The Rowing Lesson Page 4

  The toilet flushed and flushed, spasms of water gurgling, the old plumbing rattling. Dad! I was dressed in paint-spattered jeans and a shirt of William’s, my hair streaming. You were standing over the toilet, pouring pills from a bottle of Butcher’s Broom into the bowl. Empty vials and bottles littered the floor. Betsy Ilana Klein! You’re a throwback to the nineteenth century! You flushed the toilet again, and the pipes thudded and whooped in a kind of death agony.

  My pills aren’t good enough for you? Penicillin would have saved your grandfather’s life, you ungrateful little bitch!

  Dad, you’re not my doctor.

  Of course I’m your doctor. I’m your father, for God’s sake!

  Stop! I was screaming now. Get out of the bathroom! In a flash, you picked up a razor off the top of the sink. I’m going to kill myself! Ridiculously, you waved the blade at your own throat. William! Suddenly he was in the tiny room with us, between us, blocking the light with his large frame. Give it to me, he said, and you handed him the razor, between panting breaths. Your mother was right. I should never have come. This whole country is for the birds!

  You retreated into silence afterwards, eyes hooded, your beak of a nose a study in granite displeasure, the corners of your mouth drawn tight. William fixed you with another long, cool look and you stared past him, at the maze of buildings and streets, lost in the dense weave of your thoughts. This last day in New York City you spent packing and repacking your suitcases in the little room we built for you, wearing the solemn, silent dignity of an aggrieved Carmelite nun.

  In the cab on the way to the airport, you turned to me, as if waking from a long sleep. But that was one helluva show, wasn’t it? I bet my sister, Maisie, hasn’t even seen it. Maxie would have loved every minute of it. The chaps would have eaten it up! What did you say that girlie’s name was? What? She had a nice pair of legs, that girl. And what a voice! You know most of the buggers are dead now? They say only the good die young.

  The cab pulled over in front of the British Airways terminal and we were on the curb now. You reached into the trunk for your suitcase and your carry-on bag, suddenly yelping with pain. My left shoulder! Bloody bastards! I tried to lift the bags and you shouted, No! No! Don’t touch them! In one gesture, I paid the cab driver and took them anyway. Let go! There’s wine in there! Don’t hold it like that! You’re like a bloody animal! I dropped both bags between us, took your shoulders in my hands, stared at you through the wrong end of a telescope, the familiar knots grouping inside me, the old cold panic setting in. The sound of my own voice was harsh, jangled. Dad, I’m going to get back into that cab and leave you right here all by yourself if you don’t listen to me.

  I slipped a dollar into the machine that dispensed luggage trolleys and easily lifted the bags onto it, my arms used to lifting and moving my own large paintings. We have to go over there, I pointed to the doors breathlessly, stating the obvious. A small smile played on your lips. I always said you were my strongest child.

  In the long queue for the South Africa Airways flight to Johannesburg, you shrank into yourself again. I looked around for a familiar frown, the right set of shoulders, scanning the travellers gliding across the floor for any glimmer of recognition. It would please you to have someone slap you on the back with a Hello, Dr. Klein, Hello, Harry. You were known in the small Boland town where you’d practiced the art of medicine for over forty years. You were used to shopkeepers’ greetings, uniformed schoolchildren nodding at you from their bicycles, servants and mothers and babies and schoolteachers, farmers, fellow Freemasons, nurses and garage mechanics all paying their respects, with handshakes and dimpled smiles, some shy, some bold, your friends and your enemies all noticing you when you walked down the street, when you parked your car, when you dropped into the same seat you always sat in at the local bioscope.

  No one knew you here. We shuffled forwards towards the check-in counter, trapped in the vast desert of your loneliness. You were looking up, a large, grey-haired child staring at the signs and the flags and the lights, and it was hard not to feel the drift of your melancholy soaked reverie. We exchanged one last juddering hug, before you walked past the sign that said, PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. You turned to look back at me one last time, lifting your hand, and my hand was lifted too, and I wasn’t sure which one of us was which.

  Chapter 3

  IT’S BLOWING LIKE hell, Ma says, when she enters the room, patting her thinning hair into place, attempting to restore her Queen Elizabeth II do to its proper form. Oh, chookie, she murmurs, clenching me tightly in her arms. I’m seven again and I’m almost throttled by her but I grit my teeth and step back, almost stepping on the toes of Simon, who flew here from America just like me, only three days earlier, the good son, the better boy. He’s looking at the screens and the graphs around your bed, trying to read the book of your body from the inside out. Bigger structures than you’re used to, I say to Simon the scientist, explorer of the mouse genome, the human bitter-taste receptor, sea urchins, yeast. It’s all relative, he answers, his mouth wan between the covers of his brown beard.

  Betsy, you look tired! I brought some food for you in my bag. You know what they wanted to do yesterday? Take out his gall bladder! I put my foot down. I said, No! Leave him alone! Hasn’t he been through enough already? And look how it’s blowing out there!

  Waves scud across Table Bay, trees stretch sideways, the cape doctor blowing everybody’s germs out to sea except yours.

  I checked the date on it. It’s still OK. Ma hands me a strawberry yogurt with a plastic spoon.

  I’m not hungry, I say, turning to Simon. Do you want it?

  No, he shakes his head mutely. Unopened, the yogurt stands at your bedside between the tubes, trays, buttons and nozzles.

  There’s a yellow smell in the air, not medicine or machine but a whiff of what’s lurking inside you, under the white mound of the hospital sheets. Funnily enough, his arm is healing really well, Ma says. When he fell right in front of me, I thought he was going to get right up and brush himself off. Instead, he just lay there groaning. I still thought he was up to his old tricks. Even when he said, Chaps, I’m buggered. You blighters have got me this time, I thought he was performing.

  When they wheeled him into surgery, he was terrified, she says, her hands raised to her face.

  All he had was a broken arm, I say.

  It was a pathological fracture! Ma is loud, emphatic.

  Was it cancer? I ask.

  Shush! Don’t ask so many questions! I was waiting for him to come out of the recovery room. Hours and hours went by. Five or eight, I don’t even remember. Something terrible happened in there.

  It wasn’t here? Simon says.

  Ma shakes her head. It was at the other place. They brought him here the next morning.

  I notice a piece of torn paper lying near you, a white leaf flickering on a silver surface. Ma hands it to me. He wrote this down when they had him on a respirator. One of the nurses gave him a pencil and a piece of paper.

  I read the extravagant swirl of your doctor’s handwriting. “ Not talking = madness.”

  Your face is the Brandwacht, Outeniqua, Langeberg, Hottentot’s Holland, eagles screaming as they glide over its crags. Your thin sliver of a mouth is slightly parted, lips dry. Your lids are sealed, rimmed with short black eyelashes pointing straight down. I want to take that alligator clip I stole from a battery and clip it onto your ear lobe, the way I did when I was ten and you were taking a nap in your orange chair. You levitated then, as you suddenly woke up with tiny steel teeth digging into your ear. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Daddy. I made you fly.

  Everyone’s been calling me, Ma says. The Laubschers, Aprils, de Wets, du Toits, Mr. van Rensburg, Lucky Mopane, the Griels, Mrs. Grobbelaar, Antjie Foeitog. All the patients want to know how he is and then the family keeps calling, Molly and Poppy, Bertie, Pamela, Ricky, Benny . . . the phone just rings and rings all day long. What can I tell them?

  He’s so still, S
imon says, his voice cracking. If only he’d say something. He’s crying, and I’m crying and Ma has gone to get tissues and tea and talk to the nurses and call people back. Outside the southeaster still blows and blows, whistling, wheezing through the leaves, through the bricks in the walls, making the roofs creak and the dust spin.

  Remember the old cottage hospital before it was torn down, white walls and a green roof set on a rise above a stream and a terraced garden, Dad leaving us in the car while he made his rounds? First we played under the giant kaffirboom collecting lucky beans and then we followed the stream under its tiny bridges, racing leaf-boats, the sun sparkling through the trees, on the water, turning the leaves into gold green stars. I can still see the beans in my hand, kidney-shaped with a bright red streak in the center. Si, there were three and sixty-seven? More like five hundred, Bets. Remember the big medicine bottle we kept them in?

  There were scented trees in that garden. White blossoms? Pink?

  You’ve got to have something to eat, Ma says, coming back into the glinting room. Did you have anything on the plane?

  I’ll be alright, I say, and then I swear your foot moved and you almost turned over. Simon, Ma! I’m shouting now, and it seems as if you’re smiling ever so faintly, as if you know I’m here. Oh chookie, she says again, You must be seeing things. It’s the jet lag, Simon offers.

  I half expect you to sit up bolt upright and say, Ag, bullshit man, to your only son, but the wall of your face stays closed, eyelashes pointing straight down, the snowy mound of your chest barely stirring.

  The doctor said they might be able to get his GFR to a thirty or forty . . . Simon shakes his head when I say this and he’s talking now, about congestive heart failure, and the kidney not being able to filter enough extra salt and water out of the blood to lighten the heart’s load, the body’s total fluid volume increasing instead of decreasing.

  WE’RE BACK IN the sea of bad blood and I wish I had a net, a fish net or any kind of net to clean up the mess, to strain the poison out, to fix you up. The great saphenous vein, the small saphenous vein, the inferior vena cava . . . all your roads are buggered up. I make a left, taking the carotid artery, and now we’re driving a car together, the new turquoise and white Vauxhall you bought from Frank de Vos when you turned forty. We’re going to Slanghoek on a house call because one of the le Rouxs is sick and you think it’s pneumonia. You leave me at the turn off in the dark, and I look at the National Road which heads North towards Joh’burg, and then at your road, the Slanghoek road to the le Roux’s farm. The rain is pelting down and your car, your turquoise and white Vauxhall, slips into the shadow of the Brandwacht mountains like a deep-sea fish, like our old coelacanth friend. I’m praying for you, Doctor Dad.

  Hennie called at nine o’clock and he’s the young one, the young Mr. le Roux. He was having trouble with his breath. “My asem,” he said on the phone, “Maak my seer.” “It hurts when I breathe.” You looked at Ma who was sitting with her feet up and the sock basket in her lap. Those le Rouxs are animals, you said to her, clearing your own throat. Still, you took your black bag with a penicillin injection and some cough mixture. You left the ECG machine behind. It’s dark, pitch-dark and you remember me asking in the car last Sunday, Why is it called Slanghoek?

  In the rear-view mirror, you could see Simon making a thousand snakes with his fingers. Then he reached over to tickle me. You could hear me giggling like a giggle machine and now what’s in your head as you drive is me laughing and the words, Snake Corner. You love the rain driving at the windshield and the madness outside, the trees bent over double in the wind, and the grapevines like arthritic fists, their trunks stripped for the winter. Those buggers were praying for rain, and now they’ve got it and perhaps the Breede river will flood and you and Ma will take us there to marvel at what the water has done to the land. The river is usually as wide as this narrow road but when it pours down like this it spreads and that’s why the bridge is so bloody long. You and me and Ma and Simon will stand at the side of the national road, and watch as the brown water surges around tiny islands of land, around trees caught in the suddenly expanded river. We will stand in silence, a kind of prayer for the skeletal trees, for what’s gone and what’s coming.

  This isn’t the George rain, the Wilderness rain you grew up with, the long, sloughing sigh of wetness that crept into the cupboards, the blankets, the long-lasting sea smell that’s still in your nose. This is the Boland, and your life and your life’s work is circled by mountains. There are long, dry spells, blistering summers where the grapes swell and ripen, and the fruit trees get heavy with their fruit. The winters are wet and cool, and occasionally it rains like this, a kind of furious drumbeat of water on the roof of the car, on the corrugated iron roof of the house, a shout of Yes, to the prayers of the churchgoers begging for rain, the grape farmers and the wine farmers on their knees before God.

  It’s the wrong kind of begging, you tell them. You better ask God to forgive you for Sharpeville four years ago, for pass laws, for your rotten divide and conquer, separate but equal, your rubbishing apartheid laws. But no one really listens to the Jew who’s good for driving out in the dark, for twisting dislocated shoulders into place, for listening to breaking hearts. You fix anyone for a cent, a tickey, ten rand or twenty. Doctor God makes you feel better, and you can go back to beating your dog, or your wife or your klonkie. Doctor God will fix your klonkie too. He’ll fix anyone. He doesn’t mind touching white skin or black, and all the brown shades in between.

  The blinking, shifting windshield wipers are all that stand between you and the soaring rain-soaked Brandwacht mountains. Here there’s a cluster of pondokkies, a trail of smoke lifting into the air. There’s one le Roux’s farm, the older le Roux. You pass the turnoff to Hennie’s farm because it’s impossible to see everything on a night like this. At least the Vauxhall is dry and you don’t have to sit with water dripping down your neck. You make a U-turn on the lonely road and now you’re driving on a dust road that’s becoming mud. With a lurch in and out of a ditch and a rev of the Vauxhall’s engine, you drive into the heart of Slanghoek, a crisscrossing of wine farms, of veld, of twisting snakes and whatever else wasn’t shot and killed by the farmers years ago. Once in a while someone spots the eyes of a leopard in the dark, a child steps on a scorpion, a baboon tears open the arm of a motorist who stops to take pictures. But the real night monsters are the people, who fight and claw at each other when it gets dark. Hennie is a drinker and you never like to go out on a night like this to someone who has been drinking the way Hennie drinks. But when he coughed on the phone, a drowning, lung-sounding cough that caught you, you shouted, Ja, I’m coming. Put the bloody dog away.

  In the car you’re thinking of what Hennie’s wife, Marietjie, said about his soaring temperature, and his struggling to get out of bed to lead the water into the garden even though it was pouring outside. Roes, dit lyk soos roes, she said, when you asked her what he left on his hankies. Phlegm that looks like rust. Dad is sick as a dog. Doctor Harris is at his bedside and there are no goddamn antibiotics. The mould hasn’t sprouted in Fleming’s lab and your own father is dying. Your hands clench on the wheel and now the dark is suddenly as black as death. You’re driving inside the belly of eternity and there’s nothing but boiling terror in your veins.

  You’re at the river now, an offshoot off the Breede, and you drive slowly over the causeway. The tires are in the water. What was is it that floated past the two-headed dog? The boat, the floating leaf, the little ship that goes straight into the endless end? Rome is divided into three parts and the Germans are marching to Poland. Or is it Pretoria? The water is spraying the car doors. Ssssssh.

  The car stops. You turn the key in the ignition. Click. And then you laugh. You’re buggered now. You look out of the car window and it’s hard to see where the water begins and ends. Suddenly you’re pushing against the door with your shoulder. It opens and you’re crossing the causeway, your black bag on your head, the water
gripping and tugging at your ankles. It’s blind man’s buff but you’re Sarah. No wait, you’re someone’s nonnie carrying a petrol can, a water boy diving for golf balls, Moses high- stepping it across the waves. Lucky you have gills and a tail on a night like this.

  You’re out of the water and into the woods. A kind of scrub, really. Low trees and the shoulder of a hill in the semi-demi-starlight, the washed-out moon covered up with clouds, wrapped like a newborn. Mewling from somewhere. A barking, pleading and then a cough from deep within the lungs and the final ugly spitting of all the roes that was inside your father for all those years. All the years of rusting up in the shop on the corner of Meade and Hibernia Streets. The bags of nails and the sign outside and the till rusted up, so you couldn’t even bust it open with a hammer. Sold for a song. Everything that was anything is gone. And your feet are terribly wet, unbearably cold and you’re the one that’s going to pay for this bloody game in the night, for that animal Hennie le Roux who probably breathed in his own vomit and got it into his lungs and now this. Fucking pneumococcal pneumonia.

  The syringes are in the bag. Penicillin and then erythromycin and tetracycline, since you’re almost sure it’s bacterial. Not a coronary, you decided when you left the ECG machine behind. You can tell from the sound of a man’s breathing, the timbre of his cough, the way he complains and sometimes what he doesn’t say. You listen all day long to people saying, Doctor, I have a pain and you know that pain has many faces, and occasionally wears a long, pointy hat, with frills and bells. Sometimes it’s dull and other times it lights up like a bloody Christmas tree.

  Hennie slurred on the phone. There was drunken shame in his voice, and terror at the pain. Roes met die hoes. Rust with the coughing. You’ve come to love the shades of Afrikaans, the language that’s a mirror into the soul of these earthbound people who tower over you. It’s also the heartbeat of the volkies on the farm. Their voices pluck at you in the dark, as one squelching foot follows another. Onnosel. Onnosel. Bloody idiot. Hennie’s not yet forty-five and his liver’s grey with scars. A dog starts to bark and now your heart is suddenly beating in your ears and the Hennie fear is completely gone and it’s you on the block. There’s a racket on the farm, not one dog but ten and a door slams somewhere. Hennie’s screaming. You know it’s him because there’s a flurry of coughing and his croaking voice shouting, Voertsek! Then a leaden crack, the sound of a gun.