Adults Only teaser: Q&A with Arja Salafranca

Joanne Hichens – editor of the Adults Only, the second annual Short.Sharp.Stories Awards anthology – interviews Arja Salafranca.

Arja Salafranca has published two collections of poetry, A Life Stripped of Illusions, which received the Sanlam Award for poetry and The Fire in which we Burn; a third is forthcoming in 2014. Her debut collection of short fiction is titled The Thin Line, and long-listed for the Wole Soyinka Award in 2012. She has participated in a number of writers conferences, edited two anthologies of fiction and non-fiction, and has received awards for her poetry and fiction. She is the lifestyle and arts editor at The Sunday Independent. Find her online atarjasalafranca.blogspot.com.

So… a collection of sexy stories… what’s your take?

Sex is everywhere around us – seemingly – on television and billboards, online and elsewhere – and yet, you don’t find much of it in literary terms, it’s something only partially explored in SA writing – and so I think this volume will be a welcome addition to the literary canon.... Read more here: 

From mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play: a review of The Edge of Things

In 1958 Randall Jarrell, the American poet, edited and brought out a collection of stories, Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories, which contains a famous introduction. The book was long out of print but has been recently republished as a New York Review Books Classic (2002). It is, naturally, very difficult to generalise about a book such as the one under review, but there is one section of Jarrell’s introduction that seems pertinent to The Edge of Things, in its mixture of complexity and comprehensiveness:

It is so good, our stories believe, simply to remember: their elementary delight in recognition, familiarity, mimesis, is another aspect of their obsession with all the likenesses of the universe, those metaphors that Proust called essential to style. Stories want to know: everything from the first blaze and breathlessness and fragrance to the last law and structure, but, too, stories don’t want to know, don’t want to care, just want to do as they please. (Jarrell 2002: x)

The range of the story: from mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play. Arja Salafranca’s task, as compiler ofThe Edge of Things, is not to ponder the nature of short fiction; it is to present as many works as possible, with an eye on quality, in order to promote the genre in this country. She notes that the stories submitted for publication in the book showed ‘an astonishing variety of narratives and approaches, shifting from realism to playful absurdity and crossing the boundaries from the strictly fictional to something that sits just beyond fiction, but isn’t quite nonfiction either’ (p. 7). Jarrell would have approved.

Looking at the stories themselves one finds it hard to pick out those that deserve special mention, but let me refer to some. ‘Bounce’ (p. 9), by Jayne Bauling, is a curiously gripping account (perhaps because this reviewer has tried to do the same) of the attempted rescue of a baby lourie, psychologically bound to the loss of a murdered partner. Salafranca’s own ‘The Iron Lung’ (p.18), juxtaposes two first-person accounts, those of mother and daughter, about life with the iron lung device; the device assumes a figurative significance. Cunningly different from other stories is Liesl Jobson’s ‘You pay for the view: twenty tips for super pics’ (p. 30), a life story constructed around the said tips and moments captured as camera events. The events begin with
‘1. Hold it steady’, and end with ‘20. Watch the light’, and cover a period, not always in strictly chronological order, of 32 years. In this and other stories failed marriages are at issue. I think of Gillian Schutte’s ‘Doubt’ (p. 50), with its erotic daydreams, and Karina Magdalena Szczurek’s ‘The Basket’ (p. 62), where the death of a newly-retired husband in a motorbike accident actually brings the protagonist (and the reader) a sense of relief.

In the collection’s eponymous ‘The edge of things’ (p. 78), by Jenna Mervis, the protagonist is alone with her dog in a cottage on the edge of suburban space, that appears to be spied on by possible intruders. She is without, or is separated from, a partner, and the narrator uses this absence and her sense of vulnerability to create suspense. In the end, though, Samson the dog, in the middle of a moonlit night, leads her outdoors, away from her locks and alarms, into a magical dream dimension, ‘on the edge of things’ in a different sense from that originally suggested.

Pravasan Pillay’s ‘Mr Essop’ (p.137) is a matter-of-fact, Hemingwayesque account of an instance of coldly administered cruelty to a child, with some fine moments of dialogue in Chatsworth dialect. Again, it is obviously impossible to mention all the stories in the book, but let me conclude with a brief look at Dan Wylie’s ‘Solitude’ (p. 256). Here we find a punctiliously crafted story, in deed. The protagonist is an aloof, cynical academic, complacently single, with a distaste for the life around him. He works on a crossword puzzle, clue by clue. The puzzle proves intrinsic to the plot, as the life around him, with its grubbiness and despair, enters into his puzzle (though he remains imperturbable.

The book will appeal to lovers of fiction and narrative in whatever forms. Those who relish detail, those who desire free play, are catered for. Not all the stories are of the same quality, but each, in its way, is enjoyable, and is reflective of the old cliché that everyone carries a story, or stories, within him or her. There is something of this democracy of the narrative urge in these stories, which makes of them a useful and enlightening panorama of local experience, states of mind, and states of emotion.

Nicholas Meihuizen
First published in Literator, North-West University, South Africa

The Thin Line is long-listed for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa

The Lumina Foundation has released the long list for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, and Arja Salafranca's short fiction collection, The Thin Line, has been nominated.
The short list will be announced in August. Read more here

A Car is a Weapon

“Eight thousand rand.” 

She takes a sip of tea. “It’s eight thousand rand to get a driver’s licence. And it’s two thousand five hundred to get a learner’s.”

“You’re not serious,” I say, “you’re not really going to do it.”

She shrugs, smiles, in her strange accented English she says, “You know I need a licence. Without it I can’t get a better job. It’s easier this way, quicker. I could wait years otherwise. What if I don’t pass my test?”

Pauli swallows the last of her tea, looks at her watch, another half an hour remaining before her lunch hour is over. She’s talking on condition of anonymity...Read more here

Good news on the short fiction front

Good news on the short fiction front: Arja Salafranca has put together 24 South African short stories which will be published by Dye Hard Press under the title The Edge of Things, a special short fiction issue of the the literary journal Green Dragon...

Read more from BookSA here

Schmalz

In 1781, Emperor Josef II announced an Edict of Toleration for the Jews which established the requirement for hereditary family names. Jews were required to assume German-sounding surnames. Rivka Shlomo comes in and says, “Here, you’re a Schmalz.” Thrusts a piece of paper at me – not that I can read it – and says, “Look, says it there. You’re a Schmalz. So if you need to tell anyone, not that you will, you tell them Schmalz.” Schmalz. Grease. Chicken fat. Schmalz! “That’s not what Dora and her family got!” I go outside, the piece of paper with the scribbles in my hand. “They’re Goldfarbers! How did they end up with gold in their name and we’re just grease?” Read more here

Friends

It was ten to six, and the sun was still hot. It would be another hour before it would go down. Around us, in the outdoor coffee shop, children played, people walked, cars reversed in the parking lot. It was time to leave. We'd been talking barely an hour and it was time to leave. I got out my notebook and asked Athina to write down her address and telephone numbers so we wouldn't lose touch again. I wrote my details down too, even though my email address hadn't changed in ten years, and she could have got hold of me anyway...Read more here

Crumbs

“Why don’t you smile at the customers?” Tammy asks her. “Smile at them, make them feel welcome, comfortable. Smile, then ask them if you can help them.” Tammy is talking to Hazel, her newest employee, friend of a friend. It had been a favour to hire her, this young, tall, yet sullen looking woman with the black hair that hung in flat sheets on either side of her head. Hazel stares blankly back at Tammy. “OK,” Hazel murmurs. Hazel tries to smile that day. But the action doesn’t come easily. Who cares, she thinks. What do the customers care if she asks them if they need help? If they want something like chocolates they can’t find, or need a brand of cigarettes, then they’ll ask for it, surely. Hazel has a five-year-old child, Jasmine, who waits for her at the end of each long day. When Hazel appears, Jasmine rushes to greet her. At night Hazel dreams of the shop, she dreams of Tammy, unhappy because Hazel doesn’t smile at the customers. But Hazel can’t lose this job. It is all that stands between having to move back in with her parents with Jasmine. At times Hazel dreams of the markets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She dreams of the Israeli kibbutz they lived on: she dreams that she is, once more, ironing hundreds of pairs of pants in the kibbutz. And she dreams of Federico, tall, violent Federico with his jet black hair and thick black eyebrows, and that powerful, maniacal look in his almost black eyes. Once more, in these dreams, Federico lunges at her, angry, stoned, wanting her to yield, have sex when she is not ready. When she is not, he hits out. She awakes from these dreams, breathless. She smokes at three, four in the morning then, the tip of her cigarette glowing in the greyness. She does not turn on the light, Jasmine sleeps a few metres away in a cordoned off corner of the studio flat they share. Five months later, Hazel is a waitress at a restaurant, The Doughnut. The days are as long, and more tiring, but the money is better, and she is busier than at the sweet shop. Hazel complains to her parents that she never sees the sun. She goes to work and comes home, and by then the day is gone. “I could be working underground,” Hazel complains to her mother. But her mother Evelyn replies: “It’s what you chose. Your father and I warned you not to go after that man, but you did. Now you have a child and your responsibility is to look after that child. Your life is over now, your child is what is important.” Hazel is thirty-five, and does not, obviously, want her life to be over, does not, in fact, feel that her life is over. But there’s nothing now, but the huge relief of waking up without Federico every morning, without the fear, the tiptoeing around a man who could be violent or gentle and sweet, depending on his mood or whether he had smoked grass the night before, or had got high on speed. And the fear that he would discover the places she had stashed their money for the month and spend it on drugs. And then, writing home, begging her parents to send money for food, medicine, rent. She took jobs: once she was a maid to a German woman who had moved to Tel Aviv after the war, another time she tried to work in a supermarket, but Hazel’s Hebrew was too poor for dealing with customers. Federico did not work. He hadn’t worked in years. When the money finished he too wrote to his parents, and they too wired him cash, but they were poorer than Hazel’s parents. She had met the tall, exotic-looking Spaniard at a beach party at the beginning of the seventies. Everyone was stoned at the party, including Hazel. They smoked grass or dropped acid, and lay on the beach and talked of psychedelic colours. Hazel had sold the car her parents had given to her as a wedding present, divorced the man she had married at twenty-one and bought a one-way ticket to Europe. In Spain Hazel had gone to a party at a large house on the beach and met Federico. He was tall and exotic. He spoke English with the rough, yet musical accent of the Spanish. He painted. He spoke six languages fluently. Hazel fell in love, with Spain, with a Spanish man, with the possibility that life could be different. No one who Hazel met through Federico seemed to work. They lived cheaply. That in itself was a type of freedom. She felt the ties of the past unloosening, she felt single again, not divorced, but single. She and Federico moved often, never staying more than a month in one of the beach cottages. They moved crablike along the southern coast. “You need to be free,” Federico would exclaim, “You can’t be free with a job,” he said. Hazel knew she was she was pregnant. Her periods had stopped, and she was gaining weight she couldn’t lose. The flat days stretched out: Federico spent them lying on a mattress. She thought she could feel the presence of the baby around her, watching, waiting. It was going to be a girl; she knew that, and this time she wasn’t going to get rid of it. “Let’s go to South Africa,” Hazel suggested. But it was a disaster. Her parents disapproved of Federico. He wasn’t Jewish for one thing, and he was foreign. Their daughter was pregnant, and not married. It was a scandal. One night her father, Herman, took Federico out. Her parents were talking about forcing her to have an abortion, if they could declare her insane, they could force an abortion on her. At the restaurant lounge Hazel’s father, Herman impressed on Federico that South Africa wasn’t the place for him. He left. Herman paid for the trip, and when Hazel found out she slammed her fist through the glass balcony door. Her father came home to shattered glass, her mother crying hysterically while Hazel sat stoic, unmoved, eyes glazed as though anaesthetised. There, she was given a choice: have an abortion voluntarily, for her own good; or it would be arranged that she would be committed to an insane asylum, and the state would force her to have an abortion anyway. The night before the abortion she had come home after a day out with friends to find two strangers sitting, waiting for her in the lounge of her parents. They carried out the threat. They committed her. In the six weeks she was there she learned to control her temper, to be quiet and acquiescent. The psychiatrist asked her gently if she wanted an abortion. No. When they released her they didn’t tell her parents. She met up with an old friend and fled. How do you measure pain and fear? The rain drummed against the windows of the aeroplane droning on towards Europe. “I’m coming,” she had said over the phone to Federico now in Spain, “do you still want me?” “Yes,” he said. “I’m still pregnant,” she said. The first time he hit her she was six months’ pregnant. She lurched and fell against the wall, knocking her head, her glasses flying across the room. He was contrite, apologetic, gentle after that. He got so angry at life, sometimes, and he just couldn’t control it. His eyes were soft, slightly rimmed with tears; he was sorry; he said he wouldn’t do it again. It happens in increments. The first time there is disbelief, wild, unyielding incomprehension. There is forgiveness. And then there is more forgiveness. It has to be that way. You do not fall out of love so quickly, so easily. Perhaps you never do: love so slick, so illogical. Perhaps you never do: perhaps a part of you will cling, always, to that hope, that illusion. Even when bones have been broken, and eyes have been smashed, and bruises purple into the shape of clenched fists. The illusions shatter, disbelief sets in. Conversation stops after a while. Federico promised he would get a job, and asked his parents for money. They moved back to Spain. They moved into yet another house, this one in the hills surrounding Málaga. Hazel gave birth at La Cruz Roja. She wrote to her parents, sending them pictures of their first grandchild. There was a thaw, babies melt hearts. There was guilt. And so, it started, the letters exchanged, the money wired. When Jasmine was eighteen months, Hazel’s mother came to visit. The visit was successful, in its way. There was more money after that: “You should see how they’re living!” Evelyn told Herman. “They live in houses without electricity sometimes! Last year Hazel had to draw water from a well! Can you imagine it Herman? She’s gone and made such a mess of her life; the least we can do is help out with some money. It’s the child I’m thinking of, of course.” Federico could not hold down a job. For a day or two he would get up early, wash dishes at a bar, be a waiter at a restaurant, say he would try and teach at the language school in Fuengirola, but after a day or two he stopped going to work. He was tired; he wouldn’t get up till ten, eleven, noon. Days pass. By the time Jasmine was three, Federico still could not support his family and yet he wanted more children. One day Hazel came home to find him boiling her diaphragm, trying to damage it without her seeing. She eventually married him before they left for Israel. You know when you’re making a mistake. You know when what you’re doing is wrong, but it’s a last ditch effort to save something; begin something else. Years later, she’d say: “But I still thought he would change, might change, away from the domineering influence of his parents, his mother especially. She had mollycoddled him from birth. He was her youngest son, and he couldn’t do anything wrong, I thought he might learn to take responsibility if we went where we were both strangers. I thought he might have a bit of pride then.” On the first kibbutz, he was assigned the job of milking the cows at five in the morning. It lasted a few days. Then they said he could pick fruit instead. It lasted a week. The director of the kibbutz was sorry, but all members had to work, he said, as he told Hazel they had to leave. They moved to a hostel in Tel Aviv. It was a year before they were accepted on another kibbutz, a year in which love died. The days were spent before they had begun. Hazel’s parents still sent money, but it was never enough. The coins piled up on the bookcase seemed like a lot of money to Jasmine, but her mother said they weren’t. Hazel took cleaning jobs, climbing up stepladders to clean chandeliers, washing out stranger’s kitchens. There was no more pretence: he did not look for jobs, When he hit out at night, the neighbours heard the sounds of crashing, thumping. Jasmine mostly slept through, but the times she did not, she awoke to see her father flinging her mother’s head against the walls. The look was resigned, her mother silent as Federico expended his energy. Federico was always contrite, sorry, mortified almost. When he said he’d never do it again, Hazel no longer believed him. But where else could they go? To go back to South Africa meant admitting defeat to her parents, it meant relying on them. They were accepted onto another kibbutz. Once more Federico did not work, but they were lenient here, more willing to understand that Federico was “sick” and couldn’t do an eight-hour day. Instead he went more and more often to the seaside resort of Eilat. Hazel began to suspect he had someone there. Sometimes he stayed away a week at a time, and the freedom was blissful, sweet and refreshing. Hazel hadn’t realised how tightly wired she had become. With Federico around she was tense all the time: she was tense in the morning when she awoke, and she was tense getting ready for her work in the kitchens, telling Jasmine to keep quiet as they dressed. And she was tense at night in bed. If she refused, he burst his way in, and she, silent, so that the child would not be woken. She wrote to her parents. At first they refused. No, they would not send tickets for her and her child. She had got herself into this mess; she could get herself out of it. She sent letters back, longer, more pleading letters. “I’m afraid he’ll try to kill me and Jasmine,” she wrote. “The other day he said when she turns twelve he’ll rape her and force me to watch. What sort of a man would say this?” They sent tickets. Only on the plane did Hazel relax, each passing mile beneath the window the distance growing longer and longer. In the end he signed the divorce papers, relinquishing all custody or visitation rights to see Jasmine when Herman agreed to pay off all of Federico’s debts. Sometimes Hazel and Jasmine go to the swimming pool in the townhouse complex where they move when Jasmine turns six. At The Doughnut Hazel became a manageress. Soon after getting the job as a waitress, she learned how to smile, and was promoted. Smiling mattered; seeming to care about the customers mattered. And then it took over: she cared that the orders were right, that the fat man who ate breakfast at the counter every morning had his bacon crisp, not soggy; and that the two secretaries who ate lunch every day shared dessert and received two spoons or forks for the dessert. It seemed as though the world simultaneously narrowed and opened up as she cared. Life narrowed to a tight focus: she cared about the job, and strove to do as well as she could; the heavy dark blankness filled with kitchen orders, smiles from customers, an offer to become a manageress. There are strict divisions to her day: there are the breakfast regulars, the 10 o’clock housewives who come for cake and tea with friends before going shopping, the lunch time crowd of office workers, the mid-afternoon pensioners. Hazel phones Jasmine in the afternoon, her domestic worker picks the child up from school. It is all so far away so different from the life she led before. Life is strict, ordered, a patchwork of routine. By cutting the day into slices, like a cake, she goes forward in increments, and there are crumbs of vague understanding of the past. (Published in Breaking the Silence: Journeys to Recovery POWA Women’s Writing Competition 2008 Fanele, an imprint of Jacana, 2009)

Ten Minutes to Hate

I am sitting in a darkened theatre beside the man I hope will love me one day. We are listening to the words of an American writer as interpreted by a South African actress in a pseudo American accent. She is talking of the life of a weasel, whose only battle is for survival. ‘I would like to be a weasel,’ she says, ‘with my mind blank and full of nothing. I would like to know what that feels like, no present or past, the minute forgotten as soon as it is past.’... Read more here

Patterns

I dreamed about you again last night. You were warm and funny as you helped me with some problem I had. Just like old times. Except you did not like to help me with my problems, preferring to stay out of whatever would disturb the stasis. I wondered then about the patterns in our lives and what brings us to the decisions we make, the people we choose to know. Whether we do it consciously or whether the reason’s hidden somewhere back in our brains, somewhere that’s not easy to find...Read more here

Cleo and Nic

It comes up quickly. Years roll on, and suddenly there’s a scar cut into your midriff where an appendix nearly burst when he was fifty-five. He has a mark to indicate where his gallbladder was removed and most of his teeth are crowned now. His hair is nearly gone, hers has grey showing through her red curls. What passes for a life? Forty years gone; children, a wife; an eye on retirement? A mother passed away. Tuesday nights and Saturday afternoons. A routine as fixed as a marriage now...Read more here

Couple on the beach

A middle-aged woman sits on the edge of the lagoon and watches a couple take photographs of each other. It is the beginning of a new year. It is low tide, and the waters of the lagoon have receded, leaving a vast expanse of wet beige sand. The couple stand in it with bare feet splayed, toes squelching into the coarse grains, taking photos with their expensive cameras. It is nearly the end of their holiday together, and they are using up their film before they leave Knysna. They make an odd couple, as they take photos. The woman is wearing a smart jacket on this summer evening, it is too smart for this seaside town, too smart for this season, and too warm, too. The middle-aged woman wonders why she wears it, when her feet are bare and her jeans rolled up to reveal pinkly white legs. She can’t be cold. Although there is a breeze blowing, it is not a cold night, the day was warm, and the heat remains trapped as the sun goes slowly down. Perhaps it is to cover her body, perhaps she has gained weight and wants to hide behind her big black jacket. The middle-aged woman smokes a cigarette as she sits on the cement boulder and watches the couple. She knows all about gaining weight and hiding behind big clothes. She has done it too. It is only now that she is older that she can afford to be freer, that she can wear anything and not be self-conscious and concerned that others, men, are looking at her, appraising her. She knows she is getting past the age of appraisal. She has read of the liberation that comes from middle-age ­– the loss of youth, menopause ­– she welcomes it. Her hair is still mainly auburn, but lately she has been seeing the flash of silver streaks in it. They dart in and out between the dark strands, as though playing hide and seek, daring to be found. The male part of the couple is tall and thin, as opposed to the female, who is shorter, slightly overweight, her gloriously auburn hair long and flying in the dusk’s breeze. He is skinny and awkward in his body, as awkward as the woman is in hers. He is uncomfortable in the casual T-shirt he’s wearing, and the middle-aged woman wonders why he wears it. Perhaps his partner, or whatever that girl is to him, asked him to wear it. The middle-aged woman has a feeling that he would be uncomfortable no matter what he wore. He is that kind of person, awkward in his body, in his life, hanging after this partner like a puppy dog eager to please her, compliant, pliant and soft, willing to do whatever it is that would make her like him, fall in love with him, something beyond this cold dismissive need of hers. But she won’t let him go yet, she needs him, although she does not like him. She needs him and that is her weakness, that’s what makes her hate him, and hate a part of herself too. The middle-aged woman can see this as she smokes into the pale blue dusk, and watches the lagoon recede from this couple. She watches the roar of the sea at the heads, as it foams and dashes, as though the seas were a caged wild animal wanting to get into this quiet piece of solitude, preferring the domestic peace of the lagoon to the endless, deep, unfathomable sea. Her boyfriend keeps wanting to take her on the sea, perhaps on a small yacht, time and time again she refuses. She is afraid of the sea. She smokes on the cement barricade, clutching the cigarette in her finger, looking at the beauty spot on her little finger that a man once found so attractive years ago, a dark mark on the fleshy folds of her baby finer. She watches couples take photos as the sky darkens and fish burns in a house nearby.

***

The couple don’t know where to go for supper. The woman is full from a sweet cinnamon pancake eaten late that afternoon. Her name is Ailsa. Her friend, her partner, her holiday companion, whose name is Mark, is hungry. Again. She doesn’t know where all the food goes, or how it disappears on him, leaving him skinny and perpetually hungry. Once home to the tiny cottage they are renting for the week she tries to stall him. They watch TV, she puts more makeup over the day’s makeup while he watches the news, she brushes her heavy hair again. It looks limp, it always sags in summer when it’s hot, there is not much she can do about it.

“Hell, I’m hungry,” Mark emphasises from the bedroom, where he lies sprawled in front of the TV. It is their last night in Knysna, he wants it to be special. Ailsa wants to get the hell out of here, go home as quickly as possible, be free from this friend who has shared her bed, her holiday, her life. She would like to go tonight, just ride straight through, back to Johannesburg, 16 hours straight, to be home, away from this man who is as tangled in her life as fish caught in a net û as tangled and as messy. “I’m still not hungry,” she calls from the bathroom. “Can’t we wait?” They wait, talk is desultory, they make plans for the next day, deciding what time they should get up, pack, leave.

***

They eat dinner. They land up at the same place that sells the pancakes. This time Ailsa picks at a calamari salad, a salad that Mark will finish after she’s stopped pushing her fork around the bowl, eating when she’s not hungry. Only years later will she learn not to eat when she’s not hungry. It’s a simple thing, something she hasn’t learnt yet. The waiter serves them, beaming, bringing plates, taking away plates. Mark leans close to her, talking quietly. Ailsa thinks he does this deliberately, to make them look like a couple in the eyes of the world. She hates the way he does this, she doesn’t want anyone to know they’re together, she wants to shake him off like a bad smell. She leans back as though to tell the world that they are not really together. Mark makes small talk with him as well, and Ailsa simply cannot shut off her disgust. She looks away, distant, cringing. Mark’s stupid, meaningless conversation falls awkwardly into the music and hollow of the restaurant. The waiter, she thinks, appraises her, looks her up and down, wonders why she is with this man who makes stupid, unintelligent conversation, and drags her out to eat when she is not hungry. There is dessert for him. She is so tired, so very very tired, it’s early still and yet all she wants to go sleep. Mark again makes plans for the next morning. He talks on, Ailsa adds a little to the conversation, trying to find something new to say, but it is impossible. They have said the same things now, to each other, for days on end. It is exhausting being nice, not getting irritated. Ailsa hasn’t wanted to fight, not this time, now that everything has fallen back on only the two of them. There have been irritations, dishes unwashed, not enough time for herself, a feeling of frustration and helplessness at his own helplessness. She is his life, she knows that now, and because she is his life, she cannot shake him off. “I’m in love with you, Ailsa,” he had told her months before as they sat in a lounge in her parents’ home eating chocolate-covered nuts in front of a fire. “I fell in love with you. One day a few months ago I woke up and thought, ‘I’m in love with Ailsa!’ What do you think of that?”

Ailsa had sighed in the lounge, the bright lounge with glaring overhead lights and dim wall brackets, the flames crackling in the silence, the fire her father insisted on making every winter, hauling in logs and setting the stone fireplace blazing in the smart lounge. “I know,” she had said. “I’ve known for a long time now, the way you look at me. But I’m not ready, Mark. I’m not ready for a new relationship.” Mark had looked at her then, the hard sharp face dissolved into vulnerabilities, stripped bare of its usual arrogance. How could she hurt him? How could she hurt him the way she’d been hurt and cast aside by the man she’d fallen in love with and then cast aside as easily as they’d come together. A year later, and she was left nursing a bruised heart, eating chocolate-covered nuts bought by a man who said he was in love with her, who had never fallen in love before and now said he loved her. She needed him, she needed him for the friendship and for the soft pliancy of his weakness. As long as he was in love with her she could mould him or break him or twist his desires. She needed him because she needed people around her to stave off something unmentionable, and she needed, now, a man to say he loved her, and here he was, Mark, saying he loved her. And all she said was that she was not ready for another relationship. Years later she would have said, perhaps, that she could not love him, that he wasn’t her type ­– but on that night she could only suck chocolate off a nut and tell him she was sorry, and let him massage her feet for her.

***

He’d never even kissed a woman; the girl he’d asked to the matric dance hadn’t even come to the after party with him. He’d plucked up the courage many times after to ask women out, but invariably they said no. He didn’t know if it was because his stammer grew worse when he asked them out, or if it was because he was so skinny, or if it was the fact that he lived at home still, a man in his late twenties. His mother had told him to wait, she reminded him that his own father had only married in his thirties. There’s plenty of time, she’d say, when he tried to talk to her about it. She did not help. She brushed hair from his eyes in a gesture of tenderness, and cooked his favourite foods and complained to him about her unfeeling husband, but she did not help. He started noticing Ailsa after her break-up from James. They went, as friends, to movies and plays. They ate supper, as friends. This was even when she was still with James. He couldn’t believe it was that serious, if she could go out to supper with him one night, the next with James while still hoping that he, James, would fall in love with her. Sitting in the office they both worked in, she’d wonder aloud to him, asking if he thought James liked her, and then she’d describe James’ actions and words. Or, she asked, did Mark think she simply a friend to James? Mark had no answers. It was only long after she finally asked and found out the answer to her questions, and spent long times behind locked doors, emerging tear-eyed, clutching the Valiums the receptionist pressed into her hands and life. He first noticed her kindness and gentleness. Her soft shy way of talking and her fear of hurting anyone. He noticed the way she ate, delicately, with her small hands fisted around a spoon, or cupping a cappuccino, the way she wiped her mouth, the way she took care not to let the food spill, or catch in the corners of her mouth. He noticed this and thought she was a nice person. She took the time to listen to him, to go out with him. Here, at last, was a woman who did not run away, or make excuses that she was involved. She stayed and listened. They saw more movies, and one night, after drinks at a neighbourhood restaurant, he told her his greatest fear about having sex. He thought his penis was too small, and Ailsa stared into the darkness of the car, and said she’d only known one man, and his penis hadn’t been that big, and that it didn’t matter anyway. And that there was so much to sex than a large penis. “Besides, when it gets big it gets big enough!” she’d laughed into the inky morning as they sat in the car. She hadn’t yet asked him into the house, and later he was glad, would he had felt so free, so uninhibited in the house where her parents could have heard him? The next morning he phoned her and thanked her for their talk. It felt like a veil was lifting, like light was coming in through fog and murk. He felt grateful too, grateful for her kindness, for the fact that she listened to him. But he didn’t understand it. He fell in love, instead. That’s what he’d tell people years later, himself, another woman. That he had fallen in love with her soft gentle brown eyes, and the long lashes and the thick wavy auburn hair, and the beauty spot on her little finger. He stared across at her day after day in the open-plan office and walked with her to the shops at lunch time and got close enough to her to smell her sweat and perfume mingling in a heady mixture that made him dream and fantasise in his narrow lonely bed in his own parents’ house. And then he fell in love, simple as that. He could not tell her, although he tried. He found out what her feelings for James were, and found out she was still in love with him, she was obsessed by that love, that man whom Mark had met only once. Mark spoke about a woman he really liked, and she said tell me more, and he tried to hide it and eventually it came out. And she could not reciprocate his love for her as she ate his chocolate-covered nuts and let him take off her boots and knead her feet into submission. He kneaded and caressed and looked at her, wanting to kiss her and touch her breasts, he’d never touched breasts before, but had to make do with tepid coffee and the smooth curved muscles of her feet.

***

On their last night on holiday, away from Knysna, they find themselves booked into a grim, one-star hotel in a small town in the Karoo. It is clean, but plain. There are no lamps and the beds are two singles pushed apart. The bathroom is white and clinical, the curtains threadbare. The mattresses are lumpy and once more, Ailsa’s supper sits hard and rocky in her stomach. Again, she ate when she wasn’t hungry. A half a day riding in the car, the sun beating down, trying to get sleep, feeling exhaustion snatching her, trying to get away from the situation, the holiday, the man driving the big car through the sun-baked Karoo desert, the endless miles of scrubby, shrimp-like plants, crouching over the dry earth. They ate supper at an American steakhouse, the only restaurant open in town on a Saturday night. A Chinese restaurant was closed, and a grand elegant hotel that Mark wanted to go was expensive and had a set meal. Anger had hovered in the air, Mark had said he simply wanted their last night to be special. “I’m not going to spend all that money on a three course meal that I’m not hungry enough to eat!” she had retorted. “Okay,” he’d replied, but conversation died in the steakhouse. Still, after eating and coming back and undressing and washing face and brushing teeth and getting into their single beds, she lets him come into hers, and he is hard, as always, and she lets him have sex with her. Again, it is unsatisfactory, he comes too quickly, there is no joy for her. He tries to find her secret spot, and sometimes he gets it, but never for long enough. He always misses the mark, and she grows tired of his fumblings, and that is that. The bed is too narrow. He lies against her for a while, his hard bony body offering little comfort, sinking away into the sheet and the pillows, there is always an elbow he doesn’t know what to do with. He does not know how to hold her, or to run his hands around her soft hips and soft belly, to trace her scars with love. Ailsa lies there and thinks this man is as cold as the one before. But, she doesn’t love this one. He moans as he comes and she shuts off, his pleasure sounds an irritation in the dark room. He comes outside of her (she doesn’t want to get pregnant), and goes to the bathroom to clean himself up, turning on the hard white light. She watches, naked, limp penis dangling, body angular and bent as an old man’s. She hates him then, she tries to love him as he cleans her up, and hates him. She lies there passive in the white light streaming from the bathroom, and he cleans her between the legs, smoothing the white sperm away from her stomach into the wet toilet paper, and she doesn’t even mind that he sees her naked, the imperfect body, the swelling of it, the scars, the unfeminine-like trail of dark hair. She doesn’t mind, she doesn’t care. “That’s probably the last time we’ll do it,” he says matter of factly as he drifts off. He knows, he knows that was it, she’s told him she is not in love with him. He knows that when the holiday is over she will finally find the strength in her to call a halt to this, that they will not have sex and she will not try to control her temper with him, or hide her irritation. The sex had started a few days earlier, the night before the new year. Early in the morning before the next year she had forced him into her. “Are you ready?” she’d whispered. Yes, no, yes, no. “I suppose I have to do it.” He’d drunk champagne after they’d done it. They’d been saving it for the new year, but he opened the bottle and toasted the event. He couldn’t believe he’d done it, kept exclaiming over it, blue eyes big, mouth agape, sitting up in bed with a wineglass while she lay there, thinking, Get off it! It was a relief finally, even though he was quick, and she wanted something slower, something more. She almost called him James, then didn’t call him anything at all, his name behind the other one, a name she had to grope for in her head. She felt triumphant, she’d completed the cycle, stolen his virginity, forced him through that final border, showed him love and sex and kissing and lying in bed together. She’d broken her own barrier too, remembering sex a year earlier, the cold, silent night, the man who slipped off into his own single bed, the pimple that sprouted the morning after on her breast. Big and fat and white and filled with pus. She had squeezed it in the mirror, it spattered against her fingers, against the silver metal, as she clutched a towel around her, the day after she wasn’t a virgin anymore. There was no blood that morning, simply yellow, oily pus that leaked out of her.

***

It had started earlier than this trip to Knysna though. It had been like a dance. After the night he said he loved her she’d agreed to go away with him. They both needed a holiday, he argued. Over a long weekend they ran away to the mountains in the east, a deserted chalet in the shadow of snowy peaks, the pale watery beginnings of summer present in the heat of the day, the mornings and nights capped with cold. She let him caress her, it started off as a massage, a drink, the pale afternoon light coming in as he picked off her clothes, his hands moving further, getting warmer. No sex, he was a virgin, a Christian, didn’t believe in sex before marriage. But there were two bodies naked, the sordid details of an unmade bed in the waning afternoon, the silence of exhaustion as they forced food into their mouths in the hotel restaurant later, hair hastily combed, clothes piled up, putting make-up on. “But I don’t want you to look pretty for other men!” And she rolled her eyes at him, choking on the cliché. Was he saying it to flatter her, or because he’d read it or heard it said? Or did he actually mean it? She put the makeup on, like she always did, and shoved the food in her mouth, conversation dead between them, the restaurant emptying. They tried it one morning, but they couldn’t get the condom on, they didn’t seem to know how, and she was dry and sore. He wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready. She pulled away, then pulled towards him, craving love, affection, dancing around his own wants the way he danced around hers. At times she even thought she saw that old hardness and sarcasm she’d first glimpsed in him, that had made her recoil away from even friendship with him. She accused him, abused him. Told him it had to end, she wasn’t in love. And the touching would stop for a while, and then start up again. She was starving, famished, she sucked and sucked at his dry orange, wanting more, wanting something else, disgusted with herself, with her need to love and be loved. She was excising James’s ghost, this was the way she’d get rid of him: by having sex with another man she’d be over him. Once she’d sex with someone else she could get on with her life. She could forget James, forget Mark, be free to find someone new. “I can’t hurt you,” she told Mark as they lay together. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve already hurt me. I fell in love with you and you can’t reciprocate. So you have hurt me.” “I don’t want to be like James.” “It doesn’t matter.” James lay beside them, a ghost with presence and shadow and a history. Mark asked her all sort of questions about James, what he was like, the way he treated her, what she had loved about him, as though he could appropriate the other man’s abilities and qualities and thus make her fall in love with him. The dancing continued. She could not let him go, he came to fill up all the crevices of her life, till she knew she’d never be alone if she didn’t want to. He’d be there, as easy as an old armchair, she could phone him at any time, they’d see a movie, go to a play. There was no need to phone anyone else. The blanket grew tighter, it was secure, no need to risk being hurt with anyone else. One night, driving home with him, she stared at the black streets and heard him talk into the darkness, and again felt that frustration, and thought, maybe this is it. Maybe I must accept this. Maybe there won’t be anyone else. He is not a bad man, simply a boring, stupid man. The time passed. She pushed him away again. She wouldn’t let him touch her, it had to stop. He was simply getting hurt.

***

On the last day of their holiday she is happy. She points her camera at the flat Free State farms and bubbly storm clouds and takes pictures of the sun radiating out as it dips and dives in yet another dusk. They have coffee in a restaurant attached to a highway garage. Mark watches as she laughs and gets enthusiastic. He smiles with her, the tensions of the last few days dissolved. He is tired, but he is happy. He wishes she could have been as happy a few days ago, back in Knysna. He does not want to go back. He goes back to work the next day, she won’t be there. He’ll miss her in bed at night, the warmth, the miraculous warmth of another body, and her smell, that sweet smell that lingers in her hair, on his hands, he cannot get enough; or her buttery feel as he slides his hands along her hips, her stomach, doing as she asks him. It is all overwhelming as he puts his hands lightly on her, barely touching her. Only when she protests does he cup her stomach or her breasts, trying to give her what she wants, what he cannot give. It feels like going back into darkness, although he feels changed. She flirts with the waiter in the restaurant. She is twenty-five, the waiter is a teenager. She feels older, finally like an adult, leaves a tip, spoons ice-cream into her mouth and tells him she’s going to diet when they get back. ‘I like you the way you are!’ he protests. I’m not doing this for you, she thinks. He watches her flirt, eat ice-cream, take pictures. It is like watching something fly away from you, like watching bubbles dissolve in the sunlight, like candyfloss melting on your tongue. A vague sweetness remains, a thick rough fur left on your teeth. The sun goes down, you try to capture a sunset, the clouds come out blurred, an arm pokes out the corner of a photograph, fat and white. There is one perfect photo, with the light radiating out from the clouds, and the clouds spill out into the frame. One perfect moment, before it all disappears.

***

A middle-aged woman watches as a couple take pictures of each other. She has lived here for many years, It is quiet and she can paint in peace and every few years she has boyfriends. Her paintings sell well enough for her to make a living. When the tide goes out, she goes down to the lagoon, smokes on the cement barrier, or walks on the sand, trousers rolled up, feet splayed in the coarse sand, the way she did on her first trip here years and years and years ago. She had a dog when she first moved here, used to take him for walks but he died. And she has simply continued the ritual of her evening walks. It’s a habit, a break from the day’s work, a walk in the fading light, harsh lamps don’t give her paintings the same look, she prefers to paint by daylight. She has a boyfriend waiting in her house. He is younger than her, this season’s lover. He lives far away, in a big city. He is a good lover, but now, so is she. She has finally learned to be loved, the men she knows know how to find her spot and take their time. She has sex, she has lovers, she has a canvas opened wide against the window that faces one of the hills of brown and green vegetation. There, in the landscape and gentle lights, she paints the hard angular paints that shout anger and despair and hard modern living. Sometimes her daughter comes to visit. She expects her mother to paint soft gentle flowers and landscapes, to mirror this land she lives in. But she doesn’t. She paints from long ago, when she was young, and she remembers what that feels like. She paints young people – angry young people who don’t know where they’re going, who are still finding themselves, who wear hard bright colours and stare out of the canvas with hard accusatory looks. Her latest painting though is different. Unlike the others it is a soft gentle painting done in pastel blues and pinks and light whitish colours. A couple takes photographs of each other on a beach. There is a tall skinny man who holds a camera taking photographs of a short woman with auburn hair blowing in the wind, smiling uncertainly into the orb of his lens. They wear old-fashioned clothes, jeans that flare at the ankles, tie-dyed shirts, it is a long time ago. Somehow, though, the lines are jagged, the man stands too far away, the woman is too uncertain. There’s a sense of unease in the picture, of disturbed lives. Sitting on the a cement platform a middle-aged woman edges into the distance, smoking cigarettes, watching the past unfolding before her. The middle-aged woman wears a red top, it too is jarring, like a flash of blood. It is all intermingled as Ailsa puts the final touches to her latest painting, making the red of the top harder, more violent, more bloody. The past doesn’t fade, it may lie sleeping and then it comes seeping out through the cracks in your life – in a painting, a piece of music, a movie that reminds you and perhaps, makes you cry, makes you go back through the tunnel of memories and time. Till you stand in the vortex, watching a younger self, wishing you could give advice, tell her where not to go, where she went wrong, how, if she leaves half an hour earlier, or attends a certain dinner she refused to once, she would meet a certain man, not this one, not that one in the kitchen, simmering ratatouille. But it’s all impossible, to reach back as she reaches forward, asking, always asking questions of her older self, at twenty, at thirty, now at fifty, she tries to peer at herself of sixty, seventy. It never works. The future woman walks away, face in shadow, body turned away, refusing to answer questions: “Live your own life!” she would be saying if she could talk. Instead you’re left with the present, even as it dissolves rapidly into the past, memories swirling away. Ailsa sighs, catches a piece of her auburn hair, pulls out a silver strand and holds it to the light, fascinated as always by the luminosity of her white hairs, the absence of pigment and the way sun shines right through.


(Published in New Contrast, Opbrud (Denmark) and Post-traumatic (Botsotso). Winner of the 1999 Sanlam Award for unpublished fiction)