Читать книгу Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras - Страница 9

After bouncing from house to home during my parents’ separation, off we flit, the three Chilimigras girls, and settle in a two-bedroom flat in Wendywood. This is the first home I clearly remember living in. What turns our minds into sponges between the ages of four and five, I don’t quite know, but a sponge my mind was. As I sit writing now, I’m able to recall every corner, every Christmas beetle of that home.

My Pappou lives in a flat above us, just to the left. I have always thought he is a rather beautiful man. He has a round face that my mother and I have both inherited, more becoming on him than I believe it to be on either of us. He has dark marks on his face that grow year by year, and a crown of thinning grey hair that remains unaltered in my eyes until the day he dies. He wears thick glasses and carries his jersey in a plastic shopping bag, and if you stare at him for long enough he looks almost Asian.

Days spent playing in our small, sloped garden beneath his flat are forever accompanied by the aromas of his homemade chilli sauce. When my sister and I make the adventure up the black stairwell to his flat, the smells would greet us from behind even a closed door. The scent of peppercorn clung to his knitted waistcoat, TCP antiseptic lingering on his breath as he whispers that that is his secret to good health. His tiny balcony is home to the chillies he has birthed from seed gathered from Mozambique and Cyprus. Grow to harvest to keep to feed. His chilli sauce, an unending opportunity to devour sentimentality. I feel saddened now as an adult that I didn’t spend more time in his home as a child. That I didn’t pore over his collection of black-and-white photos and take him up on his offers of spaghetti bolognaise. But his bolognaise always contained entirely intact and softened peppercorns, which I couldn’t wrap my young, whimsical head around. Besides, there was an entire flat packed with my sticker books, Barbies and pets downstairs begging for my attention. With our childhood beckoning, Protector & Soul and I would flit away from his flat as quickly as we had arrived there.

When he would occasionally make the great trek downstairs to visit his daughter and granddaughters, he would sit at the table and pick at the tuna salad or the leftover pizza, or whatever it was my mom has set in front of him. I would always greet him with ‘Hello, Pappouli,’ and he in turn would say, ‘Hello, my girl.’ We’d hug and his long palm would pat my back to the rhythm of his greeting. Hello. My. Girl. This man had no idea how strong he was and I’d always walk away from these hugs smiling at a man who believed he had little life left in him, but could potentially still pound the life out of another.

My Pappou could tell stories. Long stories that were crafted with care and patience, with such intricate detailing that they could have been born from experiences of just yesterday. He’d tell stories that the family had heard countless times, that provoked sighs and slight smiles. Most of his tales would begin with ‘Thirty years ago’ and his pronunciation of the word ‘thirty’ was always one of my favourite things. The i of the ‘thirty’ would escape his lips in a high note, in a singsong manner that was drawn out and raised, and completely charming only because of the old mouth it came from. At an oval glass table that would go on to provide the frame for many a blanket fort in the years to come, the three generations would sit and eat and talk and sigh before he’d disappear once again up the dark stairwell, leaving his three girls rubbing his kind words, greetings and goodbyes, from our still-ringing backs.

In this, our new two-bedroomed home, Protector & Soul and I, along with our two best friends Brandon and Savannah, would put on Backstreet Boys concerts for our mothers. Five rand got you in. The four of us, a merry and mischievous gang dubbed ‘The Dragons’ would steal matches and set alight dry twigs under the washing line. We’d spend our hard-earned savings on BB guns from the flea market. We’d run through the black halls of the flats, at war with each other, at war with the world. It is here, in this home, that we’d convince Brandon that our Backstreet Boys concerts, while fabulous, were becoming tiresome and it was time we incorporated the Spice Girls into our repertoire. In this home, I would sit alone on the carpeted lounge floor, a single lit candle resting in front of my crossed legs, and screech along to Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’. Then, at the end of the song, dramatically exhaling, blasting the flame into oblivion, before lighting it again and lambasting the neighbours’ ears once more. In this home, the poet, the romantic, the Dragon and the child in me thrive. I fall asleep every night praying to wake up to snow … in the middle of a South African summer. In this home, I name my first pets, two goldfish, Romeo and Juliet – only to wake a few weeks later to find them both floating, dead, in the bowl. Oh, the poetry of it all! For my two fish, Romeo and Juliet, to have pegged together, on the very same day! In this home I learn how to exhale, to play, and never treat my pets again as though they are Greek, thus avoiding over-feeding them to an untimely death.

At this point, while I am living my best life, My Father moves back to his childhood home with his mother, my YiaYia. Located in Rosebank, the low walls of this home barely conceal the stereotypes that keep the My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise going. Old furniture preserved in mint condition with the help of plastic covers adorns the lounge and the dining room and the other dining room (one to use, one only to look at). Old biscuit tins filled with useful and useless things can be found in every room. Here, My Father and my YiaYia speak to each other in Greek bursts, and while I never understand a word of it, I know their conversations aren’t kind. My Father, still harbouring resentments from his early childhood, had proceeded to pack every issue he’d ever had with his mother neatly onto a shelf in his mind. Able to pick from the spines of his memory with feeling, eyes closed, he’d regale Protector & Soul and me with elaborate tales of all the ways in which she had failed him throughout his life. He would tell us, annunciating each heartbroken and heartbreaking syllable, how she’d never loved him as much as she did his sister, who was given a piano and a guitar and a car and he hadn’t. She hadn’t devoted as much of her attention or affection to him as she had with everyone else. She didn’t love my sister and I as much as she loved our cousins, who were born to the favoured sibling. He wasn’t good enough, and we weren’t good enough. ‘Look at how she brings your cousin chopped cucumber and tomato while he watches TV,’ he’d remind us as he swung his arm in the direction of my younger, blonde cousin with his big, lovely head staring contentedly at the television screen. ‘She doesn’t do that for you. Oh, and, Christy, even though you’re only six, she’s told the family back in Greece that you’re a poutana.’

‘What’s a “poutana”, Daddy?’

‘It means whore. Your grandmother tells everyone you’re a whore.’

My YiaYia, always clad in the same dresses, the pale pinks and greens of thin cotton lined with white frills that Johannesburg housewives buy for their domestic workers, would shuffle from room to room, her loose brown sandals exposing the chunky, plum veins resisting compression beneath her nude tights. Despite her legs betraying her, she is known for her flawless complexion. The skin on her face refuses to warp even while her sunken cheeks invite it to turn to waves. Framing her youthful face is her pale brown hair that dances with the grey but never lets it take the lead.

Having moved to South Africa at the age of 17 to start a new life for herself with my Pappou Number Two, she slowly somewhat mastered the English language. But even after a near-lifetime here, words spoken in anything other than her native language fall heavily from her lips like rocks she’s had to force out with a marshmallow tongue. Watching her through my young eyes in the mornings when I awoke in her home, I’d feel my frustration rise as she’d exhume a slice of white bread from within its packet before sliding it into an old, silver toaster. Once it abruptly popped up, only a few shades lighter than her houseboy, Paul, she’d carefully butter it. She’d slice it down the middle into two, oozing rectangles, and then with fluid movements, retrieve tin foil from the pantry, carefully wrap the toast, and lay it in a kitchen drawer next to where the cutlery slept. There the toast would sit untouched for two days, before she’d give in, tear it up, and toss it wildly into the air over the lawn, any number of birds waiting to be fattened up below. Having known what is was to be starving during her youth in Greece, she was adamant to always have food in her home, in her drawers, and, begrudgingly, finally in her neighbourhood pigeons. It didn’t matter how long she’d been in this country, she simply wasn’t of this country. Leaning in to me one day when I arrived at her front door with a childhood friend who’d come for a visit, she screamed in a whisper, ‘Chrysanthy, do you know your friend is a mavro?’

Me, responding in an actual whisper, ‘Yes, YiaYia, I know she’s black.’

In another of my earliest memories, I am in the back seat of My Father’s gold Toyota Corolla while my big sister, who at this point in her life is referred to as ‘Tiger’ by My Father, sits in the front seat with her tomboy-scabbed knees leaning dramatically to the left, away from the driver’s seat, distorting herself to the point that she looks ready to break. We are reversing out of the driveway. He has his arm slung over my sister’s seat to anchor his twisted body as he looks back, and says to me, ‘Mouse, I don’t care who you bring home. As long as he’s white. And if he’s Greek, that’s a bonus.’

I like to think that even then, at the age of seven or eight, I was certain of at least two things:

1 Whatever a mouse lacked, a tiger made up for.

2 My Father was absolutely full of shit.

I don’t remember when first we started spending every second weekend at My Father’s house. It was always just our condition. The way it was.

In playschool, I remember how every second Friday morning saw a shell of a Christy. Slinking into the classroom, I’d haul my black weekend bag along with me. The teacher would pop it, effortlessly, onto the top of a shelf where it would wait until My Father picked us up at the end of the day. There on the shelf it would watch and weigh on my mind. Heavy and horrendous and existing. The only solace during my childhood Fridays in playschool came in the form of bread. Having sneakily befriended every young Jew I’d set my eyes on, I’d wait, eagerly and greedily outside of the Jewish Studies classroom to collect their challah on their way out. Revelling in each bite of the sweet bread and thanking my lucky stars that they were saving their appetites for the tastier loaves their mothers would be serving that evening during Shabbat.

Meanwhile, the struggle back home for Old Lass, trapped in the two-bedroom flat, a newly single mother, was to find an escape. Let your children go. Start smoking pot more regularly. Wait for them to come back. Let your children go. Attend a rave and drop some E with your best friend. Wait for your children to come home. Let your children go. Experience the recklessness you never allowed yourself to have in your twenties. Wait for your children to come home. Get stoned.

I still dream of that every-second-weekend house, the house My Father until today continues to share with his mother. Brown bricks. A glass front door, warped, all the better to see silhouettes approaching. Over the years, I have avoided that house by all means necessary. When excuses evaded me, in I’d walk and greet my demons before melting to my knees. As a child, I never knew how to walk through the carpeted halls of this place. I would run. There goes the hairy Greek girl – see how she gallops. With astonishing clarity and considerable heartbreak, I remember racing through the dark passages of my YiaYia’s house, tears in my eyes, tearing from one room to the next, trying to outrun something I couldn’t see but could feel breathing down my neck.

When Protector & Soul wasn’t near me – God forbid she had left me in our shared bedroom alone – I would stand at the doorway. Minutes and lifetimes passed as I’d work up the courage. To outrun nothing and everything. To flee invisible demons and into the arms of tangible ones. To seek out my sister, to play Lego, to drink sweet tea. I always felt lonesome in this. Lonesome and ridiculous and furious with my sister for bravely walking without me. Years later, I asked Protector & Soul if she remembered how I would run through that house, envious that she’d been a ‘normal’ child, one who was able to walk. I asked if she knew why I did this.

‘I don’t remember exactly. I used to force myself to walk through it, though. If I ran, I felt like I was admitting defeat.’