by Eben Venter
He shuffle-walks to the radio on his bedside table, switches it off and returns to his desk, where he starts pottering about. He takes the odd break, he knows it’s the only way, to save scraps of energy, otherwise he’ll be flat on his back in no time. The arum lilies outside the study windows – he must make a note to tell Mattie they’ll be needing water. It hasn’t rained for a while. He manages to set the Philips up in the middle of the desk, right in front of his hands. Bought in 1962, if memory serves. Quite a decent machine with its dark-brown lid (which he locates by touch and lifts off) and its tan undercarriage with ivory-coloured knobs and silver finish. His index finger explores and finds the three oblong knobs right on the left: play, record, and pause. He sits down, the effort obvious from his breathing, and feels first the left-hand reel, then the one on the right. The tape is indeed neatly wound on the right-hand reel. His meticulousness. There’s not a single possession in this house that he didn’t look after and maintain. As he tried to do with his people also. And yet.
He can get going now. He leans forward slightly to the spot where the built-in microphone should be and feels his balls in their old sack slipping down over the edge of the chair and wiggling in the crotch of his pyjama pants. There’s even a brief spasm of pleasure. All set now.
First he rests a bit, shifts in his chair, leaning his head against the broad backrest. Jaydee Minnaar. Listen, there wasn’t a single part of her silk-stockinged legs that he didn’t ogle on the sly. Of course, she cottoned on. Mister Duiker this and that, all lips and nails. And then she pretends to cover up her low-cut neck a bit. Now, there was a girl who proved to him that pretty needn’t be dumb. Diek and he, the two of them, they could fire each other up just talking about her.
He presses the central button to record, ‘One, two, three,’ then presses pause. He locates the rewind button in the centre of the machine and presses it down to rewind and test. His voice doesn’t sound as worn-out as he expected. Just thin. He’ll make a point of speaking more from the pit of his stomach. Funny taste that was in Mattie’s tomato stew. He picked it up immediately. He can’t stand it when Mattie doesn’t tell him things. If only he would talk, the child. If only he would open up his heart a bit.
He presses record again and starts talking:
My dear son,
Pa has so much that he wants to share with you. It’s a bit of an effort, this living together, your father knows. He doesn’t deny it. It’s hard for you and me to talk to each other. I suppose that’s just the way the Good Father created us. Look, me and my father, your Oupa Ben, as I remember all too well, we only talked to each other about important things. You may well regard them as unimportant.
Mattie, please excuse me if I stop talking every so often, my child. I’m drawing on my feelings here, and I’m not going to press pause every time I need a break. This is not about sounding good. I’m just trying to say it as it comes from my heart, Matt. More than that, your father can’t manage.
No, as I say, your Oupa Ben and I, we mostly talked about how to keep the sheep alive in the most economical way, how to make money on a farm, and which of the farmers in the district were farming badly, going under. And we talked about cars. Your oupa was also fond of cars, of all machines, actually. One thing you have to understand, Bennie, a woman is another kind of thing. They don’t think as we do. That’s the kind of thing we discussed.
Anything you might say was a bit more private, we never touched on that, your oupa and me. And round about sixteen he said to me one day: you’ll have to start shaving, Bennie. You’re a man now. I don’t want you to leave the house looking untidy. Go and look in that white cabinet in the bathroom and take my old razor for yourself. And he also told me to wash properly down there when I’d done my thing. And none of that unnecessary fiddling. Pa doesn’t want that. See to it that you save your seed. You know, don’t you? All that kind of stuff. Yes, Mattie, we know each other, man.
Mattie, what I want to tell you is about the time when Hannes and I saw a sedan for the first time. Up to then my father had only had the Model T Ford with the side flaps. A real dust magnet.
Then the day arrived, a morning as beautiful as any you can get there on the farm. Ag, I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was summer, and the miraculous rains that year made the thorn trees flower in one mass of yellow. They made these huge pompoms, too beautiful.
Suddenly we heard something coming, a car’s engine with a different kind of sound. And different it was. Uncle Jaap in his Buick. A 1946 Roadmaster, a shiny brown one, as I remember it. Very posh. It had a wide vertical grille in front and a small silver mascot on its nose. Too showy for words. Let me tell you now, Mattie, it was the most beautiful thing on earth for me, that car. Nothing could touch it. See, stretching from its front wheels to the back, the most beautiful fender, streamlined and everything, all the way to the back wheel. The Americans knew what they were doing. Picture it, almost like a long wave breaking. With a bit less chrome, because of the war. You know, everything was in short supply.
Man, Hannes and I, when Uncle Jaap came driving past and pulled up in a cloud of dust, Hannes and I fell on our knees there and then and smelled the tracks of that car. In the sand. Rubber and dust and the exhaust that had left behind a whiff of gas. I can still smell it in my mind. Hell, man, Mattie. A sedan it was, one of the swankiest cars you could get around here in those days.
Uncle Jaap got out, white gloves and all, smiling broadly. He’d shaved himself a pencil-line moustache like in Hollywood. Errol Flynn and the boys. Ever so slightly hard-arsed. How shall I put it? A real man. With that car, Uncle Jaap was for me everything a man should be.
If only you could understand that about your father, I thought, Mattie. That’s why I’m talking to you now. Your father wants you to understand him, even if only a little bit.
Mattie, I’ve finished now, my son. Pa is tired of talking. But I hope you can hear everything clearly, as I meant it, and that you’re not bored with all the inbetween stuff. Please excuse your father’s silences, my son.
Your father.
With his computer next to him now in sleep mode, Mattheüs wakes up. It’s dark in his room, twelve noon and thirty-two degrees outside. The back of his head has made a dent in the pillow, the slip and stuffing are drenched in sweat. He disentangles himself from the sheet that has wound itself around his waist and crept in under his body, everything sopping wet. He sits up, grabs the computer that’s slipping down, and puts it on the floor. From the (recurring) dream full of delays, full of places that can never be arrived at, the anxiety about that obstruction and resultant overheating of his body, his thoughts sludge lava-like to one of the last fucked-up heart-to-hearts with his father, as he calls those conversations.
Pa wasn’t quite blind yet by then. It was December exactly four years ago, just before Christmas and shortly before he left for overseas, a red-letter day because it would have been his mother’s birthday and Pa extra-full of shit, you have to know him to know how full. And why? Was it because of the commemoration of his mother’s birthday or because he’d been waiting all bloody day for the man to come and fix the remote-controlled gate, him up and down on the lawn with his cell, or was he fretting all over again about his son who was going nowhere with his life, or was it just the illness? But the NHL or non-Hodgkins lymphoma was under control, the oncologist positive about the new treatment available. Pa had this dogged expression on his face whenever he talked about his illness. Almost an arrogance in the face of death; he’d convinced himself that he was not ready to go yet. Or was it just the hot, dry Cape day, or what? How can you get into his head?
If there’s one thing that drives him insane, it’s when Pa invites him to the study and seats himself in his great golden throne and he, Mattheüs, sits on this side on that pathetic office chair, switching position from knees clenched and legs spread wide. It was stuffy in the study even though the windows w
ere open, or at least that’s the way it felt.
‘Shouldn’t we switch on the fan?’
‘You’ll be the death of me before I’m dead, you and your sister.’ He reached over his desk and pulled the in-basket closer to him and started riffling through a lot of stapled-together stuff, looked like accounts or something.
He passed one across to Mattheüs. ‘Have a look there if you don’t believe me. Every month the electricity just goes up and up. How’s it possible? Is it that computer stuff of yours?’
Never mind Eskom’s stuff-up and never mind their directors with their fat-cat salaries, no use mentioning those. Facing him is the man now claiming back the account to slip it into its place. His face is reddish today. But it’s not a healthy shade of red. The forehead bigger and broader in relation to the lower part of his face, his cheeks more hollow since the treatment.
Funny thing that happened to Pa after he sold Duiker’s Motors and retired. (Although he never could or would truly retire.) His mother, fucking hell, he drove her mad those last few years together. It got so that she couldn’t buy anything for herself. Then he started going to the supermarket with her. Beeline for the ‘specials’ shelf. He made her so nervous, the poor woman. Mattheüs can remember her hands one day, making scrambled eggs for him, trembling witnesses to her inner life, her extreme effort to keep a grip on herself. By that time she was frazzled. And that morning, it was all about the price of a dozen farm eggs (free range). She refused point blank to eat factory eggs or chickens. She believed that the mash or the stuff they fed them gave her a rash. Under her arms, at the back of her knees and in the crook of her elbow. Strong rooibos tea helped. Sorbolene. But the inflamed redness, the exposed nerve, kept coming back. Each time with renewed vigour, fury, almost.
Pa got a bee in his bonnet about money. A condition that got worse by the day. Fuelled by a fear that he’d sink back into poverty, like his father during the Depression and the drought of ’33. Who knows, really? It wore Ma out completely, he did, and to this day it’s the principle determining every cent that’s spent in the house. Single-layer toilet paper, tinned jam. You just end up using more. Or throwing it away.
What’s odd about the money thing is that it’s not applied consistently. (Thank heavens.) About his overseas trip, Pa said: Fine, you can have this much. Pa gives it to you with an open hand. The car he can have whenever he wants. Sissy’s children are given huge cheques on their birthdays. Ridiculous, they’re just kids. But as for his mother in her final years, she was no longer allowed to buy the classy shoes she was accustomed to. She certainly had taste, paid R2 000 to R5 000 for a pair of shoes. ‘But my dear wife, have you gone off your head?’ Then he’d get really furious. ‘You’ll have to wait until I’m dead before you buy those shoes. That’s blood money you’re spending. Good Lord, how many years have I worked my fingers to the bone for you?’
‘Pa?’ In the study where he’s been summoned, his father looks at him and then looks away again. He takes his penknife from his pocket and trims the nail of his pinkie and then looks at him again.
‘It’s not easy for me, this thing. You know I respect you. Your opinions. Even if you see things so differently from me. Not that I can see why, either. It’s not as if your mother and I made a mess of our lives. Our way of life.’ He stopped there and put the penknife in his pocket and sat with his hands folded in his lap, in his light-khaki pants. He was wearing a pale-blue button-down shirt and was clean shaven as always. It was a Saturday, even on weekends he never let himself go. (Men are such vain creatures, he said often and with mischievous relish.)
He knew in advance what his father wanted to talk to him about, and resistance to the man grew in him like a huge turd. He refused to sit out the conversation, not again. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes, Mattie, yes. That’s what I want to say to you. You’re a Duiker, my son. A man. You’re my only hope of continuing the family line. When your old father is dead and buried, he just wants to know that something of him survives on this earth. It’s only human, Mattie. That’s how people throughout the ages have thought and lived. Please don’t tell me that you’re the only one who’s right.’
Mattheüs wanted to puke. He got up and adjusted the fan to blow straight onto the fucking office chair where he was sitting.
‘Look, Mattie, Pa doesn’t want to upset you. You know I want nothing but the best for you. Only the very best, my son.’
Pa shifted in that broad chair of his so that his left shoulder pointed at Mattheüs. The old man was trying to tone down the confrontation, you couldn’t accuse him of not trying in his own way. He had after all mellowed in his old age. A breeze blew in the scent of frangipani, just a whiff; it was too hot outside to release the full aroma of the pale-yellow blossoms. He would endure a few more sentences and then get up. He wasn’t going to let Pa mess with him. It happened too often in the past, too many heart-to-hearts that settled in his unconscious and lurked there, slumbering for years, and suddenly on the beach at Clifton Four where he’d fallen asleep on his stomach in the sun, it would sneak in like some thief of a nightmare and scald his skin as he lay there, overwhelmed by a surge of emotion.
Pa, in the meantime, was carrying on about all the old stuff in his usual way, ag, he knew it all. He managed to shut himself off completely, neither hearing nor seeing, he sat there, and Pa thought he was listening and taking it in and even dared to hope that today he’d make some headway. His father had become smaller of stature, that’s for sure. And looking at him like this, if he himself could curl up, foetal and vulnerable, and then think of Pa, a man deeply capable of compassion, of love, the man in his beautiful suits returning from work, transactions involving thousands and thousands concluded, success on his lips, when he thinks of him as he was and how he’d made and shaped himself to be the man he wanted to be, and when he thinks of him as he thinks of him, his son Mattheüs, and as he wants him to be, then he really does empathise with him. He could curl up and forlornly howl on his father’s behalf. Yet he could also react in this way to his father.
‘Pa, wait a moment. It’s terribly hot in here. Aren’t you hot?’ He unbuttons his shirt and goes to the liquor cabinet and pours himself a stiff brandy. ‘Do you want anything to drink?’
This time of day, broad daylight. Pa doesn’t even deign to answer, but nor does he dare comment on the liberty his son claims in pouring himself a drink. Given the circumstances, Pa is holding out for the best possible outcome.
‘Mattie, if there’s one thing I want to impress upon you. Just one thing your father asks you nicely.’
Here it comes. He gulps at the brandy that is much too good to be swigged like that, it burns all the way down to his stomach.
His father knows that his son is now knocking back his ten-year-old KWV like water, and shifts so that he is facing him head-on again. He’s picked up his letter opener and tick-ticks the silver blade on the desk. Anger is the only way he can say what he has to.
‘You know this house is open to your friends. It’s always been like that. Your sister had lots of parties here. Open house right until the day she got married and left. That’s how it is. Pa is more than happy to know that you want to entertain your friends, boys or girls, here at home. And now, now it’s Jack, your big friend. Look, Mattie, let me put it like this, I’ve got nothing at all against Jack. He’s got a respectable job. It’s not child’s play nowadays to be a teacher, that’s common knowledge. Jack is welcome here any time. He knows it and so do you.’ The blade of the paper knife lies pointing towards the crystal tumbler of brandy, or at least what’s left of the drink, in Mattheüs’s hand.
‘But there’s one thing you must understand, and Pa has no choice but to say it now. I’ve always been honest with you, Mattie. I don’t want you and Jack to come into this house and sleep together or whatever kind of unmentionable things you get up to. That’s your business. But not in my house. I won’t a
llow it. It flies in the face of my principles. I firmly believe that humans weren’t made to live that way. In my house, no. And absolutely not while I’m still alive.’ The violence in his voice subsides. He looks away from his son. The brutality of what has been said here and has been laid bare by the saying, its implication for him and Mattie, is almost too much for him as well.
He softens. There’s a weariness in his face. ‘Once I’m dead you can do as you like. Then you stand alone before your God.’ He looks at Mattheüs in the hope, perhaps, that a grain of something will come of it, understanding or assent, however half-hearted, as long as there’s something to cling to.
In the study, Mattheüs gets up from the chair he’s been sitting on and that he hates anyway (after the Battle of Blood River picture, it’s the first thing he’ll chuck out) and, as he gets up, he grabs his glass to drain the remaining liquor in one go and stalks out with his hand on his back, as if he’s just fallen or wants to ward off a shot or something – what with having his back to the enemy and his head spinning from the sudden shot of alcohol – but he keeps walking straight ahead, out of there, blindly. He has the capacity to commit some atrocity, he’s already far gone, if he were only goaded enough.
So that’s what one of the fucked-up heart-to-hearts with his father looks like.
He sits on his bed with his elbows on his knees in the overheated nocturnal darkness of his room, and the additional heat generated by the memory, and before that the dream, builds up in the bowl of his body. He plucks a hair darker than the rest from his thigh.
Then there was also the thing about the elusive cheque book in his dream. Scoured his father’s room even as far as the bathroom cupboards, and the frustration fierce and just as real as in the world outside the dream, the fear that he won’t find the cheque and that his father’s going to die and then how long, a year, before the estate is sorted out. Then at last, it felt like hours, he found the thing, hidden under the socks in his father’s drawer. Flipped it open immediately, only to find that a cheque to the amount of R500 had already been made out to him, signed BDuiker. Ridiculous. Can’t be. What’s he supposed to do with R500? He swings around where he’s standing at his father’s wardrobe with the open sock drawer, and when he looks around him he is suddenly in the study, inside already, and his father leaning against the doorway still in suit and tie and all, like a movie star, Cary Grant or one of those old-time actors, and his father holds out a hand, palm open, to receive something, and he comes closer with the cheque book, expecting that he’s going to change the amount, it’s a slip, that’s all, and when he’s almost reached his father so that he can even smell him in his dream, his father’s hand flips over and he lifts his index finger and then the erect index finger starts oscillating like the needle on a speedometer, to the left, to the right.