Читать книгу Forget-me-not-Blues - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 7

Emigrate. It is a word she has heard often, but in the past month it has become a reality. Like a cute little pet you dream of, and then one day there is a hideous mongrel outside your back door demanding that you take care of it.

Mammie’s brother, Uncle David the brave soldier, has returned from the war with the news that he wants to emigrate to Australia. And from the moment Mammie received his letter right up to this afternoon, while she waits with him in the drawing room for Sina to bring the tea, Mammie’s tears have been flowing even more easily than usual. I was so scared that I would lose him in the war, she keeps sniffing, and now I am losing him after the war has ended.

Last week Ouboet said he had an idea Mammie would have preferred it if her brother had died in the war, then at least she could have bragged about what a big hero he had been. In ­Mammie’s circle, unfortunately, emigration is not considered an act of heroism – especially not to an uncivilised outpost such as Australia. England, now that would have been another story, Ouboet said. After all, Mammie and Uncle David with their English father ­believed ‘there’ll always be an England’. Then Kleinboet hummed the rousing song Vera Lynn sings so beautifully, his brown eyes bright with fun, while Mammie pretended not to hear him.

Colette thinks Ouboet is just being unnecessarily cruel because Mammie made such a fuss throughout the war about ‘my brave brother the officer’ who was fighting the Nazis. And everyone in this house knows that Ouboet is secretly aggrieved that the blasted English have once again emerged as victors from the battle. It is not that he is trying to exonerate the Germans, Ouboet hedges every time someone mentions the horrors of the concentration camps, but just remember who started the first concentration camps right here in this country.

And who were the first victims of this form of genocide.

Then Mammie’s tears start flowing all over again.

But this afternoon Ouboet isn’t around to make nasty remarks about the rooinekke, nor is Kleinboet to tease everyone, they are in the boys’ hostel in Paarl, at the same school Deddy also attended long ago. And Deddy is on duty at the hospital, so Mammie and Uncle David can drink their tea in peace. They are having ‘a confidential chat’, Mammie says, looking meaningfully at Colette. Colette pretends not to notice the meaningful glance. She avoids her mother’s eyes and looks down at her red sloppy joe jersey, and her suntanned legs and white bobby socks, thrilled to be sitting next to her handsome officer-uncle in the elegant drawing room.

‘Colette.’ Mammie clears her throat. ‘Won’t you go give Sina a hand with the tea tray in the kitchen?’

‘She doesn’t need any help, Mammie, not when you’ve taught her so well,’ she answers, and beams at Uncle David.

‘Imagine your youngest off to high school in a few months’ time, Liz,’ Uncle David says with a shake of his head. ‘How the years have flown.’

‘You can say that again,’ Mammie sighs, and touches her done-up blonde hair.

She spent more time than usual in front of the mirror this morning fixing the two victory rolls above her temples, because she had wanted to look her best for her ‘little brother’. She is even wearing a new dress she made the other day from rayon or viscose or some or other shiny synthetic fabric, white polka dots on a dark blue background. Unfortunately, looking her best is taking a little longer every year, she complained while putting on her red lipstick.

Colette cannot take her eyes off the deep dent the dimple in her uncle’s chin makes when he smiles. Before the war he was almost too good-looking for a man, she has heard Mammie say, but now he has become really dashing with his face tanned golden-brown by North Africa’s desert sun. There is an amazing scar on his cheek caused by glass shards in a bomb explosion, and he walks with a slight limp because his left leg was injured in the same explosion.

But it is still strange to see him without his uniform in a white open-necked shirt, striped sports jacket and loose-fitting beige trousers with pleats below the belt. Not that Colette has ever seen much of him, he has always lived far away from them in Natal. Among the rooinekke, according to Ouboet. And for the past several years he has merely been an almost unknown man in uniform in a photograph Mammie constantly carried in her handbag. That is how Colette has come to think of him. The unknown soldier.

‘Colette,’ Mammie repeats, menacingly this time. ‘Don’t think that because you’re almost in high school I am going to let you eavesdrop on grown-up conversation!’

She gets up meekly and drags her feet to the kitchen.

‘You were just as curious at her age,’ she hears her uncle say, amused.

‘But I was taught curiosity killed the cat. That’s what Mother always said.’

‘And Father said little pitchers have long ears.’ Uncle David laughs, and she cannot hear the rest because the kitchen door swings shut behind her.

She watches Sina carefully pour the boiling water onto the tea leaves in the finest white porcelain pot, exactly the way Mammie taught her, and snatches a home-made ginger biscuit from the bowl that has already been arranged on the embroidered cloth on the silver tray.

‘Shoo, away with you,’ Sina grumbles with an angry frown below her flowered headscarf. ‘There are shop biscuits in the cupboard for you. These ones your mamma baked for Master David yesterday.’

‘This whole big chocolate cake she also baked for “Master David”,’ Colette says, and plonks herself down on the kitchen table next to the tea tray. Bored, she fans out her trainseat-green dirndl skirt about her, and swings her feet back and forth under the table. ‘You would swear she thinks there is no chocolate cake in Australia.’

‘Not the way your mamma bakes it,’ Sina says firmly.

Colette watches Sina as she opens one drawer after the other to take out teaspoons and cake forks, and hunt for the silver tea strainer. She is so small and spare and sinewy it is hard to believe she is already sixteen. The starched white apron tied over her faded work dress wraps almost right around her body and hangs down to her ankles. A pair of old white tennis shoes peeps out below the hem. Colette outgrew them long ago, but they still gape wide around Sina’s tiny feet. And yet, when Colette recalls the slight and timid little girl they fetched from Somerverdriet three years ago, she realises that Sina must have grown several inches already and gained ten times more self-confidence.

Sometimes it seems to Colette as if Sina, although she will probably always be the smallest in the house, is also by far the oldest. When she peers at you with those beady black eyes in her tawny little face, you could swear she was older than Table Mountain, cleverer than Jan Smuts. Bushman blood, Deddy says, mixed with Malay. And of course somewhere along the way a bit of milk in the coffee too. Colette has only recently discovered what Deddy means when he talks about milk and coffee this way. Some things are simply not mentioned by name, that is another thing Colette has learnt at almost thirteen, not in this house. Nor, presumably, in many houses elsewhere in the country.

‘What is so great about Australia anyway?’ she mumbles half to herself.

‘It’s not what, it’s who,’ Sina answers and starts singing with a surprising little cackle, ‘“My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea …” It’s that nursie from that other country he got to know in the war.’

As if that explains anything.

‘I thought she drove an ambulance,’ Colette says, suddenly annoyed with this unknown Australian girl who has lured her uncle away.

‘Couldn’t say. Something to do with a hospital, is all I know, that was mos how they met. After he got hurt in the explosion.’

Sina steps back to take a critical look at the tea tray. Then she nods, apparently satisfied that Meddem Lizzie will be satisfied.

‘But why does he have to run off to another country after her? Why doesn’t he bring her here?’

‘Your mamma says he wants to start “a new life in a new country”.’

Colette swings her feet more vigorously. ‘I also heard her tell my dad that you’d swear Uncle David was ashamed of his family in Africa.’

Sina gives her a strange look, almost as if to say Uncle David might have a point, but then she is all business again. ‘You carry the chocolate cake, and I’ll bring the tray with the rest of the things.’

Colette picks up the silver plate with the enormous cake on it, and carefully balances it on one hand while opening the kitchen door with the other.

‘It is not a she, Liz, it’s a he,’ she hears her uncle say in the drawing room.

‘You mean …’ The alarm in her mother’s voice makes Colette freeze in the doorway.

‘I am going to Australia because of a man.’

Colette glances over her shoulder at Sina who is approaching with the heavily laden tray, shakes her head anxiously and gestures sh with a finger on her lips while at the same time trying to retreat without a sound.

‘I always suspected …’ her mother says, consternation in her voice. ‘But I had hoped …’

‘Lizzie. I could never be myself in this country. You would probably die of shame if I tried. If I go away, no one ever has to know, not your in-laws or your children or …’

‘Pardon me, David, it’s just … the shock …’ her mother says, jumping to her feet and rushing from the room.

‘Here she comes!’ Colette whispers panic-stricken, and steps backwards so quickly she almost knocks Sina off her feet. They hear the tinkling of silver and porcelain, and for several endless moments it looks as if the tray is going to end up on the floor, and Mammie’s most beautiful teapot will be shattered. Colette grabs the tray with one hand to help Sina, and feels the chocolate cake slipping from the silver plate in the other. She watches helplessly as the cake hits the black-and-white tiled floor. Then she hears her mother’s footsteps on the stairs, probably on the way to her bedroom to blow and powder her nose, and she wonders frantically if there might be a way to scrape the brown mess off the floor and repair the cake before Mammie comes back.

‘Shame.’ Sina places the tray on the table and bends down to pick up the remains of the cake. ‘Another shock for poor Meddem Lizzie.’

And suddenly Colette starts to giggle. Maybe it is just from shock and nervousness, but the thought that a ruined chocolate cake might upset her mother just as much as the news that Uncle David has fallen in love with another man suddenly strikes her as extremely funny.

‘Will you stop being silly,’ Sina hisses. ‘Bring me the brush and the pan, quickly, before your mamma comes.’

‘Can you believe my uncle is a homosexualist?’ Colette whispers wide-eyed while she crouches on the floor to help Sina.

‘Oh, come on, it’s not so terrible,’ Sina mumbles without looking up. ‘Even on the farm you get animals that are … different.’

‘Queer animals? You mean males doing it with other …?’

‘Males doing it with anything that moves. Even their own little ones. And I don’t just mean the animals.’ Sina spits out the words with such a bitter expression around her wide mouth that Colette stares at her, stunned. She has sometimes wondered why Sina never talks about her childhood on the farm.

‘But if Ouboet knew …’ she whispers anxiously. ‘He can’t stand Uncle David as it is because he thinks he’s on the side of the English!’

‘He doesn’t have to know.’ Sina fixes her with a stare, her voice a soft hiss. ‘No one else in this house needs to know. Do we understand each other, Letty?’

Colette nods. The thought of yet another secret that is never going to be mentioned by name makes her mouth go dry. Uncle David will emigrate, and Mammie will be sad because she won’t know when she will ever see him again, but she will tell no one what her brother told her this afternoon. Maybe not even Deddy.

And what, Colette wonders, is she supposed to do with all this unwished-for information? About milk and coffee, and her handsome uncle who is queer, and the people of Somerver­driet behaving like animals, and heaven knows what else. Somewhere in the back of her mind she will have to make room for everything she isn’t allowed to talk about, a kind of attic where she can hide all the shame and scandals of her house and her family and her country. Yes, that is what she needs, she decides right there on the black-and-white tiles of the kitchen floor while Sina gets up to scrape the messy remains of the cake into the rubbish bin. An imaginary attic where all these secrets can lie in the dark, gathering dust, until one day the time will be ripe to shine the light on them. When that will be or whether it will ever be, that is something she doesn’t yet dare think about.

Re: Sintra

• Colette Niemand 11/9/2007

To thinalusapho@iafrica.com

There now, it is just a nasty flu that has laid me low for a few days, nothing to be concerned about. And the weather is perfect for staying wrapped up in bed. When it is so cold and wet outside, it is almost a treat to lie under a down duvet and listen to the rain beating against the window. And Sina is looking after me, as always. The two of us, we take care of each other.

Well, that is quite enough about my health, let us get back to Sintra! I need only close my eyes to see the town before me. I remember Pena Palace high on the hill, its Moorish balconies with views of the sea, the yellowed old photographs of the last Portuguese royal family. So much faded glory, isn’t there? It made me feel melancholy even then, although I was hardly older than you are now. But of course you will have learnt by now that you are in a country where melancholy easily creeps into the soul.

I am not opposed to royal crowns. I am not in favour of them either – probably just one more thing about which I have never really made up my mind. Or perhaps I changed my mind so often I ended up forgetting what I’d believed at the start. I do remember that Mammie and I were awfully pleased when the old English King George and his dignified wife and the two lovely princesses came to tour the Union. Sixty years on, the younger princess is dead and buried, her older sister the elderly monarch of a shrinking empire, and the Union an independent democratic country with a black president. And all I feel when I reflect on these radical changes, is old.

Darling child, take no notice of my aches and pains and silences. But please do keep writing to me, even if I don’t always respond, and don’t stop searching. Your heart will show you the way. There is still no better compass. If I had followed mine half a century ago, I wouldn’t feel so lost now. And perhaps not so darned old either.

Love from your bedridden guardian angel (although I will be back on my feet tomorrow, promise).