The Rowing Lesson Read online

  This is where the dead teach the living. The first week of Anatomy 1 is gone, behind you, a bright bubble of bathing costumes and bony (mostly boys’) bodies, and Professor Clark’s long line across the giant blackboard, ending up almost at the door. This line is the duration of human history, he bugled, gesturing at the white chalk stripe snaking across the room. At the end of the line, he stopped, raising his monkey-tail eyebrows. This part, he said, isolating a four-inch segment on the grand trail of history, chalk sifting onto the floor, is what we know about. (This was after he hopped like a toad, crawled across the floor like a crocodile, swung his arms like an ape and scampered behind his desk to emerge, walking erect, Australopethicus africanus!)

  He’s the chappie who found the skulls. He’s rewriting the world, and all the things therein, Maxie was saying. You’re singing “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.” The girls’ breasts are heaving under their tunics, lifting whole continents. You’re on the other side of the Outeniqua Mountains. Maxie’s in your ear, lips to lobe. Wake up, man!

  But no crawling, man-bird Professor Skullfinder prepared you for the terrible smell in the long dissecting hall. Hell’s teeth, man, you told Mickey, clinking beers in the Pig ’n Whistle later that day. It’s a smell that has wings and feet. The sweet stench of the formalin settles inside you, inside your nostrils, at the back of your throat. It cloaks your socks, your notes, your hair. It stays with you, and it leaves with you. You’re a marked man, Harry. Mickey pushes his chair back a little, as if he’s downwind, catching a whiff of it. You’re buggered.

  The hall is so bright, your eyes squeak in their sockets. White tiles march from the floor to the ceiling. Inside this upside down chamber of tiles, are two rows of concrete slabs, with the dead resting on them, draped under formalin-soaked cloths, covered by rubber sheets. Professor Clark is barking like a seal in Table Bay and he wants you to sail in groups of eight, four at the bow, four at the stern. It used to be six men to a cadaver but now it’s eight and some of them aren’t even men. Dorothy’s in your group, which is bad luck, since you would rather have her in her bathing-costume than at the helm, her leg twitching so fast it’s making the rubber sheet jiggle. In fact, most of the chaps are twitching inside their coats, stricken with a sort of hysterical cold, an agitated ready-to-go. Most of them have never even seen a naked woman before, dead or alive.

  There’s a gutter around the slab, and your eyes rests there, thinking and not thinking, held in this bitter bright cold, held in the antechamber before the Valley of the Shadow of Death, thinking and not thinking of Joseph Klein, Merchant, stopped under the shop, here but not here.

  A cherry-red Anglican priest, frocked and collared, murmurs The Earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof, and The Lord is my Shepherd, a funeral of sorts for the dead sheep under the rubber sheets. Professor Clark is next to him, shifting faces again, man to ape, ape to man, man-bird to jackal. The meek shall inherit the earth. And these poor buggers have inherited us, one of the white coats at your table speaks, a cracked thread tossed in the air, hanging loose, then vanishing. The red priest has his hands clasped around his King James Bible as if he’s trying to press one of the stories back into life, as if he could make the blinding white tiles disappear and the dead sit up. But he’s gone before they even try.

  Professor Clark scrabbles for food on the veld, cowers in the wake of a thunderstorm, showing poor Australopethicus struck by the weakness of his jaws, the thinness of his hide. But then he picks up a piece of chalk with his curled opposable thumb and draws the brain on the blackboard, an organ the size of a small and intricate cake. Africa always offers something new. In this case, gentlemen, it was man.

  There’s a ripple in the white coats, a tide of shifting feet, disbelief, awe. That’s when he asks you all to remove the cloths from the cadavers and the room is suddenly very silent. The cloths are lifted, and there’s a very large, black woman on the slab in front of you, her head shaved, her pubus shaved. But there is no blackness left in her, just as there is no whiteness in the cadaver on your left, a very old, very thin man the colour of yellow rubber. You notice that the room is suddenly new, that no one’s the same anymore. This is the first woman’s body you have ever really looked at. (There was no looking at Koeka. It was all hurry, and blunder, bits of her racing past, in pieces you lost just as quickly as it happened.)

  Dorothy is standing at the head, and she has her face tipped down. Maxie’s winking at you from the cadaver’s toes. The other five chaps, three English fellows, two Afrikaners, look a bit seasick although the boat is so still you could weep. You meet their eyes in the center, all eight of you arranged around the navel, your heads bobbing with the effort of looking and not looking, at the mountainous breasts, spread wide and flat, the ridge of the pubus, the deep set of the vaginal lips in their long unsmiling smile. The skin is a shadow, a blue-grey slide into a part of you that knows only cold, only terror.

  Professor Clark tiptoes-triptoes between the slabs, motioning the white coats to cover their cadavers with the formalin-soaked cloths, putting them back to sleep all over again. Four of you are going into the upper body, the other four will enter below the navel. We’ll uncover only those parts to be dissected. The body should never be allowed to dry out and the wrappings have to be renewed and moistened, as needed. Gentlemen, the tools of the trade. Inside your pocket, you feel for the leather container containing the picklike probe, the forceps, the scalpel and the scissors Uncle Oscar paid for. The ghommas are beating, and the carnival is about to start. You can see the white tiles dancing and tumbling.

  Professor Clark is whispering, so you have to say, What? What? to follow. Lay down your traditional weapons, chaps. (One of the English fellows actually heard him!) Uncover the thorax. It’s just a tour now, a trip from the costal groove to the xiphoid process, outlining the borders of the lungs, palpating the clavicles. The land surveyor is up on the breast with his instruments and he’s looking you right in the eyeball. Don’t worry, the pick hasn’t picked a thing, and the forceps and scalpel are still. Professor Skullfinder is up your sleeve asking you, Present, absent, symmetrical? Present, sir, you say, Harry Klein, sir. I mean the mammary glands, Mr. Klein. I know you’re here or am I bloody dreaming?

  Mammary, mammalian. Mama, for short. He’s looking at you, his eyebrows bent like seagull wings, as if he’s observing a hairless primate on the veld. Mammary mammal. Her breasts (more like elephant ears) are on skew, the left smaller than the right, the nipples thumbing something rude that you can’t hear. He’s cutting into the skin of one of these shrunken flaps, and the chaps on the boat almost fall overboard but they laugh as they cling to the sides of the boat, calling her Grootouma, Great Grandma. Dorothy is now so sharp and thin she could cut Grootouma with her fingernails, and the thin, trembling wires of her hair. Professor Skullfinder is picking you with his pick, the instrument waving inches away from your own thorax. Yes, sir. You’re going to show this bastard that you’re not afraid of his picking, his poking, and his cutting. You saw how carefully he lifted the skin, leaving the fat behind, how he rested his hand on Grootouma as he sliced through. You’re all eyes and hands now, and the rest of you is finished, something scooped off a plate and thrown into the rubbish bin.

  These are the structures, Professor Skullfinder is saying, holding a breast in his hand which must be worth ten in the bush. None of you (except Dorothy May, of course, who wears her own strapped tight and hidden), has ever look-looked at a woman’s breast before, let alone what’s under the rest of the stinking sheet. The other lookings were secret and furious; your aunties’ titties flipping in and out of their clothes inside the yellow hut at Muizenberg beach, the barely budded ones of girls at school, the blinding minutes with Koeka’s rough ones, her sad walls, everything not hers.

  You half-expect Skullfinder to put Grootouma’s breast on top of his head, and wear it like a beret, the nipple sticking up like a twist of black wool. But he gives it to you, and, as
you hold this old woman’s tittie, the world stops. The Germans even stop.

  These are the tiny pathways carrying a mother’s milk, the lactiferous ducts. They converge at the nipple, each one capable of spraying a thin fountain of milk into the mouth of a baby. Skullfinder tells you that there are between fifteen and twenty of them. You have to find each one, and clean it. He shows you how, with his fingers and the blunt end of the scalpel. The saliva pools in your mouth as you watch him work, miracle fingers trippling through these delicate feeding wires. There’s Ebb ’n Flow, where the river begins, folded into the dense bush, the trickle curling it’s way out of that lobe of glandular tissue. And here’s where it opens into the sea. . . .

  You carefully clean out each pathway, each root of this fatty, collapsed flower. Christiaan, one of the barefoot Afrikaner chaps, mutters, Hy’t jou klein handtjies gesien. He saw your small hands. Ek het die vet gekry. I got the fat. Poor Christiaan is emptying out the breast compartments, tables, chairs and even the sagging old couch. The glinting tools are dull and slithery now and the liquid seeping out of the body is in the gutter around the slab. Now you can see what sort of a canal it really is. Something’s in your mouth, suddenly, and you spit and spit into your hanky. Your lips clamp shut, locked forever in an airless grin that you will use every time you bend over a body, alive or dead.

  Professor Skullfinder nods from across the room at Dorothy. Miss May is going to make the parasagittal cut through the nipple, gentlemen. You almost feel sorry for her as her shaking hand slices through the black knob but then it’s all swept away by the blaze of understanding how the damn thing stands up on its own! Look at the smooth muscles, arranged in a circle. You’re thinking of clams and sea anemones, and all the sea creatures that circle and tighten, circle and tighten and trap. The other chaps are glued to the nipple and Dorothy says, Excuse me, and she leaves. She comes back a few moments later, her face blotchy, her hair somehow knotted and pulled away from her face. I’ve got tissue in my hair, she says, but only Grootouma is listening. Serves you right, you’re thinking. Already Skullfinder told her she was such a clever girlie that her leg almost shook off.

  You’re looking up into the air as you insert your fingers into the retromammary space. Girls like Dorothy will do anything to get what they want, to take what doesn’t belong to them. You’re feeling the breast from the inside out, finding the suspensory ligaments, in what direction the fibres run. She’s poking at Grootouma, looking under the other breast, murmuring how you can separate it from the fascia of the pectoralis major. Doesn’t she know that these are secret words, that you can’t just say them like that? She’s not the kind of girl you take to the Bohemian Club, whose skirts flap with promise, magenta lips circled around a cigarette, eyes slanted at you like a fake movie star. Dorothy’s behind you, then she’s next to you, and now she’s overtaking you, carrying Grootouma’s jelly breast flopping all over her hands across the finish line.

  When Maxie comes over and tells you what the other chaps have done, you don’t even laugh. It’s too funny. You twist your lips and two tight little dimples quiver in your fresh cheeks. Won’t Skullfinder find out?

  Ag no. He’s too busy with what’s left of Grootouma’s titties, packing them away nicely in a formalin-soaked bag, for future reference. He’s talking about how much bigger they must have been when Grootouma was young, how they shrank, bit by bit, each time she suckled a baby. And how many babies did she have, gentlemen, by the size of what was, and what’s now left behind? Two or five, or more than seven? He’s taking you back to the Western Cape of a million years ago and you can’t even imagine that Grootouma wore a dress, or cleaned somebody’s kitchen. One of the Ossewabrandwag boys says that his pa shot the Bushmen on his farm like monkeys, and yes, it’s now really true, he was right all the time except how could they be the first people when it was Adam and the apple in the beginning, not hotnots.

  Next to you, a flurry of white coats swarm all over Geelbek, the next-slab-fellow, who is one of the few white bodies, except that he’s more yellow-orange than white. Somebody says he worked on the railways because there’s something black in his lungs, a kind of coating or fur. But that’s not what the chaps are busy with. That’s not the surprise.

  You see Dorothy May outside afterwards, gulping air and smoking a cigarette. You almost tell her, because she’s not the way she was in the dissecting hall, two feet taller than you and twice as clever. She’s a girl again, and her white coat is off. You can see her long legs, and the soft, healthy skin of her throat. You imagine her naked on one of the slabs, alive not dead, more alive than anything else in the world. You’re walking with her towards Main Road, the cape doctor sifting through the trees, cleaning your face, your hair, your heart. Still, at every corner, the bad smell waits, somebody’s ugly pig-dog following you home. You want to shoo the bloody thing away but it won’t listen. It sticks to your heels. It won’t give up.

  Dorothy won’t give up either. She’s talking about the test coming up next week, and have you started swotting yet and what questions do you think Skullfinder is going to ask and are you going to specialize one day and what did you get for chemistry last year. You watch her lips moving around and around, Table Mountain standing up behind her like a huge mantle of rock on her shoulders and you want to take her and lie down with her and put your smelly hair between her breasts, and suckle. You’re going to ask her out, to the Bioscope, or to the Starlight or Bohemian, because she is the kind of girl you can swirl in the dark with a cocktail stick. The sky is so blue it’s daring you.

  “Don’t miss the greatest adventure of all time. . . .” There’s an army poster on the lamppost and Dorothy’s eyes go from the words to you, and the daring is backwards now, and she’s asking if you’re going to enlist. You tell her about Uncle Oscar and how he’s paying for everything because your father died the day before the war started. She’s nodding but she doesn’t really know what selling the house and the shop means, what happened on the corner of Meade and Hibernia.

  Are you going to swot with me or not? It’s hard to tell the difference between white and grey rami and have you found the greater splanchnic nerve? She’s about to open her handbag to freshen her lipstick. You almost grab the shiny liver shape away from her. The chaps are chuckling in your ear. You’ve got to have the big match temperament, Harry. You’ve got to score the touchdown. There. She has the bloody thing in her hand now. Geelbek’s yellow piel.

  The next lamppost is talking while Dorothy’s screaming at you, You’ll be sorry, Harry! You’re a coward, Harry!

  She’s dropped Geelbek’s penis at your feet. Dorothy’s running, walking, sobbing, How dare you? She’s growing again, and you’re the one getting smaller. You never eat enough, Harry, and Maisie’s healthy as a horse. She’s as pretty as a primrose and as clever as that fox that ate all the grapes. The posters are coming at you, Join up now! The only dress for non-key men is a uniform! (Dorothy’s around the corner and gone, lost smoke, something else broken that can’t be fixed.)

  Even Geelbek’s penis is telling you to enlist. You pick it up and it’s cold in your hand, not circumsized. You’re going to have to return it to the Valley of the Shadow of Death in case Skullfinder comes looking, in case Dorothy tells. This is a balls-up.

  Chapter 11

  THE NURSES ARE here to bathe you and change your bed linens. One is very blond, with red-fresh lips and a quick glance at Simon, who turns to me as if I can help him, as if he’s the one she’s going to strip and roll and pat dry. Ma is talking to her oldest brother, First Prize the surgeon, and we follow them out of the room into the wide hallway, with its glistening floor bright as a river. As Ma and First Prize walk slowly away from us, Simon’s muttering about science and medicine, and how the doctors are dabblers and tricksters and none of these bloody gods in their white coats is telling the truth. In his voice is the old fury, the scorn at what he had and lost, when he left medical school and became a scientist.

  I’m thinki
ng of the nurses in your room, the blond one with the full lips and the other one, brown-haired and mousey, clips in her hair, eyes downcast. They’re touching you as if it’s nothing. I’ve stood at your bed for hours and hours, your words rattling and running ahead of me, behind me, all around me, everything you ever told me, streaming back to the source before it’s too late. In all that listening and talking, I haven’t reached out a hand to touch your hand, or the top of your black-and-grey head. Si-Si, I say. Have you touched him yet? Simon looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. What the hell are you talking about? You should touch him, I tell him. At least one of us should. Why don’t you? he asks. Since it’s your bright idea.

  If he was awake, he’d be flirting with the blond nurse, reaching for her. Ma would be telling her, He’s just a dirty old man. We’d be looking away, pretending not to see or to hear, I say out loud, even though the words are hard to speak. We’d be very embarrassed.

  Simon nods, his eyes filling up. And I wouldn’t even mind.

  We’ve drifted back to the door of your room, and the blond nurse motions to us to come in. He’s ready now, she says, as she plumps the pillow behind your head, as she tucks you in. A grey cloud is filling you up from inside, and your face is darkening and changing. Life is the miracle! you once said, coming home in the early morning after delivering a healthy baby boy, drops of blood like roses on your shirt, blood on your tie. There’s nothing miraculous about death. When life goes, the body is just a piece of meat, a thing on the table.

  How long . . . ? The rest of the sentence writes itself on the empty walls. The brown-haired nurse catches the two words in her fist and says, A day perhaps, maybe shorter. It’s hard to say. But she pulls out Ma’s chair and tells me to sit, to rest. Maybe she’ll bathe me too, and brush out the knots in my hair if I sit quietly enough, if I pretend to be you.