The Long Way Home. Dana Snyman

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      Frans returns to the kitchen. The door between the dining room and the kitchen has a silver arm at the top that stops it slamming when a waiter comes in or out with plates in his hands. The mechanism makes a ffft sound as the door closes behind Frans.

      A waiter in a black jacket comes over. Freddie. “Something to drink?” He presents me with the wine list in a black cover, bends down to the floor and picks up my napkin, which has slid off my lap again, and hands it to me.

      “We’ll have the Grünberger Stein,” I hear Pa say before he closes the wine list and returns it to the waiter. “And please bring us some ice too.”

      The typed menu on the table is superfluous. It’s impossible to forget. Starters: first soup, then hake. Main course: leg of lamb or chicken with rice, roast potatoes and seasonal vegetables. Dessert: malva pudding and custard.

      Frans returns from the kitchen with a soup plate in his hand.

      “Ffft,” the door whispers behind him.

      He puts the vegetable soup with carrot slices floating in it in front of me, and the napkin slides off my lap again.

      “Eyes closed,” says Ma and takes my hand. “Pa wants to say grace.”

      “Dear Lord, thank you for watching over us this day,” he prays. “We pray that You will protect us this night too. Bless the food we are about to receive and grant that we will never forget Your name. Amen.”

      4.

      In 2011 the government allocated R89 billion for social grants. It cost around R2,4 billion to distribute, and AllPay is the name of the company that helps get the money into people’s pockets.

      Some 9,8 million women receive a government allowance of R250 per child per month. Some 2,5 million people receive a pension of R1 080 per month. Some 1,2 million people also receive a monthly disability pension of R1 080.

      In the dim light of dawn I see these statistics come alive outside the sports grounds near Laingsburg’s town centre. This is where the grants are paid out every month. A hundred or so people have already formed a queue. The old man at the front is wearing his church best. The collar of his cream-coloured shirt is threadbare. Lukas Malgas.

      Oom Lukas’s dreams of what he’s going to do with his R1 080 old-age pension aren’t big ones. “I just walk around here.” He points towards the main street. “By the time I get over there, I won’t have much left.”

      Then the cars and bakkies start pulling up, a procession of deadbeats. One by one, they get out and start putting up tables and displaying all manner of things: frilly dresses and jackets and shoes, blankets and bedding that look as if they’re meant to match the dresses. Snoek. Vetkoek. Bright plastic wall clocks made in China. Transistor radios made in China. Nail clippers made in China.

      Jerome Cupido is stacking packs of toilet paper. He comes from Paarl, more than a hundred and fifty kilometres away, to sell the toilet paper (R14 for a pack of ten) and duvet sets to the AllPay people here.

      A man and a woman pull up in an asthmatic Nissan Sentra. The man takes an enormous loudspeaker from the boot, and before long a mournful voice is wafting through the air: “The earth beneath your feet is holy. Oh, take off your shoes. The earth beneath your feet is ho-o-oly …” Each month the couple travels from AllPay point to AllPay point to sell the latest CD from gospel singer André Bayman.

      An armoured truck and two official Camrys arrive, pass Jerome’s toilet paper display, and enter at the gate. The security guards who are here to guard the gates get out of another car. No one will be allowed inside without the proper documents. Eight o’clock. The government’s coffers are about to open.

      Lukas Malgas is the first to be allowed through the gates, while the queue behind him grows longer and longer. There are girls with babies in their arms and babies on their backs. There’s a baby on the back seat of a Mazda 626. There are babies everywhere: on a woman’s back, in a girl’s arms, in a pram negotiating the gravel on bouncy wheels.

      Two men in a not-so-new Mercedes stop near the gate. They don’t get out. They wait without opening a window.

      I soon realise that two kinds of people gather here. There are the ones at the gate who are getting grant money, and there are those who are here to sell something or who have a claim on the first group’s money. Hunter and prey.

      Oom Lukas Malgas reappears at the gate in his shirt with the threadbare collar. He takes a R100 note from a brown envelope and looks at it as if it’s a mirror showing someone else’s reflection. He walks over to a woman on a chair in the shade. She belongs to a burial society that sells funeral policies. Each month she comes to collect money from oom Lukas and her other customers right here.

      “Twenty-two rand a month for a hole, a coffin and flowers.” Oom Lukas laughs with his mouth but not his eyes.

      Now more people are coming out of the gate with their money. Some go to stand in line at the white Mercedes with the two men still waiting inside. One of the men opens the window a crack, and one by one the people start counting off notes and passing them through the narrow opening.

      The men are secretive. One says his name is Wilton Booyse. He sells hampers. “Fifteen kilograms meat, ten kilograms white bread flour and various tins for around five hundred rand,” he explains. “I go to buy everything tomorrow, and then it gets delivered to the people here.”

      It’s difficult to fathom exactly how Wilton’s business operates. It sounds as if some of the people are still paying off last month’s hampers, even though they’ll be getting new ones in three days’ time. Wilton’s brother next to him in the Mercedes runs a cash loan business. For every R100 you borrow, you have to repay R130.

      Around me, the town is becoming louder. “Oh, take off your shoes. The earth beneath your feet is ho-o-ly,” the loudspeaker next to the Nissan Sentra at the gate has begun singing again, while bedding and toilet rolls change hands and men walk over to the Grand Bottle Store in the main street, which is having a special. Buy a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and stand a chance to win a blanket. Under a pepper tree, a baby boy on a dirty pink bedspread lies with his feet in the air as if he’s floating on invisible water. I try to strike up conversations with the young mothers about their babies, but how on earth do you ask, without being rude: “Did you decide to have this baby to get R250 a month?” I don’t see a young mother with three or six children anywhere, and wonder whether this isn’t the type of myth that speaks of all our fears, a story we tell ourselves to try and give a face to the statistics of poverty? Or a story used by those who have given up, to justify their despair?

      5.

      Outside Laingsburg, on the N1 on the way to Beaufort West, I see a group of hitchhikers on the left-hand side of the road. I slow down and count them: eight – five men and three women.

      The typical hitchhiker who stands next to the road, thumb in the air, is something you don’t see much any more. Three of the eight are sitting. One (a woman) is leaning with her back against a white concrete road sign, the other two (men) are sitting on rocks, their feet planted in front of them.

      The woman sluggishly lifts a hand, palm upwards, when she spots my bakkie. Not far from her, a young man in jeans with big turn-ups is waving something in the air. Nearly everyone has a neat bag on the ground beside them.

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