by Mark Behr
Aloelloel mimy loelovise.
Regards
Dominic
I slid the letter into the envelope, reread his fine handwriting spelling out my name. I wondered whether I should be generous and give ‘ Bernice the stamp, which was of a statue of Mozart, It was a new stamp, not old like most of the others in her collection, but it would age. I placed the letter between the pages of Tom Sawyer and began reading.
Bok came and sat with folded legs beside me in the sun. He asked how it was going at school and how I liked being in the Secondary Choir. It was okay, I said, and Mr Roelofse was a nice conductor, even though he was very strict. Bok asked about my school report. Why I was not doing as well as I had before. Self-conscious at the direction the conversation was taking, I said I didn’t know, that I’d work harder and improve. I did not say that it had been years since I had experienced any interest in school work, let alone in doing well. I loved reading — devoured book after book for my personal gratification — but that was all I ever wanted to do with books. Learning from them had come to seem an impossible labour. I couldn’t do Maths. I hated Geography and Biology. History was okay. I liked English essay and comprehension, but hated spelling, grammar, concord, tenses. Afrikaans wasn’t as nice as English, who knows why. And now I was in Miss Roos’s class. I had liked her at first, quite a lot, but something had fed resentment towards her. It was not that I disliked her as I’d disliked Marabou: it was that she seemed to look right through me or as if she was suspicious of me and—
‘I think something is making you unhappy in the Berg, Philistine. Am I not right?’ Bok cut short my thoughts.
I shook my head, even while wanting to tell him how I hated the place, that I wanted to leave, start high school six months later in Port Natal. But there was no sense in doing it now, in the middle of the year. Not in a hundred years would they take me out halfway into an academic year.
‘Then why are you doing so poorly?’
‘I’m still in the top ten in class, Bok,’ I answered, looking into the pool’s turquoise water. I knew I could stay amongst the best without ever opening a book.
‘But before you went to the Berg you were always first.’
‘There are clever boys there, Bok. Niklaas Bruin and Mervyn. And some of the others. You know how good you have to be to get in there. The curriculum has a much higher standard than Kuswag.’
‘But you used to get 90 to 98 per cent? Now you have 72 per cent. That has nothing to do with other boys being smarter, does it?’ He spoke inquiringly, trying to soften the judgement in his voice. In his love.
‘I can’t do Maths.’
‘But it’s not just Maths. It’s everything, even Afrikaans and English.’ I was silent. ‘And then, this thing about you being rampant and uncontrolled?’
Boisterous, I wanted to say. I glowered at my hands smoothing the book’s dustjacket. How in hell has boisterous become rampant and uncontrolled, I wanted to sneer. You’re all so thick. I wished he would leave, go and watch the ridiculous rugby game on TV Anger in me. Like something choking me in my throat.
We sat quietly for a while. Then, his tone still as soft and gentle as it had been: ‘My boy, do you remember last year, when Mr Samuels left the school? The telegram?’
I did. I knew at once what he was talking about. Fear sprinted down my legs. ‘It is with regret that we have to inform you that theservices of Mr Samuels have been terminated due to circumstances’ “There had been a few small articles in the newspapers, Rapport’s headline: HOMO STORIES in BERG SCHOOL. The school had adamantly refused comment; but amongst us speculation had been rife about who had been Mr Samuels’s boy. Everyone thought it had been Erskin Louw. Someone reminded us how, once when we had been rehearsing ‘Kiss Her, Kiss Her in the Dark’ Mr Samuels had said we should sing the folk tune with feeling, imagining that we were kissing someone worthwhile. Someone like Erskin. Rumours abounded for weeks that Mr Samuels had been given the sack because Erskin’s parents had found out. Dom said he’d heard that Erskin’s dad threatened to kill Mr Samuels unless the school got rid of him. Yet all remained rumour and whisper and looks until that too disappeared and we rarely if ever spoke of it again.
‘Yes, I remember, Bok.’
‘Does any of that still go on?’
I looked into the water. It was as though Bok knew something or wanted to know something that I could either tell him or not. ‘Sometimes I hear stories about some of the boys.’
‘What do they do?’
How would I say this? Would I say anything? Couldn’t he just leave me alone? ‘They play with each other.’ I wished he would stop, knew he wasn’t about to. Not now.
‘How do you mean?’
I didn’t know which words to use. It had been years since I had had to use any word to describe that thing to Bok. As a child we had used filafooi, but since then an entirely new vocabulary had come into my life, a vocabulary that could not possibly, to my mind, translate favourably into his world: piel, voel, dinges, cock, dick, schlong, John Thomas, willy, penis, dong, ding, tool, horing, boner. I couldn’t use any of these with my father.
‘How do you mean, play with each other?’
‘With each other’s filafoois, Bok.’
The quiet was broken only by TV sounds from the lounge. I could sense that Bok was going to push till he had a clearer answer.
‘Do you — ever do that?’
I shook my head. Petrified. I saw the three men behind the desk, just a month before. Saw Mervy’s long johns, red, bloodstained. Couldn’t look Bok in the eyes. Lena, an unwitting saviour, called from the lounge that the rugby was about to start. Bok asked whether I was coming to watch. I answered that I’d be up when I’d finished my chapter. He walked off and I opened Tom Sawyer again and tried to read, the sun beating down on the white page, eyes squinting. Reaching the end of the chapter I had not taken in a single word. All I had been thinking was that they were in the house, all their eyes on me, searching for something dark and wicked and terrible in me. The thing that made me deserve death. The windows were eyes from which my family pored over me. Accusingly.
I walked around the pool. Terrified. I entered the house. For a few seconds my eyes, blinded from the sun on the white page, could see nothing. I knew they were all in the lounge, watching rugby. Northern Transvaal vs Western Province. Blind as I was, their four figures were to me only outlines, black and white, like the negatives of photographs. I took my place beside Bernice on the couch. My eyes slowly adjusted and took in the room’s normal colours and the running figures on our Blaupunkt’s screen. It was going to be a long, long, long holiday.
4
Back from my first day in Grade One I announced that I had no intention of returning to school. Matubatuba Primary was certainly the most boring place on earth. No one else in class could read and write! All we did was draw little lines on loose paper — not even in books — while Juffrou Knutsen treated us as if we were babies. My return to Matubatuba Primary, I said, depended on whether I could be pushed up to Standard One with Lena. If Bok had skipped a standard in Tanganyika because he was so clever at school, I could comfortably skip two, and, if Lena didn’t want me in her class I could just as comfortably and confidently go into the English stream of our dual medium school.
‘Who do you think you are? You’re Afrikaans,’ Lena snarled. ‘And no one skips standards. Windgat, grootbek!’ Bokkie cautioned her to watch her language and change her tone or keep quiet. Bokkie said that skipping standards as it may have been done in former times was no longer permitted. Bernice said I would have to be patient until my peers had caught up with me; something she said was bound to happen before I knew it. Be careful that you are not seen as trying to be too big for your boots, she said. Then Bernice and Bokkie spoke about how strange it was for the girls to be coming home after school every day and Lena said she missed boarding school and her friends from Hluhluwe. I suggested that she return to Hluhluwe considering how much she had loved the place.
Bokkie warned that she was tired ’of our quibbling.
Bernice proved right: Within a few months much of the rest of the class had learnt to read and write. One day our assignment was to draw a big red ball and a little green ball, then to write beneath the big red one B-I-G and beneath the small green one S-M-A-L-L. Inexplicably — perhaps because of a brief lapse in concentration — I wrote B-I-G under the small green ball and S-M-A-L-L under the big one. Juffrou Knutsen erased my error, but the shadow of letters remained, showing through the new, corrected version on the page I had to take home. I feared that someone — Lena in particular — would comment on the shadow pencil imprint.
Then, within six months of starting school and to my frustrated surprise, the pleasure of reading aloud in class had somehow turned against me. Altered into an ordeal. Despite the reading skills I had mastered in Umfolozi, I now started stuttering, tripping over wordsand phrases each time I had to read aloud in class. Again I said nothing at home. On my sec’ond report Juffrou Knutsen gave me a C for Reading. She wrote: Karl has no confidence in front of people. On the report I had still managed a golden star, but a perplexed Bokkie said my reading would probably drag me down to a silver unless I improved dramatically. To correct the unexpected problem and to prevent me from failing Grade One, I had to read aloud every afternoon for half an hour, even to myself. If I put feeling into the way I read, Bokkie said — emphasise words and sounds — it would possibly put an end to the stutter that came like clockwork each time I had to read before the class. Somewhere around this time I started biting my fingernails; whether, from nervousness or because I had seen it from Lena, I don’t know. I began reading aloud, sometimes for an hour at a time, putting expression into things as mundane as The cat sat on the Mat and the pig ate the Fig, eventually memorising the entire book. I rehearsed constantly, terrified that I was going to fail Grade One. Bokkie shouted at me to get my fingers out of my mouth while I was reading; ‘How can you bite your nails and read at the same time!’
What had gotten into me? Why could I not read aloud in front of other children? Faced by that Grade One class of thirty-one kids — more children than I had ever seen together — something had become bigger than my will and ability to read well. I could do adding and subtracting — had been doing that for two years before from the exercise cards Lena had brought to the bush. Moreover, when I had to read to Juffrou Knutsen alone at her desk, I read like the champion I had always imagined myself to be. But reading aloud to the class tripped me up as I began thinking the audience was sitting there ready to laugh at me. Despite my rote learning of the entire book, I continued to stutter and become terrified when faced by large groups of children. The words seemed like traps, gaping at me from the page. I bit my nails, sometimes till the fingertips bled. When I spent a long time in the water taking a bath or swimming, the flesh around the fingernails became soft white and blue ridges. Like undulations in papier mache.
Singing perie — perie instead of period as we took to calling each half-hour and later each forty-five-minute silence between clangings of the hand-rung bell — became my favourite. It was the second time in my life I had come this close to a real piano. The first was when Bokkie went to Johannesburg for an ear operation and we stayed with her ear specialist Dr Godmillow and his family. The Godmillows were Jewish and Bok had taken Dr and Mrs Godmillow on trail. Dr Godmillow had said he thought he could fix Bokkie s hearing — there was something wrong with the stirrup — a stirrup in the ear, I thought, how extraordinary — but the operation had been a failure and Bokkies left ear remained deaf. I was not allowed near the Godmillow s piano, because Bokkie said it was a very expensive piece of furniture. Noting my fascination with the instrument, Mrs Godmillow invited me to stand beside her as she played and explained to me the function of the black notes, the function of the whites, how to make a semi-quaver. That the right hand plays the tune, the left the accompaniment. It was so grand, being treated like an adult in the Godmillow mansion by such a smart and important woman. All the while my parents and siblings sat outside in the sun with Dr Godmillow, my mother with a white bandage around her head. We never saw the Godmillows again. We later heard that they had emigrated. To Australia, to start a new life.
I had seen pianos in books, heard them on the radio and on our Jim Reeves, Dean Martin and Gene Autrey records, but it was exhilarating being that close to the big upright instrument in its shiny wooden casing, with its perfectly ordered row of shiny black and white notes. Now, in Singing period, it was magic, to see and hear how, when Juffrou Sang pressed just a black note, it sounded wrong, and then, when she pressed certain black and white notes together, how it became right. I thought of Mrs Godmillow, taking my fingers and pressing them to the notes, her eyes sparkling as I marvelled at the sounds produced from a mysterious process started beneath my fingertips. Single white notes played alone, for example when Juffr ou Sang was teaching us a new song, held no appeal to me, they and their tune sounded thin and boring. But when she pressed a few notes — even two — together, it made what Mrs Godmillow had called a harmony, sounds, that seemed to come alive in my body, sounds that made me want to dance and sing. How I wished we could have a piano at home. I loved the new songs we learnt from thin music books and from the big fat guide of the FAK: A1 die veld is vrolik’; ‘Nooit hoef jou kinders wat trou is te vra’; ‘Wie is die Dapper Generaal De Wet?’ Juffrou Sang, whose real name I no longer recall, also taught us ‘Die Stem’/‘The Voice’, our country’s national anthem, and a verse of ‘Nkosi Sikeleli Africa’, which she said was the Zulu people’s. And, to my delight, a song called ‘Molly Malone’, which, when I sang it to Aunt Siobhain, had her weeping as it was an Irish folk tune she had learnt as a girl in Dingle.
In our new St Lucia house, Lena and I shared a room. Being the eldest, Bernice had her own, where I was not allowed without permission. Afternoons the three of us sat around the dining-room table doing our homework. Reading aloud could not be done there — though I tried it a few times just to get Lena into a rage — and had to be practised in our bedroom or outside on the lawn. Once done, I would go off on my own or wait till Lena had finished. Then we’d take to the outdoors together. Lena, almost without fail, would want to go to the jetty down on the estuary to fish for grunter or salmon. I enjoyed fishing, but only if they bit immediately. My sister, in turn, could sit hour upon monotonous hour, till it was almost dark, even when there were no bites. Lena would rage at me for my lack of patience and tenacity; while she grudgingly fished alone, I could lie for hours on my stomach, doing nothing but looking down at the movement of water and fish beneath the jetty. Lena would tell me how useless I was at baiting hooks — she could do three for my every one. And I’d try to work quicker, but never with success. When Bernice was with us, she’d tell Lena to lay off me, that I could bait a hook at my own pace and that it wasn’t hurting anyone. Then Lena would glare at me as though I were a hated enemy.
Many afternoons we were joined by the Pierce kids, who lived in’ the trailer park. Their father worked for Natal RoadWorks and they were always moving around. Mr Pierce could hold a fifty-cent piece between thumb and forefinger and bend it into a perfect half. Patty and Sam Pierce were our friends and went to school with us in Matubatuba. They were the only other kids on the bus in the mornings for almost half the way to school, and then in the afternoons the last off before our stop, which was the final one of the route. Sam was in Grade One with me, but in the English class. Patty and Lena were friends too, though they did once have a fist fight on the side of the road. Patty tore the collar off Lena’s school uniform and Lena gave Patty a blue eye that stayed swollen for a week. Bokkie gave Lena a hiding for behaving like a Makoppolander in public. For a few weeks we were prohibited from playing with the Pierces.
We did all kinds of things: fished, swam, collected bait, built sandcastles and huge tidal dams, climbed trees, flew kites, played beach cricket with a tennis ball. We loved swimming and although we were always on guard for crocodil
e and hippo, Bernice, Lena and I disregarded our fears and spent hours in the water. In addition to the sheer pleasure of the cool water, there was another reason for me always trying to get Lena to swim: swimming was the one thing I could do better than her. She was a head taller than me, she could outrun and outsprint me, could pin me down in wrestling, catch bigger fish, intimidate even older boys at school, hit a ball farther in beach cricket, score double what I did in soccer. But in the water I was like a fish. I had taught myself to swim. When I was four she and I had visited the Hancoxes in Hluhluwe and I had, on my own accord, jumped into the camp pool and, to the consternation of Willy and Molly Hancox who were meant to be looking after us, swum to the side. When Bokkie heard about my bravery she was furious and we were not allowed near water without the blow-up water-wings Aunt
Siobhain had to send from Durban. The water-wings went with us in the afternoons when we went fishing. We never wore them. Not once. Simply lied to Bokkie.
And I could swim faster than Lena. Through swimming I had also discovered my sisters Achilles’ heel: she was afraid to stay under for very long. I, on the other hand, remained till it felt my head would burst, often leaving me with a headache. Later, when we visited Mumdeman at Midmar, I could swim a length and a half under water while Lena could barely manage a length. Poor James, unsporty as a stick insect, could do only a breadth. At St Lucia I developed the trick of coming up underneath Lena and dragging her down, screaming. This so infuriated her that she left the water at once, waited for me on land, prowling along the shore like an angry lioness. I often daren’t leave the water for fear of reprisals — on land I stood no chance against her speed, strength and agility: talents that neither friends, family nor casual acquaintances could witness without heaping praise on the tomboy who was my biggest rival.
