Sex and Stravinsky

by Barbara Trapido

  Josh was born in the early 1950s in what was then the Transvaal, a few miles east of Johannesburg. He was the child of a woman who, within three years, had become a half-mad, shoeless creature; a woman who had stopped speaking; a woman to whom Josh, in infancy, knew better than to try and cling. Instead, he was routinely tied to the back of little Dora, the teenage housemaid. By the time of his birth, Josh’s mother was already no longer recognisable as the person she so recently had been; a bourgeois Lebanese convent orphan with a nice little nest egg and a trousseau filled with the best French linen and handmade family lace. Not that Lilette Habibi had ever seen her own money, or handled statements pertaining to its extent, given the cloistered life she’d lived. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father, expecting a son and thrown into confusion by his pretty young wife’s death, gave her over to the care of a nursemaid and then, at six, to the nuns of a teaching order in his native Beirut. Since he travelled a lot on business and had no other children, his daughter spent her holidays at the convent and when he, too, died young – just before her fifteenth birthday – la petite chère Lilette simply stayed on at the convent as a cherished and useful, if ambiguous, young spinster; an accomplished young woman with a trousseau and a way with the younger girls.

  Lilette, for the time being, was not a novice, for reasons to do with the trousseau, which existed as evidence of her late father’s wish that she should one day marry, but such a significant decision was simply, indefinitely deferred. Meanwhile, the girl always rose at five for the convent’s ritual devotions and she was never without her rosary. Lilette would probably have entered the order, given a little more time. That is, had she not, all unbeknown to her, been possessed of a certain paternal male cousin, whose parents, twenty years earlier, had made the journey south from Lebanon to Johannesburg.

  The cousin was an unmarried chancer, a wide boy, who one evening met his like in the bar of the Royal Hotel in Boksburg. His companion, a hang-loose drifter, born to immigrant Greek corner-shopkeepers, was likewise a disappointment to his parents from whom he was now estranged. Both sets of parents had once cherished hopes of pushing their sons into one of the professions; upward and onward in a strange new country where the streets were paved with gold. Both men did indeed harbour dreams of rising, but without the effort of passing professional exams. They dreamed of making it from small-time fiddle to big-time money bags. They dreamed of ways to generate surplus income without bestirring themselves in any area beyond their common inclination to cheat. In this, the convent orphan’s cousin was already a step ahead, since he had moved up from running an eating house for poor black migrant workers, where – by serving up a regular slop of watery stews made from illegally sourced and flyblown meat – he had accumulated the means to run a bed-bug boarding house for the humbler white commercial traveller.

  The Greek had not accomplished much, other than to buy and sell knock-off goods acquired from crooked railway employees and then to blow the surplus in a range of brothels and bars. Grown mellow now on cheap Cape brandy, the cousin got a feel-good charge in a moment of inspiration. It came to him that he could play benefactor to his companion by turning marriage broker, and could thereby enrich them both. At fifty-fifty on the convent girl’s inheritance, he could be doing both himself and his new friend a good turn – and the convent-girl cousin as well, of course, because what sort of a babe would want to spend her life with a bunch of old maids dressed up like penguins?

  ‘Have I got a cousin for you!’ he said, of the relation he had never met, though, via his parents’ photograph album, he had seen an old picture of the convent girl’s deceased but beautiful mother. ‘Rich and beautiful, man!’ he said. ‘She’s a convent girl. You know what I’m saying? Innocent, hey? Pure. Not like some of these dollies nowadays.’

  The Greek was nodding sagely. Having some years back tried, without success, to get himself a niche in the girl-running trade, he had found the space already taken by immigrant Romanians and Poles.

  ‘Bleddy Yids,’ he said wistfully and half to himself, but he nonetheless had some experience of girls, through his role as paying client. He was partial to dainty blonde prostitutes, though he was fussy about their personal hygiene. Being on the short side, he went for ‘petite’. He liked a well-scrubbed, smiley, blue-eyed girl, pink as a newborn piglet. And naked, of course, except for some classy bits and pieces. Tassels, maybe. And a G-string. And pointy high-heeled shoes. He liked the titillating rituals of subservience, especially all the cute doggy stuff.

  There was a girl whom he especially liked to visit, who played poodle-doggy for him. She’d wear a little diamanté collar and offer him her lead between her teeth. The Greek appreciated refinements. He liked to pour Babycham into a dog bowl and push doggy choc-drops into her mouth. Good Girl treats, because he knew how much a real lady loved to eat chocolates. The convent girl would be dark-haired, of course, but good-looking like her mother. He could always get her hair bleached, couldn’t he? And the money’d got to be good.

  ‘Just so long as she hasn’t got a moustache, hey?’ he said, and both of them had a laugh.

  Negotiations over the convent girl were duly put into motion, though the business took quite a time; a whole lot of stupid foreign palaver before the bar-room friends could get their hands on some of the money. There were documents to be signed; telegrams to fly back and forth – telegrams which were frequently unintelligible. The dowry had to be established and arrangements made for sums to be transferred, in cautious chunks, via the cousin’s bank account. Proxy nuptials needed to be simultaneously enacted in the presence of respective Catholic priests.

  Then, with the help of the devoted sisterhood, la petite chère Lilette finally packed her things into a large wooden trunk – the bedlinen and handmade lace, the crêpe de Chine knickers and nighties – and she departed to meet her Prince Charming. She packed the little boxes containing her family jewels and, though she’d worn it already for the proxy wedding, her mother’s veil and somewhat mortifyingly amended full-length dress with all those extra satin panels let into the sides, because Lilette was a very different shape to that of her small-boned mother. She also packed the bridal calfskin gloves, although her hands were much too big for them.

  She washed and combed her long black hair and began that night-and-day, day-and-night, interminable sea journey from Beirut to Port Said and then on down, down, all down the Red Sea, between Egypt and Arabia, to Djibouti and the Horn of Africa, past Somalia, to Mombasa. Then on, again, to Dar es Salaam, where she could see the dhows in the harbour and she smelled the cloves of Zanzibar, and on, through the Mozambique Channel, to Beira; landscapes, seascapes, mingling with glimpses of tall, dark people and the sounds of unfamiliar languages floating up from quaysides. Finally, it was into Durban harbour, where she disembarked and was conveyed, by rickshaw, to the northbound train for Johannesburg; on and on, until there, at last, on the station platform, her unknown husband and her unknown cousin were waiting.

  But the husband was not best pleased. His wife, he observed, was anything but dainty, since the convent girl was on the solid side, with broad shoulders and heavy breasts. Her hips were wide, she had an hour-glass figure, not right then showing to great advantage in her long, loose travelling clothes, and her shoes were unambiguously flat. The fact that her garments didn’t conform to current female fashion trends gave the husband especial and immoderate cause for indignation. No swingy skirt! No stilettos! Evidently no tweezers in her toilet bag, since her eyebrows were unplucked! And, after the sweaty heat of Durban, followed by those stuffy hours on the train, the convent girl was not quite exuding an odour of scented soap and lavender.

  ‘Jeez, but you lied to me,’ he said, turning to the cousin with feeling. ‘Shit man, but she’s ugly like a baboon. And her bum’s too big. Just take a look. Boesman bum, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Ach, it’s just from all the travelling, my friend,’ said his drinking companion. ‘Keep your hair on, OK? Use your imagi
nation. She’ll tidy up really nice, all right?’

  ‘Well, I won’t take her,’ said the husband. ‘Not for fifty-fifty. I’ll only do seventy-five. Anything less and she’s taking her big fat Boesman bum straight back to where she’s come from. Understand? Jeez man, but she even looks like a chut. She could be a half-caste for all I know.’

  ‘You saying my family’s got chuts?’ said the cousin. ‘Lebanese is white people, hey? Just like Greeks, if you don’t mind.’

  All the while the convent girl was standing stock still and uncomprehending on the platform, with her trunk beside her on the ground. Her eyes were modestly cast down, as she stared at the little vanity case she was holding in her hands.

  ‘OK. Sixty-forty,’ the cousin said, after a pause. ‘It’s a deal.’

  ‘Sixty-five,’ said the husband.

  The cousin shrugged. Then he laughed.

  ‘Spit and shake on it,’ he said.

  Though the marriage had already taken place, the nuns had pressed for an on-site blessing, in a local Catholic Church. There was nobody present, next morning, at the sorry little ceremony; just the priest, the cousin and the bridal couple. But the bride, once again, wore her mother’s wedding dress, with its quantities of tailored satin. She also wore the veil.

  ‘Jeez, but she’s a sight for sore eyes,’ the husband said, jittery and discontented, in his drainpipe trousers and bootlace tie. ‘Even with her face covered up like that. She looks like she’s wearing about a million doilies.’

  ‘Ach, belt up, you’re in church,’ hissed the cousin. ‘Anyway, you’ve got her money, haven’t you?’

  ‘Ya, but why she’s got so much clothes on, hey?’ the husband persisted. ‘Is she mad or something? She looks like Mother Monkey stole the net curtains. It’s like she’s wearing all of Ackerman’s haberdashery.’

  Both men were suddenly trying to smother laughter.

  ‘Slim her down and shut it with all the moaning,’ said the cousin. ‘You can get her some different clothes. Nice dresses, hey? Sexy colours. Cerise and that. Mauve.’

  ‘And how come she no-speaks?’ said the husband.

  ‘She can’t speak English,’ said the cousin, who, having accommodated his relation overnight in one of the bedrooms of his boarding house, had himself been flummoxed by his own almost total lack of French. ‘She speaks foreign, that’s all, but she’ll soon pick it up,’ he said. ‘Anyway, no-speaks means there’s going to be no nagging, hey? No yackety-yack.’

  But the Greek was fond of chit-chat in a girl.

  ‘So what kind of foreign does she speak?’ he said. ‘Shit, I reckon she’s a retard.’

  And then the bride and groom were on their own. For all his womanising habits, the husband was not one to be easily aroused, except by daintiness and dog leads, but that night, after he had got himself boozed up, the marriage was sort of consummated in a room in the cousin’s hotel, on a creaking bed under a fly-spotted ceiling, with fly papers hanging from the lampshade. After that, the husband, having left the bed, repaired to the nearby men-only bar of the aforementioned Royal Hotel, where, with his new-found wealth, he treated a miscellany of hard-luck victims and exhausted travelling salesmen.

  ‘It’s on me,’ he said. ‘Head in the noose and all that, hey? Let’s drink to it.’ Which they did.

  They drank and played cards until the husband’s pockets were empty. But it was nice to know that there would always be more of it. Always. Even if you’d had to go and get yourself married to the Missing Link.

  With his wife’s money, the husband bought a nice suburban house in mock-Tudor style, complete with mock-Tudor double garage, because he really liked cars. He filled the house with new high-street furniture. Lounge suite, dining-room suite, bedroom suite, glass display cabinet with mahogany claw-and-ball feet. (‘Clawed balls’, as he said, being a wag.) Candlewick bedspread on the marriage bed in swags of pink and green. Dressing table (kidney-shaped) with monster pink powder puff in its own glass bowl. Pink mother-of-pearl vanity set. The lav boasted a crinoline lady to cover the toilet brush, with her dress made all of mauve ribbons, and there were mauve hand towels to match. The garage had got the new MG and the new pink Chevrolet – ‘nipple pink’, like the dealer called it. Sexy, or what?

  Soon he’d had a pool dug in the garden, with a niche at one end that had a naked-lady statue. ‘Ach sies,’ he liked to joke to his mates, ‘her drapes is just falling off her pussy, hey? But it’s all right because it’s art.’

  The husband, in addition to Dora the maid, had hired a garden ‘boy’ and a pool ‘boy’, though he himself couldn’t swim and his wife, who had never really looked at her own body, not even in the bath, had a vague idea that the pool was intended for fish. They were fish that never materialised. Meanwhile, the husband’s pride in his house did not extend to the mouldy-oldie contents of his wife’s heirloom trunk and, since he liked to smoke in bed, he’d soon burnt holes in the French linen sheets and in the hand-worked lace cloths with which the convent girl had presumed to cover the bedside tables and the chests.

  Most nights he abandoned the marriage bed in order to visit his dainty blondes and, sometimes, at two in the morning, he brought the women home; diminutive, giggling peroxide creatures in laddered stockings, suspenders showing through their flimsy skirts, their feet in tottering glass slippers. The convent girl could hear him cavorting in the adjoining room. That was until she was banished there herself, so that the husband could take sole possession of the master bedroom.

  Sex and the convent girl had not got on – not since her first baffled attempts to understand her husband’s particular niche-requirements. And his attempts to demonstrate his canine role-play proclivities had had a counterproductive effect, leaving her resolutely vertical and rigid with panic, flattened up against the wardrobe door. Having fled his clutches, she stood breathing too fast, uttering little cries of terror – a reaction which had a detumescent effect on the husband, though it did arouse his anger. He aimed the odd savage kick at her, and, twice thereafter, blacked her eye. By the fourth week of marriage, he had slammed her jaw into a door frame, which caused her face to lose its symmetry, along with two left-upper teeth. After that, he left her alone. Even so, by the end of the first month of her marriage, the Greek had somehow managed to get the convent girl with child.

  Since the husband had never been out with his wife, had never taken her to the cinema, or for a stroll in the park, or even to the greengrocer; and since, in all her past cloistered life, she had never had cause to get the shopping habit, the convent girl, traumatised by brutality and strangeness; silenced by the total absence of French or Arabic speakers, confined within the walls of her baffling mock-Tudor house, had, within the year, become an agoraphobic, non-speaking person, completely dependent on Dora the teenage housemaid – and on the husband, who would appear sporadically, bearing the wherewithal to cook. He arrived occasionally with lumps of brisket and dubious bulk-buy sacks of unrecognisable vegetables, which liquefied in the dark of the larder floor. And, since there were no visits to the doctor, no antenatal consultations, she also found herself dependent on little Dora when she went into labour with Josh.

  Meanwhile, the absentee husband was having fun with her money. He began to play the stock market and enjoyed shifting money around, usually at injudicious moments. He liked proposing joint ventures in this and that; all of them ill-fated alliances which he made with the sort of human flotsam to whom he was naturally drawn. He tried a high-interest loan-sharking venture directed at black mine workers; people who were so evidently and abjectly poor that they couldn’t not default on future repayments. He bought into a township bus company just before angry boycotters burned twenty per cent of the fleet and stoned to a standstill those vehicles that didn’t catch fire.

  As the money began to dwindle, his instinct to work on the wrong side of the law came once again to the fore. For a time, the MG and the nipple-pink Chevrolet were sharing the garage with increasing volumes of stolen go
ods. Then he sold his wife’s mother’s jewels. After that, once the lounge suite, the dining-room suite, the bedroom suite had all been repossessed; and the MG and the nipple-pink Chevrolet were no longer gracing the garage, the husband – mercifully – stopped coming home. The pyramid-selling scheme had collapsed and the Greek was wanted for fraud. And all this time, the convent girl, who, twelve months earlier, on scavenged scraps of shelving paper, had written a letter, in her neat French cursive, to the Mother Superior of the convent in Beirut, had not been in a position to post it, for want of an envelope or a stamp.

  By the time the electricity had been cut off, Josh was three years old; a non-speaking but tactile little boy who was fixed almost permanently to Dora’s back. The maid wore him, tied in a blanket, while she went about her work. She cooked bowls of maize-meal porridge on a Primus stove from the servant’s room, which she spooned into Josh’s mouth along with whatever she could rescue from the bits of brisket and rotting veg. And, while she did not quite spoon-feed the convent girl, she placed food before her.