“Where are we going?” the old man said.
“To the cemetery,” I responded, steeling myself for the canine request. Once that was dealt with we drove past the school and nearby hospital where he and I had signed off my mother’s corpse. The nurse had been a Zen-Buddhist in disguise, for she had been cheerful and told us to come and say goodbye. The old man burst into tears as he saw his late wife staring sightlessly at the ceiling with one eye. The nurse chatted away and closed that glassy eye as he God-blessed his wife. Women don’t die, I’d always thought, and I’d been right. My mother wasn’t dead, or gone; she had just changed. I’d kissed her waxen forehead – the aching flame extinguished – and consoled him that he’d had half a century with her, which he accepted.
Now we were passing Centurion City on the way, that selfsame mall I’d taken my mother to during my post-Germiston depression for a cup of coffee. I had told her that I had found that business of the tenant very confusing and that I thought the old man was a coward at life. She had told me that nothing had happened between her and that woman and that “You’re a full-grown man now. Leave us alone and don’t you ever dare say a word against him,” she’d said, crying.
That had been the end of that fact-finding mission and reminded me of a funeral we’d gone to in Jan Kempdorp, a hard, dry, stony place in the Northern Cape. I must have been about seven and Ma – the reluctant realist – had told me to come and say goodbye to Oom Jan, the old man’s uncle. They had opened his coffin to that vast sky, but I didn’t want to see a dead man, burst into tears and ran to where the men were standing and talking, leaning against a Studebaker. Grim men, the sides of their heads shaven clean. The old man said I didn’t have to go and say goodbye to the last connection to his father, and the ensuing silence of the other men very clearly said Sonnie was being much too soft on his dark, pudgy son.
Back in the present the cemetery was a feast of heartfelt kitsch, ranging from immortalised photographs of children to shared plots and biblical quotes, but time showed what it thought of such folly as photos became damp, graves tilted, cracked, caved in or sank. I was once again impressed with a school friend’s grave, though, which had a cabbage tree growing out of his belly.
Now we approached the plot of the old man’s late wife. Part of the ritual was for me to clean that heavy slab of granite above Ma’s presumably indifferent bones, after which he always delivered his deep and penetrating rhyme: “Here I stand where you used to be/there you lie where soon I will be.”
Ma had seen the two-for-the-price-of-one plots advertised in the local rag and had told me about it with a little chuckle, which was her way of saying she hated the thought, but certain things simply had to be done. That had been twenty years ago; now it was ten years after her death and I still thought she warranted more than just “Lovingly Remembered”. She deserved at least a shrine for having put up with the old man for so long.
Surrounding her were many of the people at whose funerals, children’s weddings and baptisms she’d sung. A few graves away a man stood weeping silently over a daughter who had died twenty-five years ago.
By now I had filled a plastic bucket with water and started wiping Ma’s gravestone with one of his old T-shirts, noticing that many of the brass letters on her neighbour’s grave had been removed, and said so.
“Bastards,” the old man said.
The church had been packed with people I hadn’t seen in decades. Lying in that box up front was my mother. The old man had sat very straight up, showing nothing and only once emitting a little squeak. A trio of friends sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ with trembling voices, the sound caused more by age than grief. Sitting and standing next to me was one of those old ducks who see the good in everything and sing perfectly out of tune. I wanted to burst out laughing very loudly.
That was the time of Halley’s Comet, when it rained for weeks on end, as if the very heavens were weeping for a woman who had stuck with a man through five very thin decades – and made something of it.
“I went to a funeral this week,” I proffered lamely, even though it had been a memorial for Robert Louis Amato – husband, father, friend, writer, educator, intellectual all-rounder, free spirit – wringing the rag.
“I hate funerals,” the old man said empathetically. “When I die I don’t want any singing and I don’t want any flowers.”
“Why not?”
“Flowers are meant to stay in the ground. And I want Gerhard to bury me.”
“Why him?”
“Because.”
“And why no singing?”
“Because the only person who could do it is lying there.”
I wrung the rag, emptied the brown water over someone else’s flowers before I realised they were plastic, and asked him why he was so deep in thought.
“You know, something’s been worrying me lately.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“I wonder if she was ever unfaithful to me on all those trips overseas.”
“You’ve only thought about that now?” I said incredulously.
“Ja.”
“But what does it matter now? She’s dead.”
The old man nodded, saying they’d been very different, “but we got on. When we were alone, we got on.”
“Are you saying I was a cause of friction?”
“Not you. Other people. We always fought in front of other people.”
“Even her father.”
“Oh, him. I couldn’t stomach him.”
That old man had been my only grandparent and the old man had poisoned me against him to such an extent that I’d been – to my eternal regret and shame – openly contemptuous of him. When he’d died I’d been unable to console Ma or express any kind of sympathy to a woman who had looked after her mother and then her “useless” father, while her siblings went on to varsity and professional careers. I hadn’t even attended the old man’s funeral, such was my acquired hatred of him.
“I feel really bad about him.”
“He was a fat, lazy coward. But worst of all, he was Ossewa-Brandwag. He was one of John Vorster’s hangers-on, and Vorster was a Nazi, a terrorist. He was blowing up railway lines here in sympathy with those bastards while I was prepared to die fighting against them. But when the time came for Vorster to be interned, your Oupa was nowhere to be found. He denied ever having anything to do with the OBs.”
But he could have told me so many stories, I thought. He who lived in that residential hotel with its dim passages, odours of limp cabbage and echoes of ignored voices. He had been a large, besuited man in a small, panelled room, which included a tiny basin and mirror inside a cupboard. Oupa contributed to the olfactory claustrophobia by producing a small, round silver tin of snuff, from which he and the old man would take a pinch, inhale and sneeze. The stuff looked and smelled as dark brown as the panelled walls and I couldn’t wait to get out of that room, even if my namesake called me Napoleon.
But stay we would, and I was always convinced of Oupa’s inferiority because when he rubbed an itchy eye his protruding tongue went back and forth like a windscreen wiper across his chin. And if he did try to tell a good-time story, the old man would interrupt and start one of those mock-friendly family arguments in which I happily participated, even though I could see Oupa and his daughter’s discomfort. Thinking back on our family arguments today still made me cringe. After all, hadn’t I dreamed that he was actually just a good-time guy taking me to a rugby match at Ellis Park? He who now lay a hundred metres east from the daughter who had tended to him for decades, who had even ended up spoiled in the afterlife: his grave was one of the few resting in the shade of an acacia. It formed the apex of an imaginary triangle, for it was also east of the heroes’ plot with its pseudo-Nazi insignia of squared eagle wings, cement ox-wagon wheels and torches, their eternal plastic flames faded and cracked by the indifferent sun.
I silently said goodbye to Ma and drove a roundabout route to the exit, stopping at my grandfather’s stone. The old man stayed put as I got out and gave my late Oupa’s grave a quick wipe, remembering a rumour I’d once heard that he’d been a bit of a womaniser himself. Back in the car the old man said it pleased him greatly that he was now officially older than “that fat, lazy bastard” had been.