the pavements are acquiring little motor car crossings, the furrows, the garden enclosures regain their solidity, their existence. I hear my ball bouncing on the pavement, I hear the wheels of my father’s car slowing down, the sound of tyres on the loose gravel fading and then growing as my father turns the corner, up the driveway. I grab my ball and run to open the garage door for him. The sun sets behind the mountains; it’s winter and it gets dark early. It’s cooler but not really cold, with my father at home it’s not cold, only grey with darker plants. My brother collects wood from the woodshed for tonight’s fire. I laugh out loud at the red flames that will dart up from the box planks and the crackling like guns shooting up from the chopped wood. And later, hours after supper, before going to bed, I make cocoa milk for everybody.
Someday, they should invent a camera to photograph old people’s memories.
* * *
After every gathering of the three generations I feel as if words are losing their meaning or function. Not only my nephews and nieces, my own grandchildren and their friends. Because young people no longer can or want to be specific when they speak or write; everything is covered with one word: and it follows a fashion that originated who knows where (in the dark electronic world – unfamiliar and threatening to me – where the children and their thumbs are so much at home?). First ‘nice’, then ‘cool’, then ‘awesome’. Then ‘stunning’, then ‘amazing’, and now yet again something new. Now it’s ‘huge’. Everything is ‘huge’. Can they still apprehend shades of things or events? Do they still know the names for them? I ask: How was the big jazz weekend where you were camping on the farm? ‘Amazing, Granny, but it wasn’t jazz, it was rock.’ How is the new girlfriend? ‘Okay, Gran.’ They must watch out. As the bossy German physio said when my mother, after a hip operation, was learning to walk again: ‘Lift your feet; belief me, wot you don’t use, you lose.’ You stand to lose all your words. Even worse, you’ll lose the nuancing of experiences. It would be easy, surely, to say: It was deafening, mind-boggling, you can blend Afrikaans and English for the time being, upsetting, engrossing, wonderful, boring, use anything, but name it. All those SMSs that you’re all forever sending, do they convey opinions? Or are they just the old shop-worn, mutilated words? Over and over. I want to keep up with my grandchildren’s world, but the gap is widening all the time, it’s no longer the grandmothers who have to help, now it’s the grandchildren who have to help the grandmothers with all the new things we don’t know. They grow big and strong, we grow old and small.
* * *
My father hoisted a bushel basket full of grapes over the back fence. The farmer’s vineyard borders on our yard and we children watch how the labourers, bending down, so that it looks as if they’re playing tin guitar, drift and waltz down the rows of vines filling the baskets. A bushel basket of grapes. After the harvest there is a competition to see whose basket is the first to be filled, and then they run, basket on the shoulder and with a crooked gait, as fast as they can to the finish line.
Eating grapes from a bushel basket, we never gave a thought to the pips or skins. We just sucked and spat. Now we eat grapes out of plastic packets from the supermarket and the tongue will not allow swallowing, the pips and skins lie like tiny shoes arranged on the edge of the saucer.
Who still knows a bushel basket?
All the old words now crawl out of my memory – when last did I hear them: anghoerie, which reverberated across the playground while we aimed and ducked and dived, trying to break through the defended lines of the large drawn-in-the-dust blocks. Do they still play anghoerie? How could they? A hall has now been built there.
Who still knows a small, dark pantry smelling of mouse? Where the paper bag’s corner has been gnawed open and the sugar or flour or whatever has run out in a white heap? And your mother says: Oh dear, no, we’ll have to set the mousetrap again tonight. And when everyone is asleep, your brother, who has the softest heart, removes the cheese with his fingertips and clicks the mousetrap back gently.
My brother also doesn’t want to eat the chicken that grew up in the back yard. Or watch when the live chickens are beheaded, when Abraham has to put down his spade and pull up his pants and set up his chopping block and rub a smear of spit on the blade of the axe and make the chicken, wings tightly pressed against its sides, lie across the block and amidst the scrabbling get in a blow so that the head flies off to one side and the blood spurts out and the chicken starts its headless dance among our scurrying legs.
I am scolded when blood gets onto my legs, I scuff my legs against the long grass, I pick handfuls of long green shoots and rub my legs clean. I hold my hands in the steam of the boiling water that Lenie pours over the two headless carcasses in the dish. After a while she starts plucking feathers. The tiny yellow feather stubs are easy to remove from the flabby pink chicken skin and each feather variole leaves a small, still volcano.
Ha-ha, that’s why we say you have goose bumps when you get a fright! I announce this at the dinner table and my brother tells me: Shaddup.
The axe is kept in the woodshed and it is this axe that I take into the mountain when occasionally I get jumpy and wonder whether there might after all be some truth to my mother’s scary stories. But even so I do want to go into the mountain, I challenge myself, especially now that they’ve gone to Cape Town in the car and will be gone all afternoon, and Lenie has gone to the shop to buy bread. I tell myself the axe is for chopping branches for a treehouse, but I know it’s my weapon. With the axe I can face up to the danger. It’s a bit heavy for carrying, but I wrap it in my jersey. I climb the back streets until the yellow dirt track through the bushes stretches out in front of me: to the mountain.
* * *
The closed door of the sick Englishman’s apartment is an accusation. But he’s so deaf that he can’t hear you knocking, and were you to open the door without his hearing it, there’s a good chance that he’d still be in his pyjamas and, flustered, would grab the pants that threaten to fall down and try to hoist them up, and it’s an embarrassment for him and for me.
‘Call me if you think he really needs somebody,’ I tell the nurse, but she’s too busy and later I’m told he’s been taken to hospital – they just cart us in a wheelbarrow (read wheelchair) across the road, because we live directly opposite the hospital. People are inclined to vanish and then get wheeled back a few days later, without the rest of us even noticing that they’d gone.
They also die without us noticing.
It’s the same hospital where my little sister was diagnosed with leukaemia long ago. After, for the whole of our seaside holiday, all she’d wanted was to sit on my mother’s lap, and my father had driven into Cape Town to the doctors. She died in the spring, after almost a year of gradually fading away. It was devastating to us all and I don’t think my mother ever really recovered. I wonder what my mother would have made of me, almost a century old, living opposite the hospital and twice already, carted there in a wheelbarrow. And, admittedly, carted back. My daughter gave the porter who most recently wheeled me across a hundred rand note. She took it amiss when I said it was too much. Just for crossing the road!
All old people think their children don’t know the value of money, because the children are too extravagant, because they eat out in restaurants too often. Because the grandchildren are spoiled and must all have the latest fashion in cell phones, whatever it may cost. Many of us old people are given the children’s out-of-fashion cell phones, but that doesn’t bother us, because we don’t use them anyway.
One old resident’s child said: Ma, take it along when you go for a walk in the park, for your safety. Lordy, child, when the thug sees me with a cell phone in my hand, he’ll come at me precisely to grab the phone! How did you get it so back to front?
* * *
The black telephone was fixed to the passage wall just outside my father’s study. The girl at the telephone exchange knew my voice and in the afternoons after school, before I could even ask, she put me through to Truida, my friend. We could talk for as long as we wanted and it didn’t cost anything. My mother didn’t want me to pull up a chair – then everybody trips over it and then there’s no end to your talking. Even now we still talk