Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at the seaside, not in Paarl. Wind is the devil of holidays by the sea.

      We have our holidays in the Strand in a house my father rented, a small old-fashioned place on the seafront with a stoep that made my mother say: I only come to the Strand to serve tea. Because people parade down the street in rows and peer in at where my father is sitting and there’s always an ex-student or acquaintance among them who makes the whole row of people veer in and come to shake hands and then look around to see if there are more chairs, because everybody needs a seat. That’s the thing about the Strand, says my father while we’re carrying empty cups back in, everybody’s on the lookout for an old acquaintance.

      We swim right in front of the house. We’re allowed to cross the street, after my mother has checked and then with a nudge in the back, said: Go on, walk now, the road is clear. Later she turns up with the towels and a cushion and her book. I’m wearing my bathing cap already. We look at the people and wade in the shallows. Sometimes sit down in the shallow water with other children to get used to the cold sea. We see my mother arriving and she sits down on the sand and stretches out her arms and we know what she’s saying: Oh, what a beautiful morning, by this afternoon the wind will be blowing again. Children, enjoy the sea.

      We’re not allowed to go in too far, otherwise my father or mother, even though they’re not wearing bathing costumes, will rush into the waves to haul us out by the arm. They never swim. Other old people swim early in the morning when there’s nobody to stare at them, but they don’t really swim, they just bathe.

      When I’m shivering with cold, my mother drapes a towel over my shoulders and starts rubbing me dry. I try to pull away, but she’s got hold of me too tightly. My brother has long since yanked free, he disappears with his friend, and my mother can only follow him with her eyes, and carry on looking while she’s drying me.

      The most exciting thing about the sea for me is the concrete supports under the pavilion. The entrance is level with the road, and you can go in and then walk along the boardwalk all around the pavilion that juts out far into the sea. At low tide we can walk in under the pavilion from the beach and then climb up on the supports that are overgrown with seaweed and all kinds of shells clinging to the coarse concrete. It’s dark down there and the sea makes strange sounds that swish-swoosh through the supports, crack like a whip and then retreat. It’s cold as well, and sometimes the waves burrow holes next to the supports of the pillars and the holes get bigger and bigger and the waves roll on ever bigger and harder and higher, until the water splashes all over us clinging for dear life and we are sopping wet.

      Now I’m getting scared and want to get out of this dark, wet, swishing water and I let go of the concrete support and try to jump, but the water knocks me back into the hole. I get to my feet and it knocks me back again, but I crawl out of the water on all fours and as I crawl, my knees and my feet and my hands press hollows into the sand that fill up again from below. I am tired and sore and cold with buffeting, but I have to crawl fast otherwise the sand in this horrible, cold, dark place will suck me in and draw me under.

      Outside the sand is so white and the sun shines so brightly that my eyes hurt, and the sand scorches my feet, but I have to carry on walking to get home before my father and mother wake up from their afternoon nap.

      After four o’clock I don’t want to go along to the beach. It’s too windy, I say.

      You can see for yourself, Ma, see how the drifts of sand flurry over the road. I pull the front door shut. It feels as if the sand is coming to seek me out in the house.

      What did I tell you, my mother says, every afternoon it blows.

      * * *

      I have experienced so many emotions today, they pour out of me, from my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nostrils. I must try to calm down. Perhaps now at this age I am easier prey for emotion. My friend Annari says the older you get, the closer your bladder moves to your eyes. By now it’s moved all the way to just behind my eyes. A sick child on television, sick to death, makes me cry. But the crying passes just as quickly. I am overwhelmed with emotion when I’ve done reading a book about a woman cruelly deceived by her husband, and then dying all on her own. Then Sina, Nico and Michelle’s housekeeper, phoned and said I should switch on the radio because Poppie is on the radio and that’s what I did and so Poppie also got me crying, especially the last part. So now it’s these three: television, radio, reading. Nothing direct. Can I still feel anything for myself? We are so far removed from life here, I get the impression we live through the emotions of others. Perhaps we shy away from our own emotions.

      My mother-in-law was just as weepy. I could never really understand it. It was always about things from the past that she cried, so then I’d say: Ma, there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s past, you mustn’t cry like that, and then she’d say: But it’s for things I loved so much that I’m crying.

      Nowadays I understand it better. The way I picture it: there’s a thin membrane around our brain that ordinarily anchors us to the present. But as you get older, flaws develop in the membrane, like an old sheet getting threadbare. Then the past, whether called for or not, streams through the flaws. That’s why old people get confused, or lose their concentration, or mislay things, like their keys.

      I cry even for the wretched palm tree in the garden, because at its base, close to the ground, the scales of its bark are peeling off and the weeds push up into it and wriggle their way in between the trunk and the bark and the fungi start proliferating there and digging in, creeping higher and higher up against the tree, they will kill it, that I know. There’s a palm tree I don’t even want to walk past, even though its swinging branches are singing in the wind, because the bark of its lower trunk has also split off, perhaps with age, and millions of little white roots are burrowing through it. Whether they are tiny roots, stems or worms, I don’t know, but the tree is helpless, delivered over to them. Millions of hungry, searching, white, moist tubes. The whole garden is desperate – even the ducks glance around nervously, all the time, the squirrels tremble on the branches before they leap. All of nature is trembling. We must get used to it.

      * * *

      The nurse stops me in the passage. The sickly Englishman isn’t dead after all. I don’t know why we thought he was, it must have been all the people with little briefcases in and out of his apartment, a rumour just started doing the rounds that he’d died. No, it was another man with a surname almost like his. No, says the nurse: ‘Come in quickly, he’s flying to England this afternoon at four, come say goodbye to him. We can’t just let him leave without saying goodbye.’ And when I go in, he gets up and comes up to me with small steps, his hands outstretched, and his bladder must also be right behind his eyes (actually I don’t much like this image), because it looks as if he’s crying, his pale eyes – that must once have been blue – are swimming in tears. He takes me by the upper arms, and he says: ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m flying to my daughter this afternoon. To see if I like it there. But I’m keeping my apartment, I’m coming back.’ And he clutches at my arms and presses me to him and in that overseas manner he kisses me on one cheek and then pushes me back and kisses me on the other cheek, such light half-and-half kisses. And then his cheek against my cheek, and he presses me closer, as I never thought such a sick old man could do. I’m embarrassed. When last did a man, even though it’s a sick old man and an Englishman to boot, grab hold of me like that? All of a sudden I’m clutched in his shaky arms against his shoulder and half against his neck. The old-person flesh is too intimate, too unexpected, and I move my head. He lets me go and I gulp and ask him if I can help him pack a few things, but he says no thank you, the sister has helped him, and he says archly: ‘I’m an old hand at travelling.’ I wish him a good journey and, in keeping with the overseas note we’ve struck, ‘Bon voyage.’ ‘Merci,’ he says lightly, as if he’s overseas already. So much life has come into him. I hear David Klein coming down the corridor, and his familiar voice: ‘Now what can I help СКАЧАТЬ