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Entertaining Angels
Marita van der Vyver
Translated by Catherine Knox
Tafelberg
For I.B.
The union of a frivolous form and a serious subject
lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds
as well as those we play out on the great stage of
History) in all their terrible insignificance.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
Scary Tales
Whatever else has changed on the continent of Africa, the deep-rooted belief in magic, both white and black, has not. Africans base their fear of witches on the argument that somebody – some person or spirit – has to be responsible for the inexplicable.
Encyclopaedia of Magic and Superstition
1
Snow White Takes a Bite of the Apple
Sylvia Plath did it in an oven. Virginia Woolf in a river. And Ernest Hemingway with a pistol. Or was it a shotgun? Something phallic, anyway.
Quite funny, really, thought Griet. When women do it, it’s obvious they want to return to the womb. The warmth of an oven. The waters of a river. The slow, lulling numbness of pills, like falling asleep.
But men commit suicide like they cook: dramatically and messily. Blowing their brains out, hurling themselves off skyscrapers, slashing their arteries. Blood and guts all over the place. No doubt because they know they don’t have to clean up afterwards. There’ll always be some woman to do that.
Anna Karenina did throw herself under the wheels of a train, Griet recalled. That could be pretty messy. But it was a male writer who made her do it. Shakespeare obviously understood women better than Tolstoy did. Poor Ophelia didn’t fall on a sword like Hamlet, she floated peacefully away down a stream. And Juliet would have preferred poison but Romeo didn’t leave her any – Shakespeare also seems to have understood men better than most other writers. So Juliet had no choice but to bleed.
Women actually don’t like blood. Men might be less taken with it too, if they had to wash it out of their underwear every month, speculated Griet.
Even Snow White’s ghastly stepmother chose a bloodless method of disposing of her husband’s beautiful daughter. Though a masculine set of values lurks in the stepmother’s style. In Western religion, the apple almost always symbolises female sexuality. ‘Thatfair enticing fruit’, which poor old Adam sampled, ‘Against his better knowledge, not deceived, But fondly overcome with female charm.’ Snow White was punished for Eve’s sins. And, like Eve, she was rescued in the end by manly valour. Snow White by a handsome prince on a white horse, Eve by an almighty god on a golden throne.
‘I decided the oven was the only escape,’ Griet told her therapist, who was watching her enigmatically, as usual. ‘I don’t know why, but that oven fascinated me from the moment I moved into the flat. Probably because I’d never had anything to do with a gas oven before. Except in books and movies, of course.’
Rhonda’s eyes were pools of innocence, blue and still. She looked as though she had never even heard a swear word. You’d never guess that she had to listen to other people’s deepest and darkest perversions all day long.
Her hair was blonde and wavy and her hands lay still on the open file on her lap. Every now and then she wrote something in the file, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, but Griet noticed every time. What had she given away about herself this time, she wondered distractedly, and it took quite an effort not to stumble over her next words.
‘But … but, as you know …’ Rhonda’s gold pen scratched over the paper, the noise unbearably loud in the quiet of the consulting room. Griet drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I thought I’d just see how it felt first, you know. Stick my head in without turning on the gas. Just to see if I’d be able to go through with it.’ Rhonda wrote something in her file again. The second time in less than a minute, Griet realised in a panic. ‘I … well … I knelt down in front of the oven, opened the door and slowly put my head inside, kind of turned sideways so that one of my cheeks rested on the wire rack.’
Sometimes Griet wondered whether anything would ever shock Rhonda. If one of her patients suddenly started masturbating in the consulting room, she probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Nothing would ever trouble those blue pools.
‘My head didn’t fit in very comfortably – it’s quite a small oven – so I opened my eyes to see how I was doing … No, I don’t really know why I closed them in the first place. It just happened by itself, like my first French kiss at a school party. Maybe because I’d seen it done that way in the movies. Anyway, I opened my eyes – and looked straight at a dead cockroach! Right there next to me!’
Rhonda watched her, motionless.
‘I couldn’t believe it! I mean, I know my friend isn’t all that tidy, and she probably didn’t use the oven an awful lot, and I hadn’t used it since I’d moved in – but a cockroach! I yanked my head out so fast that I banged it against the inside of the oven and collapsed on the kitchen floor. Half unconscious. Just imagine the humiliation if someone had found me there! Frightened out of my wits by a cockroach. I’d never hear the last of it. Anyway, when I eventually got over the shock and looked into the oven again – without putting my head right in this time, naturally – I saw not only a cockroach, but this thick layer of crumbs and hard-baked fat and God knows what else, all in there with the cockroach.’
Was she imagining it, or was there a hint of a smile at the corners of Rhonda’s mouth? Impossible, she decided, looking away at the opposite wall. A yellow wall with a huge Mickey Mouse clock – the mouse’s arms told the time; one arm was shorter than the other. The clock always seemed to hypnotise her as her sense of guilt grew with every movement of the mouse’s longer arm. Children were going hungry while she paid a strange woman R60 an hour – R30 a half-hour, R15 a quarter, R1 a minute, more than a cent for every second! – to listen to her pathetic problems.
Rhonda’s consulting room was as colourful as a kindergarten classroom: red and yellow and blue furniture and mats and striped curtains. Probably to make her victims feel more cheerful, Griet had often thought. Armchairs that sucked you in like quicksand, so that only your head and knees were visible once you were seated. It was impossible to feel dignified if you could scarcely see over your own knees. It was like initiation at an Afrikaans university: a way of breaking down one’s ego, only more subtle.
Rhonda never allowed an armchair to swallow her. Which made Griet all the more suspicious. Rhonda sat upright on a red sofa, her ankles neatly crossed. She wore linen slacks, a plaited leather belt, a gold Rolex. Griet was dressed in a multi-coloured frock, long and loose, and, as always when she was with her therapist, she felt creased and unkempt.
‘And so I didn’t commit suicide,’ sighed Griet, twisting a wisp of untidy hair into a ringlet round one finger. ‘I spent the rest of the evening cleaning the oven.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’ asked Rhonda.
Yes, she really was smiling. Griet sighed again and then smiled resignedly with her therapist. ‘Well, I nearly suffocated in the fumes from Mister Oven. It must have been
