Читать книгу Forget-me-not-Blues - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 9

Colette inspects herself in the full-length mirror in her parents’ bedroom. This is what the heroines in the romance novels she has been devouring lately always do at some point in the book. The easiest way to show the reader what the heroine looks like, and at the same time reveal how she feels about herself. It is one of the tips she has picked up since trying to write a few stories of her own. Not love stories – alas, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half she still knows far too little about love – just stories. Poems too, occasionally, inspired by the twilight confessions of Elisabeth Eybers, a gift from her father last year.

The biggest surprise of this new writing hobby is, even though she reads almost exclusively in English, nearly everything comes out in Afrikaans. It might have something to do with Elisabeth Eybers, who is to her knowledge the first woman to publish a volume of poetry in Afrikaans, and for whom she harbours almost the same fervent admiration as for Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Millay’s little poem about the candle that burns at both ends and will not last the night remains the most beautiful of all.) Or perhaps writing in Afrikaans is due to her excellent Afrikaans teachers at her excellent Afrikaans high school in the city. But perhaps more than anything else it is due to her father’s influence. Deddy, whom she has tried in vain to call Pappie for several years now, with his endless enthusiasm for this young language that emerged here on the southernmost tip of Africa virtually the other day.

‘Pretty as a picture,’ her mother says in English, appearing in the mirror behind her. The more Afrikaans her father becomes, the more deliberately English her mother becomes, or so it sometimes seems to her. ‘What do you say, Sina?’

‘I can’t believe it is our little Letty,’ says Sina, now also visible in the mirror, her hands clasped in admiration. Colette outgrew Sina years ago, but Sina pretends not to notice and simply carries on calling her our little Letty.

‘I look … grown-up.’

‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ Mammie says with a laugh. ‘A dinner dress to make you look grown-up?’

She had indeed asked Mammie to make her a ‘grown-up dress’ for an evening party one of her classmates was having this weekend. But she never dreamed that a dress and high-heeled shoes could make such a difference. She was used to seeing herself in school uniform, a striped blazer with white shirt and tie, thick black stockings and ugly black lace-up shoes, her blonde hair in braids resembling two short, fat koesisters, one shoulder continually weighed down by the heavy book-filled satchel. Or on weekends in flat shoes and bobby socks and a comfortable skirt and sloppy joe pullover, or in the pants she liked so much and which continued to distress Ouma Trui so deeply. That was the Colette she knew, the one she felt at home with, a schoolgirl who would easily disappear in a crowd of other schoolgirls.

Now this strange young woman stands before her, in a dress of shining midnight-blue satin with a fitted bodice – which makes her breasts inside the new brassiere look a little absurd, like two funnels – and a skirt that flares extravagantly from the wasp waist down to mid-calf. A lovely young woman, that she cannot deny, but above all an unfamiliar young woman. Her ankles look ballerina-thin in a pair of Mammie’s black patent leather high-heeled shoes, her neck long and slender, and terribly white against the dark blue satin. Especially now that Mammie is lifting her hair and piling it onto the back of her head.

‘Hmm, I think we must curl it and pin it up, what do you think? And that neck wants something. A string of pearls?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Colette resists, her voice almost panicky, and shakes her head to let her hair fall back onto her shoulders. ‘I don’t want to look so different that the children in my class won’t recognise me tomorrow night.’

‘You’re still the same Lettylove,’ Mammie says soothingly. ‘Just older and lovelier. Wait, I think we can still take in the waist just a tiny bit more.’ Mammie pinches the fabric between her fingers, and asks Sina to pass the pin cushion from the dressing table.

‘No, please, Mammie, I can hardly breathe as it is.’

‘I also felt that way the first time I wore a step-in. You will get used to it.’

‘I don’t know how I’ll manage to eat anything tomorrow night!’

‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Mammie jokes. ‘Part of the purpose of a step-in is to force girls to eat like little birds. See, there’s about another half-inch of give around the waist …’

‘And if I picked up even half a pound, I wouldn’t be able to wear my dinner dress ever again, and then all your trouble will have been for nothing, Mammie!’

‘You are not supposed to pick up half a pound,’ Mammie jokes again. Although something in her voice sounds more like scolding than joking. ‘Not until you get to my age. Oh, what I would give to have a waist like yours again …’

‘When you were young, Mammie, wasps weren’t in fashion. You flappers all wanted to be flat and straight. Oh heavens, I wish I could rather be a flapper too. Just look at these ridiculous points my brassiere makes!’

‘We also had to suffer in silence in order to be so flat and straight. We had to bind our breasts, bind everything, which was no laughing matter in the scorching African sun.’ Mammie gets a faraway look in her beautiful blue eyes. ‘No, being a woman has never been a laughing matter. Especially not in Africa. Or what am I saying, Sina? All right, let us leave her the half-inch here in the waist.’

‘It’s just like you say, Meddem.’ Sina nods several times. Colette wonders whether it is the lot of women in Africa that Sina agrees about so enthusiastically, or the half-inch in the waist. Then all three of them glance simultaneously at the radio beside the dressing table, because the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye have started to sing ‘Bongo, Bongo, Bongo’, that silly song that always makes Mammie and Colette laugh.

‘Quick, turn it louder,’ Colette bids Sina, and moves her body to the beat of the music and feels the wide skirt swish around her legs. How lovely she looks dancing in the mirror, oh, she does hope there will be a bit of dancing at the party tomorrow. ‘So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo,’ she and Mammie sing along with the Andrews Sisters, and even Sina, who can still barely speak English, joins in when they get to ‘oh no no no no no’, and arches her back and bends her knees so her wiggling bottom sticks out. ‘I’m so happy in the jungle,’ the three of them sing at the top of their voices.

‘Forget the Andrews Sisters, make way for the Cronjé Girls!’ Mammie cries out.

Colette gasps for breath. ‘I feel like Snow White did when the witch pulled the ribbon so tight around her waist. Can’t we rather let out the dress a little so I can wear it without the step-in?’

‘Oh no, Colette,’ Mammie says sternly. ‘The whole point of Dior’s New Look is that the waist must be as tiny as possible and the hips as wide as possible. Otherwise it is just the ordinary Old Look we wore throughout the war.’

‘If I had known I would have to suffer like this for the New Look, I would’ve stuck with the old one.’ Colette can tell from her mother’s face that this time she has gone too far. ‘I’m not complaining about the dress, Mammie, it is honestly the most beautiful dress in all of Cape Town, it is just the blooming step-in that is getting the better of me. It feels as if all the oxygen is cut off from my brain.’

‘When a girl looks as beautiful as this she doesn’t need a brain as well.’

And for the second time Colette senses a cruel truth hidden behind her mother’s banter. As if her mother is trying to impart something to her but doesn’t know how to go about it. ‘Deddy says with a brain like mine I don’t have to be in too much of a hurry to get married and have children.’

‘Aah, he’s just dreading the day when the apple of his eye will prefer another man to him. Like any father would.’

‘And how about you, Ma? Don’t you want me to go and study after school?’

The question remains unanswered, because right at that moment they hear Ouboet barge in through the front door, call to them excitedly from the hall, then run up the stairs to the top floor. ‘Ma? Colette? Is anybody home?’ Then he looms in the doorway of the bedroom, smiling all over his face. ‘Good afternoon, Ma! Good afternoon, Letty!’

‘Afternoon, Kleinbaas,’ Sina says and quickly makes herself scarce, shuffling down the stairs towards the kitchen. She calls Colette and Kleinboet by their names, jokes with them or tells them off for being messy, but Ouboet has always been Kleinbaas. For him she reserves an exaggerated show of respect, perhaps even something like fear. When she first came from the farm she called Deddy baas and Mammie noi, but Mammie taught her to say Master and Madam instead. It sounds less crude, Mammie maintains. Deddy shakes his head, amused, and asks what makes an English Master less crude than an Afrikaans baas.

Ouboet grabs his mother around the waist, lifts her off her feet, and swings her around.

‘Stop it, Ouboet, don’t be silly, what is the matter with you?’ Mammie protests, laughing, her eyes screwed up from sheer pleasure. It is probably years since anyone picked her up.

‘What is the matter with me? It is the happiest week of my life, that’s what is the matter with me! The government has fallen, our people are in power, everything I ever wanted came true on Wednesday!’

‘Oh, you are still not over the election.’ Mammie is still smiling, but it is no longer such a joyful smile.

‘It isn’t something that you get over just like that. It is History, Ma! History with a capital letter! In Stellenbosch we’ve been celebrating non-stop for two days and two nights.’

He flings himself onto the double bed and grins at them, his hands folded behind his head. He hasn’t even noticed her New Look, Colette realises. He probably doesn’t even see her, lying there in his happy trance, almost as if he is drunk. When he called them from Stellenbosch on Wednesday night after the results for the last five electoral divisions had been announced, and the entire country realised with astonishment that Dr Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party and the Afrikaner Party had won the election, he sounded a bit drunk, presumably from joy rather than from liquor. She knew that her eldest brother wasn’t a drinker, but on such a Historical night she supposed anything was possible. ‘We are dancing in the streets of Stellenbosch!’ he had exclaimed on the phone, his voice hoarse from cheering. Colette had struggled to picture her clever and sober brother dancing in the street in his striped Matie blazer and neat tie. Even on a dance floor he didn’t really go for dancing. ‘Smuts defeated in his own constituency in Standerton! Isn’t it wonderful, Pa?’

‘Who would have thought it,’ Deddy had muttered.

‘I told you we were going to win, didn’t I, and you all thought I had lost my mind!’

Deddy’s joy was just as deep as Ouboet’s, but more discreet, quieter. Quite overcome with joy, that’s how her father had seemed to Colette that night. She had shared his joy, and the next day the excitement of many of her classmates was infectious, and she joined the celebration over the victory for ‘our people’. The Afrikaans nation would now have an Afrikaans government. Wasn’t it wonderful?

And yet she is constantly aware that something is impeding her happiness. Like when there is a splinter in your foot, an object that is so small it is almost invisible, but nevertheless prevents you from walking properly. Her splinter is the knowledge that not everyone in her family is equally happy about this Historical victory.

Mammie, she suspects, voted for General Smuts’s United Party. With no intention, of course, of ever admitting it to her husband. And Kleinboet declared loudly last weekend that only an idiot would vote for Dr Malan; we cannot push all the other population groups aside, it will cause a catastrophe. Which had led to him and Ouboet almost coming to blows. We must help our own people first, Ouboet had shouted angrily, before we can help others! Mammie had had to restore the peace, as usual.

‘Where is Kleinboet?’ Mammie asks, concerned. ‘Didn’t you both come on the same train?’

‘Who would want to share a train with traitors? I’m just joking, Ma,’ Ouboet adds quickly, but Mammie doesn’t look amused. ‘We travelled together as far as the city, but he went off to go and court one of his English girlfriends. Probably looking for a shoulder to cry on.’

‘Take your feet off the bed,’ Mammie says, ‘you’re ruining the bedspread.’

Kleinboet didn’t call on Wednesday night. They didn’t hear from him until yesterday afternoon when Colette was paging through the newspapers, amazed – Die Burger broadcasting its Afrikaans readers’ joy and The Cape Argus sounding funereal. He had called knowing his father would be at the hospital, that only the women would be home in the afternoon.

‘This is a secret telephone call,’ he announced in a stage whisper when Colette answered the telephone. ‘I am calling from an underground hiding place where all Smuts supporters in Stellenbosch have to lie low so we are not stoned in the streets. I don’t know if I dare come home this weekend. Will you hang your ugly black school stockings out of your bedroom window when you think it is safe?’

What did he consider safe, she asked, giggling. It wasn’t a sermon from his father he minded, he assured her, he just couldn’t stand to have his brother carry on about the wonderful future that now lay ahead for the Afrikaner. Because it wasn’t going to be all that wonderful, he predicted. There was something petty in the soul of the Afrikaners that was rearing its head, he added, sounding suddenly serious.

‘But aren’t you an Afrikaner?’ Colette asked.

‘Of course. That is the reason this pettiness scares me so.’

That was when the image of the splinter occurred to Colette for the first time, a splinter that could turn into a festering sore if you didn’t get rid of it in time.

She looks at Ouboet who is still lying stretched out on the bed – although now with his feet on the floor – chewing an apple he has taken from the pocket of his maroon striped blazer. Because of the six years separating them, they never really became friends, but when she was small she admired him like a remote storybook hero. She thought his blue eyes, the same colour as hers and Mammie’s, so much more beautiful than Mammie’s or her own, so much more striking along with his black hair and his black eyebrows. But back then there hadn’t been that cold light shining in those eyes. When did that happen? she asks herself now. What was it that turned on that light?

‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you you’ll grow horns if you eat lying down?’ she asks before turning back towards the mirror.

He sits up, with exaggerated surprise. ‘And who is this beautiful young lady addressing me with such impertinence?’

Oh well, if Dr Malan’s victory is going to turn her older brother into a comedian, then it might be something wonderful after all. Every family needs a clown. And it’s starting to look as if her younger brother has grown tired of this role.

‘We Afrikaners were noble when we lost the Boer War,’ Kleinboet said on the phone yesterday. ‘But now we have won. And it is far easier to be a noble loser than a noble victor. You will see, little sis, you will see.’

She had waited for the inevitable joke, the punchline that was supposed to make her laugh, but instead she had heard something between a groan and a sigh. An almost animal sound, beyond words, like a soldier on a battlefield when he realises he has been wounded. She had wondered if perhaps it was her turn to say something funny, but then he had asked her to call Mammie. And then Mammie had shooed her into the kitchen to help Sina peel vegetables before starting to talk. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, Colette.’ And Mammie hadn’t been joking either.

Still more silence

• Colette Niemand 15/8/2007

To?

Speak now or forever hold your peace. Is that a warning to me? Well, I find it interesting that you use these words exactly, this phrase that reminds me of the marriage service, because for the past few days I have been brooding about weddings constantly. Mine was a hasty little ceremony in a London magistrate’s court on a typical English autumn day, damp and dismal, as if the low grey sky wanted to weep on my behalf. As if the clouds wanted to shed all the tears I was so sternly denying myself.

And that is about all I remember of my wedding day. That it rained, that I wanted to throw up, that I wished I were in Portugal. It is not something I particularly want to share.

I am sorry, darling child, but this is another letter you won’t read.

Why do I remember Ouboet’s wedding so much more clearly than my own? Because it was easier, as usual, to be a spectator than a participant? I don’t know, my treasure, I don’t know.

But I suspect sometimes silence can also become a way of communicating.