Long night
The lights are off and everyone is sleeping. The silence is deep. Every time I begin to slip into the silence, I hear a sound. A rustling. It’s close to me. Above me. Or under me. Or on the other side of the wall behind the bed. But when my eyes spring open, the sound is gone.
It’s later. It’s almost midnight. By now I know two things: I am sick and there may or may not be a sound, depending on whether I have a fever.
It’s later. I’ve hardly slept. I know two things: I’m not going to sleep much and there are restless stirrings that are not just me squeaking the bedsprings as I try to sleep around the cramps.
Sam stirs. I whisper: ‘Sam? I’m sick.’ He comes up on an elbow and looks at me in the dark. ‘Oh no!’
‘Also,’ I say, ‘what is that sound?’
No sound.
So he asks me what’s wrong and if there’s anything he can do. He brings me water and reminds me to hydrate.
He settles back down. The scratching begins again.
‘That sound!’ I say.
He’s heard it. He gets up. He goes to the en suite bathroom. He comes back into the bedroom and leans with an ear towards the bedroom window. There it is again.
Sam thinks it’s the gulley outside. I don’t think it is because it’s not a watery sound. But I don’t have the energy to argue. At least there is a sound and I’m not going mad.
Sam sleeps. I don’t. The illness develops into one of those full-blown things, with goosebumps and sweating. I go fast to the bathroom and I crawl back (literally) to the bed. Ever since I was little, when this thing comes over me every few years, I become so weak that walking upright causes fainting. So I crawl.
The sound is getting more intense. I imagine a striped polecat—a ‘stinkmousedog’ is the Afrikaans word for it—burrowing outside. Do polecats burrow, I wonder? It’s not a baboon, because baboons move in groups and they don’t root around in the dead of night that I know of. It’s not a porcupine because you can usually hear their quills rattling.
A porcupine in Afrikaans, literally translated, is an ‘iron pig’.
In the fever, I imagine a trapped mammal trying to dig itself out of a hole in the ground.
The sound is starting to communicate differently: more urgency, more intensity.
Now I am crawling fast to the bathroom and then I am taking off my pyjamas and stretching out on the cool tiles for respite and the sound is becoming desperate.
Is it a watery sound? It’s not watery. Or is it? Maybe it is.
I think: oh no. I’ve caused a problem! This is not our house! Imagine if I’ve blocked a drain!
I creep back to bed naked on the cool tiles. By now I am groaning. Groaning—another insight from childhood experiences of this forceful bug—helps. Sam wakes up. ‘Are you okay?’
‘That sound,’ I say. ‘The sound. What is it? Have I caused a blockage?’
Sam gets up. Bathroom. Pause for analysis. Bedroom. Pause for analysis. Window. Poised with an ear towards the possible source. He goes down on his haunches. ‘Wait!’ he whisper-exclaims. He fetches his phone for the torch. He shines it into the corner of the room by the window.
‘Aha!’
Inside the tin wastepaper basket is tiny trapped bat.
A ‘wingmouse’ is the Afrikaans word for it.
A bat in a tin bin.
He takes it outside.
I know the sound of a mammal trying to escape, I think before finally sinking into the pre-dawn silence. I wake two hours later to the sound of a red-chested cuckoo’s three-syllable call.
The Afrikaans word for a red-chested cuckoo is ‘Piet-my-vrou’.
Pete-my-wife.
Pete-my-wife.
The sun is coming up.
Are you resetting with me?
Let me know if you’re joining me for January Reset so that I can get you on the special list.
You’ll start getting the emails from 1 January, but you can start whenever you’re ready.
Here are some frequently asked questioned if you’re unsure.
Christmas is cancelled
Festive celebrations have been cancelled in many places and in many homes.
The Lutheran Church in the city [of Bethlehem] is displaying a nativity scene that shows Jesus as a child born in the rubble to reflect the destruction in Gaza.
“If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble and Israeli shelling,” Reverend Munther Isaac told Al Jazeera last week.
Christmas cancelled by Ali Harb
War is anathema to festivity.
To my Muslim and Jewish readers, I want you to know that your suffering is seen.
Suffering is complex and simple. It is long and it is short. It is your own and it is yours via your ancestors. It is physical and it is mental. It is also spiritual. It is acute and it is chronic.
I see all of it and I know that so many Love Letter readers do too.
I am sending you love, limp and impotent as that gesture is. And I am sending you one another’s love as you have expressed it to me privately.
I am a secular Christian, a lapsed sort-of Catholic. I, like millions and millions of people, want the end of a genocide that is playing out before our eyes like a horror movie we’re forced to watch with our eyes propped open and our hands and feet are bound.
I cannot wish you a merry Christmas, but I do wish you one in which you taste every morsel of your meal, where you look up from it and into the face or faces that surround you and think ‘They are here.’
Two beautiful things for you: the meditative Intsimbi ka Ntsikana, introduced to me by the author Mputhumi Ntabeni.
A poem Don Maclennan:
All my love to all of you and all you love,
Karin
I’m sorry you’ve been so sick. I hope you’ve recovered and are able to rest until you feel up to being busier again.
I love Intsimbi ka Ntsikana! I learnt to sing it with Johannesburg Queer Chorus a couple of years ago but didn’t perform it with them in the end - I left and went back to the symphony choir as soon as they started rehearsing again after the worst of the pandemic. Actually I don’t think they performed it either in the end because the soloist also left for another choir.
I hope I get the chance to sing it again some time. There is an exceptional feeling of community when singing something as fluid and closely blended as this. You have to learn not just the right words and notes but also the feelings that carry it and make it a spiritual.