The Rowing Lesson Page 18
There’s a blast of fury in your chest that withers the fat Old Man and the sneering brothers and supercilious Stella. Remember the colon-train that brought you here from George, and the other old man who thought you were less than fifteen? The sunset bursting in flames on your face? And the night with the rough blanket as you rubbed Gertrude’s thigh between your legs? These buggers have never travelled on that train. They’ve never even been up the Swartberg Pass. All they know is here, the rude cat and the long table, Friday after Friday. They’ve never seen what happens when they take the furniture away, when everything you can see and touch and sleep on gets sold for a song.
You keep all your old envelopes and carefully put them, one by one, in a saucer with water barely covering the bottom. You watch the stamps slowly loosen as the radio plays sweet music, and then the news comes on. Maxie comes over and he’s also excited by your new stamp collection and guess what, so is Stella’s youngest brother, the greenest beanstalk, the only one without a moustache.
I wish you were here, Maxie, even though this man-boy says he has the first day cover of King George VI’s coronation. There are giblets in your soup and you scoop a tiny chicken heart into your spoon, the dark-grey blood vessels a tangle of words you can still count off on both fingers. Vena cava. Left innominate vein. Innominate artery. Left carotid. Left subclavian. Vena azygos major. Look, there’s a major general standing on the potato! He’s about to lob a grenade at the carrot! Psshewww . . . Poof! The heart falls into the bowl. Dead again. Mother Bun is at your side in an instant, pouring another bucket of chicken soup into your plate. Stella said you were too thin. Ma! Stella growls at her, I never said that. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t.
Buff! The forks jump and so does the moon and your spoon. The Old Man has his fist on the table. Don’t argue with your mother. He’s shouting at Stella but his eyes are on you and he knows that you hate potatoes, that you shun carrots, that you despise anything cooked and soft and formless. You can’t finish what you haven’t even begun.
Leonard, the fresh face, shows you his Voortrekker stamps, printed to celebrate the centenary of the Great Trek. Thank God the wagons are moving, and the Old Man’s eyes have shifted north, to the promised land. You know I was there, you tell Leonard, when they wore all the old costumes and rolled through the Little Karoo for the second time around. There’s a happy family on the stamp: bearded Afrikaner father, bonneted mother and God-given child. They’re standing on a rise and looking at a rainbow spreading over the new country. Above their heads is a banner, Voortrekker Eeufees, 1838–1938, in mouse letters.
That’s not our holiday, your father said and he went and bought Charlotte. Whose country is it? you asked, even though you knew whose bread was afflicted. I sell to everyone, Joseph Klein told you. Everyone comes to my shop.
Stella’s Old Man bulges as he talks about the Bulge. You can’t help think about his innards and the layer of orange fat filling him up like a cream puff. He says he visited Prague and Vienna and London before the war, buying lace and fur-trimmed jackets and slippery negligees for his salon, where Ouma Smuts buys her suits. His shop is better than your shop ever was. Your father never sold anything that was slippery, not like the Old Man’s sliding gowns and silk blouses, satin skirts and soft pants.
The stamps flutter on the table after the dessert is long gone. Pictures of tanks, soldiers, a sailor, buck, the Red Cross, thorn trees, aviators, an old sailing ship rounding the Cape. Stella’s smoking like the devil and the Old Man is provoking her. They’re arguing about what hat a Jewish woman should wear, and how many times Stella didn’t go to shul with her mother, and who she didn’t talk to, and what sort of life she won’t even think about living. She won’t bother learning how to bleed a piece of meat, how to brine a chicken but she will make pickled herring, when she’s in the mood. What sort of a daughter is this, Mr. Klein? Who smokes when she’s not sulking, and sulks when she’s not smoking? And sneering! Why, she sneers from morning till midnight.
Then he chuckles through the fog of her smoke, and his cigar, floating, mingling, above their heads. But she likes my clothes, Harry. Ask her to show you her buttoned kid gloves, her embroidered Hungarian blouses, her cut-velvet evening dresses. There’s no joy like the joy of dressing your own daughter.
You can’t help thinking of the Old Man’s fat hands pulling Stella’s panties over her navel and hooking her brassiere, stretching silk stockings over her thin legs and lacing up her shoes. I love a good frill, you tell him, especially when it’s in the right place. My father sold combinations and one day I didn’t get them off fast enough. Ha. Ha. I was only joking. I’m not the little boy you think I am. You know I can sew ruffles and lappets, hemstitches and ha-stitches, cross stitches and bobbinets. I can turn lace into skin and skin into lace, and back to skin again.
The Old Man loads his cannon with his eldest son, First Prize, also F.P. and sometimes Jack. He’s so brrrrilliant that even the professor of his professor’s professor wasn’t clever enough for him. Do you know how brilliant that is? Here, First Prize, ask this boytjie a few questions. Check if his anatomy is still grey or if he’s forgotten everything he learned.
First Prize is tall and speckled, variegated like Stella but not so pronounced. He’s got a quirk or two up his sleeve and of course his first question is female. Where is the canal of Nuck? The floor creaks as you get off in the basement and Grootouma is there, tapping you on the shoulder, all the dissected parts of her face put back together again and tied up with string. Hy is ’n skelm! She whispers in your ear. He’s a cheat! Myne was glad nie daar nie. Mine wasn’t there at all. It’s the tale of the disappeared spleen all over again, the lost canal of Nuck, a tiny copy of the peritoneum which, in the foetus, turns into a little tube, an infinitesmal horn that protrudes into the inguinal canal.
They threw the boy away and kept me, the placenta, you tell them. I don’t have any real nerve endings, and you can take me on cruises as your handbag. You sidle up to Stella. I’ll breathe in all your smoke. I’ll sit on your lap at the captain’s table.
This is when all the sons and their father turn into one big dragon, each head a different spiny plate, Fresh Face holding up their spiked family tail. That’s our Prize Female, the only one who can carry a foetus with its very own Nuck. You have to do quite a bit of swimming for her, not to mention studying. You might as well throw away all those stupid golf balls. The Old Man is slowly crawling towards you, a fish with legs. This I can manage, you’re thinking, your brain talking back to you like someone on the other side of a telephone. One fish is better than the whole family dragon.
I am a coelacanth expert, after all. Remember when the specimen came to town in a special railway van? The Old Man pulls out a deck of cards. Do you play klawerjas?
You can’t play but you can talk and the coelacanth is an old friend. I’ve seen J.L.B. Smith’s boat on the Knysna lagoon. First Prize is telling you about Professor Skullfinder (as if you didn’t know!) and the first ape man and how they’re scared, those Afrikaners, of evolution, but they’re proud of the coelacanth and all the hominids, large and small, that keep sticking their elbows and knees and rib cages and jaws out of the South African sand.
You don’t know any card game, not even rummy? asks the Old Man. No, you answer, becoming a no-man yourself. But I like all the fish in the sea, salt water up my long nose, and tap dancing so hard that my knees knock and the chandelier falls down. Talking about chandeliers, you’re now in the lounge with the tinkling, winking light above you, and the brothers swirling, Fresh Face and First Prize playing mock rugby inches away from the table with the honeyed taiglach and crystallized fruit in cut- glass bowls. The taigel sticks to your teeth and your hands and you’re sorry you touched the damn thing. Where’s the bloody tablecloth when you need it? The embroidered baskets and bows that you left under the bush at Ebb ’n Flow must be stitched to the bottom of the river by now.
The Old Man rocks back, a glass of brandy in his hand, and he se
es a screw in the centre of the dangling, maddening chandelier. He reaches up, and his arm is longer than you ever imagined, with an opposable thumb a monkey’s monkey would be proud of. I wonder what that is, he says, twisting the screw. There’s a cracking sound, and a stupendous crash as the crystals fall, an avalanche of glass which misses the Old Man’s cranium by a sip of brandy, the whisker of a mantis.
It’s all my fault, you’re thinking, staring into the pile of broken glass. I said it. I brought the house down just by talking. Why did I have to tell the Old Man about tap dancing?
His sons are all strangling their laughs, lifting their faces to the giant hole in the ceiling, from whence cometh our help. A stream of smoke pours through Stella’s nose. She tilts her head, trying to untwist the smile in her lips. You’re counting the seconds before the Old Man says NO! And then, NO! But he’s quiet, as the houseboy comes in with a broom and a dustpan to clean up the ruins.
The smell of a bad joke is in the air, all that broken glass clinking and clattering as Sam, the houseboy, sweeps and sweeps. The crystals that fell didn’t fall on us, thank God. Mother Bun is dusting the Old Man’s shoulders looking for slivers of glass, specks of glass, tiny crumbs that can cut you to pieces. She’s chattering and so is Stella, lucky birds as they circle the Old Man, who still isn’t talking. The rest of the family dragon is lying on a couch, six long legs in a row, or is it four? There’s hissing about you and Stella and how you stepped on the chandelier instead of the wrapped-up glass, putting the cart before horse, Charlotte before Stella, tap dancing before cricket. Did anyone say cricket? Because there’s one chirping behind the curtain and crunch, the orange-and-black cat just ate it, cricket legs cracking in its mouth, folded cricket wings snapping like mangled umbrellas.
The frogs are out on the edges of the lagoon and there’s a moon in your eyes when you look at Stella laughing into the hole above your heads. I’m glad it fell down, she says. I never liked it anyway. Your heart is a bubble rising, a balloon on a string in her hands. You lead and I’ll follow. She takes your hand and you twirl like a girl.
You lead and I’ll follow.
Chapter 15
My Dear Harold,
Please accept my heartiest congratulations and very best wishes. You gave us all a wonderful surprise with your high marks and made us very happy and proud of you and your achievements. I am enclosing a small cheque for a celebration or to pay for any medical instruments you may be buying or needing.
Permit me also to put in writing some of my thought, anxieties and hopes for your future. Sir Lionel Whitby defines the “Ideal Medical Student” and for that matter the “Ideal Medical Practioner” as “Cultured, broadly educated in Humanities, Intelligent, Humane and Sympathic, and above all one who will love his profession as well as his fellow men, together with all their weaknesses, joys and sorrows.”
I am sure you possess all these good qualities and you will be a blessing to Humanity, but I have always found that you suffer from an inferiority complex, you always get in with the best, in the finest positions, but you are also kept down in spite of your superior knowledge, your experience, you are sometimes pushed aside in account of your kind nature and humble disposition. Now when you have proved yourself I hope that that inferiority complex will disappear.
I find that the General Practioner or what we used to call the “family doctor” who qualify in South Africa is found wanting. Very few doctors are born “General Practioners,” the rest grope blindly in the dark, in spite of the fact that some of them possess superior knowledge and are far above the average. In England, on the other hand this handicap or drawback is not so prominent. The average English General Practioner possesses polish, manner and poise, the English Doctor’s bedside manner is well known and appreciated, they may be born doctors, but I understand students in the Medical School in England receive training, they go out with a General Practioner and acquire the special knowledge and practice.
I would therefore suggest that you try and get in with a General Practioner, work with him and get the experience and the manner of a General Practioner in England. I am not sure whether London itself would prove a good place for that type of experience you require, as the “Panel” system may somewhat reduce the qualities the English doctor displays, but a provincial town or even Scotland may prove a good field, and I am sure you will be able to fit in, in a position. Needless to say any expense attached to it will be borne by me in full. I won’t say anything about Stella, you know her best, but I feel sure that it may have a great influence on your future, and the sacrifice of a month or two may be worthwhile. I believe that to acquire the experience I am suggesting would be of a greater benefit to you than any special course you might take up.
I hope then you will not mind an old man’s heart to heart talk, and will forgive me if I am intruding, but I mean the best for all concerned.
With love and best wishes,
The Old Man
Stella climbs into Wolfie’s boat. She’s your bride of two days ago, and there’s a dot of confetti caught in the up draught of her red hair. She doesn’t know anything about the Old Man’s English letter, in its brown envelope with a love stamp, a man and woman caught in profile, their faces floating above the sea, staring at a lost star. You read the letter, and you looked at the stamp and couldn’t tell which was which, love or the war, England or South Africa. You read it again and then you folded it carefully, under your socks, remembering your own father, Joseph Klein, Merchant of Quality. He couldn’t write like the Old Man but he had the milk of human kindness flowing in his veins. But the Old Man was trying in his own bossy way, wasn’t he? England’s not quite out of the question, I might add.
Stella’s wearing a brown tweed skirt and a jersey the colour of butterscotch toffee, all things from her father’s shop, part of her grand trousseau. Her lips are a flare of scarlet, against the tangle of bushes, the tall reeds and the sulky sky. It’s not summer and nobody’s slipping into the water. There’s a couple in the boat with you, Margie and Ike, a marriage as new and shiny as yours, rings gleaming, faces stunned with hope, and loss of hope, all the todays and tomorrows packed in tight, making the little vessel sit low in the water.
You’re on honeymoon at the Wilderness, a freshly baked groom to Stella’s pointed bride. The land is all yours, each twist of the Touw river carrying your life’s blood. A long-necked black bird lands on a bare branch, and it’s your heart he’s standing on, caught in the V of the tree. I’m the captain! you shout at Stella as she stands and trembles, afraid of falling into the water, or the sky falling into the tree, or the tree collapsing under the weight of the bird. Sit down, for Chrissake! She’s lighting a cigarette under her arm, into the wind. Margie says, She can’t swim. Stella blows smoke into the sky. No, she says, No, I can’t. You’ll drown your cigarettes, you say. You’ll pour water down the wrong end of the chimney.
Here’s where J.L.B. Smith might have brought his boat, all the way down the Serpentine. You know the coelacanth chappie, the man who’s swimming all the way back to the beginning? Of course it’s a sea fish but we can pretend. Have you ever been to Ebb ’n Flow? Ike says no, and you dip the oars and lift them, you dip them and lift them, and the boat makes a soft pleat in the water.
You’re under the pylons of the railway bridge for two strokes and a breath and then it’s in front of you, as you lean back towards Ebb ’n Flow. You reach forward, into the past, then pull your arms and the boat back into the longer future, the older beaches. The canvas tents at the municipal campsite are ghost-grey, and spotted with mould, and nobody’s there. A big tree stretches its top branches over the river. A long rope hangs from it into the water. Simon and I are taking turns at the gnarled base of the tree. Simon goes first, his cockeyed smile the best thing the river has ever seen. There’s a whoop before he lets go and dive bombs into the water. Then he’s out of the water helping me, showing me how to hold the rope high up, and climb as far up as I can at the base of the tree so that
the swing over the river takes me far and away, past the muddy little beach and the other children. I swing into the light and I’m so pale and bright that it’s impossible to see me. Stella shades her eyes from me, and so do you.
There’s a fine mist that sifts water through your hair, and a rainbow arches over the railway bridge which is now a miniature, with a toy train going over it, puffing toy smoke. Whooo . . . whoooo. The monkeys are all up at the top of the river, you tell Stella, dancing and drinking Scotch, toasting the bride and the groom. The banks are drawing closer and the water is turning to amber. Here’s where the water level used to be. You point up at the long green beards trailing from the branches. That’s lagoon slime caught in the air, from the days when the river was almost up to the sky. Rubbish, Ike says. That’s a tree fungus.
Stella checks her lipstick in her compact and there’s nothing but red. She can’t see me winking back at her, swinging on a strand of Meibomian glands, plonk! into the middle of the mirror, a twinkle in my mother’s eye. Maxie’s here and not here, whispering Gray’s Anatomy into your ear. The eyeball is composed of tunics and humours, humics and tuners. Remember the nummular layer and the liquor Morgagni, elixir of death? Stella snaps shut her compact, and you’re back in the boat again, out of the patient’s deathbed. Margie’s leaning out, near the prow, staring at miggies skittering across the surface. She’s shy and her brown jersey is thick, so thick that you can’t see her breasts. You almost smack her with the oar. Ike gives you a gentleman’s frown. That’s my wife, my house, my whole life making the boat tip like that. Margie, sit in the middle, it’s my turn to row.