LITMIR.BIZ

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an oven.

      The birth was an agonising experience that dragged on right through the night, worse than her worst nightmares. ‘Is it possible that an apple could cause so much trouble?’ she asked the young nurse who was holding her hand. ‘Do you think Eve deserved such a heavy punishment?’ The nurse smiled like an angel, rose up above the bed and floated out.

      Maybe she was hallucinating, maybe her grandfather had sent one of his angels to hold her hand. She’d thought she’d be brave – her great-grandmother, after all, had borne sixteen children without the help of painkillers or modern medicine. But after a couple of hours Griet begged her angel nurse for relief. An epidural, a gas mask, a Caesarean, she mumbled, anything to get her out of this hell.

      The fairy tale of South Africa, her bedevilled brain remembered, also began with an Eve. An Eve and a Mary, as in the most famous fairy tales of the Western world: the Old and the New Testament. Eva was a Khoi-khoi girl, adopted by Jan van Riebeeck’s household, as innocent and almost as naked as the original Eve. Maria de la Queillerie had travelled far with her husband van Riebeeck –‘founder’ of ‘white’ South Africa – like the other Mary, to save a sinful world.

      That’s the European version, anyway, the white woman aiding black sinners. Like any good fairy tale, this one also has various versions, white and black and brown and yellow. Like Little Red Riding Hood and Rotkäppchen and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.

      A short while after the anaesthetist had inserted a needle into her spine, her legs started to grow numb and lifeless. And her brain, thank heaven, a little clearer. But she couldn’t get poor Eve out of her mind. The Eve she’d learnt about at school, the one who was banned from Paradise as punishment for her sins. But also the other one, the one of whom she’d learnt no more than a name in class. The one who married a white man and was banished to Robben Island for her sins.

      The Khoi-khoi Eva became a practising Christian, wearing Western clothes, learning to speak Dutch and Portuguese, and married the gifted Danish surgeon, Pieter van Meerhoff. But after the wedding the fairy tale went awry. Eva’s husband died a few years later and she became an alcoholic and a prostitute, leaving her children to the mercies of charity. She was held on Robben Island several times, and died there in 1674.

      So much for happy endings, thought Griet, and then the angel said she must push.

      At last she pushed her baby out, ecstatic – in spite of the blood and the sweat – as though he was the saviour who would redeem mankind. He was her saviour, the child she’d waited for for so long, the son she wanted so badly.

      She saw the slippery little body, the tiny feet with ten perfect toes, the pink face with eyes tightly closed against the savagery of the world. This is how it must feel to see a god, she thought.

      And then they took him away. She could not weep when they told her he was dead. There was just an emptiness in the place where her heart had once beaten.

      An Italian woman of ninety-one, Griet had read in the paper this morning, was reunited with her son who had been adopted shortly after his birth seventy-four years earlier. ‘I wanted to find my son before I died,’ Assunta Rabuzzi had apparently told reporters. Griet immediately snipped out the report and fastened it into her Creative Arts Diary.

      She tried not to think while she did the rest of her shopping. Little pork sausages that reminded her of her son’s toes; button mushrooms that looked like his nose. Shell pasta that reminded her of the perfect curves of a baby’s ear; downy peaches that felt like a baby’s skin, bringing a lump to her throat as her teeth broke through the skin of the fruit, making her weep with longing while she gulped down the chunks. ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Once, long ago, on her grandfather’s farm, she’d seen a sow eat her own piglets. Then she’d gone behind the sty and brought up her grandmother’s lunch.

      In a trolley in front of the dairy products sat a little boy with wide grey eyes. She’d ignore him, Griet decided, taking a block of butter for her basket. He was wearing blue canvas shoes and swinging his feet. Griet wondered what sort of cheese she should buy, and where the child’s mother was. Mozzarella.

      Why did her favourite newspaper reports, like her favourite foods, usually come from Italy? Green ice falling on convents and ancient women finding lost sons. Pizza and pasta and Parma ham. Maybe foods like this make the mind more susceptible to fantasy and outlandish stories.

      She could hardly imagine what boerewors and biltong did to the minds of her own people.

      In Dante’s vision of hell, the souls of suicides are portrayed as stunted trees beside a river of blood. Imagine how many South African trees must be growing beside that blood-river! All the men who’d destroyed their families before they committed suicide, as though they were afraid that no one but their own children would play with them in hell. All the political jailbirds who’d flown out of tenth-storey windows, and all the others who’d pre-empted the authorities and taken death into their own hands.

      Just imagine whom she might have met in this grove of stunted trees if she hadn’t been frightened off by a cockroach. Griet felt her feet lifting off the ground. Hemingway and Hitler, Janis Joplin and Marilyn Monroe, Othello and Ophelia … Griet rose slowly, watching the child’s swinging feet grow smaller and smaller. Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker … It was dangerous to leave little boys like this in supermarket trolleys, she realised while she hovered high above the fridges full of cheeses from different countries. Van Gogh of the Netherlands and Cleopatra of Egypt and the chaste Lucretia from classical Italy … Mad people could easily steal them. She wafted through the ceiling, as easily as the winged horse of the muses would glide through the clouds. She flew, free as a witch, light as an angel.

      6

      I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Blow Your House Down

      Griet felt like crying when she saw the house she’d lived in for so many years. Home is where the heart is, she thought as she walked through the neglected garden. And if you no longer have a heart, home is probably where your books and your music and your most precious memories are kept.

      The clivias burned like orange flames under the bedroom window. A powerful antidote to impotence, according to old wives’ tales, and protection against evil. Although a small forest of clivias couldn’t protect the inhabitants of this house from impotence or evil.

      She unlocked the front door carefully, and felt her knees weaken as she stepped inside. She could smell her husband, she realised in a panic in the hallway, next to the table with the telephone and the answering machine. But he couldn’t be here. She’d made certain that he wouldn’t be here. It was only his smell lingering in the house: the smell of his toasted cigarettes and his body after a game of tennis and the red soap he used every morning in the shower. She could smell him because the memories in this house sharpened all her senses, because she had crept back like a dog to dig up old bones.

      Grandma Hannie’s house was a House of the Senses, a small labourer’s cottage on a Karoo farm, cool and dark as a cellar, especially on Sunday afternoons when everyone was supposed to be sleeping. There was a front door used by nobody but the dominee, and a back door that stood open day and night with a screen door that slap-slapped continually. One hard slap, deafening until you grew accustomed to it, and two softer slaps like echoes, every time someone came in or went out of the kitchen.

      There were a number of other noises around the house, especially on a hot Sunday afternoon. The crack of the dog’s jaw as he snapped at flies, the complaints of the windmill in a sudden gust, the drone of a lorry far, far away on the highway. The creak of Grandpa Big Petrus’s bed when he rolled his giant frame over.

      And at night there were inexplicable gurgling noises in the attic. Grandma Hannie said it was rats or something; Grandpa Big Petrus said: Impossible, rats don’t gurgle, it was Something. Grandma Hannie shook her head and held her peace.

      The most memorable sound was the hymn they sang in their bedroom at dawn each day, after they’d read a passage from the Bible and said a few prayers. Grandpa Big Petrus’s confidently pure bass, followed by Grandma Hannie’s hesitant falsetto. She didn’t

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