Embrace

by Mark Behr

  Many afternoons I took Bok’s new bull terrier Simba and, bearing carrots or sugar, went to Camelot where he was paddocked with two other horses. He soon knew me. I couldn’t wait for him to grow, to be broken in so that I could learn to ride. I asked Bok whether I couldn’t just try riding Camelot since he had now gotten to know me. Bok warned me to stay away until the horse was old enough to be properly broken in. On occasion Lena or Sam could be convinced to join me at the paddock. I got them to hold onto Camelot’s bridle — to which I would tie rope as reins — while I tried to get onto the eight-month-old. If Lena or Sam stood in front of the horse, he would sometimes allow me onto his back. However, the moment my aid tried to pass the rope-reins over his head, he’d start moving and I would jump off. Failure after failure, I never let up. Once, when Camelot unexpectedly bucked, I came a cropper. I struck the ground at an odd angle and thought I’d broken my arm. I screamed all the way home, lied to Bokkie and said I had fallen off the swing at thecaravan park, and within days was back at the paddock. I silently undertook that one day I’d lead Camelot onto the beach where falls in the soft sand would not result in fractured limbs. The experiment would have to wait till Bok was away.

  As much as I liked being with Lena and the Pierces, some of my time was again spent alone: walking the beach searching for shells, sitting at one end of the jetty reading while Lena fished from the other, feeding and grooming Camelot, or, with Simba, exploring the bush along the estuary. I found a huge wild fig where hadidas and finches nested and soon we and the Pierces formed a gang and built a tree-house. I came to regret having told them about the Hadi-tree, for now the solitude of the place was gone. Suddenly there were all kinds of rules about who was allowed at the treehouse — no strangers; not our cousins when they came to visit; not Lena’s friends who sometimes came to stay over. It was our gang’s secret hide-out. Lena, thanks to her superior strength, was always the gang leader. There was not much to lead us to — decisions as to whether we’d go fishing, collecting bait, smoking or not smoking stolen cigarettes, playing in the trailer park, ‘drawing up rules for the fort, playing church or doctor and nurse — a game during which I was allowed to touch Patty’s poefoe and she my filafooi while Lena and Sam touched each other’s. Patty’s poefoe was a delight. Once I had started feeling it I could barely stop. When I stuck my finger inside it was wet and slippery, like the inside of an oyster. I wondered what was up there: just loose folds of flesh, blood, or pee? Or, if you stuck it in too deep, would your finger come out of her bum covered in poo? But when my finger came out it was clean: no blood, no pee, no flesh, no poo. I wanted to touch Lena’s, but she refused, saying brothers and sisters don’t touch.

  Lena and I fought almost daily, while Bernice, four years my senior, inhabited a world of homework and older girlfriends from which I was mostly excluded. It felt as though for the first time I was getting to know my siblings. I was rarely alone with Bok and Bokkie. Now everything had to be shared, where before everything — includingattention — was mine except for every second weekend and holidays when they had come home from Hluhluwe. But what frustrated me most about Lena was not having to share attention. It was that she was stronger than me. While I could and did inflict pain, she, ultimately, would get the better of me, either during free fights or when Bok supervised wrestling matches on the lounge carpet. Lena had the resilience of a leopard. Even at school boys spoke of her strength. James, who was her age, stood no chance against her. Besides the swimming and my ability to frighten her in the water, my one defence was my mouth: I could sling abuse, in an array of curse words and snide remarks that Lena could neither counter nor countenance — at least at first. Later, when frustration drove me to bouts of verbal anger she began counter-attacking, saying that while I might think myself clever I should remember what happened to all the clever ones in the family. She warned that I was going to burst a vein in my head and go mad like Great-Uncle Klaas. The older we got, the less necessary it was to even use his name, and when we understood that Aunt Lena had dropped out of school because she had epileptic fits and a nervous breakdown, all Lena would say in response to my provocations, was: ‘Remember the mad gene.’ After Aunt Lena married Uncle Joe and ended up having shock treatments at Tara, Lena would say: ‘Remember, those shock treatments.’ Having lost my verbal ability to get back at her for what I perceived as her all-round superiority, I told Bokkie that Lena said I was going to go mad like Groot-Oom Klaas and Aunt Lena. Bokkie said it was a cruel thing to wish upon anyone and that Lena would get a hiding if she ever again used it against me. Though Lena continued reminding me of the mad gene and those shock treatments, I no longer reported her to Bokkie. Through an intricate system of trade-offs we had worked out ways in which transgressions could never be reported; I would say nothing about her using the mad gene if she said nothing about me getting it on the hand at school for back-chatting Juffrou Knutsen; I’d remain silent about her catching undersized salmon if she kept mute aboutme sometimes playing with her or Patty Pierce’s dolls. For dolls, along with dressing in girls’ clothing, had now been prohibited: sometime before I turned seven, Bok had said I was to stop handling Lena’s dolls and that I could no longer play with girls’ dresses and tea sets. We were no longer living in the bush, he said, I was now in the eyes. This was civilisation and I could not go about pretending to be something I was not.

  Another of our exchange of silences was Lena’s for me getting onto Camelot’s back, mine for not saying anything about her fishing with sea lice when sea lice were a species Bok was responsible for protecting. Sea lice made the best bait. Both of us knew it. There was no way I would have reported her anyway for I delighted in their use almost as much as she did. The big difference was that fishing was more important to Lena than it was to me. I held the sea lice and the salmon over her head like the sword of Damocles. As she did the dolls and Camelot over mine.

  We wandered around the park with Simba looking for Bok, who was responsible for marine conservation and camp supervision. We were often with him when he checked fisherman’s fish sizes, tagged turtles that came to breed in the dunes, when he wrote out fines if too many crayfish had been caught or if people took mussels from the rocks without licences. Most transgressions occurred during holiday seasons when the Look Theres came down from the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Because Lake St Lucia’s camping resort and caravan park cost only two rand per night, the Makoppolanders — a word Mumdeman now explained had some origin amongst the poor whites of Tanganyika — came down for cheap holidays. They arrived in lorryloads, extended families that seemed to have countless numbers of ugly children and fat aunts and uncles who sometimes didn’t have bathing suits and swam in their bras and panties or underpants. Bok spent his days requesting them to extinguish fires they insisted building on the beach and getting them to keep their sheep tied up. Rare it was for a truckload of Look Theres to arrive without their Christmas lamb on the spit still alive in the back of the truck. Bokkie held these people in almost the same suspicious regard as the Pierces. In time she accepted that Lena and I were friends with the Pierces — even though she said she had wanted better for us. The Look Theres, unlike the Pierces, were an unknown entity descended on St Lucia for a few weeks each year, with their wild children and their suspect origins and no addresses of return. There was an iron rule: No Playing With the Look Theres. The rule was never repealed in the years we lived there.

  Out of season Lena, Bernice and I went on the boats with Bok through the narrows and into the huge lake. Simba stood at the front of the boat, his mouth drooling in the wind. Up the narrows we beached the boat and went into the dunes to check for traps that poachers set for small antelope. Coming upon fisherman who were not regulars, Bok asked to see licences. Other times he took VIPs out on boats to see crocodile basking on the estuary beaches or hippo drifting near the reed-spiked shores.

  I went with Bok to Empangeni or Matubatuba when he had business there or if he needed to see the police about poachers o
r holiday traffic controls. Once, soon after we moved to St Lucia, he told me to wait in the Land Rover while he went into police HQ for a meeting. It felt as though he was staying away for an eternity and my bladder was telling me I had to pee. I wished Bok would come back. In front of the parking space was an open lot; I wanted to get out but was terrified of leaving the vehicle. Cars zoomed past, huge trucks stacked with sugar cane and timber rolled by making a terrible din, and there were pedestrians everywhere. Frightened of the place, I could not leave the van. Unable to hold any longer I cried, pissing myself where I sat, the warmth spreading up my legs and around my bum. The pee trickled down and I could hear it streaming in behind the seat. I sat in the squelchy pool, weeping. Soon it went cold and itchy. By the time Bok returned the entire cabin, misted up and humid, smelt likefermenting piss. He scowled and asked why I had not simply opened the door and taken a pee beside the Land Rover or in the parking lot? I said I had been afraid of getting out of the Land Rover. Bok said it made no sense: how could a child who had never been afraid of walking around Umfolozi, where lion and cheetah and rhino and eland roamed free, be afraid of leaving a vehicle in the middle of a small town like Empangeni to take a leak? I said I hadn’t known I was allowed to pee in the streets of civilisation. He clicked his tongue and told me to use my head in future. We drove to the Caltex station on the John Ross highway. Bok fetched toilet paper to wipe the seat, which he had to remove. From the metal hollow where lay the jack, his ropes, his emergency tool kit, he mopped up, shaking his head. I again started crying and he rubbed my hair and said it was no big deal, just a little accident and next time I’d know that it was in order to get out and do it — even in the middle of the street, rather than in my pants.

  Mumdeman crossed the lake from Charters Creek in the little flat-bottomed boat Piper with its fifteen-h.p. Evinrude outboard. I’ve been separated from my grandchildren for too long to stay away, she said. She would wrap a scarf around her head and steer across the estuary with Skip. Over weekends, Dademan came along and Lena and I returned with them. Dademan allowed us to steer the small fifteen-h.p. engine and we’d putter up the lake back to Charters, with Simba and Skip standing at the bow, Skip’s long Pekinese ears streaming out behind him. At Charters Lena fished. I took my book and went either on my own — for I was now old enough — or still occasionally with Phinias to the forest to see the louries. Dademan made braaivleis and drank his brandy and Coke and smoked and Mumdeman drank her sherry and didn’t smoke. Dademan told us about safaris or we watched cines and slides. The cines were our best: flickering frames of James and Lena just starting to walk; me sitting in a mud pool playing with the Wachagga houseboy who raised me in Tanganyika; blue starlings ruffling their feathers in the Mbuyubird-bath with Meru in the background; all of us cousins in a dugout drifting down the Ruvu while Stephanie rowed; Dademan, Bok and Uncle Michael fishing; Aunt Siobhain and Bokkie giving each other perms on safari with all the little curlers in their hair and Bokkie waving the camera away; old Sanna Koerant gesturing with her arms to Mumdeman in the Oljorro garden amongst rosebushes, Christmas roses and bright orange and red cannas; Bernice running her first race at school in Arusha; the Land Rovers travelling over the savannah with Kilimanjaro behind; a bull elephant charging at Bok who picks up the rifle and the elephant crashing to the ground with dust flying and a thorn tree collapsing like dry twigs beneath its weight.

  Our cousins came to visit from Amanzimtoti. Most nights there was the usual shortage of beds. I frequently ended up sleeping with Stephanie. I knew well what would happen when I shared beds with my cousin. Earlier I had woken and found her playing with my filafooi. It would have turned into a spade and after a while Stephanie would let me lie on top of her. She pushed my spade into her poefoe. A wonderful, wonderful sensation. Her poefoe had little hairs around it — which Patty Pierces didn’t — and because we usually had our heads under the blankets I could smell her: strong; it reminded me of seaweed, salty, slimy, slippery. After the first time we did it Stephanie secured my secrecy by telling me that if I told anyone Lena would die. I found her rationale for my silence ridiculous and told her so: doing it had nothing to do with anyone dying and there was no need to lie to me. I just knew we weren’t meant to do it. I had grown up with animals mating everywhere around us in the bush. I have no recollection of ever, ever not knowing that everything and everyone mated — since Mkuzi I had known that Bok and Bokkie did it all the time — what else was going on when their mattress squeaked and they breathed like rhinos through the reed walls of Mbanyana? How stupid Stephanie was to tell me that Lena would die. I knew, without anyone having to tell me, that it would be our secret. Bokkie, who read to me and my sisters from a little red book with drawings ofpeople doing it, said that at home we should call a spade a spade and sex — not the silly birds and the bees — was no big deal and we’d all do it one day when we got married. However, it was not something to discuss with children at school and it was an entirely private affair. The filafooi was a private part and the poefoe was a private part, that’s why we didn’t show them off or discuss them publicly and only walked naked around the house. Having sex was also not something for children to do because you did it when you wanted a baby, and to show how much you loved the man or woman you were married to. To do it out of wedlock was dirty and a sin. I feared Stephanie and I might be caught or, if I died, that I’d go to hell. After one of our sessions I asked Stephanie whether she might have a baby and she said no, I was not old enough yet to make a baby, although she was. So, we had nothing to worry about; except to keep it as our secret. Afterwards, I had the smell of her poefoe on my fingers. I always went to wash my hands, afraid that someone might smell me. And that, like doing it, I merely added to my deposit box in my collection of secrets: how I had stolen things from Jonas and Boy; how I sometimes didn’t pray at night or left out entire sections of the ‘Our Father’; that it was James and I who broke Aunt Siobhain’s Oljorro vase and not the wind in the curtains; how I saw Bok kiss one tourist lady after the Umfolozi flood, a long, long kiss; how I stole sweets from the camp store to take to Camelot or to eat myself; how I sometimes ate my snot when no one was looking; or rubbed my finger in my bum and smelt it; how James and I had played with Chaka’s thing to make him mate with Suz; how I tore the kite that Willy Hancox made and said it was little Jeremy; how I accidentally drowned one of Mumdeman’s bantam chicks when I tried to let it swim and then hid its body beneath the red bougainvillea and then loudly agreed that it was probably a boomslang that had eaten it; how I didn’t like going to Sunday school because it was boring and the songs we sang monotonous; how I still sometimes dressed up even though I wasn’t meant to; how Lena and I used the sea lice for bait; how Bernice wrote letters toher boyfriend Okkie and that I sometimes read them; how I sometimes wished Lena was dead; how I broke leaves off trees and grass, snapped them in half to smell or taste the juices even if Bok had told me the plant was poisonous. My little deposit box — hidden deep in my head — never filled; its capacity to take more seeming to increase with each new silence slipped in for safe keeping.

  While I have no recollection of taking seriously Stephanie’s warning about Lena dying, there is, from elsewhere, a series of vivid memories about my other sisters possible death. One Mkuzi night I awoke to find Bokkie holding Bernice over the toilet bowl while my sister wretched and belched green and red bile. Bok was away with Jonas looking for poachers. For a few minutes Bernice would stop vomiting and lie down on the double bed while my mother wiped her face and forehead with a damp cloth that Lena kept wetting from the kitchen tap. Bernice cried and held her stomach, drifting in and out of sleep. Bokkie asked Lena and me whether we had eaten green mispels or poison apples? Had we drunk too much marog at the kraal? Had we chewed poisonous leaves or twigs? What about tam-botie? Stars of Mkuzi? Or had we eaten from the boys’ fire, which might have had some tambotie wood? Had we seen snakes — she checked Bernice’s body from skull to toe — had we been close to spiders nests; s
corpions? My mind flew through the previous day but there was nothing I or Lena could remember. Bokkie tried to get Bernice to speak, but my sister just folded into a ball like a frightened shongololo and screamed and cried. Bokkie gave her Milk of Magnesia from the blue bottle. Nothing helped and she just vomited more. My mother’s helplessness made me wish that Bok were there. Bok would know what to do. When Bernice seemed to calm down and fall asleep Bokkie told Lena to sit with Bernice while she and I went to the kraal to call Boy. Lena said we shouldn’t go out because hyenas had been howling close by all night. Bokkie took the revolver and fired a shot into the sky. A while later Boy came running and Bokkie asked whether he had any idea where Jonas and the Baas had gone on patrol. Boy said they were probably north, above Kumahlala. Bokkie said she wondered whether Boy could go and search, or whether she should drive as far as she could and then fire some more shots to alert Bok. Boy said that he would go, but that it was probably better to drive with the Peugeot, because he couldn’t run fast and both the horses were away and Mary was too wild to ride. Should she just take Bernice and drive to Matubatuba? What if she ran out of petrol? Did Boy know whether there was extra petrol in the jerry cans? Yes, he said, there was, enough for her to drive to Lebombo Gate and get petrol to fill up for Matubatuba. Bernice was again retching, trying to vomit, but nothing more came from her mouth. Bokkie told Lena and I to stay and tell Bok that she was racing Bernice to hospital in Empangeni. At dawn she and Boy took a funnel and filled the Peugeot tank with what petrol they could find. Lossie stood around in the grey light, ready to run after the car. Just as Bokkie was about to drive off, Bok on Vonk and Jonas on Ganaganda came galloping through the bush. They had heard the shot. Gesturing at Bernice on the back seat Bokkie burst into tears and told Bok his child was dying. It was the first time I heard that someone in my family — outside of great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers — could die. Death of someone I loved was a remote possibility, imaginable only, but reserved for if you were run down by a rhino, or bitten by a mamba — things you could avoid.