recognise Mandela if he walked into the restaurant now. Not even a radical like Jans. The only photographs they’d seen of him were nearly thirty years old. And, as usual, Anton’s wife, Sandra, looked as though she was trying to listen telepathically to her children at home in case one was crying.
‘Oh, that Hansel,’ said Jans.
‘I hear he has his own sickbay where he’s examined twice a day by a major from Prison Services.’
‘Hansel and the witch?’
‘Mandela and the major,’ said Griet.
Jans smiled and wound a long ribbon of pasta deftly round his fork. Klaus told the rest of the group about an article on South Africa he’d read in The Economist.
‘And you think he needs a Gretel to push the witch into the oven?’
‘Maybe – but remember, Hansel didn’t wait passively for Gretel to come and rescue him.’ Griet had cut her own pasta into pieces and was carefully loading her fork. ‘He was too clever for the witch. He didn’t really stick his finger out.’
‘He fooled her with a little stick!’ Jans laughed and took a great swig of sparkling wine. ‘And you think Mandela is fooling them?’
Griet shrugged. ‘I can only hope he remembers the fairy tale.’
The Struggle, thought Griet as she made her way to her office full of children’s books, the eternal Struggle. She’d often tried to convince Jans that fairy tales were nothing less than people’s culture. Stories handed down from the people for the people. The same crystal-clear division between good and evil – princes and dragons, black prisoners and white warders, fairies and witches, township kids and suburban housewives – the same simple presentation, the same moral lessons. But to sit and spin fairy tales all day didn’t give her much credibility in the Struggle.
Tonight she’d throw her balcony door open wide, Griet decided while she waited at the traffic lights across the street from her office block, and she’d fly away with the wind. Ring-a-ring-a-roses through the clouds, over the sleeping city with a fork and a spoon, leap-frogging over the curve of the moon. Up, up, up on to the flat slab of the mountain, where the witches were sure to meet on All Saints’ Eve. Round this giant table under the moon, with a lion and a devil keeping guard at each end. Who’d dare to chase them away? Not even the angels.
3
In Search of the Golden Goose
The woman – witch, rebel angel or ordinary sinner – lived in a dreadful country. The sun always shone, except at night when the moon shone, and the people of the country changed colour like loaves in an oven. From creamy-white to biscuit-brown to coffee-black, or from salmon-pink to beetroot-red, or from the colour of butter to the colour of turmeric. Some even from blue to green. But the worst sinners never changed colour. They just bleached whiter and whiter.
This is what Griet had written on a sheet of paper in her office full of children’s books that afternoon. It seemed a long, long time ago, she thought with her chin in her hand and her elbow on a bar counter. She’d crumpled up the page and rung her friend Jans: ‘How about joining me for a drink?’
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘It was the Day of the Dead yesterday.’
‘Can’t we be like ordinary people and just have a drink because it’s Friday?’
‘But it’s a feast day in South America. The Mexicans buy sugar-bread skeletons and lay a place at table for absent guests. They believe it’s the day the dead get leave in heaven to visit the earth again.’
‘I can’t think of a better reason to drink myself into a stupor.’
‘OK, Jans, it’s Friday evening, I’ve survived another week on my own, and if you don’t have a drink with me, I’ll beat you to a pulp next time I see you.’
And now, several drinks later, she remembered there was something important she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t think what it was. Her head felt like a flower that was too heavy for its stem.
‘I’ve had a gutful of clever men,’ she muttered into her hand. ‘I’m looking for a stupid man. Stupid and strong.’
Jans looked at her blankly through the round gold-rimmed spectacles that had slipped down on his nose. He was still in his working clothes – a conservative dark suit, white cotton shirt and muted paisley tie – but the top button of the shirt was undone and the tie had been tugged loose. If Jans didn’t have to wear a suit every day, Griet had often thought, one could easily mistake him for a fairly decent tramp. He always looked as though it was two days since he’d last shaved, and three days since he’d combed his hair. And to crown it all, tonight he looked as though he hadn’t slept for four days: his mouth was tired and there were shadows like bruises under his eyes.
‘I don’t mean the village idiot, Jans. He’ll have to be able to read and write. I don’t trust men who don’t read. Maybe that’s the root of my whole problem. Instead of checking on whether he likes dogs, as my mother always said I should. Or what his underpants look like.’
Her sister Petra was a connoisseur of men’s underpants. Said they spoke volumes. Never trust a man with holes in his underpants. She didn’t really like red underpants either. Said it was a dictator’s colour.
‘But I look at his bookshelf,’ sighed Griet.
‘If he reads Camus, he’s OK?’ A light seemed to have been turned on behind Jans’s spectacles.
‘Something like that, yes.’ Griet took another sip of wine and shook her heavy head. ‘And I land on my bum every time.’
‘We aren’t just talking about George and the recent past?’
‘No, we’re talking about men in general, the whole catastrophe. I’ve never had a decent relationship with a man who didn’t have an overload of intellectual pretensions. Of course, this says a lot about my own intellectual pretensions. But the best one-night stand of my life was with a gym instructor who’d never read anything heavier than the back page of a Sunday paper.’
That was a long time ago, of course, when she still shaved her legs regularly. If he could see her now with a dowdy ponytail and all her lipstick smeared off on to the wine glass, clinging to a bar counter, the poor gym instructor would completely lose his impressive erection.
So this, then, was what people did on a Friday evening. There had been a time when she also went out on Friday evenings, when she still wore mascara and flirted with muscle-bound instructors, but it must have been in a previous life.
‘Just say you could have lived with him,’ Jans stared at the rows and rows of bottles behind the counter, endlessly reflected in sparkling mirrors, an alcoholic vision of heaven. ‘How long could you have stood it before you started screaming every time he opened his mouth?’
‘For always – if I’d known what I know now. The problem with clever men is that they talk too much and don’t screw enough. The trouble with stupid men is usually the same. But every now and then you find one who knows how to shut up and use his body. Then you must hang on to what you’ve got – and bite your tongue every time he says something stupid. But that’s what you have to do with any man, anyway.’
