Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 30
She fetches the spade Abel always used to mix cement and walks to the family churchyard. She must dig a hole. Tomorrow at daybreak she will fetch the last things from the stone house. There will be a funeral. And, one day, a black marble slab with the words: Here lies the memoir of Gertruidah Susannah Jacomina Strydom. Died 31 August 2008.
Johnnie comes up from the chicken coop, his hat held to his chest. ‘What’s going on here, Missy?’ he asks from the churchyard gate.
‘I’m digging a grave, Johnnie.’
‘Who has died?’
‘Something inside my head, Johnnie, that I want to forget.’
‘You don’t just dig any old place where people lie …’
‘Don’t water the garden today. I don’t want any trouble with wet things.’
He fidgets with the gate latch. ‘Is it still alright about the mattress, Missy?’
‘Yes. Where is my child buried, Johnnie?’
He takes a sharp breath. ‘What child, Missy?’
‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.’
‘No, Missy, God is my witness, I don’t know anything about a dead child.’
It was the hour after midnight. Friday, 13 October in the year 2000, an inauspicious day. When the full moon shone onto the nasturtiums in Auntie Lyla’s garden, her time came. She placed a towel on the floor where her water had broken. The hellish pains were now two minutes apart. She would not give birth to this child.
She leaned out of the window to get some air. Certain the contractions would kill her. She was glad Mabel knew where the cake tin was, and the stolen jewellery.
Earlier Auntie Lyla had come to say goodnight and turn off the light in the passage. ‘You’re a week past your time, Gertruidah. You must call when you need me. I’m a fairly light sleeper, but I’ll leave my door open …’
She’d kept silent about the dull ache in her lower back. ‘I will call, Auntie Lyla.’
‘I know we’ve been over this before, but are you still convinced you want to have the child adopted, Gertruidah, convinced in your heart and soul?’
Andrea’s child had been severely deformed. A tiny monster. Thank God he’d died early. But, as Auntie Lyla explained on those evenings when she made them hot chocolate and lay down on the bed beside her to talk, the challenges for children born of incest weren’t always physical; they could be psychological. Only once their characters and personalities took shape, did the adoptive parents enter their season of hell.
Trusting, childless parents who’d desired nothing more than a child. To love, to build a family. But by then the tiny vulnerable bundle they’d fetched with so much joy long ago had become an unmanageable creature they couldn’t comprehend.
They went from doctor to doctor, saw one psychologist after another, until they’d exhausted their medical aid. There were learning difficulties. Social problems.
But they never stopped looking for solutions.
A perfect baby.
A maladjusted teenager.
Never-ending problems, nightmares, fruitless searches. No one told them their adopted child was a product of incest, the carrier of a potent bundle of negative genetic characteristics. Who would’ve told them? Who could? Had they known, they might have changed their minds. Or they might’ve been alert from the start to problems that could manifest later, and prepared to face them.
It was unfair, Auntie Lyla said, to blatantly mislead two people who had only the best intentions. You mustn’t do it, Gertruidah, you don’t dare. By all means offer the child for adoption if you don’t want to raise him yourself. But use a pseudonym to protect your identity and that of your parents. Forget about the law because the law won’t help those adoptive parents raise the child. Insist during the adoption that the parents are informed about the genetic risks. Allow them to make an informed decision. Don’t make yourself complicit in the likely sorrow you would otherwise inflict on two good people.
Her back ached. She wanted Auntie Lyla to go to bed and stop nagging about responsibility and disclosure. ‘What else can I do? I don’t want the child. And my parents would rather die than allow an illegitimate child on Umbrella Tree Farm …’
‘I will come to the hospital with you, let me complete the forms.’
‘That’s fine, Auntie Lyla.’ Now please leave.
While she was brushing her teeth, she received a text message from Sarah. Are you alright, Gertruidah? Must we come?
She replied: I’m fine.
Pain throbbed in her kidneys; her feet were bloated. Making sentences would help. The earth trudged. The air dragged. Death tried the gate. Tonight the sentences didn’t help. She tossed and turned in her bed. Perhaps there was something the matter with her kidneys. She dragged the desk chair to the end of the bed and raised her burning feet onto the back of the chair. But lying on her back was too uncomfortable.
By ten o’clock the pain in her back and kidneys had become contractions, six minutes apart. Don’t moan or let a floorboard creak. Auntie Lyla mustn’t wake up. Think through the contractions, think of something else.
Mabel had tried to stop her from going into the mountain.
‘You’re six months pregnant, Gertruidah, you’re looking for trouble. What if you miscarry while we’re in the mountains? There’ll be no one close by to help.’
‘If climbing in the mountain would abort the child I would never stop climbing. There’s something I simply must show you. We’ll climb slowly and by tomorrow night we’ll be back.’
She knelt beside the bed. Buried her face in a pillow to drown her moans. The contractions were now coming every three minutes. She shuffled to the window to get some air. Cursed at the nasturtium soldiers in a low whisper. Talked to the moon to flee from the pain.
In 1984, a fairy moon year, Grandpa Strydom died. In 1986 she learnt about magic ointment. In 1989 she and Andrea repeated grade one. The same reading book again. She had lost interest in reading. In class she rarely said a word.
The clock in the passage struck midnight. The pauses between the surges of pain grew shorter. God, make the child disappear! Think about Freesia and the Egyptian geese and the Quaker book, because soon she would die from pain.
Blue moon. Fairy moon. New moon. Dark moon.
This child must not come out!
There was almost no break in the agony, now. She could no longer stand. She sat down on the end of the bed; clutched at the linen. Please God let it pass …
Suddenly the pain changed, and became absolutely urgent. The child was coming out! She grabbed the shirt that was hanging over the back of the chair. Wrapped it around her fist. Blocked her birth canal. She had to be a recce, now, and keep her fist wedged into the opening of the birth canal! In her head she sang. Fearless men who jump and die … Stars dancing before her eyes.
Push back, push back … Her arm was too tired to make a fist. With her left hand she drew the chair closer. Moved quickly onto the chair and tossed the shirt aside. She gripped the sides of the chair and bore down against the seat to close the birth canal. Her mind was slipping from the pain. She gasped for breath. The stars multiplied.
Hang on, hang on. Do not moan.
When there was a fairy moon in 1995 her mother brought the rug from Turkey, and she got her first period. The next fairy moon, in 1997, she failed grade eight. Now it was fairy moon in the year 2000. Everyone believed she’d gone to have a shoulder operation.
She vomited over her bulging stomach. Auntie Lyla mustn’t wake up. Millions of stars. Don’t let go of the edge of the chair. She couldn’t hold on any more. Her hands slipped from the sides of the chair. Ringing inside her head; the room became distant and small. The chair toppled.
She wasn’t conscious of falling over and hitting the floor.
Or of the child slipping out.
When she’s satisfied the hole is wide and deep enough, she plants the spade in the mound of soil. Down by the river an Egyptian goose calls to his mate. An eagle circles high up in the sky. A skirt of clay clings to the hem of her nightgown.
Will the day ever come and her memory fade so she’ll forget the way Auntie Lyla washed and dried her that night? Dressed her in clean pyjamas while her teeth chattered from her ordeal. Sat with her until she slipped into sleep.
She dreamed that her mother stood beside her bed and held her hand. It was just a dream.
She woke up with the sun shining onto the drawn curtains. Mama Thandeka was in the wooden chair beside the bed and she was singing. Thula, mama, thula; Sikusa ekhaya, Wasuka wakhala; Nkosi yam … Calm down, mother, calm down; we took her home; she started crying; and said: Oh my Lord.
Had she heard Auntie Lyla say some time in the night that it was a boy?
‘Where is the child?’ she asked Mama Thandeka in a whisper.
‘He was stillborn, Gertruidah. Your papa took the tiny body back to Umbrella Tree Farm.’ A cool finger moistened her dry lips. ‘Come, have a drink of water. Then sleep a while longer. Thula, all is fine …’
She never wanted to kill him.
She just wanted to keep him from coming into this world.
◊◊◊
I sit on the bench underneath the pepper tree with my red blanket over my knees. Drink my honeybush tea; they say it keeps crystals out of your kidneys.
Last night’s clouds have gone. The day will grow hot. I can feel my chest closing. Mabel gave me my cough medicine early. I had no sooner washed away the Turlington taste with maize porridge and sugar, than Johnnie was at the door. Just like a chicken with the wind up its backside. Could barely speak.
‘Thandeka,’ he said, ‘there’s big trouble on the way.’
‘How come, Johnnie?’ I was playing dumb. But Mabel had been out since early, spying.
He said Gertruidah was digging a grave close to where others lay. She was in her nightgown. And she wanted to know where her child was buried.
I called to Mabel to bring some sugar water. ‘Don’t upset yourself. And thank the stars the old man is buried in Hermanus, because if she dug up his skeleton, that’s when you would see real trouble.’
‘Thandeka, I see the old man’s portrait lying in the garden, and there’s shampoo all over his face. I am almost scared to leave the yard because any time now the big scream is going to take her.’
‘Don’t you worry about it, Johnnie, Mabel is always close by.’
When he left, my heart went with him. Because I knew of his suffering the day Abel brought the tiny body back to Umbrella Tree Farm, and it was Johnnie who had to dig the child’s grave.
Back when Gertruidah was hiding with Miss Lyla, Abel and Sarah came home from the sea. Her nerves were no better. She’d even lost interest in the Women’s Agricultural Union. Low blood pressure, was what she told the tennis people.
One day when we were in the kitchen making waffles with syrup, I said let us put Mabel on the bus to East London. For a week, company for Gertruidah.
Right there with the syrup running from her fingers she started to cry. About the scandal, and what if people found out. About threatening Abel if he didn’t get his tubes tied, and him beating her in their hotel room. I could tell she was close to her big scream when she threw a dripping waffle at the kitchen wall and shouted that she was the worst mother in the world for leaving Gertruidah alone in East London. And that it was she who had driven Abel to sin because sometimes she refused to lie with him.
Years of anger spilled out of her that day.
‘Missus Sarah,’ I said to calm her down, ‘why don’t you wait until after the baby goes for adoption and then you go live with Miss Lyla forever? Maybe everyone will be happier that way.’
But she said the money she inherited from her father was almost all gone. Gone into Umbrella Tree Farm. Into Bonsmaras, tractors, ploughs, the swimming pool, the garden, the tennis court.
‘I’m the reason,’ she shouted, ‘Umbrella Tree Farm is what it is today!’
Time and again she gave him money for the farm, if Abel promised to leave Gertruidah alone.
‘And what did it get me, Thandeka, what? All those years of thinking that if I could survive my father’s sick behaviour, then Gertruidah would come through it too. This is where it has brought me. Penniless and at Abel’s mercy!’
A woman with no money was a trapped woman.
There was nothing I could do for her except to say I would finish the waffles myself; she must lie down, I will fetch her a cup of tea.
Deep inside that same night here was Abel outside my house with the car. Hurry and pack your suitcase, he said, there was something the matter in East London. I had to come with them because there was no other way Missus Sarah said she would go.
My head swam because Samuel always said when the thirteenth day of the month was a Friday, the devil was about and you needed eyes on both sides of your head to watch out for him.
Missus Sarah sat next to me in the back seat. Her nails dug into my leg. Abel was driving so fast I had to close my eyes. It was just after sunrise when Miss Lyla let us in through the front door.
‘The child is dead,’ she said. ‘Gertruidah didn’t come call me. I only went to check when I woke up from the chair falling over. By then the child was already born.’
Abel stood like one who had died standing up. His face was the colour of ash. Tiny veins popped in his eyes.
‘Where’s the child?’ I asked. Because we couldn’t just stand around and be scared. It was time someone started doing what had to be done.
‘On the bed in the spare room.’
I told Miss Lyla to make some strong tea, I would go inside. I took the child out of the small brown suitcase where Miss Lyla had put him. Unwrapped the towel. A tiny blue boy. His harelip was the only defect I could see.
I heard a sound behind me. Abel. He started to cry like a dog that was looking at the moon. I felt my anger against him, and I felt the pain inside him. ‘Take the child, Abel, and go bury him on Umbrella Tree Farm. It won’t do any good to write this birth in the magistrate’s books. These are troubled waters and they have run their course.’ I wrapped the child again and placed him back inside the suitcase; shut the lid. ‘Take him, Abel, and go back to Umbrella Tree Farm right now.’
‘Thandeka …’ Missus Sarah whispered when I went inside Gertruidah’s bedroom. I watched her take Gertruidah’s hand in her own; the way her tears fell onto Gertruidah’s hand. Some pictures inside your head never fade.
Then I told her to go have her tea with Miss Lyla in the kitchen, I would sit with Gertruidah.
Abel fetched all of us two days later, and we want back to Umbrella Tree Farm.
Much later Johnnie told me he had to dig a deep hole at the foot of the Virginia creeper, and that Abel buried a small suitcase there, and a bunch of snowbells, too.
One month later I had to sing Gertruidah down from the windmill.
Mabel says there are blood red roses growing in a circle around the foot of the Virginia creeper. Red roses stand for shame and scandal, she says. But to this day I can’t tell you whose shame it was, and whose scandal. My poor old head can’t work it out.
My legs must carry me to the yard on Monday. Because before I join the star people, there are sorrows that Gertruidah must know. Gertruidah, I will say before I struggle home with my notsung stick: Susa ukhula egadini. Clean the garden inside your head. Pull up the weeds. Don’t let them run to seed and spoil the garden any longer. Susa amagqabi. Rake up the leaves. Before the wind blows them everywhere. Ndiza kukha iinyatyambo. Pick the flowers. So the house will smell sweet while you sleep.
Nine in the morning.
It pains her to see Johnnie cutting lucerne, stooped over the sickle. It’s time he retired. Next week she will start looking for reliable workers. People with families, and school-going children. Auntie Margie could help run the school. Andrea’s mother was also a teacher. Perhaps she could help them escape the box house. Andrea was good at maths; if she could take care of the factory books …
You’re dreaming, Gertruidah, she says out loud.
But why shouldn’t she have dreams? The cage door is open; rush outside.
She gulps down some cold coffee. Washes her hands. Goes to the bathroom.
Then she picks up Abel’s keys where they fell when she chucked out the wall stand. Unlocks his office. It’s painfully tidy. No one but him was allowed to clean and tidy here. She starts carrying out everything that isn’t bolted fast or built in. Chair, reading lamp, dustbin, stationery. Goes to the far right of the stoep, aims for the base of the Virginia creeper. Throws as hard as she can. Driven by haste to have done with this evil nest.
The top drawer of the desk is filled with pens, paperclips, thumbnails, a punch. She scatters the contents of the drawer over the rose trees that circle the Virginia creeper.
Inside the second drawer, hundreds of disks and CDs. A box of men’s tissues. Sis. In the farthest corner she locates a single cartridge case and the plastic bag with terrorist ears. A coward hiding behind a mask.
In the bottom drawer she finds a photo album with daffodils on the outside front cover. The first full-page picture is of a laughing little girl on a red tricycle. Above it he’s written, in his strong, flowing handwriting, Gertruidah on her third birthday.
She turns the pages. The pink-cheeked little girl smiles from every picture.
Gertruidah and Anthony and Sarah build a sandcastle in Hermanus. Gertruidah licks the bowl for the chocolate cake. Gertruidah has bath foam in her hair. Gertruidah and Bamba catch a dassie. Gertruidah and Anthony play shop in the tree house. Pretty confetti girl. We build a snowman.
As she turns the pages, the smile starts to fade from the tiny face.
First day in grade one. Gertruidah and her new Jack Russell. See her take aim with her new .22! Gertruidah ploughs the potato field with the John Deere. Prize-giving 2001, tennis colours.
What made him glue her life into the album and keep it? Had he also noticed the smile disappear, the laughing child becoming older than her years? Was this the little girl the psychologist had spoken of, with the deep longing for protection and reassurance?
