Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘I like that,’ laughed Griet and hiccuped louder than ever. ‘Let’s drink to Pegasus.’

  ‘To the bumpkin with the golden bird.’ Jans raised his glass in yet another toast. ‘May you find him soon.’

  4

  Goldilocks Loses Her Spectacles

  Once upon a time there was a colourful land that was regularly struck by disasters. There were long droughts during which thousands of animals perished; there were flash floods that washed thousands of houses away. There were earthquakes that destroyed historical villages like the Finger of God flattening pawns on a chessboard, and there were man-made laws that had the same effect. The difference between the natural catastrophes and the man-made disasters was that the people left churches and mosques and other religious buildings standing, like kings without subjects on the deserted chessboard.

  The worst disasters in the colourful land were always caused by people. There were mountains that spewed fire, not because a god decreed it should be so, but because careless people set the mountains alight. There was a dangerous hole in the air above the land through which the sun’s deadly rays shone down and burnt man and beast. The hole wasn’t made by a god either, but by people who were more concerned about holes in their clothes than a hole in heaven. What the people didn’t realise was that the angels watched them through the hole, like children lying on their stomachs, peeping through a crack in an attic floor. And the angels were so shocked by what they saw that their wings bristled on their backs.

  It was a country where black rhinos and black children perished by the thousand. Then one day the people grew concerned and collected millions of rand to save the rhinos. It was without doubt a strange land, the angels told each other, shaking their heads.

  ‘I’m writing a fairy tale,’ Griet told her therapist. ‘I actually wanted to write about my relationship. But I’m better with fairy tales.’

  Rhonda smiled encouragingly, a teacher watching a toddler forming her first letters with clumsy fingers. She must have had a trying day, reckoned Griet, because there was an unmistakable crease in her long cotton skirt. But her blouse was as snow-white as ever. Not even a grimy ring on the collar. Griet smoothed her own blouse self-consciously. It had also been clean this morning.

  ‘Do you want to tell me more?’

  ‘No,’ Griet said quickly and then added apologetically, ‘there isn’t really much more to tell. I’ve hardly begun. I don’t know how it’s going to end.’

  ‘Nuns startled by green ice from heavens’, she’d read this morning in the paper, one of those absurd little reports she always remembered better than the serious main stories. She obviously had a need for inexplicable phenomena, after seven years with a man who could explain everything logically, rationally and unemotionally. And any question he couldn’t answer, like what is the meaning of life, he could always evade with cynicism.

  A large piece of green ice, she read with increasing interest, had fallen out of the air through the window of a Roman Catholic convent. The nuns, frozen in terror, had stored the evidence in a fridge.

  Evidence for what? Griet wondered. A court case against the divine powers that had hurled the ice earthwards? And who would stand accused in the dock? The angels surely wouldn’t take out their disappointment in the human race on a group of nuns. No, Griet decided, the poor witches would probably get the blame again. And how could you hold it against them if they broke a few convent windows now and then? Everyone knew what the Roman Catholic Church had done to witches for centuries.

  ‘Have you seen George again?’

  ‘No.’ Griet glanced at the Mickey Mouse clock. Still almost a full hour to go. She might as well be honest. ‘I tried to see him. I drove past our house a couple of times … I mean his house … or past friends’ houses where he might be visiting. But I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go in. I’m afraid of what I might do to him.’

  ‘Are you still angry with him?’

  ‘I don’t want to beat him to death like a month ago, if that’s what you mean. I’ll never be stupid enough to try to hit him again. I nearly broke my hand. I don’t even know how to make a fist. It just isn’t something that decent girls learn at school. All we ever learnt was how to kick a guy in the crotch, but the PT teacher said that’s very serious and you should only do it if you’re being raped.’

  Rhonda nodded sympathetically, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘She didn’t say what you should do when your baby dies and your husband drives you out of the house,’ said Griet.

  ‘You were very badly hurt.’ Rhonda leant forward a little on the red sofa, her eyes peaceful, as always. Griet felt as though she could sink away into those still pools, down, down, down, with stones in her pockets, like Virginia Woolf. ‘And you hide it under this terrible anger.’

  She didn’t want to beat him to death any more, she told her therapist. She wanted to torture him to death slowly, but she didn’t tell anyone that. She wanted to lock him into his own house, without a telephone or newspapers or books or any contact with the outside world. She wanted to flush his sleeping pills and his depression pills down the lavatory. She wanted to install a remote control video camera in every room, and watch him as he slowly went mad.

  Sometimes her own madness frightened her.

  ‘He says he can’t understand why I’m so angry. That’s the worst of all, that he can carry on with his life as though nothing had happened, as though I were a page that could simply be torn out. Not a page with words on it, not something you’d miss if it disappeared from a book, not even a bloody advertisement page! A snow-white, completely blank page.’

  ‘Isn’t it perhaps possible that you want to punish him in some other way now?’ Rhonda asked carefully. ‘Now that you don’t want to hit him any more?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Griet asked, just as carefully.

  ‘Didn’t you think about him the night you put your head into the oven?’

  ‘I knew you’d ask that,’ said Griet slowly.

  Grandpa Big Petrus, who’d been punished with the Hand of Death, often spoke to the angels. That was long before there was a hole in heaven, but he had his own methods of making contact with celestial beings. He’d simply take a long walk in the veld, look up into the cloudless sky of his beloved Karoo, and hear the fluttering of angels’ wings.

  He agreed with them that he lived in an extraordinary country. Especially after he’d lost his farm during the depression years and had to live as a poor relation on his nephew’s farm. People said he never got over the humiliation, it had affected his mind, he’d started hearing voices.

  But little Griet knew that since childhood he’d talked to the angels like other children play with fairies and gnomes. He told her himself, when she was still very young and he was already very old, one day while she was listening to the fluttering of wings with him.

  ‘He was a good man,’ Grandma Hannie said after his death, ‘but he was too proud to be a poor relation. That’s why he was punished with The Hand.’

  Grandma Hannie always spoke with great awe of The Hand.

  ‘He was meek and mild,’ Grandma Hannie always said. ‘He only got angry once in his life. Then he struck a man stone dead. He didn’t know his own strength. The magistrate said he’d been punished with The Hand of Death and he might never again strike anyone, not even his own children.’

  Grandpa Big Petrus was a giant of a man – so big that Grandma Hannie had to make all his clothes for him. He had feet like mountains and hands like hills. Little Griet couldn’t keep her eyes off his hands, especially not that deadly one that had sent a man straight to his grave with one blow. The Hand was as brown as the earth and baked rock hard by a merciless sun, cracked like an empty dam in a drought.

  Grandma Hannie was a tall, sinewy woman with long sinewy hands, but when she knelt beside Grandpa Big Petrus, he folded both her hands in one of his. Grandma Hannie’s hands were covered with blotches and blue veins that always made little Griet think of villa
ges and rivers on a geography map. But Grandma Hannie’s fingers were light as feathers when she dried Griet’s hair.

  ‘My prettiest sister died of wet hair,’ Grandma Hannie always told her. ‘She had curly golden hair like yours, only much longer, almost down to her knees. She washed her hair every day, and sat brushing it in the sun for hours. Like a mermaid, the people always said. One evening she got caught in the rain and she went to bed with damp hair. The next morning she was lying in bed with her hair wound round her body like a golden cloak. Stone dead.’

  Grandma Hannie was the youngest of sixteen children who had all come to bizarre ends.

  One brother broke his neck when his horse shied at a ghost one night. It must have been a ghost, people said, because he was the best rider in the district. He wouldn’t have fallen off his horse, even if he’d been drunk.

  It was the ghost of the sister with the wet hair, the family whispered. She was taking revenge because he’d snipped off a tress of her hair after her death. He’d apparently wanted to give his daughter a doll with real hair.

  Another brother had married seven wives – sometimes more than one at a time, went the gossip – and suffered a heart attack on his seventh wedding night. The bride was a good forty years his junior, and six months later she gave birth to a child who inherited all his money and, according to the chagrined family, didn’t look like him at all.

  But the strangest death of all came to the brother in the tower. He’d ended up the richest of all – because he was the stingiest, Grandma Hannie always said, but money couldn’t buy him happiness, she never failed to add. Never a very cheerful soul, in old age he gave himself over to gloom completely and built a tower that soared up to heaven on one of his farms. He sat in it all day scanning the horizon, on the lookout for the Communists or Judgement Day, whichever came first. One day he heard the roaring of lions and the trumpeting of elephants and decided Judgement Day had dawned. The Communists wouldn’t bring elephants along, he reckoned. He hurried down but, in his haste, he tripped on the tower stairs and broke his neck.

  The elephants and lions belonged to the first circus that had ever toured the district.

  Griet thought about her family, that night she wanted to get into the oven, and wondered whether committing suicide like this wasn’t awfully unoriginal.

  ‘I probably thought about George too. But I was fed up with always considering other people, what they’d say, how they’d feel. For once in my life I wanted to think of no one but myself.’

  ‘But you couldn’t do it,’ said Rhonda carefully. ‘You couldn’t do it because you were still thinking about other people.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it because a cockroach gave me a fright.’

  ‘I know it’s going to sound strange to you,’ said Rhonda, writing something in the file on her lap, ‘but the fact that you considered suicide, considered it seriously, but didn’t go through with it … indicates a degree of progress.’

  ‘Progress?’

  ‘Up until now you have simply hidden behind anger, Griet. You’ve refused to accept any responsibility for anything that happened. Now you’re beginning to face reality. That’s the most difficult part. It’s understandable that you would sometimes think about suicide.’

  But I think about suicide all the time, she wanted to argue. I think obsessively about suicide and cancer and starving children and about what the hell is going to become of this country if heaven doesn’t help us. I have anxiety attacks about death and the possibility of getting Aids – maybe I already have Aids! – and that I could be raped or necklaced by a furious black mob, and then I think what the hell, if I do it myself at least I can choose the way I go. What’s finished is finished, Grandma Lina always said.

  But suddenly she felt too tired to argue with her therapist.

  ‘Can you remember how you felt that day? Did something happen, no matter how slight, something that could have been the last straw?’

  She hated it when her shrink sounded like an article in Cosmopolitan.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered crossly. ‘My spectacles fell off.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The day I put my head in the oven.’

  A slight disturbance swept across the blue pools, a ripple stirred the water, and Griet smiled.

  ‘As soon as you stop waiting for him and focus attention on yourself, life will improve no end’, she’d read half an hour earlier in Rhonda’s waiting room. ‘Show me a fairy tale with a beautiful woman in it and I’ll show you a bimbo in limbo waiting to be released by the love of a good man.’ She’d snapped the magazine shut in irritation and lit a cigarette.

  She craved a cigarette now, but she’d forbidden herself to smoke in Rhonda’s consulting room. A person had to have some self-discipline.

  ‘It was as though l had always looked at life through the proverbial rose-coloured glasses – such a wonderful hazy world – and then the glasses suddenly fell off. And then, for the first time, I saw myself as I am. Not as I’d like to be. It was a hell of a shock.’

  ‘Help Me, Rhonda’, the Beach Boys sang, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’. It was a tune that often ran through Griet’s mind when she looked at the Mickey Mouse clock. Her hour was nearly over.

  ‘It finally got through to me that maybe I’d never have a child, never write a great novel, never even have a successful relationship with a man. I’d never felt so fucking useless before.’

  ‘You spent nearly seven years with a man,’ said Rhonda comfortingly from her red sofa. ‘You were married for three years. You can’t make out now that everything was one big disaster.’

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Griet, ‘but that’s how I feel. It’s like a movie with a bad ending. You remember the end, no matter how good the rest was.’

  ‘It was not clear why the ice was green.’ That was the last sentence of the report she’d read that morning, the sentence that had given her hope again. At least there were still some things that even her husband and her shrink couldn’t explain.

  5

  And Why Are Your Eyes So Big, Child?

  There were days like today, when Griet felt as though she was trapped in the middle of a massive children’s party. Every woman in the supermarket had a child hanging on to her hand or packed into her trolley among the groceries. As though you could buy a child off the shelf like a life-sized gingerbread man.

  And as if the epidemic of children weren’t enough, every shelf in the supermarket mocked her failure as a woman. Baby bottles and disposable nappies and Purity food in various colours and flavours. Toddlers’ toys and pet food, colouring books and fat crayons, peanut butter and golden syrup. Everything made her think of children.

  On days like this she envied the biblical Sarah. Or Lorca’s Yerma. They’d at least escaped the humiliation of the modern supermarket.

  Purposefully, she walked past the rows of medicine, past Kiss-it-better-with-Band-Aid and Doctor-it-with-Dettol, heading for the boring washing powder aisle. She felt like Little Red Riding Hood – in a red T-shirt with an orange plastic basket – who had to resist the temptations of the forest. Her only comfort was that she didn’t have to push a heavy trolley around since she no longer shopped for her husband and his children.

  It was impossible to explain how everything inside her contracted every time she thought about the children she’d lost. Four of them: three from her husband and, long before she met him, the first one, which she’d chosen to get rid of. And now the two stepsons too. Half a dozen children, four from her own body and two from her heart, all lost to her.

  She couldn’t even discuss it with her shrink.

  She chose the cheapest washing powder because the advertisements all sounded the same to her. Idiotic women who took greater pleasure in clean washing than in sex.

  Can you see the difference?

  She wasn’t sorry about the abortion, she’d decided again and again. She hadn’t thought of the foetus as a person. She hadn’t given it a name.

  But she wondered, sinc
e she’d lost the others. She wondered whether she was being punished because she hadn’t wanted that one. And she was angry with herself because she couldn’t shake off the fetters of Calvinism.

  Good Lord, she’d been twenty years old, what could she have done? Her poor partner in crime had been barely a year older – the first man she’d ever slept with, fancy that! A sunburnt blond boy on a surfboard. It was a catastrophe that would ruin her promising student years, her brilliant career, her whole golden future.

  She’d never told him she was pregnant. She still saw him around town sometimes – a successful businessman in a silver-blue BMW, married with two children – and wondered what he’d have done if he’d known. She wondered how many men all over the world would never know that their lovers had had abortions.

  It was difficult enough to share birth with a man, to make him understand how it felt to be ripped open in such a primitive way. It was almost impossible to share the experience of an abortion with a man.

  Take Louise, for example. Her lover had dropped her in a back street in Woodstock, pressed a blank cheque into her hand and wished her good luck. He only pitched up at her flat again three days later. Griet’s sister Petra was another case in point. Her lover had driven to Lesotho with her and stayed in a hotel with her until she stopped bleeding, but their relationship was over within a month. You just can’t win, Petra had wept. There was no such thing as a successful abortion. Something always had to be sacrificed.

  Griet walked past the pet products and looked away quickly when a picture on a tin of dog food caught her eye. Beware of the wolf, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother had warned her, keep an eye open for anything that looks like a wolf. Griet had wanted a dog very badly – something to cherish in place of a child – but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. Beware of men who don’t like dogs, her mother had warned her.

  Of course she believed in a god, she had argued with her cynical husband. You can’t believe in witches and angels unless you also believe in a god. But her god was a god of love, not a wicked wizard who punished you because you’d had an illegal abortion as a twenty-year-old student. Her husband believed in nothing; not in wizards, not in gods, not even in himself.