Mike Hagemann Mike is 43 years old, married and lives in Cape Town. A school teacher by profession he came to writing a little later than most. He has published a non-fiction work on abusive churches, as well as some poetry. Military service, one-time membership of a cult and teaching in a rough part of town are the major influences on his writing.

Young girl’s funeral

Mike Hagemann

Ruyterwacht is an area of low-income housing in Cape Town. It is hemmed in by Epping’s grey industrial sprawl and it lurks in the shadow of the Grand West Casino. At the entrance to the suburb, off Viking Road, there is a large green sign that reads: “Welcome to Ruyterwacht”. Anonymous vandals have, over time, torn gaping holes in the sign, so as you drive down the road, it is possible to see the brown haze of the Cape Flats winter sky through the huge gaps in the hoarding.

There is poison in the ground here. It is like an evil artesian well of decay and degradation that seeps up, unnoticed, through the ground polluting everything. It rusts fences and cars and blisters the paint on walls and causes the trees and bushes to grow crooked and hang limply even in spring. It blights the grass and fuels the weeds that sprout and buckle the pavements. It is the source of a million irresolvable future arguments and it adds a brittle edge to already fractured relationships. It is the engine of hardship. Misery is the word that fortune’s finger has written thickly in the dust here. Youngsters drop out of school and loiter unemployed, while the grandparents in their thirties share dolls’ houses with too many mouths that take hungry bites out of meagre welfare grants and irregular pay cheques.

I am going to a funeral at the Dutch Reformed Church in Ruyterwacht. We are gathering today to bury a young girl. She lived here, attended my school and flowered briefly. She died last Friday night. A hit-and-run driver tossed her aside and left her to bubble away her last breaths on a grey pavement in Bellville.

A few of us from the school gather outside the whitewashed bulk of the Ruyterwacht Dutch Reformed church, waiting for the cortège to arrive. Some of the mourners have already filed into the church. Others huddle in corners, out of the wind that gnaws. They suck away at shared cigarettes. A subdued silence hangs over the assembled knots of people; it is broken only by occasional fragments of meaningless whispers. Our last respects are shabby monuments to the dead one. The assembled are dressed in borrowed jackets and suits with too wide lapels; or frocks cut from unfashionable materials in colours from several seasons ago.

An honour guard assembles to await the arrival of the poor girl’s hearse. Her mother works as a clerk at the Goodwood Traffic Department, so a dozen speed cops have volunteered to form up and salute the girl’s coffin when it arrives at the church. The cops have wrapped themselves in full dress tunics, prised their lower bodies into slate blue jodhpurs, and their boots, leggings, Sam-Browne belts and gun holsters are freshly blacked with polish.

The hearse arrives and the honour guard splatters to attention. Twelve white gloves flick up and freeze in salute as the coffin is withdrawn on rubber rollers from the rear of the hearse. We file into the church, and squeeze ourselves into wooden pews that have been buffed to a dull shine through a million shuffling bottoms on a thousand Sundays beforehand.

The dominee is a young man. I overheard someone say that this congregation is his first calling. He signals for us all to stand and that dreadful moment arrives. The girl’s coffin is carried in on the shoulders of her father, an uncle and her two younger brothers. They walk slowly, biting their lips noticeably, burdened not by the box with its still contents on their shoulders, but by the load they carry in their hearts. The girl’s father heads the procession. His face is fixed in the blank thousand-yard stare of a man who is but one step short of his ragged limit. They reach the front of the church and place the small white coffin on a scuffed stainless steel trolley. The coffin is cheap chipboard, spray-painted white. An attendant from the funeral home walks respectfully behind them and places a small wreath made from plastic flowers at the foot of the pathetic offering in front of the altar. The flowers have been stuck to a piece of white polystyrene foam and the whole has been fashioned into the rough outline of a dolphin. It, too, is an accessory rented out by the funeral parlour for the occasion and it bears the small dents and scuffs of a hundred previous trips up the aisle.

The air in the church is thick with the smell of mothballs, vacuumed carpet, polished wood, leather-wrapped hymnals, cigarettes smoked on empty stomachs and here and there, the whiff of sneaked three-finger tots of brandy. The service starts and we take up our hymn books. “Die Here is my Herder …”

My words wrestle with the lump in my throat. I notice the organist, a small grey-haired woman. Her hair is tied back in the severest of buns. Her ringless fingers flit across the organ’s keyboards. She is a good musician who reads the moment and spills out matching magic from her instrument. The notes swell from the pipes and fill the chapel with music that is rich and splendid, music that for a moment holds back the darkness that is edging in. Too soon we sit down, to a hundred anonymous shufflings and strangled sob-coughs.

The eulogy starts and I, the lone Englishman, cannot easily follow the speech, so I look around the assembly. The front row is reserved for family. They are gutted and sit there individually wrapped in slow, grinding moments of private torture. Just a few feet in front of them is the small white coffin. Mercifully none can see inside to the broken form of their girl who lies stiff in her linen shift. None can see the mortician’s functional black sutures that loop across the body to tie closed bloodless wounds. This is a moment where the girl’s family hang on the edge of time, wishing it to end but yet to never end. Too soon, they know, the coffin will be taken out of here and the last tangible link they have with their girl will be wheeled away to be shovelled under six feet of dry Stikland sand. They know too, that then this moment will dissolve into nothing and that then they will be alone with their grief. The others present will file away and return to their own homes and daily rhythms. Soon the phone will stop ringing and then, somehow, it will be a year gone with just a single ballpoint mark on a calendar on the kitchen wall. It is the kind of truth that sits low and is horribly uncomfortable in the stomach.

The dominee stands up to speak. His is a terrible job. He is the prophet chosen by the people to ascend the mountain at times like this and talk with God. He descended smelling of sulphur. He points the way to paradise with carefully measured words of comfort and hope to those who are blank-faced in their grief, those who are embittered and those who have cast away any scrap of faith.

The service runs with clockwork precision. In forty-five minutes it is over and it is time for all to leave. The hearse leads the way and those who can cadge a lift, depart for the interment at the Stikland cemetery. I’m parked in by a minibus and so I cannot slip away. I watch the dominee complete his duty and greet the family. Only when he walks away do I see his shoulders slump. He does more funerals than weddings here.

For a moment I think I should walk over and tell him that if he wants to serve God in this place, then he should wear thick shoes. There is poison in the ground here.


LitNet: 26 May 2004

Have your say! To comment on this piece write to webvoet@litnet.co.za, and become a part of our interactive opinion page.

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.