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We used to cycle home from school together. At her house we’d both dismount and push the bicycles the rest of the way, as if it were the first preparation for the big goodbye. We’d push our bicycles up the Orange Street hill, then get on again, and she’d cycle home down the one way and I down the other way. And at home I’d throw my satchel down, take my half-tepid tea from the oven and drink it, walk to the phone, pick up the receiver, and our conversation would start all over again.
My brother says: What are you two gossiping about again? I tell him we’re not gossiping, we’re discussing life.
Because we were both avid readers we always had things to discuss. Even now we still take each other books to read. Shortly before his death Klaas and I had a meal with them, at their holiday home in Simon’s Town. Klaas took Truida’s husband, Jan, a book, Geskiedenis van Harrismith (History of Harrismith), which his father wrote years ago. This gave Jan great pleasure, because the book was out of print and he had a farm near Harrismith and was interested in the place. I try not to think back on such incidents. I’m trying to live a life without Klaas.
* * *
A rumour is doing the rounds that the sickly Englishman has died. That, two nights ago, he was wheeled across to the hospital and subsequently died there. I didn’t even know that he had deteriorated. Walking down the passage, I still have the feeling that he will appear from behind his closed door to stop me. In his wobbly way. Even though, as the nurse says, we are all here to die, it’s a shock when it happens to someone right next to you. I hope they’ll sell the apartment quickly, because it’s not pleasant having to pass by the empty one umpteen times a day. You expect him to emerge and shuffle across the passage to the balcony. Our floor has been done short, we have the smallest balcony, if one person wants to sit there, that’s already enough, two have to sit knee to knee. If he’s sitting there, I can’t sit myself down there too.
There’s no notice posted regarding a cremation or a service or a wake, which they’re so fond of nowadays, being held for him. Not even a small gathering in our dining room. The dining room is a very large space and they arrange the chairs in a row with a place for the speaker to stand. There’s even a piano. And the workers, room attendants as well as dining room attendants, stand on the steps and needle one another, but with straight faces, and they sing a few songs like ‘Amazing Grace’, which soar up there with the high notes higgledy-piggledy and a few sob-notes down here, so that the two in front have to fish tissues out of their sleeves to wipe their eyes. There isn’t always a preacher, but often just an older man who reads from the Bible or says something edifying. Whether they knew you well or not, all the residents usually attend the service, because it’s something to do, and the kitchen produces sandwiches and scones and biscuits, which makes for a change.
Many of the old people feel they’d be happy with a gathering in the dining room rather than a church service. Then at least you’re assured of a turn-out, they say – who is still hale and enterprising enough to attend a church service somewhere? Where there’s no parking to be had. And where it could be raining or cold and windy. Even those who still have their cars are wary of driving and offering lifts to other people, especially if the church is in the city or an unfamiliar suburb.
But one can make a plan, I think. You don’t have to be in the Groote Kerk in the centre of town. There are smaller churches nearby. I don’t think you should just discard all rituals out of hand. You need the ritual of a church and an organ and a black-suited and be-bibbed preacher and people in their best attire. I’d even go for the Dead March. Just so that everybody can be pulled up short for a moment. With a consciousness of transience. Their own as well. Death is no longer accorded a space. Even old people have to do exercises and swallow handfuls of pills, just to lead a kind of half-life for a few more years. Just don’t die. And, after all, you’re not a dog just to be covered up with soil.
Even cemeteries are old-fashioned. More fashionable is a long-necked urn from which the ash slithers like a snake when the urn is upended. Like Ina Rousseau’s on the old bridge over the Eerste River in Stellenbosch. The little ceremony can be quite pretty. If you’re lucky and the wind doesn’t scatter the ashes. Some friends of my children have told how their mother’s ashes were blown back into their faces.
My casket of ashes must be dug into the side of my husband’s grave. Not deep, just covered up. I don’t want to be buried deep. But not just scattered to the winds either.
* * *
I am at my loneliest when the wind is wailing through our building. Then the clouds pile high on Table Mountain, draped over it like heavy carpets. If there’s just a chink open somewhere, the wind howls through it. Behind the lift on the fifth floor, if the windows are not shut tight, some of them are warped, the wind howls through the building like a banshee.
In the house where Klaas and I lived the wind also blew, but not so hard or so wilfully. The clouds would settle on the neck between Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak and from there plunge like lemmings to their death. Then the dog in his wooden kennel on the front stoep would start howling and carry on to such an extent that Klaas would have to venture out barefoot to let him in to sleep in the lobby. Then sometimes he’d pull the blanket up higher over me, and sometimes I’d fall asleep while reading and then he’d carefully remove the book from my hands and the glasses from my face. In the mornings he’d tease me: Do you keep your glasses on to see better in your dreams?
I don’t remember wind from my earliest days. Paarl doesn’t get much wind. That’s why it gets so hot in summer, my mother used to say. And rains so much in winter, and the earth never gets dry, but stays sodden.
It blows at the seaside, not in Paarl. Wind is the devil of holidays by the sea.
We have our holidays in the Strand in a house my father rented, a small old-fashioned place on the seafront with a stoep that made my mother say: I only come to the Strand to serve tea. Because people parade down the street in rows and peer in at where my father is sitting and there’s always an ex-student or acquaintance among them who makes the whole row of people veer in and come to shake hands and then look around to see if there are more chairs, because everybody needs a seat. That’s the thing about the Strand, says my father while we’re carrying empty cups back in, everybody’s on the lookout for an old acquaintance.
We swim right in front of the house. We’re allowed to cross the street, after my mother has checked and then with a nudge in the back, said: Go on, walk now, the road is clear. Later she turns up with the towels and a cushion and her book. I’m wearing my bathing cap already. We look at the people and wade in the shallows. Sometimes sit down in the shallow water with other children to get used to the cold sea. We see my mother arriving and she sits down on the sand and stretches out her arms and we know what she’s saying: Oh, what a beautiful morning, by this afternoon the wind will be blowing again. Children, enjoy the sea.
We’re not allowed to go in too far, otherwise my father or mother, even though they’re not wearing bathing costumes, will rush into the waves to haul us out by the arm. They never swim. Other old people swim early in the morning when there’s nobody to stare at them, but they don’t really swim, they just bathe.
When I’m shivering with cold, my mother drapes a towel over my shoulders and starts rubbing me dry. I try to pull away, but she’s got hold of me too tightly. My brother has long since yanked free, he disappears with his friend, and my mother can only follow him with her eyes, and carry on looking while she’s drying me.
The most