The Rowing Lesson (17 page)

By now, it’s too late for Bain’s Kloof. You haven’t seen all her freckles, although you’ve counted up to seventy-three so far. For every brown fleck on her nose, her hands, her arms, you’ve told her about a person, a house or a car, something real from the place you’ve known all your life. You even told her about the story of your father chasing the train, how he got the engine driver to stop at the crossing, so he could put Maisie on board, bound for a holiday in Oudtshoorn, with a rich feather-farmer’s daughter. There’s a jerk in your voice because of the last train, the one from Johannesburg that gave him the fever and the terrible sickness, his temperature flopping from high to low, his life suddenly snipped short, a gardening accident of the highest order. The Germans invaded Poland and my father died, and we almost died too, you know, of confusion and grief and being so poor, so suddenly. Faster than cats, quicker than scorpions. (We have a lot of those, climbing out of the bath at night.)

She’s living your life, cigarette after cigarette, a giggle for the river, and a big laugh for the sea. All she knows is the city, her brothers in every room of the house, and the garlic her mother puts in her coat pockets to ward off evil spirits. The two of you are sitting on a pile of rocks near the side of the national road. Charlotte is watching, and you swear her white coat is turning a faint green with jealousy. You’re not going up or down. You’re just talking, in case Stella gets frozen again, and you can’t carry her down. And anyway, the cross is all bandaged up with clouds, and the klipspringers have probably gone to Hermanus for a dip.

The Hottentot’s Holland mountains are a purple ripple in the distance. The sun is falling quietly tonight, no sweep of orange and pink, just a slow, sullen bruising spreading across the sky, a giant hematoma. Charlotte coughs when you try to start her. Do you want to spend the night on the mountain, sulking? She sputters nnnn . . . oooo. Rrrrrh! With a few tries, you manage to get her going. Stella gets back into the front seat, checking her nose in her powder compact, as if it was missing and just came back.

We shouldn’t be driving, Stella says. We’re not supposed to use motor cars for pleasure purposes. Or buy new clothes, you answer, rubbing the brown of her skirt. She triple-sneers at you, and then you lean over, almost in her lap, your voice rising. Oh, I shall remember! Didn’t you give me my first du Maurier? You have one of her cigarettes between your lips, and she’s lighting it for you. I shall always smoke them—and always think of you. . . .

But the war is between you now, and how guilty you are because you’re not dying somewhere in Europe, burst into pieces by a bomb or a land mine or a rattle of machine-gun fire. Stella’s just as bad, eating hot lunches in the Medical School dining room and wearing soft clothes from her father’s shop. When you tilt the world, so that it’s Europe on top, not the southernmost tip of Africa, Jewish girls are standing naked, their clothes in toppling piles, their shoes becoming history.

There are very few other cars on the road, black ghost ships with masked headlights because of wartime regulations. Charlotte’s lights are taped too, with just a crack of light in the center to poke through the darkness, through the valley of the shadow of your fears, and Stella’s. You’ve driven through the countryside, past sleeping vineyards, and livestock tucked in for the night, and now you take her through Athlone, and Elsie’s River, Grassy Park and District Six.

You show her the places where so many of your patients come from, the tumbled down houses and shacks and
pondokkies
where you can pick up TB, dysentery and syphilis in every garden, where stab wounds proliferate like stars poking through the sky’s night-blanket. She’s staring out of the car window, at the
skollies
and the nightwalkers, the gamblers and street fighters and she tells you to slow down. I get carsick, she says, Stop! You park next to an empty lot full of whispers and menace, two men watching your car with hooded eyes. The women and children are upstairs or downstairs, sleeping in boxes, on floors, ten in a bed, two at the window. You’re looking for Fanus’s house, for his widow and his poor children but you can’t tell Stella. You pull on your white coat, as she bends down next to the car, and vomits. At first, you try not to look and then you see she’s reeling a little. You hold her shoulders, trying not to get splashed. The two men walk past you, and they tip their hats.
Dokter
, they say, in the dark.
’Naand.

When she’s finished, there’s a tear glinting in her eye, a reproachful diamond. You help her into the car, and she tells you she’s seen her fair share of brokens too, in the radiography department, under the giant X-ray machines. She sniffs, and then she lights another cigarette, her own private smoke signal. You forgot the freckle-hunt. You got lost on your way to Ebb ’n Flow. You took the Serpentine by mistake and now you’re nowhere near her softest parts, the lilt of her breast, the slope of her abdomen. It’s not funny anymore. The car smells of her shame, her curried lunch, your shame and all the sprats you never ate. It’s salt air and leather, cigarettes and bile. She’s steaming with tears at what you didn’t give her, the tea room that wasn’t there, the nice place to stop for scones and cream and jam and a pot of tea. She didn’t mind District Six. She just wanted something hot to drink at four o’clock.

You drive her back to Chantry in silence. Nobody says sorry. Other cars lurch towards Charlotte in the dark, rolling forward like blind tanks. Out of the blue, Stella announces, I want you to come for Friday night supper and you say, When, because I’m at Groote Schuur this week and the next and the next. When the cows come home, she says, you can come too.

Chapter 14

I’m back at the window again, losing myself in the moonlit cloud wrapping itself around the dark mountain, as if it’s the caul I was born in. You told me that you came into the delivery room when Ma was about to give birth to me. She and the obstetrician were both smoking cigarettes. You waved your arms furiously in the smoke-filled room. What the hell are you buggers doing?

Suddenly it grips me, the one fact I can’t think about. This child of mine is a face you will never see.

Simon’s out in the hallway again, and Ma takes a long sigh. You think it’s all my fault, don’t you? she says, and I can’t speak suddenly, looking for your murderer in every corner. Maybe it was the night nurse at the other place where they did the surgery, who watched you struggle for your life not wanting to call up the doctor in the middle of the night, because she knew he was booked back-to-back all the next day. Maybe it was the ambulance driver, who was feeling hungover from the night before, and took an extra twenty minutes to get you here, where they finally hooked you up to the right machines and got you breathing properly again. And who made the decision to operate on you in a place without the right resuscitation equipment, without an ICU? Was it you?

Your breathing is more ragged now, and I can feel the tightness spreading inside my own chest. Perhaps I have angina too. Simon is back at your side, stricken. Ma’s eyes are shut, her cheeks have lengthened and she has her legs spread out stick-straight in front of her. We are all dying too.

Outside, the sun finally drops out of the sky, and there’s an even deeper chill in the room. Ma gets up, shuffles out of her chair without talking to Simon or to me, leaving a maze of ridges on the plastic seat. I’m going for a walk, she says. And she glances behind her, at a spot above your head, as if she can’t be caught loving you.

I’m hearing your music again, and you’re dancing with Ma at the Wilderness Hotel and she’s just as tall as you, her eyes fixed on your hairline. Your face is turned inwards, searching the past, and you’re examining an old picture of yourself, dancing and swaying to the sweetest of sounds.

I USED TO be quite a dancer, old chap, you say, shaking William’s hand, minutes after you meet him. Later that evening, over a Cabernet Sauvignon you’ve brought with you in your hand luggage, you initiate him into the brotherhood. It isn’t the Royal Arch. It’s a royal, loyal KWV red you introduce him to. William tells you about his travels all over the world, and you gasp and laugh and shake your head with penguin amazement. He listens to your stories about the wine-farmers and their vineyards. On our first trip to South Africa together just after we’re married, you have William drive you all over the Hex River Valley, to Robertson and Paarl, stopping to taste wine at every vineyard. With Medieval courtliness, William says, You are the master. And I am your young apprentice.

Danie de Wet is the Chardonnay King! You make William take you to Danie’s estate, De Wetshof, in Robertson. He follows you into a building that looks like a chateau, gleaming white against the blue flamed sky. Susanna, the girlie with the big breasts, is standing behind the counter. She must have seen you come in, the little doctor and his towering son-in-law. Of course you make her blush, your eyes clapped onto her boobs like magnets, but she says
Goeie môre
,
Dokter
, a good girl scraping her desk back and saying hello to the teacher.

You’re chattering nonstop to William about the oak, and the fruit and then, as you lurch towards Susanna, it’s her fresh nest that catches you, her wrapped-up cuckoo birds. They don’t come out of the nest, do they? You look pointedly towards the shelf of her bosom and William, a gentleman’s gentleman, feels the blush going down all the way to his heels. He isn’t going to say anything because that’s not his way, but he feels Susanna’s shame, and he tries to steer you back to the tasting table, with its rows and rows of tulip-shaped glasses. I’m not in my cups yet. I’m still trying to get into her cups!

You pour glass after glass for William, toasting and tasting, the wine, the grapes, the bloody blue sky. It’s a helluva country, this, you tell him, swirling the pale yellow Bateleur Chardonnay. Danie always selects this one from his barrels.
Waar’s Meneer
de Wet? You call to Susanna and she flushes apricot, delicate peach, all the hues of the wine itself, marmalade and smoke, oranges and nuts.

You barely see the man in front of you, William with his mop of red-gold hair and luminous skin, eyes the colour of storms. You can’t imagine the places he’s lived, the books he loves or the wide open plains where he was born. You don’t think of us dancing at dawn under a fluttering maypole in Riverside Park. You don’t notice me looping through his crooked arm laughing so hard I’m afraid I’m going to burst, on that first day of May seven years ago. You don’t hear us speak in the chilly air, stamping feet, massaging cold hands. And you don’t see William looking into my eyes, seeing me.

So he listens and you speak, and he pours and you drink, the Finesse, the Bon Vallon, the Lesca and Danie de Wet’s Call of the African Eagle Chardonnay Reserve. You shout for Susanna, A case of the Limestone Hill! And a case of the Chardonnay D’Honneur! And, then, to William, The Eagle is bigger than the Hill, don’t you think? The Finesse has more curves, just like Susanna. William takes you (and shakes you) and says, What about your boat? Betsy told me all about the Wilderness. You push your chair back and look at him and say, You know what? You’re a
lekker ou
. A nice chap. A case for Mr. William, Susanna.
Hy’s ’n lekker ou
.

Betsy told me that she was alone with you in the boat once, in the rain. You remember, whistling through your teeth as you dislodge something.
Ja
, she was curled up like an animal in the front of the boat. I’ll never forget how small she was. You stop, caught outside the circle, and William sees for the first time that day that you are my father. But then you wash it away with the Edeloes, Danie’s best dessert wine.

William loads up the back of your white Toyota with a case of the Limestone Hill, a case of the Chardonnay D’Honneur and two of the Bon Vallon, one for you, one for him. That’s the last he sees of the Bon Vallon. You bury it in the back of the cement room where you keep your bottles. He doesn’t ask for it and you don’t give it to him. Joseph Klein gave everything away and he died with a leaking pocket and a hole in his till.

But you keep both halves of every wishbone you ever snapped, all your old socks, medical samples and broken pens and stamps and envelopes and newspaper clippings. Every time you visit Danie de Wet, the Chardonnay King, you make sure you save every bottle because no one does it like Danie.

On the way back from the De Wetshof Estate, you tell William about the Kanonkop Pinotage, the Meerlust Rubicon, the Allesverloren Tinta Barocca, other great wines of the Cape. William drives and you talk and your words weave themselves into what he sees spreading out in front of him, on either side of the national road: vineyards, farms, mountains, wind pumps, telephone lines. You tell him which farmers still use the
dop
system, paying their workers in alcohol at the end of the week, which winemaker killed one of his workers, which grape-picker beats his wife, which
klonkie’s
wife drowned her tenth child, which mad Alsatian bit a farmer’s son. Which farmer was that? You don’t hear William. You’re too busy telling him that you always ask your patients to lock up their dogs when you come on house calls. Those bloody Alsatians, man, they eat a Jew for breakfast every morning!

Ma and I are back at the house when you and William drive up the driveway, the branches of the loquat tree scraping the top of your car. After you unload the car, I’m there waiting for you for to take out the old photos you took when Simon and I were little. I want them for a painting I’m working on. Wait a minute here, you say. You can’t just go through them like that. You have to make copies, copies of the copies. I’ve found some other pictures that aren’t of me or Simon, given to you by one of your patients who bought them in an estate auction and I’ve made a big pile of the ones I want to take back to America. I’m holding up one in particular, an engraving of equus quagga quagga. I’m painting one right now, I say, shaking with excitement. Look at this poor animal’s face and those sad eyes!

You can’t have it! you scream. It’s mine. I need it for my work, I say, knowing you can sense how much I want it. I’m standing right next to you, looking straight into your black eyes, at the inflamed beak of your nose. You’re just like the girlie in
L. A. Law
, you hiss. You’ll do anything to get what you want!

That’s when I run out of the house shouting the way I used to when I was a teenager. I hate you, I hate you. I never want to see you again. I wish you were dead already.

Bloody little bitch! You lock up the quagga picture in a drawer in the bedroom and hide the key.

Dinner is horrible. You drink a whole bottle of Rubicon you’ve been saving for a special occasion but you feel so bad you open it anyway. William and I decide to cut our trip short and go back to Cape Town. The only reason we haven’t left already is Ma, whose face is so hard and pinched you can squeeze battery acid out of it.

William stops liking you, the way a car just stops on the road and won’t go anymore. The whole bloody world’s gone to pot, you say, and get up from the table. You want to say something about the women wearing the pants but William’s long, folded hands and the way he looks at you stops you right in your tracks. You’re a big chap, you mumble, taking the bottle of Rubicon to bed with you.

You sit in the half-dark with no one to talk to. These bastards don’t know what it’s like, you keep thinking, to work like a dog the way I do. Jesus Christ, forty plus years of seeing people dying a million different ways, the human body just conking out, finally. You remember the chill you felt for the first time in Anatomy 1, surrounded by corpses, the sweet, bad smell, the bright cold, the prickling fear of death climbing up your spinal cord into your brain. Jesus Christ, man, I have seen so much pain. You take a sip of Rubicon and look at the drawer where you locked up the pictures I wanted and it reminds you of the other drawer, the other time, at Men’s Residence just after the Germans marched into Poland and your father died and your mother’s late letter came and you locked it away, along with the first one, wishing you a happy birthday.

Where are those letters? You leave the bedroom and go into your study, rifle through papers and files and letters and old envelopes, the dust and the crumbling paper making your head spin. You search and search until you find them and then you read them and you remember everything about that day and the trip in the car and the end of it all. You feel very, very sorry for yourself, still young, still alone, nobody’s son.

And she wishes I was dead already. You people don’t know anything about death.

The next morning Ma hands me the pictures in a brown envelope, just as we’re about to get in the car and leave the house with the loquat trees forever.

You don’t say goodbye. You look straight through me as if I’m not there, as if you’re hearing music in another room.

BOEM
, PFFF!
BOEM
, pfff! The sound of the
klopse
coming, the drums, and the shuffle of their feet, and it’s New Year’s all over again. 1945 Hurray!

Without any warning, BOOM! It’s not a sparkler, or a Catherine wheel. It’s a bloody V-2 rocket, flying at 3, 500 miles an hour towards the heart of London with murder in its belly, and gosh, golly gumdrops when it strikes its target, there’s hell to pay.

Overseas is where the action is, and you’re desperate to get started, to fight the good fight, flying away from this horned continent to the real theatres of war, to scrub and patch and sew all the demented bodies flung this way and that, broken and burst by the enemy, the enemy of all enemies, the evil legions of Hitler. There’s a race on, and you can’t even whisper a word to Maxie, even though he’s probably dreaming the same dream, yearning just like you to leave the southeaster behind, syph and sniff, staph and strep and strap, in exchange for a real uniform not a white coat over your mother’s fears.

You’ve read in
The Lancet
about debridement and you can’t wait to explore a wound and see the gaseous magic of the dreaded Clostridium bacteria for yourself, and not its black-and-white cousins in the pages of the
British Medical Journals.
Each marching footstep into France brings you closer finishing your housemanship and you’re not sure who will reach Berlin before you. All you want is to get to the war before it ends, before you miss the greatest adventure of all time. Sometimes, in your darkest dream, in your smallest hour, you know just how wicked you are, wanting this dreadful war to wait for you, so that you can join in. Have a heart, chaps. Wait for me before you break down the gates of Hell. You bastards don’t know how good I am at stopping gangrene. I’ve read up on it, volumes of the
British Medical Journal
going back to World War One. I’ve treated diabetics with festering feet and blackening legs. I’ve opened and cleaned their suppurating wounds, snipped off dead tissue, removed all foreign bodies one by one. Look at my hands. They’re the hands of a tidy monkey, a primate who tends flesh instead of gardens.