… so they threw him with a stone, right? — the director’s office, nogal…
… In your face. That’s her always… Hai! Hamba kahle…
… Awesome! Something to do with a sports event or, once, a dessert someone made? They use the word often in talk of many different kinds; she’s looked it up in a dictionary but there it means ‘inspiring awe, an emotion of mingled reverence, dread and wonder’. And there are forms of address within the circle borrowed from other groups, other situations and experiences they now share. Someone calls out—Chief, I want to ask you something — when neither the speaker nor the pal hailed, white or black (for the party is mixed) is tribal — as she knows the title to be, whether in Indonesia, Central America, Africa, anywhere she could think of. Some address one another as My China. How is she to know this is some comradely endearment, cockney rhyming slang—‘my mate, my china plate’—somehow appropriated during the days of apartheid’s army camps.
Smiling, silent; to be there with him is enough.
The party becomes a contest between him and the woman who sits between them. Each remembers, insists on a different version of what the incident was.
— You’re confounding it with that time everyone was shagging in the bushes!—
— Well, you would be reliable about that—
— Listen, listen, listen to me! — He slaps his arm round the back of her neck, under the hair she’s flung up, laughing emphasis. She puts a hand on his thigh: —You never listen—
It’s a wrestling match of words that come from the past, with touch that comes from the past. The hand stays on him. Then he snatches it up palm to palm, shaking it to contradict what she’s jeering, laughing close to his face and drowning out the calls of others. — O-O-O you were still in kort broek, My China! Loverboy — you remember Isabella that time water skiing? Kama Sutra warns against games under water—
— No ways! You’re the one to talk — also did some deep-diving in search of marine life, ek sê. No-oo, kahle-kahle was my line!—
— And what happened to your great fancy from where was it, Finland. That Easter. Well why not — whatever you did’s politically correct with me, they say the grave’s a fine and private place but no okes do there embrace. — Among the well-read of the friends this adaptation of Marvell was uproariously appreciated.
She was alone and laughed — she did not know what at. She sat beside the woman and her husband who were hugging, celebrating each other in the easy way of those who have old connections of intimacy encoded in exchanges of a mother tongue, released by wine and a good time had by all. She laughed when everyone else did. And then sat quiet and nobody noticed her. She understood she didn’t know the language.
The only mother tongue she had was his in her mouth, at night.
allesverloren
WHOM to talk to.
Grief is boring after a while, burdensome even to close confidants. After a very short while, for them.
The long while continues. A cord that won’t come full circle, doesn’t know how to tie a knot in resolution. So whom to talk to. Speak.
It comes down to the impossible, the ridiculous: talk then; about this! But to whom. Nobody knew about it. No, of course there must be some friends among those who surrounded us all those years of ours who did know, but since it was not spoken by them, it didn’t ever happen.
So whom to talk to. Necessary; to bring him back, piece him together, his life that must continue to exist for his survivor. Talk to.
There’s no-one.
Wind shivers along blue plastic covering the pergola of the house next door.
Wind in sun over the sea; come, abandon that crazy component of the quest and travel to contemplate an ocean!
Wind wags the trees’ heads. No message there, for the survivor.
Nothing to avoid it. There’s only one.
To supply answers to questions that were never asked, never necessary to be asked in an intimacy of flesh and mind that reassured, encompassed and transfigured everything, all pasts, into the living present? Answers. Is that what such understanding, coming to terms with loss, will prove to be? For so far understanding has turned out to have no meaning. Come to lunch, come to the theatre, attend the meeting, take up new interests, there’s your work, you’re a historian — for Christ’s sake, it’s important. Grief is speaking a language that reaches no-one’s ears, drawing hieroglyphs for which there is no cracked code. ‘Nor hope nor dread attend the dying animal / Man has created death.’ Everyone fears death but no-one admits to the fear of grief; the revulsion at that presence, there in us all.
Thinking about it (about the One) and not acting. The trivial irritabilities that are the only distraction; e.g., no bananas left today in the fruit bowl — regression to the quick fix of a child’s craving to eat something it likes best.
SHE, the survivor, was divorced when she met the man who was to be hers, and so was he, her man who now is dead — months ago, the long while beyond the short while when others still talked of him with her. She had had a couple of brief affairs in the interim between divorce and the marriage, and he had had only one. That was not the difference. It was with a man. He had told her of it as part of the confidentiality, confessions, that come as the relief of another kind of blessed orgasm after the first few of love-making. A form of deep gratitude that is going to be part of love for the other being, if there is going to be love.
There was love and there is love, but only on one side; the reciprocal recipient is gone. Gone? That implies somewhere. There is no somewhere in this death that man has invented. Because if the poet is right, man invented it, there’s no Divine-supplied invention of an after-life in a fully-furnished heaven or torture-equipped hell gymnasium. The beloved hasn’t gone anywhere. He is dead. He is nowhere except in the possibility of recall, a calling-up of all the times, phases, places, emotions and actions of what he was, how he lived while he was. Almost half that life — you don’t count childhood, of course — was theirs. What came before was thought of by them as a sort of prolonged adolescence — full of the mistakes and misconceptions of that state: the two early marriages, his and hers, rather inconceivable, in the knowledge of this one, theirs. The one and only, he would say to her, the days he was dying. The conclusion along with his own coming conclusion.