David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  Today Sally is clairvoyant; she beats the haft of her knife on the table and shouts, Let’s think about ourselves for a change. Then, noting his bemused look, revises it to, Let’s feel sorry for me, the one who doesn’t know what’s going on in her own house.

  He has no idea of what she means. He has not noted her reserve of the past few days, so that the outburst takes him by surprise. He has no stomach for this kind of talk.

  Shu-ut, he soothes, don’t shout.

  Why, have we turned white or something that we no longer can speak loudly? I will shout and shout until you come clean about your trip. You’ve been lying to me. Why won’t you say what it’s all about, where you’re going, and why—she lowers her voice—and with whom?

  Really, he does not understand such an uncharacteristic outburst. Sally knows that questions are out of order, that she should not know anything about his missions; having been a cadre herself, she has never had any problem with secrecy. But this time, and he shakes his head, this time with the trip being primarily a private matter, he has in fact not concealed anything. Whatever could the matter be with her? Women, he silently exclaims, throwing his eyes heavenward according to custom.

  I have told you everything there is to tell. That it’s been suggested that I take a break. Things have been hectic; there are new tensions building up in the cell that I can’t quite put my finger on—everyone’s wound up, I suppose—and I haven’t been feeling myself of late, especially after the last crisis. As for this trip, everything’s aboveboard—well, almost everything. I said that I’d take the long weekend, leave on Wednesday—Dr. Abdurahman will give me a certificate—and be back the following Tuesday morning. In time for school. That I’ll be staying in the Crown Hotel in Kokstad. Why Kokstad? Because I’ve been thinking about the Griquas. All the old stories that Ouma Ragel told, about Chief Le Fleur, and my Great-ouma Antjie trekking down from Namaqualand. I’d just like to find out more about that history, about the weird Griqua chief. Dunno why, it’s just interesting, part of my history I suppose, and I might even write something; it will take my mind off things. As the doctor said, I need some diversion, a hobby or something. And that’s all there is to it.

  With whom? Sally persists.

  With no one. I’ve just said it isn’t Congress business, although I do have to drop into a meeting at Umtata on the way back.

  Everything he says enrages her. Don’t try to fob me off with nonsense about roots and ancestors, she shouts. Rubbish, it’s all fashionable rubbish. Next thing you’ll be off overseas to check out your roots in the rubbish dumps of Europe, but no, I forget, it’s the African roots that count. What do you expect to find? Ours are all mixed up and tangled; no chance of us being uprooted, because they’re all in a neglected knot, stuck. And that I’d have thought is the beauty of being coloured, that we need not worry about roots at all, that it’s altogether a good thing to start afresh. We’ve got our brand new AMC pots of stainless steel and Ford Cortinas, she mocks, so why burden ourselves with the dreary stuff of roots and tradition? But no, people like you must also have your fake toorgoed dangling from the rearview mirror. What’s happened? You’ve always been the first to say it’s rubbish.

  But that doesn’t mean you just dismiss history—

  She interrupts, her eyes fixed on his as if there were a secret to extract. She cannot believe that he has fallen for that kind of nonsense, and putting on a faintly familiar deep voice (Dulcie’s voice?) she mocks, So you need to go away to reclaim your culture—surely Kokstad isn’t quite the place. Too well-known in Namaqualand, hey, is that it? Is that not where your roots are? It’s rubbish David. There’s nothing to reclaim. We are what we are, a mixture of this and that, and a good thing too, so we don’t have to behave like Boers, eating braaivleis and potjiekos and re-enacting the Great Trek by waiting half the day for the fockin’ thing to cook outside when we’ve got perfectly good microwave ovens at home. It’s precisely having a microwave that makes people crave potjiekos. Like picnics—only when you’re sure of a good roof over your head would you even think of eating out of doors, of making a song and dance about eating under a tree. Same thing, dressing up in leopard skin and feathers and baring your tits for the nation. And now I suppose we’ll be getting ourselves up in Khoisan karossies, strum our ramkies, and stomp around being traditional hunters and gatherers. Nice and phoney, hey, which is why the leaders who preach this nonsense sit buttoned up in their four-piece suits. Might as well do something brand new like … like—and she flings her eyes around the room—like wear a telephone on your head. We can do as we please. It’s ridiculous going around looking for Griqua history and traditions when you know that they’re just ordinary coloured people like everyone else, just ordinary gullible people who fell for the nonsense of that madman Le Fleur. Ugh, Sally snorts, the things that pass for freedom these days. Then, irrationally, she adds, So leave people like myself to straighten my hair if I want. Why should I not be able to cover my forehead with a fringe or have hair curling here, there, and she tugs brutally at the wisps in question. And it’s not about aping white people; they don’t straighten their hair. Straightened hair looks nothing like European hair; it looks only like straightened hair; it’s different. I’m sick of people with their so-called ethnic bushy heads. If freedom is about looking awful then I leave it to your revolutionaries like Comrade Dulcie. I’ll have none of it and I’ll have none of your lies. Liberate yourself and face up to being a Tupperware boy, light, multipurpose, adaptable. We’re brand new Tupperware people and should thank God for that.

  David is bewildered by this outburst. He had no idea that she bothered herself with things like that, held so many views on trivial matters, and such extreme ones at that. He supposes that they haven’t talked much of late. Things have been difficult with all the tensions about Mandela’s release, about a new dispensation, which only goes to show how badly he needs to go away. So he answers methodically, careful not to upset her further, though why she should want to discuss her hair is beyond him.

  Number one, I have told you nothing but the truth and can think of no reason to tell you any lies.

  He uses his spread fingers as usual to tick off the points.

  Secondly, it’s not like that, not really about roots and tradition; it’s about myself, my private needs. I can’t explain because it’s not clear to me either; everything’s so confused. I suppose it’s all bound up with our changing roles, the tensions around our new offices in the Movement. Let me get sorted out and then when I get back we can talk things through. Like we used to, hey! All I ask is that you bear with me. You know that I can’t afford to be troubled in this way. But, and he hesitates, you’re wrong about just being ourselves, about being simply what we are. We don’t know what we are; the point is that in a place where everything gets distorted, no one knows who he is. And he gives her cheek a consoling tap.

  And number three, I have nothing against your hair. I have always found you lovely, loved your hair just as it is; in fact, if you were not to sleep with a stocking on your head would I not choke in the night with all that hair in my mouth?

  Only then does he notice her new glasses, which he says are all the more successful for not being so noticeable. She allows herself to be held, her hair to be stroked, and David makes a pot of strong tea before putting the children to bed. Nothing like a cup of tea, he thinks, to soothe the troubled mind and wash down half-baked ideas. They have long ago given up smoking but on such occasions they both savour the memory of a cigarette, of blowing smoke through the nostrils, by way of calming the nerves.

  Only the following day as he speeds along De Waal Drive does he think of her reference to Comrade Dulcie. Why on earth should she mention Dulcie? he wonders. Dulcie, and he indulges in the pleasure of thinking her name once more.

  Not everyone has a good electric iron, but then, not everyone knows how to use it. Properly, that is. First you sprinkle each item, like baptising it with a flick-flick of your fingertips. Then roll ea
ch tightly and pack them like sausages, snug in a plastic basin, where they lose their identity as shirts or sheets and become ironing, taking on the name of the activity. Just as they have earlier become washing, smelly limp things to be passed through soap and water, then dried into warped shapes in the sun. It is the act of ironing that brings them back to life, that resurrects the damp sausage into the lovely fresh sheet, the lovely fresh shirt, the smell of sunlight sealed in with heat. To call so many stages of transformation by the single name of laundering is to take the difference out of washing and ironing—and how else do you get through your days, your life, without dwelling on such differences, without probing their meanings. No one has taught her to do these tasks, just as no one would teach her own children, but as sure as she is Saartjie, or Sally, that is what everyone does when she first looks at the ironing—she dips her fingers into water and sprinkles each item thoroughly.

  Except for David, who is too busy to tell that things need washing or ironing; he thinks in terms of laundry although he does not, of course, use the word. Ag, today she is grateful for having work on which to concentrate. You test for heat by spitting onto the hot surface—yes, even on the electric iron, which does not have a dial for controlling the heat—and when the hissing spittle rolls off, you use a cloth, taking care not to burn while you clean the iron once more, making sure that the edges will not smudge the garment. Shirts are the most demanding but the key lies in the collar. It is a mistake to move in a straight line from right to left; you’ll only end up with unsightliness. Instead, start at each edge in turn, burrow the hot arrowhead of the iron into each collar tip, resisting the temptation to carry on. Only after each tip is smoothed do you iron the central strip, lifting and switching sides, easing the fabric—for there is always somehow an excess—and there you are, a perfect collar without a crease. She hangs the shirt on the back of a chair.

  In her mother’s house there was the magic of lighting the Primus stove, of staring into the heart of that fire flower, of holding the plump brass belly while you pumped life into the flame, until the heart glowed red and the flames were blue and orange petals hissing evenly around it. And every household somehow had an old blanket, an old scorched sheet, a ring on which to rest the hot iron, and a set of irons, for while you used one, the other would be heating on the Primus. Not that one bought such things in a shop. Her own had come from their neighbour, Ouma Sanna, whose house at the bottom of the hill hummed with death just as she, Sally, was preparing for her marriage. She came home in time to greet the ouma, and in that airless room, close with the breath of singing women and camphor to cover the smell of death, the ouma sucked at her gums searching for words until those ancient lips parted and in the voice of a ghost whispered, looking into the distance as if she were not there, Die strykgoed, vat vir Saartjie-goed—that she should have the ironing things.

  It is a trick she has learnt some time ago, part of her training: to block out all else while she concentrates on physical tasks, on the minutiae of things that have to be done. So, she thinks, and not without bitterness, it has not all been wasted, even for a wife that training has its uses. She folds his shirts into neat rectangular bibs, the buttons dead centre, the arms folded under. Perfect; she could wrap each in cellophane, and even after weeks in a suitcase they would need no further ironing. She packs his bag and oh, if only she could pack her broken heart, pressed and flattened for David to find bleeding in the folds of his best shirt. But she says carelessly, I’ve packed your good shirt for going out.

  Going out? I won’t be needing best wear in Kokstad. Just clothes for messing about in. I’m going to check out the Griquas, remember?

  For a special outing, a dance, she says, as if she hasn’t heard him. She knows in her bones that the trip has something to do with the woman, that she will be with him at the hotel, although she, Sally, will say nothing, not a word. A woman whose name she knows but will not utter, not ever again.

  Does such a woman iron shirts?

  Certainly such a woman, with muscular arms and an eye that misses nothing, can aim with deadly precision, knock out a strong man with a fleet-footed move.

  And are there women in the world who do both?

  She thinks not.

  Midway between the extremities Nature had been extremely prodigal, so as to make walking neither easy nor graceful. This lady might have sat for a model to a Parisian dressmaker, without any artificial aids in order to set forth the grotesque feminine disfigurement which the freaks of fashion made popular in the middle eighties. Had “Lady Kok” once walked along the Champs Elysees in Paris or Rotten Row in London, the steel mills which were then running day and night to assist in producing this horrible artificial excrescence might have all gone into liquidation at once.

  The Reverend Dower, Early Annals of Kokstad

  THE GRIQUAS OF KOKSTAD IN ONE SHORT CHAPTER—AND OUR ARRIVAL AT THEIR HISTORY

  How strange that in his hotel room in Kokstad there should have been right next to the Bible a copy of Buckland’s Curiosities of Natural History. But no, David insisted, not strange at all; there were several old bound books of the kind that no one reads, the kind that people buy in boxfuls from auctions. Six books of even size selected to match and flank the faded maroon spine of the Bible. He had nevertheless chosen that one, had opened it at the very reference to Cuvier, and if there is, as David says, no meaning to be found in coincidence, there are certainly effects, for it was that page that persuaded him to cut out from the story the lengthy piece on the scientist whose very name so enraged him. But I say none of this; the question of coincidence seems to be a touchy one.

  Although he called the piece on Georges Cuvier and Saartje Baartman his first attempt at writing his own story, it had really been an exercise in avoidance. Besides, he found his interest deflected from outrage on Baartman’s behalf to fascination with Cuvier’s mind, with the intellectual life he imagined for the anatomist. David saw Cuvier pacing furiously the length of a long book-lined room, a corridor really, as the struggle took place entirely in his head; saw the new system of natural classification thrashed into being, the deadly combat of ideas as military fronts where function finally triumphed over form. That Cuvier, rejecting the obviousness of form, should have invented a system based on features hidden from view appealed to the guerrilla, but he did not like to think of the learned man’s anatomical studies of Baartman’s genitalia that revealed those hidden private parts. For it was not only the spectacular steatopygia that she strutted in her cage for all of England and France to giggle at—no, the entire world, thanks to Cuvier, could peer in private at those parts of which no decent person would speak, let alone make drawings. On display, the Hottentot Venus may well on a good sunny day have snarled or giggled at her plane-backed viewers. It was the shame in print, in perpetuity, the thought of a reader turning to that page, that refreshed David’s outrage.

  And so, since outrage must be fuelled, he flicked through Buckland’s Curiosities to see if Saartje was included. But there was only a description of the fountain erected in honour of Georges Cuvier, outside the gates of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and it was this that struck at David’s pledge to keep to the facts. Having memorised the passage from Buckland, he recited it to me in high dramatic fashion, lingering over the scientific words:

  Here is represented, first, an anatomical impossibility, viz, a crocodile turning his head at right angles to his body; secondly, a zoological absurdity, viz, a walrus, a graminivorous rather than a piscivorous animal, holding a fish in his mouth, and that a freshwater fish. Surely Cuvier, if he could see his own fountain, would be much pleased to observe the good use that had been made of his investigations into the secrets of nature by the artist.

  This jeering at the artist’s ignorant representation of the natural world made David smart at the transparency of his own writing on Cuvier, which he then rightly came to see as a simplistic act of revenge, the product, to use his phrase, of a mind not fully decolonised. For his p
ortrait of a scientist discoursing on the private parts of Baartman was an ill-researched one of a portly, concupiscent gentleman with a deficient posterior. In short, a windbroek, not only an absence of flesh but a weakness of spirit, which after all could not be true of Cuvier, the father of biology. Besides, the passage was largely irrelevant, no more than a warming-up exercise, a digression from the real subject of his narrative.

  And what, I ask, taking advantage of the opportunity, is the real subject of your story?

  David finds it hard to say that it is about himself; he mumbles about problems with this year’s Youth Day celebrations, about things being so mixed up since the ANC is being established within the country; one has to expect all kinds of sabotage from unexpected quarters. I remind him of his previous answers about the trip to Kokstad, about the Griquas, the maverick chief, Le Fleur, and also his own ancestors, who were among Le Fleur’s converts in Namaqualand. Yes, yes, he says, hiding behind impatience. He will not/cannot say how these are connected, so that we skirt about a subject that slithers out of reach, and I am reminded of the new screen saver on my computer that tosses the text hither and thither, prettily rearranging and replacing, until the letters, transformed, slip into fluid, abstract shapes of mesmerising colour.

  With Cuvier now removed from his story, David flew off into another fiction, into the European origins of the Griqua chief. But the anatomist would not be deleted without a trace, so that the historical figure of Madame la Fleur was transformed into Cuvier’s housekeeper, the good woman being lifted out of her period and grafted onto the wrong century. Charmed by the way in which one collapsing story would clutch at another in thin air, I suggest that, in spite of the error, we keep her after all. David giggles boyishly at the image of Madame la Fleur flitting between centuries, a Protestant angel dithering in time. It is nice to see him lighthearted.