Do You Remember?
By Kiandra de Bruin
A month had passed since I took the photos. I had not looked at them when I took them, nor on the plane through my bleary eyes, with home falling rapidly away from us. There had been no time, what with my exams looming, to sift through them and upload some to social media. So it was only in late June that I finally opened the “South Africa” folder on my phone. The first few pictures looked out of the plane window onto blue and grey pearlescent clouds shot through with the golden sun. I tapped on one of the mountain you see when you exit Cape Town International Airport, shaded in green and brown, a crisp paper cutout atop the clear sky. There, running vertically across the image, blocking out the tip of the mountain, was an intrusive grey stripe, thick and dark like pencil lead.
***
Our whole family, fifteen strong, make our way through the airport. I think we must look like an odd bunch—half of us are in tears, red faced and smiling; it’s been so long. The other half thump each other on the back in rough hugs, taking control of the trollies laden with our suitcases. We weave through the crowds of suited businessmen and air hostesses with their impeccable lipstick and too-tight skirts. My family is a bloom of colour, parting the swarms of drab business attire. I stick with my mom, who sticks with her mom and dad. They’re discussing who is going in whose car, when we reach the sign—a wall of sand coloured, rough-hewn stones, darker ones arranged in a mosaic to read “WELCOME TO THE MOTHER CITY”—and at this moment, I know that I am home.
In South Africa, you don’t drive around mountains, you drive up them and then down them again. They divide different towns and cities here, fencing in lagoons and bays, and separate Cape Town from the rest of the country. The roads snake their way up at steep inclines, and your ears pop from the height covered in such a short time. They are so high up that you can see over the city and past the stadiums and malls to the sea, bright blinding blue far, far out. There is a stretch of road like this that I remember from before we emigrated, high up, running parallel to the sea. The image is simple—I’m sat in my booster seat in the car, looking out the window as we travel this mountain road. It is deep night, and when I look down all I see are lights. So many lights that it might as well be day. The lights huddle together in some places, bunched up and cosy, and others sprawl out. They stop at a sharp edge from which the sea extends, an expanse of unruffled, undefined black. During our stay, I never found out where this road was—there are so many, it would have been difficult to identify it. Before, I thought it was during a journey from a shop or where one of my parents worked, but they agree—it could have been any road.
Most of the climb up Table Mountain is done in the car, following a thin winding road lined with other vehicles. Because of Grandpa’s leg, we can all park much higher up, and jump the busy, sweaty queue for the cable cars. The top of the mountain is not as flat as it looks. In fact, it has some severe relief patterns—it only looks flat from one angle, if you face it head-on. The surface is scorched. Of course, the sun beats down, roasting us alive, but recently the mountain has suffered wildfires that decimated the shrubbery and plants that grow here. My mother tells me as we walk through blackened and charred skeletons of small trees and balletjies of twigs that these plants need to fire to reproduce—something about the seeds needing heat to spread and germinate.1 Just beyond the roped off paths on the sides of the mountain, flowing down in waves, are healthy green bushes of fynbos, bright flowers and leaves native and often endemic to the area. In the gift shop atop the mountain my mother buys a bottle of Cape Fynbos Gin. Its label is illustrated with the colourful fynbos flowers. The bottle will come to sit on her dressing table next to a framed, undamaged selfie of her and my father.
***
I flicked through more photos, taken on the hot drive to my grandparents’ home in one of their stuffy cars. The pictures were nothing special, capturing the greenery and vegetation, another mountain beaming in the background, but two or three had been blighted by the grey lines. Some were scored with translucent green and purple lines, warping the bushes and boulders beneath. I’d started sweating then, and flicked through the next photos rapidly. All my precious memories of the beaches, the penguins, the sunsets, the flowers, the people, the rocks, the food, the old streets which really weren’t important except that they were important because they were home. It was all home, and photo by photo, it was being stolen from me.
***
One quiet day, we take a trip to the old neighbourhood in Da Gama. The route follows undisturbed stony roads lined with uniform grey brick buildings. Homes for military families, my parents tell me. We travel further up a small mountain carpeted in shrubs and magenta flowers until we reach a lookout. It's safe to get out here, but once we get to the bottom, we’ll have to make sure the windows are shut, and the doors are locked. Criminals will take any chance they can get. From atop the mountain, it looks like the perfect childhood neighbourhood, a sprawling plan of white roofed houses ensconced in the rocky hills, sheltered by green. Up here, it is easy to imagine it as my parents’ home. They tell me, as they’ve told me before, that they lived right next to each other for a long while, because Grandpa and Oupa were both stationed here for the Navy.2
When we drive down to the bottom of the hill and start to wind through the houses, the car door locks click and I tug on the window lever to make sure it is shut. My parents are silent for a moment, until my father finally says, “Yoh, it’s a dump now. It didn’t look like this when we lived here—there were a lot more trees...a park.”3
“The park got burned down”, says my mother, and we all chuckle, but it’s not that funny. I tug on the window lever again. The road is dry, pale with sand and stone dust, and cracked all over. The houses sag; most look abandoned. And then we pull up to the fence. The fence that divided my mother’s property from my father's property. “We had our first kiss right there,” my mother says, pointing to the tree nearby. Younger versions of my mom and dad rise like apparitions from the pale slabs and stand there, holding hands. The image in my mind is so vivid, yet this is not my memory. I wasn’t even a thought in their minds at that time, but twenty-seven years on, it is a memory I treasure. It makes me wonder if memories can be hereditary, passed on through the umbilical cord, coded into the matter of the brain, even before consciousness knits together.
The brain develops much during the first few years of your life. The hippocampus and cerebral cortex in particular experience significant growth, both areas being integral to memory and learning. Memories that might have been formed during this time are lost because the brain connections are undergoing renewal. You’re supposed to be able to remember things from when you were three or four, but I don’t think I can. There are whispers. A toad hopping through sliding glass doors. Filling a rubber glove with water from an outside tap. A blackcurrant lollipop as Gran cuts my hair in her home salon. Whether these are my own memories, or those that have been relayed to me, I cannot tell.
***
On the same day, we go to the busy areas of Simonstown, where markets thrive selling shark tooth necklaces, handmade silver jewellery, Shweshwe fabrics, woodcut drawings of springboks and Table Mountain, sunglasses and bucket hats, beaded animal figurines and every knick-knack one could think of. The elevation takes us high up again to Simonstown High School, which is surrounded by a simple link fence. The buildings are made with orange brick painted white, and have green roofs. This, according to my parents, hasn’t changed much. Behind the school is a nursery or daycare of sorts. You can’t tell that’s what it is, but it was a nursery when my father and mother attended the high school, so it might have changed by now. On its border, part of the school grounds, is a small old field. An area for shooting practice, my parents say. Shots would go off during the day and all in a short distance from the nursery where children would be playing. I can’t believe they let that happen but, as my parents always say, things were different back then.
***
At first, I thought my phone had overheated in South Africa’s late spring sun, that it had fried and some images simply burned. I poured over them, naively believing that with time they could fix themselves, but each time I returned, more and more had been severed with lines, some even blocked out completely with flat, emotionless grey.
***
Slaangkop is very quiet—not many people are around when we arrive, and the car park is empty. There is a proud, towering lighthouse, Snakehead Lighthouse, for which the rest of the beach is named. The sea eases on a rocky shore where stones are packed together. This band tapers out to a strip of sand smattered with larger rocks, just big enough to balance on and look out to sea. The sand and rocks give way a couple more metres inland to a belt of boulders, their cracks and crevices filled with fine bushes and plants, tiny white and yellow flowers. I alternate between clambering on the boulders, following the curve of the coast, and walking on the sandy wooden pathway next to it. The rest of my family scatter: my father and uncle crawl around near the lighthouse, unpacking camera equipment and tripods to take long-exposure photos of the sea, my mother and sister go searching for pretty pebbles, and my Ouma trails after.4 The sky, clouded and grey, is bright, illuminated by the setting sun. The other beach goers speak quietly, protecting the peace, nodding in greeting when we pass. Some have thermos flasks. Others, who I assume live in the nearby houses that look onto the water, carry open glasses filled with red wine. Far down the path leads to a cluster of large homes a stone’s throw from the beach. Surfers speckle the waves, their moves languid and unrushed, boards arcing through the water as a gull rides on the wind. As the sun finally slips below the horizon, the sky fills with gold, and God looks down upon me.
***
I now know that something must have been wrong with the SD card I had chosen to store the images on. I thought they’d be safer there in case something happened to my phone’s internal storage, and I lost them all. The SD card had slowly crept into different photos, raking its binary claws over my memories. It’s been two years. Two years since that holiday in my real home. There is so much I can’t remember from it. It’s one of the most important trips I think I will ever have taken, and I've forgotten half of it. The corrupt images make it worse—I can’t even look back on those missing memories. There are flashes of events, the image of the sun, the tang of sour cream on a chicken shawarma looking over a vineyard in the early evening, but more often that I’d like to admit, I have to sift through the uncorrupted images to fully envision a place.
Those pictures are currently on my laptop in files named “SAFE” and “CORRUPT”. There are less in the former than the latter. They are all I have. I cannot bring myself to delete the corrupted files, cannot bear to part with them. In many cases, it’s indiscernible what image I have lost—I can’t remember what I have forgotten. The memories are just not there, grey chasms in my brain that I just can’t reach into. Writing what I haven’t forgotten helps, but sometimes I just sit with my eyes closed, trying to reconstruct everything in my mind. Perhaps, if I paint a mental picture of what might have happened, one day, I could remember.
THE END
Author Bio: Kiandra is studying Literature and Creative Writing in England. As a child, Kiandra discovered her love for reading during her frequent visits to the public library, and quickly began writing her own short stories in self-made paper leaflets. She is currently working on her first novel as well as poetry, and hopes to enter a career in publishing after university. Kiandra also volunteers at a local second-hand book charity.