carriage. He places one foot on the bottom rung of the small steel ladder and hauls himself up the narrow steps. He leans down inside, picks up a case in each hand, and crab-walks his way to the wooden door of our compartment. Ma and I bunch together in the corridor behind him as the other passengers push past.
“I’ll slide them under the seats,” he says, and moves them into the dark with the toe of his shoe. He turns and looks at Ma. “Don’t forget to phone as soon as you arrive.”
I stare out of the window.
“Stop worrying,” she says behind me. Her voice is bright. In the window, I see the reflection of her hand waving dismissively. “Ros and I will get her organised.”
“Will she be meeting you at the station?” Pa asks.
I watch Ma’s reflection. She shakes her head. Aunt Rosalind, Ma’s only, elder sister, bossy and beautiful, lives in a mansion in Cape Town. In the hot Cape summer months, she and Uncle Len move to their old holiday cottage built against a hill in the tiny fishing village of Glencairn.
Pa turns to me. The space in the small compartment contracts. I can feel his heat. His voice is close.
“Goodbye, dudding.” He leans back slightly, looks down at me with his blank, tortoise eyes. “Have a good trip, Number One.”
Number One, he calls me. His Number One Daughter, eldest of three. I look at his distorted image in the dusty window and turn away. Pa’s endearments are mechanical, carelessly applied, his “rrr”s knitted in the back of his throat, wavy and rolling, his tongue contorting, sticking to his palate, distorting the word darling into his own, inimitable dudding.
“Dudding?” he shouts into the phone at the chemist, never sure which one of us he’s speaking to. “Hello, dudding?” His uncertainty hovers like a query at the end of his every greeting – our voices – my sisters’ and my own – he insists, all sound like Ma’s.
Pa smiles uncomfortably. “I’ve brought you something to read,” he mumbles.
“Pa?”
“Yes,” he says. “The last time Ma and I went to Johannesburg to buy books, Fanny Kleneman – you know, she owns The Vanguard Booksellers?”
I nod. Pa and Ma buy all our books from The Vanguard Booksellers. Pa’s enormously proud of the long hours he’s spent in conversation with her, the many years of correspondence exchanged between himself and its erudite owner, Fanny Kleneman.
“Well,” he continues, “Fanny insisted I buy this for you – it’s Salinger’s latest book, The Catcher in the Rye, it’s called. According to her, it’s a modern classic – she was sure you’d enjoy reading it.”
It’s the first present Pa’s ever given me.
He opens the book and shows me the title page. Scrawled in his handwriting that looks like the peaks of mountains, he’s written, To darling Jennifer, with love from Daddy.
I look at the inscription, and I wonder why, and for whom it’s meant.
A whistle blows shrill and urgent on the platform. The carriage jerks. Pa frowns.
“I’m sure you’ll be okay once you’ve settled in,” he says. He looks closely at me. “Work hard. Behave yourself.” His eyes behind the thick frames of his spectacles seem very small.
“Yes, Pa.”
The muscles in his jaws bunch. He puts his arms around me and hugs me long and hard. I turn my face away and pull back.
“I can’t breathe, Pa!”
The whistle blows again. My heart heaves. The prickly stink of coal and smoke blows into the carriage from the corridor. The iron wheels grate on the shining tracks.
Goodbye, Pa, goodbye …
Goodbye, my Sandy-boy and Marta, Isak … goodbye.
The engine pants. Ma lifts her arm and waves to Pa through the open window. I stand next to her in the swaying corridor and look back into the pinpoint of distance until the train trundles around the wide bend, and he’s gone.
“This is nice.” Ma’s voice rings around the compartment.
A colour photograph of Table Mountain is nailed to a glossy wooden rail above the padded back of one of the blue leather seats. On the wall opposite, there’s a picture of Groot Constantia, Governor Simon van der Stel’s house. One December school holiday, we drove down a long avenue that was dark with the shade of old oak trees, and right at the very end, there was Groot Constantia. The house was very old, beautiful in the sun – white, and very bright. We always go to Cape Town for our holidays.
On the far wall of the compartment opposite the sliding door, brass catches shine like gold on the two sash windows. A small mirror hangs between the windows and a wooden board is attached to the wall with a leather thong and a small brass toggle. Ma turns the toggle. The wooden board falls away from the wall, revealing a hidden alcove containing a diminutive, silvery basin with its own teeny tiny tap. She lifts the board slightly, and like magic, it folds out into a narrow table between the two seats.
“Oh, Ma,” I exclaim, captivated by the compartment’s aura of deception, the compact, cleverly hidden Jack-in-the-box surprises.
“Let’s open the windows.” Ma kneels on the edge of her seat. She twists the brass catch on the window in front of her, grasps the half-moon handles in both hands, slides it up and leans out of the open window, her eyes narrowed against the smoke and the wind. I climb onto the seat opposite hers and slide mine up, too. Ma turns her head and looks back to where we’ve come from – what we’ve left behind.
I sit with my back to the puffing engine and watch the world go by in reverse. I feel changed, as if time has been interrupted, the even flow of hours diverted, narrowed down in some strange, uncomfortable way. Some bewildering, heavy thing has come to rest in me. I feel older. Not really grown up, not yet – just different.
5.
Journeys
“Gemsbokstasie”
“Dwykasloot”
Wit staan die gras van Karoo.
Leeg blink die myle,
slinger brakmaer die kranskopberge deur
waar maer windmeulens
pluk
aan ’n smal wind
wat waai.
(Jennifer Friedman, Gedigte – Standpunte 153)
For two days, I watch the open plains of the Free State roll by. The hills are crowned with rock, garlanded with red and gold. Above the edge of the shimmering horizon, the shadows of trees dance in the heat. Eagles and hawks hang in the sweep of the sky. The land slides into a distant, watery tremble. It feels as if I’m watching it from some place in the past; as if the future has already happened; the present, come and gone, and all I see is the tail end of it as the land unravels in reverse.
I open my window and hold my arms out to the rushing air. Ma’s dozing in the corner of her seat. She jerks awake and reaches out as if to catch me.
“Sit down,” she blurts, blinking her eyes. “What’re you doing, you silly girl? You’ll fall out!”
I put my hands on the window rail, lean forward just a little, and feel the pull and tug of the Free State veld.
You can’t go, you are mine, click the wheels on the tracks.
I stumble down the rocking corridor towards the tiny lavatory at the end of the carriage. A man in a shiny blue shirt turns to look at me. His elbows are spread on the railing in front of a window, his bottom pushed out against the wall behind. I see his face, red and sweaty, his hair is lank and greasy in the heat. I look away, down to the end of the corridor.
“Excuse me, please.”