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J AN K LINKIES
    Perhaps Father’s cousin, Jan Klinkies, was not so strange. He had after all prised off a length of wire from the roll to serve as a belt. Unless such a belt is still attached to the roll which then is dragged heavily along, it is unfair to typecast a man merely because he bunches his trousers generously with a length of wire. Or because he is neither a coffee nor a Rooibos tea-drinker or because he is keen on empty cans.
    These things, however, constituted the sum total of what was said about him. There was no malicious gossip. No one said how thin his legs had grown, that his teeth once were white and regular, that he should do this or that. Jan Klinkies, I knew even before this visit, did not do things. He had once done things and references to his words or actions were always references to the past. For his past did not grow pot-bellied with time. Old stories about Jan Klinkies did not shrink to single images in order to make way for fresh ones. And fresh stories did not wrap around the old like coloured cellophane, covering here and there in a fold through which the old is dimmer, the cellophane doubly coloured. An event some two years before had sealed off the past and all that concerned Jan Klinkies now was in the present.
    So he bunches his trousers, refuses to take coffee or tea with his relatives, is mad for empty tin cans.
    Which presumably exempted him from such things as wrinkles, birthdays, the worry about a nest egg or the condition of his soul. He certainly did not go to church but spent Sundays in the comfort of his crusty corduroys, and no one complained. Not that he was neglected. Brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins regularly put their heads together on sad and windy afternoons. They tutted and shook their heads vigorously, saying, Blood is thicker than water.
    So twice a year Father visited Jan Klinkies who remained stubbornly unconscious of the fundamental truth upon which these visits were based. He may have noticed that the visitors came in a particular order but it is doubtful whether he correlated the viscosity of blood with the frequency of these visits, for he snarled at all alike.
    His eyes slid along the line of Father’s raised arm and proffered hand. If he associated the posture with the shaking of hands, he dismissed the idea immediately. What he looked like, whether his face was toasted or cracked by the sun, his hair tangled or combed, can be of no interest without a knowledge of his appearance two years before. He wore a broad-rimmed hat pulled down over his ears and there were two broad strips of elastoplast on his left hand which confirmed Auntie Minnie as the previous visitor.
    Jan Klinkies stood on the stoep and stared as we approached. Then, as Father extended a hand, he rushed down the steps and stubbed the toe of a veldskoen into the earth as if it were a meteorological device, for he then flung his face skyward and recited what could only be the SABC report of the wind for that day. Which suggested that he listened to the weather broadcast each morning even though the dust lay inches thick on the radio in the kitchen.
    But if his wife could be relied on, Jan Klinkies was not above duplicity. She would not have been surprised if it were the only weather report he had ever heard, many years ago, and which he repeated in the knowledge that the family rota was so large that no one would remember from one visit to another. Besides, he spoke so indistinctly, a rattle in the throat as he reeled off the information, that one barely caught the gist. There was no time to check the details even if he repeated the report in the course of the day. Then the voice came so unexpectedly that you cocked an ear as the words whistled through his barely parted lips. He was either after an onomatopoeic rendering of the wind or it was a deliberate attempt to disguise the words. Whatever his reason, he was certainly successful at both.
    Auntie Truida