‘No, tell me, man. You never know. Maybe I’ll come and visit you in Ellisras, then I must know how to get a chick.’
‘Those birds won’t go for an English moffie like you, man.’
‘OK, but just tell me what you do, or have you never had a girl?’
‘Of course I have! What do you think? Far more than you . . .’
‘Well then, tell me! What do you do? Or do you just fuck her in her front bum till her back bum farts so hard you need paramedics to come and rescue you?’
When Malcolm says this the small group around him bursts into laughter, including Frikkie’s friend. Frikkie gets up, swears and walks away.
This is how I get to know Malcolm. We never see Frikkie again—he is transferred to resume basics with the other conscripts who will stay behind in Middelburg.
Malcolm, just doing his army training in the Defence Force, by chance ends up in the same platoon as I and our paths cross, never to be uncrossed again. There are three people with whom I form previously uncharted connections here in my living nightmare; three remarkable relationships, so important that they become a part of me, like a vital organ. How ironic that here, where I feel so hopeless, I receive these blessings. But gifts of this magnitude carry a weight—especially the third friendship, the one that awaits me at Infantry School.
‘Hi, I’m Malcolm.’
‘I’ve never laughed this much; certainly not in the army.’
And from that day on we are friends.
Malcolm and I are connected by fatigue and army brown aversion for this organisation, and within it we grow effortlessly towards each other, even though we are from vastly different backgrounds. It is much easier than my friendship with Ethan, which is charged and corrupted by my infatuation. Malcolm is light and easy. He teaches me to laugh, and it feels as if we understand each other on all levels. My diary reads:
He is like a hill I walk past and don’t notice, its top obscured by clouds. Then one day I am suddenly intrigued and I start climbing. When I get to the mist, I realise it is a fog of prejudice and beyond it is the larger green of a previously unnoticed mountain—I have judged a mountain by its foothill.
There always seems to be a whole lot brimming behind the froth of coping. When he stands, he leans against a pillar or a doorway or a wall, as if he has been stacked there like a rifle, loaded and full of potential.
Yes, it’s right for me to compare him to a mountain. He is constant like a mountain.
‘Hi, I’m Nicholas.’
‘Yes, I know. So you’re English? I thought, you know . . . with your surname. I mean, Van der Swart!
‘Yep, mother’s English, father Afrikaans, but I was in an English class in a mainly Afrikaans school.’
‘What school?’
‘Paul Roos Gymnasium.’
‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of it; good school in Stellenbosch.’
‘Yes, actually wasn’t too bad. And you?’
‘I went to Jeppe Boys.’
Malcolm possesses streetwise savvy that runs like a track to his will. If he sets his mind to something, it seems that planets will conspire; constellations obey. And he has decided that we will be friends, which carries a measure of security.
He has survived a world I have only heard about, and getting through the army doesn’t scare him. I’m attracted to this confidence.
And so I learn a new love; one I have not yet experienced and one I don’t understand. It is the love of a friend. As we slip deeper into understanding each other, this love grows like ascending stairs; discovering new treads between the risers.
I think there is a possibility that Malcolm might be gay, and I think he might know that I am. But then I’ve been wrong so often. It is sufficiently warming for me just to believe that we have this similar secret—a secret boys like us will protect, for our lives depend on it.
The Defence Force distinctly forbids homosexuality, regarding it as an unpardonable offence against God and country, so perverse that it is socially acceptable to mete out punishment to anyone found to be of such orientation. If you are caught, you are sent to the psychiatric ward for shock, hormone, and aversion therapy—you are as good as eliminated. Besides, if he were gay, he too would have lived too long with the fear of the ripples exposure would cause. So we show nothing, not even to each other. I have never met anybody I feel I can trust as I do Malcolm, but it goes against my self-preservation to give anybody such power over my fate.
Malcolm is braver than I am. He tests me with supremely crafted clues, but I would never drop my guard in this purgatory.
5
There is a faint crackle as the needle settles snugly into the tiny groove. Something like static jumps between the speakers. I have listened to this track so often that the distortion has become part of the composition. Due to the off-centre design of the label, the record seems to wobble. I choose my seat and close my eyes to the fantasy I will now put to music.
While I’m waiting for the track to start, I feel the emptiness of the house. In their white clothing, clutching their rackets, they left hurriedly, my mother carrying an ice bucket, sweatband, jersey and peak. It’s like a big blob of noise that has popped out of the house.
First I select ‘Bella figlia dell’amore’ from Rigoletto. When the Duke starts to chat up Maddalena, I am seized by the music and forget to choreograph my fantasy to it. I play the track again, until I have sung it a few times. Then I sit down, close my eyes and allow the music to thread through my daydream. My fantasy will be of a man proclaiming his love, not the revenge of a court jester or Gilda watching her lover seduce another.
I rise dramatically onto an imagined stage in front of a spellbound audience to act out the drama of the aria. In falsetto I sing the parts of Joan Sutherland and Huguette Tourangeau, not knowing the meaning or the structure of the words I’m pronouncing. Then again I do Pavarotti’s part, unconcerned about jumping between the two parts, and at the same time I’m directing the London Symphony Orchestra. Needing more space for my theatre, I move the ball-and-claw table out of the way and swoop-dance to the wave of men’s voices and the shorter peaking of the women’s.
By the fifth replay I start searching through the pile of LP’s for Turandot and remove it from the sleeve. When I put it on the turntable the needle moves up and down so violently on the deformed record that it looks as if it may become airborne, but ‘Nessun dorma’ blasts forth at maximum volume.
The most romantic opera and closest to my fantasies of galloping over green hills on a white horse is Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. Riding bareback, I am holding on to my man with his shirt open, my hands clawing at his bare chest in the evening light.
In the meantime a sow has escaped from her pen, followed by seven hundred others to the green pastures of our front lawn, where they are now exploring their burgeoning new world, digging the air with their round disc-snouts.
My heart sinks, and for a moment I toy with the idea of leaving them there as punishment for my father, but the thought is shortlived. It would take me all afternoon to get my parents’ biggest investment back into their pens, so I start the arduous task with Puccini’s ‘Un bel di vedremo’ drifting towards me through the dusty lace curtains of the lounge.
6
It is both an escape and a burden, this relationship with Ethan that I tend to so carefully. I count every word, and each moment is measured, analysed and guarded against over-exposure. I wonder whether this unnatural atmosphere we’re in is what keeps us together. If we were in a civilian environment, would we still be so close? How difficult it is to develop a relationship within such complex dynamics. And after all this nurturing it may all be in vain. But my time with Ethan is my cure, the exquisite amidst the dreadful.
The first stage is almost over. I have more than survived; I have fallen in love and made a new friend. Given the choice, I probably would not have had it any other way.
Walking through the rows of neatly spaced tents on my way back from the ablution b
lock, one of my favourite tunes comes drifting towards me. I stop to listen and decide to find the owner of that song. If this is the kind of music he listens to, we will have a lot in common.
The tune is mesmerising. When it ends I meet the owner and we listen to it repeatedly until the batteries of the tape recorder have no power left. We ignore the protests of ‘hippie, blaspheming music’ from the other tents.
Leaving, I think-hear the words of Highway 61:
Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son,’
Abe says, ‘Man you must be puttin’ me on,’
God say, ‘No.’ Abe say, ‘What?’
. . .
Well Abe says, ‘Where do you want this killin’ done?’
God says, ‘Out on Highway 61.’
***
Saturday, 2 February, 1980.
When the long, brown hair was shaved off the boy’s head, I was watching a monument being defaced in a coup d’etat of a new order. We greeted this new world with a ‘number one’ haircut. The same and yet so different. Now, two days later, blisters cover our inflamed necks where our long hair used to curl down to our shoulders.
The changes thrust on us define the new creatures we become in a world seen from different angles. I have become a planet torn from its orbit, left searching.
The first week of our acquaintance I spend only watching. This boy has a voice as tranquil as a glider in flight, beyond the mess, tests, injections and abuse.
The ‘browns pants’ we have to tuck into our boots are so unintentionally sexy on him. He is a perfect 32 as he tries on the trousers—a layer of taupe fabric shrink-wrapping my passion.
7
The red ribbon slides between my thumb and index finger like mercury, and I savour the movement. The thin band continues its journey and then gently flies free. The next ribbon beckons, pointing the way to a secret covenant I know I will embrace.
Ethan has told me nothing else but that I should be at this spot, at this time. It is here, behind the tent-town barracks, that I discover the first red ribbon tied to a shrub. For a moment I ponder the magnitude of this tiny symbol. In the tents behind me the other servicemen are resting before tomorrow’s early training session. I am probably the only one in the entire company experiencing a sense of euphoria. I turn slightly to the right and see the next ribbon hanging in the still Highveld air.
This is the seventh Sunday in camp, the last one before we leave for Oudtshoorn. I feel a mild sense of accomplishment; partly for getting through this period and partly for the confidence one feels when one is elected to an elite group—even if it entails going to a place one dreads. But for now my world is Ethan, and time is a series of ribbons.
Each one leads me further up the hill. Tonight Mama Africa is again giving so uniquely from her abundant heart. There are no clouds. In the east a moon steals upwards and to the west the setting sun reminds me, for a brief moment, of Storm.
The last ribbon takes me over the hill that now separates us from the army. Ahead of us is a training area that is not used at night and definitely not on a Sunday evening. There is only a slim chance of being caught here, but it is still a possibility too frightful to contemplate.
Ethan is sitting smiling at me. Around him are four candles, and in front of him is food, but at first I only see him. Something reckless wells up inside me, and I feel filled to overflowing.
From a parcel his mother arranged to be sent from Johannesburg, delivered yesterday, he takes imported Camembert, Brie, Parma ham, bread and pâté—food we only dream about, food not in the vocabulary of most of the troops. For me, just being here, the fact that it is me he has invited to share with, is what centres the night.
‘Ethan.’
‘Hey, Nick. Let’s have some decent food!’
‘Ethan, I can’t believe this, man!’
‘No one saw you, I hope?’
‘No, I checked.’
‘I hope no one finds the ribbons,’ he smiles.
‘No chance, they are too far away from the rest and it is already too dark. If you hadn’t told me where to start, I would not have found the first one. Ethan, this is very special. Thank you.’
The setting sun on Ethan’s face turns his skin a smooth, deep brown. As he breathes in it is as if he inhales the light, which feeds him from within and then shines through his skin and blue eyes.
‘We are lucky it is such a stunning sunset, I’ll say that for Middelburg.’
‘Yes, it is. Ethan, I am speechless.’
He pulls the cork from a bottle of red wine and it sounds like something being freed. The cabernet looks black in the two glasses.
What we are doing is flirting with DB. Alcohol is forbidden for rofies, but the ridicule could be even worse. Yet for us this all belongs to another world, outside this ring of candles.
‘I asked my mother to put this in. It’s a gift for you, but first I want to read you something. This,’ tilting a book towards me, ‘is the story of a little prince who lived on a small planet, actually on an asteroid . . . uhm . . . asteroid B-612 to be exact.’ He shows me an illustration of a timid yellow-haired boy standing on an asteroid. To the left of the little prince some gas escapes from an insignificant protrusion on the tiny planet. Ethan glances up shyly. If I had to give in to my immediate impulse, I would kiss him. ‘He would move his chair around the planet to continuously see the sun set. One day he watched forty-four sunsets.’ He checks again to gauge my reaction to this information. It pleases him and he smiles.
‘Why do you think sunsets are different from sunrises?’
‘They are, hey!’
‘Nick, do you think they are actually the same, or is it just that we know they are what they are?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, say I took a picture of a sunrise and then of a sunset, do you think you would know the difference?’
‘No, guess not. They would just be pictures of shapes and light. I think we need to experience them to know. I think they feel different.’
‘Yes, a sunset actually feels different, doesn’t it?’
‘You know, I love a sunset, and not just for sentimental reasons.
‘I have a theory: In Africa, for me, sunrise and sunset are different not for their appearance, but for the effect they have on me. In the mornings over, say, the Karoo, in the cold, low distance, it stretches far and then rises with promise, looking on a clean and innocent world, but at dusk it sets with forgiveness. It’s the grace I find so warm. Sounds loopy, hey?’ Immediately I regret what I have said, thinking I sounded pompous and melodramatic.
He looks at me for a long time and I look back, focusing only on his eyes, until a tremor deep within me forces me to look away. I only turn back to him when he says, ‘This little guy in the book, I’ve always liked him and I always think of him when it comes to friendship and sunsets.’ This sentence is so beautiful that I smile at him. He looks at me, branding into different parts of me forever something that transcends this plane.
‘I want to read you the chapter about friends,’ and he reads a short chapter about a fox from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. I watch him so intently that I have no capacity for observation left to hear the story. I study him with all my senses.
The only part I remember, and only because I ask him to reread it, is, ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’
Why, at that moment, do I not touch him, can he not see, can eyes not see, can our hearts not see rightly? This is how profound the barriers are that we carry so heavily around us, the structures of refutation, how complicated our fear; we doubt even the vision of our hearts! Maybe if we knew what was waiting for us we would touch each other gently, but we don’t. If only we could know.
I will carry this night with me forever in all its unrealised fulfilment and tortured imperfection. Tonight I let him talk, not only to hear the voice, but for the things that are being said. He speaks of home and of sun
sets.
He tells me about the light at the end of day against the Twelve Apostles, the mornings on the white beaches, the sun that spills over Lion’s Head and turns the sea into silvery-blue mercury, and the storms that can sweep an entire beach out to sea.
He tells me about it like an invitation to nirvana. His eyes sparkle as though he sees it all in front of him and he wants me to see it with him.
‘From Oudtshoorn on a weekend pass you can spend the weekend with me. We will be close enough to go down for a weekend, you know.’ But the word Oudtshoorn triggers a tension we don’t want here with us tonight.
We stretch the time to just before roll call. Ethan bends down and starts collecting the evidence, then he pauses motionless, as if he is dwelling on a grave thought. The muscles in his legs are visible through his browns, even in this light.
He blows out a candle, then another and another until only one is still burning. He picks it up, comes to stand in front of me and asks me if I think we will be together in Oudtshoorn.
His face is so close that it feels as if I can see right into him. His expression is one of need—a need for security or something undefined.
‘We have to be together, Ethan. We just have to be. I will not make it without you.’
‘We will not be alone again, you know . . . before we leave.’
‘I know.’
‘I hear there will be two trains.’ I hear him asking, knowing it cannot be promised. ‘Nicholas, promise me we’ll be on the same train.’
I promise, and then he looks at me intently. The light from the tiny candle catches his eyebrows, leaving his eyes dark. ‘I want to say goodbye here on our hill.’ A shudder runs through me, like tiny sparks of electricity racing through every fibre. I hold on to his words. Our hill. Did I hear correctly? Did he say that? I keep the words and their sound like a taste. Our hill. Then we hear the whistle from behind our hill, where hell still lives and people rush to finish before roll call for the morning inspection that we are so recklessly ignoring.
Moffie Page 8
