now the two stepsons too. Half a dozen children, four from her own body and two from her heart, all lost to her.
She couldn’t even discuss it with her shrink.
She chose the cheapest washing powder because the advertisements all sounded the same to her. Idiotic women who took greater pleasure in clean washing than in sex.
Can you see the difference?
She wasn’t sorry about the abortion, she’d decided again and again. She hadn’t thought of the foetus as a person. She hadn’t given it a name.
But she wondered, since she’d lost the others. She wondered whether she was being punished because she hadn’t wanted that one. And she was angry with herself because she couldn’t shake off the fetters of Calvinism.
Good Lord, she’d been twenty years old, what could she have done? Her poor partner in crime had been barely a year older – the first man she’d ever slept with, fancy that! A sunburnt blond boy on a surfboard. It was a catastrophe that would ruin her promising student years, her brilliant career, her whole golden future.
She’d never told him she was pregnant. She still saw him around town sometimes – a successful businessman in a silver-blue BMW, married with two children – and wondered what he’d have done if he’d known. She wondered how many men all over the world would never know that their lovers had had abortions.
It was difficult enough to share birth with a man, to make him understand how it felt to be ripped open in such a primitive way. It was almost impossible to share the experience of an abortion with a man.
Take Louise, for example. Her lover had dropped her in a back street in Woodstock, pressed a blank cheque into her hand and wished her good luck. He only pitched up at her flat again three days later. Griet’s sister Petra was another case in point. Her lover had driven to Lesotho with her and stayed in a hotel with her until she stopped bleeding, but their relationship was over within a month. You just can’t win, Petra had wept. There was no such thing as a successful abortion. Something always had to be sacrificed.
Griet walked past the pet products and looked away quickly when a picture on a tin of dog food caught her eye. Beware of the wolf, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother had warned her, keep an eye open for anything that looks like a wolf. Griet had wanted a dog very badly – something to cherish in place of a child – but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. Beware of men who don’t like dogs, her mother had warned her.
Of course she believed in a god, she had argued with her cynical husband. You can’t believe in witches and angels unless you also believe in a god. But her god was a god of love, not a wicked wizard who punished you because you’d had an illegal abortion as a twenty-year-old student. Her husband believed in nothing; not in wizards, not in gods, not even in himself.
She liked to think the first one had been a boy. She knew the next two were girls. She’d given them names, Nanda and Nina, and had spoken to them for hours on end. Warned each of them against wolves and men who don’t like dogs. Funny how you recall your mother’s least sensible advice when you have a daughter of your own. You’d do anything to protect her: tell her she mustn’t go to bed with wet hair; ask a good fairy to make all her wishes come true; sell your soul to the devil if it would buy her happiness.
But it hadn’t helped. She’d carried each of them for only three months. The only proof that they’d ever existed was the sonar pictures of two foetuses, no bigger than Thumbelina, the fairy child.
She walked past the meat fridge. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so bloodthirstily angry with her husband if she became a vegetarian. She hesitated near the coffee. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so sexually frustrated if she stopped stoking her libido with caffeine. She chose a bag of Blue Mountain filter coffee and placed it resignedly in her plastic basket.
She found it amazing that she could get by without caffeine, nicotine or alcohol whenever she was pregnant. As though her whole body was working so hard to create a human being that there was no energy left for unhealthy obsessions. The maternal instinct must be one of the most powerful forces on earth, stronger than any army, more potent than witchcraft or technology. Stronger and more potent – and less comprehensible – than even mankind’s self-destructive urges.
The fourth one was the son who’d stolen her heart. And no wonder! He’d spent a full nine months creeping closer and closer to her heart, until, near the end, she could hardly breathe at night. He was too lively for the space in her womb, it seemed that he wanted to invade the space round her lungs too, as though he regarded all the inside of her as his territory. His birth left her body empty, a house without furniture, a kitchen without an oven.
The birth was an agonising experience that dragged on right through the night, worse than her worst nightmares. ‘Is it possible that an apple could cause so much trouble?’ she asked the young nurse who was holding her hand. ‘Do you think Eve deserved such a heavy punishment?’ The nurse smiled like an angel, rose up above the bed and floated out.
Maybe she was hallucinating, maybe her grandfather had sent one of his angels to hold her hand. She’d thought she’d be brave – her great-grandmother, after all, had borne sixteen children without the help of painkillers or modern medicine. But after a couple of hours Griet begged her angel nurse for relief. An epidural, a gas mask, a Caesarean, she mumbled, anything to get her out of this hell.
The fairy tale of South Africa, her bedevilled brain remembered, also began with an Eve. An Eve and a Mary, as in the most famous fairy tales of the Western world: the Old and the New Testament. Eva was a Khoi-khoi girl, adopted by Jan van Riebeeck’s household, as innocent and almost as naked as the original Eve. Maria de la Queillerie had travelled far with her husband van Riebeeck –‘founder’ of ‘white’ South Africa – like the other Mary, to save a sinful world.
That’s the European version, anyway, the white woman aiding black sinners. Like any good fairy tale, this one also has various versions, white and black and brown and yellow. Like Little Red Riding Hood and Rotkäppchen and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.
A short while after the anaesthetist had inserted a needle into her spine, her legs started to grow numb and lifeless. And her brain, thank heaven, a little clearer. But she couldn’t get poor Eve out of her mind. The Eve she’d learnt about at school, the one who was banned from Paradise as punishment for her sins. But also the other one, the one of whom she’d learnt no more than a name in class. The one who married a white man and was banished to Robben Island for her sins.
The Khoi-khoi Eva became a practising Christian, wearing Western clothes, learning to speak Dutch and Portuguese, and married the gifted Danish surgeon, Pieter van Meerhoff. But after the wedding the fairy tale went awry. Eva’s husband died a few years later and she became an alcoholic and a prostitute, leaving her children to the mercies of charity. She was held on Robben Island several times, and died there in 1674.
So much for happy endings, thought Griet, and then the angel said she must push.
At last she pushed her baby out, ecstatic – in spite of the blood and the sweat – as though he was the saviour who would redeem mankind. He was her saviour, the child she’d waited for for so long, the son she wanted so badly.
She saw the slippery little body, the tiny feet with ten perfect toes, the pink face with eyes tightly closed against the savagery of the world. This is how it must feel to see a god, she thought.
And then they took him away. She could not weep when they told her he was dead. There was just an emptiness in the place where her heart had once beaten.
An
