Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 5
There were many nights beside the fire when I told her: ‘You must talk to Abel about these things, so they can grow quiet and lie still inside your head.’
‘Let it alone, Mama. A kitchen maid doesn’t argue with the master.’
‘It is bitterness that makes you talk that way, Mabel. He has always …’
‘If I am bitter it’s because of what he’s doing to Gertruidah. One of these days when I’m in town for Mama’s old-age pension, I’m going to walk into the police station and say they must come see what …’
‘Keep your nose out of white people’s business, Mabel. White people know how to watch each other’s backs. Stay away from the police.’
My marrow is cold as ice and my old woman’s heart broken into a thousand pieces when I think that Abel will never come back to Umbrella Tree Farm.
I will call Mabel to heat a little cup of milk for me and to turn my chair around so the heat can find my back. Then, once the milk has warmed my insides, she must help me to my bed. But until then I will stay by the fire and sing Gertruidah’s song. Abel would have wanted me to sing for her. Her bony body may be as strong as any man’s and no pheasant too far away that she couldn’t put a bullet in its head and leave the meat for the pot. But she has no angel to fly around with her, either, and no matter how bad everything became, with his good side Abel loved her.
Thula baba, vala amehlo … Hush, my baby, close your eyes, time to fly to paradise, till the sunlight brings you home, you must dream your dreams alone …
Thursday, 28 August 2008
◊◊◊
She opens the shed door with sleep-numbed hands, fetches toilet paper from behind the front seat of the truck and walks around the corner of the shed. A cloudless dawn drifts above the hunched back of the mountain ridge, like smoked glass, and the earth smells of curry bush and freshly ploughed soil. The sun will shine today.
Today she can look forward to never being afraid again.
Her funeral clothes are dry but creased; the white blouse is stained. The clothes she’d been wearing since Sunday and which she’d hung in the weeping willow the day before, are dirty. She’ll stay in the overalls, then, even if they smell of turpentine. She wants to be inside the house before sunrise. To shower, wash her hair, change into clean clothes, and then start disinfecting. The skirting boards, and every corner of every room. Curtains and scatter cushions. The linen cupboard and the pantry. Even if it takes her till Sunday, until nothing of Abel and Sarah clings to anything any more.
In the grey dawn she walks to the river and sinks down onto the sand. Motionless and fearless she sits cross-legged inside her river church. God is here and nowhere else. Let them gossip all they want about the Quaker religion she’s supposed to have adopted. She’s no Quaker, she just pretends to be. So she can have a set of rules that are hers alone.
Abel and Sarah were perplexed when she turned her back on everything to do with the church. Indeed, everything about her always seemed to perplex everyone. Someone was always complaining that she didn’t concentrate or didn’t care. That she was fidgety and lazy to learn. That she refused to co-operate, took no notice of rules. Even Matron at the hostel maintained: Gertruidah looks down her nose at me, sneering.
The first few times she sat with Braham in The Copper Kettle after matric, she was quietly overwhelmed, barely able to talk. Every time she called him ‘Sir’, he called her ‘Madam’.
‘Forget that I was your teacher. Say my name, I want to hear you say it …’
She picked up the pen and on the back of the bill started building words with BRAHAM. Ham. Ram. Bra. Bahama. Abraham. Arab. Arm. Mama. Mara. Mar. Harm. Underneath the words she wrote his name, pushed the slip of paper towards him and said, out loud: ‘Braham.’
‘It sounds good when you say it. I long to get close to you, Gertruidah, but you wander in places no one knows but you. EE Cummings wrote: “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence.” I wish I could see what your eyes won’t tell me.’
‘But as the same poet says: “if you wish to be close to me, I and my life will shut very beautifully”. I cannot let anyone come close to me, not even you.’
‘There’s something brilliant inside you, Gertruidah, a kind of genius. But you deny it. Why?’
She felt his knee touching hers, sensed a tingle in her lower body. The intimate moment vanished. ‘I’m stupid, actually. But not so stupid I don’t realise I’m trying to find myself.’ She drew the bill closer. ‘I am many people, like a grasshopper’s composite eye. Here, I’ll show you.’ She built more names with GERTRUIDAH. Rita. Ruth. Retha. Gertie. Trudie. Tertia. Thea. Greta. Gita. Gerda. Greer. ‘I’m trying to merge them all into one Gertruidah.’
‘Who or what has damaged you so, Gertruidah? You’re in pieces, but you don’t have to stay that way …’
She reached for her car keys. ‘I have to go. Thanks for this afternoon … Braham …’
The sense that he was close to knowing her secret followed her all the way to the farm. She had to think of ways to mislead him, to convince him his suspicions were wrong. He was the last person who could ever know how ruined she was.
Her overalls are damp from the river sand.
Despite the truck’s cramped interior, she feels rested. Sleeping undisturbed, that only happened when Abel was away at the cattle auction, gone to hand-pick another Bonsmara bull, or overseas. And when guests stayed overnight. The two weeks in September when her mother’s twin sister came to stay were heavenly. While Auntie Lyla was there Abel behaved like a saint.
For as long as she can remember, her nights have been spent waiting to hear a toilet flush, a floorboard creak, the knob turn on her bedroom door. She lay awake just as often in her hostel bed, for fear of the leguan and the wet patch of pee. Even if she’d had nothing to drink after evening study and squeezed out every last drop before the lights-out bell signalled bedtime.
Pretty soon no one wanted to be her roommate. No one would share her sandwich or a bunch of grapes, use her crayons to colour in or borrow her eraser. During break she sat apart from the others and watched them play oranges and lemons. In school concerts she was always a rock or a tree or a toadstool.
Apart. She disgusted everyone.
In the morning Matron scolded her about the three mattresses they kept especially for her. ‘Go to the bathroom, Gertruidah, so we can wash your bottom and your froggie.’
Frogs lived in the river on Umbrella Tree Farm. They were slimy and hissed when they were angry. If they were very cross, they secreted a disgusting milky juice. Hers was a petermouse, not a froggie. ‘I don’t want to be washed!’
‘Gertruidah! To the bathroom! Now!’
‘I’ll wash myself.’
‘Gertruidah, don’t make me lose my temper or …’
She enjoyed their duel. With Matron she could at least fight back. Kick, bite, swear, refuse to let go of the bed or the towel rail or the door.
Against Abel she was powerless, even though she didn’t know why.
When he rubbed her, it felt different from scratching a mosquito bite. His fingers had a magical power that made her heart beat like a drum. Fast, and round and round until it felt as if you were peeing through the soles of your feet. But you weren’t really peeing. After he left and closed the door behind him, there’d be a slow thud in your head and at the base of your throat. Your mouth felt dry, you were too weak to move.
And in the morning you’d discover that you had in fact peed – but slimily, and not through the soles of your feet.
From around grade six Matron gave up her morning rant.
‘I give up on you, Gertruidah! You’re the naughtiest child in the hostel! How many times must I tell you, it’s the hot water pipes making that noise!’
Bed-wetter. Stinky old Gertruidah.
‘And don’t look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in! I’m going to write and tell your mother how much trouble you are. Do you hear me?’
Gertruidah carried on walking to the bathroom, ignoring her.
In high school after the new English teacher arrived she was in the bathroom long before the morning bell, before the other girls were awake. A bubble bath. Dettol soap. Shampoo. Antiseptic powder. Body lotion. Pristine white underwear, school shirt, school socks. Clean school dress; foot powder. She didn’t want to be stinky old Gertruidah. She wanted to smell fresh.
For Braham Fourie.
Even after she finished school, she still woke up in a wet bed every morning. ‘I piss on myself every night!’ she screamed at Freesia in the milk kraal one evening. ‘Because I bloody well never grew up! I’m pathetic, Freesia, pathetic!’
For her twenty-first birthday her father built a bathroom onto her bedroom. He didn’t want to but she forced him. Every tile and towel in it was white. White soap. White bath salts. White nail brush. White toilet paper. White back brush. White mirror frame. White linen cupboard where nothing but her own linen was kept. Her own washing machine and tumble drier.
They’d quarrelled about the bathroom for months. Why should he spend all that money when there were already three bathrooms and a guest toilet in the house? At night he turned into a wild animal, leaving green and purple bruises on her inner thighs. Her head ached from being bashed against the wall because she wouldn’t do as she was told. Then did it anyway to keep the peace and so he’d finally leave.
But she didn’t give in. She had to have her bathroom.
One morning while stripping her bed she remembered how Sleeping Beauty had cried the night before because she was sick and tired of the concerts she had to put on for Abel. All for the sake of a bathroom. Then she fetched her .22 and enough cartridges and ran away. To the mountains. To survive in the stone house as long as she could, living off prickly pears, blackberries and roots.
She knew Abel wouldn’t look for her. He used to, when she was younger, but he never found her. She knew to keep to the rocks so she wouldn’t wear a footpath. And the stone house was well hidden – just a crack in a rock, no wider than your forearm, so she had to slide in through it sideways. He’d never spot it while he was out looking for cattle, unless he walked straight into it. But the ground was too steep for cattle to graze there.
When she was in grade one she and Bamba discovered a bare patch among the taaibos. Afterwards they ran away there often. If Bamba was with her, her parents didn’t bother looking for her. She’s a real bushbaby, her mother would tell the tennis people, and there was no point panicking when she disappeared. She never answered if they called her anyway and when she saw them coming she’d hide.
She pretended the bare patch among the taaibos was her home. On weekends and during the holidays she fetched light stones and arranged them to make rooms flat on the ground. Her kitchen. Her passage. Bathroom. Bedroom. She filched her mother’s kitchen twine and needlework scissors to make a broom out of reeds. She filled empty cans with water, and added berries. They were her pots; she kept them in her pantry.
Because Bamba was with her she wasn’t scared of snakes. Sometimes she lay down on a bundle of red grass in her mountain bedroom, on her make-believe bed, and looked up at the sky where the clouds changed their shape all the time: a Father Christmas, a cow’s udder, a large white pumpkin. Looking for pictures in the clouds was fun.
Sometimes she turned her taaibos home into a school. She was the class captain and no one was allowed to say she stank. Or she pretended she was head of the table at the hostel and could eat anything she wanted. Or she played she was a wealthy farmer and the taaibos home was a bank. She bought a train ticket and rode to Auntie Lyla in East London where she bought herself a double-storey house close to where Auntie Lyla lived. She stayed in East London for ever and ever, near the sea.
Sometimes she built other names with GERTRUIDAH. Trudie. Rita, Tertia. Thea. Ida. Then she was someone else. Someone everyone liked. Sometimes she was Garth or Rudi or Greg or Eddie or Dieter or Gerard. Better to be a boy and not have a petermouse.
One day in grade one, when she was Garth, she started making a prickly-pear farm around her make-believe house. She drew a boundary fence with a stick. She took off her dress because boys didn’t wear dresses. She wasn’t naked, she just had no shirt on. Twisting her dress around her hand, she tore off prickly-pear leaves and arranged them on the ground, all along her boundary fence, and placed a stone on each leaf.
She shook out her dress and spent a long time picking out thorns before she could wear it again. From then on she kept extra clothes hidden inside an anthill. Shorts, T-shirts and sneakers for when she was Dieter or Garth. She covered the entrance of the anthill with dry branches. She now had a wardrobe.
‘Why are there so many prickly-pear trees around your house, Johnnie?’ she once asked Johnnie when they were together in the chicken coop.
‘I planted those years ago, Missy. For shade around the house and as a shield against the wind. And so I won’t have to walk into the veld for prickly pears when they’re ripe.’
‘Ma says if you eat more than five prickly pears you’ll get constipated.’
‘No, Missy, that’s just a story someone made up. Littlejohn eats half a bucket in one go, you must just drink a little water in between.’
‘Where did you get the seeds from, Johnnie?’
‘Missy, they don’t grow from seed. You just pick the old leaves and lay them down flat. Then you put stones on top so the leaves will lie snug against the soil and take root.’
‘The Lord will punish you if you lie, Johnnie.’
He was picking bits of down from an egg. ‘Look over here, Missy, where the little thorns sit on the leaf, that’s where the roots will appear when it rains. After a while the leaf will curl around the stone from trying to grow upwards to make a trunk. Then you wait four or five years until the tree is strong, that’s when it’ll start making prickly pears.’
‘Swear on the Bible it’s true.’
‘You don’t swear about things like that, Missy.’
For almost five years the taaibos house was the safest place on Umbrella Tree Farm.
But in the winter holiday of her grade four year Abel followed her.
By then the prickly-pear trees outside her make-believe house stood as high as her belly button and the first yellow flowers had appeared. There was something she wanted to tell Tertia and Ida. They were the only ones who knew what her father did to her. The night before he’d been furious because she’d bitten when she should’ve sucked. And when she didn’t wanted to look in the book with naked women, because they sat with their legs apart, Abel had grabbed her ears and shoved her face against the pages.
‘I don’t want to look!’ she’d screamed. Perhaps her mother would hear her.
He’d forced her jaws apart, pushed the fish thing down her throat and ordered her to swallow.
The next day she sat cross-legged on her bed of red grass, telling Tertia and Ida that she was going to tell her teacher and the minister and the police. Her throat was raw, her voice sounded hoarse. Then Bamba let out a yelp and when she looked up Abel was standing on her prickly-pear farm. Before she could run away he came striding through her pantry, knocking over her water cans. Dragged her home. She grabbed onto the bushes till her hands bled but Abel was too strong for her.
Mama Thandeka rubbed Zambuk into her hands.
Two days later when she went to show Tertia and Ida the blood-smeared toilet paper so they wouldn’t think she was lying, her house was gone. All of it. The tins, the stones and her red grass bed. The taaibos had been destroyed. Not a single prickly-pear tree remained. Her friends had all run away.
The rest of the holiday was bad. Her mother had a headache and stayed in bed all day, except when she had to go to the toilet. Which was often: horrible bubbling sounds; it was just as well she didn’t have a friend over to play or they’d hear. At night Abel made her stand naked in the moonlight that came through the window, punishment for the stupid pliers and panga he’d found at her make-believe house.
Soon she no longer knew if she was Goldilocks or Sleeping Beauty. Or whether Gertruidah still existed.
Ida and Tertia and Garth and all the other children never came back again.
Soon afterwards Abel went overseas and brought her the Victorinox.
And at the end of that year, during the Christmas holidays, she found a new place to make her home.
Bamba had been chasing a mountain squirrel, with her running behind. Higher and higher they went up the steep mountainside until they reached a place she’d never been before. High up where the overgrown southern slope was strewn with rocks as if from a rock fall long ago, Bamba and the mountain squirrel disappeared between two tall boulders. Two enormous rocks separated by a crevice she was just able to fit through. Behind them, nothing but steep, overgrown mountainside.
Afterwards she couldn’t remember if Bamba ever caught up with the mountain squirrel because she’d stopped and realised she’d found the perfect place for a new house. Not a flat stone house but a tall one. A house that Abel wouldn’t find, no matter how hard he looked, just as long as she wasn’t careless.
By cutting and joining reeds and branches to make a thatched roof between the tops of the boulders and the mountainside, she could build a house shaped like a triangle behind the boulders. She could wall up the sides with rocks and mud so her house would be warm.
It took years to build the house, with tools she took from Abel’s shed. Years to hollow out the mountain, deeper and deeper. Years to knead the clay to seal the branches and reeds. Years to fetch more rocks to build the side walls. To pack the floor with peach pips. To build a sundial the way her grade five teacher had showed them. To get to know the detours, stepping stones and patches of gravel along the way so she wouldn’t wear a path to her house.
For years he looked for her hiding place and never found it.
Her plan was to hide there with her .22 for as long as Abel dug in his heels about the bathroom, until she got her way. Once or twice she would come down the mountain in the dark to find out from Mabel what they were saying at home.
