pregnant; her poor husband touched her less and less. Month after month his gloom increased and his playfulness faded. The Incredible Shrinking Penis, that’s what she’d call the story of her marriage.
Maybe it was the story of every marriage.
She took another sip of coffee from her friend’s cracked Arzberg cup, contemplated smoking her first cigarette of the day, decided to resist the temptation, and stared with unwilling fascination at the newspaper report under the paperclip. ‘They revealed that they had to bear the brunt of “the whole Aboriginal situation”, including recurring problems of unemployment, alcohol, imprisonment and racism.’ Count your blessings, Griet dear, Grandma Hannie always said.
Once upon a time there was a woman who came from a dreadful family, she wrote on the clean sheet of paper before her. One of her grandfathers was in the habit of talking to angels, and the other grandfather believed in ghosts. She was perhaps a witch, perhaps a rebel angel, undoubtedly a troublemaker, and she was sorely punished for her sins.
The worst of all her sins was using words to seduce people. She was a woman who wanted to play with sentences like Salome played with her seven veils. She was a woman who wanted to write because she believed that the pen was mightier than the penis.
She didn’t realise that this was the eighth deadly sin in a phallo-centric world.
She wasn’t barren like so many other sinners in so many other fairy stories. Pregnancy came easily to her, time after time, but each time she had to hand her child over to death. She could conceive and she could carry a baby, but she could not give birth to one.
After four pregnancies she was still childless.
It was such a terrible punishment that sometimes, like the goose girl of long ago, she wanted to climb into an oven in protest against her fate. But these days it isn’t so easy to climb into an oven. And you can no longer count on a hero to come and haul you out, either.
It was time to go to the office, Griet decided, listening to the increasing drone all around her. It was an indescribable noise, the sound of an animal waking up, as though the mountain, to which the city clung like a tick, was stretching its back and flexing its muscles. She snapped her Creative Arts Diary shut and got up to fetch her handbag from the bedroom floor where it lay amid magazines and newspapers.
She’d ask someone to join her for a drink on Friday night, she decided, banging her empty coffee cup down on the sticky kitchen counter. Anyone, she decided, as she locked the door behind her.
She missed sex, she realised with devastating certainty on this All Saints’ Eve morning. Even Halley’s Comet was preferable to the total eclipse of the moon under which she’d been trying to survive for the past few months.
She missed her husband, she missed her house, she missed the predictability of Friday nights with him and his children. Michael and Raphael came every weekend and she’d cook for them and they’d eat while they watched TV – MacGyver and the news and Police File and a film – and she’d clear away the empty plates and her husband would doze off on the sofa and she’d take the boys to their bedroom and pull the bedding up so high only their eyes peeped out and she’d laugh at the faces they pulled every time she kissed them goodnight. She might be crazy, she thought defiantly, but she missed it.
It was Rhonda who’d suggested she write about it.
‘But no one wants to read about a failed marriage,’ she protested. ‘Not in this country. We’ve enough other problems.’
‘Write it for yourself,’ said Rhonda, phlegmatic as always. ‘Not for other people.’
‘You mean like a diary?’ Griet turned up her nose as though she’d been confronted by a blocked drain – an all-too-frequent occurrence in her friend’s flat. ‘I’m a bit past that.’
‘No, I mean like a story. Fictionalise yourself. It’s what you’re always doing in your imagination anyway.’
Griet had laughed off the suggestion – or so she thought. But it must have stuck somewhere in her subconscious. Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a woman. That was her first thought when she woke up this morning. Who on earth still began a story with ‘Once upon a time’? That was her second thought, as she sat up with the taste of the previous evening’s last illegal cigarette like a reproach on her tongue. It was her work that was affecting her mind, she decided for the umpteenth time.
She earned her bread and butter at a publisher’s, in an office full of children’s books, at a word processor on which she edited and translated and sometimes fabricated fairy tales and other fantasies. The last year or so she’d been busy with what would probably be the most comprehensive collection of fairy tales ever to appear in Afrikaans. It was a strange experience to be taking stories that had been passed on orally for centuries and pinning them down in space-age characters by pressing a bunch of electronic buttons on a personal computer. Magic meets technology.
I know what magical realism is, she often thought. Her clever friends were quick to talk about it, but she rediscovered it afresh every day at her word processor. The South Americans didn’t have exclusive rights to absurd situations and anachronisms.
‘Why do they call it a personal computer? The only personality that mine has ever revealed is a ruthlessly psychopathic streak,’ she told her therapist after a particularly demanding day at work.
‘So, you think your computer doesn’t like you?’ Rhonda asked, serious as always.
‘Now you’re making me sound paranoid again,’ Griet accused her. ‘No, that isn’t what I’m trying to say. But only a psychopath could take a story you’d poured your soul into for weeks and tear it to shreds before your eyes, then throw it into a fire without any compunction. That’s how it feels when your PC wipes out a story.’
Her clever friends said machines didn’t have human characteristics. But you couldn’t always trust your friends. Her friends fell into two groups – the clever ones and the mad ones – and she dangled in mid-air somewhere between them, struggling to get her feet down on to the ground. The clever ones were in law or journalism or academe and they liked talking about politics and religion and the latest French film with subtitles. They sat in stylish restaurants sipping vintage wine from crystal glasses and argued about Namibian independence and Wimbledon tennis. Their feet were always firmly on the ground, even when they were drunk. The mad ones were painters and writers and other artists who sat at home smoking dope and drinking boxed plonk out of cheap glasses, while they quarrelled about the Struggle and erotic art and people’s culture. They sometimes got high on pills or other substances, but they always came down with a painful bump the next morning.
‘Mandela reminds me of Hansel who was caught by the witch,’ she confessed to her friend Jans during one of many lengthy restaurant meals. ‘You know, the one who had to stick his finger through the bars every day so the witch could feel if he was fat enough to slaughter.’
Jans was a lawyer with a political conscience that compelled him to work for the Struggle. It had landed him in a moral dilemma because he was making a packet out of the Struggle. He’d bought a cottage with yellowwood floors and a fireplace, but he felt so guilty about so much luxury that he gave the key to his less privileged black friends every weekend and hiked off into the mountains. And he liked reading myths and legends which he wouldn’t discuss with anyone but Griet.
It was George who’d started the speculation about Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday in the Victor Verster Prison – while he topped up everyone’s glass with sparkling wine. Anton-the-Advocate
