Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

2

My mother was an artist. My father was a miner.

She saw him for the first time on a cold winter’s day on Oliën Park’s frost-covered rugby field, his striped Vaal Reef’s jersey almost torn off his body. He was walking slowly to the touchline to fetch a new shirt, his sweaty litheness, the definition of shoulders and stomach and ribs, gleaming dully in the weak late-afternoon sun.

She had told the story accurately, every time: the pale blue of the sky, the bleached gray white of the stadium’s grass, the smallish group of students loudly supporting their team against the miners, the purple of their scarves bright splashes of color against the dull gray of the wooden benches. Every time I heard the story I added more detail: her slender figure taken from a black-and-white photograph of that time, cigarette in her hand, dark hair, dark eyes, a certain brooding beauty. How she saw him, how all the lines of his face and his body were so irresistibly right, as if, through all that, she could see everything.

“Into his heart,” she said.

She knew two things with absolute certainty at that moment. One was that she wanted to paint him.

After the game she waited for him outside, among the officials and second-team players, until he came out wearing a jacket and tie, his hair wet from the showers. And he saw her in the dusk, felt her intensity, and blushed and walked to her as if he knew that she wanted him.

She had the piece of paper in her hand.

“Call me,” she said when he stood in front of her.

His mates surrounded him, so she simply gave him the folded paper with her name and telephone number and left, back to the house on Thom Street where she was boarding.

He phoned late at night.

“My name is Emile.”

“I’m an artist,” she said. “I want to paint you.”

“Oh.” Disappointment in his voice. “What kind of painting?”

“One of you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a handsome man.”

He laughed, disbelieving and uncomfortable. (Later he had told her that it was news to him, that he’d always had trouble getting girls. She’d replied that that was because he was stupid with women.)

“I don’t know,” he eventually stammered.

“As payment you can take me out for dinner.”

My father only laughed again. And just over a week later, on a cold winter’s Sunday morning, he drove in his Morris Minor from the single quarters in Stilfontein to Potchefstroom. She, with easel and painting kit, got into the car and directed him – out on the Carletonville road, close to Boskop Dam.

“Where are we going?”

“Into the veld.”

“The veld?”

She nodded.

“Doesn’t one do it in a…an art room?”

“A studio.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes.”

“Oh?”

They had turned off onto a farm road and stopped at a small ridge. He helped her carry her equipment, watched as she stretched the canvas on the easel, opened the case, and tidied the brushes.

“You can undress now.”

“I’m not going to take everything off.”

She merely looked at him in silence.

“I don’t even know your surname.”

“Joan Kilian. Undress.”

He took off his shirt, then his shoes.

“That’s enough.” He resisted.

She nodded.

“What must I do now?”

“Stand on the rock.”

He climbed onto a large rock.

“Don’t stand so stiffly. Relax. Drop your hands. Look over there, toward the dam.”

And then she began painting. He asked her questions but she didn’t reply, only warned him a few times to stand still, looked from him to the canvas, mixed and applied paint until he gave up trying to talk. After an hour or more she allowed him to rest. He asked his questions again, discovered that she was the only daughter of an actress and a drama lecturer in Pretoria. He vaguely remembered their names from Afrikaans films of the forties.

Eventually she lit a cigarette and started packing her painting equipment.

He dressed. “Can I see what you’ve drawn?”

“Painted. No.”

“Why not?”

“You can see it when it’s finished.”

They drove back to Potchefstroom and drank hot chocolate in a café. He asked about her art; she asked him about his work. And sometime during the late afternoon of a Western Transvaal winter he looked at her for a long time and then said: “I’m going to marry you.” She nodded because that was the second thing she had known with certainty when she saw him for the first time.