Making Challah / Karen Jennings

Walk past the neighbourhood today and see the corner shops boarded up, their proud announcements of 'Since 1916' obliterated by graffiti. In Southey Road the traffic is slow-moving, the vehicles old, few. To the right, houses meet the street without the luxury of a pavement, or sit on its verge with rusted chicken wire and zinc siding for fencing. Left, empty plots remain from decades before when it was decided to build a highway that would pass over the railway line and meet up with the cramped main road where vendors sell cheap sunglasses, surrounded by nightclubs and bars that never quite made it. In one of these vacant fields lie a three-legged chair and two broken crates left behind when a family was evicted from a council house. They neighbour each field, these houses, built for the destitute and maintained with little effort on the part of the council or inhabitants. A 'No Dumping' sign has been newly erected in one of the fields. Below it are several black bags which form a meeting ground for seagulls and pigeons, sometimes dogs.
It is this that the woman watches from her kitchen window as she makes challah for the evening's Sabbath meal. The process is drawn out, taking almost the whole day, where before it had taken a few hours. But she is older now, her hands stiff, her legs weak, so that the kneading and plaiting takes longer. She times it, the making of the bread, by the movements on the street, the changing visitors to the open fields. When she begins, dissolving the yeast and sugar in lukewarm water, there are guinea fowl and Egyptian geese scratching for insects in the dirt. Later, as she begins to knead the dough, adding more flour when it feels too soft, she watches a man with a canvas sack over one shoulder deliver pamphlets to post-boxes he passes. He is singing to himself, a song she does not know, but which seems tuneless. There are others who pass; a woman with two small children; an old man in a full suit and hat, walking slowly with a cane; a man in a pair of overalls carrying a car bumper under an arm.
She places the dough in a large, oiled bowl and covers it with a cloth, before resting it on the counter near the window so that the sun can shine on it and help it grow. She will wait until the children are let out from the school around the corner before she looks at it again. They gather on the field opposite, waiting for parents or grandparents to pick them up. Some of the parents walk down from the food processing factory beside the railway line during their lunch hour, forgetting to remove their hairnets or plastic aprons. They bring their children gifts of mis-shapes or leftovers, while their children's friends watch, waiting for the mini-bus which takes them back through the suburbs to the Cape Flats where they play in concrete squares and are called inside before dark 'because of gangsters'. Sometimes she falls asleep as she waits for the dough to double in size and she will wake, forgetful, finding the oiled bowl brimming, with no memory of how it came to be there.
Plaiting the challah is the part she enjoys most. It reminds her of her mother and of her own daughters. She yearns for them at these times, reminding herself sternly that the children will phone in the evening, that there is no reason for despair. In the field a man with a supermarket trolley has given up his usual Friday hunt through the neighbourhood's refuse. The garbage collectors have been, the bins are empty and he has all the newspapers, bottles and cans he will find for the day. He manufactures a bed for himself on the far end of the field, away from the road, using newspaper, making a big show of covering his face with his hat, as though to say 'Do not disturb.' He will sleep, she knows, as the braided dough rises again, and as she beats the egg yolk to paint on the top and sides of the bread to help it brown while baking.
The readiness of the challah she marks by the lengthening of shadows outside and the regularity of cars driving past. She removes the loaf from the oven and places it on a cooling rack, letting it stand as she lowers the kitchen blind and switches on the light. In a while she will cut a single slice, eating at the table alone.