(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 70, No. 1, Pesach 2015)
She trudged wearily up the street slope towards our home. Since I’d met her five years previously when we employed her, she’d become buxom.
“Hello Madam.” Her words were flat and unemotional. “Oh hello Nancy.” We walked into the house silently. With a sigh she lifted the hand-woven grass basket from her head, and set it down on the kitchen floor. The smell of Zululand grass mingled with a rich smell of mangoes, pawpaws, guava, and granadilla.
“How is your son?” I asked gently. She straightened up and looked at me sadly. Her round face became contorted as tears welled up and spilled out under her black-rimmed glasses. She bit her lips and began sobbing. “I went to see Chaka the witchdoctor near my house yesterday. He threw the bones. He says my dead father is calling to me. He wants me to make him funeral party. I didn’t invite anybody for a party after he died. The Zulu people do that. Then we have good luck.”
I looked at this middle-aged woman wearing a floral print dress and matching scarf around her head. A brown vinyl bag matched her comfortable flat shoes. Her arms were surprisingly firm, and her fingers still nimble, most likely from her many years of hard work.
“What do you need for a funeral party? I asked. “Perhaps I can help you.” “Oh thank you Madam. I must spend a lot of money to kill a goat and roast it. We will make much food and drink too much skokiaan! All our relatives and friends will be happy, and my father too.”
She sniffed back the tears and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She laughed a nasal laugh, which rippled up from inside her. “Then my son he will stop drinking and I will not be sick anymore,” she prophesied. “Yes, I will be strong,” she reassured herself. “Ai,” she sighed shaking her head. She showed me her purchases bought at the market on her way to our home. She’d take them to her family in the evening.
Nancy lived with her husband, son and two daughters in a two-bed roomed brick house in Kwa-Mashu city twenty-five miles away from Durban. She commuted daily to take care of our two sons and to clean our home.
“The prices at the market were good today, Madam.”
I helped her repack her produce, and left her to begin the day’s work. As I watered the pink bougainvillea on the balcony of our townhouse, my thoughts went back to the five years we’d shared with this woman. Our two boys had grown to love her as a member of our small family. She respected my husband, and she often asked his advice about money matters, and how best to manage her family resources. Uneasily I wondered what the next five years held for us and for her.
Before she went home that evening, I invited her to accompany us on our upcoming vacation in the Drakensberg mountains.
“God bless you,” she said clapping her hands and bending her knees. “The party for my son will be after that time, she decided quickly.
The four-hour car drive into the mountains southwest of Zululand was pleasant. We sang nursery rhymes and simple Hebrew songs the boys had learned at the synagogue nursery school. Nancy taught us Zulu folksongs. She told stories of her meagre schooling that she’d received in an old church down in the valley near her father’s kraal. She learned, until the age of twelve, to read and write in English. How different her life was from ours.
As we travelled further away from the city her mood became buoyant. Her brown eyes were soft and warm, and her laugh bubbled over. She shouted the greeting “Dumela,” in response to the calls of the scantily clad dancing children along the sides of the bumpy roads. They wore only the brightly coloured beads of their tribes.
Eagerly Nancy put our youngest son Steven on her lap, and she held Mark close, as she pointed out of the window to thatch roofed huts on the hillsides, and horses grazing in green valleys. She threw back her head and laughed at young herdsmen prodding stubborn cattle crossing the dirt road.
Giant’s Castle resort is four thousand feet above sea level. Our days were spent exploring the secret places of the sun-drenched Drakensberg terrain. At night, we had little difficulty in falling asleep.
On the second night, a sudden knocking at the door of our bedroom woke us out of a deep sleep. My husband opened the door to see Nancy bareheaded and shaken, in her purple overall and no shoes. Her brown face appeared a strange mud grey.
“I cannot sleep in that room anymore,” she said. We invited her in. The children stirred but continued to sleep.
“At night I hear them. Someone was killed there years ago. There are spirits creeping around.”
I glanced over to our boys, and suggested that we carry them down with us to investigate.
We ventured out into the night. The moon threw its blanket of soft light over the mountains and the servants’ quarters in the backyard, separated from the main hotel building. We tramped through the damp grass in our slippers, all of us wide-awake now in the crisp mountain air.
Nancy turned the handle, which was hanging on a single mail in the green door of the room. As she pushed it open paint fell down. How different this is from our cozy room upstairs I thought. Was this fair?
A dim bare light bulb hung on a wire attached to the ceiling and threw our moving shadows onto the whitewashed walls. A sour smell of cooked mielie pap overwhelmed me. In the centre on the floor stood a blackened primus stove with a cheap tin pot on it containing the stodgy mixture, which gave off the odour. She walked over to the small wooden table in one corner, the shuffling of her bare feet on the cement floor, like sandpaper being scraped on a wooden plank.
“This bottle – it falls on the floor when the room is very dark.” She picked up the bottle of purple methylated spirits, which she used for the primus. It was closed with rolled up newspaper stuffed into the opening.
“The spirits- they want to kill me. My bed moved when I was sleeping.” She pulled her own woollen blanket off the crumpled white hotel sheets. There was a loud crash. The iron-framed bed, which had been balanced on two bricks under each of the four legs, had collapsed.
My heart was thumping. Wind blew the small curtain. Steven and Mark were awake. We reassured them that everything was going to be all right as they stared into the dim light and held us tightly.
Nancy grabbed her plastic shopping bag, which contained her clothing. “I must have another room.”
“See, I put this powder on the floor. Philemon the chef in the hotel gave it to me.” She’d sprinkled it all around the walls on the floor, and at the entrance to the room. “To keep the spirits out,” she told us.
She slammed the door and the handle fell to the ground. We made our way to the hotel reception desk to ask for a better room, which Nancy was given. She transferred her meagre belongings gratefully, and we returned to our hotel room.
The remaining four days of the holiday passed happily for everyone. Nancy was fascinated with the magic of our camera, and posed enthusiastically beside waterfalls and rivers, on mountain slopes with and without the children.
“You can remember me when you are big boys,” she told them as if she knew what was to come.
She held the funeral party in July, and when she returned to work she seemed encouraged by the thought that now her son would be better. I broke our news to her.
“Ou,” she exclaimed looking intently at me. “You are going – where to?”
“America, Nancy”.
“How far is it?”
“Thousands of miles away – very far.”
“Ou – how will you go?”
“By aeroplane.”
“But you will come back?” she asked in a monotone.
”Perhaps.”
“Who will do your washing and ironing?”
“I will buy a machine.”
She laughed that nasal laugh, disbelievingly, for across the soft green hills of Zululand the age of washers and dryers had not yet come.
“Who will shine the Shabbat candlesticks?” she asked pointing to the tall brass candlesticks on the sideboard. “It will be too hard. You will get too tired and you will come back again. I’m going to wait for you.” She folded the shirt, which she had just ironed, satisfied with her conclusion.
In the weeks that followed, her mood vacillated. Her irritation with the whole family became her protective shield to hide her sadness and confusion.
September 15th arrived. Packers and other strangers loaded a monstrous removal truck with our familiar pieces of furniture, and boxes of our possessions. Alien faces were joyous with bargains bought from our home. Nancy chatted and laughed throughout.
The day darkened into its end. The boys were asleep, having hugged her and said their sad goodbyes earlier. My husband and I confronted our loyal friend.
“Nancy, soon it will be time for you to leave.” I told her quietly.
“Ou, Madam,” her voice quivered. She fell down at my feet beating her worn hands on the wooden parquet floor. A pleading cry came up from her and echoed through the bare rooms of our town house.
“Who will look after me? Oh Madam, who will help me?”
I stared down at her, crouched on the floor.
“I will write to you,” I almost shouted, to hide my own emotion.
“You have the savings account we set up for you, Nancy,” my husband told her gently.
She stood up and smoothed down her apron.
“Ai, thanks,” her voice was thick. “Thank you.”
Comforted by these hopes, she gave me her address. As she grasped my hands and looked at me, she laughed and said,” You will come back here. I know it. If I tell Chaka the witchdoctor to throw the bones, he will tell me that.”
“Perhaps Nancy, perhaps,” I turned away from her. My husband accompanied her to the door.
Zita Nurok is an elementary school teacher who grew up in South Africa. She immigrated in 1976 to the USA, where she continues to teach at the Jewish Day School in Indianapolis. Zita is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, and has served as Vice-President and President of the Indianapolis branch.
