Embrace (57 page)

Juffrou Sang left and Alette stayed so I could show her our record albums. She skimmed through, Jim Reeves, Mantovani, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, the Strauss waltzes, Heintjie, the Gunter Calmen Choir, Patsy Cline, Min Shaw, Kobus and Hannelie. Then her eyes caught the two flat cartons of opera;
La Boheme
and
La Traviata.
Joan Sutherland. We’d never listened to these two sets of records and I had no idea how they’d come to be in our house. Alette told me the story of Violetta. A woman who never thought she could be loved, but fell in love with Alfred. The story sounded sad, intriguing, and I now knew that opera had a story. She asked me to play one of the records from the
La Traviata
collection. As the orchestral music drifted into our lounge Alette threw back her head and smiled. She loved it. I said I hated it. It sounded forced, pretentious and difficult. Why not just read the story or have music with a nice tune. She said I should listen attentively. This — classical music — I would hear at the concert of the boys’ choir. Now was the time to begin developing my ear. Shelistened with her eyes closed, said,
La Traviata
was by Verdi, a great Italian composer. I grew bored, wished she would leave or that we could go to the bird sanctuary. I wanted songs with a clear tune, that you listened to while you sang along or read a book. It was absurd, sitting down, doing nothing but listening like a meerkat on an anthill.

Bokkie returned to the lounge. She told Alette she’d given the concert some thought and that she would like to go and take the girls along. She said she was wondering whether Alette knew how much the tickets would cost. The tickets were two rand, Alette said. Bokkie nodded and left. Alette invited me to come over to their house whenever I wanted. She would let me listen to their collection of classical records: concerts recorded in places called Carnegie Hall and Covent Garden, arias (one new word in a series of new concepts and ideas) by world-famous singers like Maria Callas, Ivan Rebroff, Renata Tebaldi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf — no, she laughed at my question, forget the silly Mimi Coertze — musicians and composers like Bach, Stravinsky, Paderewski, Rachmaninov, Beethoven.

At dinner, Bokkie told me and the girls she would take money for the concert from housekeeping. She and Mrs Willemse were planning to bake koek-sisters that we could take and sell around the neighbourhood. Lena said she wasn’t sure she felt like sitting through a whole concert and I said fine, if you want to stay common for the rest of your life, why don’t you just go and stay at Glenn and Thea’s while were in town. Lena answered that she could see I was already under the spell of the culture vultures and thinking myself a snob. Bokkie told us to be quiet: ‘Were all going together, or none of us will go.’ Bokkie and Mrs Willemse baked. We kids walked around the neighbourhood selling half a dozen at fifteen cents, sometimes charging twenty at the bigger, newer homes and pocketing the five cents we had overcharged.

Dressed in our Sunday best — though neither Bokkie nor the girlswore hats — we waited in the lounge for Juffrou Sang and Alette to collect us.

All the way to Durban, Juffrou Sang spoke about the unique choral experience we had in store; about the exclusive music school in the Berg where boys sang, played different instruments, farmed and did horse-riding. While still teaching in Port Elizabeth Juffrou Sang had succeeded in getting one boy into the school: any South African music teacher’s dream. Of every hundred applicants only one was successful. And so, already long before we took our seats in the spectacular white hall with its delicate cornices and boxes in which sat the mayor and other VIPs, I was acutely aware that I was about to hear in unison the greatest boys’ voices in the country. My chest swelled at knowing that my musical talent was of a calibre — I had not as yet dreamt myself ever being part of such company — that Juffrou Sang had found me and my family worthy of bringing to witness a group in possession of uniform tone, voice, compass, and a mastery of range that placed it in the same league as the famous Vienna Boys.

I had seen the inside of the City Hall once before when all Kuswag’s Standard Twos had been taken to a special daytime performance of the Durban Symphony Orchestra. The event had been put on as an educational concert for Durban’s primary schools. Wearing the uniforms of some private schools like Durban Girls College and Marist Brothers were a handful of black and Indian children, their dark skins and black hair visible a mile off amongst the blonds, browns, reds, auburns. I can today not recall what music the orchestra played, but whatever it was did not succeed in keeping Robbie, Felix and me from being bored to death. From where we were up on the second balcony, Robbie and I sat spitting down onto the rows of children below, then hurriedly pulling away from the balustrade and feigning attention. Getting out of the hall into the sun once the concert was over brought huge relief and at home I confessed to my parents and sisters that symphony music was not for me.

I now sat between Alette and Bernice, glancing down at theprogramme that Juffrou Sang had purchased for us. Alette whispered small details about the various pieces on the programme: ‘In Memorium’, by Antonio Vivaldi; ‘Psalm 23’, arranged by Dirkie De Villiers (‘one of South Africa’s best composers’); ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ by Cherubini; ‘In the Merry Month of May’, madrigal, traditional, English; ‘The Virgin Martyrs’, Samuel Barber; ‘Let My People Go’, spiritual, traditional, negro (‘a lighter piece, powerful rhythm, you’ll like this one’); ‘Ceremony of Carols’, Britten; Copland’s ‘An Immorality’; ‘Schlafen mein Prinzen’, lullaby, Brahms (‘wonderful soprano descant’); ‘Laudate Dominum’, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; ‘Three Mottets’, Maurice Durufle (‘I’ll play these for you at home, Mum has them on a record of the Edinburgh Ensemble’); ‘Nature and Love’ by Tchaikovsky (‘one of Russia’s greatest and most dramatic composers’); ‘Die Berggans’, ‘Die Duiwel en die Slypsteen’, ‘Rooi Disa’, by Boerneef (‘the best-known Afrikaans choir songs’); ‘Sanctus’, by Saint-Saens from his
Requiem.
The scope of Alette’s commentary was as impressive as it was daunting and I sat spellbound at her knowledge. Together we read the short biography beneath the black and white photograph of the gaunt-faced conductor with the dark hair with his hands raised in front of him. I took the booklet from her hand and looked over the photographs that made up its centre. Boys with long-haired sheep in Wales; with black riding caps on horses galloping; with the Eiffel Tower behind them in Paris; snorkelling in the Seychelles; milking cows on the farm in the Berg.

The applause began as the line of boys in their blue waistcoats and white frilly bibs walked onto stage. In neat rows they mounted t-he benches and although there must have been forty of them they seemed no more than a tiny gathering of birds on the huge stage beneath the enormous organ pipes. Then out came the man in his black suit and the applause thundered again as he crossed the stage and in front of the boys took a bow. They sang standing with their hands behind their backs, not like me at eisteddfods with my arms by my side. Most of the music was in German and Latin. Nothingsounded familiar to me; in vain I waited for them to sing something I knew. After songs where we were meant to clap I joined the audience in thundering approval, yet found little as interesting as Juffrou Sang had led us to believe it would be. Within half an hour I was disillusioned. The music was heavy and boring. Nothing I liked. I had never heard a record of such choir music — we had only the Gunter Calmen Choir on record — and these songs were all in incomprehensible languages, without tunes or movement. The whole thing seemed stifling. Singing a few solos of light songs at the eisteddfod was fun. A few songs with the Kuswag choir too, or in the school operetta. That I thrived on. But this programme was awful. The voices were, I could tell, brilliant, but they sang nothing I liked. Yes, that was the problem, I thought, I could hear how good the choir was, and when a soloist sang I could scarcely believe a boy’s voice capable of such sound or skill; but the songs themselves, like the long motionless performance, bored me. During break I ventured a cautious opinion on the songs. Alette giggled and said I should not call them songs. They were
pieces.

The encores applause died down and we shuffled out of the City Hall with the rest of the audience, all beaming, smiling. Many people were obviously acquainted with each other. Juffrou Sang looked at me with wide, excited eyes. So much had been invested in it: Bokkie’s housekeeping, Juffrou Sang’s expectations, walking around the neighbourhood selling koek-sisters. Before Juffrou Sang had even asked I said it was wonderful. What a privilege to be in such a school. And an honour, added Juffrou Sang. I did not say that it was not the music that attracted me, but rather the photographs on the programme. Of boys on horseback; touring the world. That it was on a farm. She asked whether I would like to attend the school. I said yes, but that the voices were too good for me. She said if that were my attitude I would never get in. If I believed I could, I would. She would help me. It is a private school, she said, and it costs a lot of money. Bokkie said she doubted we’d be able to afford it, but she’d speak to Bok when he got back from the Zambezi. It would be an enormous honour for Kuswag if I were selected, Juffrou Sang said, and everyone in the car concurred. Within seconds I had forgotten that I didn’t want to sing, that I hated what for me was the tunelessness of classical music, which was all, like Verdi’s opera, monotonous and incomprehensible.

I told Mary-Alice and Betty that we’d been to the concert. They said that they had a cousin at the school, he was older than them. His name was Frans Harding. They had heard from Frans that the boys sang for hours and that they even went to school on Saturdays. That you had to be bright or else you’d fail with all the touring and what not. I countered with the pictures of the farm and the horses. ‘Don’t be fooled by the tours and the horses, Karl,’ Mary-Alice said. ‘Frans says it’s singing, singing till after the cows come home.’ At this, I decided I did not want to go to the Berg. Kuswag and Toti were good enough for me. Here I had all my friends, Voortrekkers with Robbie and Felix, Judy the sausage dog, the bird sanctuary, my family. Here I needn’t fear the boarding-school goodbyes I remembered from Mkuzi and Umfolozi. No, I was not going to audition. I’d stay here. Robbie and Felix said they were glad I wasn’t leaving.

Swaargenoeg’s farmhouse, brilliant white with a corrugated iron roof, perched on an incline above a series of small gullies and lower hills. Upon completion of their agriculture degrees at Stellenbosch University, Lukas s two older brothers had each been given a neighbouring farm. Swaargenoeg, Lukas said, was going to be his. His bedroom was adorned with posters of the pop group Bread,
Scope
centrefolds, horses on show, mounted trophies of impala and kudu, and two racks of shotguns.

The other eight of us slept on bunk beds in a rondavel outside the main house on the winter lawn, yellowed and prickly from nights of frost.

Instead of sleeping before the concert, Lukas and I went to the stables. Twenty-two stalls stood behind a neatly tended garden of blue agapanthus, red-hot pokers and aloes. Inside: Arabians, American saddlers and English thoroughbreds. I now saw in real life Harlequin, the horse of which Lukas kept the photo in his Bible along with one of his girlfriend and another of the whole Van Rensburg family. The stables made up the centre of the farm’s stud and my eyes would not leave the magnificent animals. Even the horses used for rounding up sheep were in the same glorious condition I’d seen in Bok’s
Horseman’s Bible
and Uncle Joe’s
Farmer’s Weeklys.
Holidays in Klerksdorp, I had cut photographs of horses from the
Farmer’s Weekly
and
Landbrn Weekblai
and imagined owning my own farm, organising my own stables and sprawling paddocks with cross-pole fencing.

The Van Rensburgs’ saddle room represented the sort of shipshape organisation I would have wanted for my own: whitewashed walls, floor shiny with a fresh coat of green enamel paint, hooks for bridles, thongs and saddles neatly lined and the whole place smelling of dubbin, leather and horse. Saddling the horses, I contemplated living in — owning — a place like this. Being given a farm for graduation. The very idea was mind-boggling. I thought of the Brats, and that their lives — however undeserving — would continue to be something like this and better once they inherited the Mackenzie Millions.

Winter-yellow veld, only here and there dotted by sparse patches of shrubbery and lone thorn trees, spread like an endless moving kaross in the breeze. We cantered across open plains, through gullies and walked down eroded ravines from where soil had been washed, carving an otherworldly architecture into which echoed only the gentle puff of hooves, our horses’ snorting and solitary birds. Into the quiet, Lukas spoke of how he had come to know every inch of the farm since childhood: this is where vultures tore a lamb to shreds while the ewe tried to fight them off; those are the jackal burrows; that dolomite ridge in the distance is the favourite camping site for him and his Voortrekker team; there — where the aloes dangle down over the krans — his father shot a leopard two years ago, maybe the last one in the region — when we get home look at the skin on the floor in the foyer — pity to have had to kill it but it was taking a sheep every other day; that’s where the makwedini pass through after being circumcised; this is where an early Xhosa kraal stood, you can still see the foundations and all the doors facing east to protect them from evil spirits; from here to that dust road — can you see it about four kilometres away — the veld burnt last year, that’s why it’s greener than the camps we’ve just come through; this gully becomes a raging river whenever the spruit floods, every seven years, like clockwork. Lukas could not understand my and Dominic’s dream of leaving South Africa and travelling all over the world; he loved this landscape like his own life.