He was the apple of his mother’s eye. He was cleverer than the others, better looking, and he was the one she expected most of. She taught him to read before he turned four. He’d go far, she predicted, he just mustn’t expect too much happiness. Happiness was reserved for sinners like his father.
He was a loner in the little school on the farm, too clever for the others in his class. After the first term, the teacher pushed him up to the next class. Then he was even more lonely because his classmates were all much older than he was. After a year his mother decided to send him to a larger school far away from the farm. This meant that from a very early age he had to stay in a hostel.
He was a skinny child with hair that just wouldn’t lie flat. He was only allowed home for two weekends each term. The first weekend at home he cried, but his mother looked so wounded that he never cried in front of her again, not even years later at her deathbed.
When the time came to go to high school, his mother sent him to one of the best boys’ schools in the country. Each holiday he found less and less to say to his brothers, who’d all gone to school closer to home, and to his father who warmed himself up in the pub in town every evening because his own house had grown so chilly. His mother brought George coffee in the morning, and then sat on his bed and chatted about everything that had happened during the last term on the farm and in the district. And she always asked him what he was going to be one day.
She wanted him to become a powerful politician, rubbing shoulders with kings and presidents. Or a judge deciding about life and death. Or a brilliant surgeon performing operations that no one had even dreamt possible – like transplanting hearts or lungs.
His father wanted him to take over one of the family farms. Or go into business and make money.
At university, further from home than ever before, the world of the intellect really opened for George Moore for the first time. In the third week he travelled upwards and passed through the gates of a philosophical heaven. He never came back down to earth again. By the second year he’d read The Fall thirteen times and stopped believing in a god. If he’d believed in heroes, Camus would have been his hero.
Once he’d acquired a couple of degrees, he went to Europe to continue his studies and to think more freely. He said goodbye to his family on the farm as though he’d see them again within a year, but he didn’t mean to come back. His mother read him like a book and she was the only one who suspected the truth. She wrote to him every week, about the weather and the neighbours and everything that had happened on the farm and in the district, but never asked when he’d be home.
When the princess asked the shepherd’s clever son how many stars there were in heaven, he took a sheet of paper and a pen and made so many tiny dots on it that they swam before her eyes. Then he said, ‘As many dots as there are on this sheet of paper, that’s how many stars there are in heaven – you count them.’
George met his first wife in Europe, an English-speaking girl from his own country who’d been sent overseas by her prosperous parents to save her from marriage to a socially unacceptable man. And then she came back with a man who was even less acceptable: an Afrikaner.
His sojourn overseas was a sobering experience for George. He didn’t have enough money; he often went to bed hungry; the cold winter weather got him down; the people’s strange habits confused him. That was the beginning of the cynicism that lay heavier and heavier on his heart each year for the rest of his life.
After less than a year he was back in his own country, without completing his studies and with a pregnant English-speaking girl at his side. Her parents swallowed their colonial pride and organised a quick wedding. George never understood his English-speaking bride nor her arrogant family, and neither did she understand her Afrikaans husband’s rural farm background.
From the first month, the marriage was a kind of comedy of misunderstandings, but it wasn’t until seven years later that George met Griet and realised that there might be an alternative. They became good friends while he was an unhappy married man and slept together for the first time shortly after he became an unhappy divorced man.
It was fitting, Griet thought years later, that it should have been seven years. Almost as though he’d worked it out logically. A good average for a relationship. Even the Bible says seven fat years follow seven lean years.
The first year, George marvelled at Griet. He was like an old-fashioned gentleman who’d caught an exotic butterfly in his net. He wanted to pin her down in a display case and study her for the rest of his life. He invited her to come to the cinema with him and spent the whole two hours staring at her profile instead of the film. He never got tired of looking at her.
Griet felt trapped and went out with other men – but returned to the waiting net time and time again. Of her own free will, and subsequently, even eagerly. If you have sufficient patience, she thought years later, you can transform almost any animal into a pet.
But if you want to teach a pet to eat out of your hand, both must know who’s boss and who’s the possessed. George and Griet confused the roles from the beginning. George wanted a pet who’d stimulate him intellectually and sexually. Griet wanted the same thing. Neither of them was prepared to take the responsibility of a proprietor.
When the princess asked the shepherd’s clever son how much time made up eternity, he answered, ‘A long way from here lies a diamond mountain, one hour high, one hour wide and one hour long, and once each century a bird comes to sharpen its beak on the mountain. Once the whole mountain has been rubbed away, the first second of eternity will have passed.’
The princess was so impressed by the shepherd’s son’s answers that she decided to marry him. But princesses don’t usually make good housewives, and this one didn’t know how to use an oven. She put her head in there and spoke the secrets of her heart out loud because she thought no one would be able to hear her.
She didn’t know how to use a broom either. She soon learnt, however, that there were ways she hadn’t dreamt of, and she began to fly at night.
She began to write at night.
Griet lay on Louise’s bed and wondered why it had taken so many months to start understanding why she and her husband had made each other so unhappy. She was naked because Adam had taught her to sleep without clothes again, but tonight she wasn’t thinking about sex. She turned over on to her back and wondered if she’d ever see her house again. She linked her hands behind her head in the hollow of her neck and wondered why Louise’s flat made her feel like a stranger in her own life.
She closed her eyes in the pitch-dark bedroom and listened to the wind howling at the window. She wished her husband were here to answer her questions. She wished she could feel his thin body against hers just for one last time.
St George, the patron saint of England, had killed a dragon with his sword. St Margaret, the apogee of female purity, put a dragon to flight with her cross. ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’ was the theme song of their namesakes’ marriage.
The wind had blown all day as it could only blow in this city. By dusk the trees looked as exhausted as the people, but the onslaught continued. And now, in the silence of the small hours, the wind wailed like a siren. Unmuffled by any traffic noises. Exacerbated by a moonless blackness.
George had become increasingly distanced from his family, seeing less and less of his father and brothers, especially after his mother’s death. The opposite had happened to Griet. During her melodramatic teenage years there’d been such a great distance between her and her parents that she felt as though she came from another planet, but now they grew increasingly closer. Maybe she’d grown more tolerant than she’d been in the days of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Maybe she’d simply learnt to accept her family’s faults.
It was easier, in any event, than accepting her own faults.
She wished her ribcage was empty. A great black hole that she could pour all her feelings into so that she’d never be hurt again. Why d
id she still hope to hear from Adam?
Among the early cynics there had been a woman, Griet had read in surprise in one of her husband’s books. There was Antisthenes who started it all, Diogenes who apparently lived in a bath tub, Menedemos the Mad, Krates and his wife, Hipparchia …
Why couldn’t she stop believing in a god?
‘What is God?’ Hiero asked the poet Simonides. The poet asked for a day to think it over. The next day he asked for another two days’ grace. And from then on he doubled the number of days each time, until he had to tell Hiero at last, ‘The longer I think about it, the further I seem to be from any answer.’
‘Are you happily married?’ Griet had asked her sister Petra the previous evening.
‘Yes,’ Petra answered without hesitation. ‘I’m still not as unhappy with him as I am without him.’
‘Is that your definition of a happy relationship?’
‘Do you have a better suggestion?’
It was one of those moments of honesty that sometimes catch you unawares in a dark car. They were on their way home after seeing a film that was supposed to be erotic. The two young actresses had frequently stripped to the bone, and the camera, with the practised eye of a voyeur, had fastened itself on the fecund triangle described by nipples and pubic hair. The male lead kept his underpants on, even during the sexual act. (‘Boxer shorts,’ Petra whispered approvingly.) His genitals, as usual in films like this, were as invisible as the Holy Grail.
‘Don’t you miss him?’ asked Griet. ‘You’ve been here nearly a month now.’
‘Not really. It’s wonderful to get away once in a while. And when we get together again, there’ll be a couple of days of moonlight and roses before the bickering starts up again.’
‘What do you bicker about?’
‘About his smoking in the bedroom … about my buying too many groceries in one go and then letting half the things rot in the fridge … about his splashing water all over the bathroom floor when he bathes … Oh, you know: the usual things.’
‘No, I don’t know,’ sighed Griet. ‘George and I fought because I read the wrong philosophy books and didn’t ask enough questions. Or because he never read anything that I wrote.’
‘How can you write if you don’t understand the world?’ George accused her.
‘How can I understand the world if I don’t write?’ was her defence.
‘The only way to grow in wisdom is to ask questions,’ George told her.
‘Writing is also a way of asking questions,’ said Griet. ‘Don’t stories always ask other questions?’
What happened to Gretel after she and Hansel climbed on the goose’s back? When they got home to their father? When they grew up?
If all storytellers had to wait until they achieved wisdom, thought Griet in the darkness of her friend’s bed, we’d live in a world without stories.
Perhaps, in the long run, that was the greatest difference between her and her husband, the difference between Simonides and the shepherd’s clever son. Simonides was a philosophical poet. The shepherd’s clever son was a poetic philosopher.
Why did her husband, who didn’t believe in gods or devils or saints or dragons, give his children the names of angels?
23
The Queen on the Pyre
Far below her, yachts lay on the sea like crumbs on a blue sheet. Before her, on the twentieth floor of her attorney’s ivory tower, the air, in a paler shade of blue, also reminded her of a sheet. A faded sheet.
The distant island hung hazily above the water, a flying saucer slowly ascending. If wishes could still come true, Griet speculated, the prisoners would have made that happen long ago. ‘The greatest escape’, the newspapers would dub it, a bunch of prisoners escaping miraculously with a whole island. Somewhere over the sea the warders and their families would get the chance to jump off, close enough to be able to swim safely to shore. The island would rise higher and higher and then orbit the earth like a satellite, accompanied by angels and witches and geese and winged horses and exotic nightbirds and other apparitions. And only once the fairy land was liberated from maniac rulers would the island splash down again in the sea near its continent.
‘I dreamt about my ex-husband’, Griet wrote the night before in her notebook. Then she drew a line through the sentence and wrote: Griet dreamt about her husband.
Make yourself into a fictional character, her shrink had advised her.
They stood in a long empty passage in a huge empty building. He told her he was going away and she must take care of the place. She could do whatever she liked, he told her, but she mustn’t open the thirteenth door. After he’d left, she opened a door each day. Behind every door there was a bedroom that she recognised immediately.
The room she and Petra had shared as children, the pink-painted wall rough under her fingers when she ran her hand over it in the dark as she told Petra stories. The hostel dormitory she’d hated so much during high school, a grey Cape Education Department blanket as scratchy as steelwool on a high iron bedstead. The ramshackle outside room full of posters of surfers, where, as a student, she’d first made acquaintance with sex. The one-star hotel room somewhere in the Karoo where she and her husband had passed a sleepless night en route to his mother’s funeral. She too hot to sleep and he too sad. She lay waiting for him to tell her how he felt, but he didn’t say a word all night. The five-star hotel room with the equally strange king-size bed where they woke, both equally alienated, the morning after their wedding.
When she came to the thirteenth door, she couldn’t stop herself. She pushed the door open carefully, just a crack, then quickly shut her eyes as a blinding light shone on her. She slammed the door shut, but it was too late. She began to fall, tumbling, and the further she fell the darker everything grew around her.
‘Does that mean everything could be over within two weeks?’ she asked Hilton Dennis who was fiddling with his tie incessantly today. ‘That I could be legally divorced?’
‘It’s possible.’ It was a hand-painted floral silk tie, just a bit too flamboyant in this elegant office. ‘If both parties are willing to settle.’
Griet was so relieved she felt she could rise up with the island.
‘So, whatever the result of the Rule Forty-five application –’
‘Rule Forty-three,’ he corrected her irritably.
‘– Rule Forty-three application is, we can deal with the divorce on the same day?’
‘First they get a fright, then they settle.’ He smoothed the thinning hair over his forehead and tugged at his collar as though it were too tight. ‘That’s what I always say.’
He was trying to sound as confident as usual, but his sentences somehow shattered on his glass-topped desk. Maybe he’d had a difficult client. Or lost a case. She actually preferred him this way, Griet decided. A Napoleon who sounded as though he’d at least heard of Waterloo.
Once upon a time, she wrote as a result of her dream, long ago, when wishes still came true, there was a girl who lived in heaven and played with the angels. But because she didn’t listen to her master and opened a forbidden door, she fell to earth. She woke up to find herself alone in a wilderness. She wanted to call for help, but she couldn’t utter a sound. She’d lost her voice – but she discovered that she could write.
During the years she wandered in the wilderness, she slept at night in the branches of a tree and during the day she sat in its shade and wrote stories in the sand. She didn’t know where she’d learnt to write; when she woke up on earth, she could do it.
After many years a prince rode through the wilderness on a green horse. He was so surprised to see the dumb girl with the dirty, hairy body that he tied her to his horse and led her to his kingdom. In his castle he had her washed and shaved and then decided to marry her. She wasn’t really beautiful but at least she wouldn’t talk the ears off his head like all the beautiful princesses he’d considered.
‘Is there any chance of getting it over with sooner?’ she wanted
to know.
‘Why are you in such a hurry?’
How did she explain to her arrogant attorney that she felt like a piece that didn’t fit into any jigsaw puzzle? Ill at ease with half her friends who had husbands and children, and equally ill at ease with the other half who had neither. She had a husband, but she had to live alone. She had a child, but he could only live in her heart.
‘I feel as though someone’s pushed the Pause knob in my life and I’ve been paused to death. Anything would be preferable to standing still like this. Fast Forward, Play, even Rewind!’
‘If you’re prepared to give in now …’
‘I’m prepared to do anything,’ she said quickly. ‘He can keep the washing machine, the tumble-dryer and everything else. I just want to get it over with.’
‘I understand how you feel,’ soothed her attorney. ‘I know you want to get on with your life.’
He’s lying, thought Griet, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He’s a general who’s enjoying the war. It’s an opportunity for him to put his theories and tactics to the test.
But she knew how the soldiers in the trenches felt. She was the one who could lose her head.
‘But it would be stupid to withdraw now,’ said Hilton Dennis with all the sympathy he could muster. ‘You’ve made it through to the final dress rehearsal. The only thing that remains is the opening night.’
So he saw it as a concert, she thought gloomily. It wasn’t even serious enough to be regarded as a war. She was an actress with stage fright, he an impresario with an eye to his bank balance. The longer the show ran, the more money he could make.
‘Look, if you’re determined to settle, we can do it on the day of the Rule Forty-three decision. We get the chance to negotiate with the other side before we go into court. You can’t lose anything by waiting another fortnight.’
Entertaining Angels Page 16
