Embrace (86 page)

Shortly before evening choir, Mathison had a prefect call Karl from where he had fallen asleep on his arms at his desk. Still half asleep, he arrived at Mathison’s office. The headache had returned. He stood in the same spot from where he had faced Mathison less than twelve hours before. Through a tired smile, Mathison asked Karl whether the idea of helping Lukas and Mr Walshe in the dairy might appeal to him. Karl answered that he had often been a little envious of Lukas, as he too enjoyed the farm.

‘We’d like it if from now till the end of the year you helped Lukas in the dairy.’

‘What about choir, Sir?’

‘I think it best if we agree that Mr Cilliers has called you for a voice test and that your voice is going.’

That was all. All he needed for Karl to know that he would no longer be singing. That he would be telling the others and his family that his voice was breaking.

‘You will tell everyone that Mr Cilliers called you for a voice test, right? Because of some odd sounds during choir. And that it was decided you couldn’t continue. You understand, right?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘This is a reasonable resolution, right?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Let your voice jump a few times in class, right? So you’ll help out with Lukas in the dairy, right? I’ll tell Lukas myself. You’re content with that Karl, right?’

‘Yes, Sir. And, Sir, my parents?’

, ‘They will never know. As long as you keep our pact. Remember, loose lips sink big ships. Of course you will have to leave the school, though, Karl. In December, of course, once you’ve finished Standard Six’ He paused, and nodded at Karl. ‘Because your voice is breaking, right?’

‘Will you not do anything to Mr Cilliers?’

‘Your conductor and I have an agreement that is really none of your business. Now leave and forget that this ever happened. Karl, one more thing: you will not speak to Mr Cilliers again. Never. Not on the premises of this school, do you understand? If I as much as see you near him or hear anyone say that you were seen in his company, I will rescind this agreement with immediate effect, right? Both you and he will be out of here at the drop of a hat. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Again Karl rode the seesaw of relief and loss. So that was it. This is okay. I’m safe. He’s safe. No one knows. And Dom is staying. Everything is the way it’s always been. Bok and Bokkie won’t ever know. Leaving Mathison’s office, suddenly unable to keep his eyes open and unperturbed at possibly being found by Uncle Charlie, he slouched upstairs to F Dorm. Shoes and all he crept between the covers. He slept, fully clothed, from five in the afternoon till six the next morning, when Uncle Charlie s call woke them for PT.

Again fully engaged in preparations for his Grade Eight exams, Dominic spent most of the next few weeks behind the music room’s door in virtual seclusion. Karl no longer went to sit and work at the table behind his friend s back and so the two boys saw little of each other after Ma’am’s apology. To Karl’s announcement that he was out of choir Dominic, Bennie and Mervyn responded with surprise and incredulity. Dominic expressed regret, for he understood that over the previous months Karl had developed a thorough-going enjoyment of the music, a change that had introduced an element hitherto absent from their relationship. At first Dominic suggested that he would go and speak to Cilliers, convince the man that any cracks in Karl’s voice were but temporary and not at all serious. For surely the change had come on all too suddenly to be permanent? In all likelihood the tear had been caused by nothing more than a cold. In a response that seemed to leave Dominic even more perplexed, Karl angrily prohibited him from doing any such thing. He said he was quite happy with the way things had turned out; that the dairy work and additional time for riding with Lukas was more appealing than Beethoven, ad nauseam. Lukas said that having Karl down at the dairy made the job even more pleasant and jokingly he told Dominic to accept that the two of them were now ahead on the road to manhood. ‘Quite frankly, Lukas, I don’t give a spare shit for where you are in the testosterone race.’ Then turning from Lukas and facing Karl: ‘And if we were still going overseas,’ Dominic asked, scowling at Karl’s implied denial of ever having enjoyed the music, ‘would you then have taken this so,’ he searched for a word, ‘so pathetically? Still be staying down here in the barn chewing straw with your new best friend in the whole world?’

‘Well, were not going overseas any longer. So, it’s a moot point, isn’t it, Dom? Maybe if we were I would have gone begging or something, but not now. Not for one concert and some silly record album. And there’s no reason to be sarcastic.’

Being as busy as he was in the next weeks, Dominic’s frustration offered little reason to concern Karl. The two saw each other only in class and during meals. As for the rest of his friends and the school; Karl thought he sensed from them and from the teachers a hint of awe, as if his altering voice indeed placed him in a league of maturity alongside Lukas. He drew particular pleasure from the fact that both he and Lukas were still a year younger than the Standard Seven prefects, none of whose voices were showing signs of change. On the phone Bok chuckled, delighted when Karl told him that his voice was going. Bokkie too had a smile in her voice when she said: ‘You’re turning into a young man now, Karl.’

From his classmates and the schoolboys generally, the initial antagonism towards Dominic soon waned. By the time Parents’ Weekend came around, even Bennie was back on speaking terms with the boy he now called the Young Ter. The discomfort and silence between Ma’am and Dominic abated and while Karl sensed that Dominic still kept a guard to his lips, surfaces at least returned, and to all intent and purposes seemed the way they’d always been. Karl himself, now spending choir rehearsal time with Lukas at the dairy or out on the farm, had not been to the fort or to the library since the night with Mathison. The idea of returning to the river frightened him. He prayed at night that Uncle Klaas and his companion had left.

The library was taboo. Jacques passed through there regularly and he didn’t want to see him — as much because of Mathison’s imperative as from shame at the prospect of having to face the man he now knew he had certainly betrayed. His reading of the encyclopaedias had been abandoned near the middle of D in September, anyway, and now that he was doing farm work there were other obligations and responsibilities that had to be met. He tried not to think about Jacques. To forget that the man had ever been more than his choir master. Once, in class, briefly, he caught himself daydreaming about Uncle Klaas. Why, he wondered, had he not told Mathison that night about the tramp, instead of about Jacques? Or about both? Had he spoken about Uncle Klaas and thought up a better story about the key instead of telling the truth, everything may have been different. Had his betrayal of Jacques after all not been accidental? He pushed these uncomfortable questions from his mind.

In the weeks leading to school’s break-up, he would see Jacques only twice and each time from a distance: once as he drove by the dairyin his Mazda, and once when Karl and Lukas were walking across the quad as the choirs spilt from rehearsal. Each time Karl changed direction, finding an excuse to look or head elsewhere. Did he ever see me, Karl wondered. What is he thinking? Does he hate me? When their classmates went to rehearsal — at times for three hours a day — Karl went with Lukas down the hill to the dairy. By keeping to his tasks on the farm and out of the library, he made certain never to cross paths with the conductor. Although Mathison was rarely outside of his office, Karl felt sure he was under surveillance. Eyes were on him, on the corridors, the dairy, the classroom, even when he and Lukas snuck off for a quick ride after milking. He allowed himself only rarely to think of Jacques and then mostly when one of his friends spoke of what was going on in choir. Always there was the fear that even his thoughts would show through on his face and that Mathison himself might read it or that Mathison might hear of it from whomever was Mathison’s eyes. Initially, after the first few rehearsals from which he was absent, he had burnt to ask the others how it had been, but he gritted his teeth, relying on information volunteered or overheard in class, in the dorms, on the corridors, in the showers. And when the others asked whether he missed choir, he pulled his nose up and said no, what a silly notion. The thought of sending Jacques a note of explanation and regret had been repressed, again in the face of Mathisons vigilance. Since the fatal night he had not allowed himself to believe that he missed either Jacques or Dominic, the mere thought of intimacy with either causing a heaviness in his legs. He undertook that once Dominic had completed his exam, he would resist from his friend any rekindling of physical closeness that was certain to occur after the other emerged finally from behind the piano. Those were chapters over, closed, written, ripped out and destroyed. They had to be. Yet, they rushed back. How given he now was, more than ever before, to retrospection. How scenes and phrases rushed back to embarrass, haunt, anger and shame like a guilty conscience. I have betrayed twice, he thought. First my friends. Then my lover. Who will I do in next? Could betrayal, like death and accidents, come in threes? And after that, what would come from that?

He read little outside of the Bible at night during quiet time. His struggle to concentrate was not new. But what struck him as different, what worried him, was the inability to concentrate even when reading fiction. For two or three days after the night with Mathison, he had tried the Dostoyevsky, sometimes at night with his torchlight, but to no avail. He once fell asleep with the book and torch in his hand, waking to find the batteries gone flat and his cheeks wet and hot. He abandoned
The Brothers Karamazov
a bare hundred pages into the text. Instead of trying another novel, he turned for solace to that other book in his locker. It must have been four months since he had read from the Bible and he now plunged in at Genesis, resolving to read it cover to cover, to resist the old ways of singling out favourite passages.

As usual he did his homework only to the extent that he would have something to show to Ma’am in class. Barely aware of the development, he found himself resenting his former mentor. He found it difficult to hold her gaze when she looked at him in dass or if they passed each other in the corridors. He was afraid of her, wondering if perhaps she and the other members of staff knew about the thing with Jacques. Caught in a terrible daydream in which the whole school and all the teachers jeered and laughed at him, he found his face aglow, as if he were coming down with fever. He worried about his diary being discovered, vowed to get rid of it, burn it as soon as he could. His passion for writing and drawing had fled. Within days of the events with Mathison he realised he could not complete the statue essay that Ma’am had said held the seeds of promise. Instead of continuing the struggle to complete the essay, he wrote, within an hour of prep, a story about Henry Francis Fynn witnessing ‘the vision of Chaka’s great hunt at the confluence of the two Umfolozi Rivers. Already as he placed it on the pile he knew the piece was an embarrassment. Not only was there nothing original to the story, but he had not used Ma’am’s Oxford Concise once to correct theabominable spelling. Ma’am’s remarks on the returned essay were sparse, the tone curt. He received an abysmal 14/20 and he knew he would receive a B for English. He feared his report. There was no way he was going to get a single A.
Your story seems
 — Ma’am wrote —
to be nothing more than another of your excellent ideas into which little or no effort has gone. More like something written at the beginning of the year,
she said, before he had known what metaphor or simile or precise language and idiom were. Certainly before he had gleaned the existence of a thing called a dictionary. Embarrassed, ashamed, angry at himself and her, he undertook to try harder in the final essay. But again he dropped the essay on the pile, feeling ashamed, hating himself for the weakness of his resolve. Art class, too, no longer held him spellbound. He soon experienced both writing and drawing as equally boring to all his other subjects. Art prac he presented in simple black and white. The use of colour and shading seemed to him like too much hard work, a waste of time. Ma’am did not broach the question of what was going on with him until shortly before Parents’ Weekend. Keeping him after class she asked whether there was anything he would like to discuss with her, something that may be bothering him.

‘Nothing, Ma’am, not at all.’

She asked about his lack of interest in Art and English. He answered that he was preoccupied with leaving at the end of the year and that he would make good for it with the next assignments. She prodded, saying she had heard his parents were not coming up for the weekend. Was that what was bothering him?

‘Not at all, Ma’am, I’m going to stay in for the weekend and work on Latin and maybe spend a little time with Lukas’s family and maybe a little with the Websters.’

She looked him in the eye and asked: ‘Karl, are you trying to punish me? By not working anymore? Are you somehow trying to tell me you’re angry about the way I spoke to Dominic?’

‘No, Ma’am.’ He emphasized the denial, ‘No, Ma’am. Why would I be angry about that?’

“You do realise that I said what I said only to help him, don’t you, Karl? He must realise what a tough life he faces once he leaves the safe and nurturing environment of this school. The same goes for all you boys. I expressed myself badly, but it was a message I believe the dass had to hear. What do you think?’

‘I agree, Ma’am. You were right and I think he should have apologised to you. I hope you will not think I’m choosing his side if I spend a little time with him over Parents’Weekend, Ma’am?’ And she had said that she held no grudge against Dominic, that she was as fond of him as she had ever been. ‘I know, Ma’am. I’ve never doubted that for a moment.’

‘Good. And, Karl, I wanted to ask you something else. While I was away, with... the funeral... I heard that you and Dominic introduced yourselves to Mr Loveday as Oscar and Johann Sebastian. Is that true?’