Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  She left the church after everyone else, thankful and relieved that the dress was still unstained.

  That night she felt that her life was over, as though she’d been buried along with her grandfather. She was still thirteen, just like yesterday, but suddenly she had to behave like a grown-up. Tomorrow she’d have to sit with the women in the kitchen, sweating under the strips of yellow fly-paper that dangled from the ceiling, while the other children squealed in the farm dam.

  She tossed and turned and was roused from her uneasy sleep in the early morning by the saddest sound she’d ever heard. Grandma Hannie was singing a hymn, her reedy voice quite out of tune without her husband’s lead, but determined to soldier on alone. ‘On mountains and vales, the Lord is o’er all …’ Somewhere, Griet thought, Grandpa Big Petrus was smiling satisfiedly. And it was only then she could weep for his death for the first time.

  Griet looked longingly at the double bed, the heart of the house, the hub that her life had turned on for seven years. She and her husband had never sung in their bedroom. She’d inherited her grandmother’s tuneless voice and her husband preferred philosophising to singing. He believed it was only emotional Italians and sentimental Germans who liked to sing.

  Griet yanked the wardrobe open, suddenly in a hurry, and threw a bunch of hangers on to the bed. She had to get out of this house as quickly as possible and never come back. It was like Pandora’s box, the memories that crept out all over from the moment she’d unlocked the front door. It was worse than Pandora’s box. Pandora had at least kept hope.

  7

  The Grandmother Who Was Afraid of Everything

  Grandpa Kerneels grew up near the sea. You could hear the sound of waves in his blood, Grandma Lina always complained, when he lay sleeping at night. For Grandma Lina, who was terrified of water, it must have been torture to spend every night beside a man who sounded like a giant seashell.

  If the Good Lord had meant us to swim, Grandma Lina often said, He would have given us fins. Grandma Lina cited the will of the Good Lord for everything she didn’t want to do. If He had meant us to fly, He would have given us wings. if He had meant us to be educated, He would have given us bigger heads. If He’d meant us to go and live on the moon … and so on.

  Six weeks without a man, Griet wanted to write this morning in the book she’d bought on the way to her office. But the book was so pristine, with its gentian-blue cover and pages like starched collars and a quotation from a famous woman on every page, that she couldn’t desecrate it with such a predictable first sentence. The paper looked as though it’d been handmade, the sort that had you wishing you could immortalise your thoughts in calligraphy. ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are’, stood above Anaïs Nin’s name on the first page. ‘I was always a sucker for a beautiful book,’ Griet wrote under these wise words, ‘even more than for a clever man.’ Nearly as bad, she realised too late, as ‘Six weeks without a man’.

  Then she turned the page and started to write about her grandparents. She’d actually bought the book to write about her relationship, as her therapist had advised her to do, but her story simply chose its own course like a horse that refused to obey its rider. All she could do now was to close her eyes tightly, hang on for dear life and hope that she wasn’t thrown off like Grandma Hannie’s poor brother.

  Pegasus could obviously get by without a muse, but what happened to a muse if she was thrown off by Pegasus? A horse didn’t need a saddle and bridle, but a story needed a beginning and spelling rules and punctuation and an ending. If I can’t even control a little filly of a fairy tale, Griet asked herself in a panic, how am I ever going to tackle a full-blooded novel?

  Grandma Lina wasn’t only afraid of water, but also of lightning and germs and illnesses, and the dark and death, in roughly inverse order of importance. If she heard the rumble of thunder – fortunately a rare occurrence as she spent her entire life in the Cape Colony – she covered all the shiny things in her house. It was a formidable task because everything in her house shone. Even the floors gleamed like mirrors. But she got to work with gusto.

  She drew the curtains and threw sheets over the mirrors and even hid the bathroom taps under facecloths. And while the lightning played eerily round the house, she inspected the kitchen like a drill sergeant to make sure that no spoon nor fork ventured forth from a drawer to attract the destructive impulses of a bolt of lightning. While this was going on, Grandpa Kerneels would be out in the garden admiring the spectacle, a sublime son et lumière offered free to earthlings.

  Grandma Lina’s battle against darkness and death began all over again every evening immediately after sunset. Each night she left a light burning somewhere in the house, but never the same light two nights in succession. She believed the globes would last longer if they each had a turn to rest regularly. She closed all the windows and locked all the doors and ensured that her whole house was spotlessly clean. There was always the possibility that she’d lose the battle, that she’d die during the night, and her soul would never rest at peace if someone could say she’d been a slovenly housewife. She washed her feet one last time and pulled on a pressed nightdress and lay down on her back with her hands folded on her breast – the only position in which she was prepared to die – and then tried vainly to fall asleep.

  And the following morning, like every other morning, she was amazed to find herself alive.

  ‘I’ve lost control,’ Griet had admitted the day before in her therapist’s consulting room. ‘I can’t even write about what I want to.’

  ‘No, you have the reins firmly in your own hands.’ Rhonda’s Rolex flashed gold as she made a subtle inscription on her lap. ‘You are writing about what you want to, even though you don’t realise it. Remember we’re dealing with the subconscious here.’

  ‘No, it isn’t …’ Strange that Rhonda also used a riding term, she thought. ‘Why would I want to write about my grandparents?’

  ‘Because you don’t want to write about your relationship. Because you still refuse to accept that it went wrong.’ Rhonda was wearing long white linen trousers again, with a powder-blue button-through shirt, as cool as an umbrella on a hot beach. ‘And that you also had a part in the break-up.’

  ‘But what has a fairy tale about my family got to do with my relationship?’ Griet snapped.

  ‘It helps you to understand yourself,’ Rhonda answered calmly, as though she hadn’t picked up the irritation in Griet’s voice. ‘Like any proper fairy tale.’

  ‘What do you do if you feel off balance?’

  ‘I go and talk to a therapist.’

  Grandma Lina was actually the sort of woman who should only exist in washing-powder advertisements, Griet wrote in her new notebook. To have the whitest sheets in the street was a matter of life and death to her. Life is not too short to soak your table napkins in Jik, Grandma Lina believed – every single day.

  Sometimes she woke in a fright in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, because she’d dreamt of a dirty mark on the kitchen floor or a film of dust on the top shelf of the wardrobe. She couldn’t get back to sleep before she’d been down on her hands and knees to check the floor or up on a chair to inspect the wardrobe. Sometimes the insomnia was so bad that she spent the whole night ironing.

  She lived in a simple suburban house, exactly the same as all the other houses in the street, but for Grandma Lina it was a palace. Her husband was the king and she was the queen, germs and dust her lifelong enemies, and the broom and scrubbing brush her loyal subjects. There was a small garden with a birdbath in the middle of a small fishpond (an out-of-character concession to the king who loved water) and geraniums and dahlias beside a concrete path. There was a drawing room with a very upright piano and a Tretchikoff on the wall (the orchid on the steps) and a display cabinet full of ashtrays with place names on them. There was a bedroom that smelt of mothballs and a toilet with green tiles that smelt of disinfectant and a kitchen that smelt of chocolate cake and red jell
y.

  Outside the kitchen was a polished stoep with a wooden bench and a backyard with a fowl-run and a giant fig tree. Grandma Lina could stare at that fig tree for hours while she stood before the window washing up, or sat at the table polishing her knives. Her gaze was always fixed on the lowest branches.

  Grandma Lina had a thing about that fig tree. Little Griet could have sworn that one afternoon she had seen her grandmother up among the leaves. Many years on she was still wondering whether it could have been merely a trick of her imagination, until Grandpa Kerneels made a remark one day about grown-ups who climbed trees. Grandma Lina glared at him and hurried out of the room.

  Then Griet knew that her eyes hadn’t deceived her. Her worthy grandmother was a secret tree-climber. You’d never guess it, of course, if you saw her in that serviceable day dress and worn shoes, with her dark hair always neatly plaited and twisted tightly against her head in a bun.

  Griet could only begin to understand years later. In the fairy tale about the king’s son who was afraid of nothing, there was an apple tree – what else? – that the hero had to climb to pick an apple. As soon as he’d done this, he could do anything.

  Climbing trees was Grandma Lina’s only defiance of fear. From early childhood, she’d always preferred to hide in a tree than play with the other children. A lovely girl with dark hair and dark eyes, she was shy and nervous and obsessional. Too dark to be completely white, some people said, but in those days it wasn’t such a scandal as it would be after 1948. School was a nightmare for her. If a teacher asked her a question, she stuttered and stammered and sometimes even dissolved into tears. When an inspector visited the class, she began to tremble so badly that two children had to hold her desk steady. When she was in Standard Eight her father decided she was too sensitive for further study. And, anyway, the local pharmacist wanted her to come and work for him.

  The pharmacist was a middle-aged widower with an eye for a pretty girl, and her father knew only too well that his dark daughter was one of the prettiest in the whole district. What the pharmacist did to her, Grandma Lina would never say, but she never forgave her father. Like a prince on a white horse, a man as blond as Grandma Lina was dark, Grandpa Kerneels arrived in the nick of time to save her from marriage to the middle-aged widower. They were wed within a month – the handsomest couple ever seen in the town – and they went to live in the city where Grandpa Kerneels could smell the sea.

  Three nights before Grandma Lina died, she woke in a fright and sat bolt upright, but not because she’d been dreaming of germs. She’d heard someone knocking on the back door. Although she was normally too nervous to open the front door to anyone even in broad daylight, she didn’t shake Grandpa Kerneels awake that night. She got up quietly, tiptoed to the kitchen and opened the back door.

  Who or what she expected, her descendants would never know. The backyard was enclosed by a high wall topped with spikes of broken glass and rolls of barbed wire. It was impossible for any mortal to get to the back door from outside.

  But Grandma Lina had got up as though it were the most natural thing in the world that someone should come and knock on the back door in the middle of the night and she should get up and open it. When she found no one there, she went back to bed. Grandpa Kerneels woke up when she came back.

  ‘I heard someone knocking on the back door,’ Grandma Lina told him matter-of-factly, ‘but there was no one there.’

  Grandpa Kerneels immediately suspected foul play and didn’t close an eye the rest of the night.

  The same thing happened the next night. This time Grandpa Kerneels woke up when she got out of bed. She’d heard the knock again, she said quite calmly, except that it sounded more as though someone was hammering on the door now. Once again Grandpa Kerneels had heard nothing, but he went with her to the kitchen to see what was going on. Once again there was no one. Grandpa Kerneels inspected the backyard for an intruder, letting the beam of his torch play over the fig tree and every possible and impossible hiding place.

  The funny thing was, he said later, Grandma Lina had dropped off to sleep again immediately while he, normally a sound sleeper, lay awake for the second night in succession.

  The third night, when Grandma Lina sat up suddenly, he knew she’d heard the knock again.

  ‘It sounded as though someone was trying to break the door down,’ she said, still not looking the least bit worried or frightened.

  ‘It was only a dream, dear,’ he tried to comfort her. ‘I didn’t hear a sound.’

  But off she went by herself to open the back door, as though she’d never been afraid of anything. When she wasn’t back after ten minutes, Grandpa Kerneels went to look for her.

  She was lying under the fig tree on her stomach, spreadeagled. The last position in which she’d have died if she’d had a choice. A heart attack, Grandpa Kerneels said, or a stroke.

  But no one else in the family ever saw the corpse. Griet always suspected that Grandma Lina had fallen out of the fig tree, and that Grandpa Kerneels had decided to bury her secret with her. She would have preferred it that way. To fall out of a tree in the middle of the night would simply seem too undignified in a death notice or on a gravestone.

  ‘It just goes to show,’ Grandpa Kerneels was still saying years later. ‘She didn’t believe in ghosts and omens and things like that. She said only a fisherman could be so superstitious.’

  8

  Sleeping Beauty Fights Insomnia

  Sex is definitely a problem, Griet decided. And masturbation isn’t a solution. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action’, Shakespeare wrote four centuries ago. A waste of shame, and Shakespeare wasn’t even a Calvinist.

  She lay sweating in the darkness, the sheet clinging to her naked body. These days she was wearing a nightie again – pale blue with a frill round the neck, bought while she was pregnant, chaste as when she was a child. But tonight was one of those humid summer nights, almost subtropical, when you knew that you were living in Africa. Where for centuries people hadn’t been too bothered about clothes.

  And because she was naked tonight, she thought about sex. Calvin’s bequest to her people hadn’t made things easier. Was it coincidence that lus, the Afrikaans word for lust, could also be translated as a noose? Give them enough lust and they’ll hang themselves?

  She’d pulled up the blue blind at the window, hoping that sometime tonight a breeze would play over her skin. Like a man’s hands, she thought longingly, fingers caressing her hips and thighs, making music with her body. She touched herself, stroking her stomach, tangling her fingers in her pubic hair, feeling the gooseflesh break out. But it wasn’t the same. It would never be the same.

  The moonlight shining through the open window made the room look otherworldly. Moonlight is supposed to be silver, but that’s just another modern myth. If you’re tossing and turning, burning in frustration without even the smell of a man, moonlight is grey – blue-grey, lilac-grey in some patches.

  Masturbation was still a taboo subject, Griet told herself as she contemplated her body in the moonlight. Even among her friends who had no scruples about discussing sex. If they talked about the Lonely Deed, they retreated into the past tense – as though it were the preserve of schoolchildren, like smoking on the sly – or behind cynicism and mockery. A woman needs a man because a vibrator can’t push a lawnmower, ha ha ha.

  Was it because you did it on your own that there was so much shame attached to it? There weren’t many swear words left for the last decade of the twentieth century, but ‘alone’ had to be one of them. ‘Alone’ and ‘Aids’, Griet had realised since she’d been trying to live without a man. To be single was to be a misfit among all the couples around you. It was nothing short of perverse.

  She let her hands slide down to her groin, allowed her fingers to stroke the secret skin on the inside of her thighs. The softest, shyest, sweetest skin on a woman’s body, George always said. From here it was only a tongue’s length to the heavenly ho
rs d’oeuvre, the angel on horseback, the muse on Pegasus.

  Her male friends all acknowledged that they’d masturbated at school. In every thinkable and unthinkable place: in biology classrooms, in cinemas, even in team competitions in hostel bathrooms. While the girls sitting near them in those biology classrooms and cinemas – the poor respectable girls like Griet – didn’t have the faintest notion that wanking was by far and away the most popular sport among their male classmates.

  It was something that she often envied men, the easier relationship they had from early on with their sexual organs. Masturbation could at least familiarise you with the map of your own body before you risked the frightening, uncharted territory of the opposite sex. But for Griet and all her respectable sisters sex was a double-track road from which you strayed more or less accidentally on to the single track of masturbation, not the other way round.

  Griet was an adult woman before she first ventured to that mysterious region ‘down under’ by herself. It shows you what becomes of respectable girls, she thought later. It takes an awfully long time before they learn to fly on their own.

  Griet was prim and proper at school, hardly aware of her private parts except for the three days of the month when she was fed up because she couldn’t swim with the boys. When the penny finally dropped and she became aware of the powerful attraction this Forbidden Territory held for the opposite sex, she guarded it with the vigilance of a crack commando. These days she wondered whether it had all been worth the trouble, all those years of desperate defensive tactics, in dark cars and on uncomfortable sofas, to keep that virgin membrane inviolate – only to give it over to the enemy of her own free will in the end.

  Like South Africa’s vain attempt to hold on to Namibia. Or the Soviet Union trying to separate people with a wall. Nowadays Griet accepted that you can’t cordon off a geographical area in an artificial way, not even your own body.