Bitter Eden
Page 20
When I wake, the sun, warmly and rousingly in the room, is exposing the latter’s uncompromising barrenness – the narrow iron cot, ancient wardrobe that tilts a little when I touch it, cracked china jug and basin on a stand, and, in one corner, a laundry basket and a miscellany of mops and brooms. There is water in the jug and I pour some into the basin and slosh it on my face and comb my wet fingers through my hair. The night’s drunken expansiveness has shrivelled into a small but persistent knot of pain behind my eyes and I stand, listening for sound and drying my face and hands on my still clean handkerchief because I am not finding any towel, but the cottage seems as silent as though all but I have abandoned it in an hour of its need. Then I take hold of the doorknob, at long last polished, and at once remember that, sometime in the night, it had turned, but I had not responded because I had not known whether it was Danny wanting in or she checking to see who was sleeping where.
Then I go out, closing the door, and Danny – presumably hearing that – shouts, ‘In here, Tom!’ and I go through the other of the two doors opening out of the central room, and it is the kitchen and Danny is sitting at a plain wooden table and spooning up milk and cereal with a lightly trembling hand. ‘Belly up, mate,’ he says, hooking a chair out from under the table with his foot and indicating the box of cereal and a glass jug of milk, and I see that his eyes are narrowed as a Chink’s with a shared pain and his face is drawn.
I also then see that she is there, stirring something in a pot on the old-fashioned iron stove, her back turned, and I wish her a good morning, though my heart is not in it, and she says, ‘Good morning, Mr Smith,’ and Danny at once flings down his spoon, scattering cereal and milk like a bad child, and yells, ‘Call him Tom, goddammit! It won’t burn your tongue!’ but she takes no notice, just goes on stirring whatever-it-is and finding other things for her hands to do, and Danny sits moodily watching me eat cereal that’s tasting like straw, the ice between him and her thickening fit to skate on and he drumming with his spoon on the table till it is getting as much on my nerves as hers and I am wishing that I was anywhere but here.
Then I am finished and wanting to piss, but not wanting to ask where’s the toilet in this special brand of a hell for two, and he says, ‘Come, let me show you around,’ and we go out into the blessedly impersonal sun and I piss behind the nearest hedge and he watches me with sorrowing eyes, saying, ‘Shit!’ explosively, as though he is spewing out a last gobbet of rage. There is a fence with a stile at the back of the cottage and we cross over into the field that he was always telling me about in the camps, and although – like everything else here – it is smaller than I had pictured it, it is as postcard-pretty as he had described it, the grass seeding and lush and the flowers, with their obligatory bees, all the more having a ball for not being planned, and I say to Danny that I can understand why dogs always want to lie down in a place like this for a wriggle and a roll.
He grins, then – the first sign of a lightening of his mood – and shows me the stream running along the further boundary of the field, and we take off our socks and shoes and wade in the brilliant shallow water, going with its flow till its thin singing over the stones passes into the wide quietness of a pool. Here the water is deep and green as from a long bleeding of leaves, and patches of lily pads are floating on it like giants’ severed ears, and there is a dankness all about as of florists or crypts, and I am glad when we get to the gently noisy weir a hundred yards on and the pool again becomes a stream. Danny seems unfazed by the sombreness of the pool – says, in fact, that this is where he always swims, and leads me into some bushes a pace away, and we break out into a tiny glade of cropped-short grass which, he says, is his suntrap like we had at the one camp and maybe this is where we can again be what we once were, and still I do not tell him that time is running out on us more finally than any hurrying stream.
‘Let’s swim,’ he says, dropping his socks and shoes, looking at me with challenging eyes.
‘Here? Now? What in?’ and I’m knowing my questions are making me sound like a question-machine.
‘Your skin. What else? You gone all shy on me, mate?’ and already he has shucked off shirt and slacks, is wriggling out of the jockstrap that shows he is still a jogging man.
‘What if somebody comes?’
‘We’ll see them come. From way off, we’ll see them come. And, anyway, the water’s too cold for more than a quick in-and-out to get the booze out of our brains. So, come on! You’re already the bum, standing there!’ and he breaks back through the bushes and I hear him splash into the pool.
Hesitantly, I undress, get to stand on the weir, the overflowing, again clear water curling round my toes, and he mocks me as he thrashes around amongst the lily pads, and I dive in, and it’s like smashing, head on, into cold iron, and I’m out again with a yell, but he has me by a leg, dragging me back, and is ducking me till I fight free and am again on the weir, then on the bank, shivering and feeling blue as a kingfisher on a reed, but my mind shining and clear as a just-polished lens.
Then he, too, is out and we are back in the clearing and everything is coming together again as he drops onto the grass and starts to roll around in it, making like a dog, penis flailing out of the glistening bush of the pubic hair and his eyes, shrewd as a satyr’s, black as a seal’s, enticing me to join him in the perilous innocence of his world. But time is still running out for us and I stand, vacuously grinning and sad, and he gets up and puts his hands on my shoulders, his eyes asking why and his body moving to cover mine though it is still an arm’s length away, and we turn and lie down on the grass, side touching side, our eyes closed against the sun.
‘There’s something you’re not saying to me,’ he says, his voice resigned as though he already senses what it is, and I tell him, then, my misery unfeigned – but a certain cunning in me emphasizing that it could not have happened otherwise – and he nods, his face folding in upon itself, and we are silent again, listening to the heedless joyousness of the birds – or is joy as foreign to them as pain? – and once two women pass a few paces from us, chattering of their trivial affairs.
At last, he turns onto his stomach, looks down at me, ‘You will be back?’ and I nod, compelled, his closeness – of breath, being, flesh – overwhelming me, the strong, long line of his spine, buttocks, calves, reminding me of their carrying me out of death into life.
‘Yes,’ I whisper, ‘I’ll be back. As soon as they have demobbed me, I’ll be back.’
‘Yes,’ he, too, then whispers, animation and hope rekindling, ‘and I will leave her then. Must leave her then. We could never stay there, the way she is now. No, we’ll find a place of our own.’ Then, overawed, almost incredulously, ‘No stopping now,’ and he draws one leg over both of mine, his genitals nestling in the soft hollow of my side, penis slowly stiffening and his face nuzzling into my neck, and we lie for a long while so, and I know that he is wanting me to roll over, but to do it in my own time, and I, too, am wanting that, his warm breath exciting me as it does, but a residual, solitary me that always saw fit to intrude if there was no other way, but resented the reverse of it, is listening to a lark singing somewhere high, is envying it its freedom and flight, is hesitating before a fusion that will forever change its shape as, just now, it had hesitated before diving from the weir.
At last, he lifts his head and, lingeringly and gently, takes my nipples in turn between his teeth, and at once my own erection begins and I lay a hand over my groin as though to hide a shame, but he as gently removes it, says, ‘No! Face up to it, mate! All that time back there, you were lying to me and to yourself about what was going on, saying this, saying that, pretending that nothing had changed, but he,’ and he flicks my penis into full erection with a finger and thumb, ‘is telling you what you and me always knew.’
Then he brings his mouth to mine and forces his tongue between my teeth, and I am answering its grappling with an equal fury and starting, at last, to roll over, and he is sensing that and is readying hi
mself, but I have delayed for too long. Laughing, exclaiming, crashing through the brush on either side of us, a party has come for a picnicking, is already riotously at the weir, and we scramble into our clothes, crouching low, and get our arses out of there, Danny muttering, ‘Shit! Shit!’ till we are out of earshot and he can howl it out to the not-listening sky.
We don’t go back to the cottage, but to the bar, and sit there drinking beer and looking past each other till Danny hisses, ‘Damn you! Look at me, Smith!’ and I look at him and he says, more soberly, ‘Are we going to start that all over again? This is not an ending, mate. This is a beginning. You just shake them up over there and get back quick as you can. OK?’ and I say, ‘OK,’ and he fetches two more beers and touches his to mine and says, ‘To us,’ and I say, ‘To us,’ and we are almost forgetting I am going when the time comes to do just that and he has just thirty seconds to shake my hand – what else before all those seeing eyes? – and to ask, ‘You still have your gun?’ and I say, yes, but do I still need it now, and he says that one never knows, that life can deal a man bum cards when he least expects, but that’s not the point, the point is that the guns are a proof, a proof that I can, anytime, anywhere, take into my hand and be glad.
Then the train begins to move and he reaches up to touch my hand again, his eyes at last harsh with tears, and I go on searching for his taut, motionless figure long after I can no longer see it in the gathering dusk, then slump into the nearest seat, turning my face to the face in the window beside me, watching it blur into the terrifying tremulousness of a drowning man’s.
I touch the scar on my cheek and it flinches as though the long-dead tissue has a Lazarus-life of its own.
His letter beckons me. I take it up, scan it again. Phrases leap at me from its single page – ‘When you read this, I will be meat … gone, alone, to that other side of which we once spoke … the quack says just a few more days … The pain is bad, but not as bad as when I look back to how we were, how it could still have been … or is it that I never really gave up, until now? … Only time now for getting ready to go … Anyway, I wouldn’t want you to see the fuck-up I have become … When I think of how I used to jog back there, how we wrestled and you never won –’
The second reading hits me as hard as the first. Why did I never go back? Haplessly, I search for a single clear-cut reason that will wrap it up, but it is not as simple as that, I entangled in the unpredictable thickets of my self. Images leap at me as did the phrases from that letter’s searing page – pseudo-hero dying in a cardboard rubble on a makeshift stage, Douglas’ face as I boot him up the arse, Douglas’ cries as the Krauts carry him off, me, possessed, whispering ‘Out, damned spot!’, me balancing the scales, listening while a nightingale sings, waiting, like some damned tart, to be coaxed till the blood, too, sings – and there it stands – the bits-and-pieces, complex beast I must condemn.
Even then, I cannot do that without thrashing round. Was it only I that was flawed? Was there not also much that was questionable about him? Was there not, for example, something psychotic about the intensity of his friendship for me, his demands that it be anchored by pacts and vows? Was it not an almost impossible coincidence that both of us should have been sodomized by our fathers when we were young? Did he not, perhaps, after hearing me cry out about that in my sleep, lie about his own father in order to foster a relationship that would culminate in the failed foreplay in the glade? Otherwise, why should he have been so willing to wear the dressing-gown of a man by whom he had been so cruelly abused?
I lay down the letter, stand at the window, stare out at the widening dawn, hearing only sparrows chirruping where nightingales have never been, and knowing with an at last wretched honesty that I don’t believe any of these insinuations, will not be believing them even if they are true. Then I am looking down at the sleeping Carina, the pallid, formal doll that I decreasingly, dutifully, seed, and I am wanting to be back in the bitter Eden, my hands beating on the postern of its skewed parameters, my heart calling out to the echoing emptiness beyond.
Or is all this but a camp drama of my mind? His letter does not berate me! It is sad, but there is no calling me names. Does that not show that, at the end, there was an understanding and a forgiving and the postern is still a body’s width wide? And the bequest which I have not yet unwrapped? Why should he have bequeathed me anything if the bond had not still been there? Fired by a new hope, eager to be absolved, I hasten back to the study, open the package with no longer hesitant hands, lay bare what it contains.
It is his gun.
About the Author
Tatamkhulu Afrika was born in Egypt in 1920 of an Arab father and a Turkish mother. He was brought to South Africa in 1923, orphaned and raised by Christian foster parents. He served in World War II, and was a POW for three years in Italy and Germany. After the war he has also worked as a barman, a shop assistant, a bookkeeper and a drummer in a band. He settled in Cape Town in 1964, when he converted to Islam and joined the resistance to apartheid. Arrested in 1987 for ‘terrorism’, he was listed for five years as a banned person, and he still draws a pension from Umkhonto we Sizwe, the combatant arm of the ANC. Since 1990, he has published eight volumes of poetry and two prose works. At the age of seventeen he published an acclaimed novel in the UK entitled Broken Earth, but did not write again for fifty years. Prizes for poetry include the CNA Début Prize, two Thomas Pringle Awards, the Olive Schreiner Prize and the Sanlam Poetry Prize. He presently lives in a little wooden hut in the back yard of a house in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town.
Copyright
First published in 2002
by Arcadia Books Books, 15–16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
Copyright © Tatamkhulu Afrika, 2002
The right of Tatamkhulu Afrika to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–1–908129–38–3