As usual, Kay fell asleep and, as usual, I didn’t. After about two hours of duvet boxing I had to go for a pee and saw a rather bulky African necklace, which dozily bothered me, above her washbasin. I decided I was going to be sleepless in my own house, where I fretted.
If I had failed to prove to my mother that I could succeed as an artist, then I was dead on track to do more of the same with the old man. Had I more or less ended up the same way as him, stuck in a job that employed about five per cent of my potential?
It would seem so, I thought, driving towards him, listening to the opening of the so-called harp quartet’s first movement, realising it could be as if someone was waking up slowly, washing, getting dressed, locking up, getting into the car, driving through the suburbs and hitting the highway as the out-of-character adagio breaks and bursts into delighted pizzicatos for what is, after all, supposed to be a brisk movement. You’re alive, you’re moving and the man is cajoling you onwards, popping in and out of styles and eras, but always himself, always true to the centre of the piece, building up a good, complex head of steam. Now that you’re fully awake you can indulge in the real adagio, a progressive sermon for what is, you recall, a Sunday, ending as it does on what could easily be the breathless departure of gentle Jesus’ soul from this earth. But we’ve also been primed for the presto, bursting with comedic, cascading vim. There is a tiny break and we move on to some lusty, Bach-like hacking, giving the viola its mellow voice, then letting the cellist tap away as if he’s a rock bassist. The final rush is frenetic before it ends with a polite, gently ironic, conclusion.
The old man is standing at the gates of 123 Harry Smith and after we’ve gone through the usual rituals I ask him what happened after the Russians liberated him from the camp.
“Two friends and I slipped away, walked to Brussels and flew to England. There I had to wait for the ship. I thought it would take a few days but it went on for weeks. So every day I went for these long walks. And every day the dogs from the neighbourhood would join me and follow me until I had a whole bunch of them behind me. I’d do the circuit twice so that they could stop off at their houses again and I’d get back to the base without a single dog.”
“Is that it?”
“I saw a woman one day …”
“What, an English rose?”
“Ja.”
“And?”
“Nothing. The ship was leaving.”
“Were you glad to see Africa again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you stop?”
“Lagos. Cape Town.”
“How exotic.”
“We weren’t allowed off in Nigeria and I didn’t even bother to get off the ship in Cape Town.”
“Amazing. And when you got to Durban?”
“My mother and sisters were waiting for me.”
“Were you glad to see them?”
“My mother’s hair, which used to be dark brown, had turned the colour of ash.”
“What did you do at home?”
“I was there for a week or two and then I was posted to Springs.”
“What did you do there?”
He had worked in the state mortuary, where he’d sometimes have to dive out corpses from the lake.
“As you grabbed them their skin would come off.”
“Charming”
“Someone had to do it.”
“And?”
“That lasted for about a year before I was posted back to the college in Pretoria.”
“Is that when your nose got broken?”
“Ja,” the old man said.
“And the other guy?”
“I broke his jaw.”
“Why did you fight?”
“He insulted me.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did it have anything to do with Ma?”
“No.”
“Because that’s where you met her, not so? “Ja.”
One of his extra duties had been to work as a barman in the officers’ mess.
“Even though you don’t drink.”
“Not a drop. Ever.”
“And then?”
“She was standing by the piano, singing …”
“Why are you pulling your face like that?”
“Because she had a drink on the piano, and a burning cigarette.”
“So why did you marry her?”
“Because her mother told me to.”
“Dad, that’s not a very good reason to marry a woman!”
The old man just juddered his left foot and picked his right thumb nail.
“So you got married and rented in Wonderboom South, where you met the De Freitases.”
“Ja.”
The old man had actually worked with Koos de Freitas, whom he said he couldn’t stomach, like everyone else, but Ma and his wife, Jasmine, had remained friends forever. The young families had lived on the steep slopes of that white, working-class suburb, a part of the Magalies range that separated the Highveld and the Bushveld proper, leading all the way up to Messina, the then Rhodesia and the rest of Africa, which of course didn’t exist at the time. The De Freitases had had a son who became a Dutch-Reformed minister and two daughters who had become teachers, typical Afrikaner aspirations of the time.
“Then you came here.”
“Ja.”
It was almost time for me to go so I said let’s go and do the dishes and we went inside. He was rattling on about how the dishes were supposed to be cleaned when I suddenly remembered coming back from my OT in Europe, having taken a year-long break in my so-called studies. I had caught a bus to Pretoria, then the train to Lyttelton via the Fountains, Kloofzicht and Sportpark with the last of my money. My mother had been on the phone when I arrived a week early, as a surprise, and rang off in that voice of hers that got louder when she was happy or stressed. When the old man got home, I’d been standing at this sink and we’d embraced each other, the only time we ever did so in my adult life. His hair had gone snow white.
“But you know,” he came back to where he lived, “I’m not moving again. Ever. People can go and see the world if they want to, but the only place I want to be is here. This place has the best weather in the world. This is my house and I’m staying here until I die.”
“And what if you can’t look after yourself anymore?”
“Then I’ll chase a bullet through my head.”