LITMIR.BIZ

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fairy tales all day didn’t give her much credibility in the Struggle.

      Tonight she’d throw her balcony door open wide, Griet decided while she waited at the traffic lights across the street from her office block, and she’d fly away with the wind. Ring-a-ring-a-roses through the clouds, over the sleeping city with a fork and a spoon, leap-frogging over the curve of the moon. Up, up, up on to the flat slab of the mountain, where the witches were sure to meet on All Saints’ Eve. Round this giant table under the moon, with a lion and a devil keeping guard at each end. Who’d dare to chase them away? Not even the angels.

      3

      In Search of the Golden Goose

      The woman – witch, rebel angel or ordinary sinner – lived in a dreadful country. The sun always shone, except at night when the moon shone, and the people of the country changed colour like loaves in an oven. From creamy-white to biscuit-brown to coffee-black, or from salmon-pink to beetroot-red, or from the colour of butter to the colour of turmeric. Some even from blue to green. But the worst sinners never changed colour. They just bleached whiter and whiter.

      This is what Griet had written on a sheet of paper in her office full of children’s books that afternoon. It seemed a long, long time ago, she thought with her chin in her hand and her elbow on a bar counter. She’d crumpled up the page and rung her friend Jans: ‘How about joining me for a drink?’

      ‘What’s the occasion?’

      ‘It was the Day of the Dead yesterday.’

      ‘Can’t we be like ordinary people and just have a drink because it’s Friday?’

      ‘But it’s a feast day in South America. The Mexicans buy sugar-bread skeletons and lay a place at table for absent guests. They believe it’s the day the dead get leave in heaven to visit the earth again.’

      ‘I can’t think of a better reason to drink myself into a stupor.’

      ‘OK, Jans, it’s Friday evening, I’ve survived another week on my own, and if you don’t have a drink with me, I’ll beat you to a pulp next time I see you.’

      And now, several drinks later, she remembered there was something important she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t think what it was. Her head felt like a flower that was too heavy for its stem.

      ‘I’ve had a gutful of clever men,’ she muttered into her hand. ‘I’m looking for a stupid man. Stupid and strong.’

      Jans looked at her blankly through the round gold-rimmed spectacles that had slipped down on his nose. He was still in his working clothes – a conservative dark suit, white cotton shirt and muted paisley tie – but the top button of the shirt was undone and the tie had been tugged loose. If Jans didn’t have to wear a suit every day, Griet had often thought, one could easily mistake him for a fairly decent tramp. He always looked as though it was two days since he’d last shaved, and three days since he’d combed his hair. And to crown it all, tonight he looked as though he hadn’t slept for four days: his mouth was tired and there were shadows like bruises under his eyes.

      ‘I don’t mean the village idiot, Jans. He’ll have to be able to read and write. I don’t trust men who don’t read. Maybe that’s the root of my whole problem. Instead of checking on whether he likes dogs, as my mother always said I should. Or what his underpants look like.’

      Her sister Petra was a connoisseur of men’s underpants. Said they spoke volumes. Never trust a man with holes in his underpants. She didn’t really like red underpants either. Said it was a dictator’s colour.

      ‘But I look at his bookshelf,’ sighed Griet.

      ‘If he reads Camus, he’s OK?’ A light seemed to have been turned on behind Jans’s spectacles.

      ‘Something like that, yes.’ Griet took another sip of wine and shook her heavy head. ‘And I land on my bum every time.’

      ‘We aren’t just talking about George and the recent past?’

      ‘No, we’re talking about men in general, the whole catastrophe. I’ve never had a decent relationship with a man who didn’t have an overload of intellectual pretensions. Of course, this says a lot about my own intellectual pretensions. But the best one-night stand of my life was with a gym instructor who’d never read anything heavier than the back page of a Sunday paper.’

      That was a long time ago, of course, when she still shaved her legs regularly. If he could see her now with a dowdy ponytail and all her lipstick smeared off on to the wine glass, clinging to a bar counter, the poor gym instructor would completely lose his impressive erection.

      So this, then, was what people did on a Friday evening. There had been a time when she also went out on Friday evenings, when she still wore mascara and flirted with muscle-bound instructors, but it must have been in a previous life.

      ‘Just say you could have lived with him,’ Jans stared at the rows and rows of bottles behind the counter, endlessly reflected in sparkling mirrors, an alcoholic vision of heaven. ‘How long could you have stood it before you started screaming every time he opened his mouth?’

      ‘For always – if I’d known what I know now. The problem with clever men is that they talk too much and don’t screw enough. The trouble with stupid men is usually the same. But every now and then you find one who knows how to shut up and use his body. Then you must hang on to what you’ve got – and bite your tongue every time he says something stupid. But that’s what you have to do with any man, anyway.’

      All men are the same in the light [Louise wrote from London]. Graffiti that I read in the tube on my way to work. But I never seem to see the light, let alone a man in the light. It’s dark when I go to work in the morning and dark when I come home again in the evening. This is definitely going to be the winter of my discontent, here in the country of Shakespeare and the Sex Pistols where I always wanted to live. It’s terrible when your dreams come true.

      ‘But I’m a sucker for a clever man. I always think maybe he’s an Einstein or a Shakespeare and then I could be his muse. Behind every man, you know; all those clichés I was brought up with. Immortality by proxy. I believed George was a genius. A philosophy lecturer – how lucky can a girl get? I felt like a bird-watcher who’d come across the last dodo in existence. And then I discovered he didn’t want a muse, he wanted a mother. Someone to darn the holes in his underpants.’

      ‘Perhaps that’s part of a muse’s role,’ Jans said comfortingly while he tried to catch the waiter’s eye and order another bottle of wine.

      ‘No, there’s a world of difference between a muse and a mother.’ She pushed her glass towards him so he could take a mouthful of her wine in the meantime. ‘You can’t convert your muse into Florence Nightingale. You can’t expect Shakespeare’s dark lady also to play the lady with the lamp.’

      ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it?’

      ‘No, you can eat as much cake as you like, but you can’t expect a chocolate cake and a custard tart to taste the same.’

      Griet began to shake with laughter and realised that she’d had enough to drink. But she raised her wine glass resolutely, drained it, and felt herself waft away on a cloud of recklessness. Jans was looking more and more attractive, with his spectacles low on his nose and that dark shadow of stubble round his mouth.

      ‘You know, just the other day I read something about a flower that made me think of you,’ said Jans. ‘Have you ever seen a wildemagriet? An ox-eye daisy?’

      ‘Do you know the story of the sad princess?’

      ‘It’s a beautiful flower, but very poisonous.’

      ‘Her father said that the man who made her laugh could have her hand in marriage.’

      ‘The black people believe it brings protection against the devil.’

      ‘And it made you think of me?’ asked Griet and started to hiccup in

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