YD6~34 Festive Seasons Echoes in the Courtroom The Road to Hazyview

Overall, this chapter is a moving and thought-provoking exploration of family relationships, perseverance, and the enduring power of parental love.

 Returning, my sister, Ilona’s borrowed Alfa Romeo, after leaving my boys with and their cousin Brian in Kelvin, their territorial suburb, my mood chugs like a steamroller on hot asphalt. Driving and glancing at the azure sky, appeased the dark storm clouds encroaching my mind. Hopelessness consuming me as I drove back from a clandestine auspex with my boys, contrary to my visitation rights after stepping off my flight. 

Hurt at the encounter with giant tennis players dwarfing children from enjoying a court. ‘_How absurd,_’ I thought as Highveld seemed drained of natives northward and coastal homeland migration of the tribes and the white population to flood the coastal regions.

The road signs for “Houghton” signaled my exit off the Pretoria-Johannesburg highway. I weaved onto Central Street, hugging the sleek high walls of the mansions that lined the street. Until, Sabi Sabi’s gateway sign, I turn onto the gated driveway, veering behind the wall to reach a cluster of parked cars.

Stepping out of the Alfa, I flip my thoughts to the reception, awaiting me behind the mansion’s side entrance. I crank the door lever, the flush panel door swinging away to a dim hallway. Across the room, framed in the light, Ilona profiled, clad in jeans and shirt, hunched over her desk by a spiraling cigarette plume and a cold coffee mug. The shine on her face, wash down the light, her immersion pool, the scattered paperwork and open ledgers. Her eyes like striated brushstrokes painting a canvas, deciphering the underlying health and potential of the business, to lend me an unfazed glimpse. 

As I slink through the somber hallway, I’m preceded by my phantom’s shadow to stroke her consciousness, to a fleeting glance. I linger by the large office’s photocopier alongside the window glow, scanning behind Ilona the rear closed cabinets’ doors. Dithering in circles until Ilona rises from reading numbers finishing a romantic story. 

Ilona beckoned me with a firm Flemish order, “Kom.”

Ilona steps past me through the still hallway, out into the courtyard bathed in the warm hues of the setting sun. We walked through trees’ extended shadows stretches across the driveway. I passed on the car keys jingling in her hand. She rounded the Alfa Romeo trunk. Meeting again slipping into our seats. She turns on the engine roars, to a purr. Reversing from the cluster of parked cars, to drive along the white wall and out the gateway onto the deserted street, meandering eastward toward the sprawling suburbs.

We crossed Johannesburg’s marches by Edenvale, my brother, Ivo’s in-law extended family territory, until skirting Kempton Park, Ilona turns into the suburb, weaves to the cul-de-sac facing the distant highway meshed fence, screening the blurry airport structures beyond.

We pull in the driveway, stepped out of the Alfa Romeo. greeting Caroline, and Ivo, emerging from the crack of the front door, with their two little girls, siblings, to Sheldon. I pulled my suitcase out of the trunk, carrying it along the paved path past the first large bedroom window, to the middle, and the last before the little family by the door,  reflecting the manicured front yard. They lead indoors to a salon, and at task for their hospitality, I place my suitcase out of little feet’s way. Bending down, I unzipped and unfolded my suitcase, pulling out of a stack of T-shirts. Holding up for a fourish Sherrilee, handing out “I love New York.” T-shirts over my shoulders. gauging seizes for sixish Charlene, and the tenish boy. to a swirling glance up, reaching for Ivo and Caroline’s gaze. “May I make a phone call to Lionel and Gavin?” I uttered. 

I fold and zip up, tuck my suitcase aside rising to my feet. I step in the wake of their leading eyes, across the lounge for the phone. 

I dial Kelvin exchange code, and the house number, the familiar sequence from before the boys were born, and since nestling in the house. Jean answered, at the tone of my voice. The phone died. 

Undeterred, I dialed again, listening to a metronome of the distant ringing — the Hydra head of my mind reaching Jean vanishing from the amber light into the deep interior. 

I call back. Lionel’s voice break through. “Hello!” 

“Cooks!” I exclaimed. “Can I see you? . . .” I uttered. Gavin emanates from the shadows into the entrance hall’s amber light. Lionel turns to his brother, his voice fearing his mother. “Gavin! Go and ask mom if we can see dad?” He uttered.

The excitement in Lionel’s voice wanes, as he relayed messages through Gavin to his distant mother. The glimmer of hope I held faded, as did Lionel’s exhausting tone. As Jean didn’t yield, from my year’s accrued visiting rights. I refrain from augmenting further pressure upon Lionel, and Gavin’s palpable quiet moments, sad, hearing him pleading with his mother.  

Bearing my boys’ heartache, I hang up the phone, to a heavy silence settling over me. Returning to the bustling kitchen, with Caroline over the stove pots preparing spaghetti. Ivo’s sixth sense, speaks out. “I have Igor’s Audi!” sparks a flicker, Ilona had everything arranged, for the duration of my stay. 

After our meal, we move out of the kitchen, to the TV room. We caught up on each other’s lives. Laughter and shared stories across the coffee table until Ilona raised. “Ik moet na gaan nor hoos — Flemish (I have to go home now,)” she emphasized, standing up from her seat heading for the door, into the night toward her trusty steed for the commute to her “palace of work.” the Alfa on the driveway with welcoming chats fading into “Goodnight!” exchanges.

The night nurtured a whirlwind of memories, fueled by thoughts of Lionel and Gavin. In the hallowed halls of justice, grand, a tale of two courts. Johannesburg Supreme Court’s decree, two thousand five Rand. A sum so vast, it quintuples Jean’s needs for the month, the boys, and me. The dormant scars of the company checks she wrote, which I signed. But then arose a humble plea, in the Randburg Magistrate Court, a decree. “Fifty rand!” I echoed to the judge. Jean’s obnoxious Advocate and Lawyer, from lofty heights to the small chamber, in legal lore. The power of courts, from grand pronouncements to whispers low, Justice found a way to suscitate help. Resolute, I woke in Sheldon’s room, the patter of little feet in the corridor, to rise and dress for the Post-Christmas Lull. 

By marriage in his in-laws’ territorial landscape — Ivo’s imposing figure strides out the front door, in the house’s prolongation toward the 1400 Datsun pickup. He squeezes into the cabin, where I join him. He turns the ignition, reverses with an engine purring out of the driveway. Drive away from a slumbering suburban landscape. Hit the thoroughfare’s second-hand car dealers, traffic picking up inbound to Kempton Park. Fringing downtown, figuring commuters across the railway station apron, my brother, Ivo borrows the plunging slip road break into the shade to the railway underpass. Emerging into Spartan’s small industries. 

Ivo zigzags into a backstreet, passing a jumble of street-fronts adorned offices, with splashes of manufacturer insignias, backyard sheds. Ivo steers onto the apron up to ground floor offices’ string windows in darkness, frown “Bom-Mach,” slipping over the pickup’s windshield, coming to a halt.

In a flicker of hope to resolve my visiting right to see my boys, I step out, behind Ivo, walking to the four-pane wooden entrance door. Inside, passing open and closed, flash panel doors to offices, a Z-way out of the rear kitchen to a dark alley. Crossing to enter a somber hangar-like shelter to juxtapose sunlight glows at rolled up workshop doors, squeezing by infiltrating access L-lanes. The offside sunlight shrouded a film of dust on a Hot-Rod engine to a double cab Volkswagen pickup’s bed — Ivo’s dream of automotive resurrection.

Ivo called to greet an upcoming figure with a mechanic’s stride up the lane from the afar gable wall glow, through cluttered rows of shiny couchant handicapped undercarriages of jacked-up yellow heavy earth moving plants. shady mosaic of floored engines, wheels and dismembered parts. My brother, Ivo exchanges a greeting with the distant black man, leading a trailing helper. 

A bunker nestled in the dark corner of the shed, piled high with dusty mechanical parts. The doorway Ivo enters a doorway’s streaking light, to the flanked large window fetched off a wall rack. He emerges jingling a set of keys, crosses over into the offside workshop doorway’s spill of sunlight on the concrete floor. He ignores the gleaming, spanking new walk-behind dumper at the crotch of the L-lanes, drawing me into his wake, leading me out into the cool sunlight. 

We walk up the white, sunlight-reflective concrete driveway toward Igor’s dull light beige Audi. Ivo unlocks the door, pulls, offering me the keys, inviting me to step in. I slide into the driver’s seat - smack - closing the door, to whine down the window. My mind split, finding the ignition, shifting into gear, and raising a mental map, while Ivo stands by the window, to a heartfelt “Thanks,” I’m driving away.

Regaining the main road across the veldt facing the industrial area morphs into sprawling suburban houses. Nearing the cooling towers, exhaling plumes of vapor into the atmosphere. I chart my course with a bird’s eye-view north-west across Johannesburg, the territorial of my brother, Igor’s in-law’s extended family. I merge onto the Western Bypass through waving hills of veldt. Past the Veldskoen Drive-in, the lanes split, I exit the trickle of traffic, onto the thoroughfare, turn off. The asphalt straight into a trough of verdant suburban villas rises to the brow of a villagey, quiet downtown Randburg. 

Heading across the intersection, I entered the vibrant and clean town imbued with a European spirit, a point of pride for the ruling Afrikaner National Party. A little early, to spare resemble the morphing town, hence, without my long view, the Randburg Magistrate Court, raised from the veld. Parking the car on the dirt shoulder of a country road, when summoned for employing illegal labor, or a driving citation. developing into a hugging service road parking. I’m turning in circles in the paradigm of widening to a double carriageway. In my confusion of a boomed parking lot, either staff, or the public, to the courthouse terrain. I opt for the shopping center across the street. Walking toward the courthouse, the curtain of black robes, advocates and lawyers, deaf, mute, as I echoed. “I can’t afford a divorce,” faded into the past.

I ascend the portal stairs into the deserted hallway, in left wing scanning office door signs. I push on the door when, behind a prison barred counter, a figure skips from sight. Returning from the shadowy depth, the clerk faces me. “My ex refuses my visitation rights,” I blurted out. Hoping to shock her into action. “If that doesn’t shake the clerk up, nothing will,” I thought. I added a punch, “I need to know my alimony arrears.”

The clerk opens a ledger. Her words revealing she’s overseeing an agenda page. while scribbling, she mentioned a date. 

‘_What am I going to do during the two weeks?_’ I thought. “Thanks,” I muttered, turning away. I retrieve the Audi across the thoroughfare, twiddling my waste of time ahead. I’m driving away.

Amidst the post-court chaos, seeking solace amid my Eldest sister, I crossed Bryanston-Kyalami roads through waving hills  emerging at the trinary intersection at a traffic triangle that marked the family’s first home in South Africa. I turn away from Johannesburg, to drive the way to Pretoria, a block of agricultural holdings to contour and arriving by Ilona’s cottage in retrieve.

As the sun lay, its golden glow stroke the veldt, reminiscent of my adolescence. I leave Ilona to her cigarette and mug of coffee at the dining table to step to the terrace and back into the Audi. drive away, retraced the dusty tracks, grass hissing under the chassis, turn onto the asphalted Neptune Road.  

The afternoon had flown by, driving the Audi the dirt dusty roads morph since my adolescence to stretches of asphalt. Along a changing landscape leading east. I traverse the old Pretoria road through Halfway-House. The asphalt ribbon rolled through the veldt over the hill. Over the hill crest loom the cooling tower. There, I turn off crossing spartan, industrial area, and through the railway subway. turning away from downtown Kempton Park, to weave the neat suburban street, into the cul-de-sac to pull up at Ivo’s house.

The following day blends into meeting his extended family — in-laws, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and wife Caroline’s two sisters (one with her boyfriend, the other a twelveish girl) — dancing in the pool house and spilled onto the pool terrace, splashes to backdrop music the New Year’s celebration.

Quiescence in the antechamber leading to the pool wing, a silent cradle phone stands on the dining server beneath the framed mirror. I lifted the handset, knuckles pressed to my cheek, but only the echo of a distant, empty ringing filled the speaker-cup. 

The silence triggered a flashback to a courtroom for four years. Dragged to  Johannesburg Supreme Court, my voice stifled. On my life raft, I had to pay a lawyer. He trembled like a leaf until the judge interrupted his rambling. ‘_I can do better than that!_’ crossed my mind. Though he introduced me to the witness box. On my left, the judge perched on the bench, humble in my case. His voice echoing: “How much alimony can you pay?” His gaze burned into me, demanding an answer. As he repeated himself with soft eyes, I gauged the outcome in silence. To my right, Jean, curtained by her advocate and lawyer, standing in the gallery, sparsely populating the small courtroom, reminiscent of them trawling me into the historic grand chambers, so that I wouldn’t have a voice. 

I mustered my courage, as I stood locked in the witness box, shaking before a domino effect, hurt Lionel and Gavin. fueled to resolve, a given chance to obliterate Jean’s legal team from my life. Their wide-eyed fixed on my lips. In spite, my mind churned. ‘_Hundred Rand! — That is still too lenient — Do I dare risk jeopardizing with an ideal?-’

‘_Our children are equally Jean and my responsibility. Their shelter, care, pro-rata based on our respective income._’ all eyes on me, my confidence faltered.

Watching those anxious faces of Jean’s team, I felt a surge of wrath, fueled by distant memories of police stumbling into my place of work, arresting me for unpaid alimony. I short-lived on the job, pleading with the CEO for an advance on my paycheck. 

“Fifty Rand!” I spat out, the words laced with sadness. When the judge’s hammer fell, to a grim satisfaction. Watching Jean’s advocate and lawyer. Their gazes dropped, wiping the floor, skirting the bottom rail of the courtroom door in their retreat, to the blind side vanishing. leaving me with a hollow victory and a lingering concern of the repercussions for Lionel and Gavin.

The Randburg Magistrate Court sprawled low in a morning sunlight. Across the double carriageway, I approach the staircase to the plate grass entrance. I press the door grip, walk in a leading spill of sunlight butts the hallway back wall, dying around blind corners. I turn right, knock at one of the first corridor door. A muffled voice answered. Cranking the door lever, revealing a thirtyish woman seated behind a desk. 

The family court magistrate gestures toward the guest chairs. “Good morning,” I greet her, taking a seat before her desk. A file lay open. “My ex won’t let me see our boys!” I exclaim, frustration lacing my voice.   

Her eyes focused on a sheet of paper in the folder, and she began tallying figures, as my mind frustrated mind spills out. “Can’t you do something?” I pleaded.

My mind conjured a reel of remembrance. In Goma’s first self-service grocery store opened. I often called on De-M’ma working behind the refrigerated delicatessen counter serving chatty customers. intrigued by the little manageress, as she stood where customers handed Congolese banknotes, hands in the cash drawer under the counter, returned coins.

I bumped against the service counter, my eyesight skimming the wooden surface. A pencil woven through the manageress’ fingers. Mesmerizing, as the manageress mumbled, tallying with a fingernail trail two digits in the column behind the decimal point. The pencil flips to her fingertips, sums up at the bottom of the ledger sheet of paper, and carried the numbers to the top in front of the decimal point. 

Dreaming of the skill in the grade arithmetic class. In awe, I watched mumble hesitation from the earlier flow, as her fingertip hovering a vise-a-verse change of single digit expanding to double. Fearing being caught stalking her tally at the end-of-day cash intake, I turned away from the petite woman across the counter, seeking refuge with De-M’ma for her bike ride home.

I’m growing aware that the magistrate’s eyes trailed along the sheet of paper’s back margin, her ball-point pen tracing a path along numbers. “Can’t you do something so that I can see my boys?” I nudged in her silent counting.

“I can’t do anything about that,” she replies, wringing my heart without a glance. Then, fixating the bottom of the page. “You owe. . .” But my mind recoiled. The magistrate’s crumbs compared to the banquet of injustice served up by the Supreme Court. 

‘_You’re not listening to me!_’ I thought, but dare not scream. ‘_I want to get to see my boys!_’

Overwhelmed by Jean entitled blackmail with Lionel and Gavin, I tone down, feigning acceptance. Rising slink from my seat, impressing. ‘_I’ll follow your advice._’ Though my mind screams. “Thanks.” I uttered, turning away from the woman. 

I grab the door lever, ‘_I’ve wasted my breath._’ closing after me. I wander away in the deserted corridor. sunlight creeping from the crack up the blind corner to the hallway. The harsh midday glare assaults me. I press past the plate-glass door. Descending the sprawling step out of Randburg Magistrate Court, defeated. 

My mind digesting, I scan across the street. caught onto Igor’s Audi, in the forefront of the commercial corner in the sparse glittering parking lot.

I climb into the Audi and drive away, heading east. Along the country road, my brother, Igor and I, as teenagers, used to ride saddled on our racing bikes, to race meetings and home across waving hills. A single thought, engraved in my memory: ‘_It’s up to you!_’ 

My mind drifts, carried by the engine’s purr, a familiar tune rocking my thoughts: “I could have danced all night. And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things...“

The music streams through me. To swirl flashback, as we lived a little family in harmony — the night Jean longed to step into Daniella’s dancing shoes, after she learned of my Sunday night out. 

“I want to go to Sun City,” Jean swarms me with her voice. 

So, I drove Jean across the border to the Bantustan of Bophuthatswana, where we gambled until the first birds chirped. Luck wasn’t on her side at the slot machines. The irony, that Jean would lose the hundred Rand I won. After that glitter and the jingles of the casino, under the starry night fades, driving home, the question she raised in me: ‘_Can one dance all night . . . ?_’

I withdrew from the bustling activity of my brother, Ivo’s family, through the deserted TV room fares beyond the French doors, the quiet pool terrace. procrastinating distraction in the distance, the whoosh of landing aircraft and the whistling thrust of takeoffs. Dreaming a bustling return of people with new Year's resolutions, before resuming school routines. In the antechamber, I stand before the mirror on the wall. The handset of the phone, knuckles press my cheek, the speaker-cup echoing a distant empty ringing. 

Lionel’s voice breaks in. Leading to a back-and-forth conversation, revealing Jean’s distant muffled voice. Raising my mind’s Hydra head eyes lurking into the amber light filtering through the entrance hall sidelights. Drawn to the phone cradle on its little stool. Jean yields to her earlier tug-of-war. Arising a notion: ‘_Jean wants the week to herself! Why?_’

Ivo and Caroline voicing farewells. “Pass our greeting to De-P’pa and M’ma!” I reverse from their driveway into the street. Driving off, waving back, passing the little family, Sheldon, and his two little sisters, slipping in the rear. I plot my course out of the suburb, to the bustling thoroughfare. I turn away from downtown Kempton Park, heading for the airport highway and branching off south toward Johannesburg. 

I weaved through Kelvin streets, turning onto Jean’s driveway apron, to stop in front of the gate grills. Lionel and Gavin's eager faces picking up their bags. I hop out, unlock the trunk, load their luggage, slamming the lid shut. We board, I tweak the ignition key, to shift into reverse and backing into the street, to drive away. Zigzagging to the Old Pretoria Road, weaving onto the Johannesburg-Pretoria highway, merging into light traffic. We pull up for a pit stop at the filling station, refueling for the long drive skirting Pretoria and eastward. 

As the asphalt bands unfurls hypnotic across the Highveld, the mind suscitate. ‘_Jean’s sudden change of heart. Agreeing to let Lionel and Gavin on a trip to Hazyview?_’ 

It didn’t occur. I might have introduced Jean’s angelic patience to her obsession — The nights I drove to Sun City. Jean played slot machines. That derived confessing: “I danced with Daniella through the night.”

I muse. ‘_Why the bestial turn against herself?_’ Had the Rat in symbiosis Libra’s freaking control — ‘_both succumbed?_’

The Highveld’s monotony stretched on, the roadway shrinking with thinning traffic. We pulled up at the Middelburg outpost, a welcome respite from the long drive. Refueling, to relax on the restaurant terrace, savoring a bite and a drink before saddling back into our seats for the changing road ahead. 

Road signs punctuated our course, signaling our approach to Lydenburg. My heart couldn’t bypass this Voortrekkers town, steeped in the tales of pioneers en route to the subsequent gold rush. I stop, we step out, returned to the Audi, with ice creams and heading on. 

Leaving the piedmont Lydenburg, for the winding road through a landscape of upset mountains, before descending the road clung to the edge of the escarpment to the Lowveld.

Reaching Sabi, nestled in the shadows of the escarpment, we paused. indulge our curiosity and quench our thirst. Continuing the winding plantation hillsides’ roads, alongside the meandering Sabi River. At the gateway to Hazyview, I steered right onto the dirt road. Lost in sprawling banana plantations, we traverse an asphalt road and continue on a farm road into Cesare’s plantation. 

Approach, a modest cottage nestled in a profusion of vibrant flowering plants, with De-M’ma and De-P’pa emerged onto the terrace, with Ilona’s Alsatian, radiating in the warm glow of the setting sun, welcoming us.

By 7 o’clock De-M’ma drives up in the Volkswagen, Jetta. De-M’ma, in her late sixties, steps indoors. Her voice, a gentle whisper, beckoned us to Ilse’s house for dinner. 

De-P’pa drives the Jetta, out the road by which we arrived. The car windows, wound down against a playful caress of the wind. The trailing dust cloud fallback, as we turn onto the Sabi road, the African sun’s fiery artist painting deep shades, through the evening’s green landscape. A quick turn onto the driveway apron, gate slides open, closes behind as we pull up in the driveway along a sprawling oasis, around a towering “Terrorist” trees. We step indoors, with busy Ilse and Gerard greeting us, ordering to sit at the dressed dining table. 

Ilse served up the salads, while Gerard presented his pots. She lifts the lid to the steaming food. Seated, he pours red wine around. Before too deep into the night. Gerard breaks the conversation. “I’ve got to start working early in the morning.” Rises and leaves to excused ourself leaving soon afterward.

Greeting us, “Good morning! Did you sleep well?” 

The next morning, De-M’ma’s cheerful voices echoed through the house. “Good morning! Did you sleep well?”

With Lionel, Gavin and I, bustle about in the kitchen. poured milk onto a soup plate. Lionel dips a few slices of bread, soaking in the milk. With a spatula repeats the dipping in beaten eggs with a flip over, onto standing over a pan. frying another lot of slices golden and crisp to flip over. We gather around the table, Bon’pa, at a dressed table, set with his breakfast at the head of the table, beside De-M’ma’s dirty breakfast plate. 

After breakfast, we left Bon’pa behind, we stepped into the Audi, driving away. Retrace our course along the dirt road, emerging onto the paved Sabi Road, entering by orchards, veer toward Hazyview. We pull up to the Spar Supermarket nestled in the cul-de-sac.

Inside the supermarket, we're rambling the aisles, hoping to seeing my sister, Ilse in flight. We lingered near the shelves, crossing Bon’ma overseen customer’s special requests. Venturing toward the back storage area, crossing my brother in-law, Gerard at the good receiving gate. Returning to the cashiers in a row, when Ilse calls me over the phone. “Ghe kunt nar Sabi Sabi Lodge keume, Flemish, (You can come to Sabi Sabi Lodge,)” Ilona uttered, to my surprise. I hang up, turning to my boys. 

“Cooks’ Come!” I call, ushering them outside toward the Audi, embark and depart from amidst shoppers’ cars and pickups