Читать книгу Forget-me-not-Blues - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 5

But her story in fact began long before Lisbon. After all, it wouldn’t have been possible for her to turn her life into a lie if she had not been surrounded by lies from the beginning. Big ones and small ones. Black ones and white ones. Silences and blanks. This is how Colette Niemand (née Cronjé) tries to absolve herself in her old age.

She is sitting at Deddy’s feet in the drawing room listening to the poet Totius’s creaky voice on the radio. This is the yeaaar of our Looord nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-eight. Now we will ceeelebrate … Mammie is baking a cake in the kitchen. Usually she likes to help Mammie, but lately Deddy has become so excited about the ox wagons and the old men with beards and their wives with the funny bonnets that he is always listening to speeches on the radio. Come, Letty, he always says, come listen to what is happening in this country of ours. She finds most of the speeches almost as boring as the sermons in church on Sundays, but a tiny bit better because she can play with her paper dolls on the carpet while she pretends to listen.

She has taken her beloved Shirley Temple from the cut-outs in the flat cardboard box. The doll with the golden curls and the cutest dimples on earth is wearing a white vest and panties, white socks and shoes. Colette tries on one beautiful paper dress after the other, carefully folding the paper strips over the paper shoulders, patiently looking for the right outfit. But our meeerciful Father didn’t give a celebration but a reviiival …

Deddy’s pipe is in his hand – his clean, soft doctor’s hand, so much softer than Oupa Gert’s calloused farmer’s hands – but he is so engrossed in the radio voice that he forgets to smoke. He leans slightly forward, his black shoes polished to the same high shine as his sleekly oiled black hair. A gentleman, that is what Mammie calls him, and a gentle man too. The two don’t always go together, Colette. His head is tilted to one side so he can hear better, his eyes filled with a strange light, like when he points out the stars to her and her brothers at night.

‘Look, Deddy, Mammie made Shirley Temple a Voortrekker dress and a bonnet. I coloured them in and cut them out myself.’

He doesn’t hear her. His lips move below his little clipped black moustache as he murmurs the words of the poet-patriot: ‘It is a marvel in our eyes. We see it, but we do not comprehend it.’

Perhaps that is the reason she remembers this moment so clearly, her father repeating an obscure phrase, whispering as if he is telling her a secret, until his voice is drowned out by thousands of singing radio voices. Oh hear ye the mighty rumble? It is soaring across our land.

Because surely it cannot really be her first memory. In the spring of 1938 she was already almost six years old. Of her fourth or fifth year she remembers flashes, sounds and smells, shapes and colours. The smell of boiled soap on Oupa Gert’s farm, the name of the farm on a gate in the gravel road, Somerverdriet, so lovely, so sad and so puzzling. Summer and sorrow – what could the one have to do with the other? Winter, yes, that she could understand, winter was cold and wet like tears. But summer meant sunshine and playing outside all day long, and holidays by the sea. What she also remembers, vaguely, are the snow-capped peaks of a Boland mountain one particularly cold winter, snow-white linen tearing at a washing line like frisky lambs, long white dresses being whipped up by a wind that blows and blows, a white bonnet with fluttering ribbons being carried off like a balloon, bearded young men laughing and giving chase, jumping in the air to catch the ribbons.

No. The swirling dresses and fluttering ribbons also belong to her sixth year, when the town’s women sat behind their sewing machines for nights on end sewing old-fashioned dresses and bonnets. Almost as if for a concert, like the time Mammie organised a Nativity play on the farm and had to sew deep into the night to turn a pile of threadbare sheets into robes for a host of jubilant angels. Colette’s brothers and cousins got the speaking parts while the very little ones like her were bundled into the choir of angels along with the farm workers’ children, but they didn’t have to sing. Quite enough heavenly voices in that choir already, Mammie had sighed – heavenly! But the next year on the farm Oom Kleingert said ag no, rather leave it, concerts just gave the hotnots ideas.

So Mammie had left it. And in Colette’s sixth year she didn’t sew Voortrekker dresses along with the other women in the neighbourhood either. The paper dress and the paper bonnet for Shirley Temple were all Colette could get out of her, and that only after two weeks of begging.

Yes, like a concert, that was how the commemorative ox-­wagon procession seemed, only better, because this concert went on for days and weeks, even months. From the day towards the end of winter when the first wagons left Cape Town, the fields of arum lilies beside the road as white as the women’s brand-new bonnets, the crowds growing bigger and louder with each town they passed through, young men with bushy Voortrekker beards and tearful old tannies in wide Voortrekker dresses, young couples who were married there and then in the field among the wagons, and who knows how many newborn baby girls baptised Eufesia after the centenary of the Great Trek; so the trail carried them northwards, through Stellenbosch, Worcester, Graaff-Reinet, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, singing and cheering through the winter’s cold and the spring sunshine and summer’s thunder showers, it is the sound of a nation awaking from its oppressor’s hand; more and more voices joining the singing and cheering, from the beaches and up to the highland, all the way to Pretoria where on 16 December 1938 the cornerstone of a future monument was laid before a singing, cheering crowd of hundreds of thousands of people.

Dingaan’s Day, Deddy explained, to commemorate the Battle of Blood River when a small group of God-fearing whites vanquished a vast Zulu army numbering thousands. On this day one hundred years earlier the Voortrekkers realised that God was on their side. But on this day in 1938 Colette understood that her mother and father weren’t always on the same side.

It was both a Friday and a public holiday – the ideal day for a party to celebrate Colette’s sixth birthday, Mammie thought. Her real birthday was only the following week but by then, as happened every year, they would already be on holiday by the sea or on the farm. Shame, Mammie said, the child has never had a proper party with friends who dress up and bring gifts. With table decorations and balloons and party games. Why don’t we make it a fancy dress? In for a penny …

Mammie tackled the planning with great enthusiasm, almost as excited as she had been a year or two before in the build-up to that first and last Nativity play on the farm. She mailed handwritten invitations to ten friends and their mommies, baked dozens of cupcakes and a big chocolate cake, and stayed up late to cut and measure Colette’s Snow White costume for the fancy dress, with pins pinched between her lips and the wheel of the Singer sounding like a high wind in a bluegum forest as she vigorously cranked the handle.

Sneeuwitjie, Deddy admonished, she did, after all, have an Afrikaans name too. No, Deddy, Colette argued. Snow White. Like in the picture Mammie and I went to see at the bioscope. With Grumpy and Sneezy and Dopey …

Some day my prince will come, lala lalalala, Mammie hummed behind the Singer. She and Colette were both besotted with Walt Disney’s first full-length animated film. It was like getting an entire cake for supper instead of just a slice at teatime. The pleasure lasted so much longer than when you only got to watch a short cartoon before the main feature.

But making Snow White’s dress wasn’t easy. Damn difficult, Mammie sighed, although she was clever with a needle and thread. The fitted dark blue bodice, lighter blue puffed sleeves with red insets, a wide yellow skirt and – hardest of all, Mammie declared; most important of all, Colette pleaded – the starched white collar that had to fold out around Snow White’s neck like the calyx of an arum lily.

Mammie even borrowed a black wig from somewhere to pin over Colette’s blonde curls. Mammie’s final touch went on top of the wig – the red Alice band with its tiny bow. Colette stared in amazement at the strange black-haired little girl in the mirror while Mammie painted her a rosebud mouth with red lipstick. She gathered the sides of the long skirt between her fingertips, curtsied a few times, then spun around giggling so the skirt puffed out like a yellow balloon. It was the most beautiful costume in the whole world, she told Mammie. Now they only had to wait for the guests to arrive.

Three little girls turn up in old-fashioned Voortrekker dresses, bonnets and all, and two of the boys are wearing false beards and carrying toy guns. The one says he is Piet Retief; the other he is Dirkie Uys. The girls say no, they don’t have names, they are just Voortrekker wives.

Beatrix picks up the hem of her long dress to show them her bare feet. ‘My mother says they walked barefoot across the Drakensberg.’ Right away the other two Voortrekker wives take off their socks and shoes too. A Boland town grows hot so soon before Christmas, especially when you are not used to wearing long dresses. Colette decides that Snow White can also go barefoot, even though she is really a princess in disguise.

‘Time to cut the chocolate cake,’ Mammie tells the guests and their mommies who are crowded together in the drawing room where Deddy is trying to hear the radio.

‘But it’s the laying of the cornerstone!’ The protest comes from Beatrix’s mother, the stout Auntie Bea. ‘That I won’t miss, not for all the chocolate cake in the world!’

‘The children should really listen too,’ Deddy says. ‘This is something they will remember for the rest of their lives.’

‘But what about Colette’s party?’ Mammie asks.

‘She will have lots more parties,’ Deddy says with a wave of his pipe, ‘but a day like today won’t come again for a very long time. It is the nation’s reawakening, my dear.’

‘Doctor is right,’ Auntie Bea agrees and rounds up the five Voortrekkers in fancy dress and plonks them down on the carpet in front of the radio.

Mammie gives the woman a funny look, then claps her hands to get the attention of the remaining guests – a pirate and a tramp, two princesses, and a mermaid who keeps tripping over her tail fin – and herds them into the dining room with the promise of cake.

Delicious chocolate cake, Mammie smiles. All of a sudden she reminds Colette of the witch trying to tempt Snow White with a shiny red apple. The guests glance at each other uncertainly before following her into the dining room which she has decorated with balloons and paper streamers.

‘Now I am going to light the candles on the cake, and then we will sing for Colette,’ Mammie announces. From the drawing room they can hear thousands of voices on the radio singing. From the beaches and up to the hiiiighland hearts tremble and mountains grow siiiilent. Colette wonders aloud if they shouldn’t rather wait until the centenary celebrations have ended before they light the candles. ‘Until the nation is done awakening?’ Mammie asks in a sharp voice. ‘I don’t think so. You can always blow out the candles again once that lot in there have grown tired of the mighty rumble.’

Colette looks at the angry red spots on her mother’s cheeks and waits until the candles are burning properly before she takes a deep breath and blows for all she’s worth. Five little flames go out instantly, but the sixth one keeps flickering while she blows more and more desperately. Then the mermaid next to her grows impatient and helps her blow out the last flame, pffff. Colette looks at her mother, alarmed. ‘Isn’t that cheating? Can I still make a wish?’

‘You didn’t ask her to help you blow, did you?’ Mammie soothes. ‘Make your wish while we sing for you.’ And then Mammie starts to sing in a voice which to Colette sounds lovelier than any voice she has ever heard in the bioscope. ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you …’

The mermaid sings along loudly and tunelessly, the other guests join in more tentatively. Happy birthday, dear Colette … But in the drawing room she can still hear the mighty rumble of ‘The Song of Young South Africa’, and the two melodies running through each other make her forget what she wanted to wish for. For a puppy of her own? For her two brothers to stop teasing her about losing her milk teeth? That she will grow up to be as beautiful as Mammie and as clever as Deddy?

‘Why are you singing to me in English, Mammie?’ she asks when her mother reaches the final drawn-out to youoo.

Mammie’s smile drops from her face, boom! The red spots return to her cheeks. ‘I have always sung to you in English. It was how my mother sang to me. My father was English, Colette, don’t you forget that. You never knew him but you have an English grandfather. There were no Voortrekkers on my side of the family.’ And she cuts the chocolate cake so impatiently that she scatters brown crumbs all over the starched linen tablecloth.

Colette wonders how her mother manages to make Voortrekkers sound almost like a swear word. In Deddy’s mouth it always sounds so big and grand. Below Deddy’s clipped little black moustache it becomes a marvel to the ear, like reviiival or comprehend.

Re: Lisbon

• Colette Niemand 7/8/2007

To thinalusapho@iafrica.com

My darling child, it is understandable that you still feel too young and inexperienced for Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego. Remember, his Book of Disquiet wasn’t published until almost five decades after his death, and I didn’t read the English translation until the late nineties, when I was already a relatively elderly woman who had lost both her child and her grandchild. When I had long borne the wounds ‘of all the battles I avoided’.

That quotation closed around my heart like a fist the moment I first read it. When I was younger, I thought that if I could only keep a safe distance from the war, if I could leave the brutal battles of individual passion to braver souls, I would reach the other side unscathed. The other side of what? I ask myself now.

That is why I am telling you tonight it doesn’t matter if you don’t find what you went to look for in Portugal. If you only end up finding something of yourself, my dearest, your journey will have been worth it. And as far as I can tell that is already starting to happen. You hold onto that, you hear? Don’t ever let go.

When I went overseas it was also, as you know, ‘to find myself’. I found my own voice, I learnt my true sound, and what I heard so frightened me that I fled back home and cut out my own tongue. Silence is golden, Mammie always said when I was small. After I came back from overseas it became my motto, my excuse for avoiding all subsequent battles. If you stay silent, you become neither a soldier nor a contestant, you become a spectator.

But you are not a spectator, sweetheart. You have suffered enough losses in your young life to make you far wiser than I was at the same early age. (Even if it is too soon for you to understand everything Pessoa has to say.) You have inherited your mother’s fighting spirit – but just enough of your grandmother’s cautiousness, too, to protect you from self-destructive daring. I have complete faith in you. Seek, and you shall find.

Love from the Cape.