THE SEA AT HERMANUS

 The walk from our hotel to the town centre of Hermanus ran along the shoreline and as we walked there, in the dark and the silence, which seemed so novel to us after the noise and bustle of Sea Point, we could pretty much navigate by the lights of the town square ahead and the sound of the sea off to our right in the darkness.

Something about the sound of the sea caught my attention. It conjured up a very old memory. Perhaps it was just my awareness of the proximity of the old Habonim campsite, but I think the conjuring was more than that. The memory was so clear, so unique to this little corner of the earth, so unique to the time - fifty years ago - when I had been on that campsite.

Is it possible? Can the mind remember a sound over a time-lag of fifty years? Can one sea sound so uniquely different from the sound of all other seas that you can recognise it, as the eyes recognise a face from long ago? The great sea creatures, the whales that are so prevalent in these parts - can they hear it? Can they distinguish the sound of a specific sea so distinctly that they can use the sound as a navigation signal as they travel around the globe?

Can I really, truly say that I recognise the sound of this very specific piece of  sea with such accuracy that there is no doubt at all about its identity, even in the absence of any visual cues?

Could I describe it? Why is the memory so clear and so certain?

It is a very soft sound. Each wave is like a long breath. In … out. In … out. Softly. No effort. Too long to be the breath of a human being, but as effortless as the breath a child in a deep sleep. This is not the violence of the Atlantic. It doesn't smash onto the rocks below - it laps around them, caresses them, like a tongue. Like a warm liquid. All my life I have lived within earshot of one ocean or another. I know oceans. If it is true that Gondwanaland ever existed, then this little piece of it would have been the Eastern edge, with nothing beyond it but sea and more sea. This is a very old ocean. Tonight this ocean is very peaceful. We all know what power and terror seas are capable of, but not tonight. Tonight, this sea sleeps.

What dreams could this ocean hold? Dreams of a million, a hundred million, a thousand million years? Surely the dreams of an ocean, the days and nights thereof, are very different from our own. One day of it is a thousand years of ours. One night - the same. Inward breath. A long pause. Outward breath. A soft, low, liquid sound.

Fifty years ago and no more than five kilometres from here I heard exactly this sound, through the tangled branches of soft milkwood trees, over white sand (indicating that once this ocean covered more land than it does now), this very sound formed the backdrop to my young life. It sang me to sleep in the arms of a young girl. It woke me in the morning, drenched in dew on wet grass. Now she and I are in our sixties, she lives in Texas and for all I know she has forgotten me and this sea, but I have remained faithful to it. It has remained faithful, because that is what it does. I will pass from this world, and so will all of humanity, but the sea will go on and dream other dreams. Other unimaginable creatures will come and live in it, walk beside it, gaze at it in wonder.

It stretches out unseen into massive, primordial darkness. It doesn't care. It comes and goes. It has no enemies and it has countless friends. Entire continents may drift across it. It will open ahead and close behind. But now it sleeps under an infinite, star studded canopy, and I swear, it breathes.

I am tired. The drive to get here through heavy Friday afternoon traffic had felt long. And then the walk from the hotel to the town square, the noise, the bustle, the band of poor black musicians that played reggae music for rich white patrons stuffing themselves with expensive seafood, the black French and Portuguese-speaking waiters who are mostly refugees from war-torn countries up north, many of whom had actually walked unimaginably long distances across Africa to get here - all of that was behind us now as we walked back to our hotel and the sound of it had quickly receded into silence until all the sound that was left was the sound of this sea in the darkness.

I heard a similar sound from the coast of the Mediterranean once - similar, but not the same. We had arrived at our hotel in the dark and I hadn't realised how close the sea was. I awoke at midnight. It was hot, I had been sweating. It was pitch dark and dead quiet - until I realised that I could hear the rhythm and the “shooshing” sound of sea somewhere out in the darkness. I got out of bed, walked down the silent empty corridor of the hotel and out into the darkness. I fixed on the sound of the sea and walked towards it, stumbling on unseen obstacles in the darkness. I might as well have been blind. Suddenly I found myself at the edge of a steep embankment. I sensed it more than saw it. I believe that it was the quality of the sound. Is that possible? - and at the bottom was the sea. I scrambled down to the water's edge. It was the most passive sound I had ever heard from sea. I pulled off my clothes, dropped them at my feet, and walked, naked, tentatively into the warm, dark water. I got the strangest feeling: I felt as if I was part of the water, part of the earth. They say that blood has exactly the same salt content as seawater, a possible evolutionary explanation being that once our ancestors were sea creatures that crawled out of the sea, that our organs are still immersed in seawater, that all that we have achieved in order to make life on land possible is that we have internalised the sea in order to feed and oxygenate our internal organs. I was thinking of this as I floated in the water. Now I had sea within me and around me. I was part of the sea, the waters divided by a thin animal skin.

Perhaps that's why we are attracted to the sea. It is our very first, our ancestral home. It calls us, and we are comforted. When we die in it our elements return to their original state - beyond, even, dust to dust: water to water.

The water looked as if it had a strange luminescence - and then I realised that it was the broken reflection of the myriad strange stars of the Northern Hemisphere, which as a creature of the Southern Hemisphere I did not recognise.

After a while I grew tired and walked out. I had drifted quite a way from my clothes and it took me a while to find them. It occurred to me that if I couldn't find them I would have to return to the hotel naked, which would be awkward. Thankfully I found them. When I eventually went to sleep that night, I dreamed of that union with this strange sea in the dark.

The next morning at breakfast I told our guide of my experience. He was horrified. “You could have drowned in the waves!” he exclaimed. Come to my country, my boy, I thought. I'll show you waves.

IN OLD AGE

 Don’t cling to old dreams of long-ago youth

Like withered leaves, let them fall and be devoured by the earth

They are no use anymore, save to taunt and discomfort

This chair, this table, this machine – these are my reality.

 

I will not survive this plague

I will not come out the other side

I will go down into oblivion

I will try not to fear

The unknown, the opaque darkness

Or whatever lies beyond

Perhaps even - nothing

 

Sail on, sail on, great ship

Don’t wait for those who fail – they only delay you

It never occurred to me: this is my destination

I’ve been dead for a while now – unknowing, I died

And now just awaiting judgement,

The cold hand on my shoulder

And me, too afraid to turn and face that face

And then that last, that final death.

 

Well it’s better than Alzheimer’s

That intersection between death-in-life

And life-in-death

No-one visiting you in “The Home”,

Because you have become unbearable

- Who wants to contemplate a vacuum

Where someone once existed?

 

And it’s only slightly worse than pneumonia

“The Old Man’s Friend”, they called it

A quick release from suffering

Forty-eight hours, they said

Quite merciful, after abject suffering

The end of all doubts and fears

Hopes, ambitions, prayers and petitions

 

A gentle breeze moves the branches and the leaves

Patches of sunlight or rain strike the long grass, each in their season

The air carries no human voice or cry of animal

No souls hide between tombstones

in this profoundly peaceful place

Just

The sigh of wind through leaves, blades and branches

The ghost of a sigh that once passed human lips

 

The truth that ancient ancestors told

In parables whose meanings we forgot

Be kind, love thy neighbor, be true, be yourself.

STORIES MY MOTHER TOLD ME

 

STORIES MY MOTHER TOLD ME

 

My mother was always known for her ability to tell stories.

 

From the earliest days of my childhood, I recall sitting at her side while she told me the stories of her own childhood in the Karroo – stories of the cold; of the miles which she had to walk to school; of the rides which her brothers gave her on the handlebars of their bicycles; of the visitors who came to their isolated little house in the great silence along the railway-lines which her father maintained for the government; of incidents with her six brothers and sisters; of the brief spell which she spent working as a switchboard operator in Herold, Western Cape; of her life as a young nurse at the East Rand Hospital in Johannesburg.

 

Eventually we tired of the stories, after a lifetime of re-telling, but what vivid colour and what life she breathed into them. She was being generous in her way – she shared her life with us in those stories. When we eventually saw the places which she had spoken about, it was as if we were returning to something which we had once known ourselves. Such is the power of a good story.

 

Even when I was a university student, I remember bringing friends home for meals, and sometimes mom would come out with one of those stories, and manage to hold them enthralled in the details of an anecdote about a life and a childhood which must have seemed completely foreign to these sophisticated and cynical young people of the world. They didn’t just listen because they were polite. Some of them were far from polite in their normal conduct. They listened because these frequently humorous, whimsical tales of days gone by provided both information and entertainment which were clearly perceived as being part of our home environment, and to know us meant getting to know them.

 

Looking back, it occurs to me that I now only remember the fact that she told us those tales – the tales themselves seem to have evaporated like the morning mist, and I can no longer remember a single one. Only the overall impression remains, an artificial memory of scenes, events and incidents which I could not possibly have experienced myself, implanted through the charming telling and re-telling of mother’s tales. Her life, like a reel of tape, wound off the reel of her own existence, and wound onto the reel of others.

 

My father, who must have heard the stories many more times than me, would listen and laugh at the humour – sometimes his face would start to crumple into a smile before she got to the punch-line, knowing that it was coming. And then he laughed and laughed, till the tears ran down his cheeks and the handkerchief came out and he lifted his glasses to mop them away, and mom, who for all we knew had probably just told us a whopper of a lie, would protest through squeals of her own laughter, “It’s true! It’s true! – He really said that!”

 

Even now, as she lies at the end of her days in a hospital bed, her mind, detached from reality, is still spinning those yarns, and still, we listen, and we laugh, and she knows that our laughter is not hostile. How strange. Even in dying, she remains an entertainer, driven by forces which none of us understand. After two days of desperate struggle for survival, in which not a coherent word was uttered, she has emerged from that dark cloud clutching crazy tales which apparently have to be shared, and as always, she tells them with wide-eyed awe, as if she were as amazed by what she has to say as we are to hear it.

 

Last night she told us that, as she knew she was going to be discharged from hospital soon, she had got some champagne to share with the staff. But alas, she gave them the champagne to open, and they took it away and drank it all, and she never got a sip of it. She says at first she thought they had found it to be “off” and had thrown it away, but, no, it was good champagne and they must have drunk it all, the lousy sods!

 

Then she asked us whether we knew that there were mechanical robots working at the hospital. She said one of them came and stood right at her bedside last night, and she spoke to it for quite a while before she realized that it was a robot. It didn’t answer her, but it did offer her a cigarette, which she declined, as she didn’t want to start smoking again.

 

She also told Maxine and Jacob that a woman on the other side of the Intensive Care Unit had two cats, who visited her through the open window above her. The one lay on her lap, and the other lay beside her bed. She also had a brightly-coloured little bird, who wasn’t troubled by the cats at all, and who visited through the window.

 

For me the creepiest tale was about an old grey nun, in a long grey veil, who visits the ward at night and moves silently from bed to bed in the darkness. Mom says she is actually a “retired nun”, who likes to offer prayer for the sick, and who asked mom if she could pray for her. Mom said she could, and the old nun prayed for her.

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(c) Harry Friedland 2006

 

 

THE DUKE OF AOSTA

THE DUKE OF AOSTA

Every law firm ends up accumulating curiosities attached to old (and sometimes long gone- and forgotten) clients – sometimes just dusty old documents which have long since lost their relevance but for some obscure reason, never thrown away – but not infrequently, other items as well, especially if the partners have any sort of inclination to hoard.

The late CK Friedlander was more than an obsessive hoarder – he was a human magpie, to the extent that his office presented us with a nightmare when he died. But the effects of his obsession spread far beyond the four walls of his own office.

I had always been fascinated by some of the stuff lying in the old strong-rooms leading off from the Estates Department at our firm. Most of it had been carefully wrapped, sealed and labelled as belonging to various deceased estates. But every now and then you could discern mysterious unlabelled bags, packages, boxes and the like, covered with dust, forgotten in a corner, or fallen behind a shelf, lying for years undisturbed in the cool and quiet of a corner which seldom saw life of any kind.

Old tables, chairs, walking sticks (I kid you not), a wooden crate of whiskey – 12 years old when sold, but that must have been 50 years ago – old handbags, biscuit tins overflowing with sad pieces of costume jewellery which must once have adorned the limbs of some lady, who, whether she be genuine or pretentious, it was clear that the jewellery was of no real value. No end of junk which must once have meant something to someone.

Of course, there was  - still is – the fascinating tale of the collection of original Enslin oil paintings, the inheritance of a lost and once forbidden love, all the dramatis personae long departed: but I will leave the story of the Enslins for another time.

These things invite curious attention. Whose are they? What are they? How long have they been there? Why has no-one come for them? – And if anyone ever did, how would we know what they were looking for, and how could they prove that those things belonged to them?

Of all this dubious treasure, the thing which aroused my greatest curiosity was a dusty old packet which I came across in an ancient unlocked safe, while rummaging around one afternoon in 1991. It was heavy, wrapped up with duck-tape, unlabelled. I could hear some heavy metal items clanking around as I moved it. It cried out to be opened.

Four or five old handguns tumbled out of the bag: an old starting gun (CK had been a member of an athletics club, and had spent most Saturday mornings of his life with Danie Craven at Coetzenberg, assessing the young athletes on the field); an unremarkable old Browning .25 which was very common in the post-war years; an ancient Webley revolver; an old gas pistol – and a Beretta 9mm short, completely gold plated, with pearl handgrips and a gold coat of arms embossed with the letter “A” in the grip.

The Beretta, plated in gold like that, looked like a gangster’s gun. I could find no serial numbers, no markings whatsoever. I wasn’t even sure if it really was a 9mm, but it looked like it to me.

I asked around, and Blanche Portnoi in our estates department said that she thought it might belong to an “Estate Roy” which had been wound up years before. None of the members of the family remained in South Africa. She was unable to throw any further light on the matter. I pestered CK about that gun several times – I suppose I was really hoping that he would become exasperated and say, “Oh for heaven’s sake – take it” but of course he had no right to do that, I had no right to even wish for it, and in reality neither of us was that kind of person, even if it had been legal to give it away like that!

However, I did go back to that safe from time to time to take the weapon out, dismantle it, reassemble it, put it back into its packet – it held a kind of fascination for me, I couldn’t shake it off. I continued to raise it with CK from time to time, and eventually he conceded to let me get the thing valued by a weapons expert, a retired policeman who we sometimes used for that sort of thing. 

One morning after completing other duties, I put the weapon into my briefcase and walked over to that gentleman’s shop. He grunted quietly as he turned the gun over in his massive, calloused hands – in those hands it looked like a child’s toy. He was as puzzled by the absence of markings as we had been back at our office. It was untraceable. Blanche Portnoi’s guess about it belonging to “Estate Roy”, and her memory, were all we had to go on. The gentleman valued the weapon at a few hundred rand.

But my fascination remained. I had a friend who worked for Somchem, in their experimental weapons division out at the site of the dynamite factory in Somerset West. We spent many Sunday mornings out on the shooting range, sometimes shooting conventional firearms, sometimes experimenting with special ammunition, or barrels, or handgrips, or firing into artificial gel which was designed to imitate the effects of human flesh. Sometimes I was so nervous about the stuff we were shooting that by the time I pulled the trigger, I was already dripping with perspiration.

It was inevitable that sooner or later I would steal the Beretta and take it to him for his opinion. We sat in his lounge in Milnerton, the pieces spread out on his coffee table. Eventually, by holding the chassis of the slide at an angle to the light, we could see where the serial number had been covered with gold plating. We picked out a number which CK’s old expert couldn’t find. 

Then we checked the firearms catalogues.

We verified that it was a Beretta 9mm short, manufactured at the original Beretta works in Italy in 1939 – but none of them were ever produced with pearl hand-grips or gold plating!

And there, at least for that time, the trail ran dead. I put it back into its packaging, back into the safe, and moved on.

Then some years later, I got a letter from a Mr Roy, of Dallas, Texas. He wanted to know if we had his dad’s gun. Suddenly my fascination came alive again.

Sure, we’ve got it, I wrote back – but there has to be a story behind that gun, and I’m not letting it go till you tell me the story. He obliged. 

His father had been an officer in the South African forces in North Africa during World War 2. There had been a manoeuvre to capture an Italian battalion, probably during the Battle of El Alamein. They surrounded the Italians, moving between the dunes, took them by surprise, and persuaded them to surrender without a shot being fired.

The captured battalion were taken back to the South African base just before lunch. It was all terribly civilised. The South African officers invited the Italian officers to join them for lunch in the officers’ mess, which they did.

Despite the fact that the Italians were prisoners – during the course of the war thousands of Italians were captured and brought back to South Africa to serve out their wartime imprisonment – many lasting friendships were struck between South Africans and Italians arising out of this bit of history, and many marriages took place between the two nations.

Mr Roy’s father had been placed in charge of one particular Italian officer – he was an Italian nobleman, the Duke of Aosta. 

As an officer and a nobleman, he was allowed to carry his own personalised weapons. He had two Beretta 9mm shorts, gold plated, with pearl handles, which he carried, cowboy style, one on each side of his belt. They were of course taken from him upon capture, but they were kept in safekeeping for his eventual release one day.

However, such was the friendship which grew between the prisoner and the Roy family that when the time came for his release, the duke made a present of the guns to Roy’s father. That father kept them all his life, but the son could only find one of them on his father’s death, and this he had auctioned at Sotheby’s in London – not for “a few hundred rand”, as our expert had judged them to be worth, but for about fifteen thousand Pounds!

But there were relatives who insisted that the gun was part of a set – and eventually, he resolved to write to us. I took photos of the weapon (heaven knows where they are now), arrangements were made, and at least one item from that dusty hoard had finally found its owner …..

The gun was duly shipped off to it's rightful owner, bringing this strange puzzle to a conclusion.

And then in 2008 Simone and I took a holiday in Plettenberg Bay,  and in the course of our stay we did the usual things like trying out the local restaurants. One of these was Enrico’s Ristorante, out on Keurboom’s Beach, about 5 kilometres along the coastal road to Port Elizabeth.

The owner (as I would find out soon enough) was one Enrico Iacopini.

As we were about to leave, I noticed what appeared to be an old metal street name sign, stuck onto a glass window at the front of the restaurant. The legend, “Via Aosta” practically leaped out at me from the old sign. On an impulse, I asked the waiter, half-jokingly, whether there really was an Enrico who owned the place.

He confirmed that there was, and I asked if I could meet him, and lo and behold, out came a stocky little man to shake my hand.

“You’re Enrico?”

“Sure”

I’m pretty sure he thought I was going to complain about something

“That sign … where did you get it?”

“Oh, that … it comes from my home town in Northern Italy. That was my family home”

“You lived in Aosta?”

"Sure” he said.

“One night, we came home from drinking somewhere, and God knows why but I stole the sign. Many years later when I came to South Africa I found it with my things, so I put it up there to make the place feel a little bit like home”

I have subsequently discovered (acknowledgements to Google and Wikipedia) that there is a royal lineage of Dukes of Aosta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Aosta.

JOHN KEATS AND THE UNLIMITED TIME EXAM

 JOHN KEATS AND THE UNLIMITED TIME EXAM

 

I'm sure that the university authorities who dreamed up the concept of the unlimited time exam, had good intentions. But it was just an experiment, and it never got repeated. They probably thought that it would accommodate those poor hacks who are really doing their best and just write and write and write and basically just dump out everything in their barren skulls in the hope that something in there will ring a bell for the examiner and drag them over the threshold between a pass and a fail. I know, because I've been there. I'm not that fucking smart that I can afford to sit back and laugh at anyone. They probably thought, what the hell, what can it hurt, some poor dumbass planned his time wrong or got into a tailspin when his pen ran out of ink, so give him another 15 minutes -no, what the hell, let's give him 30 – no, wait, let’s just give him as long as he likes, he’ll run out of steam soon enough! Let's not show prejudice against stupidity!

 So they did this experiment and they called it “The Unlimited Time Exam”. After all, what kind of an asshole is going to sit in a cold, drafty exam hall for endless hours after all the really promising students have buggered off down to the pub if he really doesn’t have to do that and actually has something to say?

 But they obviously never thought about the stoned ones. Unlike drunks, who will at least be struck by the realisation that they have lost an hour here or there, stoners have no idea - nor do they care.

 I will never forget that exam. It is as clear as a 17th Century stained glass window - which is appropriate in my case because it was an English poetry exam and you could either answer a whole bunch of shitty little questions or you could do one big critical analysis of John Keats’ poem “The Eve of St Agnes”. I had never read the poem in my life but Keats was a personal friend of mine and I distinctly remembered him talking about it one day on Signal Hill while we were sharing a joint and he was planning the thing, so when I cast my eye on it, it all came back to me in a flash. It was love at first sight, and I just knew that that poem was mine.

 We had spent the morning smoking it up in the maid's quarters of my friend’s house in Camps Bay. Then I had to go to a dentist appointment at 12 so I had taken my Honda from Camps Bay to the city centre just before 12 but somewhere along Hof Street as I was passing through an arch created by beautiful old Oak trees, a squirrel, which was obviously planning to swing from one tree to the other, lost its grip, fell into the road right in front of my bike, and became road kill. I was so strung out one way or another by the time I got to old Doc Navias, my dad’s dentist, that his nurse checked me out with a beady eye and refused to let me in. Thank Gd the dagga cookies must have kicked in right about then because otherwise I would probably never have made the drive through to university.

 The old paranoia which had just about settled by the time I got to the exam room, started up all over again when I realised that I couldn't hold my pen. It took about twenty minutes to figure out how to do that, and then I got started on this critical analysis of “The Eve of St Agnes”.

 Oh, how I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. After about three hours, my classmates started closing their answer books and one by one they left the exam hall, but I wrote on. Eventually I was the only candidate left in the hall. The sun moved from azimuth to horizon, and I wrote. It grew dark outside, and I wrote. The stars came out, and I wrote. The exam invigilators coughed and shuffled, and I wrote. Eventually out of the corner of my eye I could see them conferring. One of them came over. “Look” he said, “you don't need all of us to be here, I suppose it'll be OK if we go and one invigilator stays?” I shrugged. They could all go, for all I cared. I was writing, damn it. Writing!!!

 I forgot about the whole thing but then one day just before the exam results came out a little note appeared on the notice-board board in the Dept of English: “Will Harry Friedland please make an appointment to see Prof. Gillham as soon as possible”. I didn't see that because I didn't know  that there was a notice board, or where it was, but someone told me about it (someone always does, don't you know).

 Prof. Gillham was a dry old Englishman who probably didn't like Jews very much, I'd never spoken to him in my life, but he did his best to be nice. I was uncomfortable as hell in his office. He wore those funny little half-spectacles - reading glasses - and he peered at me over the top as if I was a laboratory specimen, or a pygmy, or something.

 “You wrote a most remarkable essay, Mr Friedland” - he said it as if it was a question. Clearly, he expected an answer. Or an explanation perhaps. I was feeling my lack of culture and breeding acutely. I wasn't about to tell him how that essay really got written, but clearly, from what he could see on the other side of his desk, some sort of explanation might help. I don't remember what I told him.

 I got the class prize. It covered all my varsity fees for the following year, and my textbooks, and a really cool trench coat and a pair of binoculars which I have to this day.

 I never saw John Keats again, and I never did read his poem. But I think about him every time I sit on my porch and use those binoculars to watch the Southern Right whales and the dolphins cavort out beyond the surf in Table Bay. Good old John!

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(c) Harry Friedland 22 Jun 2020