Embrace

by Mark Behr

  9

  Head resting on one elbow, Ma’am marked our essays while we completed a History test on the French Revolution. Political causes. Social causes. Religious causes. Intellectual causes.

  Political: 1.&bnsp;The government of the old order was ineffectual. 2.&bnsp;The monarchs were corrupt. 3.&bnsp;The nation was excluded from government. 4.&bnsp;The masses had heard about the examples of England and the American Revolutions. 5.&bnsp;There was too much administrative unwieldiness. Social: 1.&bnsp;Inequality. 2.&bnsp;The royalty and the Church élites were unreasonably advantaged. 3.&bnsp;Dissatisfaction was rife amongst the Third Class: the farmers, workers and skilled labourers were oppressed and exploited. 4.&bnsp;The rich burgers of the cities, the bourgeoisie, were dissatisfied. (I want to be part of the. 5&bnsp;What the hell is five? Leave it open for the moment. Religious: 1.&bnsp;The Church owned 20 per cent of the land while the majority of people had nothing. 2.&bnsp;The Church was not obliged to pay taxes. 3.&bnsp;All posts in the Church were occupied by the royalty. 4.&bnsp;The philosophers were criticising the Church. 5.&bnsp;What the hell, Jesus, where’s five! Leave it for now. Intellectual: 1.&bnsp;French philosophers like Descartes and Locke argued that reason was grounded in nature. This gave rise to Natural Law. 2.&bnsp;New images of rationalism and enlightenment took hold of peoples imaginations. 3.&bnsp;A high premium was placed on the human mind and reason/rationalism. 4.&bnsp;Human beings were placed centrally and the rights of mankind were grounded in reason once reason was purified of superstition and preconception. 5.&bnsp;Faith was to be grounded in reason. There, good. I tried to remember the two I was forgetting. My mind was as blank as the page on which anything could just as well be written.

  Last period on a Thursday afternoon. When I get out of here, I thought, Lukas and I are going riding. I hated myself for not having studied for the test; relying on one reading of the relevant chapters. I drifted from anger at a lack of academic memory into daydream; reverie; from somewhere also taking her in as she sat there, reading our stories. Still see her, recall wondering whether she had yet come to mine? A full two weeks of prep I’d spent on it, checking words, phrases, creating metaphors: His Name Was Henk Willemse, my story was titled. Henk Willemse was a show-off who refused to accept that an ostrich male protecting his nest was stronger and more cunning and more deliberate than himself. One day when Henk Willemse was again showing off to his farm workers how he could outwit a breeding pair, a huge male with plumage ‘that moved like the black thunder and snow clouds of the Swartberg’ rushed down on him and with his front toenail cleft Willemse open. The essay was peppered with words like koppie instead of hill, Afrikaans words here and there, and ‘the district’, ‘people said’ and ‘it was said that,’ which to my ear epitomised the way Bosnian wrote. The essay took its name from the firstsentence: ‘People of the . district still remembered that the heap of stones surrounded by red aloes on the koppie covered the bones of a man named Henk Willemse.’The rest of the essay told how Willemse terrorised the ostriches by removing eggs and often entire nests and how he then finally met his dreadful fate ‘at noon on a summer’s day when the Karoo was closer than ever to the desert it tried not to be’. The papers last sentence — in which at least an hour of writing and rewriting had been invested — was to my mind certainly the best I had ever written: ‘Years later, witnesses who had not even been there said that as the ostrich’s thick grey toenail slid through Henk Willemse’s chest and stomach, the contents of his guts spilt over the hot Karoo sand like the contents of an enormous exploding pomegranate.’ I knew she was going to be pleased. I badly needed an A for English and another for Art — the only subjects into which my prep hours had been going. Latin would be a B. Somewhere during the term Ma’am’s Latin had started to lose me. Prep had become a struggle: I could do nothing but write and paint and draw. The prefect on prep duty, noticing the movement of my arm and hand gliding across white paper, would ask what I was doing and I was always, always doing Art homework. I rushed my way through Maths homework, Natural Science homework, History homework, Geography homework. Latin translation and vocab. Afrikaans and English grammar. My Afrikaans essays were good, but my understanding of grammar and my spelling hopeless — no hope for an A there. Miss Roos came in to teach us Afrikaans. Try as I might to find an original point of access for the essay topics she gave us, I couldn’t produce anything of interest to me or her. If Ma’am had taught us Afrikaans, I felt certain, I may even have liked the language. Might even have wanted to write books or poems in Afrikaans. I loved reading and reciting Afrikaans poetry. Loved the sound of a roughly rolled r and a g almost growled from the throat. Nothing in English sounded as earthy or brought out the same colours in words as these letters in Afrikaans. But Miss Roos didn’t carry the inspiration to class or to me that Ma’am’s merepresence did. I hated the way Miss Roos was always laughing at Dom and the other English boys for getting an Afrikaans word wrong. Or the way she’d interrupt one to point out an ‘anglicism’ or a ‘direct translation that ‘makes a mockery of pure Afrikaans.’ No, Miss Roos could never inspire me to be a writer or to love and respect language. Ma’am had the gift of imparting words with the tenderness of poetry. And not only to me. Even Bennie and Lukas, who had always detested English because they spoke and wrote it so poorly, who had almost failed English every year since Standard Four, were now getting respectable C’s thanks to Ma’am’s extra afternoon classes. They now could even speak it less formally and without all the Afrikaans words stuck in the middle. Their whining about how they hated having to do an extra language had all but ceased.

  Oh, why had I not worked harder. The term’s report was again sure to be one of shame. At least there’d be a pass for Music Theory, which I was no longer failing. The October holiday was just around the corner. I’m going home, I thought and cringed, no Cape tours to keep me away like in June. I’ll blame my report on choir, all the extra hours were putting in for Europe.

  When Mathison knocked, she and we looked up. She pushed back her chair with us as he walked into the classroom and waved us to take our seats.

  ‘May I see you, for a moment, Sandra,’ his usually formal voice, gentle and firm all at once.

  ‘Eyes on your own work,’ she said, placing her red pen on someone’s open essay. ‘Niklaas, you’re in charge. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  But it was not Ma’am a few minutes later who stepped back into my thoughts of ostrich toenails and my struggle for two further causes of the French Revolution. Mathison himself quietly entered and sat down behind her desk. His gaze swept over the bowed heads. When his eyes met mine they paused for a moment — accusing, questioning, as if suspicious that I may be cribbing — then moved off and stared silently from the window into the corridor. One brief glanceand my wool-gathering had been disturbed. My heart, within moments, was throbbing above my ribs. I looked down onto the page, tried to write but remained stuck. Tried reading over the points on the page. Someone knows, like a blue revolving light in my head. They’d found out. 5. The heartlessness of the royalty and their... I couldn’t complete the deceptive sentence, mind reeled, panic registered in the sudden sweat of fingers around the pen.

  ‘Can we hand in, Sir?’ Bruin timidly from the front.

  Let them eat cake. Poes. Gatkruiper.

  ‘Bring your papers to me and then go back to your seats. You have another ten minutes.’

  . . . refusal to give the people food. No, I couldn’t remember anything else . . . write two more I’ve already written and hope she either doesn’t see that I’ve repeated them or thinks I didn’t know I was repeating. I could always say I’d inadvertently repeated, look up the correct ones in the meantime and spit them out were she to ask or even just frivolously list them in order to show her I knew. Tried to ignore the consternation, the heaviness in my legs. The bell rang and the last of us handed in. Mathison told us to remain in our desks: something serious has happened which he has to discuss with us. Monkey-brain. Not in front of the whole
class, God, what is it, Jacques, Dominic, Uncle Klaas? Uncle Klaas may be dead in our fort; some workers found them and the police have come fromWinterton. Please, please let me be—

  ‘I’m afraid I received a phone call a while ago with very bad news for Ma’am. And for the whole school.’ His face is ashen, voice sombre, deep, severe. Cannot have anything to do with me. No, not through a phone call. ‘I’ve just had the terrible task of telling Ma’am that her son Graham has been killed in Angola.’The classroom is tongue-tied. The suffusing quiet of death’s news brought in the afternoon. My paranoia instantly erased. My mind returned to Ma’am: ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’ Jesus, Holy Merciful Father. Stunned; no one moved. The headmaster’s eyes a flagging metronome over the class. ‘It is atragedy for Ma’am and our country too . . . I want you all to be circumspect with her for the next few weeks.’

  ‘Where is Ma’am?’

  ‘She has gone to her cottage. There will be funeral arrangements . and she’ll probably be away for a while.’

  Abruptly the room was a cacophony of questions as if a flock of hadidas had been disturbed from their roost: how had it happened? Where? Was he the only one? How is Ma’am taking it? Is there anything we can do? SWAPO? Terrorists? Kaffirs! We must have a collection for a wreath. How old was he, Sir? And Mathison answered that Ma’ams eighteen-year-old son was killed during training, during i manoeuvres in Angola; killed by his own instructor, that it wasn’t an enemy killing, though of course he wouldn’t have had to be in the army if the enemy wasn’t there. He said there was a dire lesson for us in the death of Ma’am’s son: South Africa was under siege. We would have to be prepared to bring our side, if needs be, to sacrifice our lives in defence of our civilisation and our entire way of life. ‘For most of you this is the first death of a soldier you knew. I can assure you it will not be the last.’ He got up from the chair and sat on the desk. ‘If South-West Africa goes, there is little hope for our country. Mozambique is gone. Angola is gone. You boys are only thirteen — some fourteen — but you have to realise that you are our future. The protection of this country is in your hands.’

  When he said class dismissed, none of us moved. Only he rose, with both hands squaring off the sheath of test papers he lifted from the desk. He walked to the door, our tests held comfortably in both his hands. ‘Ma’am is a strong woman,’ he said. ‘Her first words to me when I told her, were: at least Graham didn’t die in vain. He died for his country, for us all, yesterday.’ Then Mathison was gone.

  I stared at Dominic’s head in front of me: it was moving from side to side. We remained still. Some staring at their hands. Others straight ahead. Tapping a pen on the desk. Bruin and Smith lay down on their arms.

  ‘Webster . . . I hope you realise,’ through the silence Radys Dietz’s voice ripped a bayonet, ‘that it’s because of people like your family that Ma’am’s son is dead.’

  Dominic turned. The class’s heads, eyes, moved as if on a ball to Radys at the back of the class, then to Dom. We were all quiet.

  ‘What?’ Dominic asked, his top lip a snarl.

  ‘Because you’re spoiling the kaffirs. I know what it’s like in your house. Those maids think they’re white. And the way you are with Beauty, bringing her presents all the time. You people are creating all kinds of expectations by spoiling the kaffirs. A poor kaffir is one thing, a kaffir with aspirations is quite another.’

  ‘Shut up, Radys,’ Lukas said, and he and some others broke the tension by pushing back their chairs and preparing to leave. Radys too rose. Bennie got up. He seemed deliberately to walk out at the side of Radys. Our eyes moved between them and Dominic. Slowly the room ran almost empty as boys drifted from the door. Soon only Bruin, myself and Dominic remained. Bruin, who forever insinuated himself into Dominic’s life, stood up and took a seat at the desk in front of Dom.

  ‘I don’t know how Radys could say that.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Dominic said and suddenly his shoulders were shaking. I jumped up and pulled a chair closer to him. He lay on his arms.

  ‘Dom, don’t take Radys seriously,’ I spoke quietly from beside him, wishing I had spoken before Bruin and that Bruin would get up and leave us alone.

  ‘I don’t,’ Dominic answered through the tears. ‘It’s Ma’am I’m worried about. She loved Graham so much and now she’s lost him.’ Again the silence whispered its gloom over the room.

  ‘God, it must be a shock to Ma’am. I wonder whether he suffered, or died instantly,’ Bruin thought aloud. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Mathison’s right. He’s the first person I know that gets killed in a war. Well, I mean I didn’t know him, but I did sort of, through Ma’am,’ I said, rising to put away my pencil case inside my desk.

  ‘It’s awful,’ Dominic said. I now sat down at the desk in front of him to his right.

  .. . “When my mother’s brother died,’ I said, ‘she said my grandparents ‘would never get over it. A parent never, ever gets over the death of a child. If I were to die, it would kill my parents.’ g;,,.‘Kari; Dominic said, a note of irritation creeping into his tone, ‘let’s think of Ma’am and Graham for a moment, rather than ourselves.’

  ‘I’m just saying, Dom—’ Lukas had come back to say he was going down to the stables. Was I coming? I shook my head. Instead of leaving, Lukas walked to Dom and put his hand on his shoulder, clasped it briefly and shrugged at us: ‘Look, guys, it’s terrible, but it’s done. All we can do is support Ma’am. And remember, he gave his life for us.’When Lukas had left I suggested to Dominic that we go outside. I wanted to be with him away from the presence of Bruin.

  ; Past the parking lot where there was no sign of Ma’ams Passat. We sat on the rock below which the school’s name was burnt into a wooden sign in rigid black letters: Drakensberg Boys Music School Above it, the dragon, our coat of arms. Dominic stared ahead of him at the stables and the servants’ quarters. The riders had already left. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure the sign and the aloes blocked our backs; shifted my arm so that it rested firmly against him.

  ,. ‘I feel so sorry for her,’ he said, and again his bottom lip quivered.

  ‘So do I. She was so proud of him. She showed me a photo of him once. At least she still has her daughter, Dom, think of that.’

  ‘Lynn . . . I wonder whether she’s been told.’

  ‘Do you think Ma’am’s down at her cottage?’ I wondered whether she knew the instructor who killed Graham; how she would ever forgive the man who had accidentally shot her boy.

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  1 ‘It would be the wrong time to go to her now, perhaps tomorrow.’ ‘She’ll probably be going to the funeral. God, it will be awful for her. I hate funerals.’

  ‘I’ve only been to one. When my Grandfather De Man died.’

  For the only afternoon in all the time I knew him, Dom did not go to a piano to practise. In moments like these, he said, doing something like a Grade Eight in music seemed so banal, our lives and everything we did nothing but a big rush into a void of senselessness. We baked in the sun, sometimes talking, sometimes letting long minutes slip by without words. He wondered where Beauty was, whether she had been told. We spoke about fearing death. I said I didn’t mind dying but that I wished Bok and Bokkie would die before me — not because I didn’t love them — but because it would ruin especially my mother if I, or one of my sisters were to die before her. Dominic said he was terrified of dying, of becoming ill, getting cancer and feeling your own body being eaten away by some force you didn’t understand or even know the cause of. I’m not afraid of dying, I said, as long as it comes quickly without me knowing, that it is not a long drawn-out process of suffering. Cancer was the worst. Then Dom said the last way he would like to die was through being shot, even though that would probably be quick. I said yes, it must be terrifying being a soldier, although Mathison had a point: at least Graham died for our cause.

  ‘Our cause my foot! Mathison’s dead wrong if he thinks I’ll ever be a
soldier,’ Dominic spat. I tugged two blades of grass from the side of the rock, passed one to him and chewed at the crisp base of the stem between my fingers.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the army either,’ I spoke through the chewing, ‘but that’s the way things are.’ Then, without checking myself, unable to keep the thought off my lips: ‘There’s no way out and I cannot face the scorn of not going. Bok will want me to go; he was in the army for three years in Potchefstroom. He says it makes a man of a boy.’ Suddenly I thought of Henk Willemse in my essay. Considered going to drag it from the pile, rewriting the story of the bursting pomegranate. Now aware of how what I wrote might disturb Ma’am — conjure in her mind’s eye an image of Graham beingshot, killed by a hand grenade or a landmine, his stomach sprayed over—

  “ ‘Yes,’ Dominic interrupted my thoughts, steel in his voice, ‘Dad says the army makes a man of a boy in the same way as rape makes a woman of a girl.’ I chewed on the meaning of Dr Webster’s words. Dominic went on: ‘Dad will do everything to keep me out. Send me out of the country. Anything. He says our presence in Angola and Namibia is utterly unjustified. A breach of international law to protect a racist system. I won’t set foot in Angola or Namibia without a „ passport.

  ‘South-West Africa?’

  ‘It’s real name is Namibia,’ he said, flicking away the grass. Namibia, I mouthed to myself. A better name, nicer sounding, named probably for the Namib Desert. ‘And,’ Dominic said, ‘South Africa’s real name is Azania.’ For a while I was silent, tasting the new name: Azania. ‘Dominic, where do you get that rubbish?’ I asked. ‘This country became the Union of South Africa in 1910, and in I960 it became the Republic of South Africa. Where do you get the idea that it’s Azania?’