Embrace (2 page)
Six afternoons a week during the culling, Bokkie prepared a canvas backpack with coffee in a Thermos, three plastic mugs, roast guinea fowl and freshly baked bread in tin foil. At sundown the three men accompanied by Jonas and Boy said goodbye to us before they got into the Land Rover and drove off into the dusk, Bokkie holding Suz by the collar, me Chaka. Lossie, the yard ostrich, seeing the men get into the vehicle, approached, his erect neck and tiny head moving from side to side like a periscope, round eyes vigilant as he took in the entire scene. Then, when the machine started up, he would emulate a mating dance, strutting and genuflecting, his wings lifted from his body, feathers ruffled into a grandiose white and black fan. As the vehicle moved off into the dust road, the bird pattered ahead until, unable to keep up, he swerved behind and trailed upwind for about half a mile as Jonas and Boy laughed and shouted from the back of the open vehicle at the giant bird to ‘go home’.
Five nights a week the men would not return until dawn. When grey streaked the horizon and the flashlights were no longer effective, they came home. On Saturday nights they were back around midnight as there was no culling on Sundays.
Monday to Saturday, having woken from the relentless
Piet-my-Vrou, Piet-my-Vrou
in the thorn trees and with nothing on but a short floral mini, Bokkie would have lifted the kitchens reed wall out onto its stilts and have coffee and breakfast ready: scrambled guinea fowl eggs, impala steaks crumbed and fried in spicy batter and slices of thick white-meal toast spread with whole-apricot jam.
Outside, at the tap beneath the water tank, the men washed the blood off their hands and forearms. They said goodbye to Jonas and Boy and then descended like lions onto the kitchen where Bokkie waited.
I arose when I heard laughter from the table. Too exhausted to sleep, the men told their stories and I, still blinking, came to listen in rapture to the tales of the night. It grew light and their ebullient voices altered into slower, softer and gentler murmuring. As the sun was about to break over the thorn trees and they prepared to go to bed — always and without fail — one of them would say, ‘It’s not nice doing this to animals; not nice at all seeing them slaughtered.’
The two guests left the kitchen, and I crossed the cool cement floor to fetch a glass of powdered milk Bokkie kept mixed in the fridge. Turning from the fridge I would see Bok’s back as he bent to kiss Bokkie s neck where she stooped over the enamel washbasin. For a few moments I might be stung by embarrassment and I might lean, smiling, blood rising in my cheeks, against the cool of the fridge door. My mother would turn to face my father, her arms going around his neck, a wooden spoon dripping suds still held in one hand over his shoulder. His arm around her waist, hand clasping her side, they swayed as if to commence a dance, turned, and I, face pressed against the gentle humming of the gas fridge, would see Bok’s hand manoeuvring Bokkie’s crimplene mini down over herbum, his bronzed fingers venturing briefly between her barely covered thighs.
Another memory made of Mkuzi. The year before Lena joined Bernice at boarding school in Hluhluwe. Bokkie: a bare foot on the spade in the patch of sweet potatoes below the water tank, cotton hat, damp, covering her short dark hair. The huge silver water tank above her a mirror in the afternoon sun, the mounting three metres above the ground a deterrent for large animals. On the farm in Tanganyika, she told us and our occasional visitors, she had had a huge vegetable garden of radishes, leeks, onions, lettuce, cabbage, rows upon neatly tended rows of fine-leafed carrots. Gardeners. Labour as cheap as water was abundant. Mkuzi, in contrast, was dry. All she grew outside the carefully tended rockery of succulents and cacti was the patch of sweet potatoes and a few bushes of mint that thrived on the tank’s runoff.
Behind her our house: Mbanyana. Shower and toilet, kitchen, sitting room and two bedrooms; each space partitioned by a layer of reeds without doors; only concrete the floor, at times our cool refuge from what the adults called the unrelenting heat and us kids only the sun.
By the time we got to Mkuzi, Bernice was seven, Lena almost five, me just over two. When we first came to South Africa and Bok was temporarily with Shell & BP, Bernice had gone to school at Werda PrePrimary on the Bluff in Durban. Then, when Bok got the Parks Board job, Bernice had to go to boarding school in Hluhluwe. When she came home for a weekend she shared mine and Lena’s room, all three of us sleeping on the fold-up camp-beds brought out from Tanganyika.
Bokkie raises herself slightly, weight on the right foot, pushes the spade in beneath the clump of sweet potatoes. She bends down and removes die indigo-coloured lumps, knocking off the soil. She throws the sweet potatoes to one side, onto a small heap. Her chin lifts. Gazemoves to the paddock about half a mile across the stretch of open veld. Even over this distance our eyes must meet. She can see me and Lena; both of us shirtless. I brush Ganaganda while Boy and Lena fill the feed trough with cubes. It has not taken me long to recover my bravado. Two days before, as the first scream reached her ears, she was already out of the house, dashing for the stables from where Boy was running with me in his arms. She had run,
knowing,
for the thousandth time, that it must have been a snake. From afar she had shouted, ‘Wat is dit, Boy? What is it?’
And the man had called back, ‘Is fine, Miesies, is fine, is not mfezi.’ Thank God, thank God, thank God, a rhythmical incantation as she ran. She took me from Boy’s arms, talking softly to pacify me, but I only screamed louder at the same time motioning at my back. ‘What happened, Boy? What’s wrong, Karl, my boy?’
‘Is Ganaganda, Miesies,’ Boy answered, perhaps trying to smile reassurance. ‘She kick Karl, here . . .’ And he pointed. She turned me to inspect my back.
‘Thank you, Boy,’ she said, motioning with her head that he was free to return to his tasks.
She blew cool air and the screaming intensified once more before I grew calmer, sobbing faintly into her neck; tears finding the path down her chest.
‘Mamma is hier; toemaar, my kind; Mamma is hier, hoor.’
Lena was making her way from the stables. With me still sobbing on her hip, Bokkie balanced on one leg and bent to remove the duwweltjies, first from one, then from the other foot. The hellish burning from her foot soles had not registered until the moment I started to calm down.
Ganaganda is just a naughty girl, don’t worry, my boy.’ She could discern the welted outline of the mare’s print between my shoulder blades.
Gana kicked Karl,’ Lena announced. Bokkie nodded.
Oh my baby, it’s nothing,’ she whispered into my ear, then turned me so that she could rest her lips against the hoofprint. Her breath against me, blowing out, then breathing in, must have taken in the smell of my body, probably mingled with the saltpetre of the horse. She smiled at Lena and started, watching, careful to step on the hot sandy patches where she was able to spy the little devil thorns. Over her shoulder I looked at Lena, following.
Leaving the sweet potato patch, she bends to collect the roots in her arms. She moves past the aloes and succulents of the rockery. One more time I see her looking at me by the stables. Then, with the bare toes of her right foot, she opens the gauze door and swings it wide open, and with a quick step, enters the house of yellow reeds as the door behind her slams shut.
Constructed in the design of an unusual L — its foot slightly higher up, rather than at the base of its leg — the school sat in a valley on a hill surrounded by orchards, green mealie fields and uncultivated veld that stretched around to where the mountains became the horizon. Along the ground floor of the foot, east to west, were the administration offices, the dining hall, the headmaster’s office and the auditorium with a roof that rose three floors to achieve its spectacular acoustics. The auditorium, where the choirs occasionally rehearsed, had long windows from where one could see across the orchard terraces, down to the swift-flowing water of Sterkspruit and up the hills to V Forest. From the choir benches, one could look up and see the balcony library and walkway, its eight bookshelves spanning the length of the room. When the auditorium downstairs became too crowded during Wednesday-night performances, additional chairs were placed up on the library walkway.
The walkway led to the Junior dormitories. Here the second and third floors of the foot accommodated the Standard Two, Three and Four boys in dormitories C and D, as well as E, where the five of us stayed for the first year and a half before we were separated.
On either side of the library landing was a door, one leading to the Secondaries in C Dorm, the other opening into a passage to the leg and the conductors’ bedrooms. Cilliers s room was the last of these. Continuing along this passage one reached the extension with the music rooms and conservatory. These rooms faced out over more orchards towards Cathkin Peak and Champagne Castle, which rose to almost 3400 metres, the highest point in the Drakensberg Range. V Forest, dense and green, was clasped in the fold of two foothills and below it, closer to the citrus orchard, sprawled the rugby fields on which cows sometimes grazed in the shade of the poplar bush. There we had our forts. In summer the green of the poplars and in autumn their yellow and orange fluttering smudged Sterkspruit’s winding waterway from sight.
The bottom floor of the leg that ran north to south was comprised of our classrooms. Built over these were the Senior dormitories: F and G for the Standard Sixes and Sevens. Between F and G was the sickbay and Uncle Charlie the house-master’s room. On winter mornings, when he walked through the dormitories, shouting, ‘Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, jeans, T-shirts and black polo-neck jerseys,’ the peaks were often covered in snow. Word had it snow had fallen down at the school only five or six times in written memory.
During breaks we had to play on the dusty soccer field that doubled as a parking lot for visitors’ cars and the school’s two tour buses. On a terrace below this soccer field-cum-parking lot was the dairy and the cowshed alongside the stables and the servants’ quarters.
Steven Almeida had not returned after the Secondary Choir’s Malawi tour. Into February, poring over the photographs of the tour, exchanging negatives, we speculated on why Almeida had left. He couldn’t have failed Standard Five, surely? His family couldn’t have gone back to Angola with the war and everything going on there. Maybe theycouldn’t afford keeping him here? No, they owned a new Audi and they too already had colour TV And remember his sister Marguerite, how gorgeous she was at Parents’Weekends and at the airport when we came in from Malawi, dressed like a pop-star? No, the Almeidas had money. The remaining five of us, including poor struggling Bennie, had passed Standard Five and were now all teenagers. Being a teenager was a wonderful and dreadful thing to be. It meant we had reached ‘that stage’, whatever ‘that stage’ was meant to mean. From the way Almeida had been the previous year we’d accepted he’d be with us to start high school and Senior Choir with Cilliers. He was very, very quiet, but still, he could have said something. How he would have loved to join us on the coming European tour! It would have been just like in Malawi, the six of us at the lake. Look at this shot here of Steven and Dom at the Olvers’ piano. And this one here on the catamaran by the jetty — look there’s Ma’am in the background. Skiing in Europe, Steven would have loved it in his quiet way. Only nine months to go. Back down to five as we’d been before Steven, we were again an odd number, which meant having always to try to find host families for three. Had Almeida indeed failed Standard Five, he would have been forced to leave, of course. But there was no way anyone with his brain could have plucked a standard. The loss of his voice, we knew, was an enormous blow to the school — especially with the proposed
Missa
that required the superstar quartet. Not that Erskin Louw was bad in Seconds, he’s brilliant, of course, and he’s the nicest of the Standard Seven prefects — any of the others would have had Bennie and I caned for gippoing hair cuts last week. But at twelve — no, he turned thirteen last April on the Eastern Cape trip, didn’t he? — Almeida was the greatest soprano, maybe the greatest voice, the school had ever had. For the year he’d been with us, he moved comfortably between firsts and seconds, wherever his volume and range was needed to fill in: somewhere between a contralto and mezzo, able to surprise an audience by flying up briefly to a coloratura descant. In the Secondary Choir he at times took Dominic’s first soprano solos — eventhough he never had Dominic’s stamina above high C. Awestruck at die agility of the handsome Portuguese boy’s voice, Dominic would stand in the wings smiling. Then he’d whisper to me, ‘He is a god, you know. He could sing the Queen of the Night and put half the fucking world’s sopranos to shame.’ Blasphemy aside, myself and the others agreed that Steven Almeida had to have in his throat and chest the vocal chords, diaphragm and thyro-arytenoid muscles of an adult. He sang with the voice of an extremely talented and well-developed female soprano, in contrast to Dominic who himself had the voice of an exceptionally gifted boy. All through Malawi the two of them had been looking forward to Rossini’s
Cat’s Duet
for the ’76 programme with Cilliers.
And Almeida was good-looking. As handsome as any boy can be before he starts looking like a girl,’ I had said to Dominic in Malawi one night. ‘Yes, I suppose. But you’ve got my kinda looks, Karl,’ Dominic whispered in a silly American accent, ‘and Mom and Dad also think you’re a far bigger charmer than Steven.’
And then Almeida, who had said he was coming back while I silently hedged my bets, didn’t. And I, who thought I wouldn’t ever return to the school I loathed so intensely, returned, lock stock and barrel.
Perhaps, Mervy said, one of us can ask Mr Mathison for the Almeidas’ address and write to them. Find out why he left. We never did. Maybe not wanting to know. Occasionally through the year we looked at the photographs, commented, eventually less and less, till Steven was almost forgotten.