Elsa Joubert
CUL-DE-SAC
Translated by Michiel Heyns
Tafelberg
To everybody who stands by us in our
old age and makes it bearable:
family, friends, doctors, nurses, carers.
1
CUL-DE-SAC
They say you fall back on your roots when the winds of time start buckling your body and your spirit. The narrowing decreed by time. The diminishing mobility. Stagnation of the spirit. The laying down of the old, trusted norms. I’d almost say the laying down of dreams.
At a physical level: the limits to movement imposed by chronically defective limbs. Walking an unfamiliar path is looking for trouble. A chair in a stranger’s living room is a confrontation. A ride in a stranger’s car is a drama. Turning off a tarred road onto a corrugated one is a catastrophe. Driving yourself, your own car, is a memory that has long since sunk under the horizon. And the quaking, the juddering that an accelerating aeroplane inflicts upon your every bone is no longer for me. My last trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town I survived standing bolt upright all the way.
The only road that can be ventured upon with a minimum of anxiety is the road to the past.
I have taken that road twice already, but a lot remains.
Poor old Paarl, once again.
No. Not ‘poor old’ Paarl. Birthplace. Town that in vividness and size and detail and colour and emotional hold trumps, in my remembrance, every city where I’ve lived since, and clings like a fungus to the whole canvas of my memory. My mother lived to ninety-seven. In Paarl. An alliance of almost a century. Now that all the many other cities I got to know – in Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Near and Far East – are starting to wilt in my memory, Paarl, like an animal that has been hibernating, is starting to wake up and take over.
Green twig with the thin, moist, white wound where the branch was torn from the bark; wet, black soil through which the twig burrows; small, dark splash of water starting to shine in the little hole in the soil. My bottom on the ground, cold seeping through the wet panties, arms picking me up and carting me off, ‘stop making such a mess’. But the water welling up out of the muddy hole, that you never forget.
Lenie on the steps of her room in the winter sun, the only winter sun that the large, angular house ever receives, brushing out her hair. So that the hair rises in an afro, as I have learned today to call it. But in her coffin, in the living room of her cousin’s house on the Ridge, to which they were removed in the Fifties, she lay so small and faraway on the white satin, like a visitor from another, distant world, that I did not want to believe that it was her … the thin hair lying flat as a bonnet around her head. The work-whitened hands on the chest. How startled I was when I saw the insides of our servants’ hands, the portals to a world suddenly looming up before me, terrible, terrifying, a world into which I am suddenly dumped head over heels, a world in which everything that is, no longer is. I scream. My mother drags me away. What are you always doing in Lenie’s room? Lenie, you mustn’t let her bother you like that. She’s not bothering me, missus.
The white insides of Lenie’s hands.
There were four lots of bearers for her coffin. Taking turns. First from the living room out of the house to the waiting hearse. Then new hands grasped the shiny handles, still warm from the previous bearers, and a little jerkily lugged the coffin from the hearse and carried it as far as the cemetery gate. Fresh bearers took over where the raw path swerved out, and they were the ones who placed the coffin slowly and carefully onto the green bands that lead to eternity. They then stood back, hats in hand, heads bowed, slightly built men with delicate features.
In his travel book, In Search of South Africa, HV Morton wrote: In the streets of Paarl you see many men with French faces, though they don’t speak French. They are dark of skin, slightly built.
We used to think he was talking about people like my father, but now I know he was also talking about Lenie’s people, also descendants of the French Huguenots. And at the time we never noticed it.
We sing ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on his gentle breast …’ Where do my tears come from? They run over my cheeks. The little face and the ancient body sink into the ground, the coffin is covered up. Again I feel the fear that took hold of me when I was a child of eight: Must all that heavy, moist, red earth be shovelled down on her so relentlessly? Here on the hill there won’t be hyenas to dig her up. I know that heavy valley soil will also be shovelled down on me. I’ve known it since I was eight years old. Perhaps my tears are not for Lenie.
* * *
My retirement home is a red-brick building five storeys high. In front, next to the entrance, is a row of garages, and behind the garages, but at a lower level, more garages. Because we all come here, cheerfully, with our cars.
We live in apartments of varying sizes facing west towards Lion’s Head or east towards the hospital and Table Mountain. We live in a kloof, close to the city centre, with a stream running through our garden. The higher the apartment, the more beautiful the views. I have a second, smaller, apartment, across the passage from the first, bought to be equipped as a study – so I have the beautiful views towards both west and east.
From our front gate it’s just a matter of crossing Hof Street, through the hospital grounds, then across Molteno Road and we are in De Waal Park. I walk in the park many times a day, alone, at any hour. Until I am hit over the head and knocked down and robbed of a little gold chain I bought at the old market in Istanbul. The Turk had stood behind me, draped the chain around my neck and measured it out according to my instructions, a little bit shorter, a little bit longer, to cover up the crease in my neck. He had snipped off the two extra links and, to my surprise, weighed them and subtracted the gold from the price. I loved that chain. I see the four men, still young, in front of me, two on each side of the path, I see them approach, close in around me, twigs in the mouth, I think of Anna on Rondebosch Common, how she said when they closed in on her, ‘I am old enough to be your grandmother …’ I start mumbling something about ‘grandmother’ when one of them presses up so close that I can feel his breath, ‘fuck the grandmother,’ he says, and gives me such a blow that I sprawl down flat, my hip in the furrow, my shoulder hard in the dry grass, his hand is at my neck, his head against me, I should bite the hand, I think, but thank heaven I don’t do it, otherwise he’d certainly have kicked my head in. His fingers are fumbling at my neck and I feel the chain breaking. He’s up and away and all four of them vanish in a flash through the big gate on Molteno Road. I move my limbs slowly, feel nothing is broken. I get up in stages, I see the nannies and children still playing by the swings – did they not see what happened, or did they just look the other way? I brush the leaves and dry grass from my clothes, start walking slowly, across the two bustling streets. I try sneaking into my building, take the front lift. I won’t tell anybody, otherwise there’ll be a big to-do. Everyone will say: she insists on walking by herself. In my room I drink sugar water. My daughter-in-law, Michelle, takes me to the police station the next day to report the matter, but nothing comes of it.
Even after this I did not heed the warnings and still took walks on my own in the park, but at set times when there were lots of people. I listened to the other women’s stories that your fingers are bitten off to get to the rings. So then I took off my rings – engagement and wedding ring – and put them in a box, from which they were nevertheless also stolen.
Ringlessness already signals a new mode of existence. It took a long time for the paths to become a heimat again.
My first and only and last heimat? I wonder.
The upper part of Nantes Street, where I lived as a child, is sacred. Only four steps from the stoep down to the front gate. My father coming out of the front door with departing guests, hatless, that’s why his hand pats his bald spot to smooth the few hairs growing long to one side of his head; when I think of him, I see his hand brushing over his bald spot, he did it at my little sister’s graveside when I was eight years