The Rowing Lesson (13 page)

The postmark is quite symmetrical—two circles with George uppermost, the date and time—29 VIII 39— 11.15. You look at the stamp, with the five wavy lines of the postmark running through it. It’s a tall ship in full sail, one of the old ships that docked at the Cape on its way to the Dutch East Indies. Suddenly you realize how carefully it’s drawn, how precise the lines are, of the little grey ship against a carefully lined grey sky. It’s sailing in an oval, with a deep pink border filled in with white leaves, South Africa in small white letters above, and the postage—1d.—below. The “one” is bolder than all the other letters.

Collector’s items, you whisper, as you lock the ship in the drawer (with the other letters), and hang the key on a nail inside your wardrobe. You make a promise never ever to lose these letters, this envelope, with the ship in full sail, and never ever to forget the weather of the day your father’s life ended (cold and wet), which was also the day before the Germans marched into Poland. No one is allowed to touch the key, or the letters, or the drawer. Ever.

Chapter 10

Last week you had to come to class with your bathing costume under your clothes. Professor Clark told you all to take your clothes off and you stood in two lines, facing each other. He spoke quietly, chastely. A medical man, a scientist. Dorothy May had spots on, and you wanted to pant in her soft ear, you wanted to tear off the strap of her spotted bathing costume. But it wasn’t your turn. One of the Ossewabrandwag boys got her, and you watched as he felt around in the acromial region for the deltoid, as he traced her humerus from the top to the bottom. You didn’t even notice the chap who was fingering you, whose breath stank of sausages. Brachialis anticus, supinator radii longus, extensor carpi radialis longor.
Oseh shalom bi-m’romav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru amen.

This is where the dead teach the living. The first week of Anatomy 1 is gone, behind you, a bright bubble of bathing costumes and bony (mostly boys’) bodies, and Professor Clark’s long line across the giant blackboard, ending up almost at the door. This line is the duration of human history, he bugled, gesturing at the white chalk stripe snaking across the room. At the end of the line, he stopped, raising his monkey-tail eyebrows. This part, he said, isolating a four-inch segment on the grand trail of history, chalk sifting onto the floor, is what we know about. (This was after he hopped like a toad, crawled across the floor like a crocodile, swung his arms like an ape and scampered behind his desk to emerge, walking erect, Australopethicus africanus!)

He’s the chappie who found the skulls. He’s rewriting the world, and all the things therein, Maxie was saying. You’re singing “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.” The girls’ breasts are heaving under their tunics, lifting whole continents. You’re on the other side of the Outeniqua Mountains. Maxie’s in your ear, lips to lobe. Wake up, man!

But no crawling, man-bird Professor Skullfinder prepared you for the terrible smell in the long dissecting hall. Hell’s teeth, man, you told Mickey, clinking beers in the Pig ’n Whistle later that day. It’s a smell that has wings and feet. The sweet stench of the formalin settles inside you, inside your nostrils, at the back of your throat. It cloaks your socks, your notes, your hair. It stays with you, and it leaves with you. You’re a marked man, Harry. Mickey pushes his chair back a little, as if he’s downwind, catching a whiff of it. You’re buggered.

The hall is so bright, your eyes squeak in their sockets. White tiles march from the floor to the ceiling. Inside this upside down chamber of tiles, are two rows of concrete slabs, with the dead resting on them, draped under formalin-soaked cloths, covered by rubber sheets. Professor Clark is barking like a seal in Table Bay and he wants you to sail in groups of eight, four at the bow, four at the stern. It used to be six men to a cadaver but now it’s eight and some of them aren’t even men. Dorothy’s in your group, which is bad luck, since you would rather have her in her bathing-costume than at the helm, her leg twitching so fast it’s making the rubber sheet jiggle. In fact, most of the chaps are twitching inside their coats, stricken with a sort of hysterical cold, an agitated ready-to-go. Most of them have never even seen a naked woman before, dead or alive.

There’s a gutter around the slab, and your eyes rests there, thinking and not thinking, held in this bitter bright cold, held in the antechamber before the Valley of the Shadow of Death, thinking and not thinking of Joseph Klein, Merchant, stopped under the shop, here but not here.

A cherry-red Anglican priest, frocked and collared, murmurs The Earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof, and The Lord is my Shepherd, a funeral of sorts for the dead sheep under the rubber sheets. Professor Clark is next to him, shifting faces again, man to ape, ape to man, man-bird to jackal. The meek shall inherit the earth. And these poor buggers have inherited us, one of the white coats at your table speaks, a cracked thread tossed in the air, hanging loose, then vanishing. The red priest has his hands clasped around his King James Bible as if he’s trying to press one of the stories back into life, as if he could make the blinding white tiles disappear and the dead sit up. But he’s gone before they even try.

Professor Clark scrabbles for food on the veld, cowers in the wake of a thunderstorm, showing poor Australopethicus struck by the weakness of his jaws, the thinness of his hide. But then he picks up a piece of chalk with his curled opposable thumb and draws the brain on the blackboard, an organ the size of a small and intricate cake. Africa always offers something new. In this case, gentlemen, it was man.

There’s a ripple in the white coats, a tide of shifting feet, disbelief, awe. That’s when he asks you all to remove the cloths from the cadavers and the room is suddenly very silent. The cloths are lifted, and there’s a very large, black woman on the slab in front of you, her head shaved, her pubus shaved. But there is no blackness left in her, just as there is no whiteness in the cadaver on your left, a very old, very thin man the colour of yellow rubber. You notice that the room is suddenly new, that no one’s the same anymore. This is the first woman’s body you have ever really looked at. (There was no looking at Koeka. It was all hurry, and blunder, bits of her racing past, in pieces you lost just as quickly as it happened.)

Dorothy is standing at the head, and she has her face tipped down. Maxie’s winking at you from the cadaver’s toes. The other five chaps, three English fellows, two Afrikaners, look a bit seasick although the boat is so still you could weep. You meet their eyes in the center, all eight of you arranged around the navel, your heads bobbing with the effort of looking and not looking, at the mountainous breasts, spread wide and flat, the ridge of the pubus, the deep set of the vaginal lips in their long unsmiling smile. The skin is a shadow, a blue-grey slide into a part of you that knows only cold, only terror.

Professor Clark tiptoes-triptoes between the slabs, motioning the white coats to cover their cadavers with the formalin-soaked cloths, putting them back to sleep all over again. Four of you are going into the upper body, the other four will enter below the navel. We’ll uncover only those parts to be dissected. The body should never be allowed to dry out and the wrappings have to be renewed and moistened, as needed. Gentlemen, the tools of the trade. Inside your pocket, you feel for the leather container containing the picklike probe, the forceps, the scalpel and the scissors Uncle Oscar paid for. The
ghommas
are beating, and the carnival is about to start. You can see the white tiles dancing and tumbling.

Professor Clark is whispering, so you have to say, What? What? to follow. Lay down your traditional weapons, chaps. (One of the English fellows actually heard him!) Uncover the thorax. It’s just a tour now, a trip from the costal groove to the xiphoid process, outlining the borders of the lungs, palpating the clavicles. The land surveyor is up on the breast with his instruments and he’s looking you right in the eyeball. Don’t worry, the pick hasn’t picked a thing, and the forceps and scalpel are still. Professor Skullfinder is up your sleeve asking you, Present, absent, symmetrical? Present, sir, you say, Harry Klein, sir. I mean the mammary glands, Mr. Klein. I know you’re here or am I bloody dreaming?

Mammary, mammalian. Mama, for short. He’s looking at you, his eyebrows bent like seagull wings, as if he’s observing a hairless primate on the veld. Mammary mammal. Her breasts (more like elephant ears) are on skew, the left smaller than the right, the nipples thumbing something rude that you can’t hear. He’s cutting into the skin of one of these shrunken flaps, and the chaps on the boat almost fall overboard but they laugh as they cling to the sides of the boat, calling her
Grootouma
, Great Grandma. Dorothy is now so sharp and thin she could cut
Grootouma
with her fingernails, and the thin, trembling wires of her hair. Professor Skullfinder is picking you with his pick, the instrument waving inches away from your own thorax. Yes, sir. You’re going to show this bastard that you’re not afraid of his picking, his poking, and his cutting. You saw how carefully he lifted the skin, leaving the fat behind, how he rested his hand on
Grootouma
as he sliced through. You’re all eyes and hands now, and the rest of you is finished, something scooped off a plate and thrown into the rubbish bin.

These are the structures, Professor Skullfinder is saying, holding a breast in his hand which must be worth ten in the bush. None of you (except Dorothy May, of course, who wears her own strapped tight and hidden), has ever look-looked at a woman’s breast before, let alone what’s under the rest of the stinking sheet. The other lookings were secret and furious; your aunties’ titties flipping in and out of their clothes inside the yellow hut at Muizenberg beach, the barely budded ones of girls at school, the blinding minutes with Koeka’s rough ones, her sad walls, everything not hers.

You half-expect Skullfinder to put
Grootouma
’s breast on top of his head, and wear it like a beret, the nipple sticking up like a twist of black wool. But he gives it to you, and, as you hold this old woman’s tittie, the world stops. The Germans even stop.

These are the tiny pathways carrying a mother’s milk, the lactiferous ducts. They converge at the nipple, each one capable of spraying a thin fountain of milk into the mouth of a baby. Skullfinder tells you that there are between fifteen and twenty of them. You have to find each one, and clean it. He shows you how, with his fingers and the blunt end of the scalpel. The saliva pools in your mouth as you watch him work, miracle fingers trippling through these delicate feeding wires. There’s Ebb ’n Flow, where the river begins, folded into the dense bush, the trickle curling it’s way out of that lobe of glandular tissue. And here’s where it opens into the sea. . . .

You carefully clean out each pathway, each root of this fatty, collapsed flower. Christiaan, one of the barefoot Afrikaner chaps, mutters,
Hy’t jou klein handtjies gesien.
He saw your small hands.
Ek het die vet gekry
. I got the fat. Poor Christiaan is emptying out the breast compartments, tables, chairs and even the sagging old couch. The glinting tools are dull and slithery now and the liquid seeping out of the body is in the gutter around the slab. Now you can see what sort of a canal it really is. Something’s in your mouth, suddenly, and you spit and spit into your hanky. Your lips clamp shut, locked forever in an airless grin that you will use every time you bend over a body, alive or dead.

Professor Skullfinder nods from across the room at Dorothy. Miss May is going to make the parasagittal cut through the nipple, gentlemen. You almost feel sorry for her as her shaking hand slices through the black knob but then it’s all swept away by the blaze of understanding how the damn thing stands up on its own! Look at the smooth muscles, arranged in a circle. You’re thinking of clams and sea anemones, and all the sea creatures that circle and tighten, circle and tighten and trap. The other chaps are glued to the nipple and Dorothy says, Excuse me, and she leaves. She comes back a few moments later, her face blotchy, her hair somehow knotted and pulled away from her face. I’ve got tissue in my hair, she says, but only
Grootouma
is listening. Serves you right, you’re thinking. Already Skullfinder told her she was such a clever girlie that her leg almost shook off.

You’re looking up into the air as you insert your fingers into the retromammary space. Girls like Dorothy will do anything to get what they want, to take what doesn’t belong to them. You’re feeling the breast from the inside out, finding the suspensory ligaments, in what direction the fibres run. She’s poking at
Grootouma
, looking under the other breast, murmuring how you can separate it from the fascia of the pectoralis major. Doesn’t she know that these are secret words, that you can’t just say them like that? She’s not the kind of girl you take to the Bohemian Club, whose skirts flap with promise, magenta lips circled around a cigarette, eyes slanted at you like a fake movie star. Dorothy’s behind you, then she’s next to you, and now she’s overtaking you, carrying
Grootouma
’s jelly breast flopping all over her hands across the finish line.

When Maxie comes over and tells you what the other chaps have done, you don’t even laugh. It’s too funny. You twist your lips and two tight little dimples quiver in your fresh cheeks. Won’t Skullfinder find out?

Ag
no. He’s too busy with what’s left of
Grootouma
’s titties, packing them away nicely in a formalin-soaked bag, for future reference. He’s talking about how much bigger they must have been when
Grootouma
was young, how they shrank, bit by bit, each time she suckled a baby. And how many babies did she have, gentlemen, by the size of what was, and what’s now left behind? Two or five, or more than seven? He’s taking you back to the Western Cape of a million years ago and you can’t even imagine that
Grootouma
wore a dress, or cleaned somebody’s kitchen. One of the Ossewabrandwag boys says that his pa shot the Bushmen on his farm like monkeys, and yes, it’s now really true, he was right all the time except how could they be the first people when it was Adam and the apple in the beginning, not hotnots.