by Andre Brink
What next? The re-entry of the nurse; two nurses. This must be the worst possible moment, and of course I shall get the blame for it. Yet to my surprise they altogether ignore my presence, as if I’m no more than a picture awkwardly suspended in the corner. What is rather more astonishing is that they pay no attention to the birds either but go about their swift efficient business of changing one of the many drips beside the bed, though at least twenty of the brightest-hued birds are perched on the stainless steel frame. Minutes later the nurses leave again. I follow them on tiptoe to the door to peer through the glass pane, making sure the coast is now clear. When I turn round again to face the room the birds have gone. I can make out the shadow of a smile on Ouma Kristina’s face.
Her free hand invites me with a tentative gesture to approach. Once again I bend over with my ear close to her. She has great difficulty mouthing her words.
‘You’re back,’ she says. ‘I told you years ago, didn’t I?’ I have to guess most of the words; the rest of what she says is a mixture of sighs and mumblings. But she persists. ‘I knew you’d come. I went to look for you last night.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I saw you.’ I put out my hand and touch hers. ‘I didn’t want something like this to bring me back.’ I feel an urge to cry, but it is more from helpless rage, I think, than sorrow. ‘How could anyone have done this to you?’
‘I don’t think they meant it. They just did it.’
‘Is the pain very bad?’
‘Most of the time they make me sleep.’ A slow shake of her head. ‘You know, there’s only one thing that helps for burns. A man’s seed. I told the doctor, but he wouldn’t listen. I suppose he thought I was expecting him to provide it. Now they’re making do with what they have.’
‘How are you, Ouma?’ I demand urgently.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to die,’ she says very calmly.
‘Don’t say such a thing. Please. We’ll nurse you back to life, I promise.’
‘Who says I want to live any longer? I’ve just waited for you to come. You’re a good girl.’
‘I’m not a good girl!’ Guilt and anger flare up in me. A good girl is one who stays, who cares, who assumes responsibilities, not one who is headstrong and runs away and chooses her own life and believes the future is more important than the past.
‘It will be better now. Like the old days when you and I –’
‘Don’t talk so much, Ouma, it’ll wear you out.’
‘I’ve waited long enough. Just one thing …’ There follows such a long pause that I begin to think she has lost track of her thoughts. But then, after another feeble gesture to demand my close attention, she continues, ‘I want to go home.’
‘But you need the care. You have to be here.’
‘If I’m going to die anyway, what’s the difference?’ Her pale almost-not-seeing eyes stare at me with the milky innocence the very old have in common with the very young.
‘If I stay here that wily old undertaker will get me. Old Piet Malan. He’s been lying in wait for me all these years. I’ve seen him at the door every time I woke up. Can’t wait to get his hands on my body, the randy old goat.’
‘Ouma, please –’
‘Promise me you won’t let him get me.’
‘Of course he won’t.’
‘Then you must take me away from here. Take me home. It’s the only safe place.’
‘Anna says the whole house was burnt down,’ I say gently.
‘She always exaggerates. She’s like your mother. I want you to go there. I’m afraid I rather neglected it these last few years.’ She brightens briefly. ‘But there are still peacocks in the garden.’ A faint but resolute nod. ‘Go and see if the place is still standing. Then come and fetch me.’
‘What if something happens to you while I’m away? I’ve come all this way to be with you.’
‘Then make yourself useful. I have no intention of dying in this place.’
That’s not for you to decide, I want to say; but of course I check myself. Ouma Kristina is quite capable of taking control, as she has always done; even over death.
7
‘WHAT DO YOU think?’ asks Anna on our way home.
‘I never thought I’d one day see her like this. A little dry twig. She was always so active.’ I cannot restrain a smile. ‘The first image I have whenever I think of Ouma is of her marching up and down through her palace with a transistor pressed to her ear, listening to rugby, commenting at the top of her voice, egging on her team, which was always Western Province, calling down fire and brimstone on the enemy. She never missed a match. I often saw her get so excited she’d hurl the transistor to the floor or against a wall. She must have gone through two or three sets every season.’
‘She always went overboard with everything,’ Anna says with unmasked disapproval. ‘The last few years she became quite impossible.’
‘She just didn’t believe in half measures.’ And now the memories start flooding back. I remind her of the family legend that soon after the Second World War an agricultural inspector visited Sinai and condemned Ouma’s small flock of goats. Infested with scab, he said. The whole flock – which in Ouma’s eyes was the prime flock in the district, of course – had to be slaughtered forthwith. There had been a long history of animosity between her and the inspector, and this was his moment of triumph. But he hadn’t reckoned with the length she was prepared to go. Ouma personally cut the throat of her best billy, stuffed the head into a burlap bag and, ignoring all poor Oupa’s feeble remonstrations, took the train to Cape Town with the head as her only baggage. Parliament was in session. Ouma brushed aside the guards at the entrance to the Assembly – that was long before Verwoerd was assassinated, and security was slack, to say the least – marched right past all the honourable members and took up position at the desk of the Minister of Agriculture. She upended the bag, shook out the gory head which by then had begun to smell something awful, and said, ‘Now you tell me, Mr Minister, whether this goat has got scab.’
‘But the goats were slaughtered after all, weren’t they?’ asks Anna.
‘That’s the sting in the tail. Don’t you remember? After the uproar in parliament, there was an investigation, and the following week Ouma’s whole flock was reprieved. Only then did she send Oupa to the abattoir to have them all slaughtered.’
‘Poor Oupa. She was never easy to live with.’
‘I know. Sometimes she drove me up the wall too. But life was never dull. When I was at varsity she would come down all the way to Stellenbosch three or four times a year to visit me. If there was a rugby match at Newlands, she’d haul me there no matter how much I protested. I could never stomach rugby, not even for the short while I had a boyfriend in the first team. But she always managed, by hook or mostly by crook, to get tickets, and I was given no choice. She was spectacular. She had everybody around us in stitches. And after the match came her great finale: she’d take me by the arm and rush out ahead of everybody else until we were a hundred yards or so clear of the crowd. Then she’d turn round and hurry back, head down, right into that surging mass and stop chosen individuals to ask them with an air of total innocence, “What are all these people doing here? Is it Communion?” Or to feign shock at seeing the match ended already, pretending we’d just arrived from some godforsaken little place on the map.’
‘That’s just plain childish,’ says Anna, unamused.
‘Not when one was there with her. She got such pleasure out of it. Just as she did, when we went shopping in some department store, to walk down the up escalators and up the down ones. Grinning at all the foul or disapproving stares that met us.’
Best of all, I remember wryly, were our visits to restaurants. Ouma wouldn’t take me to any but the very poshest places in the city and encourage me to order the most expensive dishes. She could be terribly stingy at home, but on these outings she really let go. Not that it cost anything: that was the point. Towards the end of the meal she’d draw from her scuffe
d old ostrich skin handbag a beautifully carved and inlaid little box, all mother-of-pearl and semiprecious stones. It came from Baghdad, she’d tell me every time, with undiminished glee. My stomach would contract in sheer mortification when I saw that box. For inside it was a startling collection of quite revolting items. A couple of dead flies or bluebottles. Worms of the most obnoxious hairy or juicy kind. A half-alive cockroach or two. A few thin jagged crescents of toenails hacked off without finesse. She would select whatever in the particular circumstances appealed most to her, and after a quick check to make sure no one was looking, she’d deposit one of her prizes on her plate, slip the box back into her bag, and call a waiter to complain. By the time the matter reached the management, Ouma’s voiced threatening to penetrate the most distant nooks of the restaurant, they were usually only too happy to scrap the bill in exchange for a reluctantly given undertaking not to prosecute. We never went to the same restaurant twice, of course. We often had stand-up fights about it afterwards. Every time she would solemnly promise never again to subject me to such a scene. Perhaps she even meant it sincerely. But she simply couldn’t resist the temptation.
Impossible, now, to reconcile these memories with the wretched little creature on the high bed. She was right: to die in that hospital would be the final indignity.
‘Can we go to The Bird Place straight away?’ I ask Anna.
‘One shock is enough for today.’
‘I must see for myself.’
‘It’s dangerous. For all we know the terrorists who blew it up are still around somewhere.’
‘I’ve promised Ouma.’
‘Let’s find out from Casper first. And anyway, you need a rest.’
8
AND NOW, A full day later, we’re driving through the tall gates, absurdly ostentatious on the naked plain; they are guarded by two policemen armed with automatic guns, to whom we first have to identify ourselves. From well over a kilometre away, under the sky which even on this late April day is still smouldering with sullen heat, the oasis of exotic trees surges as from a dream. Ouma has never allowed anyone, ever, to fell a tree, matter how unruly it became. ‘Cut down a tree,’ she used to say, ‘and it will become a ghost to haunt you to the day of your own death.’
We pull in under the great loquat tree in the front garden, once inhabited by birds, now somehow not quite as enormous as it seemed long ago. But its shadow is still impenetrable and reassuring; and as we get out of the bakkie, Anna and I, I involuntarily stop to stare up into the tangle of branches above where so many years ago, on Sunday afternoons when we were supposed to sleep in the oppressive heat, I would entice one of my more intrepid male cousins (not always the same one) to clamber about, vying with the darting birds for the highest brightest berries; and in the top branches, protected by the foliage, giggling and deftly balancing, we’d strip off our clothes and indulge in the daring, immemorial experimentations and explorations of the precocious, hands and bodies sticky and slippery with the secretions of the fruit of that wise old tree; and if, as it invariably happened, sooner or later, someone emerged from the front door and passed underneath, we’d try to pee on them from on high, a precarious undertaking for which the cousin’s equipment proved decidedly more precise in its aim than mine.
Anna refuses to get out with me and remains sulking in the bakkie. (The children have stayed at home, already thoroughly disillusioned with their intractable aunt.) She has remained dead against the ideaa of this visit. And Casper supported her, during those disturbing few minutes last night when he was home between two sorties of his commando that behaved more like a gang of boisterous boys preparing for a picnic or a hunt than grown men bent on the business of death. ‘If you absolutely must, then wait till I can send a couple of my men with you. The bastards that blew up your grandmother’s place – we have reason to believe they’re disaffected MK terrorists. They’re not to be toyed with, I tell you. A woman on her own’ – a knowing wink – ‘and such a woman too.’
That was yesterday. This morning Anna pretended to have forgotten about my request, and it was only when I threatened to drive here on my own that she brought me, making it very clear that she disapproved.
‘There’s no need at all for you to come,’ I reasoned with her. ‘As a matter of fact I’d much prefer to go on my own.’
‘It’s not safe,’ she said curtly. To my dismay she put a pistol and a small box of cartridges in the cubbyhole.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked.
She looked at me as if I were daft: ‘You can’t even think of driving without a gun these days.’
‘Is that what Casper says?’
She glanced at me, on the defensive. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondered.’
‘I tell you it’s dangerous,’ she insisted.
‘Do you really know how to use it?’
‘Of course, I’ve been taking lessons for almost a year now.’ A touch of pride: ‘Actually I’m quite good.’ For a brief moment there was more life in her voice. ‘Would you like me to teach you?’
‘Most certainly not,’ I said. ‘Can we go now, please?’
And here we are.
What disturbs me is the silence, as if all this enormity of space surrounding us is holding its breath. At first I cannot explain it, but then it strikes me. Of course: the birds. This whole place used to ring with their presence, their twitterings and screeches and squawks and calls a never-ceasing din in one’s ears, as if the sky above were a vast upturned bowl amplifying all sound below. And now it has fallen silent; the birds have fled, leaving only emptiness in their wake.
Unnerved, but unwilling to show Anna how it has affected me, I muster up some courage to proceed. As I approach through the trees, stooping below the branches which have clearly not been trimmed for years, I see the palace looming. In the excitement of the first sight it seems unscathed. And even if it appears, somehow, less outrageous in its proportions than I have remembered it, the rediscovery of that splendid façade with its towers and turrets, its architectural excesses, makes my heart jump. It is true after all! This is no dream or memory, but something all too real. As real as the shocking damage the place has suffered. For now, from closer by, I have a full view of the scarred wing to the right of the front entrance: these must be the rooms into which Ouma Kristina moved some years ago, after my departure, as her increasing frailty made it more difficult to continue climbing the stairs to the top floor she used to inhabit. The new room presumably overlooked the stoep where the worst damage has been done: the verandah lies collapsed in a heap of rubble; above it gape the blackened skeletal openings of doors and windows; one balustrade hangs at an angle from high above; the whole façade is covered in soot and grime.
The strange thing is that it makes me feel guilty, as if in some inexplicable way I am to blame; as if I’m an intruder in the one place that used to be my sanctuary from a world with which all too often I felt at odds. And the guilt gives rise to fear; Anna’s dire warnings about lurking terrorists no longer seem quite as far-fetched as before. What if there really are intruders inside, ready to follow up the senselessness of their outrage with still more violence? Yet the very fear makes it necessary to investigate. It is, I suspect, the same urge that once provoked me into leading midnight excursions with as many cousins as could be mustered down into the cellar with its ghosts or up into the attic where the coffins stood on their trestles. Do the thing you dread. So I follow the trail of destruction round the ruin of the right wing to the back.
The outbuildings – sheds, barns, stables, dairy, garage – appear unscathed, though in a sad state of disrepair. Through a missing plank in the garage door I can see a glint of black and chrome. My God, the hearse. I’ve forgotten about it. Oupa used to drive a Pontiac as big as the Titanic, also black, but when he died, in the hospital in Cape Town, she bought this Chrysler hearse, second-hand, to transport the body back home. She could never stand trains. ‘They don’t stop where you want to be, and they make
you get off where you don’t want to be,’ was her cryptic explanation. That was the only time in her life she drove a car; she’d never had a licence. And she enjoyed the ‘feel’ of the grand old Chrysler so much that after the funeral she sold the car and kept the hearse. She didn’t drive again, though, but instructed the farm’s foreman and factotum, Jeremiah, to bedeck himself in white dust coat and leather gloves and drive her when necessary, whether to town, or to friends in the district, or upon occasion even the four hundred or so kilometres to Cape Town.
Amused, and somehow reassured as well, I move on. In the dairy the separator still stands; in my mind I can hear the clinging of its rhythmic bell. It is comforting to find these signs of continuing life. But the back of the house itself looks terrible. It is hard to believe that anyone has lived here in recent years. The scullery door hangs from its hinges, an oversized charred slice of Melba toast. Inside, I find the kitchen flooded in black water, testifying to the eager incompetence of the fire brigade. I take off my shoes and turn up my jeans. Gingerly I step into that dark space, hesitate for a while, almost hoping to hear Anna’s voice calling me back, then venture into the nearest passage. At that moment a scream reverberates through the place, so loudly, and so close, that I exclaim in fear. And a flash of electric blue and green comes fluttering past me into the blinding daylight outside. A peacock. A burst of hysterical laughter racks me. It takes several minutes for the shock to subside. I take a cigarette from my shirt pocket; for a moment the flare blinds me. At last, my eyes now more accustomed to the gloom, I set out on my exploration, reclaiming from memory one room after the other, along what remains of the ground floor, then down a crumbling staircase to the sprawling cellar (there is no electricity left, but I have the ludicrously brave little flare of my lighter to guide me down); then upstairs again, from floor to floor, expecting at every moment the scurrying movement or the warning sound that will, if I am lucky, precede attack, the proverbial fate worse than death. But it doesn’t come, and from one improbable room or hall or landing or nook to the next I proceed, stopping frequently to retrace some steps with the hope of surprising a pursuer; until I reach the attic where a single premonitory coffin still waits patiently in the cobwebbed light from the narrow dust-covered windows. Ghosts? I giggle like the girl I used to be: if one were to confront me now or try to sidle past I’ll brush it aside and Ouma will be proud of me.
