Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “Dad?”

  “Ja,” he said, instantly awake and ready to fight, as he had been for at least four score, rising.

  “How are you,” I said, somewhat awkwardly.

  “I’m fine,” he said, unusually. “Shall we have some coffee?”

  “Good idea,” I said, shaking his gnarly hand and hurting it a bit before we went up the sunny steps, catching his elbow as he almost slipped, past the flimsy security gate and bottom door and into the cool kitchen, its windows wide open.

  After I’d excused myself I got his groceries, we packed them away and he told me that when he’d grown up their garden was full of avocados, figs, mangoes, bunches of bananas.

  “No wonder you’ve lived so long,” I said.

  “But that isn’t the only reason.”

  “What else could it be,” I wondered.

  “It’s because I’ve never smoked, drunk or slept with another woman.”

  “I wish I could say the same for myself.”

  “Do you know how much this mug cost me?”

  “No?”

  “Two ninety-five.”

  “What?”

  “Usually it costs me six ninety-five,” he crowed.

  “That’s a bargain.”

  So which mug did I want to drink from, he wondered. I said I wanted the one with the rings around it, and he said everyone chose that one. Really? Ja. Another triumphant smile.

  “I wonder why,” I wondered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But do you know that I miss my father every day of my life?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “We went hunting one day. And theeere in the distance was a kudu bull. Beautiful creature. I was standing behind my father and he went down on his knees and aimed, but I waved my arms and the buck run away. He asked me whether I’d frightened it away and I said yes.”

  “Did he hit you again?”

  “No, he said ‘let’s go home’ and never hunted again.”

  “Do you think he maybe sensed he would die soon?”

  “I don’t know, but I knew he was dead when those two men came walking towards me across the rugby field.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “And soon after you were in the North African desert.”

  “Ja.”

  “Captured, transported, seeing what they did to old Johnny van Heerden.”

  There was a blank pause.

  “I think something died in me that day.”

  “But you’ve done well, Dad. You’re still here.”

  Pause.

  “You know, one year I forgot my mother’s birthday and I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “I’m sure she’s forgiven you.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Not sure of that, he said he’d got us some Lemon Creams.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Let’s go and eat them outside. So you can breathe.”

  So we went outside and dunked our biscuits in our respective coffees and looked at the back yard and he helped the dog onto his lap in the sun and we enjoyed the warmth on our skins and he said this was the only place on earth he wanted to be. I said it was a good place because the air was clean (and the clouds were magnificent). He said it was also good because the shopping centre, schools and new hospital were within walking distance.

  “True,” I said.

  And he sat there behind Ma’s cheap, silver-rimmed sunglasses and looked so good that I took a snap of him with my cellphone, even though I felt a little like a thief. And then he said something that shocked even me, because it was a word he had never used in front of me, ever.

  “I’m fucked,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Have another Lemon Cream,” he said.

  Okay, I said, and when we’d finished he said he had so many clothes in his cupboard that were just hanging there. Let’s have a look, I said. And we went into that dark passage and darker room where his wife had laid disintegrating and he switched on the light instead of opening the curtains. There were two shirts there that suddenly appealed to me: a check brown Van Heusen (by Appointment to Her Majesty) and a shirt of vertical white and blue lines that I thought might go well with my jeans. So I took them and he was delighted and said I must take the jacket I brought because it wasn’t his kind of jacket and I did because I thought it was my kind of jacket and I’d wear it and the shirts, thinking of him.

  Now he wanted to show me something in the garage and I was glad to get out of that room, that passage with its mirror and phone at the end and into the light-filled kitchen, out into the sun before entering the different gloom of the garage again. He showed me where his last will was and then opened the Valiant’s expansive hood to show me the chromed engine, which didn’t run anymore.

  “That is fantastic,” I said.

  Then he closed it very carefully and covered it with the bedspreads he and Ma used to have on their bed when I was a child and joined them in the mornings and said he had something for me. What is it, I wondered. It was his thick Montblanc and I thanked him and assured him I wouldn’t tell anyone that he’d given it to me. Then he gave me the rest of his Parker sets, all his pen knives and fifty one-rand coins featuring the fathers of apartheid’s profiles in two faded Peppermint tubes. Those would be worth millions one day, he said.

  I thanked him and he said I was welcome.

  “I feel like some more coffee,” I said.

  And he said, do you know what, he’d been thinking exactly the same thing, smiling that sweet smile of his, and he locked up, which took a long time so I stared at the brick heart in the sun.

  We went back into the kitchen and made his and my extra-strong coffee, which would kill me. Once that was done we went back out to the cement apron again and drank our second coffees and he said he couldn’t see the planes overhead any more. That must be very frustrating, I said.

  “You should go to work now,” he said.

  “Ja,” I said, suddenly reluctant to leave and deciding I wasn’t going to tell him about the trouble I was in. He didn’t need to know right now and maybe he would never find out about it. But then I also knew that all it took was a quiet day at a newspaper for a nondescript story to catch fire, especially if there was something similar brewing in a film or TV series. You could be a zero the one day and a massive, neon zero the next. Well, if that happened I would personally let him know before anyone else. But I was going to take my chances: he had had enough misery from me without having to know this as well.

  So I said I would first help him with the dishes, which worried him. But I told him I still had plenty of time and I wouldn’t be late and I wouldn’t lose my job, so he said okay and we went inside and he told me exactly how dishes needed to be washed and dried. First you washed them in soap; then you rinsed them in clear water; then you wiped them with a damp cloth; then with a dry-as-bone one.

  Once that was over there was a silence and we both knew I had to go. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but we went to the front, shook hands and he opened the gates for me, his faithful dog by his side. I got into the Civic, put the jacket and shirts down, started the car, turned it off again, got out and put my arms around him.

  “You don’t know how much we loved you,” he quaked, this old bag of hot skin and bones beneath his Sunday jacket, smelling of dog.

  “Goodbye, Dad.”

  “Look after yourself, my darling.”

  “You too.”

  “Goodbye, my boy.”

  I got back into the car, started it and waved at the man with the silver hair, standing as upright as Charlie Chaplin, thinking I didn’t mind coming here anymore. In fact, I looked forward to coming here again, even if he lived to a hundred, and I hoped he did, no matter how much more difficult, repetitive and helpless he became.

  Late Spring

  * * *

  My living hell of waiting continued and the next Saturday I was in
the park again when I bumped into Frauke, that beautiful woman I’d met in the bush.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said.

  I wondered if anything could be wonderful (except her eyes), but asked her what she meant.

  “Weren’t you here in winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you see how the marsh’s reeds were control-burned so that they could renew themselves in spring again?”

  “Yes, I did …”

  “Didn’t you see how the new shoots sprang up again?”

  She was right. It was a free miracle and I’d been too busy staring up my own rectum to acknowledge it.

  “Would you like to go and see a movie tonight?”

  “I’d love to go and see a movie,” she said. “What’s your address?”

  So she gave me that and some friends of hers came along with their new-born child and, after introducing us, she knelt to give it her full attention. I inexplicably wanted to burst into tears and told her I would see her at seven and left.

  That night we went to see something and I ended up spending the night at her garden cottage, telling her about my predicament. The next morning I noticed that, apart from yours truly, her cottage was filled with light. We made love again and I was too smitten to even call the old man and so that Sunday melted into yet another Monday of waiting.

  On Death

  * * *

  The sun rose at 6:27am on 13 November 2007 over the municipality of Centurion.

  At 123 Harry Smith Avenue the old man whose wife and sisters had called him Son was awake already, for he was an old soldier, an old warrior and an old worrier. His dog, which had lain next to his head through the fitful night, needed to go out and relieve itself. The old man got up, probably cursed as he had his whole married life, and opened the door’s two halves and the flimsy security gate. The sun streamed in from beyond the Waterkloof air base and the dog went outside and did its business. The old man put on the kettle and started preparing their oats for the day. Then he probably went to the toilet to relieve himself too.

  When he came back into the kitchen the dog was done and the old man didn’t close the doors or gate; he liked the sun shining into his kitchen, even though the gate would not have blocked the sun in any meaningful way. He and the dog had their porridge and tea and possibly watched the news on the scratchy black-and-white TV in the bedroom across the passage. At about 8:30am the phone rang down the dark passage and the old man probably cursed that too. Then he possibly switched the TV off and went to answer the phone to talk to his Empangeni sister, and the dog faithfully followed him.

  Outside, the street was fairly empty, for school had just started. The unlocked gates opened and closed. Feet started walking down the brick driveway, probably two pairs, probably male. Their owners didn’t know or care that a black-and-white photograph had been taken on that driveway, long before the new bricks and rough heart had been laid. The photograph was of an upright, sun-tanned man and a scowling boy. The man’s hair was combed straight back and was already going grey, but he looked like a matinee idol. He wore a light-brown check jacket, an open-neck white shirt, Oxford trousers with turn-ups and his leather shoes were polished. His big, brown right hand was resting on his son’s chest. The boy was shyly leaning against his father’s leg, his feet turned inwards. He had a big, dark, square head and was squinting into the sun. He was wearing a bright red cowboy shirt and blue jeans that were too big for him; they probably had to last a while. They were rolled up at the bottom and rested on veldskoens.

  The boy liked to think it was his mother who took the photograph of the two people she loved most in this world, even though they hurt her so much.

  The feet kept walking down the driveway, over the brick heart and past the garage where the lifeless Valiant now stood and the bottle-green Chev used to, the car in which the man in the photograph used to take the boy down to the military base every Saturday afternoon. This was the highlight of the boy’s week and he loved the movies, but he desperately wanted his father to come with him. One day he’d thrown a colossal tantrum about how no one ever wanted to do anything with him, about how he had no friends, and the old man had come into that bughouse with him. The boy liked to remember that it was the World War Two film in which an Italian father and son are on the run from the Nazis. They hide in a hollow in a forest and the soldiers come with sword-long spikes, poking the earth to feel if there are any shallow caves. A soldier stops right above them and pushes the blade down and the only thing the father can do is put his hand in the way so that it feels like there is solid earth beneath the soldier. The father shudders with pain while he holds his other hand over his son’s wide-eyed mouth. The soldier pulls the blade out and of course the ground wipes away the father’s blood as the feet of the men passed the side of the garage and onto the back lawn.

  This is where the old man used to make their potjiekos and the boy used to re-enact the films he had seen, falling off the wooden steeds his father had made for him, playing the cowboys and Indians, for he had no one to play with him, so he had to make do, dying a thousand deaths on both sides. Uncle Vern had once said if those deaths had been real the back lawn would have been a veritable bloodbath.

  The feet now stepped onto the cement apron, passing the silver 45-gallon drum in which the man in the photograph had bathed the boy of a balmy summer’s evening, after the boy had scraped his knees and elbows bloody, dying, his eyes swollen and leaky from his grass and dust allergies, his chest wheezing, yet that dusky world had been timeless and filled with endless possibilities.

  The feet approached the three steps leading onto the back stoep, passing the laundry on the left, which may have been locked, unless the old man had forgotten to close it, for he had become forgetful of late. He had sometimes bathed his son in there too, standing him in one of the stone sinks and letting him son rub his feet over the serrated part meant for washing. The son had once, and only once, painted a symbol on the inside wall. He had seen that symbol in The Sound of Music and had painted a Shoeshine swastika on the wall and the old man has asked him whether he knew what it meant. Sensing something was terribly wrong, the boy had said no. The man had told his son that he had been prepared to die fighting against everything that symbol represented, and the boy had felt a deep sense of shame.

  Meanwhile, the old man probably lost his temper with his sister, much as he loved her, for she insisted on telling him what to eat and do, and now the feet went up the three steps and their owners saw the back door was open. So they went into the kitchen where the son had once walked into the kitchen, yawning, as the dog started barking. The boy’s mother had made her husband bacon, eggs and toast. It was unusual for the son to be up so early, for he was a night person, but on that particular morning he had stood up and entered the kitchen in his pyjamas. His father had sat him on his knee and given him a square-inch work of culinary art. On the prongs of that fork were a piece of hot bread, cold, salty butter, tangy bacon, egg white and yolk, salt and pepper. It was a taste the son would never be able to replicate, much as he tried for the rest of his life. Then his father had finished his tea and the son and his mother had walked with his father to the front door, past the phone and the mirror, where he kissed his wife and son goodbye and started walking down to Sportpark station in the cool spring dawn, the son’s hero.

  Back in the present the old man had started shouting at the dog to shut up, had said goodbye to his sister and had then come into the kitchen, where he’d either been attacked immediately or after he’d told the men to get the hell out of his house. He had fallen with “severe blunt trauma” injury to the head and was tied up while the dog continued barking. The old man’s nose had been broken again and he started drowning in his own blood as the men ran through the house, seeing what was there for the quick taking, watched by an indifferent Tina in the living room. They would also have rushed through Len’s old bedroom, where he’d sometimes had terrible nightmares as a child and lay whimpering
until his father got into bed with him and told him it was all right, it was only a dream. Go to sleep now. It was just a bad dream.

  Dog Guards Master’s Corpse

  * * *

  The hadedahs cawed, a car alarm went off, a helicopter passed overhead and the traffic hissed in the background. I got up, performed, no, dazedly did my ablutions and got dressed. Then, after putting out the key for Ms Motsepe, I told Butch we were going for a walk again.

  The two boxed-up dogs turned on each other. A new, younger guard had replaced Mandla and had an ugly air about him. I avoided the Doberman jerk and the Rottweiler dragon and missed Frauke, who was at work. There was a dead duck in the top dam. Further on and just off the track among the trees an abandoned supermarket trolley stood.

  We went home and I fed Butch. I wasn’t hungry. So I made myself and Ms Motsepe some tea and started up my computer. I would try to write while I waited for the machinations of the law to take their course, but I found it impossible to concentrate. There was no one I could call, nowhere I wanted to go to. Ms Motsepe came in and drank her tea in staring silence. Wait a bit. There was someone I could call. I was still feeling guilty about not calling the old man after missing out on our usual Sunday visit and called to tell him I was thinking of him, but he wasn’t answering. Occasionally I’d do that and he’d be so grateful. Probably out in the garden, I reasoned. Or the garage, dreaming of driving his car again. Or just ignoring the phone in a temper. Or really not hearing it.

  I tried to write again. Still nothing. Think, I told myself. If you can’t write one thing, write another. Start on that new story you’ve been thinking about. But it was all flat, dead. Well then read a book or go see a film. Not interested. Ms Motsepe came struggling up the stairs with the vacuum cleaner and I greeted her halfway down. She was well and I was fine too, thanks.

  I wandered around in the back garden, which really was too big for a single man, even a large family, and I picked the last lemon of winter. It was rotten. Was the old man near his lemon tree? Who knew? Butch joined me and I thought of the one time the old man and Ma had come to see our new house. Butch had taken to the old man like a duck to water. Animals instinctively knew there was safety and kindness there. And what’s wrong with being attracted to kindness, comfort? A good curry smell came wafting in from the neighbours as a Jumbo sailed overhead. I was going to call Uncle Vern and ask him to check up on the old man. But he wasn’t answering either.