Embrace (5 page)
Then, a disorderly mix of ashtrays cut from coloured sandstone; wooden heads and busts of bald indunas and bare-breasted girls; salad spoons; small and large spears.
Against the back wall were the cotton crocheted doilies sown in with beads; then necklaces, bracelets in copper and silver. Postal cable woven and plaited into bracelets. The postal cable bracelets, made from sources unknown and not enquired after, Bok said had been particularly popular of late. On a stretch of open white wall, above these, were the four trophies Dademan had left me in his will: the two Grant’s gazelle heads, the small dick-dick and the huge sable antelope with its eyes that followed you everywhere you went in the garage. These, Bok said, we could hang in my room once I returned from the school and went to Port Natal with Lena. For that was where I’d go, to the best Afrikaans school in Durban, not to Kuswag High where
Bernice would matriculate. Bernice had remained there, Bok told family and friends, only because a change midway through high school would have disrupted her studies.
Stacked in piles after the bracelets were watercolour and oil paintings from near the Mozambique border. Less abundant since Frelimo took over. Some of these were on paper and some on canvas, mostly of sunsets and dugout canoes with palm trees and villages. Unlike the paintings in the books Ma’am shows us or those I’ve seen in galleries while on choir tour, these in Bok’s garage have no names signed in the bottom corners.
The semi-precious stones: boxes full of tiger’s-eye, amethyst, malachite, jade and onyx. Running my fingers through the smooth stones, letting them slip across my palms, endlessly, daydreaming, thinking of nothing in particular, my eyes taking in the shadows of woodcuts, scents, the play of light on glinting varnish and matt wood, grey silhouettes against white walls.
Beneath the back shelves were the woven grass baskets and to the right of those the rolled-up grass mats and then rows of brown, ochre and black kaffir beer pots in various sizes and shapes.
On the shelves to the left, the cow-hide shields and assegais, many of which Bok commissioned from kraals in Zululand. Then, on the last section of wall to the left of the window, smaller narrower shelves were taken up by ostrich eggs from Oudtshoorn. While most of those were white, Bokkie had written in one of her letters that Bok had asked James to decorate a few eggs with black figures and sunsets, as demand for adorned eggs had suddenly increased.
In the middle of the floor was Boks huge work-desk with the phone, neat piles of paper and ledgers and a small two-door filing cabinet.
Bok had still been a game ranger when he got the curio idea from Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain, though the notion of doing curios as an own business was from after Uncle Michael started his fish and chips shop near the Amanzimtoti Drive-In. The curio idea had been a long time in the make, starting on a smaller scale while we were in Mkuzi. When Uncle Michael was still with the municipality, he and Aunt Siobhain, who was in medical supplies with Lever Brothers, were trying to save money to buy their own house in Toti. Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain had different schemes going, one of which was the curios, while the other was the ironing of surgical masks. Aunt Siobhain got the surgical mask contact through her work at Lever Brothers, and she passed on the idea and the know-how to Bokkie in the bush. Bokkie used two irons and an enamel jug of water from which she sprinkled. While she pressed the white tissues into their right shapes with one iron, the other stood with its face up to the stove’s gas flame. When a pile of the tissues had been pressed, I was allowed to help her cut-knot-and-fold-in the elastic bands into the masks. The elastic was there to go around the surgeons’ and nurses’ ears. While we cut-knot-and-folded-in, I usually wore one or more masks, often not only over my nose and mouth, but occasionally over my head, arms and forehead, so that I watched our labour only through slits. Once every two months or so, when our cousins came from the city, Aunt Siobhain collected the masks and Bokkie received five or six rand. That was the one scheme, and it kept Bokkie busy in Umfolozi while Bok took out trails and assisted with Save the White Rhino.
The other was the curios. Uncle Michael would give Bok cash with which Bok bought things mostly from the Zulu girls in the villages outside the reserves or from Dademan’s staff at Charters Creek. Jonas’s wife Nkosasaan and some rangers in Hluhluwe also spread the word. When Boy and Jonas returned from near Ulundi, where Nkosasaan lived, they sometimes brought along masks and other woodcuts. From Umfolozi the boys could go home more often then they could from Mkuzi, so the curio trading increased. Jonas himself carved crocodiles and hippos on weekends when he and Bok were back from trail. Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain then bought these andsold ata profit to the tourist shops along the Durban Beach front. On Friday afternoons we went to pick up my sisters from the bus, the black girls with clay pots, baskets and trinkets had at first tried to sell to Bokkie. But as the girls at the Hluhluwe gate often sold directly to tourists for higher prices, Bokkie never bought. Occasionally a small load of baskets or kaffirpots was dropped off at Mr Watts’s store. While Bokkie was ironing masks, she sent me up to Mpila to carry the goods back to the store room beside the carport. A camp guard came to tell her that something had arrived and I would be dispatched. Once, around the time of the hornbill invasion, a guard came to say eight pots were delivered at Mpila. I was sent up while she stayed bent over the ironing-board. She told me to make eight trips — not carry two at a time and to take Suz along.
The eight brown beer pots stood polished and shining in a row in the sun outside the store. On either side of the elegant necks were oval handles. The adorned openings were ridged with different patterns of leaves, beads, criss-crosses and antelope spoor. On the first trip back I balanced a pot on my head as was customary for the black girls. I imagined a blanket wound around my waist, swinging my hips, humming as I sashayed down the footpath. As far as I walked, hornbills followed me, flitting from branch to branch. ‘Go away,’ I shouted, from beneath the pot, ‘I’m not feeding you anymore. Go away.’ But they followed, squawking like the plastic toys of Molly Hancoxs baby. I managed fine with the pot on my head until Suz got in my way. I caught the pot by a handle as it was about to crash into the ground. The pot had not broken, but the handle came off in my hand. I swore and kicked Suz in the ribs. Fearing another hiding as I’d recently had for feeding the hornbills, I threw the handle into the long yellow grass beside the footpath. The next seven trips passed without incident and I packed the merchandise in the store room with the missing-handle pot at the very back, angled away from the door. Instead of going in to report the completed task I went to the sand-pit. With another kick Suz was banished to the side yard. I knew Bokkie wouldgo out to inspect the goods, but hoped that the longer I stayed away, the less likely she was to discover the damage. I played with my Dinky cars and started building a new guest camp beside the Black Umfolozi.
‘Kaaarl,’ I heard. She had found it. I ran to the store room, trying to look cheerful. She asked about the missing pot-handle and I said it had been like that when I fetched it.
‘Then why is it standing at the back, turned so that I cannot see?’ ‘It was the first one I brought down, so that’s why it’s in the back.’ ‘Well, I don’t have money to pay for broken things.’
She told me to get Suz, because we were going to Watts’s store. ‘Why is the dog locked in the side yard, anyway?’
‘I’m playing in the sand-pit.’
‘Get her out. Were going up to the store.’ Letting Suz out I muttered that she had me in deep trouble and that if I got another hiding she would live only to regret it. I went into the kitchen, where Bokkie had already turned off the stove and was placing both irons on the sink. Up we went, Bokkie striding ahead, Suz trotting in the middle and me behind.
At the store Mr Watts said he’d personally seen to the off-loading of eight clay pots, each with handles attached. Bokkie apologised for bothering and we headed back towards the footpath. She asked how I had broken the handle.
‘I didn’t break it off, Bokkie! I promise. Maybe it just fell off somewhere along the way.’
Our eyes skimmed the footpath all the way home and to the store room.
‘Did you leave the path, Karl?’
‘No, Bokkie, I walked straight home. I promise, Bokkie.’
Back up to the store. Nothing. Then, as we went down the path and the hornbills were going crazy in the trees around us, she reminded me of how I had lied about feeding the birds and how my lie had returned like Lena’s plastic boomerang to catch me out. For weeks she had been aghast at hornbill droppings and an occasional feather everywhere, inthe window frames, all over the veranda, in my bedroom. Discovering for the umpteenth time a ragged cut from the loaf of bread, she had at last asked, ‘Are you feeding the hornbills?’ I said no, I knew better than to feed any wild animal. Still I continued the feeding: lumps of porridge from Chaka and Suz’s bowls — a place the birds were too cowardly to venture near; pieces of bread, either stolen from the loaf in the kitchen or morsels snuck off my own plate while my mother wasn’t looking. I lured them into the house while she was in the kitchen, eventually feeding them in my bedroom. If they fought or screeched so that their sounds were sure to reach her, I’d hurriedly shoo them from the window.
‘Was that a hornbill I heard?’ Bokkie shouted from the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bokkie, it was just sitting here in the shade in my room when I came in to fetch my Mustang. It’s gone now.’ Soon the birds had become so confident they were flying into the open kitchen door, sitting on the bottom door, squeaking at Bokkie who chased them away. Soon I was waking in the mornings with the tick-tick-tick of their enormous bills against the glass pane of my bedroom windows. I feared a glass pane may shatter, a shard pierce me as I lay on my stretcher. This was a full-scale hornbill invasion. Soon it seemed my parents were content that the strange pattern of bird behaviour had developed spontaneously — probably because of the hornbills growing accustomed to me from the hours I spent in the bush with the dogs and in the front garden. Then, while I was sitting in my room one day — the huge birds by then eating from my hand — Bok, whom I didn’t know was in the house, snuck down the passage and, before I knew what had struck me amidst the fluttering of hornbills, laid into me with his palm until I was screaming and begging for him to stop.
I’ve told you a hundred times not to feed wild animals.’
‘I’m sorry, Bok,’ I hollered.
We fine tourists for feeding them and here you sit! The game ranger’s son, feeding them in your own bedroom!’ I looked at Bok with pleading eyes. ‘How long,’ he growled, ‘before you have the elandeating from your hand! Until they gore a tourist, or one of your pet baboons rips out an old lady’s throat!’
‘I’m sorry, Bok.’
‘And the lying? How many times did your mother ask you whether you were feeding the hornbills? How many times did you lie to her?’
‘Twice, Bok.’
‘Twice too much! You never lie to your mother or to me, do you understand me? Do you ever, ever hear Lena or Bernice lying to Bokkie or to me?’ Licking the salty snot and tears from my lip, rubbing my bum, I shook my head.
‘This pot cannot be sold without a handle,’ Bokkie said in front of me in the footpath. ‘That’s one rand gone, flushed down the toilet. One rand that I don’t have.’ By now I felt sorry for her but could not imagine recanting and again being exposed as a liar. Later, I thought, if she was safely back in the house, I’d go and fetch the handle, say I had found it somewhere on the side of the path where we hadn’t looked.
‘Your father earns a hundred and twenty rand a month,’ she spoke from ahead of me as we made our way down the path. A rand is worth ten loaves of bread. That’s one-third of our bread money for the month.’Trailing a few steps behind, I cast a glance into the grass patch by the wayside where I had thrown the handle. Every now and again she stopped, turned over a fragment of wood or a stone with her sandal. Eventually, close to the gate and seeming near tears, she gave up, ‘I’ll just have to make two hundred extra surgical masks.’
Instead of listening to the afternoon wireless serial with Bokkie, I returned with Suz to the grass along the footpath. I went through, inch by inch, trying to get Suz to help. There was no sign of the handle. I had cost my mother the equivalent of ten loaves of bread; had caused the labour equivalent of making two hundred surgical masks. In the long grass — now become sprawling fields where before I had seen only patches — every pebble, twig or piece of dung seemed for a second to be the handle, but was useless other than to fling in anger at thehornbills that now seemed set on tormenting me from the branches. The loathsome object was nowhere. I searched, eventually convincing myself that it must have been in a vast stretch of grass higher up, near the camp. I combed that. The handle had, I felt in despondent certainty, simply vanished. Maybe the plot of land where it had been flung was cursed by the Zulu witch doctors in the olden days. Maybe it was an old kraal or a burial ground and my tossing the handle onto the sacred ground had disturbed the ancestors.
The wireless was on and Bokkie was listening to
Die Geheim van Nantes.
The one iron rested against the gas flame and with the other — a wad of cloth around its handle — she was pressing the tissue of another surgical mask. I waited for a commercial break.
‘Bokkie,’ I said, on the verge of tears, ‘I’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone.’ She kept her face averted, pushing down hard on the tissue in a deliberate movement that made the ironing-board tremble on its thin wooden legs. She nodded her head, rigorously.
‘I’m sorry I lost it, Bokkie,’ I said.
‘What?’ She asked, turning to hear with her good ear.
‘I’m sorry I lost it, Bokkie,’ I repeated, almost whispering from the lump in my throat.
‘It’s nothing, Karl. It’s nothing. What is an extra ten hours breaking a back over an ironing-board when the back has been broken so many times it doesn’t feel any more? Just shows: better to do everything myself than entrust it to others. If I ask anyone to do anything in this house I’m just making extra work for myself. There you have it, Katariena Maria De Man born Liebenberg. This is your life. This is your cross to bear.’