Behind these kneeling people, stands my friend. I cannot see his face, but I know that he is not unhappy with the stone world in which he belongs. He turns his back on us. He cannot hear us.
* * *
—
The life of a sentinel suited me. I watched the city crumble. I heard bombs and I saw fires. Sometimes bombs fell on the hillside or in the carpark. The Monument endured. The streams of refugees dried up. Fewer and fewer people were left in the city. But still the siege continued.
For a long time no one came to the Monument at all. I was happy with myself. The foolish desire to be a man left me.
Then one day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw three men appear from the trees. They studied the Monument with telescopes. Then they came on, and passed out of my vision, heading towards the steps. I heard them exclaiming and breaking through the undergrowth. After a while they left, going back the way they had come.
Later that day they returned, bringing with them many others, carrying bundles and drawing handcarts. I knew then that they would stay here. They were bringing their voices, their smells, their sour breath. They would make fires and sit around them talking, laughing, disagreeing. My feet began to itch. The blood was rising in me.
But there was something worse. She was with them. She was moving towards a space I carried in me and she would fit it perfectly.
I cried out: You may touch me, but not enter. Here in my untouchable heart nothing needs to move. But already my heart had awakened. It was beating softly, forcing blood into my dry veins.
I fled inside. I scrambled from frieze to frieze, trying to find a place to hide, pushing aside the quiet women, trampling the toys of the children, kicking over kettles, stumbling across battlefields strewn with thorns and assegais and the bodies of the dead.
I heard their feet on the steps.
I found myself in a corner, among the vanquished.
I heard the beating of her heart.
I turned my back and sank into the stone.
She has made her bed just below me. That was inevitable. I hear her dimly, talking in her sleep. I feel her warm breath on the back of my neck. She wills me to turn around.
* * *
—
We came to live in the Monument, more or less by chance.
It seems to me sometimes as if the earth stopped dead on its axis then, like a globe blocked by a child’s hand, and slowly began to revolve in the opposite direction. It gathers up the long thread of history, so carelessly unwound into space. A wind is blowing in the hourglass and it lofts the grains of sand into the night. When the people are asleep the sand settles in the blood, the streets. I try to resist by dreaming up storms and floods.
* * *
—
Sometimes I think I hear storms deep in the earth, and lightning striking upwards to the surface, to break me from these walls. At last, a destiny of stone. From my skull, cracked open like an egg, hopes and hungers as improbable as birds take flight against a steep grey sky and disappear.
Except for one, which digs its claws into the earth and howls her name. It turns on me its ancient face of joy and grief. It will not let me go.
A Science of Fragments
In memory of Lulu Davis
Fragments neither close
nor open meaning:
they may mean anything except
wholeness, except certainty.
– Lionel Abrahams
An Unposted Letter
On the day of her death he sat down to write and took her death, or rather his grief, as theme. He found disturbing the haste with which he needed to convert grief into fiction. Yet he admitted that his grief, her death, became more believable with every word he set down. He read the words over as if he had chanced upon them in the flyleaf of a borrowed book. He was moved to tears by his own face, in a mirror.
On the day of her funeral he rewrote the piece three times and typed it up. It hardly filled a page. Rereading it, moved once again to tears, he found an error, and had to type it over. It had to be perfect.
He unpinned two paper figures, a dancer and a sleeper, from his notice-board and folded them in his page. Now that it was folded into quarters the page became a letter. He sealed it in an envelope and put it in his pocket.
It was late. He dressed hurriedly, and while he was dressing he realized that he intended to post his letter in her grave. It amazed him that this had been his intention all along.
The need to post the letter stayed with him, a voice speaking softly in his pocket, as he walked with the other mourners to the open grave.
In the end, he did not post the letter. A spadeful of sand came to seem the adequate gesture, a sheet of white paper an affront. But another consideration urged restraint: he had become too attached to his own words to part with them.
Fruit
She props herself in a fork of the apricot-tree and picks fruit. She is a lilac shadow in the quiet green heart of the tree. In her hands the apricots are succulent suns. She bites into them gleefully and spits out the pips.
He sits on the verandah in an armchair and watches her out of the corner of his eye.
She picks five apricots and drops them in the lap of her lilac dress. Then she discovers that she needs both hands for climbing. So she eats two of the apricots, stores three in her mouth, and climbs down. The hem of her dress snags on a branch and the cloth tears.
She goes to where he is sitting. Her cheeks bulge with fruit. He stifles laughter.
An indistinct fanfare from her full mouth, and then her lips open slowly and she pops the apricots out one by one. She does this with a flourish, like a magician, but he is reminded of a fish; a bird regurgitating from its crop; an insect laying eggs. He looks at the fruit, shiny with spit, in his hand.
It hurts her that he goes to wash the fruit under the garden tap, but she says nothing.
Versions of Himself
Once, at an exhibition, he bought a photograph she had taken: “The Waiting Room.” A cardboard box full of chaos and decay. A looming matchbox. Two giant moths. Mulberry leaves as tall as trees, uprooted. Silkworm cocoons stuck to the grey walls. Silkworm droppings. Pink scented sweets. Bones. Electric flex. A crashed dove. A die toppling onto its lucky face. A dead pig. Five plastic people on a bench (from l. to r.):
The watcher
holds an object in his lap and looks into it, rather than at it: a book, a crystal ball, a mirror, a reliquary.
The lovers,
man and woman, their heads resting together, their hands meshed, inanimate. Her eyes are closed. Or perhaps they are simply lowered to look at his hand.
The listener
holds an object to his ear: a telephone, a shell, a bloody rag.
The other man,
the dark one, cut off by the edge of the photograph, in shadow, his head down, his hands hidden. Below the brim of his hat, a face without features.
Conversation
With the dawn a grey chill came into the room. He reached for the bottle and she suddenly burst out: “I used to like your hands but I’ve changed my mind. They’re the hands of a clerk.”
He replied, trying to be cruel, “You have the hands of a plumber.”
Her head jerked, as if he had struck her, but she laughed. She clapped her workman’s hands, full of scratches, the nails chipped and rimmed with black, and she snorted with delight.
Broken Mirror
In the Cavalier Bar at the Flashback Hotel he turned an empty glass in a pool of its sweat on the counter. On the back of a Laughing Cavalier serviette he wrote:
“You crossed the border. You came to rest in a homeland of deaf earth and dumb stone. Now and always, you are travelling on a foreign passport.”
He asked the barman for the date and wrote it next to the laughing face. The ink ran. He put the serviet
te in his pocket.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, she floated in the immense calm beyond the waves. She opened the valve in one of her water-wings and it jetted stale air below the surface. She puttered in circles, on her back, looking up at the circling clouds.
Under one arm she carried a story, her own, missing a chapter or two, wrapped in bright yellow oilskin and tied up with string. The story refused to sink. She forced it under, boiling bubbles as if it were drowning, but it twisted out of her hands and bobbed stubbornly to the air.
She swam back to the shore, towing the bright package behind her.
* * *
—
In the margin of the sea, in large letters, he wrote:
“Forgive me my story, as I forgive you yours.”
He sat down to watch the sea erase his message. But the tide was going out and
“Forgive me my story”
persisted. He had to cross it out himself with the palm of his hand.
* * *
—
No one saw him leave. While her eyes were closed he walked out in the sunshine at Jan Smuts airport, his head turned purposefully away, his collar up. He phoned the Flashback from a booth. Reception said the number rang and rang.
* * *
—
In the gardens then, in a childhood place, in the beautiful gardens of the Flashback Hotel, her veins slow with sleep, one leg drawn up, her bones heavy with words, her eyes wide open and dark, she curled at last into cactus-needle, leaf-vein, moss, lichen, loam.
Conversation
She said, “I have the mind of a forty-year-old divorcee in the body of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.”
He replied, “Or vice versa.”
She did not hear, or pretended not to. She looked at the grey morning behind the window-panes. The look on her face was so unexpected that he almost laughed: a jaded, adult expression, signifying worldliness, cynicism, regret.
Versions of Herself
Once, for his birthday, she gave him the fragments of an animated film she had made. A cardboard box spilled out the bits and pieces of a puzzled world: paper people, two inches tall, wax-crayon rainbows, trees, hungry eyes and mouths.
There were hundreds of versions of the heroine, herself, each differing slightly from the next.
For an evening he amused himself, hunting out the figures that could be placed one after the other to build the raising of a hand, a single step, a leap over an obstacle, a pirouette. Then he put the box in a drawer.
Years later he came across the box when he was tidying up. He kept two versions of the heroine and threw the rest away. He pinned the two survivors to the notice-board above his desk:
The dancer
wears a tattered lilac frock. She stands on one foot, her other leg drawn up almost to her chest, her arms stretched for balance. Her hair explodes over her shoulders. Startled eyes, two full stops, are the only features of her face.
The sleeper
wears the same frock, lies on her side, one knee drawn up and hugged. Her hair pours over a turned shoulder and obscures her face, which she presses into a pillow of earth. Just visible, one heavy-lidded eye, shaped like a comma, closed.
Crossing
They waded into the waves to cool their feet, and he scared himself with a joke about sharks. Then the word “shark” kept circling under the conversation. They walked on in silence towards the wreck.
The wreck, when they reached it, disappointed him. From miles away it had promised to be a monument, something magnificently wasted. From close it was merely metal, dead, rotting into rock. Even the gulls left it alone.
She was more than satisfied. She wanted to swim across to the wreck. She said it was an island worth exploring. He dissuaded her, mentioned sharks again, pointed out the cross-current, threatened to go home.
They climbed up to the dunes, where they had imagined shade. But as he lowered himself onto the sand, the dune shifted with his weight and slid into heat.
She settled down and slept. The sun put a gloss of sweat on her skin, a hot fluff on her shoulders. He came close and watched her sleeping face. This crossing held no dangers. This space could be bridged by a hand or a word. An image slid out of the blue: a finger stirring chips of shell to catch the light. He drew back, unaccountably afraid, spilling sand around him.
She dreamt (she said, when she awoke) that she braved the crossing. The sea was wild. She was washed, exhausted, swallowing salt-water, into the hold. A shaft of light showed her a ladder, but high and out of reach. She scrabbled against the sheer walls and tore her palms on rust. She went under once, twice. Then a wave lifted her gently, as if she was a child, and guided her hands to the rungs. She climbed up to the deck and was saved.
Debris
In the waiting room, in the shadows, the dark man speaks:
if I should stay up all night with a lucky-packet watch on my wrist, in the dawn, in the corner of a room, in the mysterious symmetry of wall meeting wall, if I should lie on my back with the curtains open wide, in Braamfontein, the sky, from my dirty window, the Hillbrow Tower with a polka-dot bow-tie, a bruised sky full of blood, in salmon, puce, cerise, peach, apricot, plum, a thorn-tree, the musical fountains at Wemmer Pan, a papier mâché Dromedaris, a fibreglass Van Riebeeck, the gilt-edged dumps, the laundromat in Pretoria Street, dirty linen dancing in the suds, in the butchery at the Restless Supermarket, a butcher with three fingers and a bloody Band-aid, if I should smell salt, tea-rose, turpentine, if I should see, in the rearview mirror, rows of mealies arrive-depart-arrive, in a telephone booth, if I should open at random to a name, to a number, in the pages of a notebook bound in black, with a red spine, on the last page, or the first, in a margin, if I should hear in the ribcage of the hardest word its soft heart beat
Echo
On the anniversary of her death, his grief, he takes two versions of her, a dancer and a sleeper, from their shroud. He can no longer remember why he chose these two from among the hundreds. He pins them up, pushing the pins carefully into the familiar wounds.
Tsafendas’s Diary
1 Granny is knitting me a thinking-cap, in pink and blue. It is shaped like a turnip, with a long, curling tail. I’ll be able to pull it down over my ears, I’ll be able to pull it down right over my face, and look out through the two eye-holes she has thoughtfully provided.
“You need to do some thinking,” Granny says, “and it is always better to do your thinking incommunicado.”
* * *
—
2 Granny in her wicker rocking-chair.
In the twilight Granny’s moonface comes and goes, comes and goes, while her crochet-hook knots the giddy momentum of the planet into little coloured squares.
Granny is off her rocker.
* * *
—
3 Granny rocks and rocks. The wicker squeals. Her shadow comes and goes on the wall behind her.
“We must have Tsafendas’s Diary,” Granny says. “We are its rightful owners. It’s a shame to keep it locked up somewhere, away from the world.”
I agree.
“Do you know what it is, child?”
I do not answer.
Granny laughs and the shadow laughs with her. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
* * *
—
4 Granny gives me the thinking-cap. It fits me well. She seems pleased, plumping the cap up on my head and tugging the tail so that it hangs down at a jaunty angle.
“Now you are ready to do some thinking,” she says. “The first thing you must think about is Tsafendas’s Diary.”
I pull the cap down over my face and look out through the eye-holes.
Granny smiles. “You must fetch it for us,” she says. “Tsafendas’s Diary is the key to all mysteries. The mysteries of meat and the imagination.”
* * *<
br />
—
5 In the mean time, Granny keeps me busy feeding the hole in the backyard.
“Food for the earth,” Granny says. “Excellent stuff. Full of goodness.”
I carry the buckets of food out from the kitchen and empty them on the edge of the hole.
“Don’t just stand there, you impossible child. Down to business. Feed it. It cannot help itself. You must be willing to get your hands dirty.”
I climb into the hole. The bottom is marshy, it sucks at my feet. Granny rocks closer to the edge so that she can look down on me. Her eyes are as pale as the sky behind her. Her face comes and goes on the horizon. With the flat edge of my spade I scrape the piles of food along the rim into the hole. Potato peelings, bones, bread-crusts, meat. I dig it in. The mixture bubbles and steams.
* * *
—
6 Granny has the meat-hook. She tacks the meat together. She pulls the meat-blanket up to my ears and tucks it in. By morning it will be rotting.
* * *
—
7 In the coldest winter in living memory I wear my thinking-cap to bed. I notice a distinct improvement in the quality of my dreams.
I dream I am the curator at the Houses of Parliament.
I lead a party of tourists across a desert of pale-grey carpet to a square of stainless-steel pillars and chains, which marks the spot where Tsafendas slaughtered the Prime Minister. The tourists dam up around the chains. I step into the empty space. I stoop and lift a square of plastic, and there they are: the historic bloodstains.
Flashback Hotel Page 8
