Nine Open Arms

by Benny Lindelauf

‘I don’t think I asked for your opinion,’ said Oma Mei. ‘But now that you’ve given it anyway, I’ll tell you what I think. About all of you. I am so terribly glad the Mam hasn’t had to live through this. I am sure that, with her rag-doll heart, she wouldn’t have survived it.’

  It may have been because of those words. Because of this reproach. ‘You have lied to us,’ I said.

  A silence fell – a deeper silence than there had ever been in Nine Open Arms.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ spluttered Oma Mei.

  ‘You lied to us,’ I said. ‘And that is much worse.’

  I heard my brothers and the Dad breathe in, all at exactly the same moment.

  ‘Listen,’ said the Dad. ‘Perhaps we should—’ ‘I would like to know what my oldest granddaughter has to say,’ Oma Mei interrupted him. Her good eye glared at me, icy cold, and that look made me wish my words could crawl back into my mouth, but I forced myself to go on.

  ‘You said you had burned the tombstone bed, but it’s sitting in Mr Wetsels’ little shed. And you said that it was Oompah who had to find rest. But that wasn’t true, either.’

  I was vaguely aware that there was some confusion in the room. The Dad stared at Oma Mei. Our brothers were frowning. Oma Mei flushed. Not just an ordinary blush: fiery red splotches broke out on her face and throat.

  ‘What are you saying to me?’ Her voice was soft, but dangerous, and I knew it. I had known her all my life, and I knew exactly when my grandmother was at her most dangerous. Up to now, that had always been the moment at which I shut up. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I could feel a fury rising in me that was so huge and so strange, it was as if it was changing me into a different person.

  ‘Why haven’t you told us that the house used to stand in the cemetery?’ I shouted.

  The swivel-eye made a wild sweep.

  ‘What?’ The Dad was confused.

  ‘What?’ shouted Piet, Eet, Krit and Sjeer.

  ‘What on earth does that have to do with anything?’ shouted Oma Mei.

  So it was true. She was admitting it. It was true!

  ‘You’ve lied to us three times then.’

  ‘Fing, stop it, please,’ said the Dad. ‘Oma Mei, calm down.’

  But nothing could stop us now.

  ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ she shouted. ‘To me, your grandmother.’ She lashed out at me, but Piet jumped between us and caught the blow.

  I dived behind the kitchen table. ‘You lie!’ I screamed.

  ‘How dare you!’ shouted my grandmother. She wanted to come after me, but the Dad and Eet stopped her.

  ‘Calm down now! Calm down, let us—’ ‘You are always lying!’ The words flew out of my mouth, as if they weren’t mine at all. All I had to do was open my mouth. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time. ‘You are a liar!’

  ‘Watch out, kendj. I am still your—’ ‘And who knows what else you’ve been lying about.’ My voice cracked. ‘You with your crocodile stories. How true are those stories, really? What sort of lies have you been telling us about the Mam? Or about Opa Pei?’

  Oma Mei flinched. I had never seen her flinch, never seen her take a step back. Nobody had ever seen that. I heard the Dad gasp.

  Then there was another silence, an even more terrible silence. It was as if all sound was disappearing through an invisible hole in the house.

  ‘I don’t think I like being called a liar by my own granddaughter.’ Oma Mei was trying to say this in an icy tone, but I could feel that something in her authority had broken down. Her voice wavered, and so did the harshness in her face.

  ‘Listen,’ the Dad said soothingly. ‘We’re all dead tired. There will be plenty of time for being angry later, so why don’t you go and have a good sleep now, Fing. And tomorrow we’ll—’

  My fury burst out again.

  ‘And why are we forever bloody leaving? Why can’t we ever stay somewhere? Why don’t we ever visit the Mam’s grave anymore? It’s not true that she is everywhere. That’s another lie, a dirty filthy lie. Just like the opposite of worrying, just like first believing then seeing.You two are always lying, till you’re blue in the face.’ I turned to Oma Mei, softening my voice. ‘Why are we only able to ask questions you want us to ask? Why can’t we ever pose questions of our own?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Oma Mei said, shaking.

  ‘And why do we always have to wait until you are prepared to tell us something? That is so terribly mean.’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘There are other things I want to know,’ I sobbed. ‘I want to know how the Mam died. Why she went with the Dad to live somewhere else, instead of staying in this town with you. Why she was buried there, and not here. I bloody well want to know what illness she died of.’

  With every question our grandmother took a step back, until she stumbled away, out of the kitchen. I heard her climbing the stairs, rummaging around. Then she came down again and stood in the passage, holding the broken Crocodile in her arms, her face grey.

  Now we were both crying.

  ‘I may not do everything right,’ she sobbed. ‘I may not be the best grandmother. If that is so, you should say so. Nobody ever says anything here.’

  ‘Go away! I shouted in tears.

  And before we realised what was happening, before anyone could do anything, our grandmother walked through the passage, wrenched open the front door and, without looking, stepped out of the house with the Crocodile in her arms.

  Through the door with its knee-high threshold. The only front door in the town that stood twenty metres away from its porch.

  memories blowing about

  The photos were everywhere. They stirred in the grass and in the vegetable garden. They got stuck behind the cellar windows. They fluttered across Sjlammbams Sahara into the hedge.

  ‘There,’ called Oma Mei from the kitchen window. ‘And there.’

  And we ran around Nine Open Arms catching them one by one.

  She was sitting on the sofa, her bandaged-up left foot resting on a chair. I brought her the photos I’d picked up. She took them without looking at me. I was no longer angry – or rather, I was still angry, but that anger no longer made me feel guilty.

  ‘That wasn’t nice of you, kendj,’ said Oma Mei.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And with me already . . . ’

  ‘. .. standing with one-and-a-half feet in my grave,’ I chanted along with her. She clamped her lips together. I thought she was about to say something nasty, but instead her mouth relaxed and let out a sigh.

  We were silent for a while.

  ‘How’s your foot?’ I asked.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Shall I bring you another cushion?’

  ‘Just let me be for a little.’

  We were silent again for some time. I heard Muulke call out, ‘In the tree, in the tree.’

  Our brothers shouted all sorts of ideas at each other on how to get the photos out of the tree.

  ‘I hope we’ll find all of them,’ I said.

  ‘They’re only photos,’ said Oma Mei. I could tell she didn’t really mean it, but it was terribly brave of her to say it. I wanted to throw my arms around her, but I couldn’t. Not yet.

  Oma Mei made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry. I looked up. She had the photos I had found in her hands and was looking at them.

  I hadn’t noticed earlier which ones I’d picked up. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I saw which photo was on top. It was that one of Opa Pei.The photo of him and his workmen. Opa Pei in his smart clothes and his felt hat.

  I knew which one it was by the way she was looking at that photo alone.

  ‘The story of Nienevee and Charley wasn’t finished yet, was it?’ I said.

  She shook her head.

  tell me why

  Many stories can be told about a person’s life. Everyone’s story is connected to other people’s by thin threads. But the stories of Nienevee from Outside the Walls and Charley Bottl
etop weren’t reconnected till the end of their lives.

  Thirty-two years had passed. It was 1902, and there was Charley standing on her doorstep.

  Much had happened. The nineteenth century had become the twentieth. A railway line had come to the town. New neighbourhoods had grown up around it, new roads been laid out. Much had changed, but not everything.

  ‘So, Bottletop, there you are at last,’ said Nienevee, fifty years old, one week a widow.

  He had arrived in the town the evening before and spent the night in a simple guest house. He’d packed his bag at first light. It was drizzling a little when he walked through the unguarded Putse Gate.There was no reason to have guards on the gate now that most people lived outside the town walls. And yet he still had that same feeling as when he’d first left the town – it made him feel scared and it made him feel happy.

  Sjlammbams Sahara had looked grey and deserted. November wasn’t a month for farmers, not a month for travellers and certainly not a month for lovers: the maize and the tall corn had already gone. It was a month for a dog called Dimdog, though. She was everywhere. She waited for him among the stubble of the cornfield. She wagged her tail by the oak trees at the dip in the slope. He put his bag down and threw a stick. She ran after it: dogs will be dogs, even if they’ve been dead for thirty years.

  ‘So, Bottletop,’ said Nienevee.

  There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much that had to be put right. There were reproaches and declarations of love thirty years old. Questions that had gone unanswered for so long they had gone their own way, looked for their own answers. How angry he had been at first, and how sad, and these feelings had been followed by years of indifference, he thought, and then . . .

  She kissed him.

  Nienevee, ex-traveller woman, brand-new widow, kissed Charley Bottletop, straight on the mouth. And when she had finished with that, she said, ‘Now all the old words are gone. Now all the pain is gone.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Not that it was true – the pain was still there – but when you’ve just fallen in love again, you’ll lie to yourself till you’re blue in the face. You’ll say ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ to anything, even if you are nearly an elderly man.

  The biggest surprise was waiting for him in the bedroom.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, astonished.

  ‘Why not?’ was her reply.

  There stood the tombstone bed. It was smaller and greyer than he remembered. He suddenly felt ashamed.

  ‘You weren’t to blame,’ she said.

  He heard the sadness in her words; the anger, the bitterness. But no resignation.

  She never told him about their son, the orphan who wasn’t an orphan and who, on his sixteenth birthday, had left the town without saying a word. What could she have said? Sometimes words only make things worse. Sometimes it is better to be silent.

  Love that becomes calmer over the years was not something Nienevee understood. After a one-day-and-one-night honeymoon, words flew about every day, and plates, too, at times. Even though he couldn’t fully understand her fits of rage and her deep sorrow, Charley let her rave and rant, because it meant her heart was still beating – and that he could try to make up for her pain, even if he hadn’t caused all of it. She was Nienevee, had always been, and never changed. This house with all the expensive things in it couldn’t make any difference to that.

  ‘My Nienevee,’ he said.

  Every night they slept in the tombstone bed, and then Nienevee behaved like the old Nienevee again. Then she wrapped her arms around him. Then they talked about Lexidently and the night he and she fell on top of Charley.

  About the house Charley had made in the cornfield, and how Nienevee had known then that she loved him.

  Then she would fall asleep, and he would twist and turn like a chair leg in a lathe. He claimed he didn’t sleep a wink in the tombstone bed. ‘It’s as if we’re buried already.’

  ‘Better start getting used to it,’ she said.

  He sketched a design for a new bed. She laughed in his face, because of its little kissing angels and the nesting birds passing each other twigs.

  ‘Sentimental kwatsj,’ she said. And when Charley wasn’t looking, she set fire to the paper. Charley decided to forget about it then, before the whole house went up in flames.

  They had nothing to do with the town, and the town had nothing to do with them. The scandal of the traveller widow living with an unmarried man was only whispered about. By the older people, that was; the more recent townspeople barely knew who Charley and Nienevee were.

  One day a letter arrived. Nienevee read it and turned pale. Charley asked what the matter was, but she didn’t take the time to answer him. She slipped on her overcoat and, outraged, she marched to the town hall.

  ‘Don’t think for a moment that you can go and try this on me,’ she shouted. She spat across the counter.

  ‘But, madam,’ said the startled clerk. ‘This was decided by the city council, not me.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about the city council,’ said Nienevee. ‘I don’t give a shit about the whole world, if it comes to it.’

  The town had grown considerably in that half a century. And in places where there are more people living, more people die. The old cemetery was now surrounded by new housing, and a new cemetery was needed. In a spot where it could expand, a spot outside the town. Along Sjlammbams Sahara.

  Charley couldn’t understand what she was making such a fuss about. The council said they would provide a replacement house at least as spacious as the one she was living in.

  ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ said Charley.

  But she said – no, she screamed – that no one was ever going to get her out of that house.

  ‘You don’t even really like it, though, do you?’ said Charley.

  But she screamed – no, she howled – that she’d been told too often that travellers should know their place, and not this time, oh no, not this time, you could be sure of that.

  So he let it be. He was not going to make an issue of it. Nienevee wanted to stay? Fine, he would stay, too.

  Then fate struck. One day, Charley cut himself on a gouge, his hand became swollen, and two days later he was dead.

  Blood-poisoning.

  Dying can be as simple as living is complicated.

  Nienevee went looking for a gravestone for her Bottletop.

  ‘That one?’ The stonemason sounded surprised.

  Nienevee nodded.

  ‘A family gravestone?’ said the stonemason.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nienevee. And she told him – no, commanded him – what words to carve on the stone. That evening, the oldies in the local bar had another story to shout at each other about what that traveller woman had cooked up this time.

  ‘She wants to be in the one grave with Charley!’

  The ancient parish priest got involved. ‘Only those whom God has joined in holy matrimony shall lie in one grave.’

  She chased him out of the door with a frying pan.

  No, she didn’t go about it cleverly, our Nienevee from Outside the Walls.

  Meetings were held. Important meetings, involving even the mayor. A new proposal was drawn up. An official came to tell her. He took care to stay close to the door: he had heard the story of the parish priest and the frying pan.

  ‘You will be buried together. And you will not have to go and live in another house, but the house will be moved,’ said the official.

  Flabbergasted, Nienevee stared at him. ‘Moved?’

  ‘We have people who know how to do that,’ said the official. And he showed her on the survey map where the house was going to go.

  Nienevee signed the expropriation document.

  Two days later, surveyors started drawing lines and putting down markers.

  Nienevee saw them from her window.

  ‘A high price to pay to be buried with you,’ she said, as if dead Charley, who was laid out in the living room,
had raised the topic. ‘Not at all, Bottletop.’

  But nobody could tell if it was only Charley she was crying for when he, the first occupant of the new cemetery, was buried. So new was the cemetery that the priest had to bless Charley’s plot. Trees had to be pruned, fields changed into lawns. There was going to be a tall hedge. But Nienevee and Charley’s grave was there first.

  A week later, they started pulling down the house. First, they removed the roof tiles, then the roof beams. The house’s timber frame was dismantled, so all that was left between the two chimneys was a gaping space. The floors were pulled up board by board.

  And so, brick by brick, plank by plank, the house was demolished.

  And then rebuilt, brick by brick.

  After that, Nienevee couldn’t really find her feet again. She became restless, started wandering. She buttonholed total strangers and told them about herself and Charley.

  Barely one year later, she died. She was found on the sofa, because after Charley’s death she never slept in the tombstone bed again. Her face bore a mistrustful expression, and that mistrust was not for nothing.

  It was never clear who had a hand in it, but one day in January, Nienevee was carried away from her house. Away from Sjlammbams Sahara, away from the new cemetery where the man she loved was buried. Away to the town she had hated. To the wrong grave with the wrong man.

  two drops of water

  Outside, everybody was still busily finding photos. I heard Muulke call out. The Dad tapped on the window. He asked Oma Mei first, then me, if everything was alright, and promptly disappeared again without waiting for an answer.

  For a while, neither of us spoke.

  ‘They were like two drops of water,’ Oma Mei said then.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your grandfather and your father.’ She laughed, but it didn’t sound cheerful. ‘They never knew each other – Opa Pei died a year before the Mam met your father – but if they had known each other, I’m sure they would have become friends. They shouldn’t have been father- and son-in-law, but father and son.’