By Larry Schwartz
Meanjin Winter 2001, Vol 80 issue 2, pages 18-19
On a Sunday recently I travelled with my mother to her hometown in the Boland, the winelands north east of Cape Town where her migrant father and his father established a cooperage at the turn of a century. We went in her old metallic blue Valiant sedan she’d traded in decades ago. “Seat belt on?” I said from my place 10,000km away. “Buckle up.”
And so we went, the grande dame and her greybeard laaitie*. Starting on the N9 national road to Johannesburg. Past the Koeberg interchange, up the slopes of Tygerberg past Bellville, Klapmuts, said to take its name from a sailor’s cap, looking out at the blue expanse of the Hottentots Holland range. Finally we reached Paarl, where Ma grew up beneath a glistening pearl-like mountain in a whitewashed two-storey with a sturdy loquat tree, corner of Nantes and Louis Streets. “Polly ons gaan Perel toe,” we’d sing a traditional song on family trips here when I was a boy. “Ek en jy alleen.” (Polly we’re going to Paarl. You and I alone.”)
Paarl. Die Perel. Cape Dutch architecture on 11km of main road. Vineyards on the banks of the Berg River, where a museum in town and towering monument nearby celebrate its part in the emergence of the Afrikaans language. Paarl, where Nelson Mandela finally walked free from prison in February 1990, after spending the last two of 27 years in detention.
The telephone line crackling or clear, cut off sometimes, we make our way on weekly calls, stirring memories of her childhood on the backroads on family outings with her dad. One black night on a country road an older cousin long gone had walked ahead of the car with a torch so they wouldn’t lose their way.
Sometimes we drive the Valiant VIP sometimes her old Fiat station wagon with a foam mattress in the rear, sandy from the beach she’d take us to each summer.
She listens quietly as I relate the journey drawing on guide books updating one from the 1970s I found in a second hand bookstore near her flat some years back. “Ex libris Doris Pienaar,” it says. Dankie mevrou. Thank you.
“Though I have used some not-so-well-known routes, practically all the roads included are tarred, and the dirt roads are in good condition,” author Jose Burman notes in an introduction to Cape Drives and Places of Interest, published by Human & Rousseau in 1975. This is reassuring for these weekly travels in a conjured car.
Burman was a prolific author whose books included accounts of shipwrecks, mountaineering and guides to the Cape. I tell Ma, much to her amusement, that he recalled elsewhere he was just 11 when a country constable called at his family home in the Free State town of Jagersfontein after he was seen driving his father’s car with his mother as passenger. When the constable demanded to see the youngster’s drivers licence, his mother offered hers. Told that this would not do – the boy was the one behind the wheel – she explained that her son was a learner driver. She was teaching him. We laughed together at this.
Sometimes Ma’s so quiet I wonder if she is still on the line. Then she interrupts to ask me to repeat or reminisce. So much she’s forgotten. Something triggers a memory. Her mother’s brothers lived here in Klapmuts, she says. (Another brother once rode off on his motorcycle and was never seen, or heard of, again).
One chilly evening in Melbourne- a blustery morning in Cape Town – I said, Ma when’s the last time you went cycling? And courtesy of a map and details from a dear friend Hugo Truter, involved in a cycle group called Fietsry, went biking about the Boland university town of Stellenbosh where I once studied. “Jou pragtige blonde moeder,” another classmate said, as she fondly recalled Ma, blue-eyed daughter of Lithuanian Jewish migrants. “Your pretty blonde mother.”
Left on Ryneveld Street past the university’s Old Hoofgebou. Right into Plein Street, past the Town Hall. We two cross the Braak, passing the Powder Magazine on our right. Reminiscing about my time in the journalism department, in a restored old house in Crozier Street; after hours with students and others who were fixing motorbikes and playing Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert on a farm called Bontevlei. Smoking a mix of Fox and McBarens Golden Blend. (Long since Ma quit Ransom cigarettes).
The eyesight isn’t what it was. Ma can’t see so clearly now but from her window near a table where she keeps some of her sculptures and tools she can make out the shape of distant mountains. Could that be Paarl Rock? The Hottentot Hollands range? She can make out the bulk of nearby Table Mountain but can’t recall what’s on the other side.
Together – from a distance- we’ve been around the city on the edge of the mountain and ocean. Blouberg-Melkbosstrand. Red Hill. Silvermine Plateau. Jonkershoek. Wemmershoek. Along the False Bay coast to Simonstown and on to Cape Point. Darling. Ceres. Worcester. Kleinmond. Hermanus.
One of the joys of our weekly chats has been her good humour in adversity of declining eyesight, loss of mobility. I’ve barely heard complaint despite injections in the eyes for macular degeneration, the disorientation of what others term dementia, the indignity in being captive to a declining body.
She’s laughed out loud – generously I suspect – at my clumsy attempts at jokes. She tells me she’s come up with a song about the absurdity of reaching a certain age and sung it on a visit to her GP. Who lives this long? she wonders. No-one in her family.
The line may crackle and the call be abruptly cut off. “I can’t hear you,” she’ll say louder and louder when I’m still on the line but it is somehow faint. “I can’t hear you!” “Ma! Ma! I’m here.”
Sometimes I think I’ll surprise her and take her travelling to Venice or up the Swiss Alps; maybe down the Great Ocean Road where we holiday for a week or so each year. I bought a simple book on space and thought we might go there, looking back at this round earth. But for now I’ll keep to the Western Cape. Together criss-crossing her place – and mine in memory – thousands of kilometres and continents apart.
Larry Schwartz Writer 