Embrace (91 page)

Again the car is hulled in silence. Bokkie says they’re leaving the Dutch Reformed Church. ‘For too long we’ve been slaves to Afrikaner narrowness and hypocrisy! Dressing up and sitting there like dummies. Were going to the Presbyterian Church the moment we set roots in Durban.’ She says that he and Lena will have to share a room in the Durban flat. The flat has only two bedrooms and costs three hundred and fifty a month.

And I will go back, he tells himself, to Dr Taylor, yes, yes, Dr Taylor will give me direction. Look up his number in the phonebook, won’t be in the Toti book, call inquiries 1003, Dr Taylor. A new programme of action. POA. I’ll get the money, somehow, ask Aunt Lena. Or Ouma De Man! Yes, she adores me and she’s marrying money. Surely she can get money from Mr Shaw? But that might take a bit of time. He’ll get Mr Shaw to like him. In the meantime there’s Aunt Lena.

Are the Mackenzies coming for Christmas?’

‘Did you know that Uncle Joe’s Matilda is in the other time?’ Bokkie asks from the front seat.

‘What?’

‘Four months.’ Silence again as Bok takes the off ramp and crosses the highway bridge. Karl’s eyes are on the dark stream of the highway below. Soon the bird sanctuary will be on their right.

‘Why didn’t she go to London to have an abortion?’ he asks.

A brief silence before Bokkie answers: ‘Why would she? She and that poor white family of hers can milk Joe Mackenzie for maintenance for the rest of their lives.’

‘What does Aunt Lena say?’

‘Cries a lot. The whole town knows, of course. But she still believes Uncle Joe will change. Begged the Lord to give her guidance about a week ago and that night she had a dream of Saul riding to Damascus on the donkey. Now she believes the Lord has spoken and told her to stay. So she’s staying, for God and those children. Phones here every two or three days in tears. Like she has for all these years.’

‘’n Jakkals is ’n jakkals,’ Bok says, flicking his cigarette butt from the window.

‘Won’t surprise me if she goes mad again. I know her when she’s like this. Starts getting visions of angels and Jesus on the cross. I tell you, before Matilda gives birth Lena will be in Tara again having shock treatments. It’s the only way to let her forget.’

As they slow down to turn into Bowen Street, Karl’s mind speeds. He is driven to make — before they turn in at that gate and park beneath that Natal mahogany — a chain of what he swears areunbreakable resolutions: henceforth I will be an honourable, disciplined and upright young man. No more boisterousness, no more things with other boys, no, it is all over, no thoughts of the mad gene, or any of this stuff. I will begin by no longer thinking of myself as a boy; boyhood will be left behind like a single unbroken dreadful memory. To make forgetting easier, I will no longer flounder around in the memories of the bush either, for letting go means severing all ties, definitively. It is all over and gone. With the photographs. I will be turning fifteen next year, he tells himself. It is a time for new beginnings. Taking the future into my own hands: eyes on nothing but the target. So yes, there may be high-school guys waiting for him at the gates as Lena had said she’d ensure, but he will eat their initial wrath with good cheer and then he’ll win them over: initially by doing everything they tell him, by not using his hands, by trying to use as few words as possible with s and t sounds, by not folding his legs at the knee, keeping his handwriting slanted and desisting from twirling the e’s. I’ll try to stop biting my nails for that only adds to the appearance of nervousness. I will exude confidence without giving lip to anyone. I will learn to laugh scornfully or to feign indifference. Indifference, indifference, indifference: my motto, my salvation. There is, he knows, the problem that everyone knows he can sing — and Ma’am said her sister will be a mentor for his writing. But that I will evade, yes, I will, he thinks, I will not go near Miss Hope, for to become the teacher’s pet or to let anyone know I want to be a writer will again undermine the entire programme of action. Just stop it, forget about being a writer, what a stupid idea anyway. Or do it in secret. Yes, writing can be done without anyone knowing. I can do it in secret. Practise with the weights again. I will simply stick to the story that my voice is breaking and after it indeed has, I will say there is no voice left. I will continue swimming, and after swimming season I will for the life of me play rugby. I won’t fake injury or illness as so often in the past: I’ll become a team player: loyal to the bitter end, not letting down the side. There will be cadets at school! Yes, the militarymarching will, as surely as my name is Karl De Man, teach me to walk without the swagger that Dominic said his mother called androgynous. And if anyone uses that word in my direction or simply in my presence or any of its synonyms or associative nouns, I’ll smile in mock amusement and then let it go, will not remember it beyond the moment of its articulation. And Dominic can write till he’s blue in the face; I won’t read a word of his evil. I’ll practise with my weights. I’ll be strong. I’ll have occasional fights, even if I can’t stand the thought. I will deliberately pick a fight, maybe with someone I suspect a hint weaker than myself. And I will control this tongue: no wisecracks, no slinging of verbal abuse at enemies, I will become friends with the roughest, strongest boys. Go to school movies with Alette. No, I must break up with Alette. To arrive there with an older girlfriend spells trouble. Lena’s right. Find another girlfriend, I’m good-looking, smart and charming. I’ll find one. I will be loved and admired. I will go to the army to serve this country and get the Pro Patria. Hopefully be injured. Not killed. Please not killed. Wounded and awarded the Honorus Crux for bravery. This country, each and every person who lives here, will be proud of me. I will become exactly what they all want me to be, and more! I will be their man, whatever it costs. But if I die, let me be killed by the enemy, and not in training at the hands of my own people. Then on to university to become a lawyer. With a beautiful wife and two children and I’ll buy a house maybe in Cape Town or Muizenberg and I’ll go to the beach with my children and my wife and I’ll be a success. I will be kind, generous and successful. I will take care of the woman I marry and the bright, beautiful children we beget. I will not end up like Uncle Joe. Or Bok. Uncle Klaas! Never. I will be powerful and wealthy. But in an honest, respectable way. No, I don’t want wealth, no, just respectability, to be part of the decent people, the bourgeoisie of this country. Not rich but not poor. And I will try to be quiet, to keep this loud mouth and laughter muted, to not speak, not speak about anything. If I want to keep a secret I’ll think it in Gogga — no — toomany others can understand that. I’ll find a hew secret language, create my own new alphabet. No! No secrets, I will have no secrets any more. Transparent as the skin of a gecko. What you see is what there is, that’s me. And I will succeed at everything I do. I will be a phenomenal success. I will be silent and no one will know or suspect anything about the other things I was or may have been or might have become. Only I can decide whether it will have occurred. If I don’t say a thing, it doesn’t exist. If I don’t tell the story, it never happened. What is the past other than the story we choose to tell! It’s in my hands. Everything.

Starting tomorrow! It will be the first day of the rest of his life. His new life. Life is remarkable, truly, re-mark-able, he mimics the word into syllables, feeling the tongue on his pallet, the lips close, then open into a new shape, lips touching on the b and the tongue’s tip coming to rest against the bottom teeth, its front surface rested against the pallet and top teeth, the mouth slightly open. A new Karl De Man! It is going to be fine, everything is going to be just fine. Perfectly, perfectly fine, as they drive through that gate and park beneath the mahogany, he can hear, already feel it! Like applause flowing over him, audience calls of Bravo! More! Massed voices in unison demanding: Encore! Encore! Encore! As he glides back onto stage, beaming, smiling, as if he were back, again poised to perform.

‘From the heart — may it return — to the heart.’

A boy at ten and a bit. The year before I leave my family. I am at the front door dressed in school uniform with my case in one hand after having placed in there my lunchbox and homework book and the jotter with the essay on what I want to do during the holidays. While I gaze from the door, my mother, in the conjugal bedroom, where she is brushing her thick brown hair, is probably frustrated beyond compare at now, again, finding missing what she is looking for in her closet. She possibly tells my dad — who is almost dressed and freshly shaven — that she has had enough, that she cannot take it anymore. When her voice growing angry reaches my ears, and as she slams the door of her closet and calls my name, I know at once what I have done wrong. Many, many years later, I am able to imagine my mother exasperated at a series of associations now activated at finding, again, something missing from her things and knowing for the umpteenth time that it has to have been her son. Yet, at that front door, I clasp the lost object tightly into my free hand. My father, who knows, responding to my mum and to internal echoes of outrage, fear, anger too long dormant in his own memory, glides down the passage towards me. He must be seething with rage, for over the years he must have become increasingly concerned at a series of words and images he suspects his boy of being or becoming. Having heard the commotion from the bedroom and dreading the approach of the father, I am about to unlatch the bottom door to make a hasty escape and catch up with my siblings who are already halfway down the drive. Coming close, my father does not speak, and I simply wait and watch. He stands in front of me motionless. In later years I will recall that I saw or understood or read from my fathers cold blue eyes only loathing, hatred, a raging calm ready to explode into hands around my throat, pressing in the place where the Adam’s apple would yet appear. My father may say that his anger then was nothing more than an expression of deep concern. Or he may say that no such thing occurred or that if it did he has no such recollection or it happened in a different way, in a different place. But now, still, I picture that father speaking softly, and, when I look down at my brown Bata school shoes, I hear my father telling me to look him in the eye like a man. Perhaps — in some phraseology or another — saying: ‘If you ever go into your mother’s things again,’ holding my gaze, ‘I will cut off your filafooi, do you hear me? If you want to be a little girl, I will turn you into a little girl. If you don’t want to be a little girl, then I’m warning you: if you ever even think of doing it again, or if I or your mother ever even suspect you of doing it again, or of you imagining yourself doing it again, I will kill you.’

Then, my father turns around and I hear his tread down the passage. Again, later I might imagine Bok and Bokkie glancing at each other as he re-enters the bedroom. In an attempt to save their son from what they suspect, know, the world may make of him and from feeling their own shame at being held responsible, they have decided that a good talking to this time — even more than a beating — can save them and the boy from himself.

Pausing at the front door, I can see the driveway clearly and coldly. I do not have tears in my eyes and I can see that my siblings have long since disappeared. I unlatch the door with my forefinger and may notice that my hand is trembling — particularly the three fingers clasping the loathsome object in my palm. I step out of the house. Then, again, using thumb and forefinger I latch the bottom door behind me and start down the driveway. In that instant I know what I am to do. I will go away. And not just away anywhere. I will take myself, by hook or by crook, to the place I have been told about, the place of the boys in the concert. Through my mind rush the photographs on that programme: trips overseas with the Eiffel Tower and London Bridge, hikes in the forest, swimming in rivers, and horses, horses in the mountains! Eland and zebra in a game compound. It doesn’t matter that Mary-Alice next door says it’s mostly singing and music. I suspect — know — that I do not have an extraordinarily good voice and that I can as of yet play only the recorder and that my sight reading is poor. But I have good rhythm, I can carry a tune, I can learn, like one can learn anything. I have resilience and imagination. That is all I’ve got, I might mutter or growl to myself: a will of iron and imagination. I will go to that place where there are others like me; others with imagination who know how fabulous, how filled with colour, sound, scent and texture the universe really is. A celebration of the senses. Out of this house. Away from them whom I believe despise me and whom I in this instant loathe with the heat of white- hot metal. I have not noticed how the trembling of fear has transfigured surreptitiously to the shaking of hatred. I hate and from hatred I draw strength. I will not, cannot cry. I will leave them, I tell myself, will not love them again, ever. And I feel stronger than I can remember from before.

But this is only a child’s rage boiling over in passions of a moment. Who knows how soon all will be forgotten? How soon I will swell with pride at her beauty when she comes to parents’ evenings at school and the other fathers fawn over her. How soon I will play cricket on the lawn with him who teaches me to bowl overhand. How soon I will again giggle as one of them bends over the bed to rub Vicks onto my chest and over my back when I have a cold and a blocked nose, how, in delight, I will squirm when tickled. Certainly, from familiar intimacies repeated, I will love them as much as anything, anything that was ever dreamt or ever existed in the staggering memory of the world.

I can imagine myself in so many ways, my entire life lies ahead. Where do I find an erudition that will most succinctly capture what I become or do in the gorgeous future? And, is knowing
those
 — the signifies bouncing within the space and on the contours of the historyfrom within which I today narrate — perhaps of endlessly greater import or interest than the telling only just begun: an agnostic, a braggart, a charmer, a driver, an enemy, a friend, a gardener, a home-owner, an image, a joker, a keeper of hornbills, a lover, a mountaineer, a nobody, an opportunist, a perpetrator, a queer, a radical, a soldier, a traitor, an upstart, a voyeur, a womaniser, a xenophobe, a yuppie, a zealot? This same space from within which I will complete a poem two decades in the writing: Beloved Dearest, contemplate the sphere in your hands: fleshy, sweet, Southern Asia, sour, Spain, fragrance, wax, planet, bright, oranje, red, yellow, tree, citrus, mandarin, navel, pick, ship, auranja, warm, California, fruit, white, mould, river, leaves, colonialism, naranj, nooi, indentations, skins, tangerine, mampoer, Portugal, segments, health, russet, vomit, fish, sugary, lemon, seeds, transparent, juice, narang, veins, succulent, medicinal, round, naranga, blood, Boland, Beauty, hybrid. But when I whisper through passages of a life’s infinite inventory each time I take up language’s pen, I say none and all of these in a single word: orange. How much is lost, Dearest, in the brutal reduction to concept? Pay heed then as do I, to the elisions of the story and hear me do battle with veracity as it goes to war in the struggle through and against the scars of the tongue. Then, from care-filled recollection and fine weighing of the fruit touching the boniness and skin of your fingers, may you try arid grant the writ’s inability to say anything but duplicitous and shabby half-truth. Of happiness, shame, envy, pleasure, guilt, hatred, resentment, and of love.

None, some, all of these pulse in my veins awaiting the terrifying page, every breath and each embrace, as I turn that corner and glance back over my shoulder. Case in hand. The street is empty; no one in sight. With a swift motion of my wrist I flick the hairclip into the bushy sidewalk and head for school.

Oslo, 1993 — Cape Town, 1998