Читать книгу Once We Were Sisters - Sheila Kohler - Страница 16

VII

KNOWLEDGE

YET IT IS MY SISTER WHO KNOWS ALL I BELIEVE AS A CHILD.

It is she who has the knowledge. I follow her around, her pale shadow, pretending to do what she does, “reading” a book, Pinocchio, because she, two years older than me, is reading it. “You are not reading, silly,” she says, laughing at me.

“I am!” I say, holding the book upside down, sitting on the soft velvet sofa in the dimness of the lounge, with the soft mauve carpet, and the mauve velvet curtains closed on the light.

I stay in the swimming pool as long as she and my cousin do. I tread water, though my teeth are chattering with cold, my lips blue, my fingers crinkled like an old woman’s.

I imitate and emulate as long as she will permit it. Sometimes she escapes me. She vanishes.

Once, we are told to take our afternoon nap in the nursery with our cousin Heather, Pie’s daughter, who is four years older than I am and often spends time with us. When I awake, I discover my sister and my cousin had only pretended to lie down to sleep, and while I was sleeping, they slipped out quietly and went off to swim at the public swimming pool, leaving me to wake up alone in the nursery. I feel this departure is a terrible betrayal; they have lied to me, left me alone. I weep bitterly.

My sister is the only one allowed into my father’s study, a mysterious place on the west side of the house. I have peeped in there and seen the fat, dark leather armchairs, the big desk before the window, the gramophone, where I believe little men must live and make music. Maxine is allowed into this sanctum sanctorum to file Father’s papers, a mysterious operation that concerns the alphabet, which I do not yet know.

We rarely see my father, who leaves before we wake up, slipping off silently, driven down the driveway in his shiny Rolls-

Royce, going to the timber yard, where he makes all our money.

Once, though, by chance, I saw him standing naked in the black-and-white-tiled bathroom before the big basin, and I dared to go up to him and touch the thing dangling there temptingly like a bell. I reached up and said, “Ding dong!,” swinging it back and forth with my little fingers, much to his ire.

My father’s Rolls-Royce coming in the gate at Crossways.

Maxine will be the one to explain the strange secrets of sex to me. We are walking together on the dry lawn—it is winter in the Highveld, and the grass is yellow and stiff. She tells me how the man puts his part into the woman to make a baby.

“It’s not true!” I exclaim.

“But it is. Cross my heart,” she says.

At the thought of this absurdity I fall to the grass and roll around in laughter, holding my stomach. For some reason this seems extraordinarily funny to me.

My sister says severely, “There is nothing funny about it at all!”