Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 18
‘Knowledge is power, Gertruidah.’
She longed to be clever. Knowledgeable. But the more she knew, the more powerless she became.
Auntie Lyla didn’t look like Sarah, wasn’t like her in any way, even though they were twins. She spoke little. Was thin as a rake. Wore layers upon layers of clothes in sombre shades of brown, black and sand, so she looked like a woman from the Children’s Bible. In the evenings she lay beside Auntie Lyla on her bed. There was a candle burning on the dressing table. In the mirror it looked like two candles. Auntie Lyla told her about the constellations, religious wars, ancient cities, the Bermuda Triangle. She was spellbound. She couldn’t take her eyes off Auntie Lyla’s bed socks or her long white flannel nightgown. At night she brushed her long black hair in front of the mirror. Knelt beside the four-poster to pray.
If only Auntie Lyla would always stay on Umbrella Tree Farm.
Her mother and Auntie Lyla often walked to Anthony’s grave taking arum lilies and roses. Her mother never wanted her along. When they returned, her mother went to her room with a headache.
Then she and Auntie Lyla sat on the stoep drinking black leaf tea. Slowly, so the leaves sank to the bottom of the cup. When there was just a drop left, Auntie Lyla would swirl the cup round and round, then place it upside down on the saucer.
‘Come let me read your fortune, Gertruidah.’
The same ceremony year after year.
I see a little white-and-brown dog coming towards you: maybe you’ll get a new puppy … I see little gold stars in an exercise book; maybe one day you’ll become a poet … I see a man coming into your room at night, it looks like your father; maybe he’s come to check if the tooth fairy put enough money in your shoe … I see you sitting among book shelves, you’re stamping the books; perhaps some day you’ll be a librarian … I see you walking across a lawn between buildings and carrying a leather satchel; it could be a sign that you’ll go to university … I see you sitting on a couch and telling a strange woman something, something sad, because you’re crying; but I can’t hear what you’re saying …
After the baby was born Auntie Lyla never read her teacup again. Because tea leaves and dreams, they all went almost as soon as they came.
Not long after she joined the library in grade six, Mr Williston allowed her to pack away books in the adult section. On a wall near the art books was a painting that made her long for Auntie Lyla; it was as if Auntie Lyla was looking down from the frame.
The Mona Lisa.
Sometimes she sat on the carpet with a book about the life of Leonardo da Vinci. She gazed at the sad, shy expression in the woman’s old-fashioned face and wondered how a man could paint a woman’s eyes so that they looked as if they were about to close. As if she might fall asleep. She asked Mr Williston what it was about the Mona Lisa that was so mysterious. He called it an aura of mystique.
New words to look up. Aura: an air, a subtle emanation. Mystique: seeking to join one’s spirit with God; secret, mysterious.
Almost impossible to understand, but so beautiful.
One day she heard ‘Ave Maria’ playing in the background on the library CD player. Something about the deeply moving sounds helped her understand what an aura of mystique meant. Even though she couldn’t explain it in words.
Auntie Lyla had an aura of mystique. When she and Auntie Lyla sat by the river, they could talk to each other without words. Especially when she was a little older. One day, she must’ve been about fifteen, she and Auntie Lyla sat listening to the frogs. Then a tear rolled down Auntie Lyla’s cheek.
She came close to showing Auntie Lyla her stone house that day. Because she knew that Auntie Lyla would have liked to sit against the body of the mountain, in a warm hollow where no one knew about her. Then Auntie Lyla got to her feet and put on her slip-on sandals; she said she’d promised Sarah they would walk to the grave and take sweet peas.
In her heart she felt glad after all that the stone house was still hers alone.
The next September Auntie Lyla brought her a small print of the Mona Lisa and a book about Leonardo da Vinci. She took both to the stone house and told Auntie Lyla she’d hidden them somewhere in the mountain.
Mountain child, Auntie Lyla said. Beautiful mountain child …
She was twenty-two when Auntie Lyla visited for the last time; three years after the child was born. One wind-still day she and Auntie Lyla went to the river at sunset. They watched the evening clouds. Orange. Pinkish-purple. Lead grey.
‘You are beautiful, Gertruidah. You have so much potential. You must forget about the baby.’
‘No, Auntie Lyla, I’ll never forget.’
‘But you must put it behind you.’
‘How do you put something like that behind you?’
‘By moving forward. Gertruidah, I have no right to try and influence you, but I’m convinced you must make a radical break with Umbrella Tree Farm. With your parents, too, if necessary. Here you’ll remain a prisoner until the end of your days. Get away from here, it doesn’t matter how or where. I’ll help you with money if you want to go to university, or until you’re on your feet.’
‘With my matric subjects I can’t get university exemption.’
‘Then do a bridging year. Do anything. Just start standing on your own two feet.’
Dark grey evening clouds. The hadedah shouted ha-de-dah … ha-de-dah … ‘I would like to see them rot in jail. I want to shoot them in their sleep.’
‘That I can understand with my whole heart. But prosecution and exposure isn’t always the best option, Gertruidah. Murder certainly isn’t, because then you would suffer twice as much, for the rest of your life.’
‘Auntie Lyla, I hate them.’
‘No one, not even God, can blame you for that. You’re the victim of your father, of your mother, too, but you shouldn’t become the victim of your self. Sometimes people grow so used to torture and humiliation, they think it is normal. But there’s a life away from Umbrella Tree Farm. Don’t become trapped in a victim mentality, Gertruidah. Emotionally that is dangerous, even deadly.’
The evening sky looked like transparent black glass. The noise of the frogs grew louder.
‘Just get away, Gertruidah, please?’
‘If I leave I’ll also go away from a man I love.’
‘If he loves you too he’ll follow you. I’m going to tell you a story I want you to memorise. If you ever feel hopeless and think about suicide, repeat this story to yourself. In a moment of despair it might restore the insight you have lost, or help you gain the insight that’s been stolen from you.’
She liked stories.
In the early 1960s scientists did an experiment to discover how the human flight instinct worked. They placed a dog inside a large cage of which the right side was wired so the dog would get an electrical shock if it walked or lay there. The dog learned fast, and kept to the left side of the cage.
Then they changed the wiring so the left side would shock the dog and removed the wiring from the right. The dog adapted fast and kept to the right side of the cage.
‘It’s called conditioning,’ Auntie Lyla said and wound her heavily pleated brown linen skirt around her shins. ‘What it comes down to is that people naturally adapt and respond to events taking place directly around them. If someone splashed water in your face, you would duck out of the way and shut your eyes. But if someone continued to splash water in your face hour after hour, after a while you’d stop ducking. You’d blink, wipe the water away and carry on. The shock and cold and discomfort would affect you less and less. But wait, I’m getting sidetracked …’
Next, the scientists wired the entire floor of the cage, so the dog received a shock no matter where it stood or lay. At first the dog was confused and anxious, but when it realised it wasn’t safe anywhere, it lay down on the floor and accepted each shock passively and as inevitable. It gave up trying to outwit its opponents.
But the experiment wasn’t over yet. The scientists opened the cage door wide, expecting the dog to rush outside immediately to get away from the painful shocks. To their amazement, however, the dog stayed where it was, deadened to pain and shock. The dog’s flight instincts had been damaged; it accepted its fate as the beginning and end of its existence.
‘Don’t lose sight of the open door, Gertruidah. Don’t just lie down and give in. The longer you lie there, the more you’ll get used to the impact of the shocks. Eventually a life of pain and helplessness will come to seem like your fate. Don’t, Gertruidah, don’t … Fight. Spit. Bite. Leave. Have a new lock put onto your bedroom door every week. Keep pepper spray under your pillow. Buy an electric rod and shock him out of his mind. Do something, Gertruidah …’
On the day she left, Auntie Lyla wore an air of bewilderment. Spookily dark. The bones in her face protruded: in the two weeks on Umbrella Tree Farm she’d grown even thinner. On her way to the car Auntie Lyla picked a light purple Michaelmas daisy and gave it to her. It meant farewell or remembrance, she said. Press it in one of your dictionaries, then you’ll always have something of me with you. She drove off. Waved through the car window. Dust swirled and settled again.
Three months later, on Christmas Eve, Auntie Lyla gassed herself in her garage in East London. Umbrella Tree Farm was shocked into silence. Dazed, she fingered the Michaelmas daisy in her thesaurus and knew Auntie Lyla had said goodbye in September.
The image of Auntie Lyla dead in her car haunted her mercilessly. Had her head been swollen? Had her eyes been open or shut? Was it true that your bladder automatically emptied when you died? How did undertakers straighten a body that had grown rigid sitting up?
She went to lie on the bed with her mother. ‘Why did she do it, Ma?’
‘I never wanted to tell you this, Gertruidah, but Auntie Lyla had two illegitimate daughters who were severely disabled. They were placed in a home. The younger one died early, but the older one survived until deep into her thirties. She died at the beginning of December. Auntie Lyla gave up on life a long time ago, but she couldn’t leave her child behind without a mother.’
‘But Ma, Auntie Lyla was only fifty-two, like you. How old was she when the child was …’
‘Fourteen. Now go, I never want to talk about this again; I want to go to sleep.’
Abel and Sarah went alone to East London for the memorial service. She’d wanted to stay behind and write her farewell message in the river sand. Something inside her was too shattered to think of sentences. Tethered. True-hearted. Dear. Dead. Gratitude. Guarded. Ragged. Hard-headed. Hurt.
She rolled over onto her stomach and cried.
An aura of mystique was gone.
The next week when she went to the post office there was a letter addressed to her. Delight. She never received letters. Inside the oblong envelope, with the address typed on a sticker, was a letter from Auntie Lyla.
Beautiful, beautiful mountain child
Because I have always lacked the courage to tell you directly, I am sending you Anne Sexton’s poem, ‘The Frog Prince’. You are clever, mountain child, you will understand. Always remember that your mother and I were twin sisters in the same house; that we shared everything and that we are woefully tied to one another. Although I leave everything in my estate to you, your mother will have usufruct until she dies. I do it this way because the day may come when your mother needs money and a house. Underneath your mother’s bed you’ll find her brown suitcase from her childhood. You must look for the key, so you’ll know what’s inside it. Thank you for the precious hours at the river. Take good care of yourself and of your mountain, and never stop fighting. Don’t wait too long like I did. Don’t give up like I did.
Love. Auntie Lyla
It was the story of the frog prince, into which the poet had introduced the alchemy of poignant images and symbolism. She read the four pages of poetry again and again. Until some of the phrases solidified inside her head.
Frau Doktor
Mama Brundig,
take out your contacts,
remove your wig …
Frogs arrive
With an ugly fury.
You are my judge.
You are my jury.
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I’ll take a knife
and chop up frog.
Frog has not nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father’s genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob …
At the feel of frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Slime will have him.
Slime has made him a house.
Mr Poison
is at my bed.
He wants my sausage.
He wants my bread.
Mama Brundig,
he wants my beer.
He wants my Christ
for a souvenir.
Frog has boil disease
and a bellyful of parasites.
He says: Kiss me. Kiss me.
And the ground soils itself …
I took the moon, she said,
between my teeth
and now it is gone
and I am lost forever.
A thief had robbed by day.
Suddenly many of the events she observed while she waited for the baby at Auntie Lyla’s house made sense. The psychologist. The skill with which Auntie Lyla had handled everything. Her voluntary work at a home for the disabled on Mondays and Wednesdays. In order to be close to her child of shame.
Something inside her understood perfectly why Auntie Lyla committed suicide.
Twin daughters. Lyla and Sarah. Surely it wasn’t true that Sarah also …?
It was like falling down a well and never reaching the bottom.
Sometimes it’s easier to escape from the truth, to look the other way.
She wanted to talk to her mother but couldn’t. Because instead of feeling compassion for Sarah, for her mother, she scorned her even more. If her mother had lived through the hell of the night rider herself, why did she allow her child to be dragged through it too?
And yet she couldn’t escape the truth entirely. Because during all the many sad hours she spent at the river, missing Auntie Lyla, the psychologist’s words during their final session kept running through her head, driving her insane.
‘Gertruidah, whatever happens to you in future, I want you to remember that there’s a frightened little girl living inside you. You have to comfort her, constantly. Hold her, protect her. Keep telling her that she is innocent, that she wasn’t the instigator but a powerless puppet in the hands of someone who’d been her hero.’
The heartburn boiled up inside her; her feet were puffy.
‘I hate my father with every fibre of my being. The bloody paedophile.’
‘He isn’t a paedophile, Gertruidah. “Paedophile” is a word people use to describe someone who molests children. But a paedophile molests more than one child at the same time. He’s always hanging around places where there are children. If your father was a paedophile he’d probably have wanted to be a Sunday school teacher, or organised tennis days or hiking weekends on the farm for children. He would’ve encouraged you to bring friends home …’
‘Then what is he?’
‘An incestuous father.’
‘And I am an incestuous daughter?’
‘No, you are a victim. And remember this, Gertruidah,’ and the psychologist held a glass of water out towards her, ‘there’s a frightened little boy living inside your father.’
It made her want to gag. ‘I don’t give a damn about that. I wish he would get cancer and die a slow and painful death.’
‘Your rage is understandable. But I assure you, even though you may not want to hear it, your father is a confused and wounded man whose emotional world in many ways has remained that of a powerless child. There’s nothing under the sun that could justify his conduct towards you, but you must at least try to see inside the soul of that frightened little boy. That could be your salvation, and it could be his.’
At the time she didn’t realise that the psychologist probably knew, from Auntie Lyla’s therapy, that her mother had also undergone years of torment.
But there, next to the river, while the Egyptian geese grated and the finches chattered and the poem swirled around inside her head, she kept wondering about the frightened little girl that lived inside Sarah. Had she also been terrified of a leguan and a turning doorknob? Doomed to live in a no-man’s land where she was never permitted to erect her own boundaries?
But however hard she searched inside her heart, she could never find a trace of compassion for either Abel or Sarah. Nor for the frightened little girl inside herself. And yet she clung to the psychologist’s parting words.
‘Find yourself a therapist, Gertruidah, someone you trust. Keep talking. Because one day the final healing phase will begin, and that’s when the old hurts won’t really matter any more. Just keep going. And going.’
After about a month she knew the poem off by heart. Then she fetched the key for her school suitcase from the stone house and locked the letter away. Put the key back inside the cake tin in the stone house. Grieved dry-eyed against the body of the mountain because she hadn’t shared her stone house with Auntie Lyla. Even for just a little while.
A tear dried. A third dithered. The eighth darted. The thirtieth thudded. A great tide gathered. Gertruidah irrigated the eager earth.
The second guest room is an African work of art. It must have taken Sarah months to sew the draped curtains, embroider the bedspreads with animal motifs. A genet skin on the end of the bed. Footstools carved to resemble elephant feet. Tanned springbok hides on the floor beside the bed. Lampshades made from pig skin. Curry bush in a wooden bowl on the window sill. The silhouette of a black man blowing a horn against an orange sunset, painted on the western wall.
Long ago this was Grandpa Strydom’s bedroom. She can’t really remember him. Just snippets here and there, and that Anthony had said the room smelt sour. Now it smelt of wild herbs. It was where the tennis guests sometimes slept. And business visitors staying overnight, important people from overseas.
