Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert

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СКАЧАТЬ after almost a year of gradually fading away. It was devastating to us all and I don’t think my mother ever really recovered. I wonder what my mother would have made of me, almost a century old, living opposite the hospital and twice already, carted there in a wheelbarrow. And, admittedly, carted back. My daughter gave the porter who most recently wheeled me across a hundred rand note. She took it amiss when I said it was too much. Just for crossing the road!

      All old people think their children don’t know the value of money, because the children are too extravagant, because they eat out in restaurants too often. Because the grandchildren are spoiled and must all have the latest fashion in cell phones, whatever it may cost. Many of us old people are given the children’s out-of-fashion cell phones, but that doesn’t bother us, because we don’t use them anyway.

      One old resident’s child said: Ma, take it along when you go for a walk in the park, for your safety. Lordy, child, when the thug sees me with a cell phone in my hand, he’ll come at me precisely to grab the phone! How did you get it so back to front?

      * * *

      The black telephone was fixed to the passage wall just outside my father’s study. The girl at the telephone exchange knew my voice and in the afternoons after school, before I could even ask, she put me through to Truida, my friend. We could talk for as long as we wanted and it didn’t cost anything. My mother didn’t want me to pull up a chair – then everybody trips over it and then there’s no end to your talking. Even now we still talk for such a long time, there’s no end to our talking. Both our husbands are dead, we both have three children; but she’s one ahead of me with a seventh grandchild, I have only six. And then we both have three great-grandchildren, my three are all boys. We don’t talk about them. We talk, as in the old days, about things: We both believe ‘thoughts are things’, and there are so many more thoughts nowadays than there were then. Even though all else falls away from us, nobody can take thoughts from us. We talk about what we feel and think, about how we must try to accept the rapidly changing world, about how we can hardly keep up. I think she is the only surviving person I still know who knew my father and mother, and I’m the only surviving person she knows who knew her father and mother. It’s a strange bond. It means we can resume our conversation at any time, as if we had never interrupted it. We trust each other.

      We used to cycle home from school together. At her house we’d both dismount and push the bicycles the rest of the way, as if it were the first preparation for the big goodbye. We’d push our bicycles up the Orange Street hill, then get on again, and she’d cycle home down the one way and I down the other way. And at home I’d throw my satchel down, take my half-tepid tea from the oven and drink it, walk to the phone, pick up the receiver, and our conversation would start all over again.

      My brother says: What are you two gossiping about again? I tell him we’re not gossiping, we’re discussing life.

      Because we were both avid readers we always had things to discuss. Even now we still take each other books to read. Shortly before his death Klaas and I had a meal with them, at their holiday home in Simon’s Town. Klaas took Truida’s husband, Jan, a book, Geskiedenis van Harrismith (History of Harrismith), which his father wrote years ago. This gave Jan great pleasure, because the book was out of print and he had a farm near Harrismith and was interested in the place. I try not to think back on such incidents. I’m trying to live a life without Klaas.

      * * *

      A rumour is doing the rounds that the sickly Englishman has died. That, two nights ago, he was wheeled across to the hospital and subsequently died there. I didn’t even know that he had deteriorated. Walking down the passage, I still have the feeling that he will appear from behind his closed door to stop me. In his wobbly way. Even though, as the nurse says, we are all here to die, it’s a shock when it happens to someone right next to you. I hope they’ll sell the apartment quickly, because it’s not pleasant having to pass by the empty one umpteen times a day. You expect him to emerge and shuffle across the passage to the balcony. Our floor has been done short, we have the smallest balcony, if one person wants to sit there, that’s already enough, two have to sit knee to knee. If he’s sitting there, I can’t sit myself down there too.

      There’s no notice posted regarding a cremation or a service or a wake, which they’re so fond of nowadays, being held for him. Not even a small gathering in our dining room. The dining room is a very large space and they arrange the chairs in a row with a place for the speaker to stand. There’s even a piano. And the workers, room attendants as well as dining room attendants, stand on the steps and needle one another, but with straight faces, and they sing a few songs like ‘Amazing Grace’, which soar up there with the high notes higgledy-piggledy and a few sob-notes down here, so that the two in front have to fish tissues out of their sleeves to wipe their eyes. There isn’t always a preacher, but often just an older man who reads from the Bible or says something edifying. Whether they knew you well or not, all the residents usually attend the service, because it’s something to do, and the kitchen produces sandwiches and scones and biscuits, which makes for a change.

      Many of the old people feel they’d be happy with a gathering in the dining room rather than a church service. Then at least you’re assured of a turn-out, they say – who is still hale and enterprising enough to attend a church service somewhere? Where there’s no parking to be had. And where it could be raining or cold and windy. Even those who still have their cars are wary of driving and offering lifts to other people, especially if the church is in the city or an unfamiliar suburb.

      But one can make a plan, I think. You don’t have to be in the Groote Kerk in the centre of town. There are smaller churches nearby. I don’t think you should just discard all rituals out of hand. You need the ritual of a church and an organ and a black-suited and be-bibbed preacher and people in their best attire. I’d even go for the Dead March. Just so that everybody can be pulled up short for a moment. With a consciousness of transience. Their own as well. Death is no longer accorded a space. Even old people have to do exercises and swallow handfuls of pills, just to lead a kind of half-life for a few more years. Just don’t die. And, after all, you’re not a dog just to be covered up with soil.

      Even cemeteries are old-fashioned. More fashionable is a long-necked urn from which the ash slithers like a snake when the urn is upended. Like Ina Rousseau’s on the old bridge over the Eerste River in Stellenbosch. The little ceremony can be quite pretty. If you’re lucky and the wind doesn’t scatter the ashes. Some friends of my children have told how their mother’s ashes were blown back into their faces.

      My casket of ashes must be dug into the side of my husband’s grave. Not deep, just covered up. I don’t want to be buried deep. But not just scattered to the winds either.

      * * *

      I am at my loneliest when the wind is wailing through our building. Then the clouds pile high on Table Mountain, draped over it like heavy carpets. If there’s just a chink open somewhere, the wind howls through it. Behind the lift on the fifth floor, if the windows are not shut tight, some of them are warped, the wind howls through the building like a banshee.

      In the house where Klaas and I lived the wind also blew, but not so hard or so wilfully. The clouds would settle on the neck between Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak and from there plunge like lemmings to their death. Then the dog in his wooden kennel on the front stoep would start howling and carry on to such an extent that Klaas would have to venture out barefoot to let him in to sleep in the lobby. Then sometimes he’d pull the blanket up higher over me, and sometimes I’d fall asleep while reading and then he’d carefully remove the book from my hands and the glasses from my face. In the mornings he’d tease me: Do you keep your glasses on to see better in your dreams?

      I don’t remember wind from my earliest days. Paarl doesn’t get much wind. That’s why it gets so hot in summer, my mother used to say. And rains so much СКАЧАТЬ