Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 28
That afternoon I was sitting on the bench underneath the pepper tree and longing for my mama when I heard the shot. Big gun. I would have paid no mind if Abel was sober. But you don’t want a drunk man near a gun. So straight away I took my walking stick and started for the yard, with a jar of sour fig jam as if I was taking it for Missus Sarah.
When I got to the kissing gate I heard another shot. I told my legs to stay strong and walk faster. On the front stoep I heard the third shot; it came from inside the house. My ears rang. Heavens, who was shooting at whom? My first thought was that Gertruidah had shot her papa and her mama, and then herself. Because that was the time Gertruidah’s tunes were badly mixed up.
The front door was locked. Round the back to the kitchen, fast, as if my legs belonged to a young woman. The back door was open. Softly down the passage to where I could hear Abel shouting. Peeped around the door frame. Shut my eyes and looked again, because there was Missus Sarah and Gertruidah sitting in a tight bundle on the double bed. And in the wall above their heads were three bullet holes as big as ploughshares.
Plaster everywhere. When Missus Sarah saw me, her mouth opened. She was holding on to Gertruidah’s knee. I put a finger to my lips to keep them quiet.
Abel was swaying on his legs and shouting. About scandals and who was to blame and that he would rather kill them and himself than rot in jail like the town’s magistrate.
I knew I had to act, but carefully. That gun could go off any second. I shuffled around the door frame, my notsung stick raised above my head. I took aim at the end of the gun and knocked the heavy gun out of his hands. Then I landed the stick above his ear. When he was lying on the ground, I took aim at his balls. I saw Gertruidah grab the gun and drag Missus Sarah out the door by the sleeve of her dressing gown.
‘You black bitch!’ he shouted and held his groin. I took no notice. Because he was drunk and tomorrow he would be back at my kitchen table eating ash cakes with goat’s butter.
His shouting became quieter. Then he rolled onto his stomach and began to cry with his face in the carpet. I sat down on the chair at Missus Sarah’s dressing table. My heart carried me back to that day behind the cement dam and in my distant memory I heard Samuel sing.
Fly to your nest, sweet birdie.
Then the song came out of my throat by itself. Unsteady, because my tears kept coming. Sendiya vuma, Somandla … Send us Lord in your Name …
It wasn’t a week afterwards when I saw him coming this way with a half pocket of baby onions and a bunch of spinach for Mabel and me. I watched him from far away. Head down.
‘Good morning, Mama Thandeka.’
‘Molo, Abel.’
We didn’t talk. I placed a bowl with white rice and warm milk and cinnamon sugar on the table before him. He ate. I could see his hand shake when he raised the spoon to his lips.
‘Thank you, Mama Thandeka, thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Then he left. When I could no longer see him I was still wondering. Thank you for the rice, or the blows from my stick, or because he had heard me singing in his drunken stupor? ‘Sala kahle, go well,’ I said quietly to his back.
◊◊◊
She lays down the pupa inside the flannel blanket on the red-grass bed. Stows the cake tin. There is just enough time for a mug of pea soup, then she must go, before the darkness brings the fog. She pours water from the green plastic container Abel used to keep in the back of the truck until one day it went missing.
Strikes a match. Lights the stove. Boils the kettle.
Listens to the hadedah’s teasing hah-de-dah cry. Mama Thandeka always says you must stop and say a prayer when you hear the hadedah’s cry. Because when a hadedah cries a baby is being born. And that baby will need all our blessings if he’s to keep an eye out for a mamba.
No one had wanted to bless her baby. Not even her. It had been night; not even the hadedahs had hah-de-dahed.
Tiny sips of pea soup.
She was grateful. For getting away from the tennis, and taking off the tracksuit top. Shouting and cursing in the fog. Floating in the mountain pool. For being in the stone house with a blanket wrapped around her, and watching the fog weave its tentacles.
The child stirred. She shuddered.
How did one give birth? What if it happened while she was in the veld and the child got stuck? What would she do with the child? What did a placenta look like? She would cut the cord with her Victorinox. Then she would wait till it was dark and walk to town, leave the child on the steps outside the hospital. Could a newborn baby drink water? Was it possible to walk that far if you’d just given birth? Perhaps she should take the money in the cake tin and go to Auntie Lyla to hide.
No.
She would bandage herself tightly; perhaps that would abort the child. Or she could drink poison. Shoot herself with the .22, at the point in her stomach where she could feel the child stir.
Forget it.
Rather draw the canvas and light a candle. Get started on the Italian sonnet the grade elevens would have to hand in by next Friday. She wrote her full names at the top of the page so she wouldn’t use forbidden letters.
G E R T R U I D A H S U S A N N A H J A C O M I N A
This would be the first time she’d use her full names.
With G E R T R U I D A H alone it wouldn’t make sense. It was important for her words to have meaning. For Braham. For herself. For the sake of Andrea and the box house.
They started with poetry on a Wednesday. The boys sighed when Braham handed out computer printouts of William Wordsworth’s ‘To sleep’.
‘This is a classical Italian sonnet. Easy to distinguish from other poetic structures. It always has fourteen lines …’
A good place to start, especially for the boys. Soon everyone was counting lines.
‘It has a definite rhyming pattern, although the pattern sometimes varies. But here,’ and he held up the sheet of paper, ‘we have the rhyming patter a b b a a b b a c d c d c d. Underline the last word of every line and see if you can decipher it.’
Everyone deciphered. Except her. She knew the poem. It was in the well-thumbed copy of Wordsworth’s Collected Poems Auntie Lyla had given her in grade eight. Her eyes sought out Andrea’s empty desk. What did an open skull look like, and a double row of teeth? People said the doctor had cut loose the webbing between the tiny fingers.
When she looked up, Braham was staring at her. As if he could see inside her.
The child stirred again.
‘Right,’ he said and sat down on the table corner. ‘On the back of the page is an extract about the man who masterminded the origin of the Italian sonnet in the thirteenth century, Francesco Petrarca.’
That was the reason she loved him, in a different way from Mr Williston. Braham had a way with words. He had an aura of mystique. He brought his lessons to life with stories from outside the textbook boundaries. Stories about Sylvia Plath who started writing poetry at the age of eight. While a student at Smith College, she made her first suicide attempt, which she recorded in her novel, The Bell Jar. Her recovery marked the beginning of Sylvia Plath, the poet, who wrote:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
Early one freezing February morning, she sealed off the door between her and her children and shoved her head into a gas oven. Dead at thirty, tired of life.
Stories of sacred beauty. Loving beauty. Reverent beauty.
She would go to Yorkshire some day, to kneel at Sylvia’s grave.
She rinses her hands with the warm water from the kettle. Tonight she will make herself a bed on the disinfected floor in her bedroom. But before she goes to sleep she will fetch the hammer and smash the doorknob to pieces.
There’d stir no doomed generation inside her had the door to the room remained shut and the rider marooned outside.
Why was Braham at the funeral?
I will be waiting in The Copper Kettle. Let me know if you need me, Gertruidah …
She shouldn’t have trampled the wild chestnut flower. But she’d wanted to.
While they were busy with irony he told them a fascinating snippet from The Soul of the Ape, Eugène Marais’s study of baboons. About Hesperian depression. A kind of sad longing that overtook baboons, and some people too, when the sun went down and the evening star Hesperius rose in the sky. It only disappeared once it was dark.
‘The baboon troop sits quietly and the babies snuggle up against their mothers,’ he said. ‘Their body language becomes sad. They make grieving sounds that represent crying …’
Braham could take her away to places where no frog princes existed. Introduce her to the souls of Sylvia Plath, Eugène Marais, Francesco Petrarca, Mark Twain. That thought alone gave her a reason to live, made her forget how Abel beat her head against the wall when she became stiff and unwilling.
Even though she is sitting alone in the stone house with her shattered life around her, and the garden is strewn with a lifetime’s rubbish, she can still hear Braham’s voice.
‘We also experience this twilight sadness, but we hide it behind our masks. But enough about that. Let’s get back to Petrarca and the Italian sonnet.’
The classroom stank of chalk dust and school socks. It made her dizzy and nauseous. The day before she had nothing to eat except for an orange and a slice of melon. Played four sets of tennis, almost swamped inside her tracksuit top. Between the second and third sets she went to the bathroom to stick a clean panty liner to her black Lycra pants. Stared with revulsion at the brown line of excrement. During the final two sets she played ferociously; in her head every smash was a blow struck against Abel.
‘For homework there are two options.’ Don’t ring, bell, she wanted to stay where she was. ‘You can write a summary of the extract on the back, or write your own Italian sonnet. Just as long as your sonnet bears some relation to “sleep”, the rhyme scheme is correct and you hand it in before the end of the term.’
She would do both.
That afternoon she arranged with Mr Williston to take out Eugène Marais’s The Soul of the Ape on long loan. She googled Francesco Petrarca but there were people waiting to use the library’s computer. She would do more research on the weekend, and look up sphincter muscle too. On her way back to the hostel something magical about Francesco Petrarca carried her away to the world of what-if.
… famous for his poems addressed to Laura, an idealised beloved whom he met in 1327 in Avignon … saw her the first time in the church of Saint Claire … possible that she was a fictional character …
Right there on the littered sidewalk she made up her mind that one day she would go to the south of France, to Avignon, and sit in the Saint Claire church to listen for Laura’s voice somewhere among the eaves.
Dreams. Horizons. Bread to feed her hunger. That was what Braham gave her.
It was getting colder, but the blanket felt cosy around her naked body. She lifted the canvas and saw drops of fog suspended in the bushes. It felt good not to have to clench her stomach muscles. She lit another candle. And started on the sonnet.
The second candle was almost burnt down and it was pitch dark outside when she heard the whistle. Abel was looking for her. The fog would muffle the sound; he had to be close by. What if the canvas had been open a crack and he’d spotted the glow of the candle? Blow it out. Get dressed. Wait to hear the rock tin fall.
‘Truidah! Truidah!’ She saw him approach from the west with the hunting lamp. ‘Truidah! Where are you, Truidah?’ He kept past the turn-off where the fishing line trap was set. ‘Answer me, Truidah!’
Mama Thandeka told her that Anthony once got lost in the fog when he was small. Her father almost went out of his mind. The neighbours and the entire congregation came to help with the search, right through the night. On the afternoon of the second day Littlejohn found him asleep in a rock crevice. Fortunately he called Johnnie and could lead them back to the spot.
‘Truidah! Truidah!’
She watched the glow of the hunting lamp disappear towards the east.
Let him suffer, the pig. The way the child was making her suffer.
By Sunday afternoon the sonnet was complete and she walked home through the fog, still praying for a tall cliff. She found her father next to the river where he was walking and calling. Hoarse as an Egyptian goose. Without letting a twig snap she snuck up behind him. ‘Pa …?’
He swung around. Dark circles under his eyes. Drenched. ‘Truidah? For the love of God …’ He put his arm around her and cried with his chin on top of her head. The crying sounds seemed to come from his throat and ricochet around her skull.
That was at the end of April in grade eleven.
For three months he became the father she loved. A concerned father who said she shouldn’t play tennis if her shoulder hurt. Who played Scrabble at the kitchen table. Brought coconut marshmallows from town. Helped take Bamba, who was becoming senile and messing inside the house, to the veterinarian. They drove to the vygie camp and grilled sausage on an open fire beneath the early winter sun. He asked her opinion about improvements he wanted to make at the tennis court and lapa.
It felt good to have a father.
But every time the child stirred, she despised him.
When the June holidays started he once again made her his moonlight dancer. She wrapped herself in a sheet; pretended she was an Eastern princess in a harem. In his passion he tore the sheet away and saw what she’d wanted to hide.
The next day he was staggering around the yard, drunk.
A week later Mabel helped push the Corsa out of earshot in the middle of the night and she went away to Auntie Lyla.
The soup’s gone cold. She rinses out the mug. Gathers up the flannel-wrapped pupa and the key for the school suitcase. Checks that the gas is turned off. Draws the canvas across the entrance to keep out the snakes. Splashes a bit of water from her hip flask outside the entrance to thank the stone house for its shelter.
Tomorrow afternoon she will fetch the rest of the stuff. Mona Lisa. Bamba’s collar. What Every Girl Should Know. She would return the book to the library, and pay the fine. Wordsworth’s Collected Poems. The black ribbon from Andrea’s baby’s funeral. The photograph taken at the prize-giving when Braham presented her with a certificate for outstanding creative writing.
‘The entire school has matric dance fever,’ Braham said when they were sitting behind the maidenhair fern in The Copper Kettle. His black polo neck jersey gave him a masculine air; his light stubble made her long to touch his face. ‘The books in the school library are in tatters, but they’re prepared to spend money left, right and centre on a matric dance. And if I dare mention buying books, the headmaster has a fit. I’m sick of teaching, Gertruidah.’
A small mouthful of black coffee. She watched the early winter rain beat against the window. Tried to laugh. ‘I will leave all my books to the school in my will.’ Frivolous. She had to hide her growing depression from him.
‘Thank you. But before you do that, will you give the tenth of October to me? Please?’
She’d seen it coming. ‘What for?’
‘Come with me to the matric dance, please, Gertruidah?’
‘Braham, surely you know by now …’
‘This is the sixth year in a row I’ve asked you. For the past five years I’ve gone alone. Come out of your cocoon, Gertruidah, or at least try to. It doesn’t matter if we don’t dance; just put your arm through mine when we walk through the door.’
With an undertone of belligerence. It was a side of him she didn’t know. ‘Braham, every year I imagine we’ve put this issue behind us. And every year in the second term it’s back on the agenda.’
Frustrated, he brushed away a few grains of sugar. ‘And every year I hope that you’ll come. Last year and this year you didn’t want to come along to my parents either. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m alone. In fact, Gertruidah, I am lonely. I can’t be bothered with the young teachers and their parties and silly jokes. I don’t fit in among the married ones either. I’m no saint and I don’t want to live like a recluse. That’s why today I’m asking you please, let’s go see a psychologist together so we can get to the bottom of what’s …’
She pressed the rim of the cup against her bottom lip. Most beautiful man with whom she couldn’t share a bed. The thought of lying naked beside him terrified her. And yet she wanted it. But how did one share a gentle passion, without shame or revulsion? How could Andrea open the door to everyone who came hunting?
‘No, Braham, I’m not going to the matric dance. Or to a psychologist. And I don’t want to discuss it or argue about it again, ever.’
He pushed away the plate with the half-eaten waffle. ‘Alright, Gertruidah. But then I want you to know I’m going to ask Almari Leibrandt to come with me, and to the year-end staff function too. She may be fat and she’s stupid, but she’s somebody. In the meantime you should start thinking about my feelings for a change …’
So even Almari Leibrandt was a better option than she was? Was Braham really so hard-up and desperate that he’d take Almari Leibrandt …?
Her fingers closed around the bunch of keys beside the milk jug; with her other hand she felt for her handbag. Leaned forward across the table. Whispered urgently: ‘Take her, Braham, any time you want to. But before I go, let me tell you what’s the matter with me, so you can look down on me with disgust, and be free from me and not feel guilty. And you can tell anyone you want, I don’t care any more.’ Her hand felt sweaty around the keys. ‘Ever since I was four-and-a-half years old my father has raped and sodomised me. It was his child I was expecting in grade eleven. Emotionally and mentally I’m a wreck who’ll never be able to function normally. And I’m not going to ruin your life any longer.’
She got up, put her handbag over her shoulder.
‘Sit down, Gertruidah. Do you think it could make me love you any less …’
