Embrace (31 page)

It was not my big, older sister Bernice I saw on the chair in the Mbanyana kitchen when I got home. It was a tall skeleton covered in shadowy yellow parchment. Like a dry twig that could snap if you touched it too hard: a dying praying mantis, barely able to move without assistance. She missed weeks of school and Bokkie was concerned she was going to fail the school year. She lay in bed for weeks while Bokkie fed her milk and medicine from tens of botdes that caught the light from the reed opening that was our bedroomwindow. Soon, Bernice was better and we were out in the bush again, at Jonas and Boy’s kraal. It was just like old times when she came home for weekends, when she would come walking with me, reading me stories, dressing me up. Only I never chewed tambotie leaves again to see how much I could shit. While I never said it, Bernice, more than ever before, became the sister I loved. Bernice was vulnerable.

On a Saturday afternoon — I must have been about seven — Bok and Bokkie went to Empangeni in the Peugeot to visit friends. That was when Lena and I convinced Bernice to take us for a drive in the Land Rover. With Simba beside us in the cabin, we slipped down the back road near the kayas where we knew no one but the black guards’ wives might see us. After a short distance I demanded to sit outside on the bonnet in the spare wheel, where Bok had always allowed me since Umfolozi days. Bernice tried to refuse, saying it was too dangerous. I responded with the threat of reporting her for driving. She eventually stopped the Land Rover and I got out and went to sit in the spare wheel. With Bernice driving and Lena beside her, we drove up and down the beach road. I sat demanding Bernice go faster. Eventually I was standing up and dancing around on the bonnet. Bernice slowed down and Lena screamed through the window for me to sit down, or else get back into the cabin. I sat down and pulled faces at them through the windscreen. We took a different route home — behind the new holiday cottages — to make sure we were not spotted, and Bernice started speeding. That is all I remember. Next I am in my bed with Dademan and Mumdeman bent over me; I cannot speak or move my face, my tongue feels a fleshy gap where both my front teeth are missing; if I try to speak it’s as though my face is tearing to pieces. Dademan smiles down at me, holding my hand. He says I am a big boy and I’m going to be fine; that he has given Bernice a hiding for being so irresponsible. Mumdeman says I must be taken to the doctor in Matubatuba to check whether anything is broken, but we must wait for Bok and Bokkie to get home. Bernice comes in with a red face and swollen eyes and says sorry. Mumdeman puts her arms around Bernice, who starts crying. What had happened, so the story slowly comes together, was that unbeknownst to us the Parks Board had made new, higher speed bumps in the road behind the cottages. Bernice, at high speed, spotted the bump just as she was about to strike it and braked, suddenly. I had flown off. A game guard had arrived to find me lights out with the front wheel only a few centimetres from my head. The girls were hysterical because even though they could see me breathing, they thought I was dying. The game guard ran to the office, told the warden who came and saw that I was okay. The warden radioed Dademan at Charters and they had come over the estuary in Piper.

Bok and Bokkie got home to find me lying covered in blood and mercurochrome. They were shocked. Dademan had to restrain Bok from giving Bernice another hiding. Then, in front of me, Dademan asked Bok where he thought we children had learnt our recklessness? How, asked Dademan, could Bok ever, ever, have allowed me to sit in the spare wheel on the bonnet while he was driving? No, Dademan shouted at Bok, it was not Bernice’s fault that I had almost been killed! It was Bok’s fault! Do you want your son dead — Dademan asked. How, how could a father be so irresponsible? Was Bok so thick that he couldn’t guess he’d be setting a precedent for us young baboons?

‘If you want the boy dead he can come with Mum and me to Charters Creek,’ Dademan said in English. Bok, beside me on the bed, was like a shy boy, not knowing what to say, just mumbling, ‘Sorry, Dad, sorry, Mum, yes, I know it was irresponsible.’ The doctor in Matuba said nothing was broken and the lost baby teeth would eventually grow back. I was off school for a week. When I got back, still covered in scabs, I was something of a hero, recounting the story everywhere anyone asked or even if they didn’t, occasionally throwing in the fact that I, like my older sister Bernice, had survived a neardeath experience.

And, I continued to practise more reading aloud. Now it was
Emile
and
Pippy Longstocking.
For weeks I tried unsuccessfully to get one of Bokkie’s or Mumdeman’s dishes to stick to my head so that I would again have to be taken to the doctor, this time to have the pot removed. I snuck a discarded pair of Bokkie s pantyhose from the rubbish bin and put the panty section over my head and wound wire around the legs to resemble long plaits like the pencil sketches of Pippy in the Astrid Lindgren books. Closing the bathroom door, pantyhose over my head, facing the mirror, I was Pippy, reading — with expression — my own story. I felt my reading, and thus myself, getting better inside the bathroom and out: was learning to show the outward confidence I had always felt with my family, but that had fled when I had to read in front of the class. I knew I could get it right and I did: by the end of Grade One I had not only become the most confident reader in class — and better than Lena two years my senior — but I was chosen to be the frog — the main character — in the class play of
The Frog and the Ducks
in front of the entire school hall full of parents. Mumdeman, who, with Dademan came to the concert, said I was becoming more and more like Bok. She told of how Bok used to do Shakespeare in Arusha so well that an American film producer wanted to take him to Hollywood. Who or what Shakespeare was I had no idea, but he or it sounded grand, even as Dademan and Bok pulled their faces behind Mumdeman’s back to show Mumdeman was exaggerating. By the end of the year, when I passed Grade One, I had forgotten my erstwhile fear of reading, tried to tutor Lena in putting expression into things: I was now confidence incarnate. I had been chased by eland; I had survived the fall from the Land Rover; I was the frog in the school play; I could read like a grown-up.

Nothing in the world, I believed, frightened me: I, like Bernice, was invincible. Bernice had the pink scar on her belly to prove how she had almost died. I had the missing teeth and the little scar, almost like a frown, between my eyebrows.

26 August 1976

Getting warmer. Hate Latin and Ma’am gives too much homework. Beauty’s husband Ezekiel is here. He comes to visit her from the Carletonville gold mine twice a year. He again has to teach us pronunciation of the ethnic music. In each of our programmes we sing two or three traditional African songs. Our audiences love the African songs — they are light, playful, have catchy tunes and magnificent rhythm. ‘Shosholoza’ usually makes the audiences mad and it is sometimes performed as an encore. The other big hit is ‘Siyahamba’. Then there’s the ‘Xhosa Click Song’. And the Zulu lullaby ‘Tula Baba’. Beauty’s husband speaks Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Zulu and other black languages of which he knows all the pronunciations. We don’t know the meanings but we sing the words. Last year Mr Roelofse was walking past the servants’ quarters when he heard the workers and the servants singing a tune that took his fancy. He asked Beauty to send Ezekiel up to teach him the song. That’s how we came to sing ‘Uyatlhaga’:

E. . . la, E. . . la!

Urnunt’ onzima kilomhlaba, Uyatlhaga

E. . . la, E. . .U

Myekeleni athwalisamende, Uyatlhaga

All the choirs did it and Ezekiel came to show us how to pronounce the words and to move. Ezekiel said it was a traditional Ndebele song that the mine wbrkers sang, originally from Rhodesia, about how people love the land. Mr Roelofse allowed us to jive a little during rehearsal, just like the Bantus, but when we performed in public we had to stand stock still without moving. After the first concert we never sang it again: it simply disappeared from our repertoire. No explanation given. Must get back to my homework.

Twice a week after the day Bok spoke to me at the pool, I went to see Dr Taylor in the office on the second floor of Salisbury Arcade. Mornings after antihistamine and breakfast, if Bok had to visit curio shops in the city, I went with him in our new Chevrolet. ‘South Africa!’ I called out, the first time the whole family went for a drive in the metallic gold vehicle. ‘What do you love?’ And we all sang: ‘
We love braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet!
When Bok wasn’t going into town, I caught the train from Pahla to Durban Central. Twenty-five cents for the return trip: an hour there, five minutes down West Street, an hour in Dr Taylor’s office, five minutes back to Durban Central, an hour back to Amanzimtoti. The same train Lena and Alette took to Port Natal High.

Dressed in civvies — my school jeans and hand-me-down shirts from cousin James or Leon Lategan, I walked to Pahla station, taking a book to read on the train. I’d started on
To Kill A Mockingbird.
I liked Scout and Jem, but it was Atticus Finch I wanted to be. I too would defend good black people against evil whites. The train galloped me to and from the city and more than once I wiped off tears for Tom Robinson, so alone against the world. Around the last visits to Dr Taylor I was onto Wilbur Smiths
The Sunbird,
which I got from the small bookshelf in our passage, Over the previous years I had read, or started to read before abandoning from boredom, most of the thirty or so books in our house:
The Washing of the Spears, Game Ranger on Horseback
by Bok’s friend Nic Steele,
The Man With the Golden Gun, The Horseman’s Bible, Cry the Beloved Country
(abandoned and later read in the Berg),
Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels
(Six Volumes),
The Call of the Wild, Jock of the Bushveld, Reader’s Digest Medical Dictionary
(paged through and searched through mostly for anatomy),
Trees and Plants of Natal, White Rhino Saga
by Dr Ian Player. All English; not a single Afrikaans one other than the three volumes of
The Arabian Nights,
Grimm and Andersen that I no longer read.

Alette and her family had left for their vacation near Uvongo. When Bernice could find an excuse and twenty-five cents she accompanied me to Durban to do window shopping. She waited for me in the City Hall gardens. When she asked what Dr Taylor and I had talked about, I’d say something like: ‘Oh about school. Why I’m not as bright as I used to be. What I want to be one day.’ On the train home she asked me to tell her stories, any of the many I adapted from others I’d read, or made up in my mind and sometimes wrote down in fragments. Bernice doted on my storytelling while Lena only rarely showed interest. I began telling Bernice the story of the Singing Chameleon, one I had read in a book that was given to me by Molly Hancox when we were just leaving the Parks Board. The collection of stories was still somewhere on our little bookshelf.

After our pool-side conversation Bok had told me he wanted me to meet someone in Durban. A man who specialised in education. I was now turning into a young man and the specialist in Durban would be someone to talk to about things that may currently be on my mind or issues which may face me once I grew up.
Dr Vincent Taylor, MA, Clinical Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand.
There was a reception area but no secretary. The reception area floor was carpeted and led directly into the wide hall and the elevator. The hall had shiny plastic tiles on the floor. Later that year, on the shores of Lake Malawi, I would remind myself of the hall’s acoustics. Like the passages of a hospital.

Try as I might, today, it is impossible for me to reconstruct, session for session, what happened there. Like so much memory, there are flashes, moments, images, words. And these I now strain to order into some narrative chronology, for my inventory of consciousness. It can be that I still forget or silence what I choose to disregard or voice what is chosen to tell in a way that fits my logic, my love, my explication, my life, and so, here, specifically, the silences might — as much as I doubt — speak louder than my words. The silence of the waiting room, the rustling of pages of magazines —
Scope, Personality, Fair Lady
 — I paged through while waiting for him, no windows, all these years later placing myself in that room from far away as I now take it to the language of a man.

Dr Taylor asks what I, at twelve and a half, want from life. Boisterously I say I once wanted to be a jockey or a film star but that I know I’m already too tall to be a jockey and not good-looking enough to be a film star. The picture of a dancer is so long disremembered that saying it doesn’t even cross my mind. So I will probably become a lawyer even though I also want to be a playwright. I will only become a lawyer so that I have something to fall back on — for the off chance my plays don’t make it to Broadway or the West End. I want to be a lawyer like Atticus Finch, or like Prime Minister B.J. Vorster, who was a lawyer before he went into politics. Dr Taylor says I am very wise to go to university, that there isn’t much of a future in writing. Only one in a million who want to be ; writers actually succeed. I say I don’t want to be a writer, I want to be a playwright, but that it’s fine and I will become a lawyer, as I said. He asks why I want to be a lawyer. I say that I really want to be a game ranger but that lawyers make money. I want to be rich like my Uncle Joe and my friend Dominic Webster’s father. I never want to be poor. People say I have a good mouth and a sharp mind, that I argue well, characteristics needed to make a case in court.

He asks what sort of things I write. But something in his voice makes me cautious. I say I’ve written bits of stories and poems but that I’m only twelve — almost thirteen. I am reading now, to prepare myself for one day when I will write plays and maybe even make movies. There is no better education than to read, I say. He says he has heard about a play I’ve written. One we performed up in the Berg. I say it was only half an hour long and we only performed it to our class, so it wasn’t a big deal. What was the play about? he asks. Something places me on complete guard; something has clicked. How does he know about the play? I have never mentioned it to Bok or Bokkie. I begin to clam up, feel a flush spread up my neck. I am being led somewhere; being tricked. After thinking for a moment I choose my words carefully: it was about a peasant who became a regent. Dr Taylor asks me what sort of regent I wrote about. I say the regent was a peasant who was a queen who dressed as a king. I want him to stop. What does this have to do with what I’m going to become or whether I’m doing poorly at school? He asks why I wrote that specific play. I say that I was inspired by a piece — a romantic piece of music — my friend Dominic plays on the piano; it is called
Remembrance.
I’m not sure, Dr Taylor, I say, but I think it may be by Chopin because Chopin is one of Dominic’s favourite composers although he also likes Schoenberg. I say: Dominic is overseas now, has been for almost two months. I received a letter from him in Vienna. Dr Taylor asks whether I’ll bring the letter for him to read. I lie and say I’ve thrown it away. Dr Taylor asks me where I got the story for the play from, the story on which the play was based. I say I made it up, though the idea was from two other stories, a Chinese myth that I read in
Children of the World
and one that Steven Almeida told me. Steven, I say, heard it in school in Angola before they came to South Africa because of the communists. He is Portuguese. Steven Almeida, I say, is my friend. Again, Dr Taylor asks what the play is about. I can no longer look him in the eyes. It was, I say, about a regent who ruled a kingdom in West Africa. The king ruled for forty years, I say.