Embrace (62 page)

‘I don’t,’ Dominic answered through the tears. ‘It’s Ma’am I’m worried about. She loved Graham so much and now she’s lost him.’ Again the silence whispered its gloom over the room.

‘God, it must be a shock to Ma’am. I wonder whether he suffered, or died instantly,’ Bruin thought aloud. He closed his eyes.

‘Mathison’s right. He’s the first person I know that gets killed in a war. Well, I mean I didn’t know him, but I did sort of, through Ma’am,’ I said, rising to put away my pencil case inside my desk.

‘It’s awful,’ Dominic said. I now sat down at the desk in front of him to his right.

.. . “When my mother’s brother died,’ I said, ‘she said my grandparents ‘would never get over it. A parent never, ever gets over the death of a child. If I were to die, it would kill my parents.’ g;,,.‘Kari; Dominic said, a note of irritation creeping into his tone, ‘let’s think of Ma’am and Graham for a moment, rather than ourselves.’

‘I’m just saying, Dom—’ Lukas had come back to say he was going down to the stables. Was I coming? I shook my head. Instead of leaving, Lukas walked to Dom and put his hand on his shoulder, clasped it briefly and shrugged at us: ‘Look, guys, it’s terrible, but it’s done. All we can do is support Ma’am. And remember, he gave his life for us.’When Lukas had left I suggested to Dominic that we go outside. I wanted to be with him away from the presence of Bruin.

; Past the parking lot where there was no sign of Ma’ams Passat. We sat on the rock below which the school’s name was burnt into a wooden sign in rigid black letters:
Drakensberg Boys Music School
Above it, the dragon, our coat of arms. Dominic stared ahead of him at the stables and the servants’ quarters. The riders had already left. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure the sign and the aloes blocked our backs; shifted my arm so that it rested firmly against him.

,. ‘I feel so sorry for her,’ he said, and again his bottom lip quivered.

‘So do I. She was so proud of him. She showed me a photo of him once. At least she still has her daughter, Dom, think of that.’

‘Lynn . . . I wonder whether she’s been told.’

‘Do you think Ma’am’s down at her cottage?’ I wondered whether she knew the instructor who killed Graham; how she would ever forgive the man who had accidentally shot her boy.

‘I suppose . . .’

1 ‘It would be the wrong time to go to her now, perhaps tomorrow.’ ‘She’ll probably be going to the funeral. God, it will be awful for her. I hate funerals.’

‘I’ve only been to one. When my Grandfather De Man died.’

For the only afternoon in all the time I knew him, Dom did not go to a piano to practise. In moments like these, he said, doing something like a Grade Eight in music seemed so banal, our lives and everything we did nothing but a big rush into a void of senselessness. We baked in the sun, sometimes talking, sometimes letting long minutes slip by without words. He wondered where Beauty was, whether she had been told. We spoke about fearing death. I said I didn’t mind dying but that I wished Bok and Bokkie would die before me — not because I didn’t love them — but because it would ruin especially my mother if I, or one of my sisters were to die before her. Dominic said he was terrified of dying, of becoming ill, getting cancer and feeling your own body being eaten away by some force you didn’t understand or even know the cause of. I’m not afraid of dying, I said, as long as it comes quickly without me knowing, that it is not a long drawn-out process of suffering. Cancer was the worst. Then Dom said the last way he would like to die was through being shot, even though that would probably be quick. I said yes, it must be terrifying being a soldier, although Mathison had a point: at least Graham died for our cause.

‘Our cause my foot! Mathison’s dead wrong if he thinks I’ll ever be a soldier,’ Dominic spat. I tugged two blades of grass from the side of the rock, passed one to him and chewed at the crisp base of the stem between my fingers.

‘I don’t want to go to the army either,’ I spoke through the chewing, ‘but that’s the way things are.’ Then, without checking myself, unable to keep the thought off my lips: ‘There’s no way out and I cannot face the scorn of not going. Bok will want me to go; he was in the army for three years in Potchefstroom. He says it makes a man of a boy.’ Suddenly I thought of Henk Willemse in my essay. Considered going to drag it from the pile, rewriting the story of the bursting pomegranate. Now aware of how what I wrote might disturb Ma’am — conjure in her mind’s eye an image of Graham beingshot, killed by a hand grenade or a landmine, his stomach sprayed over—

“ ‘Yes,’ Dominic interrupted my thoughts, steel in his voice, ‘Dad says the army makes a man of a boy in the same way as rape makes a woman of a girl.’ I chewed on the meaning of Dr Webster’s words. Dominic went on: ‘Dad will do everything to keep me out. Send me out of the country. Anything. He says our presence in Angola and Namibia is utterly unjustified. A breach of international law to protect a racist system. I won’t set foot in Angola or Namibia without a „ passport.

‘South-West Africa?’

‘It’s real name is Namibia,’ he said, flicking away the grass. Namibia, I mouthed to myself. A better name, nicer sounding, named probably for the Namib Desert. ‘And,’ Dominic said, ‘South Africa’s real name is Azania.’ For a while I was silent, tasting the new name: Azania. ‘Dominic, where do you get that rubbish?’ I asked. ‘This country became the Union of South Africa in 1910, and in I960 it became the Republic of South Africa. Where do you get the idea that it’s Azania?’

‘Mum says that name is on the lips of the protesting children who ‘get shot by police in Soweto.’

‘I thought they were burning down their schools because they didn’t want to learn Afrikaans?’

‘That too. You’ll hear all about it when we have the French Revolution debate.’

Azania. Az-ania. Azaiinia. Azanea. Yes, I thought, that too is a better name than South Africa, which sounds like a direction rather than a place. But I am all too aware of what happens in countries that change their names. Tanganyika to Tanzania. Not worth the risk merely because it sounds nicer. A place is more than its name. But, if that’s true, then why not just change it, anyway? It’s the principle that matters. The principle of who gets to name it. So, it’s not the name, but from whose mouth it comes. ‘You know, Dom, when theblacks get hold of the name of a place it leads to trouble. The farmers in Tanzania lost everything. And look what’s happened since Lourenco Marques became Maputo. All the whites had to leave, and just remember Almeida’s family fleeing from Angola with only the clothes on their backs. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t come back this year, because they didn’t have the money to keep him here.’

Dominic didn’t respond. After a while, he spoke: Angola is still Angola, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but who knows for how long.’ Then he turned his back on me and said we should be ashamed of ourselves, taking only selfinterest from Graham’s death. It should be her and her son were crying for, he said; instead were thinking only of ourselves. Again silence came and sat with us. Dominic said he wanted to go and call his parents. I asked whether he would like me to come to him tonight. He said no. Sex was the last thing on his mind. Not for that, I said, just to be together. No, let’s leave it till after the piano exams, he said.

Choir, so it reached us by word of mouth, had been cancelled. A gesture of respect for Ma’am and Graham. A horrible damper sat over us during prep, in the showers, and through quiet time. Tonight’s was not the usual silence of discipline enforced through the cane or the threat of the cane, of censure or the threat of censure. This was the quiet of mourning and respect. Ma’am must be down at her chalet, I thought. Who was with her, Jacques, Mathison, Marabou? And her daughter, where was she? How was Ma’am mourning? I tried to imagine her pain, her tears, her despondency. All that came when I tried to visualise Ma’am was Bokkie’s face, contorted at the death of Uncle Gert; my own doubling over and screaming at hearing Dademan had died. More than anything I wanted to talk to my mother or Bernice or any one of the others, to hear what they were thinking and feeling: Bennie, Mervyn, Lukas and Dominic. After lights-out, the deep sadness stayed with me. Tears welled in my eyes as I thought of Graham, of

Ma’am, on the phone, calling relatives. Weeping. How did one announce a death? Had Mathison done it correctly? I buried my head in the pillow when I saw Graham’s photo, now ghostly white — no, probably smeared with the camouflage Bennie said was called Black is Beautiful — and dead with a gun wound that had ripped open his chest, his heart and lungs dangling out in a horrendous fruit salad. It is the heart where he is hit, I imagined. Or was it his head? What if his face had been blown away? I wept; realised it was less for Ma’am and her son than it was for myself. I am weeping from fear for myself;’ for something that lurked at least four years away in my future.

I now wanted to be with Dominic or Jacques. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. How could anyone sleep on a night like this? I was angry at Jacques. This idiotic fear he had of allowing me to come to him. Weeks — at least two — since I had last been there. And Dominic, the rawness of his sadness, he seemed to take Graham worse than all of us. After supper he had phoned his parents. When he came into prep he passed me a note saying they sent their regards. Then, as we made our way upstairs in silence — none of the usual horsing — he held me back and said; ‘Mom and Dad send their love.’

‘What did they say about Graham?’

‘Dad said it’s a time to separate the personal from the political. Certain things, like the loss of a child, are above politics and I should pay no attention to Radys. Mum suggested we respect Ma’am’s need to mourn: mourning is an intensely personal thing.’

‘I agree with your folks.’ I thought about what Radys had said, that Dominic’s family was spoiling the natives or plurals as they were now called: Stupid, I thought, I don’t know what dying in Angola has to do with spoiling the blacks.

‘Dad still thinks I’m right, though. Radys is a reactionary. Loelovise yokou.’ As we said goodbye and he turned right to G, I left to E

‘Loelovise yokou titoo,’ I had answered, wondering about the meaning of the word reactionary.

An hour after I guessed everyone asleep I again rose and donned dressing gown and slippers. Wounded and brooding at Jacques’s forewarning that I was not to come to his room unsolicited, I slunk past his door, silently wishing he would come out and see me.

‘My teacher’s son has been killed in Angola. His name was Graham Sanders.’ I announced from where I sat at the mouth of the fort. Uncle Klaas stared into the fire. He offered no response; his sleep-creased face expressionless, the news no concern of his. From the opposite bank the scent of flowers twitched in my nostrils. My neck turned, searched the dark above the sandstone embankment. I had still not made time to cross over, climb the bank and identify the blooms. During the day, when they didn’t seem to smell, I almost forgot about their existence.

I awaited a response to the news of Graham’s death. Nothing forthcoming. Uncle Klaas took the zol from the Silent One. He held it to his lips half hidden by strands of the scraggly moustache. He didn’t drag on the brown paper cylinder; only held it there, staring pensively into the flames at my feet. He may as well be, I thought, some ghostly version of Oupa Liebenberg after a day in the sun on the tractor: same sad blue eyes, same prominent nose with the perfecdy shaped nostrils that flare when they’re thinking, same full lips turning down at the sides as though in perpetual readiness to cry. This is like Oupa Liebenberg. Only skinnier. And with the filth, the long greasy brown and grey hair like rats’ tails under the woollen balaclava, now rolled up onto his forehead. Sitting in his great-nephew’s fort beside a black man also in tatters and also a rolled-up balaclava or some other woollen cap.

‘Did you come and listen to the concert?’ I asked. His eyes lifted towards me then sunk back into the flames. What was up, tonight? Why the withdrawal, the uncommunicativeness, when other nights he’d been quite pleasant and receptive to chat?

As long as I didn’t sit too close to either of them I didn’t have to cope with their smell. It made no sense, I thought, that they, down here on the riverbank of all places, would not occasionally wash. Scrub themselves. It was impossible to decipher from Uncle Klaas’s skin what was dirt and what the ravages of age, madness and living wild. The Silent One’s black-brown skin looked dusty and tired: clearly that skin had not seen water in days, weeks, months, years perhaps. They wouldn’t even have to submerge their bodies, I thought, why not just wash hands, faces and hair? I looked at the Silent One’s hair sticking out around the dusty balaclava that sat like a crest on his crown: grey and black, salt and pepper, long strands, like wool or down sticking from a frayed pillow slip. And what of their other ablutions? I was intrigued by what they must do after defecating. Leaves, or stones, like we used as kids in the bush? Or was even that too sophisticated for them? The picture of them squatting, standing up and pulling up their pants without a second thought stuck with me. Shit caking like mud in their trouser pants. That could be part of their smell: unwashed starfishes, shitty trousers. My throat contracted; I swallowed. Over the previous weeks I had seen them only once — the first time — during the day. And then Uncle Klaas had looked at his worst — at least the firelight at night softened the dirt, the age. If he could have a hair cut and get rid of the greasy rats’ tails; that’s at least part of why he looked so much older than Oupa Liebenberg. But the two men before me were creatures of sleep, day and night, seeming to wake only to smoke, light and stoke the fire when I arrived. Of what they might eat I had no idea and was too guarded to ask. Afraid I may be assigned the task of fetching and carrying. And yet I did feel pity for them — and the tickle of excitement at the idea of sneaking food from the dining hall right from under the noses of Marabou and Matron Booysen. So far Uncle Klaas had asked nothing save the blanket. And then even he had not asked, had merely said: ‘We need another blanket.’ And he had known, somehow and through my protests, my curses, that it would be brought. The blanket had been barely spoken of.