NATASHA Illum Berg

Tea on the Blue Sofa

Whispers of love and longing from Africa

For you. As promised.

Such grown-up tears roll down relentlessly, when moley, milky eyes still only know how to turn up, hoping for the blurry light of a mother’s face.

Such fine nails on a new foot. Each of the five, already with its own half-moon, rising out of toes that cannot even support the weight of a person yet.

How soon would the nails bend over those toes, if not cut? And dig in to the ground, like crows’ claws, clasping the soil already from the first steps.

Such beautiful hair on the head of that child, so quickly it grows long. Falling fair strands. Seems it grows faster down, than the child up.

The earth is sucking hard from underneath.

Waiting, sucking.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Notes

About the Author

Praise for Tea on the Blue Sofa:

About the Publisher

1

My mother once met a dead tiger. In Margali, India. Four years before I was born. She walked up to its still-warm body with timid steps, wary of cutting its camouflaging protection from the shades and shadows–seeing the whole clearly the first time. Aware that only its death will let you cut a tiger out of the jungle. She was overcome by sadness. In an attempt to find a way to carry with her some of the strength lost in the death of a tiger, she and my father cut out the heart and ate it. Bearing in mind the stories my grandfather told about his times in India, my father knew that they were not the first to do such a thing. If there is strength in anything, it must be in a tiger’s heart.

‘I have two mindsets, that can be exchanged like keyboards, with letters of different languages. The mind of a writer, and the mind of a hunter. But you bring me straight back to the hunter’s mind,’ I had written to you, as we became losers to the shade-clad eyes of the world for falling in love. ‘Eyes, ears, taste. Legs aching to walk, or to stop, or not knowing which, but aching. Salt at the corners of my mouth. The hope of an opportunity for a shot at the top of the heart. Pursuit, following tracks with expectation, alertness and a bit of fear.’

‘The shot at the top of the heart,’ you answered, ‘has already happened. My heart has been severed from all reason. You can do with it what you want. You see the flower has been pollinated. This process cannot be reversed, and that is that. Nobody will ever have the power to remove these feelings, not even you.’

You left this world, on your way to my embrace.

In waiting for my eyes to get used to the dark, morning broke and daylight let me down.

Dawn entered as well-meaning and out of place as a mime for children and I never liked them much. In their lack of sound they throw unwanted desperation into communication.

I went out on the gravel road, where your beautiful body had fallen, brutally murdered by a single shot to the heart. The cruelty of that. The heart. The head would have been a different story, but the heart, my love. The heart that appeared on everything.

I lay down in the road next to the last part of you I would ever see, and hated myself for understanding that it had run out of your heart. A hunter knows at a glance.

A few drops of your heart’s blood, I put on my lips.

I was never allowed to see you again, or to go to your funeral, but a bit of your strength, a few drops of the heart that was on everything, I will carry with me to death, a lifetime later, not now.

And the thick window that is between myself and my bitter-cold grief, between my life and your death, opened a little.

2

The first letter was sent from me to you. It was a Tuesday. You took it as a confirmation, you told me later. A confirmation that I was the person who you had hoped I might be, ever since we met several years ago.

I still had a base in Kenya then. We had had Tanzanian tea on my blue sofa for the first time, the day before I sent the letter. It was a sofa larger than any sofa I had ever seen before, well, not longer, but deeper than any sofa, any of us, really, had ever seen before. It was a special kind of blue, three different-coloured threads especially chosen and woven together, to make the perfect blue. A child’s blue pulled out again after years in the attic, a child’s forgotten blue with a thread of time’s dust woven into it.

I wrote to you that I had found a seed pushed in between the cushions of the sofa after you had left. That it must had dropped out of your trouser pocket at some stage, when we were talking and drinking tea. I told you I had planted it and could not wait to see what would become of it.

The answer you sent back was as if you had finally discovered me, caught me in the act of being somebody you had already made a space for in your heart. You shouted, ‘I knew it!’

But as far as airborne words are concerned, you had already started using them years ago. Back then, you had seen me sitting by the fireplace at a friend’s house, seated in my usual position of people-watching. Watching people was what I would spend most of my evening doing, at any kind of social gathering. Watching intensely and stubbornly, slightly embarrassed that I had still not understood the rules of this game I had so often witnessed. Confused at my own inability to comprehend the point of the sport I was obviously (at least in body) part of, somehow.

You came over and crouched down, knees and bent toes resting on the floor, beside my armchair. ‘You look like a bird of prey’ was the first thing you said to me that day. ‘I don’t know which kind, but it is a raptor.’

I didn’t find those words interesting in any way, I didn’t. I didn’t trust them. I told you to tell me a story, instead of trying to flatter me. I was a bit tired of the enormously long and invisible suffixes written in lemon juice, that so often appear later when strangers’ sentences are held up to the sunlight.

I didn’t see you for quite a while after that. Well, I met you on occasions, but didn’t talk to you and didn’t see you more than I see anything big so close without taking a step away from it first.

Children have understood so clearly, that we cease to exist when we close our eyes. As grown-ups we only understand when we see in the rear-view mirror.

I was born without eyelids so sooner or later I had to let you in. I couldn’t keep on turning my face away. But you had known that we existed, before I had seen. Thank God for that. There would not have been any time at all for us otherwise.

Of course I don’t accept time like most people any more. I can’t. To live in some kind of social society we have to accept the clock, ageing, the rising and setting of the sun and the changing seasons, but we don’t have to accept the value of time on the scale of a clock. I don’t. I never have. Thank God for that too, my love. Clocks spat on us.

Then I met you at a party again, at the same house. At the house of the same beautiful woman, a friend who lives in a labyrinth. Honouring the masquerade theme, you looked like a Cossack–in a huge white sheepskin hat. Perhaps bought on the road to Naivasha. And you had in turn honoured the Cossacks with your vodka consumption. Red-label Smirnoff, certainly not blue.

I spent most of my time leaning against a Masai spear, with a drink in my other hand, enjoying the evening as it floated past my friends and me. I caught a glimpse of you out of the corner of my eye, hovering closer as the night went by, until you caught me standing on my own.

You said, ‘You are always there somewhere at the back of my mind. I met you the first time many years ago. I remember what you wore. Then we met several times again, but we never had the chance to talk properly. Still you are there, in my mind.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, laughingly putting one hand on your shoulder. A cloud of a sulkiness passed over your face. ‘Why don’t you come and tell me if we chance to meet in the dukas1 on a Monday morning?’

You sat down, trying to look more sober and we talked of books and paintings, the sea and the bush.

And silken lines were drawn between words and paint, the hunting of buffaloes and the catching of waves.

Monday morning you arrived at my gates, gardenia intact in your inner pocket.

Now I must learn to suppress the overwhelming hunger or even greed for a future that will not be.

To ignore that greed death offers.

There was such a relief in us both when we had finally understood what was the only way in life: to not be too greedy for each other–to not own too much too quickly. To let taste buds be just that, instead of letting greed open demanding mouths wide in hungry expectation. To keep from letting taste buds open helplessly, with only withering in sight shortly. You more than I had tried that so many times before. But I knew the feeling too. Looking over your shoulder in fear of the other person’s sticky eyes and their purple-faced fright of losing something they never owned in the first place.

‘To cut the ropes of two boats,’ you called it ‘and find the absolute happiness in discovering that they end up on the same shore by pure force of nature, not force of guilt, fear or confusion.’

Finally there.

No doubts.

‘No gaps’ was your way of saying it.

Boiled is what I hate, boiled, boiled, boiled, rolled around with other bits and pieces inside people’s worlds of numerous tasteless root vegetables and genuine chicken stock. Until one thing is no longer distinguishable from another.

There are so many now who think they know about us, so many who thought they knew everything about your heart, because of your past, but we both knew that and laughed. So many who think they know anything about my half-Danish half-Swedish heart because of the way I carry my feet forward.

Steamed. Our colours enhanced and bodies slightly softened, by heat travelling upward, individual shape intact, nothing important thrown out with the water. We were on our way, we had already started our journey, ropes are cut.

They were lies, the pictures I saw of you in the newspapers just the other day. In them your face was falling, like bitter almonds from a tree. But it was a lie; you didn’t look like that any more. Your face had changed. I saw it happen.

The stories you told me about waking up full of deep fear and confusion next to a prostitute with black plastic hair in Mombasa, were obvious. (The same kind of plastic that is wrapped around most electric wires.) There had been so many lies.

Lost in black gaping holes.

You forgot if you were looking for a way in or out. I love you for telling me, but I would have guessed anyway. It was written all over your face when I met you.

You never entered my house without a gardenia. You pulled it out amazingly intact from an inner pocket, always stating it was the most beautiful gardenia you had ever seen. Much more beautiful than all the others you had given me before. They were your favourite flower. When you were born, the room you were in with your mother was filled with the scent of gardenias and you told me the story of your maternal grandmother’s gardenia bush. A bush grown from a cutting, planted at the Kenyan coast. When she left Kenya, to go back to England, that particular bush was given to your family and planted in your garden at Shanzu. On the way to some white swings. By the thought of that now, I imagine them swinging, empty, not fast, not slow, but continuous. Swinging fruitlessly. When your grandmother died, you told me, her ashes were spread around it and from then on it would flower every year on her birthday without fail. The third of December. Then the bush was moved and never flowered again. Some things don’t like to be moved, I know. But to you, it stopped flowering because the ashes of your grandmother were not there to remind it any more.

You mostly arrived on a motorbike.

I could hear your smile from behind the helmet.

Eyes wide open, two steps up until inside my house. Expectation, the sound of the zip on your jacket. And then tea, on the blue sofa. First the kitchen, to wait for the water to boil as we moved around the table in the middle, in a gravitationless space of drying bread and ripening mulberries, just picked from the tree outside. Polite conversation initially, with me glancing at your hands. How I loved your hands. They were the most beautiful I ever saw. One crossed over the other, or one holding the wrist of the other, resting in front. Or a hand before your mouth as you laughed. There was nothing pure about your hands at all, just real.

And then tea on the blue sofa. You sitting back, me putting my feet up on the sofa. The preparation of it all. You told me later that you knew for sure, when you saw me undo my shoes, before I folded my legs that first time. I never quite understood that.

Now imagine an egg. Perfectly sealed and slightly pointed. A white egg balancing on a steel-clean surface. It is there simply because of the wonder of nature. So strong it is in its Tightness, so clearly outlined against the air around it. If I lay it in my hand, across my lifeline and close my first around it, I won’t be able to crush it. I simply can’t, it is the wonder of physics. But I don’t touch this egg, I leave it there and marvel.

Just slightly above this still life, a giant pendulum swings back and forth. Comparative to the egg, it is the size and material of a tank. THE INFINITE NO is the name of the pendulum, and it swings with such uncontrolled power, such limitlessness. There is the INFINITE NO travelling back and forth as if on patrol to crush, or cut time in bite-size pieces, just at fingernail-distance above the perfect egg on a spotless surface.

In that centimetre of air between the egg and the pendulum, is all hope, are endless possibilities–the reality of that hope, however, is a matter of millimetres, one way or the other.

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Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa

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