Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert

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      A bigger adventure, but only in times of crisis, is the MRI, the scan in the tunnel. For that, a family member or an ambulance or David Klein is required, to transport us to the other hospital in the city. To deposit us right next to the driveway in Loop Street, to go into a room that looks like a cellar, and the door is wide open so that you peer in at the white monster incarcerated there like the enormous, shiny white barrel of a cannon, into which you have to crawl, which reminds me of the cannon in Pagel’s Circus from which the clown would be fired. Or rather, you have to lie flat on your back and then you are reeled into the tunnel. Just don’t look around in the tunnel. Keep your eyes shut tight. And recite a hymn. Then recite another hymn.

      And nowadays the envelope-bearing is no longer necessary, because the doctors inform one another electronically about our infirmities and we’re hardly back in the bedroom when the telephone rings and the GP wants to talk to you.

      * * *

      And a heart-to-heart talk with a bosom friend over a cup of tea in her apartment? Not that easy with a stranger. A blessing from Above if there is somebody from your old life living here already, or when an old friend from outside, when she is also left on her own, moves in.

      As is to be expected, because we are all old, illness is much discussed in the passages and on the verandas.

      It’s a perilous path you have now set foot on, a narrow bridge over a precipice. But if you can manage to cross it, something beautiful may await you.

      It’s actually only to be expected that you’ll have an illness in your past. But a conversation I cannot have, from which I recoil, is one about never-ending physical pain. You can read pain in eyes. There are two things I can read in eyes: a woman who is newly pregnant and doesn’t know it for certain yet, and a woman in pain. Of the first capacity there is no longer any need where I live, and from the second I shy away. That pain that runs with the clock, in shifts of four hours or, if the pills are very strong, six hours. Day in, day out, night in, night out. I want to prostrate myself on the ground before her, kiss her feet.

      * * *

      An older person just falls silent with pain. A child thrashes, yells and cries till the tears stream down his face when he has pain. A child ‘performs’, yells louder, squeezes out the tears because he wants relief and will get it; there are many kinds of relief – sweets, a toy, caresses, kisses, promises. And for lasting pain there could also perhaps be relief. But the older person no longer has the strength to cry or yell, and has long known that there is no lasting relief to be had. And that the pain must be accommodated. To learn to accommodate many things is the condition of growing old. I don’t like the word ‘adapt’, ‘be reconciled with’ is perhaps better, but it indicates something continuous, without end. In the word ‘accommodate’ there is hope, it’s temporary, it will pass. Just take the painkillers regularly, as directed, and one day you’ll suddenly realise: It’s no longer necessary, it’s over. You can’t believe it, take half a pill anyway, forget even the half, and: it’s gone.

      * * *

      We live in a ravine or gulley between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. Thus, there’s a plot of ground behind the old-age home and a garden and a rivulet and lots of trees, even old, old palm trees with golden dates hanging down in bunches between the sharp leaves, and acorns that fall on your head and squirrels rocking on the pointed leaves of palm trees and leaping from one to the other. The old garden. With a gate into the street at the back and then a short distance to Kloof Street.

      My curiosity goads me, what does the Afrikaans word ‘pril’ mean, as in ‘prille jeug’? I find the English synonym ‘prime of life’ (questionable), and ‘prime’, and thus also ‘pril’, can function as verb as well. Somebody can ‘pril’/‘prime’. I discover interesting meanings for the process of priming a very young child: Giving a first coat. Grounding. Giving a base coat, putting gunpowder in the pan. Leavening. How clever our ancestral speakers were. To ground a very young child. Give a base coat. Spot on. ‘Leaven’ gives me great pleasure. ‘Gunpowder in the pan’ even more fervent pleasure. It bothers me that I didn’t ‘prime’ my children. Or my grandchildren. It seems that their powder in the pan had to come of its own accord.

      * * *

      In the prime of my youth, my preschool years, before my years of reading books, I was a garden child, or a backyard child. I could sit on the ground and crumble the soil in my little fat hands, I could tug at a leaf until it tore from its stem, I could crush it between my fingers; I could draw a flower towards me until the stalk yielded, I could eat the petals of flowers and feel scraps on my tongue until my mother’s finger in my mouth ferreted them out and threw them away. I picked up a lemon and bit into it, and sucked pebbles; I squashed a worm.

      I’m now approaching those years again. I can’t sit flat on the ground, I’d never get up again, but I can drag my chair in among plants, or under trees, and drop my hands on either side of my body and sit still, and later small black ants start scurrying over my fingers. And the leaves I don’t have to pluck from the trees, they come to me of their own accord. One falls on my forehead, as if the hand of the tree is blessing me. I press it to my lips and the leaf moistens, it gets into my mouth and I taste it, I nibble at it slowly. My fingers pull stalks from the soil, I wipe them on my sleeve, and also suck at them. Am I preparing myself for blending with the earth? It’s a pity I want to burn, I think, because the blending with the earth is much more appealing, as Klaas, who wanted to be buried, also said, but those spadesful of soil thudding down on my sister’s grave I still hear, and the suffocation, it must be my asthma days that make me so scared of a coffin underground, that suffocation is not for me. A pity, that the burning is not so poetic. But perhaps it also is.

      * * *

      I tell my daughter: My life is now a cul-de-sac. A dead-end street.

      My daughter tells me: Ma, you never stay in a cul-de-sac. You turn around, drive back and find a new direction.

      That sounds very brave, but I am no longer brave.

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