The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  ‘Yes?’

  He is close to sleep now, so it seems, or fainting.

  She explains how English was the language in which Wolfson’s hated mother used to bombard him daily with a stream of meanness and invective. His strategy was, immediately upon hearing the English words, to substitute it in his head with words or fragments from other languages of which the English sounds reminded him. He wanted to decapitate and disempower the language. The problem, she explains, was that the more he tried to forget, the more he forced himself to remember. The wounds that the mother tongue had carved on him were reopened by every attempt to displace them. And yet, and yet. His project, she explains, also opened a glimmer of possibility that, one day, he would be able to forge a new relationship with the mother tongue. That he would be able to return to it, as if to a lost land.

  She looks at Cornelius. He is asleep, as pale as ash.

  Vera

  ‘One evening there was barking at the gate. When we came out of the house, our dog was on fire. A streak of light through the garden. Back and forth. It was terrible. Frank had to shoot the dog through the head with his pistol.’

  Vera sinks back into the couch.

  ‘The security guard had vanished. Somewhere in the dark, we knew, the gang was waiting. But the pistol must have frightened them off. Nothing further happened. But, yes, that was the last straw. A month later we left Joburg.’

  Contrary to plans, it is not in Frank and Vera’s villa in a desert ghetto where she gets to see her sister for the first time since their father’s funeral. Over the phone, beforehand, Vera had gone on about their desert house. A spacious place, brand new, a lawn and pool amidst all the sand. Very quiet. As safe as can be. The international school right there in the complex, inside the walls. Ondien was prepared for a visit to a sandy compound.

  Instead, they are sitting here, across from each other, on the sixty-first floor of one of the highest buildings in Dubai. Ondien does not even know whose apartment it is. A cryptic SMS message from Vera was waiting on her cellphone when her plane landed: Change of plan. Meet me at HHHR Towers, Sheikh Zayed Road, apartment 6101.

  ‘No, I’m not asking why you’re here in Dubai; I mean why are you here? In this apartment?’

  As she is speaking, Ondien gestures towards the living room, the soft furnishings, the tassels and shiny artefacts. Over Vera’s shoulder, she looks through the exterior glass wall. Vanishing points and horizons of the desert landscape multiply blindly in the mirrored façades of other buildings. In here the light is softened by dark brocade, deep pile carpets and chestnut wood. Arabic calligraphy on handmade paper is displayed on the walls.

  Vera looks away, towards the desert reflections, and the desert itself, disappearing in the distant sunlight.

  The last time Ondien saw Vera, she was elegant and upright on their covered patio, with the stiff neck and stacked hair of a Bryanston wife. Her forehead was unnaturally smooth, just a few fine lines around the mouth. Gold decorating the ears and hands. Over her shoulder the gardener was visible in his blue overalls, out of focus. When Frank joined them, Vera’s voice became louder, switching to whiny nasal English, the hypocrite-speak of corporate Northern Johannesburg.

  Now Vera is disorientated, restless. She looks around as if she is searching for something, as if she has forgotten what it is that makes one important.

  ‘Things didn’t work out as expected,’ she says. ‘Dubai isn’t all it’s made out to be. Frank and I aren’t what we used to be.’ Ondien nods. Vera continues. ‘Frank’s company is teetering on the edge. A month ago the board asked him to resign.’

  ‘Surely he’ll get rewarded handsomely – doesn’t his contract provide? Isn’t that how things work in that world?’

  Vera looks away.

  ‘There are investigations,’ she says. ‘It’s been going on for months.’

  She explains that the South African and British tax authorities are auditing Frank. That the company is alleging that he has enriched himself, there will probably be fraud charges. The company won’t pay him a cent pending completion of all this.

  ‘And our investments … ’ She shakes her head. ‘There is little left. Falling markets. Huge legal fees in different countries. There is talk that the Brits or South Africans may issue a warrant for his arrest, that they’re going to freeze accounts. Issues here in Dubai around extradition … My own life’ – she spreads out her fingers, looks at her own hand – ‘has taken a different turn.’

  She tells of the Arab, owner of a Dubai construction company, of the romance which has flourished so unexpectedly.

  ‘I just knew,’ she says vehemently, ‘there was life in me yet.’ She taps with perfect nails against her sternum. ‘I couldn’t just roll over with Frank. How many sacrifices haven’t I had to make already? My own happiness has to count for something too.’ She bursts into tears. While weeping, she gestures towards the apartment’s interior. ‘I’m living here now, with Shahin. How could I resist? He’s awoken something in me again.’

  She blows her nose, finds her strength again.

  ‘But I’m also scared. After all the wining and dining, he suddenly became very possessive.’

  She recounts how she was still living with Frank and the children, but Shahin wanted her here. He started exerting pressure, at first subtly, but then he warned that he would have her charged with adultery, that she would be stoned to death on a public square, unless she agreed to marry him.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she says, ‘I don’t know if it’s true, whether such things can happen. Surely they’re not all that barbaric here, it’s not Iran or Afghanistan after all, but I don’t have a choice. I’m scared. And, if Frank goes to jail, somebody has to look after the children financially. Shahin wants a proper Muslim wedding …’

  ‘The jet lag is catching up with me,’ Ondien says, and holds her head. ‘Can you show me where I’ll be sleeping?’

  Vera sits forward, speaks urgently. ‘Please, you can’t sleep here. An unmarried woman under the same roof won’t do. He has strict rules. We’ve booked a hotel for you.’ She looks at the door. ‘He’ll be back any minute.’

  She has hardly finished speaking when they hear the lift, which enters the apartment directly, opening. Vera jumps up; her heels click down the corridor, on the marble floor. Ondien heads for the guest toilet.

  She splashes water from the gilt taps over her face, looks at herself in the mirror. She is not wearing any make-up. She will be relieved to get out of here. The new Vera, the messy emotions, are too much for her. The tantrum style rearing its head, the hysterical register that one associates with a face contorted with weeping, loose strands of hair, smudged make-up. God, no, she would rather have the stiff corporate wife from Bryanston with her anointed Botoxed forehead.

  Ondien breathes deeply and opens the toilet door. Vera introduces her to Shahin. He is swarthy with fine features, his eyes piercing. She half expected a traditional head covering, like a wise man in a passion play from her and Vera’s Free State school days, but he is wearing a suit. In Shahin’s presence, Vera often lowers her eyes.

  ‘We’ve booked you a hotel,’ says Shahin, ‘the Kempinski at the Mall of the Emirates. I’ll take you.’

  In the underground carpark they get into his four-wheel-drive vehicle. The alarm gives a shrill whistle when he unlocks it. The car is canary yellow and stands high on its wheels. HUMMER, Ondien reads in chrome on the bonnet. Thick streams of icy air blow into the cabin.

  At the hotel, Shahin checks her in. She waits. When they get to the room, someone in white gloves is there for them.

  ‘Your personal butler,’ says Shahin. ‘We thought you’d be comfortable here.’

  Inside the spacious suite Ondien walks up to the glass that occupies an entire wall. It overlooks an indoor ski slope, a vast freezer in which figures in bright clothing are zigzagging across snow.

  The butler presses a remote-control button. A cosy fire flickers on in the fireplace next to her. In
front of the flames lies a bear skin with a stuffed head still attached to it.

  Shahin waves away the butler.

  ‘Before I go, let me provide you with some guidance,’ he says. She turns around. He continues. ‘Don’t even think of taking Vera away from here, from me. The force of the law will deal with her. And with you. You’re now in my country. And she’s an adulterer.’

  This is so out of the blue that Ondien is speechless for a moment. Then something surges in her, like vomit. In a flash she is the self-conscious young gender studies and music student again, the militant SOAS ethnomusicologist. She feels more reckless than she has in ages.

  ‘Islamic law is a load of shit,’ she says. ‘You Arabic men and your little homosocial world – all it’s designed for is to allow you to freely fuck each other, and little boys and girls to boot, out in the desert.’

  He does not react in the way she hoped he would. He utters a cool, dry little laugh, looks at his bulky golden watch.

  ‘You are full of Western misapprehensions. I believe you’ve been confused by those CNN and BBC images of the Taliban. That is not how things are here. But, yes, we do have our ways.’

  He takes his time rearranging the cuffs of his silk-and-wool suit, one side, then the other, until they are perfect. He smiles neatly and then departs.

  She is left alone with the blueish snow out there (or out there but in there). Machines are spewing clouds of fine flakes over the slope. She regrets her outburst. Her frustration and resentment towards Vera are boiling over. She has little appetite for helping to sort out this mess.

  Ondien wanders aimlessly through the vast shopping complex that merges with the hotel and skiing centre. She walks into a store with an exhibition of life-sized toy animals in artificial snow: polar bears, white lions, Siberian tigers, snow leopards, white sabre-toothed tigers, a white dinosaur. A sales clerk approaches her. She has a sweet smile, a transparent hijab draped over charcoal-black hair.

  ‘Many of these animals don’t even occur in nature,’ Ondien says.

  The woman’s smile does not change.

  ‘Feel how soft,’ she says. She takes Ondien’s hand gently and lets it rest on the sabre-toothed tiger’s neck. The silky fur against Ondien’s palm causes an unexpected sob to rise in her chest. And there she has it: her funeral march. Instruments are tuned. A short silence and then it starts to play in her skull, from the very first note.

  Vera calls. She is upset. ‘What did you say to Shahin? He was silent with anger when he returned.’

  ‘What are you scared of?’

  ‘That he’d send someone to do something to my children.’

  ‘Has he threatened to?’

  ‘Not this time, no, but previously, when I wanted to end the relationship.’

  Ondien and Vera meet at the hotel, amongst Westerners in the coffee shop. Vera takes off her hijab, but keeps on her Jackie Onassis sunglasses. The dark glass covers half her face.

  ‘You look like Grace Kelly,’ Ondien says drily, but Vera is not amused. Her mouth is tense.

  ‘It is important that you don’t spoil things for me here, Ondien. I don’t know why I agreed to your visit. I just wanted to see you, see someone … perhaps it was a mistake. You’ve always been a troublemaker.’

  Ondien breathes deeply, grits her teeth.

  ‘Vera, why don’t you go back to Frank and the kids? Face the crisis, support your children, your husband.’

  Vera shakes her head, looks away, astonished that Ondien cannot take in the complexity of her situation.

  ‘You don’t understand. There will be nothing left of the assets. Frank may go to jail. Perhaps he’ll be extradited to South Africa. Just about the entire board and most shareholders are black and from the political inner circle. Frank’s the scapegoat. It was humiliating enough to have to grovel and fawn to be tolerated on the edges of the new South African hierarchies. And, now? To go and stand in front of a judge as an accused? The wife of a white white-collar criminal in a South African jail? That I will never endure.’

  What about possibilities for you and your children somewhere else, a completely new beginning? she wants to ask, but she says nothing, just sniffs her hand: it still smells of the sabre-toothed tiger’s nylon fur. The music swells, fills her skull, lifts her heart, the darkness of it notwithstanding.

  She looks Vera straight in the eye. ‘Vera, were you at our mother’s funeral, back then?’

  Vera looks at her with a raw expression. She shakes her head, starts weeping so unexpectedly that people at other tables turn their heads.

  ‘I am so lost,’ she says. ‘Everything has collapsed, I am worthless to my children, I am so ashamed, I mean nothing to anyone, I am a useless woman.’

  Vera is crying disconsolately, her face ugly. She drops onto her knees next to the little table, her cheek against Ondien’s hand. ‘I want my mother,’ she says. ‘I just want my mother.’

  Ondien scarcely hears Vera. The music in her head is so beautiful, it moves her so terribly. Ondien gently pulls back her hand.

  ‘I’ll go to Frank and the children, Vera, and make sure everything’s fine there. Do you have a message for them?’

  She shakes her head in between sobs, slumps flatly onto the floor. Face down, high heels next to her buttocks. She looks snottily down at the floor.

  ‘Just let me know the children are ok.’

  Ondien

  On the plane back to Johannesburg the funeral march is playing in her head. In massive, surging chunks. It is moving at the pace of a storm. She tries to keep up, jots down ideas and sequences and motifs: on pieces of paper, in the margins of magazine pages, on the stub of her plane ticket. On a napkin.

  When she arrives in the city from the airport, the door to her flat is open. The security gate is hanging askew from its hinges. The flat is virtually empty. The furniture is gone, the sink ripped out of the bathroom. Her collection of musical instruments from North and West Africa has been stolen; the same goes for her LPs and old-fashioned turntable. Her clothes, the kaftans and costumes in which she used to perform in the VNLS days. The whole lot. Someone must have stripped the place repeatedly. In the bedroom the bowl of cat food has been left behind, largely uneaten.

  ‘Flame!’ she calls for the cat.

  Nothing. All that has been left behind, in the bedroom cupboard: her Casio synthesiser from the 1980s. She feels light. This is all she owns now: one suitcase and a dinky keyboard.

  She gets in her car and drives to the Free State. To the farm where she grew up. She drives without stopping, until the sharp winter light makes her eyes burn. In town she stops at the co-op. She no longer knows anyone behind the counter or amongst the shelves. She buys nasturtium seeds, a little fork and garden gloves.

  The homestead is somewhat neglected, but unchanged. The garden is dry and flowerless.

  ‘This was my mother’s garden,’ she says when a woman comes out, without first greeting her. ‘I’d like to replant a corner of it. One small bed of flowers. Do you mind?’

  The woman’s hands are in the pockets of a stretched cardigan. She looks stupefied, or perhaps just bored. She looks at the little fork in Ondien’s hands.

  ‘An overloaded gesture, I know, sentimental. Still, grant me this. I have the seeds with me. And a small garden fork. If I may only borrow a little water …’

  ‘Do what you like,’ the woman says. She turns around and enters the house.

  Ondien drops onto her knees, in the garden where her mother once walked and sang. Clichéd arias, always. Puccini or Verdi. ‘Sì, mi chiamano Mimì’ from La Bohème, ‘Ah, fors’è lui’ from La Traviata. The sun burns her back, the tears come.

  When she is done, she rinses her hands at an outside tap. She leaves without speaking to the dull woman again. When she is too tired to drive any further, she stops and sleeps in a motel. All night trucks brake and depart in front of her window.

  Someone’s grimy sleeping bag on the kitchen floor. The pane of the kitchen window has been
removed. A stranger has spent the night in her flat. When dusk falls, she awaits the guest. She waits until late. No one comes. She goes outside in the dark to see if someone is hiding there. The garden has become neglected in the weeks since Mrs Zuckermann – Mrs Z, as she calls her – moved out. Mrs Z’s children are in New York and Toronto. It has been a decade since they last visited. Mrs Z writes them letters that go unanswered. Her friends are either dead or have emigrated to Israel or the US. Not a soul to look after things in her absence, no one to administer anything. Two months have passed since Ondien last paid rent.

  The grass is long around Ondien’s feet, the leaves of shrubs dry between her fingers. In a corner of the garden sparks are flying. She approaches. Something is hanging from the electric fence, but she cannot see what it is. She fetches the key to the main house. In Mr Zuckermann’s little library with shelves full of books on Zionism, she finds a small ladder. She carries it out and climbs onto it, stretches a hand towards the thing hanging there. It’s rubbery to the touch. Flame the cat.

  In the kitchen light she studies the pink carcass, the skin stripped off completely. It smells of death. It looks too small to be her cat – its neck like a twig that one could snap between two fingers – but it is. The stomach has been cut open, it has been gutted. (Was someone planning to eat it?)

  She cannot immediately decide what to do with the carcass. There is music in her head that first needs to be purged. For now, she will put it in a plastic bag and leave it outside, behind the flat.

  For the remainder of the evening she composes as if in a fever. The march is finished, she is working on a new movement to precede it: on the horizon clouds are approaching. There is the roll of percussion, then the wind instruments take over, stately and skirling, pushing against the dark. Then death, the abrupt entrance of the quarter chords. It is the sound of a swarm of locusts: hatching in the underworld, expanding like gas. The air around their wings stirs the Styx’s water when they cross. The swarm has been sent to fetch the dead. They arrive and devour the body where it is cooling down. Then they alight for the flight back. They carry the body away in ten thousand pieces, diluting it like a cloud. All these unusual things she hears. The Casio is next to her. With one hand she is tinkling – the tinkling is standing in for a sweeping, surging orchestra. The funeral march is now but one movement of her piece; it is becoming a requiem.