by Mark Behr
After the concert, Lukas bought Mr Roelofse a carton of Benson and Hedges Filter. It seemed the man’s attitude towards both of us softened considerably. Later, I would tell Bok and Bokkie that boys bought cigarettes for the conductors — that Mervy’s mum had given Mr Roelofse a small krugerrand to be mounted as a signet ring; Bruin’s parents were donating tennis trophies to the school — and Bok said that was arse-licking, that he would be livid if he ever heard that
I had done something like that. Despite what my father said, I knew that if I had the money I would buy carton after carton of cigarettes for Mr Roelofse or any of my teachers. I’d shower them with krugerrands. If that would make them like me.
6
And I asked Mumdeman to let Phinias wait until the dandelions were in seed.
Once the lawn was covered by miniature silver ballerinas on a stage, I would pray for wind. When in the afternoon the blowing swept up from the estuary, lifting the pirouetting and swirling into a mist of movement, I’d dance with the seeds while Phinias began mowing and the smell of Kikuyu came in the sap that turned my toes and footsoles green. The fine parachutes drifted and sped over the garden, and I moved among them while Phinias spun up and down the lawn, the mower revving, revving, sputtering when it hit a moist patch. Then Phinias had his foot on the machine, and pulled and tugged, just like Bokkie at home when she mowed. The smell of mowed lawn hung in the air — and dog shit if he went over where Skip had done his business — and the fairies and snowflakes were caught in spiderwebs or settled in the wet bright cut green grass against the bark of the kaffir tree or the huge tree wisteria, or twirling, up-up-up and away in gusts of wind.
7
A pear-shaped stone with hollows for a grip and a rounded, worn point that looked as though once it may have been sharpened. Lukas, who uncovered it deep along the overgrown ledge, said I could keep it. Delighted at the find and my ownership, I didn’t mind that we again had no time to do a proper search for the hidden cave. In the library I paged to find a sketch and a description of what it might once have been used for. Archaeologists placed the Bushmen in the category of the Later Stone Age, which lasted from 16,000 years ago till the present. Books maintained that the little wrinkly people once roamed the entire stretch of land now called the Republic of South Africa. As I’d learnt in Standard One Geography, the Bushmen were hunter-gatherers and dancing, acting, making musical instruments, singing and dressing-up and storytelling occupied much of their time. As people of the Stone Age they made all manner of implements from rock. Indeed, many such implements had been collected from the Drakensberg and placed in museums around the world. Much of what I read recalled my Geography lessons from when I first got to Kuswag: ostrich eggs used as water bottles; mysteriously poisoned tips on arrows; arrows carried in quivers; no domestic animals; dances around camp fires. But, now, in these few texts, there were descriptions of rock art. One book mentioned an artist named Walter Battis, who said of Bushmen art that no artists had said more with paint by saying less. I pondered the truth of the words, undertook to ask Ma’am, found myself in agreement with Battis: how extremely simple the little figures against the rock ledges are, yet we can see that they are moving their hands, flexing arms and legs. Even while the paintings have very few details, we can imagine almost exactly what’s going on in every scene. I wished the Bushmen of the Drakensberg and Umfolozi were not extinct. Umfolozi? I don’t remember seeing Bushmen paintings there; do I? I imagined riding up to the caves and finding some of them sitting around a camp fire, others painting against the back of the cave walls.
In vain I searched for a sketch of the implement Lukas had found. Most pictures in the books were photographs or reproductions of paintings. The ox-wagons in some rock paintings, so the books held, indicated that the Bushmen lived just over a hundred years earlier, when the Voortrekkers arrived in this vicinity from the Cape Colony. But, I wondered, who knows the age of my stone implement with its patterned indentations? How long since the hidden ledge had been used, before being abandoned and allowed to be overgrown? Or was it always like that, had it always been a secret hiding place, like a fortress against the marauding Zulus and the Boers with their guns? Could this rudimentary chopper, or ax, or digger, or weapon be as much as 16,000 years old? I must take it to Uncle Klaas, I thought, tonight, to show him and ask his opinion. Leaving the library I collected sheets of paper from the art cupboard, a pencil and a sharpener from our classroom and went to the music room where Dominic was practising. He formed his lips into a kiss when I entered, but continued over the keyboard. At a desk behind him, I made myself comfortable and placed the implement in a sheath of sun spilling across the flat surface. First I drew the shadows with the pencil point longways against the paper, then the outlines, the hollows and the rounded end. Once the drawing was completed, I signed it De Man in the bottom right, and on the second sheet started again. The sonata stopped and Dominic turned, came over and placed his hand on my shoulder as he watched what I was doing.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘Above Bushmen Paintings, along that hidden ledge.’
‘Did you find the other cave?’
‘No. But we will. That one’s for you,’ I said, lifting the pencil and handing him the first sketch. He smiled and said he’d thank me later, rolling his eyes suggestively, and returned to his seat. The piano started again and I dropped my head, adding a longer shadow beneath the object’s sharp point. The second sketch signed, I left, waving at Dominic, and went to place it on Ma’am’s desk. .
The stone tool was inside my dressing-gown pocket when I went on one of my surprise visits to his room. I heard the muted chords of Scarlatti. The door opened and he was in front of me. A frown quarried into his forehead beneath the wet slicked-back hair. Tonight there was no playful smile at seeing me. Instead his light grip drew me into the room without the usual roughing of my hair. Unable to ignore the change in our routine, the cool reception, I let the implement remain in the warmth of my pocket, my hand folded around its smooth, furrowed surface.
Jacques forced a half-smile and a nod, at the same time pulling me down to sit beside him on the bed. He stared into my face, as if searching for something there. ‘I’m worried,’ he said softly, then got up from the bed and briefly paced the room.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked in a whisper.
He turned to look at me intently. Now he smiled, but again, it was the concern that shone through.
‘Have you told anyone?’
‘Told anyone what?’ I asked.
‘About this?’ motioning with both palms upwards in a gesture that said: of us, of you and me, of this coming to my room.
‘No, I swear. I promise,’ shaking my head.
He returned to the bed and sat down beside me, still staring. ‘Don’t be scared, Karl. You know you don’t have to be afraid of me. Have you told anyone — Dominic, or any of your other friends?’
‘No, I promise you. I haven’t ever even’thought of telling a soul.’
‘Does anyone suspect, do you think?’
I shook my head.
‘Has anyone seen you leaving the dorm?’
‘No, Jacques, I swear. No one can possibly know. What’s wrong?’
He said he was worried, couldn’t quite tell why, but for a time we would have to be watchful. It’s merely a feeling I have, he said.
My mind raced, thoughts somersaulted as I searched for a slip, a lapse in vigilance, a word spilt. ‘No one knows,’ I tried to reassure myself as much as him.
‘How can you be so sure?’ he asks.
‘’Cause unless we’ve told anyone, no one can know. And I haven t; you must believe me.’
‘I do. Over lunch Uncle Charlie said something to Sandra — Ma’am — about boys moving around at night.’
‘But they do, some of them. That’s not me he’s talking about.’ ‘Who then?’
‘Probably Knowles going to Stein, or anyone else. I’m sure Knowles and Stein have something going o
n.’
‘Knowles and Stein? What a couple!’ He suppressed a laugh.
‘You won’t say anything, Jacques, will you?’
‘How could I?’ And without further explanation he seemed reassured. He pulled me closer and kissed my lips, my eyebrows, eyelids. I shivered and clung to him when his tongue ran into my ear and he reached over me, fumbling, to turn off the bedside lamp.
Later, he reiterated that my sneaking to his quarters had become too dangerous: ‘Let’s just give it a few weeks. Come only when I tell you.’ ‘Well, should I leave right away?’ I asked, sarcasm in my tone. He pulled me closer and said no, he wished I could stay till dawn. Satisfied, I snuggled into his neck. Niggling doubt, questions about whether I had done something wrong, I pushed to the back of my mind. Could Lukas have remembered the key? No, this was other boys sneaking around. Nothing to do with me and my key.
I told him about the afternoons drawings, that the Stone Age implement was in my dressing-gown pocket to show him. I moved to retrieve the object, but he held me back, saying he’d look at it later. For now he wanted only to feel me beside him.
I lay in his arms as we listened to Scarlatti, played on piano instead of harpsichord.
‘It is beautiful,’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ against his chest.
He told me of Domenico, son of Alessandro, how Domenico and Handel were contemporaries and friends. ‘The music can mean anything,’ he says softly. ‘Or if there is meaning, it is hidden by the way the composition communicates whatever it wishes to our senses.’
I try to understand what he says, mulling over his words. Can the music truly mean anything? What a peculiar thing to say and what a strange question to be asking myself. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asks, turning over onto his stomach, his eyes glistening at me from the pillow in the dark. I am thinking of Dominic’s hands, how they cross at the wrists, running over each other like baboon spiders. When he plays Domenico Scarlatti. ‘About what you just said,’ I whisper, ‘whether it’s true.’
‘Well, what goes through your mind when you hear Scarlatti?’
The truth is that I’ve never thought about it. About Scarlatti or anyone else. In choir, when he gives us an image to hold on to, like with parts of the Mass, of hundreds of people weeping, or in folk songs or madrigals of girls dancing and laughing around a maypole, that is the picture I take and try to imagine. Fabrications of my own I do not have. And even my accepting of images to go with music, that too is new, for last year and the year before the conductors could ply us with ideas and images that either made no sense to me or mattered not at all: in one ear and out the other as I frequently willed parts of concerts and entire rehearsals over. It has been only now, in the months that I’ve been out of first soprano and in second, in a voice where I am able to sing every note, hear mine meld with those around me and give body to the sound of the whole, that images are starting to make sense, that I have begun to look forward to almost every practice session and each concert. That it is not only the idea of Europe that appeals to me, but performing to the educated audiences who carry in their ears the musical traditions of a thousand years.
‘Is the art of music different from other art? For example, the drawing you made this afternoon?’
For a moment I think. ‘Drawings, they stick around. But music, once it has been played, disappears, it’s over.’ I speak into his face and wonder whether I have smelly breath; can’t recall having brushed after showers.
‘Yes, music is an instant. It does things that words or paint orphotographs can never do. Play it again and it is entirely new. Ma’am agrees with me, I think,’ he says. I contemplate his idea that when you hear a piece a second time it’s entirely new. I want to say that I disagree, but I’m not sure whether I do, afraid that my thoughts might not be relevant to the issue being discussed. Maybe I’m not understanding anything he’s saying.
‘Come on,’ he prods, ‘what do you say?’
‘If I hear the Scarlatti again,’ I say, terrified of sounding stupid, ‘I ‘ will be unable to hear it without thinking of this moment I first heard it, here with you.’
‘Ha!’ he laughs, turning his face from me. ‘You’ll soon forget me and listen to Scarlatti uncontaminated.’
‘I won’t ever forget you,’ I say, running my hands around his shoulders, lifting myself and lying on top of him. ‘So,’ I say, ‘even if it disappears, when it comes back, it’s not new.’
‘That’s why we protect ourselves from too much experience. Ignorance is bliss. The more we have under our belts, the less likely we are to see the world as black and white.’ His words come and I try not to let him know what I’m thinking. I remain silent. This is a difficult series of concepts. ‘But what about the first time you hear a piece?’ he asks. ‘Then you have no associations to drag the music away from the here and now? Then it is pure, and beautiful in and of itself, surely? Isn’t that the function of all art: the attainment of beauty for its own sake?’ Again I remain silent, wondering about the question.
‘No, it’s not, Jacques. Because when I hear a piece for the first time, like when we started the Missa Sokmnis with you, I already associate it with other pieces, just a few bars here and there. Or it puts me in a mood because I can’t sing without knowing you, there in front of us are,’ I pause, ‘my lover.’ The word, as well chosen as it was, sounds awful and out of place. He tugs me to him, kisses my head. ‘But that has nothing to do with the music,’ he says, ‘and everything to do with you, Karl.’
‘I can’t help it,’ I say, a sadness, an embarrassment at having said something wrong, fingering my mind.
‘So, you’re saying nothing is inherently beautiful, everything is subjective. Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
‘I suppose . . .’
‘So, if you don’t see beauty, it means there is no real beauty or no really great art.’
For a moment I struggle to follow the logic of his argument, unsure that is what I meant. His conclusion sounds wrong. For surely, surely, there are things that everyone on earth would agree are beautiful? Like the rock paintings, even if the books this afternoon said they were functional as much as aesthetic — words I was yet to look up. Or the flight of louries, in the instant they open their wings, when from below in surprise you see the hidden red — no, crimson — fold out from where you thought there was only green and purple. Yes, surely, the flight of louries is something that will move every human with its beauty. Forget about the Big Five! Who decided what was the Big Five anyway? Change it! Add new names. The Big Six! The Big Six is what it should be! But still, it’s really like Basil Hallward says: Every portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the thing he paintsl Overseas the imbeciles wont even know what a lourie is! Yes, I’ve just copied it into my diary! I want to tell him that when I first saw him, even long after I first came to his bed, I never thought him beautiful. Handsome. Yes, I had found his face so plain, had feared him and perhaps, perhaps even hated him after that night in Mathison’s office last year. Is that possible! That I once saw him and the beginnings of us together in a light so different from what he and we have become? Since March, the way it was then has been almost forgotten. On that diving board, when, from the way I understood his eyes on Lukas, I had suspected he was interested in precisely the things he had seen punished last year, I had thought of adventure and maybe a little revenge. And then, within months I fell in love with him, have come to need being with him, have come to find him ravishing, cannot nowget enough of him: how rapidly he grew on me, spreading under and over my skin like lichen or moss — parmelia reticulata — in a perfect habitat. And then, that he is different from Almeida and Almeidas sister, whom I saw and instantaneously found beautiful, with a look that tells you: I have never looked like that, I don’t now, and I never will. A physical beauty that sears itself into memory. Like Dorian Gray. Steven and Marguerite Almeida. For a moment I want to ask him whether he remembers Steven; wonder, if Steven w
ere here, whether he would have still chosen me. And I remember that it is I who have chosen him. And then Alette and Dominic, who also only with time became beautiful to me, only as I got to know them. That Alette’s short legs don’t matter, that her laughter does, and her white teeth. Or the prints in Ma’am’s books of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings! How at first I hadn’t a clue what made them special, had thought Pierneef s paintings of the high veld so much better. But, the longer I looked at White Birch and Cottonwood Trees in Spring — trees I have never seen, that are not indigenous to this country — how her paintings had since altered the way I see most trees and vegetation. Afternoons, when I look at the poplars down on Sterkspruit’s bank, I see cottonwoods in spring. And there are photographs a man took of O’Keeffe, of her hands, that reminded me from the first time I saw them, of Bokkie. Something in the woman’s face, the dark hair, in her strong fingers, the thick unplucked eyebrows, the way she looks into the camera like she’s studying us and it’s not us looking at her, that now makes it impossible to look at my mother and not wonder whether if she were not so shy and hurt she might have been a painter. How I resent her for not. If Beethoven could write this whole mass while not hearing a single note, what could Bokkie have done if only she tried? Instead of cleaning the house and Hoovering the floors till they shone like mirrors and feeding us all the time or slaving in the stupid church garden. And the flowers, how I can never think of a vagina again without thinking of an iris or a red canna, or how I can barely look at some flowers — lilies and cannas — without thinking of vaginas. And,her Bleeding Heart, like me now on top of him, my penis pushed back, down over his buttocks. That is what makes her a great artist, I think: that the world I see will never be the same after I have looked at it through her eyes. Yes, isn’t that what Ma’am means? That the artist has lent us her eyes, to look and see something as she saw it in a way that none of us has seen it, but all of us now can, even if we still see it differently. Oh, how I want to be a Great Artist! To be mentioned in the same breath as Georgia O’Keeffe or Oscar Wilde. Yes, the reviews will say, there is a hint of O’Keeffe in De Man’s early work, but look, by the age of twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, he had certainly established his own, unique style, which changed the face of creative work the world over.
