Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘And what about Adam?’

  ‘What about Adam?’ Griet smiled idiotically. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘How do you feel about … what happened?’

  What her therapist wanted to know was whether she’d slept with the man. She decided to be enigmatic – or as enigmatic as you could be with someone who knew your filthiest thoughts.

  ‘I’m not sorry.’

  It wasn’t so easy to smile like the Mona Lisa with someone you’d used as your personal confessor for months. Naturally she still felt guilty, but she’d also learnt that guilt could be a more powerful aphrodisiac than seafood.

  ‘Three months without a man’, she had written yesterday in her Creative Arts Diary. And then she’d scratched the words out and written: ‘Three months without my ex-husband’.

  ‘What do you want to happen next, Griet?’

  ‘With Adam?’

  ‘With your life in general …’

  What would she like to happen next, Griet wondered while she stared thoughtfully at her kneecaps, or at the floral dress that hung in folds over her kneecaps. She wanted a good fairy, or one of her grandfather’s angels, or the Egyptian goddess Aridia, mother of witches, to make all her wishes come true. She wanted the world to believe in something again. She wanted to write fairy tales. But that wasn’t what her shrink wanted to hear.

  The ghastly country where our heroine lived, she was going to write tonight in her book with the beautiful pages, was a place where everything was forbidden. The king had forbidden the truth, and the pages of many newspapers had bare patches, bare as the king’s head, and white as the queen’s thighs. (Which no one but the king had ever seen, of course.) When the truth had first been forbidden, the people clutched desperately at fantasy and imagination, and so the bald king decided to forbid fantasy and imagination too. He shut down the libraries and the theatres and changed the art galleries into prisons.

  Humour was all the people had left. They could laugh at the country they lived in, at the queen’s white thighs and the bare newspapers and the art gallery prisons, and they could laugh at their powerlessness to do anything but laugh. Then the king decided to forbid humour, and he threw all the clowns into the art gallery prisons, and all the banana peels into the sea, and forbade the people to laugh at anything but his own feeble jokes about other countries.

  ‘I want people to laugh at everything that’s absurd,’ Griet admitted to her kneecaps. ‘From politics to the power of the penis.’

  ‘And you yourself?’ Rhonda wanted to know.

  ‘I’ve been laughing at myself for months already.’

  ‘No, what I mean is: What do you want for yourself, Griet?’

  ‘You can’t take yourself seriously any more once you have a failed suicide attempt behind you. I know now that I can survive everything, even the cockroaches in my friend’s flat. Even the stupid armchairs in my shrink’s consulting room.’

  Griet’s head jerked up when a strange noise came from Rhonda’s throat, like breaking glass. Her therapist had burst into tears! Rhonda’s composed face suddenly looked sloppy, crumpled, her mouth gaping and her head thrown back. No, she realised, her therapist was laughing.

  This is what Rhonda must look like when she was having an orgasm, Griet realised.

  It was over in a minute, as suddenly as it had begun. Rhonda rubbed her eyes, gasped for breath, and rearranged her features neatly.

  ‘You can’t always laugh,’ said Rhonda as calmly as ever. ‘You have to be able to cry too.’

  Griet stared at her therapist. Rhonda’s legs were crossed at the ankle as usual, her back straight on the red sofa, her hands folded on the file on her lap. Griet thought of her grandmother. After she’d caught her up a tree, she’d seen her through new eyes. But Grandma Lina had looked exactly as before, with her down-at-heel shoes and her plaited bun. Or was it all just a figment of Griet’s imagination?

  ‘I cried non-stop day and night for three months!’ she exclaimed. ‘And then I stuck my head in an oven. And when I couldn’t even make a success of that, I began to laugh. Kundera says the devil laughs about the senselessness of everything and the angels laugh about how wonderful it all is. I laugh with the devil – and to hell with the rest!’

  ‘Can’t you laugh with the devil and the angels?’

  ‘Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds?’ Rhonda shook her head. A hint of a laughter line still lingered at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘My grandmother was afraid of everything,’ said Griet, and her eyes began to sting. ‘But she could climb trees. I can laugh.’

  20

  Clever Gretchen Greets the Golden Goose

  You could see from Jans’s house that its master had given his heart to Africa. Framed black-and-white photographs of township children toyi-toying, funeral crowds with clenched fists and policemen throwing tear gas decorated the bathroom walls. Striped mats made in the Transkei were scattered on the stripped wooden floors and the second-hand sofa was covered with cushions embroidered with lizards. Carved walking sticks from Malawi waited in a drum near the front door for anyone who fancied a walk.

  ‘Food’s nearly done,’ said Jans at the stove, taking a swig from the wine bottle which he kept close at hand in the interests of the culinary art.

  ‘You’ve been saying that for hours,’ complained Gwen, with her elbows on the dining room table. ‘We’ll be so tiddly by the time we get to eat we won’t be able to taste anything.’

  Jans was roasting a leg of mutton that Gwen had brought from her parents’ farm. As the walls between the kitchen, dining room and living room had been removed, he could talk to his guests while fulfilling his duties as chef. He lifted the lid of a casserole and the aroma drifted to the dining room on the stirring notes of Janáček’s ‘Taras Bulba’. Jans closed his eyes and sniffed ecstatically.

  ‘Mint and orange,’ he sighed.

  Griet met Gwen’s eyes and shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen anyone have such a jol in the kitchen.’

  ‘May one ask where Klaus is tonight?’ asked Jans, opening the oven door to take the roast out.

  The aroma overwhelmed his two guests. They sat at a rough old yellowwood table that had been used for years in his grandmother’s farm kitchen. A toy wire-and-tin windmill stood in the middle of the table in place of the conventional vase of flowers.

  ‘One may,’ Gwen told him, ‘but one won’t get an answer from me.’

  Jans carved the meat, arranging the pink slices on a large platter. He brought it to the table like a father carrying a child to the font at a christening.

  ‘I’m going to move out,’ said Gwen once they’d raved sufficiently over Jans’s prowess as a cook. ‘I can’t stay with Klaus any longer.’

  Griet and Jans exchanged a quick glance, but Gwen avoided meeting their eyes. None of them knew what to say next. They listened to ‘Taras Bulba’ in silence.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that Gwen and Klaus had broken up.

  ‘Well …’ said Jans when the silence started becoming uncomfortable.

  ‘Are you certain?’ asked Griet carefully. ‘The other times …’

  ‘Of course I’m not certain,’ Gwen told them through a mouthful of meat. ‘I’ve been saying it for a year, every time I have too much to drink. And next day I stay put because I’m afraid of being alone.’

  ‘The old Goths believed that all important matters must be discussed twice, Gwen,’ Jans told her. ‘Once while you’re drunk to ensure passion and once when you’re sober to ensure discretion.’

  ‘My passion says to me: Get the hell out of it; my discretion says: Wait, maybe there’s still hope. Everyone says you know when a relationship is over. How do you know? That’s what I ask myself. Is it like a bolt of lightning that strikes you, scales falling from your eyes, waking up one day and knowing? How did you know, Griet?’

  ‘I woke up one day with my head in the oven. Then I knew.’

  ‘Maybe one should stay drunk,’ la
ughed Gwen. ‘Who wants to be discreet? Can I have some more wine, please?’

  Had she become such a clown, wondered Griet, that no one believed her when she was serious any more? She looked at the flower-patterned porcelain plate before her, something else Jans’s grandmother had left to him. All she’d inherited from her grandparents, she thought rebelliously, were personality defects.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t laugh so much, as her analyst had suggested. That way her family and friends might realise she wasn’t waving to them, she was waving her arms to chase the wolf away. Or was the wolf also only a figment of her imagination?

  ‘Do you know there’s a bird called a swartstertgriet?’ asked Jans out of the blue.

  Griet and Gwen looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘No, I didn’t know, Jans, but thank heavens I won’t go to my grave without that bit of information.’

  ‘Limosa limosa: rare migrant, fond of water. Black-tailed godwit.’

  ‘Godwit?’ Griet shook her head incredulously. ‘Is that what they call a Griet in English?’

  ‘The only swartstertgriet that I’ve ever heard of,’ said Gwen, topping up all three glasses, ‘is the one you drink out of.’

  ‘No, Gwen, that’s swartgriet! As in kissing swartgriet. That’s the expression for drinking too much, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh. Well, seeing we’re talking about birds, have you heard from the golden goose?’

  ‘OK, make a joke of it. He was good for me.’

  ‘Adam?’ asked Jans, helping himself to a second serving as large as the first.

  ‘Did you know that the original story of Hansel and Gretel ended with the children climbing on to the back of a goose?’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Gretel?’ Jans looked at her over the top of his spectacles, his eyes more serious than usual.

  ‘If you can’t get a horse to be your Pegasus, maybe you could use a goose?’

  ‘A goose might be more suitable,’ said Jans, ‘in your case.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘A horse symbolises war, and I gather you’re tired of making war?’

  ‘And what would a goose symbolise?’ Griet smiled at Jans. ‘Nursery rhymes?’

  ‘There are lots of ways of flying,’ said Jans. ‘Isn’t that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘Well, have you heard from him again?’ Gwen still wanted to know.

  ‘No, and I don’t expect ever to do so.’ She took a generous swig of wine. ‘What could he say to me? Hey, man, I love you, baby?’

  Gwen looked down at her plate, rubbing a hand over her cropped hair.

  ‘More meat for anyone?’ asked Jans, making for the kitchen.

  ‘I wonder if I’ll ever sleep with a man,’ said Griet, with her eyes still on the table in front of her, ‘without falling in love just a tiny bit. I know I’m not supposed to admit it. I’m a liberated woman, aren’t I?’

  Gwen clucked her tongue and refilled Griet’s glass.

  ‘I know it’s ridiculous. Adam talks like a surfer and thinks like a teenager. But his body …’

  Griet twirled a strand of hair round her finger. Adam’s body was fluent in the seven languages of heaven. And her body wanted to answer him in all seven. ‘Women who scream and shout,’ she’d read in the paper, ‘are likely to live longer, healthier lives.’ Thank you, Adam, she thought. ‘According to researchers from the University of Michigan, “polite” women who swallow their anger are three times more likely to die young than their more extrovert sisters.’ If she could just escape Aids and cancer and the oven, she could probably still live a long and healthy life.

  ‘He made me feel safe. God, do you know how good it feels to lie beside a man who’s afraid of nothing?’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘I’m starting to get maudlin. I miss him at night, I want to close my eyes and snuggle in under his arm. I’m tired of lying alone and afraid in my bed.’

  Jans brought the platter back to the table with a fresh load of meat.

  ‘Eat, Griet. It’ll make you feel better.’

  He smoothed her hair; a clumsy gesture that brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘Sorry.’ She linked her hands in front of her forehead, elbows on the table, so they wouldn’t see her eyes. ‘Since my shrink told me yesterday that I shouldn’t laugh so much, I just want to cry the whole time.’

  ‘Drink,’ said Gwen, raising her glass to Griet. ‘I feel as though I want to have a good cry myself. Klaus hates it. It makes him feel helpless. He hates feeling helpless.’

  ‘I can’t cry in front of other people.’ Griet swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘It’s false pride, I know. I inherited my grandfather’s false pride and my grandmother’s fears. And a good dose of Calvinism to fuck me up thoroughly. But in private I cry like an actress in a Greek tragedy.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ asked Gwen.

  But there was something in her, Griet knew in her heart, that remained aloof even when she wept, even when she was alone, perhaps especially when she was alone. When her face crumpled and her cheeks were stained with tears, the storyteller in her watched, fascinated by the sobbing Griet Swart.

  That was the worst thing about being a storyteller. She became an observer of her own life.

  ‘I think you all try too hard to be tough.’ A sudden silence fell and Jans jumped up to change the record. ‘You make us poor males feel quite inadequate.’

  Griet closed her eyes and relaxed back in her chair to listen to Mozart.

  ‘Who do you mean by “you”?’ demanded Gwen, gesticulating so vehemently that her wine slopped on to the table. ‘What the hell do you want? Every time I open my heart to a man, the door is slammed in my face!’

  Jans looked flustered.

  ‘It’s as though you’re encouraging us to be dishonest. As though you’re so used to being manipulated that you run away if a woman tells you frankly what she wants.’

  Griet went through to the living room and picked up the record cover. Symphony No. 41 in C Major. ‘Jupiter’.

  ‘Do you really want us to play games for the rest of our lives?’ Gwen asked in a voice that suddenly sounded weary. She leant back in her chair, exhausted by her own anger. ‘Don’t show that you’re crazy about him, it’ll scare him off. Don’t say you want children, it’ll make him impotent.’

  Griet’s eyes started to sting again. She was tired of cynicism and just as tired of idealism. She was tired of irony and absurdity and humour, tired of laughing when she really felt like crying. Tired of living when she really wanted to be dead.

  ‘If you don’t act tough, Jans,’ said Gwen quietly, ‘you land on your arse.’

  They listened to the music in silence until Jans asked at last, ‘Well, what do you want?’

  ‘Just listen to this.’ Griet brought the record cover back to the table. ‘“All four movements are based on the principle of a dualistic union between masculine strength and feminine tenderness – expressed as a dialogue between wind and string instruments in perfect harmony.”’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said Gwen without a smile.

  ‘What do you want, Griet?’ asked Jans, leaning towards her.

  He looked as though he’d wiped his mouth with newspaper; as though he hadn’t seen a razor for ages. Did he really want to know what she wanted?

  ‘I’d like to say to Adam: Hey, come on, live with me and be my love. I know it wouldn’t work, but it’s a great fantasy. If I could transplant someone else’s head on to his body, I’d be the happiest woman on earth.’

  ‘For a few weeks,’ smiled Gwen.

  ‘Is that too much to ask?’

  Jans shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his ears.

  Griet looked at the framed poster above the dining room table. Mayibuye iAfrika. Where would her help come from, she wondered. Wishes didn’t come true any more and fantasy was a horse of a different colour, not one she could fly away on. She sighed heavily as the third movement of Mozart’s symphony began.

  ‘But
you can’t really take a guy in a pair of Union Jack underpants too seriously,’ said Griet.

  ‘What?’ asked Gwen.

  ‘He’s got this thing about funny underpants.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s got a pair with Uncle Sam pointing his finger and saying: “I want YOU”.’

  Gwen bit her lip to stop herself from laughing. Jans dropped his head into his hands and studied the empty plate in front of him with apparent interest.

  ‘And you, Jans?’ She smiled at him when he dared to look up again. ‘What do you want? And I’m not talking about politics.’

  ‘Do I ever talk about politics to you?’ He sounded peeved. ‘Unless you ask me?’

  ‘No, dear Jans, and you never laugh at my stupid questions. You’re the nicest man I know.’

  ‘Uncle Sam!’ Gwen was shaking with laughter. ‘I can’t imagine Klaus in a pair of Uncle Sam underpants.’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ said Griet, relaxing back in her chair and allowing ‘Jupiter’ to wash over her.

  21

  Cat and Mouse Keep House

  ‘It’s a good thing I arrived in time to help you with your Great Trek,’ said Griet’s sister Petra, wrapping a pile of plates in newspaper.

  Griet looked up bemusedly from the saucepans ranged on the kitchen floor. Petra sat cross-legged amid a mountain of boxes, in her oldest designer T-shirt and faded Levis, her beautifully manicured nails varnished rose pink. She looked like a princess playing housey-housey.

  ‘I don’t know if you’re going to be able to believe this, Petra, but somehow I coped without you for a whole year.’

  Petra raised her eyebrows. Griet could read her mind: in the last few years, her scatterbrained older sister had not only made a botch-up of three pregnancies, but she’d also lost a very presentable husband and a house designed by a yuppie architect. Not exactly a success story.

  Griet got up and shoved the saucepans into a box. Now all she had to do was pick her cutlery from the jumble in the drawer, and then she’d be finished with this kitchen. For ever, she realised, and relief changed to despair. What had happened to her glasses? Had George got so drunk every night that the glass fell out of his hand? Or had he smashed all the glasses in a single fit of rage?