* * *
—
We came to live in the Monument, more or less by chance. We were on our way to the city, but we came to the Monument and it seemed like a place to stay. That was months ago.
News came from the north that the city had been abandoned. After the long years of siege, the defenders gave up hope. They put aside their guns, they turned to dust, they took flight. The attackers, storming triumphantly through the deserted streets, were surprised to find nothing worth possessing. They smashed a few statues (according to the reports) and went away.
For a long time we had been dreaming about a return. So we left our place in the bush and came north. We were five families in all. Our leader’s name was Steenkamp; I am his only daughter.
* * *
—
I lived in the city once. I lived there for a long time. I stood on my pedestal at a busy intersection, and I thought I was fortunate to find myself at the heart of it all, in a place so full of people and incident.
I watched carelessly over the people. Generally, they watched carelessly over me. Few of them knew what I stood for. Industry, some might have said, or Courage, or the People Themselves, their Past, or maybe their Future.
I remember a few of them. An old woman, for example (I watched her grow older). Her head became a broken bird’s nest, her body a twisted branch. She used to scatter breadcrumbs from a plastic bag. She planted her feet like roots in the dry grass and the birds settled around her like scraps of blackened paper.
I also remember those who were cleaning up, because they were always there: trimming the edges of the lawn, cutting the trees into solid geometry, spearing pieces of paper on sharpened wire. I thought then: One day soon one of them will spear a pigeon, or the old woman’s chattering brain, and roast it over a brazier in front of the iron gates.
But this is all beside the point.
I remember especially my love.
I lived in a city of rock. In the morning a tide of flesh and blood came in, it surged through the streets and crashed against the buildings, voices slid over one another like pebbles. In the evening the tide receded, leaving the streets full of sand.
I remained behind, a monumental silence, dry and hollow. I waited my turn to speak through my love’s talkative hands, her fluent skin.
* * *
—
On the last day of our journey north we camped within sight of the Monument.
It stands on a hill overlooking the city. When I was a child the Monument was floodlit every night so that you could not forget about it. It was visible from every window, summoning us. We entered that cavernous space as if it were a cathedral. Signs told us to be silent. The walls inside were lined with marble friezes. My father would lead us around, stopping in front of each panel to read the inscription on a brass plaque and point out certain details. Clockwise, we would go, for it was a chronicle, telling the whole story of our people: a story of origins and pioneers, battles and massacres, and long journeys marked by heroism and suffering. The names of the places, the heroes, the battles won or lost were familiar to me. But the friezes filled me with a small, private horror. The people were frozen, half in and half out of the stone. It was not a passive element. It sucked them in, it cunningly enslaved them, while allowing them the illusion of liberty. The folds of a woman’s dress flowed secretly into a rockface. A man’s boots were rooted to the stony ground. The manes of the horses, at full gallop, hooves trampling the bodies of our fallen enemies, blew back in a stone wind.
On the last evening of our journey, there were no floodlights on the Monument, just the sordid backdrop of the sunset. Even when the sky faded to grey the black block on the broken hills persisted. As we ate, gathered around the fire, my eyes went again and again to the hills. I saw that some of the others also looked to the Monument, and then turned their eyes away and stared into the flames.
Just before bedtime my father called us all together. “I have been thinking,” he said, “that the scouts should go first to the Monument tomorrow morning, to pay our respects. From there they can also observe the city and judge whether it is safe to return.”
It was agreed.
But I knew then, in a way I have of knowing what is inevitable, that we would never go further than the Monument. We had come home.
* * *
—
I lived in the city, and I wept, when the weather permitted. Sometimes I could see the place reeling between monument and ruin, and I could not flee.
The wind was ravenous; it peeled a skin of dust from the hills, it carved numbers on the faces of the buildings, it chewed the trees down to the bone, it ambushed people, exploding under skirts and coats, it swallowed and spat out fragments of bone and cloth.
The wind blew all sorts of madness into people.
I was troubled by a recurring dream: One morning I see a crowd coming my way, laughing and singing, carrying ropes and crowbars and hammers. They have come to topple me, to drag my body down into the street. I am afraid that I will fall to pieces if I move. I do. I expect that they will leave me to rot, as a warning to all those whose hearts were hardened. But no, they scavenge me for souvenirs. My eye becomes a paperweight, my foot a doorstop. What bits of me will make bookends, flowerpots, stepping-stones, a wreck for the bottom of the fish-tank? Those who pull me down are surprised to see a sticky heart pacing out the confines of my broken ribcage.
The dream troubled me, but my love troubled me more.
Always heads turned to watch her as she passed. An old man on a bench, a student with a clipboard under his arm, the businessman, the bus-conductor, those who were cleaning up – they watched her as though she were public property, the way I am, or the fountains, or the bust of a dead statesman. Only I did not need to turn my head. I kept my eyes fixed on a space next to the bus-shelter, a space shaped just like her. And when she suddenly filled the space, I was pleased with the inevitability of my love for her.
At other times it drove me to distraction to be so implacably myself. My heart betrayed me. I felt my veins begin to tingle, my skin begin to itch. I told myself this desire to be a man was foolish. There are more than enough men in the world.
But I wanted to go with her. I began to prepare myself.
My hands had been frozen into two permanent gestures, one open, one shut. Always like that, in the mornings, in the evenings, one open, one shut. But then the local historians, who wanted to give our city a history with footnotes, began to say that sometimes the hand that was open in the morning was shut at night. They said I was some kind of miracle or, at least, that I contradicted myself.
The people paid no attention. There were no tour buses full of pilgrims. The people knew that a statue is only a statue.
* * *
—
The scouts came back from the Monument to say the place was in ruins. They said nothing about the city.
We held a meeting to discuss our course of action. Some said that the ruined Monument was a sign we should turn back. Others argued that it summoned us on to some task of reconstruction. My grandfather said it was our duty to go up to the Monument and do what we could to clean it up and make repairs. Finally it was agreed that any decision would have to wait until we had all seen the place for ourselves.
The road up the hill was cratered and overgrown, and the ascent, with all of us pushing and pulling the loaded handcarts, took many hours. It was mid-afternoon before we emerged at last from a grove of bluegums onto the slopes below the Monument. Where once there had been lawns as smooth as carpets, the grass now grew wild, spilling over the terraces and pathways. The trees, once sculpted into leafy cannons and bombshells, had exploded into disorder.
And the Monument itself. An acidic wind had scoured the sheen off it. Lightning had branded it and thunder had rubbed its hard edges to powder.
We circled the enclosing wall until we found
an entrance and steps leading up to a sagging door. My father stopped in the doorway and the rest of us crowded around, peering into the gloom. He pointed, and I saw that a narrow beam of sunlight, marbled by dust motes, fell from a crack in the ceiling onto a dead, unintelligible face. My grandfather dropped to his knees and began to wail. Grandma tried to comfort him.
We lit torches and went in, hesitantly, my father in the lead. Dry leaves crunched underfoot. The place had a warm, furry stench. We followed my father, clockwise, stopping in front of each panel. The torchlight flickered on discoloured faces, slimed chins, cobwebbed mouths. At the first panel – the settlers erect a stone cross on a beach, curious natives look on, a stunned sea – my father held his torch to the plaque, but could not make out the words.
I covered my mouth with my shawl. The figures on the walls twitched and turned their eyes away from the light. We waded through the warm air, slow as the hands of a clock, in silence. At last we emerged into the glare.
“We’ll camp out here,” my father said, indicating the wild grass between the steps and the enclosure.
We spent the rest of the afternoon making camp.
When night was falling and the other women were preparing supper, I picked my way to the rear of the Monument, hoping for a view of the city. Instead, I discovered an unaccountable absence. Each of the four corners of the Monument had once been guarded by sentinels, great stone warriors with their backs fused to the walls and their hands clasped around the barrels of their rifles, whose stocks rested between their boots. But one of the sentinels, the one who had looked to the city, had abandoned his post. I climbed up onto the empty ledge and rested my back against the corner. I looked into the distance, to the factories he had watched over, a ragged skyline of chimneys, toothed roofs and pylons. When I was a child that sky would be red with the flames from the furnaces. Now a cold grey night poured in, filling in all the spaces between things, congealing on every surface, until my back grew numb.
I cracked myself loose and went back to the fire.
* * *
—
The wind blew a war into the city.
The city fathers put up lights everywhere to turn night into day. On a whim, they would switch them all off, and then the darkest of nights rang through the city like a cracked bell.
Some people left. I saw the convoys, the families carrying creaking suitcases, the lonely ones and twos.
Others stayed. They bought uniforms and held meetings at night. Then it was as if spaceships had landed in the stadiums. The lights were blue against the sky, the stars were washed out. I thought the people of the city were fortunate that they no longer needed the stars, neither for navigation, nor prophecy, nor hope.
I itched all over. Every night I schooled my heart to beat and moved my hands. I would fetch her from the space next to the bus-shelter, and together we would leave and find a place where the night was left in peace.
I waited too long. One morning, I knew that she was gone. The space had crept into me while I slept and now it ached like a tooth socket. I sought it again and again with my tongue, urging blood into my cold limbs. And when the blood had seeped to the tips of my fingers, to my toes, I knew that I could walk.
When I was younger I longed to be a man. I wanted to wear Christmas hats of crackling paper, I wanted to clean my nails, clear my throat, put on socks, wait at the robot looking impatiently from side to side. Now I wanted simply to leave. But something kept me rooted to the spot.
One day a man with a long feather-duster tickled my face until I almost split my sides. He connected a hose to a tap and washed me down as if I were some artefact, caked with dirt, unearthed from the tomb of a dead civilization. He sat under a tree, with his back against the trunk, and waited for me to dry. Then he came to look at me, squinting into the sun, as if he saw the outlines of a new man.
That night when the tide had gone out I climbed down from my pedestal, stretched, and walked away.
I walked through the gutted city. I walked past the survivors, asleep in the ruins, in their stainless-steel beds, in their striped pyjamas, above their patient shoes, next to their incorruptible clocks. I walked out of the city, along the route taken by the refugees. And so I came at length to the Monument and it seemed like a place to stay.
I took the place that had been kept for me among the sentinels. There, with my back pressed comfortably to the walls, I could watch the city from a distance. The busy lives and deaths of the people could take their course in the corner of my eye.
I never cried for my lost love; sometimes the rain wet my face. I never laughed for my found freedom; sometimes the wind pasted a leaf against my mouth.
I said: I am just a monument to a night I wept with my ear against your breast, a morning I touched your sleeping eyes and your dreams brushed off on my fingers, a moment between darkness and light when, at last, the planets turned on the brittle stem of your wrist.
But I didn’t believe a word of it. After all, none of it happened. Still, a sense of loss was necessary.
And in this way many years went by.
* * *
—
The day after we made our camp in the shadow of the Monument, I rediscovered the museum. I remembered clearly where it had stood, dug into the rocky slope, but still it was hard to find. Rock falls had almost buried the building. When I eventually found the entrance it was blocked by rubble, but I managed to squeeze through.
The torch showed me a broken display-case, an upturned desk. A woman used to sit there, I remembered, selling tickets and souvenirs: scale models of the Monument, teaspoons with engravings of the Monument, Monument dishcloths and paperweights, Monument letterboxes. I righted the display-case: tarnished teaspoons.
I went down a passage and came to a room behind glass. The Living Room of a Typical Farmhouse. A man sat at a table with the family Bible open in front of him. Two well-behaved children sat on either side of him, their chins resting on their hands. A woman stood behind the man, one hand resting on his shoulder.
I smashed the glass and climbed through into the room. There was a film of dust on the table, rat-droppings in the teacups. I tried shifting the little boy, but he would not budge: closer inspection revealed that he was bolted to his chair, the chair was bolted to the floor.
I went through a low doorway into the kitchen. The light from my torch flickered on copper pots and pans, and on the painted coals that glowed in the oven. The pot on the coals was empty.
In room after room I examined the set faces of these statues, touched the rough fabric of their clothes, their cold hands. I turned the dusty pages of their hymnbooks and Bibles. I tested their clumsy implements, their hard chairs and lumpy mattresses.
I took back with me an embroidered bonnet to show the others.
That evening when we gathered around the fire there was an argument. My grandfather started it by asking me about the bonnet.
“I found it in the museum,” I said. “There are all sorts of wonderful things down there, maps and –”
“You must put it back,” he said flatly.
“Why should I do that?”
“If you had any respect for the dead,” Grandfather said, “you would not have taken it in the first place. You should know better.”
I told him there were all kinds of useful things in the museum, clothing, blankets, buckets – things we needed. It would be foolish to let them lie there. Grandfather accused me of treachery. Others joined the argument, most of them arguing that we needed to be practical. Grandfather persisted. “You don’t need a fancy bonnet,” he said.
And he was right, although I did not admit it. It amused me to start a fashion. By tomorrow, I thought, all the women will be wearing these ridiculous bonnets. By next Sunday, when we gather for prayers, half the men will be wearing top hats and coarse black suits, and clutching prayerbooks in a language we hardly understa
nd.
Eventually my father joined the discussion. “Our situation is difficult,” he said. “It is not unlike the one our forefathers found themselves in. We must take a lesson from them. They improvised, they endured, they made do. The rains will be here soon and the tents are inadequate. We must build better shelters for ourselves. Perhaps there are things in the museum that will make our task easier.”
He did not mention the city.
“I have an idea,” Grandfather said sarcastically. “Why don’t we just move into the Monument?”
And that, of course, is exactly what we did.
My grandparents stayed on in their tent for a week after the rest of us moved. Then one night there was a storm. Grandma moved inside. Grandfather lasted another day on his own, speaking to no one, but when it rained again the following night, he too moved in with us.
All the best places along the walls had been taken; my grandparents had to make their home in the middle of the room. They put up a canvas lean-to next to the sarcophagus of the unknown pioneer.
I have made myself a bed on a marble bench in the corner. In the frieze just above me is a statue who intrigues me. He has turned his back on us.
This particular panel depicts the signing of a treaty. Two men are seated at a table. One of our early leaders sits on the left. Behind him stand our people, his people. Some of them hold rifles; all of them wear hats. Our leader looks at the man opposite him, but he appears not to see him. He looks through him to the distant mountains. Immediately behind our leader stands a woman. She too looks to the mountains. One of her hands rests on our leader’s shoulder. To her left, a priest who holds a Bible. He looks at the man on the other side of the table with determined tenderness.
The enemy. He sits awkwardly on the edge of his chair. He looks like a man who has never sat in a chair before. He holds a quill in his left hand. He is about to make a cross on the document our leader pushes towards him. He does not look at the mountains. He looks at the end of the quill. Around him, his people kneel.
Flashback Hotel Page 7
