The next morning I drove over to Lyttelton in an understandably better mood than my pre-Klara days, except that a certain restlessness had taken hold of me. Maybe I just needed a holiday, I told myself, but it felt like it was more than that. Much more. Just to add to my woes, there was a car in the old man’s driveway, which was unsettling.
Once I’d negotiated his charging dog and its urinary ways I found him and Koos de Freitas’s minister son on the back apron, finishing their plastic coffee. Gerhard was tall and bald like his father, had bad skin like his tiny mother, and it didn’t help much that he represented a church I couldn’t help associating with unrelenting Afrikaner exclusivity, whereas we’d been working-class Methodists when we’d been anything. But it was his mother who had sat with mine and held her hand and prayed for her as the cancer had eaten away at her memory and bodily functions. One by one. Such people were angels, whatever their beliefs. Where do such people come from? Are these the “sisters of mercy” Leonard Cohen sings about so delicately? It had always struck me that Ma, in her often imperious way, had spoken down to Mrs de Freitas. But no. Here was a woman who had helped someone step into the unknown and, in the old man’s terminology, surely there had to be a “special place” for such beings.
“Gerhard,” I said. “How are you?”
“I rejoice in the grace of God,” he said calmly, standing up to shake my hand.
I don’t, I felt like saying, but nodded affirmatively and greeted the old man, who was dressed smartly again, but still minus my jacket.
“Hello, my boy,” he said.
“How are you?” Gerhard said.
“I am very well,” I lied under his gaze, sounding as two-faced as the old man to myself.
“That’s good,” Gerhard said softly. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Likewise.”
He was just about to leave and the old man, the dachshund and I accompanied him to his car. As he started reversing his dirty old Nissan Skyline the dog went ballistic. The old man told it to shut up, which it finally did, whereafter he walked up to the gate and shook Gerhard’s hand in that grovelling way he had towards people with any kind of authority. Then he closed the gates after him and came walking back to me.
“What was that all about?” I said.
“Nothing,” he replied vaguely.
“That didn’t look like a social visit.”
“I don’t know why everyone’s so worried about my soul,” the old man said. “I may not go to church, but I read my Bible, every day, hard as it is with the magnifying glass. But do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“I talk to the Old Man, all the time!”
“Good,” I said. “Lock up.”
“What for?”
“We’re going out for breakfast.”
“No,” he said automatically.
“Dad, I’m taking you out for breakfast.”
“Can the dog come?”
“No. And we won’t be long.”
He sighed deeply, shook his head and walked towards the house. Uncle Vern caught my eye, so we had a quick chat about his sons and their children – “Gosh, how time flies” – and exchanged phone numbers in case something serious befell his neighbour and I needed to be contacted, or vice versa. After that I joined the old man in what used to be the spare room, since he could no longer sleep in his and Ma’s old one because “It just doesn’t feel right”. He was struggling to get his one arm into the sleeve, so I helped him and asked him whether he didn’t like the jacket I’d bought him. He became very uncomfortable about that and all it really boiled down to was that it was too bulky for him.
“That’s fine, Dad. I’ll take it. I like it.”
“I’ll be so glad if you would. But don’t you want to look in my cupboard and see if there isn’t something you want?”
“But that’s not my style, either.”
He nodded, so we went through the struggle of finding the keys, locking up, bidding the dog farewell as if he wouldn’t see it again, ever, and headed towards the Irene Dairy Farm. Irene was a separate suburb that had always thought of itself as an English village and even had a typical cricket oval – though the people I knew there were Afrikaners from school days – and a golf course. It also had an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp cemetery, mentioning an unknown nurse, and, if you carried on with that road which ran parallel to the railway track, you could turn left at the village’s only four-way stop, dip under the railway line, turn right immediately again and head towards General Jan Smuts’s farm. The old man didn’t seem to connect that bit of information with his personal experiences over fifty years ago and let off steam about his usual topics.
Apart from the smell of cow dung and the sound of milk sheds, the farm had changed. In the old days it used to have a small dairy where you could bring your silver canisters or glass bottles and fill them with fresh Friesland milk. Now there was an additional balcony next to the shop where you could eat light stuff, and a separate barn, in a postmodern echo of the original homestead, from which you could buy a big Sunday meal and sit at tables al fresco. But there were so many people that we got a bit flustered and ended up at the open-air restaurant, which was noisy from the usual imposing music and the old man suddenly looked lost, frail, half blind. I took his dog-smelling arm and led him away to the balcony, warning him of the stairs, sitting him down.
It took him a while to calm down, but he didn’t lash out, as was his wont, maybe because that was not the kind of thing you did in public, which might be why he never went out. He just stayed at home (for about six decades) and lashed out from there, a massive hypocrisy from a man who supposedly hated it.
Now he sits there looking uncomfortable and I expect him to rail against the service or the waste of money eating out, but when the poached eggs, bacon, toast and coffee arrive he eats with his new, uncomfortable false teeth as if this is the first square meal he’s had since returning from the war.
“What’s the food like, dad?”
“This is the best breakfast I’ve ever had,” he says, as discerning as ever.
“Good,” I say, thinking of Klara, missing her in my highly evolved way, and the rest of the meal is civil.
But after our second coffee he was restless again, as restless as I’d become, so we drove back via the narrow poplar lane crossing a bucolic bridge, popular and conveniently close to Johannesburg to feature in those car ads with their multi-cuts per second. Beyond that a golf estate had sprung up, containing more pseudo-Tuscan nightmares, and beyond it Centurion Mall, living its last-bastion dream before becoming what it should have been in the first place: an African marketplace.
So we took in a bit of highway, passed the cemetery (he still didn’t feel right to go visit Ma) and for some reason made a small detour via Monument Avenue, so named because if you stood in parts of it and looked north, like Oom Paul Kruger on Church Square, you could see the Voortrekker Monument in the hazy bushveld distance. How clever, I’d thought a long time ago. And if you stand at a particular point on the tar between Cantonments and Langebrink streets, looking north, and turn right, you will see the face-brick church in which I’d been baptised and confirmed as a teen, affirming my faith in God loudly and clearly so the old man could hear, even though we all knew I was lying through my teeth.
Then I took him home to his dog, who understood everything.