The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  A storm is building outside the open bedroom windows. Ondien is tossing and turning amidst billowing satin. She gets up, creeps across creaking floorboards towards the veranda. She stands in the wind, looking out. A backward little frontier town. At the top of the slope is an official building, a school or college of some kind. Then there is this ramshackle nineteenth-century house where they are staying, Bella Gardens, with its ornamental ironwork below the veranda ceiling. Probably an old farmhouse. Otherwise the village consists of shacks that seem to be perpetually washing away. There is nothing here. She has to laugh at herself, stuck in this outpost. She allows herself a flash of memory of her former Parisian life, but stops once she starts thinking about Thierry.

  Something is moving at the edge of the veranda. The dachshunds’ little bodies stir where they are lying under a chair, as if Mrs Nyathi’s feet have been left behind, disembodied. Sleepily the two trot into the house, one behind the other, to snuggle up under Mrs Nyathi’s sheets.

  Ondien stands with an index finger in one ear, cellphone against the other. Inside, Mrs Nyathi has put on another record. The record player is built into a high-gloss wooden cabinet, like a coffin. Their Mistress’s Voice. Miriam Makeba is singing. For their presumed enjoyment. Hers and Beauty’s and Nungi’s. ‘Amampondo!’ Makeba sings, and there is heaving and clicking, heaving and clicking. The throat, the intestines and the knotting stomach muscles: all flesh serving the rhythm, inducing hypnosis.

  ‘What about the sound system and the sound engineer? Did you get my email with the mock-up of the poster?!’

  Beauty is sitting on the veranda step, listening to Ondien’s side of the conversation. Mrs Nyathi is stroking the dogs on her lap. Trixie and Mixie, they are called, she informed Ondien the first evening. ‘Got them last month. Some pleasant company. It’s lonely for a widow here in the mountains.’

  ‘Wait, give it to me. I understand the language.’ Nungi wants to take the phone from Ondien. Ondien turns away. Miriam Makeba is becoming louder, more insistent – one of Mrs Nyathi’s maids is turning up the volume inside. The phone cuts out.

  ‘Bloody telephone lines in Lesotho!’ Ondien says, and rolls her eyes. ‘The goats probably chew them to shreds. Just have to hope for the best. And drag as much of our gear with us as we can.’

  In two days’ time they are performing in Lesotho. About half an hour’s drive by taxi, their hostess informs them. She looks as if she wants to go along, does Mrs Nyathi; as if she has not felt music in her limbs for some time.

  ‘It’s “Pata Pata” time!’ Mrs Nyathi shouts out with Makeba, her eyes now screwed shut in entrancement. Trixie lifts her wrinkly neck and slurps little mouthfuls of whisky from Mrs Nyathi’s glass.

  Ondien submits to the waiting, to the forlornness of the little village. One afternoon she walks down the slope, through all the poverty, to the flood plain by the river. Fish are lying on the ground after the previous night’s floods, barbels flapping in the mud. Children are running around, collecting fish in plastic shopping bags, touching Ondien’s hands as they pass. She smiles, not really present, hands out a few coins.

  She is happy to be here, on the edge of everything. She could only stomach the Cape Town music scene for a few months. Initially it provided a shot of energy after London and Paris’s insincere politeness. New influences made the VNLS sound even more complex, more chaotic. The music had found a new niche. Or, rather, new niches to smash. Her music – she, after all, is VNLS’s image-maker and driving force; Nungi and Beauty have the voices and the rhythm, but they just follow.

  Earlier, VNLS’s sound was a reasonably coherent fusion of Western club music with instrumentation from North and West Africa, with kwaito and township elements in between. Gradually, they had to start packaging and underplaying the éléments exotiques – the multitude of influences – to retain their mainly white Parisian audiences. Ethnic was passable, as long as the listeners could make them out, in a recognisable way, to be Zoulous. In Cape Town the elements multiplied swiftly: Nigerian soul layered over London electro-pop, influences of ragga. A little funk and hip-hop. Lyrics in Cape Afrikaans. The musicians with whom they collaborated rotated as fast as the music mutated. There was a brief Cape gang-rap phase, but Beauty was too scared to work alone into the small hours in grubby Long Street studios with the men with their golden teeth and prison tattoos. Ondien started listening to Lucky Dube again, Yvonne Chaka-Chaka and Brenda Fassie. She listened further and further back into history. A long time had passed since abandoning her academic interest in ethnomusicology, but now she was listening to kwela and marabi again, was singing along to early Mahotella Queens, starting to make a thorough study of mbaqanga from the 1760s. She pushed her ear right up against the speaker. The old recordings crackled with static.

  After one of their Cape Town performances, a record company representative came up to her. He ignored Beauty and Nungi and looked Ondien in the eyes.

  ‘Some astonishing moments and sounds,’ was his judgement, ‘but it doesn’t gel, there’s no identity. A hodge-podge. There’s something we could work with, though. I like the ethnic thing.’

  He offered to buy drinks, but looked annoyed when the other two did not want to come along. It turned out his intention was an intimate drink in his hotel room. For the three of them.

  ‘I think you are misunderstanding the complexity of our intentions.’ Ondien’s tone was as chilly as only a European could manage – her lessons had been learned in the wintry north.

  The multitude of sounds milling inside her skull had unpredictable – and probably irreconcilable – influences on VNLS’s music. Her own musical reactions became unpredictable too. Sometimes they would hit upon a chord or stanza that suddenly made her choke on her tears. Initially, she thought she might be approaching cacophony, but when she closed her eyes and listened more deeply, she could make out prime chords behind the noise. Something that was gravitating back, to the beginning. She reminded herself that she was unable to endure anything other than skimming over the surface of this country; that this was the reason for her original departure. To make the music move forward, she had to avoid origins. She had suddenly become averse to Cape Town cool, to the city itself. Whenever Ondien noticed VNLS’s audience getting going with the dancing, she would improvise, working against her own rhythms and melodies. On impulse, she would harden her ear and interlace small quotes from ancestral music. The high priests of European bloodlessness were honoured in this manner. Precise little fragments of Schoenberg or Webern would find their place. Alien in the bright sunlight. She insisted on translating English lyrics into Afrikaans and Zulu, combining the Afrikaans with the most unresolved, self-cannibalising music – songs that were pulling apart at the seams. Their performances descended into exquisite chaos. Fellow musicians stormed off the stage. Audiences booed. Beauty and Nungi kept dancing in their Zulu skirts with apparent joy, singing into their microphones.

  Their last night was a perfect Cape Town November evening: everything shimmering, perpetually moving, something nervous in the air. But how absurd the city looked to her when she and Beauty and Nungi returned to their hotel room after the performance – this city with its wild oceans and sandy flats, its corrugated-iron shacks in the fog, its self-satisfied enclaves with neo-modernist villas cantilevered over the waves. She stood there, looking out from the balcony on the eleventh floor, and thought: it’s time to go. As always, Beauty and Nungi followed. For a few months thereafter, they stayed in guest houses and down-at-heel hotels in villages in the Western Cape and Free State, played where they could, for white as well as black audiences. They were penniless, and had to support themselves with what, after their Parisian adventure, Ondien had left of a modest inheritance from her parents. Ondien adjusted the music according to where they were. She was as nimble as a fox, reading audiences and veering in new directions. (A rousserolle verderolle, Thierry called her between his sheets in his Marais appartement shortly after they had met: a marsh warbler, the migrati
ng northern bird that can impersonate seventy species from Africa.) By this time, Beauty and Nungi knew her so well that they could follow seamlessly.

  The white audiences were suspicious. Art-festival types: thin-lipped parents with obstreperous children, important women with important hair, thirty-something yuppies with German-style spectacle frames, acned teenagers misinterpreting the fashions of more civilised parts of the world, clean-faced Free State university students. Mostly Afrikaans-speaking, sometimes with cynical expressions when commenting behind their hands amidst the noise. Even though Ondien felt strange here – kept herself strange – the sense of menace that she would sometimes experience in front of black township audiences was absent. There she had to wear the ‘ethnic thing’ like a mask to outface the listeners until, at last, she could reach them. It took something for a white woman to soften them, to render them defenceless enough to be entertained.

  The first Christmas back in South Africa Ondien spent with Beauty and Nungi. Ondien’s parents had died two years earlier, within two weeks of each other. She could attend only her father’s funeral. It was to be her last visit to the farm where she grew up. She had hardly set foot back in London when her mother collapsed over her little gardening fork in a bed of nasturtiums. Ondien could not afford to fly back again. Shortly after her mother’s death the farm was sold.

  The only family member still left in South Africa was her sister Vera. In an Italian-style villa in Bryanston with security cameras in the garden. But only just: she and her husband were spending most of their time on business trips to Dubai, the children looked after by au pairs. The last time Ondien saw them was at the funeral. They wanted to establish themselves in Dubai as soon as possible, they explained over and over again.

  ‘Not that different to this place,’ Vera said, gold flashing on her fingers. ‘Just safer. Sunshine. Homes the same size. Swimming pools. International schools, tax advantages. It’s not really all that strict either. Westerners are allowed to drink alcohol. And you hardly need have anything to do with Arabs.’

  No, she would not be spending Christmas with Vera. Vera did not even know that she was back in the country. And, who knows, perhaps the tide had turned, perhaps Vera and co had decided, after all, to make cultural concessions and give up Christmas, in anticipation of their utopian existence in the Middle East.

  Her brother the banker she had seen only once when she was still in London, in a restaurant filled with City men in suits. The place made her feel frumpy. Her kaftan with ornamental stitching around the neck was a mistake. She found herself wondering whether she smelled of the small grey nest of a council flat that she shared in South London with a Ghanaian photographer and a Japanese ballet dancer.

  ‘When will you be moving on from the academic stuff?’ Cornelius wanted to know. ‘There’s a big world out there, you know. You have talent. You could easily requalify in, say, finance or law.’

  When she tried getting in touch again afterwards, a series of women – secretaries or lovers – answered his phone each time, explaining that he was travelling. He was either in Tokyo or Moscow, in São Paulo or Sydney.

  Her younger sister, Zelda, was in Phoenix. She was divorced from her psychopathic American husband. The psychopath was unemployed and she had to support him. The American courts had forbidden her to take the child out of the country for more than two weeks per year. Zelda would not be able to return to South Africa. Ondien had not spoken to her since their father’s funeral. Zelda had been so run-down by her working life, the long flight and her maladjusted, brutal child with his Arizona accent that they had exchanged no more than a few sentences, and half of it in English. It had surprised her how Zelda’s Afrikaans had become diluted. Ondien was sad about Zelda. They had been bosom sisters in their youth, just two years apart. Walking together from the farm to the village school in the mornings, they had always smoked a cigarette on the sly in the red grass. On one such morning, Zelda had accidentally set Ondien’s sleeve alight. The burn was still visible on her arm. Yes, she missed Zelda. But she was also grateful that Satan’s child was trapped in America. She had no desire herself ever to set foot on that continent, and the ocean between her and that little psychopath was hardly wide enough.

  So, over Christmas it was just them: she and Beauty and Nungi. They were in the Karoo, having rented a small cottage on a farm. The farmer and his wife cast each other furtive glances, trying to figure out the relationship between the three of them. Ondien cooked a goose that she had bought from the farmer’s wife, stroking the scar on her upper arm absent-mindedly as she stood in front of the stove.

  ‘You are now my family,’ Ondien said later, as they were eating, and lifted her glass.

  A moment after she said it, she sensed that her tone had been misplaced. It was as if the false note reverberated for the rest of the evening, as if it made the air ebb and flow all night. One moment they were strangers to each other, the next sisters, then strangers again. Ondien kept rubbing the scar on her arm and smiling. She slipped out at one point and brought back some painkillers for Beauty. The evening did not stay still for a moment. One moment she was too close to Beauty, then too far away again. Nungi held out her greasy plate for more goose meat, then pulled it back, resentful that it was Ondien who was dishing it out. Her two companions drank so much wine that they fell asleep on the couches. From where Ondien was sitting on the rug, they looked like cadavers.

  ‘My sisters,’ she said out loud, and her voice was strange. The red wine had made her melancholy. She was alone in this morgue, and outside the Karoo sky was clear and merciless. She took the pain pills that Beauty had left on the coffee table.

  ‘You’re only the second white woman to stay in my guest house,’ Mrs Nyathi says on the veranda after dinner. The dachshunds, it turns out, have bladder-control problems. The two lie leaking on the chairs, leaving behind damp spots that filter through to the buttocks of unsuspecting sitters. While nodding at Mrs Nyathi, Ondien suddenly feels the damp warmth below her. She glares at the two dogs on Mrs Nyathi’s lap.

  ‘The other woman was a nurse who studied here at the college,’ Mrs Nyathi continues. She puffs on her cigar. ‘Things aren’t looking good for her. She lives near the lodge where you’re playing after your Lesotho gig.’

  Gig falls strangely on Mrs Nyathi’s tongue, too youthful a word for her. Ondien cannot get her head around this woman. But she imagines the confusion is mutual.

  ‘Who is my predecessor and why aren’t things looking good for her?’

  ‘She’s gone back to Venterstad. She does things that white women don’t normally do. She cares for the sick and for orphans. Near that lodge. But that’s a different story.’

  Mrs Nyathi lets the smoke hang between them. She says nothing more.

  The dampness spreads across Ondien’s backside. The isolation in Vloedspruit and Mrs Nyathi’s hypnotic presence are making her want to stay. She is in no mood for the gig in Lesotho or the one following that. Somewhere in the godforsaken Eastern Cape, she told Mrs Nyathi last night, there is an extravagant private game reserve, Twilight Lodge, where VNLS has been invited to play in two weeks’ time. The Lesotho gig is a minor distraction along the way. One of Ondien’s former professors at the School of Oriental and African Studies was a middle-aged ex-South African who had, after years of exile, got stuck in London, but had long-standing, albeit fading, ANC connections. He had recommended her. A national soccer team staying at the lodge after the World Cup would apparently have to be entertained. And there would be plenty of VIPs, of that she was assured repeatedly and emphatically. Government people, industrialists, Black Economic Empowerment types, of course, and celebrities. The invitation impressed on her what an immense privilege it was to be performing at this historic occasion. A token white is required, she suspects, to put European soccer players at ease, but one picked by hand – someone with the right credentials, who embraces Africa with the appropriate conspicuousness. She smiles wryly. She does not think her hosts have t
he vaguest clue what is awaiting them.

  Mrs Nyathi lifts Trixie, rubs her own nose back and forth over the dog’s muzzle.

  ‘Yes,’ she says and screws up her face, ‘you and Mixie are Mommy’s toys, hey? Here for me to play with.’

  Trixie wriggles. Mrs Nyathi lets her settle in next to Mixie on the knee blanket.

  Beauty joins Ondien and Mrs Nyathi. She sits down painfully, aware of each joint. Mixie jumps off Mrs Nyathi’s lap and stands up, paws against Beauty’s leg. She picks up the little body, presses it to her stomach. From Mrs Nyathi’s lap, Trixie licks the cigar balanced on the rim of the ashtray. She pulls her nose back sharply. Mrs Nyathi puckers her lips, lifts the dog so that it may lick her mouth.

  Ondien leans over to Beauty in the half-dark and touches her hand. Beauty pulls back.

  ‘Shall I get some pills?’ Ondien whispers.

  Beauty shakes her head.

  Music becomes audible inside, spreading like light across the veranda. It is Nungi, playing one of Mrs Nyathi’s records. Youssou N’Dour, the little prince from Dakar. Nungi appears in the door, belting it out with the music. She tries to get Ondien to dance with her. Ondien first resists, then surrenders. She sees how Mrs Nyathi’s fingers and fat little toes start moving, sees how the older woman wishes it were she that Nungi was sweeping across the veranda like a lover.

  At night, when she struggles to sleep, Ondien sits up in her bed for long periods. Tonight is such a night. The voice of Youssou N’Dour is still ringing in her head. She tries to bend it into something else, but it evades her attempts. Yet another storm is building up outside her bedroom window. She touches the satin draping. Their stay here feels so provisional – a trip that has failed to start properly, that cannot get going. On reflection, she realises it is in fact a trip that has lost momentum. There is almost nowhere left to go.