Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert

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СКАЧАТЬ In the odd shaky way in which all our words are spoken. Perhaps stand on the staircase and wave at him? But a wiser voice warns me: He said he might come back. He must just not think he’s coming back to something. Then you’re in the soup. I close my door and don’t hear his bags being shunted into the lift. As long as he doesn’t faint again when the door starts sliding shut.

      There’s something about a very old man, with bent, skinny shoulders and loose skin around the throat, in his good cashmere cardigan, with the broken veins in the reddish cheeks, and the blue eyes shiny with moisture. The bald head with the few sparse hairs combed over it. And his shaky hands. That makes one feel a certain tenderness. Dear Lord. If only he wasn’t stone deaf. You have to yell at him before he understands, and repeat yourself umpteen times.

      * * *

      I’m going to leave David Klein money in my will. On behalf of all the old people he helps. And puts into lifts with their parcels and the buttons he pushes to dispatch them up. And when they faint in the lift. And if their journey goes further than the fifth floor? Only a mercy.

      David Klein has been driving me for a long time. A short, stout man with red hair and a speckled skin, always in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Big voice and equally at home on our front porch and in the Labia bioscope, in the doctor’s rooms or at the hairdresser. He opens the door for me, unfolds my little blue cushions: ‘What are we doing today? The hair or the marbles?’ He takes me to a doctor who manipulates my head, on the days when my marbles are in such disarray and my head so dizzy that I can’t stand or walk. In the city he parks right next to the kerb and no matter who’s hooting or shouting, he gets out, opens my door and takes me by the hand, onto the kerb, into the building, and helps me into the lift. ‘Keep an eye on the lady,’ he tells the caretaker who’s sitting at his desk reading the paper. He stands watching me until I’m out of sight.

      We are all his clients. He says: ‘The other taxi drivers asked me the other day: “Why do you bother with the old people, you can’t make much on their short trips?” Then I tell them: “When the season’s over, you’re stuck with nobody. My clients are year-round.”’

      I ask him: ‘How come you know all the side streets so well?’

      ‘I hauled mailbags, ma’am. All of Tamboerskloof. Criss-crossed Gardens, Oranjezicht. It was my first job.’

      As I said, I can’t handle emotion any more. If I think of him walking with the mailbag over his shoulder and posting mail through the slit at each house, a young man with no other future, my eyes fill with tears again. I wouldn’t mind if one day he pushes the last button of the lift for me, going up.

      * * *

      That night I am uneasy about the sickly Englishman cleaving the dark sky in the silver Boeing. A skinny sick man gasping for breath, up there in the dark sky. At who knows what speed through the night. Would they know about his emphysema, would an oxygen mask be available? Is he clinging to his armrests or is he travelling way beyond it all, tiny on the wings of his great decision?

      I hope his daughter is waiting for him at Heathrow. She’s one of those lean, strong little women, strong calves and forearms, draped in shawls, long strings of beads around the neck and highlighted bottle-blonde hair pinned up on the head. She calls him ‘Oh Daddy, no’.

      * * *

      Here among us children play a very large role. Grown-up children, not grandchildren. They were so cute, couldn’t come to play with us often enough, and now, it seems, they don’t care about us any more, the grandmothers complain. Older grandchildren can gladden the hearts of the grandmothers with a spontaneous visit, although there are plenty of complaints about them too. One woman knitted her eighteen-year-old grandson a beautiful wine-red jersey, hours of work, and phoned him on his birthday and said the jersey was waiting for him, he should come to fetch it. ‘It’s still lying here,’ she tells us. We consoled her – the children are so busy, he’ll still come. But ‘my son’, ‘my daughter’ and for the truly blessed ‘my sons’ and ‘my daughters’ are magic words. ‘My son says I mustn’t worry about the price of medicine, I should just take it all.’ Or my daughter: ‘Ma, we’ll have to get you some more stuff for winter.’ The words that are peddled in the corridors and that, however paternalistic (odd to think of the word ‘paternalistic’ rather than ‘maternalistic’), do provide a sense of being cared for and cherished.

      But all the stories one has to listen to: their grandchildren’s stories or their grown-up children’s virtues … Heavens, for every anecdote I tell about a grandchild, I have to listen to six or seven others. I’m not interested in the eisteddfod achievements of this or that five-year-old poppet. But if I want to tell about mine, I must be prepared to listen as well. That is the law of give and take … and I have to tell, it was so cute. But, say the women, especially the Dutch women: Don’t interfere, don’t offer advice about children or grandchildren, just bring gifts, shut up and put up. I must say, it sounds a bit too austere.

      One little old lady here never had a husband or children, but she has thirty-two teddy bears. She invited me into her room. They sit on the bed against her pillow, on the long bay-window sill, on the dressing table, on the shelves. Big ones and little ones, wearing dresses or checked pants. They have names. She swops the ones on the window sill around, so that the others can also get some sun, or enjoy the view. They greet her when she comes in, she greets them when she goes out. She’s untroubled and peaceful with them, she never waits for a phone call or a visit. A mother worries about her children until the day she shuts her eyes for good, my mother told me. I don’t worry about my children, I say resolutely. Then you should worry about not worrying about your children, she says. She doesn’t know it’s just bluster.

      * * *

      Word reaches us that the Englishman was so ill, he went straight from the plane to hospital in an ambulance, and had to stay there a fortnight. Now he’s in Wales in a care home for old people and there’s no question of his returning. His apartment is being refurbished for sale. I hope the Welsh weather is kind to him. And his daughter. And his son-in-law.

      * * *

      Contrary to my expectations, it’s difficult to make new friends in a retirement home. By the time people turn up here at our place, their lives are behind them, wrapped up like a parcel in brown paper and tied with string. Their past is completed. They’re not coming here to continue their lives. They’re coming to wind down. Like the spring of an old-fashioned watch. To come to rest.

      It’s a very big move to make. Bigger than the move to another house or another province or even another country. It’s a way of life that you forfeit and a new way of life that you have to acquire. With the realisation: Something is over for ever. You’ll never get it back. You’ve had your chance, you won’t have it again.

      It’s a mistake to come to a retirement home too early. Like me at seventy-eight. Or too fit. Then you kick against the pricks, bloody your nose against the invisible walls. The most toxic words you hear are: ‘You’ll adapt.’ Adapt to what? To decrepitude? To death? And if you don’t want to adapt? The bloody nose. Again and again and again.

      And slowly, cautiously put out your feelers to someone else, sitting alone on a stoep on the fourth floor, just sitting, hands folded on the lap. Or sitting in a patch of sun next to the lift, a resident with an apartment on the shady side of the building seeking sunlight. You’ll say: Come and have a cup of tea this afternoon. Or a drink this evening. One corner of the folded paper of the parcel of life may perhaps be lifted, slowly, half-reluctantly, half-eagerly. And some sad story will always emerge, until you’re scared to hear the rest. How is it that behind every tightly closed door there’s a sad story? Mostly about a child who’s been lost – to a debilitating СКАЧАТЬ