Читать книгу Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa - Natasha Berg Illum - Страница 10

The first time I heard the whisper was when I was about six years old. I remember it very clearly.

My parents had gone away. I would guess they had driven from our home in Blekinge in Sweden, to Sealand, Denmark. Perhaps to visit one of my grandmothers or perhaps they had been invited to a dinner or a shoot somewhere. I love to imagine my mother wearing her red silk dress with white squares on it as she jumped into the Range Rover just before leaving. My mother’s hair at its bounciest, my father’s at its flattest. Scent and kisses.

I was to stay with the gamekeeper, Mr Persson, and his not-quite-wife Mrs Svensson, who helped my mother in our home. This wasn’t the first time I had stayed and I would have waved my parents goodbye thinking, that I might, if I was lucky, already this afternoon start indulging in the culinary advantages there were for a six-year-old staying with Mr Persson and Mrs Svensson. White bread baked with syrup, Bob’s divine apricot jam in a jar big enough to lose your knife in. And hopefully, very hopefully if I was lucky we might get crispy pieces of fried ham with apple sauce for supper, things I would never get at home. The mere luxury of eating pork as opposed to some kind of deer meat from the estate was something I only experienced very occasionally; at school, at my grandmother’s house and at the gamekeeper’s. ‘Fläsk’, as it is called in Swedish, in little square pieces, fried hard and golden-brown.

There are some particular moments that I carry with me from my visits to their little red house that smelt of frying pans and geraniums.

I remember being told that Mrs Svensson’s eldest son P had once fallen into the nettles outside their house and had been stung all over his back. I considered him a hero because of that.

Summer afternoons in their garden. Sneaking a spoof lump of sugar into Mrs Svensson’s coffee. We were seated on the lawn just in front of all her nettles, and I told her to watch the surface of her coffee (a moment later a tiny plastic figure of a naked person would float to the surface and I would laugh hysterically).

Then there were the dirty magazines in their loo.

With wooden shoes, and a sponge of a mind, I would sit quietly and rather longer than expected on their loo and discover the secrets of the adult female body as it, literally, unfolded in front of me.

But one of the things I remember most clearly was the ‘whisper’.

Mrs Svensson had put me to bed in one of their two bedrooms. The room that used to belong to P and T–her sons. They had both left home by now and I could pick either bed in which to sleep. I chose the one next to the window. It was only glass, wall and a few steps away from the owls my father had put in a huge aviary behind Mr Persson’s house. In the evening I was put to bed, and eventually Mrs S and Mr P switched off all lights and went to bed upstairs.

I had been fast asleep hours later, when suddenly I woke up.

I felt a hand caressing my cheek ever so gently. It was obvious to me that nobody was in the pitch-black room, but I wasn’t afraid. It was natural and very loving. Then a whisper in that particular tone and voice. ‘Anoushka…’ said in an urgent way, as if to say, ‘Look here, here I am.’

That was the first time I heard it. From then on I would wake up about three times every year to that urgent whisper. Never the touch again, but the word and the whisper that followed me until I was about thirty and a half.

The last time I heard the whisper, it came from your lips. I had never told you about it. I don’t think I had ever told anybody about it. It was just one of those things that was in my picture of reality because I had heard it the first time at a stage of my life when the world to me was so full of incomprehensible things anyway and I had been taught by grown-ups to believe them whether I understood them or not. It had followed me since I was six years old, I didn’t think about it. Not until I picked up the phone a few days before you died and heard you say it. The same particular way of saying it, the same whisper. Now it is about six months since you left and I haven’t heard the whisper again.

I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more. The night has gone solid and when I stretch in the mornings it is to push the walls away.

Clip, clap, clippedy-clap, I miss my wooden shoes.

I had hardly had time to fall in love with you before you had swallowed my soul. My reaction time was longer than yours–I was always catching up–so seeds we planted in me keep growing now, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. The weather is gone but my season cannot be halted. Leaves keep unfolding for us, all in vain, like fair hair that keeps growing on an ever-stilled head.

I had tried to resist our love at first, tried to push it away it was so much larger than me, so out of my control, I did all I could to make myself stop it all, but I knew.

I knew when I woke up with you sitting on the floor next to my bed. You had brought sushi to my house that evening. Flying-fish eggs like pieces of sand inflated far beyond solidity, millions of tiny ‘pops’ waiting to happen. We drank sake and discussed your ideas behind the paintings you were going to start making. Your photographs of Kenyan butcher-shops lay spread all over my buffalo table. I drank far too much sake, we both did, but I wasn’t as accustomed to it as you were, and a few hours later I ended up almost falling asleep on the blue sofa. I don’t think I had done much more than just closed my eyes for a little moment, when you lifted me off the couch and put me to bed. I remember saying ‘sorry’ when you put the blanket over me and then I fell fast asleep. It was several hours later, when I opened my eyes for a moment and found you sitting on the floor beside my bed still. You were holding my hand looking at me. For two or three hours you had sat next to me on the floor holding my hand while I had been sleeping and when I opened my eyes for that short moment in the middle of the night you saw it and said, ‘Look at me, I am on my knees. Don’t you see? I love you.’ As if you had been waiting all night to throw that sentence in when a gap appeared. At that instant, between sleeping moments, when there is no resistance at all, you threw the message in, and it went straight through all the burning loops to the bottom of my heart without any hindrance.

When you had said what you had waited to say, you left.

I wrote to you the next day. ‘Now it’s said, there it goes, off it buzzes. In the shape of a fly. Afraid to get lost and later trapped in dark gaping mouths or blind clapping hands. With only one weapon to protect itself: the skeleton on the outside, skin, intestines, heart and soul on the inside. A fly could never be squeezed slightly, it is either perfect or crushed.’

It was perfect, then we were crushed, not it.