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Nineteen

Aunt Annie is dead. Despite the promises of the doctors, she never walked after her fall, not even with a stick. From her bed in the Volkshospitaal she was transferred to a bed in an old-age home in Stikland, in the back of beyond, where no one had the time to visit her and where she died alone. Now she is to be buried in Woltemade cemetery no. 3.

At first he refuses to go. He has to listen to enough prayers at school, he says, he does not want to hear more. He is vocal in his scorn for the tears that are going to be shed. Giving Aunt Annie a proper funeral is just a way for her relatives to make themselves feel good. She should be buried in a hole in the garden of the old-age home. It would save money.

In his heart he does not mean it. But he is compelled to say things like this to his mother; he needs to watch her face tighten in hurt and outrage. How much more must he say before she will at last round on him and tell him to be quiet?

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder. He hopes that the bath in their house in Plumstead has never had an old person in it.

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who caused it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

In the end, however, he does go with his mother to Aunt Annie’s funeral. He goes because she pleads with him, and he likes being pleaded with, likes the feeling of power it gives; also because he has never been to a funeral and wants to see how deep they dig the grave, how a coffin is lowered into it.

It is not a grand funeral at all. There are only five mourners, and a young Dutch Reformed dominee with pimples. The five are Uncle Albert and his wife and son, and then his mother and himself. He has not seen Uncle Albert for years. He is bent almost double over his stick; tears stream from his pale-blue eyes; the wings of his collar stick out as though his tie has been knotted by other hands.

The hearse arrives. The undertaker and his assistant are in formal black, far more smartly dressed than any of them (he is in his St Joseph’s school uniform: he possesses no suit). The dominee says a prayer in Afrikaans for the departed sister; then the hearse is reversed to the graveside and the coffin is slid out, onto poles over the grave. To his disappointment, it is not lowered into the grave – that must wait, it appears, for the graveyard workers – but discreetly the undertaker gestures that they may toss clods of earth on to it.

A light rain begins to fall. The business is over; they are free to go, free to return to their own lives.

On the path back to the gate, through acres of graves old and new, he walks behind his mother and her cousin, Albert’s son, who talk together in low voices. They have the same plodding gait, he notices, the same way of lifting their legs and setting them down heavily, left then right, like peasants in clogs. The du Biels of Pomerania: peasants from the countryside, too slow and heavy for the city; out of place.

He thinks of Aunt Annie, whom they have abandoned here in the rain, in godforsaken Woltemade, thinks of the long black talons that the nurse in the hospital cut for her, that no one will cut any more.

‘You know so much,’ Aunt Annie once said to him. It was not praise: though her lips were pursed in a smile, she was shaking her head at the same time. ‘So young and yet you know so much. How are you ever going to keep it all in your head?’ And she leaned over and tapped his skull with a bony finger.

The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says.

They have reached the gate. It is raining harder. Even before they can catch their two trains, the train to Salt River and then the