by Mark Behr
He moved, turned his body to face head down next to me. He did not speak; just ran his hand through my hair, stroked my cheeks with his fingertips.
I asked him how old he was and he told me to guess.
‘My father started going grey when he was about thirty. We used to pull out the grey hairs and he’d give us one cent for every one. You’re going grey, so you must be about thirty or forty, I don’t know.’
‘Thirty-three.’
Mungo Jerry’s voice died away and the peep-peep-peep signalled time for the news. A woman’s voice said that the schools around Soweto had once again been set ablaze by black children. The police had been forced to shoot. Statistics on deaths were not yet available. The entire township had been cordoned off and Prime Minister Vorster had declared a State of Emergency. Jacques muttered something about ungrateful savages and sat up to turn the radio off.
‘Is it okay... to —’ I whispered, embarrassed, and could not complete the thought.
‘To what?’ he asked, smiling down on me.
I quickly shut my eyes, then opened them and blurted, ‘Is that stuff I swallowed poisonous?’
He laughed, still looking at me where my head rested on the pillow. He shook his head and whispered, no, it wasn’t poisonous. Then he was down there, again, his tongue everywhere. I thought I would faint. With hands on his ears I brought him back up to me. He lifted himself and lay with his full weight on me, and kissed me. There was a damp spot where his hair began to curl in his neck; both my hands were there, pressing his face into mine. I whispered for him to put it into me, and he said he couldn’t, that he didn’t want to hurt me. I said it wouldn’t hurt. While we kissed he began to push with a finger against my anus; trying to slip it into my rectum. My body resisted, seemed to contract. Pain stirred in my lower back and abdomen. It opened, slowly, until he could slide in a finger; then two; moved them around; asked how I felt and I just nodded my head. With my legs lifted over his shoulders, I could feel his penis now against my anus. He whispered that I should try and relax. My eyes closed. Gently, he began to push and withdraw. I could feel myself open. At moments I wished him to stop. An excruciating pain; but then, for moments again, pleasant. He asked whether I was all right. I nodded, my head thrown back in the pillow, unable to speak or open my eyes. I was impaled; I could not move; as if every atom of will had been drained from me; that nothing mattered except what was happening in that moment everywhere and nowhere in my body. I was gasping through my mouth; not sure whether I could take it. When he moved too deep, pain bolted up my spine, exploded in my skull; he asked whether he should stop. I shook my head. Now there was a remarkable, overwhelming feeling of lightness, as if I were composed of only air, grounded only where he was inside me. The longer it continued the more I could move; my arms came back to life, brought his face down to mine; I kissed him. Tears ran down my cheeks; dammed into my ears. He stopped. I opened my eyes, saw the fringe tumbled across his forehead; frowning. I nodded for him to continue. I started crying. Again he stopped, but I clasped my legs to his back, urging him to go on. When I sobbed he covered my mouth with his hand. From behind my closed eyelids and through my tears I saw the world slowly break apart into millions of new colours, and I wondered for weeks afterwards whether I had perhaps lost consciousness, for just a few seconds.
Later, lying curled up against him, he again asked me whether I was all right.
‘I loved what you did to my starfish,’ I whispered.
‘Your what?’
I giggled. He had no idea what I was talking about. I flopped over on my back, embarrassed at having said it. Smiling with my eyes shut.
‘What star?’
‘My bum, I liked what you did.’
‘Your starfish!’ He sputtered and laughed in my ear, saying I was too clever for my own good. He went into the bathroom. Now I felt that I was drenched in sweat, as though I’d just got out of a lukewarm shower. I let my fingertips crawl around my anus, certain there would be blood. Nothing. I sniffed. A waft of shit. Lifting myself I checked the sheets. The brown smudge made me squirm. The toilet flushed and I dropped myself onto the mark, hoping he would not discover or suspect what I was hiding.
I moved the orange leaf to the top of the page so that once the book was shut only the tip was visible. Rain was again thundering down on the roof, leaving me wondering whether there may have been a cloud break. I stepped onto the chair and reached to the top shelf. I slid the encyclopaedia in between B and D. I looked up and down the balcony; peered over the balustrade into the auditorium. No one in sight. I stepped down and ran along the passage.
At his door I again checked behind me. I turned the handle and stepped into the room, just as he was emerging from the shower. I locked the door. I asked whether we could open the curtains and the window, just a little, so that we could smell the rain. He cautioned meto whisper. He drew back the curtains a few inches and opened the louvres.
With both hands he ran the towel behind his back. I removed my sandals. In a whisper I asked whether he knew Eugene Marais’s poem about the rain. He nodded, smiling. I asked whether he’d like me to recite it for him. He winked and nodded, a finger to his lips.
‘Must I whisper the poem?’ I asked, smiling, gesturing as if perplexed. ‘Yes! Unless you want us to get caught. And we have about ten minutes before choir.’ Running his hand down my cheek.
‘Okay. I’ll whisper it to you. Sit down.’Then, while he sat naked on the bed and the rain again beat down harder on the corrugated iron roof, I began to whisper:
The Dance of the Rain
Song of the fiddle player, Jan Konterdans, from the Great Desert
I recited the dance and I moved my limbs, my body, my clothing, to make visible the words:
Oh the dance of our Sister!
First, over the mountain-tops she peeps on the sly
and her eyes are shy, and she laughs softly.
From afar she beckons with one hand;
and her bracelets shine and her beads glitter;
softly she calls
My hands, trembling, around my mouth:
She informs the winds of the dance
and she invites them because the yard is wide and the wedding huge
My arms open, go up, my body moves from one corner of the room to another, an urgent whisper:
The big-game chase from the plains,
they dam up on the hilltop
they flare their nostrils
and they swallow the wind
and they stoop, to see her delicate prints on the sand
The small-folk deep beneath the ground hear the swish of her feet
and they crawl closer and sing softly:
Our sister! Our sister! You came! You came!
Leaping onto the bed, stooping the way game does to sniff the soil, and the whisper further subdued:
And her beads tremble;
and her copper-ringsflash in the disappearance of the sun
On her forehead is thefireplume of the mountain vulture
she steps down from the heights
Step from the bed:
with arms outstretched she spreads the faded kaross
T-shirt removed and cast to the floor, body twirling around the room:
and the breath of the wind is lost
O, the dance of our Sister!
My arms shoot up and my hands reach towards the ceiling: ‘See, it’s the dance of our sister!’ My voice rasps in a laugh-filled whisper and my wild eyes see him come for me in the room’s centre. He presses my chest to his and my feet leave the floor and he kisses me as he carries me to the bed. ‘You’re getting too heavy! You’re almost as tall as me.’
*
In choir, smelling him from my hands, I feel how raw my chin is. Know in a day or two it will peel.
11
‘I did learn to speak Swahili, but not as well as Bok who was born there and spoke it all his life. And English, of course. That was a nightmare, because we hardly spoke Eng
lish in Klerksdorp, you know, it’s a very Afrikaans town. We did do English at school — we had to — but writing a few words for exams or reading some books wasn’t the same as speaking it. I knew when I married Bok that I’d have to learn because he told me from the beginning that many people in East Africa knew no Afrikaans. So when I got there I just listened, picked it up from Aunt Siobhain — though I never got her Irish accent, of course. Siobhain and I raised you kids together because Bernice and Stephanie were four years apart and of course Lena and James just a few months. Look, let me tell you, Aunt Siobhain and I got along like a house on fire. That’s a smart woman, I tell you. Can work her fingers to the bone. No airs and graces. Doesn’t touch drink. A heart of gold. That Uncle Michael, though, believe you me, doesn’t know what he’s got in that woman. Always out at night, drinking with the boys while poor Siobhain has to sit at home with the kids. And a snob, man, thinks he’s better than us you know, and then there’s this pretence at being English. And Siobhain had a thing for you, of course. Ag, when I fell pregnant we were all hoping it would be a boy — but especially Siobhain — because you know there were the two girls and we really wanted a boy. Also to be friends with James. I told Bok this was the last time we were going to try and you know, my bad ear . .. Anyway we were all sure so everyone gave only blue things for you and there were still all the blue things from when we thought Bernie and Lena may be boys. That had all been packed into the campher kist and we’d had to buy pink after they were born . . .’
‘Couldn’t the doctors fix it, Bokkie?’ I asked, listening to her knitting needles click click above the half-finished jersey, concentrating on my own: one plain, one pearl.
‘What?’
‘The ear, Bokkie.’
‘No, we tried.’
‘Do all women go deaf when they have babies, Bokkie?’
‘No, Karl. It’s just something that happens to some women. It’s usually during labour, when the pressure on your eardrums is so intense. Same thing happened to Ouma Liebenberg: with each one of us that was born she went a little deafer. So when I fell pregnant with you we decided it was the last time, because I’d lost so much hearing with the first two. When news spread that you were a boy all the farmers and their wives came into Arusha and there was a big party at the club into the early hours of the morning. I could hear them all the way to the hospital. Bok was quite a sought-after bachelor. You know how handsome he is and how women always fall for his charms — lots of girlfriends before me I heard after I got to Tanganyika — and a bit of ’n ramkat. Just like we did with Bernie and Lena, Dademan made tape-recordings of you crying and making baby noises and we sent the recordings by mail to South Africa for poor Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg. Ag, later, when we got a letter, Ouma Liebenberg wrote to say how Oupa cried when he listened to you screaming. He has such a small heart, you know.’
And was it sore, Bokkie, when I was born?’
‘Not as sore as with Bernice and Lena. They took hours and hours. That’s where the deafness probably came in. But you couldn’t wait to get out into the world. Wasn’t really even necessary for me to go to hospital, but we didn’t know that of course, when my water broke. You just slid out like a little pink bird — nine and a half pounds, mind you — ten minutes and that was it. A smile on your face after onlythree weeks. Little devil, from the beginning. And you didn’t sleep through the night until you were three years old. Not one night did you sleep through until some time in Mkuzi. When we woke the next morning I told Bok to go and check, I was too scared, sure you died in the night or had been dragged off by a leopard.’
‘Tell when the Maasai came to dance at the house.’
‘Now that was a story! It must have been about six months after we were married because I was already heavily pregnant with Bernie. I fell pregnant five days after we were married. So somewhere on the trip from Klerksdorp to Oljorro; probably at Lake Victoria where we spent two nights resting. Anyway, one afternoon I was alone at home on Mbuyu, when I heard the singing from the distance. I think the houseboy had the afternoon off because I had no one to ask where the singing was coming from. We had a little stoep and I went out and looked down the farm road but there was nothing. The singing was growing louder, no drums or anything, just the singing and then I walked around the house and saw this group of twenty or thirty Maasai running towards the house, singing and spears waving and simis in the air and they were painted and I had heard all the stories about the Mau Mau and I ran inside the house and I couldn’t lock the door because we never locked doors there so I had no idea where the key was and it sounded like they were surrounding the house and I ran and hid under the kitchen table. Just praying. Praying that God would spare me and my unborn child. So scared, so very scared. Later it grew quiet outside but I was still too scared to come out from under the kitchen table. I didn’t know what they were doing out there. You know what the Mau Mau did in Kenia; killed hundreds of innocent white farmers, slaughtered all the animals they could find on the farms. Witchcraft and things. That was all going through my mind and I wished I had never come to Tanganyika. Then I heard the sound of a truck and I heard Dademan’s voice coming into the house. He found me there under the table and almost laughed his head off. He had asked the Maasai to come and dance, so that he could filmthem on cine. Anyway, the whole Oljorro thought I was a real pumpkin!’
‘Did you miss South Africa, Bokkie?’
‘I missed my family. Oom Gert and Aunt Lena. But the six years in Tanganyika were the best years of my life. I would go back tomorrow if we could.’
‘Did you ever visit?’
‘Once. That’s when you were conceived. And we wrote letters.’ ‘Were Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg still in the Molopo?’
‘No, they were already living in Klerksdorp where Oom Gert works on the mines.’
‘Tell when you were little and the leguan gave the donkeys a fright and they ran off with you.’
‘Ag no, Karl, that’s enough now. My throat is completely dry. Go outside and play in the sand-pit or take Chaka for a walk. Out you go, you haven’t been outside once today. You can’t sit in here day and night listening to stories.’ I dropped my knitting needles in her wool-bag and went off with Chaka to see whether we could find the eland herd.
12
Wednesday-evening concerts were attended by guests from the surrounding hotels. A deadly silence reigned in the dormitories; showers were taken without anything more than muted and hushed whispers; letters were distributed without the usual teasing and fanfare. Sound travels far and God help anyone whose voice reached the auditorium while a performance was in progress. When not our turn to perform, we could hear the music and applause carry through to us in the dormitories. These were some of my favourite moments. Hearing the songs from my bed. Not having to sing.
After Mr Samuels left in our Junior year and we were briefly without a conductor, Mr Mathison appointed me to conduct two of the Junior Choir’s Wednesday-night concerts. That was when we did Oliver as part of our programme. Richard Benson, the Senior soloist, had played Oliver on our tour earlier but with him away Dominic would be Oliver during the second, lighter part of the concert. Previously Mr Samuels had had me learn a portion of Fagin’s role: ‘One boy; boy for sale, he’s going cheap, only seven guineas’. Excitedly I told Bok on the phone that I had my first solo part. I tried to growl out Fagin’s songs, but eventually Mr Samuels gave the part to a Senior, saying I just couldn’t act tough enough to convince anyone I was selling a boy. I lied to Bok on the phone and said the school had decided only Secondaries and Seniors would do solo parts in Oliver.
Why Dominic or Mervyn weren’t asked to conduct our Wednesday-night concerts I had no idea and didn’t really care, even though they would have undoubtedly done a better job than me. We assumed it was because both their voices were needed in the choir. Before one of the performances I was cheeky to Marabou. She slapped me across the face and threatened to appoint a different conductor. Then, midway through the first half o
f the programme — to what must have been Hildegaard’s unmitigated delight — there was a humiliating moment when I couldn’t find the right combination of notes for the ‘Hodie Christi’. Four or five times I pushed the wrong chord. Eventually Mathison’s voice swept through the hall: ‘Help him, Mervyn.’
