Ramblings on Bertie the pigeon and boeber

JUST as I was lamenting my distance from streets busy with barakaat-bearing children, I answered the early evening knock on the Deanery front door where I was greeted by a soaking-wet Hermy Adams.

“Ek se ‘salaam’ virrie Kriste iman,” he half-shouted while I regained my balance from his feetlifting, sandalwood miaang-scented embrace. I was handed a daltjiesand samoosa-filled Tupperware (and other delicacies).

Hermy wore an onne-koefiya and salaah-top. A sign that he had visited his in-laws in Rose Street in the Bo-Kaap.

During the pwasa (fast), Hermy morphs into the Muslim husband that Gabeba, his wife, longs for him to be throughout the year. He eyed my foot-washing utensils, sucked his teeth and exhaled a judgment-toned “Hmmm”.

It is difficult to do libations in the company of one with the attitude of a tahbliggie observing Itikaaf, the last 10 days of Ramadaan. I reserved my holy water for when my less pious confreres would visit.

At that moment, when my guest was trekking up Upper Orange Street, I was in conversation with Deanery Kitchen Management (DKM).

I had suggested that the DKM should consider being a bit more interfaith and that we should observe Eid with a bowl of boeber. Feminist that I am, I understood the DKM’s response: “But I would really love to taste the boeber you make, dahleeng.”

I replied, in a tone of hopeful and seductive solemnity: “But yours is so much like Aunty Fahtima’s boeber.”

I also reminded the DKM that Aunty Fahty had passed on in case it was suggested that I must ma’ go to Welcome Estate for lekka boeber.

But there were weightier matters that preoccupied the mind of my brother. “What is this junk that ‘they’ must go back where they come?”

Hermy’s father was an Ndebele from Zimbabwe and had been employed in the hotel trade in the 1960s.

The laws of the land drove him back across the Limpopo when Hermy was five years old.

His parents had met at a hotel in Sea Point where they had both worked. His matrilineal line linked him to Okiep in the Northern Cape and his grandfather, Mr Okkie Adams, kept pigeons in our part of Elsies River.

My first pet, Bertie, was a fantail pigeon that I had brought from the Adams family. Mr Adams never knew that his grandson sold from his stock of pigeons as I had released Bertie before he was properly homed.

Apparently, I learnt years later, you need to keep a pigeon in a loft

(in my case on top of the cupboard in the room I shared with my two brothers) for at least two months.

Hermy’s advice to me, after my siblings complained about the smell and pigeon crap all over the room, that one can circumvent a lengthy caging of the bird by spitting in the bird’s beak.

“Jou nies is te lank,” was the sage advice from my entrepreneur friend when I showed him the blood-red cut on my nose where Bertie had pecked at it consequent to my adhering to his instructions.

He recommended that a tjokka might be best suited to my personality and lifestyle. I purchased Mr Magic for a tickey (Black Magic was the brand of chocolates much loved by my mother and my siblings and I) but he – his beak filled with the saliva of myself and that of my brothers, Mark and John – took to the skies too, as did two other birds before I realised that it might just be best to visit them at the Adams homestead. They seemed to be more at home there.

It was on my third purchase expedition, on a Saturday morning, that, on entering the front room, I saw an open coffin next to the sideboard. Oom Okkie Adams was lying, clothed only in white underpants, inside it.

Hermy assured me that his Oupa was still very much alive. He was protesting because Ouma Adams refused to iron his pyjamas.

Next week we will consider Hermy’s view on the National Question of identity and belonging.