Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa. Natasha Berg Illum
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then if I turn my back for ever so slight a moment (and how can I avoid that?), it all goes horribly wrong. They start running in all directions. I try to catch them but they slip so easily from my grip. “Curiosity” runs in one direction. “Desire” in the other. Damn! There goes beautiful “elbow” as quick and heading in the same direction as “thirst”, already halfway over the hill. They have done it again! All gone, with an exception of some miserable word like “moist”. (Standing big-eyed in front of me pleading to be used.) Of course I am not surprised about their behaviour, they are my words after all. But I have to try to watch them better!’
Then you would ring me to ask for words for your paintings and I would ring you and ask for pictures for my words. ‘Turn on a penny, staccato on short legs,’ were my words for a buffalo painting. And the pictures you gave my words came wrapped in things like an ever-flowering gardenia, giant palm leaves shimmering on one side, like mother-of-pearl and other images I had never seen before. Like ‘the configuration’, as you very seriously called the large cluster of freckles I have on the back of my right leg. I was born with this mark, yet you were the first person ever to find it. When I was a shorts-clad child, in pale Swedish summer nights, grown-ups would occasionally catch me as I ran by, to brush off what they thought was dirt from the lawn or from a tree. As a hunter in shorts, in Tanzania, my friends in the bush always seem to think I have walked into a cloud of giant pepper-ticks. To everyone it always looked like something that should be brushed off or pulled off with tweezers. Yet you, you as the first and only person, were seriously surprised that I had lived with this for thirty years without realizing the obvious truth about the skin on the back of my right leg. The ‘right-in-your-face, can’t-miss-it-obvious’ truth. To you, this thing that all my life I had so ignorantly disregarded simply as an odd and rather ugly birthmark, was a drawing. Very clearly a drawing of a lion, a bicycle, and a nondescript character riding the lion. I had to lie on my stomach on the blue sofa one afternoon, as you sat on the floor with a torn-off piece of newspaper, a black pen and your nose about one centimetre above the mark, trying to keep me from twisting and turning too much, in laughter or curiosity to see.
The relief, to finally have found the person who thought the same things important and worth attention. For the first time we were sharing the world of unimportant things that the uninterested call ‘details’, and arrogantly discarding things that we had both been told were important but had never felt were so.
You never told me I split hairs. You understood I didn’t. I just needed to tell the stories exactly, exactly as I felt them. Or understand the story exactly as somebody else felt it. What is the point of words if we don’t try to use them carefully, precisely? How are we to say that we understand each other then? There aren’t enough words as it is.
You have to try to get to the core, to the marrow in communication and in life. Blood buzzing in the fingertips is the whole point.
It wasn’t that I had never loved before. I had. We both had. Past love wasn’t a lie, not at all, I just had never expected to find you, my love. I thought people weren’t meant ever to feel so fulfilled by one person.
When I was a child I had accepted that nobody would ever be able to understand me fully and that I would perhaps never understand them fully either. Always slightly on the edge of any social group, my closest friends were my dog and a particular tree. To them I would talk to for hours. I was never sad or angry about being slightly outside, I accepted it as my fate and made it into my strength. But now that you are gone, my love, I feel loneliness spreading through my body, I watch it stretching out its little crooked arms inside me. Like the globule of ink on my desk that was contained in its own perfect voluptuous circle until just a moment ago, when a drop from under my teacup fell right on top of it and made it run in all directions.
I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more.
The first time I heard the whisper was when I was about six years old. I remember it very clearly.
My parents had gone away. I would guess they had driven from our home in Blekinge in Sweden, to Sealand, Denmark. Perhaps to visit one of my grandmothers or perhaps they had been invited to a dinner or a shoot somewhere. I love to imagine my mother wearing her red silk dress with white squares on it as she jumped into the Range Rover just before leaving. My mother’s hair at its bounciest, my father’s at its flattest. Scent and kisses.
I was to stay with the gamekeeper, Mr Persson, and his not-quite-wife Mrs Svensson, who helped my mother in our home. This wasn’t the first time I had stayed and I would have waved my parents goodbye thinking, that I might, if I was lucky, already this afternoon start indulging in the culinary advantages there were for a six-year-old staying with Mr Persson and Mrs Svensson. White bread baked with syrup, Bob’s divine apricot jam in a jar big enough to lose your knife in. And hopefully, very hopefully if I was lucky we might get crispy pieces of fried ham with apple sauce for supper, things I would never get at home. The mere luxury of eating pork as opposed to some kind of deer meat from the estate was something I only experienced very occasionally; at school, at my grandmother’s house and at the gamekeeper’s. ‘Fläsk’, as it is called in Swedish, in little square pieces, fried hard and golden-brown.
There are some particular moments that I carry with me from my visits to their little red house that smelt of frying pans and geraniums.
I remember being told that Mrs Svensson’s eldest son P had once fallen into the nettles outside their house and had been stung all over his back. I considered him a hero because of that.
Summer afternoons in their garden. Sneaking a spoof lump of sugar into Mrs Svensson’s coffee. We were seated on the lawn just in front of all her nettles, and I told her to watch the surface of her coffee (a moment later a tiny plastic figure of a naked person would float to the surface and I would laugh hysterically).
Then there were the dirty magazines in their loo.
With wooden shoes, and a sponge of a mind, I would sit quietly and rather longer than expected on their loo and discover the secrets of the adult female body as it, literally, unfolded in front of me.
But one of the things I remember most clearly was the ‘whisper’.
Mrs Svensson had put me to bed in one of their two bedrooms. The room that used to belong to P and T–her sons. They had both left home by now and I could pick either bed in which to sleep. I chose the one next to the window. It was only glass, wall and a few steps away from the owls my father had put in a huge aviary behind Mr Persson’s house. In the evening I was put to bed, and eventually Mrs S and Mr P switched off all lights and went to bed upstairs.
I had been fast asleep hours later, when suddenly I woke up.
I felt a hand caressing my cheek ever so gently. It was obvious to me that nobody was in the pitch-black room, but I wasn’t afraid. It was natural and very loving. Then a whisper in that particular tone and voice. ‘Anoushka…’ said in an urgent way, as if to say, ‘Look here, here I am.’
That was the first time I heard it. From then on I would wake up about three times every year to that urgent whisper. Never the touch again, but the word and the whisper that followed me until I was about thirty and a half.
The last time I heard the whisper, it came from your lips. I had never told you about it. I don’t think I had ever told anybody about it. It was just one of those things that was in my picture of reality because I had heard it the first time at a stage of my life when the world to me was so full of incomprehensible things anyway and I had been taught by grown-ups to believe them whether I understood them or not. It had followed me since I was six years old, I didn’t think about it. Not until I picked up the phone a few days before you died and heard you say it. The same particular way of saying it, the same whisper. Now it is about six months since you left and I haven’t heard the whisper again.
I wake up at night with nowhere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more. The night has gone solid and when I stretch in the mornings