Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 29
‘Goodbye, Braham.’ She walked off. He grabbed her wrist. She shook off his hand and kept walking.
Away, away, away.
The dream of Avignon shattered before her eyes.
The sun is setting by the time she draws level with the vygie camp and stops to pick a sheaf of scarlet chinkerinchee flowers for Bamba’s mountain grave. Twilight longing.
She places the flowers on the tiny mound of soil. Tidies the river stones around the edges.
She will travel to Avignon on her own. She will grasp a small chunk of the life that was supposed to be hers. And when she returns, she will buy herself a Jack Russell. A friend who’ll never have to crawl under the bed when the bedroom door opens. And who she won’t send into eternity with the .22 the way she did the weakened Bamba when she was blinded by sadness.
When darkness descends on the yard, she comes out of the shed carrying the claw hammer. She hears the telephone ring a long way off. Unplugs it. Carries it outside. When it lands it tears a hole in the bed where the first daffodils are flowering. Mabel always said that daffodils stood for hopeless love. The hole among the daffodils makes her want to cry. But she walks away as if it doesn’t matter.
Back inside the house.
She grips the handle of the claw hammer and starts hammering at the doorknob of her bedroom. With every blow she imagines that she’s chopping off another of Abel Strydom’s fingers. Crushing the bones in his hands. His genitals. When the knob has been destroyed, she sees his image in her mind, a man without hands, castrated.
In the same instant she sees Braham’s hand writing on the blackboard, sees his hand pushing her answer sheet across the coffee table after SCA in the small office.
She fetches Tennis biscuits and walks to the kraal in the dark. Inhales the fresh straw smell. Freesia lows softly. She rubs her with the stone. First one side, then the other. Talks in a whisper. ‘Maybe I’ll come sleep in the kraal with you, Freesia, tomorrow night when it’s fairy moon.’
She walks home through the chilly night air. Showers. Washes her hair. From the linen cupboard she takes the white flannel night-gown Auntie Lyla brought her that last September. Tears open the cellophane packaging. She’d been keeping it for a stone house night. But now there won’t be another night like that. She slashes the dirty white tracksuit to ribbons with her Victorinox. Tosses the rags onto Grandma Strydom’s dressing table. Fetches blankets from the linen cupboard and makes a bed on the floor.
She takes her school suitcase from the desk chair. Straightens the white sheet again. Sits cross-legged on the disinfected floor. The last time she unlocked the school suitcase was four years ago when she hid ‘The Frog Prince’ inside it.
She turns the key in the lock.
Terrified of walking the old paths.
Shortly before school closed for the June holiday in grade eleven, when she was six months pregnant, she was helping Mr Williston dust the shelves. The child fought against the bandages. She’d bought lots of bandages at the pharmacy. Bandaged her shoulder every day so they wouldn’t expect her to play tennis or netball. Then she found a book where the birth process was described and illustrated. She didn’t want to look. And yet she couldn’t look away.
She jumped when Mr Williston spoke behind her. Snapped the book shut, pretended she was dusting it. When he asked if she’d heard anything about Andrea, Andrea of all people, she knew he’d seen what she’d been looking at.
‘Nothing, Mr Williston. But I feel so sorry for her. That day at the school … I mean … she must’ve been so ashamed to … on the floor … Maybe with a Caesarian the child would’ve lived … I don’t know. I just know I never want to get married or have children.’
‘Why not?’
‘I hate men.’ Too forceful, too fast. ‘I have to go now, Mr Williston, I must still go to the pharmacy.’
‘Gertruidah …?’
Get out of here! Don’t let him push you into a corner. ‘I’ll come finish dusting next Wednesday, Mr Williston.’
The next year she went back to the town school to repeat grade eleven. She stuck to the story Abel and Sarah had drilled into her. That she had decided to discontinue her schooling and go farming instead. And that she’d then changed her mind, deciding to finish school first and go farming afterwards.
Strange how a lie eventually started looking like the truth. And the truth like a lie.
About two weeks before that fatal day in The Copper Kettle, Braham was reading the newspaper when she arrived. Late, as usual, because on Fridays Abel always managed to find urgent jobs on the farm that had to be finished before she could get to town. And at the last minute he made long lists for the co-op. Every minute he could keep her away from Braham, he used. And every Friday she was emotionally drained, because Thursday was his night of humiliation; always about Braham’s tiny pink willy that wouldn’t touch sides inside her.
That Thursday morning he was outside the shed sharpening scissors when she came back from taking bran rusks and a bottle of lemon syrup to Mama Thandeka. She arrived in the yard and saw him busy with the grindstone. She hid behind the trunk of the cedar tree and took aim with the .22. Levelled the gun at the back of his head.
‘Good heavens, Gertruidah,’ Mabel spoke behind her. ‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘I’m just aiming, Mabel. I won’t really shoot.’
‘Go put away that gun, Gertruidah, the devil is cunning.’
Braham didn’t notice her until she pulled out her chair. ‘Why are you looking so cross?’ she asked.
‘Hell, Gertruidah, did you see the story about that Austrian man?’
‘No.’ She couldn’t tell him that on Thursday nights she was struck with blindness; like someone with film over their eyes.
‘Read this,’ and he turned the newspaper over.
It was a news report about a man in Austria who’d kept his daughter captive in a cellar for twenty-four years. Nineteen years old when she went in, forty-two when she came out. Seven children she gave birth to in the low-ceilinged cellar. While her respected father was a popular visitor in the town pub. An excellent fisherman, they said.
One of the granddaughters of shame was already nineteen. None had ever seen the sunshine or stars. Night moths whose wing dust had been stripped away. How could the monster’s wife not have known? Why didn’t the night moths overpower the old man and try to get away? Did captivity become so rooted in their existence that in time nothing mattered?
‘It’s terrible,’ she said, trying to hide the storm inside her. ‘Things like this must happen very rarely …’
‘They don’t, actually.’ He passed her the menu. ‘In South Africa incest occurs in one in five families. And even that’s believed to be a conservative estimate.’
Panic was beating in her throat. Could that be true? How many children she knew, besides her and Andrea, endured a silent hell during her school years?
‘There’s a little girl from a neighbouring town at school who was sent to the hostel on the recommendation of welfare workers. She shakes so much, she can barely hold a pencil. It’s heartbreaking.’
‘Shame.’ She had run out of words.
Opening the school suitcase is upsetting.
Dry wet wipes. Half a pack of panty liners. She fetches the bin from her bathroom to throw them away. She wants no reminder of the secret missions to the bathroom between classes. Auntie Lyla’s ‘The Frog Prince’. She tears up the pages. Into the bin. A hand-drawn map of France. It took many study sessions to complete, with the blanket wrapped around her bandaged body. Below it, she’d noted the cost of a plane ticket to Paris. Traced the route from Paris to Avignon. Copied down the address of the Saint Claire church. She tears the map into four pieces. Tears each quarter into strips. Some places are simply out of reach. Like Avignon. And on the Internet she discovered, sadly, that the Saint Claire church no longer existed. All that was left after the French Revolution were a few side chapels, and the semi-circle where the choir once stood. A small garden demarcating the place where the monastery used to be. Scant testimony to Petrarca’s imagined love.
The funeral letter for Andrea’s child. The town whore. Was that what love meant to her?
She wipes her hands on the white nightgown. Folds open the piece of paper with the sonnet. Recalls a foggy, candle-lit night in the stone house, when for the first time she manipulated the letters of her full names in order to acknowledge the sum of who she was.
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
Moon dance
Shhh, said the rider, no one must hear
a sound nor a sigh; and no stranger sight
the scars that denounce our secrets at night –
shhh-shhh, said the rider, come near.
More, said the toad, and don’t shed a tear –
do as I order or trust me I might
thrust home a reminder to get it just right;
more and harder, this instant, me dear.
And though she cried and cursed his name,
she tasted the moon, and she ate;
and in his arms she rode in shame
a hundred times through that gate.
Then the moon died, and in the morning came
ten thousand more reasons to hate.
It is clumsy and over-written. Pure teenage melodrama. And yet, that’s who she’d been then. She rests her head on the school suitcase. Smells pencil and leather. Cries softly while she crumples up the sonnet.
Days before the June holiday of her grade eleven year she copied the sonnet in pencil onto a loose sheet of paper and placed it inside her creative writing book. On a day when the grade elevens would have English directly after break, she left the book on Braham’s desk in the empty classroom.
He greeted the class and opened the book absentmindedly. Took out the sheet of paper; folded it open. Read.
He glanced up at her. Replaced the paper, closed the book.
‘Turn to page 116 in your textbooks. Today we start with clichés, also known as hackneyed words and expressions.’
During supper announcements she was summoned to the small office. They seemed to sit there for an eternity; he was drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. ‘Gertruidah, please tell me, does your father molest you?’
She felt the tears sting her eyes before she answered. ‘No, Sir. I wrote it on Andrea’s behalf. Because I feel sorry for her.’
He got up. Came to stand close to her. ‘Here,’ he held the piece of paper with the sonnet out to her. ‘I don’t want you to paste or write it in your book.’
Without checking to see what else is in the school suitcase, she tips it out onto the floor. Shoves the contents inside the bin. Fetches matches from the candleholder on her mother’s bedside table. Outside she kneels beside the stone angel and packs a paper fire around its base. Stands like a ghost in the flannel nightgown, watching it burn. The faint smell of wet wipes drifts through the cold night air.
She adds the empty school suitcase to the tableau on the cast-iron table.
Drags her worn-out body past the place where Hermanus used to be.
Closes the teak front door behind her.
Drifts into a deep sleep on the bed on the floor.
◊◊◊
I lie in my bed under my soft blanket and I wonder: Iyaphi lendlela? Where is this road taking us? Sleep will come quickly tonight. The last few days have bruised me. I must rest, or my legs won’t carry me down to the yard on Monday.
Abel always said the day my legs finally collapse underneath me, he will buy me a wheelchair that goes by itself, just like a car. But without fuel, just a battery. I always wondered how that chair would get through the sandy soil in the lucerne paddock or how I would reach to open the kissing gate.
Johnnie was here with Littlejohn after knock-off time. He came to tell me he tossed Mabel’s death present into the grave on Missus Sarah’s side. Littlejohn is growing old. Grey peppercorns on his head, and beneath them the mind of a child. He has been going downhill ever since he stopped working in the garden. I remember how we used to laugh, back when he was still doing garden work, at the show he put on when he ate the black jelly baby. Always stared at that black jelly baby and, before he bit off its head, he would turn it to face Missus Sarah and say in his sing-song way: ‘Now say goodbye to the auntie.’
But then Abel stopped wanting people in the yard who might break or steal. So now Littlejohn sits in front of the house all day long, singing the songs Missus Sarah taught him. And when the sun goes down he drops his chin onto his chest and whimpers like a thirsty dog, for no reason.
So the years have passed. Many long roads behind us. An old woman’s road before me. But the road ahead for Umbrella Tree Farm is the one I worry about. A woman can’t breed Bonsmaras on her own. And who knows what will become of Gertruidah’s plan with the prickly pears and bringing all those workers back to the farm?
When Mabel came back from the mountainside, she made corn fritters with honey. ‘Mama,’ she said when she put down my plate, ‘I’m very worried about Gertruidah. She had the doll in her arms when she came down from the stone house. Wrapped in a blanket up to its head. Mama, how do you know when someone has lost their mind?’
‘You will see it and hear it, that is how you will know.’
Through the crack in the curtain I can see that the night is covered in clouds. On a night like this I don’t have to look for stars or ask where this road is taking me. Nkosi knows the way.
I enter lightly through the gates of sleep. In the distance I can hear Gertruidah talk, the way she used to when she was just a little girl chasing dragonflies.
What is it, can you guess? Five moles in one nest.
No, Gertruidah, how would I know?
How can you not know, Mama Thandeka? It’s easy, it’s five toes in one shoe!
Saturday, 30 August 2008
◊◊◊
She wakes up on the floor with an evil feeling in the pit of her stomach.
In her sleep she recited the sonnet till it drove her insane; dreamt that the fairy moon was the colour of fresh blood. She is sick and tired of trying to understand. A blue moon that isn’t blue. Pitch-black fairy moons with no fairies.
Throwing away the coffee and sugar was stupid. She will go ask Mama Thandeka for coffee. But first she will lie in bed a while longer, and listen to the silence in the house. If only she could stop talking altogether, never be among people again. Do nothing but think.
Do nothing but look further and deeper for the real Gertruidah Susannah Jacomina.
Early in her grade ten year, before she had her own computer, Mr Williston told her she had a photographic memory. She looked up the exact meaning, but the dictionary didn’t help much. In the thesaurus she found a most beautiful word. Memoir. She longed to use it in an essay.
The next time she saw Mr Williston she told him she was writing a memoir of only events she wanted to remember.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is called “selective memory”.’
‘What does that mean, Mr Williston?’
‘There’s no one at the computer. Go and google “selective memory”.’
Astonishing. There were over six hundred thousand references.
Later that year when she got her own computer, she kept searching. Soon she became entangled in the complexity of the human brain. She learnt that all the world’s suffering was the result of something becoming derailed inside the brain. If someone had a healthy conscience, and if his innate morality could help him distinguish between right and wrong, he was incapable of monstrous deeds. But once the centre of the human conscience became impaired, it started spreading a poisonous gas. The poison gas afflicted other people who were already secreting their own poison. The gases merged, and sowed death everywhere they reached.
Holocaust. Lockerbie. Tiananmen Square. Jeffrey Dahmer. Jack the Ripper. Colonies of sex slaves run in the name of religion. Satanists who slaughtered live cats and used foetuses as burnt offerings.
All of it the product of twisted consciences, of impaired morality.
And what about Abel and Sarah Strydom? Was Umbrella Tree Farm any different from a small colony governed by sex and religion?
On free afternoons she couldn’t wait to drink from Mr Williston’s fountain of knowledge. She was constantly late getting back to the hostel. Matron grounded her, but she ran away. The headmaster reprimanded her for breaking hostel rules. She was sorry, she said, she suffered from selective memory disorder. He looked at her with venom and gave her detention on Friday.
The punishment pleased her because during detention no one was allowed to speak. Time to think about ways to taunt Abel on the weekend, which footpath she would take to the stone house, what she would steal from Sarah’s pantry. Time to build sentences.
The idea irritated Gertruidah that the hired guard deterred the rude daughter.
On some detention afternoons she wrestled with herself. Had it been God’s intention that man’s twisted brain should bring about such chaos? Why, if it only made Him seem more absent from the world? Because with every blow to its ego a human being became more twisted. Every time he felt inferior and humiliated and rejected, he worked harder to be admitted to the circle. And if that effort led to nothing but more rejection, his distrust and vengefulness grew. Inevitably it gave rise to a monster. A monster no one noticed until it lost control over its masquerade and turned into a beast.
What had made Abel a monster, and Sarah too?
She pulls the blanket up to her chin. Listens to a laughing dove’s burbling call.
Time to get dressed and go ask Mama Thandeka for coffee. Today she must clear out Abel’s office and the main bedroom. Today she must be a recce, or she will rip like a rotten old rag.
She gets up. Pulls a long-sleeve T-shirt over the white nightgown. Shoes. Fetches the flask with lukewarm coffee from beneath the umbrella tree. A jar of fig jam. Half a loaf of bread.
She carries it home and eats next to the water tank. Checks the level of the petrol drum inside the shed. It’s three-quarters full. Fifteen litres is plenty, she must uncoil the garden hose. When the night grows dark below the fairy moon, she will strike the match. And watch with her own eyes her hideous memoir go up in flames.
