Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert

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СКАЧАТЬ that’s why the survivor is here, everybody has lost somebody. It’s not that sad, your own story is replicated behind every door. And as when you are borne from one floor to the next by an escalator, and you can’t get off, so time transports you inexorably away from your husband’s death.

      But the loss of a son or a daughter, that showers sorrow, also on you, doesn’t matter how long ago, it’s still there, always there. So that you’re actually afraid when the parcel is opened slowly, cautiously, slightly. You have to know, how can you be friends, real friends, if you are not let into the past; but how full of sorrow is the past.

      Another Englishman who devoted his life to the Empire, part of the British colonial service in just about every country on the African continent, born somewhere in the East, never really had a permanent home, with only a British passport (here he is not granted a residence permit for longer than a year, and must reapply every year). Even he, with his British-colonial appearance – safari suit, neatly cut hair, ruddy colouring – even he is burdened with his parcel. In the end you are shy to ask the age-old questions on a first acquaintance: Are you married? Do you have children? Suddenly afraid that you’ve now trespassed too far, because his answer is measured: ‘My wife and two of my children were killed by the Mau Mau in Kenya in an ambush.’

      Rather stay wrapped up, then, little parcel.

      At lunchtime the people walk with stiff-backed steps down the corridors, crowd the lift: no, please, there’s plenty of space, do come in. Sit down at the elegant tables, dish up salad, make small talk, eat, even linger for a moment at a table on the way out, make more small talk, predict the weather – because it’s clouding over outside the large, lovely windows. Winter’s here, you know. We’ll still have a few fine days. You’ll see. The concept of an Indian summer is so lovely – where would it come from? But Piet Cillié thought up such an appealing word for a few late warmish days: pop-up summer. We all enjoy the pop-up summer. Have a nice nap this afternoon. Is there anything worthwhile on TV this evening? We’ll have to see. Have a good nap. And back into apartments behind closed doors.

      In the life of almost every woman or man I’ve met here has been the death of a child. It leaves me dumb and dismayed. Should I stop trying to be sympathetic, stop asking, or do people yearn to tell, is that what friendship is, to listen? Does it bring a tiny bit of relief, here in the new home, here among so many strange people with whom you’re suddenly co-existing?

      Only we can really understand them, we, their contemporaries, the survivors, the persisters, the die-hards. My cleaner says to me: ‘I never see so many old people together in my life. I go into dining room I dunno what I see, old people and grey hair. You must be very strong people for so many to get so old.’

      There are more or less sixty of us residents. Our average age last year was eighty-eight. We celebrated the hundredth birthday of an old lady, the place provided cake and tea and she sat up straight in her seat of honour behind the table, a bit scared, the hair a bit out of place. The staff sang to her. She clung to her carer’s hand, tugging at it as if she wanted to go back to her room. She died three days later, in the night, but it was only two days after that that the death notice was put up in the lift.

      Although we are all here to die, death is handled so gently and in such an unreal fashion that we forget about it most of the time. Once when we were taking the big lift down to the dining room (the small lift closer to the rooms had got stuck on some floor), an old deaf lady declared in her shrill voice: ‘That’s why we have this big, long lift, to take out the coffins at night, when we’re all asleep.’

      We all went silent. In our lexicon that was a faux pas. That’s not the kind of thing one mentions in conversation.

      We’re not only survivors, we’ve sailed through the rocks, how many times, we’ve survived births and operations and replacements and deaths, we’ve nursed and buried our parents, raised our children, buried a spouse, we are not to be pitied.

      A dining room assistant clearing the tables while a few of us are still sitting chatting announces to us: ‘You must have looked after your parents very well, I know my Bible, it’s written in the Ten Commandments: Honour your mother and your father that your days may be long upon the earth. I know my Bible.’

      Now that’s a novel approach.

      * * *

      Since we are all on the threshold of the hereafter, you’d expect a steady procession of preachers, as heralds of the hereafter, perhaps a little creaming off from the estate for the Church, even a substantial creaming off, but no such procession materialises.

      Now and again a church elder with a little book. Once, just before Christmas, there was a young minister here with a few shopping bags full of snacks and food, but he must have had the wrong old age home on his address list, because the recipients were embarrassed rather than grateful. The food parcels must have been intended for the underprivileged and were declined with thanks. How vain we humans are. Not for us the food parcels.

      There would, though, be scope for ministering, and interesting variations at that, because we have people of all faiths: for rabbis, for the Dutch Reformed, for Roman Catholics, for Anglicans, Methodists and Reformed. The tai chi classes offered on Tuesday mornings in the dining room prepare the way for Buddhists, Zen. Oddly enough no signposts to Islam, although a woman in a burqa was our receptionist for a few years.

      But in spite of our communal destination the subject of the hereafter is taboo as far as the talks offered to us are concerned. Talks on investments, on diet, on hobbies or on Adapting – very important for old age, Adapting – are sometimes held in the dining room, usually with meagre attendance. We didn’t come here for talks, did we? And the investments have certainly been wound up. And our hard-of-hearing ears hear nothing when the speakers mumble as they do.

      * * *

      We came here to ease the path across the divide a little, perhaps to postpone it by a year or so. And not to be a burden to our families. Perhaps we were just too scared to live on our own in our big, empty houses. Perhaps the electronic buttons and panic buttons and burglar alarms and garden gate intercoms just confused us a bit. It’s terrible when you forget your dog in the house and all the alarms have been set and his passage through the house sets off the alarms and he is so bewildered he doesn’t know what to do. Once I returned from shopping and found the armed response men sitting outside in the car, wary of the dark, moving mass behind the window panes that had hardly lain down when he’d get up again and the alarm would start wailing all over again in his ears.

      The path across? At present the path across is mainly to the hospital across the road. It’s a busy road. The cars speed downhill from the Kloof Street side, from Buxton and Rosmead and even Molteno Road, it’s so steep, stopping isn’t easy. There’s a zebra crossing in front of our gate, but can our ageing souls, sceptical from bitter experience, believe that the crossing will stop the speeding demons? With a sturdy nurse holding us by the arm we are braver. Just cross the road with us. Then we’ll manage, thank you.

      Awaiting us are the corridors, the steps, the confusion of rebuilt floors, the sheet topography of the hospital. You name it, we know the way. We shall master the wide, bewildering passages, the sections radiating from the central axis, sometimes with shiny-clean black-and-white tiles as guides: ‘Many thanks, if I can just get to the black-and-white tiles, yes, the new section, I know the way from there.’ We are brave; sooner or later, we shall cross the road again with our large, square envelope under the arm, with the X-ray photographs (requested by the specialist) that will proclaim the news, good or bad, to our GPs, and that we now bravely bear as if it were a new dress or shawl, festively, and the hotel porter (I mean the hospital porter) will come forward to escort us home. He will walk across the zebra crossing, whether there are cars approaching or not, and flail СКАЧАТЬ