Moeder And Elsa

Sometimes she couldn’t sleep, a mother of a fully grown comic nightmare of a promiscuous daughter, a woman with a battered heart. She’d married young though she couldn’t recall the exact age, as does her daughter who opted to believe a baptism certificate instead of their grandmother. After years of toiling the highlands of her matrimonial country of Lesotho as the third of four wives, she had returned home broken; but that after many epic misfortunes beset her, a foreigner among a proud and isolated people.

But that was too many a flood, debris under bridges she crossed to still be waking up her arthritic body to toil, now at Oubaas’ house. She had set roots in Kokosi, worked as a maid for racist households of Fochville, a town whose modernity seemed like a dusty façade painted over rusted monuments and relics of white affluence. Here, contract was the only option for child-mothers drained by screeching screams of malnourished infants they could feed on social grants.

At 42, she felt ancient. A twenty-two year old daughter whose recent pregnancy had brought shame upon her was her greatest failure, or rather she wished. Ausie was her name, a taciturn character, with snapping rage and lazy hands. Yet she carried her belly vibrantly unconcerned about gossip and slander by religious fanatics. And to further throw fuel to her ferocious daring, she knew who else was about to bloat like toads; which made her disliked by many women her age.

But she was the least bilious of Moeder’s sacramental cocktail of depressive encounters while she waded a stream of a desolate life, for today, as daylight tainted her bedroom with stale golden rays, was yet another day of reckoning at Oubaas’ house – that sickly twisted man, wheel-chair bound and repulsed by the country’s new political climate. Nevertheless, Moeder held Oubaas’ family closest to her infernal heart; they were an epitome of unabashed family love and resilience under many adverse situations, considering that Oubaas a badly aged man of 65 was now senile like any veteran secret police apparatus.

What could one expect for one who made a name for himself by guillotining hundreds of unnamed necks? Furthermore, plagued by many dysfunctional bodily organs, he now needed to be bathed by the maid because his wife was herself confined in an asylum. Their daughter Elsa, a chubby urchin with varicose veins crawling up her legs was breast-feeding a nine month old boy, living off their pension and other family heirlooms.

So today, Moeder had to be early to prepare the old man for his routine check-up consultations with discouraging doctors who probably would perform anesthesia at their intrepid patient’s lisped request. Ran him a shower, undressed his soiled frail body and brushed all caked gastric deposits clumped between cheeks and scrotum with the devotion of a catholic nun during wartime. These were followed by other mundane and repetitive house chores which turned to be more a misadventure for Moeder as she often finds plates hidden under bed with litters of kitten stinking up bedrooms stale with tobacco smoke.

***

Yet today Elsa had another pot boiling when Moeder found her. For as she began doing dishes which was eternally heaped like garbage in a reluctant sink - perhaps an aftermath of a buffet with trailer trash, Elsa snuck into the kitchen to reveal a sordid truth about her calculated intentions to terminate an untimely pregnancy. Elsa’s unknown impulse to reveal such a matter to Moeder was unnerving yet unclear, let alone incriminating as she knew well that nobody else was aware of the bun in the oven. 

Besides Elsa, an impassioned cook and gorger, had a body with a perspicacious ability to conceal any bizarre transformations of the waist areas. Such unwarranted courting into the arena of bloodlines being aborted was too heavy for Moeder’s adoration of the sanctity of life. And in her silent intensity she listened but with a double-edged prayer that sparked of fear and a realization of the unavoidable.

It was on Moeder’s day off that Elsa pleaded they meet near the church grounds the following morning, for a journey to a doctor who lives off maiming newborns. Her arguments, immersed in regret of a night spent with Jan soon after giving birth to her infant daughter, were those of an apologetic juvenile infatuated with the short-lived brutish allure of farm-boys. She made excuses for him, but also blamed herself excruciatingly.

Coupled with the shame of open acceptance of sinful indulgence, were still more confessions which burned Moeder’s mind for the entire day. By the time she left the mansion, returning to her four roomed municipal matchbox house rationed after years of impotent patience, she was spent. One would have surmised that both being of nearly the same age, this germinated a form of camaraderie which has always remained respectful. They could always share their internal strife of age without recourse to metaphors but straight talk. And Moeder being a mother already, she had become a source of inspiration to the otherwise, unmotivated, under-educated paranoid brat shielded from the world by orthodox deceits and values spelt by whips and leashes employed on black back throughout her racists upbringing.

But that afternoon, Moeder felt a breach in the unspoken accord, yet it was too late to refuse the rendezvous. The afternoon had begun to wear a somber shade even though spring was in full throttle. Elsa’s jabbering and her own sympathies were a weight for which she was ungrateful. It was too much, how could she contemplate murdering a seed of a bloodline of her oppressors? Yes she allowed her own daughter Ausie the privilege of birthing illegitimately, but this Elsa situation was perplexing. Would this allow Elsa a chance at a right refused many, which Ausie had neglected?

Was her conundrum weaved by a secret lust for the extermination of Jan’s seed? Jan, the self-same brute who baptized an elderly woman with boiling water in a maid’s quarters  shower when she demanded her pay? And as her shoulders began to tighten unbearably during her ride back home, she remained distraught, dragged even further into melancholy’s inferno by wanton taxi gossip about pastors who impregnated adolescents, and mother who aborted their own grandchildren. Wondering how best to shield Ausie from the matter, she opted to keep a tight lid on Elsa’s tear-marked pot of sorrow.

***

Day later, after driving in silence until they were slightly away from prying ears of god’s angels prancing in gardens of the church yard, Moeder attempted to beckon a change of heart. But Elsa was pink with resolve, determined and captivated by prospects of a life without her parent’s shame and fury. Moeder recalled her venomous tirades aimed at her daughter, but she could not stand a better ground today as guilt churned her growling stomach. The pink CITI GOLF was already hell bound, and it was thus that Jan’s seed was to leave life prior to being among the living.

Moeder felt as though she had brought the unborn to its cemetery, distant yet near like all sorrows of the flings of youth. She had been called upon to hold her hand through this dark valley filling with fetal deformities disguised as a laboratory for the humane treatment of the discarded. She could not bear the bile gnawing her tripe, death was as clear as the brightest midday. There she was to comfort a bereaved jester, listen to more private confessions; a keeper of blackest secrets told through pallid lips of a dehydrated middle-aged white girl still blushing with small town innocence.

And when the agonizing episode ended with a ride back to the Celestine church among giggles and exclamations of relief and hunger – Moeder found herself pushing a trolley load of unlisted groceries and fast food combos as a reward for her part in the murder. Elsa had the decency to drive Moeder back home that afternoon, to Ausie’s vivid surprise as it had been years she since she saw the Klein Mevrou, compounded also by the common reaction of inferiority when many are faced with white folk. 

Glancing at her mother’s bounty, she had difficulty containing herself. Bursting into an intrigued smile, confusion could be read on her face. A momentary cloud crept over Elsa’s face while Ausie was greeting her, her face perturbed by her heavy pregnancy of which she had not known. The fun and jovial mood of the ride changed to a cold simmer of rage that reminded her of her whiteness.

Moeder had to rush now, seeing that Elsa was already buckling her bulky self into a worn seat , a bloated hand clutching the steering wheel and a betrayed look on her face. An idle superiority rising in her hot cheeks, she gave a mocking glance at Ausie. Stupefied by an indictment for an unknown crime, even when she had waited for the mere decorum of entering the meagre house, a township girl was swelling beneath Ausie’s breast. Moeder remained at a loss for words, but at the back of her mind she could discern an apocryphal judgment for her sacred deed as an accomplice in what she could never wish upon her own.

***

Moeder often curiously thought about the dynamic of this motley family; about the paralysed father whose affliction seemed to have traceable origins. The Mevrou, who was an otherwise calm 58 year old shopaholic with a penchant for neighborhood social clubs and avid fundraiser for jubilee sales fairs, loved street children and battered spouses. Their daughter, however, was a naïve soul; shielded through Sunday school pageantry and farm house etiquette. She grew up clearly wishing to vent out her caged disobedience and sexual hurricanes since adolescence. But an odd combination they had become over the 15 years of Moeder’s working for them, estranged from one another in a way far more mysterious than incest.

Photographs of pristine times past standing on well-dusted tables, in glass cabinets holding star-studded medals and other trophies; Moeder knew these like familiar eyes. A resolutely upright brigadier framed in all his composed arrogance brimming with insolent shrewdness and aloofness. A lady dressed in a light gown walking over dunes of some conquered shoreline, the ocean at her rear; it was saddening to recall how she was institutionalized after finding out the truth about her husband’s brutalities. A triad drowning in exuberant wealth farmed on serrated shoulders of gullible black folk, which was their legacy.

Moeder could even smell a whiff of aging dust tracing pages of floral albums depicting Elsa’s upbringing, from birthday pictures, to shooting range poses with her father’s collection of assault rifles. But all that reminiscence, that admiration was a double edged sword that threatened to taint this splendor with her rage; for how could she tend and nurse a tragic man who was her husband’s torturer?

Once the sun had fallen silent and night coursed the sky, Moeder and Ausie sat quietly listening to light thunder of late spring while trying to make out mundane dialogues of soap stars, a ritual they both adored. Ausie wanted desparately to know what had happened, but Moeder was in a contemplative morbidity with her heart twisted in shame of her complacency which has bred only catastrophe.

It was during such nights of commonplace doses of earth tremors, when reverberations rocked her cracking walls, the earth reeling with other perishing children of other widows that she remembers fondly her daughter’s boyfriend. A sweet young soul who died two months after being hired at the mines. Witchcraft was the culprit, many had speculated. But like many ghosts that know all the misery of the living, he lay somewhere unwept, in a sinkhole further dragging his corpse into bilious throats of hell. No lamentation for their breath taken by unholy death, their vanished names would only be worn by their newborns, otherwise remain unsung, swallowed by rubble.

***

After yet another sleepless wade through dreamland, Moeder knew that among a million fortunate ones who wake towards undesirable jobs, she was to face a battery of slurs she alone could imagine. But at least she had work, no matter how brutal and dehumanizing and with it a myriad of dark secrets kept by maids reeling in exhaustion and lethargy. She had heard of white women running over black maids for their husband’s infidelities and bastard children, and of barbaric rape orgies on farms owned by khaki-clad millionaires. She was well versed in the Afrikaners culture steeped in violent tantrums, incest and other habits of extracting pain and ridicule, which rested on heavy souls of reluctant mid-wives and nannies absconding from their own grandchildren.  

Coming up the stairs towards the colossal mansion sprawled over a double garage, she opened the doors to find Elsa and Oubaas seated formally across one another at the hardwood table lined with blompotjies inherited from Tannie. Somehow, there was a twisted comfort in having expected the tension, but Elsa’s crimson eyes and Oubaas’ stuttering hands fidgeting curses he could not utter were paralyzing. A knitted blanket over his scrawny knees, legs shriveled by constant motionlessness, fingers cramping over the armrests of his wheelchair, Oubaas asked: “Hoekom het jy my kleinkind vermoor, mouth snapping shut with every syllable.

Morning light dancing through giant sparkling windows, a silence unbeknown waited for all cares and anger of the day. Moeder pulled a chair hesitantly and gazed with resolve at Elsa and tears begun streaming again on her pale, dull face. Her father’s sick-sounding grunting of a broken man who knew he was to die never having laid eyes on a grandson pained her not as much. Moeder tried to reach out a shy hand towards Elsa but only a cold retraction squeaked on the wood. So, Moeder just sat there with a perplexed expression, looking both, hoping for them to let her depart and start with her chores.

But a cruel air lingered, straining their resolve until the room felt like a coffin, all purity scraped from the spick and span walls. Those photographs of their past lives stared morosely at their somber gathering, Elsa’s elegant mother in her wedding gown standing before a mirror; her father at his desk with a pipe in his mouth while she played nearby, intricate ribbons wound around her ponytail. Moeder felt them all in her, senses remembering how each glass smoothly kissed her palms when she dusted then, and the cushions she slapped faintly before placing on beds decorated with woolen dolls and quilts.

And the realization of loss impending found her mind wondering in a fog of remorse, of memorabilia which spoke not of her life, which left only unreal sorrow escaping her eyes when she needed to hold herself together. Elsa fingered her hair finally, staring at her father before coldly informing Moeder she was no longer needed as a helper. Moeder only nodded, placed her palms flat on the table one final time after fifteen years and with a detailed voice said: “Ek is baie jammer, Elsa.” Tears glistened in her burning eyes as she turned the corner of the street she came to loved, life had gotten rather too intricate.

Heat was breeding some insane mirages before her, perhaps Elsa’s car was coming to pick up with wails of apologies and endearments. But the streets were empty now, just whispering their reflections of other tales of masters and slaves.