LITMIR.BIZ

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nuns at this school were very religious. Brought up atheist, we didn’t have a clue about their Roman Catholic rituals, and we didn’t speak French or Flemish. Paul-Henri wasn’t naturally studious to begin with. His first year at school in South Africa had been at a Holy Cross Convent and it had been difficult, and there he was taught in English. He’d done well in ballet, but he’d needed elocution lessons. The only upside to Belgium was he no longer had sneezing fits.

      Paul-Henri was lost. The other kids targeted him. He must have been an object of derision – an illiterate, heathen vegetarian from Africa. The teachers didn’t have enough imagination to understand what was happening inside an intercontinental child displaced by some ten thousand kilometres. A few teachers would have vaguely remembered kids that had come from the Congo in the 1960s, but they had at least spoken the language. I doubt Paul-Henri himself understood that he was grieving for the loss of his friends and his home. He must have felt utterly betrayed, a feeling I think he would struggle to shake in life.

      My mother took on his anguish. She ganged up with him against his teachers and the school. This didn’t help us to adjust, but she didn’t want to be in Belgium either anymore. She told us about the Spanish Inquisition and how the Catholics burned women and Joan of Arc alive at the stake. Don’t believe a word those nuns teach you, she said as she dropped my brother off at the school gate. She was terrified they would fill his head the way they had filled the galleries in the museum with religious claptrap.

      I remember watching Paul-Henri disappear down a stone archway into a distant courtyard. My mother was holding my hand and I sensed her heartache. We stood a while, even after he’d vanished from view. As time would have it, he would again very much vanish from my view. I have not seen him for the past twenty-six years.

      I recall the two of us playing among hundreds of pigeons on the Grote Markt and being in a kind of rapture as the birds sat all along our arms and even on our heads and pecked bread from our hands. Their beating wings didn’t frighten me. But much of the time in Antwerp, I was frightened out of my wits. I was in an alien home watching my mommy rapidly unravel, although I didn’t fully understand that at the time.

      Papa was at work all day, working even longer hours than he had in South Africa, yet we never had any money. Our new, but ancient, apartment had no bathroom. My father reverted to garlic; he also found the Belgian beer irresistible. My mother, a stickler for cleanliness, wouldn’t go near him anymore. She had to bathe herself and us kids in a tin tub in the middle of the lounge floor. The water had to be heated in batches on the stove. The stove had to be fed anthracite. The anthracite had to be hauled in a hessian sack up six flights of stairs. The typical Belgian staircase is steep, like a ladder. There was no lift in the block. Africa was civilised enough to have servants for the white working class, my mother said. Her back, which wasn’t good to begin with due to a fall from an unfamiliar horse when she was a farm girl, would never again fully recover from this coal-lugging ordeal. Bopa had no sympathy. Every Belgian woman could do this; what was Churley’s excuse? He said that at thirteen my great-grandfather had been put to work underground in a coal mine, working ten and a half hours a day for one franc.

      Our apartment was freezing. The sky was eternally overcast. As they say in Antwerp, if it isn’t raining, it is about to rain, and then they shrug. But Shirley couldn’t bear being deprived of the light she needed to paint.

      She had cried, standing on the back deck of the MS Randfontein, as she watched her beloved Table Mountain sink into the sea, not knowing if she would ever see it again. And that was before ‘the Belgian episode’, when she still had great expectations of her husband’s country.

      We crossed the equator on 26 August 1971. My father told the South Africans on board they would feel the bump.

      Shirley had spent quite a bit of the voyage in our cabin with debilitating seasickness. Lying on the bed, she thought of her nineteen-year-old father in 1918 crammed into the hull of a British troop carrier with thousands of men in hammocks, half of them vomiting. But she had such high hopes for Belgium – a kingdom full of opportunities and a haven for artists. She dreamed of finding new inspiration in breathtaking art galleries, of setting up a studio and holding stimulating soirées with European painters and sculptors, of at long last meeting people who would understand her work and not snigger at nudes. My father had told her Paris was so close they could go shopping on the Champs-Élysées on weekends.

      But now she found she didn’t even have a decent space to paint, no easel and no desk, only a few sticks of furniture that my father had bought from my grandparents – yes, bought: two beds, a table and a few stools to sit on. The apartment was hardly big enough for one of those horrid little Belgian Griffons or monkey-dog Affenpinschers she had glimpsed eating pralines at tables in fancy Antwerp restaurants. Her paintings and most of her things were still in wooden crates in a cargo ship somewhere on the Atlantic.

      The neighbourhood was overcrowded. The stairwell was cluttered with gawking, gossiping women who she had a sneaking feeling were openly chatting about her in their incomprehensible Brabantian dialect. ‘Like a bunch of macaws,’ she said. And when men spoke Antwerps they sounded sloshed; the lurching vernacular punctuated with what sounded like painful yelps as if their toes were being pinched by narrow shoes. As for the shopkeepers, they were not only unintelligible but also unfriendly. She didn’t recognise anything on the shelves and they either refused to or didn’t speak English. They had never heard of an avocado pear. They hated Marmite.

      She continually suspected she was being diddled. Belgian francs confused her; there were seventy-one of them to a South African rand. Foreigners reminded the people of Antwerp of those who had invaded and stomped all over their country and they didn’t like it – the Romans, Norsemen, British, French, Austrians, Spanish, Germans. In Belgium, where anybody from more than ten kilometres away is a foreigner in any case, Shirley had no friends, no relatives and no doctor she could count on; only her in-laws who pecked at her day in and day out.

      This was the first time in her life she had experienced such naked hostility, she told me, for my grandparents hated her passionately. Nothing she did was right. They even criticised the way she folded socks. They complained she was wasting money by keeping the lights on. She was forced to buy candles. They resented her using the gas for hot water to wash underwear and socks, never mind the amount of water she boiled for all that tea she drank. They wanted her to get a menial job and give up painting. They couldn’t understand that taking such a job would be committing ‘personality suicide’, as my mother put it. Her relationship with her in-laws soon broke down completely. She didn’t even answer the door anymore when Boma came. I remember Boma knocking and calling while my mother hid with me in the back room. I didn’t like Bopa or Boma either. I recall my grandmother as a buxom woman, yet without any maternal quality, and inseparable from her handbag. She called me Brentjie. Ugh!

      ‘Divorce her!’ my grandparents told my father. They would look after us grandchildren. Maybe they would do a better job this time than they had with Willy. They called him Willy (after William Paul), not Paul. They didn’t blame Willy entirely for being such a failure. His mother admitted for the first time they hadn’t educated him enough. Willy hadn’t amounted to anything more than a factory worker and he had married a disaster, an African who couldn’t even fold socks properly. They, on the other hand, had money in the bank and owned a furniture shop, named the Red Star, after the famous New York-Antwerp ocean passenger line. They also owned a forest somewhere. Bopa said money did grow on trees and wood was safer than a pension fund. Bopa loved the idea of his oaks and beeches in a forest somewhere getting bigger and bigger every year and putting on more and more wood for him to harvest later. And it was all being done for free! By sunlight!

      But not to digress, Bopa conceded he hadn’t been the greatest parent. Bopa had broken Willy’s nose when he was ten years old. He had been a prizefighter and he lost his temper and forgot he was punching a tiny person. He should have just locked Willy in the coal cellar for a day and night without food as he normally did. His only child irritated him, especially his deformity.

      My father was born with a harelip and a cleft palate. Bopa would tease his kid mercilessly by mimicking his lisping speech. Little Willy ­spoke a bit like a deaf person. Bopa didn’t like being seen with the boy in public, couldn’t

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