The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Ondien’s suitcases are being packed by the maids. Mrs Nyathi insisted. They are swift and able, their movements between cupboard and four-poster stirring the drapings. (‘A packing and unpacking service is part of what we offer,’ said Mrs Nyathi. Nobody offered to pack for Beauty and Nungi.)

  Ondien walks through the house with her kwela whistle, abstractedly testing tunes. She sinks into the low-slung sofa on the veranda. The whistle drops from her mouth. Bones, small soft bones, crunch below her. She jumps up, picking up the little dog (is it Trixie or Mixie?). The eyes are open, but there is no sound.

  ‘Whimper, little dog, or at least move!’

  Beauty is standing in the door, hand over her mouth. Ondien turns away. She holds the dog under its stomach, feeling the little bones one by one. An interrupted trickle of urine is dripping on the sofa. She gingerly puts the dachshund down on the floor. From the village the noise of soccer applause is rising. For a brief moment everything looks fine, but no – the hind body is dragging uselessly. Trixie whimpers softly once and then lies down.

  Ondien wants to take Beauty inside, but Mrs Nyathi has appeared in the door. She looks at the little dog, lying in a puddle of urine.

  ‘Mrs Nyathi, I’m so sorry, I didn’t notice …’

  Mrs Nyathi picks up the dachshund, looks it in the eye. ‘Trixie?’ she asks, as if the dog can answer.

  Trixie is hanging limply, not reacting to anything. But there is still breath. A paw is quivering. Mrs Nyathi shrugs her shoulders. Ondien cannot gauge her expression.

  ‘To sing for her won’t help,’ Mrs Nyathi says, as if Ondien had offered. ‘I’ve seen death in that hospital where I used to work. This one won’t make it.’

  Beauty wants to hold Trixie, but Mrs Nyathi keeps the dog out of her reach. She climbs down the steps to the veranda and disappears around the corner of the house.

  ‘Leave it, Beauty, there’s nothing more we can do.’

  The taxi is being loaded by the garden gate. Ondien is supervising Mrs Nyathi’s maids, who are carrying their sound equipment from a storeroom in the backyard. What is left of Trixie is visible in the long grass. Next to it, the wooden plank with which the dog’s skull was crushed is glinting.

  From the veranda behind them Mrs Nyathi is waving. They watch her standing there until they have turned the corner. Only once they have crossed the border into Lesotho does Beauty take Mixie out from under a small blanket in her carry bag.

  ‘Beauty! How could you? And the poor thing has almost suffocated.’ Ondien takes the dog from her. ‘Can’t turn around now, we’ll have to take her along and bring her back.’

  She is suddenly feeling lighter, happy about the little dog’s body in their midst. The three of them look at each other in turn, stroking the long spine. Nungi laughs brightly. Here, on the other side of the border, a greater sense of freedom is washing over them than they have felt since returning to the country. An old familiarity between them is returning.

  The higher they drive into the mountains, the cooler the air becomes. Outside there are kraals with thatched huts, streams in which melted water rushes. They drive past a blind man. He prods the air with his walking stick as if wanting to feel them, his eyes like silver coins.

  The large (and largely male) turn-out may have something to do with the printing error on the poster: Victorian Naked Ladies’ Society, it reads on the lampposts along the main street, on the gate in front of the hall and above the hall’s entrance. Ondien shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘Go with the flow,’ says Nungi.

  ‘Hopefully that doesn’t mean you’re going to comply!’ Ondien says. They laugh.

  The venue is located in the only street with streetlights. The audience is a hodge-podge. Entertainment is a rarity here. Shiny young people from the town wearing two-tone shoes or Nikes. Men arrive from the hills with blankets around their shoulders, ponies tied to lamp posts. A few broad-bottomed women with children sleeping on their backs after a day tilling the fields.

  The local promoter is nowhere to be found. There is only one ticket-seller and no one to help set up the equipment. Ondien tries in vain to reach the sound engineer on her phone. He arrives twenty minutes late. It is not clear that he understands Ondien’s instructions.

  Without collaborating musicians, the sound tonight is thin. Ondien is doing her best with the kwela whistle and the saxophone. Beauty and Nungi each have a harmonica. Otherwise the performance is vintage VNLS. Initially, Ondien experiences the familiar discomfort: she is the only white face. It is only when she decides that she is entitled to her white fears, that they are not unfounded, that she starts relaxing. She is assessing the audience, finely calibrating the performance. Nungi and Beauty are observing her carefully – without appearing to do so – and adjusting their actions cheerily. Ondien makes her concessions to the audience, allows them to recognise rhythms. The traditional South African elements are foregrounded this evening, the wide register of influences from North and West Africa are tempered. Then, when she has got them, when they start dancing unguardedly, she cannot help but pounce. She reacts with a left-field improvisation, lets confusion wash over the hall. Beauty and Nungi lose her for a few seconds, but then fall seamlessly into line. Ondien keeps Beauty in the corner of her eye. Her forearms are as thin as sticks – getting thinner with each performance since Paris.

  Ondien’s eye is caught by a man standing utterly still at the edge of the light. A white man. She looks at his shoulders, losing her rhythm and voice for a moment. The audience stops dancing. They wait; after half a minute, they start fidgeting. She cuts the performance short. The evening has been long enough. When she walks off the stage, the other two following her, the audience just stands there in silence. The microphone whistles.

  He approaches her outside, behind the hall. In his khaki shorts, his legs brown in the white light that is emanating from the hall, he looks like a farmer from the Free State, one of those men who drive white pickup trucks beyond the northern border, where she also grew up. There is a vague smell of engine oil in the air.

  ‘I don’t understand much of what you, or you’ – he looks at Nungi and then at Beauty, who is standing with Mixie in her arms – ‘do. But you’ve entertained this bunch, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’ he asks when they fail to respond.

  Ondien looks at the other two. Beauty presses her cheek against the dog’s. It was the presumed power in those upper legs, Ondien later thought, and the set of perfect teeth, that made her ignore Nungi’s expression, and Beauty’s hesitancy.

  ‘Hendrik,’ he says. Only Ondien takes the hand he holds out. The next morning in the shower her hand will still smell of oil.

  Ondien’s skull vibrates against the Land Rover’s window. Heavy tools press against her feet.

  ‘It’s midnight, we have to sleep over somewhere,’ she said to Beauty and Nungi, shrugging her shoulders, when Hendrik was out of earshot earlier. ‘Do you really want to trek all the way back to Nyathi’s place?’

  Nungi was glowering. Beauty was counting Mixie’s vertebrae. Before Ondien could confirm, Hendrik had already started to load the sound equipment into the Land Rover. She did not ask where or how far. Ondien let the taxi, which was waiting to take them back to Vloedspruit, go.

  Nobody speaks. They are going higher and higher, Hendrik’s forearm on the gear like an extension of the engine. Ondien is becoming lighter in the dark, and increasingly blind. When the road starts getting rough, memories shake loose. Before Lesotho there were the small South African towns. Before the towns there was Cape Town. And, before Cape Town, there was Paris. Before Paris, London. But it is in Paris where her mind now lingers. And with Thierry.

  After she turned her back on the academic world of music in London (the loose threads of her unfinished PhD – The Role of Dance and Ritual in the Polyphonic and Polyrhythmic Construction of Traditional Zulu Music – she had decided, could not be tied together), Ondien arrived in Paris, penniless. She
had met Beauty and Nungi during a previous research trip to KwaZulu-Natal. Their voices were already on a few recordings that she had added to the SOAS music library’s collection. They accepted her invitation to Paris exuberantly. Thierry, a Parisian world music promoter, was a contact of a contact at SOAS.

  A friend of Thierry’s was in Mali for a year. The three of them could stay in the friend’s flat in the eighteenth arrondissement. Over beers and falafels from a Turkish takeaway, the three South Africans conceived VNLS one evening. Later she would remember VNLS as her idea, Thierry would as his.

  It was not long before she and Thierry were bathing in each other’s sweat between his sheets in his Marais appartement. These were the days when, enveloped by a sheet and fog, she could still walk out onto his balcony above the roofs and catch a glimpse of new and promising seasons. Into which currents of her thoughts did Thierry tap so powerfully? she later wondered. Why did she plunge into things so mindlessly? She imagined it was something to do with the mystique surrounding things continental in her Free State childhood, with her mother’s thwarted dream of a singing career in European opera houses. Interwoven with this was her obsession with music cultures. She was impressed by the years that Thierry had spent in the heart of the music scenes in Senegal and Algeria, by his experience in the Parisian world music scene. She was tired of her lonely attempts to write art music in an academic sphere, the marginal pseudo-radical performances with student musicians in university auditoriums. All with such deadpan sincerity. Thierry would help her make music rather than theorise about it. The real thing, la vraie chose. And she was, of course, moved by the fact that he, in his way, in his world, through associations that she could barely understand or suspect, was clearly moved by her.

  Ondien looks around. In the back of the Land Rover she can make out Nungi’s head on Beauty’s shoulder. Beauty’s eyes are shining.

  Hendrik looks at Ondien. ‘Almost there.’

  She holds her watch right before her eyes. Two o’clock. Where on God’s earth is he taking them? Hendrik’s teeth are white in the dark. She can hear the little dog panting. She can smell its urine. She does not look around again.

  VNLS’s first performances were in tiny clubs africains. In these places, with their walls of velvet and names like Zouzou or Boum-Boum in neon above the entrances, it felt like 1971. They had to steer towards the little stages between women from further up north in Africa, women with chocolate skins, stretched limbs, platform shoes and Afros. The air was thick and rich, the bodies as smooth and fluid as oil. These nights of glowing cocktails were not the Africa that Ondien knew. It made her skin tingle. For the first time since her student performances for connoisseurs in auditoriums, she could do something again, rather than just write or think. And it was the real thing. Beauty and Nungi thrived. Their rhythms became slippery, their voices sweeter and stranger.

  After a few weeks, Thierry moved their performances to mainstream places, in the sixth or eleventh arrondissements, their audiences now predominantly white. Musique et la danse Zouloues, the posters and handbills announced. Beauty and Nungi’s performances were suddenly muted. The intimacy and the intoxication of the clubs africains were lost. After the first performance, she objected to et la danse.

  ‘We sing,’ she said.

  Thierry shrugged his shoulders, his mouth drooping – his most characteristic gesture, she soon realised.

  ‘What is it that these two sexy girls do, then?’ He pointed to Beauty and Nungi.

  Midnight, on his balcony, after the second performance, she said: ‘But it’s not just musique Zouloue, it’s more complex. You’re putting us in a box.’

  ‘Tone down the improvisations,’ he said, ‘and the digressions. You are losing the audience. Keep it simple.’

  Several performances and similar conversations later, Thierry decided it was time to reconsider the image and the approach. He wanted to start with the name, but Ondien would not budge. VNLS it had to be. He wanted to elevate the comédie, and the sensualité.

  ‘We’re trying to entertain here,’ he said. ‘How to defuse the seriousness, bring some levity, that’s the question. How to find the lieu du désir in your audience. Think of Josephine Baker. Think of the two girls—’

  ‘They have names, Beauty and Nungi.’

  ‘Think of Beauty and Nungi in Josephine Baker banana skirts – before you say anything, think of that iconic image, how powerful allusions to it are. In ironic fashion, of course. We have to think: what is our greatest asset, what lures people to VNLS shows?’

  He took a photograph from his pocket, put it down on the table: Beauty and Nungi in full swing, hips and breasts swollen and glistening in the stage light.

  ‘We’ve never wanted to be an ethnic curiosity; the girls are not the Saartjie Baartmans of the music world. Our stuff is meant to be subversive, an attack on the system.’

  He shook his head. ‘You South Africans are too caught up in the snares of your own little political tale. Too serious, too pudibonde. You don’t get the La Baker phenomenon. She was more, much more, than a petite danseuse sauvage. What I’m proposing is in the spirit of the times; the audience will understand what we’re playing with.’

  ‘That’s not what I want to do. Or Beauty and Nungi.’

  He sat back, inhaled the last smoke from his cigarette. ‘So, now you’re speaking on their behalf?’ He shot the cigarette through the window, across the roofs. ‘What you want to do, Ondien, is not important. The question is: do you want to play or not?’

  They changed course, developing the Josephine Baker act, just like Thierry wanted. He was in full control of the production. He sat there every day, in the second row of the empty theatre. Beauty and Nungi did what was expected of them, unperturbed. The ideas went beyond the La Baker imagery, became more layered. The stage set-up, the concept, was now that of a circus – Ondien as tamer, la maîtresse de spectacle. The other two women paraded as skittish, wild dancers with wide eyes, banana skirts and necklaces made of the fangs of wild dogs. A musical with black Betty Boop twins from the tropics. Ondien felt her aversion intensifying.

  She was spending her nights in the flat in the eighteenth with Beauty and Nungi again. The evening before the première she arrived on Thierry’s doorstep.

  ‘Naked commerce is the driving force in your world, isn’t it? That and your ego. Your cynicism is starting to make me hate the stage!’

  ‘I must give them what they want.’ Shoulders pulled up, mouth drooping. ‘The French want fun, their taste is sophisticated.’

  ‘Sophisticated!?’ she shouted. ‘There are world music festivals in this city where unexpected things happen. There one gets glimpses of sophistication. In your little theatres I see nothing of it. Just humiliation. For me it’s about irony, about delicate play, for you it’s about idiotic nostalgie de la boue!’

  ‘I haven’t got state funding to promote obscure and childish experiments. I must make a living! The market is the market!’ Palms turned upwards. His expression changed, his hands slipping around her buttocks. ‘Come on, Ondien, stay here tonight. The girls may be yours, but you are mine.’

  She pushed his hands away and walked down the five flights to the street. She did not look up at the light emanating from his balcony.

  Tonight everything will change, she thought when she walked into the silvery limelight on the opening night. Now she could swim freely, she knew, like in an ocean. For a moment she considered sabotaging it all, but then looked at Beauty and Nungi. She held back, did what she had to. It was their evening, Beauty and Nungi’s.

  The Zulu women’s skins shone, the audience responded. The opening scene is set in an unidentified landscape near the equator. Ondien has to crack the whip above the supposedly terrified native girls’ heads. She chases the sexy, ululating little barbarians into a cage to be taken away across the ocean, to the frozen north, their eyes white and big. The second scene is set on the ship. A storm is raging, the girls are panic-stricken in their cage of rough-h
ewn wooden poles. In an effort to dispel their fears, they start singing and dancing. A young sailor hears them and is instantly enchanted by the vitality, the wild abandon. He attempts a stiff little dance of his own next to the cage, on the slippery, tilting deck. (The unoiled stage machinery grumbles when it makes the ship sway.) In Paris the two girls become wretched exhibitions in Ondien’s cruel circus. The dancing sailor wins a lot of money in a drunken game of dice and becomes the owner of a Parisian entertainment hall. He attends a circus performance and takes pity on the girls. He wants to buy them, offers a good price, then doubles it, but the circus mistress refuses. (‘Go to the Tropics and catch your own, monsieur! These two I tamed myself.’)

  To cut a long story short: with the help of a bunch of muscled fellow sailors – as queer as well-hung models in Jean Paul Gaultier outfits – the entertainment-hall owner frees the girls one night. Ondien’s fuming character summons the gendarmes. By the time the two girls are found, they are singing and dancing proudly, bewitchingly, as Les Deux Sauvages in Parisian concert halls – darlings, now, of the French public, who can, at last, imagine natural rhythms throbbing through their own rigid bodies again. When the gendarmes interrupt a performance to capture the girls, the audience’s noble, untamed instincts are revived. Rioting and violence threaten. The gendarmes and the sadistic circus mistress are forced to retreat. From the distant Tropics an ancient force has been channelled. The girls have been released from their bonds of slavery by their exotic talents. When the circus fails, Ondien’s character falls into abject poverty. Humiliated and begging, she comes to seek mercy at the feet of the two chanteuses …

  Afterwards they – or, rather, Thierry and Nungi –finished off several bottles of Algerian and Lebanese red wine in an over-lit restaurant.