Oranjezicht. It was my first job.’
As I said, I can’t handle emotion any more. If I think of him walking with the mailbag over his shoulder and posting mail through the slit at each house, a young man with no other future, my eyes fill with tears again. I wouldn’t mind if one day he pushes the last button of the lift for me, going up.
* * *
That night I am uneasy about the sickly Englishman cleaving the dark sky in the silver Boeing. A skinny sick man gasping for breath, up there in the dark sky. At who knows what speed through the night. Would they know about his emphysema, would an oxygen mask be available? Is he clinging to his armrests or is he travelling way beyond it all, tiny on the wings of his great decision?
I hope his daughter is waiting for him at Heathrow. She’s one of those lean, strong little women, strong calves and forearms, draped in shawls, long strings of beads around the neck and highlighted bottle-blonde hair pinned up on the head. She calls him ‘Oh Daddy, no’.
* * *
Here among us children play a very large role. Grown-up children, not grandchildren. They were so cute, couldn’t come to play with us often enough, and now, it seems, they don’t care about us any more, the grandmothers complain. Older grandchildren can gladden the hearts of the grandmothers with a spontaneous visit, although there are plenty of complaints about them too. One woman knitted her eighteen-year-old grandson a beautiful wine-red jersey, hours of work, and phoned him on his birthday and said the jersey was waiting for him, he should come to fetch it. ‘It’s still lying here,’ she tells us. We consoled her – the children are so busy, he’ll still come. But ‘my son’, ‘my daughter’ and for the truly blessed ‘my sons’ and ‘my daughters’ are magic words. ‘My son says I mustn’t worry about the price of medicine, I should just take it all.’ Or my daughter: ‘Ma, we’ll have to get you some more stuff for winter.’ The words that are peddled in the corridors and that, however paternalistic (odd to think of the word ‘paternalistic’ rather than ‘maternalistic’), do provide a sense of being cared for and cherished.
But all the stories one has to listen to: their grandchildren’s stories or their grown-up children’s virtues … Heavens, for every anecdote I tell about a grandchild, I have to listen to six or seven others. I’m not interested in the eisteddfod achievements of this or that five-year-old poppet. But if I want to tell about mine, I must be prepared to listen as well. That is the law of give and take … and I have to tell, it was so cute. But, say the women, especially the Dutch women: Don’t interfere, don’t offer advice about children or grandchildren, just bring gifts, shut up and put up. I must say, it sounds a bit too austere.
One little old lady here never had a husband or children, but she has thirty-two teddy bears. She invited me into her room. They sit on the bed against her pillow, on the long bay-window sill, on the dressing table, on the shelves. Big ones and little ones, wearing dresses or checked pants. They have names. She swops the ones on the window sill around, so that the others can also get some sun, or enjoy the view. They greet her when she comes in, she greets them when she goes out. She’s untroubled and peaceful with them, she never waits for a phone call or a visit. A mother worries about her children until the day she shuts her eyes for good, my mother told me. I don’t worry about my children, I say resolutely. Then you should worry about not worrying about your children, she says. She doesn’t know it’s just bluster.
* * *
Word reaches us that the Englishman was so ill, he went straight from the plane to hospital in an ambulance, and had to stay there a fortnight. Now he’s in Wales in a care home for old people and there’s no question of his returning. His apartment is being refurbished for sale. I hope the Welsh weather is kind to him. And his daughter. And his son-in-law.
* * *
Contrary to my expectations, it’s difficult to make new friends in a retirement home. By the time people turn up here at our place, their lives are behind them, wrapped up like a parcel in brown paper and tied with string. Their past is completed. They’re not coming here to continue their lives. They’re coming to wind down. Like the spring of an old-fashioned watch. To come to rest.
It’s a very big move to make. Bigger than the move to another house or another province or even another country. It’s a way of life that you forfeit and a new way of life that you have to acquire. With the realisation: Something is over for ever. You’ll never get it back. You’ve had your chance, you won’t have it again.
It’s a mistake to come to a retirement home too early. Like me at seventy-eight. Or too fit. Then you kick against the pricks, bloody your nose against the invisible walls. The most toxic words you hear are: ‘You’ll adapt.’ Adapt to what? To decrepitude? To death? And if you don’t want to adapt? The bloody nose. Again and again and again.
And slowly, cautiously put out your feelers to someone else, sitting alone on a stoep on the fourth floor, just sitting, hands folded on the lap. Or sitting in a patch of sun next to the lift, a resident with an apartment on the shady side of the building seeking sunlight. You’ll say: Come and have a cup of tea this afternoon. Or a drink this evening. One corner of the folded paper of the parcel of life may perhaps be lifted, slowly, half-reluctantly, half-eagerly. And some sad story will always emerge, until you’re scared to hear the rest. How is it that behind every tightly closed door there’s a sad story? Mostly about a child who’s been lost – to a debilitating disease or an accident or some other tragic event. A spouse’s death, husband or wife, is common, that’s why the survivor is here, everybody has lost somebody. It’s not that sad, your own story is replicated behind every door. And as when you are borne from one floor to the next by an escalator, and you can’t get off, so time transports you inexorably away from your husband’s death.
But the loss of a son or a daughter, that showers sorrow, also on you, doesn’t matter how long ago, it’s still there, always there. So that you’re actually afraid when the parcel is opened slowly, cautiously, slightly. You have to know, how can you be friends, real friends, if you are not let into the past; but how full of sorrow is the past.
Another Englishman who devoted his life to the Empire, part of the British colonial service in just about every country on the African continent, born somewhere in the East, never really had a permanent home, with only a British passport (here he is not granted a residence permit for longer than a year, and must reapply every year). Even he, with his British-colonial appearance – safari suit, neatly cut hair, ruddy colouring – even he is burdened with his parcel. In the end you are shy to ask the age-old questions on a first acquaintance: Are you married? Do you have children? Suddenly afraid that you’ve now trespassed too far, because his answer is measured: ‘My wife and two of my children were killed by the Mau Mau in Kenya in an ambush.’
Rather stay wrapped up, then, little parcel.
At lunchtime the people walk with stiff-backed steps down the corridors, crowd the lift: no, please, there’s plenty of space, do come in. Sit down at the elegant tables, dish up salad, make small talk, eat, even linger for a moment at a table on the way out, make more small talk, predict the weather – because it’s clouding over outside the large, lovely windows. Winter’s here, you know. We’ll still have a few fine days. You’ll see. The concept of an Indian summer is so lovely – where would it come from? But Piet Cillié thought up such an appealing word for a few late warmish days: pop-up summer. We all enjoy the pop-up summer. Have a nice nap this afternoon. Is there anything worthwhile on TV this evening? We’ll have to see. Have a good nap. And back into apartments behind closed doors.
In the life of almost every woman or man I’ve met here has been the death of a child. It leaves me dumb and dismayed. Should I stop trying to be sympathetic, stop asking, or do people yearn to tell, is that what friendship is, to listen? Does it bring a tiny bit of relief, here in the new home, here among so many strange people with whom you’re suddenly co-existing?
Only we can really understand them, we, their contemporaries, the survivors, the persisters, the die-hards. My cleaner says to me: ‘I never see so many old people together in my life. I go into dining room I dunno what I see, old people and grey hair. You must be very strong people