The Power of One (19 page)

Nanny? Where was she now? Was she dead? Tomorrow I must speak urgently to my granpa. For, while grown-ups never talk to small kids about death, my granpa would tell me for sure. I would ask him when I returned his shilling to him in the morning.

I awakened early as always and padded softly through the sleeping house to find myself in the kitchen. The black cast iron stove was smaller than the one on the farm and, to my surprise, when I spit-licked my finger before dabbing it on one of the hot plates, it was cold. On the farm the stove had never been allowed to go out. The two little orphan kitchen maids, Dee and Dum, had slept on mats in the kitchen and it had been their job to stoke the embers back to life if the stove showed any signs of going out. This kitchen smelled vaguely of carbolic soap and disinfectant and I missed the warm smell of humans and coffee beans and the aroma of the huge old cast iron soup pot that plopped and steamed on the back of the stove in a never-ending cycle of new soup bones added and old ones taken out. In the country, food is a continuous preoccupation, not simply a pause to refuel. Country people know the sweat that goes into an ear of corn,

a pail of milk, a churn of butter, bread warm from the oven, and the eggs and bacon that sizzle in the breakfast frying pan. Food is hard-earned and requires the proper degree of respect. This stove was bare but for the presence of a large blue and white speckled enamel kettle, which looked new and temporary.

The doorway from the kitchen led out onto a wide back
stoep
which, unlike the front of the house, was level with the ground and looked out into a very large and well-tended garden. The fragrance of hundreds of rose blossoms filled the crisp dawn air, and I observed that stone terraces, planted with rosebushes, stretched up and away from me. Each terrace ended in a series of six steps, and at the top of each set of steps an arbor of climbing roses bent over the pathway. Blossoms of white, pink, yellow, and orange, each arbored trellis a different color, cascaded to the ground in colorful loops. The path running up the center of the garden looked like the sort of tunnel Alice might well have found in Wonderland. Six huge old trees, of kinds I had not seen before, were planted one to each terrace. It was a well-settled garden and I wondered how it had come to be Granpa's. Nothing on the farm had ever seemed to be well settled except the bits that had broken down forever.

I now saw that our house was situated a little way up a large hill, which accounted for the steps in the front and the terraces behind. Beyond a dark line of mulberry trees at the far end of the garden and a stone wall enclosure that stretched halfway across the last terrace, the hill of virgin rock and bush rose up steeply. It wasn't an unfriendly-looking hill, and its slopes were dotted with aloe, each tall, shaggy plant carrying a candelabra of fiery, pokerlike blossoms. A crown of rounded boulders clustered, like currants on a cupcake, at its very top.

As I walked up the path, I saw that each terrace carried beds of roses set into neatly trimmed lawns, though the last terrace was different. On one side it contained the stone wall enclosure, too tall for me to see over; on the other it was planted with hundreds of freshly grafted rose stock behind which, acting as a windbreak, stood the line of mulberry trees.

Except for the strange and beautiful trees and whatever might lie behind the stone wall, no plants other than roses appeared to grow in this very tidy garden. Only the fences on either side testified to the subtropical climate. Quince and guava, lemon, orange, avocado, pawpaw, mango, and pomegranate mixed with Pride of India, poinsettia, hibiscus, and, covering a large dead tree, a brilliant shower of bougainvillea. At the base of the trees grew hydrangea, agapanthus, and red and pink canna. It was as though the local trees and plants had come to gawk at the elegant rose garden. They stood on the edges of the garden like colorful country hicks, jostling and pushing each other, too polite to intrude any further.

I decided to explore behind the stone wall a little later, and ducked under the canopy of dark mulberry leaves. The ground under the trees had been completely shaded from the sun and was bare, slightly damp, and covered with fallen fruit. As I walked, the moist berries squashed underfoot, staining the skin between my toes a deep purple. I hadn't eaten since lunch with Big Hettie the previous day, and I began to feast hungrily on the luscious berries. The plumpest, purplest of them broke away from their tiny slender stalks at the slightest touch. Soon the palms of my hands were stained purple and my lips must have been the same color from cramming the delicious berries into my mouth. Above me the birds, feeding on the berries, squabbled and chirped their heads off, the leaves and smaller branches shaking with their carrying-on.

Emerging from the line of mulberry trees clear of the garden, the first of the aloe plants stood almost at my feet, its spikes of orange blossom tinged with yellow two feet above my head. In front of me, stretching upward to the sky, the African hillside rose unchanged, while behind me, embroidered on its lap, tizzy and sentimental as a painting on a chocolate box, lay the rose garden.

Without thinking I had started to climb, skirting the rocks and the dark patches of scrub and thorn bush. In half an hour I had reached the summit, and, scrambling to the top of a huge, weather-rounded boulder, I looked about. Behind me the hills tumbled on, accumulating height as they gathered momentum until, in the far distance, they became proper mountains. Far to my left an aerial cableway strung across the foothills into the mountains remained motionless; work had not yet started for the day. Below me, cradled in the foothills, lay the small town. It looked out across a vast and beautiful valley that stretched thirty miles over the lowveld to a slash of deep purple on the pale skyline, an escarpment that rose two thousand feet to the grasslands of the highveld.

It was the most beautiful place I had ever been. The sun had just risen and was not yet warm enough to lap the dew from the grass, but it was sharp enough to polish the air. I could see the world below me, but the world below could not see me. I had found my private place; how much better, it seemed to me, than the old mango tree beside the hostel playground. Above me, flying no higher than a small boy's kite, a chicken hawk circled, searching the quilted backyards below for a mother hen careless enough to let one of her plump chicks stray beyond hasty recovery to the safety of her broody undercarriage. Death, in a vortex of feathered air, was about to strike out of a sharp blue early-morning sky.

Chimneys were beginning to smoke as domestic servants arrived from the black shantytown hidden behind a buttress of one of the foothills to make the white man's breakfast. The sound of roosters, spasmodic when I had started my climb, now gathered chorus and became more strident and urgent as they sensed the town start to wake. Part of the town was still in the shadow cast by the hills, but I could see it was crisscrossed with jacaranda-lined streets. My eyes followed a long line of purple that led beyond the houses clustered on the edge of the town to a square of dark buildings surrounded by a high wall perhaps a mile into the valley. The walls facing me stood some three stories high and were studded with at least 150 tiny dark windows all of the same size. The buildings too were built in a square around a center quadrangle of hard brown earth. On each corner of the outside wall was a neat little tower capped with a pyramid of corrugated iron that glinted in the early morning sun. I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

My granpa, who was an early riser, would be out and about soon. It took me no more than twenty minutes to clamber down the hill, back under the green canopy of mulberry trees, and into the rose garden. He was cutting away at the arbor on the third terrace, snipping and then pulling a long strand of roses from the overhang and dropping it on a heap on the pathway. He looked up as I approached down the corridor of roses.

“Morning, lad. Been exploring, have you?” He snipped at another string of roses and pulled it away from the trellis. “Mrs. Butt is an untidy old lady. If you let her have her way and don't trim her pretty locks, she's apt to get out of control,” he announced cheerfully. I said nothing. Much of what my granpa said was to himself, and asking questions was no use. I was soon to learn the names of every rose in the garden, and Mrs. Butt, it turned out, was the name of this particular cascade of tiny pink roses.

I pulled the lining of my shorts pocket inside out and carefully undipped the large safety pin that held Mevrou's
doek
Crouching on the ground at the old man's feet, I unknotted the grubby cloth to reveal Granpa's shilling, the threepenny bit Hennie had given me on my departure from Kaapmuiden, and my folded ten-shilling note. I removed Granpa's shilling and once again knotted the cloth and pinned it back into the pocket lining of my trousers. “This is your change from the tackies, Granpa,” I said, rising and holding the gleaming shilling out to him. He paused, holding the pruning shears like a sword above his head. “Here, take it, it's your shilling, isn't it?” I repeated. He reached down for the coin and dropped it into the pocket of his khaki trousers. “There's a good lad, that will buy me tobacco for a week.” I thought he sounded quite pleased, so I took a deep breath and came out with it.

“Granpa, where's Nanny?” He had moved back to the roses, and now he turned slowly and looked down at me. Then he walked the few paces to the steps leading up to the terrace and slowly sat down on the top step.

“Sit down, lad.” He patted the space beside him on the step. I walked over and sat down beside him. He removed his pipe from his pocket and tapped it gently on the step below him. A plug of ash fell from the pipe. He blew through the pipe twice before taking his tobacco pouch from his pocket and refilling it. My granpa was not one for hurrying things, so I waited with my hands cupped under my chin. Lighting a wax match on his thigh, he started at last to stoke up, puffing away at the pipe until the blue tobacco smoke swirled about his head. For a long time we sat there, my granpa looking out at nothing, his pipe making a gurgly noise when he drew on it, and me looking at the roof of the house which had once been painted but now only had patches of faded red clinging to the rusted corrugated iron. I could hear a truck coming up the hill in front of the house, its low gear rasping in the struggle to get up the hill, then a pause as it reached the top and slipped into a higher gear, relieved the climb was over.

“Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad,” my granpa said at last. Then he puffed at his pipe and seemed to be examining his fingernails, which were broken and dirty from gardening. “Parting, losing the thing we love the most, that's the whole business of life, that's what it's mostly about.”

Shit, I know that already,
I thought to myself. Then my heart sank. Was he trying to tell me Nanny was dead?

He was doing his looking-into-nothing trick again and his pipe had gone out. “She was a soft and gentle woman. Africa was much too harsh a place for such a trembling little sparrow.” With this he struck another match and touched it to his pipe. Puff, puff, swirl, swirl, puff, puff, gurgle, but he did not continue. While it didn't sound a bit like big, fat Nanny, my granpa was always a bit vague about people and the sentiment seemed appropriate enough, so I waited for him to continue. Taking his pipe from his mouth, he used it to indicate the rose garden around us. “I built it and planned it for her. The roses, to a rosebud, were the ones which grew in her father's vicarage in her Yorkshire village. The trees too, elm and oak, spruce and walnut.” He replaced the pipe in his mouth, but it had gone out again and he had to light it a third time. This time he cupped his hands around the bowl and gave it a really good stoking up so that at one stage his head disappeared completely behind the clouds of blue smoke. I had already observed that my granpa could waste a great deal of time with his pipe when he didn't want to give my mother an answer or needed time to think. So I waited and thought it best to say nothing, though none of it made sense. Nanny, who discussed everything with me, had never once talked about the roses in the farm garden, and I knew for a fact that she came from a village in Zululand near the Tugela River. While she had often talked about the crops and the song of the wind in the green corn, of pumpkins ripening in the sun which were as big as a chiefs beer pots, and of the sweet tsamma melons that grew wild near the banks of the river, she had never, even once, mentioned anything about roses to me.

After another long while of looking into nothing, my granpa continued, “When she died giving birth to your mother, I couldn't stay on here in her rose garden.” He looked down at me as though seeking my approval. “Sometimes it's best just to walk away from your memories, just put one memory in front of the other and walk them right out of your head.”

I was beginning to realize that Nanny had nothing to do with my granpa's conversation.

“Her brother Richard had come out from England to try to cure his arthritis and decided to stay on. A grand lad, Richard, and a good rose man. In thirty years he hasn't changed a thing. When the roses grew old he replaced them with their own kind.” He pointed to a standard rose on the terrace below him. From it rose two perfect long-stemmed blossoms, the edges of their delicate orange petals tipped with red. “I'll vouch that is the only Imperial Sunset left in Africa,” he said with deep satisfaction. He tapped the bowl of his pipe on the step until the smoking ash fell from it. Then, picking up the garden shears where they lay on the step below, he rose and turned to look about him. “Now Dick's dead I've come home to her rose garden. The pain is gone but the roses, the sweet Yorkshire roses, not a day older, bloom forever on.”