The Rowing Lesson Page 17
Your breathing is more ragged now, and I can feel the tightness spreading inside my own chest. Perhaps I have angina too. Simon is back at your side, stricken. Ma’s eyes are shut, her cheeks have lengthened and she has her legs spread out stick-straight in front of her. We are all dying too.
Outside, the sun finally drops out of the sky, and there’s an even deeper chill in the room. Ma gets up, shuffles out of her chair without talking to Simon or to me, leaving a maze of ridges on the plastic seat. I’m going for a walk, she says. And she glances behind her, at a spot above your head, as if she can’t be caught loving you.
I’m hearing your music again, and you’re dancing with Ma at the Wilderness Hotel and she’s just as tall as you, her eyes fixed on your hairline. Your face is turned inwards, searching the past, and you’re examining an old picture of yourself, dancing and swaying to the sweetest of sounds.
I USED TO be quite a dancer, old chap, you say, shaking William’s hand, minutes after you meet him. Later that evening, over a Cabernet Sauvignon you’ve brought with you in your hand luggage, you initiate him into the brotherhood. It isn’t the Royal Arch. It’s a royal, loyal KWV red you introduce him to. William tells you about his travels all over the world, and you gasp and laugh and shake your head with penguin amazement. He listens to your stories about the wine-farmers and their vineyards. On our first trip to South Africa together just after we’re married, you have William drive you all over the Hex River Valley, to Robertson and Paarl, stopping to taste wine at every vineyard. With Medieval courtliness, William says, You are the master. And I am your young apprentice.
Danie de Wet is the Chardonnay King! You make William take you to Danie’s estate, De Wetshof, in Robertson. He follows you into a building that looks like a chateau, gleaming white against the blue flamed sky. Susanna, the girlie with the big breasts, is standing behind the counter. She must have seen you come in, the little doctor and his towering son-in-law. Of course you make her blush, your eyes clapped onto her boobs like magnets, but she says Goeie môre, Dokter, a good girl scraping her desk back and saying hello to the teacher.
You’re chattering nonstop to William about the oak, and the fruit and then, as you lurch towards Susanna, it’s her fresh nest that catches you, her wrapped-up cuckoo birds. They don’t come out of the nest, do they? You look pointedly towards the shelf of her bosom and William, a gentleman’s gentleman, feels the blush going down all the way to his heels. He isn’t going to say anything because that’s not his way, but he feels Susanna’s shame, and he tries to steer you back to the tasting table, with its rows and rows of tulip-shaped glasses. I’m not in my cups yet. I’m still trying to get into her cups!
You pour glass after glass for William, toasting and tasting, the wine, the grapes, the bloody blue sky. It’s a helluva country, this, you tell him, swirling the pale yellow Bateleur Chardonnay. Danie always selects this one from his barrels.Waar’s Meneer de Wet? You call to Susanna and she flushes apricot, delicate peach, all the hues of the wine itself, marmalade and smoke, oranges and nuts.
You barely see the man in front of you, William with his mop of red-gold hair and luminous skin, eyes the colour of storms. You can’t imagine the places he’s lived, the books he loves or the wide open plains where he was born. You don’t think of us dancing at dawn under a fluttering maypole in Riverside Park. You don’t notice me looping through his crooked arm laughing so hard I’m afraid I’m going to burst, on that first day of May seven years ago. You don’t hear us speak in the chilly air, stamping feet, massaging cold hands. And you don’t see William looking into my eyes, seeing me.
So he listens and you speak, and he pours and you drink, the Finesse, the Bon Vallon, the Lesca and Danie de Wet’s Call of the African Eagle Chardonnay Reserve. You shout for Susanna, A case of the Limestone Hill! And a case of the Chardonnay D’Honneur! And, then, to William, The Eagle is bigger than the Hill, don’t you think? The Finesse has more curves, just like Susanna. William takes you (and shakes you) and says, What about your boat? Betsy told me all about the Wilderness. You push your chair back and look at him and say, You know what? You’re a lekker ou. A nice chap. A case for Mr. William, Susanna. Hy’s ’n lekker ou.
Betsy told me that she was alone with you in the boat once, in the rain. You remember, whistling through your teeth as you dislodge something. Ja, she was curled up like an animal in the front of the boat. I’ll never forget how small she was. You stop, caught outside the circle, and William sees for the first time that day that you are my father. But then you wash it away with the Edeloes, Danie’s best dessert wine.
William loads up the back of your white Toyota with a case of the Limestone Hill, a case of the Chardonnay D’Honneur and two of the Bon Vallon, one for you, one for him. That’s the last he sees of the Bon Vallon. You bury it in the back of the cement room where you keep your bottles. He doesn’t ask for it and you don’t give it to him. Joseph Klein gave everything away and he died with a leaking pocket and a hole in his till.
But you keep both halves of every wishbone you ever snapped, all your old socks, medical samples and broken pens and stamps and envelopes and newspaper clippings. Every time you visit Danie de Wet, the Chardonnay King, you make sure you save every bottle because no one does it like Danie.
On the way back from the De Wetshof Estate, you tell William about the Kanonkop Pinotage, the Meerlust Rubicon, the Allesverloren Tinta Barocca, other great wines of the Cape. William drives and you talk and your words weave themselves into what he sees spreading out in front of him, on either side of the national road: vineyards, farms, mountains, wind pumps, telephone lines. You tell him which farmers still use the dop system, paying their workers in alcohol at the end of the week, which winemaker killed one of his workers, which grape-picker beats his wife, which klonkie’s wife drowned her tenth child, which mad Alsatian bit a farmer’s son. Which farmer was that? You don’t hear William. You’re too busy telling him that you always ask your patients to lock up their dogs when you come on house calls. Those bloody Alsatians, man, they eat a Jew for breakfast every morning!
Ma and I are back at the house when you and William drive up the driveway, the branches of the loquat tree scraping the top of your car. After you unload the car, I’m there waiting for you for to take out the old photos you took when Simon and I were little. I want them for a painting I’m working on. Wait a minute here, you say. You can’t just go through them like that. You have to make copies, copies of the copies. I’ve found some other pictures that aren’t of me or Simon, given to you by one of your patients who bought them in an estate auction and I’ve made a big pile of the ones I want to take back to America. I’m holding up one in particular, an engraving of equus quagga quagga. I’m painting one right now, I say, shaking with excitement. Look at this poor animal’s face and those sad eyes!
You can’t have it! you scream. It’s mine. I need it for my work, I say, knowing you can sense how much I want it. I’m standing right next to you, looking straight into your black eyes, at the inflamed beak of your nose. You’re just like the girlie in L. A. Law, you hiss. You’ll do anything to get what you want!
That’s when I run out of the house shouting the way I used to when I was a teenager. I hate you, I hate you. I never want to see you again. I wish you were dead already.
Bloody little bitch! You lock up the quagga picture in a drawer in the bedroom and hide the key.
Dinner is horrible. You drink a whole bottle of Rubicon you’ve been saving for a special occasion but you feel so bad you open it anyway. William and I decide to cut our trip short and go back to Cape Town. The only reason we haven’t left already is Ma, whose face is so hard and pinched you can squeeze battery acid out of it.
William stops liking you, the way a car just stops on the road and won’t go anymore. The whole bloody world’s gone to pot, you say, and get up from the table. You want to say something about the women wearing the pants but William’s long, folded hands and the way he looks at you st
ops you right in your tracks. You’re a big chap, you mumble, taking the bottle of Rubicon to bed with you.
You sit in the half-dark with no one to talk to. These bastards don’t know what it’s like, you keep thinking, to work like a dog the way I do. Jesus Christ, forty plus years of seeing people dying a million different ways, the human body just conking out, finally. You remember the chill you felt for the first time in Anatomy 1, surrounded by corpses, the sweet, bad smell, the bright cold, the prickling fear of death climbing up your spinal cord into your brain. Jesus Christ, man, I have seen so much pain. You take a sip of Rubicon and look at the drawer where you locked up the pictures I wanted and it reminds you of the other drawer, the other time, at Men’s Residence just after the Germans marched into Poland and your father died and your mother’s late letter came and you locked it away, along with the first one, wishing you a happy birthday.
Where are those letters? You leave the bedroom and go into your study, rifle through papers and files and letters and old envelopes, the dust and the crumbling paper making your head spin. You search and search until you find them and then you read them and you remember everything about that day and the trip in the car and the end of it all. You feel very, very sorry for yourself, still young, still alone, nobody’s son.
And she wishes I was dead already. You people don’t know anything about death.
The next morning Ma hands me the pictures in a brown envelope, just as we’re about to get in the car and leave the house with the loquat trees forever.
You don’t say goodbye. You look straight through me as if I’m not there, as if you’re hearing music in another room.
BOEM, PFFF! BOEM, pfff! The sound of the klopse coming, the drums, and the shuffle of their feet, and it’s New Year’s all over again. 1945 Hurray!
Without any warning, BOOM! It’s not a sparkler, or a Catherine wheel. It’s a bloody V-2 rocket, flying at 3, 500 miles an hour towards the heart of London with murder in its belly, and gosh, golly gumdrops when it strikes its target, there’s hell to pay.
Overseas is where the action is, and you’re desperate to get started, to fight the good fight, flying away from this horned continent to the real theatres of war, to scrub and patch and sew all the demented bodies flung this way and that, broken and burst by the enemy, the enemy of all enemies, the evil legions of Hitler. There’s a race on, and you can’t even whisper a word to Maxie, even though he’s probably dreaming the same dream, yearning just like you to leave the southeaster behind, syph and sniff, staph and strep and strap, in exchange for a real uniform not a white coat over your mother’s fears.
You’ve read in The Lancet about debridement and you can’t wait to explore a wound and see the gaseous magic of the dreaded Clostridium bacteria for yourself, and not its black-and-white cousins in the pages of the British Medical Journals. Each marching footstep into France brings you closer finishing your housemanship and you’re not sure who will reach Berlin before you. All you want is to get to the war before it ends, before you miss the greatest adventure of all time. Sometimes, in your darkest dream, in your smallest hour, you know just how wicked you are, wanting this dreadful war to wait for you, so that you can join in. Have a heart, chaps. Wait for me before you break down the gates of Hell. You bastards don’t know how good I am at stopping gangrene. I’ve read up on it, volumes of the British Medical Journal going back to World War One. I’ve treated diabetics with festering feet and blackening legs. I’ve opened and cleaned their suppurating wounds, snipped off dead tissue, removed all foreign bodies one by one. Look at my hands. They’re the hands of a tidy monkey, a primate who tends flesh instead of gardens.
With a snickering, sickening thud, your fiercest dream comes true. The Germans burst through the American lines, and they’re a bulge in old Europe’s pants. The Allies wade through thickets of death. When the klopse sing, Daar kom die Nuwejaar! Ons is deurmekaar! they’re not joking. From the silver trees on Table Mountain to the pines of the Ardennes Forest, the earth shivers, as the Battle of the Bulge holds everyone’s fresh new year by the throat. There’s a lock on joy. The ships in Table Bay are buffeted by a sudden squall, a whiff of misery from the North. How many wars are you going to miss, boytjie, before it’s too late?
Maxie, infernal, bloody genius, hands you a note during a ward round at Groote Schuur. Where do the spots end, Doc? Never mind the Krauts. Stella Bellicosa.
A houseboy answers the telephone when you call. How about that! Stella gets on the line and her galloping laugh is in your ear. What did you say that was funny? It isn’t you, she screams, it’s my little brother, tickling me to death. Little brother, my foot. You know he’s a head and a half taller than you. Shush! she giggles and she tells you which Friday to come, and how strict her father is. You might as well walk because he hates Jews who drive on the Sabbath. I’m going to put on my shoes, you say. I’ll start right now. Vat jou goed en trek, Fereira. Vat jou goed en trek. Sssss . . . phhhhh. . . . She’s smoking one of those du Mauriers. You can feel the earpiece getting hot and smoky in your hands. Can I breathe while you smoke? Can I drive while your father eats? Can he hold his breath under the table? Why don’t we just forget his strings and his prayers. My family cut up ten rugs, long after it was dark.
You’re scraping your feet on the mat outside the house, when the voice-on-the-telephone houseboy opens the door. You almost fall into his arms, before he disappears like a coffee-coloured shadow into the derms of the house. The wall next to the door is cold, and the glinting floor gives you the evil eye. There’s a giant grandfather clock facing you at the foot of the spiny stairs, chiming loudly in your ear. You’re the mouse running up the clock, a tailor house mouse who can sew very tiny buttonholes, thank you very much. Hello Stella, you greet the Queen of Smoke, a white ribbon trailing after her as she comes down the stairs. I can do ruffles and lappets. And then, squeezing your eyes together and tipping your fingertips, My stitches are very, very small. She smudges her red lips against your forehead, a quick blurr on your cockle shell.
My father won’t like your muddles. His father’s father was a gaon, a learned man, and his father’s father’s father was a gaon too which makes my father the gaon of the gaon’s gaon. Now you’re in the dining room, a chamber of men, except for Stella, her mother and the tawny manx cat twitching her orange-and-black coat behind your knees. Shabbat candles twinkle on the table, Mother Bun fusses with the houseboy and a row of dishes steam on the sideboard. You plant your coccyx in the chair closest to Stella, the cuckoo’s beak pointing down, down. The brothers fan out on both sides of the long table like beanstalks. You’re not quite sure if there are four or five or only three. They’re all twice your size, oddly patrician for yeshiva bochers, talking about the cricket scores and the Old Man, how the Allies are closing the Bulge, and what perfume does Stella have on tonight. Cat’s water? Dog’s whistle? Or is it bred in the bone, something a little closer to home?
The Old Man enters, in the middle of Stella’s squealing and sticking out her tongue at the boy-boys. He’s tight and fat in his suit, his chest and abdomen puffed like a pigeon’s, every part of him swelling with pride. You’re shocked that he’s as short as you are, but so full of his own gifts. You can’t help kicking Joseph Klein under the table for all the things he gave away: the brooms and tins and old postcards and nails and bags of flour as well as his life’s blood. There’s a tear prickling in your throat as the Old Man winds up for the kiddush and raises his cup, twin billows of self-congratulation holding up his right arm, and his pudgy right hand. Even his lips are full, two plump fish moving ever so slightly with each loose, warm breath he takes.
His eyes are a mix of soft and sharp, the same piercing cocktail Stella has, the eyes of a judge, a noticer of defects, flaws, inconsistencies. Now they’re resting on you, son of poor dead Joseph and East End Yetta, the shop that stopped with barely a penny to its name. What do you have to say for yourself? What do you have to offer?
God made the world in six
days and on the seventh day he rested. The Old Man blesses the Sabbath wine, the covered bread, this holy penetrating moment as his eyes flick from the dancing Hebrew letters on the page to the quivering half-smile on your face watching Stella and her pouts and all the nonsense going on with her brothers and the sister-in-law who is missing, mind you, the oldest tallest brother’s wife, pregnant and upstairs, lying in. There’s a lot of muttering and chair-scraping and sardonic eyebrow-raising, the cat’s back arching, as she sidles behind everyone, counting feet and faces and who’s going to pay her with a nice long stroke.
Ahh. Friday night was never this iffy in George, with the commercial travellers putting their hats on the table and the music lifting the edges of the carpet, a night to plan picnics, and find the right high tide, to remember the old roads and when Joseph stopped the train and the Model T Ford got stuck halfway up the Montagu Pass. At least that’s what you remember tonight, on this night of judgment, the Old Man’s gaze scraping you like sandpaper. Are you good enough? Are you big enough? Your name and college, sir. This warden of all wardens has cracked the shell of this year’s confidence, shaking the fragile mannikin of selfhood that you’ve patched together on the eve of becoming a doctor.
You’ve forgotten all the knife wounds you’ve stitched and cleaned, the broken bones you’ve set and the babies you’ve held, fresh to the world. He doesn’t think much of you, this roly-poly ball of a man, Stella’s father. There’s a quick prayer for the rear-gunner, the middle brother up in the air over Europe. The war suddenly swoops into the room and the rear-gunner might as well be there, in his bloody uniform, stretching his hands inside his Air Force gloves, stamping his cold feet. It doesn’t matter that you want to be in the air too, or fighting on the ground, from a ship, in a tent, cracking codes behind enemy lines, using every ounce of what you’ve learned as a doctor, as a man, as someone with a heart. None of that matters, because you’re here and you’re poor and you have to wait until Uncle Oscar says you can go.