The Rowing Lesson Read online

  He didn’t want an endotrachial tube, I hear Dr. Daniels saying. And the laryngeal mask usually works perfectly well. Simon’s voice is getting louder and louder, And you listened to him!

  Look here, I don’t know how you chaps do it in America, but we were working with him, we were doing what he wanted. He’s practiced medicine for over forty years! We had to take that into account.

  He was his own doctor! And you didn’t think there was something wrong with that?

  Ma gets up and she’s shouting too. Simon! How dare you! And the two men are in the room, the row is moving right to your bedside. You always liked a lekker fight and now it’s happening right here and this time I’m sure you’re going to wake up. You wouldn’t want to miss it for anything in the world.

  He didn’t want the tube, Simon! He was terrified! Ma’s almost spitting. Why don’t you leave your father alone? There’s nothing more we can do!

  That’s the point! Simon shrieks. He was operated on and he struggled through the night without getting enough oxygen and then Dr. Daniels moved him here where they could finally intubate him! But by then it was too bloody late!

  How do you know what happened? You weren’t even here!

  We were following your father’s wishes, and with that, Dr. Daniels swirls in his white coat and is gone.

  Is that true? Simon’s eyes are burning and his voice is thundering and you’re still quiet as a mouse, even now.

  Ma’s crumpling and she’s telling us that she has angina. We’re ringing for the nurse and by the time a new one comes, with greasy hair this time and mottled skin, she’s bent over in the chair moaning. The pain is here, and here, she says, pointing to her own heart.

  How does that song go again? I whisper, as the nurse takes Ma’s pulse. “Love, love, falling in love. I wasn’t thinking of you but now I am. She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me?”

  * * *

  Stella Sacks’ arms, face and throat are covered with tiny brown freckles. She wears her reddish-brown hair twisted up and there’s always a halo of cigarette smoke above her head because she smokes like a chimney. How far down do the freckles go? You whisper to Maxie in the Groote Schuur student dining room, as the fat lady behind the counter pours gravy on your chop. He shrugs, makes a quick calculation, as you both watch Stella sit down with her tray, rummage in her handbag for her cigarettes. Oops! She dropped something. She looks at the chap who’s with her and now he’s bent under the table looking for her matches. She has them all over, Maxie breathes. I’m not so sure, you tell him. But I’m going to find out.

  You make a bet. If there are freckles inside her brassiere, or folded between her thighs, you owe Maxie a shilling per freckle. If she’s lily white, he owes you. C’mon, old man, you say, how do you expect me to count them all? Okay, he says. A shilling for the first five you see. You can keep counting if you like, he grins, his mouth as damp as a puppy’s.

  Stella’s laughing now. Maxie’s craning his neck, telling you that the chap next to her said, Can I eat while you smoke? He’s one of the senior men, going into pathology. She’s still laughing, her mouth wide, her head thrown back, a big, open laugh that makes you want to see her laugh again and again.

  She’s a radiography student, learning how to tell patients to lie absolutely still, and hold their breath, until she takes a shadowy picture of the oceans and continents inside their bodies. Suddenly she catches your eye, and you swear she has X-ray vision because she can see inside your cowering heart, to that silly bet you made with Maxie, all the way down to Fanus Meintjies shooting his blood all over you. You want to back out now, forget the whole damn thing but it’s too late, old chap. A deal is a deal. She seals it with a look into her powder compact, a dash of scarlet onto her lips, and click, the mirror snaps shut and lunch is over. The serviette on her chair has the red trace of her lips on it. You’re up the river all over again, with the stained tablecloth and the yearning burning, all over the world.

  Look down when she passes your table, pretend you’re talking about the war. Maxie’s checking his teeth in the butter knife. Watch out in case she sprinkles you with her cinnamon dust, her brown paper freckles. Her legs are pencil thin, and her brown shoes have straps around her narrow ankles. She’s nervy, and slim, with buttons marching all over her breasts, wearing a tight-topped dress that’s closed up like a soldier’s uniform. Maxie looks up, as she stops a few feet away from you, and the senior chap lights her cigarette. Du Maurier, my dear Watson, in case you didn’t see. But she’s gone now, freckles and all.

  It’s only two days later, a slow Saturday afternoon slipping into dusk. You just got off duty, and Stella’s climbing into the front seat of Charlotte. You can’t help noticing the tiny brown spots all over her feet and her calves, marching into the car with her like an army of ants. In the house called Chantry, she was all flurry and promise, a scarf fluttering between her hands, dropping her du Mauriers in her handbag, kissing her ma goodbye, a mother bun sort of mother, solid and greying, floating a wan smile in your direction. There were boys all over the place, taller than you, one young and soft, one on leave, the infantry man, and another freckled one, the oldest, studying to be a surgeon. The father, you were told, was in shul, a macher, a Zionist, a religious man from a religious place, practising his religion religiously. He stared at you from his wedding picture, next to his much younger bride, new missus Bun before all the boy babies got to her. Stella is the rose among the thorns, the one and only kitty cat, the prize girl.

  You leave the double-storied house with its pile of rooms and Persian carpets, the aura of something immoveable your house never really had, the commercial travellers coming in and out, and ma’s flying bells and bad moods. Stella’s lighting a cigarette again and you lean towards her, mock-whispering the advertisement, Didn’t you give me my first du Maurier? I shall always think of you, who-who-who, you hoo-hoo-hoo. She’s not quite Jeanette MacDonald and you’re not Nelson Eddy, but wait, she’s calling you, who, who, who, that Indian love call across the Canadian gorge. You shade her with your Mountie hat, then you slip the clutch and Charlotte lurches towards Paarl and beyond, to the secret place you’re taking her to, almost as good as Ebb ’n Flow.

  This isn’t what she was expecting, she tells you, a bit cross. It’s not the Bohemian Club in the misty dark, an omelette or a sandwich before midnight, giggling with the other powder puff girls in the cloakroom, a long dance in the arms of a new stranger. You can’t really tell her about the freckle-hunt, how you need light to see, and a reason to go swimming. I hope you brought your bathing costume, you say, as smoke streams out of her nose. What? She’s not really laughing now, a play-play sneer curling her upper lip, a funny spoiled girl attractive. You brought Maisie’s costume just in case, you tell her. Maisie who? Maisie, my sister, you tell her.

  The road winds through vineyards, the Hottentot’s Holland mountains retreating into the far distance, Du Toit’s Kloof up ahead, where the Italian prisoners of war are helping to blast a road through the mountain, which will replace the old Bain’s Kloof road. They’re the chaps captured in North Africa, you explain. I saw one once in casualty. She’s interested, suddenly, and her half-sneer drops into a half-smile, not the full-blown rose you saw in the cafeteria, but a smaller flower.

  You’re driving towards your story, the place where your Italian prisoner of war, Enrico Carretoni, helped four of his friends carry a painted wooden cross to the top of Huguenot Kop, a mountain near the farm where they are stationed. If you squint on a clear blue day, you can see the cross glinting white at the top of the mountain, small as your thumbnail, the Holy Ghost sitting up there all by himself. Of course you don’t believe in the Man, the Ghost or the Cross but there it is, and those chaps carried it all the way up to the top of the mountain. A couple of the farm boys went with them, chaps they’ve befriended since they’ve been living in the barracks near Keerweder. The Afrikaans boys bring them fruit and fresh eggs and the Italians teach them to swear. Eat my fig. You
r mother’s pancake. Stuff ten birds with your goat.

  She’s laughing now, and you could almost do it, one fell swoop, off with the white shirt she’s buttoned up to her nose but Charlotte would mind, and drive herself off the side of the road. Instead, you tell her that one of the farm boys, Hendrik, brought Enrico into casualty the day it happened. What happened? You tell her about the baboon that climbed up Huguenot Kop behind the Italians and the two Afrikaans boys, the baboon that grabbed their sandwiches, stole their cigarettes and gave Enrico a swipe on the arm that peeled the skin and muscle off the bone like someone rolling back the lid of a can of sardines.

  The baboon was almost as clever as Professor Skullfinder. He exposed all the woven parts, the warp and weft of nerves, the long head of the biceps and its smaller brother, the short head. You could see the humerus and it wasn’t even funny. You slowly park Charlotte at the side of the road. He wasn’t the usual Friday night pile of stab wounds, the chronic ones with TB, syphilis, kwashiorkor, beriberi. (She smiles when you say beriberi.) Roma, he said, when you asked where he was from, and his black eyes flashed with pride. It took you hours to stitch and clean up his arm, and you worked slowly, and carefully, the saliva pooling in your mouth. She’s smoking again, and you climb out of the car, looking up at Du Toit’s Kloof. See what those chaps built, you tell her. Look at the new road! I want to know about his arm, she says, and you’re the baboon now, chasing her and holding her thin upper arm between your teeth. She’s screaming and laughing, a last hint of smoke escaping from her mouth.

  You see freckles on top of her shoulder, a line of them on her acromion, two or four or forty nestled in her scapular notch, and at least a dozen lurking in her supraspinous fossa. The sleeve of her dress balloons up above your hands, and you can see right in. She jerks her arm back and away, with a sharp snapping motion. I have four brothers, she says, with that snarling smile she has, spoiled silly with boys.

  You point up to the cross, white as your nail. You lunge again, and she dodges, almost falling off those strap-happy shoes. Let’s climb to the top, Stella Bella. The wind has started sighing and whistling through the protea bushes, silver trees and pincushions, above the jagged line of the new road. There are fir trees below the line, a windshield for the farmers protecting the vineyards in the valley. You tell her what Hendrik the farm boy told you, his flat blue eyes watching you as you sewed up his friend’s arm. When you stand and look out across the valley, the mountains make the shape of a man’s face. You see small buck hopping over the bushes, and beautiful flowers you’ve never seen before.

  I was stuck on a mountain once, she says. And I couldn’t go up or down. I was frozen. They had to carry me. She can barely light her next cigarette the wind is so strong. There’s a big grey cloud covering the cross. You’re thinking of the Wilderness and Wolfie’s boat and raindrops in the river. Your boyhood comes tumbling out, faster than the blood spurting out of Fanus’s neck, stories to patch up the broken faces and oozing limbs, your mother’s tablecloth to mop up the pus, Nettie and the chicken called Harold, the house on the corner of Meade and Hibernia, Ebb ’n Flow and the rocks under brown water, golf balls in your pockets when you least expect them.

  Stella can’t believe how much you miss the Outeniqua Mountains, the waves at Victoria Bay, how many orange fan shells you’ve collected at Lentjiesklip and how you know the difference between spring tide and neap tide, and which moon is which. Let’s go to Ebb ’n Flow, you tell her. I’ll take you to the source. She pretends to know what you’re talking about, the way girls do sometimes, when they like you.

  By now, it’s too late for Bain’s Kloof. You haven’t seen all her freckles, although you’ve counted up to seventy-three so far. For every brown fleck on her nose, her hands, her arms, you’ve told her about a person, a house or a car, something real from the place you’ve known all your life. You even told her about the story of your father chasing the train, how he got the engine driver to stop at the crossing, so he could put Maisie on board, bound for a holiday in Oudtshoorn, with a rich feather-farmer’s daughter. There’s a jerk in your voice because of the last train, the one from Johannesburg that gave him the fever and the terrible sickness, his temperature flopping from high to low, his life suddenly snipped short, a gardening accident of the highest order. The Germans invaded Poland and my father died, and we almost died too, you know, of confusion and grief and being so poor, so suddenly. Faster than cats, quicker than scorpions. (We have a lot of those, climbing out of the bath at night.)

  She’s living your life, cigarette after cigarette, a giggle for the river, and a big laugh for the sea. All she knows is the city, her brothers in every room of the house, and the garlic her mother puts in her coat pockets to ward off evil spirits. The two of you are sitting on a pile of rocks near the side of the national road. Charlotte is watching, and you swear her white coat is turning a faint green with jealousy. You’re not going up or down. You’re just talking, in case Stella gets frozen again, and you can’t carry her down. And anyway, the cross is all bandaged up with clouds, and the klipspringers have probably gone to Hermanus for a dip.

  The Hottentot’s Holland mountains are a purple ripple in the distance. The sun is falling quietly tonight, no sweep of orange and pink, just a slow, sullen bruising spreading across the sky, a giant hematoma. Charlotte coughs when you try to start her. Do you want to spend the night on the mountain, sulking? She sputters nnnn . . . oooo. Rrrrrh! With a few tries, you manage to get her going. Stella gets back into the front seat, checking her nose in her powder compact, as if it was missing and just came back.

  We shouldn’t be driving, Stella says. We’re not supposed to use motor cars for pleasure purposes. Or buy new clothes, you answer, rubbing the brown of her skirt. She triple-sneers at you, and then you lean over, almost in her lap, your voice rising. Oh, I shall remember! Didn’t you give me my first du Maurier? You have one of her cigarettes between your lips, and she’s lighting it for you. I shall always smoke them—and always think of you. . . .

  But the war is between you now, and how guilty you are because you’re not dying somewhere in Europe, burst into pieces by a bomb or a land mine or a rattle of machine-gun fire. Stella’s just as bad, eating hot lunches in the Medical School dining room and wearing soft clothes from her father’s shop. When you tilt the world, so that it’s Europe on top, not the southernmost tip of Africa, Jewish girls are standing naked, their clothes in toppling piles, their shoes becoming history.

  There are very few other cars on the road, black ghost ships with masked headlights because of wartime regulations. Charlotte’s lights are taped too, with just a crack of light in the center to poke through the darkness, through the valley of the shadow of your fears, and Stella’s. You’ve driven through the countryside, past sleeping vineyards, and livestock tucked in for the night, and now you take her through Athlone, and Elsie’s River, Grassy Park and District Six.

  You show her the places where so many of your patients come from, the tumbled down houses and shacks and pondokkies where you can pick up TB, dysentery and syphilis in every garden, where stab wounds proliferate like stars poking through the sky’s night-blanket. She’s staring out of the car window, at the skollies and the nightwalkers, the gamblers and street fighters and she tells you to slow down. I get carsick, she says, Stop! You park next to an empty lot full of whispers and menace, two men watching your car with hooded eyes. The women and children are upstairs or downstairs, sleeping in boxes, on floors, ten in a bed, two at the window. You’re looking for Fanus’s house, for his widow and his poor children but you can’t tell Stella. You pull on your white coat, as she bends down next to the car, and vomits. At first, you try not to look and then you see she’s reeling a little. You hold her shoulders, trying not to get splashed. The two men walk past you, and they tip their hats. Dokter, they say, in the dark. ’Naand.

  When she’s finished, there’s a tear glinting in her eye, a reproachful diamond. You help her into the car, and she te
lls you she’s seen her fair share of brokens too, in the radiography department, under the giant X-ray machines. She sniffs, and then she lights another cigarette, her own private smoke signal. You forgot the freckle-hunt. You got lost on your way to Ebb ’n Flow. You took the Serpentine by mistake and now you’re nowhere near her softest parts, the lilt of her breast, the slope of her abdomen. It’s not funny anymore. The car smells of her shame, her curried lunch, your shame and all the sprats you never ate. It’s salt air and leather, cigarettes and bile. She’s steaming with tears at what you didn’t give her, the tea room that wasn’t there, the nice place to stop for scones and cream and jam and a pot of tea. She didn’t mind District Six. She just wanted something hot to drink at four o’clock.

  You drive her back to Chantry in silence. Nobody says sorry. Other cars lurch towards Charlotte in the dark, rolling forward like blind tanks. Out of the blue, Stella announces, I want you to come for Friday night supper and you say, When, because I’m at Groote Schuur this week and the next and the next. When the cows come home, she says, you can come too.

  Chapter 14

  MA SWALLOWS A nitroglycerine tablet the nurse gives her, chasing it down with a mute sip of water, her lips flattening. The glance she gives Simon and me over the top of the glass is full of reproach.

  I’m back at the window again, losing myself in the moonlit cloud wrapping itself around the dark mountain, as if it’s the caul I was born in. You told me that you came into the delivery room when Ma was about to give birth to me. She and the obstetrician were both smoking cigarettes. You waved your arms furiously in the smoke-filled room. What the hell are you buggers doing?

  Suddenly it grips me, the one fact I can’t think about. This child of mine is a face you will never see.

  Simon’s out in the hallway again, and Ma takes a long sigh. You think it’s all my fault, don’t you? she says, and I can’t speak suddenly, looking for your murderer in every corner. Maybe it was the night nurse at the other place where they did the surgery, who watched you struggle for your life not wanting to call up the doctor in the middle of the night, because she knew he was booked back-to-back all the next day. Maybe it was the ambulance driver, who was feeling hungover from the night before, and took an extra twenty minutes to get you here, where they finally hooked you up to the right machines and got you breathing properly again. And who made the decision to operate on you in a place without the right resuscitation equipment, without an ICU? Was it you?