Sex and Stravinsky (24 page)

Oh dear. Irresponsible Josh. Gertrude was certainly not best pleased and the Silvers were facing another domestic headache. This could be considered the third time that Josh had made a problem for his kindly adoptive parents. The first, admittedly not of his making, was when he’d turned up in infancy, as the child of the catatonic novice. The second was when he’d appeared with pregnant Gertrude. The third occasion was now. Because what were the Silvers to do with the boy, in a place where there wasn’t a school that was eligible by law to take him? Decamped, without legal status, in the backyard of a dissident family under the increasing scrutiny of the state was not a viable option, especially as Ida had recently been declared a banned person. She couldn’t work. She couldn’t be quoted. She couldn’t attend gatherings. She’d had her passport impounded and Bernie had a reasonable hunch that his turn would come before long.

For some weeks Ida used her enforced idleness to tutor Jack at home. She and Bernie tried telling each other that Jack was merely on a ‘visit’ from the rural homeland. They attempted a family meeting with Gertrude but, as ever, it was hard enough to get Gertrude to sit at the dining table; harder still to solicit her participation in the matter of her hijacked child, to whom she’d always seemed so curiously muted. Clearly the boy could not stay where he was and he was adamant that he wouldn’t go back. The only option, as the Silvers saw it, expensive as it would prove – and at a time when their own future was looking somewhat shaky – would be to place the boy in the junior department of a progressive, private boarding school across the country’s border.

Gertrude appeared neutral. She made no objection. Josh was happy. Jack was on board. The Silvers, in the circumstances, were admirably sanguine. Having done well by one bright, creative nowhere boy who, twenty years earlier, had landed in their lap, they now accepted that life had landed them another. This time it was talented little Jack, who, through no deliberate intent on their part, had become a marginal child, a stolen child, a child who, thanks to Josh’s warm embrace and his own mother’s curious indifference, had long ago been lured by the charms and resources of an unusual white bourgeois household, with its open door to a treasure trove of books and puppet theatres and scissors and glue. And a big silver desk with cut-glass, pear-drop handles.

It was the Silvers’ plan to ship out of the country, passports or no, which meant that they could not return. With this in mind, they began discreetly to make their plans. Josh would be leaving for London and Jack for Swaziland. Things were drawing to a close. Bernie called in both the boys and suggested they might each like to choose something special from among his possessions to have as their own. Josh, with the logistics of packing in mind, chose four Leon Bakst lithographs that Bernie had once been given by his one-time academic mentor, an émigré anthropologist who had come out of pre-war Vienna. Jack, somewhat less practically, chose the big silver desk.

‘OK, Jack!’ Bernie said, and he laughed. ‘OK. The desk will be yours.’

And then they made plans for its storage. The desk would be waiting for Jack, he said. It would be up at the university. He’d have it moved into his office in the social studies department. That was room number twenty-seven, on the first floor. It was the second door on the right. Bernie made a large notice and pasted it into the top right-hand drawer. ‘This desk is a present from Bernard Silver to Sipho Jack Maseko. To await collection. He may be quite some time.’

And then Jack was at boarding school, year after pleasant year; transplanted into a royalist mountain kingdom, too small, too landlocked, too powerless to be anything but acquiescent with its looming, well-armed neighbour to the south, but sort of independent, for all that. School offered a gentle and privileged existence, and a nice ethnic mix, among whom the offspring of South Africa’s exiled or imprisoned ‘struggle royalty’ was adequately represented. Then there were those whose parents were bankers, farmers, tribal heirs apparent, regional bishops, and the heads of independent African states. School made a context in which Jack, the illiterate housemaid’s child; cool, self-contained, brainy Jack, soon prospered and became a schoolboy star. The resources of the art room, the library, the music room, the theatre were all versions of Josh Silver’s bedroom, writ larger and more wonderful.

Jack shone in everything at school, but it was literature and theatre studies with its related arts that held particular appeal for him, not only because of Josh’s early influence, but because these things offered him opportunities to take on alternative identities. And Jack, who had long ago come to understand that he would never become a white person, was confident by now that he was nonetheless able to become whosoever he wished. Self-sufficient, touch-me-not Jack, who had no holiday journeys home and no person from his earlier life who was able to come and visit, considered these things to be a matter of little consequence. He found favour with the teaching staff and, in the vacations, was quite content to be billeted, as arranged, with a local doctor’s family whose own slightly younger boy was a pupil at the school.

Gifted and bookish, Jack took as his birthright what the Silvers were doing for him; had no sort of yardstick, had never had any own-age friends and was, by now, quite open-eyed in the matter of what he considered to be the Silvers’ respective personal shortcomings. Josh, at the time of their parting, appeared to him morose, self-indulgent and preoccupied with the business of losing his girlfriend. Bernie, as always, was somewhat boringly pedagogical, and had offered him edifying lectures on the heretical Bishop Colenso and on the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, as they had made that final drive together towards the Swaziland border. Ida, for all her flair with food, he remembered as forever banging on about health care and crèches and human rights violations and workers’ education. God only knew, she’d even had a shot at teaching his own dead-end mother. Jack was glad to have all that behind him because, right here, at school, he belonged to no one but himself.

And then he began to learn French. Jack discovered a profound and romantic passion for French. He loved its sounds; loved what it did to his gestures and to the shapes it made with his mouth; loved it for being so different from the language of those white corner-shopkeepers who’d distrusted him for his accent; an uppity little brown boy who had presumed towards white-boy speech. And thanks to the accident of an art-theory essay, Jack one day encountered a thing that caused him to imagine for himself a vision of francophone Africa. It was something about which, until then, he had known nothing, though he chose from now on to construct it in opposition to all that he associated with that lingering British-settler imperialism of his birthplace; that pathetic small-minded mix of racism and royalism, which – thanks largely to the Silvers – he had early on learnt to despise. The Union Jacks in white suburban flowerbeds, the portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and her incessantly smiling mother, always in those appalling feathery hats. Lemon and lilac; matching accessories; hat, gloves, two-piece, handbag, shoes; colour photographs that his own abject mother would cut from glossy magazines and stick obsequiously to walls of the maid’s room.

He had imbibed enough of the Silvers’ anti-monarchism to find it a little stifling that, even here, in the agreeable mountain kingdom, the Swazi royals, tinpot as they may have been, should loom so large in people’s minds; should command such loyalty and respect. So Jack chose to despise the local rain-dance rituals; for all that he knew the pretty, grass-skirted maidens who appeared before the king were often enough studying higher maths or history of art – some of them at his own school. He was especially repelled by the prospect of that annual display, in which a young, public-school-educated Swazi male royal could be observed, naked, and straddling a large black bull.

In the French class; in French language and culture, he saw only the beauty of otherness, a disposition that was helped along by the persuasiveness of his pleasant young teacher, who was very good at her job. In quick time she had her classes up and running; singing French songs, performing simple one-act plays, filling out vocabulary sheets, marking diagrammatic maps that transfigured for Jack all those ordinary things that he was required to label –
hôtel de ville, église, boulangerie, musée, bicyclette, chien
. Then there were the real-life maps; maps of Toulouse, maps of Montpellier, maps of Paris itself. Notre-Dame, the Île St Louis, Montmartre, the Louvre.

Miss Lundy fleshed out her lessons with meanderings through the history of French culture. There were the republican Romantics – Jacques Louis David; Delacroix and Ingres. And before that, the courtly Romantics – Watteau and Fragonard. She played her pupils tapes of French music: Lully, Fauré, Messiaen, Edith Piaf. She had videos of French films – sometimes even films about French royals who were so distant, so strange, so unlike the British Family Windsor, that Jack found himself enchanted. Beautiful, long-dead and deadly royals; a ballet-dancing Sun King, twirling in golden shoes.

And then, coming up sixteen and working in the library on an essay he had entitled ‘Picasso and the Theatre’, Jack came upon Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet, intellectual, cultural icon; first black member of the French National Assembly; President of Senegal; patron of the arts. And here, on the page, was the man himself, writing about Picasso. The greatness of Picasso’s art, Jack read, was that it came from a combination of ‘assimilation and rootedness’; that Picasso, by use of symbols, assimilated a wide range of cultural forms that welded together modernism and ancient traditions. And, in this, the art of Africa had played a hugely significant part. Likewise, the great new national force of Senegalese art, Senghor wrote, would be forged in pan-ethnic assimilation; a cultural inheritance that would incorporate ‘Berber Arab, Black African, Mediterranean and Indo-European’. And this particular inheritance would be played out in a constant ‘dialectic with modernity’.

This is all about me, Jack found himself thinking, because the whole enriching drift of what he was reading had nothing to do with Grandmother and gall bladders and feathers. It had to do with the forging of a new urban identity in an independent French-African state which, from that moment, became the focus of Jack’s intense and romantic imaginings.

He read about the Senegalese National Ballet and the Senegalese Film School. He pored over such photographs as he could find of pavement cafés in Dakar; of agitprop artists’ workshops, of busy little blue-painted buses run by brilliantly robed Mourides. He began to envisage his own inheritance, no longer in terms of Grandmother’s hut or the maid’s room in the backyard, or that hey-boy-no-change style of white corner-shopkeeper, but as ‘Berber Arab, Black African, Mediterranean and Indo-European’.

He left the library wrapped in a cloak of his newly made plural identity. And each element was splashed on it like a bright star on a fabric of inky midnight blue. Way Up. Way Out. Way to go.

His Picasso essay was excellent. And Jack would duly have proceeded in predictable fashion towards a string of A grades in the International Bacc, had it not been for his French teacher, who, by chance, had returned from a vacation in Paris, laughing gaily, tossing back her head as she slammed the passenger door of a hired car, which had been driven by a young Parisian Senegalese whom she had befriended at an arts event in the 16th arrondissement. The young man was a poet who was on his way to visit family members in northern Senegal, but only after a term which he would spend as writer in residence in Dar es Salaam. As a French citizen he could travel easily – oh, easy for some! And Miss Lundy, who had a bit of a thing for clever, creative young Afro chaps, had quickly fallen for his impulsive, somewhat madcap plan to make a brief detour via her school in Swaziland, where he’d offered himself for a couple of poetry readings and a workshop or two. They would fly together from Paris to Johannesburg, yes? Then the poet – protected, of course, by his Euro status from the absurd local race laws – would hire a car at the airport and they would drive to the school in Mbabane. Once done, he would bid her farewell and drive the hired car to the Mozambique border, where he would hand it in. Then he would cross the border and linger to eat gigantic spicy prawns on the white beaches of Maputo. After that, he would travel pillion, by motorbike, northwards towards Beira and beyond, until he reached the Tanzanian border.

‘You do know that South Africa has begun to stoke a civil war in Mozambique?’ the French teacher said. ‘A nasty little secret war. I believe they’ve been planting landmines. And as to all those giant prawns – well – food is beginning to run short. And if petrol should also be in short supply, that just might put paid to the motorbike.’

‘Pah,’ said the poet. He had ‘connections’. He had a friend called Thierry, who had a friend called Claude, who had a friend called Pedro, who had a motorbike. And Pedro was friends with everyone, including the border authorities. Pedro was friends with the government. He was also friends with the rebels. And Pedro was friends with the South Africans as well, who were officially ‘not there’. But Pedro fetched and carried for them. Pedro would always have petrol. Pedro would always have access to food. Pedro would collect him at the border and they would ride into Maputo. Then on and up. An adventure,
n’est-ce pas
?

The poet made Miss Lundy laugh – and Jack as well, to whom she had, at once, introduced him; Jack, her rising star; Jack, who had read Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Like Jack, the poet was tall and slim. Like Jack, his skin was pale. He looked young for his age, though he was seven years Jack’s senior. He had cute round tortoiseshell glasses and longer hair.