Читать книгу Cul-de-sac - Elsa Joubert - Страница 4

CUL-DE-SAC

They say you fall back on your roots when the winds of time start buckling your body and your spirit. The narrowing decreed by time. The diminishing mobility. Stagnation of the spirit. The laying down of the old, trusted norms. I’d almost say the laying down of dreams.

At a physical level: the limits to movement imposed by chronically defective limbs. Walking an unfamiliar path is looking for trouble. A chair in a stranger’s living room is a confrontation. A ride in a stranger’s car is a drama. Turning off a tarred road onto a corrugated one is a catastrophe. Driving yourself, your own car, is a memory that has long since sunk under the horizon. And the quaking, the juddering that an accelerating aeroplane inflicts upon your every bone is no longer for me. My last trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town I survived standing bolt upright all the way.

The only road that can be ventured upon with a minimum of anxiety is the road to the past.

I have taken that road twice already, but a lot remains.

Poor old Paarl, once again.

No. Not ‘poor old’ Paarl. Birthplace. Town that in vividness and size and detail and colour and emotional hold trumps, in my remembrance, every city where I’ve lived since, and clings like a fungus to the whole canvas of my memory. My mother lived to ninety-seven. In Paarl. An alliance of almost a century. Now that all the many other cities I got to know – in Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Near and Far East – are starting to wilt in my memory, Paarl, like an animal that has been hibernating, is starting to wake up and take over.

Green twig with the thin, moist, white wound where the branch was torn from the bark; wet, black soil through which the twig burrows; small, dark splash of water starting to shine in the little hole in the soil. My bottom on the ground, cold seeping through the wet panties, arms picking me up and carting me off, ‘stop making such a mess’. But the water welling up out of the muddy hole, that you never forget.

Lenie on the steps of her room in the winter sun, the only winter sun that the large, angular house ever receives, brushing out her hair. So that the hair rises in an afro, as I have learned today to call it. But in her coffin, in the living room of her cousin’s house on the Ridge, to which they were removed in the Fifties, she lay so small and faraway on the white satin, like a visitor from another, distant world, that I did not want to believe that it was her … the thin hair lying flat as a bonnet around her head. The work-whitened hands on the chest. How startled I was when I saw the insides of our servants’ hands, the portals to a world suddenly looming up before me, terrible, terrifying, a world into which I am suddenly dumped head over heels, a world in which everything that is, no longer is. I scream. My mother drags me away. What are you always doing in Lenie’s room? Lenie, you mustn’t let her bother you like that. She’s not bothering me, missus.

The white insides of Lenie’s hands.

There were four lots of bearers for her coffin. Taking turns. First from the living room out of the house to the waiting hearse. Then new hands grasped the shiny handles, still warm from the previous bearers, and a little jerkily lugged the coffin from the hearse and carried it as far as the cemetery gate. Fresh bearers took over where the raw path swerved out, and they were the ones who placed the coffin slowly and carefully onto the green bands that lead to eternity. They then stood back, hats in hand, heads bowed, slightly built men with delicate features.

In his travel book, In Search of South Africa, HV Morton wrote: In the streets of Paarl you see many men with French faces, though they don’t speak French. They are dark of skin, slightly built.

We used to think he was talking about people like my father, but now I know he was also talking about Lenie’s people, also descendants of the French Huguenots. And at the time we never noticed it.

We sing ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on his gentle breast …’ Where do my tears come from? They run over my cheeks. The little face and the ancient body sink into the ground, the coffin is covered up. Again I feel the fear that took hold of me when I was a child of eight: Must all that heavy, moist, red earth be shovelled down on her so relentlessly? Here on the hill there won’t be hyenas to dig her up. I know that heavy valley soil will also be shovelled down on me. I’ve known it since I was eight years old. Perhaps my tears are not for Lenie.

* * *

My retirement home is a red-brick building five storeys high. In front, next to the entrance, is a row of garages, and behind the garages, but at a lower level, more garages. Because we all come here, cheerfully, with our cars.

We live in apartments of varying sizes facing west towards Lion’s Head or east towards the hospital and Table Mountain. We live in a kloof, close to the city centre, with a stream running through our garden. The higher the apartment, the more beautiful the views. I have a second, smaller, apartment, across the passage from the first, bought to be equipped as a study – so I have the beautiful views towards both west and east.

From our front gate it’s just a matter of crossing Hof Street, through the hospital grounds, then across Molteno Road and we are in De Waal Park. I walk in the park many times a day, alone, at any hour. Until I am hit over the head and knocked down and robbed of a little gold chain I bought at the old market in Istanbul. The Turk had stood behind me, draped the chain around my neck and measured it out according to my instructions, a little bit shorter, a little bit longer, to cover up the crease in my neck. He had snipped off the two extra links and, to my surprise, weighed them and subtracted the gold from the price. I loved that chain. I see the four men, still young, in front of me, two on each side of the path, I see them approach, close in around me, twigs in the mouth, I think of Anna on Rondebosch Common, how she said when they closed in on her, ‘I am old enough to be your grandmother …’ I start mumbling something about ‘grandmother’ when one of them presses up so close that I can feel his breath, ‘fuck the grandmother,’ he says, and gives me such a blow that I sprawl down flat, my hip in the furrow, my shoulder hard in the dry grass, his hand is at my neck, his head against me, I should bite the hand, I think, but thank heaven I don’t do it, otherwise he’d certainly have kicked my head in. His fingers are fumbling at my neck and I feel the chain breaking. He’s up and away and all four of them vanish in a flash through the big gate on Molteno Road. I move my limbs slowly, feel nothing is broken. I get up in stages, I see the nannies and children still playing by the swings – did they not see what happened, or did they just look the other way? I brush the leaves and dry grass from my clothes, start walking slowly, across the two bustling streets. I try sneaking into my building, take the front lift. I won’t tell anybody, otherwise there’ll be a big to-do. Everyone will say: she insists on walking by herself. In my room I drink sugar water. My daughter-in-law, Michelle, takes me to the police station the next day to report the matter, but nothing comes of it.

Even after this I did not heed the warnings and still took walks on my own in the park, but at set times when there were lots of people. I listened to the other women’s stories that your fingers are bitten off to get to the rings. So then I took off my rings – engagement and wedding ring – and put them in a box, from which they were nevertheless also stolen.

Ringlessness already signals a new mode of existence. It took a long time for the paths to become a heimat again.

My first and only and last heimat? I wonder.

The upper part of Nantes Street, where I lived as a child, is sacred. Only four steps from the stoep down to the front gate. My father coming out of the front door with departing guests, hatless, that’s why his hand pats his bald spot to smooth the few hairs growing long to one side of his head; when I think of him, I see his hand brushing over his bald spot, he did it at my little sister’s graveside when I was eight years old, he did it at my wedding when we came out at the front door. The last time we drove away from there, a week before his death, he’d already started turning back, feeling the cold, but my mother remained standing at the gate till the children had stopped waving and the car had turned the corner into Mill Street.

He constantly urged me: Remember what the Greeks said: Follow the golden mean. But I couldn’t. I saw the words chiselled in marble at the ruins of the temple at Delphi, above an entrance now lying flat among the stones. I tried, Pappa, but I couldn’t.

My mother used to walk down the steps, and for short distances down the street with friends who lived nearby, then turn back home. Waited until I too was inside before slamming the gate shut.

How ironic, I came to the Berghof retirement home to be safer than in the big family home above the Molteno reservoir, and regardless of how often it was predicted that I was looking for trouble walking around the reservoir on my own, in thirty-five years it never happened. And now, here in this ‘safe haven’, it happens. Security is an illusion.

* * *

The old man in the corner room on our floor seldom ventures out. They say he takes his midday meal at the Mount Nelson, or sometimes in the cafeteria of the Mediclinic. We thought at first that it was an affectation, that we oldies in the dining room were not good enough for him. But we were wrong. It’s because he’s as deaf as a post. He stops me with thin, trembling arms outstretched. ‘My twin,’ he says cheerily. Crooked as he is, he tries to press me to him. The twin story owes its origin to the fact that I own the two apartments opposite each other at the end of the corridor. He has seen me emerge from one, then the other. Now he stops me. ‘My twin,’ he says. I try to avoid him, take a detour if he’s sitting on the balcony.

‘Come chat a bit to the old man,’ the nurse says. ‘He took a heavy knock today.’

I take a chair next to his, in front of the big-screen TV jabbering on soundlessly, as in most of the rooms.

He has finely chiselled features and a ruddy-skinned complexion, like the other Englishmen living here, who devoted their lives to the smooth running of the British Empire: civil servants, defence force, commerce, you name it, they converge here in our retirement home. They are sensitive to the fluctuating rand–sterling exchange rate, they complain readily about the meagre pension, have neither kith nor kin in the country. I pity them, the disillusioned remnants of the once great Empire.

He drove to the Gardens Shopping Centre that morning with Mr David Klein, the taxi driver whose dark-blue Cressida, with the yellow light on the roof and the fare written on the side, is regularly parked at our gate. Mr Klein has a knack with old people; he can drive into the centre for free to drop us off, provided that he’s out of there in under ten minutes. He can also drive into the centre to pick us up again. He bolsters our jittery hearts when we’ve got out of the taxi and see the neon lights of the centre flashing back and forth, making our eyes see twin lights that we know are not there, we are at the point of getting dizzy. He takes us by the elbow, accompanies us a few steps into the centre, squeezes our arm and says: ‘So, just wait here for me on this bench, don’t try to come outside on your own. In about an hour, right?’ Then we have the courage to venture into the milling crowd. When my mother was my age, she wouldn’t put a foot on an escalator, but I ride the escalator hands-free.

It transpires that the Englishman went to the bank, and then to Pick n Pay to buy his few provisions. Tins of coffee tumbled down on him when his hands missed their mark, but he bent down, picked them up, and managed to wheel his trolley to one of the tills. He clung to the trolley and, just before his turn came, everything went dark before him, and he fell down, gently, without ado. When he came to, he was lying on a single bed in a room, and a woman in a white coat had hold of his arm, while another was taking his pulse. He sat up and asked to be taken to the bench where Mr Klein would pick him up.

One of the women took him, slowly, shuffling, and wouldn’t let go of him until she saw Mr Klein approaching – by now they knew him at the centre, with his old people – Mr Klein led him out of the centre, with the bags in one hand and his other hand under the old man’s arm.

Mr Klein unloaded him carefully at the home and took him to the lift with his shopping bags. ‘I’ll be fine, Mr Klein, no, really, I’m fine,’ he said, and pressed the button for his floor. And just there, he passed out again. He fell against the lift door so it couldn’t close and the lift couldn’t go up. The nurse found him lying there.

‘Come chat a bit,’ says the nurse, ‘just so he can get his confidence back … a bit of a chat will help him.’ I know that there are only two souls in the whole wide world that he has any connection with: his brother in Australia, too old to brave the plane trip to him, just as he is too old himself to visit his brother. And his daughter in Wales. ‘She begs me to come home, she says there’s a place for me at a retirement home close to her. And my medical costs will be free. Here I have no medical aid.’

‘That’s a wonderful solution,’ I tell him. He has a coughing fit, he has severe emphysema, he sips a bit of water that I hold to his mouth while supporting his wobbling head. The lines on his red-flecked forehead run deep and his greyish old-person’s eyes are two narrowed slits from which all colour has gone. In the angle of the head, in its delicate vacillation, I read more clearly than in words: he can’t decide.

At the age of ninety-five my mother said: Decisions, decisions, decisions. Why must I make decisions? She was a headstrong old lady.

Because you don’t trust my decisions, I tell her.

Because you’re a mere child, she says.

If you can’t decide whether to send Hettie chocolates or flowers for her birthday, I say, send both.

She is pleased as Punch: Proves my point, you’ve got no logic.

It’s a lifetime later. I’m sitting with the sick, scrawny Englishman in his elegantly furnished room, in front of a big-screen TV with the sound off. I’ve made him tea and the warmth soothes his throat, the cup warms his fingers.

His breath is now a mite calmer. ‘Wales is beautiful, but the climate … is damp.’

‘Your daughter will be nearby.’

‘I don’t much like her husband.’

He is very deaf. I try to keep my sentences short so that I don’t have to shout, my head aches with shouting, he’d better decide now, for heaven’s sake.

I think it’s the flight to England that he doesn’t feel up to. Can I hold it against him? I don’t even fly to Gauteng any more.

My last plane trip, at eighty-six, was to Johannesburg for the wedding of my eldest granddaughter and namesake. I’d hardly sat down, my blue cushions arranged just right underneath me, when the engines of the plane were switched on; the whole tin carcass started shuddering. The other passengers sit back and open newspapers, rummage in the pocket in front of them for the in-flight magazine, but I can’t ward off the juddering from my body. It feels as if every joint is being violated, my whole skeleton shaking in unison with the plane. Flying is no longer for us, for you and me, I hear my body reluctantly telling me.

The body can endure less, is no longer adaptable. Even the canals in my ears object. A few hours after we’ve landed, I still feel as if I’m flying, terra firma is no longer firma, there are still waves of howling about my head. Thank heaven for the airport’s wheelchair.

* * *

On the way back to Cape Town from Wellington, where we’ve been celebrating my sister-in-law Jeanne’s birthday at Freddie and Katrien’s, my children want to surprise me. We turn into Nantes Street, because they want to show my grandchildren where they used to spend holidays with their grandfather and grandmother in Paarl.

The street no longer appeals to me. It’s been built up: The plots with the large gardens, as I knew them, have been subdivided, the gardens have been sold and on each new plot another, more modern, house has been built. The new, ugly houses, purple, yellow and dark maroon, vanish from my sight, I push them away. I reject them. It was never like this, I tell my grandchildren. Only later does my dismay subside.

As in water settling into calm, the pictures appear in my head. The street where I grew up can never be destroyed or wiped away. See, there the shimmering outlines are settling, the pavements are acquiring little motor car crossings, the furrows, the garden enclosures regain their solidity, their existence. I hear my ball bouncing on the pavement, I hear the wheels of my father’s car slowing down, the sound of tyres on the loose gravel fading and then growing as my father turns the corner, up the driveway. I grab my ball and run to open the garage door for him. The sun sets behind the mountains; it’s winter and it gets dark early. It’s cooler but not really cold, with my father at home it’s not cold, only grey with darker plants. My brother collects wood from the woodshed for tonight’s fire. I laugh out loud at the red flames that will dart up from the box planks and the crackling like guns shooting up from the chopped wood. And later, hours after supper, before going to bed, I make cocoa milk for everybody.

Someday, they should invent a camera to photograph old people’s memories.

* * *

After every gathering of the three generations I feel as if words are losing their meaning or function. Not only my nephews and nieces, my own grandchildren and their friends. Because young people no longer can or want to be specific when they speak or write; everything is covered with one word: and it follows a fashion that originated who knows where (in the dark electronic world – unfamiliar and threatening to me – where the children and their thumbs are so much at home?). First ‘nice’, then ‘cool’, then ‘awesome’. Then ‘stunning’, then ‘amazing’, and now yet again something new. Now it’s ‘huge’. Everything is ‘huge’. Can they still apprehend shades of things or events? Do they still know the names for them? I ask: How was the big jazz weekend where you were camping on the farm? ‘Amazing, Granny, but it wasn’t jazz, it was rock.’ How is the new girlfriend? ‘Okay, Gran.’ They must watch out. As the bossy German physio said when my mother, after a hip operation, was learning to walk again: ‘Lift your feet; belief me, wot you don’t use, you lose.’ You stand to lose all your words. Even worse, you’ll lose the nuancing of experiences. It would be easy, surely, to say: It was deafening, mind-boggling, you can blend Afrikaans and English for the time being, upsetting, engrossing, wonderful, boring, use anything, but name it. All those SMSs that you’re all forever sending, do they convey opinions? Or are they just the old shop-worn, mutilated words? Over and over. I want to keep up with my grandchildren’s world, but the gap is widening all the time, it’s no longer the grandmothers who have to help, now it’s the grandchildren who have to help the grandmothers with all the new things we don’t know. They grow big and strong, we grow old and small.

* * *

My father hoisted a bushel basket full of grapes over the back fence. The farmer’s vineyard borders on our yard and we children watch how the labourers, bending down, so that it looks as if they’re playing tin guitar, drift and waltz down the rows of vines filling the baskets. A bushel basket of grapes. After the harvest there is a competition to see whose basket is the first to be filled, and then they run, basket on the shoulder and with a crooked gait, as fast as they can to the finish line.

Eating grapes from a bushel basket, we never gave a thought to the pips or skins. We just sucked and spat. Now we eat grapes out of plastic packets from the supermarket and the tongue will not allow swallowing, the pips and skins lie like tiny shoes arranged on the edge of the saucer.

Who still knows a bushel basket?

All the old words now crawl out of my memory – when last did I hear them: anghoerie, which reverberated across the playground while we aimed and ducked and dived, trying to break through the defended lines of the large drawn-in-the-dust blocks. Do they still play anghoerie? How could they? A hall has now been built there.

Who still knows a small, dark pantry smelling of mouse? Where the paper bag’s corner has been gnawed open and the sugar or flour or whatever has run out in a white heap? And your mother says: Oh dear, no, we’ll have to set the mousetrap again tonight. And when everyone is asleep, your brother, who has the softest heart, removes the cheese with his fingertips and clicks the mousetrap back gently.

My brother also doesn’t want to eat the chicken that grew up in the back yard. Or watch when the live chickens are beheaded, when Abraham has to put down his spade and pull up his pants and set up his chopping block and rub a smear of spit on the blade of the axe and make the chicken, wings tightly pressed against its sides, lie across the block and amidst the scrabbling get in a blow so that the head flies off to one side and the blood spurts out and the chicken starts its headless dance among our scurrying legs.

I am scolded when blood gets onto my legs, I scuff my legs against the long grass, I pick handfuls of long green shoots and rub my legs clean. I hold my hands in the steam of the boiling water that Lenie pours over the two headless carcasses in the dish. After a while she starts plucking feathers. The tiny yellow feather stubs are easy to remove from the flabby pink chicken skin and each feather variole leaves a small, still volcano.

Ha-ha, that’s why we say you have goose bumps when you get a fright! I announce this at the dinner table and my brother tells me: Shaddup.

The axe is kept in the woodshed and it is this axe that I take into the mountain when occasionally I get jumpy and wonder whether there might after all be some truth to my mother’s scary stories. But even so I do want to go into the mountain, I challenge myself, especially now that they’ve gone to Cape Town in the car and will be gone all afternoon, and Lenie has gone to the shop to buy bread. I tell myself the axe is for chopping branches for a treehouse, but I know it’s my weapon. With the axe I can face up to the danger. It’s a bit heavy for carrying, but I wrap it in my jersey. I climb the back streets until the yellow dirt track through the bushes stretches out in front of me: to the mountain.

* * *

The closed door of the sick Englishman’s apartment is an accusation. But he’s so deaf that he can’t hear you knocking, and were you to open the door without his hearing it, there’s a good chance that he’d still be in his pyjamas and, flustered, would grab the pants that threaten to fall down and try to hoist them up, and it’s an embarrassment for him and for me.

‘Call me if you think he really needs somebody,’ I tell the nurse, but she’s too busy and later I’m told he’s been taken to hospital – they just cart us in a wheelbarrow (read wheelchair) across the road, because we live directly opposite the hospital. People are inclined to vanish and then get wheeled back a few days later, without the rest of us even noticing that they’d gone.

They also die without us noticing.

It’s the same hospital where my little sister was diagnosed with leukaemia long ago. After, for the whole of our seaside holiday, all she’d wanted was to sit on my mother’s lap, and my father had driven into Cape Town to the doctors. She died in the spring, after almost a year of gradually fading away. It was devastating to us all and I don’t think my mother ever really recovered. I wonder what my mother would have made of me, almost a century old, living opposite the hospital and twice already, carted there in a wheelbarrow. And, admittedly, carted back. My daughter gave the porter who most recently wheeled me across a hundred rand note. She took it amiss when I said it was too much. Just for crossing the road!

All old people think their children don’t know the value of money, because the children are too extravagant, because they eat out in restaurants too often. Because the grandchildren are spoiled and must all have the latest fashion in cell phones, whatever it may cost. Many of us old people are given the children’s out-of-fashion cell phones, but that doesn’t bother us, because we don’t use them anyway.

One old resident’s child said: Ma, take it along when you go for a walk in the park, for your safety. Lordy, child, when the thug sees me with a cell phone in my hand, he’ll come at me precisely to grab the phone! How did you get it so back to front?

* * *

The black telephone was fixed to the passage wall just outside my father’s study. The girl at the telephone exchange knew my voice and in the afternoons after school, before I could even ask, she put me through to Truida, my friend. We could talk for as long as we wanted and it didn’t cost anything. My mother didn’t want me to pull up a chair – then everybody trips over it and then there’s no end to your talking. Even now we still talk for such a long time, there’s no end to our talking. Both our husbands are dead, we both have three children; but she’s one ahead of me with a seventh grandchild, I have only six. And then we both have three great-grandchildren, my three are all boys. We don’t talk about them. We talk, as in the old days, about things: We both believe ‘thoughts are things’, and there are so many more thoughts nowadays than there were then. Even though all else falls away from us, nobody can take thoughts from us. We talk about what we feel and think, about how we must try to accept the rapidly changing world, about how we can hardly keep up. I think she is the only surviving person I still know who knew my father and mother, and I’m the only surviving person she knows who knew her father and mother. It’s a strange bond. It means we can resume our conversation at any time, as if we had never interrupted it. We trust each other.

We used to cycle home from school together. At her house we’d both dismount and push the bicycles the rest of the way, as if it were the first preparation for the big goodbye. We’d push our bicycles up the Orange Street hill, then get on again, and she’d cycle home down the one way and I down the other way. And at home I’d throw my satchel down, take my half-tepid tea from the oven and drink it, walk to the phone, pick up the receiver, and our conversation would start all over again.

My brother says: What are you two gossiping about again? I tell him we’re not gossiping, we’re discussing life.

Because we were both avid readers we always had things to discuss. Even now we still take each other books to read. Shortly before his death Klaas and I had a meal with them, at their holiday home in Simon’s Town. Klaas took Truida’s husband, Jan, a book, Geskiedenis van Harrismith (History of Harrismith), which his father wrote years ago. This gave Jan great pleasure, because the book was out of print and he had a farm near Harrismith and was interested in the place. I try not to think back on such incidents. I’m trying to live a life without Klaas.

* * *

A rumour is doing the rounds that the sickly Englishman has died. That, two nights ago, he was wheeled across to the hospital and subsequently died there. I didn’t even know that he had deteriorated. Walking down the passage, I still have the feeling that he will appear from behind his closed door to stop me. In his wobbly way. Even though, as the nurse says, we are all here to die, it’s a shock when it happens to someone right next to you. I hope they’ll sell the apartment quickly, because it’s not pleasant having to pass by the empty one umpteen times a day. You expect him to emerge and shuffle across the passage to the balcony. Our floor has been done short, we have the smallest balcony, if one person wants to sit there, that’s already enough, two have to sit knee to knee. If he’s sitting there, I can’t sit myself down there too.

There’s no notice posted regarding a cremation or a service or a wake, which they’re so fond of nowadays, being held for him. Not even a small gathering in our dining room. The dining room is a very large space and they arrange the chairs in a row with a place for the speaker to stand. There’s even a piano. And the workers, room attendants as well as dining room attendants, stand on the steps and needle one another, but with straight faces, and they sing a few songs like ‘Amazing Grace’, which soar up there with the high notes higgledy-piggledy and a few sob-notes down here, so that the two in front have to fish tissues out of their sleeves to wipe their eyes. There isn’t always a preacher, but often just an older man who reads from the Bible or says something edifying. Whether they knew you well or not, all the residents usually attend the service, because it’s something to do, and the kitchen produces sandwiches and scones and biscuits, which makes for a change.

Many of the old people feel they’d be happy with a gathering in the dining room rather than a church service. Then at least you’re assured of a turn-out, they say – who is still hale and enterprising enough to attend a church service somewhere? Where there’s no parking to be had. And where it could be raining or cold and windy. Even those who still have their cars are wary of driving and offering lifts to other people, especially if the church is in the city or an unfamiliar suburb.

But one can make a plan, I think. You don’t have to be in the Groote Kerk in the centre of town. There are smaller churches nearby. I don’t think you should just discard all rituals out of hand. You need the ritual of a church and an organ and a black-suited and be-bibbed preacher and people in their best attire. I’d even go for the Dead March. Just so that everybody can be pulled up short for a moment. With a consciousness of transience. Their own as well. Death is no longer accorded a space. Even old people have to do exercises and swallow handfuls of pills, just to lead a kind of half-life for a few more years. Just don’t die. And, after all, you’re not a dog just to be covered up with soil.

Even cemeteries are old-fashioned. More fashionable is a long-necked urn from which the ash slithers like a snake when the urn is upended. Like Ina Rousseau’s on the old bridge over the Eerste River in Stellenbosch. The little ceremony can be quite pretty. If you’re lucky and the wind doesn’t scatter the ashes. Some friends of my children have told how their mother’s ashes were blown back into their faces.

My casket of ashes must be dug into the side of my husband’s grave. Not deep, just covered up. I don’t want to be buried deep. But not just scattered to the winds either.

* * *

I am at my loneliest when the wind is wailing through our building. Then the clouds pile high on Table Mountain, draped over it like heavy carpets. If there’s just a chink open somewhere, the wind howls through it. Behind the lift on the fifth floor, if the windows are not shut tight, some of them are warped, the wind howls through the building like a banshee.

In the house where Klaas and I lived the wind also blew, but not so hard or so wilfully. The clouds would settle on the neck between Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak and from there plunge like lemmings to their death. Then the dog in his wooden kennel on the front stoep would start howling and carry on to such an extent that Klaas would have to venture out barefoot to let him in to sleep in the lobby. Then sometimes he’d pull the blanket up higher over me, and sometimes I’d fall asleep while reading and then he’d carefully remove the book from my hands and the glasses from my face. In the mornings he’d tease me: Do you keep your glasses on to see better in your dreams?

I don’t remember wind from my earliest days. Paarl doesn’t get much wind. That’s why it gets so hot in summer, my mother used to say. And rains so much in winter, and the earth never gets dry, but stays sodden.

It blows at the seaside, not in Paarl. Wind is the devil of holidays by the sea.

We have our holidays in the Strand in a house my father rented, a small old-fashioned place on the seafront with a stoep that made my mother say: I only come to the Strand to serve tea. Because people parade down the street in rows and peer in at where my father is sitting and there’s always an ex-student or acquaintance among them who makes the whole row of people veer in and come to shake hands and then look around to see if there are more chairs, because everybody needs a seat. That’s the thing about the Strand, says my father while we’re carrying empty cups back in, everybody’s on the lookout for an old acquaintance.

We swim right in front of the house. We’re allowed to cross the street, after my mother has checked and then with a nudge in the back, said: Go on, walk now, the road is clear. Later she turns up with the towels and a cushion and her book. I’m wearing my bathing cap already. We look at the people and wade in the shallows. Sometimes sit down in the shallow water with other children to get used to the cold sea. We see my mother arriving and she sits down on the sand and stretches out her arms and we know what she’s saying: Oh, what a beautiful morning, by this afternoon the wind will be blowing again. Children, enjoy the sea.

We’re not allowed to go in too far, otherwise my father or mother, even though they’re not wearing bathing costumes, will rush into the waves to haul us out by the arm. They never swim. Other old people swim early in the morning when there’s nobody to stare at them, but they don’t really swim, they just bathe.

When I’m shivering with cold, my mother drapes a towel over my shoulders and starts rubbing me dry. I try to pull away, but she’s got hold of me too tightly. My brother has long since yanked free, he disappears with his friend, and my mother can only follow him with her eyes, and carry on looking while she’s drying me.

The most exciting thing about the sea for me is the concrete supports under the pavilion. The entrance is level with the road, and you can go in and then walk along the boardwalk all around the pavilion that juts out far into the sea. At low tide we can walk in under the pavilion from the beach and then climb up on the supports that are overgrown with seaweed and all kinds of shells clinging to the coarse concrete. It’s dark down there and the sea makes strange sounds that swish-swoosh through the supports, crack like a whip and then retreat. It’s cold as well, and sometimes the waves burrow holes next to the supports of the pillars and the holes get bigger and bigger and the waves roll on ever bigger and harder and higher, until the water splashes all over us clinging for dear life and we are sopping wet.

Now I’m getting scared and want to get out of this dark, wet, swishing water and I let go of the concrete support and try to jump, but the water knocks me back into the hole. I get to my feet and it knocks me back again, but I crawl out of the water on all fours and as I crawl, my knees and my feet and my hands press hollows into the sand that fill up again from below. I am tired and sore and cold with buffeting, but I have to crawl fast otherwise the sand in this horrible, cold, dark place will suck me in and draw me under.

Outside the sand is so white and the sun shines so brightly that my eyes hurt, and the sand scorches my feet, but I have to carry on walking to get home before my father and mother wake up from their afternoon nap.

After four o’clock I don’t want to go along to the beach. It’s too windy, I say.

You can see for yourself, Ma, see how the drifts of sand flurry over the road. I pull the front door shut. It feels as if the sand is coming to seek me out in the house.

What did I tell you, my mother says, every afternoon it blows.

* * *

I have experienced so many emotions today, they pour out of me, from my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nostrils. I must try to calm down. Perhaps now at this age I am easier prey for emotion. My friend Annari says the older you get, the closer your bladder moves to your eyes. By now it’s moved all the way to just behind my eyes. A sick child on television, sick to death, makes me cry. But the crying passes just as quickly. I am overwhelmed with emotion when I’ve done reading a book about a woman cruelly deceived by her husband, and then dying all on her own. Then Sina, Nico and Michelle’s housekeeper, phoned and said I should switch on the radio because Poppie is on the radio and that’s what I did and so Poppie also got me crying, especially the last part. So now it’s these three: television, radio, reading. Nothing direct. Can I still feel anything for myself? We are so far removed from life here, I get the impression we live through the emotions of others. Perhaps we shy away from our own emotions.

My mother-in-law was just as weepy. I could never really understand it. It was always about things from the past that she cried, so then I’d say: Ma, there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s past, you mustn’t cry like that, and then she’d say: But it’s for things I loved so much that I’m crying.

Nowadays I understand it better. The way I picture it: there’s a thin membrane around our brain that ordinarily anchors us to the present. But as you get older, flaws develop in the membrane, like an old sheet getting threadbare. Then the past, whether called for or not, streams through the flaws. That’s why old people get confused, or lose their concentration, or mislay things, like their keys.

I cry even for the wretched palm tree in the garden, because at its base, close to the ground, the scales of its bark are peeling off and the weeds push up into it and wriggle their way in between the trunk and the bark and the fungi start proliferating there and digging in, creeping higher and higher up against the tree, they will kill it, that I know. There’s a palm tree I don’t even want to walk past, even though its swinging branches are singing in the wind, because the bark of its lower trunk has also split off, perhaps with age, and millions of little white roots are burrowing through it. Whether they are tiny roots, stems or worms, I don’t know, but the tree is helpless, delivered over to them. Millions of hungry, searching, white, moist tubes. The whole garden is desperate – even the ducks glance around nervously, all the time, the squirrels tremble on the branches before they leap. All of nature is trembling. We must get used to it.

* * *

The nurse stops me in the passage. The sickly Englishman isn’t dead after all. I don’t know why we thought he was, it must have been all the people with little briefcases in and out of his apartment, a rumour just started doing the rounds that he’d died. No, it was another man with a surname almost like his. No, says the nurse: ‘Come in quickly, he’s flying to England this afternoon at four, come say goodbye to him. We can’t just let him leave without saying goodbye.’ And when I go in, he gets up and comes up to me with small steps, his hands outstretched, and his bladder must also be right behind his eyes (actually I don’t much like this image), because it looks as if he’s crying, his pale eyes – that must once have been blue – are swimming in tears. He takes me by the upper arms, and he says: ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m flying to my daughter this afternoon. To see if I like it there. But I’m keeping my apartment, I’m coming back.’ And he clutches at my arms and presses me to him and in that overseas manner he kisses me on one cheek and then pushes me back and kisses me on the other cheek, such light half-and-half kisses. And then his cheek against my cheek, and he presses me closer, as I never thought such a sick old man could do. I’m embarrassed. When last did a man, even though it’s a sick old man and an Englishman to boot, grab hold of me like that? All of a sudden I’m clutched in his shaky arms against his shoulder and half against his neck. The old-person flesh is too intimate, too unexpected, and I move my head. He lets me go and I gulp and ask him if I can help him pack a few things, but he says no thank you, the sister has helped him, and he says archly: ‘I’m an old hand at travelling.’ I wish him a good journey and, in keeping with the overseas note we’ve struck, ‘Bon voyage.’ ‘Merci,’ he says lightly, as if he’s overseas already. So much life has come into him. I hear David Klein coming down the corridor, and his familiar voice: ‘Now what can I help you with, sir?’ I’m in my room already, when it occurs to me: He can’t just leave all on his own like that, with only the taxi driver. Shouldn’t I go back and wish him bon voyage again? In the odd shaky way in which all our words are spoken. Perhaps stand on the staircase and wave at him? But a wiser voice warns me: He said he might come back. He must just not think he’s coming back to something. Then you’re in the soup. I close my door and don’t hear his bags being shunted into the lift. As long as he doesn’t faint again when the door starts sliding shut.

There’s something about a very old man, with bent, skinny shoulders and loose skin around the throat, in his good cashmere cardigan, with the broken veins in the reddish cheeks, and the blue eyes shiny with moisture. The bald head with the few sparse hairs combed over it. And his shaky hands. That makes one feel a certain tenderness. Dear Lord. If only he wasn’t stone deaf. You have to yell at him before he understands, and repeat yourself umpteen times.

* * *

I’m going to leave David Klein money in my will. On behalf of all the old people he helps. And puts into lifts with their parcels and the buttons he pushes to dispatch them up. And when they faint in the lift. And if their journey goes further than the fifth floor? Only a mercy.

David Klein has been driving me for a long time. A short, stout man with red hair and a speckled skin, always in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Big voice and equally at home on our front porch and in the Labia bioscope, in the doctor’s rooms or at the hairdresser. He opens the door for me, unfolds my little blue cushions: ‘What are we doing today? The hair or the marbles?’ He takes me to a doctor who manipulates my head, on the days when my marbles are in such disarray and my head so dizzy that I can’t stand or walk. In the city he parks right next to the kerb and no matter who’s hooting or shouting, he gets out, opens my door and takes me by the hand, onto the kerb, into the building, and helps me into the lift. ‘Keep an eye on the lady,’ he tells the caretaker who’s sitting at his desk reading the paper. He stands watching me until I’m out of sight.

We are all his clients. He says: ‘The other taxi drivers asked me the other day: “Why do you bother with the old people, you can’t make much on their short trips?” Then I tell them: “When the season’s over, you’re stuck with nobody. My clients are year-round.”’

I ask him: ‘How come you know all the side streets so well?’

‘I hauled mailbags, ma’am. All of Tamboerskloof. Criss-crossed Gardens, Oranjezicht. It was my first job.’

As I said, I can’t handle emotion any more. If I think of him walking with the mailbag over his shoulder and posting mail through the slit at each house, a young man with no other future, my eyes fill with tears again. I wouldn’t mind if one day he pushes the last button of the lift for me, going up.

* * *

That night I am uneasy about the sickly Englishman cleaving the dark sky in the silver Boeing. A skinny sick man gasping for breath, up there in the dark sky. At who knows what speed through the night. Would they know about his emphysema, would an oxygen mask be available? Is he clinging to his armrests or is he travelling way beyond it all, tiny on the wings of his great decision?

I hope his daughter is waiting for him at Heathrow. She’s one of those lean, strong little women, strong calves and forearms, draped in shawls, long strings of beads around the neck and highlighted bottle-blonde hair pinned up on the head. She calls him ‘Oh Daddy, no’.

* * *

Here among us children play a very large role. Grown-up children, not grandchildren. They were so cute, couldn’t come to play with us often enough, and now, it seems, they don’t care about us any more, the grandmothers complain. Older grandchildren can gladden the hearts of the grandmothers with a spontaneous visit, although there are plenty of complaints about them too. One woman knitted her eighteen-year-old grandson a beautiful wine-red jersey, hours of work, and phoned him on his birthday and said the jersey was waiting for him, he should come to fetch it. ‘It’s still lying here,’ she tells us. We consoled her – the children are so busy, he’ll still come. But ‘my son’, ‘my daughter’ and for the truly blessed ‘my sons’ and ‘my daughters’ are magic words. ‘My son says I mustn’t worry about the price of medicine, I should just take it all.’ Or my daughter: ‘Ma, we’ll have to get you some more stuff for winter.’ The words that are peddled in the corridors and that, however paternalistic (odd to think of the word ‘paternalistic’ rather than ‘maternalistic’), do provide a sense of being cared for and cherished.

But all the stories one has to listen to: their grandchildren’s stories or their grown-up children’s virtues … Heavens, for every anecdote I tell about a grandchild, I have to listen to six or seven others. I’m not interested in the eisteddfod achievements of this or that five-year-old poppet. But if I want to tell about mine, I must be prepared to listen as well. That is the law of give and take … and I have to tell, it was so cute. But, say the women, especially the Dutch women: Don’t interfere, don’t offer advice about children or grandchildren, just bring gifts, shut up and put up. I must say, it sounds a bit too austere.

One little old lady here never had a husband or children, but she has thirty-two teddy bears. She invited me into her room. They sit on the bed against her pillow, on the long bay-window sill, on the dressing table, on the shelves. Big ones and little ones, wearing dresses or checked pants. They have names. She swops the ones on the window sill around, so that the others can also get some sun, or enjoy the view. They greet her when she comes in, she greets them when she goes out. She’s untroubled and peaceful with them, she never waits for a phone call or a visit. A mother worries about her children until the day she shuts her eyes for good, my mother told me. I don’t worry about my children, I say resolutely. Then you should worry about not worrying about your children, she says. She doesn’t know it’s just bluster.

* * *

Word reaches us that the Englishman was so ill, he went straight from the plane to hospital in an ambulance, and had to stay there a fortnight. Now he’s in Wales in a care home for old people and there’s no question of his returning. His apartment is being refurbished for sale. I hope the Welsh weather is kind to him. And his daughter. And his son-in-law.

* * *

Contrary to my expectations, it’s difficult to make new friends in a retirement home. By the time people turn up here at our place, their lives are behind them, wrapped up like a parcel in brown paper and tied with string. Their past is completed. They’re not coming here to continue their lives. They’re coming to wind down. Like the spring of an old-fashioned watch. To come to rest.

It’s a very big move to make. Bigger than the move to another house or another province or even another country. It’s a way of life that you forfeit and a new way of life that you have to acquire. With the realisation: Something is over for ever. You’ll never get it back. You’ve had your chance, you won’t have it again.

It’s a mistake to come to a retirement home too early. Like me at seventy-eight. Or too fit. Then you kick against the pricks, bloody your nose against the invisible walls. The most toxic words you hear are: ‘You’ll adapt.’ Adapt to what? To decrepitude? To death? And if you don’t want to adapt? The bloody nose. Again and again and again.

And slowly, cautiously put out your feelers to someone else, sitting alone on a stoep on the fourth floor, just sitting, hands folded on the lap. Or sitting in a patch of sun next to the lift, a resident with an apartment on the shady side of the building seeking sunlight. You’ll say: Come and have a cup of tea this afternoon. Or a drink this evening. One corner of the folded paper of the parcel of life may perhaps be lifted, slowly, half-reluctantly, half-eagerly. And some sad story will always emerge, until you’re scared to hear the rest. How is it that behind every tightly closed door there’s a sad story? Mostly about a child who’s been lost – to a debilitating disease or an accident or some other tragic event. A spouse’s death, husband or wife, is common, that’s why the survivor is here, everybody has lost somebody. It’s not that sad, your own story is replicated behind every door. And as when you are borne from one floor to the next by an escalator, and you can’t get off, so time transports you inexorably away from your husband’s death.

But the loss of a son or a daughter, that showers sorrow, also on you, doesn’t matter how long ago, it’s still there, always there. So that you’re actually afraid when the parcel is opened slowly, cautiously, slightly. You have to know, how can you be friends, real friends, if you are not let into the past; but how full of sorrow is the past.

Another Englishman who devoted his life to the Empire, part of the British colonial service in just about every country on the African continent, born somewhere in the East, never really had a permanent home, with only a British passport (here he is not granted a residence permit for longer than a year, and must reapply every year). Even he, with his British-colonial appearance – safari suit, neatly cut hair, ruddy colouring – even he is burdened with his parcel. In the end you are shy to ask the age-old questions on a first acquaintance: Are you married? Do you have children? Suddenly afraid that you’ve now trespassed too far, because his answer is measured: ‘My wife and two of my children were killed by the Mau Mau in Kenya in an ambush.’

Rather stay wrapped up, then, little parcel.

At lunchtime the people walk with stiff-backed steps down the corridors, crowd the lift: no, please, there’s plenty of space, do come in. Sit down at the elegant tables, dish up salad, make small talk, eat, even linger for a moment at a table on the way out, make more small talk, predict the weather – because it’s clouding over outside the large, lovely windows. Winter’s here, you know. We’ll still have a few fine days. You’ll see. The concept of an Indian summer is so lovely – where would it come from? But Piet Cillié thought up such an appealing word for a few late warmish days: pop-up summer. We all enjoy the pop-up summer. Have a nice nap this afternoon. Is there anything worthwhile on TV this evening? We’ll have to see. Have a good nap. And back into apartments behind closed doors.

In the life of almost every woman or man I’ve met here has been the death of a child. It leaves me dumb and dismayed. Should I stop trying to be sympathetic, stop asking, or do people yearn to tell, is that what friendship is, to listen? Does it bring a tiny bit of relief, here in the new home, here among so many strange people with whom you’re suddenly co-existing?

Only we can really understand them, we, their contemporaries, the survivors, the persisters, the die-hards. My cleaner says to me: ‘I never see so many old people together in my life. I go into dining room I dunno what I see, old people and grey hair. You must be very strong people for so many to get so old.’

There are more or less sixty of us residents. Our average age last year was eighty-eight. We celebrated the hundredth birthday of an old lady, the place provided cake and tea and she sat up straight in her seat of honour behind the table, a bit scared, the hair a bit out of place. The staff sang to her. She clung to her carer’s hand, tugging at it as if she wanted to go back to her room. She died three days later, in the night, but it was only two days after that that the death notice was put up in the lift.

Although we are all here to die, death is handled so gently and in such an unreal fashion that we forget about it most of the time. Once when we were taking the big lift down to the dining room (the small lift closer to the rooms had got stuck on some floor), an old deaf lady declared in her shrill voice: ‘That’s why we have this big, long lift, to take out the coffins at night, when we’re all asleep.’

We all went silent. In our lexicon that was a faux pas. That’s not the kind of thing one mentions in conversation.

We’re not only survivors, we’ve sailed through the rocks, how many times, we’ve survived births and operations and replacements and deaths, we’ve nursed and buried our parents, raised our children, buried a spouse, we are not to be pitied.

A dining room assistant clearing the tables while a few of us are still sitting chatting announces to us: ‘You must have looked after your parents very well, I know my Bible, it’s written in the Ten Commandments: Honour your mother and your father that your days may be long upon the earth. I know my Bible.’

Now that’s a novel approach.

* * *

Since we are all on the threshold of the hereafter, you’d expect a steady procession of preachers, as heralds of the hereafter, perhaps a little creaming off from the estate for the Church, even a substantial creaming off, but no such procession materialises.

Now and again a church elder with a little book. Once, just before Christmas, there was a young minister here with a few shopping bags full of snacks and food, but he must have had the wrong old age home on his address list, because the recipients were embarrassed rather than grateful. The food parcels must have been intended for the underprivileged and were declined with thanks. How vain we humans are. Not for us the food parcels.

There would, though, be scope for ministering, and interesting variations at that, because we have people of all faiths: for rabbis, for the Dutch Reformed, for Roman Catholics, for Anglicans, Methodists and Reformed. The tai chi classes offered on Tuesday mornings in the dining room prepare the way for Buddhists, Zen. Oddly enough no signposts to Islam, although a woman in a burqa was our receptionist for a few years.

But in spite of our communal destination the subject of the hereafter is taboo as far as the talks offered to us are concerned. Talks on investments, on diet, on hobbies or on Adapting – very important for old age, Adapting – are sometimes held in the dining room, usually with meagre attendance. We didn’t come here for talks, did we? And the investments have certainly been wound up. And our hard-of-hearing ears hear nothing when the speakers mumble as they do.

* * *

We came here to ease the path across the divide a little, perhaps to postpone it by a year or so. And not to be a burden to our families. Perhaps we were just too scared to live on our own in our big, empty houses. Perhaps the electronic buttons and panic buttons and burglar alarms and garden gate intercoms just confused us a bit. It’s terrible when you forget your dog in the house and all the alarms have been set and his passage through the house sets off the alarms and he is so bewildered he doesn’t know what to do. Once I returned from shopping and found the armed response men sitting outside in the car, wary of the dark, moving mass behind the window panes that had hardly lain down when he’d get up again and the alarm would start wailing all over again in his ears.

The path across? At present the path across is mainly to the hospital across the road. It’s a busy road. The cars speed downhill from the Kloof Street side, from Buxton and Rosmead and even Molteno Road, it’s so steep, stopping isn’t easy. There’s a zebra crossing in front of our gate, but can our ageing souls, sceptical from bitter experience, believe that the crossing will stop the speeding demons? With a sturdy nurse holding us by the arm we are braver. Just cross the road with us. Then we’ll manage, thank you.

Awaiting us are the corridors, the steps, the confusion of rebuilt floors, the sheet topography of the hospital. You name it, we know the way. We shall master the wide, bewildering passages, the sections radiating from the central axis, sometimes with shiny-clean black-and-white tiles as guides: ‘Many thanks, if I can just get to the black-and-white tiles, yes, the new section, I know the way from there.’ We are brave; sooner or later, we shall cross the road again with our large, square envelope under the arm, with the X-ray photographs (requested by the specialist) that will proclaim the news, good or bad, to our GPs, and that we now bravely bear as if it were a new dress or shawl, festively, and the hotel porter (I mean the hospital porter) will come forward to escort us home. He will walk across the zebra crossing, whether there are cars approaching or not, and flail his arms and plant himself in the middle of the road so that the cars stop with screeching brakes, front tyres just touching the white line, as if to shout: Stop for the crown of creation, the jewel of society – the old person. With a light tremor of our lips we shall attain the other side, lean for a moment against the fence; the gates will swing open and we shall enter. Desperate for the bathroom.

A bigger adventure, but only in times of crisis, is the MRI, the scan in the tunnel. For that, a family member or an ambulance or David Klein is required, to transport us to the other hospital in the city. To deposit us right next to the driveway in Loop Street, to go into a room that looks like a cellar, and the door is wide open so that you peer in at the white monster incarcerated there like the enormous, shiny white barrel of a cannon, into which you have to crawl, which reminds me of the cannon in Pagel’s Circus from which the clown would be fired. Or rather, you have to lie flat on your back and then you are reeled into the tunnel. Just don’t look around in the tunnel. Keep your eyes shut tight. And recite a hymn. Then recite another hymn.

And nowadays the envelope-bearing is no longer necessary, because the doctors inform one another electronically about our infirmities and we’re hardly back in the bedroom when the telephone rings and the GP wants to talk to you.

* * *

And a heart-to-heart talk with a bosom friend over a cup of tea in her apartment? Not that easy with a stranger. A blessing from Above if there is somebody from your old life living here already, or when an old friend from outside, when she is also left on her own, moves in.

As is to be expected, because we are all old, illness is much discussed in the passages and on the verandas.

It’s a perilous path you have now set foot on, a narrow bridge over a precipice. But if you can manage to cross it, something beautiful may await you.

It’s actually only to be expected that you’ll have an illness in your past. But a conversation I cannot have, from which I recoil, is one about never-ending physical pain. You can read pain in eyes. There are two things I can read in eyes: a woman who is newly pregnant and doesn’t know it for certain yet, and a woman in pain. Of the first capacity there is no longer any need where I live, and from the second I shy away. That pain that runs with the clock, in shifts of four hours or, if the pills are very strong, six hours. Day in, day out, night in, night out. I want to prostrate myself on the ground before her, kiss her feet.

* * *

An older person just falls silent with pain. A child thrashes, yells and cries till the tears stream down his face when he has pain. A child ‘performs’, yells louder, squeezes out the tears because he wants relief and will get it; there are many kinds of relief – sweets, a toy, caresses, kisses, promises. And for lasting pain there could also perhaps be relief. But the older person no longer has the strength to cry or yell, and has long known that there is no lasting relief to be had. And that the pain must be accommodated. To learn to accommodate many things is the condition of growing old. I don’t like the word ‘adapt’, ‘be reconciled with’ is perhaps better, but it indicates something continuous, without end. In the word ‘accommodate’ there is hope, it’s temporary, it will pass. Just take the painkillers regularly, as directed, and one day you’ll suddenly realise: It’s no longer necessary, it’s over. You can’t believe it, take half a pill anyway, forget even the half, and: it’s gone.

* * *

We live in a ravine or gulley between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. Thus, there’s a plot of ground behind the old-age home and a garden and a rivulet and lots of trees, even old, old palm trees with golden dates hanging down in bunches between the sharp leaves, and acorns that fall on your head and squirrels rocking on the pointed leaves of palm trees and leaping from one to the other. The old garden. With a gate into the street at the back and then a short distance to Kloof Street.

My curiosity goads me, what does the Afrikaans word ‘pril’ mean, as in ‘prille jeug’? I find the English synonym ‘prime of life’ (questionable), and ‘prime’, and thus also ‘pril’, can function as verb as well. Somebody can ‘pril’/‘prime’. I discover interesting meanings for the process of priming a very young child: Giving a first coat. Grounding. Giving a base coat, putting gunpowder in the pan. Leavening. How clever our ancestral speakers were. To ground a very young child. Give a base coat. Spot on. ‘Leaven’ gives me great pleasure. ‘Gunpowder in the pan’ even more fervent pleasure. It bothers me that I didn’t ‘prime’ my children. Or my grandchildren. It seems that their powder in the pan had to come of its own accord.

* * *

In the prime of my youth, my preschool years, before my years of reading books, I was a garden child, or a backyard child. I could sit on the ground and crumble the soil in my little fat hands, I could tug at a leaf until it tore from its stem, I could crush it between my fingers; I could draw a flower towards me until the stalk yielded, I could eat the petals of flowers and feel scraps on my tongue until my mother’s finger in my mouth ferreted them out and threw them away. I picked up a lemon and bit into it, and sucked pebbles; I squashed a worm.

I’m now approaching those years again. I can’t sit flat on the ground, I’d never get up again, but I can drag my chair in among plants, or under trees, and drop my hands on either side of my body and sit still, and later small black ants start scurrying over my fingers. And the leaves I don’t have to pluck from the trees, they come to me of their own accord. One falls on my forehead, as if the hand of the tree is blessing me. I press it to my lips and the leaf moistens, it gets into my mouth and I taste it, I nibble at it slowly. My fingers pull stalks from the soil, I wipe them on my sleeve, and also suck at them. Am I preparing myself for blending with the earth? It’s a pity I want to burn, I think, because the blending with the earth is much more appealing, as Klaas, who wanted to be buried, also said, but those spadesful of soil thudding down on my sister’s grave I still hear, and the suffocation, it must be my asthma days that make me so scared of a coffin underground, that suffocation is not for me. A pity, that the burning is not so poetic. But perhaps it also is.

* * *

I tell my daughter: My life is now a cul-de-sac. A dead-end street.

My daughter tells me: Ma, you never stay in a cul-de-sac. You turn around, drive back and find a new direction.

That sounds very brave, but I am no longer brave.