Sometimes There Is a Void Read Online Free Page A

there was no one else in the room I opened their eyes with my fingers and inspected their eyeballs. Then I poked their faces just for the heck of it. This practice continued on a daily basis until I heard the radio telling on me as soon as my father switched it on to listen to the news one evening. It was the same radio that once interrupted Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’ with ear-shattering static and then ratted on me that I had stolen sugar and condensed milk. Fortunately, on all the occasions it decided to be a tattle-tale no one else paid attention. Both my parents carried on with whatever they were doing as if they had not heard it. But I decided to stop all my criminal activities because I knew that one day the radio’s snitching would ring loud and clear in their ears and I would be in deep trouble.
    Yes, the grounds of the mission station are exactly as I remember them when I played with my friend Bernard Khosi on our tricycles, and when I followed my father around on a path between the buildings, a
newspaper in my pocket. Even though I could not read I always carried a newspaper with me, just like my father. Or a book. Any book from his shelf. It didn’t matter that none of its pages was illustrated. The fact that I was walking around with a big book in my hand, just like father did, was satisfaction enough. It could be Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel , Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or a tome by George Eliot or one of the Brontë sisters that my father taught in his English literature classes, or the William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley poetry that he made his students recite. During these walks father would himself recite Mark Antony’s oration or something from Macbeth . I had no idea what the words meant and he never bothered to explain, but his voice still reverberates in my head: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time …’
    My father was also an ardent gardener, and the staff quarters at St Teresa did not give him the opportunity to consummate his relationship with the soil. So, he rented a house at the nearby village of KwaGcina and we moved there. He cycled to work every morning, and after school he worked in his garden, particularly on those days when he was not conducting the school choir. When he was too tired to water the flowers and vegetables he sat on a chair on the stoep and drew pencil portraits of the twins and me and anyone else who happened to be around. People always marvelled at how he was able to bring out a person’s likeness exactly as the person was.
    Later, he bought a number of Jersey cows and employed village women to churn butter in big jars that were normally used for bottling peaches. I remember rows of women, some in the red-ochre isikhakha attire and big iqhiya turbans of the abaThembu people, sitting in front of the hatchery and shaking the jars to the rhythm of four-part harmonies. Occasionally a woman would be carried by the spirit, stand up and flaunt a few oscillations of the waist and shoulder, and then sit down to resume churning the butter.
    In the hatchery there were batteries of incubators. Father encouraged villagers to raise chickens for meat. They bought day-old chicks from his hatchery.

    When my mother got a job as a nursing sister in another village called Dulcie’s Nek my parents employed a nanny to look after us. Nontonje was initially a red girl, which meant she wore the traditional red-ochre clothes, but she was soon socialised into floral dresses that were mostly hand-downs from my mother.
    I didn’t know of my father’s activities besides his teaching and farming. Sometimes he was away for extended periods. We heard adults talking about how he had been banned by the Minister of Justice, C R Swart, from attending any gathering in any place within the Union of South Africa. Then we heard that there was a big problem