Embrace

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Embrace Page 42

by Mark Behr


  At midnight, the Brats still awake, we lit the firecrackers. I missed Dominic. Imagined the Websters on the beach at Plettenberg Bay as we left 1975 behind.

  On New Years Day as we prepared for church, Aunt Lena phoned to say she wasn’t coming because Uncle Joe wanted her to stay with the Brats. Bokkie reminded us that Uncle Joe refused for himself or Aunt Lena to set foot in any church, the Dutch Reformed Church in particular. Uncle Joe, who refused to read the Bible, said that the portals of hell were lined with the dominees, deacons and elders of the Dutch Reformed Church.

  With Juffrou Sang away we made do without an organist. Lena shared her hymnal with me and we giggled at the solemn dragging of the congregation’s a cappella. I scooped from note to note, putting a sob at the end of every line. Bokkie jabbed me in the ribs. When the last hymn was over and Lena pulled away her hymnal, I whispered: ‘Thank you, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ She glared at me and shook her head.

  Aunt Lena had secretly given us money to pay for Ipi Tombi with Aunt Siobhain and James. Aunt Lena had really wanted to come along too, but Uncle Joe said she couldn’t leave the kids and he didn’t want to pay for her to go and watch kaffir girls dancing around with bare tits. That, he said, he could see for free on one of his farms.

  At lunch on 2 January, Aunt Lena and the Brats pulled into the driveway with the Mercedes. It was obvious from her face she had been crying. She burst into tears and said that Uncle Joe had left early in the morning without saying where he was going. Then, at eleven, when they were on the Malibu pool deck, he was back: with the little fourteen-year-old slut Matilda.

  ‘He didn’t say anything, just that she was now on holiday with us,’ Aunt Lena wept.

  We sat in horrified silence. Once Aunt Lena had stopped crying,

  Bokkie said, ‘Lena, my sister, now you have grounds for a divorce. Leave the fucken bastard.’ It was the first time I had heard my mother use the word.

  ‘He’ll take my poor children from me. We have no proof that he’s sleeping with her.’

  ‘Jirre, the whole Klerksdorp knows he is.’

  Everyone around me is doing It, I thought to myself. Everyone is doing It with everyone.

  ‘How do I prove it?’ Aunt Lena sobbed.

  ‘Put a private investigator onto him.’

  ‘No one will do it for me, they’re all scared of him.’ I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get one from outside of Klerksdorp, from Johannesburg. I was stewing: our entire holiday was again, as had been the case year after year, messed up by the travails of my mother’s sister, the Brats and Uncle Joe. And yet, I knew, we kept visiting them, kept inviting them. It felt as though we were their willing prisoners — enjoying their money, the laughs, and that we therefore had to eat their shit as well. Support Aunt Lena at any cost. For the entire day and night it was just Joe and Matilda this, Joe and Matilda that. Matilda, Matilda, Matilda. A fourteen-year-old girl — the daughter of Joe Mackenzie’s farm foreman — someone I had never set eyes on, who had nothing to do with me or my life, was determining our every discussion and move. A fourteen-year-old slut’named Matilda was ruining my holiday. Not only Uncle Joe, but the mysterious Matilda. What’s her story? How could someone we knew nothing about, determine the course of our lives? I longed to see her. To put a face to the name. A voice to her mouth; fill in the silence that was making us all forget it was New Year. When things were meant to be nice.

  I had to sleep on the couch in the lounge while Aunt Lena and the Brats moved into my room. Early the next morning, the day Alette was due back from Uvongo, Uncle Joe arrived in an Avis car and asked to see Aunt Lena. They sat out at the pool. The Brats sat on his lap while we stood behind the lace curtains in the lounge trying to eavesdrop. Within ten minutes Aunt Lena came in to say she was going back to the Malibu. Uncle Joe had sent Matilda back on the airplane and had promised that things were going to be different from now on.

  ‘But, Lena,’ Bokkie said, ‘he’s said that a hundred times.’

  ‘Please, please, Bokkie,’ Aunt Lena began to whimper, ‘support me in this. Remember Saul on the road to Damascus. If God could change Saul’s heart, he will, I believe, change Joe Mackenzie too.’

  I had to carry the suitcases back to the car and she cautioned: ‘Karl, don’t say anything, please. Just be nice, or else he’ll take it out on me and the children.’ None of us said a thing in front of her. The moment they left Bokkie went into a silence, deeper and more horrifying than I could remember from previous times.

  Lena and my animosities were forgotten in the glow of a shared outrage. We sat at the pool with Alette. ‘I swear to you two today, I will never get married,’ Lena was saying, lines to her mouth.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Alette.

  ‘And I swear to you too: may God strike me dead if I ever do.’ It was as though Lena and I saw — at least on this one issue — the world through the same set of eyes. How surprised I was to contemplate missing her along with Alette when I went back to the Berg. ‘Living together,’ I continued. ‘I’ll do that. Dominic’s parents say marriage is outdated.’

  ‘Yes, and fuck the Church,’ Alette said.

  ‘Dr Webster’s right. Living together’s becoming the in thing,’ Lena continued. ‘I’m going to do it too. Look at Coen and Mandy, living together in sin and happy as any couple I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘My parents,’ Alette, began, ‘I know you’d never say so, but their marriage is in trouble. All my father does is work, work, work at the university, his students are much more important to him than my mother. They don’t speak to me about it, but I wouldn’t be surprisedif they separate. I think my mum would have done it long ago, but she’s scared of the censure of the Church.’

  ‘What’s censure?’ I asked.

  ‘If you get divorced you’re not allowed to go to church for a year.’ ‘Do you really think they might... divorce?’

  ‘Sometimes I hope they will.’

  Going back to the Berg — out of the house with my mother’s terrible silence, Bok’s grandiosity, the whispers of my aunt’s tears and faith in a Damascus Road awaiting the most evil man I had ever known — now seemed a wonderful prospect. We would be in Standard Six, in the Senior Choir. And the dreadful Harding and Reyneke would be gone! There would be Dominic. Yes, Dom. This year was going to be incomparable. Dom and I could pick up where we left off. We’d take ourselves back to Lake Nyassa! Why had I ever wanted to leave? To hover with dragonflies high above the pool: to see the whole story from a position of elevation. Idiotic, to think I’d rather be down here, back with the family. And Ma’am. Art and Latin. There would again be Rufus, the river and our new fort. And none of this shit flying around the idea we call home.

  25

  About that first night I went to the fort, I remember clearly how, from a distance, their acrid smell reached my nose. A good five paces before the snores like branches groaning in the wind sounded from inside our grass and stick sanctuary, I knew already they were in there: smoke, old sweat and sleep, the aromas of the Great Unwashed. Erasing almost every other from the spring night’s air. The school’s coarse grey blanket would be ruined, that much was certain. No ways it could be salvaged after passing through their foul lives. I’d have to make a plan and get another from Beauty. In the meantime probably freeze my bones off. Sleep even less because of them. One needs eight hours of sleep to function properly at school and in choir, everyone knew that. I was down to about six, sometimes five. If being cold at night kept me awake even more, I’d be a wreck. Exhausted and pneumonic, I may end up in sick-bay. I could see Jacques and Dominic bent over me, worried brows, their thumbs caressing the black halfmoons beneath my eyes. My pale and dying skin. ‘It was for my starving uncle,’ I’d groan, barely able to speak through chapped and peeling lips. ‘I couldn’t see him suffer any longer. To see others suffer is to me worse than if it were me. There was snow on Champagne Castle. I gave my life so that he may live.’ And I’d be a hero. Like Racheltjie
de Beer and Wolraad Woltemade. Our country’s undisputed national heroes. But before I died, Buys and Marabou and Lena — everyone who’d ever been nasty to me — filed past my bed crying, murmuring how sorry they were for everything they’d ever done to me. I’d turn my head tragically on the pillow and I’d look up at Dom and Jacques and bravely try to smile at them as I struggled with rasping breath to whisper: ‘Loving someone means never having to say you’re sorry.’ No, ridiculous. All that would happen would be me freezing and probably not even getting near death or sick-bay’s doors. Thoughts of turning back were now foremost in my mind. This was crazy. Risking my place in the school for someone I barely knew and cared for even less. Now I was down here, I might as well go through with it. Silly to turn around at this point and not give the old fool what he’d asked for. I’d just have to get another blanket from Beauty. But I didn’t want to see them. Let them just find the blanket and know it must have been me. Karl, the Good Samaritan. And may God grant that they’d then get out of here, leave, take the blanket with them, back to the Transvaal. The worst would be if anyone found out. Jesus, no. The De Man boy’s poor white uncle.

  At the fort’s mouth I paused for a moment. I flung the blanket awkwardly into the dark cavern and at once turned on my heel and headed off. Inside the snoring had abruptly ceased. I stopped, listened. I could hear mutters and joints creaking. Again I started off. Had they found it? Did they know it was from me? I slunk back, cat foot over the blotches of dry leaves in the path. By now they had again settled down, the snoring again starting up.

  ‘Uncle Klaas,’ I whispered, urgently. ‘There’s a blanket for you and the other one.’

  I heard them sit up. ‘Take it with you when you leave. Bye.’Then I ran off, down river and up across the rugby field. Not a light on anywhere in the school or the conductors’ chambers. Into the first music room. Closed the window behind me. I passed Jacques’s door. The music had been turned off. Already asleep. I wondered who he was. I’d have to ask him. All we do is It. We barely speak.

  IV

  1

  As we went down, my left arm interlocked with Lukas’s right. We gripped each others jerseys, went onto haunches and moved forward for our heads to shove through the two gaps on either side of Bennie s buttocks. My free hand went through Radys s legs, clutched the seam of his jersey and the elastic of his rugby shorts. In the second before we heaved and roared my wrist pressed against the soft mound of his penis and balls. Each time we went down — even before — I anticipated the brutalisation of my ears rubbed against Radys’s outer thigh at vasskop prop to my left, and, to my right, Bennie s on hooker. There was the grinding of cartilage, knuckles, the thudding of togs digging in, tearing at grass. Soil, chalk. Huffing, puffing and groaning; the curses, the thrusting: ‘Nou boys, nou manne!’ Which would drive me to giggles were it not for my silent hatred of the entire enterprise. Of this tangle of limbs and aggression, of this smell of sweat and farts and shit and repulsive male odours, the racket of elbows and knees, of soiled white shorts and bruised grass, I wanted no part. The longer a game progressed, the more automatic my participation, the less aware I became of my own whereabouts. Something in my brain shut down, gave me over, enabling me to while and will away both halves until the final whistle signified only my relief. I cared little whether we won or lost, or about what had appeared on the scoreboard. I wanted off the field, through the shower and out and away from that game. My game, my motive my heart — I told myself, is different from theirs even as I engage in theirs, even as I function within the rules of this savage sport. To my mind there was no escape: I was tall, well built and perceived as strong. I am a strong boy therefore I have no choice; I do not think therefore I am one of you. Dominic, skinny, spindly, was pardoned from play almost without question for he was a musical genius. Mervy — despite being almost as tall as me — was also excused with only rare questions, teases, remarks like sissy, naff, mof. But, I told myself, when these were flung at Mervy or Dominic they were playful, they did not hurt and were not intended to. When they came at me, they were like poison darts. I would not have that; I played to escape the words. Clearly, size alone did not demand participation. There were other codes and expectations, real and imagined, imposed and self-imposed. In my case there seemed to be no substitute which may have approximated even Dominic and Mervy’s half-baked and frowned-upon pardons. I might manage to escape a few weeks of play by dragging the swimming season out for as long as some gala could be found. But that I had to play to live was a fate I accepted. I knew I was there only to be seen to be there. The returns on my sacrifice were, I believed, infinite. Therefore I was a lock, with Lukas, who lived for the four months of the year we played this game to which he gave his all, and where he was the captain. If Lukas or any of the other thirteen noticed my disinterest — the fact that entire matches went by without me touching the ball — none said a thing. That I was there seemed good enough. Lukas did say, ‘Well played, Karl, good aggressive tackle,’ after the rare match in which I had for a five-minute spurt made any contribution. During practices and games, I was mostly quiet, thinking of something else, forcing my thoughts elsewhere. When things got rough and I found myself at the bottom of the heap of bodies struggling for the ball I tried to cover my head, hoping that I would not be injured or scarred by a perspex boot stud, develop cabbage ears or get a fist in my eye. When I did get the ball, I passed it to one of my team-mates at the first possible instant. Having the ball was having the eyes of theteam, opposition and spectators upon me. That was something I could not countenance on a rugby field and less and less anywhere else.

  On the Cape tour we played a few friendly matches against our ‘host schools. When Jacques attended, which more often than not he did, I became self-conscious in the way I did when Bok or Bokkie attended when I first played at Kuswag. Back then I still enjoyed the game, had excitedly elected to play. But something had since changed. Whatever excited me at ten had long since turned to resentment. Whenever Jacques came to watch, I played like hell, knowing his eyes were on me. When we left the field I felt his gaze, cast him a glance, saw the pride there. But instead of being pleased by the way he looked at me, I felt disappointed, wanted instead that he should know — even as I declined to show — how I loathed the spectacle. I wanted him to say that it was a game for barbarians and hooligans. Instead he glowed, reminding me again of Bok, back from hunting along the Zambezi, putting an arm around me and patting me on the back after a game. At first my father’s delight had been an inspiration for playing, but with time that reason seemed to have become inverted.

  We played against Upington High and even though we lost, we — and I — had played well. After the pep talk and post-match prayer thanking God for letting us play a brave game, Lukas grinned at me and said he’d never seen me play with such determination.

  Dominic and I stayed with the headmaster and his wife. The headmaster had come to watch the game and afterwards he and Jacques spoke while I, seated in the car with my legs outside, removed my togs. Over the car radio I heard that there were now full-scale riots in Soweto. Black children were burning down their schools. While the news entered the cabin, I took off my togs and socks — which I sniffed at as always — and rubbed wool from between my toes and studied the way the nylon fabric had discoloured my toenails and the area around them, swollen from the sweat of an hour inside the togs. I have no recollection of what did or might have passed through my mind when I heard the radio bulletin. I might have thought of Radys and Bennie’s host mother a week or so earlier when the kids had surrounded her car. Of what the Websters may have said the evening we stayed with them in Saxonwold I have no memory at all. I do remember Jacques coming over with the headmaster and winking, saying I had played well, and that he’d see me the following morning at the bus when we departed for Oudtshoorn. And I remember going with him to Paternoster, staying in the opera singer’s home in False Bay, going up Table Mountain with Dom, Cape Town City Hall. And then, driving back f
rom Cape Town to the Berg, through the Orange Free State: from the front of the bus where she sat beside Jacques, Ma’am called me.

  ‘Sit for a moment,’ she smiled, making room beside her and Jacques. He winked at me.

  ‘What do you see, out there?’

  ‘How do you mean, Ma’am?’

  ‘This landscape, this sky. What do you see?’

  The odd question and my being called to the front of the bus to sit beside them did nothing to help me understand what I was expected to say. ‘You mean, the yellow grass and the flatness, Ma’am?’ She laughed and shook her head, asked where I thought I saw anything flat? She told me to take a minute and look carefully at what was unfolding outside the bus windows. Nervous at my proximity to the two of them and wondering rather about how they had come to call me, I tried to grasp what she wanted from my answer. My cheeks were aglow. The yellow veld, undulating in the afternoon sun, was not flat. Gullies, hills, dams, clumps of dull green trees, here and there a white eucalyptus, empty red fields, an occasional farmhouse or huts dotted the landscape. The sky was an exceptional blue and here and there fragments of suspended white clouds, all at exactly the same height, cast shadows on the yellow, brown and red earth. Ahead of us the tarred road cut a deadly straight track into thedistance, disappearing into hills that rolled on into a growing blue range.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Karl. I’ve just been telling Mr Cilliers that you’re a born artist! He said this was the ugliest part of the country and I said you — of anyone in this bus — would see the beauty! Whose work is this landscape?’ I looked out again, desperate to give the correct answer. Did she mean God? No, Ma’am had never indicated any interest or belief in God. Suddenly my hand flew to my mouth. The cliffs, the clouds! Yes, the dryness, the way the reds and browns and yellows flowed into each other!

 

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