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to a good boxing match.
    â€œPapa is going to win. Then we’ll leave him and go to Thaba Nchu where we’ll stay in a real house and not a shack,” said Viliki, looking forward to another long journey.
    He felt very important. Very superior. After all, he allowed the big white boy to share his mother. The big white boy could boast about his bicycle, which he promised to let Viliki ride when he grew older. He too had something to boast about: his mother. When he grew older, he would ride Tjaart’s bicycle while Tjaart rode his mother. And now here was another thing to feel superior about: he was going to entertain Tjaart to the spectacle of a fight between his parents.
    â€œWhy did you bring this boertjie boy here?” exploded Pule.
    â€œPlease children, go and play outside,” said Niki, pushing the reluctant boys out.
    â€œIt is not enough that you spend all your time attending to the whims of these people, now you have to bring their brat here!” cried Pule.
    Niki did not respond. She resumed sweeping the floor.
    After cleaning up all the mess, and throwing it into the dustbin outside, she poured some sunflower oil into the pan and fried three big chunks of meat. The pan wobbled on the Primus stove as the hot fat splattered on the table. She looked at the pan with undisguised contempt. It had been used by Pule’s first wife, until they divorced. Then it was used by a string of girlfriends. Now it was her turn to use it. The pan yoked her to all the previous women in his life.
    She said under her breath, “One day, I’ll go and leave him with this pan.”

THE BIG SKY IS BEREFT OF STARS
    I T WAS BEFORE Popi’s time. So these are things that she heard from those of us who saw them happen, even though today she relates them as if she herself witnessed them. She is no sciolist. She can indeed experience them in the immortal world that the trinity has bequeathed us. She is able to become part of whole lives that are frozen and rendered timeless. A memoir that conveys our yesterdays in the continuing present.
    She experiences how the villagers, to their utmost sadness, discovered that there were no stars in the sky. Men and women stood outside their skewed yellow houses one blue night, and raised their eyes to the big sky. They pointed up and lamented that the sky was bereft of stars. A lonely full moon rose behind distant hills. Fumbling in a sky that had no stars. A yellow moon fluttering its cloudy wings above yellow hills.
    The villagers stood outside their black-roofed houses, listening to the restlessness of the night. And to the sweeping rhythms of their clustered houses that leaned in directions that were determined by fickle winds. Then a giant with a boyish face appeared. A giant in a red hat and red boots and yellow overalls. He carried over his shoulder a big star attached to a stick. He jumped over theroofs of the houses bringing the star to the village, flooding the skewed houses with titanium white light.
    The friendly giant transformed the blues and yellows into a scintillating light-filled land of promise. A world conceived of beautiful madness. Had he lived here, the trinity once surmised, Vincent van Gogh would have gone mad even earlier.
    Niki was mad for a different reason. A different kind of madness. Many months had passed without Pule coming home from the mines of Welkom. White man’s gold in the earth held him in its bosom, making him desert his family in Excelsior. Although he hadn’t really deserted it. He sent Niki money every month. “She will see my money,” he told his mates while sweating in the dark tunnels, “but she will not see me until such time that she learns to appreciate me. You are right, my friends, I have spoilt her by going home every long weekend.”
    Mmampe and Maria applied a soothing balm to her loneliness by making her aware that Pule’s conduct was quite normal. Most men came home only once a year.