Читать книгу The Year of Facing Fire - Helena Kriel - Страница 14

It is Friday afternoon.

Evan is looking stronger. He is sitting and reading and we are preparing the Sabbath meal. Melida is crying into her pink-and-orange ruffles.

“What, Melida?” my mother asks.

But Melida can only shell the peas and wail. Then finally it comes out: her husband Peter has a girlfriend. “Another woman is washing his clothes.”

This is the betrayal. It is Melida’s right to wash her husband’s clothes and that another woman has been given the privilege cements the infidelity.

“He’s no good, Melida. Isn’t one woman enough for him?” my mother asks. “He thinks it’s manly to have more than one woman! Let him go! Good riddance. What do you want him for? You work, you make money and all he does is drink. Am I right, Julia?” my mother calls to Julia, who comes once a week to iron and sits, her four hundred pounds taking up the seat in the scullery, making her deliberate way through the pile of clothes and linens that bank up all week.

“Love-is-blind, love-is-blind,” she says, her words keeping rhythm with her stroking of the iron across everything that needs to be pressed straight in this house. She shakes her head, a baby pink streaking across her brown face thanks to the unsuccessful skin-lightening job she did on herself, those pink lines now creating cobweb patterns across her dark cheeks.

“Love-is-blind,” she says again.

We stand at the stove, shaking our heads, Melida crying a little less and then the doorbell goes.

It’s Greg Kartun delivering fruit and vegetables to the house from the produce market near the racecourse. He drives his vegetable lorry, his freight train, in and parks, then wanders in from the early autumn cold, gun tucked into the belt of his Levi jeans, white Versace shirt ironed crisp, thick brown hair coasting over his forehead to dip down in a careless wing over very blue eyes. Greg was part of a famous gang that ran the streets of Johannesburg. After a shootout in which three people died, Greg and his cohorts were brought to trial for murder. He served four years for public violence and exited jail reformed; he now owns his own company, Major Potato, and delivers produce to restaurants round town. Given that he was a student of my father, he takes it upon himself to keep the late Dr Kriel’s wife supplied with the best fruit and veg.

He walks into the kitchen – thirty-five years old and six foot two, feet turned out like a prima ballerina, back erect as though strapped to a painted maypole – a childhood watching his mother teach ballet has rubbed off and he holds himself, part ballet dancer, part fruit-and-vegetable Mafia man.

“Huuuuullo, Mrs Kriel.” Deep male voice.

Life, Greg’s assistant, carts in the boxes of produce, which he piles into a leaning tower of Pisa in the centre of the kitchen. Peaches and oranges instantly perfume the place.

“How are you, Mrs Kriel? Hello, Helena.” His voice is modulated to dip an octave or two when addressing me. He stands, gun in his jeans, cell phone in his hand, feet turned out. “When you going back to America?” he wants to know. “Isn’t Hollywood calling? Aren’t you a Very Important Person? What you still doing here?”

“Hollywood can wait,” I say. “I’m not going back now.”

“Why?”

“Because. I’m needed here,” I say.

“Why’s that?”

“Stop asking so many questions, Greg,” I snap.

“I hope you’ve given me good peaches this week, Greg. The peaches last week were dry,” my mother interrupts, changing the subject and waving her wooden soup spoon about, head all pea-green.

“It’s autumn, Mrs Kriel,” he laughs. It sounds like a crow caw-cawing. “The only reason you’re getting peaches is because you know Greg Kartun.”

“Make Greg some tea,” my mother says to no one in particular. “So what’s new, Greg?”

“Nothing.” He taps the Versace logo over his shirt pocket looking for his smokes. “I live a very mundane life. I sell potatoes in the murder capital of the world. Time to get out of South Africa.” He lights up. “Go to Portugal. That’s a nice place, except the Americans are ruining it; fucken soya eaters, cutting down the trees to farm soya and coffee, and then they have the cheek to tell the Brazilians not to burn the Amazon, those same soya-eating, vegetarian coffee drinkers. Don’t burn the Amazon! If I was a starving Brazilian, what do you think I’d do? Let’s see the Americans drop their standard of living. Hawaii was a paradise till the whites got hold of it. White-Protestant-fucken dogs!”

“You’re so PC,” I say.

“Ja,” he says. “I am.”

He follows me to the counter where I switch on the kettle to make him tea. He looks me up and down like a slave trader assessing a virgin for sale. “You lost weight?”

“Don’t look at me so closely, Greg.”

“And why shouldn’t I look at you? You’re pleasing to the eye.”

“You’re such a thug.”

I turn my back on him and pour the tea, pass it over. He holds the cup like an aristocrat, his pinkie finger sticking into the air. His other fingers are bedizened with diamond rings, collateral from all the people he has lent money to who still owe him.

“Why d’you walk around with your cell phone in your hand?” my mother asks.

“In case it rings.”

“Why don’t you put it down?” I say.

“In case I forget it.”

“Bit of bondage going on there?” I say.

He takes a delicate sip of tea. “I’m into bondage.” Pinkie standing up like a snorkel on a snorkeller.

“You’re into bondage?”

“Yes, baby. I think you should get into bondage too. I could teach you. You’d be good at it, whipping someone into submission.”

“Is that what it takes to get you to submit?”

“Ja.” He is categorical. “Whip me blind and I’ll surrender completely.”

“Well, that gives me something to consider. It’ll help me with my research.”

“What research?”

“On surrender.”

“Come to my house and I’ll introduce you to all my whips. We’ll get into some surrender, big time.”

“Definitely something to consider.”

When the sun goes down we bring flame to wick.

My mother and I light the Sabbath candles. When I open my eyes, Evan is sitting on the couch, showered. His shoes shine, candlelight making suns on the tips of his polished black brogues, his hair growing slowly in. Lively fire turns the piano room crackling. My mother opens her eyes when she has finished her prayers, claps her hands in a syncopated beat, as though dancing to a Flamenco guitar in a Spanish courtyard, polka-dotted dress, long train, thick hair, coding some inner beat. She was a dancer with the Madrid Spanish Dancing Company when she was young. Forty years later, those castanets are still making music in her mind. Ross has arrived with Stargazers, which we put, all pink and open throated, into vases to perfume the rooms and passages.

At the table, set with my grandmother’s Russian silver and lace, Evan recites the prayers. We move from the everyday to the sacred. And after eating, we retire to the couches and sprawl out by the fireside, cheeks traced in orange as though painted by Rembrandt. The fire clicks-snaps-seethes from the grate, then burns down slowly.

“So, hopefully, Ev will go back to teaching,” I say into the room almost in darkness now, the night’s candles burned out and the last of the fire turning us into shadow puppets wavering on a bagged white wall.

“Let’s not rush it.” My mother’s voice emanates from somewhere. “Teaching means going into town and being exposed to all those germs.”

“What’s wrong with being exposed to germs?” Ross wants to know, his voice gone deep and sleepy. “Apart from getting flu, what’s the problem?” He’s almost asleep, each word dragged out.

No one answers. I wait. Are Evan or my mother going to take the opportunity to tell Ross the truth? Evan is slouched in the maroon armchair by the fireplace, long legs up the white brick wall, warming his socked feet in the slow heat that emanates through the bricks, his place every Friday night, a precision to the image we can count on. Ross is asleep, lying along the couch, arms crossed over his chest.

“What’s the rush about getting back to teaching? Why not start next year?” my mother asks into the almost dark room.

“No,” Evan says. “I have to get back to my life, my world.”

“He needs something concrete to move towards,” I say.

My mother is silent. Only the fire chats, crick-cracking.

“I have to get up in the morning with something to do,” Evan says. “You know, with a contribution to make.”

Silence from my mother’s side of the room, she is evidently thinking and not talking. The fire sends a mini explosion into the room and up the chimney, a lone bullet.

“Lying around isn’t good,” Evan says. “I’m not used to it. It’s depressing.”

“There’s no time to be depressed,” my mother says. “The only option is strength and faith … You heard what Mataji said, and I agree. It’s not easy being a human; it’s not straightforward. There’s no time to be depressed. You have to have faith and carry on! It’s all going to be okay.” Unlike her offspring, my mother does not suffer from uncertainty. In my mother’s fiery cosmology, there is no time for that.

“Couragio. Fortitude. Come on. Where’s the philosophy? The wisdom? What’s the point of all this meditation, all this study, if you don’t apply it?”

I lie on the carpet in front of the fire. We all study wisdom, but applying it and cracking certainty is another matter. The flames on the fire slowly subside, until it is only red coals and the occasional dart of fire, like an itinerant teenager dashing out and about after curfew.

“Courage and patience. Let’s all learn a little patience, if you please. What’s all this need to rush? There’s plenty of time to return to teaching.”

Cracking patience is also another matter. So I say nothing.

“I’m not waiting till next year to go back to teach,” Evan says.

“No one listens to me,” my mother says.

Out there in the sooty suburbs, dogs bark.

I get up and stretch. “Ev, go to bed, don’t fall asleep here, the fire’s burned down, it’s going to get cold.”

I wait till he assembles himself and leave my mother to rouse Ross, then follow Evan, stumbling after his stumble; we’re following religious ritual and not turning on lights, so we keep our hands on the table, the chairs. We read the room like Braille, turning into the passageway and walking along it, fingers trailing the Dali lithographs that line the walls, to navigate the steps, one, two, and down into the lower part of the house. Evan disappears into his room off left and I read the cold walls to mine at the end of the treacherous passage, which is frigid and black as Juliet’s tomb, bed an icy square by the windowed night. In the dark, I feel my way to the closet to find something soft to sleep in and come away with tights, sweaters, leggings, a lone bathing suit; no pyjamas anywhere – haven’t thought ahead and put the pyjamas onto my bed for easy reaching – and can’t switch on lights, so I cocoon into a scratchy towel. Evan is padding about in his room, the one that flanks mine, quiet, like a stag bedding down in long grass; he thought ahead. His room settles into silence. Ross is no doubt still sleeping in the piano room and will surface round five; the leather couch gone frigid and hard in the cold, he’ll find himself awake to a bed of maroon ice. I tuck myself into a curl, tight as a pangolin, coiled for protection. The house is silent now. Outside a bird gives a distant call and a lone dog’s barking dies into stillness.

On the Sabbath day, we lounge and read; Evan and I wander in the garden and walk step by step around the lawn. And we make endless cups of tea for my mother.

Soup and the rest of the tagine and homemade bread for lunch.

My mother likes to fill the wine glasses and make toasts over family meals. She will always drink to the ones present, and the ones absent. With Ross returned from Mozambique, only my sister Lexi and her son are absent.

“To Lexi,” my mother says. “May she come to her senses and get out of that cesspool.”

But Lexi is not leaving India any time soon. She has a husband and a child and a spiritual master, and “there’s no greater commitment than serving the guru”.

“Gurus! I’ve had a life time of guru worship,” my mother says, because my grandmother was devoted to her master for twenty-five years, trailblazing with my grandfather before the Beatles had even discovered India and spiritual life and presented it to the West as something cool. My grandmother was ahead of her time. She was a seeker, searching for truth and, as her destiny would have it, she came across the Bhagavad Gita, the seminal work on Hindu philosophy, in a bookstore window. On account of the fact that her own name was Gita, she went in to inquire after the book and found that Gita meant “song” and the words “Bhagavad Gita” are Sanskrit for “Song of God”. By a further strange design of fate, my grandmother was an opera singer and she was losing her voice! How odd, she must have thought, standing in the bookshop. It prompted her to immediately buy, then read the ancient manuscript and, moved by it, she heeded the call to adventure and set out into India, my hapless grandfather in tow, where she found her guru in some hinterland in the middle of the subcontinent and served this man in robes, dedicating an entire life to him: she wore saris, she painted a red dot onto her forehead and she opened up a yoga centre in some dark street in downtown Joburg to raise money for the master, her babaji, his framed photo everywhere, his name in every sentence, his wisdom imparted. In my art classes at school, following my grandmother’s injunction, I painted Shiva with cobras wrapped round his purple throat, and intoned om sitting in planes waiting for take-off.

Om … intoning as we took off for Stratford to see Shakespeare.

Ommmmm … sounding like bees in pepper trees, the thunder of the plane’s take-off in my ears.

After twenty-five years of serving her guru, my grandmother had an almighty nervous breakdown on account of her guru letting her down, treating her badly, one of his first disciples. He arrived back in India after his first journey to America, a very successful foray by all accounts, where he was worshipped and adored, garnering thousands of new disciples and, as the hidden side of the story has it, discovering his taste for young boys and bedding them; this man wearing the orange robes of the monk – having taken his vows of celibacy so he could be free of all human frailty and appetite and be a true master – became a late-in-life fornicator. According to my grandmother, her guru returned from America changed and full of ego, so she questioned him and he set her to cleaning toilets. Yes, it was toilet duty for her after twenty-five years of tireless service: Johannesburg, Bombay and beyond, vanishing for months. Toilet duty? My grandfather put his foot down, refused to see his wife wipe the shit off the side of the squatting bowl, singing to try to alleviate her disgust as she swabbed yellowed turd. Enough is, after all, enough! Let him clean shit, my grandfather thundered, because after twenty-five years it was not going to come to that.

“Save me from gurus,” my mother says of her own mother and now her daughter.

“It’s a wasted life,” Evan says. “It’s a waste of all Lexi’s potential. She’s a brilliant, talented person.”

“It’s a tragedy,” my mother says. “To give up a full-blooded life, youngest fashion editor of The Star ever! Give it all up and go to India to serve some so-called master. Some American pipsqueak. And get married in a circus tent on the Durban beach front, with every Tom, Dick and Harry coming to watch, as part of a festival.”

Ratha Yatra, or Festival of the Chariots, when the deities of Lord Jagannath, an incarnation of Krishna, are placed onto three forty-foot chariots and pulled through the streets.

“We went down to Durban for the day, Ev and I. We were hoping she’d change her mind. We were praying for it, Ev and I, standing outside and saying the psalms.”

Lexi was marrying a devotee in front of thousands of strangers; Lexi: beautiful, unusual, talented, Indian henna in swirls along her hands, a traditional Indian bride, ornate sari from Benares embroidered with gold and weighing her down as she followed her devotee husband around a ceremonial fire, her sari tied to his robes, with this American guru presiding. And just outside the flaps, in the humid afternoon, my mother, under an umbrella to protect herself from the sun and Evan enshrouded in a towel placed over his head like a veil, repeating psalms and hoping to bring about some kind of intervention to prevent the wedding from taking place, standing with shaven-headed devotees chanting the names of the Lord, selling samoosas and holy beads, with the gigantic deity of Lord Jagannath staring down with his big, black eyes from the forty-foot chariot, draped in streamers and flowers.

My mother returns from carrying plates to the kitchen. “One of those devotees came over to us in his orange robes, with his bald head and a greasy pony tail, an eighteen-year-old cockney, but going as a Hindu of course, wearing orange robes and beads like he was a saint just off the Ganges. Gandhi himself.”

“He tried to convert us, in his thick accent,” Evan says, rocking on his chair.

Outside the finches are squabbling over the leftover bread from lunch and the dogs are at our feet, waiting for inevitable scraps.

“They called security and a guard came,” Evan says.

“He didn’t know what to make of us,” my mother says. “Ev looking like Rasputin and me standing next to him under the umbrella, holding a book of psalms. We said: What are we doing wrong? We’re just praying.” And meanwhile the wedding going on inside the circus tent.

“I peeped inside and I saw Lexi walking around the fire with her sari tied to her husband. I realised we were making no difference, so I said to Ev: The ceremony is proceeding, let’s leave, and we went down to the beach. It was full of huge, black women swimming in their broekies and bras. So Ev and I dumped our clothes on the sand and also went into the sea in our underwear. And some man groped me. I felt these arms around my legs, and there were waves crashing over us, so I pinched him hard and managed to swim away.”

“I suppose there must be a reason for it all happening this way,” I say. “Lexi in India and in a temple and all that.”

“I don’t see any purpose in it,” my mother says.

“We’re finished if we don’t believe life has a purpose,” Evan says.

I feed the dogs the scraps of leftovers.

“That’s enough,” my mother says. “They’ll get fat.”

“They’re already fat.”

“Well, I don’t want them getting fatter.”

I continue feeding them.

“No one listens to me!” my mother says. “That’s the bloody problem with all of it. So now Lexi’s in India and married and there are fat dogs.”

I feed them the last of the bread. “They’re not so fat.”

“Certain things are unknowable,” Evan says on his way to the couch. “Certain things are just impenetrable.”

My mother takes the rest of the bread out for the birds to get it away from the dogs.

“Now the birds are going to get fat,” I say.

“They’ll fly it off,” my mother says. “There’s no such thing as a fat bird.” She sprinkles the bread across the bird tray. The finches flutter to higher branches in the old peach tree to watch from a safe distance, mottled orange heads poking over sinewy black branches like blossoms making their way out of old bark.

My mother lapses, staring into the garden. And Ross lapses, lying on the floor with his feet on the dogs and a book on fifteenth-century witch hunts, and Evan is lapsing into sleep on the couch with David Copperfield, which he’s reading for the third time, and I lapse, looking at the finches regrouped around the Sabbath bread, framing the square feeding tray like little bird soldiers. And so the afternoon takes us into night.

In the evening, three stars will signal that the Sabbath is over. I stand outside with Ross, side by side on the slope that leads onto the sea of emerald grass. We search the black sky.

“So, when you heading back to LA?” he asks.

I hesitate. “I’m not going for a while.”

“Haven’t you got work to do? Don’t you have to hand in your script and all that?”

“I can do it from here. Joys of the writer’s life.”

He regards me. I can see this doesn’t satisfy him; he’s too clever for that.

“I want to be around till Ev is stable.” This is vague enough, but gives him some information.

Ross shakes his head. “Ev is on medication, so what’s the problem? TB’s not such a big deal. I’m confused.”

“Ugh, you know …” I taper off.

We continue to search for stars over the long, slanting roof of the house towards where the thorn tree emerges, a giant dark green coral making the long shape of the house look like a submerged ship. Ross points and, yes, two diamond chips hang in the dark there, tiny fish in a big black sea. The Sabbath is over. We go back inside. Evan and my mother are sitting in the almost dark, as though in the submerged ship, surrounded by dark ocean.

“No stars yet,” I say, keeping with the family tradition.

“Well, let’s have some sherry while we wait.” My mother pours four glasses and we sit and sip, surrounded by black water, waiting for the Sabbath to end, though we all know it’s over and the sea-sky is now completely salted.