The Smell of Apples: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

most terrible of terrible times for Dad. And also for Oupa's younger brother Uncle Samuel.
    Dad and Uncle Samuel combed the coastline for days, searching for the body. Two days after the storm, some fishermen found the wreck of Oupa's boat washed up near Smitswinkel Bay. But there was still no sign of Oupa or his crew. All they found was a piece of cloth on Muizenberg beach that Dad believed was torn from Oupa's fishing jacket.
    So they went and cemented it into a little monument they built on the rocks at Smitswinkel Bay. Because some people believed Oupa was still alive, there wasn't much of a funeral. Only his family and Uncle Samuel were there, and Sanna Koerant and the Van der Merwes who had just come down from Tanzania to live in the Transvaal. It had

    Mark Behr
    hardly been a full year before that Oupa had gone to fetch Uncle Samuel from Rhodesia after Uncle Samuel had escaped from Tanzania. Before Oupa drowned, Uncle Samuel had been hoping that Oupa would be there to celebrate his first apple-harvest from his new farm at Grabouw.
    We moved in here to live with Ouma soon after Oupa died. Use and I still shared a room then.
    Ouma always complained about backache. She thought it had something to do with Dad's difficult birth, because it was after he was born that her back problems began. When Ouma was complaining about her back again one day, Mum said they should go for X-rays. Mum said she was sure they could fix the problem, what with Chris Barnard already transplanting hearts just up the road and all the modern medicines available these days. If Neil Armstrong could walk on the moon, why on earth wouldn't they be able to do something about a simple backache?
    So Mum and Ouma went off to a specialist in Constantia, where all the snobs live. There they X-rayed Ouma's back. Mum told us later how shocked the doctor was when he called her to a separate room to show her the X-rays. There, in the middle of the picture, the cause of all Ouma's suffering could be seen: in her stomach, just below her ribs, was a small pair of scissors.
    Because Dad was so big when he was born, he couldn't be born like other babies, and they had to cut Ouma open. After that she couldn't have more babies, even though her and Oupa really wanted to. But all of that we only heard later, when the story about the scissors came out. The doctor who had taken Dad out had left the scissors inside Ouma's stomach, and Ouma had walked around with those stainless steel scissors inside her for all those years. The

    The Smell of Apples
    specialist said it was definitely because of the scissors that Ouma could never have another child after Dad.
    When Dad heard about the scissors, he was furious. But what could he do? He wasn't even allowed to go back to Tanzania, where he was born. Dad said he would move mountains to see justice done, but who could he take to court? Even if he could go back, the country was in such chaos under the black government that the courts in Tanzania wouldn't even know it was wrong to sew up a pair of scissors in a woman's stomach.
    When Ouma went to hospital to have the scissors removed, we all went to Groote Schuur before the operation to visit her. Early the next morning the hospital phoned to say that Ouma had died under anaesthetic. The doctor said it was as though Ouma didn't want to live any more, because she wasn't really ill or even so very old. Mum said it was because Ouma didn't want to live without Oupa. What is left for a woman of Ouma's age once her husband dies? Mum said she could completely understand it, and maybe it was even better that way.
    That was the first time I saw Dad cry.
    At Ouma's funeral Sanna Koerant said men always cry when their mothers die, but only the men themselves know why. The mothers aren't there to see their tears anyway. 'Too close for comfort and too late for tears,' Sanna Koerant said, and Aunt Tienie glared at her through her own tears and shook her head for Sanna to keep quiet.
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