The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  By four in the morning her fingers are stiff and cold. She lies down in the sleeping bag for some warmth, too tired to be bothered by the rancidness. When she gets up, her body is sore from the hard floor. She is itching. Perhaps there are bedbugs in the bag. Not really a liveable place any longer, this flat. But, yes, it is free accommodation. To be a white homeless woman in Johannesburg, to be sleeping under bridges, cannot be a joke. She suddenly realises she has not eaten since getting off a plane two days ago.

  The gardener no longer comes, no one has been paying him. The pool has been emptied, probably the last thing he did before absconding. The concrete sides are baking in the winter sun. Scratchy with tiredness and thirst she walks out on the sun-bleached diving board. She tests its bounce, jumping up and down a little, as if she is on the verge of diving. It creaks as it moves. A tuft of grass has already grown through a crack in the bottom. Ondien goes into the house, finds a few tins of cheap meatballs, things that Mrs Z used to feed her domestics. Then she fetches a little spade and a flowerpot from Mrs Z’s garage. In it she plants the leftover nasturtium seeds.

  Early evening. A Highveld storm is building. There is a flash between cloud and wire: the electric fence has been struck. Late evening, when she is lying in the rancid sleeping bag, she hears someone breaking out the burglar bars in front of Mrs Z’s windows. She is lying there like a mummy, waiting for the intruders to come and do her harm. She can hear footsteps back and forth through the garden as they carry things off. But the footsteps pass, they do not come to her. Either they do not know she is there, or an unspoken understanding is developing: she does not bother them and they do not bother her.

  The next morning she enters the house. Wires are hanging where the television has been ripped out. Across the carpets lie the muddy marks of feet, there is a broken plate on the kitchen floor. She takes what she needs. What is left in the pantry she packs in a box. She takes pots and pans, plates and cutlery. Sheets. She cannot find any blankets: probably all stolen. She carries two chairs and a mattress through the garden, to her flat.

  She visits Mrs Z in the care home. She is lying with her chin on a white sheet.

  ‘Be sure to pay your rent into my account,’ she says.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Zuckermann. Promptly, every month.’

  ‘You are like a daughter to me.’

  Mrs Z knows as well as she that there is no truth in this. Their relationship was purely commercial. And now it is in a vague no-man’s-land: the strongest ties she has with Mrs Z are the things she steals from her house in order to survive. And the fact that she is a squatter in her back garden. She does not even know why she is standing here with the ungerminated flowers in her hands. Guilt, probably. If she were ever to bring flowers again, they would have to be bought with the proceeds from what she is stealing from Mrs Z’s home. There is no money left.

  ‘And please look after the house, there’s no one else to do it. When I pass on, it all goes to my children. Remember that.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Zuckermann.’ (And who exactly, does the woman imagine, ought to be paying all the bills?)

  ‘Everything in order at home? The garden still neat?’

  ‘Winter hasn’t touched your garden, Mrs Zuckermann. It’s as lush as if it were midsummer.’ (Is she expecting Ondien to pay the gardener too?)

  ‘How about Arthur? Still his happy self? Not missing me?’

  Ondien has to think for a moment. Her husband’s name was Samuel. Then she recalls the photograph of a dog in Mrs Z’s bedroom. A spaniel that has been dead for years.

  ‘Fit as a fiddle, Mrs Zuckermann, more boisterous than ever. Welcomes me every time with a swing of the tail.’ Her voice becomes quieter. ‘He does miss you a little, though.’

  For the first time Mrs Z smiles wanly.

  ‘I have to go now, Mrs Zuckermann. I’m leaving you this container I’ve planted with flowers; they should come up soon.’

  While Ondien is walking away, she hears Mrs Z tell a nurse to go and throw out ‘this pot of soil’.

  When she comes home after the visit, half of the things she took from the house have been stolen from her flat again. A thief amongst thieves, that is what she is becoming. You steal from someone weaker, the stronger ones steal from you. You return to your weaker victim. Things circulate. A life cycle, an ecosystem. She is becoming part of natural life in this country, the instinctive processes sustaining themselves behind shiny surfaces. She is learning, she is approaching the real nature of things. Music and theft are the paths leading her to the light.

  She is now penniless; she cannot even afford a cup of coffee in the shopping malls. She survives on what she is able to carry out of Mrs Z’s house. Over the next day or two she takes everything she can fit into her car to a pawnshop in Braamfontein. Before the thieves can lay their hands on it and before her fuel runs out and she is stranded.

  At night the activities in Mrs Z’s house continue unabated. One night the footsteps come close to the flat. Ondien holds her breath. There is breathing at the kitchen’s paneless window. From the bedroom, peeking out of the rancid sleeping bag, she is unable to see a face, but she can see little rhythmic clouds of vapour pushing inwards. It glows against light filtering in from outside. Her visitor is sniffing the flat’s smells. A torch clicks on, a beam slips around. She holds her breath. Then voices, outside by the pool. The vapour pulls back, the footsteps move away. Then she hears them scale the wall, out towards the street.

  She remembers Flame, somewhere in a plastic bag. She finds a spade in Mrs Z’s storeroom. She is surprised it has not been stolen yet. In the main house, there is almost nothing left. The kitchen cupboards have been ripped out. Doors have been lifted from their hinges. Wall-to-wall carpets have been torn from the floor.

  She buries the cat. It is the first time in days that she is able to stop writing down music for a while. The soil is hard. It is a shallow grave. Afterwards she sits on a kitchen stool on the unmown lawn. There, in the sun, she performs the funeral march movement of her requiem on the Casio. She is trying it out.

  The next evening she is composing again. A siren screams past and breaks her concentration. Silence reigns in her head once more. She can now only think of the electric wires gleaming above the garden wall. But she has to continue, she has to intercept the thick surges of sound in the air. She has to play it inwardly, mutilate herself with it.

  Her cellphone rings. She is surprised it has not been cut off; she has not paid a bill for some time. It is Mrs Z.

  ‘Mrs Zuckermann, what a surprise!’

  She is sitting with her feet on one of Mrs Z’s dining-room chairs.

  ‘Are you my daughter?’

  She is wrong-footed.

  ‘Mrs Zuckermann, your daughter is in America. I’m your lodger.’

  ‘You’ve never responded to any of my letters. Not even one. And my grandchildren? Do you know what grief it is for me not to know them?’ Her voice cracks. ‘Do you have any idea of my sorrow, dying here alone? In this cruel, dishonest place, this country full of goyim with bloody hands?’

  ‘You are not alone, Mrs Zuckermann.’

  Mrs Z starts to cry softly. The phone goes dead.

  She returns to her music sheets and the Casio. To the requiem. She toys with the idea of voices, a choir, and at least fragments of the traditional mass liturgy. But the piece is too amorphous, too unconventional. It is changing shape like a cloud. She cannot get a grip on it. She can only follow where the skull musicians lead. A few voices do ultimately appear; it is becoming a twenty-first-century oratorio. There are monks, chanting atonally, layer upon layer. A soprano voice, briefly, somewhere in the fogginess – a young boy, as pure and clear as the fiercest physical pain: ‘libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni et de profundo lacu.’

  Then everything bordering the lyrical, the tonal and the melodic drains away. The music bends, doubles, starts to devour itself. The instruments are now played in all conceivable ways. Strings are i
gnored, the edges of violins are scratched, flutes are obstructed breathily, the piano is being played with bricks dampening the strings, like a sickly harpsichord. The piano wants to destroy itself, the monks’ throats are constricted, each note an ugly little cry of fear. The devoured body has arrived with the locusts in the underworld. The swarm descends into the swamp. Shards of bone dissolve in locust bellies. This she imagines with one hand on the Casio’s keys – a child’s tinkling is all that emerges.

  She stops the tinkling. At the window a face has appeared. She did not hear footsteps. Yet she is not startled. He – the face – neither. They look at each other. For a while neither of them moves. Behind the chirping of crickets and the highway traffic, she hears silence. Highveld silence. Like a dove’s feather against the wrist.

  Small and black and shiny, the face. Prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks. A cruel face, so it seems, but she would not want to judge hastily. She should give him a chance, leave his options open.

  ‘Come in,’ she says, ‘I’ve been expecting you. The boundaries here are now porous, after all, everyone’s welcome, anyone can come and get. Take what you want. Even my Casio, if you wish. And here’ – she waves the sheaf of music paper in his direction – ‘take the music too if you choose. Perhaps you could perform it somewhere. I’m sure there are many funerals where you come from. Or, even better, burn it on a cold winter’s evening, for a hint of warmth.’

  He says nothing. His eyes scan the room, take it all in, settle on her again. She nods comprehendingly at his silence.

  ‘If it is me you want, I won’t stop you either. As I said, take what you want.’

  There is still no sign that he understands her. He pulls himself up by the window frame, hops in with a smooth movement. He is as small as a pygmy. She can smell him. She looks at his hands, considers whether they are skilled enough to skin a cat in a single movement.

  She gets up, he stiffens. She moves slowly, turns her back on him, opens the cupboard door to take out two teacups (from Mrs Z’s kitchen, of course).

  ‘You must forgive me, the kettle’s been stolen. I only have a pan from Mrs Zuckermann’s house in which to boil water. See,’ she smiles and looks around. He is watching her closely. ‘I’m also a looter … Perhaps,’ she says into the cupboard, ‘we can try to be friends. What do you think?’ She continues making tea, looks at him from the corner of her eye. He opens the cupboard behind him, throws things on the floor. He gets hold of a box of salty biscuits, takes what is left, throws the empty packet on the floor. The crumbs fall from his mouth as he is eating.

  She sits down slowly on Mrs Z’s dining-room chair. ‘I’m just a looter myself,’ she repeats. ‘I’m also only squatting here. You and I, we’re in the same boat.’

  She clears her throat, shifts in the chair.

  ‘I know I understand little of your thoughts, your degree of need and all that, but let’s experiment. Let’s each share something. As an icebreaker,’ she says, ‘let me tell you about my mother. Of her neat flower beds, how she used to sing in the garden. How her voice disappeared in the high Free State sky.’

  The pan of tea water gives off slow steam. There is silence. She continues.

  ‘Let’s give friendship a try,’ she says. ‘As my friend you would probably want to ask (wouldn’t you?): “what else? Is that all that’s left of your mother, Ondien? The little flowers, a few notes in the afternoon?”’

  She pours the tea, the heat against her face. In the skull music there appears, amidst atonal chanting, a graceful shred of melody which vanishes before it can be caught. Chords, just two or three, sweet and high, like snowy peaks above clouds. The suggestion, over a bass line, of glass bells. The melody slips, major into minor, shadows drift over thoughts. Thus one remembers, she thinks. And thus one forgets, is forgotten. Even by your own music.

  She continues in the silence. She can feel the power draining from her muscles. ‘Another question you would want to ask is: “can one grieve alone? Grief,” you would frown and shake your head, “as private language, Ondien? Here in your little room, in a barren garden, hands flitting over a stunted organ?”’

  She breathes deeply. His hands keep moving, his eyes are quick, his scalp is breaking out in shiny sweat.

  ‘And,’ she coughs, her voice sounding thin and flat, ‘you would have asked: “could it yield anything, Ondien, your search for someone in a cloud of sound, in the chambers of bone behind the ear?” “Probably not,” I’d have to answer. And yet,’ she says, ‘come and listen, come and stand here next to the organ.’ She swallows, keeping an eye on his movements, avoiding sudden movements herself. ‘As if I’m the accompanist and you the soloist. Let me play.’ She swallows again, steadies her hands. ‘I’ll play the bit near the end of the final movement where the locusts, the underworld’s devouring undertakers, gather to land. Listen closely: there is an instant, just the briefest of moments, when the swarm takes on the shape of the deceased …’

  Between the mattress and table he blocks her way, takes her hard by the upper arm.

  ‘You’ve talked enough,’ he says, ‘talking is over.’

  ‌Loose

  In rasic theatre, the partakers empathize with the experience of the performers playing. This empathy with the performer rather than with the plot is what permits Indian theatre to ‘wander’, to explore detours and hidden pathways, unexpected turns in the performance. [...] The partakers’ interest is not tied to the story but to the enactment of the story; the partakers do not want to ‘see what happens next’ but to ‘experience how the performer performs whatever is happening’.

  Richard Schechner,

  Performance Theory

  He dreams he is doing ballet with a Japanese man at the Voortrekker monument. The man is half sitting, half standing against a low granite wall. He walks to the man, turns around and presses his back against his chest. The man puts his arms around him and they move across the expansive paving. Besides firmness, there is empathy in the man’s grip, in the manner in which he is steering them. It is simultaneously without doubt and without insistence. Gently the Japanese man is initiating him, as if wanting to say: everything is ok, we can do it. (He utters no word in the dream, the Japanese man.) The trust grows swiftly and, as they become more synchronised, all his restlessness and grief dissolve. It is as if there is a transfer of skill to him directly from the man’s body. And it consoles him, this flow. Like a blood transfusion: a biological consolation. He knows – they know together now – the exact direction they should go, what the next movement will be. His chest heats up, becomes warm like a bird’s nest. Around them the hills are barren and beautiful. The highways astonish him with their sweeping width. He is light and gracious.

  When he wakes up in the early morning hours with a lingering feeling of fondness for his nurturing dance partner, he walks out onto the balcony. In front of him lie the amphitheatre of the city and Table Bay. One loose cloudlet is hanging above the city, motionless. He stretches his hand out towards it. It looks so close. Where did it come from, all that grief that had to be danced away in the dream?

  He leans forward against the balustrade. It must be the conversation of the previous evening that gave the dream its shape – or movement. Sam called from the north and excitedly explained how he was using Butoh as inspiration for his latest choreography. Sam is a young man, a contemporary dance student.

  ‘Butoh?’ he enquired.

  ‘Difficult to explain,’ Sam said. ‘It’s a Japanese style – I’ll have to show you. It works for my body, that’s all I know. I feel it just like that.’ He could hear Sam snapping his fingers.

  Sam’s forte is dance – movement – rather than description.

  Like all his previous encounters of this kind – perhaps it goes for most encounters that cause unexpected joy to burgeon between two people – his meeting with Sam was unlikely. After years of absence, he had been trapped for some time in Pretoria, the despised city of his youth, occupied with gruelling family matters
.

  Yes, trapped: in this place that has become so dusty and messy, the seat of successive governments, all ultimately of the same hue (or at least flavour). He had shaken the dust of this place from his feet a long time ago, he thought. He feels tricked. There is hardly any diversion here. No cultural activity to speak of, little to lift him from his torpor, from being extinguished.

  As a last resort, he attends a student drama festival at Pretoria’s university. Without much expectation or hope. And his lack of hope was not unfounded. The performances are incoherent, sometimes embarrassing. Musicals, improvised dramas with adolescent themes. No, wait, he is too merciless in his judgement; it is, after all, the work of kids, loose-limbed kids still finding their form. And what could they know of the world beyond the boundaries of this dull city?

  Even so, there is one performance that makes an impression. Dance theatre, physical theatre. The stage represents a claustrophobic flat in Cape Town in the 1980s. A soldier has returned from the border war to his wife and child after being seriously wounded. He has been irreparably traumatised and numbed. He is like a creature in a cage. The child’s escape into a fantasy world provokes his ire. At some point, in order to demonstrate the principle of unreality, he stabs the child’s imaginary friend to death with a knife. The actor-dancer’s sequences of movements, in between his deadly silences, are a tour de force. He has a gun in his hand throughout the movements. He is shirtless, his muscles like rock under skin the colour of strong tea. Long black hair tied back tightly. Loose-fitting linen trousers. He is engaged in a bitter battle with the floor and walls. He strains against gravity; then, suddenly the earth lets go and he tumbles weightlessly upwards, towards the ceiling.