What is it? I ask.
It’s the magazine we saw in the Huisgenoot, my mother says, Don’t you remember? Your father said we could order it.
Carefully I remove the brown paper, careful, careful, I’m going to save it. I roll the magazine open. There is a soft noise and the fern in the hallway shivers, it is the flight of the Big Grey, first to the front door and then back into my bag.
This is not like when the piano appeared, that moment was a step into a new doorway; this thing I am holding now is a luxury. We live simply; something with your name on, something that is delivered so your grey can flee, is almost unreal.
Bollie was a magazine for children, full of comic strips, among others the adventures of a hare family with Bollie the leading character. I devour every word and picture, afterwards I cannot remember even one story, my joy is the paper, the colours, the way Bollie and his life are drawn, the way the ink shines on the pages, the way the paper rustles, the way something smells when it is brand new, when it was packaged before it could lie on a shop’s shelf or be handled without care.
Again and again Bollie was delivered, a whole afternoon and a whole evening without grey. I treasured it like jewellery, hid it before my little brother could damage it, paged through it again and again, imagined myself living in a place where dining tables looked like those of the brightly dressed hare family, where puddings and cakes were as big as the guests, where raisins spilled out of loaves of bread and steam rose from mugs of hot chocolate. Even today my family still uses it as an adjective: Bollie book biscuits, Bollie book bread, Bollie book towers.
Later there were more magazines, Patrys, Tina, Panorama. Patrys was full of activities, facts and things you could cut out; it would break my heart to cut up one of my treasures, I only cut out things when my mother was done with her magazines. Tina was exclusively for teenage girls and for me, how it ended up in our home, how my father allowed it, I do not know. Panorama was a big magazine with expensive paper, full-page photos of nature – in which I had no interest at all – and articles in a language that could not appeal to any child, but it was delivered in a big envelope without any folds and it smelled of promise, new and mysterious. I handled it as though it was a message from a far-off place, a document for the nobility.
The Big Grey would always stay with me, and later I would become smarter and think up many escapes, but in that little town of my early school-going years and countless realisations, paper was my first luxury and constant salvation. On magazine days the stones and reeds knew, here it is VERY GOOD.
Paper is the bringer of messages, the shepherd of the earth’s biggest stories, the proof of artists’ immortality, somewhere homes are made of it, everywhere food is eaten from it, somewhere it is worn as clothing, it brings birthday wishes and Christmas greetings, it fans people cool, it is proof that you passed, it wraps presents.
After the first magazines many envelopes followed. I floated when I excelled, yelled when I won something, got a fright when I disappointed, was disgusted when I got my first call-up papers for the army. Later there were cruel papers, rejections of love, poisonous newspaper reviews, reminders of student debts.
But at first there was only joy. And then, soon after the first Bollie, my father’s and my life changed.
It is my birthday. My mother bakes a cake, it is a chocolate locomotive, I can’t believe my eyes, how did Mother make this whole thing? Grandfather and Grandmother come from Wellington. It is one of the best days ever. Friends appear. Who invited them? (A little grey escapes from my bag.) Mother puts down the cake and everyone sings. I want to eat the chimney. I break it off, it is an empty toilet roll with icing. (More grey.) I decide to eat the cab. It is an empty tissue box. (Lots of grey!) Eventually there is something to eat, the chocolate roll in the middle, but I don’t feel like it any more. My father gives me my present, it’s a rugby ball, brand new and light brown, leather or plastic, I close my eyes and make a wish, I open my eyes, it isn’t an Easter egg, still a ball. I put it aside. Grandmother gives me her present. It is wrapped in Christmas paper. (The grey becomes less.) I open it. It is a paper doll, a girl with sheets and sheets of clothes you can cut out, short strips wrap around her body and make the clothes stick. She can be a princess, a teacher, a policewoman, a lady with her own shop.
One thing about Grandmother – she could shop like no one else. She often dragged big brown paper bags into her kitchen and began to unpack. Twenty boxes of canary seed. Thirty boxes of cough mixture. Forty packages of orange hair dye.
Grandfather: What are you doing with the seed? Who has budgies?
Grandmother: It was on sale, it would be stupid to leave such a bargain behind.
Grandfather: And the cough mixture? Who is coughing?
Grandmother: You! Soon!
Grandfather: No, heavens, Grandmother, and the hair dye?
Grandmother: Ben, that pharmacy is closing, the things are marked down, if the wrong woman gets hold of it she’ll make a fool of herself, I had to take it.
Grandmother had definitely been in a shop somewhere, maybe stood with a small truck or a set of blocks in her hand and then saw the paper dolls were much cheaper. That’s all. But it shifts my reality as quickly as someone taking a pair of scissors from a drawer. My princess changes her appearance within minutes, she moves between worlds. My friends disappear, Grandmother and Grandfather go home, Mother does the dishes, Father gives my brother a bath, I am in my room, the door is closed, the grey is gone, I am cutting out a blouse. I do not dream of a braid down my back or a dress on my body, I do not want to be a girl, but I have a job to do. I dress my princess and I listen to her speak, she says the strangest thing: One day you can change your clothes just as quickly.
When? I ask.
My father opens the door. I do not look up. He opens the cupboard and puts the rugby ball next to my shoes. He says nothing, he merely closes the door behind him. And he would do it again, every time I broke his heart.
A Table for Prentjie
Somewhere near the church, the main road’s tar disappeared and there, where gravel became ground, they sat in a row: church, school, tennis courts, dormitory. In this dormitory my mother worked a few times a week, she had to supervise until the sun began to set. On these days I had to stay there after school; I have no idea where my baby brother was.
A few years ago I visited the town for the first time since I left there at the age of nine. I was invited to do a show at the church hall; this hall had been a gigantic building where all of the town’s plans began or ended, but when I went back I was shocked to see how small and cramped the hall actually was. This has happened a few times: childhood buildings that had shrunk so much over the years that on a return visit they were invariably unrecognisable and always bitterly disappointing. This would also be the case with the dormitory, but for the purposes of this story I have kept it in its original form, long, pale and damning.
The occupants were farm children – the descendants of both wealthy and struggling farmers – who all went back home on Friday afternoons, city children who’d been sent there to keep out of trouble, and a few town children from families too miserable to have any future prospects. A few had to stay there over weekends and even holidays. And when my mother was on duty, I wandered about, one afternoon after another.
The youngest children played outside, the rest had to do their homework in the dining hall. I was too young for real homework and so I wandered. The front door opened onto a small entrance hall and then you could turn left or right down a long corridor with pale, polished floors and on both sides a multitude of doors. There was a forgotten lounge, an office, bedrooms for staff, single rooms and dorm rooms for pupils (I don’t know how it was decided who would sleep in a dorm room and who in a single room), bathrooms and the dining hall. At the end of the corridor, on either side there were sharp turns to even more rooms and the long wing at the back that consisted of laundry rooms, storerooms and the kitchen; from above thus a perfect 8.
Here