Cul-de-sac

Elsa Joubert

CUL-DE-SAC

Translated by Michiel Heyns

Tafelberg

To everybody who stands by us in our

old age and makes it bearable:

family, friends, doctors, nurses, carers.

1

CUL-DE-SAC

They say you fall back on your roots when the winds of time start buckling your body and your spirit. The narrowing decreed by time. The diminishing mobility. Stagnation of the spirit. The laying down of the old, trusted norms. I’d almost say the laying down of dreams.

At a physical level: the limits to movement imposed by chronically defective limbs. Walking an unfamiliar path is looking for trouble. A chair in a stranger’s living room is a confrontation. A ride in a stranger’s car is a drama. Turning off a tarred road onto a corrugated one is a catastrophe. Driving yourself, your own car, is a memory that has long since sunk under the horizon. And the quaking, the juddering that an accelerating aeroplane inflicts upon your every bone is no longer for me. My last trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town I survived standing bolt upright all the way.

The only road that can be ventured upon with a minimum of anxiety is the road to the past.

I have taken that road twice already, but a lot remains.

Poor old Paarl, once again.

No. Not ‘poor old’ Paarl. Birthplace. Town that in vividness and size and detail and colour and emotional hold trumps, in my remembrance, every city where I’ve lived since, and clings like a fungus to the whole canvas of my memory. My mother lived to ninety-seven. In Paarl. An alliance of almost a century. Now that all the many other cities I got to know – in Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Near and Far East – are starting to wilt in my memory, Paarl, like an animal that has been hibernating, is starting to wake up and take over.

Green twig with the thin, moist, white wound where the branch was torn from the bark; wet, black soil through which the twig burrows; small, dark splash of water starting to shine in the little hole in the soil. My bottom on the ground, cold seeping through the wet panties, arms picking me up and carting me off, ‘stop making such a mess’. But the water welling up out of the muddy hole, that you never forget.

Lenie on the steps of her room in the winter sun, the only winter sun that the large, angular house ever receives, brushing out her hair. So that the hair rises in an afro, as I have learned today to call it. But in her coffin, in the living room of her cousin’s house on the Ridge, to which they were removed in the Fifties, she lay so small and faraway on the white satin, like a visitor from another, distant world, that I did not want to believe that it was her … the thin hair lying flat as a bonnet around her head. The work-whitened hands on the chest. How startled I was when I saw the insides of our servants’ hands, the portals to a world suddenly looming up before me, terrible, terrifying, a world into which I am suddenly dumped head over heels, a world in which everything that is, no longer is. I scream. My mother drags me away. What are you always doing in Lenie’s room? Lenie, you mustn’t let her bother you like that. She’s not bothering me, missus.

The white insides of Lenie’s hands.

There were four lots of bearers for her coffin. Taking turns. First from the living room out of the house to the waiting hearse. Then new hands grasped the shiny handles, still warm from the previous bearers, and a little jerkily lugged the coffin from the hearse and carried it as far as the cemetery gate. Fresh bearers took over where the raw path swerved out, and they were the ones who placed the coffin slowly and carefully onto the green bands that lead to eternity. They then stood back, hats in hand, heads bowed, slightly built men with delicate features.

In his travel book, In Search of South Africa, HV Morton wrote: In the streets of Paarl you see many men with French faces, though they don’t speak French. They are dark of skin, slightly built.

We used to think he was talking about people like my father, but now I know he was also talking about Lenie’s people, also descendants of the French Huguenots. And at the time we never noticed it.

We sing ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on his gentle breast …’ Where do my tears come from? They run over my cheeks. The little face and the ancient body sink into the ground, the coffin is covered up. Again I feel the fear that took hold of me when I was a child of eight: Must all that heavy, moist, red earth be shovelled down on her so relentlessly? Here on the hill there won’t be hyenas to dig her up. I know that heavy valley soil will also be shovelled down on me. I’ve known it since I was eight years old. Perhaps my tears are not for Lenie.

* * *

My retirement home is a red-brick building five storeys high. In front, next to the entrance, is a row of garages, and behind the garages, but at a lower level, more garages. Because we all come here, cheerfully, with our cars.

We live in apartments of varying sizes facing west towards Lion’s Head or east towards the hospital and Table Mountain. We live in a kloof, close to the city centre, with a stream running through our garden. The higher the apartment, the more beautiful the views. I have a second, smaller, apartment, across the passage from the first, bought to be equipped as a study – so I have the beautiful views towards both west and east.

From our front gate it’s just a matter of crossing Hof Street, through the hospital grounds, then across Molteno Road and we are in De Waal Park. I walk in the park many times a day, alone, at any hour. Until I am hit over the head and knocked down and robbed of a little gold chain I bought at the old market in Istanbul. The Turk had stood behind me, draped the chain around my neck and measured it out according to my instructions, a little bit shorter, a little bit longer, to cover up the crease in my neck. He had snipped off the two extra links and, to my surprise, weighed them and subtracted the gold from the price. I loved that chain. I see the four men, still young, in front of me, two on each side of the path, I see them approach, close in around me, twigs in the mouth, I think of Anna on Rondebosch Common, how she said when they closed in on her, ‘I am old enough to be your grandmother …’ I start mumbling something about ‘grandmother’ when one of them presses up so close that I can feel his breath, ‘fuck the grandmother,’ he says, and gives me such a blow that I sprawl down flat, my hip in the furrow, my shoulder hard in the dry grass, his hand is at my neck, his head against me, I should bite the hand, I think, but thank heaven I don’t do it, otherwise he’d certainly have kicked my head in. His fingers are fumbling at my neck and I feel the chain breaking. He’s up and away and all four of them vanish in a flash through the big gate on Molteno Road. I move my limbs slowly, feel nothing is broken. I get up in stages, I see the nannies and children still playing by the swings – did they not see what happened, or did they just look the other way? I brush the leaves and dry grass from my clothes, start walking slowly, across the two bustling streets. I try sneaking into my building, take the front lift. I won’t tell anybody, otherwise there’ll be a big to-do. Everyone will say: she insists on walking by herself. In my room I drink sugar water. My daughter-in-law, Michelle, takes me to the police station the next day to report the matter, but nothing comes of it.

Even after this I did not heed the warnings and still took walks on my own in the park, but at set times when there were lots of people. I listened to the other women’s stories that your fingers are bitten off to get to the rings. So then I took off my rings – engagement and wedding ring – and put them in a box, from which they were nevertheless also stolen.

Ringlessness already signals a new mode of existence. It took a long time for the paths to become a heimat again.

My first and only and last heimat? I wonder.

The upper part of Nantes Street, where I lived as a child, is sacred. Only four steps from the stoep down to the front gate. My father coming out of the front door with departing guests, hatless, that’s why his hand pats his bald spot to smooth the few hairs growing long to one side of his head; when I think of him, I see his hand brushing over his bald spot, he did it at my little sister’s graveside when I was eight years old, he did it at my wedding when we came out at the front door. The last time we drove away from there, a week before his death, he’d already started turning back, feeling the cold, but my mother remained standing at the gate till the children had stopped waving and the car had turned the corner into Mill Street.

He constantly urged me: Remember what the Greeks said: Follow the golden mean. But I couldn’t. I saw the words chiselled in marble at the ruins of the temple at Delphi, above an entrance now lying flat among the stones. I tried, Pappa, but I couldn’t.

My mother used to walk down the steps, and for short distances down the street with friends who lived nearby, then turn back home. Waited until I too was inside before slamming the gate shut.

How ironic, I came to the Berghof retirement home to be safer than in the big family home above the Molteno reservoir, and regardless of how often it was predicted that I was looking for trouble walking around the reservoir on my own, in thirty-five years it never happened. And now, here in this ‘safe haven’, it happens. Security is an illusion.

* * *

The old man in the corner room on our floor seldom ventures out. They say he takes his midday meal at the Mount Nelson, or sometimes in the cafeteria of the Mediclinic. We thought at first that it was an affectation, that we oldies in the dining room were not good enough for him. But we were wrong. It’s because he’s as deaf as a post. He stops me with thin, trembling arms outstretched. ‘My twin,’ he says cheerily. Crooked as he is, he tries to press me to him. The twin story owes its origin to the fact that I own the two apartments opposite each other at the end of the corridor. He has seen me emerge from one, then the other. Now he stops me. ‘My twin,’ he says. I try to avoid him, take a detour if he’s sitting on the balcony.

‘Come chat a bit to the old man,’ the nurse says. ‘He took a heavy knock today.’

I take a chair next to his, in front of the big-screen TV jabbering on soundlessly, as in most of the rooms.

He has finely chiselled features and a ruddy-skinned complexion, like the other Englishmen living here, who devoted their lives to the smooth running of the British Empire: civil servants, defence force, commerce, you name it, they converge here in our retirement home. They are sensitive to the fluctuating rand–sterling exchange rate, they complain readily about the meagre pension, have neither kith nor kin in the country. I pity them, the disillusioned remnants of the once great Empire.

He drove to the Gardens Shopping Centre that morning with Mr David Klein, the taxi driver whose dark-blue Cressida, with the yellow light on the roof and the fare written on the side, is regularly parked at our gate. Mr Klein has a knack with old people; he can drive into the centre for free to drop us off, provided that he’s out of there in under ten minutes. He can also drive into the centre to pick us up again. He bolsters our jittery hearts when we’ve got out of the taxi and see the neon lights of the centre flashing back and forth, making our eyes see twin lights that we know are not there, we are at the point of getting dizzy. He takes us by the elbow, accompanies us a few steps into the centre, squeezes our arm and says: ‘So, just wait here for me on this bench, don’t try to come outside on your own. In about an hour, right?’ Then we have the courage to venture into the milling crowd. When my mother was my age, she wouldn’t put a foot on an escalator, but I ride the escalator hands-free.

It transpires that the Englishman went to the bank, and then to Pick n Pay to buy his few provisions. Tins of coffee tumbled down on him when his hands missed their mark, but he bent down, picked them up, and managed to wheel his trolley to one of the tills. He clung to the trolley and, just before his turn came, everything went dark before him, and he fell down, gently, without ado. When he came to, he was lying on a single bed in a room, and a woman in a white coat had hold of his arm, while another was taking his pulse. He sat up and asked to be taken to the bench where Mr Klein would pick him up.

One of the women took him, slowly, shuffling, and wouldn’t let go of him until she saw Mr Klein approaching – by now they knew him at the centre, with his old people – Mr Klein led him out of the centre, with the bags in one hand and his other hand under the old man’s arm.

Mr Klein unloaded him carefully at the home and took him to the lift with his shopping bags. ‘I’ll be fine, Mr Klein, no, really, I’m fine,’ he said, and pressed the button for his floor. And just there, he passed out again. He fell against the lift door so it couldn’t close and the lift couldn’t go up. The nurse found him lying there.

‘Come chat a bit,’ says the nurse, ‘just so he can get his confidence back … a bit of a chat will help him.’ I know that there are only two souls in the whole wide world that he has any connection with: his brother in Australia, too old to brave the plane trip to him, just as he is too old himself to visit his brother. And his daughter in Wales. ‘She begs me to come home, she says there’s a place for me at a retirement home close to her. And my medical costs will be free. Here I have no medical aid.’

‘That’s a wonderful solution,’ I tell him. He has a coughing fit, he has severe emphysema, he sips a bit of water that I hold to his mouth while supporting his wobbling head. The lines on his red-flecked forehead run deep and his greyish old-person’s eyes are two narrowed slits from which all colour has gone. In the angle of the head, in its delicate vacillation, I read more clearly than in words: he can’t decide.

At the age of ninety-five my mother said: Decisions, decisions, decisions. Why must I make decisions? She was a headstrong old lady.

Because you don’t trust my decisions, I tell her.

Because you’re a mere child, she says.

If you can’t decide whether to send Hettie chocolates or flowers for her birthday, I say, send both.

She is pleased as Punch: Proves my point, you’ve got no logic.

It’s a lifetime later. I’m sitting with the sick, scrawny Englishman in his elegantly furnished room, in front of a big-screen TV with the sound off. I’ve made him tea and the warmth soothes his throat, the cup warms his fingers.

His breath is now a mite calmer. ‘Wales is beautiful, but the climate … is damp.’

‘Your daughter will be nearby.’

‘I don’t much like her husband.’

He is very deaf. I try to keep my sentences short so that I don’t have to shout, my head aches with shouting, he’d better decide now, for heaven’s sake.

I think it’s the flight to England that he doesn’t feel up to. Can I hold it against him? I don’t even fly to Gauteng any more.

My last plane trip, at eighty-six, was to Johannesburg for the wedding of my eldest granddaughter and namesake. I’d hardly sat down, my blue cushions arranged just right underneath me, when the engines of the plane were switched on; the whole tin carcass started shuddering. The other passengers sit back and open newspapers, rummage in the pocket in front of them for the in-flight magazine, but I can’t ward off the juddering from my body. It feels as if every joint is being violated, my whole skeleton shaking in unison with the plane. Flying is no longer for us, for you and me, I hear my body reluctantly telling me.

The body can endure less, is no longer adaptable. Even the canals in my ears object. A few hours after we’ve landed, I still feel as if I’m flying, terra firma is no longer firma, there are still waves of howling about my head. Thank heaven for the airport’s wheelchair.

* * *

On the way back to Cape Town from Wellington, where we’ve been celebrating my sister-in-law Jeanne’s birthday at Freddie and Katrien’s, my children want to surprise me. We turn into Nantes Street, because they want to show my grandchildren where they used to spend holidays with their grandfather and grandmother in Paarl.

The street no longer appeals to me. It’s been built up: The plots with the large gardens, as I knew them, have been subdivided, the gardens have been sold and on each new plot another, more modern, house has been built. The new, ugly houses, purple, yellow and dark maroon, vanish from my sight, I push them away. I reject them. It was never like this, I tell my grandchildren. Only later does my dismay subside.

As in water settling into calm, the pictures appear in my head. The street where I grew up can never be destroyed or wiped away. See, there