Entertaining Angels Read online

  Entertaining Angels

  Marita van der Vyver

  Translated by Catherine Knox

  Tafelberg

  For I.B.

  The union of a frivolous form and a serious subject

  lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds

  as well as those we play out on the great stage of

  History) in all their terrible insignificance.

  Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

  Scary Tales

  Whatever else has changed on the continent of Africa, the deep-rooted belief in magic, both white and black, has not. Africans base their fear of witches on the argument that somebody – some person or spirit – has to be responsible for the inexplicable.

  Encyclopaedia of Magic and Superstition

  1

  Snow White Takes a Bite of the Apple

  Sylvia Plath did it in an oven. Virginia Woolf in a river. And Ernest Hemingway with a pistol. Or was it a shotgun? Something phallic, anyway.

  Quite funny, really, thought Griet. When women do it, it’s obvious they want to return to the womb. The warmth of an oven. The waters of a river. The slow, lulling numbness of pills, like falling asleep.

  But men commit suicide like they cook: dramatically and messily. Blowing their brains out, hurling themselves off skyscrapers, slashing their arteries. Blood and guts all over the place. No doubt because they know they don’t have to clean up afterwards. There’ll always be some woman to do that.

  Anna Karenina did throw herself under the wheels of a train, Griet recalled. That could be pretty messy. But it was a male writer who made her do it. Shakespeare obviously understood women better than Tolstoy did. Poor Ophelia didn’t fall on a sword like Hamlet, she floated peacefully away down a stream. And Juliet would have preferred poison but Romeo didn’t leave her any – Shakespeare also seems to have understood men better than most other writers. So Juliet had no choice but to bleed.

  Women actually don’t like blood. Men might be less taken with it too, if they had to wash it out of their underwear every month, speculated Griet.

  Even Snow White’s ghastly stepmother chose a bloodless method of disposing of her husband’s beautiful daughter. Though a masculine set of values lurks in the stepmother’s style. In Western religion, the apple almost always symbolises female sexuality. ‘Thatfair enticing fruit’, which poor old Adam sampled, ‘Against his better knowledge, not deceived, But fondly overcome with female charm.’ Snow White was punished for Eve’s sins. And, like Eve, she was rescued in the end by manly valour. Snow White by a handsome prince on a white horse, Eve by an almighty god on a golden throne.

  ‘I decided the oven was the only escape,’ Griet told her therapist, who was watching her enigmatically, as usual. ‘I don’t know why, but that oven fascinated me from the moment I moved into the flat. Probably because I’d never had anything to do with a gas oven before. Except in books and movies, of course.’

  Rhonda’s eyes were pools of innocence, blue and still. She looked as though she had never even heard a swear word. You’d never guess that she had to listen to other people’s deepest and darkest perversions all day long.

  Her hair was blonde and wavy and her hands lay still on the open file on her lap. Every now and then she wrote something in the file, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, but Griet noticed every time. What had she given away about herself this time, she wondered distractedly, and it took quite an effort not to stumble over her next words.

  ‘But … but, as you know …’ Rhonda’s gold pen scratched over the paper, the noise unbearably loud in the quiet of the consulting room. Griet drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I thought I’d just see how it felt first, you know. Stick my head in without turning on the gas. Just to see if I’d be able to go through with it.’ Rhonda wrote something in her file again. The second time in less than a minute, Griet realised in a panic. ‘I … well … I knelt down in front of the oven, opened the door and slowly put my head inside, kind of turned sideways so that one of my cheeks rested on the wire rack.’

  Sometimes Griet wondered whether anything would ever shock Rhonda. If one of her patients suddenly started masturbating in the consulting room, she probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Nothing would ever trouble those blue pools.

  ‘My head didn’t fit in very comfortably – it’s quite a small oven – so I opened my eyes to see how I was doing … No, I don’t really know why I closed them in the first place. It just happened by itself, like my first French kiss at a school party. Maybe because I’d seen it done that way in the movies. Anyway, I opened my eyes – and looked straight at a dead cockroach! Right there next to me!’

  Rhonda watched her, motionless.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it! I mean, I know my friend isn’t all that tidy, and she probably didn’t use the oven an awful lot, and I hadn’t used it since I’d moved in – but a cockroach! I yanked my head out so fast that I banged it against the inside of the oven and collapsed on the kitchen floor. Half unconscious. Just imagine the humiliation if someone had found me there! Frightened out of my wits by a cockroach. I’d never hear the last of it. Anyway, when I eventually got over the shock and looked into the oven again – without putting my head right in this time, naturally – I saw not only a cockroach, but this thick layer of crumbs and hard-baked fat and God knows what else, all in there with the cockroach.’

  Was she imagining it, or was there a hint of a smile at the corners of Rhonda’s mouth? Impossible, she decided, looking away at the opposite wall. A yellow wall with a huge Mickey Mouse clock – the mouse’s arms told the time; one arm was shorter than the other. The clock always seemed to hypnotise her as her sense of guilt grew with every movement of the mouse’s longer arm. Children were going hungry while she paid a strange woman R60 an hour – R30 a half-hour, R15 a quarter, R1 a minute, more than a cent for every second! – to listen to her pathetic problems.

  Rhonda’s consulting room was as colourful as a kindergarten classroom: red and yellow and blue furniture and mats and striped curtains. Probably to make her victims feel more cheerful, Griet had often thought. Armchairs that sucked you in like quicksand, so that only your head and knees were visible once you were seated. It was impossible to feel dignified if you could scarcely see over your own knees. It was like initiation at an Afrikaans university: a way of breaking down one’s ego, only more subtle.

  Rhonda never allowed an armchair to swallow her. Which made Griet all the more suspicious. Rhonda sat upright on a red sofa, her ankles neatly crossed. She wore linen slacks, a plaited leather belt, a gold Rolex. Griet was dressed in a multi-coloured frock, long and loose, and, as always when she was with her therapist, she felt creased and unkempt.

  ‘And so I didn’t commit suicide,’ sighed Griet, twisting a wisp of untidy hair into a ringlet round one finger. ‘I spent the rest of the evening cleaning the oven.’

  ‘And how do you feel about that?’ asked Rhonda.

  Yes, she really was smiling. Griet sighed again and then smiled resignedly with her therapist. ‘Well, I nearly suffocated in the fumes from Mister Oven. It must have been an ancient can. I don’t think it had ever been used in that filthy oven. Maybe some chemical reaction or other took place, I don’t know – something that made it poisonous. I wondered if anyone had ever committed suicide with Mister Oven …’

  ‘You seem to have found some humour in the situation.’

  ‘It actually wasn’t very funny at the time,’ Griet said rather sharply. ‘I kept thinking about something Athol Fugard wrote somewhere, that he’d carry on making a fool of himself until the day he died, and then probably fuck that up too. Something along those lines.’

  Rhonda didn’t say a word.

  ‘Y
es, I know what you’re going to say now. I’m still living through books and movies. Protecting myself from reality by pretending that I’m Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.’

  ‘Maybe someone a little more intellectual,’ smiled Rhonda. ‘How about the green-haired woman in The House of the Spirits?’

  ‘She had blue hair,’ Griet snapped, wondering whether her therapist wasn’t right, as usual. ‘And she was in One Hundred Years of Solitude.’

  ‘See what I mean? You leap at the chance to discuss a fictional character. You come to me to talk about yourself and then spend half the time quoting from books.’

  ‘But fictional characters are more … I don’t know, they’re somehow more … convincing.’ Griet looked at the Mickey Mouse clock again. Five minutes to go. That meant five rand – enough to buy a plate of food for a hungry child. Or three packets of cigarettes for herself. If she could only stop smoking! She sighed for the hundredth time in the last hour. ‘I mean, have you ever read about someone who was saved from suicide by a cockroach? It could only happen in reality.’

  Rhonda didn’t respond, but her eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Kafka wrote a story about a chap who turned into a cockroach, Gregor Samsa. The same initials as mine. And his sister also had a Griet-ish name. Gretel? Gretchen?’

  It was time to read the story again, Griet decided. It had always been one of her favourites, perhaps because, in a way, the poor cockroach had also been killed by an apple. The apple his father threw at him, the one that wedged in his back. The Symbolism of the Apple in World Literature. Yet another ridiculous title for the literary thesis that she’d been postponing for ten years.

  ‘The fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe,’ wrote Milton. It was impossible to imagine Eve with a banana or a pear or any other fruit, for that matter. And it was an apple that caused the fall of Troy. The famous apple of contention that was thrown on the table for the most beautiful of three goddesses. Paris chose Aphrodite and the other two took vengeance. ‘Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,’ William Congreve said, ‘Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.’

  ‘But even Kafka didn’t write about a cockroach as a lifesaver. Snow White was rescued by a prince on a white horse – and Griet Swart by a dead cockroach in a dirty oven. Wouldn’t you rather have been Snow White?’

  2

  Hansel and Gretel and the Struggle

  ‘Three weeks without a man’, Griet wrote in her Creative Arts Diary, above her weekend shopping list. Wine, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, toilet paper and tampons – not necessarily in order of importance. This was one of the advantages of being manless, the abbreviated shopping list, with no shaving foam and chocolate for him, no vegetables and fruit for his children.

  Tuesday 31 October 1989. Almost three months on her own, and three weeks without any contact. Without seeing him or ringing him or writing to him. She hadn’t felt so proud since she’d managed to last three weeks without a cigarette.

  There were close parallels. Her relationship with George did to her emotions what nicotine did to her lungs, she’d realised ages ago, but the relationship was as difficult a habit to kick as smoking. More than a habit – an obsession, a physical addiction, an oral fixation. One truly does keep all four seasons in one’s groin, as she’d always teased him.

  She’d enjoyed sex with George, more than with anyone before him. It wasn’t an earth-shaking affair with shooting stars and similar celestial manifestations. It was playful, fun, funny and sometimes even absurd. If George felt adventurous and wanted to try an unusual position, he was sure to fall off the kitchen counter or bang his head on the edge of the bath or end up with a stiff neck instead of a stiff penis. George wasn’t the acrobatic type, but sometimes he forgot the limitations of his own body and swept her along with him, and then they experienced a few moments of sexual trapeze before tumbling head over heels back to earth. Before the car seat became too uncomfortable or one of the children from his first marriage was roused by those strange noises coming from the dining room.

  Not that George made many noises. Screaming orgasms weren’t his style. And with the children in the house at weekends, Griet also had to learn to appreciate dark and silent sex. Like a blind-mute, she sometimes thought in a moment of rebellion.

  Griet drank a cup of coffee on the balcony of her friend’s flat, as she’d done every morning since moving in here. The street below came slowly to life. On the rickety plastic table lay the English-language newspaper, which she’d already scanned, the open diary with her shopping list, and a pencil for noting down her social commitments for the week. With a shock she realised that she didn’t have any social commitments. Not a single date. The thought of yet another Friday evening on her own made her long for the comfort of an oven all over again. A clean oven, she thought before she could stop herself.

  ‘It’s dangerous to travel alone,’ Griet wrote in her diary, ‘especially after your thirtieth birthday.’ It was All Saints’ Eve tonight, she saw when she looked at the date again, New Year’s Eve on the old Celtic calendar. The night of witches and goblins and other unholy spirits, the Scots believed. The blood of a Scottish sailor ran in her veins and she was by profession a weaver of fairy tales so she took the date seriously, but she was the only person she knew who still did.

  The Americans had banalised it, as only they could, with children in silly costumes and candles in pumpkin shells. And Hollywood had converted it to cash, along with everything else that’s supposed to be sacred, making a whole string of movies that consisted mainly of blood and screams.

  Tomorrow would be the Day of the Holy Ones, Griet thought nostalgically, and the day after All Souls’ Day when one was supposed to pray for the souls of the dead. There were a number of souls she should pray for: those from whom she had descended and those who had descended from her, her predecessors and her progeny. If only it weren’t so difficult to pray.

  She picked up the item she’d torn from the paper. ‘One in five women heading Aboriginal households have told researchers that their stressful lives have driven them to attempt suicide.’ She attached the report with a paperclip to today’s page in her diary.

  Sex could become predictable after seven years with the same man. But it was a comforting predictability, like a well-loved poem that you read over and over again until you knew it off by heart, until nothing but a punctuation mark could still surprise you. Until one day you look at a comma as though you’ve never seen it before. She knew the language of her husband’s body as well as she knew her own tongue, the salty taste of his navel, the bony hollows on his shoulders, the stickiness at the tip of his penis. And yet she still sometimes discovered something – perhaps a mole – that she’d never noticed before. Her body was at ease with his, under his, on top of his.

  She had sometimes seen shooting stars, but it’d been light years ago, when every night with him was still a satellite voyage of discovery. They’d married three years ago, and on the nuptial bed such heavenly appearances became as infrequent as Halley’s Comet. She was always pregnant; her poor husband touched her less and less. Month after month his gloom increased and his playfulness faded. The Incredible Shrinking Penis, that’s what she’d call the story of her marriage.

  Maybe it was the story of every marriage.

  She took another sip of coffee from her friend’s cracked Arzberg cup, contemplated smoking her first cigarette of the day, decided to resist the temptation, and stared with unwilling fascination at the newspaper report under the paperclip. ‘They revealed that they had to bear the brunt of “the whole Aboriginal situation”, including recurring problems of unemployment, alcohol, imprisonment and racism.’ Count your blessings, Griet dear, Grandma Hannie always said.

  Once upon a time there was a woman who came from a dreadful family, she wrote on the clean sheet of paper before her. One of her grandfathers was in the habit of talking to angels, and the other gr
andfather believed in ghosts. She was perhaps a witch, perhaps a rebel angel, undoubtedly a troublemaker, and she was sorely punished for her sins.

  The worst of all her sins was using words to seduce people. She was a woman who wanted to play with sentences like Salome played with her seven veils. She was a woman who wanted to write because she believed that the pen was mightier than the penis.

  She didn’t realise that this was the eighth deadly sin in a phallo-centric world.

  She wasn’t barren like so many other sinners in so many other fairy stories. Pregnancy came easily to her, time after time, but each time she had to hand her child over to death. She could conceive and she could carry a baby, but she could not give birth to one.

  After four pregnancies she was still childless.

  It was such a terrible punishment that sometimes, like the goose girl of long ago, she wanted to climb into an oven in protest against her fate. But these days it isn’t so easy to climb into an oven. And you can no longer count on a hero to come and haul you out, either.

  It was time to go to the office, Griet decided, listening to the increasing drone all around her. It was an indescribable noise, the sound of an animal waking up, as though the mountain, to which the city clung like a tick, was stretching its back and flexing its muscles. She snapped her Creative Arts Diary shut and got up to fetch her handbag from the bedroom floor where it lay amid magazines and newspapers.

  She’d ask someone to join her for a drink on Friday night, she decided, banging her empty coffee cup down on the sticky kitchen counter. Anyone, she decided, as she locked the door behind her.

  She missed sex, she realised with devastating certainty on this All Saints’ Eve morning. Even Halley’s Comet was preferable to the total eclipse of the moon under which she’d been trying to survive for the past few months.

  She missed her husband, she missed her house, she missed the predictability of Friday nights with him and his children. Michael and Raphael came every weekend and she’d cook for them and they’d eat while they watched TV – MacGyver and the news and Police File and a film – and she’d clear away the empty plates and her husband would doze off on the sofa and she’d take the boys to their bedroom and pull the bedding up so high only their eyes peeped out and she’d laugh at the faces they pulled every time she kissed them goodnight. She might be crazy, she thought defiantly, but she missed it.