S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

‘The jet lag is catching up with me,’ Ondien says, and holds her head. ‘Can you show me where I’ll be sleeping?’

Vera sits forward, speaks urgently. ‘Please, you can’t sleep here. An unmarried woman under the same roof won’t do. He has strict rules. We’ve booked a hotel for you.’ She looks at the door. ‘He’ll be back any minute.’

She has hardly finished speaking when they hear the lift, which enters the apartment directly, opening. Vera jumps up; her heels click down the corridor, on the marble floor. Ondien heads for the guest toilet.

She splashes water from the gilt taps over her face, looks at herself in the mirror. She is not wearing any make-up. She will be relieved to get out of here. The new Vera, the messy emotions, are too much for her. The tantrum style rearing its head, the hysterical register that one associates with a face contorted with weeping, loose strands of hair, smudged make-up. God, no, she would rather have the stiff corporate wife from Bryanston with her anointed Botoxed forehead.

Ondien breathes deeply and opens the toilet door. Vera introduces her to Shahin. He is swarthy with fine features, his eyes piercing. She half expected a traditional head covering, like a wise man in a passion play from her and Vera’s Free State school days, but he is wearing a suit. In Shahin’s presence, Vera often lowers her eyes.

‘We’ve booked you a hotel,’ says Shahin, ‘the Kempinski at the Mall of the Emirates. I’ll take you.’

In the underground carpark they get into his four-wheel-drive vehicle. The alarm gives a shrill whistle when he unlocks it. The car is canary yellow and stands high on its wheels. HUMMER , Ondien reads in chrome on the bonnet. Thick streams of icy air blow into the cabin.

At the hotel, Shahin checks her in. She waits. When they get to the room, someone in white gloves is there for them.

‘Your personal butler,’ says Shahin. ‘We thought you’d be comfortable here.’

Inside the spacious suite Ondien walks up to the glass that occupies an entire wall. It overlooks an indoor ski slope, a vast freezer in which figures in bright clothing are zigzagging across snow.

The butler presses a remote-control button. A cosy fire flickers on in the fireplace next to her. In front of the flames lies a bear skin with a stuffed head still attached to it.

Shahin waves away the butler.

‘Before I go, let me provide you with some guidance,’ he says. She turns around. He continues. ‘Don’t even think of taking Vera away from here, from me. The force of the law will deal with her. And with you. You’re now in my country. And she’s an adulterer.’

This is so out of the blue that Ondien is speechless for a moment. Then something surges in her, like vomit. In a flash she is the self-conscious young gender studies and music student again, the militant SOAS ethnomusicologist. She feels more reckless than she has in ages.

‘Islamic law is a load of shit,’ she says. ‘You Arabic men and your little homosocial world — all it’s designed for is to allow you to freely fuck each other, and little boys and girls to boot, out in the desert.’

He does not react in the way she hoped he would. He utters a cool, dry little laugh, looks at his bulky golden watch.

‘You are full of Western misapprehensions. I believe you’ve been confused by those CNN and BBC images of the Taliban. That is not how things are here. But, yes, we do have our ways.’

He takes his time rearranging the cuffs of his silk-and-wool suit, one side, then the other, until they are perfect. He smiles neatly and then departs.

She is left alone with the blueish snow out there (or out there but in there). Machines are spewing clouds of fine flakes over the slope. She regrets her outburst. Her frustration and resentment towards Vera are boiling over. She has little appetite for helping to sort out this mess.

Ondien wanders aimlessly through the vast shopping complex that merges with the hotel and skiing centre. She walks into a store with an exhibition of life-sized toy animals in artificial snow: polar bears, white lions, Siberian tigers, snow leopards, white sabre-toothed tigers, a white dinosaur. A sales clerk approaches her. She has a sweet smile, a transparent hijab draped over charcoal-black hair.

‘Many of these animals don’t even occur in nature,’ Ondien says.

The woman’s smile does not change.

‘Feel how soft,’ she says. She takes Ondien’s hand gently and lets it rest on the sabre-toothed tiger’s neck. The silky fur against Ondien’s palm causes an unexpected sob to rise in her chest. And there she has it: her funeral march. Instruments are tuned. A short silence and then it starts to play in her skull, from the very first note.

Vera calls. She is upset. ‘What did you say to Shahin? He was silent with anger when he returned.’

‘What are you scared of?’

‘That he’d send someone to do something to my children.’

‘Has he threatened to?’

‘Not this time, no, but previously, when I wanted to end the relationship.’

Ondien and Vera meet at the hotel, amongst Westerners in the coffee shop. Vera takes off her hijab, but keeps on her Jackie Onassis sunglasses. The dark glass covers half her face.

‘You look like Grace Kelly,’ Ondien says drily, but Vera is not amused. Her mouth is tense.

‘It is important that you don’t spoil things for me here, Ondien. I don’t know why I agreed to your visit. I just wanted to see you, see someone … perhaps it was a mistake. You’ve always been a troublemaker.’

Ondien breathes deeply, grits her teeth.

‘Vera, why don’t you go back to Frank and the kids? Face the crisis, support your children, your husband.’

Vera shakes her head, looks away, astonished that Ondien cannot take in the complexity of her situation.

‘You don’t understand. There will be nothing left of the assets. Frank may go to jail. Perhaps he’ll be extradited to South Africa. Just about the entire board and most shareholders are black and from the political inner circle. Frank’s the scapegoat. It was humiliating enough to have to grovel and fawn to be tolerated on the edges of the new South African hierarchies. And, now? To go and stand in front of a judge as an accused? The wife of a white white-collar criminal in a South African jail? That I will never endure.’

What about possibilities for you and your children somewhere else, a completely new beginning? she wants to ask, but she says nothing, just sniffs her hand: it still smells of the sabre-toothed tiger’s nylon fur. The music swells, fills her skull, lifts her heart, the darkness of it notwithstanding.

She looks Vera straight in the eye. ‘Vera, were you at our mother’s funeral, back then?’

Vera looks at her with a raw expression. She shakes her head, starts weeping so unexpectedly that people at other tables turn their heads.

‘I am so lost,’ she says. ‘Everything has collapsed, I am worthless to my children, I am so ashamed, I mean nothing to anyone, I am a useless woman.’

Vera is crying disconsolately, her face ugly. She drops onto her knees next to the little table, her cheek against Ondien’s hand. ‘I want my mother,’ she says. ‘I just want my mother.’

Ondien scarcely hears Vera. The music in her head is so beautiful, it moves her so terribly. Ondien gently pulls back her hand.

‘I’ll go to Frank and the children, Vera, and make sure everything’s fine there. Do you have a message for them?’

She shakes her head in between sobs, slumps flatly onto the floor. Face down, high heels next to her buttocks. She looks snottily down at the floor.

‘Just let me know the children are ok.’

Ondien

On the plane back to Johannesburg the funeral march is playing in her head. In massive, surging chunks. It is moving at the pace of a storm. She tries to keep up, jots down ideas and sequences and motifs: on pieces of paper, in the margins of magazine pages, on the stub of her plane ticket. On a napkin.