by SJ Naudé
Upon his return, the little house in the castle smells of baking. Joschka is at work in the kitchen. He avoids the kitchen, goes to lie down on the plane-patterned duvet.
Later, Joschka comes and lies down too. He tells Joschka the news about his mother while looking up at the ceiling. He does it reluctantly. It feels wrong given their newfound strangeness towards each other, but there is no one else to share it with. Joschka is quiet for a long time.
‘I would be lying if I said I know how it feels. As far as I’m concerned, my mother has been dead for a long time. I don’t remember.’
He catches an early-morning train to Nuremberg. First he visits the clinic, then gets a taxi to the airport. From there he will fly to Frankfurt, where he will wait a few hours for the evening flight to South Africa that he booked the previous night.
He is waiting to board in Nuremberg airport. The airport building displays the kind of watered-down architectural modernism that has become the common denominator of airports everywhere in the West: row upon row of structural glass plates in a steel frame. One could be anywhere in the extra-sylvan world, in the Vierte Reich. And yet, in the distance beyond the runway, the hills are briefly visible, and the dark green of pine forests, before the fog closes in.
He has a box of biscuits with him, German biscuits that Joschka baked and shoved in his hands when he left. He just looked at it without saying anything.
‘Let me know when you’re coming back to London,’ Joschka said, eyes still avoiding his own. Joschka’s hand is burrowing into his, like a small forest creature in distress.
We return to where we started, the nude scene in the bathroom. As mentioned, neither he nor his mother says a word about it. It is as if it never happened. Something has changed, though, something has become raw. The breach between now and then, the time of innocence, has been brought into sharper focus. Or maybe he is imagining things; maybe it was nothing more than it was.
When he arrived in South Africa a month ago, he made a call to London and resigned from his job. It was long overdue. His former assistant packed up his office, shipped the boxes. He asked a friend to empty out his flat and let it out. He did not say goodbye to anyone in London, gave no one his new telephone number or his parents’ address.
The rhythms of his mother’s illness catch his mother and everyone around her unawares. For a few weeks, she looks better than ever, radiating inner light. One could imagine the diagnosis was a mistake. Then the decline follows, much faster than predicted. It progresses with such speed that one cannot keep up. Soon she has intense pain. Accompanying the pain is protest, refusal. She declines pain medication. She wants to maintain control. (‘I want to know what’s going on in my body. Want to be all there when it all happens.’) Her condition changes daily, there are new kinds of pain, pains she cannot describe.
The more she becomes lost in thought, and the worse the pain, the more she does. She gets up and cooks on a large scale. She is waging a war on the scattering growths inside her. She’ll show the pain. For hours on end, she cooks and bakes, as if determined to fill a freezer from which everyone whom she has ever loved can eat for the rest of their lives. She cleans the floors, dusts, polishes windows and prunes potted plants so that no one else will ever have to do it again. She drives off to buy clothing for his father, bringing back pullovers and thick socks for him too, for all his future winters in the north. Everything will be clean, everyone will be warm and fed and cared for. So it will be. For ever and ever. (Amen.)
Later, still without painkillers, she is lying, motionless, amidst the regularity of domestic sounds: the drone of the fridge, the ticking of clocks. When one enquires cautiously, she insists there is no pain. Judging by how serenely she is lying there, one could almost believe it. But now and then something travels dimly through her eyes. She talks about taking a trip to the farm with him. She wants to show him the grafted crabapple tree, wants to see for herself how it is growing. Wants to sit in the sandstone pergola again. She is sure she can do it; they can stack a pile of cushions in the back of the car. His father must come too. He nods, but he knows it is not possible, knows it will never happen.
One evening he brings her back from the hospital after she has undergone a procedure. An attempt at brief relief – in the intestines of this most unembittered woman, the bile had dammed up to bursting point and required surgical drainage. She is sore. They drive through wet streets and he tries to understand the nature of pain. It is a strange evening. It has rained unnaturally heavily. It has stopped now, but the idea of rain hovers in the dark. The pain makes his mother speechless. It is a blade cutting them from each other, a presence in the car that dominates them in different ways, makes them absent from each other. In himself there is an echo of her pain, black and shiny and enormous and soundless. But it is not pain itself. Outside there are so many lights: street lamps, houses, cars, shopping centres. It surprises him how powerless all the bulbs are against the dark, how little they infringe on it. He looks at her: she is blind and frozen. The pain inside her is a strange country, an impenetrable language. Not a Germanic language barked in a menacing voice, but a set of soundless signs. Like aleph, the unvoiced Hebrew consonant. Or what one hears when the birds fall silent.
It is during this time that he gets such an unprotected view of his mother in the bathroom. The retina will not let go of the image, he realises after a while. It stays with him. He wonders what it means, the lingering. Yes, it does carry something in it of then and now, the man before and after the event. How he is to construe the respective selves, however, he will never know. But he knows it is a dividing line, a flash of light in the blindness of which all protection is torn away. And it superimposes her body indelibly over his German trip, a defenceless landscape on the edge of collapse. It is also on one of these mornings that she gets up and walks out into the garden. She takes the spade from the gardener. He stands back slowly, respectfully. His forehead is shiny, he has taken off his woolly hat and is turning it around and around in his hands. She puts a foot on the spade, pushing it into the soil. The man’s eyes are turned downwards. She totters. The gardener steps forward, gently adds his own foot. Together they manage to turn over a sod. On the underside earthworms teem and twist.
‘At least one spadeful,’ she says with rasping breath when she sinks into the sofa. Perhaps she wants to dig her own grave, one sod per day.
‘You can bring it now,’ she says. ‘Administer the oblivion.’
He helps her into bed, lifts her feet gently onto the sheet. He covers her lightly with an angora blanket. She surrenders, accepts the morphine. In the coming days, she insists on increasing doses, much more than prescribed.
The care becomes exhausting. He and his father take turns with the night shift. By his mother’s bedside he searches inside himself for all the tenderness he possesses. Nothing is kept in reserve.
During the first week or three he and Joschka occasionally exchanged emails. But Joschka and the entire northern world – London, Berlin, Nuremberg, the castle above the valley – feel so utterly removed from this strange continent. From this place of his childhood that has nothing to do with him, that never really left traces on his consciousness. Their electronic epistles are devoid of substance, impart no concrete news. They are stiff and unnatural – nothing feels the same from here. The menace of his mother’s illness dominates his thoughts, so that the events around Joschka in the previous months look increasingly distant and implausible, like something remembered from a story. The emails start trailing off. In his state of intensified emotion, while his mother is sunk so deep into her pillow, he does, nevertheless, write to Joschka again one night. Lack of sleep has made him scratchy behind the eyes.
Josch
You have, I realise tonight, taught me a few simple lessons (is there any other sort?) and for that I want to thank you. What are these lessons? In no particular order:
1. That one must learn to live with open endings.
2. That we like gr
afting our painful little stories onto other, greater narratives, onto stories filled with deeper trials and more intense pathos. Even though we want to weigh them down with meaning, they just remain what they are: our own stories.
3. One may linger in a beautiful room as long as possible. One does not have to open the door.
4. That everything is of short duration; we are permitted but a brief sojourn in a shadowy landscape.
5. I am (still) here. I am alive.
6. Pain is a soundless language, a different language to the birds’. (On reflection, this lesson may have come from my mother.)
7. That I owe the gods gratitude for a mother who loved me (loves me, if love is still possible). A mother who never forsook me, who cherished and protected me.
8. To keep the gleaming distant city fiercely in view, without a hand against the brow to shade the eyes.
What I taught you, if anything, I do not know. Perhaps just how tenderness feels when it bleeds through fingertips.
Tschüss, bis später.
He receives no response to his list of lessons. The correspondence ends.
One day, when he awakes from an afternoon nap after a long, gruelling night, he looks out the window and sees his father in the sunshine. When he goes down to his parents’ room, the bed is empty. He exits through the veranda doors. The light is sharp, the sun white.
‘What’s going on?’
‘She’s gone. They’ve come to take her away.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you wake me? I wanted to be there.’
His father shrugs his shoulders, keeps looking at the stirring leaves. ‘Meaning does not, after all, lie in the end. It’s just a moment like any other.’
He wants to grab his father by the shoulders and throw him onto the lawn.
We move a few months ahead. He still thinks of Joschka sometimes, more so now that his mother has died. Via a distant acquaintance, he hears that Joschka has moved to Bavaria, that he has renounced London and Berlin. He now lives near his sister in the Oberpfalz. There was a forest ranger’s hut close to the castle, he remembers, by the footpath, on the edge of the forest. Perhaps Joschka moved in there. Perhaps he goes wandering in the mornings, climbing one of the fire towers at dawn, looking out over the fog-shrouded valleys. He could not say, they no longer speak. These days, when he tastes something sugary, he imagines feeling the tips of Joschka’s fingers on his head. Just for a moment, but still. Sometimes, when a long shadow falls over him, it feels sweet and cool, like Joschka’s, with the same texture of velvet. And often, when he wakes up, he expects to see planes on his duvet.
He wishes it were true, the idea of Joschka as a Bavarian ranger, in a forest hut close to Burg Heimhof, the child of his aunt. But this account turns out to be apocryphal. By chance he comes across one of Joschka’s Berlin acquaintances one day. The man is on holiday in Cape Town. It is one of those names from his and Joschka’s Berlin nights (Ritter? Wolfrik? Tabor?). The man remembers him even though he would never have recognised the man. The man tells him that Joschka returned to Berlin shortly after he returned to South Africa when his mother had been diagnosed, that he has cut himself off from everyone, that he stopped his medication shortly after his move and is withering.
He retreats while the man is speaking. He holds his hand above his eyes, seeking out the shade.
So, his mother’s pain did not belong to her alone, it also had to stand in for Joschka’s. It had to fill in his imagination, had to give content to lost time.
What about him? Es geht, as Joschka would say. Life goes on. Things could be worse. He never found out the result of his test. Anyhow, we all know how an ending looks, or have some notion of it. His father was right. Endings are all the same, everything ends up in the same place. You would rather linger in a beautiful room, the room of which you now often dream, a cube within a cube. From the corners of the colossal ur-cube, cables are stretched to the corners of the smaller cube. And there it hangs: a box within a box. You keep the door locked. Outside the threshold, you know, the floor falls away. No stairs lead here. Nothing supports the floor. Should you look down into dizzying space, you would see cellar stairs disappearing into the darkness below. Should you look up, you would see pigeons flashing through columns of light. Elsewhere, tumbling beams and floors. Remarkable, the proximity of the two things: the perfect and the abject, the room and the destroyed space. In here, on the heavy oak table, there are wild yellow flowers. In the corner, there is a knight’s armour into which you could climb. Through the walls you can hear the pigeons and, behind that, an undertone that you could cut out if you carefully adjusted your ear: the barks emerging from a dog’s barren intestines.
One morning, upon waking from the same dream once again, he gets up and opens his bedroom door. He sits down at his computer and books a ticket to Berlin.
War, Blossoms
Later on he will see it differently, but it starts as a kind of war. Or, at least, a series of escalating skirmishes.
He is caring for his mother. Cancer is growing in her intestines. She is going to die. The only unknowns are the moment and the precise route. The markers are set out for him: the self-poisoning body, the distending organs, pain, starvation and farewells.
The war, when it begins, is about food. It is a soundless war, a collection of mute battles. She hardly speaks any more. It deprives him too, of speech and breath, the disease.
He registers its progression in fragments.
The day dawns when she stops eating. The oncologist had explained this would happen. The last phase. It is important for the patient’s psychological state, he had elucidated, not to intervene. Let ‘the thing’ take its course, do not try to coerce.
But when her refusal comes, he does not accept it. He too refuses. He is constantly in front of the stove. He has rarely before had to cook. He is clumsy, inept. Even so: here he stands, steaming chicken, then shredding the flesh into strips along the grain. He also cooks pale, watery vegetables. He juices pineapples, adding the pressed juice of limes. He makes toast and thin chicken soup. It is not helping. Nothing helps. He carries the untouched plates back to the kitchen.
He leaves his mother on her own for a while. She is calm, she is sleeping. For the first time in a week he goes outside, sits down in the autumn sun. He has forgotten that autumn in the Highveld is so beautiful, even though here it is bounded by a suburban garden surrounded by crime-ridden streets. For many years he has restricted his visits to summer so as to escape the northern winter.
Out of the blue he gets a phone call, on his British cellphone, from his Japanese friend Hisashi. How long is it since they’ve spoken? At least a year.
‘This is unexpected.’
‘I’m here.’
‘What do you mean, Hisashi?’
‘I’ve come to visit.’
‘Here in South Africa?’
‘Here in South Africa.’
‘And you’re here already?’
‘I’m here. In Johannesburg.’
Just before his departure from London, he sent all his friends an email, notifying them that he was on his way here. It contained all of his contact details. He was in a hurry to get to his mother’s bedside, couldn’t take proper leave of anybody. Hisashi had moved back to Tokyo from London a year before, but was still on the list. Typical of Hisashi, to arrive at such an inopportune moment, without warning.
The air is moving. The leaves of the pin oak are falling ceaselessly, their stems impaled in the lawn. The tips of the leaves tremble in the breeze like nerve endings.
In the course of an afternoon, his mother’s complexion changes from grey and transparent to yellow. The vomiting commences. It doesn’t stop. She has not eaten for days; there is only bile. It is as if an external force is controlling her, making her shudder to her fingertips. Even her eyes are yellow: the eyes of a devil.
Food, when he tries to eat, congeals on his palate. He sits on his own at the kitchen table. Ultimately he has to spit out the grey masti
cated mush onto the porcelain.
The freezer is overflowing. While she had the strength, she spent her days cooking. Baked puddings and loin of lamb, trifle and stuffed shoulder of venison, oven-roasted chicken with a lemon where the bloody intestines used to be. But these are not for her; they’re a legacy. She has now forsworn the body’s banalities, the lower functions. He is standing in front of the freezer, chilly fog billowing onto his feet. There are plastic bags, aluminium dishes and plates Serried in rows, the contents unidentifiable, everything furred with frost. Nausea wells up in him. A cupboard full of cadavers. Fossils of the future. He works up a fury against his mother. The ice age has dawned.
He meets Hisashi in the French embassy in London, about two years before his return to South Africa for his mother’s last months. They are introduced to each other by a mutual acquaintance, one of Hisashi’s French colleagues, Philippe. Philippe is engaged in a uniquely French version of conscription. Or, rather, Philippe chose ‘community service’ as an alternative, which entails travelling between French embassies across the world marketing champagne on behalf of French regional authorities. He organises glittering events in lavish interiors in London, New York, Beijing or Kuala Lumpur for guests clothed in expensive textiles, impeccably cut, where the champagne, flanking bowls of fraises, fizzes against crystal.
Sometimes he wishes he were French too. The joys of what is not immediately useful, of the mellow delights and nurturing of an old culture, could have suited him well. Better, at any rate, than the diaspora of fearful, grim, white children from South Africa of which he forms a part, like it or not.
He doesn’t really know what Hisashi does at the embassy – generic administrative work of some sort. Nor does he know what the driving force of the friendship between them is. There is little common ground. Be that as it may, before long they are planning a trip together to Vietnam and Japan. At first, in fact, only to Japan. He has long been interested in an eclectic variety of Japanese things. From Kabuki and Noh theatre to manga in all forms and travesties. From the woodcut prints of the Floating World and writers like Mishima, Ōe and Murakami, to underground bands from Tokyo with names like Ghost, Angel’in Heavy Syrup or Acid Mothers Temple.