Читать книгу Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa - Natasha Berg Illum - Страница 9

Do you remember the bees? The strange swarms of bees that kept coming. Thousands of them. I opened the windows in my bedroom and they flew in. The first time they found their way into my bedroom on their own, the next time I had to invite them by opening all four windows. They were so calm and friendly and landed in clusters–one hanging from the opening in the mosquito-net around my bed and another in one of the window frames. I couldn’t close my window for days. At night a few stayed inside my closed net, I knew they meant no harm. These bees were acting strangely; they weren’t so alive that they were busy stinging themselves to death. I liked having a house that big swarms of bees would circumnavigate and enter through cracks and openings. The fact that they all got weaker and eventually fell down dead on the floor one by one, was the part I chose to not take seriously.

It happened three times in a week Margaret, my giant soft-spoken Kamba² maid, kept sweeping them out, without any sign of surprise or inquisitiveness about the one room in the house that kept filling up with bees. Her serious sweeping made me laugh and I used it as a picture later, in one of my letters to you.

As you remember I started off saying, ‘Maybe we will be together one day’ and then it became, ‘maybe we will be together in twenty-five years’. You used to get so cross when I said that, you hated it and refused to express any kind of amusement at the thought. You were not the kind of person who would let a piece of chocolate melt in your hand. Or a piece of ice–strange, all those newspapers would call me that later. You see our love was all a bit frightening at first. For several reasons. I was with another man who had since long chosen to become my best friend as opposed to a lover, but I still thought I would hurt him frightfully by being the first to let go. I was wrong. After we parted he turned to another woman without the slightest pause. He only ever once met me after that. He made the meeting as brief as possible and then, very strangely, handed me a bunch of cigars on his way out from the room I had taken in a hotel for squirmishly chirpy Kilimanjaro climbers. For months I kept coming across the silver holsters of Romeo y Julieta amongst my shoes and clothes.

There is nothing I could have done or wanted to do to stop you from becoming my life’s love. The heart is the heart, but it mattered to try to square things with a man I had spent so many years with. I needed to look him in the eyes and tell him that I had moved on as soon as he came back, I didn’t want to do it over the telephone. It looks so childish now that I have lost my love and my best friend forever. Disaster, pain and death swallowed us all up anyway.

I had tried; I tried to push you away, until both of us settle our affairs. I even tried convincing myself that it was just lust at first. Of course you wouldn’t stay away and the emotions I tried to calm with fragments of self-deceit in the form of simple indulgences were getting totally out of control.

With fear I watched myself search for solutions far more likely than true love. Love would always deprive me of my freedom. That was before we laughingly understood that it was a fear we had always both had. The fear of not being close enough when close, and not far enough apart when apart, yet always together.

I lay on my bed one afternoon whispering to the bees, who by then knew most of my thoughts, as they flew in and out of my bedroom,

‘Ja visst gör del ont när knoppar brister. Varför skulle annars våren tveka? Varför skulle all vår heta längtan bindas I det frusna bitterbleka? Höljet var ju knoppen hela vintern…’³

With a teacup in your right hand and one in my left, searchingly as if I didn’t know whether I was to find gold or a land-mine, I probed my way forward one Thursday until I found myself completely lost in love. I wanted to say, but I couldn’t, not yet.

The cracking of denial makes a hell of a noise to one’s own ears from inside the space woven to protect soft-skinned change from prying eyes.

A cat was let out of a bag. Out it jumped, wild-eyed, disoriented, pupils gone mad with darkness. A simple, wild cat really. But smart, oh very smart. Quickly it assesses the situation. Fortunately it has a sense of humour, it can see the tragic, the painful, but also the funny in being a cat let out of a bag. Now let’s watch it. Let’s watch it compose itself, lick its ruffled fur into place. As any cat would, as any cat should really. It is OK that it will eventually utterly compose itself. Soon it is a cat of the world, like it used to be, before this wretched sack business. It might even get a walking-stick.

Eventually the event will be forgotten. Forgotten is the look of fright and panic on its face, forgotten is how terribly savage it looked. A cat of utter elegance with only one subtle fear that nobody knows about any more.

I thought I had everything under control.

A week later, when I went to let you out of my house, I could not look into your eyes. You asked if I was angry with you about something. I answered the next day. I told you that it had been something far worse I had tried to keep concealed that midday. Much worse, in its most ironic sense. Not kept hidden like a present, which only at first is charmingly hidden in a box. A present promises revelation, and the biggest feeling of all; expectation! To be followed no doubt by the clapping of excited hands and a moment or many moments of unfearful gratitude and balance.

I tried merely in the most practical sense to protect what was so naked, pigment-free. An albino emotion, with a desperate need to set out in search for the lightest spot possible.

‘I don’t know what we will let life bring us,’ I said, ‘but until we do I will just clutch this feeling to my chest. Crossed arms, holding it close, keeping it from burning. Telling it to half-close its red tearful eyes. For no other reasons than I selfishly adore it.’

So finally, I let go and told you that I had found Margaret sweeping out the years one morning. That I had woken up that day to wide-open doors and clouds of years being swept out into the morning breeze before I could stop her. I told you to blame it all on my giant maid. You told me you didn’t dare to, so we better just accept it. ‘Until the moment we can be together,’ I wrote, ‘I shall just try to breathe in, breathe out. All in a steady rhythm. I shall imagine my chest as a balloon being blown up by a purple-faced child who doesn’t have the capacity to ever get past that hard point. So it tries again and again and again. Breathe in, breathe out.’

But that all happened much later.

When I was already yours.

I have always been slightly shocked by the dishonest way English people sign off their letters. ‘Yours’ they will write to a person they hardly know. The English have such a rich language yet they sign off letters like this to more or less any kind of person with no meaning to their life. Perhaps they have too many words to appreciate them.

But to me words have a literal meaning. I often signed off my letters to you ‘Yours’. Of course you understood immediately.

‘Don’t you love the expression “to watch one’s words”?’ I wrote to you. ‘I know I have to do that. I line them up with great difficulty. But then if I turn my back for ever so slight a moment (and how can I avoid that?), it all goes horribly wrong. They start running in all directions. I try to catch them but they slip so easily from my grip. “Curiosity” runs in one direction. “Desire” in the other. Damn! There goes beautiful “elbow” as quick and heading in the same direction as “thirst”, already halfway over the hill. They have done it again! All gone, with an exception of some miserable word like “moist”. (Standing big-eyed in front of me pleading to be used.) Of course I am not surprised about their behaviour, they are my words after all. But I have to try to watch them better!’

Then you would ring me to ask for words for your paintings and I would ring you and ask for pictures for my words. ‘Turn on a penny, staccato on short legs,’ were my words for a buffalo painting. And the pictures you gave my words came wrapped in things like an ever-flowering gardenia, giant palm leaves shimmering on one side, like mother-of-pearl and other images I had never seen before. Like ‘the configuration’, as you very seriously called the large cluster of freckles I have on the back of my right leg. I was born with this mark, yet you were the first person ever to find it. When I was a shorts-clad child, in pale Swedish summer nights, grown-ups would occasionally catch me as I ran by, to brush off what they thought was dirt from the lawn or from a tree. As a hunter in shorts, in Tanzania, my friends in the bush always seem to think I have walked into a cloud of giant pepper-ticks. To everyone it always looked like something that should be brushed off or pulled off with tweezers. Yet you, you as the first and only person, were seriously surprised that I had lived with this for thirty years without realizing the obvious truth about the skin on the back of my right leg. The ‘right-in-your-face, can’t-miss-it-obvious’ truth. To you, this thing that all my life I had so ignorantly disregarded simply as an odd and rather ugly birthmark, was a drawing. Very clearly a drawing of a lion, a bicycle, and a nondescript character riding the lion. I had to lie on my stomach on the blue sofa one afternoon, as you sat on the floor with a torn-off piece of newspaper, a black pen and your nose about one centimetre above the mark, trying to keep me from twisting and turning too much, in laughter or curiosity to see.

The relief, to finally have found the person who thought the same things important and worth attention. For the first time we were sharing the world of unimportant things that the uninterested call ‘details’, and arrogantly discarding things that we had both been told were important but had never felt were so.

You never told me I split hairs. You understood I didn’t. I just needed to tell the stories exactly, exactly as I felt them. Or understand the story exactly as somebody else felt it. What is the point of words if we don’t try to use them carefully, precisely? How are we to say that we understand each other then? There aren’t enough words as it is.

You have to try to get to the core, to the marrow in communication and in life. Blood buzzing in the fingertips is the whole point.

It wasn’t that I had never loved before. I had. We both had. Past love wasn’t a lie, not at all, I just had never expected to find you, my love. I thought people weren’t meant ever to feel so fulfilled by one person.

When I was a child I had accepted that nobody would ever be able to understand me fully and that I would perhaps never understand them fully either. Always slightly on the edge of any social group, my closest friends were my dog and a particular tree. To them I would talk to for hours. I was never sad or angry about being slightly outside, I accepted it as my fate and made it into my strength. But now that you are gone, my love, I feel loneliness spreading through my body, I watch it stretching out its little crooked arms inside me. Like the globule of ink on my desk that was contained in its own perfect voluptuous circle until just a moment ago, when a drop from under my teacup fell right on top of it and made it run in all directions.

I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more.