if anyone had ever committed suicide with Mister Oven …’
‘You seem to have found some humour in the situation.’
‘It actually wasn’t very funny at the time,’ Griet said rather sharply. ‘I kept thinking about something Athol Fugard wrote somewhere, that he’d carry on making a fool of himself until the day he died, and then probably fuck that up too. Something along those lines.’
Rhonda didn’t say a word.
‘Yes, I know what you’re going to say now. I’m still living through books and movies. Protecting myself from reality by pretending that I’m Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.’
‘Maybe someone a little more intellectual,’ smiled Rhonda. ‘How about the green-haired woman in The House of the Spirits?’
‘She had blue hair,’ Griet snapped, wondering whether her therapist wasn’t right, as usual. ‘And she was in One Hundred Years of Solitude.’
‘See what I mean? You leap at the chance to discuss a fictional character. You come to me to talk about yourself and then spend half the time quoting from books.’
‘But fictional characters are more … I don’t know, they’re somehow more … convincing.’ Griet looked at the Mickey Mouse clock again. Five minutes to go. That meant five rand – enough to buy a plate of food for a hungry child. Or three packets of cigarettes for herself. If she could only stop smoking! She sighed for the hundredth time in the last hour. ‘I mean, have you ever read about someone who was saved from suicide by a cockroach? It could only happen in reality.’
Rhonda didn’t respond, but her eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly.
‘Kafka wrote a story about a chap who turned into a cockroach, Gregor Samsa. The same initials as mine. And his sister also had a Griet-ish name. Gretel? Gretchen?’
It was time to read the story again, Griet decided. It had always been one of her favourites, perhaps because, in a way, the poor cockroach had also been killed by an apple. The apple his father threw at him, the one that wedged in his back. The Symbolism of the Apple in World Literature. Yet another ridiculous title for the literary thesis that she’d been postponing for ten years.
‘The fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe,’ wrote Milton. It was impossible to imagine Eve with a banana or a pear or any other fruit, for that matter. And it was an apple that caused the fall of Troy. The famous apple of contention that was thrown on the table for the most beautiful of three goddesses. Paris chose Aphrodite and the other two took vengeance. ‘Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,’ William Congreve said, ‘Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.’
‘But even Kafka didn’t write about a cockroach as a lifesaver. Snow White was rescued by a prince on a white horse – and Griet Swart by a dead cockroach in a dirty oven. Wouldn’t you rather have been Snow White?’
2
Hansel and Gretel and the Struggle
‘Three weeks without a man’, Griet wrote in her Creative Arts Diary, above her weekend shopping list. Wine, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, toilet paper and tampons – not necessarily in order of importance. This was one of the advantages of being manless, the abbreviated shopping list, with no shaving foam and chocolate for him, no vegetables and fruit for his children.
Tuesday 31 October 1989. Almost three months on her own, and three weeks without any contact. Without seeing him or ringing him or writing to him. She hadn’t felt so proud since she’d managed to last three weeks without a cigarette.
There were close parallels. Her relationship with George did to her emotions what nicotine did to her lungs, she’d realised ages ago, but the relationship was as difficult a habit to kick as smoking. More than a habit – an obsession, a physical addiction, an oral fixation. One truly does keep all four seasons in one’s groin, as she’d always teased him.
She’d enjoyed sex with George, more than with anyone before him. It wasn’t an earth-shaking affair with shooting stars and similar celestial manifestations. It was playful, fun, funny and sometimes even absurd. If George felt adventurous and wanted to try an unusual position, he was sure to fall off the kitchen counter or bang his head on the edge of the bath or end up with a stiff neck instead of a stiff penis. George wasn’t the acrobatic type, but sometimes he forgot the limitations of his own body and swept her along with him, and then they experienced a few moments of sexual trapeze before tumbling head over heels back to earth. Before the car seat became too uncomfortable or one of the children from his first marriage was roused by those strange noises coming from the dining room.
Not that George made many noises. Screaming orgasms weren’t his style. And with the children in the house at weekends, Griet also had to learn to appreciate dark and silent sex. Like a blind-mute, she sometimes thought in a moment of rebellion.
Griet drank a cup of coffee on the balcony of her friend’s flat, as she’d done every morning since moving in here. The street below came slowly to life. On the rickety plastic table lay the English-language newspaper, which she’d already scanned, the open diary with her shopping list, and a pencil for noting down her social commitments for the week. With a shock she realised that she didn’t have any social commitments. Not a single date. The thought of yet another Friday evening on her own made her long for the comfort of an oven all over again. A clean oven, she thought before she could stop herself.
‘It’s dangerous to travel alone,’ Griet wrote in her diary, ‘especially after your thirtieth birthday.’ It was All Saints’ Eve tonight, she saw when she looked at the date again, New Year’s Eve on the old Celtic calendar. The night of witches and goblins and other unholy spirits, the Scots believed. The blood of a Scottish sailor ran in her veins and she was by profession a weaver of fairy tales so she took the date seriously, but she was the only person she knew who still did.
The Americans had banalised it, as only they could, with children in silly costumes and candles in pumpkin shells. And Hollywood had converted it to cash, along with everything else that’s supposed to be sacred, making a whole string of movies that consisted mainly of blood and screams.
Tomorrow would be the Day of the Holy Ones, Griet thought nostalgically, and the day after All Souls’ Day when one was supposed to pray for the souls of the dead. There were a number of souls she should pray for: those from whom she had descended and those who had descended from her, her predecessors and her progeny. If only it weren’t so difficult to pray.
She picked up the item she’d torn from the paper. ‘One in five women heading Aboriginal households have told researchers that their stressful lives have driven them to attempt suicide.’ She attached the report with a paperclip to today’s page in her diary.
Sex could become predictable after seven years with the same man. But it was a comforting predictability, like a well-loved poem that you read over and over again until you knew it off by heart, until nothing but a punctuation mark could still surprise you. Until one day you look at a comma as though you’ve never seen it before. She knew the language of her husband’s body as well as she knew her own tongue, the salty taste of his navel, the bony hollows on his shoulders, the stickiness at the tip of his penis. And yet she still sometimes discovered something – perhaps a mole – that she’d never noticed before. Her body was at ease with his, under his, on top of his.
She had sometimes seen shooting stars, but it’d been light years ago, when every night with him was still a satellite
