Tandia (93 page)

Magistrate Coetzee grinned back. He'd probably never been spoken to in such a familiar way in his entire life. 'Two months ago in my court, talk like that would have earned you the sjambok. You're a cheeky bloody kaffir, Johnny Tambourine, but I'm glad you're here to look after Miss Tandy as well!'

Johnny Tambourine laughed. The honours were even, the old man hadn't tried to patronize him. He gave Magistrate Coetzee an informal salute and wandered off to the back of the house with Tandia's overnight bag. This place was so quiet. He'd become aware of the silence the moment he'd turned off the high whine of the VW's air-cooled engine. He could feel it, it was a distinctly spooky sort of quiet, a nothing-is-happening-in-this-place sort of silence. No engine noises, bicycle bells, car engines, the sudden cry of a child, the sharp bounce of a tennis ball as the kids played soccer in the street, the laughter of people, the sudden roar of a bus passing, the coal man rattling along in his donkey cart, the repetitive notes of a mine worker strumming his guitar and the call of the woman mealie vendor with her golden cobs of roast corn carried in a white enamel dish on her head. Already he was missing Soweto.

The only noises Johnny Tambourine heard now were from the birds and insects. Christ, there must be a hundred things around here to bite a person! Like snakes! He'd heard how snakes like the cool and came into people's houses in the country and sometimes even got into your bed.

Johnny Tambourine was so busy scanning the bush beyond the yard that he didn't notice a large black hen pecking away in his path. The hen, alarmed at his sudden approach, jumped into the air with a 'Schwark!', its feathers flapping. Johnny Tambourine's feet also left the ground and Tandia's bag went flying; he seemed to peddle the air for a moment, like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, before he realized it was only an old black hen.

That was it! That was the trouble with coming into the bush, all of a sudden a guy has to live like a fucking peasant! Looking out for things he doesn't even know about. Sounds don't make sense any more. You couldn't even trust a hen to sound right. No wonder all the guys from the country wanted to come into the city. It was definitely dangerous out here, the most dangerous place he'd ever been.

Johnny Tambourine retrieved Tandia's bag and opened the screen door leading into the kitchen at the back of the house.

'I see you, Mother,' he said politely to the old woman bent over a scrubbed pine table kneading a large lump of dough, her quick black hands disappearing into the white dough and then out again.

The old woman didn't look up at his entrance. 'Tell me, my son,' she asked, 'where you come from, are the people afraid of hens?'

Tandia sat on the stoep with Magistrate Coetzee. It was like being back at Bluey Jay on a Sunday morning when everyone slept. So quiet and peaceful. You could see the riverbank and then the cool glint of the setting sun on water beyond.

A flock of guinea fowl appeared at the water's edge. It was too far to see them clearly but she'd seen them often enough when she'd been on walks with Juicey Fruit Mambo into the hills around Bluey Jay. The guinea fowl was a pretty bird, the size of a smallish hen with a bright grey-purple head and a hornlike cockscombe sweeping back from its small beak. It possessed sharp little beady eyes, a lot more suspicious than a hen's. Grey feathers, patterned with minute white dots, swept back smoothly into a beetlebacked body to gave it the appearance of a church elder, which was further characterized by the way it walked. Guinea fowl seemed to rock slightly as they walked on their short blue legs, always on the move, never pausing, busy as anything.

Magistrate Coetzee spoke quietly. 'Sometimes, if you lucky, you see a small buck, a little duiker or an old warthog couple who come down to drink. But usually they wait till dark, then you hear them grunting, just like ordinary pigs. Maybe I should get some pigs? They tell me pigs are easy to look after.' His voice trailed off.

'What will you farm, Magistrate Coetzee?' Tandia asked. There was no sign of any farming around her and they seemed almost entirely surrounded by natural bush.

'You know in every Afrikaner there is a farmer waiting to come out, we are a people of the land, just like the Bantu. But for me it is more an idea in the head, a race memory, a coming back to my roots. It is the land that matters. I don't think I want to farm, to grow things.' He indicated the bush around him. 'At my age it seems pointless to compete with God. I think I'll just sit on my stoep and drink brandy, grow a beard - a proper voortrekker beard - and grow old properly. He chuckled and placed his empty glass beside the decanter. 'Thank you, my dear, for your nice letter about the tractor.'

'Peekay and I were both terribly upset when we read about it in the papers.'

Magistrate Coetzee chuckled. 'Ag, Tandy it's probably a good thing, if I had the tractor standing out there in the shed I'd feel I had to use it. My old bum is more used to sitting on the bench than on a tractor seat trying to grow something I don't need and only have to worry about.' He turned slightly in his wicker chair and pointed to the small brass plate which shone brightly on the door. 'It wasn't the tractor and the plough, though God knows it was a generous gesture from poor people, but that, the inscription they put on the side of the tractor, that has made my whole life worthwhile.'

Tandia rose and examined the small plate screwed to the door. The indentations from the hammer blows it had received could be dearly seen, though they didn't interfere with the inscription etched into the plate.

Tandia turned suddenly, her heart beating fiercely. She was standing directly behind Magistrate Coetzee as she spoke. 'Sir, I know you could have almost any lawyer in South Africa to represent you when you challenge the government's banning order, but I would be tremendously honoured if you would let me act for you.' It was the reason she'd come to see the old man, but now she found she was trembling. Old Coetzee, for she suddenly thought of him like this, was a great magistrate, but underneath he was still an Afrikaner. How would he feel about a black girl defending him in court?

Standing behind the old man, she couldn't see his expression and he was quiet for a long time. Tandia didn't dare move. At last Old Coetzee spoke. 'Tandy, I am touched beyond words. You have given me hope, hope that one day our beloved country will come out of its madness and all the tribes can live together in peace. But until that time we have only the instrument of the law/ he paused, 'which I know is becoming a very blunt instrument, but it is all we've got, it is the last bit of sanity left.' He half turned his head. 'Come here, child, come where I can see you.'

Tandia moved to stand in front of the wicker chair where he sat. 'You are a very good lawyer and I am enormously proud of you. While I don't honestly think Pretoria will allow me to appeal, I accept your offer. I would be proud to be represented by you.'

Tandia gave a squeal of delight and without thinking she stooped and kissed Old Coetzee on the cheek. The old man grinned. 'Magtig, you are pretty!' He leaned forward and, lifting his glass, proffered it to Tandia. 'Here, pour me a brandy just like old times at Bluey Jay.'

Tandia poured Old Coetzee another snort, holding it up to the setting sun.

'They were good times, Tandy.' He took the brandy from her. 'You know that old Mauser, the old Boer rifle Sarah would give me when I came to Bluey Jay?'

Tandia nodded, not sure how much to admit she knew. 'Well, Mama Tequila sent it to me when I retired, together with a case of my favourite brandy and a nice little poem from Sarah.'

Tandia was trying hard to contain her laughter. She had a fair idea what the poem might be like. Then Old Coetzee started to chuckle and she began to laugh with him, two people laughing naturally and easily, no self-consciousness between them, two old friends sharing the the past. 'If we lose the case I'll take that old gun up to Pretoria and shoot Minister Vorster's balls off, hey Tandy?'

After a while Old Coetzee grew silent. She sensed that they'd stirred too many thoughts between them and he wanted to be on his own to settle them down again. 'It's getting dark and we must leave at dawn,' Tandia said. 'I have a petty sessions case scheduled for two o'clock tomorrow. May I take a walk around?'

'Tandia, you do too much, leave the little cases for someone else.'

Tandia laughed. 'I can't this time. It's Johnny Tambourine's aunt, she's been cheated over the cost of her dead husband's headstone.'

The old man made as though to rise from his seat, but Tandia stayed him with her hand. 'No, please stay where you are, Magistrate, I just want to nosey-park around the yard. I've been sitting in the car for four hours.'

Magistrate Coetzee's farm wasn't really a farm, just a little house with a nice stoep and a low roof with the ground beaten hard around it. A few small trees were planted in scooped-out hollows so they could be hand watered until they grew strong enough to make it on their own. A large round corrugated water tank with a pipe that pumped water up. from the river stood at the far side of the house and further back was an open-sided garage and shed with a corrugated-iron roof. A green International pick-up stood parked under it with a white hen standing on its bonnet. To the left were the servants' "quarters, two corrugated-iron rooms with wooden doors and a window cut out of the iron, hinged at the top so it could be pulled out and propped open with a branch which rested against the corrugated-iron wall below each window. It was late spring. Tandia had spent her childhood in a shed not dissimilar and she knew that on a hot night it would be like an oven.

Further along the yard was a fowl run, stakes cut from the bush and driven into the ground and then covered with chicken wire to a height of about six feet, with the wire bending and extended over the top as well to keep the chickens safe from hawks. Inside was the cabin and the front mudguards of an old rusted lorry, its doors still intact, the window and windshield glass long since removed. Tandia imagined it must serve as shelter for the hens. The gate to the run stood open, and Tandia observed how the hens were returning voluntarily, each pausing momentarily at the open gate, one leg raised, head slightly cocked as though listening for an instruction to proceed, then a quick, bold step into the safety of the chicken run. Finally the old rooster arrived, his head darting around as though checking his harem to see if anyone was missing.

A fat black hen with a flash of henna-coloured feathers about her breast came hurrying up, clucking ten to the dozen with eight tiny mottled yellow-and-black chicks cheep-cheeping and frantically moving about her. She hurried into the coop and moved under one of the rusted mudguards, spreading her wings wide. In a few moments the chicks gathered around her legs and her wings swept downwards so they disappeared into her undercarriage. With a soft 'Schwaark' she settled down for the night, grateful to get the weight off her legs.

Tandia was about to return to the house when she noticed an overgrown and disused farm road to the right of the yard which appeared to lead to the top of a small rise. Old Coetzee's house was built two-thirds up this slope rising from the river and now Tandia wondered what might be concealed behind the top of the slope; though in the far background she could see a ridge of koppies, the middle ground was lost to her. There was still sufficient light for her to see and she walked the thirty or so yards to the top of the rise where, to her surprise, she discovered that the road continued for another hundred yards or so into a dip in the landscape which then led up to the green ridge of rock, aloe and the brighter, lighter green of early summer thorn bush.

At the end of the road stood a large old farmhouse fronted with two gables in the Cape Dutch tradition. The walls stood intact though its roof was missing; the crossbeams were mostly still in place, though the corrugated-iron sheets had been stripped from them, perhaps to be used in Old Coetzee's far smaller and less appealing new house.

The house was built on a high solid rock foundation probably quarried from the ridge which rose up behind it, so that its front stoep was fifteen or so feet from the ground with wide steps leading up to it. It had never been a grand house, but it had the look of a home which had bred two or three generations of solid burghers in its time, a house built to last as long as it was needed. Its thick whitewashed walls seemed to defy its hapless state, like an ageing bull elephant fallen on hard times but with his pride still intact. Silhouetted against the setting sun it looked as though it was merely waiting to get a new roof and a few new window panes and wasn't really standing idle and useless in the landscape. It seemed a used, happy house accustomed to the smell of baking and the cries of children and the aroma of pipe tobacco, a house in which to be born and in which to spend old age. To the left of the house stood the remains of an orchard; a dozen orange trees, two large mango trees, an avocado tree, and a single tall leafless stump of an old paw paw, its top dried out, like a twist of brown paper.

Almost nothing remained of the front garden except for two coffee bushes, a tall moonflower tree growing under one of the gables and a huge old frangipani covered in white and yellow blossom, which as Tandia drew closer perfumed the evening air around her. Closer yet she could see that the coffee bushes, with their small, dark, shiny leaves, were covered in brilliant red coffee beans. The bushland had taken over the remainder of what must once have been a garden, but this didn't make the' approach to the house seem in the least untidy or even uninhabited. Rather it looked as though someone had, very sensibly,' allowed the bush to create a natural landscape about the lovely old home.