A Pavlova
Karen Martin
“What’s a pavlova?’ I said. The phone was between my shoulder and my ear, like a lobster. My hands were holding my breasts.
Restrain yourself, Mother.
I’m talking, Llewellyn. “What’s a pavlova?” I said.
“My favourite birthday dessert,” said Silas’s voice. It was morning. I was naked. The large glass doors were open to the ocean.
“How old will you be?”
“About seventy-four by the cards I’ve been dealt. About four if I was a dog. Times seven makes me, um, twenty-eight?” said Silas. “And now, apparently, according mainly to women, I’m on an astrological hell-ride called Saturn Return.”
You heard satin, didn’t you Mother?
The breeze off the Atlantic was cold and right.
Salt. And kelp. Ozone. Petroleum.
I held the lobster in one hand and put my other hand between my legs. “You’re younger than me,” I said.
“In years maybe,” said Silas. “But not if we’re counting broken bones.”
The years between us – one, two, three, four – stacked like big grey rocks up Table Mountain, or scattered like kill bones. “Is Satin Return smooth and shiny?” I said.
“What’s smooth and shiny is my nine mil,” Silas said. “Half past seven Susie says. But we won’t actually dine before nine. Unless of course we’ve chowed each other by then.”
“I’m not good at family fights,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” said Silas, “we only eat our own. Followed by a pavlova.
A pavlova is a dessert from New Zealand, Mother, involving meringue of a certain kind and cream and fruit. Basically, inedible. Made for and named after a ballerina. What’s a brave beauty to do? Say thank you. Say thank you. Or in Anna Pavlova’s case, blagodaryu.
Susie and Guy’s blue front door stood open. Light came out onto the stoep. I sat in the car: the curved wooden dashboard, the low seats, the smoky smell of leather. I smoked. Why can’t I just live like this, I thought. Upright 24/7 and an engine. All it needs is the little silver key.
Your little hands on the wheel, Mother.
But I got out. I crossed the street. There were two cement steps up from the pavement. Voices were inside. Table Mountain surged and glowered over the little old done up houses and the little old streets. Soon, the terrible white spotlight lights would come on, flattening the mountain. Where do the small mammals hide, Llewellyn?
You scurried back across the street, Mother, unlocked Marcus’s car and got back in.
I put my little hands on the wheel and stared at the car parked in front of me. It was an old-fashioned Mercedes Benz, black with wings. One day Marcus will want his car back, I thought. And his apartment. When I’m ready, he’d said. But when?
Silas was tapping on the window.
So you glided it down.
“Chickening out?” he said. “I don’t blame you. I’ve had, of course, a little something. To sort me out. Keep me jolly while they break my balls.”
How I loved, yes, I can say I loved, his hooked nose. And something like a lisp, but not quite.
“I know, I know. You don’t want any. But don’t say I didn’t offer.” Silas put his hand in through the window. He tapped his finger on the side of my head. “Everything okay in there?” he said. “Enough cucumber sandwiches for a Teddy Bears’ picnic? Lift going all the way up?”
“The lights are on Silas,” I said, “but nobody’s home.”
“Because we’ve driven off into the sunset.”
You feel the car holding the curves of Chapman’s Peak, Mother. The windows will be open and you can hear the crash of the ocean, comforting, relentless, far below, where no one can go. Sky the colour of poison where the sun has melted. Silas will know just where and when you should put your foot down and keep the rudder straight. The transition from humming tar to rattling gravel, a bump and a lurch, sudden confused surge of the engine, spinning wheels, and you’ll be flying. He’ll say, “Keep going, you bird. Let’s find the fire.” But you crave the obliterating smack. Tin on ungiving surface. Want the pull of the dark cold water, the whole of you in slow rocking descent, bubbles leaving a trail like short-lived stars, your breath going out.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m coming in.”
Susie was at the stove at several pots. Verna was removing stalks from a pile of strawberries, very beautiful, at the large kitchen table. Her straight hair, black, streaked with grey, tucked behind her ears. Her fine olive skin, jealous, like Silas’s.
Verna.
“Julia,” Verna said, smiling with her narrow grey eyes. Her eyebrows are like a moth’s perfect feelers. Her fingers are long.
“Jules!” said Guy. He stood up and opened his arms. Whiskey sloshed out of his glass. His face was red and dented.
“Julia?” said Karl. He sucked on his affected pipe.
Smicky-smack.
Mickey was leaning against the wall tearing at his fingernails.
“Guy babes,” said Susie without turning round, “be the gentleman you’re not and get Julia a drink.”
“Welcome,” said Guy, “to the home which is not a man’s castle.”
“Julia doesn’t drink,” said Silas. He was picking up the lids of pots. “Mmmmmmm,” he said. “Sister!”
“Make yourself useful for a change,” Susie said, “and stir the tomato sauce.”
“Cup of tea then?” said Guy, raising his burnt eyebrows at me.
“I’m definitely not making tea now,” said Susie. “There’s too much going on.”
“It seems, Julia, it will have to be,” said Karl, “whiskey.”
He said, hh-wiskey, he said. His rich lips made their little smicky-smacky sounds from the clearing he made for them in his elder flower beard.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Blagodaryu.
I sat down on the other side of Verna, where I wouldn’t have to see Karl. I thought, he can only see me if he looks through her. Which she doesn’t allow.
Susie was on her haunches in front of an open cupboard. “Here Mickey,” she said, “take these plates to the dining room, would you.”
“Yaaaaaaah!” Mickey shouted, pointing at Silas. “You farted! I heard you! He farted Mom! He’s always farting! Silas! He’s always!”
“Jesus Christ Mickey,” said Susie. Upright, the many, many plates in her hands were always too heavy, suddenly, and the small of her back ached. “Fuck it Guy,” she said, “Can’t you teach the dude some manners. He’s your son.”
“Your son,” said Guy. “Cheers dude!” he raised his glass.
“Sister,” said Silas. “Relax. Everyone farts.”
“Honestly Silas,” said Verna. “Susan is trying—”
“And what, may I ask,” said Silas, turning on Verna. “What exactly. May. I ask. Do you know about bringing up a kid? I don’t exactly see any crowding round your skirts.”
Karl had disappeared into the garden, which is where I would have liked to go too.
To the lemon verbena, Mother. And the oak tree from the colony. And the slate flags. And the moon. But his teeth will be white. He will bite, Mother. And you will say that you did it by mistake, the inside of your lip.
Verna stood up. The strawberries were all destalked. There was a pile of hard red tongues and a smaller pile of dark green spiders. “I think I’ll go and see if Pat needs any help with Sizwe and Nono in the bath,” she said. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, like a blade.
She smells like mint, and honeypollen. But underneath’s another Verna. Beetroot. No, wet earth. No. Wet iron.
“Jesus Si,” said Susie. “That was a bit rough.”
“I’m sick,” said Silas, “of her self-righteous ‘I’m a proper person and you’re some kind of fucked up savage’ big sister bullshit.”
“People, people,” said Guy. “We’re one big happy family, remember?”
“Right,” said Silas. “And the pope’s a Catholic.”
“Wrong,” said a woman in the doorway to the hall. “The pope’s an agent of the global patriarchal oligopoly.”
Pat.
The front of her lumpy sweatshirt was wet and her face was flushed.
These are the details you notice, Mother.
“Why is Verna in the bathroom with me and the kids, weeping?” Pat said. “No, no thank you Silas dear. Don’t tell me. What I really want to know, Suze, is when’s dinner? Just, you know, approximately.”
“About twenty,” said Susie, “if Mr Mickey here will move his arse and give me a hand for a change.”
“Come on Micks,” said Guy, jerking his head in no particular direction.
“But what am I supposed to do?” Mickey whined, sinking back into the wall.
“Find something dude,” said Susie. “These plates I’ve been holding like the Statue of Liberty for a few hundred years for ee-gee. Or don’t you know how to lay a table?”
“Ja man, lay the table,” said Guy, pulling a face.
Mickey folded his arms.
“See what I mean,” said Susie. “Does anybody see what I mean?”
“Dearest siblings, and those of you lucky enough to be attached to one of us,” said Pat. “Please start dinner without me. I’ll put the babies down in your and Guy’s room Suze.”
“You must be Julia,” she said. I was. “I’m Pat.”
She used to emanate a hum, Mother. Like peaceful bees.
“Want a break from the grownups?”
I did.
“Come and meet two unsullied beings.”
In the bathroom, the light was coming from a row of candles on the high narrow windowsill. The glass sparkled. Shadows veered and swooped when Pat closed the door behind us. Verna was sitting on the closed toilet lid, her hands squeezed between her knees. There were two black babies in their sitting rings in the bath.
But it’s not black, Mother. It’s brown. Like a deep cup of strong black tea, where black means no milk.
“God, Silas is such a shit,” said Verna.
“Oh don’t, please,” said Pat, bending over the bath to pick up one of the babies. It jerked its arms and legs and said, “Guh.”
“Pass me a towel,” said Pat, “Julia, will you?”
I moved to pick up a towel from the pile on the floor.
“Not one of those festering rags, for God’s sake,” said Pat. “Suze has got to be the worst housekeeper. Pulls off a pavlova, but can she get the laundry done?”
“Silas and his pav-fucking-birthday-lova,” said Verna. “You’d think—”
“On your feet Verna dear, you’re sitting on the towels I brought,” said Pat.
Verna got up and opened a big white towel and swaddled the baby Pat passed to her. She put her beautiful face, like a coastline, into its neck.
The baby’s eyes were open, and they roamed.
Verna rocked herself from side to side.
“Isn’t he marvellous?” said Pat. “Nine months old. I’ve had them for three weeks. Two years to okay single mother me.”
I held out the other folded towel.
It was warm and steamy and fragrant and gold in that room. But there’s mould in the corners, and old piss.
“I’m not going to have any children,” I said.
Ahem, Mother.
“Rot,” said Verna.
“It’s a choice,” said Pat.
“No,” said Verna. “One day you’ll be forty something and then what?”
Well Llewellyn, that was then, and it had come to me quite recently, walking on Camp’s Bay beach. The sun had gone down, so it was mauve. The air was cool but thick. I was heading for the boulders at the end, where I could touch one, in order to turn and head back. I knew it then, like someone else had told me in my own silent voice, like decision I had made in a dream.
“Mma,” said Pat’s other baby.
What remains of a pavlova is: pearly crumbs and sweeps of greasy cream streaked pink. Mickey got sent to his room before the pavlova. Pat and her babies went home straight after. Guy fell asleep on his arms at the table. The dining room was decorated with objects from the sets he builds for commercials. There is a couch no one can sit on, upholstered with chipped plastic Smarties. The curtains are red and heavy velvet. The light is dim from gold chandeliers made of jigsawed board. There is a life size tree in the corner, hung with dusty peaches. Karl as ever stood in the doorway with his pipe. Susie was smoking too, putting out one cigarette after another in an ashtray shaped like a dolphin. Silas was rocking on his chair, which is more dangerous than most people know.
And you, Mother?
“All night,” says Verna, “I’ve been noticing your bracelets.”
I hold up my arms and they slink and clink. The bracelets are made of tiny pieces of brass or copper, stolen, beaten into beads, and threaded onto a piece of string or gut or shredded cloth.
“Where do they come from?” says Verna. “Well I know where they come from,” she says. “They come from Africa. But where did you get them?”
Silas gave them to me. I was lying on his bed, watching him cut and weigh little blocks of hash from the brick. I adored the miniature scale, and the smell of the hash on his fingers on my face later.
Mother.
“Man’s got to make a living,” he’d said. “And I’m saving for my teeth.” He was often in furious agony. His teeth were brittle, grey. They broke, crumbled. They fell out for no reason.
“Don’t,” Silas says.
“No,” says Verna. “Tell us where you got them.”
Karl is no longer in the doorway. I heard him leaving. Someone will have to take Verna home.
“Well where?” says Verna. “I only want to know.”
“Jesus Christ Verna,” says Susie.
Silas slid his trommel out from under his bed and gave me something wrapped in newspaper. There were a lot of these bracelets in there.
There was sand in the newspaper, which rained down and disappeared.
They were light but they had heft. They had a smell, brass I suppose, and smoke and animal grease. They were dull. Now they shine. Now they pinch the hairs on my arms when they move. Sometimes they scratch, catch on my clothes; sometimes they’re smooth.
“What?” says Guy, sitting up, waking up.
“Where did Silas get those bracelets?” says Verna.
“Silas gave them to me,” I say.
“Yes, but where did Silas get them?” she says.
“I took them off the arms of dead women. Sometimes I chopped their hands off, says Silas. “While their huts burned down and their kids departed, you know, into the bush.”
“Whoa bro,” says Guy. “Whoa.”
“Ask me why,” says Silas. “With their own homemade machetes.”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” says Susie.
“Ask me why!” Silas shouts.
A pavlova, Mother.
Her Swimming Sister
The summer before, Irene and I had gone swimming. This time we drove all the way around False Bay to somewhere we hadn’t been before. It was hot and remote. We stumbled down a chalky cliff, and smoky smells of resin came up from the medicine plants we were breaking.
Mother, say their names: buchu, honeybush, vrouebossie, kooigoed, agdaegeneesbos or pyjama bush, rose-scented pelargonium, sad geranium or rooirabas, and dune sage.
There were families on the beach but not many. They had made their patches noticeably close to one another given the expanse. Irene and I put down our things apart from everyone else and walked out, out, out, kneedeep for a very long time in the warm, pale rippling of an unfamiliar tide. We were silent with each other. Irene kept her eyes on the horizon.
To escape from the enclosing rock arms of the baylet. To shimmer.
I looked down at my feet.
Which were disintegrating.
Suddenly, the ground fell away and we were swimming in dark water.
I remembered another swim with Irene: on the other side of this confusing peninsula, in another summer. At Clifton, where the sun sets late every evening into the cold Atlantic, we found ourselves perfectly suspended. In reiterating moments, just before the high waves break, over and over again we let ourselves be lifted to hang above our natural ground.
Occupy the crossing, Mother. Why did we ever leave? Now we must bear the calamity of walking, walking, walking upright.
When we stood at last on the steady beach, kelp and salty ozone smell, our hip joints ached. Oh Llewellyn, I see us still in glassy water, our pale legs dangling, not much use, our arms like feelers.
Now, a different sea was drawing us back.
“Irene!” I shouted when at last I felt the drag. She was floating on her back with her ears underwater.
There are whales, Mother, and the Titanic. Trawlers and ski boats. Squeaks and squawls, blips emitted for 52 million years or so.
Michelle’s red bikini with big white dots emerged and went under, emerged and went under with her breath. I pulled her long white arm. “We’re in trouble!” I shouted. She righted herself, blinked at me. She made graceful movements with her long white arms on the dark choppy surface, beneath which everything had vanished. She frowned at the faraway cliffs with their tumbling green and crumbly stones falling down, down, against the rocks going up, up against the sky. “We’ve got to get back,” I said. “Now.”
I am a strong swimmer. Every time I looked around, Irene was further and further behind me, away. Her head got smaller and smaller and her open mouth got bigger. I hesitated. But in treading that water I felt where it would take me.
Here comes the point, Mother, when you can’t look behind you again.
Behind, ahead, what’s the difference boy? What do you even know? I looked ahead. I decided. When my feet found the sand of the shallows, I had been swept a long way down the curving beach. I stumbled towards the families. Three fathers ran towards me, crowded kindly around me. I said: “Hhuh-hhuh-hhuh-hhuh-hhuh.” I pointed at the horizon.
Where there was nothing to see but where the dawn comes.
Bacchantes
The Whale
In my life there have been wonders, Llewellyn. I remember with exceptional clarity the weekend the whale came to our town in a tent on the rugby fields at a school at the bottom of the pine forested hill. The forest contained the Scout Hall, a small beige block with a handpainted green fleur de lis, always locked when I looked. Once, driving up the hill, probably after our sequential ballet lessons, it would have been late afternoon by then, Vanessa, Irene and I squabbled so relentlessly our mother stopped her car on the gravel by the side of the winding road and said we should get out. She was calm and polite. I could see the blank ovals of her black sunglasses in her rearview mirror. I could not see her mouth. We all three sat in silence for quite some time. “Get out of my car,” our mother said again. When I opened the door it was still hot out and the smell came in of pine and dust. I knew immediately I would not be able to negotiate the uncertain path through the slippery needles with Vanessa dragging her feet with their turned in toes, dragging at my hand, looking back for our mother when there was no hope. She would have to be left for another mother, whereas I would make my home of fallen branches near where the boy scouts came, or the wolves, once a week, to learn how to make knots and a fire from two twigs.
Irene, Mother?
I’ve told you. Irene had drowned 20 years later.
Shall we hear about the wondrous whale?
The whale came to the rugby field at the bottom of the pine forested hill. It was in a tent. We went, Dada and me, my mother and Vanessa and Irene, to go and look at it. We all stood in a queue. It was evening. You moved forward slowly along the rugby field grass, which was getting ruined my mother said, towards the opening in the white tent, which glowed. The evening was glowing mauve, and thickish yellow light came from the opening. There were a lot of parents and children, chattering and shifting and checking the soft paper tickets we had been given at the gates. Dada was excited. He gripped my hand and told us interesting facts about whales, which I have forgotten.
They get slaughtered, Mother. Blubber. Corsets. Pianos?
My mother was silent in her orange and pink dress with her hair up in her French pleat. She was forever trying to calm us all down, as in this instance, by being very calm herself.
They communicate in song.
Recently it’s come to me that our mother was in fact forever bored.
Their young are called calves and they don’t drown.
Inside the tent, there was a rough wooden platform. Around the platform was a barrier of short brass poles with twisted red satin ropes strung between. You were not allowed to touch the smooth glassy mountain of stuffed grey whale that surged away in a curve there was no end to, higher and longer than you could see. There was dust in the yellow air and the smell of dust. Around the barrier, feet had made a path in the grass. How they would repair that field, our mother didn’t know. There was a sign that said how big the whale was, and Dada said it was the same size as our house.
They can smash a ship to pieces with their tails.
Afterwards, Dada, our mother, me, Vanessa and Irene drove home up the hill past the Scout Hall in the dark. When we got to home, we drove straight into the whale’s mouth through its curtain for filtering plankton.
You untethered yourselves from the long rooms and corridors, and you coursed underwater emitting your unmusical cries.
Interestingly, I could also see the whale from the outside, from far away, from the surface of the sea, where I still sometimes sit in my rowboat.
Language
According to many feminists, I write in a language that isn’t my own. Don’t have a language. Isn’t allowed. Won’t be understood, anyway. My mewling, my roar. At best, the language I write oppresses me, apparently. Or worse, obliterates. Mute, garbled. I am thoroughly infiltrated. Where is there untouched?
I am thinking about Steve Biko: Know that a black man cannot fully exist in English. I am thinking about Julia Kristeva: Exist between the words.
We must denounce our mother to become the world.
I am thinking about Helene Cixous: Stay wrapped in your body by a language that does not allow you or use your body as a way to communicate.
Unconscionable trap! Speak the language that hates you or make a bloody mess.
I am thinking about Luce Irigaray and how good looking she is. Monique Wittig and the heterosexual contract. I am thinking about how good looking they all are, the French feminists.
I opened my mouth and gave birth to a fish headfirst, choking. It opened and closed its mechanical mouth to say something. Invisible lips made smicky smacky sounds in the silent cathedral. Our eyes bulged. We were gasping for breath out of our water. Tell the truth now, Dada says.
Tell the truth and shame the devil.
But I can see there’s beauty in dust suspended, sun slant, slice.
My Sunglasses
In the mid to late 1980s I became a member of the Federation of South African Women, FEDSAW, which I found out later was a front for the banned African National Congress Women’s League. Or was it that exactly? I still don’t completely understand.
Google, Mother.
I was a member of FEDSAW by virtue of being a member of another women’s organization, Rape Crisis. At that time, it was strategic to form political alliances, and I think an obligation.
Right or wrong, good or bad. For. Or against. A certain kind of blindness was required, and a certain kind of trust.
The FEDSAW meetings were difficult for me to follow. After a while I realised there was a code I didn’t have access to. Later I came to understand that there was power-mongering between ideological factions in FEDSAW, and that there was always a danger of government spies. Probably someone like me, peripheral, naïve, could be a government spy. I would put my hand up and vote for this or that motion on the agenda as someone in the Rape Crisis leadership had told me to.
For. Or against.
Something that bothered me was I had to wear a skirt. Or was this later, after 1990, when I was openly a member of the Women’s League? I had a good black skirt that came to just below my knees and a dark green t-shirt for the meetings. It was annoying that an organisation of women insisted that we don’t wear trousers, but I went along with it. It shocks me now that I cannot remember a single thing that happened in those meetings.
There was always a large hot meal at the end, and the smell of offal and beans and pap permeated the inevitable church hall where we sat in rows on fold out chairs. At first it was pleasantly distracting. Hours later, I would feel suffocated by steam from the tired organs of cows.
When the agenda had been worked through, and before we ate, we would toyi-toyi, sometimes indoors after we had put the chairs away, sometimes outdoors in the sand. I loved a particular song, which went like this: “Tshona malanga, sesozidaba, dibana, nge bazooka ehlatini”. (I Googled.) I understood it to be a traditional song about coming home, until one evening in the minibus on the way back to Cape Town I mentioned this to Shelley.
She laughed: “We’re singing ‘When the sun goes down we will meet in the bush with our bazookas.’”
I was shocked.
“’Umamaya jabula matishayi bhulu’ means ‘Our mothers are happy when we kill the Boers,’” she elaborated on another song. “’Botha, uyabaleka, Botha, nonyana wakeh. Sizo bashayi nge-AK’ means ‘Botha and your sons, you’d better run. We’re going to kill you with our AKs.’”
I stared at her, but she would give me no help. I looked out of the window at the Cape Flats rushing by. The sand dunes are still covered by shanties, higgledy piggledy among the Port Jackson, and there are also rows and rows of boxy government housing. The sun was going down at an angle that hurt everybody’s eyes, but when I felt for my sunglasses in my pocket they weren’t there. I felt on top of my head, and they weren’t there either. Suddenly I could see them where I had left them behind on the seat of the empty chair next to mine in the meeting hall.
I tapped the shoulder of the woman who was the contact with the township women’s groups. She turned around to look at me and I asked her if she would enquire, next time she was in contact, whether anyone had found my sunglasses. She couldn’t hear what I was saying, and she frowned and leaned towards me, and I had to ask again, louder.
“Wuh wuh wuh MY SUNGLASSES!” she must have heard.
I felt the first pangs of irretrievable loss when without answering me she turned away and continued her discussion with her comrade.
I probably shouldn’t have been worrying about something like sunglasses while we were engaged in a civil war, but I loved those sunglasses, a lot, and I had felt nice about myself when I was wearing them.
Thirty years later, and we have never again found such a fabulous pair.
Sea View
Shortly after that, Silas moved to the house in Clovelly, Sea View. As you know, the narrow road winds close against the mountain, and there’s the railway track and the sea.
The last strip of the walk from the train station is hazardous, Mother.
There is the small blue gate on the pavement. The flight of stairs up is extraordinarily steep. Suddenly, I would be at Sea View’s dark front door, which was always unlocked. That night, I was going to meet Silas’s mother.
Granny? Gran? Gogo? Mrs Kraak? You tell me, Mother.
Silas was wearing an apron. He was sweeping the kitchen floor. I had come to learn that he was fastidious about housekeeping. His Mandy tattoo, with the heart and the ribbon and the bluebirds, drove the broom. His bare feet were white and I wanted to kiss them.
Please, Mom.
Mrs Kraak was sitting on a chair which she had moved into the kitchen doorway to catch the breeze.
Which came down through the mountain trees and mingled with the sea air.
She was annoyed because I was late.
At the dining table, she asked her questions that someone else answered in my voice. All the while her attention was on Silas, as though he might Do Something. She presided, though he sat at the head. She took it upon herself to press more food on me, but I wasn’t hungry.
Yet.
“But Silas made this food,” she said, “for you.” She looked with some distaste at the brown rice, spinach, tofu and sprouts before her, which she, herself, had eaten, unwillingly and out of politeness only on my behalf.
What was the matter with this girl? There could easily have been a roast chicken.
“Sorry,” said Silas. We were in the bath.
Oh God.
It wanted to be romantic, but there was only, really, ever, kindness between us. And Silas was too tall. His legs. His arms. Like a locust. It worked best when we sat one behind the other, like passengers, like locusts mating. I liked to wash his back, the knobs of his spine, the Silas code for all those women, the ribs like a broken cathedral.
We used the front bedroom. Its windows plunged down the rocks to the road. Or flew out across the bay to the horizon. That night there was a moon, long gone high.
Tomorrow there is work, I thought, and saw myself already in the dawn on the train back to Rosebank with no one suspecting anything. The taxi wars were raging, and their job at work was to understand and explain the burnt vehicles, the hacked people. Dead men, no go zones. All the while the new South Africa was being negotiated in corridors and halls. I sat with my back to the consultants. I looked at the wall and made appointments: with the mayor of Cape Town or a trade union or the taxi associations or the ANC or the police. I did the filing. Sometimes I fetched Ingrid’s son from school. Then I took him from his violin lesson to his swimming lesson. Once, when we were coming round the side of Devil’s Peak, “Look at the view, my Paulie,” I said.
“Don’t you know,” said Paul, not looking up from his book. “Kids don’t like views. I don’t know how to explain, but we can’t actually see them or something.”
In another conversation it became clear that Paul was under the impression that we all lived in America.
I sat on the benches for mothers at Newlands pool. Someone had made a small wooden raft so that the Egyptian geese could get out of the water. It wasn’t clear to me exactly how they might get off the raft, but still.
Your grief at this small act of love, Mother, is inexplicable and unsustainable.
Paul was not a good swimmer. He thrashed and sank with terrible determination.
Walking is falling, Mother. I see you crashing onto your hands and knees at last. The dark green whorls and clumps of Newlands Forest surge up to your left.
Silas was making love to me. The pleasure was in my capacity to accommodate more than I could bear. And I adored his skin. Sexed, he smelt like Mopani leaves.
Must we?
He said, “Uhh.”
That night, I dreamt a monkey came in the windows.
Dreams in fiction, Mother?
Down from the mountain, across the back courtyard, round the side of the house where the outdoor shower was, onto the front stoep, and in. It sprang onto me and clung to me, wanting milk. I screamed. I tried to prise its hands from my neck but it clung and screeched and chattered and bit. I tore tufts out of its fur. I dug my fingers into it horrible little shoulders and ripped it away from me. I flung it at the windows. The small leaded panes, already old, smashed and I woke up.
Silas was holding me very tight. His arms went all the way around me and included himself. “What? What? What?” he was saying. “What?”
“Let me go!” I said.
“What?!” he shouted, and shook like a train.
In the long evenings, I would return to Sea View empty. Silas would be surfing. I liked to stand at the dining room window and look. Sometimes he was alone, sometimes in a pod of three or four, waiting. That evening, I picked up the Lalique I had noticed on the dresser.
It was called Bacchantes.
I opened the dresser drawer. There was a pair of new binoculars.
I was shocked by how close Silas came into view. He shimmered and shook, and you could see his detail. You could see his mouth making words to the other guy. He said, “Mmmma,” and “Wuvuh,” and “Aba.” I could see the sinews that hold our heads up, and each yellow tooth of the zip of Silas’s wetsuit.
He would come up almost in the dark and ask me to unzip him.
Oh Lord.
Warm water was inside like blood, though his hands and feet could be blue. One night, he would let me peel him completely.
There will be some tugging. And when it comes to the legs you will be on your knees on the bricks, Mother.
On the weekends, Saturday or Sunday, I would go down to the beach with my book. Silas did not lie on the beach nor go down unless it was dawn or dusk.
One day, you will recognise the glint from Sea View’s dining room window, Mother. You will allow it to traverse your baking legs, penetrate the hairy dark hole of your ear, shine over your shoulder: “Outside the plot there was a great darkness but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth.”
Yes, and next time I took the binoculars with me to the beach. Through them I saw Silas up there inside Sea View looking for them and then looking at me and we waved at each other and were happy-ish.
Then you looked out over False Bay.
There are ocean-going liners taking goods.
And birds.
And dolphins on special occasions.
Clouds?
And sunrises.
Yes, the day leaves backwards across the plain, or in winter is ravaged by the jagged shadow of Muizenberg mountain.
Silas c. 1991
First Time
The first time I saw Silas, he was sitting on the stoep outside Mandy’s kitchen. He was collapsed over his knees. He was saying, “Huuuuhuuuuuhuuuuuuhuuuuuuh,” very loudly. I looked away into the garden not to see him. A dry haze shimmered beneath the trees. A child’s rusty swing from a long-gone family was collapsing.
A large black dog, also a stranger to you, looked at you with its little round eye, amber, that could kill without feeling.
“Fucked up,” said Silas. He wiped his nose across his forearm. He put his arm around the dog. “Fucked up,” he said.
His mouth opened four times like that to say “uh” and “uh” and “uh” and “uh” between the consonants.
Unfolding himself to look at me, “Silas,” he said. He held out his hand. On his inside forearm was a heart with an arrow through it, and “Mandy”, and ribbons and bluebirds. “Sit with me,” he said.
You could say that Silas grabbed your wrist and pulled you down beside him, but you were falling with volition of a leaf, Mother.
“Sixteen days on my own in the bush. They didn’t pitch at the pick-up,” he was saying. “Whatever you’ve heard, that’s what happened.”
You thought: Touch me like you touch the dog, Mother. Communicate instructions.
We drove to the ocean in Silas’s truck.
Wherever was Mandy?
Tough dry vines snaked around our feet as we climbed up the dunes towards the rumble of the Atlantic. Cold smell of kelp. Macbeth began to whine. Her eyes rolled, she growled and snarled. Her lips curled away from her teeth.
“She’s never seen the sea,” Silas said. “You’re my bush dog, eh? My lady, my Macbeth.” He put his hand on her head.
Yes, this is a language, Mother.
Then Silas was stumbling down the dunes. “Don’t look back!” he shouted. “Just run!” Bloubergstrand flung herself open, disappeared to her curving edges, the bay like a bowl, full to the brim and disturbed. Silas was shouting and running. He said, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” He fell into the long unfolding waves, dived and staggered, crawled, stood up, dived, again and again. Macbeth was pacing up and down at the edge of the dunes. She said, “Nnnnnnnnn-nnn-nnnn.” Silas leapt and plunged like a seal. He beat the water with his hands and shook his head. He said, “Rrrrrrrrrrr!” And at last Macbeth went across the beach, tongue lolling, and ploughed into the sea, barking and biting at it, flinging herself like a horse towards Silas, who was shouting words like, “Grrraaaaah!” I watched him stand up in the shallows. His chest heaved. His clothes gleamed like satin in a painting. He scooped up water in his hands and poured it over his head. Do you know how cold the water is in Table Bay?
Yes, Mother, I do. That October it was 12 degrees Celsius.
The Cape Doctor blew my hair out of its clasps. It whipped and flapped. It got stuck in my mouth. I watched them run down the beach, barking, yes both of them Llewellyn, getting smaller and smaller.
Bloubergstrand
Lost
Think about everything that’s in the world, Mother: cats, all the upright chairs, and people behind windows watching television. You Mother. I see you looking into other people’s yards from your window with your whisky, wondering. Let me tell you, they are doomed: you needn’t worry. If they were men on the street, I’d say run. Run for your life.
Baby shoes, where we come from an umbrella spoke is a weapon.
I walk the streets looking for you, Mother.
Almost eight months in and I am still finding another woman’s hair in my bed. Will it never stop?
I walked the streets, Mother, today, looking for you.
Their pavements are like elephant hide. And everywhere, the poor. Yes, even in America. I saw a man who could easily have been Philip Mngomezulu. I saw two women in saris and cardigans. And of course, up close, the smell.
The entropic trajectories. Some kind of limbotic, stale layered, underfelt and animal fat, used.
Pension queue in South Africa, 2011
I am so tired. Yesterday I washed my hands a hundred times. Last night I dreamt about the latest woman to become a goddamn man.
You fell in love with him, Mother, of course.
All summer, my dear, all summer.
One day, Mother, you will be dry of your endearments.
Never, my cockleshell, my diamond, my deer. My sweet green autumn pear, my dove. Never. My love.
Obese, stunned. Oh Mother, they are ill with inertia. They smoke. They lumber and wheeze. They slouch. They hack and are crumpled. And you wash your hands.
What, my angel, my cloud, am I to do? When I touch the railings their hands have touched I am contaminated. Do not bring your fingers to your face. A thousand, ten, twenty thousand, from all the four corners, have touched it there before me. I am besieged, constantly under attack, in danger of imploding, of rot. Pestilences make their way like forerunners of the meek. I am exhausted by microbes, my lamb.
Speak sense, woman!
What do you want from me? I am presenting you with things that happened. I am assembling them as I find them. This isn’t a story. Which of your questions must I answer?
Which is it enough that I am asking?
Speak sense, boy! I want you to read me like a poem. Open me like someone else’s photograph album you found at the edge of a puddle. You are on your way home one afternoon. You are unsatisfied, ready to drift away from what you have so striven to establish. You are open to distraction. Is this a viable project?
Llewellyn, my rowing boat, the wind is up, bringing change I don’t know what. The wind I know comes down from Botswana bringing rain. Last night I dreamt I sent two people in a raft over the edge of a waterfall. In the way of dreams, I was one of them. I am weary, my pearl, my muddy water.
Mother, I know.
Why is it that any fur will always smell like my grandmother?
Mother, you are asking the wrong question.
There are no insects here. The absence of moths, spiders, beetles, ants, praying mantises, is a cause for my despair. Then yesterday, there were three of four fruitflies at the half lemon I left in the bowl. That they knew where to find me—I wept.
That’s better, Mother.
4-5 week old baby, Mother.
I live with dust and balls of dust. My comfort is in letting a moth out into the evening. Its fluttering against my window woke me from a dream in which my mother was here.
Dreams in fiction, not a good idea, I’ll say it again.
She was pacing the floor. She was telling herself that she would not allow Irene to eclipse her. Dragging myself from sleep I would not have been surprised to find her standing before me. My neighbour’s homecoming footsteps could so easily have been hers.
When he grows old, Silas’s nose and chin will touch. Like a witch.
Some mutations keep us intact. My body has remade itself seven times. I am seven times entirely not myself. Inaccessible memories reproduce what I and others can recognise,. But here, look, something is rent, Llewellyn. I have tried to stitch our flesh to meet. I’ve used catgut, I’ve used wire. I have licked my sorry sutures, wrapped the ragged rips in cobwebs. It is a mess.
Mother, I like to walk by the doors and make them open all by themselves due to me. I do it again and again until someone tells me to stop.
I don’t understand, Llewellyn, what children are. They come across as mental, you know, actually retarded. How are we tamed? The brutality of our training won’t bear thinking about. It is required, of course. Or there would be no bridges or birthday cakes and other such feats of civilisation. But Llewellyn, love of my life, the sacrifices. Our innocence, Mother, our fantastic savagery.
Ah, Llewellyn, my bean. I saw you suspended in a pale green lake. God forgive me. There is blood and honey on my sheets, the former in streaks which will soon turn brown, the honey is sinking in to stain.
A marker of that time is Halley’s Comet.
The nucleus, Mother, 1986
Karen Martin graduated in 2014 from Syracuse University’s creative writing MFA programme. Her student fiction won her residencies and fellowships in the United States, and Caine Prize winner EC Osondu awarded her 2013 short story “Re-enactments” a New York state-based prize.
Karen edits creative writing, and mentors creative writers. She has worked with novelists, science writers, academics, memoirists, artists and musicians. The anthology she developed and co-edited with Makhosazana Xaba, Queer Africa: New and Selected Fiction, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2014. Queer Africa 2: New Stories was published in 2017.
She lives in South Africa.
