The Shouting in the Dark (11 page)

The mother holds her cheek up for a kiss.

‘Hippy hippy shake Holland,' he says, pursing dry lips in the general direction of her face, ‘Just look at it, your Dam encrusted with drug addicts, can't you see how the country has gone to rack and ruin? The minute the Nazis were allowed to march in, the country's game was up. First the Nederlanders let those Moffen walk all over them, and then, beaten and abject as they were, they fell into the embrace of drug-crazed American hippies, let them piss on the remaining achievements of the past. A once-robust body politic reduced to pure flab, oppressed by the freedom the War so dearly bought. Whereas this country, well, look around you, the place is run like a tight ship. The good strong laws of the land make the European truly free – free to work, free to succeed. In the very year the child was born they clapped those terrorists who were threatening to undermine the place in gaol for life, and rightly so, that tall schemer Mandela and his sidekicks –
bah!
– trying and failing to use their brains.

‘As for spending
one last time
with my mother-in-law, as you, Irene, suggest,' he raises his voice over the noise of an ascending plane, ‘Sorry, it's beyond me. In respect of your family, I've had enough of
one last time
. They can't stop, your family, pushing things to their limits, begging just
one last time
. How many pleas of
one last time
has it now been, going over to see Oma? So typical it is, so Dutch,
trying it on
, like trying on neutrality versus Hitler because you're too yellow in fact to
take him on
. All Dutchmen are shirkers, mark my words – Dutchmen, Dutchwomen too.'

He briefly puts his leathery cheek against Ella's forehead. ‘Trying it on, begging
one last time
,' he walks round to the driver's side of the Volkswagen, ‘It's not for me,' he says, and casts a strange, haunted look at the mother. She checks the travel documents in her bag, doesn't again look at him. The prospect of the trip gives her courage.

‘Like that other one before her, when she got sick, she begged to go on one last furlough home,' he tosses over his shoulder, getting into the car. The mother pulls at Ella's hand. ‘And your family, that precious Oma, my two-times mother-in-law, falsely promised all the while to send her back.'

 

So the journey by air across Africa every two years is covered by the trust fund Oma has set up in the mother's name. And, once here, they stay on as Oma's guests to make the long trek worthwhile, to give the mother time to recover from its horrors, hating flying as she does, in fact hating it like death. For the mother, the distance of South Africa from the Netherlands is a personal insult inflicted by fate, so she says – the fact that these days the KLM jumbo jet and not the Union Castle Line is the quickest way to go.

If it was up to Ella, they could stay even longer in the Netherlands than they do. They could stay as much as a year. In the Netherlands she doesn't miss South Africa. She definitely doesn't miss Braemar, except maybe one or two things, like the nights keeping watch at her window, some of them, listening out, picking up stories, watching that her father stays upright in his chair. Come to think of it, her father's stories on the Braemar verandah are the nearest thing to television she has in South Africa.

At the Vrijeschool, as far as she can see, she slots in. Every time she's back, she slots in. Her voice, her clothes, even her built-up shoe, everything more or less fits. All the children wear shoes. Three of them even live in the same tall apartment block as Ella and her mother, a rental arranged by Oma's second cousin's daughter, Loes. Ella and her Vrijeschool neighbours make up a small gang. In the afternoons after school they gather at the tall mound of sand on the building site behind the apartment block to kick stones and make sandcastles. They hook up in chains and chant the marching songs they learn in class, ‘
Witte zwanen, zwarte zwanen
', ‘
T'is plicht dan ied're jongen
', a song about fighting for your fatherland's independence. Ella shouts out the songs the loudest of all.

In Oegstgeest Ella feels her mother is contented, or so it looks. She shops at the grocer on the ground floor of the apartment block without complaining as she does in Braemar that there's nothing to buy in darkest Africa and no money to buy it with. She sits with Oma by the hour talking about all kinds of things, family doings, local house prices, knitting patterns, the Vrijeschool, how little it has changed since the mother herself was a pupil.

Sometimes they look at old photograph albums and play ‘Do you remember?'. ‘Oh, look, see, behind Tante Han's head, that
Jugendstil
clock we had, remember, that lost two minutes every twenty-four hours?' ‘And here you are, Irene, on the old swing in the back-garden of the Hasselsestraat behind the red currant bushes. How I loved that swing, the dry sweet smell of the dunes that wafted up as you swung high.'

Now and then they mention the mother's sister. They point to her face in the photograph albums, say
Ella
and sigh. Though Ella sitting pressed against Oma enjoys the game, she avoids looking at dead Ella's face.

‘Too generous always,' the mother mysteriously whispers. ‘If she hadn't given everything up and gone out there, I wouldn't have had to follow, would I? I always ended up walking in her wake.'

She puts her hand over the studio photograph of Ella's portrait that's in one of the albums. It takes up a whole page. ‘At least certain parties now have her to themselves,' she says, ‘For a limited time anyway.'

‘I don't like it,' Oma shakes her head. ‘That portrait captures her exactly. I don't like to think of her left out there without her family, alone.'

The mother and Oma don't talk about the wider world. They never talk about South Africa and they don't talk about the father. Ella sees that these things somehow go together.

One afternoon though, when the mother's in a meeting with the home's dietician, Oma does mention the father to Ella, the father and his two wives, her daughters: first dead Ella, then our young Irene.

The photo album is lying open on the side table. Oma lets her finger fall on a small square photo: the two sisters, Ella and Irene, stand in short-sleeved summer dresses and stout walking shoes in a meadow lane, their arms draped over each other's shoulders. Ella is sturdy and smiling; Irene's eyes are averted to avoid the bright sunlight.

‘It might just about have been tolerable losing one daughter to that bad-tempered Navy man, old before his time,' Oma says, looking askance at Ella stacking empty raisin boxes on the floor. ‘Two, however, is harsh. I know it's harsh for her, too, for Irene, though she doesn't ever say a thing. She did what she did and she's sticking to it. Maybe I shouldn't say anything either, but still, I have my thoughts.' Oma rears back in her chair. Ella peers up into her face but can't find her eyes behind her glasses.

‘My older one, Ella, she was heedless,' Oma continues, sighing. ‘Yes, he's short, grey and half-blind, mama, she once said to me, but after a war, can unmarried girls be choosy? I never thought the virginal younger one would think so too. That she'd so want a husband as to take her dead sister's. After her death, I remember, they started writing to each other. Those pale blue air letters like missives from the underworld. How quickly she darted to the letter box when they arrived. A pact of the living against the mourned. But a pact forged in sorrow, is that likely ever to bring happiness— ?'

Oma tosses her head, her bifocals flash. ‘
Ach
,
lieverd
, look at you, staring at your Oma as if she was some silly person, babbling. I'm forgetting myself. Come, give me your hand. Shall we go to the kitchenette to see if there are more raisins?'

On Friday nights in Holland Ella's mother puts on the smart Loden winter coat she bought with her first pay cheque at eighteen and never takes out of the country. All by herself she attends recitals and string quartets in various
zalen
in Den Haag, the
Concertgebouw
in Amsterdam. She leaves Ella on the sofa in front of the television with Cousin Lieke as babysitter. Lieke sits side by side with Ella and wraps a big cosy quilt around their legs.

When the mother returns late at night she half-carries Ella, drowsy and blundering, from the sofa to her bed. Ella puts a hand up to her mother's rosy cheeks.

‘Just the cold,
lieverd
,' the mother says. ‘The lovely brisk cold.'

One evening in front of the television, Lieke puts the finishing touches to a geography project on South Africa she has done at school. She traces a map, sticks in pictures. Ella helps by cutting photographs of zebras and lions out of a travel brochure. Colouring the sea around Durban with a royal-blue pencil, Lieke asks Ella, quite abruptly, what it's like living in a police state. Are there lots of rules to follow?

‘A police state?' Ella stops cutting and looks at Lieke. ‘What's that? I don't know what that is.'

‘Our teacher's told us,' Lieke says, ‘In South Africa you must do as the authorities say and if you don't you're punished.'

Ella shakes her head, No, she doesn't know about that.

Later that evening she watches a programme about the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where the secret stairway behind the bookcase is being restored. Dutch actresses reading extracts from Anne Frank's
Diary
intercut with footage showing the restoration team at work. Lieke by now is curled up at the sofa's end, dozing. Ella watches Anne Frank's sad story to its end. She can't believe that Anne and her family spent all that time during the war hidden in an attic. Imagine, the bookcase door clicking closed behind them. The footsteps of their minders walking away, receding into silence. She sees Anne lying in bed, maybe even under her bed for better protection, listening out for suspicious noises . . .

Then, as Ella watches, Lieke's question begins to gnaw, that thing she said about punishment. Anne Frank and her family were terribly punished, the programme tells her, once they were discovered in their
Achterhuis
. They had disobeyed the rules about being Jews so the occupying Nazis rounded them up and put them on trains headed for concentration camps over the border in Germany.

Ella glances over at her cousin, her peaceful face and closed eyes. She wonders what Lieke would say if she, Ella, told her about the strange things back home in Braemar: the Remedial Class and the visits from Dr Fry; the father shouting on the verandah? But she wouldn't know where or how to begin telling her about these things. She wouldn't have the words. Loyalty in their family, she knows, is an iron band. Her mother Irene went to South Africa to marry her father out of loyalty to her late sister's memory, Oma herself said this. Irene booked her passage on the Union Castle Line because her late sister Ella had been Har's wife before her and now he was left all alone. If she, Ella, said anything funny about the father and the mother to Lieke, wouldn't it be she herself, named for that sister, who would look bad?

 

Outdoors, the Netherlands is made up of horizontal planes painted in primary colours, like a stage set made for the sole purpose of entertaining children. Wherever Ella and her mother go there are more playgrounds filled with red and blue climbing frames than she has time to play in. Once a fortnight, the park beside the old age home is visited by a ventriloquist and his red-haired man-sized puppet dressed in a harlequin suit. Oma saw his poster in the hallway. The ventriloquist stands and performs beside the big sunken sandpit and Ella is allowed to run out on her own to watch him. Huddled together with the other children she listens in wonder as a chirrupy voice springs from the puppet's mouth. The ventriloquist barely moves his lips.

On her way back to Oma's room Ella practices lowering her voice till it rumbles deep inside her chest. With time, she wonders, if she had a life-sized doll like the ventriloquist's, would she be able to jump her voice from her chest like he does? Throw it straight into the doll's mouth without stirring her lips? She'd like to practise, she thinks, to watch and listen till she learns how to fill up a puppet's chest with words.

One morning on a walk in the park Ella asks the mother what the father could be doing today, right now. There's a pause. They circle the pond. The mother inspects the last husks of withered white roses still clinging to the bushes in the small rose-garden. Her voice when it finally comes is curt. ‘I'm sure he finds things to do,' she says. ‘He'll have no trouble entertaining himself.'

But what things does he find to do? Ella puzzles. How does he entertain himself? Does he tell himself stuff out on the verandah just as if they were home? Does he keep himself amused that way? Not ever knowing that he has an audience, does he shout his stories just as energetically when she's not around as when she is?

Sitting with Oma one afternoon during her nap, Ella finds in the knitting bag beside her chair a blank postcard of a beach scene slipped in alongside the fifty or so other bits of scrap paper she likes to keep there.

Dear Dad
, she writes on the postcard, then doesn't know what to say. She tries,
It is misty today.
She wants to tell him about the
ven-trill-o-quist
in the park but she can't spell the word. She draws a picture of the doll in its harlequin suit instead. The doll has a bubble in its chest.
Buikspreker
, stomach-talker, is the Dutch word for ventriloquist.

She gives the postcard to the mother to post. Weeks later, a few days before they are due to fly back to South Africa, the blue-sky edge of the postcard is still there in the document wallet the mother carries in her coat pocket. The mother sees Ella catch sight of it.