The Children of Eve Learn to Laugh Again
‘Jans is torturing himself again,’ said Griet’s friend Gwen at an exhibition opening. ‘He’s not supposed to drink beer because the workers are on strike. But the beer’s on the house here. What’s the poor man supposed to do?’
Jans stood in a corner of the packed hall, beer in hand and a drawn expression on his face – as though he hoped no one would notice him if he didn’t move. For a change he wasn’t wearing a suit or tie but he still looked as though he were standing before a magistrate in court, as uncomfortable as it was possible to look in jeans. Griet and Gwen sat on the floor looking at the people who were looking at the works of art on the walls.
‘Luckily I don’t like beer.’ Griet smiled and raised her wine glass to attract Jans’s attention. ‘So I don’t have to suffer with him.’
‘Do you know how badly the workers on wine farms are paid?’ asked Gwen seriously, waving at someone she recognised. ‘And they can’t even strike: they don’t have a union. Just imagine how the farmers would shit themselves if they had to pay fair wages.’
‘So I shouldn’t really drink wine either,’ sighed Griet. What’s left, she wondered gloomily, to make life worthwhile? Cigarettes give you lung cancer, marijuana makes you stupid, coffee brings on heart attacks, chocolate makes you fat, sunshine causes skin cancer, alcohol hammers your liver, money spells sleepless nights, make-up enrages the feminists, pregnancy leaves you with stretch marks, politics leads to despair and sex gives you Aids. She really couldn’t blame her children for refusing to be born.
‘No, you can drink as much as you like,’ Gwen told her, ‘as long as you seem guilty about it. Just look at Jans, he’s perfected the technique. Enjoying himself thoroughly, but making it look like every moment is sheer torture.’
‘I wonder if the artists here know anything about the beer boycott.’ Most of the people around them were young and white, wearing T-shirts with cartoons or political slogans, and staring at the paintings as though they’d discover the meaning of life in them if they only had sufficient patience. Griet and Gwen had been invited to the opening by a friend who created ‘significant sculptures’, according to a Cape Style reporter who obviously hadn’t known what else to say about his work. ‘Maybe they’re so busy Creating Art that they don’t have time to read the papers. Maybe it’s only political lawyers like Jans who take the Struggle seriously.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m just about Struggled out. Just look at all the crap on the walls here. Everything is so “relevant” I could puke.’
‘And so desperately serious,’ sighed Griet.
‘The whole world is in an uproar because the whale is endangered. Stuff the whale, I say. We should spare a thought for the Happy South African instead – also in danger of extinction.’
Griet burst out laughing at her friend’s vehemence. Gwen, sitting cross-legged beside her, had broad hips and a rounded bosom but her haircut was so short and masculine it almost distracted attention from her abundant body. Like most women, she’d have preferred a different one.
‘After the Grahamstown arts festival last year I was so exhausted by the breast-beating I had to spend a week in bed,’ said Gwen glumly. ‘If I’d had to endure one more relevant painting or play, I’d definitely have cut my throat. In the end I spent a whole evening watching TV sitcoms just to make sure my laughing muscles still worked.’
Griet folded her arms round her knees and examined her Levi jeans with some concern. She’d heard the other day that the indigo they used to dye denim could cause skin cancer if you didn’t wash your jeans in boiling water. And these days she didn’t even have a decent stove to boil water, let alone a washing machine. If she got skin cancer, she thought with grim satisfaction, it would be her husband’s fault.
‘When did you last read a funny Afrikaans book?’ asked Gwen sombrely.
‘Well, I found the latest Ena Murray omnibus quite absurd,’ said Griet with her chin on her knees.
‘I mean apart from Jan Spies and all those guys with funny accents. I’m talking about a Funny Afrikaans Novel. Was there ever such a thing as a Funny Afrikaans Novel?’
‘I’m sure someone must have written a thesis about it.’ Griet smiled unwillingly at the deadly seriousness with which Gwen discussed humour. ‘What about Etienne Leroux?’
‘One clown with sunglasses doesn’t make a circus, Griet. I’m talking about a whole tradition of humour: irony, satire, absurdity, fantasy. We imitate everything the Americans do, why can’t we also learn to laugh as we read? Give the devil his due, just think of Salinger and Heller and Irving and Updike and Vonnegut …’
‘Well, we do have Herman Charles Bosman,’ said Griet. ‘But he didn’t write in Afrikaans.’
‘OK, South African, then, Afrikaans or English. But not something that was written fifty years ago. What about the last ten years, what about “this moment in time”, as the politicians like to put it?’
‘Tom Sharpe?’ Griet suggested apologetically.
‘He doesn’t count.’ Gwen was relentless. ‘He had to go and live in England before he could joke about South Africa.’
In his corner, Jans hunched his broad shoulders and tensed his neck muscles as though he were about to charge through the crowd to the nearest door. He looked more like a rugby forward than ever, Griet thought, amused. Ill at ease in a room full of art. It was only the beer that kept him here.
Hugging her knees closer, Griet frowned. Her left breast felt tender in this position. She lifted her chin a little and tried to touch the breast unobtrusively. If she got breast cancer, it would also be her husband’s fault. Her own hands would never be as familiar with her body as his were. Since he no longer touched her, it was only her gynaecologist who stood between her and her worst nightmare.
But these days she had so many fears that even breast cancer had lost some of its old horror. To die alone had to be worse than going through life with one breast.
My husband is snoring in the bedroom [her friend wrote from England], and the alcohol fumes from his open mouth are strong enough to kill flies. I wish I could patent him and send him to Africa. Talk about killing two flies with one blow.
It couldn’t be as bad as it sounds, Griet comforted herself. Louise wasn’t the type to become a martyr. Not even for a foreign passport. And she’d always believed that a decent dollop of exaggeration could only make a good story better.
‘Where’s Klaus tonight?’ Griet asked Gwen because she didn’t want to talk about the seriousness of Afrikaans literature any more, especially with someone who refused to laugh about it.
‘At marriage guidance,’ said Gwen so bitterly that Griet’s eyes darted to her face. ‘With his ex-wife.’
‘What for?’
‘You may well ask.’ Gwen sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. ‘Their son’s apparently psychologically disturbed. Not that one could blame the poor kid – with a father and a mother as different as Capitalism and Communism. Just think what an identity crisis you’d have if your mother were Dolly Parton and your father Fidel Castro.’
‘Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller.’
‘And look what happened to Marilyn Monroe.’
‘So they’ve decided to go to marriage guidance?’
‘To dig up the old skeletons and make sure they can’t be brought to life again.’
‘I thought marriage guidance was for marriage …’
‘They call it relationship counselling these days,’ explained Gwen, ‘because no one wants to get married any more.’
Klaus didn’t want to get married again, Gwen always said, because his divorce had been so messy. And she didn’t mind, she insisted staunchly, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to take such a radical step. In the meanwhile they’d lived together like a married couple for years.
‘How do you feel about it?’ asked Griet carefully, sounding unexpectedly like her shrink.
‘I’ve never felt so threatened in all my life.’ Gwen ran a distressed hand through her short hair. ‘No, I lie, I have. When I was in Standard Five and I had to go to a new school and no one wanted to be friends with me.’
‘But Gwen, it’s unthinkable that Klaus and his ex-wife would …’
‘Almost as unthinkable as it was a month ago that the Berlin Wall could be broken down overnight?’ Gwen smiled ruefully. ‘Have you seen the last Time? “Berliners embrace in disbelieving joy” is the headline on the cover story.’
An East Berliner, Griet had read in the paper this week, brought back two library books which he’d borrowed in West Berlin on 9 August 1961. ‘I couldn’t exactly throw the books over the Wall,’ was the greybeard’s apology. The books were Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and F.W. Foerster’s The Jewish Question. The library had apparently let him off the fine which amounted to more than five thousand rand.
‘Maybe they deserve each other, God knows they’re both emotional cripples.’ Gwen began to laugh at herself. ‘I know! I’m bitter because he never wanted to go to a shrink with me. I mean, it isn’t as though we never had our own problems. I want a child and he doesn’t want another one, and some time or other we’re going to have to do something about that. And now he’s in therapy with his former wife because of their son. Does that mean his son is more important to him than his relationship with me?’
Griet shook her head because she didn’t know what to say. Her own impending divorce seemed to have opened the floodgates of her friends’ unhappy secrets. She wondered if she still knew anyone who could live happily ever after with someone else.
I chucked orange juice at my husband last week [wrote Louise from London]. It was in the living room. I had a glass of juice in one hand and a knife in the other, and I opted for the juice. I still feel proud of my self-control. Then he chucked coffee at me. Luckily he wasn’t holding anything else, because he’d most likely have chosen the more lethal weapon. I think men do it automatically. Once they lose control, they lose it completely.
And now I’m battling to scrub the orange stains off the landlord’s white sofa. I don’t know what the Brits put into their orange juice, but it must be a kind of dye. I never thought I’d miss a washing powder, but I miss Omo!
PS: Do you still have so many men killing their own families?
Anton and Sandra, she thought sadly – she’d always been so sure of them. They’d started going out as students. Anton became an average advocate and Sandra was an average mother of two schoolchildren, and they were crazy about each other and their children and the big house where they were sure to live happily ever after.
But since she’d felt Anton’s hands on her hips, she wasn’t so sure any more. Maybe she was wrong, maybe her own lust made her unnecessarily suspicious. Maybe for ever after is just too long, too much to ask. Maybe one should only aim at a year or three.
‘Divorced men have unbelievably complex relationships with their children.’ She tried to dredge some consolation from her own limited experience. ‘It has to do with feelings of guilt and uncertainty and defensiveness and God knows what else.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Gwen, leaning her head back against the wall and closing her eyes. ‘I don’t know whether it’s worth the trouble any more.’
Jans looked around, his eyes glazed above his round spectacles. Griet raised her glass again to attract his attention. This time he noticed and, smiling with relief, pushed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.
‘“Some thirty thousand gods on earth we find, subjects of Zeus and guardians of mankind”,’ he said as he collapsed on to the floor beside them. ‘That’s according to Hesiod. And yet you can’t call on a single one to protect you against art exhibition openings.’
‘Or marriage therapy,’ smiled Griet.
‘Or relationships,’ said Gwen, opening her eyes again.