The Rowing Lesson (18 page)

With a snickering, sickening thud, your fiercest dream comes true. The Germans burst through the American lines, and they’re a bulge in old Europe’s pants. The Allies wade through thickets of death. When the
klopse
sing,
Daar kom die Nuwejaar! Ons is deurmekaar!
they’re not joking. From the silver trees on Table Mountain to the pines of the Ardennes Forest, the earth shivers, as the Battle of the Bulge holds everyone’s fresh new year by the throat. There’s a lock on joy. The ships in Table Bay are buffeted by a sudden squall, a whiff of misery from the North. How many wars are you going to miss,
boytjie
, before it’s too late?

Maxie, infernal, bloody genius, hands you a note during a ward round at Groote Schuur. Where do the spots end, Doc? Never mind the Krauts. Stella Bellicosa.

A houseboy answers the telephone when you call. How about that! Stella gets on the line and her galloping laugh is in your ear. What did you say that was funny? It isn’t you, she screams, it’s my little brother, tickling me to death. Little brother, my foot. You know he’s a head and a half taller than you. Shush! she giggles and she tells you which Friday to come, and how strict her father is. You might as well walk because he hates Jews who drive on the Sabbath. I’m going to put on my shoes, you say. I’ll start right now.
Vat jou goed en trek
, Fereira.
Vat jou goed en trek.
Sssss . . . phhhhh. . . . She’s smoking one of those du Mauriers. You can feel the earpiece getting hot and smoky in your hands. Can I breathe while you smoke? Can I drive while your father eats? Can he hold his breath under the table? Why don’t we just forget his strings and his prayers. My family cut up ten rugs, long after it was dark.

You’re scraping your feet on the mat outside the house, when the voice-on-the-telephone houseboy opens the door. You almost fall into his arms, before he disappears like a coffee-coloured shadow into the
derms
of the house. The wall next to the door is cold, and the glinting floor gives you the evil eye. There’s a giant grandfather clock facing you at the foot of the spiny stairs, chiming loudly in your ear. You’re the mouse running up the clock, a tailor house mouse who can sew very tiny buttonholes, thank you very much. Hello Stella, you greet the Queen of Smoke, a white ribbon trailing after her as she comes down the stairs. I can do ruffles and lappets. And then, squeezing your eyes together and tipping your fingertips, My stitches are very, very small. She smudges her red lips against your forehead, a quick blurr on your cockle shell.

My father won’t like your muddles. His father’s father was a
gaon
, a learned man, and his father’s father’s father was a
gaon
too which makes my father the
gaon
of the
gaon
’s
gaon
. Now you’re in the dining room, a chamber of men, except for Stella, her mother and the tawny manx cat twitching her orange-and-black coat behind your knees. Shabbat candles twinkle on the table, Mother Bun fusses with the houseboy and a row of dishes steam on the sideboard. You plant your coccyx in the chair closest to Stella, the cuckoo’s beak pointing down, down. The brothers fan out on both sides of the long table like beanstalks. You’re not quite sure if there are four or five or only three. They’re all twice your size, oddly patrician for yeshiva
bochers
, talking about the cricket scores and the Old Man, how the Allies are closing the Bulge, and what perfume does Stella have on tonight. Cat’s water? Dog’s whistle? Or is it bred in the bone, something a little closer to home?

The Old Man enters, in the middle of Stella’s squealing and sticking out her tongue at the boy-boys. He’s tight and fat in his suit, his chest and abdomen puffed like a pigeon’s, every part of him swelling with pride. You’re shocked that he’s as short as you are, but so full of his own gifts. You can’t help kicking Joseph Klein under the table for all the things he gave away: the brooms and tins and old postcards and nails and bags of flour as well as his life’s blood. There’s a tear prickling in your throat as the Old Man winds up for the kiddush and raises his cup, twin billows of self-congratulation holding up his right arm, and his pudgy right hand. Even his lips are full, two plump fish moving ever so slightly with each loose, warm breath he takes.

His eyes are a mix of soft and sharp, the same piercing cocktail Stella has, the eyes of a judge, a noticer of defects, flaws, inconsistencies. Now they’re resting on you, son of poor dead Joseph and East End Yetta, the shop that stopped with barely a penny to its name. What do you have to say for yourself? What do you have to offer?

God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. The Old Man blesses the Sabbath wine, the covered bread, this holy penetrating moment as his eyes flick from the dancing Hebrew letters on the page to the quivering half-smile on your face watching Stella and her pouts and all the nonsense going on with her brothers and the sister-in-law who is missing, mind you, the oldest tallest brother’s wife, pregnant and upstairs, lying in. There’s a lot of muttering and chair-scraping and sardonic eyebrow-raising, the cat’s back arching, as she sidles behind everyone, counting feet and faces and who’s going to pay her with a nice long stroke.

Ahh. Friday night was never this iffy in George, with the commercial travellers putting their hats on the table and the music lifting the edges of the carpet, a night to plan picnics, and find the right high tide, to remember the old roads and when Joseph stopped the train and the Model T Ford got stuck halfway up the Montagu Pass. At least that’s what you remember tonight, on this night of judgment, the Old Man’s gaze scraping you like sandpaper. Are you good enough? Are you big enough? Your name and college, sir. This warden of all wardens has cracked the shell of this year’s confidence, shaking the fragile mannikin of selfhood that you’ve patched together on the eve of becoming a doctor.

You’ve forgotten all the knife wounds you’ve stitched and cleaned, the broken bones you’ve set and the babies you’ve held, fresh to the world. He doesn’t think much of you, this roly-poly ball of a man, Stella’s father. There’s a quick prayer for the rear-gunner, the middle brother up in the air over Europe. The war suddenly swoops into the room and the rear-gunner might as well be there, in his bloody uniform, stretching his hands inside his Air Force gloves, stamping his cold feet. It doesn’t matter that you want to be in the air too, or fighting on the ground, from a ship, in a tent, cracking codes behind enemy lines, using every ounce of what you’ve learned as a doctor, as a man, as someone with a heart. None of that matters, because you’re here and you’re poor and you have to wait until Uncle Oscar says you can go.

There’s a blast of fury in your chest that withers the fat Old Man and the sneering brothers and supercilious Stella. Remember the colon-train that brought you here from George, and the other old man who thought you were less than fifteen? The sunset bursting in flames on your face? And the night with the rough blanket as you rubbed Gertrude’s thigh between your legs? These buggers have never travelled on that train. They’ve never even been up the Swartberg Pass. All they know is here, the rude cat and the long table, Friday after Friday. They’ve never seen what happens when they take the furniture away, when everything you can see and touch and sleep on gets sold for a song.

You keep all your old envelopes and carefully put them, one by one, in a saucer with water barely covering the bottom. You watch the stamps slowly loosen as the radio plays sweet music, and then the news comes on. Maxie comes over and he’s also excited by your new stamp collection and guess what, so is Stella’s youngest brother, the greenest beanstalk, the only one without a moustache.

I wish you were here, Maxie, even though this man-boy says he has the first day cover of King George VI’s coronation. There are giblets in your soup and you scoop a tiny chicken heart into your spoon, the dark-grey blood vessels a tangle of words you can still count off on both fingers. Vena cava. Left innominate vein. Innominate artery. Left carotid. Left subclavian. Vena azygos major. Look, there’s a major general standing on the potato! He’s about to lob a grenade at the carrot! Psshewww . . . Poof! The heart falls into the bowl. Dead again. Mother Bun is at your side in an instant, pouring another bucket of chicken soup into your plate. Stella said you were too thin. Ma! Stella growls at her, I never said that. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t.

Buff! The forks jump and so does the moon and your spoon. The Old Man has his fist on the table. Don’t argue with your mother. He’s shouting at Stella but his eyes are on you and he knows that you hate potatoes, that you shun carrots, that you despise anything cooked and soft and formless. You can’t finish what you haven’t even begun.

Leonard, the fresh face, shows you his
Voortrekker
stamps, printed to celebrate the centenary of the Great Trek. Thank God the wagons are moving, and the Old Man’s eyes have shifted north, to the promised land. You know I was there, you tell Leonard, when they wore all the old costumes and rolled through the Little Karoo for the second time around. There’s a happy family on the stamp: bearded Afrikaner father, bonneted mother and God-given child. They’re standing on a rise and looking at a rainbow spreading over the new country. Above their heads is a banner,
Voortrekker Eeufees
, 1838–1938, in mouse letters.

That’s not our holiday, your father said and he went and bought Charlotte. Whose country is it? you asked, even though you knew whose bread was afflicted. I sell to everyone, Joseph Klein told you. Everyone comes to my shop.

Stella’s Old Man bulges as he talks about the Bulge. You can’t help think about his innards and the layer of orange fat filling him up like a cream puff. He says he visited Prague and Vienna and London before the war, buying lace and fur-trimmed jackets and slippery negligees for his salon, where
Ouma
Smuts buys her suits. His shop is better than your shop ever was. Your father never sold anything that was slippery, not like the Old Man’s sliding gowns and silk blouses, satin skirts and soft pants.

The stamps flutter on the table after the dessert is long gone. Pictures of tanks, soldiers, a sailor, buck, the Red Cross, thorn trees, aviators, an old sailing ship rounding the Cape. Stella’s smoking like the devil and the Old Man is provoking her. They’re arguing about what hat a Jewish woman should wear, and how many times Stella didn’t go to shul with her mother, and who she didn’t talk to, and what sort of life she won’t even think about living. She won’t bother learning how to bleed a piece of meat, how to brine a chicken but she will make pickled herring, when she’s in the mood. What sort of a daughter is this, Mr. Klein? Who smokes when she’s not sulking, and sulks when she’s not smoking? And sneering! Why, she sneers from morning till midnight.

Then he chuckles through the fog of her smoke, and his cigar, floating, mingling, above their heads. But she likes my clothes, Harry. Ask her to show you her buttoned kid gloves, her embroidered Hungarian blouses, her cut-velvet evening dresses. There’s no joy like the joy of dressing your own daughter.

You can’t help thinking of the Old Man’s fat hands pulling Stella’s panties over her navel and hooking her brassiere, stretching silk stockings over her thin legs and lacing up her shoes. I love a good frill, you tell him, especially when it’s in the right place. My father sold combinations and one day I didn’t get them off fast enough. Ha. Ha. I was only joking. I’m not the little boy you think I am. You know I can sew ruffles and lappets, hemstitches and ha-stitches, cross stitches and bobbinets. I can turn lace into skin and skin into lace, and back to skin again.

The Old Man loads his cannon with his eldest son, First Prize, also F.P. and sometimes Jack. He’s so brrrrilliant that even the professor of his professor’s professor wasn’t clever enough for him. Do you know how brilliant that is? Here, First Prize, ask this
boytjie
a few questions. Check if his anatomy is still grey or if he’s forgotten everything he learned.

First Prize is tall and speckled, variegated like Stella but not so pronounced. He’s got a quirk or two up his sleeve and of course his first question is female. Where is the canal of Nuck? The floor creaks as you get off in the basement and
Grootouma
is there, tapping you on the shoulder, all the dissected parts of her face put back together again and tied up with string.
Hy is ’n skelm!
She whispers in your ear. He’s a cheat!
Myne was glad nie daar nie.
Mine wasn’t there at all. It’s the tale of the disappeared spleen all over again, the lost canal of Nuck, a tiny copy of the peritoneum which, in the foetus, turns into a little tube, an infinitesmal horn that protrudes into the inguinal canal.

They threw the boy away and kept me, the placenta, you tell them. I don’t have any real nerve endings, and you can take me on cruises as your handbag. You sidle up to Stella. I’ll breathe in all your smoke. I’ll sit on your lap at the captain’s table.

This is when all the sons and their father turn into one big dragon, each head a different spiny plate, Fresh Face holding up their spiked family tail. That’s our Prize Female, the only one who can carry a foetus with its very own Nuck. You have to do quite a bit of swimming for her, not to mention studying. You might as well throw away all those stupid golf balls. The Old Man is slowly crawling towards you, a fish with legs. This I can manage, you’re thinking, your brain talking back to you like someone on the other side of a telephone. One fish is better than the whole family dragon.

I am a coelacanth expert, after all. Remember when the specimen came to town in a special railway van? The Old Man pulls out a deck of cards. Do you play
klawerjas
?

You can’t play but you can talk and the coelacanth is an old friend. I’ve seen J.L.B. Smith’s boat on the Knysna lagoon. First Prize is telling you about Professor Skullfinder (as if you didn’t know!) and the first ape man and how they’re scared, those Afrikaners, of evolution, but they’re proud of the coelacanth and all the hominids, large and small, that keep sticking their elbows and knees and rib cages and jaws out of the South African sand.