bed and rush back to the kitchen. Marta’s still standing where I left her, her head to one side, smiling at the sweet sound of the dove. In a frenzy of love and excitement I climb back onto the counter and, on my knees in front of her, I hold her face in one hand and shake the tissue’s crumpled creases out with the other. I turn her cheek towards me, place the soft paper carefully on her loved face and against the folds of the pink tissue I kiss her hard.
With grace and humility, she submits to my loving ministrations.
In the poplar tree, the turtledove is silent.
French Cuisine by Proxy
Aunt Rosalind is beautiful, but not as beautiful as Ma, even though I can see she thinks she is when she smiles her secret smile at her reflection in mirrors and shop windows. I watch her pat her smooth brown hair while she preens at her own briefly glimpsed image. She looks like Ma, but Ma’s much prettier than her sister.
When Aunt Rosalind and Uncle Len go Overseas, Aunt Rosalind writes postcards and letters to Ma. Ma says her letters are exciting and exotic.
Our house is on the right side of the bridge in a small town in the northwest of the Free State, bordered by farmlands and mealies growing in dark red ground, right in the middle of the Goldfields near a big town called Welkom.
One day a letter arrives for Ma. We’re sitting in the dining room eating chops and vegetables for lunch. The sun is hot on the iron roof above our heads. Flies drone and bump against the windows. Pa helps himself to Ma’s beetroot and sliced onion salad from a bowl on the stiffly starched, green-and-white-checked tablecloth. From where I’m sitting, the lines in the cloth stretch straight and true. Ma opens her letter, scans its contents and starts reading it out aloud to us.
They’ve arrived in Gay Paree, writes Aunt Rosalind, visited the bright Tuileries Gardens, the opulent opera house, and photographed the view through the heroic Arc de Triomphe. She describes the spacious boulevards lined with clipped trees, patrolled by bejewelled-collared poodles on leashes held by elegantly dressed Parisian women, suave Frenchmen in berets, who sit all day long on tiny wrought-iron chairs in pavement cafés drinking hot chocolate and eating croissants. I hang onto every word, entranced by the images reeling out of the letter in Ma’s hands. A fly lands on the page she’s reading. Irritated, she waves the thin onion-skin sheet and reaches for the flyswatter with her free hand.
Behind Pa’s chair, our dining room wall redefines itself as the left bank of the Seine. The state-of-the-art standing lamp in the lounge is transformed into an ornate, cast-iron street light glowing yellow in the early-evening fog. I’m not sure what ‘fog’ is, but it sounds mysterious and exciting. Under the table, Sandy changes from a cocker spaniel into a curly-haired, primped poodle lifting a dainty leg to wee into the sluggish Seine.
Aunt Rosalind’s letter from the elegant end of another world describes patisseries and boulangeries – white loaves narrow and crisp, longer than Pa’s arm; gendarmes blowing whistles, wearing caps called kepis, directing Citroëns and rushing taxicabs, Renaults and Peugeots and bicycles darting in different directions, all hooting at once. Most exciting of all, she writes, they have dared to sample true French cuisine: they have eaten frogs’ legs! Pa and my sister gag on their chops.
‘Frogs’ legs? Ma, you mean they ate the legs of real, live frogs?’ I can’t believe my ears.
‘So it would appear,’ Ma murmurs. ‘Apparently the French consider them a real delicacy.’
‘Have you ever eaten frogs’ legs, Ma? Have you, Pa?’ I ask.
They shake their heads. Grimace in unison.
‘I wonder what they taste like?’
‘Curiosity killed the cat, my girl! Don’t you dare try anything funny …’
Ma peers at me over the tops of her spectacles. I glower at her across the table. Carefully, I place the old, bone-handled knife and fork side by side in the middle of my plate and, hoping to distract Ma’s attention from my uneaten vegetables, casually drape my napkin over them.
‘Please may I be excused from the table?’
Ma’s eyebrows crease.
‘Just a minute! What are you hiding under that napkin?’
She reaches across and whips it off my bread plate.
‘Sit down and finish your lunch, Jennifer.’
‘I don’t want any more, Ma. I hate vegetables.’
Pa bangs his hand down on the table, making us all jump.
‘Enough! That’s perfectly good food in front of you. There are millions of starving children who would give anything to eat it.’
My sister chews complacently. One half of a stringy green bean hangs out of her mouth and droops down her chin like a lizard’s tail.
‘Look, Ma,’ I point at her across the table. ‘She’s eating with her fingers!’
‘Mind your own manners, miss.’
‘You’re a big girl, sweetheart,’ Ma says, smiling at my sister. ‘You know how to use a knife and fork.’
I glare at them both.
‘You can give all my vegetables to the poor children, Pa. They taste horrible.’
Ma pats his hand, turns it over so that his big palm lies face-up on the table. She strokes it gently. Pa loves having his palms tickled. We beg her to tickle us too.
‘Tickling dulls the senses. It makes children stupid,’ Pa says.
All very well for him, I think.
The hovering fly finally settles on the table in the middle of a green square. Fastidiously, it starts polishing its antennae. Ma reaches for the flyswatter and smashes it down on her hapless victim. A moue of distaste pulls at the corners of her mouth; she narrows her eyes and turns over the swatter to examine the mashed remains.
‘Yes, you may go … you’re excused,’ she mutters.
Outside, pigeons and turtledoves call from the shade of the poplar trees. In the swamp a block away from our house, an occasional croak from a green-and-yellow-bellied bullfrog booms into the air. In the hot afternoons, when the summer rains come thundering over the veld, their wild chorus rises into the air so loud it drowns out the sound of our voices and, without asking for permission in the night, their sonorous songs invade the recesses of our dreams. I swing myself over our stiff, silver-painted front gate and run down the road and around the corner towards the swamp where the bullfrogs spawn and hatch and call.
As soon as I set foot on the track, the raucous croaking is silenced. I can hear the beat of my heart in my ears. I crouch down. The grass is as high as my middle. The tight plumes of seeds nod and wave pale green against the sky. A small frog squats in the mud, its liquid gold eyes splashed with black. Its sides move rapidly in and out. Poised to jump, its wide mouth closed in its habitual smile, the delicate webs between its knobbed toes are stretched thin, nearly transparent over the wet ground. It hops hesitantly and, as I bend down, it gathers up its long hind legs, croaks with fright and makes a startled leap for freedom. My hand swoops and catches the graceful jumper in mid-air. With the frog gripped tightly around its pulsating
