Forget-me-not-Blues. Marita van der Vyver
but he went off to go and court one of his English girlfriends. Probably looking for a shoulder to cry on.’
‘Take your feet off the bed,’ Mammie says, ‘you’re ruining the bedspread.’
Kleinboet didn’t call on Wednesday night. They didn’t hear from him until yesterday afternoon when Colette was paging through the newspapers, amazed – Die Burger broadcasting its Afrikaans readers’ joy and The Cape Argus sounding funereal. He had called knowing his father would be at the hospital, that only the women would be home in the afternoon.
‘This is a secret telephone call,’ he announced in a stage whisper when Colette answered the telephone. ‘I am calling from an underground hiding place where all Smuts supporters in Stellenbosch have to lie low so we are not stoned in the streets. I don’t know if I dare come home this weekend. Will you hang your ugly black school stockings out of your bedroom window when you think it is safe?’
What did he consider safe, she asked, giggling. It wasn’t a sermon from his father he minded, he assured her, he just couldn’t stand to have his brother carry on about the wonderful future that now lay ahead for the Afrikaner. Because it wasn’t going to be all that wonderful, he predicted. There was something petty in the soul of the Afrikaners that was rearing its head, he added, sounding suddenly serious.
‘But aren’t you an Afrikaner?’ Colette asked.
‘Of course. That is the reason this pettiness scares me so.’
That was when the image of the splinter occurred to Colette for the first time, a splinter that could turn into a festering sore if you didn’t get rid of it in time.
She looks at Ouboet who is still lying stretched out on the bed – although now with his feet on the floor – chewing an apple he has taken from the pocket of his maroon striped blazer. Because of the six years separating them, they never really became friends, but when she was small she admired him like a remote storybook hero. She thought his blue eyes, the same colour as hers and Mammie’s, so much more beautiful than Mammie’s or her own, so much more striking along with his black hair and his black eyebrows. But back then there hadn’t been that cold light shining in those eyes. When did that happen? she asks herself now. What was it that turned on that light?
‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you you’ll grow horns if you eat lying down?’ she asks before turning back towards the mirror.
He sits up, with exaggerated surprise. ‘And who is this beautiful young lady addressing me with such impertinence?’
Oh well, if Dr Malan’s victory is going to turn her older brother into a comedian, then it might be something wonderful after all. Every family needs a clown. And it’s starting to look as if her younger brother has grown tired of this role.
‘We Afrikaners were noble when we lost the Boer War,’ Kleinboet said on the phone yesterday. ‘But now we have won. And it is far easier to be a noble loser than a noble victor. You will see, little sis, you will see.’
She had waited for the inevitable joke, the punchline that was supposed to make her laugh, but instead she had heard something between a groan and a sigh. An almost animal sound, beyond words, like a soldier on a battlefield when he realises he has been wounded. She had wondered if perhaps it was her turn to say something funny, but then he had asked her to call Mammie. And then Mammie had shooed her into the kitchen to help Sina peel vegetables before starting to talk. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, Colette.’ And Mammie hadn’t been joking either.
Still more silence
• Colette Niemand 15/8/2007
To?
Speak now or forever hold your peace. Is that a warning to me? Well, I find it interesting that you use these words exactly, this phrase that reminds me of the marriage service, because for the past few days I have been brooding about weddings constantly. Mine was a hasty little ceremony in a London magistrate’s court on a typical English autumn day, damp and dismal, as if the low grey sky wanted to weep on my behalf. As if the clouds wanted to shed all the tears I was so sternly denying myself.
And that is about all I remember of my wedding day. That it rained, that I wanted to throw up, that I wished I were in Portugal. It is not something I particularly want to share.
I am sorry, darling child, but this is another letter you won’t read.
Why do I remember Ouboet’s wedding so much more clearly than my own? Because it was easier, as usual, to be a spectator than a participant? I don’t know, my treasure, I don’t know.
But I suspect sometimes silence can also become a way of communicating.
WEDDING
All together now, the little crippled photographer sings out in his strange accent: ‘Say cheeeeza.’ And for the umpteenth time the group in front of the camera laugh and say ‘cheeeeza’.
‘I will never be able to eat cheese again without thinking of my wedding day,’ Ouboet says with mock exasperation.
They have been posing for Mister Giuseppe for close to an hour already; just the happy couple at first while the rest stood and watched, then the happy couple together with their parents, and now the whole caboodle: bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girl and pageboy too. The setting for the official wedding photographs is the rose garden on a distinguished Boland farm, with a dam with ducks, a whitewashed slave bell and a Cape Dutch gabled homestead in the background. Too beautiful for words, the groom’s mother sighs tearfully every now and then. Ouboet’s bride grew up in this gabled homestead, the eldest daughter of a wealthy wine farmer who is nowadays also a Member of Parliament – for Dr Malan’s party, of course – and the apple of her father’s eye.
‘Your brother really struck it lucky when this girl agreed to marry him,’ the chief groomsman remarked to Kleinboet yesterday when the bridal couple and their retinue gathered for the wedding rehearsal in the Dutch Reformed Church in town. Oh no, Kleinboet said, luck has nothing to do with it. My brother doesn’t rely on luck. Everything is carefully planned.
Colette had been rather shocked by his comment. Ouboet wasn’t as cold-blooded as all that, she scolded Kleinboet after the rehearsal. Anyone could see he was madly in love with Elsa!
‘Of course,’ Kleinboet mollified her. ‘Let’s just say that it was easier for him to fall madly in love with the daughter of a rich and important father than with any other girl.’
But Colette is convinced Ouboet doesn’t need a rich or important father-in-law. Not with a Bright Future having been predicted for him since childhood. He had been at the top of his class throughout his legal studies at Stellenbosch, and a member of the Student Council in his final year, and everyone on campus knew his name. As she soon discovered when she started studying last year. Even though Ouboet has now left the campus to establish himself as a brilliant young lawyer in the city, his Bright Future continues to cast a long shadow over her and Kleinboet.
Just look at him standing there grinning in his tails with his radiant bride on his arm, his important in-laws, proud parents and a large retinue fanned out around him, the groomsmen also in tails, the bridesmaids in canary-yellow silk and brocade. Colette doesn’t like wearing yellow; it brings out the yellow in her blonde hair and pale skin, and makes her look like someone with kidney failure.
But as the third bridesmaid, along with the bride’s best friend and the bride’s younger sister, she didn’t have much say. Elsa adores yellow, it goes well with her bronzed skin and golden brown hair, and on this joyous day she wanted to surround herself with yellow. Even the bridesmaids’ satin shoes and long gloves are pale yellow. Kleinboet is also a groomsman, along with two of Ouboet’s student friends, Pietman and Hannes, and presumably no less ill at ease in his swallowtail coat than his sister in her canary outfit. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, Colette consoles herself, just like one canary cannot ruin a wedding.
Elsa’s wedding gown is a miracle of brocade and tulle and lace, a heart-shaped bodice, and a fitted jacket of transparent lace and tiny pearl buttons