Читать книгу Entertaining Angels - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 7

Hansel and Gretel and the Struggle

‘Three weeks without a man’, Griet wrote in her Creative Arts Diary, above her weekend shopping list. Wine, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, toilet paper and tampons – not necessarily in order of importance. This was one of the advantages of being manless, the abbreviated shopping list, with no shaving foam and chocolate for him, no vegetables and fruit for his children.

Tuesday 31 October 1989. Almost three months on her own, and three weeks without any contact. Without seeing him or ringing him or writing to him. She hadn’t felt so proud since she’d managed to last three weeks without a cigarette.

There were close parallels. Her relationship with George did to her emotions what nicotine did to her lungs, she’d realised ages ago, but the relationship was as difficult a habit to kick as smoking. More than a habit – an obsession, a physical addiction, an oral fixation. One truly does keep all four seasons in one’s groin, as she’d always teased him.

She’d enjoyed sex with George, more than with anyone before him. It wasn’t an earth-shaking affair with shooting stars and similar celestial manifestations. It was playful, fun, funny and sometimes even absurd. If George felt adventurous and wanted to try an unusual position, he was sure to fall off the kitchen counter or bang his head on the edge of the bath or end up with a stiff neck instead of a stiff penis. George wasn’t the acrobatic type, but sometimes he forgot the limitations of his own body and swept her along with him, and then they experienced a few moments of sexual trapeze before tumbling head over heels back to earth. Before the car seat became too uncomfortable or one of the children from his first marriage was roused by those strange noises coming from the dining room.

Not that George made many noises. Screaming orgasms weren’t his style. And with the children in the house at weekends, Griet also had to learn to appreciate dark and silent sex. Like a blind-mute, she sometimes thought in a moment of rebellion.

Griet drank a cup of coffee on the balcony of her friend’s flat, as she’d done every morning since moving in here. The street below came slowly to life. On the rickety plastic table lay the English-language newspaper, which she’d already scanned, the open diary with her shopping list, and a pencil for noting down her social commitments for the week. With a shock she realised that she didn’t have any social commitments. Not a single date. The thought of yet another Friday evening on her own made her long for the comfort of an oven all over again. A clean oven, she thought before she could stop herself.

‘It’s dangerous to travel alone,’ Griet wrote in her diary, ‘especially after your thirtieth birthday.’ It was All Saints’ Eve tonight, she saw when she looked at the date again, New Year’s Eve on the old Celtic calendar. The night of witches and goblins and other unholy spirits, the Scots believed. The blood of a Scottish sailor ran in her veins and she was by profession a weaver of fairy tales so she took the date seriously, but she was the only person she knew who still did.

The Americans had banalised it, as only they could, with children in silly costumes and candles in pumpkin shells. And Hollywood had converted it to cash, along with everything else that’s supposed to be sacred, making a whole string of movies that consisted mainly of blood and screams.

Tomorrow would be the Day of the Holy Ones, Griet thought nostalgically, and the day after All Souls’ Day when one was supposed to pray for the souls of the dead. There were a number of souls she should pray for: those from whom she had descended and those who had descended from her, her predecessors and her progeny. If only it weren’t so difficult to pray.

She picked up the item she’d torn from the paper. ‘One in five women heading Aboriginal households have told researchers that their stressful lives have driven them to attempt suicide.’ She attached the report with a paperclip to today’s page in her diary.

Sex could become predictable after seven years with the same man. But it was a comforting predictability, like a well-loved poem that you read over and over again until you knew it off by heart, until nothing but a punctuation mark could still surprise you. Until one day you look at a comma as though you’ve never seen it before. She knew the language of her husband’s body as well as she knew her own tongue, the salty taste of his navel, the bony hollows on his shoulders, the stickiness at the tip of his penis. And yet she still sometimes discovered something – perhaps a mole – that she’d never noticed before. Her body was at ease with his, under his, on top of his.

She had sometimes seen shooting stars, but it’d been light years ago, when every night with him was still a satellite voyage of discovery. They’d married three years ago, and on the nuptial bed such heavenly appearances became as infrequent as Halley’s Comet. She was always pregnant; her poor husband touched her less and less. Month after month his gloom increased and his playfulness faded. The Incredible Shrinking Penis, that’s what she’d call the story of her marriage.

Maybe it was the story of every marriage.

She took another sip of coffee from her friend’s cracked Arzberg cup, contemplated smoking her first cigarette of the day, decided to resist the temptation, and stared with unwilling fascination at the newspaper report under the paperclip. ‘They revealed that they had to bear the brunt of “the whole Aboriginal situation”, including recurring problems of unemployment, alcohol, imprisonment and racism.’ Count your blessings, Griet dear, Grandma Hannie always said.

Once upon a time there was a woman who came from a dreadful family, she wrote on the clean sheet of paper before her. One of her grandfathers was in the habit of talking to angels, and the other grandfather believed in ghosts. She was perhaps a witch, perhaps a rebel angel, undoubtedly a troublemaker, and she was sorely punished for her sins.

The worst of all her sins was using words to seduce people. She was a woman who wanted to play with sentences like Salome played with her seven veils. She was a woman who wanted to write because she believed that the pen was mightier than the penis.

She didn’t realise that this was the eighth deadly sin in a phallo-centric world.

She wasn’t barren like so many other sinners in so many other fairy stories. Pregnancy came easily to her, time after time, but each time she had to hand her child over to death. She could conceive and she could carry a baby, but she could not give birth to one.

After four pregnancies she was still childless.

It was such a terrible punishment that sometimes, like the goose girl of long ago, she wanted to climb into an oven in protest against her fate. But these days it isn’t so easy to climb into an oven. And you can no longer count on a hero to come and haul you out, either.

It was time to go to the office, Griet decided, listening to the increasing drone all around her. It was an indescribable noise, the sound of an animal waking up, as though the mountain, to which the city clung like a tick, was stretching its back and flexing its muscles. She snapped her Creative Arts Diary shut and got up to fetch her handbag from the bedroom floor where it lay amid magazines and newspapers.

She’d ask someone to join her for a drink on Friday night, she decided, banging her empty coffee cup down on the sticky kitchen counter. Anyone, she decided, as she locked the door behind her.

She missed sex, she realised with devastating certainty on this All Saints’ Eve morning. Even Halley’s Comet was preferable to the total eclipse of the moon under which she’d been trying to survive for the past few months.

She missed her husband, she missed her house, she missed the predictability of Friday nights with him and his children. Michael and Raphael came every weekend and she’d cook for them and they’d eat while they watched TV – MacGyver and the news and Police File and a film – and she’d clear away the empty plates and her husband would doze off on the sofa and she’d take the boys to their bedroom and pull the bedding up so high only their eyes peeped out and she’d laugh at the faces they pulled every time she kissed them goodnight. She might be crazy, she thought defiantly, but she missed it.

It was Rhonda who’d suggested she write about it.

‘But no one wants to read about a failed marriage,’ she protested. ‘Not in this country. We’ve enough other problems.’

‘Write it for yourself,’ said Rhonda, phlegmatic as always. ‘Not for other people.’

‘You mean like a diary?’ Griet turned up her nose as though she’d been confronted by a blocked drain – an all-too-frequent occurrence in her friend’s flat. ‘I’m a bit past that.’

‘No, I mean like a story. Fictionalise yourself. It’s what you’re always doing in your imagination anyway.’

Griet had laughed off the suggestion – or so she thought. But it must have stuck somewhere in her subconscious. Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a woman. That was her first thought when she woke up this morning. Who on earth still began a story with ‘Once upon a time’? That was her second thought, as she sat up with the taste of the previous evening’s last illegal cigarette like a reproach on her tongue. It was her work that was affecting her mind, she decided for the umpteenth time.

She earned her bread and butter at a publisher’s, in an office full of children’s books, at a word processor on which she edited and translated and sometimes fabricated fairy tales and other fantasies. The last year or so she’d been busy with what would probably be the most comprehensive collection of fairy tales ever to appear in Afrikaans. It was a strange experience to be taking stories that had been passed on orally for centuries and pinning them down in space-age characters by pressing a bunch of electronic buttons on a personal computer. Magic meets technology.

I know what magical realism is, she often thought. Her clever friends were quick to talk about it, but she rediscovered it afresh every day at her word processor. The South Americans didn’t have exclusive rights to absurd situations and anachronisms.

‘Why do they call it a personal computer? The only personality that mine has ever revealed is a ruthlessly psychopathic streak,’ she told her therapist after a particularly demanding day at work.

‘So, you think your computer doesn’t like you?’ Rhonda asked, serious as always.

‘Now you’re making me sound paranoid again,’ Griet accused her. ‘No, that isn’t what I’m trying to say. But only a psychopath could take a story you’d poured your soul into for weeks and tear it to shreds before your eyes, then throw it into a fire without any compunction. That’s how it feels when your PC wipes out a story.’

Her clever friends said machines didn’t have human characteristics. But you couldn’t always trust your friends. Her friends fell into two groups – the clever ones and the mad ones – and she dangled in mid-air somewhere between them, struggling to get her feet down on to the ground. The clever ones were in law or journalism or academe and they liked talking about politics and religion and the latest French film with subtitles. They sat in stylish restaurants sipping vintage wine from crystal glasses and argued about Namibian independence and Wimbledon tennis. Their feet were always firmly on the ground, even when they were drunk. The mad ones were painters and writers and other artists who sat at home smoking dope and drinking boxed plonk out of cheap glasses, while they quarrelled about the Struggle and erotic art and people’s culture. They sometimes got high on pills or other substances, but they always came down with a painful bump the next morning.

‘Mandela reminds me of Hansel who was caught by the witch,’ she confessed to her friend Jans during one of many lengthy restaurant meals. ‘You know, the one who had to stick his finger through the bars every day so the witch could feel if he was fat enough to slaughter.’

Jans was a lawyer with a political conscience that compelled him to work for the Struggle. It had landed him in a moral dilemma because he was making a packet out of the Struggle. He’d bought a cottage with yellowwood floors and a fireplace, but he felt so guilty about so much luxury that he gave the key to his less privileged black friends every weekend and hiked off into the mountains. And he liked reading myths and legends which he wouldn’t discuss with anyone but Griet.

It was George who’d started the speculation about Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday in the Victor Verster Prison – while he topped up everyone’s glass with sparkling wine. Anton-the-Advocate and Gwen-the-Journalist had dived into the conversation with the eagerness of children who wanted to prove they weren’t scared of the deep end. Gwen’s lover, Klaus, reckoned that not one of the liberals round the table would recognise Mandela if he walked into the restaurant now. Not even a radical like Jans. The only photographs they’d seen of him were nearly thirty years old. And, as usual, Anton’s wife, Sandra, looked as though she was trying to listen telepathically to her children at home in case one was crying.

‘Oh, that Hansel,’ said Jans.

‘I hear he has his own sickbay where he’s examined twice a day by a major from Prison Services.’

‘Hansel and the witch?’

‘Mandela and the major,’ said Griet.

Jans smiled and wound a long ribbon of pasta deftly round his fork. Klaus told the rest of the group about an article on South Africa he’d read in The Economist.

‘And you think he needs a Gretel to push the witch into the oven?’

‘Maybe – but remember, Hansel didn’t wait passively for Gretel to come and rescue him.’ Griet had cut her own pasta into pieces and was carefully loading her fork. ‘He was too clever for the witch. He didn’t really stick his finger out.’

‘He fooled her with a little stick!’ Jans laughed and took a great swig of sparkling wine. ‘And you think Mandela is fooling them?’

Griet shrugged. ‘I can only hope he remembers the fairy tale.’

The Struggle, thought Griet as she made her way to her office full of children’s books, the eternal Struggle. She’d often tried to convince Jans that fairy tales were nothing less than people’s culture. Stories handed down from the people for the people. The same crystal-clear division between good and evil – princes and dragons, black prisoners and white warders, fairies and witches, township kids and suburban housewives – the same simple presentation, the same moral lessons. But to sit and spin fairy tales all day didn’t give her much credibility in the Struggle.

Tonight she’d throw her balcony door open wide, Griet decided while she waited at the traffic lights across the street from her office block, and she’d fly away with the wind. Ring-a-ring-a-roses through the clouds, over the sleeping city with a fork and a spoon, leap-frogging over the curve of the moon. Up, up, up on to the flat slab of the mountain, where the witches were sure to meet on All Saints’ Eve. Round this giant table under the moon, with a lion and a devil keeping guard at each end. Who’d dare to chase them away? Not even the angels.