Isak blinks his eyes to adjust. It is Oom Kalla in the middle of the room, sleekly Brylcreemed, shuffling with bowlegs to the voice of Petrus. His arms are draped around the shoulders of Raatjie. She wears her new pink overall meant for the party. Her face is hidden in his shirt. Oom Kalla licks an ice cream cone. Now and again he kisses the top of her head to the beat of the music.
Isak closes the shutter. Raatjie will not be doing the evening shift. He drags his feet up the path to the house through rows and rows of new trees with spindly branches that claw at him. The clouds part above the mountain and he can see a scattering of stars and the outline of the moon.
Ahead the house glows with light. Someone stands in the shadows of the front stoep. As he comes closer, there is not one but two and the laugh is a laugh he knows.
Light from smoking candles flits over black and raw silk.
SIX
“Isak.”
He opens his eyes to see Danie and the doctor watching over him.
“I’ve told Amelie that you’re fine, just fine, a fall over a little wall, that’s all.” Danie speaks slowly, “Nothing to worry about, really. But she insists on coming. Maybe when you are feeling better you can speak to her. Reassure her that you are under good care.”
Twice he has died. He wants to laugh but all he can do is machine-breathe. The ceiling is grey as the sky outside his window, grey as the skin of Danie. There is a hole in his head. Under the bandage his skull has broken, that he remembers too. He tries to raise an arm but it lies dead under the sheet. He tries the other arm connected to the drip, but it is also dumb.
“It’s not neccessary, everything is under control.” Someone said that. He wants to tell them that nothing is under control. That everything is on the verge of chaos. He needs to get money and fast otherwise he might as well lie here and die for good, but money for what? Desperately, he tries to talk but a nurse removes the respirator, pulling the pipe out of his throat like a fish line. Panic-stricken he breathes in short spurts, eyes on the computer screen above his bed, watching his heart rate shoot above the line. Then a mask is fitted over his face. He inhales the pure oxygen, forgetting the pressing question for another.
“Am I alive?”
No one replies.
He makes noises in the mask and Danie comes closer to hear better. “You fell at my house, in the garage.”
“I was busy dying …”
But Danie cannot understand and the doctor gestures to him not to speak.
Danie continues, explaining as to a child. “You were travelling from Paris to Rotterdam. We were having supper when you fell into the underground garage, that’s where the dogs found you.”
“Amelie, I must speak to Amelie.” The room spins, engulfing him in nausea.
His brother leans over him and the cross swings in and out of his vision “Easy, easy … you were on a business trip to see clients.”
What the hell am I doing here with you? he asks in his mind.
Danie senses his question, pulling back as though slapped. “I invited you, I wanted to see you.”
“Enough.” The doctor leads Danie behind the screen.
Isak can see their shadows in the screen’s folds. The answer to his question comes up in his mind. He has been entrusted to find money that will save them, otherwise all is lost. It is as though the fall is not only a fall to the ground but a fall from grace. A final fall into failure that makes him escape the responsibility he carries so heavily. It is now out of his hands. The fall has taken the burden off his shoulders.
Relieved, he closes his mind to it, drifting in a drugged haze to a time of long ago.
* * *
There’s a knock on the door just before sunrise. Someone large leans over his bed. They walk through the house, him tailing his father, brusque and removed. The heads of the lilies have turned brown and at the door are crates with empty bottles.
His father climbs in the bakkie and he does the same. The smiling dog waits for the whistle but there is no whistle. They drive fast, very fast to the hills, his father like a man with a devil inside of him, stopping on the lands behind the hills. Closed vygies wait for the sun. His father pulls the handbrake and climbs out. Here, no one can see them. Isak remains seated, switching on the radio to get rid of the plaintive tune in his head. Without caution his father runs up the hill as fast as he can, up and down, over and over.
The radio’s reports can’t rid him of the woman’s nasal voice of the previous evening. Suddenly the man sinks to his knees, pressing his arms around his chest. A fear wells up inside of Isak. He sits in the cab, silently singing the tune over and over, not sure what to do as pain contorts his father’s face.
Isak watches.
His father hits his chest. Once again he tries to run, his eyes glazed, gasping for breath.
Isak climbs out.
His father falls at his feet, face first. “Enough,” his father murmurs, “enough.” He lies there as the sun strikes the rock. Isak is not sure what to do. Vygies open, changing the veld to purple. Isak bends down. The man is heavy. He grips him under the arms but his weight is too much. Inch by inch he drags him over the flowers. Piece by piece he lifts him onto the seat, his own chest paining, his own muscles contracting in a spasm. His father slumps over the dashboard. He drives flat out. Each stone, each dip in the road seems to pierce the man beside him.
She is waiting in the garage, her hair a mess.
And the doctor’s new Capri is in the driveway, with open doors. The doctor pulls him out.
Isak wants to tell what has happened out there but there is no time for talking. They load his father into the sports car and the doctor spins the wheels. He can hear how the Capri’s low undercarriage scrapes the gravel.
Her lips are drained, goosebumps all over her skin. Both stand barefoot on the stoep, she in a nightie and him in pyjamas. Above the hills they see the sun and the air is scented from the falling blossoms.
“I knew it.” She turns to him reaching for his hand.
But he ignores her, calling the dogs.
“Try to sleep,” she suggests, dropping her hand.
Angrily he walks away, all along the ridge to the rubbish dump. From here he can see far, almost as far as the town. The Capri has turned onto the main road, just a speck, just a suggestion.
He runs his hand over the smiling dog’s fur.
Noises come from the house of heavy things being shifted, voices from the farm barracks, then David’s tractor coming along the ridge, with a trailer. A subdued Danie and Pensie sit on a heap of boxes and rubbish. David backs the trailer to the edge of the dump site and the small boys help him tip.
Isak moves closer to inspect.
There’s the normal rubbish of bottles and broken glasses. Heaps of wilted lilies and a record snapped in two. He digs it out amongst the flowers. It is the record of Nana Mouskouri with the cursed party tune.
* * *
Behind the screen the doctor moves on to old men dribbling into pee pots. From the shouts and swearing, he can make out that their bodies are being wiped down as well. No one wipes his battered body. His urine is piped into a pot.
He opens his eyes a little more. Black flowers come into focus. At the foot of his bed is a uniformed man, holding a bunch of tulips. The nurse clasps them to her chest and there are apologies made for the second fall and for the second death in the ambulance.
Flowers of condolence, flowers