The Smell of Apples: A Novel

by Mark Behr

  By noon I must find water, even though I know I shouldn V stop. Once you ve stopped, broken the rhythm of the body's automatic drive, it i difficult getting it back. But my lips are cracked and I can feel blisters swelling like fiery funguses from my feet. Slowing down, I spot a smallish water-hole in amongst a thicket of thorn trees.

  Even the sight of vile brown water makes my thirst unbearable, and I must force myself to first make sure that everything is safe. I look and listen while I try to

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  hold my breath, at the same time fighting the urge to plunge into that water and get rid of the coals that consume my chest.

  Eyes combing every dark patch amongst the trees, I make my way forward. Holding the R4 in my one hand, I squat down on one knee and with the free hand I scoop water to my mouth. I drink as much as I can, and then move back into cover.

  My stomach cramps from all the water and I sit down with my back against a tree. Not even the sound of a bird in the trees. Only the omnipresent monotone of the cicadas and the rumbling from the north.

  I wonder what Dad is doing at this moment. Has he been informed that there has been no radio contact with us this morning? Is he giving angry orders for them to come and find his son?

  Now Vm alone, Dad.

  Without a single one of my men.

  I keep wondering about the troops. No training could have properly prepared them for what happened this morning. Last night I could hardly bring myself to give them orders.

  'If there's a contact during the night, we just cut a line to Qalueque in the east,' / said to the black section-leader, and told him to go around with the instruction. I barely looked at him while I spoke. Only when he began walking away from me in the dusk, I spoke after him:

  'Why are you here?' I asked, and half surprised he turned around. He stood staring at me with a puzzled expression as though at last I'd gone completely crazy.

  7 m asking you why you are here - in Angola?'

  I stopped myself from asking why he is fighting against his own freedom. I waited for his answer, I waited to hear him say that theirs is a form of economic conscription, that

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  he was here only because he was unable to find a decent job on account of the system. Eventually he shrugged and answered:

  'To make war, Lieutenant. We are not like the Cubans who take women to fight. It's men that must make war!

  I smiled at him and said: 'Ja . . . God knows . . . eventually you blacks could end up being the same as the bloody whites. '

  He looked at me for a moment, and then asked: 'Who else should we be like, Lieutenant?'

  As he walked away into the falling dusk, I looked at his narrow back beneath the uniform, and his dark neck seemed unexpectedly vulnerable.

  From Muizenberg, all through St James and Kalk Bay, many of the houses are more than a hundred years old. Members of Parliament and all the rich Capetonians came here for their vacation in the olden days. Before the war, when Oupa Erasmus arrived, it was still the holiday place. After the war the rich English started moving away to Sea Point, Three Anchor Bay and Clifton, on the Atlantic side of the mountain. But lots of English people still live here, like the Spiros and the Smiths and the Wileys. The only ones we really know are the Spiros, whose twins are almost as old as me. Like all Jews they're stinking rich, and Mister Spiro owns all the Mobil petrol stations in the peninsula. They live in a huge double-storey close to the Rhodes Cottage.

  In Kalk Bay the houses are even older than in Muizenberg and St James, because that's where the first fishermen came to live and where they built the harbour. At first it was called Kalkhoven Bay, because of the chalk they mined there. But after they realised they could make

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  more money from whaling, they closed down the chalk mine and built the harbour.

  Back then, thousands of whales came into the bay every year. The boat that belonged to Jan Bandjies' great oupagrootjie from Java used to bring in eighty to a hundred whales some years. And his boat was only one of many. Everything went well until the Battle of Muizenberg in the 1800s, when the English took over the Cape. Many boats were taken away from the fishermen, and most of them had to find work on English ships or in factories, because the small boats couldn't compete with the big ships. Since our government built nice homes for the fishermen higher up the track, there are even less boats going out of the Kalk Bay harbour every morning.

  St James is named after the first little church that was built here. Against the post-office wall there are pretty coloured tiles that make up a picture of people going into the old church. They're wearing strange pointy hats and they've got dark skin and narrow eyes, so maybe they came from the east or somewhere else.

  The railway-line was built while the Cape was still under the British. Building the track was a big thing, because the fishermen wanted it up against the hill, behind the towns. But the English just ignored them and built it down here along the shore. Dad says if the British had only listened to the fishermen, our property would be worth even more, because now our house is separated from the beach by the track. But, with the mountains all around, it's still one of the most beautiful places in the country. Dad also said so one day when he and I parked the car at the top of Sir Lowries Pass and looked down over the whole of False Bay. It was just before sunset on our way back from Uncle Samuel's farm in Grabouw and the whole back seat of the car was stacked up with apples. The apples

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  lay on a bed of wood shavings inside their little plywood crates so that they wouldn't get bruised. The crates were stacked so high you could hardly see out the back window. When Dad and I got out of the car to look at the sunset, the whole sky was turning dark red. The bay was as flat as a mirror, with Table Mountain pitch-black above the city lights in the distance. We stood up there, looking down on it, and Dad said there's nothing more beautiful in the world than what we were seeing in front of us. He said nothing and no one could ever take it from us. All of us, specially the Afrikaners who lost everything in Tanganyika, had suffered enough. People like Uncle Samuel could bear witness to that. And then Dad told me the story again:

  When Uncle Samuel came out, he had to escape by aeroplane from Tanganyika to Salisbury. The blacks, under Julius Nyerere, wanted to force him to pay his debts to the bank - and that after they had confiscated his farms. One day he just received a letter saying the government was taking over his land, and that on such and such a day he had to be off the farm. A few days later he received another letter saying he had to start making his repayments to the bank. They took away his passport and told him that he wasn't allowed to leave the country until he had paid off his debts. It had been a good crop that year and he had bought six new John Deere tractors, so his debts to the bank were very big. Uncle Samuel's fields in the Oljorro district stretched as far as the eye could see and he even had a small spray-plane to spray pesticide over the export crops. You never had to use fertiliser like here in Grabouw, because in Tanganyika the ground is so rich, everything just grows by itself.

  But suddenly everything was taken away from them.

  So Uncle Samuel sent Tannie Betta and Barrie and Marion to get on to the Kenya-ship in Mombasa. The new

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  government thought they were just coming to the Republic to visit relatives. Sanna Koerant came with them - even though everyone was petrified of her big mouth giving away all the plans. Before they left, Uncle Samuel gave Tannie Betta a letter to give to Oupa Erasmus once they got here. In the letter he asked Oupa Erasmus to fix it that on such and such a day the airport in Salisbury would know that an aeroplane was coming in from Tanganyika. The man on board wouldn't have a passport.

  Because Oupa had lots of friends in Rhodesia, it was easy to organise, and Oupa went up himself to meet Uncle Samuel. Oupa even met Ian Smith personally, and later on Oupa sent him a message of congratulations when he declared Rhodesia's independence from Britain. In Dad's
study there's a letter of appreciation from Ian Smith's secretary, dated 25 November, 1965.

  Uncle Samuel asked a friend to hire a small Cessna with a pilot from Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. It cost four thousand pounds - two thousand at take-off, and two thousand if they made it. It was all very dangerous because the airstrip from where they were going to take off, right next to the Tsavo Game Park, was only meant for tsetse-fly spray-planes.

  On the night of his escape Uncle Samuel shut the door of the farmhouse and never even turned to look back. The plane took off without lights, and it flew away from the farm and the land Uncle Samuel and Tannie Betta loved so much. The only things he had taken with him were the reels and reels of cines, and his photographs and slides. The new farming equipment and everything else stayed on the farms, exactly as it was. They flew a long way without lights and then filled up at Lilongwe in Malawi. Then it was on to Salisbury, where Oupa Erasmus was waiting for them.

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  While Dad and I stood up there, watching the red sky, Dad said that that was why we can never go back. The blacks drove the whites away and all we have left is here, Dad said, sweeping through the air with his arm.

  'And this country was empty before our people arrived. Everything, everything you see, we built up from nothing. This is our place, given to us by God and we will look after it. Whatever the cost.'

  When we got back into the car, you could smell the apples everywhere. I turned round to look at the crates on the back seat, but it was already too dark to see them.

  'Dad, do you smell the apples?' I asked in the dark.

  'Ja, Marnus,' Dad answered as he turned the Volvo back on to the road. 'Even the apples we brought to this country.'

  Things are fairly quiet at school today. Our school reports are ready and we have to sit quietly and read. Frikkie can't sit still and Miss Engelbrecht sends him out of the classroom to stand in the passage. At break I throw Use's peanut-butter and syrup sandwiches into the bin and buy myself a packet of Fritos from the canteen.

  After school Mum comes to fetch us. Mum says she's going to wear her Elsbieta Rosenworth dress to Use's prize-giving this evening, even though it might be a bit too smart for the occasion. Use asks whether Doreen has called and Mum says she hasn't heard a word. But no news is good news and she knew all along that Doreen was overreacting.

  I take off my school uniform and when I come downstairs Mum tells me to leave Use in peace. Mum doesn't want Use all worked up for tonight. Tonight we're going to hear whether Use is going to be next year's head girl. If I want to go fishing or for a swim in the tidal pool, I must

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  make sure I'm back in time to get dressed and have supper before we leave. We must leave early because Use still has to warm up with the choir.

  'Is Mister Smith coming, Mum?' I ask.

  'No,' she answers. 'He should be here any minute now. But tonight he's going to see Brigadier Van der Westhuizen. He'll be picked up from here before we leave.'

  I find the Spiro twins playing between the little coloured beach huts down at the St James tidal pool. When Frikkie isn't here I sometimes play with them. It doesn't matter that they can't really speak Afrikaans, because Use and I are completely bilingual. Dad says there are two official languages in South Africa and you won't get anywhere in life unless you can speak both of them fluently. We won't ever regret the extra lessons he made us take to improve our English.

  David and Martin Spiro are a year younger than me and they're as ugly as anything. They're even uglier than Zelda Kemp's brothers. Mum was furious one day when Use said the twins' pinched faces made them look like sea-lice. Mum says you shouldn't ever judge anyone by their appearance. She says Maria Callas was a much better soprano while she was as big as a house than later, when she looked like a starved Biafran. That just goes to prove that appearances can be extremely deceptive. If only the world would accept that, the world would be a much better place to live in.

  With Mister Spiro owning the petrol stations, he must be feeling the pinch of the new petrol restrictions, what with it only being sold on weekdays now. Now that the price of oil is so high, people are only allowed to travel at eighty kilometres an hour. Since Dad became a general, he gets a concession and we can drive around as much as we like. But he never abuses the concession and we only drive

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  somewhere if it's really necessary. Dad says the government may still be forced to close all filling stations at night as well, unless the Arabs can be brought to their senses. The Arabs were the Philistines in the Bible, and you can expect them to still be the same after all these centuries. A jackal never loses its cunning.

  The Spiros are going to Standard Three next year, so I tell them that it's the most difficult Standard of all, with the most homework. Kids plug Standard Three like flies, and once you've plugged a Standard at school, you might as well forget about ever finding a job. Someone who has such a disgrace to his name won't easily be trusted by an employer.

  We play on the beach for the whole afternoon and later on we go to their house for cool drinks. They walk back to St James with me, because at low tide they want to go for another swim at the pool. I wish I could go with them but I have to get home to change for tonight. We walk past Mrs Streicher's house up against the hillside next to the Carrisbrooke steps. You can hardly see the house from the road, it's so overgrown with plants. In the front of the house there's a high hibiscus hedge, covered with yellow double-cupped flowers. I tell David and Martin that I want to go and pick some to wish Use good luck for the prize-giving. Mum always gives her music students flowers before they give a performance because it's part of the music culture.

  'But Mrs Streicher won't give you flowers,' says Martin. 'She's too stingy.' Martin always speaks first because he was born three minutes before David.

  'Yes,' says David. 'And she's German!'

  'We don't have to ask her. We can just go and pick from this side of the fence,' I say, and put my hands on my hips. I always do that to remind them that I'm older than them. At Voortrekkers Frikkie also does it when he doesn't

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  want to listen to me. Then I simply remind him that I was elected as team leader by majority vote and that he has to listen.

  'What if she sees us?'

  4 Yes! Or if we get caught?'

  'She only comes out of the house at night/ I answer. 'We saw her walking down the road once when we came back from the drive-in. She sleeps during the day.'

  'I don't think we should go,' says David. He's a real sissie. He's scared of everything, especially of Frikkie, because Frikkie held him underwater once for almost a minute for calling us 'hairy back rock-spiders'.

  'Are you coming, Martin?' I ask in my irritated voice. 'David's a real scaredy-cat,' and I start up the stairs towards the hedge. I hear them following.

  'We mustn't make a noise. She might wake up,' says David.

  I can hear he's scared again because he sounds just like when he's speaking to Frikkie.

  'Well, keep your trap shut then,' I hiss at him. That's what Mrs Engelbrecht always says to Frikkie in English period.

  We climb up the stairs, whispering to each other. When we get to the top, I peer over the garden gate to see that everything's safe. Then we start picking the yellow flowers. When you pick hibiscus you have to break off the flower on its stem. I tell David to stop breaking off only the flowers, because they won't last without the stem. When we have enough between the three of us, I gather them all into a big bunch. The ones with the shortest stems I just throw down on the stairs as we walk down.

  Then, suddenly we hear her voice behind us. We swing around to look. She's standing on the small landing next to the gate, right above us.

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  'JudenV she croaks at us. 'litre JfudenV Then her face pulls like it's going to break apart and she opens her mouth wide and starts yelling, so that her voice carries up into the mountain.

  4 Run!' sh
outs Martin as she yells again. All three of us turn away together and start running down the stairs. Martin is in the front, with me in the middle and David at the back. We take three steps at a time, and her voice is still coming from behind us. I glance over my shoulder to see if she's coming after us, but she's still up at the gate. Then I miss a step and tumble forward, hibiscuses flying in all directions. David almost trips over me, but he jumps to the side and past me, and runs after Martin. I get back to my feet in a flash, and dart after them. They reach Main Road and turn left towards their house. Without even looking at them, I swing to the right, and run in the direction of St James. I slow down to walk when I reach the tidal pool.

  I look down at my knees. The skin is grazed off completely and there's blood dripping down my one shin. I stop to wash my knees at the tidal pool. Then I walk home, with my knees burning even more from the salt water. By the time I get home there's blood all the way down to my foot. Mum's going to go mad if I tell her it happened while I was pinching flowers. Mum says if you steal you'll become a liar and if you become a liar you'll end up being a murderer.

  I want to slip into the passage bathroom and wash the blood off before Mum sees, but the door is locked. It must be the General. Now I have to use the other bathroom because the blood's about to drip on the passage floor. Mum is standing behind Use at the dressing-table mirror. I try to sneak past into the bathroom - but Mum turns around. She's about to look back at the mirror, but her eye catches my legs.

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  'What have you done to those knees! Get off my carpets and wash yourself!'

  'I fell on the rocks, Mum,' I say, moving on to the bathroom tiles. I stand in the bathroom doorway and look at Mum. Now Use has also turned around. It looks like she's been crying. I wonder what's wrong with her now. She's probably putting on some act so that we should all give her lots of attention for tonight. Mum is wearing her purple dress and Use is in her school uniform. Her honours blazer is lying on the bed. Embroidered in gold on the pocket is the Jan Van Riebeeck motto: Be Yourself.