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Cul-de-sac. Elsa Joubert
Читать онлайн.Название Cul-de-sac
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624087809
Автор произведения Elsa Joubert
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
My curiosity goads me, what does the Afrikaans word ‘pril’ mean, as in ‘prille jeug’? I find the English synonym ‘prime of life’ (questionable), and ‘prime’, and thus also ‘pril’, can function as verb as well. Somebody can ‘pril’/‘prime’. I discover interesting meanings for the process of priming a very young child: Giving a first coat. Grounding. Giving a base coat, putting gunpowder in the pan. Leavening. How clever our ancestral speakers were. To ground a very young child. Give a base coat. Spot on. ‘Leaven’ gives me great pleasure. ‘Gunpowder in the pan’ even more fervent pleasure. It bothers me that I didn’t ‘prime’ my children. Or my grandchildren. It seems that their powder in the pan had to come of its own accord.
* * *
In the prime of my youth, my preschool years, before my years of reading books, I was a garden child, or a backyard child. I could sit on the ground and crumble the soil in my little fat hands, I could tug at a leaf until it tore from its stem, I could crush it between my fingers; I could draw a flower towards me until the stalk yielded, I could eat the petals of flowers and feel scraps on my tongue until my mother’s finger in my mouth ferreted them out and threw them away. I picked up a lemon and bit into it, and sucked pebbles; I squashed a worm.
I’m now approaching those years again. I can’t sit flat on the ground, I’d never get up again, but I can drag my chair in among plants, or under trees, and drop my hands on either side of my body and sit still, and later small black ants start scurrying over my fingers. And the leaves I don’t have to pluck from the trees, they come to me of their own accord. One falls on my forehead, as if the hand of the tree is blessing me. I press it to my lips and the leaf moistens, it gets into my mouth and I taste it, I nibble at it slowly. My fingers pull stalks from the soil, I wipe them on my sleeve, and also suck at them. Am I preparing myself for blending with the earth? It’s a pity I want to burn, I think, because the blending with the earth is much more appealing, as Klaas, who wanted to be buried, also said, but those spadesful of soil thudding down on my sister’s grave I still hear, and the suffocation, it must be my asthma days that make me so scared of a coffin underground, that suffocation is not for me. A pity, that the burning is not so poetic. But perhaps it also is.
* * *
I tell my daughter: My life is now a cul-de-sac. A dead-end street.
My daughter tells me: Ma, you never stay in a cul-de-sac. You turn around, drive back and find a new direction.
That sounds very brave, but I am no longer brave.
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