Forget-me-not-Blues. Marita van der Vyver
with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up, his dark hair oiled and slicked back. Kleinboet is not exactly what she would call dashing; he is too short and stocky, his skin too dark, his nose too big. Yet he fares much better with the opposite sex than Ouboet who is far too serious to flirt, too busy building his Brilliant Future. The secret to making a girl fall in love with you is to make her laugh, Kleinboet believes. He relies on humour to reel in one girl after the other. The way he has reeled in his mother and little sister from childhood.
But Colette is curious about the origin of some of the more serious ideas he has expressed lately. Their older brother used to be his hero – hers too, of course, it was hard not to be impressed by someone for whom Great Things had been predicted almost from birth – but then one day Ouboet said that perhaps Oom Kleingert was right about the Ossewabrandwag after all, and about Deddy being a little too fond of the English because he had an English father-in-law. Kleinboet turned on him like a dog biting its owner. You have an English grandfather, he snarled at Ouboet, and a half-English mother! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? From that day on Kleinboet looked at his older brother differently.
Sometimes the strange things he said seemed calculated to provoke Ouboet.
‘Ouboet is nothing like Oom Kleingert.’ Mammie sounds as if she is talking to herself. She is scrubbing more slowly now, and staring out the window at the fruit trees in the backyard that are starting to show their autumn colours. ‘I don’t always agree with his ideas. But it is not as if he actually belongs to the Ossewabrandwag, is it?’
‘Not as far as we know,’ Kleinboet mumbles.
What Colette knows, and Mammie probably too, is that Ouboet is dying to become a member of another secret organisation for Afrikaans men, some or other bond, but it isn’t one you can just up and join, you must wait until you are asked. Deddy was never asked. Apparently something to do with his half-English wife, but Colette can’t be sure because this is something no one ever talks about. Not in this or in any other Afrikaans household. It is a secret organisation, remember. You don’t talk about secrets.
More silence
• Colette Niemand 13/8/2007
To ?
Coimbra … Heavens, child, you are leading my heart like a stubborn horse back to sweet waters. All I have to do is drop my head and drink deeply.
I wouldn’t have felt at home there. Not in Coimbra or Sintra or Lisbon or anywhere else on your Portuguese route. I have, after all, spent a lifetime convincing myself of that – but ah, when you start sweet-talking me about aloes and bluegums and the like, plants that can take root in more than one place, I catch myself sliding back into doubt and self-reproach.
Sweet waters? Perhaps. But for me there is no peace in those green pastures. The water may be sweet and still, but down below the devils are dancing. Don’t imagine I do not know what I am talking about. The cruellest devil I know goes by the name of Memory, and this past week he has been back to torture me.
I suspect this is another letter I won’t send you.
Indeed my past is everything I have failed to be. No, it is not me who says so, it is Pessoa again. And don’t ask why I keep writing if I don’t intend you to see what I write. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I started keeping another journal in my old age? As if the last one didn’t cause enough destruction! And the last time I at least had a good excuse. I was young and confused. Fifty years later I am old and confused. The more things change?
The devil whose name is Memory brings no clarity, only longing and confused dreams. I have been longing for my family for days now, Deddy and Mammie and Kleinboet and Ouboet, yes, even Ouboet! I wish I could just see him one more time, to make him understand that I always loved him, even after we had nothing left to say to each other. Blood is blood, isn’t it? That, sweetheart, is something you have also learnt lately.
But I long above all for that period in my life, for those few carefree weeks in Portugal, when I got to know the two Fernandos, the dead poet and his exceptionally vigorous namesake who became my lover. I long for the courageous woman I was fifty years ago. Lord, I didn’t know it was possible to feel such deep longing for oneself!
VICTORY
Colette inspects herself in the full-length mirror in her parents’ bedroom. This is what the heroines in the romance novels she has been devouring lately always do at some point in the book. The easiest way to show the reader what the heroine looks like, and at the same time reveal how she feels about herself. It is one of the tips she has picked up since trying to write a few stories of her own. Not love stories – alas, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half she still knows far too little about love – just stories. Poems too, occasionally, inspired by the twilight confessions of Elisabeth Eybers, a gift from her father last year.
The biggest surprise of this new writing hobby is, even though she reads almost exclusively in English, nearly everything comes out in Afrikaans. It might have something to do with Elisabeth Eybers, who is to her knowledge the first woman to publish a volume of poetry in Afrikaans, and for whom she harbours almost the same fervent admiration as for Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Millay’s little poem about the candle that burns at both ends and will not last the night remains the most beautiful of all.) Or perhaps writing in Afrikaans is due to her excellent Afrikaans teachers at her excellent Afrikaans high school in the city. But perhaps more than anything else it is due to her father’s influence. Deddy, whom she has tried in vain to call Pappie for several years now, with his endless enthusiasm for this young language that emerged here on the southernmost tip of Africa virtually the other day.
‘Pretty as a picture,’ her mother says in English, appearing in the mirror behind her. The more Afrikaans her father becomes, the more deliberately English her mother becomes, or so it sometimes seems to her. ‘What do you say, Sina?’
‘I can’t believe it is our little Letty,’ says Sina, now also visible in the mirror, her hands clasped in admiration. Colette outgrew Sina years ago, but Sina pretends not to notice and simply carries on calling her our little Letty.
‘I look … grown-up.’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ Mammie says with a laugh. ‘A dinner dress to make you look grown-up?’
She had indeed asked Mammie to make her a ‘grown-up dress’ for an evening party one of her classmates was having this weekend. But she never dreamed that a dress and high-heeled shoes could make such a difference. She was used to seeing herself in school uniform, a striped blazer with white shirt and tie, thick black stockings and ugly black lace-up shoes, her blonde hair in braids resembling two short, fat koesisters, one shoulder continually weighed down by the heavy book-filled satchel. Or on weekends in flat shoes and bobby socks and a comfortable skirt and sloppy joe pullover, or in the pants she liked so much and which continued to distress Ouma Trui so deeply. That was the Colette she knew, the one she felt at home with, a schoolgirl who would easily disappear in a crowd of other schoolgirls.
Now this strange young woman stands before her, in a dress of shining midnight-blue satin with a fitted bodice – which makes her breasts inside the new brassiere look a little absurd, like two funnels – and a skirt that flares extravagantly from the wasp waist down to mid-calf. A lovely young woman, that she cannot deny, but above all an unfamiliar young woman. Her ankles look ballerina-thin in a pair of Mammie’s black patent leather high-heeled shoes, her neck long and slender, and terribly white against the dark blue satin. Especially now that Mammie is lifting her hair and piling it onto the back of her head.
‘Hmm, I think we must curl it and pin it up, what do you think? And that neck wants something. A string of pearls?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Colette resists, her voice almost panicky, and shakes her head to let her hair fall back onto her shoulders. ‘I don’t want to look so different that the children in my class won’t recognise me tomorrow night.’
‘You’re still the same Lettylove,’ Mammie says soothingly. ‘Just older and lovelier. Wait, I think we can still take in the waist just a tiny bit more.’ Mammie pinches the