Embrace (51 page)

At the fort’s mouth I paused for a moment. I flung the blanket awkwardly into the dark cavern and at once turned on my heel and headed off. Inside the snoring had abruptly ceased. I stopped, listened. I could hear mutters and joints creaking. Again I started off. Had they found it? Did they know it was from me? I slunk back, cat foot over the blotches of dry leaves in the path. By now they had again settled down, the snoring again starting up.

‘Uncle Klaas,’ I whispered, urgently. ‘There’s a blanket for you and the other one.’

I heard them sit up. ‘Take it with you when you leave. Bye.’Then I ran off, down river and up across the rugby field. Not a light on anywhere in the school or the conductors’ chambers. Into the first music room. Closed the window behind me. I passed Jacques’s door. The music had been turned off. Already asleep. I wondered who he was. I’d have to ask him. All we do is It. We barely speak.

As we went down, my left arm interlocked with Lukas’s right. We gripped each others jerseys, went onto haunches and moved forward for our heads to shove through the two gaps on either side of Bennie s buttocks. My free hand went through Radys s legs, clutched the seam of his jersey and the elastic of his rugby shorts. In the second before we heaved and roared my wrist pressed against the soft mound of his penis and balls. Each time we went down — even before — I anticipated the brutalisation of my ears rubbed against Radys’s outer thigh at vasskop prop to my left, and, to my right, Bennie s on hooker. There was the grinding of cartilage, knuckles, the thudding of togs digging in, tearing at grass. Soil, chalk. Huffing, puffing and groaning; the curses, the thrusting: ‘Nou boys, nou manne!’ Which would drive me to giggles were it not for my silent hatred of the entire enterprise. Of this tangle of limbs and aggression, of this smell of sweat and farts and shit and repulsive male odours, the racket of elbows and knees, of soiled white shorts and bruised grass, I wanted no part. The longer a game progressed, the more automatic my participation, the less aware I became of my own whereabouts. Something in my brain shut down, gave me over, enabling me to while and will away both halves until the final whistle signified only
my
relief. I cared little whether we won or lost, or about what had appeared on the scoreboard. I wanted off the field, through the shower and out and away from that game. My game, my motive my heart — I told myself, is different from theirs even as I engage in theirs, even as I function within the rules of this savage sport. To my mind there was no escape: I was tall, well built and perceived as strong. I am a strong boy therefore I have no choice; I do not think therefore I am one of you. Dominic, skinny, spindly, was pardoned from play almost without question for he was a musical genius. Mervy — despite being almost as tall as me — was also excused with only rare questions, teases, remarks like sissy, naff, mof. But, I told myself, when these were flung at Mervy or Dominic they were playful, they did not hurt and were not intended to. When they came at me, they were like poison darts. I would not have that; I played to escape the words. Clearly, size alone did not demand participation. There were other codes and expectations, real and imagined, imposed and self-imposed. In my case there seemed to be no substitute which may have approximated even Dominic and Mervy’s half-baked and frowned-upon pardons. I might manage to escape a few weeks of play by dragging the swimming season out for as long as some gala could be found. But that I had to play to live was a fate I accepted. I knew I was there only to be seen to be there. The returns on my sacrifice were, I believed, infinite. Therefore I was a lock, with Lukas, who lived for the four months of the year we played this game to which he gave his all, and where he was the captain. If Lukas or any of the other thirteen noticed my disinterest — the fact that entire matches went by without me touching the ball — none said a thing. That I was there seemed good enough. Lukas did say, ‘Well played, Karl, good aggressive tackle,’ after the rare match in which I had for a five-minute spurt made any contribution. During practices and games, I was mostly quiet, thinking of something else, forcing my thoughts elsewhere. When things got rough and I found myself at the bottom of the heap of bodies struggling for the ball I tried to cover my head, hoping that I would not be injured or scarred by a perspex boot stud, develop cabbage ears or get a fist in my eye. When I did get the ball, I passed it to one of my team-mates at the first possible instant. Having the ball was having the eyes of theteam, opposition and spectators upon me. That was something I could not countenance on a rugby field and less and less anywhere else.

On the Cape tour we played a few friendly matches against our ‘host schools. When Jacques attended, which more often than not he did, I became self-conscious in the way I did when Bok or Bokkie attended when I first played at Kuswag. Back then I still enjoyed the game, had excitedly elected to play. But something had since changed. Whatever excited me at ten had long since turned to resentment. Whenever Jacques came to watch, I played like hell, knowing his eyes were on me. When we left the field I felt his gaze, cast him a glance, saw the pride there. But instead of being pleased by the way he looked at me, I felt disappointed, wanted instead that he should know — even as I declined to show — how I loathed the spectacle. I wanted him to say that it was a game for barbarians and hooligans. Instead he glowed, reminding me again of Bok, back from hunting along the Zambezi, putting an arm around me and patting me on the back after a game. At first my father’s delight had been an inspiration for playing, but with time that reason seemed to have become inverted.

We played against Upington High and even though we lost, we — and I — had played well. After the pep talk and post-match prayer thanking God for letting us play a brave game, Lukas grinned at me and said he’d never seen me play with such determination.

Dominic and I stayed with the headmaster and his wife. The headmaster had come to watch the game and afterwards he and Jacques spoke while I, seated in the car with my legs outside, removed my togs. Over the car radio I heard that there were now full-scale riots in Soweto. Black children were burning down their schools. While the news entered the cabin, I took off my togs and socks — which I sniffed at as always — and rubbed wool from between my toes and studied the way the nylon fabric had discoloured my toenails and the area around them, swollen from the sweat of an hour inside the togs. I have no recollection of what did or might have passed through my mind when I heard the radio bulletin. I might have thought of Radys and Bennie’s host mother a week or so earlier when the kids had surrounded her car. Of what the Websters may have said the evening we stayed with them in Saxonwold I have no memory at all. I do remember Jacques coming over with the headmaster and winking, saying I had played well, and that he’d see me the following morning at the bus when we departed for Oudtshoorn. And I remember going with him to Paternoster, staying in the opera singer’s home in False Bay, going up Table Mountain with Dom, Cape Town City Hall. And then, driving back from Cape Town to the Berg, through the Orange Free State: from the front of the bus where she sat beside Jacques, Ma’am called me.

‘Sit for a moment,’ she smiled, making room beside her and Jacques. He winked at me.

‘What do you see, out there?’

‘How do you mean, Ma’am?’

‘This landscape, this sky. What do you see?’

The odd question and my being called to the front of the bus to sit beside them did nothing to help me understand what I was expected to say. ‘You mean, the yellow grass and the flatness, Ma’am?’ She laughed and shook her head, asked where I thought I saw anything flat? She told me to take a minute and look carefully at what was unfolding outside the bus windows. Nervous at my proximity to the two of them and wondering rather about how they had come to call me, I tried to grasp what she wanted from my answer. My cheeks were aglow. The yellow veld, undulating in the afternoon sun, was not flat. Gullies, hills, dams, clumps of dull green trees, here and there a white eucalyptus, empty red fields, an occasional farmhouse or huts dotted the landscape. The sky was an exceptional blue and here and there fragments of suspended white clouds, all at exactly the same height, cast shadows on the yellow, brown and red earth. Ahead of us the tarred road cut a deadly straight track into thedistance, disappearing into hills that rolled on into a growing blue range.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Oh, come on, Karl. I’ve just been telling Mr Cilliers that you’re a born artist! He said this was the ugliest part of the country and I said you — of anyone in this bus — would see the beauty! Whose work is this landscape?’ I looked out again, desperate to give the correct answer. Did she mean God? No, Ma’am had never indicated any interest or belief in God. Suddenly my hand flew to my mouth. The cliffs, the clouds! Yes, the dryness, the way the reds and browns and yellows flowed into each other!

‘O’Keeffe, Ma’am? Georgia O’Keeffe?’

A victorious smile spread over Ma’am’s face when she looked at Jacques and then back at me. ‘And . . . is it yellow and flat. Ugly?’ she asked triumphantly. From beside her he smiled, staring from the window.

‘No, Ma’am. It is exquisite. It took me a moment because I hadn’t understood your question.’

‘Can you ever again see the Free State as flat and yellow?’

‘No, Ma’am. Imagine if O’Keeffe could ever see this. What she’d do with it?’

‘She’s probably a bit too old now, and I hear she doesn’t travel much outside of New Mexico. Anyway, what about you, Mr Cilliers?’ she asked. ‘Would you be able to call it exquisite?’

‘It might take me a while, too,’ he laughed. Ma’am thanked me and said I could return to my seat. I told the others about our discussion and Bennie said he hated the south-eastern Free State. That Ficksburg where he was born was good for nothing other than cherries. And also that it wasn’t too far from Maseru in Lesotho where one was allowed to gamble and watch blue movies. He said it was a region of perpetual drought. That they’d stand on their veranda looking out towards Lesotho and see all the rain was falling over kaffir country while the white country stayed dry. Dominic told Bennie there was a lesson inthat and Bennie snarled that yes, the lesson was that Satan looked after his own in the mountain kingdom. Lukas told them to shut up.

At dusk, close to Bennie’s home town, we began to look out for his mothers car parked on the roadside. She had arranged to say hello to him when the bus passed by. At last we saw the green Beetle and Bennie dismounted with Ma’am and Mr Cilliers. ‘Come,’ Lukas said. ‘Let’s go say hello so we can get some of whatever’s in that parcel.’We piled out to say hello to Mrs Oberholzer. The moment the bus rewed itself back onto the road, we had Bennie’s box open. Inside were large packets of dried fruit, a litre of Coke, a bottle of peanut butter and a tin of Illovo Syrup. While we chomped on the fruit — saying we’d be farting like pigs in a few minutes — I watched the sun from behind us turn the plains and hollows and the distant Maluties and the Drakensberg to a deep purple, then orange, then black. It was remarkable. How had I ever thought this part of the country boring or plain? Bennie didn’t know where the Maluties ended and the Drakensberg began, said he thought they were sort of one. I undertook to look at a map the moment I got back to school.

The rugby season over and I, physically unscathed by the game and free till the following May, had from an unexpected source indeed been graced with the blessing of a scar. With the tiny one on my forehead almost faded, the new one had come, I told myself, at the perfect moment. Beneath my right kneecap. A sickle-moon lying on its back, this was the mark that could substitute for the lack of the like from the rugby field. New, pink — the stitches removed only two weeks before — it was a bright crease emphasising the kneecap while I stood, then stretching flat, snug and shiny when the leg was bent. Now aware that my injury had not been particularly serious, I retained gratification from the wound being thought grave enough to warrant the stares of Seniors and Juniors as they passed by me on the veranda. For one week only the knee was bandaged; the attention and my overstated limp a source of tremendous pleasure. Only the other four knew that I was overdoing it when I told Jacques that I couldn’t possibly stand during choir, that I had to sit on a chair; when I told Uncle Charlie I couldn’t do PT even though I was back in the saddle; when I told Ma’am that I’d have to have my leg resting on a chair in class for at least three weeks. There was a sense of disappointment when the bandages were removed and the scar turned out to be less impressive than I had been hoping. Only eight stitches. Will you ride again, everyone asked. I glowed in shrugging that of course I would, nothing would stop me from riding, even if there was water on the knee as the doctors feared. The question of whether I would ride again reminded me of one asked to surfers after they’d had close shaves or been bitten by sharks off the Natal coast: will you ever surf again? Of course they’d surf again, even if it meant sitting on the stumps where their hips used to be.

Why I liked this little scar I did not quite know, though on the most obvious level it was that it had been inflicted by a horse. On our way back from Bushman Paintings, Whiskey — with Alex Snyman on his back and briefly in front of Rufus on a canter — had kicked up. I felt the hoof like a rock through the denim against my knee. Still on the canter, I leant forward, feeling my fingers and the fabric sink into a clammy dent below the kneecap. I brought Rufus to a standstill by the roadside, hollering for the rest to wait. I slid off the horse’s back and as I landed my right knee gave way beneath me. I couldn’t get the denim’s leg up and had to remove my belt and drop my pants. By the time the group was around me, the damage was exposed and my eyes brimmed with tears. The kneecap — a strange pink and white bone like a raw hamburger patty — was half sticking out. I did not wish to cry, but did, shocked at the sight more than from feeling any pain. Mr Walshe dismounted and told me to stay seated in the grass. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I asked whether my walking would too be impaired. Would I lose the kneecap? He told me to look away and, with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t movement that felt like hell, slipped the kneecap back into place, leaving a gaping and bloodymouth below the knee. Under Lukas’s supervision, the others returned to school from where Lukas was to have a vehicle sent to fetch me. Mr Walshe stayed and alleviated my concern about a permanent limp. He said I would be fine and showed me scars on his own body — among them where an ostrich had kicked him and trampled on his neck, almost killing him. I told him about Lossie in Mkuzi, how tame the bird had been, that he died after being bitten, probably by a green mamba.

When the bakkie returned, Lukas was sitting in the front beside the driver. I was loaded in and Lukas and Mr Walshe cantered behind us, out of the dust range, as the vehicle meandered its way back to school.