The Rowing Lesson (6 page)

You can’t see
The Water Babies
in your father’s hands, the pictures with babies sleeping in oyster shells, an underworld of plump children and silvery fish, angels and seaweed, girls round, pink and untouched and do-as-you-would-be-done-by. You can’t see the beads of sweat on your father’s lip, hear the sea swell of his breath, the chair too small and the words too big, the words his children spill into the house, the long English words on the wireless jabbing their fingers at him. He thinks of you and your long nose, pointing East and then South, your scorn when he talks and you don’t listen, you never listen, you’re tap dancing away from all of us, tap-tapping right down Hibernia Street, right out of town, this boy who wouldn’t eat. He wants to slam the book on your head but he doesn’t. He folds the tissue carefully over the frontispiece and up he gets, his body not quite young, not yet old. Water Baby is what your mother called you, and now he knows why. You’re not the chimney sweep, up in the dark the way he was, you’re playing on the ocean floor, with the pink girls and the pink shells. You don’t know snow falling on your village, the quiet before the pogrom, the hooves that scar and the upset house, and a long, terrible trip in a ship that almost killed your grandmother. You don’t know what it’s like to leave and never come back.

He doesn’t see you, slumped over the apex of Douglas’s pouch, until his coat brushes you and he says he’s sorry. Your head moves and of course it’s your nose that catches him, and “Harold!” he shouts as if he’s never seen you before. He’s a tall man in a suit, with a shop, and a bicycle propped on the wall outside, near the big oak tree with the long, long chain, where they used to tie up the slaves. It’s the bicycle not Charlotte, not on weekdays, never on weekdays. Charlotte is for drives on a Sunday, on the dust road to the Wilderness. You stand and it’s not like you’re going to drive anywhere together, no father and son to the shop together. He won’t let you work in the shop. You’ve never even opened the cash register. For all you know, there are mice inside, or marbles.

You slip
Gray’s Anatomy
back under the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
No point in telling him about the Hippocratic Oath because he doesn’t know anything about the Father of Medicine. The oath he knows is the covenant with God, the promise to circumcise your sons, and the mysteries of the Five Points of Fellowship. Your father is a Jew and a Freemason. He loves both his temples. He’s a man of mystery and friendship, do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Shame and love swirls between you, and you almost want to laugh when he gets on his stupid, wobbling bicycle, this father of yours who’s not Doctor Brown, the elegant English doctor who comes to your house when someone’s ill. He comes in his car. So what if the boys on the street touch the windscreen and stand on the running board. He doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care! You want to run after your father and shout, He doesn’t care! But you can’t really shout these days, not too loudly, since across the seas there are blackshirts and brownshirts and here there are greyshirts, special South African Nazis, picked and pickled in our own backyard and they’re on the streets and at school and you don’t even know where else you might find them, marching and goosestepping and acting like the sour Krauts. It’s no joke when you’re two bricks and a tickey high and you turn the corner and there they are, thick and blond, a band of Afrikaans boys furious about the Boer War and the Depression and English money and Jewish shops. No one has thrown the first stone although you’ve seen plenty of glass all over the newspapers, Jews in Germany sweeping up glass and of course the ones who died that night, the Night of Broken Glass.

You can’t look at the window of “Joseph Klein” on the corner of Meade and Hibernia without hearing the sound of glass breaking. Of course, nothing is going to happen. How could anything bad happen in this neck of the woods, where necking in the woods is all you really want to do, with Gertrude or Hilda or any other sweet girl who will do the Lambeth Walk with you. She’ll be the Peanut and you’ll be the Toffee King and you’ll walk the Lambeth Walk.

Mum left the East End when she was ten but even then she loved musicals. Her half-brother, Sam, still sends programs and records from London and you’ve just learned to sing “Any evening, any day, when you’re walking Lambeth way. . . .” It’s a tuck-arm, roundabout, happy-go-lucky dance-and-dip, lift up the leg and laugh a lot. Knees up, Mother Brown, and you poke Mum in the ribs and she has her happy face on, smiles for miles. You and Maisie go to Mrs. Giles’ Bioscope and Oh, God, that’s where you can see women! Ten pence on a Saturday, usually seven and a tickey to get house seats. Jean Harlow slipping in and out of your dreams, the smoke from her cigarette sharp in your nostrils. She moves and your heart flops. She swaggers and you stop breathing. Maisie laughs at you in the dark and she has the same smile as Mum, and the same mad up-and-down temper. You’re all up-and-down people and Look, it’s a monkey’s wedding, a sun shower. After the film, you and Maisie walk home together in the lances of rain with the sun poking through the clouds and don’t you just wish this black-haired, brown-eyed girl was your girlfriend and not your sister!

Maisie’s up early listening to the wireless and once you caught her practically upside down. Physical Jerks was on and she was touching her toes and standing on one foot and then she bent over backwards and that’s when you came in and she almost choked on her foot. Chamberlain saying “it’s peace in our time” came on after Physical Jerks and you remember both together, the promise of peace and your sister’s foot halfway down her throat. It’s amazing what the human body can do.

* * *

WHO IS THE little girl standing over there? Is it my sister? you asked Ma last week before I came, before the coma dropped you into the pitch-dark. You were still cuckoo then, not OK in the top story. But now it’s me not Maisie standing at the foot of your bed waiting for the lights to change, waiting for you to wake up. If you don’t open your eyes soon, I’m going to take pliers and some tape and fix those damn kidneys myself. You didn’t know I was an expert at plunging toilets, did you?

It’s 1967 and we’re back in the Touw River, a web of green slime floating on the surface of the water. The sand has crept up so high that you can walk across the river at its widest part when the tide is out. The golf balls are gone and forgotten and I’m in the boat. Well, almost forgotten. I’m holding an imaginary golf ball in the pocket of my shorts.

The boat is a special red-and-white handmade wooden rowing jobbie that you bought from a furniture salesman who liked to go fishing on the Knysna lagoon not far from the place where J.L.B. Smith had his boat. The coelacanth man. You mention the coelacanth and the boat, which is a collector’s item, in one breath, and the time you went up the river with Maisie and Bunny and everyone. All the old roads. Putt-putt, goes the five-and-a-half horsepower Johnson engine, lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp goes your heart. That summer you couldn’t start the boat your heart broke, but that’s later, when I’d already flown away and the boat was empty.

I’m sitting on the prow, my feet slipping into the water every so often and you tell me not to but it’s impossible to talk to children. They don’t listen and they don’t care. All she cares about is dipping her feet in the water so that the spray wets your arms and your sleeves and you wonder why you’re in this boat at all with your youngest child, a dreamer and a
loskop
. She walks into walls and once she even walked into a moving car. Sometimes you think it could be something neurological but Mrs. God says,
Ag,
rubbish. She’s just a
loskop
, that’s all.

You and Simon and me and Simon’s friend, Andrew, went up the river after lunch, to Ebb ’n Flow, past the little white beach where you used to have picnics, where Gertrude scratched herself getting out of the boat. You always look at the white sand, and still to this day you remember the milk-white of her inner thigh revolving against your hand. The tablecloth must have rotted by now. You never let the children get out. You’re the captain of this ship and now that area is completely overgrown. It’s a thicket of tangled branches and matted leaves and you are sure there are snake holes and snake nests and snake parties in there. It looks so much more dangerous than it used to.

Is it the web of dark-green, thickening against the flank of the mountain, the river slowly curdling, or the Sharpeville massacre four years ago when I was still a baby? Property values dropped and you and Ma bought a house in the Wilderness suddenly for half what it was worth a few months before. The couple who owned the cottage on the banks of the river left South Africa for good. They live in England now, somewhere in the North. They weren’t the only ones, of course, fleeing the pictures in the papers of black bodies strewn in the road, shot in the back by the police. Then the rioting in the townships, share prices on the Johannesburg stock exchange plunging as white people sold and left, sold and left.

You didn’t sell. You bought. The house has a view of the lagoon as it fans out into the sea. Behind you, mountains, in front of you this glittering sweet river slowly going bad, and the roaring sea. This sea is the breath in your body, the tide going in as you breathe in, the tide going out, as you exhale. Now and forever. You are bound here, caught in this crook of land. The river runs straight into your heart, the vena cava bringing blood without oxygen, to be renewed and restored, renewed and restored. Every summer you come back here, where you follow the river up to its source, to the miracle place where you shush-shush all of us and make us sit quietly in the red-and-white boat listening for monkeys.

You listen, there’s a plash in the water (I can’t sit still) or Simon gets tickled and he laughs and the monkeys scatter. Then it’s back down the river to the Rope where we clamber onto a mossy bank and swing into the middle of the river from a gnarled, knotted rope that looks like entrails and hairs and an elephant’s trunk. Another coil and a slither of river and it’s Fairy Knowe where you dropped Simon and Andrew this afternoon, to play tennis. You stopped at the jetty and let them off and Mrs. God was supposed to pick them up later. Clouds were stacking up in the sky but it was still warm. You decided to take the boat back, with me.

I beg you to teach me how to row and you maneouvre the boat into a quiet spot, away from the speedboats and skiers and swimmers. I sit on the seat next to you, and you put my hand on the left oar and cover your hand with it. I can’t see my own fingers. We dip the left oar in the water together. At first, it skitters in and out of the water, bouncing unevenly, what Simon calls “catching a crab.” The little boat jerks like a marionette bobbing on the end of its string. I feel your warm, dry hand tightening on mine, my fingers slowly going numb. Your mouth tightens too, as if I should know how to do this already. But your movements are slow and steady, and I try as hard as I can to follow them, bracing my feet against the wooden bar set up on the seat in front of us. Hold water! you shout, when a speedboat comes too close to us and I’m not sure if you’re talking to the driver or to me but I freeze anyway, squaring my oar. Back pedal, back pedal, you hiss when we start drifting towards the reeds. All the time, your hand stays clamped on mine, small and square, the skin a reddish-brown, hairs crisscrossing the knuckles. I can smell the scent of Prell in your hair, the sweat dampening your armpits, mixed with the whiff of petrol coming from the orange fuel tank on the floor of the boat.

Finally, you let go of my hand, and I start rowing by myself, just with the left oar. You have the right one, and every time we dip the oars into the river, you say, Catch, and then Pull, Catch and Pull, Catch and Pull. The oarlocks creak, I breathe in loud, big gusts, and you suck air in between your teeth as the boat slips through the water sweetly and easily. On the other side of the railway bridge, you say, I think we’ve had enough for today. We lift both oars into the boat and you pull-start the five-and-a-half horsepower engine. I climb onto the prow, my favorite place, and try to keep my feet from trailing in the water.

We chug-chugg past the aerodrome where I once sat on the wing of a small plane and you took a picture. As we round the bend in the river, near the caravan park and the other bridge with the storm-tossed pylons from your own childhood, there’s a low growling in the sky, grey dragons of clouds heaving one on top of the other. The first drops sweep across the surface of the water. I swing my legs into the boat and sit on the seat near the front where you tell me to sit. The boat has to be steady at all times. You can’t have everybody doing whatever they please, especially at times like this, when there are waves in the water. They’re not big waves, but the water isn’t smooth anymore.

You look at me and I stare back at you. I have black eyes too, black hair and a long nose that won’t be as long as yours, thank God. I’m wearing red shorts, a short-sleeved shirt with puffy sleeves and no cardigan and I’m shivering. You say something about the storm that brought down the pylons in 1926. I look blank. I’m cold, I say. You can see the goosebumps on my arms and the star-shaped scar on my knee where I fell into a rose bush. There’s nothing in the world like looking at the face of your own child but you can’t tell me that. You throw me your old jersey and I wrap it around my legs. Then I crawl into the tiny space right under the prow where I was sitting before.

She’s curled in there like a hedgehog or a rolled-up centipede, you think as you pass a houseboat moored near the caravan park. In the distance you see lightning crack open the sky for an instant. The thunder grumbles, a lion pacing up there somewhere. The waves are much bigger now as you steer the boat through the choppy water. This could be a bigger storm than ’26 or 1914 or the one just before they reenacted the Great Trek. No wait, it’s still summer, you think, stopping the flood of panic and excitement in your chest, that same mad thrill you get staring at a bone piercing through skin, or at a wound as open as a flower. Betsy can swim, you’re thinking, but for how long. This is the first year Mrs. God packed away the orange cork-filled lifejacket Betsy hated so much. But the boat won’t go over and if it does the river is deep only in certain places, not nearly as deep as it used to be when you dived off the bridge for golf balls. Of course there’s the lightning flashing now here, now there, some mad giant in the heavens playing pin the tail on the donkey.