The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Thierry was as pleased as Punch. ‘Everyone thinks you’re highly original,’ he said, ‘an act for our time. Provoquant. Tongue-in-cheek. Political correctness’s nemesis.’

  She and Beauty were absent though present. When the waiters started stacking chairs on tables around them, Thierry and Nungi still sat right up against each other, smoking. A bleary-eyed Nungi snorted some lines with Thierry, just there, off the table, in front of the waiters, his hand on her leg. Thierry’s face showed no expression when Ondien got up and walked out.

  At four in the morning, Ondien’s phone rang. Beauty was in the intensive care unit in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. The call was from the hospital. Thierry had left Ondien’s number with the staff and disappeared without a trace.

  ‘Motorbike,’ the matron said when Ondien had at last found the right wing. ‘Rue Jean-Macé. Almost every bone.’ She shook her head, paging through the file notes. ‘The nose, cheekbone, ribs, pelvis, femur, foot.’ The matron was a fat woman, her own bones comfortably cushioned against shattering.

  ‘A bunch of nasty fractures. Bones penetrating through skin, dislocations. They’re putting her back together with steel.’ The woman gestured as if she was hitting a chisel with a hammer. ‘She will be in the operating theatre for quite some time.’

  While Beauty was in surgery, Ondien waited. The matron sat with her for a while in the bright corridor, legs spread apart, spongy little hands folded across her stomach. She was wearing white stockings and white men’s shoes with rubber soles. She told Ondien how, before the revolution, the hospital had served as a prison for Paris’s prostitutes. The women were locked up, then coerced to pair off with convicts and sent to French-colonial North America. Until, that is, the masses from the pest-ridden sewer of Faubourg Saint-Marcel came to forcefully liberate them.

  ‘If I had lived then,’ the matron said while getting up and walking away, ‘I would probably have been one of the liberating masses. Or, perhaps,’ she said gigglingly over her shoulder, ‘one of the prostitutes.’

  When she arrived back at her flat in the eighteenth, Beauty having been transferred from the operating theatre to intensive care, Nungi was packing.

  ‘If you’re heading to the Marais, you’re making a big mistake, Nungi.’

  ‘Always the madam, hey? Always wants to keep the best for herself!’

  Ondien was speechless. She could not even ask what exactly had happened to Beauty. Nungi stormed out, cracked suitcase in hand, and then, after a few seconds, returned for her Zulu costume on the drying rack before slamming the door behind her.

  For three weeks, Beauty was in the Pitié-Salpêtrière. Apart from the broken bones, there were internal injuries, bruised organs. She was reluctant initially, but then came out with the story: the three of them outside the restaurant, Thierry wanting to take both of them home with him, Beauty refusing, and not wanting to leave Nungi alone with Thierry either; Nungi brusquely pushing Beauty aside, Thierry pushing Beauty against a backyard wall, tearing off her underwear. Nungi looking on impassively. Beauty running blindly into the street.

  It was the beginning of winter. Nungi was now living with Thierry. When Beauty was discharged from hospital three weeks after the accident, Thierry locked Ondien and Beauty out in the cold. Literally and figuratively. The lock to the flat in the eighteenth was replaced, with most of their possessions still inside. The incestuous little world of ethnic music in Paris shut them out overnight. No one booked VNLS any more. Perhaps they would still be able to play at one of the annual festivals, or maybe Ondien could get in touch with her contacts in London again, but Nungi was gone and she and Beauty had nowhere to live, and little money left. Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance it was to be, on the cheapest flight they could find.

  Shortly before their plane departed, a sullen Nungi arrived at Charles de Gaulle. It was Beauty who had told her that they were leaving. Nungi and Ondien had not exchanged a word in weeks. They embraced Nungi. First Beauty, but in her new, timid manner, as if she was scared the bones would break again in the same places. Then Ondien, her hands cupping Nungi’s cheeks, their foreheads touching for a moment. Ondien took the cracked suitcase and carried it for her.

  In Cape Town it is summer, Ondien thought when she sank back in the aeroplane seat, the other two to her right and left, their forearms against hers.

  The Land Rover comes to a halt. She must have dozed off. The little dog has crawled onto her lap. Half-past two. In the darkness and cold, holding a small torch, Hendrik leads them to a building. Inside he lights a candle. Above them is a low corrugated-iron roof. It is colder inside than outside. Between the stone walls, sleeping bags have been rolled out onto three iron beds, as if specially prepared for them. Hendrik disappears in the dark, returns after a while with a paraffin heater. Beauty and Nungi sit upright next to each other on a bed. Hendrik smells of engines and red grass. It puts Ondien at ease: smells from her childhood days on the Free State farm.

  She is blind here in Hendrik’s place after the sharp morning light outside. His house is half a kilometre down the slope from the outbuilding where they are sleeping, and surrounded by a plateau of blonde grass, dotted with sandstone rocks. It is similar to their building – sandstone and corrugated iron – but it’s much larger, having clearly been expanded in a piecemeal fashion. She walks in behind Hendrik, and straight into his back.

  Her eyes have now adjusted. She is still half-frozen after her cold morning shower. She has in fact not warmed up since their arrival the previous night, the lacklustre little paraffin heater notwithstanding. A shaft of light falls in from a back room.

  Tools and parts hang from every inch of the walls and ceilings. She sits down on a camping chair, the smell of oil and grease surrounding them.

  ‘What is all of this? What do you do here?’

  His face opens up, he smiles with perfect teeth. ‘Live,’ he says, ‘and work. Fix things, build machines.’

  It is not clear where his living space ends and the workshop begins. To her side, by the front door, there is a single bed and a hearth, a little cupboard. On the other side, there are workbenches with vice clamps, iron tools hanging everywhere.

  ‘Come and see,’ he says.

  They walk further in, past the workbenches, through the beam of light, through various dim rooms. He steers her by the elbow, past rotors and tubes, oil filters and engines. A collection of iron and rubber and screws and tins are stacked on shelves.

  ‘How do you know where to find things?’

  ‘Everything is where I put it. I’m here alone.’

  ‘So, what are you building?’

  ‘Different things. I buy appliances that are thrown out in South Africa – washing machines, radios, televisions. Sometimes cars. Then I fix them up and sell them here. It’s my business. Rest of the stuff’s just a hobby.’

  She loses track of the number of rooms. A few doors remain closed. They walk out into a backyard with a lean-to supported by poles. Underneath it is a row of rusty vehicles on flat tyres or wooden blocks.

  ‘So, you’re carrying the torch of technology. Seems to me you’re a kind of modern missionary here among the Basothos.’

  He smiles. When he turns around, she notices sweat starting to soak through the back of his khaki shirt, despite the cold.

  She turns around and starts. The barrel of a cannon stares her in the face. A row of old tanks on caterpillar wheels stand under a second lean-to.

  ‘They date from the 1940s. All running again now. And see this?’ He walks past the tanks, pointing to a rusty Volkswagen Beetle with a split back window. ‘One of the very first ones. A few were built in the 1930s for top brass in the German army. Who knows who might have driven this one—’

  ‘I must go now—’

  ‘Wait, the tour isn’t finished.’

  He walks out the back. She hesitates, then follows.

  There is no grass here. On this side of the house/workshop, a large hole has been excavated into the slope. A stone quarry.
From where she and the other two spent the night, it is invisible. Half-cut blocks of stone are dotted around. It is quiet; nothing is moving. The place is pale and dim.

  ‘Come for dinner tonight. Bring the two black girls.’

  ‘Their names are Beauty and Nungi,’ she says.

  ‘Bring them with you,’ he says. ‘I live here with these people, it’s not a problem.’

  Ondien digs out her cellphone from underneath the clothes in her bag. She has missed eleven calls since they left the previous day. She holds the phone above her head. No signal. Somewhere along the road, the missed calls must have registered last night. She switches off the phone. The gig in the Eastern Cape is only a few days away. Nothing’s rushing them. The cold here has started entering her core, convincing her to stay a while.

  ‘Beauty and Nungi didn’t want to come.’ The two Zulu women silently shook their heads, remaining seated on the beds, when Ondien left for Hendrik’s place.

  ‘Then they’ll have to go without food.’

  She looks at him.

  He smiles. ‘A joke. I’ll give you something to take back for them.’

  On the way here, small falcons circled above her in the dusk, sweeping down from time to time to snatch prey off rocks.

  ‘Snow rats,’ Hendrik says when she asks. ‘The herdboys roast them on spits.’

  He turns a lump of meat in the hearth. (Is it goat?)

  ‘So, tell me more about your music. It was like a carnival.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says coolly, ‘like a church fête, I guess, or a circus.’

  ‘How does one come up with such music?’

  ‘You mean music with such disruptions and abrupt transitions, such dissonances and syncopations?’

  He says nothing, just keeps looking into the fire.

  ‘I think,’ she continues, ‘it’s like building a machine. The different elements first appear as shreds moving around in my mind. Then they start to find a centre of gravity. Gradually, the shreds revolve more closely to the centre. I wait for them to gain mass. I weigh the cloud, waiting for the right moment to write it down. But then, when I walk on to the stage, I rip it all apart again.’ She smiles. ‘Do you ever dismantle your machines?’

  He says nothing, turns the meat again, looks into a pot. In the glow of the fire, she is warming up for the first time since their arrival. But, as usual, she has not taken proper account of her audience. He has closed up, become sullen.

  There is too much meat on her plate and it is tough. Hendrik dishes up floury potatoes from the pot. They eat in silence.

  ‘That is not how one builds a machine,’ he says after a while. ‘I will have to show you.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ he wants to know after a further silence.

  She is darting too swiftly and too cleverly over his questions. She can feel it. Something is building up. But she continues: ‘Perhaps I’m grasping towards a core,’ she says, ‘an origin.’ She breaks open a potato with her fingers. ‘Perhaps I want to escape the centrifugal forces, the éléments exotiques. I’m but a simple Free State girl, you know.’ He looks at her, seeing whether she’s mocking. And whether it is self-mockery or aimed at him.

  She walks up the slope, towards where Beauty and Nungi are waiting behind thick walls. She looks around in the dark. He is standing in the doorway. There seems to be anger in his shoulders. He keeps standing there. She walks back to him, even though she knows she should not.

  In Hendrik’s bed everything is silent and urgent, his body against her like stone. She becomes aware of the membranes between her fingers. She thinks of fish ejecting strings of phosphorous eggs in the mountain streams.

  Early afternoon, the following day. Deep grass stretches in all directions, as far as the eye can see. Ondien is on her own. The blond grass is pulling her in, trapping her. She sits down. Down here one is aware of nothing but scurrying rats and the blue sky above. Inside her skull it is quiet; the music is waiting, she hopes, behind floodgates. She decides she will ask Hendrik to sing a few songs from the FAK, the book of Afrikaans folk songs. She will record him in the stone quarry, where there is a little acoustic texture, at least an echo. Yes, she will make him do it and then use samples of it.

  When she was a PhD student, she had an idea for a piece of music that would incorporate such fragments. The structure of the first movement came to her when she was at a London conference, listening to a paper by an exiled South African ethnomusicologist. ‘Numbing the Ear: The Afrikaans Folk Music Project (1948–1994) and the Construction of an Aural Past’ was the title. The only other Afrikaans person in her field of study that she had ever met while she was outside the country. Jakkie, if she remembers correctly, Jakkie de Wet. From some Canadian university or other. Afterwards, during the lunch break, and for the rest of the conference, she took care to avoid him.

  ‘We want to leave,’ Beauty says. She is on her knees, pushing a bowl of water towards Mixie. ‘I think she’s missing her little sister.’ She gets up with difficulty.

  ‘Where the fuck are we anyway?’ Nungi wants to know. ‘Are we hostages?’

  ‘I promise you,’ Ondien says. ‘Tomorrow we’ll leave.’ She looks at Nungi and Beauty. In three days’ time they have to be at Twilight Lodge for their performance. She regrets bringing them here, and making them stay a second night.

  They haven’t touched the cold goat’s meat and potatoes that Ondien brought back the previous evening. They are listening to the silence.

  The third morning. They wake up in strange light. There is deep, soft snow outside, their first snow since Paris. The cold in the hut is bitter, the little paraffin heater’s flame glowing blue like glacier ice. They venture outside. They sink into the snow, their socks getting soaked. Mixie is wrapped in a pullover. She is clambering higher up against Beauty’s chest, escaping the whiteness. There are scratchmarks on Beauty’s neck.

  They sit in a circle with their feet against the heater. Hendrik brings more blankets and three new pairs of boots, as if bought specially for them.

  ‘Tell me if you want to move to my place. There’s a fire there.’

  ‘We’re fine here,’ Ondien says through clenched jaws.

  ‘The phone’s dead,’ he says. ‘We’re cut off.’

  The blankets smell of iron, of rust. Late morning it starts again: small snowflakes on the corrugated-iron roof.

  When the sun emerges, Ondien goes for a walk in the snow. She gives Hendrik’s house a wide berth, looping round and down to the stone quarry. She pricks her ears, waiting for the music, for fragments. It has been a while since she has heard anything. Against the white page of this landscape it has to come. She looks around at her tracks. How present one becomes in snow.

  Where she reaches a narrow valley at the bottom, the snow has been driven in so deep, and piled so high, that telephone wires are virtually touching the fresh powder. Her legs disappear up to the knees. She bends over, her ear against the wire. Voices. She smiles. She wants to intercept them, use them to make something. She waits. A few notes, nothing more. It is the American minimalists of her student days that are unexpectedly back in her cold ears. Riley or Reich, she cannot be sure, and the droning of more obscure composers – Morton Feldman, La Monte Young.

  She recalls Hendrik’s announcement that the phone is dead. She holds her ear against the wire again. Unmistakeable, the voices. Her breath melts away a small hollow. She lies back. Flakes settle on her cheeks. If the snow were to bury her, the search parties would come and walk back and forth over her face, calling and calling. She would not be able to respond, but would change their voices to music in her head … Her heart is knocking against her chest; something wants to break through. She sharpens all her senses: it is something new, but it is not music. She has never written a poem, but she knows: it is a line of poetry.

  She hears her name. Nungi. The line disappears instantly. When she sits up, both Nungi and Beauty are standing there, knee-deep: Beauty with a frowning Mixie, Nungi with a black stick
in her hand. Beauty is humming to the dog in her arms.

  ‘We want to go,’ Nungi says. ‘We want to leave now.’

  ‘How can we, Nungi? Look around you—’

  ‘Why did you bring us to this place? Did we ask to come here?’ Nungi clicks with her tongue, looking across the plateau. ‘We always do everything for you, everything you want to do.’

  ‘We’re trapped, Nungi, surely that’s obvious …’

  Nungi is not listening. She is drawing a line in the snow with her stick. She and Beauty are on one side of the line, Ondien on the other.

  ‘You’re there, we’re here. So it’s always been,’ Nungi says.

  The wind dies down. For a while they stand in silence. Then Beauty drags one leg out of the snow. It clumps down on Ondien’s side of the line. Nungi walks away. Beauty follows, then Ondien. They walk with exaggerated movements, their shadows stretching and shrinking absurdly. Beauty’s shadow wobbles most. Ondien tries to feel Beauty’s pain in her own body, the chill of steel against bone.

  The rest of the day takes shape around the cavity of the lost line of poetry, Ondien’s thoughts arranged around the edges. Perhaps, she thinks, it is time, once she has returned to civilisation, to disband VNLS and take up her research again. She can see the title of her last – incomplete – chapter, as if written in snow: Where does music end and speech begin? There were so many questions. In which ancient mouths did music and speech part? How does one synchronise them again? Fieldwork was required. She would search for her answers in the singing-speaking throats of the world, in enclaves where something has survived from the time of the bone flute. She had wanted to invoke proto-noises, to use them to create something new. Not poetry, but something in the region of poetry …

  She smiles. The centrifugal forces are taking hold again. Could such detours perhaps lead one back to the shard of poetry?