Pretoria is a tropical wonderland at the moment. Everything is dripping. When the thunderclouds amass, they form a graphite background for greens that turn luminous in the filtered sunlight. The air is alive with winged creatures and their noises.
A mosquito came to settle on my laptop screen this morning. It looked like a tiger mosquito. They’re an invasive species. In Germany, we often read warnings about tiger mosquitoes. People were urged to report them. I can’t remember who to. Maybe to the Ordungsampt. That’s the department at municipal level that makes sure general order is maintained. And it generally is.
Yesterday I read a story about people driving through the Kruger National Park — a place as big as Israel the story maintained, and I haven’t checked — discussing how whenever someone spots a hippopotamus, someone has to trot out the fact that hippos are the deadliest large land mammals on the planet. After which someone else always adds they don’t kill as many humans as mosquitoes do.
I was reminded then too that the Afrikaans saying for ‘the tip of the iceberg’ is the cute idiom ‘that’s only the hippo’s ears’.
I stopped to take a photograph of the mozzie, who was trying to look casual and uninterested in my naked arms — if he’d had a newspaper, he’d have been leaning against a lamp pole reading it — to send to Sam. He confirmed it was a tiger mosquito. They carry the dengue virus.
I have at least five portals for dengue on my ankles.
I tried to get back to work.
A hornet swept in and hovered under the ceiling. I watched it for a while. Then I heard a Piet-my-vrou. I sat back and tried to identify all the other bird calls. There was the usual twittering of the little twitterers and the cooing of the cooers and the hysterical screaming of the hadedas, and then I heard a grey go-away bird.
My mother’s little flat is perched on a koppie. There are always dassies on the road that winds up to her place. They watch you approach for ages and then, without a twitch to warn you that the time has come to retreat from the danger you represent, they will dart away. Darting, when you’re a chubby, furry little thing with short legs and a short tail, seems unlikel, but they’re as quick as a spark of electricity.
My mother found a mole snake in her flat last year. Once, when we all still lived in the family house, a scorpion sauntered into the living room.
Every evening, at Sandra’s house, where I’m staying for the week while I’m in Pretoria, the windows open on to frog discord so loud you have to raise your voice when you’re in conversation. When I go to bed, a stinkbug flies into the room. It sounds a lot like my roof back in Cape Town sounds when the wind is blowing a gale. And the way my roof sounds is very much like a didgeridoo.
I hear crickets too.
What I don’t hear, and haven’t seen on this visit, are the giant African snails that sometimes make an appearance here. They are the size of an adult’s hand. I couldn’t believe my eyes when Sandra called me to show me one crawling up a wall one year I was here.
All this thinking about the buzzing and whizzing and trilling and peeping, all this slithering and hovering, around me here in Pretoria — all this muchness — made me remember the daddy-long-legs nested in the corner of the bathroom in Berlin and whose activity I’d watch when I was lying in the bath. I used to wonder what it found to eat. The flat was so sealed off with those amazing German windows. The only animal life I ever saw inside was that spindly spider and the odd mosquito of a variety unreportable to the Ordungsampt.
In my flat in Cape Town, I don’t see that many creepers and crawlers either, and the bird sounds are limited to starling calls and the cooing of doves. And hadedas, of course. With the odd angry plover trying to distract something away from its nest of chicks on the soccer field across the way at night sometimes. And, very seldom, an owl hoots at night.
Over lunch with Noah and Gabe today, an insistent bee was our guest. Twice, it thrust itself into the little oil lamp on the table. Both times, Gabe saved it from the flame with a spoon.
An advert for insect poison came on the radio station after we said goodbye. A cheerful ditty urged the listener to ‘just spray it’ — the ‘it’ being whatever bug was bothering you.
What a ridiculous injunction!
Things I’ve been doing
Life’s been terriblywonderfully (yes, both) busy since I got back six weeks ago and I have still not settled into anything vaguely resembling the rhythms that encourage reading, listening to music and watching things, so I have few discoveries to share.
I thought the Uruguayan movie Society of the Snow was sensitively done. I know the story from the first time someone made a movie of it (Alive, 1993).
I’ve started watching Boy Swallows Universe, an Australian series. If the rest of it is like the first two, then I’m very glad I found it. The acting by the young actors Felix Cameron and Lee Halley is phenomenal.
I read Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris. I wrote about it here.
I wrote about a literary adventure in Berlin, featuring a book called Slumberland by Paul Beatty here.
I practically swallowed whole a graphic novel called Kafka by Robert Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz.
Here’s a poem from my second collection, Navigate (Modjaji, 2017) that features a grey go-away bird.
Lots of love,
K.