Embrace (28 page)

Great-Uncle Klaas showed up at the front door. I was shocked to see him. He resembled Oupa Liebenberg in so many ways — once handsome face, the arched nose, the long slender fingers, the thinning hair — but he was filthy, smelly, with greasy hair and a moth-eaten coat that smelt of mildew and old sweat. The man sitting there in our garden looked nothing like on the photographs I had seen of him where he was young, startlingly good-looking, dressed in a black suit and holding three graduation scrolls and wearing a tasselled cap. Great-Uncle Klaas — even after he went mad — had been everywhere in the passage of late Ouma and Oupa Grootjie’s cold house in Orkney — beside stark paintings of the Battle of Blood River and a huge pencil drawing of Dingaan’s kraal. But the man on those photographs had been tall, strong, with high cheekbones, a well-trimmed moustache and black eyes that smiled pensively at the camera.

We fed him before he would again be on his way. Without the slightest hint of shame, he stuffed a sandwich and a banana into his pocket. He asked how Bernice and Lena were doing and Bokkie said Bernice was consistent and solid, and Lena was also working hard even though her primary interest lay in sport. I knew he was going to ask about me. But, even before he could, Bokkie, looking into the middle distance, said that I was meant to be the clever one in the family but that I had spiralled into mediocrity and for all she knew I would fail Standard Five and have to be sent to a school for the mentally retarded. ‘All the talent in the world and he’s going to end up a zero on a contract,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Maybe you can speak to him, Groot-Oom Klaas, warn him what becomes of the idle.’ She went on to tell Uncle Klaas about Miss Roos writing that I couldn’t contain my
boisterousness.
A word that seemed now to feature in our family’s every interaction. Bokkie whispered how I had disgraced her and Bok with my loud and rampant behaviour. Uncle Klaas laughed out loud. He said boisterous could mean a thousand different things. That it was a positive word as far as he was concerned and that the family should let me be. He said you kill a child’s spirit if you try and turn the child into something he is not. With that he got up, burped, patted his stomach and said he would soon be heading back to the Transvaal. Before he idled down the driveway, he asked to see Bok’s business. We showed him the garage with the shelves of curios. Because he reeked so badly of sweat, Bokkie and I stood at the garagedoor while he nosed around, not saying a word. Then he was off, down the street.

We saw him again in Toti the next day, walking down the main road with a bantu by his side. Bokkie slid down her seat and us three kids dived for cover so that he wouldn’t see us. We laughed and giggled. And Bokkie was no longer ignoring me. From the Toti library I took Twain’s
Tom Sawyer
and F.A. Venter’s
Man van Cirene
and
Geknelde Land.
I swam a lot and read constantly at the poolside over Bokkie’s warnings that I was destroying my eye-sight through reading in the glare. On a Saturday afternoon, when SABC TV was due to test broadcast a rugby match, I sat at the pool, legs dangling in the water, reading the first letter I had ever received from overseas. Abroad.

20 June 1975

Hotel Auersperg

Auerspergstrasse

Vienna, Austria

Dear Karl

I wish you were here. This place is fantastic. The hotel we’re staying in used to he a palace. Gluck used to conduct concerts in the hall that’s now the dining room. I have been going to masterclasses at the university and it’s wondeful I’m learning more here in four hours than in a year in the Berg. I wish you were here. We’ve been to see where Mozart lived when he first came to Vienna for Count Colloredo who treated him like he was a slave. Mozart had to eat with the servants. Can you believe it? Mozart is everywhere. I was invited to give a small performance of the A Minor Rondo, K 511 and it went so well. You would love the Mozartplatz. It has small statues from the Magic Flute. Tamino is playing the flute and Pamina leaning against him. I’ve been to places where all the famous composers went: Brahms, Haydn, Strauss, Schibert, Bruckner and to Heiligenstadt to Beethoven’s one house and to the villa where he composed the Ninth and to Schwartzspanierhaus where he died on 26 March 1827.

It’s very hot and I wish there was snow because this doesn’t feel like Europe at all. From here we go to Paris and I’ll see where Chopin lived and wrote most of his work. Imagine if you could he here, how much fun we’d have. I miss you. How is Alette and your family? Phase send them my regards. I’m not writing letters to anyone else, though I’ve sent postcards to Lukas and the others and one to Beauty. I think of you when I play. I’ll write again from Paris.

Aloelloel mimy loelovise.

Regards

Dominic

I slid the letter into the envelope, reread his fine handwriting spelling out my name. I wondered whether I should be generous and give ‘ Bernice the stamp, which was of a statue of Mozart, It was a new stamp, not old like most of the others in her collection, but it would age. I placed the letter between the pages of
Tom Sawyer
and began reading.

Bok came and sat with folded legs beside me in the sun. He asked how it was going at school and how I liked being in the Secondary Choir. It was okay, I said, and Mr Roelofse was a nice conductor, even though he was very strict. Bok asked about my school report. Why I was not doing as well as I had before. Self-conscious at the direction the conversation was taking, I said I didn’t know, that I’d work harder and improve. I did not say that it had been years since I had experienced any interest in school work, let alone in doing well. I loved reading — devoured book after book for my personal gratification — but that was all I ever wanted to do with books. Learning from them had come to seem an impossible labour. I couldn’t do Maths. I hated Geography and Biology. History was okay. I liked English essay and comprehension, but hated spelling, grammar, concord, tenses. Afrikaans wasn’t as nice as English, who knows why. And now I was in Miss Roos’s class. I had liked her at first, quite a lot, but something had fed resentment towards her. It was not that I disliked her as I’d disliked Marabou: it was that she seemed to look right through me or as if she was suspicious of me and—

‘I think something is making you unhappy in the Berg, Philistine. Am I not right?’ Bok cut short my thoughts.

I shook my head, even while wanting to tell him how I hated the place, that I wanted to leave, start high school six months later in Port Natal. But there was no sense in doing it now, in the middle of the year. Not in a hundred years would they take me out halfway into an academic year.

‘Then why are you doing so poorly?’

‘I’m still in the top ten in class, Bok,’ I answered, looking into the pool’s turquoise water. I knew I could stay amongst the best without ever opening a book.

‘But before you went to the Berg you were always first.’

‘There are clever boys there, Bok. Niklaas Bruin and Mervyn. And some of the others. You know how good you have to be to get in there. The curriculum has a much higher standard than Kuswag.’

‘But you used to get 90 to 98 per cent? Now you have 72 per cent. That has nothing to do with other boys being smarter, does it?’ He spoke inquiringly, trying to soften the judgement in his voice. In his love.

‘I can’t do Maths.’

‘But it’s not just Maths. It’s everything, even Afrikaans and English.’ I was silent. ‘And then, this thing about you being rampant and uncontrolled?’

Boisterous, I wanted to say. I glowered at my hands smoothing the book’s dustjacket. How in hell has boisterous become rampant and uncontrolled, I wanted to sneer. You’re all so thick. I wished he would leave, go and watch the ridiculous rugby game on TV Anger in me. Like something choking me in my throat.

We sat quietly for a while. Then, his tone still as soft and gentle as it had been: ‘My boy, do you remember last year, when Mr Samuels left the school? The telegram?’

I did. I knew at once what he was talking about. Fear sprinted down my legs. ‘It is with regret that we have to inform you that theservices of Mr Samuels have been terminated due to circumstances’ “There had been a few small articles in the newspapers,
Rapport’s
headline: HOMO STORIES in BERG SCHOOL. The school had adamantly refused comment; but amongst us speculation had been rife about who had been Mr Samuels’s boy. Everyone thought it had been Erskin Louw. Someone reminded us how, once when we had been rehearsing ‘Kiss Her, Kiss Her in the Dark’ Mr Samuels had said we should sing the folk tune with feeling, imagining that we were kissing someone worthwhile. Someone like Erskin. Rumours abounded for weeks that Mr Samuels had been given the sack because Erskin’s parents had found out. Dom said he’d heard that Erskin’s dad threatened to kill Mr Samuels unless the school got rid of him. Yet all remained rumour and whisper and looks until that too disappeared and we rarely if ever spoke of it again.

‘Yes, I remember, Bok.’

‘Does any of that still go on?’

I looked into the water. It was as though Bok knew something or wanted to know something that I could either tell him or not. ‘Sometimes I hear stories about some of the boys.’

‘What do they do?’

How would I say this? Would I say anything? Couldn’t he just leave me alone? ‘They play with each other.’ I wished he would stop, knew he wasn’t about to. Not now.

‘How do you mean?’

I didn’t know which words to use. It had been years since I had had to use any word to describe that thing to Bok. As a child we had used filafooi, but since then an entirely new vocabulary had come into my life, a vocabulary that could not possibly, to my mind, translate favourably into his world: piel, voel, dinges, cock, dick, schlong, John Thomas, willy, penis, dong, ding, tool, horing, boner. I couldn’t use any of these with my father.

‘How do you mean, play with each other?’

‘With each other’s filafoois, Bok.’

The quiet was broken only by TV sounds from the lounge. I could sense that Bok was going to push till he had a clearer answer.

‘Do
you
 — ever do that?’

I shook my head. Petrified. I saw the three men behind the desk, just a month before. Saw Mervy’s long johns, red, bloodstained. Couldn’t look Bok in the eyes. Lena, an unwitting saviour, called from the lounge that the rugby was about to start. Bok asked whether I was coming to watch. I answered that I’d be up when I’d finished my chapter. He walked off and I opened
Tom Sawyer
again and tried to read, the sun beating down on the white page, eyes squinting. Reaching the end of the chapter I had not taken in a single word. All I had been thinking was that they were in the house, all their eyes on me, searching for something dark and wicked and terrible in me. The thing that made me deserve death. The windows were eyes from which my family pored over me. Accusingly.

I walked around the pool. Terrified. I entered the house. For a few seconds my eyes, blinded from the sun on the white page, could see nothing. I knew they were all in the lounge, watching rugby. Northern Transvaal vs Western Province. Blind as I was, their four figures were to me only outlines, black and white, like the negatives of photographs. I took my place beside Bernice on the couch. My eyes slowly adjusted and took in the room’s normal colours and the running figures on our Blaupunkt’s screen. It was going to be a long, long, long holiday.

Back from my first day in Grade One I announced that I had no intention of returning to school. Matubatuba Primary was certainly the most boring place on earth. No one else in class could read and write! All we did was draw little lines on loose paper — not even in books — while Juffrou Knutsen treated us as if we were babies. My return to Matubatuba Primary, I said, depended on whether I could be pushed up to Standard One with Lena. If Bok had skipped a standard in Tanganyika because he was so clever at school, I could comfortably skip two, and, if Lena didn’t want me in her class I could just as comfortably and confidently go into the English stream of our dual medium school.

‘Who do you think you are? You’re Afrikaans,’ Lena snarled. ‘And no one skips standards. Windgat, grootbek!’ Bokkie cautioned her to watch her language and change her tone or keep quiet. Bokkie said that skipping standards as it may have been done in former times was no longer permitted. Bernice said I would have to be patient until my peers had caught up with me; something she said was bound to happen before I knew it. Be careful that you are not seen as trying to be too big for your boots, she said. Then Bernice and Bokkie spoke about how strange it was for the girls to be coming home after school every day and Lena said she missed boarding school and her friends from Hluhluwe. I suggested that she return to Hluhluwe considering how much she had loved the place. Bokkie warned that she was tired ’of our quibbling.

Bernice proved right: Within a few months much of the rest of the class had learnt to read and write. One day our assignment was to draw a big red ball and a little green ball, then to write beneath the big red one B-I-G and beneath the small green one S-M-A-L-L. Inexplicably — perhaps because of a brief lapse in concentration — I wrote B-I-G under the small green ball and S-M-A-L-L under the big one. Juffrou Knutsen erased my error, but the shadow of letters remained, showing through the new, corrected version on the page I had to take home. I feared that someone — Lena in particular — would comment on the shadow pencil imprint.

Then, within six months of starting school and to my frustrated surprise, the pleasure of reading aloud in class had somehow turned against me. Altered into an ordeal. Despite the reading skills I had mastered in Umfolozi, I now started stuttering, tripping over wordsand phrases each time I had to read aloud in class. Again I said nothing at home. On my sec’ond report Juffrou Knutsen gave me a C for Reading. She wrote:
Karl has no confidence in front of people.
On the report I had still managed a golden star, but a perplexed Bokkie said my reading would probably drag me down to a silver unless I improved dramatically. To correct the unexpected problem and to prevent me from failing Grade One, I had to read aloud every afternoon for half an hour, even to myself. If I put feeling into the way I read, Bokkie said — emphasise words and sounds — it would possibly put an end to the stutter that came like clockwork each time I had to read before the class. Somewhere around this time I started biting my fingernails; whether, from nervousness or because I had seen it from Lena, I don’t know. I began reading aloud, sometimes for an hour at a time, putting expression into things as mundane as
The cat sat on the Mat and the pig ate the Fig,
eventually memorising the entire book. I rehearsed constantly, terrified that I was going to fail Grade One. Bokkie shouted at me to get my fingers out of my mouth while I was reading; ‘How can you bite your nails and read at the same time!’