The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Slowly, very slowly, the masked actor glides across the stage of cypress wood. Apart from the stylised representation of a pine tree, the stage is bare. With the flick of a fan and the tilt of a mask, the actor becomes a beautiful woman. One forgets that there is a man behind the second face, the wooden one.

  Noh, so his travel guide informs him, was originally called Sarugaku – monkey music. The first actors, according to the guide, were supposedly monkeys impersonating the gods.

  The actor’s fan is laid down once he has assumed his position, and is only taken up again when he walks off the stage. The stage hands, clad in black, hand over props. They remain mutely on stage.

  The themes are conventional. In the first scene a young woman in love and a desirable warrior appear. The love remains unrequited. In the second scene the woman is a ghost. More beautiful than in life itself. Earthly ties and desires have been transcended.

  Hisashi is fidgety. Once he has had enough of the shimmering gown of silk brocade, he finds it all too stilted, too slow. This he imparts by means of a loud whisper. The performance consists of several dramas and lasts the entire day, but they leave after the first piece.

  Hisashi stands around looking bored while he is buying a mask in the tourist shop. The kind worn in the play, a Noh-men. He tries on a few; there are a number of traditional designs. He chooses one that expresses a spectrum of emotions depending on the angle at which the wearer faces the audience. A bowed head shows joy, a smile. As the wearer gradually lifts his head, the light now catching it differently, the expression gradually changes. Surprise, then anger. At last, when the onlooker is faced squarely, there is undisguised anxiety.

  They drive back. Hisashi is behind the wheel, where he is most comfortable. He is sitting turned sideways, away from Hisashi. He is reading in his guide about rōjaku, the final phase of a Noh actor’s development, when, as an old man, he refines the art of eliminating all unnecessary sound and action, until only the essence of a scene or the action imitated remains.

  ‘Fuji next,’ Hisashi says.

  ‘And Aokigahara.’

  Hisashi looks at him quizzically.

  They stop at the baths next to the highway again. Hisashi goes off to soak himself. He, however, undresses and stands in front of the mirror in the dressing room. He is trying on the Noh-men, dropping his head, practising the angles.

  In one sitting she eats more of Hisashi’s dishes than the sum of what he has managed to get her to eat in weeks. And she keeps it in. Hisashi’s visits have a remarkable effect. She is truly improving. She gets up and walks short distances again, as in a New Testament miracle: to the sofa in the living room, once even to the door leading onto the veranda. For a moment she remains standing there, but the frosty breeze against her cheeks makes her teeter.

  ‘Have you seen,’ Hisashi asks, ‘how transparent?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She is now a ghost.’ Hisashi ogles him; unexpectedly, there is lasciviousness in the Japanese man’s heavy fingers.

  ‘It’s time for you to go, Hisashi.’

  He leaves.

  He keeps an eye on his mother from the garden. She is like a marionette when Hisashi arrives. The air in the house changes, stirring her limbs. When he leaves, she falls back onto the pillows like a rag doll.

  Outside the bathroom window, the mesh of grey winter twigs creates complex patterns. He is bathing her, not for cleansing, but against the pain, which briefly flees before the warmth. The knobs of her knees are outlined against the white enamel. He pours piping hot water over her, aims it at the pain.

  He wakes up in the early morning hours. The tinkling of a bell. Unmistakeable in the nocturnal winter air, the air that is crystallising around him and his mother. The silver sound brings relief. He recognises it instantly. He walks down the stairs. He finds her in the kitchen, sitting at the table in her white nightgown: in electric light, in front of an empty plate.

  ‘No,’ she shakes her head when he asks whether she has rung the bell, ‘it’s in the bedroom.’

  The voice is hollow. It is coming from afar. She starts keeling over, weightlessly. There is nothing left of her.

  ‘Sea of trees’: that is what Aokigahara is often called. But here in the pine forest, where he and Hisashi are walking along a footpath, Hisashi hesitant behind him, it does not sound like the sea. It is the quietest forest in Japan. Perhaps that is why people come here to kill themselves. About fifty bodies are found in the forest every year. Notices are pinned to trees, in Japanese and English, trying to dissuade those planning to commit suicide. A small bouquet of flowers is tied to a random tree. Areas to both sides of them are cordoned off by blue ribbon. Volunteers come to scour the forest each year, according to his travel guide. The ribbons are put up to delineate search areas.

  Through the treetops, there is the occasional glimpse of Fuji. The sky above the snowy peak is the brightest shade of blue he has ever seen.

  ‘Have you seen enough? Can we go back?’ Hisashi wants to know.

  He shakes his head, striding ahead. Here and there a figure is visible at a distance, on other paths, through the trees.

  They sit down to rest for a moment. The silence penetrates the skin. He reads in his guide that ubasute was practised here up to the nineteenth century – the practice of leaving an old and enfeebled parent in a remote place to perish of hunger or exposure. There is a reference to an old tale of a man carrying his mother up a mountain on his back, planning to abandon her there, at the peak, to the elements. On the way there she snaps off twigs, scattering them behind them, so that he will find his way back down and not perish with her.

  ‘Shall we turn around now?’ Hisashi asks.

  He shakes his head. ‘I want to go further.’

  They have hardly started walking again when a figure appears against the light, some distance to their left. Not on a path, but between the trees. The figure stops, then remains quite still. They stop too. Something in the silence compels him to open his backpack and take out the Noh-men. The afternoon sun is shining through the leaves. He wants to put on the mask. He will adjust the angle, lift his chin all the way from below. He will know exactly what the effect is of every degree of tilting. But the mask stays in his hands. The figure just keeps standing there, as if petrified.

  Then the figure lifts his arm and points. He looks around. Behind him, Hisashi has lain down flat on his back in the path. Motionless, eyes open.

  Hisashi is sitting next to her on the bed. He is standing around, as if supervising.

  She points to the wild gardenia growing near her bedroom window. ‘Go and pick me one. Please.’

  Hisashi trots outside elatedly. The flowering time is in fact over; there are just a few flowers left. The slightest draft causes more to drop. He keeps an eye on Hisashi through the window. When his thick fingers stir the small shrub, a spray of flowers sifts down onto his feet. He brings one inside. She smells it, shakes her head slightly.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He goes and picks another, and two more after that, until she detects the last whiff of summer and smiles quietly, eyes shut.

  In a week’s time it is his birthday.

  ‘By that time, I’ll be walking around again,’ she insists.

  The corners of her mouth are pulled downward by the pain. She wants to know what is left in the freezer for a birthday meal. He feels paralysed, unable to formulate an answer. Everything, is the answer, the entire colony of misshapen cadavers. He closes his eyes. He can imagine the last words, when they come, sometime or other in the next few days. As has become his habit, he will bend over her, lower down this time, to catch the last puff of her breath: ‘Take something from the freezer,’ she will say. ‘Let it thaw for dinner.’

  Since Hisashi’s meal in the garden, she has not eaten again. The era of food has passed.

  ‘I would love an ice-cold glass of lemon syrup.’

  He drives from one cottage-industry shop to another. At last he finds home
-made syrup with bits of lemon peel floating in it. He fills a rippled glass with ice, dripping syrup over the cubes and diluting it with water. She takes a sip, or rather, dips the tip of her tongue. The nausea overwhelms her. She falls back, trembling, with a weak, apologetic smile.

  Water is his last hope.

  ‘Tap water has a metallic aftertaste,’ she says.

  He goes out to buy her carbonated water of various brands. He serves it with a few strawberries, cut in half and sprinkled with sparkling grains of sugar – not to eat, but to reflect in the bubbles and lend colour to the water. He holds it to her lips. She throws up. She reckons it is the carbon dioxide. He goes out to buy still water. She does not hold that in either. The last line of defence falls.

  It is night-time. He is by her side. He has difficulty staying awake – he keeps the overhead light on to create the illusion of daylight. Earlier, the pain was so intense that she bared her shoulder for a new morphine plaster: 75 micrograms. She is now travelling freely between sleep and wakefulness; the border fence has been removed. Boundaries between his mother and himself are fading too. He no longer knows which side he is on. He has been concentrating so long on feeling the illness in his own body. He wanted to become the perfect echo chamber. Wanted to be her from the inside, to make her pain entirely his own. But as soon as he thinks he is approaching the slippery mass of the pain, he looks in her eyes, sees how far ahead of him she is. Her boundaries have shifted unimaginably. He must now give up.

  Even so, he cannot. This is what he now asks for in a prayer, the first in years: drive out the evil. Let it enter me. Make me the host, like a possessed swine from Gadara. Or it might be a moment of perfect beauty that sucks the evil out of her. No matter how hard he has to search, or how far or randomly he has to travel, find it he will.

  His chin touches his chest, he cannot stay awake. She is whispering something. Or he thinks she is whispering. He brings his ear closer. Nothing. There are times, especially at night, when he wonders whether she will ever say anything again, whether she can still speak. He is able to measure what he has left of her in two ways: in days or in the number of sentences she will still utter. She is moving, she wants to go to the bathroom. He didn’t think anything was being processed any longer. She shakes her head at the bedpan offered to her. She wants to get up. There is a remnant of will, a welling up of insistence. He clasps his arms around her chest, under her arms. He walks with her, an endless journey to the toilet. Or no, he is the only one touching the ground; carrying her. Her feet and arms are are rowing in the air, slowly and weightlessly. His mother the water-treader: she thinks she is walking, but she is swimming towards the light. He lowers her over the porcelain bowl. A few drops of urine, the colour of a forest pond.

  On the way back, her resistance hardens. She extends an arm, struggling towards the door. ‘I’m leaving now,’ she says, and he knows immediately: it is the last sentence.

  Everything that she still has left is invested in the refusal – the force of a raging crowd.

  ‘Please,’ he begs, ‘please lie down instead.’

  Initially he thinks it is the medication that is befuddling her, but when he looks her in the eye, he sees that she knows and means what she is saying. He has to apply coercion to get her under the sheets.

  She slips away and he too slumbers in a chair by the bed, leaning forward, his head against her feet. In a dream he sees her against a slippery cliff. She is pulling herself up with great effort, on a rope with forty-nine knots. He wakes up when a raspy sigh escapes her. Like a gust of wind flipping through the pages of an open book forgotten on a summer lawn. The pages rustle and turn to the last word.

  Hisashi’s visits are unpredictable. Sometimes short, sometimes long, any time of the day. Sometimes twice a day, sometimes not at all. Hisashi watches critically when the oncologist arrives to set up a mechanical syringe driver. The needle goes into her chest. The plastic tube is filled with an amber-coloured mixture of morphine and sedatives. The little machine is wound up and placed on her pillow. It ticks like a bomb while slowly forcing fluid into her. When the oncologist has left, he pushes Hisashi aside gently. He feels his mother’s pulse and, with his other hand, his own. Elsewhere in the house, the wall clock is chiming more slowly by the hour. It has not been wound for at least a week. Like metronomes running down at different speeds, all these rhythms, the interrelationships between intervals increasingly complex.

  Hisashi is doing his little things: sometimes he just stands looking at her for a long time, talks at her in jolly Japanese, cooks something, becomes engrossed in some incomprehensible little ritual. On the whole he is ignoring Hisashi. He now often sits outside, in the rosy light filtering through the red chestnut leaves. He observes the white bed through the window. He writes in his journal. This is how he thinks of the writing: he is trying to give texture to the surface of a strange planet. Perhaps this will enable him to start exploring the textures around him, the most mysterious of all surfaces. Often, when he is writing in the garden, Hisashi sits or strolls near him, stealing glances at him. He still has no idea what Hisashi thinks his role here might be.

  The morphine mixture is now draining all movement from her limbs. She is slipping into a semi-coma. Even Hisashi, during his unexpected visits, can hardly make her stir. He scatters small winter flowers from her bed to the veranda door, out across the veranda and in a winding path through the garden.

  ‘What are you doing, Hisashi?’

  ‘It’s a route; I’m encouraging her to walk again.’

  Hisashi keeps walking and tossing flowers.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ Hisashi says from where he has stopped at the end of the flower trail, only a few left in his hand. ‘You’re becoming a ghost too. You must follow the path yourself.’

  For an hour Hisashi watches him intently as he writes at the steel-mesh table. He does not look up, just clenches his teeth ever more tightly. At last Hisashi averts his gaze.

  ‘I’m flying back this weekend. I’m going to confirm my flight for Saturday morning.’

  The blind fear entering his heart catches him entirely off guard. He knows very well he only has to say a word and Hisashi will stay. But he cannot.

  No, he will test Hisashi. Saturday, when the morning sun starts falling into his mother’s bedroom, he will throw open the front and veranda doors. He will go and stand in front of her cupboard. He will take out one of her nightgowns and put it on. In her bedroom he will smear a daub of make-up on his face. Then he will lie down next to her, there under the white sheets, and curl up like a monkey. Their faces turned to each other, eyes open, everything in perfect symmetry. In silence they will wait for Hisashi. To come and care for them. To come and feed them like a mother feeds her twins: a spoonful for him, and then a spoonful for her.

  And if Hisashi does not come? Then no one would have to refuse, or threaten to refuse, ever again. He will see to it that his desiccation and departure coincide with his mother’s. The leaves will blow in through the doors. The garden birds will fly in and whirl around their heads, will write an ending on them. Sharing a boat, they will row through to the secret lake. With a white flag at the bow.

  ‌VNLS

  ‘Sounds like a venereal disease, that name.’ On the veranda Mrs Nyathi’s eyes blink in the moonlight.

  Ondien half-smiles. ‘Yes, I guess, like something that would have meant insanity and death for a woman a hundred years ago.’

  She leans over towards Mrs Nyathi’s cigar, smouldering on the edge of the ashtray. ‘May I?’ Ondien puffs on it, blows the smoke in little clouds towards the village lights below them. ‘It stands for “Victorian Native Ladies’ Society”. An attempt, originally, at ironic allusion—’

  ‘Gosh, they were rotten with venereal diseases, the women, when I was a nurse in Frere Hospital! Ooh, you should be careful, girls of your age!’ Mrs Nyathi clicks her tongue. ‘The men do just what they want, they don’t care.’

  She wriggles in her chair, lifts he
r puffy feet in front of her, looks through screwed-up eyes at Beauty, sitting deeper in the shade. Lying under Mrs Nyathi’s chair are two dachshunds, like twins.

  ‘Yes, you young girls with your voices like honey and the music in your hips. You are the candles and men the moths,’ she continues, nodding her head.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Ondien says drily, ‘our music gives off the sort of heat that the moths might be hoping for.’

  Mrs Nyathi is not to be dissuaded. ‘Oh, you’ll see over the weekend in Lesotho. They won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.’

  In the room Ondien moves her travel-worn suitcase and the little box of VNLS CDs off the comical four-poster. Satin is draped from above in salmon pink. ‘Here in Bella Gardens you can expect luxury, everywhere just luxury,’ Mrs Nyathi insisted on the phone. Since it is the only guest house in Vloedspruit, there was in fact no need for sales talk. The ‘Regina Suite’ was allocated to Ondien. The R on the room’s nameplate, she noticed later, had at some point been scratched out (by a mischievous guest? an aggrieved employee?) and replaced with a V.

  Ondien can hear little noises from next door. She knows Beauty’s sleeping routines well. First she rubs cream in little circular movements on her face. Slowly, she then folds the sheets back, testing the mattress before entrusting her weight to it. Nungi has been lying asleep on the single bed next to Beauty’s since dinner, when Ondien peered into their room: clothes scattered around her, hips wide and self-assured under the sheets.

  Ondien takes out one of the CDs, holds it under the reading lamp. She smiles a little. The production values of the cover design are dubious, like the quality of the recording itself, which she had made at her own expense in a musty Long Street studio in Cape Town. She is standing in the middle, plucky in drag: an early British-colonial uniform. Beauty and Nungi, in Zulu skirts, are kneeling at her sides, their breasts exposed, complete with beads and little patches of leopard skin. VNLS in an arc of large lettering at the top. Like a vaudeville handbill, an advertisement for a Victorian spectacle.