Son
Page 21
This was probably the closest he was going to get to admitting that he’d loved Ma and that he was missing her, possibly even regretting some things, and ignoring the “until death do us part” bit.
“Dad, every day I read about people who get murdered, raped and tortured. It’s completely out of hand.”
“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself. You must get out of here.”
“You mean leave the country?”
“Yes. We’re not wanted here anymore, if we ever were.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You must go to another country, start a new life.”
“I couldn’t leave you alone.”
“I’ll be fine. But do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“I’m bored. I’m tired. I want to die.”
“What the hell am I supposed to say to that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Shall we go and wash the cups?”
“Good idea.”
So we went inside and I realised he kept the Beethoven bust because it reminded him of Ma. Now he told me exactly how the cups and saucers should be washed, but his sight had deteriorated so badly that some of the cups were still dirty after he’d cleaned up. Halfway through I had to go to the toilet. The passage was dark, the ceiling stained from a leak and Ma’s yellow woollen warmer on the seat was grubby. When I came out I saw that the dog had crapped at the other end of the passage, right next to the phone stool where the old man had implored his wife to come home to him, sobbing. Above that, of course, was the mirror, reflecting his son.
A Shortish Holiday
* * *
Maybe if I took a break I’d get rid of this gnawing sensation. Maybe I just needed some respite from all the secondary violence, I thought. I was sick of it. It came at you from all angles. Whites knew they didn’t have the law on their side anymore, but that didn’t stop them from being downright rude. You didn’t have to use racist terms to be a racist. You could, for example, use the more refined, and therefore nauseating, weapon of tone. “Things used to be so much faster in the old days,” a white housewife might say for all to hear in the supermarket queue as she inspected her nails. Others might say around a glowing, meat-sizzling fire, “You know, I’m not a racist, but.”
Blacks reciprocated in kind by being as uncommunicative – or familiar – as possible. You asked an assistant for something in a shop and they just walked away without a word, leaving you wondering whether they were going to help you or not. Or they called you cold on a phone and, without greeting you or identifying themselves, said: “How are you?”
It was all good and well that we were allegedly equal now, with all our cultural differences, but it was almost impossible to make friends across the deeply embedded colour line without it feeling forced. If you tried too hard it seemed affected, if you didn’t try at all you felt as if you weren’t doing your duty, a word to which my poor, late mother had made me allergic for life. Once Shanti and I had parted our friends, bar Jay and Veron, had neatly fallen back into their respective racial and/or gender camps. In the end I’d given up, being too lazy to do what the government should have done from the start: insist that every white person speak an indigenous language. It would have solved at least fifty per cent of the problem.
The media were worse. Public figures weren’t criticised, reprimanded or castigated, they were lashed. They weren’t fired or sacked or, worse, euphemistically let go: they were axed. I couldn’t help seeing people with axes embedded in their heads every time I saw that expression. Daily. And I wasn’t guiltless in providing those headlines; it was my job, as they say. The violence came at you as you were driving, nervously waiting at the red light, walking, picking up a paper or switching on the radio or TV.
So that Monday I put in four days’ leave without thinking too much about being the world’s rankest amateur at taking holidays, possibly because my youthful vacations had been such deadly dull affairs. But I had another reason why I took that particular week off. It would be my birthday that Thursday and it was always a time that depressed me and left me ratty for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. The last thing I felt like doing was taking a cake to the office or having drinks with mates, Jay and Veron again excluded. Still, I found all kinds of excuses not to go away on the first, second and third days, though I did walk Butch a lot and saw Mandla had grown ever thinner, hacking much more. The old man actually remembered my birthday and wished me many more and I told him I wasn’t going to come over that Sunday; I was going away for a break. He understood, he said – did he sound relieved or was he hiding his disappointment? – and God bless you. That night Jay and I drank ourselves stupid.
The next morning I was too hungover to move and told Ms Motsepe I was going away the next day, would she please put the lights on that night and feed the dog.
Long face.
“I’ll pay you extra, of course.”
Less long face.
That night I watched porn but did nothing about it and the next morning I packed one of the tents and a sleeping bag Shunt had left behind, grabbed a couple of extra odds and sods, and drove towards that thing – the only thing – that most of the overseas bourgeoisie was interested in about Africa, and then on their terms: the bush. I knew of a place that was only a few hours outside Johannesburg and gave you the illusion that you were far away from civilisation, apart from powerlines marching across those prehistoric hills like gauntly mutated King Kongs. At night you could lie and look at a sky almost as clear as that of the Karoo in a range named after a rebellious Sotho leader, close to the Cradle of Mankind and equidistant to a dam being choked by hyacinth invaders and a visible ex-nuclear station.
But at least my week wouldn’t be completely wasted, I thought profoundly. If anyone bothered to ask what I’d done in my time off I’d be able to say I’d gone bush. It wasn’t only a good place because of its proximity, but also because no music, TV and musical instruments were allowed. There would be no drunken singalongs around the campfire, thank you very much. No rumbling, window-rattling basses either.
I instantly felt better out there, of course, encouraging myself to do this more often, really, and went for a long walk through hardy bush, red soil and particularly rough rock instead of putting up the tent, one of the many things at which the supremely organised Shunt had been particularly good. When I got back it was beyond dusk and I struggled to get the bloody thing to resemble any kind of shelter. In fact, it turned out to be our – her – provisions tent. In other words, it was a children’s tent: tiny. Moreover, a wind had sprung up and come rushing over the Drakensberg-side hills and down into the valley as if ordered, turning my little fire into a joke of horizontal flames. I lay freezing in the mini-tent with my bagged feet sticking out, flame-side. Keeping them at the right distance so as not to melt the sleeping bag meant I would have to stay awake, otherwise I might roast my feet. And now I had an Australian rock song about burning beds going through my head, over and over. Wonderful. I finally lost my temper with myself and struggled out of the tent, accidentally tripped over and loosened the anchoring rope, which sent the tent billowing away like a tumbleweed. I chased after it, stepped into a nest of thorns appropriately called little devils in Afrikaans, hopping about while brushing them off, and finally managed to wrestle the mangled mess of nylon into a ball, shove it into the boot and slam it shut. I didn’t need to stomp out the fire because Mother Nature had already done her duty in that regard. Thank you, I silently shouted at the heavens. Thank you very fucking much!
Now I opened the passenger door, finally found the lever to push the seat back into an approximation of prostration, and laid Shunt’s bag out on it. That was much better, except that I hadn’t thought of bringing a pillow and could feel my neck heading towards spasm, so I still couldn’t sleep. Plus I could still feel a residue of her in there, smell her. For all our troubles, we had been able to talk. We could have objective, even constructive, disag
reements, as long as they were about ideas, art, politics, news, the country. In fact, we used to talk so much that we’d arrive late at events as a result, and that was something. It would be good just to have a normal natter – even disagreement – with her again.
But what now? After about an hour or so I knew. Beethoven. Listening to him build castles, no, much more, civilisation itself, in the air – with nothing. The first movement of the fourteenth is melancholic but never indulgent. If this work’s predecessor was disjointed, restless, filled with silence and violence, then this, his favourite, was filled with continuity, healing perhaps. Transcendence certainly. Beethoven in Africa. I had always scoffed at black Africans talking about a united continent, but if I could lie here and consider myself African as much as I was comfortable with a very distant Beethoven as part of “my” culture, why couldn’t “they” think or feel the way they did? Sweetest of all, hadn’t it been a black host who had introduced me to the quartets on that classical station? That, and the fact that the eminently learned Professor Joseph Kerman wrote that a mature Beethoven piece, like this C sharp minor, was “a person”. It was an admittedly non-technical argument, but it had a Beethovian ring of truth about it and that – apart from the fact that it suited me personally – was all that mattered.
Naturally I was “looking” at this music through that symbol so beloved of publishers to sum up the alleged romance of Africa – an acacia tree – while the music itself continued in its own fine, progressive way. All of it was so logical and whole that I found myself feeling more or less at peace with the world, even, most surprisingly, with my ex-wife. But there was still the brief but funereal sixth movement, flowing into the finale beyond death: assertive, powerful, affirmative, eternal. Shanti.
The next morning I woke up with the early sun in my eyes, stiff in all departments, as usual, and discovered that my sole box of Lion matches had ended up in the flames the night before, a whoosh I had enjoyed causing as a child. But now I was fireless. The Civic’s lighter had given up the ghost a long time ago, so I was forced to ask the neighbours for a light to restart my fire in order to boil some water and have a smoke. They were all about a decade younger than me, had all the accoutrements of camping and it soon transpired that the two men and one woman had a slightly smirking, messianic quality about them. Greenies. Vegheads. Cause junkies.
The other woman, however, a dark redhead, said she would bring me a cup of coffee and a box of matches after I’d done my ablutions. That done, she came over and I felt obliged to regale her with my heroics of the night before. When all else fails, make them laugh. Dance like a monkey. Entertain them. Except she wasn’t laughing at me, just smiling, as if she was seeing and hearing something completely different to what I was saying. She was one of those open-faced beauties who didn’t use – or need to use – make-up. She really wasn’t my type: gentle, practical and, judging by her questions and silences, intelligent. We really had nothing in common, but it turned out we lived a few blocks away from each other back in Jozi. The others, however, were impatient to go on their hike.
So I drove away from that camp feeling guilty that I hadn’t seen the old man, deeply reluctant to go to work on a Sunday (or any other day, for that matter), and intensely annoyed with myself that I’d been too much of a coward to ask that beautiful woman her name or address, knowing she would have given it to me. The sum result was that it felt like I was driving in one direction but going in its complete opposite.
On Funerals
* * *
“Where are we going?” the old man said.
“To the cemetery,” I responded, steeling myself for the canine request. Once that was dealt with we drove past the school and nearby hospital where he and I had signed off my mother’s corpse. The nurse had been a Zen-Buddhist in disguise, for she had been cheerful and told us to come and say goodbye. The old man burst into tears as he saw his late wife staring sightlessly at the ceiling with one eye. The nurse chatted away and closed that glassy eye as he God-blessed his wife. Women don’t die, I’d always thought, and I’d been right. My mother wasn’t dead, or gone; she had just changed. I’d kissed her waxen forehead – the aching flame extinguished – and consoled him that he’d had half a century with her, which he accepted.
Now we were passing Centurion City on the way, that selfsame mall I’d taken my mother to during my post-Germiston depression for a cup of coffee. I had told her that I had found that business of the tenant very confusing and that I thought the old man was a coward at life. She had told me that nothing had happened between her and that woman and that “You’re a full-grown man now. Leave us alone and don’t you ever dare say a word against him,” she’d said, crying.
That had been the end of that fact-finding mission and reminded me of a funeral we’d gone to in Jan Kempdorp, a hard, dry, stony place in the Northern Cape. I must have been about seven and Ma – the reluctant realist – had told me to come and say goodbye to Oom Jan, the old man’s uncle. They had opened his coffin to that vast sky, but I didn’t want to see a dead man, burst into tears and ran to where the men were standing and talking, leaning against a Studebaker. Grim men, the sides of their heads shaven clean. The old man said I didn’t have to go and say goodbye to the last connection to his father, and the ensuing silence of the other men very clearly said Sonnie was being much too soft on his dark, pudgy son.
Back in the present the cemetery was a feast of heartfelt kitsch, ranging from immortalised photographs of children to shared plots and biblical quotes, but time showed what it thought of such folly as photos became damp, graves tilted, cracked, caved in or sank. I was once again impressed with a school friend’s grave, though, which had a cabbage tree growing out of his belly.
Now we approached the plot of the old man’s late wife. Part of the ritual was for me to clean that heavy slab of granite above Ma’s presumably indifferent bones, after which he always delivered his deep and penetrating rhyme: “Here I stand where you used to be/there you lie where soon I will be.”
Ma had seen the two-for-the-price-of-one plots advertised in the local rag and had told me about it with a little chuckle, which was her way of saying she hated the thought, but certain things simply had to be done. That had been twenty years ago; now it was ten years after her death and I still thought she warranted more than just “Lovingly Remembered”. She deserved at least a shrine for having put up with the old man for so long.
Surrounding her were many of the people at whose funerals, children’s weddings and baptisms she’d sung. A few graves away a man stood weeping silently over a daughter who had died twenty-five years ago.
By now I had filled a plastic bucket with water and started wiping Ma’s gravestone with one of his old T-shirts, noticing that many of the brass letters on her neighbour’s grave had been removed, and said so.
“Bastards,” the old man said.
The church had been packed with people I hadn’t seen in decades. Lying in that box up front was my mother. The old man had sat very straight up, showing nothing and only once emitting a little squeak. A trio of friends sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ with trembling voices, the sound caused more by age than grief. Sitting and standing next to me was one of those old ducks who see the good in everything and sing perfectly out of tune. I wanted to burst out laughing very loudly.
That was the time of Halley’s Comet, when it rained for weeks on end, as if the very heavens were weeping for a woman who had stuck with a man through five very thin decades – and made something of it.
“I went to a funeral this week,” I proffered lamely, even though it had been a memorial for Robert Louis Amato – husband, father, friend, writer, educator, intellectual all-rounder, free spirit – wringing the rag.
“I hate funerals,” the old man said empathetically. “When I die I don’t want any singing and I don’t want any flowers.”
“Why not?”
“Flowers are meant to stay in the ground. And I want Gerhard to bury me.”
“Because.”
“And why no singing?”
“Because the only person who could do it is lying there.”
I wrung the rag, emptied the brown water over someone else’s flowers before I realised they were plastic, and asked him why he was so deep in thought.
“You know, something’s been worrying me lately.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“I wonder if she was ever unfaithful to me on all those trips overseas.”
“You’ve only thought about that now?” I said incredulously.
“Ja.”
“But what does it matter now? She’s dead.”
The old man nodded, saying they’d been very different, “but we got on. When we were alone, we got on.”
“Are you saying I was a cause of friction?”
“Not you. Other people. We always fought in front of other people.”
“Even her father.”
“Oh, him. I couldn’t stomach him.”
That old man had been my only grandparent and the old man had poisoned me against him to such an extent that I’d been – to my eternal regret and shame – openly contemptuous of him. When he’d died I’d been unable to console Ma or express any kind of sympathy to a woman who had looked after her mother and then her “useless” father, while her siblings went on to varsity and professional careers. I hadn’t even attended the old man’s funeral, such was my acquired hatred of him.
“I feel really bad about him.”
“He was a fat, lazy coward. But worst of all, he was Ossewa-Brandwag. He was one of John Vorster’s hangers-on, and Vorster was a Nazi, a terrorist. He was blowing up railway lines here in sympathy with those bastards while I was prepared to die fighting against them. But when the time came for Vorster to be interned, your Oupa was nowhere to be found. He denied ever having anything to do with the OBs.”