When Hoopoes Go to Heaven (10 page)

‘
Eh!
’

‘If your indicator doesn’t work, stick your bloody arm out of the window!’ The Toyota in front of them was dead still; it was waiting to turn right onto the road to the
Calabash Restaurant, where rich people ate. Baba had eaten there once with the minister, but their cakes weren’t as nice as Mama’s.

‘Did they have a law like that anywhere else?’

‘
Eish
, ask Rachel and her mom what happened to their Jewish ancestors in Germany!’

Auntie Rachel’s mother, Mrs Levine, had been with her in the yellow Hi-Ace after school on Friday with her suitcase in the back, straight from the airport in Matsapha. The Mazibuko
children had been happy – though surprised – to see their
Gogo
Levine. She was friendly enough, though the tight, straight line of her mouth told Benedict that something was
making her angry. He really didn’t feel like asking her about her ancestors.

Uncle Enock went on. ‘But you know, I doubt you should be using past tense about these things. You’ve done past tense at school, nè?’

‘Mm.’

‘People are not everywhere respected. People are not everywhere free. What? What? You’re a luxury tourist bus and you can’t afford brake-lights?’

The bus in front of them was pulling off the road near the big hotels so that tourists could look at the things for sale at the long line of wooden roadside stalls. Sellers hurried towards the
bus, hoping to lead the tourists to their own stall and persuade them to buy their own hand-made baskets, clay pots and carvings of wood or stone, or their own selection of brightly coloured
cloths. Mama had bought some of the cloths to wear as
kangas
tied around her waist, which she said was a much more comfortable and sensible way to dress at home than a smart, tight
skirt.

‘Do you mean like a
shangaan
or a
kwerekwere
not being respected here?’ Benedict asked.

‘
Eish
, thanks God you’re here and not South Africa! That side a mob can kill a
kwerekwere
!’

‘
Eh!
’

‘Here we’ll just be rude to you or send you home.’ He slammed his foot on the brake. ‘Are you bloody blind? How can you just turn in front of me like that?’ He
swerved to overtake the tractor that had joined their road from a side road and was now barely moving on account of the driver being busy with his cell-phone. ‘No, as Swazis we’re too
peaceful. Our last king, this king’s daddy, on his memorial it’s written
I have no enemy.
But there’s ever a problem for outsiders, nè? Everywhere. What would you
call me if I came as a Swazi to live in Tanzania?’

‘Welcome,’ said Benedict, and Uncle Enock laughed, even though Benedict hadn’t said anything funny.

‘But it’s been okay for you at school, nè?’

‘Mm, except when they thought Baba was the Pipi Doctor.’

Uncle Enock looked at him and began to laugh again.

Benedict had read about the Pipi Doctor in the
Times of Swaziland
that Baba brought home from work for Mama every day. That doctor had come from Tanzania to Manzini, the big commercial
town down at the end of the highway, and everybody called him the Pipi Doctor because he was doing special operations on men to make their pipi bigger. Some days the newspaper said that men wanted
him to go home and ladies wanted him to stay, but other days it said that ladies wanted him to go home and men wanted him to stay. Now ministers in parliament were going to decide for everybody if
he should stay or go.

At school all the children knew that the Tungarazas were from Tanzania, but only some of them knew that Baba was
Dr
Tungaraza. Those children had done what Baba called adding two to two
and getting six instead of four, which is a way of saying they had looked at the evidence and then guessed wrong.

Eventually Mrs Dlamini had spoken to the whole school and explained to everybody that you could be called Dr Somebody if you had read a lot of books and been to school for a long time, or you
could be called Dr Somebody if you knew how to help sick people and to do operations, so Dr Tungaraza wasn’t even the same kind of doctor as the Tanzanian doctor in Manzini. She never said
Pipi Doctor, but everybody had known and some of the older ones had giggled. But after that they had stopped asking Benedict about his pipi.

Uncle Enock was finding it difficult to stop laughing. He would say he was sorry and try to keep quiet, but then he would start up again. His laughter was like a cold that somebody else could
catch, and soon Benedict began to laugh with him.

He managed not to laugh when he saw Execution Rock, the high, rocky mountaintop that long-ago criminals got pushed off. It was also called Nyonyane, meaning little bird, on account of the
criminals looking like little birds on their way down from the top. But when Uncle Enock was too busy laughing to shout at the minibus taxi that overtook them at high speed when another was coming
towards them, Benedict began to laugh again.

Crossing the bridge over the Lusushwana River, they both took in great gulps of air, filling their lungs to calm themselves, and Uncle Enock asked for one of the tissues from the cubbyhole to
wipe his eyes. Benedict handed him one then used the end of his T-shirt himself.

He was calm enough to be respectful when they passed the Royal Kraal of the late King Sobhuza II, who was the father of Mswati III, the current king. Some of the late king’s wives had
lived there, but only twenty-six of them; the other forty-four had lived in other places. King Sobhuza II had been a bit like King Solomon, who the encyclopaedia said had had seven hundred
wives.

Benedict couldn’t imagine having more than one mama. Okay, he had had a first mama, and then he had got a new mama, but they hadn’t both been his mamas at the same time and in the
same house. Say you lived in the Royal Kraal with twenty-six mamas. How would you ever be able to read a book without a mama calling you to do something? And say each mama had children. How many
brothers and sisters would you have? How would you ever get time to be alone with butterflies and birds and all the other creatures God had made? Imagine!

Before they got as far as the big fruit and vegetable market at Mahlanya, they had to slow right down, on account of cattle being in the road. Bearing long, curved horns as far apart at the tips
as Uncle Enock’s shoulders, some black, some chocolate, some the colour of peanut sauce, they ambled slowly, not seeming to be going anywhere in particular. One or two cars hooted at them
impatiently, but Uncle Enock let them be.

Then they saw a tiny boy, smaller than Moses or Daniel, running barefoot down towards them from round the slight bend in the road just before the market. Though winter had already begun, the boy
was naked except for a tattered old pair of brown shorts. He carried in one hand as he ran a long branch from a willow tree, all its leaves pulled off, while in the other hand he clutched a mealie
with blackened seeds that had been roasted over a fire.

Before he reached the cattle, the boy began shouting and waving his willow-branch in the air, and the huge creatures listened to him and began to move slowly off the road. As the cars began to
move again, the boy bit into his mealie.

‘
Eish
, the cops aren’t going to be happy,’ Uncle Enock said.

And they weren’t. Vehicles were only just beginning to get going again as they rounded the bend, so the police waiting there with their radar machine weren’t going to get any money
out of any of them. Baba said the radar machine didn’t work properly: everybody Baba knew who had got caught had exactly the same speed written on their ticket, which couldn’t be
possible on account of statistics. Anyway, somebody at Baba’s work had a cousin in the police who could make a ticket go away for a lot less than half of what the ticket cost.

Two of the police at the side of the road were buying mealies from a man who was roasting them at the edge of the market. Benedict hoped that the man had given the mealie to the small boy
herding the cattle rather than making him buy it. It wasn’t right for a man with a mealie-roasting business to take money for food from a child who didn’t have shoes.

They turned off the old road, Uncle Enock shouting at a pineapple-laden bakkie that was supposed to stop for them but didn’t, and a short distance further, just before the small settlement
called Malkerns where pineapples were put into cans, they pulled up outside Uncle Enock’s work.

Inside, an old woman waited with a nervous, skinny dog, while a man sat with a lamb lying across his lap like a rag. The receptionist told Uncle Enock that Dr Mamba was at the back. Benedict
wasn’t sure that Dr Mamba was a good name for a vet. A mamba was a kind of snake: there was a green mamba and a black mamba. Both had a head the shape of a casket, and both could kill a
person or any other animal very quickly.

At the back, Dr Mamba was giving an injection to a goat that lay shivering in a wheelbarrow, while a young man watched anxiously. Benedict left the two doctors to talk and ran to the holiday
home for pets at the end of the property.

The long building making a T with the rear wall had dogs on one side and cats on the other. Lining the side wall that faced the section for dogs was another row of dog accommodation, while
lining the side wall facing the cats was accommodation for the manager of the holiday home and space for him to prepare the animals’ food.

Benedict began in the dog section, where each animal had its own little house to sleep in at the back in a covered area protected from the rain, and a patch of grass to play on at the front.
Most of them had brought their favourite blanket from home and one or two of their toys to play with. Benedict knew without having to think about it that he would bring his cushion and the
bookshelf full of books.

The first dog, an old black Labrador, came to the chicken-wire at the front of its cage wagging its tail, and licked his hand. The two small brown-and-white dogs next door jumped high in the air
like Maasai men, straight up and down, barking at him like he was a robber and everybody must wake up and call the police. All the other dogs joined in, even the tiny one that was a ball of fluffy
white curls with a purple bow on its head.

In the section opposite, a huge brown and black creature barked with a very deep voice, curling back its lips and showing Benedict its enormous teeth. He moved round to where the cats were.

Dogs and cats didn’t like each other much; he knew that. Not unless they had been raised together and they had grown up understanding and respecting each other. Then they could be good
friends; they could lie down together like the lion and the lamb in the Bible. But while they didn’t trust each other, it was best for them to holiday separately.

The accommodation in the cat section was different, on account of cats liking to climb. As well as a house to sleep in and a section sheltered from the rain, each cat had part of a tree to play
on. Draped over a thick branch in the first cage was a sleepy creature that looked like something Moses or Daniel might have painted. Splodges of orange, brown, black and white seemed to be
fighting with one another all over its body.

Auntie Rachel had taught him the word
splodge.
When he had finished his first ever glass of farm milk at the other house, she had leaned forward with a tissue and said, ‘Here.
You’ve got two splodges of milk,’ and she had dabbed at either side of his upper lip. Auntie Rachel used the word a lot, but Benedict had never used it himself, not even in his mind.
Not until now, when the patches of colour on that cat couldn’t be thought of as anything other than splodges.

Next door, two black cats, one skinny and the other rather fat, rubbed up against the mesh, pushing each other out of the way to get near him. Squatting down, he put the palm of his hand flat
against the wire, feeling the vibration of their purrs. Then he pushed a finger through to give one of them a gentle scratch. Twisting round, it licked at his finger with its sandpaper tongue.

There were several more cats: a white one that didn’t even want to look at him, a sleepy pair with grey-and-white stripes, and a noisy orange one with an angry-looking face. Then there
were two empty cages before the last one that had a piece of board up against the mesh at its side, blocking the view into it from any cats that might have been in the neighbouring cage.

Benedict went to look.

Sitting in a shallow tray of water on the grass was his duck!

Eh!
He had expected her to be inside, in the clinic!

Squatting down, he greeted her in a gentle voice, unsure whether she would know him or be frightened of him. But she simply continued to sit in the water.

He looked at her carefully. As far as he could see, there were no patches missing from the black feathers with flecks of white on her wings and tail, and her grey beak seemed to be fine.
Eh!
She looked so much better than she had when he had rescued her, exhausted and almost drowned, from the dam and run with her all the way down the hill to Uncle Enock, panic pounding in
his chest and tears streaming down his face.

‘You found her!’ said Uncle Enock now, squatting down next to him.

‘Is she better?’

‘Just need to check her leg,’ he said, standing up and opening the gate at the front of the cage. Inside, his big hands lifted her up out of the tray of water and put her gently on
the ground. Standing, she shook her tail from side to side and took a few steps on her big orange feet.

‘Tip top,’ he said to Benedict. ‘Go and ask Dr Mamba for one of the small cages, and we’ll take her home.’

‘Um... Uncle Enock...’

‘
Yebo
. Yes. What?’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t take her home.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I mean, maybe she doesn’t want to go back there. On account of bad memories.’

Mwanza, where Benedict had spent his first six years, had bad memories on account of his first parents getting late there. Okay, there were happy memories, too: memories of him, Grace and Moses
doing nice things with their first mama and baba, and also with Titi. But now it was much better for them to be away from that place.