Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa. Natasha Berg Illum
we planted in me keep growing now, and there is nothing I can do to stop them. The weather is gone but my season cannot be halted. Leaves keep unfolding for us, all in vain, like fair hair that keeps growing on an ever-stilled head.
I had tried to resist our love at first, tried to push it away it was so much larger than me, so out of my control, I did all I could to make myself stop it all, but I knew.
I knew when I woke up with you sitting on the floor next to my bed. You had brought sushi to my house that evening. Flying-fish eggs like pieces of sand inflated far beyond solidity, millions of tiny ‘pops’ waiting to happen. We drank sake and discussed your ideas behind the paintings you were going to start making. Your photographs of Kenyan butcher-shops lay spread all over my buffalo table. I drank far too much sake, we both did, but I wasn’t as accustomed to it as you were, and a few hours later I ended up almost falling asleep on the blue sofa. I don’t think I had done much more than just closed my eyes for a little moment, when you lifted me off the couch and put me to bed. I remember saying ‘sorry’ when you put the blanket over me and then I fell fast asleep. It was several hours later, when I opened my eyes for a moment and found you sitting on the floor beside my bed still. You were holding my hand looking at me. For two or three hours you had sat next to me on the floor holding my hand while I had been sleeping and when I opened my eyes for that short moment in the middle of the night you saw it and said, ‘Look at me, I am on my knees. Don’t you see? I love you.’ As if you had been waiting all night to throw that sentence in when a gap appeared. At that instant, between sleeping moments, when there is no resistance at all, you threw the message in, and it went straight through all the burning loops to the bottom of my heart without any hindrance.
When you had said what you had waited to say, you left.
I wrote to you the next day. ‘Now it’s said, there it goes, off it buzzes. In the shape of a fly. Afraid to get lost and later trapped in dark gaping mouths or blind clapping hands. With only one weapon to protect itself: the skeleton on the outside, skin, intestines, heart and soul on the inside. A fly could never be squeezed slightly, it is either perfect or crushed.’
It was perfect, then we were crushed, not it.
It was April in Sweden when I returned for my yearly visit. Six months after I saw your face for the last time, in reality. This time I wouldn’t really have called it a visit, it was more of a journey to the surface for a fish living in dead water. It was more the hope that a bit of oxygen would be found outside my own element.
I don’t know which was the loudest in my sister’s garden that month; the sound of buds cracking under the violent hammering of spring, or the creaking of small children’s bones eager to evolve.
I had decided I was going to try to catch a big pike before I went back to Africa after a few weeks.
I talked to some people by the lake, they told me that an 8.5-kilo pike had been caught there two weeks earlier and that it had bite marks across the back. So the big one might still be lurking in the shallow waters. There was no time to waste. Especially as I had to catch one for you too.
I have packed away your favourite photograph of me, aged thirteen with the biggest pike I ever caught, nearer five kilos of pride. That one was caught at home. In the picture I am dressed in a blue and white checked dress (changed for the very important occasion. It seems I even brushed my hair for once) and my feet are perfectly together. I am holding out my pike on a big hook to the camera and my smile is proud.
You loved all water, as long as it wasn’t dead. (Swimming pools were almost sinful.) Water, salty water especially. But not only because you loved surfing or fishing, you simply loved water.
As far as water was concerned you knew it more intimately than almost all.
As far as water was concerned, it was the only thing you would never have been able to drown in. We spoke of waves and I wrote to you about waves. I said that waves had passed through me too, during those last few days you had been at the coast, even though I was just sitting at my desk in Nairobi. I told you how I found it funny, how some people seem to think that one is more likely to drown in a wave of water, than in any of the other engulfing waves one can suddenly be swept away with.
And that it is a laugh really, how mothers all flock on tropical holiday shores, like pink flamingoes (Spearing the half-shin-height water. Careful, knee-lifting steps on long slender legs, so as not to get too wet.), unblinkingly watching their young children laugh and show off their first method of swimming. (Their feet on the sandy bottom but arms pretending to swim). Making sure their little child is not swept away by a nasty wave, foaming at the mouth.
Meanwhile, their husbands, sisters or mothers sit far away from the water, perfectly dry, in the shade with barely a hint of salt-water-air in their noses, waving merrily, still, with heads and lungs full of a wave that makes it difficult to keep their balance (it is difficult to keep your balance when the inner ear is constantly tapped on by a wave). Doggy paddling while eating a cool piece of watermelon, drowning any moment now.
You knew that I saw your fear of drowning in your situation; we didn’t speak of it again.
I only told you later that I had a river that ran through my house. It would force its way in just underneath one of the windows in front of my desk and leave by the front door when it rained. And rained it did then, rained, rained, rained and I hardly had any dry clothes any more as only mad dogs and Englishmen stay well covered or inside when it thunders, flashes and pours in Africa.
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