Embrace (65 page)

‘We’ll see, my boy, we haven’t worked it out yet. I may be in the Eastern Transvaal buying stock.’

‘Okay, Bok, thanks for phoning.’

‘Bye, Karl.’

‘Bye, Bok.’

‘Hello, Karl!’

‘Hi, Bernie, how are you?’

‘I’m fine, but, as you’ve heard, everyone’s saddened by what happened to Ma’am. Lena says it was announced in assembly at Port Natal. And it was on TV Lena says Miss Hope is going up to the funeral. Are you people singing at the funeral?’

‘Ja, I told Bok and Bokkie.’

‘Look out for Miss Hope, she’ll be with Ma’am. Maybe you could go and introduce yourself , because she’ll be teaching you English when you come to Port Natal next year!

‘I’m not coming to Port Natal next year.’

‘Anyway. Go and introduce yourself if there’s an opportune moment.’
‘Okay. Are you still going to Tech, next year?’

No, I’ve applied to SAA. Bokkie said she wrote to you. I’m trying to lose weight for the interview.’

‘That’s nice, then you’ll go overseas often.’

‘Yes, later on, hut one starts out on domestic flights. Are you excited yet about Europe?’
r’ ‘I can’t wait. Were doing rehearsals for Africa!’

‘I’m going to share aflat with Stephanie at Overport next year. Listen, I must go,
it’s getting expensive. Here’s Lena, but don’t speak for too long, okay?’

‘Bye, Bernie.’

‘Bye, Karl, and go and say hello to Miss Hope, okay?’

‘I will, bye.’

‘Hello, you!’

‘Hi, Lena, how are you?’

‘Fine thanks and you?’

‘Fine. How’s school.’

‘Okay. I won all six of my events and broke the hundred metres hurdles and shot-put records, did Bok tell you?’

‘Yes, that’s great. So you broke two records?’

‘Yes, I’m rather proud of it.’

‘So am I. It’s wonderful. Did you get trophies again?’

‘Yes, just one, the Alice Brown trophy for the hurdles. It was donated by the coffee creamer people. Imagine winning the Alice Brown trophy.’

‘I’ll see it in a few weeks. Were you the victrix laudorum?’

‘No, idiot, only Standards Nine and Ten qualify for that. Next year. When are you coming?’

‘It’s from Kruger Day till the eighteenth. Is it the same as yours?’
“No, we break up now, so we’ll already be back at school by the time you come.’
‘That’s a pity.’

‘How’s Dominic?’

Fine. He’s practising for his Grade Eight, so I don’t see him much.’

‘Well, say hello to them!

‘I will, and they said I must say hello as well. How’s Alette?’

‘Fine. Also busy practising for some piano exam.’

‘Grade Five.’

‘Did they tell you about the thing with Aunt Barbara and the cheque?’

‘No, what?’

‘Well, big family drama: while Aunt Lena was doing the hooks for Uncle Joe’s business they found a cheque missing for two hundred rand!

‘Yes?’

‘Anyway, it turns out Aunt Barbara had stolen a cheque and forged Uncle Joe’s signature and then sent Kaspaas to cash it at Volkskas!

‘How did they find out?’

‘The teller at Volkskas remembered that it was a white boy in a Volkies uniform and then they just put two and two together. But Uncle Joe didn’t call in the police or anything. Just basically let Aunt Barbara know that they knew. Anyway, I must go!
‘Will you tell Alette I say hello?’

Ja. They’re moving to Durban, at the end of the year!

‘She wrote and said they might. I’ll be home for my birthday, maybe she can come over for that.’

‘No she won’t! I know what you’re getting!’

‘Tell me!’

No! It’s a surprise. Listen, I must go. Bokkie is having silent fits about the phone bill. See you in a few weeks!

‘Okay. Bye, Lena.’

‘Karl!’

‘Ja?’

‘Remember to go and say hello to Miss Hope, she’ll be your English teacher next year at Port Natal!

‘I’m staying here next year.’

‘Lena?’

‘Bye, Karl!

‘Bye . . .’

In areas the Umfolozi lawn did not reach, right beside the walls of the house and beneath the Marula tree in the front garden, ant-lions burrowed conical craters in the powdery sand. If one very gently dropped a grain or small stone into the crater, the ant-lion, mistaking the movement for the approach of prey, would emerge from its hiding place and if fast enough you could flick out the little devil with a stick. Or if you blew, very gently, in the middle of the crater, sending the sand flying out in a neat fountain onto the surface, you stood a good chance of blowing its cover and exposing him down there, bewildered and hurriedly digging deeper. Ant-lions — real lions hiding out in caves — constituted favourite game in my private reserve contained between the rectangular slates of two empty apple-boxes. Ant-lions were low-maintenance, like impala (ants), and seemed to take care of themselves. Dung-beetles — the elephants of the reserve — on the other hand, needed to be kept happy with twice weekly supplies of donkey dung, which I collected from down at the stables. If the dung was dry, I invariably found rhino or eland droppings close to the house, somewhere along the road to Emoyeni Hill. To make the dung-beetles’ lives more interesting, one side of the game reserve had a steep incline, and it was there where they had to go to find their dung. Up there on the cliffs they rolled their symmetrical balls and then tried, with varying degrees of success, to control the descent into the plains where impala roamed the low veld. Chameleons (dinosaurs), leaf bugs (rhino) and stick insects (crocodile), I knew, changed colour. These were caught and held in an old shoebox where Lena had once kept silk-worms she fed from a huge stock of mulberry leaves in the fridge. Because of their propensity to escape, the dinosaurs, rhino and crocodile were not let loose into the game reserve unless I was driving around.

From the school stationery brought to Umfolozi by my sisters, I took glossy red, blue and yellow paper and placed a selection of creatures on the bright surfaces to monitor their responses. Unlike in their natural habitats where they could go brown, green, mottled autumn and beige, my experiments in the shoebox proved that they could not adapt to the paper colours I set up for them as challenges. The stick insects refused to alter from the brown state in which I had first caught them; the leaf bugs died within hours — still the green they had been on the leaves. And, instead of turning blue, red, yellow, the chameleons went a ghostly off-white, their big eyes looking sad and troubled, even as they hissed and opened their yellow mouths in a display of anger and displeasure. Bok said I was going to kill them. He said these creatures could only do so much to adapt and then they die. Or they bite or sting. Forget it, he said, a chameleon — even if it tried — cannot ever turn blue unless you do something artificial, like paint it, which means you’re closing its skin’s pores, and its predators would see it a mile off, and it would die. Still, I tried, believing that if I slowly moved a slip of blue under them, so that perhaps they didn’t notice, I could trick the chameleons into turning blue, my favourite colour. Eventually two chameleons did indeed die and responding to my disappointment Bolckie shouted: ‘If your father told you once, he told you a hundred times: even a chameleon cannot turn blue. It will stand on its head and sing the national anthem through its arsehole before it turns blue.’ And I went outside and buried the chameleons in the canna beds that Bokkie had planted to line the yard fence. I prayed for the souls of the chameleons and for forgiveness that I had murdered God’s innocent creations. Then, extending the burial into a grand ritual my mother came to witness wearing the one church hat she owned and had not worn since Oljorro, I let my captives go free: caterpillars, stick insects, leaf bugs, frogs, lizards, ladybirds, shongololos, earthworms, butterflies, dung-beetles: into flowers, branches, onto rocks, amongst leaves, singing, as I lifted them from the box: ‘All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful the Lord God made them all.’ When

Bok came back from trail he told me he was proud of me, not only for liberating the creatures, but also for having learnt a wonderful lesson from my own experience.

11 October 1975

Bloemfontein

Dear Alette,

Last night was the inauguration of the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl. We left there this morning and are now in Bloemfontein. Tomorrow night we’re giving a concert at the University of the Orange Free State. Our hosts are Mr and Mrs Schoonwinkel. Mr Schoonwinkel has an electronics company in town.

The ceremonies at the Language Monument were broadcast live on TV and while we sang I wondered whether you were watching and what you thought. The Monument’s monolith rises like a concrete finger pointing to God from near the top of Paarl Mountain. Day b fore yesterday, we went to the open-air amphitheatre below the Monument for a dress rehearsal. It was the first time that the Mass choir was officially conducted by the Senior Choir’s conductor, Mr Cilliers, and there was a lot of to-do about us being on TV for the first time and so on.

After rehearsal all 120 of us visited the graceful monolith that starts from a broad base and gets narrower closer to the top. A hearty Afrikaans lady gave us a conducted tour of the whole thing and explained what each part of the architecture symbolises. The tall monoliths made up of three sections symbolise the brightness of Western Civilisation with its languages and cultures. Then there are three concrete mounds, like flattened beehive huts, which represent the Cape Coloureds from Africa and their language and culture. The monoliths and the mounds are connected by a bridge where the two connect, just like the Afrikaans language is the bridge between Africa and Western Civilisation. There’s a little wall as well symbolising the Malayan influence on Afrikaans, as they are neither from here nor there. There’s a bubblingfountain celebrating the two languages of Afrikaans and English, our country’s two If e-giving cultures which make up one nation. On the programme it says our nation stands‘powerfully brfore its future task as, in the hurtling bramble-bush of time, it is aware of a Higher Presence’.

Our guide herself said she had spent her life researching and fighting for the rightful place of the Afrikaans language in a world under attack by English. She grew up near Dal Josafat where the First Afrikaans Language Movement got started in the olden days. Because of unity Dr W.J.B. Slater of the 1820 British Settlers spoke on behalf of English-speaking South Africans.

Performing in the amphitheatre was wonderful. The programme opened with prayers and the singing of Psalm 146. Cobus Rossouw recited ‘Ek hou van ’n man and Babs Laker ‘The Dance of the Rain’. Adam Small did ‘Nkosi Sikelel I Afrika’ and Nic de Jager did ‘The Fallen Zulu Induna’.

The Windhoek Youth Choir was there, all the way from South-West Africa and there were also Cape Coloureds and Malayans like the Primrose Choir. There was a spectacular air show by the SA Airforce’s Harvards and Silver Falcons and a salvo of military cannons to celebrate the power of Afrikaans. After us there were other choirs and someone read the same speech that Eitemal did in 1949 at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Then, at night, eight torches which had been carried from all over South Africa arrived at the amphitheatre and were received by Prime Minister Vorster.

When we sang the audience was enthusiastic and the fact that we could feel the heat of spray and TV lights on us made it even more special. We sang the Boerneef cycle. Whenever we sing T)ie Berggans Het ‘n Veer Laat Val’, I think of you. ‘Rooi Disa’ is also lovely. Have you ever seen a disa? Then, because it was October and because of his astounding voice, Almeida garnered for us a standing ovation with John Pescod’s ‘Oktobermaand’. As it was live TV and we weren’t allowed to do encores with the rest of the programme to follow, we left the stage while the audience was still on its feet.

I’m becoming sleepy,
so
I’m off to bed now. I’ll post this tomorrow when Mrs Schoonwinkel takes us into town to see
Jaws.
Have you seen it yet? Grrrr . . .

See you soon for our short break. We Durban boys are coming home by train.

All my love

Karl

xxxxxxxxxx

10 October 1975

Wellington

As usual I am not tired tonight, so I’m writing in my diary. Dominic, our hostess and her children are asleep and I’m sitting at the diningroom table. Mrs Heese with whom were living is a widow with four daughters. She is a schoolteacher and loves reading, so I am surrounded by hundreds of books. I wish I lived in a house like this. Tonight was the inauguration of the Afrikaanse Taal Monument. The Monument’s monolith rises like a concrete finger pointing to God in heaven from the top of Paarl Mountain. Yesterday, we went to ‘ the open-air theatre which is right below the monument for dress rehearsal. It was the first time that we were conducted publicly by Cilliers. Cilliers is an all-too-strict choir master and I’m glad I’ll be out of the school before I have to sing in his choir. I don’t think he’s quite as bad as Roelofse, whom I am sure still cannot stand me. All around us TV people were busy putting up lights, testing cameras and talking on walkie-talkies, so everybody in choir was looking around and Mr Cilliers was getting angry. I hadid loelaneedidedid upop soostitaneedidineegog rigoghtit inee fickroneetit ofick Hardidineegog. Eviseryok fickewow mimineeutitesoos, he fickloelicockykedid mime bokehineedid mimyok rigoghtit ear aneedid popineecochedid tithe sooskykinee ofick mimyok neeecockyk. I titriedid neeotit tito soosquirmim bokecocausoose tithatit wowouloeldid havise gogotit-titenin mime ineetito titroubokloele wowitith Cociloelloeliersoos. Mr Cilliers suddenly became enraged at our lack of concentration and the noise the TV people were making and shouted at the organisers to get the TV people to shut up or else he’d remove the choir from the stage. Atit loeleasoostit tithatit outitbokursoostit gogotit Hardidineegog tito loeleavise mimyok bokurneeineegog ear aneedid necockyk aloeloneee.