She liked to think the first one had been a boy. She knew the next two were girls. She’d given them names, Nanda and Nina, and had spoken to them for hours on end. Warned each of them against wolves and men who don’t like dogs. Funny how you recall your mother’s least sensible advice when you have a daughter of your own. You’d do anything to protect her: tell her she mustn’t go to bed with wet hair; ask a good fairy to make all her wishes come true; sell your soul to the devil if it would buy her happiness.
But it hadn’t helped. She’d carried each of them for only three months. The only proof that they’d ever existed was the sonar pictures of two foetuses, no bigger than Thumbelina, the fairy child.
She walked past the meat fridge. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so bloodthirstily angry with her husband if she became a vegetarian. She hesitated near the coffee. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so sexually frustrated if she stopped stoking her libido with caffeine. She chose a bag of Blue Mountain filter coffee and placed it resignedly in her plastic basket.
She found it amazing that she could get by without caffeine, nicotine or alcohol whenever she was pregnant. As though her whole body was working so hard to create a human being that there was no energy left for unhealthy obsessions. The maternal instinct must be one of the most powerful forces on earth, stronger than any army, more potent than witchcraft or technology. Stronger and more potent – and less comprehensible – than even mankind’s self-destructive urges.
The fourth one was the son who’d stolen her heart. And no wonder! He’d spent a full nine months creeping closer and closer to her heart, until, near the end, she could hardly breathe at night. He was too lively for the space in her womb, it seemed that he wanted to invade the space round her lungs too, as though he regarded all the inside of her as his territory. His birth left her body empty, a house without furniture, a kitchen without an oven.
The birth was an agonising experience that dragged on right through the night, worse than her worst nightmares. ‘Is it possible that an apple could cause so much trouble?’ she asked the young nurse who was holding her hand. ‘Do you think Eve deserved such a heavy punishment?’ The nurse smiled like an angel, rose up above the bed and floated out.
Maybe she was hallucinating, maybe her grandfather had sent one of his angels to hold her hand. She’d thought she’d be brave – her great-grandmother, after all, had borne sixteen children without the help of painkillers or modern medicine. But after a couple of hours Griet begged her angel nurse for relief. An epidural, a gas mask, a Caesarean, she mumbled, anything to get her out of this hell.
The fairy tale of South Africa, her bedevilled brain remembered, also began with an Eve. An Eve and a Mary, as in the most famous fairy tales of the Western world: the Old and the New Testament. Eva was a Khoi-khoi girl, adopted by Jan van Riebeeck’s household, as innocent and almost as naked as the original Eve. Maria de la Queillerie had travelled far with her husband van Riebeeck –‘founder’ of ‘white’ South Africa – like the other Mary, to save a sinful world.
That’s the European version, anyway, the white woman aiding black sinners. Like any good fairy tale, this one also has various versions, white and black and brown and yellow. Like Little Red Riding Hood and Rotkäppchen and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.
A short while after the anaesthetist had inserted a needle into her spine, her legs started to grow numb and lifeless. And her brain, thank heaven, a little clearer. But she couldn’t get poor Eve out of her mind. The Eve she’d learnt about at school, the one who was banned from Paradise as punishment for her sins. But also the other one, the one of whom she’d learnt no more than a name in class. The one who married a white man and was banished to Robben Island for her sins.
The Khoi-khoi Eva became a practising Christian, wearing Western clothes, learning to speak Dutch and Portuguese, and married the gifted Danish surgeon, Pieter van Meerhoff. But after the wedding the fairy tale went awry. Eva’s husband died a few years later and she became an alcoholic and a prostitute, leaving her children to the mercies of charity. She was held on Robben Island several times, and died there in 1674.
So much for happy endings, thought Griet, and then the angel said she must push.
At last she pushed her baby out, ecstatic – in spite of the blood and the sweat – as though he was the saviour who would redeem mankind. He was her saviour, the child she’d waited for for so long, the son she wanted so badly.
She saw the slippery little body, the tiny feet with ten perfect toes, the pink face with eyes tightly closed against the savagery of the world. This is how it must feel to see a god, she thought.
And then they took him away. She could not weep when they told her he was dead. There was just an emptiness in the place where her heart had once beaten.
An Italian woman of ninety-one, Griet had read in the paper this morning, was reunited with her son who had been adopted shortly after his birth seventy-four years earlier. ‘I wanted to find my son before I died,’ Assunta Rabuzzi had apparently told reporters. Griet immediately snipped out the report and fastened it into her Creative Arts Diary.
She tried not to think while she did the rest of her shopping. Little pork sausages that reminded her of her son’s toes; button mushrooms that looked like his nose. Shell pasta that reminded her of the perfect curves of a baby’s ear; downy peaches that felt like a baby’s skin, bringing a lump to her throat as her teeth broke through the skin of the fruit, making her weep with longing while she gulped down the chunks. ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Once, long ago, on her grandfather’s farm, she’d seen a sow eat her own piglets. Then she’d gone behind the sty and brought up her grandmother’s lunch.
In a trolley in front of the dairy products sat a little boy with wide grey eyes. She’d ignore him, Griet decided, taking a block of butter for her basket. He was wearing blue canvas shoes and swinging his feet. Griet wondered what sort of cheese she should buy, and where the child’s mother was. Mozzarella.
Why did her favourite newspaper reports, like her favourite foods, usually come from Italy? Green ice falling on convents and ancient women finding lost sons. Pizza and pasta and Parma ham. Maybe foods like this make the mind more susceptible to fantasy and outlandish stories.
She could hardly imagine what boerewors and biltong did to the minds of her own people.
In Dante’s vision of hell, the souls of suicides are portrayed as stunted trees beside a river of blood. Imagine how many South African trees must be growing beside that blood-river! All the men who’d destroyed their families before they committed suicide, as though they were afraid that no one but their own children would play with them in hell. All the political jailbirds who’d flown out of tenth-storey windows, and all the others who’d pre-empted the authorities and taken death into their own hands.
Just imagine whom she might have met in this grove of stunted trees if she hadn’t been frightened off by a cockroach. Griet felt her feet lifting off the ground. Hemingway and Hitler, Janis Joplin and Marilyn Monroe, Othello and Ophelia … Griet rose slowly, watching the child’s swinging feet grow smaller and smaller. Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker … It was dangerous to leave little boys like this in supermarket trolleys, she realised while she hovered high above the fridges full of cheeses from different countries. Van Gogh of the Netherlands and Cleopatra of Egypt and the chaste Lucretia from classical Italy … Mad people could easily steal them. She wafted through the ceiling, as easily as the winged horse of the muses would glide through the clouds. She flew, free as a witch, light as an angel.
6
I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Blow Your House Down
Griet felt like crying when she saw the house she’d lived in for so many years. Home is where the heart is, she thought as she walked through the neglected garden. And if you no longer have a heart, home is probably where your books and your music and your most precious memories are kept.
The clivias burned like orange flames under the bedroom window. A powerful antidote to impoten
ce, according to old wives’ tales, and protection against evil. Although a small forest of clivias couldn’t protect the inhabitants of this house from impotence or evil.
She unlocked the front door carefully, and felt her knees weaken as she stepped inside. She could smell her husband, she realised in a panic in the hallway, next to the table with the telephone and the answering machine. But he couldn’t be here. She’d made certain that he wouldn’t be here. It was only his smell lingering in the house: the smell of his toasted cigarettes and his body after a game of tennis and the red soap he used every morning in the shower. She could smell him because the memories in this house sharpened all her senses, because she had crept back like a dog to dig up old bones.
Grandma Hannie’s house was a House of the Senses, a small labourer’s cottage on a Karoo farm, cool and dark as a cellar, especially on Sunday afternoons when everyone was supposed to be sleeping. There was a front door used by nobody but the dominee, and a back door that stood open day and night with a screen door that slap-slapped continually. One hard slap, deafening until you grew accustomed to it, and two softer slaps like echoes, every time someone came in or went out of the kitchen.
There were a number of other noises around the house, especially on a hot Sunday afternoon. The crack of the dog’s jaw as he snapped at flies, the complaints of the windmill in a sudden gust, the drone of a lorry far, far away on the highway. The creak of Grandpa Big Petrus’s bed when he rolled his giant frame over.
And at night there were inexplicable gurgling noises in the attic. Grandma Hannie said it was rats or something; Grandpa Big Petrus said: Impossible, rats don’t gurgle, it was Something. Grandma Hannie shook her head and held her peace.
The most memorable sound was the hymn they sang in their bedroom at dawn each day, after they’d read a passage from the Bible and said a few prayers. Grandpa Big Petrus’s confidently pure bass, followed by Grandma Hannie’s hesitant falsetto. She didn’t care much for singing, she only did it to make him happy.
Griet looked through the pile of unopened mail on the telephone table, found a few envelopes addressed to her, mostly accounts that she thrust into her handbag and Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes which she crumpled up. She went to the kitchen to throw them away. Really just an excuse to postpone braving the bedroom.
She’d left in a hurry, just throwing a toothbrush and a few items of clothing into a suitcase in the middle of the night after her husband had told her she was the most pathetic specimen of humanity he’d ever come across. She’d spent the rest of the night sitting in her car down at the beach, feeling just as pathetic as her husband said she was. At five the next morning she’d gone to her office – the security guard in the entrance foyer stared at her creased clothes and uncombed hair – and rung Louise in London.
‘I need your flat for a couple of weeks, until I find a place of my own.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Louise mumbled drowsily – it was still dead of night in London. ‘What’s going on?’
‘George has thrown me out.’
She tried to sound businesslike, not to saddle Louise with her personal problems, but her voice wouldn’t co-operate. The night in the car had been unreal, a nightmare she’d wake from, but now she was awake: she didn’t have a fairy godmother, she told herself in front of her word processor in the grey morning light. She couldn’t think of anyone able to turn a pumpkin into a flat.
‘Shit.’ Louise’s usual response to any communication out of the ordinary. After a long moment of silence during which Griet expected the dreaded ‘I told you so’, Louise sighed dramatically, ‘Marriage stinks, that’s all I can say.’
‘Can I use your flat, please, Louise?’
Her voice was trembling dangerously.
‘Of course.’ Louise was wide awake now. ‘Stay as long as you like but don’t be surprised if I join you in a couple of months. My husband’s driving me up the wall.’
Louise had married a British citizen because she wanted to get rid of her South African passport – as she admitted unblushingly – but she was sceptical enough about the arrangement to hang on to her Cape Town flat. You never know, she said. It’s best to keep the back door open. She’d learnt her lesson with her first divorce. Griet thought her friend was far too cynical to make any marriage work.
‘Is it that bad?’
‘It’s like being married to the Pope. And not being able to tell him he doesn’t have any clothes on.’
‘That was the emperor.’
‘No, the fucking Pope! It’s the righteousness that gets me down, the holier-than-thou attitude that Brits like him are apparently born with. He won’t even fart in front of me. As though only we barbarians from Africa have such basic needs. But when he’s in the shower, he farts so loudly I can hear him in the living room.’
‘Where’s he now?’
‘Don’t worry, he still doesn’t understand a word of Afrikaans. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone in the struggle. Marriage is a great institution, as they say, but who wants to live in a fucking institution?’
Despondent, Griet got up from the phone and again passed the confused security guard. It was going to be a miserable day, she thought while her car lights sliced through the wisps of mist that hung low over the quiet streets. Welcome to reality, Louise had said.
And now, three months later, she was still in limbo. Alone in a strange flat with a kitchen full of cockroaches.
When other people split, she thought as she squirted the hole in the ozone layer bigger and bigger in her Struggle against the cockroaches, the man is normally the one who moves out of the house.
The woman is, after all, the one who looks after the house, she thought resentfully, who’s responsible for everything from the colour contrast of the living room cushions to the choice of toilet paper. Not always because she wants to be responsible for everything. Sometimes she’s just too tired to make a feminist last stand in front of the stove. Anyway, Griet acknowledged bitterly, it’s humiliating to wipe your bum with newspaper while you and your husband argue about Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. In the end it’s less trouble simply to go out and buy the toilet paper yourself.
But everyone knows it’s easier for a man to live out of a suitcase. What do you do if you begin menstruating in the middle of the night and you discover you didn’t pack your Lil-lets? Or if you forget your imported nightcream and you don’t have enough money to buy another jar, and every morning when you face a borrowed mirror you have to stare in horror at the new wrinkles that have formed round your eyes overnight?
What is a house without a woman? Griet wondered as she walked through her house for the first time in weeks. What is a woman without a house? What is a woman without her husband’s razor? She’d always used George’s – infuriating him – to shave her armpits. He didn’t like hairy women. Of course, she could have bought her own razor during the last three months, but somehow she hadn’t got round to it.
You’re the only woman alive at the end of the twentieth century, Louise had written to her last week, who still believes that frogs turn into princes. And now you’re disillusioned because the opposite happened. So what, Louise wrote. Join the club.
Griet wished she could be as cynical as her friend. But she wanted to cry over her house that felt as abandoned as an Afrikaans church on a weekday. She stood in the kitchen where she’d never been plagued by cockroaches and stared moodily at the unwashed clutter in the sink. Mostly glasses, she noticed, wine glasses and whisky glasses and almost all the other glasses in the drinks cabinet. It looked as though her husband had had a party every night since she left. Or was drinking himself to death in remorse, she thought hopefully.
For a moment she contemplated turning on the tap and doing the dishes, but she managed to stop herself in the nick of time. It was too late to play the kind fairy now. As if he’d ask her to come back if he came home to a clean kitchen tonight.
It didn’t look as though he was eating much. The
re were only three plates in the sink. In the fridge she found a dozen cans of beer, a couple of bottles of wine, a box of milk (sour: she sniffed against her will), a heel of mouldy cheese and four eggs. She wondered what the children ate when they came for the weekend. She wondered whether there was toilet paper in the bathroom. And whether he’d remembered to pay the telephone account in time and water the rosemary bush near the back door regularly and to leave a window open at night for the neighbour’s peripatetic cat.
It had nothing to do with her any more. She’d only come to get clean clothes and a couple of books, she reminded herself. She suddenly noticed that he’d removed all her photographs and postcards from the pinboard next to the fridge. It’s fucking final, she realised, and fled blindly from the kitchen.
In the bedroom she could smell him again, the unlikely combination of sweat and soap and smoke. But she didn’t smell another woman, thank God. She wouldn’t have been brave enough to cope with that. Not while her own smell still lingered in the corners.
Grandma Hannie’s house had always smelt of food, of baked bread and stewed quinces, and sometimes also of animal carcasses on the butcher’s block. The smell of blood always took Griet back to that house. That was where she’d smelt her own blood for the first time, on the day of Grandpa Big Petrus’s funeral.
Symbolic, she thought afterwards, but at the time she hadn’t seen anything symbolic in the situation. Just the cruelty of fate to choose the day she had to wear a lily-white funeral dress. The family thought she wouldn’t stand up in church to sing with the congregation because she was so heartbroken. Shame, the local women whispered sympathetically, she was the apple of her grandpa’s eye.
Entertaining Angels Page 4
