Embrace (27 page)

Bok and I are going shooting at Poinsettia this afternoon. We have a competition against Durban North.

It’s only a few weeks before Parents’Weekend, and we can’t wait to see you. We’ll be staying with Uncle Gerrie and Auntie Babs on the farm. I don’t think Bernie will be coming because she has to study for the trial exams.

Work hard, dear child, because remember: they can take everything away from you except your education. I’m ending this letter now, but never my thoughts of you.

All our love

Bok, Bernie, Lena and Bokkie

My eyes were coals seared to the trembling aerograms incorrect address format. Why can’t you listen to me! I know what I’m talking about. Know, I’m clever, ashamed of you, hate you. Eyes squeezed shut I fell back onto my mattress, turned over, pressed my face into the pillow and crumpled the letter in my fist. Damn you, I will not come home at the end of the year, damn you, damn you, Bokkie.

He was ten. He was standing in the passage dressed in school uniform with his suitcase in his hand, ready to start walking to school. His sisters were already halfway down the driveway. His father came walking down the passage and the boy looked up. The father placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was a firm grip. He spoke to the boy softly. He said many things while he looked the boy in the eyes. He said: ‘If you ever, ever, ever so much as think of doing that again, I will kill you.’

He ordered a bottle of Boland white wine. One drinks white only with chicken, fish and seafood, he told me; red wine only with red meat. Never err on your order or your etiquette.

With no one else there, it had seemed the small dining room was laid out for us alone. He allowed me a full glass — my first not sipped surreptitiously from half-empties in the kitchen with Lena and cousin James.

He showed me the fish-knife and fork; explained that cutlery is used from the outside, inward towards the plate. I said I knew, that that’s the way my parents ate in Tanzania. I said I also knew that the napkin is unfolded from the moment one is seated. Tipping the soup bowl away, rather than towards, we had been taught by the school in Standard Four, before we went on our first tour. And do you know, he asked playfully, that if you drop the serviette, you don’t bend down to pick it up or dig around with your heel to find it; you simply ask the waiter for another? No, I smiled, I would have dived down and fetched it, so thank you, Jacques, for sharing your wisdom. A new world of stylish rules was opening itself to be used by me.

While nowhere as big or impressive as the hotel dining rooms I had been in with Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe, the Paternoster Hotel dining room was special in other ways. I sensed the chasmic difference between being in a hotel with Bokkie’s sister and her rich husband, and being on the quiet West Coast with Jacques. Paternoster was classy and romantic. Quaint. The Malibu in Durban was a glossy, plastic and superficial holiday resort for the nouveau riche. While Bernice, Lena and I liked Aunt Lena — who had a great sense of humour and showered us with gifts — you didn’t need a degree to see that Uncle Joe knew as much about class as a cat of saffron, spending thousands and thousands of rands on dumb racing pigeons. Uncle Joe was a self-made man. He had become big as a building contractor for the Western Transvaal mines — even thoughhe only had Standard Six. Aunt Lena said he had never read a book in his life and that’s why he smirked and made snide remarks whenever I read on the beach. Despite my spending half the day body-surfing, kicking ball or playing beach-bats with him and Lena, when I said I wanted to take a break to read he almost flipped and said he couldn’t believe I hadn’t outgrown my girlish habits. How could a boy as tall and strong as me sit reading like a moffie on the beach? Lots of money, that he has, Aunt Lena said, but he’s clueless about anything beyond the building and mining professions. We all knew that Aunt Lena was the one with brains in that family. Not that book knowledge brought wisdom or joy; look where it had landed Uncle Klaas. But neither did wealth. For all their money, Uncle Joe and Aunt Lena’s marriage was held together only by the Brats. We distrusted Uncle Joe because Aunt Lena — and the whole Klerksdorp — knew he had strings of affairs, the latest with the little Matilda slut. And that he may be dabbling in illegal diamonds. His perpetual absences from home drove Aunt Lena half crazy. We all knew she would end up in Tara again. That she’d again received electric shock treatments to make her cope with the blues.

The blond receptionist doubled as our waitress. Before taking our order she joined us at table and had a glass of wine and a cigarette. She said she had grown up in Malmesbury. She had dreamt of going to secretarial college in Cape Town, but her parents hadn’t wanted her to leave the district so she stayed and found the job with the hotel. Her boyfriend of two years farmed nearby and they were to be married when she turned twenty-one.

She asked Jacques what he did. He answered that he was a high school teacher. When he said he taught Maths she snorted and said Maths had been her worst subject at school. I wanted to say that I too couldn’t do Maths — that to my mind it was the worst subject in the entire history of the world — but I caught myself, concerned that she would ask why he didn’t help me master the curse.

‘And the wife? Doesn’t she mind you two gallivanting in the Cape while she’s at home?’

‘My wife and daughter are in Maritzburg. He and I are on a trip so the girls can spend a little time on their own. You know how it is.’ ‘Oh yes, and don’t I just,’ she said. ‘Me and my girlfriends just love a night on the town. Alone, no boyfriends, nothing. Just us. It’s necessary, sometimes, just to catch your breath, you know. So, you have a daughter, too!’

He nodded. She said she wanted a daughter and wanted her to become a ballerina. A prima ballerina.

‘My sister is a ballet dancer,’ I said, catching his eye. A fleeting frown cautioned me not to colour the story too much.

‘Oh how wonderful! Does she do shows and stuff?’

‘She recently danced Gizelle for NAPAC,’ I said, nodding my head. ‘Oh I’d love my little girl to do ballet one day!’ she beamed, dragging on her cigarette. ‘Or gymnastics! Oh, there’s a farmer up the road with TV, and I went to watch the Olympic Games there the other night. And there was this little girl, Nadia something, you know all those communist names sound the same, who got ten out of ten for her exercises. The first time ever in the history of gymnastics. Did you see?’

‘Yes, she was very good,’ he spoke before I could continue. ‘Shall we get ready to order?’

While he ordered a starter, my eyes skimmed the menu. She asked whether I had decided. Emboldened by half a glass of wine, I glanced at her and asked, ‘You don’t happen to have any starfish on the menu, do you?’

‘Starfish? No klong, we don’t eat those in the Cape!’

‘You haven’t eaten starfish in a mayonnaise sauce?’ I asked, my mouth wide in mock surprise, hand over my chest, not looking at him.

She shook her head and smiled. ‘Never heard of it. There’s no meat on a starfish. You’ll break your teeth!’

‘Oh, but there are other, extraordinary nutrients in starfish!’ I said. ‘You lick it and suck it. It’s full of rare juices. You should try it!’

‘Sounds pretty strange to me,’ she said and looked at him.

‘Okay. Then I’ll have a prawn cocktail,’ I said.

She said it was a very good choice.

I kept my eyes on her as she turned on her heel and left the dining room. I grinned and looked him in the face. He was biting his bottom lip, nodding his head, smiling.

‘You know how to play the game, don’t you?’ He spoke through teeth still clasping his lip.

‘Maybe they have starfish only on the room-service menu,’ I said.

He buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. And I still recall how I glowed, blessed as if the doors had just swung open and life, real life, was beginning at last for me.

How different their scent and taste. Again, and again, how indistinguishable scent from taste. Could a word exist for that? One I did not know? When things smell like the palate of others or a taste is really the odour of another. Could it be that I, Karl De Man, had discovered another sense: the seventh perhaps? One that exists at the cusp of the tongue and the nose; at that point where sensations can no longer be distinguished. Him: the salted almonds, and if he had recently washed — which he usually had — Palmolive soap and English Leather aftershave. Aftershave, he claimed, prevented shavers rash. And afterwards, the sweat: at first salty then vaguely bitter in its aftertaste; if I went down there a second time it had changed to moss or humus mixed with saltpetre; and in the black hollows of his armpits — later damp: there, or in his shirt before it was removed, the smell of kakibush and horse. Dominic: rarely sweat, Brut beneath the arms where recently a few long hairs had begun to wisp; always sweet his sweat; soft the pale skin, barely an odour on the belly, and in the fine hair now starting to curl sometimes the faint smell of piss, shit and fresh sawdust.

We had developed a loose pattern in which Jacques was mostly the one to tell me to come and see him. Occasionally I went on my own accord and from the smile when he opened the door to my knock — sometimes just audible over music from the B&O in his room — I was sure I saw the special pleasure he took from my surprise visits. I tried keeping these to a minimum, going there uninvited no more thanonce a week. For Dominic and I, being together and planning nights was simpler and we generally stuck to Saturdays, though sometimes we slipped in a weekday session. Occasionally I went first to Dominic, then, after leaving him and donning my dressing gown in which I kept the key, headed for Jacques.

Back in my bed, my hand was over my nose; bringing them with me. Sweat, squirt, soap, sawdust, horse: an ensemble of secret smells. I breathed into my right palm where it was always strongest, while with the left, awkwardly, I brought myself to another climax. I did not wipe it as they were want to do. Dragged my fingers up, scooping it into the fold, smearing my cheeks, my forehead, my lips, tasting or smelling myself: different from either of them. In this place we eat the same food, drink from the same taps, but still we smell and taste or that other sense different, I thought. And when about to fall asleep, I willed myself into the dream: I glided over a veld of brown grass that blows in the breeze, at first in all directions, and I know I’m gliding but I don’t know what or who or how many I am. Then, if the focus, the concentration was deliberate, the breeze takes all the grass in one direction, the same direction as I am moving, and it goes faster and faster and sleep takes me. When I do not concentrate — underwater breath lungs bursting fire I’m English almonds that woman receptionist garage full of curios breaking Bokkie’s pots Bokkie made masks to sell for money Dominic Both Sides Now bilingual Arusha, Oljorro, Kenia ship this mark on my forehead Bokkie says is from when I fell on the Kenia no Kenya ship when we came out, can’t remember too small maybe two, fell off Camelot, Lena, giggles, dragged by Camelot, Simba licking blood off Lena’s legs, Bernice puts disinfectant, lying to Ouma, Mumdeman and Dademan no Dademan was dead, cemetery, all crying, family, High on the Hill with the Lonely Goat Herd lei odelei, who is the girl in the pale pink coat, blue dress, fairy’s silver star of tin foil, fairy’s star, fairy-tale, the fairy’s tail, the fair tail, dance with Stephanie, ballet, when she was the cat on the stage, Siamese Cat, over Bok’s dead body, can Dademan see me, must pray, dear Jesus, let Dademan understand me, not think, don’t think about it, bury it in grave, ghosts, no ghosts exist, pagan beliefs, irrational, cannot see from heaven, unspeakable, will still go to heaven, hell, no, no, not think, think of something else, forget, forget it, over, past, finish en klaar — the grass remains tangled, chunky, blowing in all directions, untidy. Then the dream would not take me and I could cast about in the sheets, unable to fall asleep for hours.

In the mornings I stooped to brush my teeth and’it had virtually all flaked from my face; here and there around where the hair began on the forehead and temples it was like skin peeling from sunburn. I washed it with only water; no soap. I smelt them on me through Sunday church and the terrors of burning in hell, or, for the entire day in class. Breathing now into my left, the right struggling with trigonometry, fractions; or doing battle in the oblique trenches of language. On the fine blue lines that veined the blank pages with their pink margins. Translating Latin. Memorising the vocab. Thirty new words a week; and
adjectives with the nominative singular the same for all genders:
felix, felicem, felicis, felici. Learning a new language.

Boy stole Bok’s revolver and is sitting in jail in Matubatuba. Now Jonas goes on patrol and trail alone with Bok. Boy must go to court. They say Boy will go to jail. Boy stole the revolver and was hiding in the location near Empangeni when the police caught him. We go to court to see how they send Boy to jail. Magistrate says Boy was going to help the poachers but Interpreter says Boy says that’s not true. Interpreter says Boy says he was going to sell the revolver for money, he was not helping poachers. Interpreter says Boy says he wanted money for his wife and children. No one knows Boy has a wife and kids. He’s lying says Bok. I sit in the middle between Bok and Bokkie and it’s hot and sweaty where my legs are on the wooden bench and there’s nobody else in the court. Everyone doesn’t speak and only the Magistrate must ask questions and Interpreter says into Zulu and Boy talks to Interpreter in Zulu and Interpreter tells Magistrate in English what Boy said in Zulu. Then Boy starts crying and Magistrate asks Interpreter what’s wrong with Boy. Interpreter asks Boy something in Zulu and Boy cries and says something in Zulu and then Interpreter tells Magistrate that Boy says his wife and children need money and how are his children going to eat if he goes to jail? Magistrate is sweating on his bald pink head like a plucked pigeon. Magistrate says he will show mercy because it’s the first time Boy has stolen. Boy will get twelve cuts. Bok blows through his nose and shakes his head. Boy stops crying and he doesn’t look at us when they take him away. Bok says there’s no justice in this world. Boy won’t be a game guard any more and he’s only getting twelve cuts for stealing a firearm. What’s becoming of this country? Going the same way as Tanganyika. Maybe it was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

I’m six and it’s time I go to school. I want to go to school but I hate that I must leave Umfolozi and I must go to boarding school in Hluhluwe. The Parks Board boss Dr Ian Player tells Bok he’s transferred to St Lucia. Dr Player is the brother of the golfer Gary Player. Gary Player is rich and famous. Save The White Rhino is nearly finished because maybe the white rhino is saved. We will live right across the lake from Dademan and Mademan in Charters Creek. I can go and visit there every weekend with the boat. Now I don’t mind leaving here so much because now I will go to day school in Matubatuba. Matubatuba sounds nice. I say it over and over to Jonas. Ma-tu-ba-tu-ba, Matu-batu-ba. Jonas must stay here in Umfolozi. Now no one sleeps on Boy’s bed. Boy is gone and I’m scared he’ll come and kill us in our sleep. I say to Jonas we will come and visit. Bernice and Lena can come and live at home again and I’ll catch a bus with them to go to school every day. I’m getting school uniforms for boys like Lena and Bernice’s for girls. To get shoes on my feet Bokkie makes me sit with my feet in her red bucket full of warm water with salts to makemy kaffir heels and toes soft and not any more like leather like Chaka’s impis. I am getting shoes because you need shoes for school and church and Sunday school. I’ve never had shoes and always thorns in my feet. When a long white thorn went in at the bottom and came out at the top it broke off and Bokkie put green Sunlight soap with sugar smashed and stuck it on the top hole and bottom hole with a big plaster to draw out the thorn and the poison. Now I won’t have more thorns because I’m a big boy going to school in Matubatuba . . . Matubatuba sounds nice. I say it over and over . . .

We pack the truck. Chaka and Suz kill a big waterbuck up at Mpila. Camp. They grab it by the throat and strangle. Jonas brings Chaka and Suz full of blood by the collars to tell Bok. Tourists saw it all happening at Mpila Camp. It’s a very big thing. Dogs killing wild animals. Worse in front of tourists. Scandal, says Bok. Bok holds Chaka and Suz by the front legs and swings and beats them against the wall. It is not good enough. If a dog kills animals once it will kill animals again. Chaka and Suz must be put to sleep. Put down it’s called. Bok goes down to the office and I sit outside by the water tank stroking poor Chaka and Suz. I tell Chaka and Suz to be very brave. They will go to doggy heaven and I’ll see them there one day. Bok comes with the injection. I start crying but so that Bok doesn’t see. I ask if maybe he will not put them to sleep. Bokkie calls from inside and says I must come inside I cannot watch it. Bok says no, the boy watches everything and the boy can watch this too. Bokkie shouts the boy’s going to have nightmares and Bok says the boy’s a boy and he must see the world the way it is. Now I don’t cry. Bokkie’s eyes water when she looks at Chaka and Suz. She goes into the kitchen. Bok pats Chaka’s head. Bok’s fingers are dirty from packing the truck. I hold Chaka’s head in my lap. Bok looks like he’s going to cry. Tears in Bok’s eyes. Bok injects the medicine. Chaka stops looking at me. His eyes go like glass, like stuffed animal heads. Then Suz. And Jonas comes to watch because Suz loved Jonas from the trails. She cries. And Jonas shakes his face and wipes his eyes and walks to his kaya. Bok sticks in the needle. Istroke Suz s little head. Then she’s dead. Bok gets up and goes to the fence and looks out over the valley to the White Umfolozi. I go and stand next to him. His mouth is thin. We put Chaka and Suz in brown mealie bags and Jonas digs two holes and I help him. We put the bags inside and I help Jonas to fill them up. At night I cry a little bit. I don’t say the Our Father. I pray big. I pray Jesus take care of my dear Chaka and my dear Suz and please Jesus forgive them the water-buck and also look after the waterbuck. And don’t let Boy come and kill us because he’s angry. In the morning I go to the graves. Bokkie says when someone dies you put flowers on the grave. I pick flowers and grasses and yellow monkey-apples and put them on Chaka and Suz’s graves. Bokkie asks why monkey-apples and I say it’s an offering and Bokkie says were not heathen who make offerings so I throw away the monkey-apples and put more mauve tree wisteria it’s mauve not purple that Jonas picks when I ask him because its too high for me. I take the
Kinder Bybel
and sit and read about Jacob’s ladder at the grave. I ask Bokkie why we didn’t stuff Chaka and Suz like kudu heads and buffalo heads and Grant’s gazelle. Bokkie says that’s for wild animals, not for pets you love.

At St Lucia we will live at the sea in the ranger’s house. And we can go fishing and see the flamingoes. I will go to Sunday school and to church for the first time. I’m going to the big world.

The best of everything ever happens: Willy Hancox gives me a foal, a Palomino. His name is Camelot and he’s still brown like all baby Palominos and he’ll turn like honey when he gets older. Camelot can come to St Lucia because there’s a paddock. Bok says he’ll teach me how to ride when Camelot is old enough.

Seasons on the Natal coast came and went, quietly and inconspicuously, without the show of the Berg. Summer seemed to me to exist all year round with the only real change the drop in humidity and summers afternoon showers. Returning to Amanzimtoti at the end of June 1975 it had been to the new house on Bowen Street, the first i we’d owned since leaving Tanzania. Bok borrowed money from Oupa Liebenberg for a deposit, but still, the bank owned the house, of course, even though in Bok’s name. It would take me about eighteen months to fully grasp the concept. Bok’s curios had been thriving for six months and I was elated to be in Toti — now in a home with a swimming pool, my own bedroom and wall-to-wall carpeting. If only Lukas and Dom could come and visit, so they could see I had my own room. Bokkie refused to have a maid and continued cleaning and , servicing the house and its running herself. The house sparkled. In spite of Prime Minister Vorster’s belief that it was a communist plot, South Africa was getting television and Bok wanted to be the first to have a set. Evenings Alette would come over and we’d all watch the test broadcasts and the seven o’clock news read on alternate nights I think by Nigel Caine and Michael De Morgan in English and Heinrich Marnitz and Friedel Hansen in Afrikaans. Afterwards I’d walk Alette home to Dan Pienaar and maybe pop in to say hello to Juffrou Sang and Prof.

There was a slight unpleasantness because of my school report: since going to boarding school eighteen months before I no longer came first in class. My marks had dropped from the nineties into the low seventies. The marks, in and of themselves, seemed not to worry Bok and Bokkie unduly. But there was one sentence on my June report that sent my mother first into a rage and then, worse, into a silence. In the report’s comments section, Miss Roos had written: ‘Karl is a pleasure to have in class, yet, he consistently underachieves, never getting the marks he should. If he can learn to control his uitgelatenheid, I have little doubt that his academic performance would better reflect his academic ability.’ Neither Bokkie nor I understood the word uitgelate so she sent me to fetch the Afrikaans/English dictionary.
Uitgelatenheid:
boisterousness, elation, exuberance, exultation, in high spirits, loud, rampant.
Then, I had to look under each of these in Bernices
Verklarende Woordeboek.
The closest to Miss Roos s intention — according to Bokkie — was obviously:
loud, rampant; uncontrolled.
When Bok came home, that was what uitgelatenheid had come to mean: Your son is rampant and uncontrolled. Your son is turning into a wash-out. My father shook his head and said that unless my grades went up he’d take me out of the school. I tried to hide my elation, that I had seen the gap, that this could be my passport away from a place which I increasingly detested. At the end of my first year in the Berg I had asked them to take me out, and they’d refused, saying that being away from home was making me a stronger boy. Where you can’t hang onto Bokkie’s apron strings, Lena had said. Now, after Miss Roos’s remarks, I suspected that a weak report was my ticket home. And how badly,
desperately,
at that moment, more than ever before, did I want to be at home. The events of the previous six months, while never contemplated, lurked like invisible spectres in my mind. And then, Bokkie went silent. With me. That I, her star child, was turning into a wash-out, was driving her to muteness. With me. To Lena, Bernice and Bok she spoke as if nothing were wrong. But I was invisible. I washed the dishes and tried to help prepare meals when Bok wasn’t home — that didn’t help. I walked over to the church where she was gardening, asked whether I could trim the edges of the lawn, she only nodded at my presence and said: ‘You must do as you please, Karl.’ I mowed the lawns — at home and at church; I cleaned the pool, I raked the leaves, I weeded, left the heaps in the driveway where she’d have to see my efforts. Tried to get her to talk to me. To acknowledge me. She didn’t budge.