The Rowing Lesson (21 page)

Star-spangled stairs, the nurses of yesteryear floating past in their capes, singing “Silent Night.” I sat on your shoulders like a prize, an important hat. Today I’m still special, the doctor’s daughter, the same nurses bobbing and smiling at us as we walk the halls. That’s Sarie Boshof, Ma says to me as we turn a corner and practically bump into a white uniform.

The nurse has a crisp part in her brown hair, a careful ponytail. She’s a patient of your father’s, Ma says. Her mother was the one with porphyria, the royal urine. I look at Sarie as if I’m as old as Noah. Hello Dr. Klein, she says. Hello Mrs. Klein. You must be Betsy. Your father is always talking about you and now here you are, in the flesh.
Sy’s baie slim, nê?
She’s the clever one.

She has pain in her abdomen, Ma explains. The pain’s pain lifts me onto its shoulders. I can still see everything just the way I used to, but from a position of vast superiority. Hey, remember how you used to bring her to the hospital on Christmas Eve, to listen to the carol singing?
Ag,
shame man, she was just a
lightie
. You give her one of your special Christmas box smiles, trimmed with that special ha-haah laugh. Of course I remember, nursie.

I walk into one of the X-ray rooms between you and Ma, a prisoner of my own plucking. She hands me a hospital gown, always the drabbest, saddest kind of dress. My hands shiver as I tie a long bow in the back. I’m still shivering when she tells me to climb onto the table and hold myself in the foetal position. Sarie flits around the room like a black-and-white butterfly, in case you need her. I can see her out of the corner of the eye pressed closest to my right knee. Funny how body parts drift apart, disassemble, how the foot is a stranger to the ear, how the eye won’t have anything to do with the buttock.

I lie there as still as a quagga, turned into a fascinating skin for someone’s floor, the very quietest of Snufflies. When you insert a tube into my rectum for the barium to pass through, the table sinks beneath me, my mouth falls down. In the close dark, I find myself looking at a giant squid in a giant case in an immense museum. The museum guards are all nurses, singing “Silent Night” silently as the barium spread like a red tide. I close my giant squid eyes while Ma takes the X-rays, just the way she used to when she worked at Groote Schuur.

Sarie Boshof, sampler of my shame, denizen of my knee cap, mote in my sad squid eye. She could be in the room with you right now, counting your bad numbers, watching the clicking, spitting machines draw pictures of your heart.
Ag,
shame man.
Ag foeitog.

Later, when you and Ma examine the pictures, you notice a slight distension in the splenic flexure. You end up taking me to First Prize, a fancy surgeon by now and Chief Family Operator. He’s removed a benign cyst from one of Ma’s breasts, cutting and sewing his way through brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces and in-laws. He welcomes me with his trademark, a shrill whistle right into the ear, echoes of Uncle Wolfie. Then he examines me and spends several moments staring at the X-rays. If it is a hairball, maybe it will pass right through, he says, in his soft, sing-songy voice. Keep an eye on it.

For a few days, you inspect my stools but you can’t see anything. I stop complaining about the pain in my abdomen. All my animals are in perfect order, thank you very much, the Snufflies mixing nicely with the squid, the quagga and some of the lesser vertebrates.

When I go to have my hair cut, I ask the hairdresser to cut it very short, like a boy’s.

The animals prefer it that way and so do you. Ma says I look more beautiful than ever, and that she can see my eyes, finally. My eyebrows are almost gone by now but I can see my whole face in the mirror, white and luminous like an egg.

What about the gastric lavaaage? I ask, making my voice plummy and droll. It sounds like a special beauty treatment. Am I going to have one of those too? You say, No lavaaage for you, my dear.

Off to the nunnery!

Chapter 17

Simon and I are posted like sentries on either side of your bed, and now the machines are shooting at us, spit balls and paper planes that land on our eyebrows and in our hair. You’ve finally had enough.

When I bend over to see if you’re still breathing, the blood-pressure cuff slips from your arm onto mine, and pulls my arm back so quickly and fiercely that I hit myself in the face. Simon’s struggling with the cords of the IV wrapping his legs and his feet and pinning his arm to his sides. He’s pulling the tubes with both hands but it’s hard to break free.

Your pillows are filling up then emptying out, like giant white bladders. Your sheets are shifting and flapping, sails on a boat that’s coming around. I can hardly see in the blizzard of spit and piss that’s flying around the room. Simon, I’m shouting but he can’t hear a word I’m saying. The sphygmomanometer is hissing and wheezing like a child with croup.

You’re in the eye of the storm, a wan smile playing on your lips. Look, Simon! I’m pointing at your amused face through the gauze of fluids and solids floating past. But Simon’s buckling over, stumbling out of the room, the largest spitball landing squarely on the back of his head.

You are my strongest child, you once said, handing me a case of wine to carry into the house. Well, I’m going to show you all over again. You put the machines up to this, and I’m not afraid of them or of you.

In the half-dark, the cords twirl one last time, and then finally shudder and settle. The air is clear now, and a deep quiet flows into the room. All the machines are shinier than ever before. You’re still alive, even though the spaces between your breaths are longer and longer. I notice that my teeth are chattering, that my hands and feet as cold as blocks of ice. “Not talking = madness,” you wrote, and now it’s come true.

* * *

THE OLD PAIN is spreading, a spring-tide covering the beach, edging up the shoreline, lapping at the rough grass, finding its way onto the stoeps of the beach houses. But where’s Maisie? The tide is rushing towards you and you’re running now, looking for her everywhere. There’s a plane roaring overhead and you look up and there she is in the sky with Ronald, her husband, and they’re flying over the Du Toit’s Kloof mountains.

Everybody else drives over the mountain but Maisie’s different. She flies. The chicken is stringy and Stella’s upset, pacing and shouting because they’re late, late, late. She’s a woman who eats by the clock, a woman who respects the twin needles of time. Maisie and husband Ronald land at the Worcester aerodrome and we’re all there to watch them land. No, we’re not staying for lunch or for tea or for supper, they say. We have to fly before dark, before the sun goes down and we crash right into the side of the mountain. They don’t even offer you a ride, a loop-de-loop over the Breede River, and the patchwork farms. They plop me on the wing and take one, two, three pictures which they send years later in a foreign envelope, airplane wing girl with bow in her hair, nine years old. You and Ma, Simon and I stare up at the sky like village idiots as they disappear again, with a bellow from the plane’s engine and a breezy wave.

She loves me, she loves me not. The sound of the sea is deafening, and you can hear Arnold Toynbee above the noise, with his grand pronouncement, The Jews are the fossils of history! Bloody anti-Semite, sticking it to the Jews like that. We’re not a dead civilization, no matter what Mr. Hitler tried to do to us!

Your voice is coming out the old wireless radio at Chantry. She loves me, she loves me not. I’m a fossil, I’m not a fossilwww . . . Sssssh. . . . zzzzz. . . . Wheeee . . . V for Victory! May 7th, 1945. Germany surrenders! But the war’s not completely over. England’s on the air, all ravaged and torn. “The evil-doers are now prostrate before us . . . But let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.” If I live long enough to eat Mother Bun’s chopped herring and sticky
taiglach
, none of you buggers are going to stop me from fighting this war, from going as far east as I can.

AND YOU’RE NOT going to stop me from taking the boat up the river either, you tell Stella, who is watching you from her beach chair on the lawn of the Fairy Knowe Hotel, her face set in an attitude of grim concern, a plastic-covered library book rustling in her lap.

It took you almost an hour to get the boat into the water, Dumbleton’s grandson, directing you from the little beach, as you backed your car with the boat-trailer hooked onto it towards the river. The wheels of the trailer slowly inched backwards into the mud. It took all your strength to release the winch and let the boat glide into the water. You wouldn’t let the boy help you with that although you took his arm as you climbed into the boat from the jetty. Fuel-pump check. Oars check. Oarlocks, check, check. Once you left one behind.

It’s May 7th, 1997, old chap. Fifty-two years to the day after Germany surrendered! You tell this to one of those black, long-beaked birds sitting on the skeleton of a tree on the opposite bank, watching you as you gear up to start the engine. Simon used to do this, in the old days. His kids must be old enough to help you by now. You can’t remember when last they were here. Was it before you got sick? Before the operation to take out the bad piece of your colon, the inflamed train, hell on wheels?

You pull the cord to start the motor. It doesn’t snap tight the way it used to, and fire the little five-and-a-half horsepower engine. There’s no putt-putt, no whiff of petrol, no sound of churning water just the empty, whirring of the cord, motion without action. You look up, briefly. Even the clouds are stacking up against you. You take the handle in your hand again, inhale, pull . . . downstroke, upstroke, downstroke . . . The motor’s still dead. You bend over, squeeze the bulb on the petrol tank, giving the engine a little more juice. Stella gets up, leaving the book in the chair. She stands at the edge of the lawn, a few steps away from the wooden jetty, her arms folded across her chest. She doesn’t want you to go. She doesn’t want to worry about whether you’ll come back or not.

The river is very full, you tell her. I wonder how far up Ebb ’n Flow I can take the boat. She says, I still don’t think you should go. You take the cord between both hands and pull as hard as you can. Stella bites the dust. She has to eat her words. Downstroke, upstroke . . .

Dead. Rage is blackening the sky, the river, the other boats. Get away from me! Go sit in your bloody chair! The Dumbleton boy, who’s been working on a boat at the other end of the jetty, looks up at you, as if you called him. It’s flooded, you pant. Have to wait. Stella’s back at her post, the book in front of her like a shield. For an instant, you see a column of smoke rising from her. Jesus Christ! She’s smoking again! Remember that slip of a girl, smoking like mad, a laugh as big as a house. I’m going to grab in and take those tonsils out, you used to say. I can see them from here.

Then you remember that she hasn’t smoked a cigarette since 1965. Not that you miss the cigarettes, mind you. You were one of the first doctors in Worcester to tell your patients to stop smoking. You grew to hate Stella’s cigarettes, the sour ashtrays, stale air in every corner of the house. She got so sick one winter, wheezing and coughing for weeks, that you finally said to her, You have a choice, Stella. Smoke or breathe.

She gave up, and gained inches and pounds for all the lost smoke. Maybe that’s when her laugh evaporated too. Or maybe it happened when the last child left home. Was it when they stopped having New Year’s Eve dances at the Wilderness Hotel? The fire that burned down the old buildings? The new management? Maybe it was the new management everywhere, shopkeepers, salespeople and chemists younger than your own children, not to mention women doctors, women lawyers, women everything. Remember how you hated the way Dorothy May’s leg jiggled, how it was never still? She became professor of medicine somewhere, didn’t she? You pull the cord in a fury. Bloody fucking bitch!

There’s a sharp pain on your left side. Dammit. You sit down on one of the wooden seats, your legs crossed under you, purpling varicose veins threaded through your calves. All I want to do is take the boat up the river, putt-putting between the canoes and the swimmers, the rope-swingers and the same old birds on the trees. Have a heart, chaps. Have a heart.

Stella is talking to the Dumbleton boy, and she’s pointing at you. Jesus Christ, woman. It’s not that bad. She’s still pointing, as if you’re lost at sea. I’m still here, chaps, alive and kicking. You almost wave and make a face at them but that would let her know that you noticed. You make a point of staring at the sky, folding your arms. I could be swotting for the seventh degree. I could be writing my speech for the annual Lodge dinner. Stella hates those dinners. She hates it all.

Now the little bastard is coming over to tell you something. He’s still wet behind the ears, but he towers over you already. He’s going to be at least six foot two, Marfan syndrome or not. In two long strides, he’s in the boat next to you, folded over the engine. With a quick flick of his arm, he gets the motor started. There are tears in your eyes. Thank you, old chap. He gets out of the boat quickly, ducks away.

He bloody well saved my life and doesn’t even know it. I wonder if old Dumbleton is a Freemason. In Stella’s old house, the orange-and-black manx cat twitches in front of the wireless, rubbing against the corded fabric of the speaker, listening to the Yanks roaring The War’s over! in Times Square. Now she’s behind the cabinet, looking for Americans buried in there. An unearthly yowl erupts. The heart of the city is breaking. Stella, her brothers, her uncles, her aunts, babies and grannies, the Old Man and Mother Bun stop in mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-everything. The cat leaps out from behind the wireless, its stub of a tail still smoking. So that’s where the smoke was coming from. The wireless crackles and dies.

The orange cat’s gone too, along with so many of the chaps who graduated in 1945. Maxie died in his forties, a sudden myocardial infarction in a fancy house in London, with a world-class job and a world-class wife, blond up to her armpits. You had no idea what you were in for, did you, when you became a doctor. Of course Maxie’s world was science and he didn’t see naked women year in and year out, young and firm, old and sagging, every kind of breast you can imagine, every pubus in the universe. You always wanted to talk to him about that, about the years of look-and-don’t-touch, but then it was too late. Maybe he wouldn’t have understood anyway, doing his experiments in the Arctic, testing how the human body reacts to extreme changes of temperature, and then back in lovely London, with his blond, not-one-bit-Jewish wife. He flew out of your life and never came back. Here today, gone tomorrow. Old Wolfie’s kicked the bucket too, more sheep than wolf at the end. Even the war died before you could get to it.

The engine purrs louder than a thousand orange-and-black cats, as you steer the boat under the railway bridge. The water mark on the pylons is very high this year, and it fills you with an old happiness, a love for this river that goes all the way back to George, to your mother and father’s childhood thrill at their new world, away from the cold of England and Eastern Europe, winters forever and ever.

You keep to the left side, just as you always told me and Simon. There are no more cowboys on the river the way there used to be, big men in powerboats pulling skiers. The George Divisional Council banned them, turning the lagoon into a wildlife sanctuary. You have to cut the engine around the next bend, observing the same rule. Oars, check. Oarlocks, check, check. You have to row soon, and there’s a pang in your right shoulder, a blinding glint of sunlight on the blade of a knife. It’s the same knife that poked you on the right, when the boat was moored, and you sat and waited, long minutes dropping into the water and sinking like stones. Bloody bastards let you sit there all alone. No one came to help until it was almost too late.

The high-water joy is gone, and you feel so sorry for yourself that you can hear the monkeys laughing behind their hands at you, a pathetic old man in an old boat going up the river all alone. She wouldn’t come with you. She hates the water. She can’t even swim. Now she’s sitting on the lawn looking at her watch every five minutes, waiting for you to come back so that she doesn’t have to worry whether you’re dead or alive, animal, vegetable or mineral. I’ll show her. I’ll stay out on the river until the sun rolls over and plays dead, hiding behind the mountain like a charred dragon.

You cut the engine and the air is suddenly quiet. You sit in the silence for a moment. Then you lift the left oar, carefully inserting it into the left oarlock. You do the same with the right oar. You sit still again, the oars lifted out of the water. There’s a twisting just under the surface of the river and you peer in, staring straight into the eyes of something you have never seen before. Jesus Christ man, it’s a fetus fish with legs and a big head, a bloody coelacanth’s uncle. You can even see nails on its fingers and toes. Before you can recite the Five Points of Fellowship, the swimming thing is gone, buggering off downstream.