sorry, no. I’m not well, I’m sick. I can’t drive.” I replied. Hesitant and unsure whether these requests were starting to become more frequent because I was recognized as a soft touch, always ferrying folk around for pineapples. Adamant I wasn’t driving anyone anywhere today for bok meat or whatever. I’d almost lost my unborn son, please, please leave me alone.

“Ok, sorry”. They chimed, as they started the steep walk up past the cricket pitch and the old Methodist church to the next settlement on the way to Kenton-on-Sea.

I returned to bed to read Coetzee’s Summertime, grateful not to be reading Disgrace while alone in that tiny village of Salem. It was that weekend that

hairs of motherhood started to come through like a set of weeds and for the first time I felt that I could do it all alone, if need be, if only the baby would stay.