Embrace (68 page)

‘Why don’t you go tell the others to stop terrorising you? Why come and speak to me?’

‘Because you’re the worst. I don’t mind the others, but it hurts most when you do it.’

I felt uncomfortable and wanted him to stop.

Hastily I promised never to tease him again. Less because I felt guilty, than as an incentive for him to desist from the intimacy, the moment of familiarity I felt he was trying to create.

Two people in one afternoon asking me to refrain from repeating something: one the schools biggest bully boy, who looked like he was shouldering people out of his way, even while he stood still. Who had been at me, out to shame and humiliate and infuriate me at every corner. The other the weediest, drippiest, creature in my class, who whined, and studied himself half to death. Got nineties for everything, whose grades I knew I could eclipse if I worked a tenth of the time he did.

Both wishes would meet my agreement. Reyneke because I merely needed him to lay off me. He, like myself, was leaving in two months’ time. He because he was at the end of Standard Seven, I because of my hatred for the place. Two months of peace, at least, I thought. And then Bruin. I rarely teased Bruin again. Not in Malawi a few months later, nor when I indeed did return to the Berg again the following January. I tried to ignore him, mostly. Tolerate him. For each time there was an opportunity — like later when he shat in his blazer pocket — I would see, before my mind’s eye, again this afternoon’s pleading, the desperation if not of trying to get me on his side then at least of trying to neutralise me. Today, facing the text, I again see the beginnings of a wasps’ nest in his ear where he had not properly washed out the klei — something I would have told anyone else of. What I did not know consciously then — though perhaps by not teasing him again it had registered somewhere — was that I never again wanted to hear in another’s voice that desperation to please — ever. What I did not wish to recognise, then, and for years to come, were the frightening echoes of my own.

Days later the Natal boys caught the train home for a short break. It was no more than a six-hour trip from Estcourt. I was in a compartment with Harding, and for some reason had ended up sitting on the top bunk beside him. Somewhere along the journey, while my nose was in whatever book I was reading, he leant over to me and whispered: ‘I think I’m dying.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m going stiff’

I looked back into my book. I ignored his palm crawling up my jean-clad thigh. He began rubbing my crotch. I slowly lowered the book, found his eyes. I shook my head. He withdrew his hand. He sat up. Smiled, and red-faced stared down and out from the window. Neither Harding nor Reyneke ever cast me another glance in the last months they remained in the Berg.

We looked at each others and in Aunt Siobhain’s little mirror to see what it looked like when you do a poef and it opens like a brown snake coming out of its hole and then James put the Coke bottle there and you can smell it and it slipped into the Coke bottle and down the glass like chocolate with nuts and then we didn’t know what to do so we took the bottle with poef downstairs but Aunt Siobhain was in the passage so we went back up to the second storey with the poef bottle and we didn’t want it because it stinks, so we tied it to a string and I went outside and in the passage Aunt Siobhain asked me why I looked as though were up to something and I said no, I just wanted to go and sit in the garden for a while and then James let the poef bottle out of the window by the string and I took it and untied it and hid it in the bottle-brush that comes from Australia till he came down then we buried it beneath the rubber tree — the rubber tree comes from Brazil — and it was our secret.

For the first time since March I remained after what had now become a two-hour-long evening practice. Behind him the maids had begun laying the teachers’ dinner tables, hurriedly putting down plates, knives, forks, water jugs. Three hours a day we now faced him from the benches. These two plus one before lunch. By the time we left for Europe the one hour before lunch would probably be up to two. I myself had become engrossed in the music. I could feel myself comfortably go on for another two hours a day, not at all concerned by the regimen that Bennie bemoaned. Not the Mass alone was bringing delight; even well-known pieces we’d sung in previous years of which I was now learning the second soprano. Exploring the music, the nuances of my voice, seeing how our score supplemented that of the firsts and the alto voices, mastering and understanding each transition that initially seemed impossible or once seemed boring or had been taken for granted. Music was now an adventure into genius for me, its discoveries an enigmatic plain of pleasure. That I was singing what had been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven more than a century earlier suddenly mattered to me. I listened with enthusiasm when Dominic and Mervyn spoke about why or if the Mass in D was superior to Bach’s B Minor Mass. I paused outside classrooms and music rooms to soak up the music streaming from clarinets, oboes, violins, cellos, flutes. Nichols playing a rondeau on piano by an unknown fifteenth-century composer. Mervy’s bow stroking out a sonata by Biber. Lukas struggling with a Corelli that Mervy had performed publicly by the age of nine. I tried to memorise details from our music theory lessons, to copy as little as possible from Dominic, to forget in class that the knowledge was being imparted by Marabous beak and that Bennie, Lukas and I were her ‘most idle students ever’.

Amidst the excitement of mastering the worlds most complex mass and of beginning my own private love affair with music, I missed Jacques. When my attention lapsed in a moment he was occupied with the other voices, trepidation came to me. A fear of sorts that I might never again be alone with him. A fear that could not be stilled even by my new-found passion for identifying notes, harmony, patterns, instrumental accompaniment, voice. Almost without knowing it or why, I was now again collecting sheet music, putting awaymusic stands, straightening benches. Deep in conversation with the accompanist, he had none the less noticed me tarry. The bell rang for supper. Still I hovered. At last the accompanist left, and he came closer to me, smiling, asking from across the room how I was.

‘I’m fine, and you?’ I answered, dropping the Sir I had planned to use as a jab. Standing right in front of me, he said he was fine too, though thoroughly preoccupied with the Mass and the overseas tour arrangements. Only nine weeks away.

‘Are you happy with the Agnus Dei?’

‘It’s sounding magnificent. Absolutely. Even though I’m hard on you boys. What do you think?’

‘It’s great and were enjoying it. Long hours and all.’

He believed Durban City Hall would be a formidable performance. A dress rehearsal for Europe. And Europe! The continent was bound to be impressed with the Mass extracts and the school had just received a telephonic enquiry from the Amsterdam Symphony Choir as to whether or not we may want to repeat there.

Is there something different to the way he speaks or looks at me? So clinically enthusiastic. So professional. As if I were just another choirboy. Weeks I had not been with him — and I now wanted him. As secret as my thing with Dominic had to be, at least we could talk, all day, and when he was not rehearsing we could try and be together as frequently as we dared. But with Jacques, I was feeling I was left out in the dark, waiting, wondering when he would call. When he had completed his monologue on what a phenomenon we’d be in Europe, I, trying to sound playful, obscuring my insecurities inside our joke, said softly: ‘Haven’t been starfishing for quite a while.’

He threw his head back and laughed. Looked around and in a tone instantly serious, said: ‘It’s dangerous now. And I’m busy as hell, Karl. You should be studying for tests, shouldn’t you?’

‘I want to come tonight,’ I said, now begging with my eyes.

He frowned. Shook his head as he looked at me: ‘It’s too dangerous, Karl.’

I wanted to ask why. What had happened that had positioned him at such a distance from me? On the other side of a chasm? But I did not have the courage to engage further with a mind that seemed made up. I felt weak, fearful, as though I had no voice in this relationship. Not even to talk, let alone insist on being allowed into his bed. He was again the conductor.

, ‘I’ll let you know, soon, I promise,’ he tried to reassure. For an instant I believed him.

‘Oookay,’ I smiled, hiding my disappointment by pretending to blow up my mouth, act fat-lipped and merely frustrated. The holidays ‘ were looming. Then, I wondered, what would happen afterwards? Practice, practice, practice. His preoccupation with the tour and the Durban concert was not going to disappear. It was bound to get worse. What if I didn’t get to see him alone before December? And what if not even in London, or Amsterdam?

‘It’s a promise. I’ll see you soon,’ he repeated.

I turned to leave the hall.

I began to wonder about him. He’d told me he was from Sabie, about his parents and his brother. But that, and what it said on our programmes of his career as a conductor, was about all I knew of him. What subjects did he do at school? Had he been to the army after university? Did he have a girlfriend? And had he ever had another boy, like me? Had he ever done it to Almeida, as someone had said last year? Would I ask him that? All the questions I never asked in the nights we’d been together. How I now wished we had spoken more. I wished I had asked his favourite colours, his favourite food, his favourite music. Then again, no! Who cared about talking when we could rather do everything we’d done since March. No, I told myself, I don’t want to converse with him; I only want to touch him.

Afternoons I still went to the library. He occasionally walked by and then hope would fill the air, only to dissipate as he winked and still did not stop for more than a minute to chat and never to say that I should follow him. I was becoming angry. Thought of writing hima letter. Began writing, abandoned the idea when nothing looked right on paper and the whole idea of a letter seemed childish and sentimental. Like something from an Abba song. No, I thought, making love to the music he conducted would become my substitute for touching him or communicating in any form. I could act tragic, like Callas scorned by Onassis who married Jackie Kennedy. Turn life into a play. But the substitute act failed to relieve. It became almost unbearable to watch the movement of his hands in front of us.

And doubt arrived.

I wondered whether he’d found someone else. Was another against his back at night? Was it the way I kissed or did I stink or something? During breaks I drifted to the parking lot, checking whether his car was there. What had happened; what had I done wrong? What had I done to deserve his distance, why had I been cast aside and who, who in the school had taken my place? I began to reconstruct our every shared moment and brief conversation of the past nine months, little pockets of words that could confirm that his current aloofness was indeed merely a temporary preoccupation, like Dominic’s with his Grade Eight, and not a rejection. After midnight I glided through the dormitories to check whether all the boys were in their beds. I snuck to his room and listened at the door. I could not bring myself to leave the school and visit Uncle Klaas and the Silent One at the fort. That place I knew would bring no respite before Jacques had taken me back. I mulled over and chewed on how his withdrawal had begun, with some unknown fear he said he had, how it had now shifted to an excuse about the Prime Minister’s concert and the overseas tour. Excuses, each and every one. In choir, while we practised a sequence of Negro spirituals, he got angry because we were moving around while singing. He shouted at us to stand still, to not rock like kaffirs around a camp fire. And who, I slowly began to ask, am I to think that I was unique! Who else might have keys to that door? Who else could be doing anything,
anything,
in this place at night? Suddenly I wanted him to get angry. I imagined he might call me, would need meto cairn him down. I began to think I must do something, to provoke bim, so that he’d be compelled to beat me: in that way he’d have to take notice of me. I could test him. He could touch me again.

A range of beautiful hills; not mountains! The short winding pass had been tarred, up there where the Peugeot — roofracked and piled high — skidded in the mud as we left. Not mountains. Hills! With its dust road and scattering of huts and patches of crops. Kilted sentinels, aloe candelabra blazed against the green foliage and dark of crags and rocks, breaking the skyline where hills met blue sky. Piccanins and ntombis, cupped hands, calling sweeeeets, sweeeets, getting waves and smiles in return. Already five when we left there for Umfolozi. Donkeys with lopsided ears loitering at the roadside, cattle in the road’s centre facing the Alcamino, unconcerned, till we smacked their flanks through open windows and they grudgingly made way for the van to pass. Lena seven. Bernice nine. Less than a decade before and these had been huge mountains shaping a deep dry valley. The Lebombos. Highest point on my horizon. The beginning and end of a world I remembered as my first. Before Tanzania, which had happened before but had left no memories other than those relayed. Beyond the Lebombos lay Mkuzi village in the shadow of Ghost Mountain, the sisal plantations, giants’ sheets the cotton fields hung out in the sun, and then the dust road leading up to the tarmac along which Bokkie and I drove to collect the girls from boarding school in Hluhluwe once every two weeks.

And this is green. Greener and denser than it had ever been in my memory. The only vivid and permanent greens I remembered were the lime of fever trees and the deep shiny bottle green of magic guarri around the house. And! The Forest of Figs. That was always green specked with the red and yellow of fruit, and the shafts of sunlightdappling the sandy floor where the blackseed grass stayed green. Other than that I remembered only browns, yellow, ochre, the mustard of dry
Themeda triandra
and the white sand and stone of the roads we drove, the tracks I walked.

Like the mountains and the valley through which we were driving, the game reserve gate, where Bok stopped for us to have a pee before entering, was smaller and less imposing than I remembered. To my one side Stars of Mkuzi —
adenium
 — still in full white and crimson bloom and on my other, Bok, who said, yes, they should have finished flowering when the rains came; rarely see them this late, as we shook ourselves, dropped legs of shorts, and returned to the Alcamino which he had left idling. And then we drove in through Mkuzi Gate, Bok and I, back there for the first time in so many years. How will we see animals in the long grass? Can it be, Bok, can it be that so much time has passed and that in all this time we have never been back? Yet, it also felt as though I had never left. As if parts of me had been there all along; parts that now came alive. Something had happened in the chemistry of my brain, was sending signals into the skin, the hair of forearms and the nape of my neck, into the eyes. No, we’d never been back. Not after Umfolozi. Not after St Lucia. Never since being in Amanzimtoti. But how I’d been there! This could not, I imagine, be merely the function of nostalgia: surely the other senses are activated during childhood in ways similar to the conditioning of the head, the ears, the tongue, the nose?

The Alcamino’s pick-up was chock a block with the curios we had been purchasing from kraals around the Matubatuba plantations and north, close to the Josini dam. Packed neatly into boxes. Each article wrapped in
Natal Mercury
or
Daily News.
Most of the stock on the back consisted of the new Zulu ethnic pipes which would make or break my father’s business. If these didn’t make him rich — or at least provide the capital for him to buy en masse for the export market — he was going into insurance: ‘It’s time to play big,’ he said. ‘Play ball with big money and the place to do that is the insurance industry.’Without fail, his good looks, his charm and certitude overrode in my mind Bokkie’s eternal worries, her silent irritation when to our visitors he gave away as gifts curios that had cost him — us — dearly. ‘He’ll give away the shirt on his back, and the clothes off our bodies,’ she muttered. ‘He still doesn’t know he’s not the fat cat he was in Tanganyika.’ And so I was letting concern go, had decided to enjoy this break, even as I anticipated that within these two days he would tell me that I would not be returning to the Berg the following year. That there was no money. I am not going to think about that now, I told myself, I have no need to immerse myself in that other life of mine when I’m here. In paradise. Anyway, I would find a way to go back. I would not leave Jacques and Dominic. The past ten months had been the happiest of my time at the school. And Jacques would come around. He would, I knew, let go the groundless fear that someone may find out. And here: Bok and I had two days together before he took me back to the Berg.

This, then, was the gift they were giving me for my fourteenth birthday. Nothing I could have imagined could have felt as right as this. Who cared about the silly European tour! About a bad school report!

Two days earlier I had taken
The Brothers Karamazov
to the bird sanctuary. The place no longer held the attraction it once had. It looked smaller and was better tended: less like the bush, and more like the neighbourhood park it indeed was. The area around the top of the lake, where Lena and I once fished in secret, was gone. Cleared and transformed into lawn with benches and walkways. There were still the ducks, the peacocks, the rabbits and the tortoises. Before the birds and the tortoises seemed to provide for me some link to the very bush where I now was with Bok. But in the bird sanctuary I was seeing the creatures only as unhappy prisoners: sad, in poor condition, trapped between fences. I returned home without having read more than ten pages of the novel. I changed into my Speedo and for a whilescooped leaves off the surface of the pool, watching the shadows dance on the bottom. I fetched my drawing pad and sat sketching, in between working on Dominic’s orange poem. At hearing the postman open our golfball postbox I ran to meet him. Tearing open the envelope I knew contained the dreaded report, I saw at once the letter the school had included. Heart racing — what could it be — fear dissolved into anger and disappointment as my brain took it in:

10 October 1976

Dear Parents and Boys,

Due to pressure front Europe it seems likely that the International Choir’s planned December tour will be cancelled. It has been brought to our attention that a series of protests and demonstrations are in the planning at a number of the venues where the boys are scheduled to perform. While we continue in dialogue with our European hosts in an attempt to resolve certain questions, it is of paramount importance that the safety of our boys be placed first. We trust that you will understand and support the school’s governing body in whatever decision is ultimately taken.

Sincerely,

Royce Mathison,

Headmaster and Chairman of the Board.

My heart sank. This was not possible. How on earth, how, how, how could this be happening? What had I ever, ever done to deserve this? Bernice: behind the closed door of her room, studying for exams. Bok: in Durban, business. Bokkie: working in the church garden. Lena: at school. I went to the phone. Would have done anything to speak to Jacques, hear from him whether it was true. I called Dominic, in Saxonwold. He was out and I left a message with Prudence, the maid, asking that he call me, urgently. An hour later he called: yes, he hadn’t yet received his report or the letter but Mathison had called his father last night and told them the whole story. It doesn’t sound good. The tour was in all probability off and Dr Webster said it was almost certainly because of the black children being shot in Soweto and other locations all over the country. What does that have to do with our tour, I asked. How can Europe host a bunch of all-white children while hundreds of all-black children are being shot and held in prisons, Dom answered. Dr Webster said that South Africa may as well wipe international contact off its stomach until we learnt to respect black life. He and Mrs Webster were ready to emigrate. Perhaps go to Canada or Australia, but Dominic said he couldn’t see that happening. Just another idle threat his father had been making ever since Dominic could remember. I wanted to scream at Dominic that I wanted to go overseas, that I didn’t care about black kids who sabotage their schools being shot or stupid rich Dr Webster wanting to go and live in Timbuktu! I asked how piano was going. And so we let overseas go, spoke about other things.

And this, this — scent of dust road and grass through open windows, the silver-green leaves of marulas in pink-white bud, the kaffir trees’ leafless stems, grey bark and red feathers against the blue sky — felt as though I was home. If I emigrate, I will come here, I smiled contentedly to myself. I will emigrate or immigrate home, whichever is the apt term. I was ready to forgive Bok everything. I had not thought of the Berg much since I’d heard we were coming. The blow of the European tour possibly cancelled, had lighted, lifted. When Bok suggested I come on his stock-buying trip I had at first cringed but said nothing of wanting rather to stay home with Bokkie and the girls. My anger at Bok had not subsided, and his invitation to accompany him to Zululand was clearly a sort of pay-off for the selling of my trophies. Then, perhaps sensing my reluctance, they had given me the incentive: your birthday gift a trip to Mkuzi and Mfolozi. Just you and Bok. Two days. Two nights. Yes, who cares if the overseas trip goes down the drain, now!

A yellow-billed hornbill sat almost in the middle of the road, digging with its beak into a heap of dry rhino dung. Bok slowly edged around the bird. I leant: across him to get a better view from the driver s window. The beady yellow eyes rolled at us, head lilting fromside to side, curious, tame, its legs as if covered in long johns hidden in the dung. Bok, his breath smoky in my nose, asked if I could remember the Latin without
Roberts.
Only the
nasutus
part, I answered, which I remember from nasal. Check it in
Roberts.
No. It’s the grey hornbill:
Tockus nasutus.
This one is
flavirostris.

‘Remember the hiding you gave me in Umfolozi, for feeding the hornbills?’ I asked, again lifting myself over him.

‘And for lying about it.’ Our laughter, startling the bird.

‘I was scared of you. That’s why I lied.’

‘Didn’t stop you from feeding the birds. And don’t think you’re too old to stop being scared of me.’

‘I’m almost as tall as you, Bok. Soon I’ll be able to give you a taai klap.’

‘Don’t get too big for your boots, my boy,’ lightly punching my buttock, and we again laughed as I rubbed the spot in mock agony.

Then we saw who remembered: distribution. I checked it in
Roberts.
Status. Both right. Habitat. Both right. Habits. Food. Breeding. Female lays eggs inside hole in tree stump, male sits on eggs and seals himself in, leaving only slit for feeding from female. Male on eggs for twenty-four days — I said twenty-one — before they hatch, he stays another twenty to twenty-two days after eggs start hatching and then he leaves and I said
he
reseals the entrance but Bok said no the chicks reseal from the inside and then male and female together feed the chicks. We checked it in
Roberts.
Bok was right: chicks seal themselves back in. ‘This drawing has more pink beneath the throat than it should.’ I said, looking from the page at the bird on the dung. It was still eyeing us. Back in the book my eyes glimpsed the lilac-breasted roller. Troupand, in Afrikaans, a name I had never understood. We sat for ten minutes, taking in the hornbill. We drove on, slowly, ten kilometres an hour, our eyes scanning the insides of the bush, the veld. Again it was as if I’d never been away. A giraffe’s head above the thorn trees! And quickly we saw them all around us, both sides of the road. Fifteen over a stretch oftwo hundred square metres. He turned off the ignition. We sat in silence. Watched their lips move, strained to hear the sounds of their crunching.

‘Eleven,’ he said softly, almost to himself, but also for me to hear, ‘we had only eleven giraffe when we were here.’ His eyes were slit against the glare on his glasses. Memory, thought, concentration, awe, tenderness, nostalgia, in the lines around his eyes reaching to the spread of grey in his temples. It was in this moment, there, in this way — even with the gold-rimmed glasses that came after the rinkhals spat in his eyes, with the salt and pepper of his temples where before it was dark brown like chocolate — that I remembered him and us together: in his Land Rover or on Vonk’s back, his one hand holding the reins, the other arm pressing my back to his stomach. Nothing that had since happened mattered there. Other than being there, being able to see where we spent those years which were the happiest 1 time I’d had on earth. The beautiful genesis of memory.

At HQ we went in to speak to the camp warden about allowing us to visit Mbanyana. When he and Bok saw each other it was like brothers embracing after a decade-long separation. Hugo Reynolds. He remembers Bok and Dademan from when he was at Fanies Island and Dademan at Charters. They shake hands again and laugh and reminisce about the old times. When Reynolds hears we re going up to Umfolozi tomorrow he grins: ‘Do you know who’s chief warden at Mpila?’

‘No idea,’ Bok answers.

‘Willy Hancox,’ and Bok says, well, Willy’s done well for such a lousy shot and they speak about the culling of ’67, or ’66, no, no it was ’67. Bok tells Mr Reynolds about his business. They talk through the old guard: Ian Player now running the Wilderness Leadership School. Mumdeman at Midmar but retiring and probably remarrying! James White, cancer at only forty-four. Helena, his wife, also leaving the Board now. No, our reed house, Mbanyana, has been demolished.

But he’d love to take us out. Bok says no, we can go alone. Mr Reynolds asks Bok whether he’s sure, because there are quite a few leopard now, and lion, that come and go.

‘Hell, Hugo. I still know this bush like the back of my hand.’