Liesl JobsonSTILL LIFE IN THE ART ROOM*Dalila paces about the art room like a plover, with jerky steps. When she stops moving, her head is cocked, as if listening to some half-heard thing. "Mafudu is restless today," says Sikelela, an eleventh grader, under his breath. He rinses a sable brush in a jar of water. "Mafudu indeed!" The scissors grumble on the shelf. "Why don't these children call their teacher 'ma'am'?" "She's probably dieting," says a girl. "These children show no respect," murmurs a charcoal drawing-stick. "Go awaaay!" cries a loerie in the tree outside the classroom, startling Dalila. "Silence," she says.
Shortly after her return from compassionate leave nearly a year ago, Sikelela had noticed the scraps of paper filled with tortoises on the teacher's desk. Dalila had passed the time doodling serried ranks of the ancient creatures marching eastward toward an imaginary shoreline beyond the page. "You really like tortoises, Ma'am?" "Mmm," she'd nodded, flipping the pad closed. Dalila did not point out that what she drew were turtles, not tortoises. No Zulu word exists for the former, only an extension that approximates: ufudu-lwaso-lwandle or the tortoise-of-the-water. The nickname Mafudu stuck. Miss Tortoise. Dalila had been unperturbed by the nickname. She recognised that it fit her heavy tread and fixed gaze, but had no desire to change either. She was relieved that her students had noticed only her eccentric drawings. They hadn't heard, it seemed, the rattling palette boxes in the cabinet or the shuffling of the sketch boards. Perhaps these sounds were lost against the scraping chairs and the grinding of the old-fashioned pencil sharpener on her desk. A few days before Sikelela's observation, she'd presented an easy lesson, saying, "Today we're doing 'Take-a-line-for-a-walk'. Who knows which artists developed this style?" She nodded towards the girl with unruly dreads whose hand was raised while the question was being asked. "Klee, Ma'am," said Refiloe. "Yes. Another artist?" "Miro," answered Salmaan. Dalila switched on the overhead projector to demonstrate. "This way you let an abstract line take shape, as it curves, zigzags, makes corners; let it wander freely over the page." Her hand whizzed over the screen. "Now shift the page until you see something recognisable." She swivelled the transparency around. "Maybe you'll see an eye or a claw. Look, here I've got the skeleton of a tree." She pointed with one hand. With the other, she made rapid gestures filling in leaves like eyelashes, twigs like feathery bones and beaks. "Keep going until the whole page is covered in detail." It was the last time her hand moved swiftly, unselfconsciously for many months. "The other way of performing this task requires some planning to create a specific image. It is more controlled and presents a bigger challenge." She put another transparency on the projector and drew the tail of a turtle, raised the hump, formed the head, the flippers and lower carapace. Without lifting her pen, she entered the shell cavity, interweaving three rows of scales. Lastly, she created a diminishing spiral in the head cavity to form the eye out of negative white space. "Try a waterfall, a skyline, or a garden. Whatever you do, keep your pen on the paper." The class had already begun while she talked. The exercise was a favorite. She switched off the projector and drew another turtle, this one on a piece of paper, and then another beside it before returning to check her students' progress. She stopped a boy about to erase his work, "Keep going," she said over his shoulder. Pointing to an empty space on his page she said, "Keep it loose and free; don't think too hard." The bell rang. The students gathered their books and pencils and sauntered out. Once they'd gone, Dalila completed an entire sheet of inch-long turtles. She put the page in the bottom drawer of her desk, the first page of identical scribbles that would accumulate over a year. Soon hundreds of miniature beasts were crammed into her desk, scraping their flippers, yearning for release. An erratic fluttering sound, barely audible, caught her attention. It sounded like the overhead projector's fan slowing after being switched off. But it was under its cover, unused, in the storeroom. She opened the drawer. The noise stopped.
Today is the first anniversary of her mother's passing. "No cartoons today," hisses a flat pencil. "Draw us a turtle, Mafudu," taunts a coloured pencil. Dalila drums her fingers on her desk fifteen minutes before the final bell of the day. She chivvies the daydreaming Refiloe and complains at Salmaan's dithering. Ten minutes early she says, "Finish up. Don't start another colour. Put your folios away." The students look up. Surprised, they comply. As the last one leaves, Dalila flips over an empty bucket placing it upside down, in front of the window. The label stuck to the bottom reads Powder Tempera: light green. The colour of hospital walls. Residues of poster paint ingrained in the plastic release a faint odour of sour dust. Usually she constructs still-life compositions on a plinth in the centre of the room. Today she needs a different perspective. She removes a faded kikoi from her tog-bag and holds it to her face, inhaling deeply. Her mother brought it back from Nairobi, a few weeks before getting ill. The open suitcase had released the fragrance of grassy plains, Kenyan shillings and Watamu Beach, where Dalila lived as a child. She had walked beside the waves holding her grandmother's hand. They found a strange depression in the sand. "Look, a green turtle nest," said Bibi. "Turtles lay their eggs, then leave them to hatch." "Does their mother not stay with them?" Dalila asked. "No. The hatchlings must dash toward the surf before the gulls catch them. Only the lucky ones make it into the sea." "They go in search of their mama and papa?" asked Dalila. "They go to continue the cycle of life." "Do they ever find them?" "Turtles don't think that way, but they return here throughout their life." "Return to Watamu?" "The females will return to lay their eggs here when they are 40 years old." "They return looking for their parents," said the girl. "Hmmm." "Bibi?" "Green turtles live to be ninety." "Do the babies find their parents?" Dalila tugged on Bibi's skirt. "Hmmm." Dalila had already learned that when Bibi said, "Hmmm" in that mournful tone, she would not reply, and it served no point to ask again. There were many questions for which Bibi had no answers, including why Dalila's parents had been gone so long. Bibi didn't know where they were. Perhaps they were attending a congress in Dar es Salaam or a conference in Botswana, or were sneaking in and out of South Africa. They never told her. It was safer that way. That night Dalila dreamed of late hatchlings, flopping in vain against the outgoing tide. They were almost at the shore when hovering gulls plucked them from the sand, their flippers swimming in midair. Dangled low over the water, the babies could see their parents. Then the gulls swooped to the beach where they cracked open the shells and gorged on the rich meat. Dalila woke sobbing. Bibi cradled her, rocking her back to sleep, crooning, "Harambee, harambee, tuimbe pamoja. Tujenge serikali. Harambee." She sang slowly, in the key of blackness. It sounded like a song for harvesting serpents. The next morning the news came that Dalila's father had opened a letter bomb in Lusaka.
Dalila pinches her nostrils and blows hard. Her ears pop. Her sinuses feel as if she has swum a mile underwater. She wonders if she developed an allergy to paint. The theme of today's lesson is identifying environmental and historical factors that influence visual artists. Sikelela has brought a mbira, the traditional herd boy's piano. Salmaan's flag provides the backdrop and Refiloe's leggy strelitzias add colour. An exhibition of the work is planned for the Heritage Day celebration, and the president of the country is scheduled to visit the school that his grandchildren attended. "Here we go again," sighs the bucket. "Another plastic snake, ja?" mutters a thin yellow stripe woven into the kikoi. "Be quiet," says Dalila, sniffing. She will not tolerate the voices today. Like her students, they pay her little attention. "You should stick to porcelain dolls," says the bucket, "in gingham frocks and lacy petticoats." "We haven't seen dolly for a while," says a cerise stripe. Dalila's grandmother had sewn her party dresses, Western-style, in pastel shades, with matching dresses for the dolls from leftover fabric scraps. Peering through her bifocals, Bibi formed delicate stitches. Then she braided Dalila's hair in satin ribbons of the same shade. Dalila tried to braid her dolls' straight blonde hair, but it slipped from her fingers, refusing to hold the weave. "Does porcelain ever come in shades of brown?" "Hmmm," said Bibi. Dalila drapes the kikoi, which has softened with washing, over the bucket, letting the stripes fall in a gentle curve. Once there were traces of her mother's scent in the cotton, a faint whiff of crisp herbal beer even, the brand her father had allowed her to sip when she sat on his knee that last time. "No, Mandla," her mother had scolded. He had laughed at his daughter smacking her lips, but had whisked the bottle away. After her father died, her mother walked along the beach with a kikoi wrapped around her thin hips. She had always been a round comfortable figure. She stopped eating until clothes hung on her angular form. She'd sit alone in the sand, staring at the horizon for hours. Dalila would watch her from afar. The following breeding season, a record low number of eggs were documented by Turtlewatch Kenya. Her grief scared the females away. They refused to lay. The shushing in Dalila's ears is like waves inside a seashell. She tries to depressurise her nasal chambers again, but there is no relief. The turtles scuttle in the drawer. She places the potted plant on top of the bucket. Sunlight reflects off the finely demarcated green and white leaves. Dalila had taken a slip of the hen-and-chickens plant from her mother's balcony garden when the flat was sold to cover the doctor's bills. She left the cutting in a bottle of water. When it developed roots, she transplanted it into a large ukhamba, a traditional Zulu beer pot she bought at the Rosebank market. "Those shocking shades will quite outdo me." The pot plant glares at the bold kikoi. "My delicate stripes will be utterly lost." "Hen lady, relax your sphincter," says the bucket. "How uncouth," says the plant. Dalila runs her fingers over the elaborate patterns, Iron Age motifs, incised into the dark clay. She wishes she had a banana frond to frame her composition, but Johannesburg's winter frost burns the tropical plants. There were banana groves around Gogo's kraal. Dalila recalls visiting her paternal grandmother in Gingindlovu before her father fled into exile. Gogo showed her how to twist sticky coils of clay over bunches of rolled grass to make an ukhamba. Dalila was about six years old. Her cousin Zodwa terrified her at bedtime with stories about green mambas. When they walked along the muddy path to the long-drop toilet, Zodwa screamed, pointing into the grass beside Dalila's feet: "Snake! Be careful!" The first time it happened, Dalila wet her pants and ran to her father. The sniggering Zodwa disappeared into the long stalks of sugar cane with the other village girls. The second time it happened, her father comforted her: "Gogo's mean stick will talk to that naughty Zodwa." Dalila was not comforted.
This morning before school as Dalila sipped her coffee, an article in The Star grabbed her attention: GABORONE – The remains of Thami Mnyele were exhumed on Wednesday from Gaborone's New Stands Cemetery for reburial at home. Mnyele, a gifted graphic artist, was one of twelve ANC cadres killed by the South African Defence Force in a cross-border raid on 14 June 1985. His artwork had been deliberately destroyed in the attack. This soft-spoken gentleman, who had a passion for poetry and music, will be buried in Tembisa after a memorial service at the Mehlareng Stadium. Dalila took the newspaper in shaking hands into her tiny garden to gather herself. On the wooden bench beside the lemon tree, she recalled her indebtedness to Thami Mnyele, the kind uncle she had met once at Beitbridge with her father. They had just fled South Africa in a hot, gritty train, and were both tired and thirsty from the long journey. A stranger arrived with two cans of cold Coca-Cola. Her father gave her a pen and an empty envelope to keep her busy while they had an important meeting. "Draw me a picture of Mama," he said. Dalila drew a tiny train chugging around the edge of the envelope. In the centre was a little house. Her mother waved from its window where she had remained to cover for her husband and to sell their few belongings. Uncle Thami noticed the girl's picture, and reached into his briefcase. He brought out a pad of paper and some pencil crayons. At the time, she thought he was trying to keep her from disturbing the adults. But he had taken the drawings she offered him. He admired them, praised her, and remembered. A few weeks later, Uncle Thami sent her her first set of paints. When the slip for the parcel had arrived bearing her name, she waited with Bibi in a long queue at the post office. When the post-office clerk eventually placed the mysterious parcel in her hands, she itched to open it right there at the counter. Bibi stopped her. The clerk gave Dalila a toffee to reward her patience. That was when the rustling of brown paper was still sweet, when string and sealing wax meant only that one had been r emembered. A few weeks later her mother appeared unexpectedly, and Dalila tried to piece together the whispered fragments she overheard while pretending to sleep. "Is this Mandla's child?" asked Bibi. Dalila couldn't see in the dark whether her mother nodded or shook her head. "Does he know?" "He must not," said her mother. "How often?" "Every night for two weeks." "And what else? Stifled sobs were the only answer. "Is Mama very sick?" asked Dalila the following morning. "Don't worry," said Bibi. "Your mother will be all right. These are old screams your mother is passing. They will go. When a woman's screams get stuck inside, her sisters have ways to set them free…." An old woman from the village arrived with herbs and oils. She rubbed Dalila's mother's belly and pressed cool cloths against her forehead. Later she bled into the long-drop. When Dalila went to relieve herself, she stared in horror at the livery chunks that caught the sunlight through the cracked tin roof.
This morning the deep purple irises growing beneath the lemon tree reminded her of the previous winter. On her mother's last day, she'd taken a bunch of the flowers in a Heinz bottle. It was a make-do arrangement since her mother's favourite vase had been stolen in the hospital. Perhaps a nurse recognised the fine crystal that had been a wedding present. In the ward, she had wiped her mother's face with a warm cloth and brushed her thin grey hair. Her mother whispered in the oxygen mask. Dalila couldn't hear. "Pardon, Mama, what was that?" she asked, bending close. Her mother's rapid breath smelled fruity. "You are my blessing," said her mother.
Dalila reached beneath the lemon tree to pick a single stem with a bud, an unfurling bloom and a fully opened flower. Back in her kitchen, she placed it in a moistened blob of cotton wool, twisting silver foil around it. A sudden yearning to paint its yellow tongue pecked at the inside of her heart. She remembered the tiny beak of a green turtle poking through the last egg at the bottom of the nest. An angry gull had hovered overhead as it struggled free. She had chased the bird away and urged the baby on. The gull swooped and dived above. Dalila shouted at it, flapping her arms. "Hurry, little one." She faced her grandmother, crying. She wanted to pick it up, to carry it to the sea. "If you carry that baby, it cannot develop strong flippers for swimming. It will be too weak for the ocean," said Bibi. "But it will never get there." Dalila chased the gulls away, over and over, until the tiny turtle slipped into the waves.
Beyond the wrought-iron school gates, a queue of children waits at the bus stop. A lemon rolls off the table. Dalila catches it. "Your roots smell off," says a stripe in the kikoi. "Too much water," say the leaves curling over the edge of the ukhamba. Dalila blows her nose. "School out?" asks another stripe. "No peace unto the wicked," says the lemon. Sikelela and Refiloe disappear into a rickety taxi headed for Soweto.
Dalila had shown her mother the striated throat of the iris. The old woman lifted a frail arm to touch its indigo petal, and then removed her oxygen mask. "Put it against my cheek." Dalila had neither words nor tears. No question lingered in the folds of the hospital curtains. Not a tear fell onto the pale green linen. Dalila readjusted her mother's mask. That evening, she had tried to paint her mother's hand holding hers, but all she had to show hours later was a blank sheet of paper. That night, and every night since then, her paint box remained still silent. Nothing else let up: the chatter of desks, the prattle of chairs, the mumbling of the classroom blinds. Even the kiln in the corner sighed periodically. In her drawer, the turtles waved their flippers in agitation. But neither the pastels nor the oil paints made a murmur. The blues: phthalo, cerulean and sapphire all remained silent. Ultramarine, turquoise and Madonna blue lay like miniature coffins in her paint box. The flat and round sablette brushes lingered, soundless.
Dalila unclasps the long string of pearls her mother wore and drapes them over the lemons. "Beats a plastic snake, I guess," says the yellow stripe. "Pearls," says a lemon in an irritable tone. "Not very good quality." "Hush," says Dalila. The pearls slip and clatter on the tiled floor. She picks them up and curls them around the base of a tomato sauce bottle containing the irises. "Why can't we be juxtaposed against a simple urn?" asks the plant, glaring at the shabby bottle. Dalila chews a hangnail and rearranges a lemon. She removes a little package wrapped in paper towel from her tog-bag. She places it, unopened, beside the composition. The pearls glint in the sunlight. Her mother had pulled the plastic mask off and said, "Take this away." Dalila tried to slip the mask back over her face, but it separated from the oxygen tube, bubbling loudly. The papery skin of her mother's cheeks was grayish against her dark-blue lips. Her mother turned away. "I don't want it any more. It's killing me."
Dalila opens the package, removes the oxygen mask and sets it beside the largest lemon. The mask, shaped like a ghoulish nostril, has a faint green tinge. She tries to identify the exact sheen: copper resinate, viridian, verdigris, cobalt green. Turning it in the light, she recalls the many-hued shells of the baby turtles. "What next?" ask the pearls. "Who can tell?" answers a stripe. Very softly, the kikoi starts to hum, "Harambee, harambee..." Dalila's ears are finally clear. The loerie in the tree outside calls "Go awaaay."
Her mother, trying to get out of the bed, had gasped, "Take me home. I don't want to die here." "Okay, Mama," said Dalila, cradling her. With her free arm, she pressed the button that called the nurse. She wanted to ask whether home meant Watamu Beach, or the little flat in Yeoville. "I want to lie beside Mandla again. It's been too long." "Shhh, Mama, shhh," she stroked her mother's hand. "Where will you bury me?" "Watamu," she said to soothe her mother. She still believed, even then, that she'd improve enough to be taken back to her ancestral village, but the hospital bills had precluded that. Dalila buried her mother in the alien soil of Westpark Cemetery, which lies at the base of the Melville Koppie, under a scraggly oleander that drops toxic pink blossoms onto her grave all year long.
Dalila wipes the textured paper with a damp sponge. Her movement across the easel is swift and focused. She blends the under-wash in a palette cup with a wide hake brush, forming a streak of colour, and another. When she looks up again, the loerie is perched on a branch. Its crown fans out. The large grey bird lifts into the air and flies off. The only sound is the wind in the leaves.
*This story is from Liesl Jobson's collection Ride the Tortoise (Jacana Media, 2013).
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