Embrace

by Mark Behr

  The Olvers had not attended any of our concerts. After supper they asked whether the six of us would sing for them. While as a rule we were not allowed informal singing, Ma’am said the tour was in fact over and there was no reason we couldn’t; no reason to save our voices at this point. With Dominic behind the piano and Mervy stroking his violin, we sang Christmas carols while Ma’am and the Olvers sat in armchairs with drinks. Shy as I was to have my voice heard with only five others, I enjoyed the carols and soon relaxed. For the first time in two years, I was feeling music. Allowing volume on the middle range, I didn’t even try to reach any of the high notes and left the ‘Silent Night’ descant entirely to Dominic and Steven. Dom cast a few quick glances at me, frowning when I also left out parts of other songs.

  From an open window behind the piano, I saw a full moon above the lake. I left the others and went to find a place outside. There was a flat boulder above the jetty where earlier in the afternoon I had seen wild gladioli and purple foxgloves. Behind me, against the moonlit night sky, candelabra trees clung to crevasses between the rocks and further inland I could make out the silhouette of a baobab. Piano,violin and voices continued, and I wondered how far sound carried over the water before me. 363 miles long, 20 to 50 miles wide, 2200 feet deep. Somewhere I’d read that sound, like matter, never quite disappears. So, our voices, our singing, like all the other voices and singing of thousands of years around this lake, were still somewhere there, nestling on rocks, in the water, on leaves. All eternity’s sounds, a dog’s bark, a child laughing, the beating of a bird’s pulse, and the echoes of these, were suspended or drifting somewhere around where I sat. I sighed. The echo of a sigh. And what incredible sound might be made if it all came back at once! If history’s every voice and echo was heard in a single instant? Like a bomb going off, that’s what it would resemble. Its volume, surely, would shatter our universe?

  From lights across the bay came the rhythm of drums, possibly a band, for it was not the sound of African drums. Pop or rock.

  Mr and Mrs Olver had taken us to see the clock tower at Fort Johnston that afternoon. The red-brick tower stood on the banks of the Shire River along which Livingstone had first entered the lake. In the late afternoon sun Mrs Olver took a photograph of the six of us standing in front of the tower, the clock pointing at half past five.

  Ma’am and Mr Olver walked out into the night, passing close to where I was sitting. Ma’am asked whether they could join me. She asked why I was so pensive, and I said I was wondering how much farther north I’d need to go to see the Livingstone Mountains. Mr Olver asked why I was interested and I replied it was less the mountains than the country I wanted to see. I had been born there and no one in our family had been back since we left in 1964. Never before, other than in the aeroplane, had I spoken to anyone outside of our family about Tanzania.

  ‘So, your family left after independence?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘After all white property was nationalised by the new government. We lost everything.’

  ‘Except your lives.’ Mr Olver said it was just as well we had left. He said Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa policies had failed miserably and thehandful of whites who remained in Tanganyika were having a tough time keeping afloat what little business was left. He said Malawi was an African anomaly, though a very bloody struggle had preceded independence from Britain. ‘Long and bloody and always against one and in cohorts with the other hand of Europe,’ he said, ‘like everywhere else on this wounded continent. When Europe decided what would be this country, way back, there were the Germans to the north, the Portuguese over there.’ And he inclined his head towards the lake’s invisible other shore. ‘But that’s all gone, only the borders and mixed excuses for nations they left remain. And the history of struggles. One interesting story from close by here is about Tobie — you know, the tall houseboy who served the lamb tonight — well, his great-grandfather was Chilembwe.’ Mr Olver lit a cigarette for Ma’am. She said ta, inhaling and exhaling the smoke into the night. ‘Chilembwe, backed by the Tanganyika Germans, led what is today called the Chilembwe Rising. He was disgruntled at the treatment of Bantu labourers by white farmers and, one imagines, from seeing that black life mattered to Europe during times of war only — as cannon fodder. So he staged an uprising. He gave strict orders that no white women or children were to be harmed. Lists were drawn up of white men who had to be killed as they slept beneath their mosquito nets. William Livingstone, one of the cruellest white farmers, had his head cut off in the presence of his family. The head was put on a pole and the women and children in nightclothes were herded through the night behind it. Chilembwe, a minister, held his Sunday service with the head hoisted up on the church altar. The European community, in a panic that they were on the verge of being slaughtered, made plans to pack up. The militia mobilised against the rebels. There are conflicting stories about what became of Chilembwe. He was a village boy who had gone through a missionary education: one story holds that he fled and was killed by the militia. Buried in the bush with nothing except his gold spectacles. If you were to ask Tobie about it he’d say he turned into a pigeon and flew off to Madagascar or the Seychelles. The other story I’ve heard Chiluma tell is that Chilembwe, at seeing the soldiers approach, simply walked out of the back door of his church. The soldiers who followed his trail found that the tracks of his shoes had turned into hyena spoor.’

  Quiet after the story, we watched the slow ascent of the moon over the water from the Mozambique side. Mr Olver lit another cigarette and offered one to Ma’am. She declined. The story had reminded me of the Mau Mau in Kenya; only the Mau Mau had raped and murdered women and children too. I had read about the Mau Mau in Robert Ruark’s Uburu, and filled in bits of additional information from family narratives and memories.

  ‘It sounds like the Mau Mau,’ I said, wanting to show I knew the history of East Africa, ‘who murdered hundreds of whites in their sleep.’

  Mr Olver’s chuckle rang across the water. ‘Seven whites, my boy, that’s about all they killed. And we killed thousands of blacks in return. Had murdered a million and more on the Middle Passage.’ I had no idea what the Middle Passage was and regretted having said anything about Tanzania. After a silence Mr Olver altered his tone and became pensive: ‘What a continent,’ he said. ‘This country too . . . Things here are not nearly all the papers or Dr Banda make them out to be. There is no press freedom here. Women have to cover their legs down to the ankles.’ Dr Banda ruled with an iron fist. Then there was also a man called Chipembere, who posed a serious challenge to Banda’s leadership. Mr Olver said that Dr Banda countered support for Chipembere by invoking Chipembere s Yao ancestry. I immediately said that I had read about the Yao: were they not the ones who had sold other tribes into slavery? Mr Olver said yes, and that Banda kept harping on the fact that less than a hundred years ago the Yao were in cohorts with the Arab slave traders from North and East Africa. Mr Olver said that by playing on the history of the slave trade in Malawi, the president could justify his links with South Africa and oppose OAU attempts to impose sanctions on us. I assumed sanctions weresomething like boycotts, which I understood because of the international sports boycott of South Africa.

  Things were also disintegrating in Mozambique, Mr Olver said, looking out to where the moon sat above the black waterline of the horizon. Early in 1975 the Portuguese had, after three hundred years, withdrawn from there, as they had from Angola. Abandoned Mozambique overnight and left a population of eight million people with twelve doctors. Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, now one-party Marxist states. And he gave Ian Smith and Rhodesia two or three years, at most. Mr Olver asked Ma’am what she thought would happen in South Africa. Did she not think it would eventually have a black majority government? Ma’am said she doubted it: the state was powerful and the homeland policies on track, with Transkei due for independence in a year’s time. Her son would be going into the army in January, and that was of course a concern now that South Africa was involved
in the war in Angola.

  ‘Darling, the boys are going to sing again, do come in and listen.’ Mrs Olver s voice reached us from the open lounge doors.

  Mr Olver stood up, saying he’d like to hear more about Ma’am’s children.

  She and I were left alone outside. ‘

  ‘And you, Karl, what do you think will happen in South Africa?’

  This — the enormous question — was not something I’d ever really thought about. I said I hated politics. I said I didn’t really mind Bantu, that I thought it was unfair that they could not vote in South Africa or live where they’d like. Bantu were human beings, but they were not ready to run a country. And then there was the thing that they tended to take away white land. We now owned a house in Amanzimtoti, I said — the first since we got out of Tanzania. I would hate to lose that if the blacks took over.

  I asked her about her son, who had just completed matric. She was going to phone home within a day or so to hear about his results — if she could get through on these lines. She was proud that he wasgoing into the army. Of course it was dangerous, but it was service to our country and simply the way things were. I wanted to ask about her ex-husband, why she was divorced, but imagined the question overly familiar or rude. Instead I told her that my cousin James had a British passport, and that meant he would not be required to go into the army like the rest of us when he turned eighteen. ‘Don’t you think it unfair, Ma’am,’ I asked, ‘that people can live in a country and get everything from that country and not have to go to the army because they have foreign passports?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s outrageous.’

  ‘My cousin James says he refuses to die for a country that isn’t even his.’

  ‘Well then, why doesn’t he leave and go back to England?’

  ‘Ireland,’ I said. ‘My Aunt is Irish.’

  ‘Back to Ireland, then?’

  ‘That’s exactly what my father says. My’ cousin’s a real sissy, anyway,’ I said. ‘Always doing flower arrangements and he wants to be a florist when he grows up.’ Ma’am said she supposed there was nothing really wrong with that, and we laughed when she said James would probably have a tough time being a florist in the army.

  ‘And, what about you, Karl? Do you like flowers?’

  ‘I don’t like flowers in arrangements,’ I said. ‘I love flowers; but in a house I prefer just one flower, like a single rose or even a single bottle-brush or just one twig of bougainvillea in a vase. My cousin makes these arrangements, with green oasis, that are all stiff and formal. Especially protea arrangements; they’re so hard and ugly. I hate those.’

  She said she didn’t believe any flower ugly. Did I know proteas were named for the Greek sea god Proteus, who could change his shape to become whatever he wanted to be? I said no, I didn’t know that; and, that I didn’t mean I hated proteas, I hated them in arrangements. I pointed out the wild irises and foxgloves growing behind us. She asked what sort of flower arrangements I liked.

  ‘At one of our host families, I saw some paintings and photographs of one red disa in a vase. That’s what I’ll have in my house one day. Or in my office on my desk where I work. A single disa in a vase, so that I can look up at it from my work. Or just a handful of irises, like Van Gogh.’

  Dominic and Almeida were doing ‘Dos Allerschonste Kindi’.

  ‘Like angels, those two voices,’ Ma’am murmured. Something about the phrase had an odd or familiar ring. Like angels, those two voices. Where was the memory’s origin?

  She asked whether I was fond of art. I said yes, I loved painting. Knowing she was the one who taught Standard Six Art and Latin, I left out that the few times I’d been in an art gallery I had found most of the paintings and sculptures devoid of meaning; that amongst every two or three hundred paintings there might be but a single one I liked. I told her that Bok had agreed that I could take Art as a subject in high school as long as I played rugby and did athletics as well. It was rugby and Art or no Art at all. Or, Bok said, I could drop rugby if I won the 1500 metres in track. I told her my favourite painter was Van Gogh, his poplars, and Monet’s waterlilies. She asked whether I knew an artist by the name of George O’Keeffe. I said no, though it does sound familiar. She said she would show me pictures, the following year. I thought of telling her I wasn’t coming back. Kept quiet, not wanting to complicate the moment or ruin the adult conversation. If I were fond of landscape and flowers, Ma’am said, I’d have to see O’Keeffe. Where’s he from? I asked. She, Ma’am said. Georgia O’Keeffe is an American. The greatest woman painter in the world. And what about Jan Hendrik Pierneef, and Maggie Laubscher, South Africa’s greatest painters, the ones who drove our national art? Again I wanted to tell her that I was not coming back; that I was going to Port Natal to start high school there; that I would look up the painters in Durban and write to her about my impressions.

  She asked what I would like to do when I was a grown-up. Irepeated what I had for years said: I was going to be a lawyer. I now left out the part about writing plays or making films.

  She turned to me, slowly, and in the night, I now again hear her voice: ‘You know . . . Do you remember last year, when I heard you do “The Moth and the Flame”?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ I laughed.

  ‘There was in your rendition something of the sensitivity and sensibility of an actor. It was as though you understood each word of that poem, as though you yourself could have written it. Do you ever think of becoming an actor?’

  I said no, I don’t, though I’d been in plays and musicals.

  ‘You should, Karl,’ she said, in her voice a note of inspiration, but also a shadow of sadness as my name left her tongue. For an instant, I no longer wanted to leave the school. Ma’am, alone, strict, upright, humourless, attractive in a severe way, she — even without Dominic — might be worth returning for.

  The following night we sang again for the Olvers. Noticing me once more leaving the ‘Silent Night’ descant to him, Dominic asked that I try second soprano. Keeping my ear close to Almeida’s mouth, I quickly picked up the seconds’ score. I heard my own voice beside and with Steven’s. I sounded bigger and richer than ever before.

  In bed Dominic suggested I should get out of firsts. That I should ask next year to be moved to seconds: ‘How come you’ve stayed in firsts so long?’

  ‘When we do those voice-tests at the beginning of the year, I’ve said both times that I have hay fever. So I’ve never been tested. Besides, I know how to fake the high notes. Look, I just strain these ligaments in my neck, like—’

  ‘It’s a complete waste, Karl. You can’t even go near a D. You must move. No wonder you hate choir. You’re in the wrong voice.’ Outside was as quiet as inside the house. Being in the wrong voice wascertainly part of it, but there was also the fact that much of the music didn’t appeal to me.

  ‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘when we sang . . . I could hear my voice has changed. Not just that it’s deeper. It’s not bad, is it, Dominic?’

  ‘Karl, it’s useless on first soprano. It’s terrific in second. It’s developed, idiot. You don’t sing for two years every day without developing your whole vocal chamber. You should hear recordings of me two years ago; I sound like any average little choir moffie from Pofadder. Okay, not quite that average. Promise me you’ll ask to be transferred, in January? Anyway, if you do the test Cilliers will pick it up. Promise me.’ ‘I promise,’ I said, knowing the promise could not be broken for I was not coming back.

  Giggling into my ear, and suddenly changing to Gogga, he said, ‘I wowouloeldid popay a mimiloelloelionee tito boke fickucockykedid boky Cociloelloeliersoos.’

  I laughed into the pillow and whispered: ‘Popigog.’ To which he said he couldn’t wait for next year when Cilliers would be our conductor and we’d be Seniors.

  Sunlight, filtering through the mosquito net, fell across our sheets. The wind sent waves up the jetty and white horses cavorted miles over the lake. Another night in which we had shar
ed the same bed. Holding hands. At breakfast, Mr Olver said the weather was ideal for the catamaran. Tantalising associations flashed through my mind. Catamarans at full sail were things I had seen only in Seven Seas Cane Spirits advertisements screened in drive-ins and on cinema screens: tropical beaches and turquoise water; men and women in wet bathing suits in colours contrasting with their streamlined bronzed bodies.

  Mrs Olver suggested we wear T-shirts over our bathing trunks as some form of protection both against the wind, which was sure to be freezing at high speed, and against sun. Ma’am, afraid of the water, declined to join us. She followed us out onto the jetty, the wind scooping up her thin cotton dress, exposing white muscular legs. She insistedon our wearing life jackets for the duration of the trip. Life jackets, I thought, were no more than devices of physical constraint, designed to inhibit physical mobility. How ridiculous it would look, how it would spoil everything, if the men and women in the Seven Seas commercials had to plod around with life jackets covering their bouncing breasts, their rippling torsos. I resented Ma’am for her interference with my idea of what a catamaran trip should be — for forcing us into inflatable straitjackets; a brief wish that she was not staying with us.

  Mr Olver instructed us to sit three on the port fin and three on starboard. At his command, we were to move from side to side as his navigation and the wind dictated. Mrs Olver, readying ropes and slowly unfurling the sails, seemed an able sailor, despite her grey hair and a face creased and lined like a tortoise from too much sun. We drifted from the jetty. The others waved at Ma’am. I, deliberately, looked out into the choppy lake.

  Mr Olver steered while his wife hoisted the sails. Wind billowed the enormous white sail and we shrieked as we took off into a southerly wind. Shouts of excitement passed between the two fins, the three of us on port trying to make ourselves audible over the wind, the roar of the sail and the crashing of waves. Mr Olver called for starboard to prepare to move to port; the moment all six of us were seated and clinging to the fin, Mrs Olver swung the sail and suddenly we lifted into the air, howling as the port fin flew over the water two metres above the surface. I was sure we would capsize at any moment. Mrs Olver shouted for us to lean back. I closed my eyes and felt the gush of air as my back hung over the side in mid-air. As she tightened the sail the port fin slowly descended closer to the surface and we exchanged glances, signalled relief with smiles just a little too broad. Mr Olver called three back to starboard and I wondered whether we were in for another lift, but nothing happened and we merely sped along at what seemed a miraculous pace. By then we were hanging back on our own accord, our heads skimming the surface as we chattered and laughed. I looked to the fore and aft: we had completely lostsight of land. There was a moment of unease in which I felt grateful for the secure suction of the life jacket to my ribs and the belt tightened around my waist. Looking into the wind made my eyes water so I closed them, leant back over the side, imagined us on a voyage through space. A few more times we were hoisted into the air, screamed, certain each was an occasion for capsizing, but the greyhaired Olvers, smiling and sticking out playful tongues, brought both fins down and we swished along, getting drenched each time the craft sliced the swells. Soon we could again see land. Mrs Olver, agile as a monkey, began lowering the sail and our speed decreased.