The Rowing Lesson Read online

  Chapter 5

  EXHAUSTION GLITTERS BEHIND my eyes, a thin silt I can feel under my lids, lining my throat. Get some fresh air, Ma says. Go get a cup of tea.

  My shoes glide on the red floors, down the hallowed, yellow halls of Groote Schuur. I’m remembering the old cottage hospital in Worcester on Christmas Eve, the nurses in their white hats and black capes, the squeech of their rubber-soled shoes, singing Stille Nag, Heilige Nag, floating down the corridors in the dark, holding candles in paper doilies. I’m sitting on your shoulders probably for the very last time. Ag, shame man, one of the nurses says. It’s her only Christmas.

  The sour tang of hospital food wafts through the cafeteria, settles around the pile of plastic trays. There’s steam and macaroni and green beans in the air, cabbage and boiled fish, and burst hotdogs. I’m struggling with everything, my tears, my tray, my tea, this honoured place where you became a doctor, the riot of sea, city and mountain just outside the windows.

  The cup slides on the tray and the hot water burns my hand, drips onto my shoe. There’s a quick place at a table between young doctors, men and women bulging with stethoscopes the way you must have, and a clatter of nurses to the left of them.

  They’re singing a kind of song I’m straining to hear, Afrikaans and English and the magical Latin and Greek of medicine braided together, leukonychia, hypoalbu-minemia, Meneer Kafaar en sy rooi gesig, the laryngeal mask airway. Daniels’ patient was cyanotic by then, a young woman wearing the tag, Dr. Marlene Matthee, says. Hy’t net sy arm gebreek, a dark-haired boy who could be sixteen and not twenty-five, says. A fracture of the upper humerus.

  The bobbling white coats rise and fall like piano keys. They’re playing your song, the old talk on the phone about cardiac arrests and murmurs and babies with strawberry birthmarks, ECGs and haemoglobin and porphyr-ia, not uncommon in the Afrikaner population. He was hypoxic, Dr. Marlene says, and there’s a murmur, Hy het nie genoeg suurstof gekry nie.

  A fracture of the upper humerus. I’m leaving now. Ek is baie jammer, I’m very sorry, as the cup spills the last of the tea on one of the housemen’s coats. They’ve barely seen me, a patient’s patient reeking of airplane and long distance, and now I’m travelling the halls again, my feet skimming the glistening floor, always two steps ahead of myself, a dark, curly-haired woman almost as short as you.

  There are white faces and brown faces in the lift, white coats and white shoes, and sturdy brown legs, next to khaki pants. This isn’t the kind of hospital you spent forty-three years in, with separate entrances and exits for Blankes and nie-Blankes, Europeans and non-Europeans.

  Sy was baie bekommered. She was very worried, a blonde nurse with tight lips whispers to her colleague, an Indian nurse with a long, lustrous braid down her back. Sy’t Dr. Daniels gebel. Hulle het hom hier gebring. She called Dr. Daniels. They brought him here. I’m looking at the numbers lighting up on the panel. Who was worried?

  There’s a knot of doctors outside your room, and Dr. Daniels, the anaesthesiologist, is there again. He approaches me with Afrikaner courtliness, his voice gruff but warm. He’s fought one helluva fight but I think it’s tickets this time. Somehow he’s got one of my hands sandwiched between his large, dry palms and I’m lulled, as if he’s putting me to sleep just by touch.

  I retract my hand carefully, murmuring, Thank you for everything you’ve done, Doctor. I’m standing at the foot of your bed again, staring at the cliff of your nose, the folded swallow’s wings of your black and silver hair. We’re on the beach at Lentjiesklip and you’re showing me a bluebottle lying dead on the sand, with periwinkles crawling out of their holes to come and eat its blue, stinging tendrils. They don’t get stung, you’re telling me as you pop the bluebottle’s bubble with a long spear of dried kelp. We watch the periwinkles, shells pointing up, swept forward by the circular motion of what looks like a tongue and a leg and a sucker, as they ingest the bright blue of the bluebottle. You point up and out with your kelp spear towards the sky and the mountain, towards the old road from the Wilderness to George, snaking over the mountain, near the Kaaimans River gorge.

  I CAN’T HELP going with you, all the way to the station to say goodbye to George, the town, and Mum, your mother, and to Maisie, eight-year-old Bertie, and your very own Dad. We’re all crammed into Charlotte and we just travelled along the hepatic flexure, the beginning of the transverse colon. Whoopsa-daisy, there’s the sharp downturn, the splenic flexure, which is scenic not splenic in the middle of summer, with the smell of lucerne in the air and no one’s crying yet.

  There’s a knock-knocking sound underneath the car and your father stops dead. He gets out and his head pokes under the bonnet, checking. Time drizzles between your fingers, drips from your clenched knees right to your ankles locked around each other like cuffed hands. Your mother screams, Joseph! We’re going to miss the train! And your father waves his grease-stained hands at her like a drowning man. Now you’re out of the car and checking too and your father is so furious he almost slams the bonnet down on your head. Mr. Expert! He’s shrieking. You think I’m a fool. You think I can’t see what’s wrong. Come on, Charlotte. This time he does slam the bonnet and you jump back, as if escaping the guillotine. He’s in the car and Charlotte leaps into life but somehow he’s thrown your suitcases into the road and is pulling away without you, taking you to the train station without you. Bertie is laughing and he’s waving a spanner that he tip-taps on the roof of the car and you suddenly see that he’s the noise, the broken twang, the bloody reason your mum threw you out of her bed and out of her love and out into the yard to catch the Friday chicken. All those years of blankets and special baths and special meals and special treatments for your stick-legs and your tiny arms gone in a flash.

  The car stops and you’ve pulled Bertie out, headfirst out of the window, and you’re choking him, and he’s biting you and Mum screams, Joseph! Your father is driving away again and you and Bertie are running down the road after the car. And then it stops, like a funny silent film, and you run backwards to get the suitcases and Bertie hops up and down and then onto the running board. You jump up too and push him back through the window. The car swallows you and Bertie and the suitcases and swerves a little. Maisie is at the window, with her hanky to her mouth, green as a cucumber. She’s sick of you! Mum is screaming and you say nothing but now the tears are rolling down your cheeks and you should be ashamed of yourself, a young man of eighteen crying like a baby. Buck up, man. Buck up!

  Mum is talking like a wind-up toy and her head is bobbing and she’s saying something over and over again about her cousins and her sisters and her brother in London and the wind can be bad in Cape Town, the southeaster blows dust into your mouth and the northwester brings rain and don’t sleep with the door closed. What if the house is on fire or the street or if the war does come here but that won’t happen. They won’t let it. I never slept alone, mind you, she says, never ever. My mother and I slept in the same bed until the day I got married. She smiles as wide as can be.

  Maisie looks up from her hanky, and she says, And your dad? My father was dead, Mum says and her head bob-bobs in a little-bit-sad kind of way. Of course, Maisie settles back into her hanky. I forgot.

  You’re looking out of the window. Your tears are drying in the wind and no one really cares. So what if your mum lost her father when she was three or four or six. She had all those lucky uncles and funny half-brothers and the whole of London town. Oh to be in England now that April’s there and old Westminster Bridge. The earth has nothing to show more fair than the beauty of the morning. Who can be sad in a place like that? Great Britain is pink on the map, always pink. Half the world is pink, you know.

  You see Maisie out of the corner of your eye, across the madness of Bertie, who’s sucking on two of his fingers, not one but two, and your mother is reaching across to slap his wet fist and she almost clocks you instead. Say the wrong thing and you’ll be back on the dust road again, back with the suitcases, Charlotte’s tires sp
itting stones at you.

  I need to go to the lavatory. That’s the only thought in your head as Charlotte stops at the railway station right at the end of Hibernia Street, past the High School, past Rosemoore, the Coloured location where Nettie lives, past all the houses and lives that you’ve known since the day you were born. You can’t think goodbye anymore. All there is is the pressure in your bowels and the thought of the train, the colon, the colon-train that will carry you in and out of this old life where Mum toilet trained all three of you. She and Nettie held your tiny bottoms over chamber pots and lavatories and in water closets for years and years and years. It started early and it’s never ended, this glint in her eye about clean bottoms.

  Mum’s talking the hind leg off a donkey now, about the tea dances and the southeaster, again, and don’t look out of the train window, you’ll get soot in your eye. You don’t want to start Medical School with a patch like a pirate. The train is steaming into the station and there’s a blur of movement around you, Bertie suddenly clinging to your legs with his head in your groin, Oh, God, not there, and Maisie seems to have vanished. The train has eaten her and it’s grunting and panting and you look for her in the steam that’s billowing and disappearing, billowing and disappearing. Your father is handing bags to you. You’re in the second-class compartment with two old men and a stringy boy, taller than you, with bristles on his head, and a running sore on his wrist. You see the sore as he lifts his own suitcase up, and puts it right next to yours.

  The steam engine bellows, once, twice, three times and you’re out of George, Mum and Maisie up in smoke, your father clapping old Bertie so hard he nearly falls over. You run through the narrow passage, past the second-class compartments, desperate to find the toilet and when you get to it, someone’s in there, and you bang on the door almost crying. The train lurches. Where are you? Great Brak River or Little Brak? You’re stumbling over villi, over Peyer’s glands and watch out, don’t fall into the crypts of Lieberkuhn.

  You can’t go forward into first class or backwards into the third class, with the Coloureds and Natives. Dirty and bad, dirty and bad, that’s what the wheels are singing, that’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t find the lav, the john, the loo, the place to poo. There’s a baby crying so loudly that a seam opens up behind your eyes. You’re jiggling up and down in your new big suit, holding your water, your waste, your baby tears, sad and bad, not big enough, too wet, too dirty, too sad. Your legs are twined like vines gripping an old, old tree and there are frog sounds, frog sounds at the Wilderness. Oh God, the frogs are going to get you through this, the night sound of all of them in the soft rain as you walk back in the dark to the rondavel, the lagoon black and soft in the dark. I’m leaving, you remember, I’m leaving and out of the window, the places you have planted your heart roll past, one love-place after another. Herold’s Bay and Victoria Bay, the bluebottles and periwinkles, the curling waves and a thousand eggshells, all the picnics on the sand washed up and gone. Pacaltsdorp, where your grandfather smoused ostrich feathers, where there’s one road and a graveyard, a small town heaving itself up onto a hill and Blanco, another tiny place where you stopped, once, to fill Charlotte with water. And the baby’s still crying as the train thunders towards Mossel Bay, straight for the sea.

  The cecum is the cul-de-sac where the small intestine ends and the large intestine begins. You’re crouched now, a C shape, and you trip over the bristle-haired boy as he edges out of the door, the train throwing him this way and that, his running sore flying at your cheek. You recoil and fall into the water closet which is more vapour than water. The running sore boy has left a mess, and you are careful, now, a man in a minefield of microbes, a soldier covering the seat with garlands of toilet paper so that no part of you, not one inch of skin will touch the place where the sore boy sat. The baby’s scream is a gurgle and a sigh and the baby feeds. You can breathe again, and the sheepshank inside you loosens. The next stop is Mossel Bay and suddenly a new fear sits down next to you. The train will stop and they’ll put the engine that was in the front at the back and everything will be swung around. You’ll be sitting here, shitting onto the tracks in front of the railway station and everyone will see.

  The train groans and stops and it doesn’t go into the sea. If you were in the mood, you could twist open the window and take a last look at Seal Island, a tiny hump of land not too far from the harbour just seething with seals. But you’re frozen, waiting for the switch, for what was in front to go to the back and what was in the back to be put in front. You’re in the cecum or is it much, much farther in the narrowest part, the sigmoid flexure? The tracks here are of course much narrower than the tracks in England, with a three-foot-six-inch gauge which makes the train slow, a day-long train with lunch on both ends. They curve forward, downward and inward and then form a loop, which ends in the rectum.

  The third-class carriages are now in front, and the first-class carriages are at the back. The long line of panting elephants lumbers back, makes a left, heads inlands towards the looping mountain chains of the Western Cape. With a groan and a sigh, you leave the last breakfast you ate in your mum’s house neatly on the tracks, a mile outside of Mossel Bay, next to the battered skeleton of a dassie. What is the better part of valour? What is it? What is it? The train wheels hiss at you and you search outside in the veld for the lost word and there it is, an akkertjie, an acorn, a tiny miggie inside the folded leaf of a succulent. Discretion. Discretion is the better part of valour.

  Albertinia is the next stop. It’s not much more than a railway station and a hotel with shade, a handful of farms with prickly pear fences and a few old ostriches who survived the ostrich-feather boom and then the crash, and watch the trains with hooded eyes. But the big thrill is just outside Albertinia, the Gouritz River bridge, a rickety wooden structure that spans a deep rift in the earth, with a sly trickle of brown water at the bottom. The train is on the bridge and there’s creaking galore, the wooden supports swaying and groaning under all that steel and panting machinery. Bertie would love this, you’re thinking. He’d throw something out of the window, down, down towards the mud puddle so far down below. But there’s no Bertie. There’s just you here, alone in the passageway of the swinging train, afraid to go back into the compartment with the infected boy who’s not your brother, who is not despised, loved-to-death Bertie.

  The train is off the bridge now and everyone is still alive. You must go. You can’t stand here in the middle of the train all day, stuck inside the coils of your own colon, stuck like the shilling you once ate and then vomited up, your mother’s white face hanging over you, big as the moon. When you get into the compartment, it’s not the three you left, but five now, the two ou toppies, old ones, and the long boy and a couple of rough-looking extra ones, two plaasjapies from Albertinia. It’s going to be Afrikaans all the way to Cape Town. And why not? Waarom nie?

  Mum never learnt to speak Afrikaans properly. She tried in the shop and it was the sound of a Rooinek through and through, her tongue stepping gingerly over the hard g’s and the rumbling r’s. Your father was a different story, with his Russian and his Yiddish and his funny English, he took a dive into Afrikaans and never really came up. Ja, meneer! He loved to say when one of the hops farmers came into the shop. Then he was off and it always reminded you of those World War One flying aces doing double backflips in the sky. He didn’t care. He made double language mistakes and then he corrected himself with a fine, fat Afrikaans idiom, just like the fine, fat-tailed sheep you see out in the far Karoo. Of course you learned Afrikaans at school and although it wasn’t your best subject, you liked the sound of vis in your mouth instead of fish, vuur instead of fire, vuurhoutjie instead of match.

  Albertinia, Riversdale, Heidelberg, Swellendam. Suurbraak. Sour Vomit. Nothing more than a siding where the train stops.Waar is jou pappie? Where is your father? The pipe-smoking white-haired oupa at the window looks at you with watery eyes, his pipe clenched between stained teeth. Ek is alleen.
I am by myself. He is looking at you curiously, those watery eyes fixed on your long nose and you clench yourself for the next question.

  Hoe oud is jy, my kind? The old film is burning inside you. It has edges so hot they’re curling and setting the whole world on fire. Outside the sun is leaving the sky and suddenly the train is diving through flames, long ribbons of ruby and bright orange. The train window flashes like a thousand burning mirrors. God is fuming! He’s going to poke his fingers into the old man’s eyes and blind him forever!

  Ek is agtien, oupa. I am eighteen, grandpa. Everyone in the compartment is looking at you and you’re the one who’s going blind. You can’t see them because the sun is staring you down. The shadow of your nose falls between your feet and there’s nothing to shade your eyes from these rude giants with their halos of glittering veld and sky, their weeping sores, their big, earth-slapping feet. How old did they think he was? Twelve? Thirteen? A tiny Jew they could fold up and stick in their pockets, right next to the tobacco pouch and the smashed packets of cigarettes.