Moffie

by Andre Carl van der Merwe

Bloemhof, Orkney, and early in the morning at Potchef­stroom more people board the filthy train—they don’t have the luxury of experiencing the process of decline.

  Slowly we crawl through the outskirts of Johannesburg. The pollution over the graffiti-scarred homes, factories and grime demoralises me even more. Old caravans are dying in backyards; mangy animals, filth, futility and crumbling structures line our route.

  I will the engine driver to go faster, but he seems to slow down even more, savouring the hangover of the humanity outside. The dirt of being close to a railroad lies on all the surfaces, but even cruder are the marks people make in despair.

  We leave Johannesburg station, our last stop, and the people of this train become more subdued. The nervous laughter turns to giggling, and by late afternoon it is quiet. We sit staring blankly ahead, consumed by what we have heard is waiting for us. It settles on us like a damp bandage.

  As the quiet train moves into rural stretches between towns, massive thunderclouds start building up and casting shadows on the dark land. There are small settlements in the shallow valleys, small white dots in partial shade. The marks of man seem frail on the plains beneath the billowing vapour.

  Gerrie is sitting opposite me. Behind him the backrest of the seat that becomes a bunk bed at night forms a blue background to his anxiety. He cradles his guitar and strums softly; stops and starts until a song emerges. When we round a corner, the sun comes out and lights up his face.

  He repeats certain chords over and over until they are linked together and become recognisable. In the previous days, when he sang, volume was important. Now I only hear emotions lying gently in the chords—deep emotions. He looks at the floor but sees the clouds. He plays a very deliberate, unhurried interpretation of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

  Rows and flows of angel hair.

  And ice cream castles in the air.

  And feather canyons ev’rywhere,

  I’ve looked at clouds that way.

  And . . .

  If you care, don’t let them know,

  Don’t give yourself away . . .

  It’s life’s illusions I recall

  I really don’t know life at all.

  Someone who knows the area, or has memorised the stops, says quietly,

  ‘One more station then we’re there.’

  Every moment becomes a large door slamming irrevocably shut behind me. In carefully selected steps, down, down from where already there is no return, the closer we get, the more solid they become, the more heavily they shut, the more thoroughly they seal.

  It is almost dark. We sit in concentrated twilight in the unlit compartment. As the train creeps into Middelburg station, we see them on the platform: the instructors. Their stance is menacing, army-aged; a worn-turned-hardened army threat.

  Metal screeching, painful-sounding; then a jerk, heavy with friction. Shouting. The men burst onto the train, hitting and kicking the sides of the passages and compartments, flinging doors open and swearing. The words are mostly fuck, poes or cunt . . . and move, move, move!

  Shit you will shit! You are going to vomit blood, troops! You are going to vomit blood for a long, long time.

  We are given a ‘rofie-ride’ to the camp in the back of Bedford trucks, under dark canvas, on raw, splinter-emitting benches. We can only see out the back, unable to brace ourselves against the turns and sudden stops. So we fall about, which is the driver’s intention. Everything is immediately childish, spiteful and senseless—I have no wavelength of logic to tune into.

  At the camp there is some comfort in the darkness, the chaos and the fact that we all face the same fate. We are allocated tents in groups of six. Nobody knows what to expect; some say we will be woken up in the night, beaten and drilled and exercised until we pass out. Others say the instructors are going to attack us with balsakke (tog bags) filled with rocks and iron. I think of ways to protect myself and go to sleep curled up with my arm over my face.

  4

  The shapes in the house have started to change. Furniture has been moved to one side and there are large boxes everywhere. When the carpets are rolled up, Frank and I skate on the woodblock floors that Sophie has polished. The rooms sound hollow and our voices louder than usual.

  We are excited, but Sophie has a private sorrow about her. She holds me close and there is a tautness in her body. I look up and see tears on her round cheeks, which she wipes away with the back of her hand, but they stay shiny. To me it feels as if she is overflowing with tears, so I avoid her and play in the maze of boxes with Frank.

  Whenever I have supper with Sophie in the kitchen, I eat by candlelight. My father says it’s not allowed, because I’m not black, but I only want to eat when it’s dark and peaceful. What I really crave for is the dark night and a fire with people huddled in blankets in front of their round homes called huts—the first English word I learn.

  A big truck with a compartment above the driver’s cabin comes to take away all our furniture and the boxes. Frankie and I sleep on the floor, on a blanket-bed. We don’t feel the hardness, only the adventure.

  I look up from the floor. My parents are moving about as people do when they’ve been awake for some time. It is light and our mother tells us to get up.

  ‘Frankie, see that Nicky gets up now. Come on, boys, we don’t have time. Be a big boy, Frankie, and help your brother brush his teeth.’

  I’m sleepy-slow and Frank is urging me to go to the toilet and get out of my pyjamas. Milk and rusks that Sophie baked, no putu porridge this morning, no breakfast, just sluggish drinking and eating and our hurried parents around us.

  ‘Come now, boys, let’s not make your father angry, come-come. Say goodbye to Sophie you two, quickly, and get to the car, quickquick!’ I hug Sophie and say goodbye. Her embrace is rigid.

  My mother looks at Sophie. ‘Don’t upset the little baas (master) . . .’

  I walk to the car. Before I get there, I hear a wail and words I don’t understand because they are drowned by sobs. Sophie bursts past my mother and runs to me. She calls out her name for me, ‘Isipho!’—my gift! She moves towards me, charged with momentum. She has lost her composure and the quiet peace that dwells in her. I have never seen her like this, and it unsettles me.

  Bent over and weeping, she picks me up. A sound like shouting comes from deep in her throat, ‘Ngizokubona . . . Ngizokubona, Isipho, Isipho, Isipho.’ She is sobbing and crying and saying over and over, ‘I see you, I will see, I will see you always, my gift, my gift,’ and then we are both crying.

  I hear my father’s angry voice, but my mother says, ‘Wait, Peet, he’s like a child to her, just let her be.’

  ‘I don’t care. What will the neighbours think?’

  ‘Forget about the neighbours . . .’

  Then my mother speaks to Sophie, and her grip relaxes. She sits down on the garden wall, her body round and hunched up. She doesn’t move, and when my mother tells her to help with the bags, she ignores her for the first time in her life.

  Suddenly I feel a loneliness, as if something has been taken out of me. It’s confusing and overshadows the excitement of the journey ahead. Thus, at the age of four, I leave the rolling foothills of the Drakensberg. I leave forever where the dragon pushes its feet into the earth to steady its mass that towers above in the blue Lesotho distance. I leave a life of happiness.

  Later that morning we have tea, which extends into lunch, with my father’s family in neat, suburban Bloemfontein. In the bathroom there is a machine with big straps that, my mother explains quietly to Frank and me, is to shake one’s fat so that one can become thinner. I wonder for how long the woman has had the machine, because her fat looks hard, solid.

  Her husband is shipshape, like his house.

  We are not allowed to play in the house. We sit down and have ‘Hertzog-cookies’ with our red Kool-Aid. Only one of each, and for the rest we have to sit still and keep quiet. The lounge suite is beige-brown with armrests in the shape of wagon wheels. Everything
is carefully covered with crocheted squares to protect the gleaming surfaces. There is a lot to look at: ornaments, mostly bright and shiny, like different synthetic species herded together in polished packs; collections of all sizes of shiny dogs, frogs, chickens. The dog assortment is so large that it almost takes up a corner of the room. Small tables bear arrangements made out of feathers or shells, or plastic flowers in clay pots surrounded by glazed figurines, boats made out of matches, and little carts made from pegs hold bottles of something wrapped in silver wire. The pictures on the walls are of old cars or ‘arrangements’ of beads or sand on fabric, jigsaw puzzles glued and framed, and backlit silhouettes on glass.

  The woman looks angry and speaks almost exclusively to my mother. When she walks, there is a chafing sound that I trace to the top of her legs where, under the stiff dress, I imagine her stockinged legs rubbing against each other.

  She has a sour-sweet smell. Her head looks flat from the back and runs straight up from her neck to her tightly curled and lacquered hair. On either side of her mouth deep grooves bracket her down-turned mouth, which seems to be made of something other than flesh. She and her house are both cluttered with precise behaviour.

  Her husband asks us if we play rugby. I say, ‘My mother says it’s a stupid sport because people get hurt.’ This seems to shock him, and he replies that if we don’t play rugby we’ll grow up to be sissies. The only time he talks to us after that is to say goodbye. He squeezes my hand with a swollen grip. I pull away, which embarrasses my father. We snigger in the car when Frank calls him Banana Fingers. My mother also laughs, giving us the freedom to ride the joke all the way out of the Free State.

  By late afternoon, about 400 kilometres south of Bloemfontein, we turn off the N1 to my father’s family farm, situated between Richmond and Britstown. We will stay there for five days before going on to Cape Town.

  Frank and I stand behind the front seat, riding the potholes in the gravel road. We are thrilled by the sound of the stones hitting the undercarriage of the car, the wide expanse and the feeling of adventure. Off the tarred road we become part of the landscape, the textures, sounds and smells.

  The sky is bigger here, with clouds on different levels catching the late sun, reflecting colours of different weight. Unique aromas of the wild Karoo float through the car.

  There are farm gates that Frank and I take turns to open. When it is my turn, he helps me with the heavy hinges. I slide off the seat and land on the dirt road, and the smells rush at me—something that will remain in me.

  The immense expanse overwhelms me. I am aware of the different air causing an unfathomable emotion in me. It is somehow untouched by humans, like the land lying ahead. And it is filled with ghosts and smells of the untamed. An uneasy madness tugs at me as the wind curls over the land that is turning from solid to sand.

  ‘Come now, Frank, we don’t have all day, or night. What are you two doing out there?’

  ‘Come, Nicky, we’d better get in.’

  ‘What were you looking at for so long out there, Nicky?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, as I would for the rest of my life when I can’t explain or (I believe) they don’t have the understanding to grasp.

  ‘When are they coming?’ my mother asks my father.

  ‘In two days’ time; until then at least we’ll have peace.’ He shakes his head and clicks his tongue to emphasise his displeasure. ‘If only she would stop her drinking and leave that useless Jacobus!’

  ‘Just don’t let it affect you so.’

  ‘She’s my sister, Suzie; of course it affects me. Now the child complicates matters even more. How can that hippie be a father?’

  ‘What’s a hippie?’

  ‘A hippie, Frank, is worse than a ducktail. They are disgusting people who listen to crazy music and don’t believe in God.’ He allows the silence that follows to press home his sentiment. ‘Promise me you will never become one, because if you do, I will chase you away and you will never set foot in my house again.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that to him; he will believe it.’

  ‘Well, he’d better, because I will.’

  ‘I promise,’ says Frankie.

  A hare jumps out in front of the car and runs in the light pools that break the shadows of small undulations. Our father laughs and speeds up to chase it, but it darts into the dark ahead of the big-eyed noise. The car drifts slightly over tinned-roof corrugations, and then rights itself. When we go through a dip, the bottom of the car scrapes the gravel and bounces up.

  ‘Three more gates to open, then we’re there!’

  We rib-run over the cattle grid and reach the place where our father was raised.

  The house is set within a big, green lawn dotted with pepper trees. The high roof with the curved covering over the wraparound veranda looks proud and inviting.

  There is a formal politeness in the way the two brothers greet each other. Uncle Hendrik and aunt Sannie have a son, Hanno, who also stands on the neat pathway of greeting. He is my age. In him pulses a father-shaped competitiveness, scab deep, barely civil.

  It is a place of contrast—the freedom of the spirits borne on the evening air and the mundaneness of my father’s family. They seem carefully crocheted into self-righteous squares on which their prejudice rests. There are special voices for God, then in descending steps of deference, for people of the church, authority, old people, friends, children, dogs, and finally the voice they use for the staff.

  Long table, respectful children on one side, humble, grateful, then off to bed. We walk down the high-ceilinged passage covered in photographs, to the blank room that Frank and I share. High above the bed a light hangs on a long cord. The frilly, blue lampshade projects in half moons on each wall, with harsh light below the dividing line and mysterious shadows above. We ask my mother to leave the door open. When she leaves, I crawl into bed with Frankie, and we fall asleep hugging each other. Breakfast consists of ‘build-you-up-to-play-rugby’ helpings that we have to eat in silence. When my uncle asks me a question, I stutter a reply in Afrikaans and my father grimaces.

  It is time for a tour of the farm. We reach the barn with the farm vehicles and implements, and the ever-present layer of dust amidst the smell of sheep manure.

  Our drive around the farm takes all morning. Frank and I stand on the back of the Ford truck with high railings for transporting sheep. Hanno has a ‘you-don’t-really-belong-here’ attitude and takes up position in the centre against the cab. We reach a whitewashed clay wall and go through a rusty gate leading to the stones that mark the places where our dead forebears lie, contorted as though the hard soil wants to twist them out. My father combs his hair, almost as an act of respect, and returns the comb to his calf-length sock. He points out the different generations to Frank and me, and then we turn to go.

  Before the doors of the Ford close, uncle Hendrik says: ‘One day we will all lie here.’ He starts the engine and drives off. I look at this dismal place, confused and frightened, and turn to Frankie’s frowning face for comfort. After lunch we all have to rest. No sound from the children. We wait for the noise to die down, and Frank and I tiptoe through the settled discipline to play with the dogs.

  We sit on the red cement veranda squinting into the glare. In the distance a springbok walks by, the heat waves stretching its needle-thin legs into quivering waves of rising air. The corgi that I’m stroking lies panting, its tongue reaching the concrete floor and making wet marks that stay only for a moment before being snatched away by the thirsty air.

  In the evening the wind pushes the curtains aside and the spirits look in on us to the beat of the generator. I pull the sheets over my head and hold Frankie tight. Where we touch it is dampwarm and I pray for sleep.

  They appear to him broken, dressed in silver, telling him to get up. They carry the boy off through the window; he tries to fight but he is helpless. The chill of the faraway stars panics him as he drifts high above the farm. Below, the old farmhouse is dark and quiet
and the land it stands on crumbling. Eyes, behind which a tornado rages, burn darkly and he obeys. The generator is off. Fragile, the sleep of the naive self-righteous . . . he sees them lying, denial fluttering behind their eyelids. The dogs look up and the corgi is calling, but he is too high to hear.

  A preacher clothed in piety is talking and has turned his back on a truth of which he has total clarity. Then he takes the hand of a forefather. Both of them are carrying rifles for hunting. It is as though they are pondering a weighty decision and then decide to go ahead. The boy is aware that they have decided against his will. He calls out to them, but no one hears his soundless plea.

  Swinging around he sees angels fighting—in the centre he witnesses his own birth in a violent storm . . . recognising them beside his mother, who is screaming in delivery, fighting desperately as they pull him to the square walls until he is dragged within its shadow. When they pass the top of the conifers he kicks and cries, ‘No, no!’ The one with the gouged features is weighing him down by his feet.

  The hard earth opens. Inside the darkness is movement. Now he is begging, ‘I cannot go there. NO, PLEASE . . . it’s not my grave, It’s . . .’

  ‘Nick . . . NICKY . . . wake up!’ The words cut through the men standing on the mist. I shake and hold on to my brother, but on the outskirts they are waiting. I know they are there . . .

  5

  The springbok arches its back and jumps fantastically high, defying gravity. Three times in a row it bounces with majestic grace; head down, horns forward. At the apex of the third leap all its energy suddenly disintegrates. I reel at the sound, cover my ears, close my eyes. Not only against the noise, but also against the destruction I have just witnessed. The shell from uncle Hendrik’s .308 rifle clanks onto the metal floor of the truck. I’m still holding my ears when he jumps off the back, gets into the cab and drives off.