What nation still had a social conscience? Who would pay for the sins of the father?
His agent amongst the pallets, white-coated like Madam, shrugging his shoulders, “Pardon, monsieur Minnaar, but only the best sells at Rungis. There is no place for beginners. Too much good fruit.” Dominique’s finely wrought face frowns up at him, the words formed voluptuously on his thin lips.
Later they sit in the diner surrounded by men smoking cigarillos, Dominique, apologetic over the baked Camembert and the Bordeaux in his hand. Uncomfortable and embarrassed by this attention, Isak regrets the invitation to eat.
“Rungis is dying,” Dominique tries to soften the blow, waving his hands. “Another hall is to close down. We have lost the battle with the supermarkets.”
Dominique greying at the temples, just like him. Dominique, fourth generation on the market floor. Perhaps the last generation on the market floor. They walk back through the halls to the red-and-blue carton of Oupa. He bites into a pear, the wind marks and russeting forgotten as he tastes the sweetness and tartness of home.
Without hope, all is lost.
Sleeping in the cramped room, he dreams of the men on the wall.
He wakes to a moon and the clock-face down the street, searching in the dark for the briefcase with its calculator, listlessly pressing the digits over and over. The bank wants answers and he needs to give them the bigger plan, they too have little patience with a white man and a social experiment. Cartons, fruit, fuel, fertilizer and people, lots of people are coded into figures. Abruptly he switches on the light. It is the time of day that markets across Europe switch on their lights too.
And back home in the valley someone will be lighting a candle and another heating water on a stove and they will be sleeping, the two of them together in his absence. Lambs will be born and the leaves will fall and the river will run full through the orchards as he struggles to find a saviour for them all.
In despair he drops the calculator with totals that won’t go away.
* * *
Spine to the wall, the little boy waits in the dark for the crying. It begins, rising and falling, then dissolving into a whimper. He mimics Outa’s song, clicking his tongue, filling the hollow space in his head. With a cocked head he waits, wrapped in Ouma’s eiderdown. There’s a lull, then another voice, singing songs of comfort and he repeats the words, over and over again. Suddenly the song stops. He studies his feet and the shape of his sleeping brother, curled up like a frightened songololo. The shamed thumb moves in and out and the light from the stoep makes tiger stripes, light and dark, light and dark. His eiderdown is made of different material. One by one he strokes the blocks, guessing the names; calico, satin, velvet, kaffir sheeting.
On the wall is Jesus walking on water and the water looks like the wave pattern they do in their books at Sunday school, rows and rows of them, especially for Noah’s ark.
Without waking the other, he climbs in, curving his body with his brother’s back, mimicking the breathing of the smaller boy. The lines over his face dissolve into oneness and the words of the lullaby sink into the waves on the wall.
* * *
Walking down the main street of Perron, he rolls his head tentatively from side to side, feeling the old neck injury. Automatically he lifts the phone to check the screen but Amelie is silent. Bad news travels fast, he consoles himself, as he enters the old church.
Perron’s museum is hell displayed in glass cabinets; framed, listed and catalogued. Artificial limbs made from wood and cloth stand at attention on shelving. Against the wall a projector flashes scenes of soldiers in trenches of mud. Running, shooting, riding, falling in mud as high as horse bridles. There is no sun, no golden aura, just misery and defeat on their faces.
This is Oupa’s war. Thousands of lives for a metre of soil. Trenches turned into bloodied moats, men turned into bloated bodies, embalmed in the ever-present mud. What for? he thinks, as Europe moves to a union. If only one could see ahead.
He exits through the fire escape onto the grounds of the castle that leads to the church. Old men sit on canvas chairs fishing in the canal. He zips his jacket and hunches his shoulders from the cold as he stops to look at the tables. Live crabs and unplucked ducks lie next to each other while eels squirm in shallow baths. Again he unfolds the map showing the Autoroute de Soleil. It is a five-hour drive to the Belgian-Dutch border.
Our house is the last in the street, on a hill, the only hill in Holland.
The putt-putt of the scooter comes from behind. Isak points to apples and the lady lifts them off the table by their stem ends, apples with unblemished skins. He sits down on the low wall of the church biting into one, its insipid taste offering no consolation. There are millions of such apples spread over Europe.
Fruit is the beginning and the end of him.
Across the canal a girl plays the accordion. He notices her sullenness. She is the age of his daughter, her slim limbs reminding him of Sophy and the awkwardness that comes with being a father to a girl-woman.
The scooter stops. He senses the man’s closeness. Without speaking Isak passes on an apple. They watch the lines in the water, listening to the thin singing.
Then he tosses the stripped core into the water and the other does the same. The two cores drift downstream until they are sucked under the bridge. With delight the man claps his hands while Isak returns to the car. Small pleasures no longer please him.
Pulling at the choke, he wonders about the cores and whether they will seed as he drives past the girl, hidden by falling hair. She is only a child. He stops the car, holding out a coin to her, which she takes with barely concealed anger, dropping it disdainfully onto the red velvet of the opened case.
Wheat and mustard lands replace the fields of crosses. Stone villages and fuel stops break the monotony along the highway. Eventually, the hills flatten out to beech forests and the first polders appear. He switches on the fan as a concentration of piggeries spew their stench onto the road and the sign for the village, straddling the border, comes up on the board.
It is a truck stop, a take-away town for travellers and below the road, shop windows sell women. At the end of the village is a hill and a house with a weather vane pointing south.
Two men stand on the porch, each holding a dachshund. Isak flips the indicator’s arrow towards them as he slowly turns into the driveway.
His brother is of slighter build but with the same neatness as Father and a sallowness of skin he cannot remember. The other is like the house, modest in build and appearance. The dogs fly at the Fiat’s wheels.
The other scolds the dogs.
“Isak … Sakkie.” His brother pulls at the door.
“Danie.” Isak struggles to release the safety belt, his eyes on the catch.
He gets out, with the dogs snapping at his heels, holding out his hand but Danie steps forward, embracing him.
“Boeta.” Danie grips him hard.
Isak withdraws, dropping his arms to his side and his brother is thinner, less muscular than he can remember.
“We’ve been waiting for you.” Danie’s eyes are placid like dam water.
“Business in Paris.” Isak apologises. “I underestimated the time it takes to get out of the city.”
The other with lashless eyes holds out his hand. “Gabriel.”
The dogs are picked up and carried like watermelons under the arm.
“I thought you may have changed your mind as we didn’t hear from you.” Danie drops the dog in the entrance hall. “Welcome to one of the last vicarages in Holland.”
The house is compact and meditative in its tones. He waits awkwardly as they unlace their shoes, staring at the picture on the hat stand.