The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  She can hear him breathe.

  ‘Do you know that Vera and Frank left for Dubai a few months ago?’ he asks. ‘Did you see them before they left?’

  ‘No and no.’

  She had no desire to look up her sister Vera (older than her, younger than Cornelius) or her husband Frank, the über-important CEO, in their Italian villa in Bryanston.

  ‘What do you know about Zelda? Heard that she had to get another court order against that psychopath of an ex of hers?’

  Ondien bumps lightly against the little table. Coffee spills. There are a few moments’ silence.

  He continues. ‘I know it’s unexpected to hear from me, Ondien …’

  ‘Completely unexpected.’

  ‘Do you remember blood, how it’s supposed to be thicker than—?’

  Her voice rises. ‘Cornelius, spare me the aphorisms. A weak spot in your armour would surprise me. But if you need support or something, just say so.’

  His voice changes too. ‘I no longer sleep at night, Ondien. I’m standing here in an empty office, above a street full of black cabs. This entire building is made of glass, even the lifts. One is visible from every every goddamn angle …’

  Zelda

  When Ondien enters through the gates, Zelda is waiting in Phoenix Airport’s arrivals hall. She is holding the child’s hand and it is straining. Ondien addresses the child first, holds out the gift. ‘I brought you something, Stanley.’

  The child looks at her from under his eyebrows. She waits for him to grab it or knock it from her hands, but he takes the parcel and slowly turns it round and round without opening it.

  Zelda has lost weight. She addresses Ondien in English. Ondien responds in Afrikaans, partially to exclude the child. Zelda struggles with the car keys, half blind in the dim parking garage. They get into a white car. She begs Stanley to fasten his seat belt. She refuses to drive unless he obeys. The child sits with folded arms, shouting huskily and vehemently until his mother closes her eyes and leans back against the headrest. The voice echoes hard against concrete. It envelops Ondien like ice. Zelda relents. She closes her window and starts driving. The noise ceases.

  ‘It was Cornelius’s idea, the trip,’ says Ondien. ‘There’s a flavour of personal crisis in London. Of fragility, if you can believe that of our brother. But I can’t really figure out what’s going on.’

  It was Ondien’s suggestion to Cornelius that she fly here first, to Zelda, for a weekend. Then to him in London. And from there to Dubai, to Vera, a round of sibling visits. Cornelius is funding it all.

  The highway on which they are driving passes underneath the runway. A plane thunders over them, over a thick concrete bridge. Stanley hangs his head upside down out of the car window.

  Zelda points out the headquarters of the pharmaceutical company where she is employed as a regional sales manager. Low-slung office buildings right next to the highway, as brown as the barren hills behind them. Like barracks. Rows of flags in the sun: the Stars and Stripes alternating with the company logo.

  The house is in a newly built suburb, slapped down here during the property bubble. One of those toy neighbourhoods with neat lawns, white postboxes and paved driveways. At least half the houses are standing empty. Computer-controlled sprinklers are spraying in the desert heat. Inside the house air conditioning is humming.

  ‘Tea?’

  Zelda looks lost in her kitchen. She searches in one cupboard, then another.

  ‘Only herbal tea, I’m afraid. Oh, and coffee.’

  ‘How about something stronger?’

  Zelda frowns. ‘Have you forgotten? It’s morning here. I’m heading to work.’

  We can’t all indulge in bohemian slacking, she might have wanted to add, Ondien imagines – some of us have responsibilities.

  Stanley has to be taken to a preschool and day-care centre, far from the house and far from Zelda’s workplace. Zelda half drags, half carries the child outside. He holds on to the door frame with both hands. He would probably want to stay behind in order to do away with her, Ondien thinks. The child grabs Zelda by the hair, by her mousy brown bob. It strikes Ondien that he is unnaturally strong, stronger than Zelda. After a brief struggle, Zelda and Stanley drive away in the white car.

  Ondien does not unpack. She wanders through the grey light suffusing the house. Through net curtains the slope of a bare, dry mountain is visible. She opens the fridge, stands in the glow. It is almost empty, bar a few packets of processed cheese and meat. Half a carton of long-life milk. The carpets smell of glue, as if they have just been laid. In the child’s room there is a pine bed with a duvet (a ‘comforter’, her Americanised sister would call it), a bare desk and a chair. The comforter strikes her as the only soft thing in the room. There are no magazines anywhere in the house, no mail waiting to be read. The walls are bare and white. It is as if the place has been rented for the day, a set with props, hastily prepared for a film shoot.

  When Ondien awakes from a jet-lag nap, blue light is shining through her bedroom door. She walks into the empty living room. Early evening. The enormous television set is on. A silent American football match. The front door opens. It is Zelda. Ondien notices Stanley in a corner behind her, where he has been sitting all along. Her scalp tightens at the thought of her sleeping self alone with the child in the house. Zelda is grey with tiredness. A hot wind enters the house behind her. She puts Chinese takeaways on the table.

  Initially they eat in silence. The child pushes bits of vegetables from his plate. They collect in puddles of soy on the table. Zelda stares at him without saying anything. Stanley’s gaze meets hers and he makes an unearthly sound. His speech is not normal, Ondien has noticed. When she saw the child before in South Africa, she did not realise; she kept her distance, observing his cruel spells from afar.

  ‘Does he have a speech impediment, or is he just his father’s child?’

  ‘Oh, please, Ondien. He is sitting right next to us.’ She is now speaking Afrikaans too.

  ‘But he doesn’t understand a word!’

  Stanley has stopped eating. He is looking intently at Ondien, a restless fork in his hand.

  ‘I know he’s impossible, Ondien, but he is six years old. And he has a hearing problem.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘When he hears a strange language, it’s as if he’s being teased. It provokes him. That’s why he was so upset at Dad’s funeral.’

  That is Ondien’s clearest memory of that grim visit to South Africa. Stanley moaning loudly, straining towards the open grave and kicking in soil while the elderly Basotho farm labourers were trying to sing something. The child seen from behind, a convulsive little figure kicking up dust, his mother trying to hold him back. On the other side of the hole, the handful of singing people, hunched together in an attempt to occupy as little space as possible.

  ‘At first I spoke Afrikaans to him, and his father English, to make him bilingual. A speech therapist and child psychologist said it was increasing his frustration and behavioural problems. When Cayle finally left, I spoke only English.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Zelda switches back to American, the Afrikaans and South African English just under the surface, ‘what’s happened to your music, to your life in London and Paris? How did you end up amongst the mine dumps?’

  Ondien shrugs her shoulders. ‘I think the music has left me.’ She came, she thinks, to a certain point where she couldn’t hear anything any longer. For so long, it was such an obsession, so deep in her skull, and then it was suddenly gone. She snaps her fingers. ‘Just like that.’

  Zelda nods wearily. ‘It’s called “giving up”. Believe me, I know it when I see it.’

  Ondien says nothing.

  ‘So, what are you doing over there in Johannesburg?’

  ‘At first I did some dry academic work. I thought: if you can no longer feel the music, then you may as well listen to it from a distance. For a while I was a volunteer in a rehabilitation centre for children with neu
rological injuries. Wanted to write an article about the musical abilities of children with aphasia.’

  ‘Aphasia?’

  ‘Loss of language capacity. Upsetting to observe, at the beginning. Some of the children can only sing and no longer speak. Some keep repeating ossified words or phrases, a kind of ghost language. Some make up their own stuff, create incredibly complex sentences, swap letters and syllables, talk gibberish … Some understand what they are saying, others don’t. Some hear their own mistakes, but can’t help them. Once they realise they’re not understood, they become immensely frustrated. Others are completely unaware. The happiest ones are those who don’t know what they’ve lost or forgotten. The one who could only sing couldn’t understand a word of her own songs.’ Ondien looks down, shakes her head thoughtfully. ‘But she was the most blissful human I’ve ever encountered.’

  ‘So, why did you leave?’

  ‘I started helping with the therapy. “Melodic intonation therapy”, it’s called.’

  ‘What is that?’

  Zelda’s questions are automatic, for the sake of politeness. Her sister has, after all, come from afar. Her head droops towards the table, her eyes bleary.

  ‘Basic exercises to change speech into music. The idea is to elicit language from damaged parts of the brain through linking speech to rhythm and melody.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  Zelda looks as if she could fall asleep at any moment.

  ‘I didn’t follow the rules. My compositions – my tunes for the phrases and sentences – were apparently too meandering, too unstable.’ Like a muezzin’s calls to prayer from a minaret, she thinks. ‘Or something like that. I tried new methods, experiments. According to the director of the centre I was worsening some children’s conditions. “It’s not an avant-garde music lesson,” she said when she was monitoring me, “it’s a delicate and responsible task.”’ She imitates the director’s voice: ‘You lack sympathy, your banal curiosity is driving you to use vulnerable children for irresponsible experiments.’

  Zelda notices the way Ondien looks at Stanley while speaking. Zelda shakes her head slowly, as if the movement is demanding more than she has left in her.

  ‘Nothing wrong with his brain.’ She is speaking Afrikaans again.

  Just the inherited mental pathology, Ondien thinks.

  ‘I try to see and hear things from his perspective,’ Zelda says, ‘through his eyes, his ears … Bedtime,’ Zelda says to Stanley.

  The child makes a sulking noise. He slinks off his chair and runs to the television. He lies down on the couch, flicking through the channels frenetically.

  Zelda sighs. ‘The same story every night. I’ll find the energy to deal with him later.’ She gets up, draws the curtains on the street side, ensures every window is locked.

  ‘South African habits?’

  Zelda looks over to the child, back to Ondien. Afrikaans, again. ‘It’s about Cayle. I’m scared he’ll find us. We just got this house. After the last court order.’ She shrinks her shoulders. ‘He always finds us.’

  ‘What was the threat this time?’

  Zelda looks Ondien in the eye. ‘To cut out Stanley’s intestines and feed them to me before I’m forced to eat my own.’

  Upon her saying the word ‘intestines’, the television halts on a channel. Stanley’s head turns slightly.

  Ondien looks away. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘There’s been worse. Once, elsewhere, before the protection programme, before we had a secret address, he tried to break down the front door with a spade. Stanley and I waited inside for the police, or for the door to break.’ Zelda looks smaller and smaller as she is speaking. Her hair is dull. ‘A few months ago’ – Her sister looks as if she has to concentrate hard to unearth the story – ‘I had to travel for work. I tried everything, but I could find no one to look after my child. Nothing was working out. The after-school centre is just for day visits; others who had looked after him before didn’t want to do it again. I had no choice; he had to go with me. On the plane he grabbed my laptop and smashed it on the floor. Ran around like a crazy person. A stewardess threatened that he would become a safety risk if I didn’t control him.’

  She tells Ondien how the hotel in Florida arranged a minder so that she could attend her meetings. A Mexican woman arrived. Zelda was explicit: they were not to leave the hotel room. When she returned at dusk, they were gone. For weeks she had barely slept. Her psychological defences were down and the shock hit her like a fist in the throat. She phoned the concierge, who phoned the police. She took the lift down. Outside, in the street, there was a limousine with dark windows. She suddenly became convinced that Stanley was inside, that someone was abducting him. She ran after the car, hitting against the opaque windows until her hands ached. It drove away. She just kept standing there, in the street, amongst the traffic. Heavy American cars, Ondien thinks. He was gone, Zelda continues. Across from the hotel, behind a wall, was a funfair. Zelda could see the coloured lights flickering, could hear the merry-go-round.

  The concierge came and led her away by the arm. Inside, next to the lift, she slid her palm over the concrete wall. Someone had told her once, she remembered, that, when the core of a large building is poured, a labourer sometimes falls in, occasionally even more than one. Because the process cannot be stopped, every building apparently has one or two mushy spots somewhere deep inside. With her fingers she searched for a suture in the concrete, imagining the grey silence of a cement grave. A congealed nest. A cool mother’s womb. Filled with peace.

  Back in the hotel room, she looked out the window. There, on a path at the funfair, in the light of merry-go-rounds, they were. Stanley and the Mexican woman. Stanley looked up, and it felt as if Cayle himself was looking at her. She realised that she did not want the child back.

  Stanley jumps from the couch, runs to the front door and slips out into the dark. Zelda’s shoulders are drooping, her eyes are shot through with blood. For a moment Ondien thinks Zelda is going to faint. The conversations – Ondien’s exegesis on brain-damaged children and Zelda’s own hotel story – have only exhausted Zelda further, Ondien realises.

  ‘I’ll fetch him,’ Ondien says. She walks out the open front door. A last remnant of light creates a pale fringe over the mountain peak. The mountain looks higher than in daylight, and closer. She hears Stanley’s footsteps in the backyard. She walks around the house. There he is. She cannot make out whether he is looking towards or away from her. She feels a chill in her stomach: a piercing sound, as of steel on steel, emanates from the child’s throat. It stops as suddenly as it began. He moves nimbly, disappears through the wooden fence. She follows, just able to scrape through the hole herself. The fence smells as if it has been freshly sawn. Behind the fence the landscape starts rising. She calls after him, but the little figure keeps running. She follows. When she stops for a rest and looks up, he is standing right in front of her.

  She is out of breath.

  ‘Something is seriously wrong with you, Stanley,’ she says to the child, in Afrikaans.

  He comes up with a string of swear words and sexual vulgarities which take her breath away. ‘You fuck your dad,’ he says in conclusion. ‘You tear your cunt and rip out your heart.’

  She winces, shocked. Another noise comes from his throat, more muffled now.

  ‘Relentless little fucker,’ she mumbles in Afrikaans, breathlessly, ‘duiwelsgebroed’.

  The child instantly ceases its screeching.

  ‘Devil,’ he says brightly in the silence. Her mouth opens. There is no longer anger in his voice, rather the satisfaction of a pupil who has answered a question correctly. She catches her breath, takes in the landscape, her eyes now used to the dark. The desert air is cool. Small stones are shining, shards of mica are shimmering in moonlight. Stanley burrows in his ear, takes something out. He offers it to her. She hesitates, then takes it. His hearing aid. It feels waxy. He is as quiet as a mouse, points to her ear. She inserts it.
Nothing but a hissing sound. She smiles slightly, for the first time in months.

  ‘I can hear it,’ she says and nods. ‘Yes, I’m hearing it.’

  He turns and runs, homewards. When she comes back and enters his room to return the device, he is lying with shiny eyes in the dark, under his comforter. On his bedside table, bottles of psycho-medicine are arranged in a row. On the desk is the gift that Ondien brought with her. He has unwrapped it. Opperman’s Kleuterverseboek, an anthology of Afrikaans poems for children. All the way from South Africa (and even there no longer so easily obtainable).

  Breakfast.

  ‘Give the child up, let his father have him. Come back to South Africa.’

  Ondien does not know why she is saying this. Perhaps just to bring hope. She does not want to return to South Africa herself. But here she wouldn’t want to stay either, in this godforsaken, bloodless landscape. She looks at her sister. She is grey. Ondien suddenly feels guilty about what she has said. She thinks of the child in his bed last night when, for a moment, he was almost vulnerable, like a puppy in a bag with a rock just before it is hurled into a river. But it was a brief pause. Before breakfast, when Ondien approached him again, trying to build on the moment they’d shared last night by reading Stanley a poem from the Kleuterverseboek, his face twisted again. Someone else, the little brute that lives deep under his skin, had gained the upper hand again, overnight.

  The child was still in his bed, warm with sleep. She leaned over him, opened the Verseboek between them, and read in a soft voice:

  ‘Engeltjie, engeltjie, vlieg dadelik voort!

  Jou vader is dood, jou moeder is dood

  En jou kindertjies eet droë brood.’

  ‘Mom, the bitch is telling me stuff in that language!’ he screeched, and let out a grating moan.

  ‘What so amazed me about Cayle,’ Zelda says over dry toast, ‘was how such an incredibly beautiful man could be so incredibly cruel.’