NATASHA Illum Berg
Tea on the Blue Sofa
Whispers of love and longing from Africa
For you. As promised.
Such grown-up tears roll down relentlessly, when moley, milky eyes still only know how to turn up, hoping for the blurry light of a mother’s face.
Such fine nails on a new foot. Each of the five, already with its own half-moon, rising out of toes that cannot even support the weight of a person yet.
How soon would the nails bend over those toes, if not cut? And dig in to the ground, like crows’ claws, clasping the soil already from the first steps.
Such beautiful hair on the head of that child, so quickly it grows long. Falling fair strands. Seems it grows faster down, than the child up.
The earth is sucking hard from underneath.
Waiting, sucking.
Contents
Praise for Tea on the Blue Sofa:
My mother once met a dead tiger. In Margali, India. Four years before I was born. She walked up to its still-warm body with timid steps, wary of cutting its camouflaging protection from the shades and shadows–seeing the whole clearly the first time. Aware that only its death will let you cut a tiger out of the jungle. She was overcome by sadness. In an attempt to find a way to carry with her some of the strength lost in the death of a tiger, she and my father cut out the heart and ate it. Bearing in mind the stories my grandfather told about his times in India, my father knew that they were not the first to do such a thing. If there is strength in anything, it must be in a tiger’s heart.
‘I have two mindsets, that can be exchanged like keyboards, with letters of different languages. The mind of a writer, and the mind of a hunter. But you bring me straight back to the hunter’s mind,’ I had written to you, as we became losers to the shade-clad eyes of the world for falling in love. ‘Eyes, ears, taste. Legs aching to walk, or to stop, or not knowing which, but aching. Salt at the corners of my mouth. The hope of an opportunity for a shot at the top of the heart. Pursuit, following tracks with expectation, alertness and a bit of fear.’
‘The shot at the top of the heart,’ you answered, ‘has already happened. My heart has been severed from all reason. You can do with it what you want. You see the flower has been pollinated. This process cannot be reversed, and that is that. Nobody will ever have the power to remove these feelings, not even you.’
You left this world, on your way to my embrace.
In waiting for my eyes to get used to the dark, morning broke and daylight let me down.
Dawn entered as well-meaning and out of place as a mime for children and I never liked them much. In their lack of sound they throw unwanted desperation into communication.
I went out on the gravel road, where your beautiful body had fallen, brutally murdered by a single shot to the heart. The cruelty of that. The heart. The head would have been a different story, but the heart, my love. The heart that appeared on everything.
I lay down in the road next to the last part of you I would ever see, and hated myself for understanding that it had run out of your heart. A hunter knows at a glance.
A few drops of your heart’s blood, I put on my lips.
I was never allowed to see you again, or to go to your funeral, but a bit of your strength, a few drops of the heart that was on everything, I will carry with me to death, a lifetime later, not now.
And the thick window that is between myself and my bitter-cold grief, between my life and your death, opened a little.
The first letter was sent from me to you. It was a Tuesday. You took it as a confirmation, you told me later. A confirmation that I was the person who you had hoped I might be, ever since we met several years ago.
I still had a base in Kenya then. We had had Tanzanian tea on my blue sofa for the first time, the day before I sent the letter. It was a sofa larger than any sofa I had ever seen before, well, not longer, but deeper than any sofa, any of us, really, had ever seen before. It was a special kind of blue, three different-coloured threads especially chosen and woven together, to make the perfect blue. A child’s blue pulled out again after years in the attic, a child’s forgotten blue with a thread of time’s dust woven into it.
I wrote to you that I had found a seed pushed in between the cushions of the sofa after you had left. That it must had dropped out of your trouser pocket at some stage, when we were talking and drinking tea. I told you I had planted