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

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

A passionate, bittersweet memoir of a love cruelly cut short, set in the splendour of East Africa.Natasha Illum Berg is secretly in love. As she waits for her married lover in her beautiful house in the African countryside, she reflects on her Danish childhood, her African present, the tides of her life. She has been changed forever by meeting her lover – her previous existence, her family, her journey to Africa and her other lovers seem to belong to a different person. But one evening, on his way to visit her, her lover is shot, murdered, outside her gates. As their love was clandestine, so her mourning for him must be private too. How can she come to terms with a sadness that cannot be expressed? To whom will she turn when she must never reveal the truth of her mourning?Tea on a Blue Sofa introduces an extraordinary and distinctive new voice. The book is full of wonderful images and scenes, peopled by vivid characters. But, above all, this love letter gives off a searing, intense emotion that leaps off the page, a sadness that is as deep and profound as literature can provide.

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.

Contents

Chapter 1 (#u153908fb-0e45-5da1-a490-1e5d18ded779)

Chapter 2 (#u006d6d63-6ca4-5e1f-bbb4-6be1d304d857)

Chapter 3 (#uaf706e6d-a28c-5dc1-88a5-5850c1e3806f)

Chapter 4 (#u4f10c0dd-25e3-5aa8-b08c-1a06f1ad1a1f)

Chapter 5 (#u0a4579bf-feae-588e-b3dd-6ce5696db33e)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise for Tea on the Blue Sofa: (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 (#u14a286fb-207a-5c51-bc27-96b10a94a3b4)

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 (#u14a286fb-207a-5c51-bc27-96b10a94a3b4)