And how come Dolfie had been retrenched as a teacher, I asked.
No, there’d been an incident.
“What kind of incident?”
Dolf had actually refused to teach black children.
“Why?”
“Because his brother had been killed by a kaffir.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that that was ridiculous, but then I told myself that that was not why I was here. Why was I here? Because I was in lust.
“How?” I managed to squeeze out.
“In a car accident.”
It was getting more and more absurd, but then one forgot that there were still old-school idiots around and that when blacks said racism was still alive and well, Dolf and his dear wife were living proof of it.
“I’m sorry,” I lied, bored brainless for more than one reason.
“It’s all right,” she said, getting up.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere.”
She went to the toilet and I sat drinking my beer, realising I also needed to go and fantasised about barging in while she was on the seat, but told myself to think of something else. How was Jay, for example. It seemed like he’d recovered from the enigma of depression, which Kay had called the black dog. Speaking of dogs, Butch. Eternal optimist. The old man. How he would disapprove of what I was doing. His sister, Aunt Esther, had faithfully sent me a birthday present from her African store in Eshowe, year after year. Now she was dead, gone.
The toilet flushed and I got up and walked in that direction, hoping for a bit of frottage with Klara.
“Where are you going?” she said, meeting me in the narrow doorway.
“Somewhere,” I said, putting my hand on her clavicle.
“Are you starting again,” she said, mock angry.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Kiss?”
So she gave me a peck and told me to go and do my business, which took quite a while because I was so aroused that I had to sit and fold myself double on the seat to get anything out.
She wasn’t sitting on her chair anymore but on the far end of the couch.
“So tell me about yourself,” she said.
“Well, I’m completely turned on by you,” I said.
“You hardly ever noticed me in the park.”
“I did, but I was married until recently.”
“What happened?”
So I told her about how Shun and I had lived our lie and that I’d been at least fifty per cent to blame, which impressed her. She said she could understand why I might have been half the problem, but at least I had the balls to admit it, which of course got me all aroused again.
“Must be because you’re a liberal,” she said.
“I am not a liberal. I mean, if Frank Zappa could call himself a pragmatic conservative then that’s what I am too.”
“Who the hell is Frank Zappa?”
“He’s a musical genius and you’re a sexual goddess.”
“You talk such nonsense,” she said.
“Come here.”
And lo and behold, she snuggled up under my left arm, enjoying my warmth, saying Dolfie had become so cold towards her.
“That’s probably because he feels threatened, isolated, castrated.”
“I know. I feel so sorry for him.”
“You’re not a neo-Nazi or something, are you?”
“Would it be a problem if I was?”
“Right now? No.”
“Actually, I’m just a German Boer from South West Africa.”
“Namibia.”
“Whatever.”
“And you are absolutely desirable,” I said, meaning it and stroking her neck with my hand.
“You’re lying.”
“Take off your clothes and see if I’m lying,” I said, barely able to force out such a long – not to mention outrageous – sentence coherently.
“You must be joking,” she said as I started kissing her neck and taking my hand down to her stomach, under her blouse and vest and up towards her breast again.
“Do it,” I said, as Verdi barked at someone passing in the street.
“The cheek,” she said, getting up and doing exactly as I’d commanded, the movement ending on its ultra-quiet note, as provided by the Alban Berg Quartet. It was time for the comedy of the third movement and hacking of the fourth to begin, holding out for that clear, emphatic ending.
On Beauty
* * *
On Thursday morning my alarm clock went off before dawn because I’d managed to organise a mid-morning flight for the old man. This was to avoid the rush hour traffic going to Pretoria and so that I could have a cup of coffee with him while that was in full swing, then to ensure that I’d have plenty of time to take him to the airport after the gold rush in the opposite direction and before the Joburg lunch crunch.
I put the key out for Ms Motsepe and decided that early morning really was the most lucid time of the day, the old nut being not only refreshed from its rest, but also because it had been working in another mode. Conscious thought is fed by unconscious thought. The living are fed by the dead, which could mean that the reverse applied and the old man was standing at the gate with his dog, backgrounded by a lawn white with frost, checking his watch.
“Let me see your eye,” I said.
Apart from a little redness, it looked fine, and I said so.
“I still can’t see anything out of it.”
The dog put in its ten cents’ worth of grumbling and the old man bent down, stroking its head, assuring it he didn’t have to worry about anything, “see my dog?”
“Who’s going to feed it?” I wondered, having given up on any medical advice.
“Him,” the old man indicated with his head, having ensured Uncle Vern wasn’t around.
Now we had to get the old man’s suitcase inside and, after he closed the kitchen door, its Yale automatically locking it, he became convinced he’d left the keys in the kitchen and went through all his pockets – twice – in a complete panic before I found them on the unsteady table where we usually sat outside.
“Shit!”
“Don’t worry, Dad. We’ve still got plenty of time.”
We walked to the gates and locked them with his pathetic little chain from the outside, his ward looking up at its master with yearning brown eyes.
“Don’t worry, my dog, see?” he said, weeping unashamedly. “I’ll be back soon.”
Once in the car he told me how the gasbag always waited for him, faithfully, when he went to the bank, to which I grunted, whereupon he told me how the damn thing slept on the pillow, next to his head, to which I also grunted.
We drove down Harry Smith Avenue, through Irene and Olifantsfontein, past Tembisa, that flat brown township the maid of my youth, Maria, had come from. As a child I had seen it hundreds of times on our way to the airport but had never asked a question like, why was it so different to where we lived? Yet the essential knowledge was there. It was different, clearly poorer, exclusively black. All one had to do was ask – why did they live apart? – though at school that usually meant being ridiculed, and who wanted that? So the mind played tricks with itself, protected itself, carried on playing number-plate games. But at the edge of its own awareness it knew something was wrong about that mass of dull housing, and the only thing it couldn’t delude itself about was that Tembisa was there. It was as there as your old man was there, absent but always there.
As we saw the air traffic tower of OR Tambo in the near distance we ran into the one thing we didn’t need on the new highway that was being built to the airport: a traffic jam.
“Let’s go home,” the old man said.
“Dad, I am going to get you on that flight if it’s the last thing I do.”
“We’re going to miss it.”
“No we’re not,” I said, not entirely convinced.
A silence descended on us as we millimetred our way through the traffic in all that space, close to a route we had oft
en taken to see Ma off, so much so that at one stage I’d started resenting her for leaving him so often, siding with him. The silence became unbearable so I asked him whether he remembered my St Bernard, Bella.
“Of course I remember her.”
“Did I ever tell you what happened to her after I started living in Joburg?”
“No.”
“One day I went on holiday and when I came back she’d had an eye operation. St Bernards have this genetic eye problem of in-grown eyelashes. Anyway, my fellow tenant’s sister had come to visit, all the way from Botswana, and she’d fallen in love with Bella. So she paid for the operation and said I could either repay her or Bella could come and live with her and her family in Maun. Our garden was too small and I was too broke, so I said ‘Take her’. She would be flown there in an Anglo American jet. I brought her here to the airport, gave her a fat, sentimental hug and she was taken away. And do you know what?”
Silence.
“She didn’t even look back. Not once.”
Silence.
“I think there’s a moral lurking there.”
Silence.
“Dad?”
“We’re not going to make it.”
But we did finally get through and at the airport the old man looked bewildered, frightened, child-like. I got him checked in and, after lugging his case onto the conveyor belt, saw him transfixed by something.
“What are you looking at?”
“Look at that girl,” he said.
Standing about two metres away from us was a particularly unattractive young woman with dirty hair, buck teeth and bad skin, which she’d tried to cover with too much rouge.
“What about her?”
“I’ve never seen such a beautiful woman in my life,” he said, gaping.
“Yes, Dad. They’re saying you must go through that entrance over there.”
“Okay,” he said, regretfully.
The traffic had eased by now and I drove home in a fairly good mood, partially because I would have the coming Sunday off. Butch gave me his usual let’s-go-for-a walk look and, as a break from her soul-deadening routine, Ms Motsepe was standing in the kitchen, ironing instead of vacuuming.
I was determined to have a cup of coffee, which meant I had to stretch past and over her to put the kettle on with a “sorry” here and an “it’s all right” there. As usual, we spoke Afrikaans, a habit that used to drive Shanti mad because she’d never really been exposed to it where she’d come from, the then Natal. But then she would have been very exposed to isiZulu, which she’d also never learned. What drove her mad was that we were speaking a language she didn’t understand linguistically, hated politically and, most importantly, excluded her. She was powerless and if there was one thing she liked it was control.
Beauty, on the other hand, had grown up in the then Western Transvaal and had entered what was effectively an arranged marriage as a seventeen-year-old girl. She had had seven years of schooling but was now a married woman who produced a daughter and son for her much older husband. He had been a Sotho, but she was a Tswana and you can only push a Tswana woman so far. The man wouldn’t give her any money, so she divorced him and came to the City of Gold. Her children would stay with her mother in Lichtenburg and Beauty would become a housemaid.
Now she was working for her own pittance and staying in a back room of two by three metres. She could send a little home. Then she met a man, Joe, who dazzled her and she gave him a daughter. Joe was a friendly truck driver who one fine day just stayed away. Beauty was shattered. Occasionally he’d call her and say I still love you, baby. Beauty would tell him to voetsek in fast and furious Tswana, after which she’d be depressed for days. The daughter would also have to stay with her grandmother in Lichtenburg, getting the rudimentary education her mother’s city money could afford.
The years had gone by and her children had grown older and, as kids will, up. The eldest, like her mother, was a true beauty. She had had that natural grace which artists like the much-maligned Tretchikoff had recognised and honoured in a way that had liberals pulling up their noses, a notion which put them, ironically, in the same camp as the white supremacists who simply made as if he and his subjects did not exist. Then she, too, married a much older man and gave him two daughters and a son before he disappeared into the blue yonder. She had worked as a kitchen maid on a farm and started drinking, but her youngest girl had a light about her. Maybe she would become an MP one day.
Beauty’s son had become a handyman and gardener around town, working an average two days a week. He had married a Coloured woman and Beauty did not like Coloureds. They were dishonest. Gangsters. The pair had produced three lighter-skinned boys who would no doubt become good-for-nothings, even though the middle one showed some talent in maths.
The youngest girl, Joe’s daughter, meanwhile, was also growing up. She had finished standard eight and Shanti had argued that it was not right that such a young girl grew up without her mother. I hadn’t been able to counter that argument and Beauty’s back room was an exception to apartheid’s architectural legacy of live-in cells: it was a good seven by three metres. There was also a brick gardening shed in which a bed could fit – just. So the teenager had moved in and finished her schooling and would study at university. Once that was done she would get a job, start earning and therefore move to her own place, where she could receive the constant stream of young men already visiting her. Halfway through her degree I caught her with her fingers in my wallet and her mother called her in and shouted so loudly and hit her so hard that I had to step in and stop her. A few days later the daughter moved out anyway and went to live on the East Rand. One day she came to visit her mother and seemed to have put on some weight. I’d asked her whether she was pregnant and she’d said no, laughing in that shy, modest African way. She had also stopped studying.
On top of that it seemed like Beauty was getting at least one bad-news phone call a week. This brother and that cousin had died in such and such a town and could she have Friday off to attend the weekend funeral please. What did they die of? No, she did not know. Even the post-Joe boyfriend had eventually died in far-off Thabazimbi of some unidentified illness. Beauty also became ill, but somehow she kept it all together and maintained, on top of that, a capacity for laughter. One friend in particular would call her and perhaps tell her what a mutual enemy or her stupid employers had done, and Beauty would be unable to talk or stand straight she was laughing so much, her voice echoing up the stairs and down the passage, into my ears and therefore my characters’ living rooms.
Now, having made myself a cup of coffee and her a cup of tea, I regaled her with how I got the old man to the airport – the keys, the dog, the traffic jam, Bella, the complaints, the ugly girl. She folded over the ironing board with laughter.
“He’s such a difficult man,” I half complained.
“Yes,” she replied, wiping away her tears of laughter and getting seriously passionate again, the state doctor having accurately diagnosed Ms Beauty Motsepe’s most serious condition as being that of an aching heart, “but he’s a big man!”
The Grape Escape
* * *
That night after deadline and my first beer I did what I’d been dreading the whole day, which may well have been Cancer of the Left Pinky Day. I called the old man in Empangeni, where he was staying with his surviving sister, expecting a litany of complaints. But no, he’d had a fantastic flight and he’d sat next to such a nice young woman, whom he’d told all about the war, and do you know what?
“No, Dad. What?”
“I flew over Eshowe. I could see everything!”
“That’s good. Are you okay otherwise?”
“I’m fine!” he laughed enthusiastically, forgetting that he was there for his beloved sister’s funeral. He thanked me passionately for organising his flight and God-blessed me.
“It’s a pleasure,” I said, wondering about war, flight and family over a Grouse.
My paternal grandf
ather had been taken off the ship in Durban harbour because of his alleged German surname, had thus avoided becoming cannon fodder in the Great War and died in a dutiful motorcycle accident. The old man had been captured before he could fight and was going to live forever, and I had evaded war in my usual half-hearted manner. I had volunteered to do two years of national service because it meant I would never have to do camps thereafter, and I could get a nice payout that would put me through journalism school in a place that was far away from Lyttelton.
Moreover, I had become a stores officer, which meant I had even less chance of making battle and got even more pay. Just to make double sure, I had enrolled for a course in Criminology through Unisa so that I could plead study time. But the military is nothing if not inventive when it comes to shirkers and put me on the Border for the last month of my two years because by then the academic year had ended. I had gone there, consolidated my signature and drinking habits, seen what the bush could do to people and returned a few days after New Year’s and before clearing out. The old man had stood next to his green Chev as I’d walked towards him under a spinnaker sky, knowing his son wasn’t going to take this excellent opportunity to have a secure income for the rest of his days.
“Well, that’s the end of that,” he’d sighed.
Back in the present, Dolfie was at home, so everything returned to its usual masturbatory routine, ending at Jay and Veron’s that sporting Saturday. Now that he’d recovered from his depression he drank with renewed vigour and Veron’s bellicosity increased accordingly, even though she herself was letting rip and I saw no reason not to join in. After all, not only were we media people, we were South Africans.
Stumbling home in a very good mood and thinking about Klara’s vagina – the two were far from mutually exclusive – it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to see her the next day because dear old Dolfie would be at home. And if I wanted to go out looking for Ruth or anyone else I would have to take a taxi, since I was smashed. That wasn’t such a bad idea, I thought deeply, when the phone rang.
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