Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘No wonder you jumped on me like a wild animal,’ said Adam, pulling her on top of him, his eyes closed again.

  ‘I did not jump on you! I was eating my supper and the next moment I was flat on the floor! I couldn’t even protest because my mouth was full of calamari.’

  ‘It’s the way you eat that drove me berserk. I figured anyone who enjoys food so much must also be into sex. Even if she feels guilty about it.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I don’t feel guilty any more.’

  ‘Hey! This sounds like sin!’ He pulled her head against his neck and ruffled her hair into an even wilder mess. ‘We can’t have you living without guilt. We’ll have to do something about this.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything we’ve left undone.’

  ‘Where’s your imagination?’ sighed Adam with his mouth in her hair. ‘I thought you wrote fairy tales?’

  ‘Exactly,’ answered Griet. ‘The princesses in my fairy tales would never get laid on a dusty living room floor.’

  ‘Imagine what they’re missing,’ whispered Adam in her ear.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Do you always keep a condom handy?’ She felt the laughter well up in the body under her cheek. ‘Or did you know what was going to happen last night?’

  ‘Hope springs eternal.’

  Griet rubbed her face enthusiastically against the hair on his chest.

  ‘Two women aged sixteen and seventy-one years were burnt to death at Izingolweni.’ She drew her fingers through his pubic hair and felt him grow hard. ‘The following day a fifty-year-old woman was struck with a stone and then set alight in Oshabeni.’ She’d always been amazed at how easily a man could get an erection in the morning. ‘A woman was burnt to death and another woman killed with a sharp instrument in Enkulu.’ It was like witchcraft: abracadabra, you take hold of him and part of his body changes before your eyes. ‘On the same day at Msinbini a forty-year-old woman was set alight.’ In the last years of her marriage it had been the only power she still held over her husband. ‘At Maguchana a sixty-year-old woman and a thirty-year-old woman were burnt to death.’ Sexual sorcery in bed in the morning – until he’d started sleeping in another bed.

  ‘The police said all those killed were suspected of witchcraft.’

  16

  Whatever Happened to Rumpelstiltskin?

  The Christmas tree was small enough to stand on the coffee table. Nella had decorated it in gold and silver: it was as stylish as the grown-ups’ trees you see every year in glossy magazines.

  Griet would have preferred a naïvely kitsch tree, with flickering lights and shaving-foam snow and all the other over-the-top decorations children love. She crouched before the tree in her parents’ living room and touched the spiky foliage. Even an artificial tree decorated by a child would have looked more alive than this real one turned into a piece of pretentious artwork.

  A year ago she’d looked forward so much to this Christmas Eve. She had been seven months pregnant and irrepressibly excited about the adventure that lay ahead. She must be patient, her analyst told her: memories were like blood that congealed to form scabs. The problem was that dates kept coming up that scratched the scabs off. Tonight everything was all bloody again.

  A year ago she and her husband had been alone, his children with their mother, her parents holidaying at the coast. She wanted to be with her parents, but he wasn’t in the mood for a family Christmas. So she’d given in and spent Christmas with her silent husband in his silent house.

  ‘Next Christmas everything will be different again,’ she promised him over a glass of sparkling wine. ‘The baby might even be crawling by then.’

  They sat alone at the long dining room table in the empty house. It was impossible to believe that anything between them could ever be different to this unbearable reality. But she wanted to believe it so badly.

  ‘The house won’t be so quiet. Michael and Raphael will be here. I want to get a proper Christmas tree, and a turkey and plum pudding and all the trimmings, and invite my family over to join us for a change, for a real –’

  ‘Is it necessary to involve your family in the extravaganza too?’

  ‘Christmas is supposed to be a family feast.’ She laughed nervously because she didn’t want to quarrel on Christmas Eve. There were enough arguments, there were enough other evenings. ‘We could also invite your family, I don’t mind, but you probably wouldn’t …’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ George studied the trout on his plate critically. The fish looked raw, Griet realised. It was the first time she’d cooked trout. ‘It sounds like the perfect evening. My AWB brother will no doubt fall for your lesbian sister.’

  ‘George, I know it’s boring of me to be fond of my family.’ She felt as though she were posing for a camera, the muscles round her mouth sore from smiling. ‘I’d like to be able to suffer with you because I don’t get on with my parents and my siblings. It might have given me something to write about.’

  ‘Are you sure this fish is cooked through?’

  ‘Trout is supposed to be pink.’

  She tasted the fish cautiously. It wasn’t raw. She was so relieved that she drained her glass in one gulp.

  ‘If I could have chosen, I would perhaps have chosen different parents. I don’t know, but I couldn’t choose so I have to try to make the best of what I got. But it could definitely have been worse, it could have –’

  ‘I don’t have a quarrel with you and your family, Griet. Just leave me in peace, that’s all I ask.’

  He spat out a mouthful of bones. Naturally he’d divided the fish so he got more bones than flesh in his mouth. George dragged a sack full of thorns with him through life, regularly strewing them over his own path.

  ‘It’s the only family I’ll ever have,’ she murmured.

  Had she married a frigid man, she asked herself, or had their relationship frozen his emotions? Had there been any warmth long ago? Or was it just her fertile imagination that made her mistake a freezer for an oven?

  Why had she grown so chilly after seven years with him that she wanted to climb into an oven?

  ‘I don’t even like my own children all the time.’ His mouth was unexpectedly vulnerable, without the normal mocking smile; there was no trace of cynicism in his eyes. ‘Can’t you understand that I’m depressed about the arrival of another one, Griet?’

  She put out a hand and touched his cheek. She’d always been defenceless against his vulnerability. I love you, my husband, she thought. As God is my witness, I love you.

  ‘It’s too late to do anything about it now,’ she said, folding her other hand protectively around her belly.

  She shouldn’t have tempted fate.

  She’d given her husband a jersey for Christmas, a cable-stitch sweater that she’d spent weeks knitting in secret. It was thick and the wool made her hands sweat and she kept wishing she was lying under an umbrella on a sunny beach. Once upon a time, long ago, there was a girl who was ordered by a king to spin gold from straw, otherwise she’d be put to death. A dwarf had appeared to help the poor girl with his spells, but he’d demanded an impossibly high price. She had to promise to give her first-born child to him.

  Never knit a man a jersey before you’re married, her mother had always told her, it’s unlucky. Griet had laughed at her superstitious mother. Anyway, she was married. She felt safe.

  In the end she had to give up her child even though she hadn’t had a dwarf to help her with the knitting, even though her husband never once wore the jersey.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d given him something he didn’t like. Her only comfort was that he hadn’t done much better himself. It was as though they were unconsciously competing over who could give whom the most unsuitable gift.

  She’d given him a white cotton dressing gown that he’d never worn, and he’d given her a crocheted tablecloth she’d never used. She should have known that he’d rather wrap a towel around himsel
f than wear a dressing gown and he should have known that she hated crocheted things. She frequently gave him books that he never read: gardening books a week before his interest in gardening evaporated like the early morning dew on the lawn; carpentry books just after he’d sold all his tools without telling her; philosophy books by writers he regarded as intellectually inferior. He gave her perfume that made her smell like a prostitute, cookery books with the sort of recipes a dyslexic child could follow, and a green and yellow Swatch that didn’t go with anything in her wardrobe.

  Maybe he was trying to encourage her to get Springbok colours for some sport or another, Louise had suggested.

  ‘Wear it with a black beret and a clenched fist to one of Jans’s parties,’ Gwen suggested. ‘It’ll do wonders for your credibility in the Struggle.’

  After seven years they seemed to be bound together for ever by an unbreakable chain of inappropriate presents.

  ‘And why are you sitting here all on your own?’ asked her father behind her. She swung round guiltily. ‘Or are you trying to escape the racket in the kitchen?’

  ‘I should go and help them,’ she said, jumping up from the Christmas tree, but her father stopped her with a raised hand.

  ‘You don’t have to, they’re just talking, your mother and your sisters.’

  Hannes sat down on the sofa as carefully as an old man. His hair was quite white, she noticed with surprise. In his young days, he’d been tall and lean like his son, but the last few years he seemed to have grown steadily shorter and smaller, like a balloon that’s leaking air.

  She felt slightly ill at ease, as she always did when she was alone with him. She could never understand that a salesman should have so little to say to his children. To sell something, you have to be able to communicate with your customers, don’t you?

  No, Griet corrected herself, he has plenty to say to his children, sometimes even too much, and he says it regularly. He liked launching into long monologues at table, usually with a glass of wine in one hand. He would have made a good preacher or Shakespearian actor, if he knew the Bible or Hamlet half as well as he knew his precious literature on sales techniques. How to Sell Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anybody, Tienie called everything her father read. With the subtitle Death of a Salesman’s Family.

  ‘You must believe in yourself,’ Hannes always said. ‘You must be positive and have faith in yourself, then you can do anything you set your mind to. It’s easy to be negative. Easy and cowardly. If you tell yourself you can’t do something, you’re protecting yourself from the risk of failure. To be a spectacular success, you have to be willing to be a spectacular failure. Nothing ventured, nothing lost, but nothing gained either.’

  His family had grown accustomed to his monologues over the years, learnt to listen patiently or laugh tolerantly, even tease a little sometimes.

  But no one could ever accuse him of communicating with his children.

  He liked to hold forth about positive thinking and how to get rich and which rugby teams were going to make it to the Currie Cup final. It was a pity that none of his daughters was particularly interested in who would win the Currie Cup, but, after all, what could you expect from women? His son’s lack of enthusiasm was harder to accept, but then his mother had spoilt him rotten from the day he was born.

  Sometimes he also talked about politics and religion. ‘The problem with black people is that they’re too different from us,’ Hannes always said.

  ‘The problem with children is that they’re too different from parents,’ sighed Nella behind his back.

  ‘Coloureds aren’t a problem – they share our language, religion and habits – but the blacks just aren’t as highly developed as we are. You can’t simply hand the country over to them. Look at what’s happening in the rest of Africa. The whites are pulling out and economies are collapsing, the streets are littered, the schools are deteriorating and the public services falling apart.’

  ‘Sounds like Britain,’ Griet would interject when she wanted to be provocative, ‘after ten years under Thatcher.’ But she usually preferred to hold her tongue.

  ‘The public services can’t really get much worse than they are already,’ said Tienie, who always found it hardest to keep quiet. ‘When were you last in a post office, Pa? Or a provincial hospital?’

  That normally started a fight.

  But if you asked him about his emotions, he was the one who went quiet. The ease with which he talked about positive thinking was matched only by his embarrassment if you expected him to say something about fear, uncertainty or love. The idea that there were people who would consult a therapist of their own free will gave him gooseflesh. Griet never discussed her shrink with her father. It was even a bit of a battle talking to her shrink about her father.

  ‘I hate Christmas,’ Griet sighed, sitting down beside him on the sofa. ‘I never liked it – I mean since I stopped believing in Santa Claus – but I’ve never hated it as much as I do this year.’

  He didn’t meet her eyes; just nodded sympathetically.

  ‘It was one of the biggest disappointments in my life when I heard that Santa Claus was my own father in my mother’s dressing gown.’

  ‘You always believed in that kind of thing more easily than the other children,’ Hannes said thoughtfully. ‘Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Mouse.’

  ‘I still have an extraordinary capacity for self-deception.’ Her father cast a surprised glance her way. ‘But when I first started doubting Santa Claus … It was like pulling a cornerstone out of a wall. The whole wall collapsed.’

  Hannes had grown up the hard way – he said so himself. There’d always been enough food in Grandma Hannie’s labourer’s cottage – bread and butter, eggs and meat. But there was never enough money for luxuries like school shoes or sports clothes. And fantasy was a luxury. Grandpa Big Petrus had his angels, but that wasn’t fantasy, they were as real as religion. And, unlike the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Mouse, the angels didn’t cost anything.

  ‘I only heard about Santa Claus when I went to school,’ Hannes had told Griet years earlier. ‘I thought he must have lost my address, otherwise he wouldn’t have overlooked me all those years. Then I decided to write to him explaining in detail how to get to our place, and just mentioning in passing that I wanted a rugby ball or a bike. Who knows, maybe he’d make up for all the years he’d missed me?’

  Hannes wrote to Santa Claus, but said nothing to his parents. Grandpa Big Petrus, he knew, was too proud to accept anything from a stranger in a red outfit. On Christmas Eve he hung up his pillow case in the living room beside the sofa on which no one but the dominee ever sat. If it was good enough for a clergyman, it would be good enough for Santa Claus.

  Hannes was a middle child, like his difficult daughter Tienie. If he’d received a present from Santa Claus that night, he’d have felt more special than his brothers and sisters for the first time in his life. He was so excited that – also for the first time – he battled to fall asleep.

  Of course, the pillow case was still empty next morning.

  ‘I stopped believing in Santa Claus there and then.’ That was how he always ended the story. ‘I never believed in anyone but myself again.’

  ‘Are you happy, Pa?’ Griet asked him on the sofa.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘No, I mean generally. You’re always so positive, you’re actually a pain in the butt. Like Nella tells me I am,’ she added quickly. ‘You’re always busy with some project or other – changing a bedroom into a study or breaking a new window through the living room wall …’

  ‘You have to keep busy,’ he answered exactly as she’d expected he would, ‘otherwise you start asking too many questions.’

  ‘What’s wrong with too many questions?’

  ‘You’ve asked too many questions since you were a little girl. The devil finds work for idle fingers.’

  ‘And you think in the end I’ll be seduced by the devil?’

  ‘I wou
ldn’t say that.’ He smiled. ‘But if you don’t get answers, you could get negative and depressed. And before you can say Jack Robinson, you’ll find yourself wondering whether anything is worth the trouble any more.’

  She’d already reached that stage, she wanted to tell her father, but she didn’t know how to. Her father thought it was terrible to ask too many questions. She knew it was worse to get too many answers.

  ‘Do you know the story about the young man who came across Death at the roadside, Pa?’

  Hannes raised his eyebrows and shook his head. The skin of his neck was starting to sag, Griet noticed. He was beginning to look like Grandpa Big Petrus had looked years ago. Why did an old person’s skin stretch like a jersey that had been washed too often? When did the air start leaking from the balloon?

  ‘Well, Death was lying at the roadside and the young man helped him to his feet, and Death was so grateful that he promised to send a messenger before he came to fetch him. So he could get ready. The years went by and the young man became an old man, but he always comforted himself with the thought that Death would not come upon him unannounced. And then one day Death tapped him on the shoulder and said he’d come to fetch him.’

  Hannes stared at the Christmas tree on the coffee table, his hands folded over his paunch, his face relaxed.

  ‘“But you told me you’d send a messenger!” cried the old man, sorely put out. “I sent one messenger after another,” said Death. “I sent sickness to lay you low and toothache to plague you. I sent age and wrinkles to warn you. And every night of your life I sent my silent brother, Sleep, to remind you of me.”’

  Hannes nodded slowly, his eyes still fixed on the Christmas tree.

  ‘Don’t you sometimes feel unhappy because you wanted more from life, Pa?’