Moffie

by Andre Carl van der Merwe

  All grieving has a structure and it is different for each person. The one I hate is the flimsily constructed sorrow, the temporary, overcrowded sadness with too many words. Here everything is different. I watch them walk and talk, and I don’t trust them. They constantly use the Afrikaans words for tragedy, great sadness and sorrow.

  I follow them when they remove my brother in his dusty box from the boot and carry him to a cool place. I go unnoticed in the gloom under the mantilla of night sinking over the homestead and outbuildings.

  My father and uncle Hendrik put the coffin down in front of a corrugated-iron sliding door. There is a grating sound as the wood connects with the gravel and they fumble with the lock. Inside the cold room a single light bulb casts meat-hook shadows on the wall and lights up the red and white sinew and fat on the carcasses under which they place the casket. The air smells of meat, blood and cold.

  I don’t cry, nor do I say anything as the sliding door is closed, slicing the view of the casket with the disembowelled animals above it until there is only a shaft of light, a knock and then nothing.

  I lie in the bed where Frankie held me when I cried for Sophie. I don’t cry; I speak to the hollow emptiness in me, and I learn to understand purgatory—limbo.

  The next day the minister comes from town, with an extravagant, patronising sympathy. Everyone is wearing black, and outside the wind is blowing. I meet relatives whom I don’t remember and forget again immediately. Nobody talks to me. They just greet me, touch my head, and then they appear to switch on their tears elsewhere.

  Five cars drive up to the place where all the dead people lie under the ground. The car doors slam. Women hold on to their skirts and hats, and their white petticoats contrast with the black.

  Past the rusty gate is a freshly dug hole. The coloured layers in the walls of the grave reflect the eternity Frankie will be entering. The minister is very serious about this business of putting Frankie into the hole. He reads from the Afrikaans Bible with foreboding, the wind fraying the end of each sentence. He makes me feel that where Frankie is going, he’ll be suffering.

  The coffin is lowered on ropes. It swings forward and hits the top end of the grave. Some soil is dislodged and falls on the lid, and I imagine Frankie’s head hitting against the gravel. My mother and father are beyond caring about the wind or anything else.

  From behind the wall I hear voices. The farm workers are singing a hymn for my brother. They are not allowed inside the white people’s walls, but their weather-beaten faces are distorted with compassion. They stand in their ragged clothing, under which one can see their emaciated frames. It is they who touch me, for pity is part of their design; suffering and understanding ingrained. It is their anguish I will never forget.

  High above us the sky is filled with flaky clouds, like wallpaper on the clear blue of the big, big heaven.

  Lunch, tea, and then the drinking. I wander amongst the people. The sounds, the movements, the black clothing all seem to blur into a marsh of indifference. Everything is so completely different now that every molecule of my world has been distorted. How dare anything exist, and not Frankie? How can my life go on when its axis has gone?

  As dusk descends, the wind dies down. From where I sit on the back steps of the kitchen, the labourer’s cottages beckon me. Their exaggerated shadows from the firelight dance against the walls and their voices are animated.

  On my way to the cottages I come across a metal drum lying on its side, and inside I see a corgi with her four puppies. I am still staring at the perfection when Hanno arrives and beats the side of the drum with a stick. Then he strikes again, and this time he hits the mother.

  I jump up and grab the stick. Only afterwards do I realise what I’ve done. He is shocked by my reaction and leaves the stick in my hand, kicks the dog, grabs one of the puppies and walks back to the house. My bravery astonishes me. Halfway to the kitchen Hanno turns back and shouts,

  ‘Get the fuck away from those dogs, they’re mine! I will kill them if I want to. And tomorrow I’m shooting that bitch, you sissy, you moffie!’

  The labourers only notice me once I am standing amongst them. Their voices die down and they stare at me. They have an understanding of my grief and they don’t need to tell me. Their eyes are soft and moist from smoke and alcohol. I sit down on an old tyre, and their conversation resumes. From where I sit, I see the glow of a cold, ancient sun sliding over the vastness of the Karoo. Black paint crawls from the shadows, around the small houses, and stops behind the people at the fire.

  I feel the warmth of the circle, different from Sophie’s people who seemed to grow from the earth. Sophie’s world was mud and grass; this world is tin and poverty. Their sounds are also sharper, whereas the ones at the feet of the dragon are deep, rounder. But the empathy is equally inviting.

  They can feel my grief, and to me this is sympathy. Their collective warmth gives me a comfort I have not felt since Sophie. Piet, the one who blew into the mouth of the baby springbok, smiles a toothless grin at me, and the music starts up again.

  A big woman with sagging breasts starts to sing. It is more like attrition; weeping, hypnotic cycles. Its strength is not in the lyrics, although they have a raw sincerity, but in the passionate way she expresses them. Her head tilts to one side, eyes closed, her face remarkably dramatic, with round cheekbones like golf balls.

  A man gets up, as if in a trance, and dances around the fire with his eyes closed. Puffs of dust fly up as his worn-out shoes drag and beat the ground. His body is skeletal and his arms look remarkably long. His frame is bent over and his arms gyrate as if controlled by a different brain. I have a sense of comfort and honesty, a reality so completely different from the restrained discipline, the formulated emotion that has chilled this day.

  By the time they find me it is quarter past twelve. My mother is bordering on hysterics. Uncle Hendrik is angry. He tells me to get home immediately. On the short walk home he is able to talk to me without parents’ presence: I am different and badly behaved, an embarrassment to my father; the sooner I change, the better. Now that Frank is gone I’m the only boy. I’m the eldest, I must do what my father tells me, and I must respect my father at all times. I must stay away from the non-whites. He has heard me speak Zulu, which is not good. We do not mix with them. We are different. If we mix with the staff they will become white. We must always show them who is boss.

  All I want to do is stay with those poor people. Their sorrow is visible; it is raw and honest, whereas in my world it is deep and secretive. I want passion that weeps and holds, not hides and pretends.

  When we get to the house I am the centre of different attentions: relief from my mother, disappointment from my father, embarrassment that manifests itself as anger from the rest. I have ended their ‘party.’

  Uncle Hendrik speaks to my father as if I don’t exist. My mother is crying and wants to hug me, but they take her to her room.

  ‘Look what you’ve done to your mother.’ He shakes his head. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ My father walks me down the long, dark passage, composed but angry-drunk. He holds me by the scruff of my neck, and by the time we reach the room my toes are barely touching the ground.

  In the room he removes his belt and orders me to lie over the side of the bed. It’s the bed my brother slept in. I am panic-stricken because my mother is not here to protect me. As he strikes the first blow I start to cry. The leather claws around the side of my legs, where it hurts most, like cuts.

  Afterwards I curl up on the bed. I can’t hear anything around me—the space is full. I have lost my brother and my life.

  ***

  To me there will always be the time before and the time after. A clear line, even though three days pass between Frank’s death and the funeral on the farm. The event is so large it takes days to mark. Everything ‘before’ is drained away like dishwater swirling towards a slurping hole—behind the absolute divide that crystallises over these days.

  In the days
that follow I rescue one of the puppies and insist on taking it home—this in a house where children don’t insist. Dot, my father names her, for the one white dot on the neck of her otherwise brown body. She looks more like a corgi than the others, which are now dead.

  11

  Bronwyn is the good baby. That’s how they refer to her. I have hardly any memory of her before this time. She was invisible to Frank and me. Now she is everywhere.

  Affinity is not something that can be created. What was between Frank and me seemed alive. It breathed and grew. It fed us like food; only us. My relationship with Bronwyn, on the other hand, is incomplete, damaged too often. The more my mother encourages camaraderie, the more I recoil. I am even self-conscious when I talk to her.

  There is always blame after a death, often invented. It was because of Bronwyn, yes because of her, that Frankie crossed the road. I would have seen the car coming; I should have kept an eye on her; I should have said, ‘Don’t play here. Mom said we’re not allowed to go outside the gate.’

  It is easy for my sorrow to turn to anger and then to loathing the one whose fault it was.

  12

  This place is so fucking ugly.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No, I mean it’s impregnated with ugliness.’ I think I’m very clever using the word, but I’ve thought about it for a long time, sitting here—long, bored, army-hours against the barracks wall.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is not a single nice thing in sight.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I’m talking about the place, pervert! It’s the surfaces, I think, even the surfaces we’re covered in. Actually, that’s the intention. I had this art teacher at school who said kitsch is a lack of sincerity.’

  ‘Mm . . .’

  ‘In some ways though these barracks are sincere in their intention. Ugliness does not have to be kitsch, of course, but then the shapes are so unresolved.’

  ‘I can point out plenty of kitsch.’

  I laugh. ‘Yes, you’re right, there’s plenty.’

  13

  Don’t be a sissy, man!’

  ‘I’m not. I just don’t want to.’

  ‘You will play rugby! Do you understand me? This is my house, and here you do as I say. Is that clear? And another thing, look at this report! If you are this bad at school you’ll end up a tramp on the street.’

  ‘I won’t!’

  ‘Yes, you will. And don’t think I’ll help you. I’ll walk right past you. You are good for bloody nothing.’

  ‘I’m good at something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m good at art!’

  ‘Art! Oh please, Nicholas, grow up. What can you do with art? I’m talking about the real world here! One day you’ll have to make money, not play around. I tell you, you are going to suffer. You have no idea of the real world, and don’t you ever think I’ll help you when you turn out a failure. You’d better start performing at school. At this rate you’re going to end up working under blacks, I’m telling you.’

  ‘I want to do the things I like. I hate maths.’

  ‘Nonsense, you’re just bloody lazy, that’s all. Or are you stupid?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘One thing is certain, from this year on you WILL play rugby. And you’d better be careful—you’re turning into a bloody moffie! Do you want that, hey? Hey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bad at school, bad at sport. Why can’t you be more like your sister? What are you going to do with your life? Just don’t come and cry to me. You’re on your own. A tramp on the street! I’ll walk right past you . . . Always remember that . . . you hear me?’

  And I do.

  ***

  Bronwyn somehow escapes the impact of these events. As for my parents, neither of them openly cries again for Frankie. They’re clad in ‘the way you behave,’ showing the world their strength.

  I, in turn, craft a world soaked in him. I set up rituals in his honour; parts of the house, parts of me, reserved only for him. I talk to him and we play together. And I am old enough to know that this will be seen as bizarre.

  ‘Who are you talking to, Nicholas?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me! I saw your lips move.’

  I tell her that I was singing to myself, and she knows I’m lying. She wants to tell me she knows, she wants me to stop, but she doesn’t know how. She just wants it to go away.

  To me it seems as if my parents don’t keep him as close as I do. Frank is carefully wrapped and tied up, like a fragile heirloom from another era, and stored away.

  I walk specific paths, open and close doors in a certain way and keep paving stones and routes in his memory, as if the surfaces still carry his touch. I enshrine his shrouded world of undisturbed imaginary relics.

  My father, too raw for patience, tries to stop me. But the disfigurement I carry in my heart, that which I haven’t let out, and my behaviour as a result of it, deepens the rift between us. Selfrighteousness is the knife he uses to cut this rising dough, but it sticks to the blade that he polishes in church every Sun­day, where he believes his outbursts and malicious words are swiftly sterilised.

  ***

  School, Plasticine, powder paint, Mrs. Kreebel, wave patterns, homework, coloured pencils, the smell of wax crayons, lunchbox sandwiches, orange cold drinks in Tupperware bottles, yellow cling peaches, stories, fear of the future, uniforms, older boys, fights, Silverleaf pies with lots of tomato sauce, remember your cap and garters, Matchbox cars, carpets smelling of dust, sit and listen, keep quiet, inoculations, fear, a den in the bushes, rockery with daisies, missing Frankie.

  As the years patiently notch up experience, I realise that sport, maths and the sciences are most admired in a system geared for achievers in these disciplines. By some genetic disposition I have neither these abilities nor the desire to develop them. Competence in catching or throwing a ball is held in much higher esteem than the rendering, in words or colour, of a deep emotion, or architecture that sits perfectly in its environment.

  By age eight, my third year at school, my younger sister displays remarkable ability in all these categories of this changing world.

  Middle-class Welgemoed, and my family in particular, worships at a new cathedral—one of sport. Tennis starts consuming our household.

  A coach is appointed to mould the parents’ little replicas into winning—a prerequisite for being trendy in this class of South African in the late 1960s. Bellville Tennis Club—catechism for the new religion. At first I also worship there, hating it, but carried by the flood; the only one I know.

  Not only the people, but even the leather grips of the Slazenger and Dunlop Maxply rackets have their own pungent identification. The hats, sweatbands and dressing rooms all bear their scent in this island of tar, cement and asbestos. Pla­toons in perfect formation on a parade ground of competition.

  14

  They’re visiting us for the day at our rented holiday house in Jeffrey’s Bay—in-laws of my mother’s sister Fran. They’re poor, so don’t talk about money. They refer to their son, my distant cousin, as Blackie, or Ossie or Oscar.

  He has dark skin and hair and a striking presence. I sense in him a gentle strength that I find mysterious and attractive, but because he is related to my cousin Michael I take it for granted that he feels the same about me as Michael does. So I escape on a trip around town, pushing my draadkar—my little wire car—with its long steering shaft.

  I have constructed a fantasy around saving a man: I am the only one to make it over the final obstacle in time, and in a brave, crowd-pleasing move I rescue him. What he looks like is the best part of the fantasy—I only need to dip my mind into my barrel of handsome boys.

  Early evening, deep into their visit, uncle Dirk sends Michael to pour him another brandy and Coke. Then he calls me to the balcony. He has devised a wrestling competition on a dirty mattress lying in the corner. The children have been paired off with those closest to their age,
and I see my sister battling it out with the cousin a year older than she is.

  The dark corner has an eerie luminosity caused by the light from the adjacent room. A shaft of light falls over the bodies like a chevron.

  The boys must take off their shirts. From behind him uncle Dirk puts his arms over Blackie’s shoulders and rests his hands on the boy’s chest. Michael returns with his father’s drink, which he tastes. Then he nods and places it on the balcony wall.

  The dust from the mattress makes me sneeze. But there is something more hanging in the air—the fear of shame. Uncle Dirk is swaying, with Blackie still in front of him. His head is turned to the mattress, but his attention is on Blackie. His mouth is in a dog-on-heat smirk. He is somewhere between humiliating me and touching the boy. In the corner of his mouth white spittle stretches and shrinks as he speaks. His right hand plays over the boy’s chest, and I see how his thumbnail rubs over Blackie’s nipple.

  Suddenly I’m angry, confused about my sudden attraction to the boy and jealousy towards my uncle. Uncle Dirk has it all his way. He pretends not to notice the boy squirming under his hand as he stands shouting instructions to the two on the mattress. When he realises that Blackie wants to break free, he puts his head down and rubs his face over the boy’s hair.

  The round is over. The object of the game is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mattress. Uncle Dirk lets go of Blackie, and now it’s my turn against his son. This is the main event. I find the idea of touching my cousin distasteful.

  ‘Riiiightio, here we have the Flop-Klaas-Kaffirrr . . . annnd Michael!’ he shouts into his glass as if it were a microphone. Then, in a softer voice to his son, but still loud enough for me to hear, ‘OK, take your time, and I don’t care if you hurt the sissy.’