Grandpa Kerneels’s ancestor was a Scottish seaman who’d secretly jumped off a sinking ship while he was expected to stand to attention and go down with the vessel. After the women and children had been loaded into the only lifeboats, he decided it was just too idiotic to stand waiting for death motionlessly. Exactly, little Griet thought the first time she heard the story.
So he leapt into the stormy sea and swam as best he could until he lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, they grew wide with amazement. He’d landed in heaven, he thought ecstatically, in spite of the sinful life he’d led as a sailor. The air arching endlessly blue over him, the sand under his body as white as an angel’s wings, an extravagance of green surrounding him …
It wasn’t heaven, he was to recount later, but it was probably as close to Paradise as a sinful sailor would ever get. He’d been washed up on a pristine beach on the Southern Cape coast. The lifeboats, he heard later, had all sunk.
He became a sort of wandering teacher because, as Grandpa Kerneels was fond of stressing, he had ants in his pants. If he couldn’t be on board ship, sailing to exotic destinations, he could at least be on horseback, riding over the veld to remote farms, where he taught the children his Scottish version of English and told the grown-ups the tallest of tall stories. A good storyteller, he reckoned, would always be welcome somewhere.
Grandpa Kerneels had inherited this love of stories and passed it down to his granddaughter. Little Griet had inherited it from two sides: from Grandpa Kerneels’s sea stories and from Grandpa Big Petrus’s angel stories. Sometimes she wondered whether she shouldn’t have become a brain surgeon or a movie director instead, or gone to work in the streets of India like Mother Theresa, or done something more dramatic with her life. But in her heart of hearts she knew that she’d never had any choice.
She had to spin fairy tales to stay alive. Not just to earn her daily bread, but also to keep death at bay. Like her heroine and role model, the clever Scheherazade.
If you inherit land, you have to farm it. If you inherit stories, you have to tell them. And Griet Swart had inherited enough stories to keep herself alive for a thousand and one nights.
Riddle Tales
We may agree, say, that contemporary consciousness is incapable of conceiving of either angels or demons. We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, both angels and demons go on existing despite this incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them.
Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels
10
Rapunzel Rescues Herself
‘How are you getting on, Gretchen?’ Gretha bent to take a roast chicken out of the oven and kept a sympathetic eye on her oldest daughter as she slowly straightened up again. She put the roasting pan on the stove and wiped a film of perspiration from her forehead with one of her bulky yellow oven gloves. ‘It doesn’t look as though you’re getting enough to eat.’
Griet shook her head and poured her mother a whisky, just as she liked it – weak, with lots of soda and a couple of blocks of ice.
‘As long as you keep on cooking enough for the devil and all his henchmen every Sunday, Ma, I certainly won’t starve.’
Gretha did her best to squeeze the chicken into the electrically heated trolley with all the other dishes already keeping warm in there. She realised she wasn’t going to be able to close the doors of the trolley, shrugged and hurried back to stir the mushroom sauce on the stove.
‘Is it really necessary, Ma? So much trouble for one meal?’
‘I know that you enjoy a proper meal now and then.’ Gretha smiled and took a cautious sip of her whisky, her hand still in the yellow oven glove.
‘That’s not what I was asking.’ Griet caught her mother’s eye above the rim of the glass and Gretha quickly looked down at the mushroom sauce. ‘Do you enjoy it? Standing sweating in front of the stove?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. “Enjoy” isn’t exactly the right word. I must admit, these days I’m not as keen as I used to be. Must be old age. But once I get going …’
If you had a mother like Grandma Lina, you couldn’t help turning against kitchen chores early in your life. Gretha never played housey-housey like other little girls. She always knew it wasn’t a game. She was reminded every time she was roused at night by noises from the kitchen and found her mother down on her knees, scrubbing the floor. It looked more like martyrdom than a game, and with the practical instincts of her Scottish patriarch, the one who’d jumped ship, Gretha decided she didn’t want to be a martyr.
Grandma Lina’s life made her daughter feel as though she were locked in a tower, but she believed there must be some way to escape. She could grow her hair, like Rapunzel, and wait patiently for a prince to come and rescue her. Or she could become a film star and marry a rich man. But Gretha was sensible enough to know she’d have to come up with another plan. To be Rapunzel you had to have long straight hair that you could throw out of the window of a tower, and Gretha’s hair was as short and curly as Shirley Temple’s. To be a film star you had to have the looks of Gretha’s famous namesake, the goddess Garbo. Or at least be cute like Shirley Temple. And from childhood Gretha had felt clumsy and plain.
She could rely on neither a prince nor a rich man. She’d have to plan her own escape. It was a courageous decision for those days, long before Simone de Beauvoir had shaken her sisters awake all over the world.
Gretha wasn’t as lucky as Sleeping Beauty, who’d had a dozen good fairies at her christening to shower her with gifts like Beauty and Wealth and Happiness. But she’d had one good fairy who’d given her one of the most precious gifts on earth. Imagination. She was a clever child who devoured books, and she decided she’d become an Authoress. If she couldn’t be Alice in Wonderland, nothing could prevent her from being Lewis Carroll. Until she realised Lewis Carroll was a man.
So she just became a kindergarten teacher and told the children in her class all the stories that she’d write one day. One day, in the castle she was going to build herself, on the other side of the rainbow.
But she hadn’t reckoned on love. She met a man who made her heart beat faster and her footsteps stray from the path she’d chosen. He wasn’t a prince on a white stallion, just a salesman in a borrowed Morris Minor. But he was tall and dark, as she was fond of recalling. Not as handsome as Clark Gable, but so what? She wasn’t exactly Vivien Leigh herself. And he certainly had the swagger of an Errol Flynn. When he drove past her house in his borrowed Morris, he’d stick an elbow nonchalantly through the open car window, supporting the roof with his right hand.
‘He obviously thinks he’s impressing me!’ she said. Shaking her head, throughout their courtship, right up to the altar: ‘You obviously think you’re impressing me.’ He smiled confidently and slipped the wedding ring on to her finger. He was strong, she decided, and a strong salesman was better than a weak prince.
‘Remember, strength has nothing to do with muscles,’ she often warned her daughters. ‘Look for a man who can eat seven bags of salt with you.’
And when she wiped her eyes again, more than thirty years later, she was the middle-aged mother of five adult children. And she’d never written her stories. And she didn’t know whether she still wanted to.
But she’d reared a daughter who wrote stories. Although no one became an Authoress these days, she thought sadly. Griet had become a writer, with a small w, as androgynous as the jeans she loved to wear.
‘You grew up on old-fashioned food,’ said Gretha at her stove. ‘And now it looks as though you’re all living on pasta and salad.’
‘You brought us up properly, Ma,’ sighed Griet, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘A roast and three veg every Sunday, pudding twice a week, and bedtime stories every night.’
‘Nella has even become a vegetarian!’
‘I’ll believe that when I see her resist your venison pie, Ma.’
‘Talk of the devil …’ Her sister posed like Mae West in the doorway, a hand on one hip and an ar
m dramatically flung up over her head. ‘How do you like my outfit, Ma?’
Gretha took a hasty sip of whisky and decided it was wiser to say nothing. Her youngest daughter, she always said, was the most wayward of the four sisters. And the other three were not exactly pillars of society.
‘I heard sixties fashions were in again.’ Griet wondered if she should be diplomatic. Her sister’s outfit consisted of a scrap of shiny fabric above a bare midriff, long pants flaring down to the hem and the kind of platform shoes sported by classical Greek thespians. Nella worked in the RAG TRADE (her emphasis) and often wore the kind of clothes ordinary people would only risk for a fancy-dress party. To hell with diplomacy, decided Griet. ‘I just couldn’t believe that anyone would fall for all that stuff again.’
‘The sixties were an exciting time for fashion! The mini, pantihose, bell bottoms, hot pants …’
‘Only for you people who are too young to remember the real thing,’ Griet cut her sister short. ‘You obviously don’t have a stash of embarrassing photos of yourself in a purple wet-look outfit and laced-up boots. Or a lime-green catsuit with diamante buttons.’
‘You begged your father for that suit for weeks, Griet,’ Gretha reminded her while she packed the dishwasher. ‘I told you you’d regret it.’
‘I remember you wearing a couple of ridiculous outfits yourself, Ma.’ Griet smiled at her mother who was crouching wearily in front of the dishwasher. She’d never let her hair grow. It was still short and curly. ‘Do you remember the photo Pa took that day at the zoo, Nella?’
‘Who could ever forget it? It’s the sort of photo you discuss with your shrink years later. It’s the sort of photo that lands you up with a shrink in the first place!’
Nella poured herself a glass of soda water and sat on the kitchen table, swinging her legs.
‘Ma in a shocking-pink Crimplene mini in front of a hippo that looks as though it’s going to charge her any minute.’
‘I hope your daughters take the mickey out of you one day too,’ Gretha laughed, holding her back as she straightened up. ‘If you ever get around to –’
She was suddenly busy about the stove again.
‘Ma,’ Griet said with a sigh. ‘The fact that I haven’t managed to bear a c-h-i-l-d doesn’t mean that you have to feel guilty every time the word slips out.’
‘Oh, Gretchen, I do worry about you so.’
Griet looked at her mother and shook her head. Gretha’s lovely face had become one mass of wrinkles the last few years. It was only her hair – the same shiny brown it had been in her girlhood, without a hint of grey – that held invincible age at bay.
‘You always make out that everything’s fine, but I know how badly you want a baby … And now, with George leaving …’
There was nothing like a mother’s concern to bring a lump to your throat, thought Griet.
‘It’s true,’ agreed her sister. ‘You’re always so busy being the efficient big sister, you’re actually a pain in the arse. Why don’t you just relax for once? Tell us you’re having a hard time. Or do you think we’ll reject you because you can’t cope?’
Almost eight weeks without a man, she’d written this morning in her Creative Arts Diary. And she missed his sons almost more than him. She wondered how they were getting on at school, where they were going to spend the holidays, which TV programmes they were watching on Friday nights these days.
She’d seen them in a shopping centre the week before, two laughing blond boys with gangly arms and legs. They’d walked past quite close to her without seeing her, two children she’d fed every weekend for seven years: Michael, the serious first-born, and Raphael, his devil-may-care sibling. She’d watched them develop, she thought bleakly, from chubby-cheeked toddlers into rowdy schoolboys and now these almost adolescent strangers.
She had to restrain herself from calling out their names, from running after them. They were chips off the old block, she could see quite clearly, with their father’s bony shoulders and loose-jointed arms. She was the outsider. She faced the fact finally. Goldilocks in the bears’ house.
‘It’s terrible to be a stepmother. You’re the villain of every fairy tale. And if your husband throws you out, you lose all claim to his children. As though they were bits of furniture that belonged to him. I miss Michael and Raphael and I can’t see them. I’m having a hard time.’
‘See? You said it and you’re still sitting here,’ Nella cried. ‘You weren’t struck by lightning.’
‘But it’s not as bad as it was a month ago,’ said Griet, jumping up to go and set the dining room table. ‘I was ready to put my head in the oven then.’
Her mother and sister laughed nervously as she left the kitchen.
‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ she heard Nella’s voice behind her. ‘She’s only joking. She’s not the suicidal type.’
If her sister only knew what her shrink knew.
On the way here this morning she’d listened to a radio report about a man who’d gassed himself in his car. He’d stuck a notice on the windscreen: ‘Beware! I have Aids! Wear gloves!’ The police had praised his action, announced the newscaster, deadpan. Griet nearly drove into the car in front of her.
Somewhere in a police station, she fantasised, a circular letter is being drawn up right now: ‘To protect the safety of the community, the following groups of people must be encouraged to commit suicide: ANC activists, PAC terrorists, Communists and Atheists, End Conscription Campaigners, Any Other Agitators, Et cetera, Et cetera …’ And right at the bottom of the list: ‘Aids Sufferers.’
It’s dangerous to travel alone, she thought, and it’s getting worse all the time.
She walked into her brother who’d just appeared at the front door, his long hair windblown from his motorbike ride and his cheeks as pink as a sleeping child’s. Marko was the baby of the family, the boy who, according to his father, was reared for the devil: spoilt to hell by an angelic mother and four older sisters. Griet tended to agree with her father. But he was the only brother she’d ever have.
‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ teased Marko with the words she’d taught him as a toddler.
‘You, O King, are handsome,’ smiled Griet, ‘but your oldest sister, who lives with the seven dwarfs over the mountains, is a thousand times fairer than you.’
‘I’m so hungry I could eat a whole sheep.’
He threw an arm round her shoulders and went back to the kitchen with her.
‘I thought you weren’t eating mammals any more,’ Nella accused him, jumping down from the table.
‘Hell, you look more like a clown than ever.’
‘Community service, my brother.’ Even with her platform shoes she fitted in under his arm. Marko was tall and thin like Grandma Hannie’s people, with Grandpa Big Petrus’s gigantic hands and feet. ‘Don’t you think we need clowns these days?’
‘Sure. Clowns and fairy tales. Between you and Griet maybe you can still save the country.’ He kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘With your food, Ma, to feed the starving masses.’
Gretha wiped the lock of hair from his eyes, radiant because three of her children were together under her roof. But Griet knew she was wondering what the other two were eating today, wherever they were in the world. A mother never really gave up her children, she knew, even if they’d only lived in her womb.
‘And why are your eyes so big, Ma?’
‘All the better to see you, my child.’
‘You’re all mad.’ Nella got her brother a beer from the fridge. ‘My boyfriend says it sounds as though my whole family believes in fairy tales.’
‘There aren’t many other things to believe in,’ said Marko.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gretha asked quickly.
‘Nothing.’ He took a few thirsty gulps from the beer bottle. ‘The army’s looking for me again. I’m thinking of going to live in Namibia, now that they’re becoming independent.’
‘It’s not so bad, Ma,’ Griet said
comfortingly when she saw the expression on her mother’s face. ‘Namibia is much closer than the Netherlands. You can go and visit him there’.
Marko had completed his military service a few years earlier without undue question or crisis of conscience, like most white boys who’d just written matric. Two years later, considerably older and wiser, he returned to reality and became a press photographer. He was convinced that he could never serve in the defence force again.
But he also didn’t see his way clear to sign declarations and go to jail. He’d just keep on the move, he decided. If they couldn’t track him down, they wouldn’t be able to call him up for further military camps. It’s the easier way, he said in bitter self-mockery, for chaps who don’t want to be martyrs. He also probably took after his patriarch who’d bailed out of a no-win situation.
Griet had often wondered what her grandfather would have done if he’d been born a few decades later – Grandpa Kerneels, who’d believed in peace because there were enough people who believed in war. Would he have gone to jail rather than shoot at township children? Would he have chosen voluntary exile in Europe rather than military service?
No, she thought, Grandpa Kerneels would probably have chosen to keep on the move too. Hers wasn’t a tribe of martyrs and heroes.
‘Where’s Pa?’ asked Marko, to change the subject.
‘Can’t you hear the thunder of the gods?’ giggled Nella, hopping back on to the table. ‘He’s building again.’
‘Another room?’ he asked in surprise.
‘No,’ said Gretha sheepishly. ‘Help me get this trolley into the dining room. He’s changing your old bedroom into a bar.’
‘A bar?’
‘A man must have a bar, he says. Somewhere his wife and children can’t bug him. A room of his own.’
‘And where do the wife and children go if they want to get away from him?’ Marko asked as he pushed the trolley out of the kitchen.
‘Pa must watch out,’ said Griet, following her mother and Marko, guilty because she hadn’t laid the table yet. ‘He’s behaving more and more like Grandma Hannie’s mad brother. Before you know it, he’ll have built himself a tower in the backyard.’
Entertaining Angels Page 7
