Embrace (17 page)
Old Phinias, the garden boy, sometimes took me into the forest to look for the louries, just as did Jonas in Mkuzi’s forest of figs. Phinias was a bit crippled in one foot and had sleeping sickness because of repeated bouts of malaria. Dademan said he wasn’t quite sure about the malaria-story and a more plausible explanation for Phinias’s falling asleep on his feet was your typical kaffir disease:
idleness.
Another new word. Still, I worried about Phinias dozing somewhere during one of our bush walks where I may be unable to wake him. I knew there were no large animals to fear. Mostly duiker, the shy bosbok and occasionally nyala and kudu. But there was always a chance of encountering a lone hippo strayed from the river. Or a mamba, the most terrifying and poisonous of the Zululand snakes. But like everywhere, the fear was rarely at the front of my mind; it dozed very far at the back. With Dad or Mumdeman’s permission, Phinias walked with me along antelope path where it was possible to hear the louries. If one were deadly silent, there was even occasion to see them, hopping from branch to branch or swooping off into the green. We approached the forest as quietly as possible, my eyes simultaneously trying to look out for birds and Phinias’s long toes like a frogs spilling over his mpategas and crunching dry leaves. We would stand quietly and look up, our mouths open so we could hear better, and when they called, our eyes swept the branches in competition to see who could spot one first. Soundless, with only a show of eyes, he or I would signal victory. If the birds were not there, I begged him to sit down and wait with me, for I couldn’t imagine returning home without a report of a sighting. If, on an odd chance, we had not seen one, I’d simply bring myself to believe that we indeed had, just briefly, that I had certainly seen one while Phinias was sleeping on his feet. In Mkuzi Jonas couldn’t be tricked and would have told me I was a liar. Sometimes we would have to sit for half an hour, and they might stretch out with their arms behind their heads on the leaves and I’d lie down beside them. But while my eyes and Jonas’s were searching in the branches, Phinias’s soon closed and before long I’d hear the breathing of the man asleep. Jonas also closed his eyes, but I doubted he ever slept. Nothing seemed to pass him by. Suddenly a high-pitched ko-ko-ko-ko-ko-ko, rising in pitch, louder, then transformed to growling and suddenly ending, or a kok-kok or kro-kro-kro broke the forest silence only to be re-called from somewhere in the thickets. Before you could see them fly they tumbled into the centre of a tree, sat quietly, or hopped along the branches. Then you held your breath, waiting for the flight, and, when they swept down, you saw at last the hidden crimson under their wings.
On one of our homeward walks I suggested Phinias go and see the Sangoma to cure his sleeping sickness. Phinias laughed and asked whether I thought the Sangoma could really cure him. I said no, because only people who believed in Jesus were real doctors and the Sangomas were heathen witch doctors who were going to burn in hell. Then Phinias held his stomach and laughed so much he came to a standstill in the sandy track.
‘What you laugh at, Phinias?’ I asked, but he carried on walking, laughing so much the tears ran glistening down his cheeks.
‘Is cause you’re not really sick, eh, Phinias? Is cause you have idleness not sleepiness.’ But that just sent him spinning in circles, bent over double, his laughter breaking open the sudden quiet of the bush.
Sticking loosely together somewhere in the middle as the groups of boys walked along, we had been speaking about the upcoming Parents’Weekend. Letter-writing and lunch were done and under Mr Buys’s supervision we were hiking to Copper Falls. Even though I disliked Buys, feared his anger and temper, I was looking forward to the falls. It was a new route to a place we had not been before. Hiking, like riding, allowed me to feel that my being in the Berg was worth while, after all. With Buys at the head and some prefects at the tail, our line stretched for about half a kilometre along the dust road that wound up towards the Champagne Castle Hotel. Buys cut left into the veld and started along a footpath through the green veld.
The six of us talking as we fell into single file to follow the overgrown footpath. Bennie: built like a Rottweiler and as strong as one; short, stocky, arms and legs lined with muscle. Of us all, Bennie had the shortest fuse and he was constantly ready to fight. Mervyn: red curls, freckles on his white face, long arms and legs. Steven Almeida: as tall as me, long slender limbs covered in fine black threads, a head of straight jet-black hair and, I knew, a dense tuft sprouting in the centre of his chest. Lukas: towering in the middle, already looking like a man. Dominic, the shortest, his hair standing upright in the breeze. And me, inspecting them from behind. At an angle from which Champagne Castle and Cathkin Peak together looked like a mammoth flat-topped table, the six of us posed for a photograph, Almeida and Dominic on either side of me.
In two weeks’ time our parents would come for the once-a-term visit. It would be the first time I’d seen Bok and Bokkie after the July holiday. They would again stay on the Therons’ farm. I found myself hoping they would not come so that I could spend the weekend in the hotel with the Websters.
Mervyn’s parents were again flying down from Pretoria in their Cessna and staying, along with Dominic’s parents, at the El Mirador. After the weekend Mervy was flying back to record an album and a violin solo for TV with the National Youth Symphony Orchestra. We envied Mervy and Dominic the sporadic liberties afforded by their instruments.
As Bennie’s mother often didn’t come for Parents’ Weekends, he went out with the Clemence-Gordons. Bennie’s mother worked as a secretary at the Ficksburg farmers’ co-operative where his former stepfather was the manager. Bennie told us it was difficult for his mother to get away on Saturdays when most farmers came to the coop. I would later think that her absences were perhaps related more to their not having much money and the story about the co-op an excuse. I resisted asking, but as far as I could ascertain his late father left money for his education that enabled his mother to keep him in the Berg.
Lukas. Certainly the strongest among us, he was rarely inclined to show off or prove his strength. He was, I sometimes thought, a friend to all of us and to none. Although he mostly hung around with us, he got along with everyone, was respected by everyone, and despite him being as hopeless as Bennie at school — and that he was caned as much as the rest of us — it did nothing to tarnish his reputation as a solid, reliable companion to all. Once in a while his mother or father came to Parents’Weekends alone as the American saddlers and Arabs could not be left alone on Swaargenoeg.
Steven Almeida. Carrying a makeshift walking stick in front of Lukas. Silent. Soft-spoken. Gentle. Portuguese, and his family had left Angola due to the war. While no one had ever rivalled my friendship with Dominic, I was fascinated by almost everything about Almeida. I was sure the affinity was in part the result of his being from outside South Africa and that it sounded as though his family had been forced to leave their country, just like mine. When we toured Malawi that December, he would be the only one besides me whose passport would show he had not been born in South Africa. Almeidas voice — like good red wine, Mr Roelofse always said — had just garnered for us a standing ovation at the inauguration of the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl. In the glaring lights and zoomed onto by cameras practising SABC TV’s first live concert broadcast, he did a solo of ‘Dit Is Die Maand Oktober’ that, despite his odd Portuguese pronunciation, brought the entire open-air pavilion to its feet. Almeida intrigued me. His voice, his broodiness, his Catholicism, and his ability to take cuts, as phlegmatic and seemingly indifferent to pain as Lukas. Almeida would rise after he’d been caned and seem to glide away without twitching a nerve. Lukas, when caned, grinned, though the steely glint in his eyes gave away the fact that he was repressing the pain. Before and after cuts, Bennie seethed, whispering that he’d return to kill the torturers when he was a grown-up. Dominic and Mervyn, whom we teased as goody two-shoes, had probably been caned no more than ten or twelve times. Seeing Dominic caned was dreadful: worse to see than if it were being done to me. Coming up from bending, his face was white and his huge eyes blinked rapidly to prevent tears from brimming over; the eyes of an impala in spodights. And Mervyn, his freckles hidden for hours afterwards by a red glow: pain, shame, silent, unable to hide or speak a word of the anger and humiliation flushed over his face and into his neck.
From Parents’ Weekend, and Mervyn’s week off for LP and TV recordings, our discussion moved to those of us who had TVs at home and whether Phillips was better than Sony and whether it was true that sitting too close to a TV screen could make one sterile. Much of our time was being taken up by talk of television: the SABC was running test programmes in anticipation of January 1976 when South Africa would get regular television for the first time. Not only had we already been on live TV at the Language Monument, we were scheduled for more recordings en route to Malawi when we’d stop in Johannesburg to do
Kraaines.
Karicke Keuzenkamp was the presenter of the show and for the duration of the Malawi tour one heard boys humming ‘I Love You Timothy. Dr Webster called Karicke Keuzenkamp a one-hit wonder, just like ‘Four-Jacks-And-A-Jill’.
Within the thicket of trees we could already hear the falls and then the shouts as the front of the column reached the water. Mr Buys’s voice, in Afrikaans, found us before we exited the forest: ‘Take off your clothes and I don’t want to see any wet shorts or shirts when we leave. And no photographs!’
Entering the bright sunlight, the cool air rushing from the falls struck me and turned my skin to gooseflesh. Two thin but powerful silver jets squirted about ten metres over shear rock face to the green rock-pool below. I whistled. My eyes ran along the almost copper granite exposed and shining beside the falls. I shoved to the front of the group.
‘This is like a fairy-tale.’
‘Don’t get all lyrical, De Man,’ Bennie mumbled and shoved me playfully from behind. ‘Wait till were in that water. We’re going to freeze our balls off
We joined a group on a flat boulder and began peeling off shorts, shirts and underpants. Beneath us the first boys approached the water. From the corner of my eye I saw Mervy raise his Kodak Instamatic. Then Buys’s voice: ‘I said, no photographs, jou bliksemse klein Jood!’ And he came towards us, swinging the check shirt he had already removed. Mervyn was silent at the bare-chested mans approach. Buys threatened to remove the film but Lukas protested in English: ‘Mr Buys, he only aimed it as a joke. He didn’t really take a photograph.’
Buys glowered at Mervyn, then, still showing disdain, turned and stalked off. Over his shoulder he reminded Lukas that it was an Afrikaans week.
As soon as Buys was well away and as Mervyn pulled down his underpants I said under my breath: ‘Now, quickly, Mervyn, take it while his jelly arse is turned.’
‘Come on, Karl,’ Lukas interjected, ‘quit your shit.’
‘Yes, Baas Lukas,’ I whispered and tugged off my shirt. Unobtrusively, I let my gaze run over them, becoming naked around me. Five sets of loins: Dominic, cut; his so much like mine: standing, rather than hanging, the purple head exposed, the shaft straight and the pubis just showing the first shadows of dark hair. Mervyn, huge, cut, round head like a giant red acorn, shaft white as marble and long red hairs around and on his balls, freckles on his arms tummy and legs, but white where the sun never got him. Lukas, uncut, thicker and darker but probably about the same as Dominic’s and mine when the skin was pulled back; his testicles not half the size of mine.Then Bennie: below the belly stencilled like a palm leaf, also uncut, brownish, long and thin, tip dangling from side to side below the tight mauve scrotum. Almeida: dark skin all over his body, the penis small, almost translucently grey and pink like a hatchling in the tangled crotch. My eyes moved up to his face. Surely, surely, I thought, the most handsome in the school. No, not handsome, beautiful. The most beautiful boy in the world. How different it felt seeing him out there than at night during the ritual shower. He looked up, caught my eyes on his chest. I slipped out of my underpants, ashamed at being caught; swearing never to look again, Dr Taylor, will not look, wrong, boy man will be will not ever again, deserve death, everything they want, proud of me, read
To Kill A Mockingbird,
Bernice in Wimpy Bar, we spoke about school, Bernie, don’t think. Don’t think.
We clambered down the. rocks and from the corner of my eyes I caught Buys taking off his shorts. Revulsion at his hairy arse and flabby buttocks. Again, admonished myself; focused on the falls.
‘No diving, De Man!’ Buys called from behind.
‘Ja, Meneer.’ As if I’d dive into a pool I haven’t explored. Sod. Everywhere around us were naked boys. Buys warned the little ones to stay away from the mouth of the pool where the current was strongest. We waded, splashing each other, then, bodies half submerged, made surface dives and swam to where the pool was an emerald of shadows and depths. Bennie and I joined some Standard Sixes, taking turns to dive down and see how deep it was. Each of them returned sputtering to the surface, unable to go all the way down. Bennie and I went together. At first I could see him, beside me, down, down, into the green, ever growing darkness and colder water. As my chest tightened I no longer looked out for him and concentrated on the downward flight. My lungs felt like bursting. I was already turning up when my fingers grazed the stony bottom. I grabbed for something to take back, felt pebbles come away into my hand, then brought my feet down as I began to panic and shot myself up, terrified. We broke the surface at the same moment, each waving a fist full of small round pebbles.
We stayed in for a while, looking for warm patches in the water, floating there, then diving beneath the waterfall and coming up to feel the force of water beating on our heads, pushing us down again. All the while I held on to the quarry. We left the pool to laze with the others in the sun.