Embrace (15 page)

Klerksdorp, Unde Coen and his girlfriend Mandy. I was terrified of leaving someone off my list lest I unknowingly contribute to death, suffering or bad luck. Unsure whether I was expected to pray for Groot-Oom Klaas, I none the less sometimes did, asking God to forgive Groot-Oom Klaas for turning into a tramp and casting disgrace and shame over the Liebenberg family. Bok eventually taught me the ‘Our Father in Afrikaans and English, because he said it basically covered everything and in that way one was sure not to leave anyone or anything out.

If the Blaupunkt’s batteries had not gone flat, I could hear them from my stretcher, over the wail of jackal, and the weeping of the nightjars, doing the polka or the two-step or the waltz, and I imagined them, again, Ralph the prince and Katie Cinderella, floating over a marble floor in a country called Vienna.

I developed, so Bokkie said and I still recall, an insatiable appetite for story-telling by age three. About the time she and Bernice began teaching me to read and write. I can also remember Lena’s fifth birthday, when Molly Hancox brought her children to have a party at Mbanyana. I cannot remember that it was Molly Hancox for sure, but the recollection is of a party with two kids who are not cousins from the city. The only other white children living in Mkuzi were the Hancoxes from Southern Gate, so, to my mind, it has to have been them. It w
as
Lena’s birthday of the year before she went to boarding school, which means fragments of conscious memory from around two and a half: Lena quietly walks up behind a laughing dove that has come to sit on the red ground outside the lounge wall. She bends and picks it up. It sits quietly in her hands while the two children and I draw around her to see. The children want to take turns to hold the bird, but I implore my sister to let it go, to see if it can fly and go back to its nest. When I want to cry, Lena raises her hands, unfolds her fingers, and the dove flaps its wings and flies off into the bush. We all watch its flight. And that’s where the memory ends.

Other stories, told and retold at my request, of our lives in Tanganjika, of our great-grandparents leaving the Union in 1910 to trek to East Africa to get away from the British who had won the Second War of Liberation. And Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg who were poor farmers in the Molopo before poverty forced them to Klerksdorp. As much as these family sagas for which I depended on the willingness of adults to tell, I loved to hear the stories from the three thick books Aunt Lena had given us. These were
The Tales of Grimm, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen,
and
The Arabian Nights.
I also remember, from somewhere around the time of Lena going to boarding school, she and I lying on either side of Bokkie while she read us
Hansel and Gretel
Bokkie broke off reading mid-sentence when the story had been barely begun — because I was already whimpering.

‘Mommy’s not going to carry on reading if you cry, Karl,’ she said, closing the book over her index finger. ‘We haven’t even got to the sad part, and already you’re crying.’ I controlled myself, wanting to hear the rest and knowing Lena would be furious if the reading was terminated because of my tears. I managed, for a while at least, not to cry. But by the time Hansel is imprisoned in the cage, being fed to fatten by the witch, I sobbed openly and Bokkie tried to console: ‘It’s only a story, my child. It’s only a story.’There is little memory of this incident other than my tears and Bokkie’s words.

Then, from among these I so loved to hear, I adored even more the stories within the story of Scheherazade, the mistress of the Sultan who deferred death by telling tales that would never be concluded by morning so that her execution was eternally postponed. My book didn’t say that that’s how it worked, but Bernice, who’d heard another version, told me all about Scheherazade. And Bernice, who already knew how many days there were in a year, once calculated for me: two years and 271 days. I thought Scheherazade certainly the cleverest woman in the entire world. Once I could read for myself, I frequently put off the last page or so of the fables, waiting rather for the following day. Then I would read on, makingbelieve that the Sultan would have had my head had I concluded the other story too soon.

Our cousins came to the bush with Unde Michael and Aunt Siobhain. We got our first Christmas tree: a central stem of aluminium with fold-out wire branches covered in plastic pine-like leaves, about half a metre tall and mounted on a tripod. From two cake tins came the most beautiful decorations imaginable. Silver and golden balls, reams of silver, gold and copper streamers to drape over the green plastic branches. Small Santa Claus, stars of Bethlehem, leaves and red berries of holly, triangles, squares, little boxes in tinsel to hang from the branches. And, a fairy — an angel, stupid, Lena said — in a white satin dress with a wand and a star on its tip, to be placed at the top of the tree.

Unde Michael brought along a diesel generator, a movie projector and movies we watched against a sheet Bokkie draped against the outside wall. She and Bok, next to Unde Michael and Aunt Siobhain, sat on camp chairs while we kids with James and Stephanie lay on blankets spread open across the spiky grass. Jonas and Boy, neither of whom had ever seen moving pictures, were allowed to come and sit on one side of the fire behind us kids. For us and the grown-ups at least part of the fun was watching Jonas and Boy’s faces, their white teeth shining in the projector’s light, just like baboons in the dark, we said.

During the much-anticipated
Casablanca
I fell asleep — for the life of me not having seen any resemblance between my mother and the tragic-looking white-skinned actress called Ingrid Bergman. I thought far more that Bok resembled Humphrey Bogart — less in that than in
The African Queen,
which we all found hilarious. Swimming in the single remaining pool of the Mkuzi River next day, someone was forever screaming that someone else had leeches and the rest of us fled or rushed to aid the one whose blood was being sucked from his body.

But the movie I wanted shown repeatedly, that was set up at least twice while I alone sat and watched and everyone else was around thebraai, was one Aunt Siobhain said she had brought as a special treat for me. In it was a young girl with violet eyes whom they said had since become the most beautiful woman in the world; one who was forever getting married and divorced. Her name was Liz Taylor. Able to read for myself the screen titles, I knew her real name was Elizabeth. Virtually from the instant the first images flickered against the sheet, I fell in love with every fibre of my four-year-old body; Clueless about why it was called
National Velvet
and unconcerned with ever finding out, all I cared about, dreamt weeks of having for myself, was a horse named The Pie.

During visits to Mkuzi or when we went to the city, we heard Unde Michael and Aunt Siobhain say that Stephanie was at
that difficult stage.
I recall Stephanie once receiving a beating for calling Unde Michael a bastard to his face. I must have been four or five. We were all shocked, but my outward expression was tempered by an unspoken respect for Stephanies courage; after all, she was only calling my unde a word everyone else, induding Aunt Siobhain, called him behind his back anyway. We all looked upon Stephanie with a tinge of awe: not only was she older than any of us — a full eight years older than me — and already in Kingsway High, but she had breasts and though she no longer walked naked in front of us, it was dear through her bathing suit that she already had hair around her poefoe. The hair, far more than the breasts, we speculated, was why she no longer bathed with us or swam naked in the river. Stephanie moreover, alone among us, could hold court with the grown-ups whenever talk turned to East Africa. And then, tied to these awesome characteristics, Stephanie did ballet.

With the house too small to hold us as well as the dan from Toti, Bok and Unde Michael put up a two-roomed tent beside the water tank. The grown-ups slept out there and the children inside the house. One night, long after we’d gone to bed, we were awakened by a commotion. James, in bed beside me, screamed that an elephant hadcharged through the tent and his mother was dead. Stephanie told him to shut up — that there were no elephant in Mkuzi. We jumped up, wide awake from the sound of voices shouting. We bundled through the door to the outside.

At first I saw only the flames leaping up and licking at the base of the water tank. I screamed and started crying. We all cried, including Stephanie. I waited for Bokkie or Bok to come running out of the tent, ablaze. It could not have been more than a few seconds, but the horror of what it would mean if they were dead had dawned on me. Bernice had her arm around me and Lena. Then we saw them: all four adults naked, scurrying from the dark at the tap with jerry cans and buckets of water. Bok shouted at us to get out of the house — in case the thatch caught alight. He ran to the other side of the tank and climbed the scaffolding. While the others went about throwing buckets of water and sand, Bok adjusted the sprout of the run-off and opened it so that it spurted full blast onto the fire. The tent had already almost burnt to the ground; the flames subsided.

What had happened, or so it was said forever after, was that after a particularly heavy bout of drinking Uncle Michael had fallen asleep with a cigarette between his fingers. The stompie had set his foam-rubber mattress alight and by the time they awoke from the smoke the smouldering mattress had turned into a fire that ignited the canvas tent.

James and I now had to share our bed with Lena, three of us, head to toe. Before we fell asleep James leant over Lena’s feet between us: ‘Did you see their poefoes and their filafoois?’

Lena kicked us to lie still. I bit her foot and pushed James back to his side of the bed. Lena said she’d get me the next day. Bernice whispered for us to go to sleep. I could not understand what James had found unusual in nude adult bodies. There was nothing remarkable for me in seeing my parents naked; after all, there were no doors in our house, not between rooms nor to the bathroom and toilet. Seeing Aunt Siobhain’s or Uncle Michael’s meant nothing to me, for surely, as

Bokkie always said, if you had seen one you’d seen them all. And surely my parents knew that the squeaking of their bedsprings at night only
sounded
like the rattle of guinea fowl? None of that mattered: it was the fire — that Bokkie and Bok could have been burnt to death, that I could have been left alone with Lena and Bernice — that was foremost in my mind.

Late April’s first cold night and I, reclining on my side, the sheets bunched onto the floor, lay on the single bed in his room beside him. Back to the wall, my one leg rested over his knee. Above his chest — still heaving — I could see light from the bathroom door slightly ajar. The tip of the white towel protruded into view from the carpet beside the bed A wind, howling and whistling like hundreds of distant sirens, swirled around the school. Sheets of corrugated iron rattled on the roof and the bare peach tree creaked and rubbed against the window. When I breathed, the warm film forming between my stomach and his side went schluck as if we were being glued together. I thought of Suz and Chaka getting stuck, Bok, the garden hose, spraying the jet at them, getting them to separate. And Cassandra, the blood and ooze when she’d foaled the previous afternoon. The little foal.

‘Mr Cilliers?’ I whispered.

‘Uhhm...’

‘Are you falling asleep?’

‘No . . . Are you?’

‘No.’

I had no idea how to proceed. Willed him to act. He must feel it, down there against his leg, why wasn’t he touching it?

I slid my hand up over his damp belly; my elbow momentarily brushing his limp penis. My fingers found his hands folded into each other in the tangle of fine hair on his chest. Fingers wrapped aroundmine, intertwined. Again, I waited, wondering if he could not sense what I wanted. What if he knew but wouldn’t? Heedful of the stillness when the wind subsided and all of a sudden again apprehensive, I began to withdraw my hand. A swift application of pressure from there; I read reassurance. I took his hand down his belly, over his thigh. Restiveness from his body against mine; I paused; wanted to let go of his hand.

Once more, I felt him lax, the hand become limber in mine. Down farther. Placed it where for weeks I had wanted. Relief, at least as much as pleasure, when the fingers wrapped into a cocoon around the pulsing chrysalis.

He turned onto his side; propped himself on one arm and rolled me onto my back. I closed my eyes. Felt the warmth of his torso descend even before his mouth reached my lips. Into the movement from the wrapping of fingers I lifted my hips; into the wet of the mouth my head from the pillow. I tried to empty my mind, to feel only the mouth, the tongue, the stimulus of the hand.
Relax. Relax. Relax.
Concentrate. Dom’s voice — amoroso, ad libitum, arabesque — no — affrettando, agitato —

Exhausted, I dropped my head back into the pillow, left him panting above me. I know it’s there! Why isn’t it happening, dammit, dammit. It’s just sitting in there but it doesn’t want to pop out. I felt his face move, heard him now breathing through his nose. The wind tugged at the roof; branches scratched at the windows.

Lips, stubble, moved across my cheeks, my chin, down my neck, tingles gathered where hair begun at the nape. My neck lifted from the pillow, my nose gasped at the unexpected smell of shampoo in his hair, funnelled it into my head till it was filled to bursting. His tongue, the enamel of teeth broadside against my chest; lips; caresses down my side; my belly. My palms open on the back above, below me; fingertips found heat in the moist down of his armpits. A tremor, a second of incredulity at a mouth in my loins. Memory: something like this. Hands in his hair, hips heaving, and felt it burning I’m going to pee shudders through my body and tug whisper frantic now stop but it’s too late and my body shakes and I am dizzy in the silence. A rush of blood coursed a beat through my temples.