LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

all around the pavilion that juts out far into the sea. At low tide we can walk in under the pavilion from the beach and then climb up on the supports that are overgrown with seaweed and all kinds of shells clinging to the coarse concrete. It’s dark down there and the sea makes strange sounds that swish-swoosh through the supports, crack like a whip and then retreat. It’s cold as well, and sometimes the waves burrow holes next to the supports of the pillars and the holes get bigger and bigger and the waves roll on ever bigger and harder and higher, until the water splashes all over us clinging for dear life and we are sopping wet.

      Now I’m getting scared and want to get out of this dark, wet, swishing water and I let go of the concrete support and try to jump, but the water knocks me back into the hole. I get to my feet and it knocks me back again, but I crawl out of the water on all fours and as I crawl, my knees and my feet and my hands press hollows into the sand that fill up again from below. I am tired and sore and cold with buffeting, but I have to crawl fast otherwise the sand in this horrible, cold, dark place will suck me in and draw me under.

      Outside the sand is so white and the sun shines so brightly that my eyes hurt, and the sand scorches my feet, but I have to carry on walking to get home before my father and mother wake up from their afternoon nap.

      After four o’clock I don’t want to go along to the beach. It’s too windy, I say.

      You can see for yourself, Ma, see how the drifts of sand flurry over the road. I pull the front door shut. It feels as if the sand is coming to seek me out in the house.

      What did I tell you, my mother says, every afternoon it blows.

      * * *

      I have experienced so many emotions today, they pour out of me, from my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nostrils. I must try to calm down. Perhaps now at this age I am easier prey for emotion. My friend Annari says the older you get, the closer your bladder moves to your eyes. By now it’s moved all the way to just behind my eyes. A sick child on television, sick to death, makes me cry. But the crying passes just as quickly. I am overwhelmed with emotion when I’ve done reading a book about a woman cruelly deceived by her husband, and then dying all on her own. Then Sina, Nico and Michelle’s housekeeper, phoned and said I should switch on the radio because Poppie is on the radio and that’s what I did and so Poppie also got me crying, especially the last part. So now it’s these three: television, radio, reading. Nothing direct. Can I still feel anything for myself? We are so far removed from life here, I get the impression we live through the emotions of others. Perhaps we shy away from our own emotions.

      My mother-in-law was just as weepy. I could never really understand it. It was always about things from the past that she cried, so then I’d say: Ma, there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s past, you mustn’t cry like that, and then she’d say: But it’s for things I loved so much that I’m crying.

      Nowadays I understand it better. The way I picture it: there’s a thin membrane around our brain that ordinarily anchors us to the present. But as you get older, flaws develop in the membrane, like an old sheet getting threadbare. Then the past, whether called for or not, streams through the flaws. That’s why old people get confused, or lose their concentration, or mislay things, like their keys.

      I cry even for the wretched palm tree in the garden, because at its base, close to the ground, the scales of its bark are peeling off and the weeds push up into it and wriggle their way in between the trunk and the bark and the fungi start proliferating there and digging in, creeping higher and higher up against the tree, they will kill it, that I know. There’s a palm tree I don’t even want to walk past, even though its swinging branches are singing in the wind, because the bark of its lower trunk has also split off, perhaps with age, and millions of little white roots are burrowing through it. Whether they are tiny roots, stems or worms, I don’t know, but the tree is helpless, delivered over to them. Millions of hungry, searching, white, moist tubes. The whole garden is desperate – even the ducks glance around nervously, all the time, the squirrels tremble on the branches before they leap. All of nature is trembling. We must get used to it.

      * * *

      The nurse stops me in the passage. The sickly Englishman isn’t dead after all. I don’t know why we thought he was, it must have been all the people with little briefcases in and out of his apartment, a rumour just started doing the rounds that he’d died. No, it was another man with a surname almost like his. No, says the nurse: ‘Come in quickly, he’s flying to England this afternoon at four, come say goodbye to him. We can’t just let him leave without saying goodbye.’ And when I go in, he gets up and comes up to me with small steps, his hands outstretched, and his bladder must also be right behind his eyes (actually I don’t much like this image), because it looks as if he’s crying, his pale eyes – that must once have been blue – are swimming in tears. He takes me by the upper arms, and he says: ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m flying to my daughter this afternoon. To see if I like it there. But I’m keeping my apartment, I’m coming back.’ And he clutches at my arms and presses me to him and in that overseas manner he kisses me on one cheek and then pushes me back and kisses me on the other cheek, such light half-and-half kisses. And then his cheek against my cheek, and he presses me closer, as I never thought such a sick old man could do. I’m embarrassed. When last did a man, even though it’s a sick old man and an Englishman to boot, grab hold of me like that? All of a sudden I’m clutched in his shaky arms against his shoulder and half against his neck. The old-person flesh is too intimate, too unexpected, and I move my head. He lets me go and I gulp and ask him if I can help him pack a few things, but he says no thank you, the sister has helped him, and he says archly: ‘I’m an old hand at travelling.’ I wish him a good journey and, in keeping with the overseas note we’ve struck, ‘Bon voyage.’ ‘Merci,’ he says lightly, as if he’s overseas already. So much life has come into him. I hear David Klein coming down the corridor, and his familiar voice: ‘Now what can I help you with, sir?’ I’m in my room already, when it occurs to me: He can’t just leave all on his own like that, with only the taxi driver. Shouldn’t I go back and wish him bon voyage again? In the odd shaky way in which all our words are spoken. Perhaps stand on the staircase and wave at him? But a wiser voice warns me: He said he might come back. He must just not think he’s coming back to something. Then you’re in the soup. I close my door and don’t hear his bags being shunted into the lift. As long as he doesn’t faint again when the door starts sliding shut.

      There’s something about a very old man, with bent, skinny shoulders and loose skin around the throat, in his good cashmere cardigan, with the broken veins in the reddish cheeks, and the blue eyes shiny with moisture. The bald head with the few sparse hairs combed over it. And his shaky hands. That makes one feel a certain tenderness. Dear Lord. If only he wasn’t stone deaf. You have to yell at him before he understands, and repeat yourself umpteen times.

      * * *

      I’m going to leave David Klein money in my will. On behalf of all the old people he helps. And puts into lifts with their parcels and the buttons he pushes to dispatch them up. And when they faint in the lift. And if their journey goes further than the fifth floor? Only a mercy.

      David Klein has been driving me for a long time. A short, stout man with red hair and a speckled skin, always in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Big voice and equally at home on our front porch and in the Labia bioscope, in the doctor’s rooms or at the hairdresser. He opens the door for me, unfolds my little blue cushions: ‘What are we doing today? The hair or the marbles?’ He takes me to a doctor who manipulates my head, on the days when my marbles are in such disarray and my head so dizzy that I can’t stand or walk. In the city he parks right next to the kerb and no matter who’s hooting or shouting, he gets out, opens my door and takes me by the hand, onto the kerb, into the building, and helps me into the lift. ‘Keep an eye on the lady,’ he tells the caretaker who’s sitting at his desk reading the paper. He stands watching me until I’m out of sight.

      We are all his clients. He says: ‘The other taxi drivers asked me the other day: “Why do you bother with the old people, you can’t make much on their short trips?” Then I tell them: “When the season’s over, you’re stuck with nobody. My clients are year-round.”’

      I ask

Скачать книгу