Embrace

by Mark Behr

  ‘Mum says that name is on the lips of the protesting children who ‘get shot by police in Soweto.’

  ‘I thought they were burning down their schools because they didn’t want to learn Afrikaans?’

  ‘That too. You’ll hear all about it when we have the French Revolution debate.’

  Azania. Az-ania. Azaiinia. Azanea. Yes, I thought, that too is a better name than South Africa, which sounds like a direction rather than a place. But I am all too aware of what happens in countries that change their names. Tanganyika to Tanzania. Not worth the risk merely because it sounds nicer. A place is more than its name. But, if that’s true, then why not just change it, anyway? It’s the principle that matters. The principle of who gets to name it. So, it’s not the name, but from whose mouth it comes. ‘You know, Dom, when theblacks get hold of the name of a place it leads to trouble. The farmers in Tanzania lost everything. And look what’s happened since Lourenco Marques became Maputo. All the whites had to leave, and just remember Almeida’s family fleeing from Angola with only the clothes on their backs. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t come back this year, because they didn’t have the money to keep him here.’

  Dominic didn’t respond. After a while, he spoke: Angola is still Angola, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but who knows for how long.’ Then he turned his back on me and said we should be ashamed of ourselves, taking only selfinterest from Graham’s death. It should be her and her son were crying for, he said; instead were thinking only of ourselves. Again silence came and sat with us. Dominic said he wanted to go and call his parents. I asked whether he would like me to come to him tonight. He said no. Sex was the last thing on his mind. Not for that, I said, just to be together. No, let’s leave it till after the piano exams, he said.

  Choir, so it reached us by word of mouth, had been cancelled. A gesture of respect for Ma’am and Graham. A horrible damper sat over us during prep, in the showers, and through quiet time. Tonight’s was not the usual silence of discipline enforced through the cane or the threat of the cane, of censure or the threat of censure. This was the quiet of mourning and respect. Ma’am must be down at her chalet, I thought. Who was with her, Jacques, Mathison, Marabou? And her daughter, where was she? How was Ma’am mourning? I tried to imagine her pain, her tears, her despondency. All that came when I tried to visualise Ma’am was Bokkie’s face, contorted at the death of Uncle Gert; my own doubling over and screaming at hearing Dademan had died. More than anything I wanted to talk to my mother or Bernice or any one of the others, to hear what they were thinking and feeling: Bennie, Mervyn, Lukas and Dominic. After lights-out, the deep sadness stayed with me. Tears welled in my eyes as I thought of Graham, of

  Ma’am, on the phone, calling relatives. Weeping. How did one announce a death? Had Mathison done it correctly? I buried my head in the pillow when I saw Graham’s photo, now ghostly white — no, probably smeared with the camouflage Bennie said was called Black is Beautiful — and dead with a gun wound that had ripped open his chest, his heart and lungs dangling out in a horrendous fruit salad. It is the heart where he is hit, I imagined. Or was it his head? What if his face had been blown away? I wept; realised it was less for Ma’am and her son than it was for myself. I am weeping from fear for myself;’ for something that lurked at least four years away in my future.

  I now wanted to be with Dominic or Jacques. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. How could anyone sleep on a night like this? I was angry at Jacques. This idiotic fear he had of allowing me to come to him. Weeks — at least two — since I had last been there. And Dominic, the rawness of his sadness, he seemed to take Graham worse than all of us. After supper he had phoned his parents. When he came into prep he passed me a note saying they sent their regards. Then, as we made our way upstairs in silence — none of the usual horsing — he held me back and said; ‘Mom and Dad send their love.’

  ‘What did they say about Graham?’

  ‘Dad said it’s a time to separate the personal from the political. Certain things, like the loss of a child, are above politics and I should pay no attention to Radys. Mum suggested we respect Ma’am’s need to mourn: mourning is an intensely personal thing.’

  ‘I agree with your folks.’ I thought about what Radys had said, that Dominic’s family was spoiling the natives or plurals as they were now called: Stupid, I thought, I don’t know what dying in Angola has to do with spoiling the blacks.

  ‘Dad still thinks I’m right, though. Radys is a reactionary. Loelovise yokou.’ As we said goodbye and he turned right to G, I left to E

  ‘Loelovise yokou titoo,’ I had answered, wondering about the meaning of the word reactionary.

  An hour after I guessed everyone asleep I again rose and donned dressing gown and slippers. Wounded and brooding at Jacques’s forewarning that I was not to come to his room unsolicited, I slunk past his door, silently wishing he would come out and see me.

  ‘My teacher’s son has been killed in Angola. His name was Graham Sanders.’ I announced from where I sat at the mouth of the fort. Uncle Klaas stared into the fire. He offered no response; his sleep-creased face expressionless, the news no concern of his. From the opposite bank the scent of flowers twitched in my nostrils. My neck turned, searched the dark above the sandstone embankment. I had still not made time to cross over, climb the bank and identify the blooms. During the day, when they didn’t seem to smell, I almost forgot about their existence.

  I awaited a response to the news of Graham’s death. Nothing forthcoming. Uncle Klaas took the zol from the Silent One. He held it to his lips half hidden by strands of the scraggly moustache. He didn’t drag on the brown paper cylinder; only held it there, staring pensively into the flames at my feet. He may as well be, I thought, some ghostly version of Oupa Liebenberg after a day in the sun on the tractor: same sad blue eyes, same prominent nose with the perfecdy shaped nostrils that flare when they’re thinking, same full lips turning down at the sides as though in perpetual readiness to cry. This is like Oupa Liebenberg. Only skinnier. And with the filth, the long greasy brown and grey hair like rats’ tails under the woollen balaclava, now rolled up onto his forehead. Sitting in his great-nephew’s fort beside a black man also in tatters and also a rolled-up balaclava or some other woollen cap.

  ‘Did you come and listen to the concert?’ I asked. His eyes lifted towards me then sunk back into the flames. What was up, tonight? Why the withdrawal, the uncommunicativeness, when other nights he’d been quite pleasant and receptive to chat?

  As long as I didn’t sit too close to either of them I didn’t have to cope with their smell. It made no sense, I thought, that they, down here on the riverbank of all places, would not occasionally wash. Scrub themselves. It was impossible to decipher from Uncle Klaas’s skin what was dirt and what the ravages of age, madness and living wild. The Silent One’s black-brown skin looked dusty and tired: clearly that skin had not seen water in days, weeks, months, years perhaps. They wouldn’t even have to submerge their bodies, I thought, why not just wash hands, faces and hair? I looked at the Silent One’s hair sticking out around the dusty balaclava that sat like a crest on his crown: grey and black, salt and pepper, long strands, like wool or down sticking from a frayed pillow slip. And what of their other ablutions? I was intrigued by what they must do after defecating. Leaves, or stones, like we used as kids in the bush? Or was even that too sophisticated for them? The picture of them squatting, standing up and pulling up their pants without a second thought stuck with me. Shit caking like mud in their trouser pants. That could be part of their smell: unwashed starfishes, shitty trousers. My throat contracted; I swallowed. Over the previous weeks I had seen them only once — the first time — during the day. And then Uncle Klaas had looked at his worst — at least the firelight at night softened the dirt, the age. If he could have a hair cut and get rid of the greasy rats’ tails; that’s at least part of why he looked so much older than Oupa Liebenberg. But the two men before me w
ere creatures of sleep, day and night, seeming to wake only to smoke, light and stoke the fire when I arrived. Of what they might eat I had no idea and was too guarded to ask. Afraid I may be assigned the task of fetching and carrying. And yet I did feel pity for them — and the tickle of excitement at the idea of sneaking food from the dining hall right from under the noses of Marabou and Matron Booysen. So far Uncle Klaas had asked nothing save the blanket. And then even he had not asked, had merely said: ‘We need another blanket.’ And he had known, somehow and through my protests, my curses, that it would be brought. The blanket had been barely spoken of.

  If they were to stay another few weeks, they’d have food aplenty. Stealing, thieving from the orchard. And the school would think the broken branches and half-eaten apples, plums and pears the result of some of us boys getting up to mischief.

  ‘I said my teacher Ma’am Sanders’s son was killed.’ Again, nothing but the river, the crickets, the frogs. Then Uncle Klaas muttered something to the Silent One, who responded in barely a whisper. At last Uncle Klaas took a deep drag from the zol, held it in his lungs while I waited for an answer that might come once he’d exhaled. But again he said nothing to me. Grumbled at the Silent One in a language I didn’t know. The mad gene, I told myself; at work again. I did not understand any of the words that occasionally passed between them, and Uncle Klaas offered no translation: theirs was a secret language, it could have been from any part of the world or it may not have been a language at all. Gibberish or another type of Gogga, for my gratification and entertainment. Frequently I had felt that I would have liked to speak to the Silent One, through him find out more about my uncle. And to have asked where he came from, where he grew up, how he met Uncle Klaas. But there seemed to be no will on the part of this old black man to converse with me. If Uncle Klaas was to be believed, the Silent One spoke neither Afrikaans nor English. When I asked Unde Klaas the man’s name and what language he Spoke, I was told to ask him myself.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked, not even getting him to look me in the eye. ‘Me . . . Karl,’ I said, and you, Jane, almost, but of course didn’t. ‘What language do you speak?’ Again he didn’t keep his eyes on me for more than a moment. ‘Hey, what language do you speak?’ He again ignored me, or pretended not to hear. ‘How,’ I hissed at Uncle Klaas, ‘can I ask him anything when he doesn’t understand a word I say? He doesn’t even know I’m speaking to him or about him. Is he deaf?’

  ‘He can hear you,’ Uncle Klaas said. Sensing that my great-uncle was taking a turn towards the incorrigible aloofness sometimesbrought on ,by the dagga, trying to make me guess what he meant, I changed the topic. He and I spoke for a while about The Picture of Dorian Gray. A smile played around his eyes and the stringy lips. He seemed delighted at what I was reading, seemed to forgive my earlier engagement with the doings of Scarlett and Rhett. Now I asked him please to translate what had happened to Ma’ams son for the Silent One. Surely, this was news important enough to justify some form of dialogue? Trialogue? Still he ignored me, instead taking another drag from the zol that had been passed back to him by the black hand. With a languid movement of his arm, he holds out the zol to me even before he exhales.

  I take it from the grubby claw extending towards me.

  ‘Suck softly and not too deep, as though you’re breathing.’ He spoke, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils, from his beard, an old flightless dragon. ‘Then hold it in your lungs.’ Doubtful of what I was about to do — aware of crossing an enormous frontier from where there may be no return — he saw the hesitation. ‘Gendy and slowly,’ he said, ‘then you won’t cough.’The wet brown paper was against my lips — cool to the touch, their spit — and I shuddered. My mouth closed around the damp and I dragged feebly, watched the tip turn red, saw the ash grow, felt heat beneath my fingers, breathed in slow and deep like at an extended pause preparing for a long high “note, and then, starting to panic at the burn in my chest, let the , smoke rush from my lungs, watched in relief through teary eyes as it came from my mouth in a clear white jet. I waited for the hallucinations I had heard and read and seen so much of in the films that warned of the dangers of drug use.

  ‘It’s doing nothing,’ I said. ‘It s just like a cigarette.’

  1 fSo,’ he said, over the disappointment in my tone, ‘Graham Sanders is dead.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Klaas, killed by his own instructor in Angola. It’s terrible.’

  ‘And since when did you start caring for Graham Sanders?’

  ‘Unde Klaas? He’s Ma’am’s son. Ma’am is my favourite teacher.’ ‘You should expend the energy caring for the living that you do on the dying . . . Then the world would be quite a different place. But then, there’s such drama in death, isn’t there? A spectacle of grief that gets your tears flowing, and can make you believe you really cared. As if your tears show how deeply human you are. When in fact you’ve never cared for the life, death’s drama can make you and your witnesses pretend — believe — you did. It’s like a concert, hey? Nothing that happened before matters, just what happens on stage . . . What are you people doing there, in the first place?’ he asked, again passing me the brown zol. I took another drag, this time more successfully. Still hoping to make some contact with the man in the back of the fort I leant past Uncle Klaas and handed it there, felt skin like sandpaper graze my fingers. Again I awaited psychedelic colours, swirling and throbbing beats like rock music in my head. Still nothing. I’d anticipated I would be rolling around on Sterkspruit’s bank by now murmuring, I am an orange, peel me, peel me, please peel me. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you people doing in Angola?’

  ‘They’re protecting us from the terrorists,’ I say. ‘You know that, Uncle Klaas.’

  ‘Do I, really?’

  ‘And, it’s not you people, Uncle Klaas. You’re one of us.’

  ‘I am what I want to be. I’m neither here nor there. Don’t drag me into the quagmire. People make war because they’re afraid or because they want to protect things. I’m not afnjjd of anything and I’ve nothing to protect. Also not the lie you’re all in on.’

  His provocation, his indifference to things important, did not infuriate me tonight. Feeling as if I could not get a hold of him, had no way of communicating with him, didn’t bother me. I was sitting in the lap of a huge and extraordinary calm. Like I’d swallowed a whole handful of antihistamine. Uncle Klaas was speaking from a place in a nomanclature that didn’t make any sense, but couldn’t irk me.

  ‘It’s easy for you, Uncle Klaas, because it’s not your child. How woUld you feel if it were me?’

  ‘This war will be over by the time you’re old enough to be stupid enough to go and fight.’

  1 ‘Bok says it’s like our Vietnam.’

  ‘What’s our Vietnam? An American metaphor? A mere allegory? Is that what Vietnam has been reduced to? Or is it a place where America’s poorer boys killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were doing nothing but trying to live, where there was life before America came to make war, before France came to conquer and pillage. In Vietnam there will be death, love and life after and without America.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what happened there: the terrorists won.’

  ;j ‘‘They won’t here . . .’

  , ‘And why is that, Karl’tjie?’

  1 I lie down, legs to the water, face to the fire, chin resting in my hands. Smiling into the flames, I say because we have God on our side, because were fighting to safeguard Christian civilization from the fate that befell the countries behind the Iron Curtain. I go quiet at the thought of the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain. Like tightly packed metal bars of a prison. Slicing Europe in half and Russia at its heart. There people live to stand in long queues for food in the blistering snow and are hunted down for being Christians. Behind the Iron Curtain. There people are martyrs for Christianity, spreading tracts and Bibles, in spite of the fact that being caught with the Word ,,of God means incarceration, b
anishment to Siberia, torture with electrodes and hot needles inserted beneath fingernails, and frequendy death and assassination. The Iron Curtain spreading down Africa, bringing poverty, chaos, communism, starvation, famine, wars. The loss of land. The state gives you a house and if you don’t like the house get out! and live on the pavement. You can’t own land under communism. Just like in Tanganyika. Julius Njerere. Ujamaa. Uhuru.

  Everything taken by the black state. No freedom to move as you please. Rules, rules, rules. There’s a song, Little Boxes, Little Boxes we all get put in boxes; our Sunday school teacher said it’s about what communism does to people, making them all the same. Nothing left, taking away. I said to Uncle Klaas, communism means the loss of land.

  ‘Whose loss of land?’ he asked, and leant back, taking the zol from the Silent One, dragging on its dregs and stubbing it out in the sand.

  ‘Our land,’ I said, rolling onto my side, still staring into the fire. ‘In Tanganyika, they stole our land. Bok is struggling. Since they left Tanzania, we’ve never had money.’

  ‘Is that the story? That they took your father’s farms? That’s why you left?’

  ‘It’s not a story, Uncle Klaas. It’s the truth.’

  ‘Your father and mother left before their farm was taken. They ran because they were afraid their farm may be taken.’

  ‘Rubbish, Uncle Klaas. That’s rubbish.’

  ‘Your parents were afraid that the people of Africa would take back what had been taken from them. A thief always fears thievery.’ ‘They stole it,’ I say in a whisper, ‘after we had worked it free of the bush, turned it to civilisation. Everyone’s, the Therons down the road, Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain’s, all the whites’ stuff was nationalised.’ I left the word hanging, hoping he’d realise I knew what I was talking about. There was to my mind something extremely mature about the discussion.