S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

After one of their Cape Town performances, a record company representative came up to her. He ignored Beauty and Nungi and looked Ondien in the eyes.

‘Some astonishing moments and sounds,’ was his judgement, ‘but it doesn’t gel, there’s no identity. A hodge-podge. There’s something we could work with, though. I like the ethnic thing.’

He offered to buy drinks, but looked annoyed when the other two did not want to come along. It turned out his intention was an intimate drink in his hotel room. For the three of them.

‘I think you are misunderstanding the complexity of our intentions.’ Ondien’s tone was as chilly as only a European could manage — her lessons had been learned in the wintry north.

The multitude of sounds milling inside her skull had unpredictable — and probably irreconcilable — influences on VNLS’s music. Her own musical reactions became unpredictable too. Sometimes they would hit upon a chord or stanza that suddenly made her choke on her tears. Initially, she thought she might be approaching cacophony, but when she closed her eyes and listened more deeply, she could make out prime chords behind the noise. Something that was gravitating back, to the beginning. She reminded herself that she was unable to endure anything other than skimming over the surface of this country; that this was the reason for her original departure. To make the music move forward, she had to avoid origins. She had suddenly become averse to Cape Town cool, to the city itself. Whenever Ondien noticed VNLS’s audience getting going with the dancing, she would improvise, working against her own rhythms and melodies. On impulse, she would harden her ear and interlace small quotes from ancestral music. The high priests of European bloodlessness were honoured in this manner. Precise little fragments of Schoenberg or Webern would find their place. Alien in the bright sunlight. She insisted on translating English lyrics into Afrikaans and Zulu, combining the Afrikaans with the most unresolved, self-cannibalising music — songs that were pulling apart at the seams. Their performances descended into exquisite chaos. Fellow musicians stormed off the stage. Audiences booed. Beauty and Nungi kept dancing in their Zulu skirts with apparent joy, singing into their microphones.

Their last night was a perfect Cape Town November evening: everything shimmering, perpetually moving, something nervous in the air. But how absurd the city looked to her when she and Beauty and Nungi returned to their hotel room after the performance — this city with its wild oceans and sandy flats, its corrugated-iron shacks in the fog, its self-satisfied enclaves with neo-modernist villas cantilevered over the waves. She stood there, looking out from the balcony on the eleventh floor, and thought: it’s time to go. As always, Beauty and Nungi followed. For a few months thereafter, they stayed in guest houses and down-at-heel hotels in villages in the Western Cape and Free State, played where they could, for white as well as black audiences. They were penniless, and had to support themselves with what, after their Parisian adventure, Ondien had left of a modest inheritance from her parents. Ondien adjusted the music according to where they were. She was as nimble as a fox, reading audiences and veering in new directions. (A rousserolle verderolle , Thierry called her between his sheets in his Marais appartement shortly after they had met: a marsh warbler, the migrating northern bird that can impersonate seventy species from Africa.) By this time, Beauty and Nungi knew her so well that they could follow seamlessly.

The white audiences were suspicious. Art-festival types: thin-lipped parents with obstreperous children, important women with important hair, thirty-something yuppies with German-style spectacle frames, acned teenagers misinterpreting the fashions of more civilised parts of the world, clean-faced Free State university students. Mostly Afrikaans-speaking, sometimes with cynical expressions when commenting behind their hands amidst the noise. Even though Ondien felt strange here — kept herself strange — the sense of menace that she would sometimes experience in front of black township audiences was absent. There she had to wear the ‘ethnic thing’ like a mask to outface the listeners until, at last, she could reach them. It took something for a white woman to soften them, to render them defenceless enough to be entertained.

The first Christmas back in South Africa Ondien spent with Beauty and Nungi. Ondien’s parents had died two years earlier, within two weeks of each other. She could attend only her father’s funeral. It was to be her last visit to the farm where she grew up. She had hardly set foot back in London when her mother collapsed over her little gardening fork in a bed of nasturtiums. Ondien could not afford to fly back again. Shortly after her mother’s death the farm was sold.

The only family member still left in South Africa was her sister Vera. In an Italian-style villa in Bryanston with security cameras in the garden. But only just: she and her husband were spending most of their time on business trips to Dubai, the children looked after by au pairs. The last time Ondien saw them was at the funeral. They wanted to establish themselves in Dubai as soon as possible, they explained over and over again.

‘Not that different to this place,’ Vera said, gold flashing on her fingers. ‘Just safer. Sunshine. Homes the same size. Swimming pools. International schools, tax advantages. It’s not really all that strict either. Westerners are allowed to drink alcohol. And you hardly need have anything to do with Arabs.’

No, she would not be spending Christmas with Vera. Vera did not even know that she was back in the country. And, who knows, perhaps the tide had turned, perhaps Vera and co had decided, after all, to make cultural concessions and give up Christmas, in anticipation of their utopian existence in the Middle East.

Her brother the banker she had seen only once when she was still in London, in a restaurant filled with City men in suits. The place made her feel frumpy. Her kaftan with ornamental stitching around the neck was a mistake. She found herself wondering whether she smelled of the small grey nest of a council flat that she shared in South London with a Ghanaian photographer and a Japanese ballet dancer.

‘When will you be moving on from the academic stuff?’ Cornelius wanted to know. ‘There’s a big world out there, you know. You have talent. You could easily requalify in, say, finance or law.’

When she tried getting in touch again afterwards, a series of women — secretaries or lovers — answered his phone each time, explaining that he was travelling. He was either in Tokyo or Moscow, in São Paulo or Sydney.

Her younger sister, Zelda, was in Phoenix. She was divorced from her psychopathic American husband. The psychopath was unemployed and she had to support him. The American courts had forbidden her to take the child out of the country for more than two weeks per year. Zelda would not be able to return to South Africa. Ondien had not spoken to her since their father’s funeral. Zelda had been so run-down by her working life, the long flight and her maladjusted, brutal child with his Arizona accent that they had exchanged no more than a few sentences, and half of it in English. It had surprised her how Zelda’s Afrikaans had become diluted. Ondien was sad about Zelda. They had been bosom sisters in their youth, just two years apart. Walking together from the farm to the village school in the mornings, they had always smoked a cigarette on the sly in the red grass. On one such morning, Zelda had accidentally set Ondien’s sleeve alight. The burn was still visible on her arm. Yes, she missed Zelda. But she was also grateful that Satan’s child was trapped in America. She had no desire herself ever to set foot on that continent, and the ocean between her and that little psychopath was hardly wide enough.