Embrace

by Mark Behr

  We crossed and headed along the footpath of cleared leaves, upstream. We were approaching the powerful structure of Harding and Reyneke, a blockhouse of huge logs. It was Dominic who snorted and pointed. I saw it, through the openings between the logs. Inside, in the dusk, four or five prefects, standing up, bare buttocks, movement. Hands shaking like pistons in front of loins. We walked on, “quiedy, as though we had not seen anything.

  ‘Did you see that!’ Dominic exclaimed. Still none of us spoke.

  ‘They were tossing each other off!’ Still waiting for a response. It was Almeida who gave it, as if on all our behalves: ‘Ignore the pigs.’

  Dominic giggled and told Almeida to not be such a prude. Mervyn changed the topic by again commenting on the craftsmanship of the Junior fort we’d just visited, and Bennie wondered whether we could better enlarge ours by digging a cavern beneath the clump of hard soil around the roots of the poplar. Lukas and I said nothing. Approaching our fort I could not contain an urge to know what was going on amongst the Seniors. I had to see. I circled away from our group and once out of my friends’ view ran back towards the big fort. From a distance, I watched for a few moments, wanting to make surethat they were indeed doing what Dominic had seen. I could see the white of arms moving in the dark, an occasional laugh. Hardings voice, muted, saying: ‘Hey, not so hard, Mike. Ouch . . .’ I walked quietly to the door of the fort. Placed myself at an angle from which I would have to be seen. I stood watching them, my heart pounding. They were each busy with themselves. Raubenheimer, with his back towards me, muttering that he was going to win. It was Harding who saw me and in the same instant lifted his erection and quickly pulled up his pants. They all looked up. Raubenheimer swung around. Pants were drawn up. Faces ashen.

  I stared only at Harding and Reyneke, I as speechless as they. Afraid my voice would not come out, would shake. I cleared my throat, not to speak, merely to break the silence, let them know I was not a ghost. I could not have been there for more than four or five seconds, though it felt an eternity, seemed I was seeing them through a haze.

  I turned around and started off. Back upstream, my legs weighted down. Mixed with my terror was a sense of exhilarating satisfaction. As well as a blind anger. Let them stew. Let them wonder how much I saw and heard. I was not quite sure of all I’d seen or of exactly what they’d been doing. What would they do to me? Nothing! I’ve got the bastards by the balls. From behind me came rapid footsteps swashing through the dry leaves. I waited to be struck by a fist in the back, refused to turn around and face my attackers, ready to spew that if they touched me they’d only be in deeper shit. Reyneke was alone: ‘Listen, Karl, tell Mathison about me, but don’t say anything about Harding, Raubenheimer and Cooke, please. Tell on me, but not on them.’ He now walked backwards in front of me. I was terrified, but acted as in control of the situation as I knew how, trying not to meet his gaze. I smirked, shaking my head. I had no intention whatsoever of telling. Wanted them only to know that I knew.

  Reyneke grabbed me by the arm and forced me to stand still, facing him.

  ‘Karl. Please be reasonable.’ He looked me deep in the eyes, his cheeks flushed. It was to me as though I were really seeing him for the first time. He was no longer the big man who with Harding had been terrorising me for almost two years. He was in front of me, his eyes direct, but not fearful. I wanted to see fear, humiliation. Where were the others, why had they sent Mr Reyneke? I hated Harding more than Reyneke. Harding, the cousin of Mary-Alice and Betty. It must have been a month or two after I arrived. It was pocket-money day and I was with Lukas and Bennie, standing at the fence of the game camp, watching the zebra and eland. Harding and Reyneke, then in Standard Six, arrived with their purchases. Lukas was speaking about the zebra. We were minding our own business. Reyneke was telling Harding that the boo boooh, like the growling of a lion, was coming from the eland bull in the distance. Turning to them I said: ‘No, it’s from the ostrich, over there, look, you can see its beak and throat, watch, it’s puffing.’ It was the first time I had spoken to either of the Seniors, and had not thought it a transgression. The next day I was stopped by them on the stoep. Harding, in front of Reyneke, said: ‘You’re the fairy in the red dress. You ran around the streets of Toti in a red dress. My cousin told me.’

  I denied it flat.

  Did not dream of saying it had been Harding’s auntie’s blue chiffon.

  But they kept up the story. Once. Twice a term. In front of teachers, my friends, my enemies: ‘Tss, tss, De Man. Where’s your red dress?’

  ‘Take your hands off me, you disgusting pig,’ I now said to Reyneke, pulling loose and starting off. For an instant I thought of asking him, blackmailing him and Harding, to never again mention the dress. But I couldn’t, couldn’t ever do it. To ask them to keep quiet about it would mean it was somehow true.

  Karl, come on, we were just having some fun.’ He spoke from behind me.

  ‘Then why are you afraid?’

  ‘Tell on me, then, if you must tell. Not on the others. And we can just deny it, were Seniors.’

  ‘I wasn’t the only one who saw you’ And with that I walked off, leaving him behind. I was terrified and elated at the power I wielded over them. I wished I’d seen them doing this when I had first arrived at the school. I thought of the night with Buys and Mathison and Cilliers. Did not know why it would have helped had I known about Harding and Reyneke then, but somehow it would have lightened what Buys did to us and the humiliation of Mathison’s soliloquy.

  The whistle blew and I waited in the pathway for my friends. Almeida was ahead as they cut across Second Rugby Field and I started towards them.

  ‘Karl,’ a voice behind me I recognised at once as Bruin.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said, trying to move off before anyone saw me hanging around with the class sissy.

  ‘I want you to stop teasing me. Please stop while I’m talking to you.’

  ‘The whistle went, didn’t you hear.’

  ‘Why must you always pick on me?’

  ‘I don’t always pick on you, Bruin.’ As we made our way through the bush. Dominic and the others had spotted me and curved towards where I was emerging from the trees.

  ‘It hurts me when you speak to me like that.’

  ‘Why don’t you go tell the others to stop terrorising you? Why come and speak to me?’

  ‘Because you’re the worst. I don’t mind the others, but it hurts most when you do it.’

  I felt uncomfortable and wanted him to stop.

  Hastily I promised never to tease him again. Less because I felt guilty, than as an incentive for him to desist from the intimacy, the moment of familiarity I felt he was trying to create.

  Two people in one afternoon asking me to refrain from repeating something: one the schools biggest bully boy, who looked like he was shouldering people out of his way, even while he stood still. Who had been at me, out to shame and humiliate and infuriate me at every corner. The other the weediest, drippiest, creature in my class, who whined, and studied himself half to death. Got nineties for everything, whose grades I knew I could eclipse if I worked a tenth of the time he did.

  Both wishes would meet my agreement. Reyneke because I merely needed him to lay off me. He, like myself, was leaving in two months’ time. He because he was at the end of Standard Seven, I because of my hatred for the place. Two months of peace, at least, I thought. And then Bruin. I rarely teased Bruin again. Not in Malawi a few months later, nor when I indeed did return to the Berg again the following January. I tried to ignore him, mostly. Tolerate him. For each time there was an opportunity — like later when he shat in his blazer pocket — I would see, before my mind’s eye, again this afternoon’s pleading, the desperation if not of trying to get me on his side then at least of trying to neutralise me. Today, facing the text, I again see the beginnings of a wasps’ nest in his ear where he had not properly washed out the klei — something I would have told anyone else of. What I did not know consciousl
y then — though perhaps by not teasing him again it had registered somewhere — was that I never again wanted to hear in another’s voice that desperation to please — ever. What I did not wish to recognise, then, and for years to come, were the frightening echoes of my own.

  Days later the Natal boys caught the train home for a short break. It was no more than a six-hour trip from Estcourt. I was in a compartment with Harding, and for some reason had ended up sitting on the top bunk beside him. Somewhere along the journey, while my nose was in whatever book I was reading, he leant over to me and whispered: ‘I think I’m dying.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m going stiff’

  I looked back into my book. I ignored his palm crawling up my jean-clad thigh. He began rubbing my crotch. I slowly lowered the book, found his eyes. I shook my head. He withdrew his hand. He sat up. Smiled, and red-faced stared down and out from the window. Neither Harding nor Reyneke ever cast me another glance in the last months they remained in the Berg.

  16

  We looked at each others and in Aunt Siobhain’s little mirror to see what it looked like when you do a poef and it opens like a brown snake coming out of its hole and then James put the Coke bottle there and you can smell it and it slipped into the Coke bottle and down the glass like chocolate with nuts and then we didn’t know what to do so we took the bottle with poef downstairs but Aunt Siobhain was in the passage so we went back up to the second storey with the poef bottle and we didn’t want it because it stinks, so we tied it to a string and I went outside and in the passage Aunt Siobhain asked me why I looked as though were up to something and I said no, I just wanted to go and sit in the garden for a while and then James let the poef bottle out of the window by the string and I took it and untied it and hid it in the bottle-brush that comes from Australia till he came down then we buried it beneath the rubber tree — the rubber tree comes from Brazil — and it was our secret.

  17

  For the first time since March I remained after what had now become a two-hour-long evening practice. Behind him the maids had begun laying the teachers’ dinner tables, hurriedly putting down plates, knives, forks, water jugs. Three hours a day we now faced him from the benches. These two plus one before lunch. By the time we left for Europe the one hour before lunch would probably be up to two. I myself had become engrossed in the music. I could feel myself comfortably go on for another two hours a day, not at all concerned by the regimen that Bennie bemoaned. Not the Mass alone was bringing delight; even well-known pieces we’d sung in previous years of which I was now learning the second soprano. Exploring the music, the nuances of my voice, seeing how our score supplemented that of the firsts and the alto voices, mastering and understanding each transition that initially seemed impossible or once seemed boring or had been taken for granted. Music was now an adventure into genius for me, its discoveries an enigmatic plain of pleasure. That I was singing what had been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven more than a century earlier suddenly mattered to me. I listened with enthusiasm when Dominic and Mervyn spoke about why or if the Mass in D was superior to Bach’s B Minor Mass. I paused outside classrooms and music rooms to soak up the music streaming from clarinets, oboes, violins, cellos, flutes. Nichols playing a rondeau on piano by an unknown fifteenth-century composer. Mervy’s bow stroking out a sonata by Biber. Lukas struggling with a Corelli that Mervy had performed publicly by the age of nine. I tried to memorise details from our music theory lessons, to copy as little as possible from Dominic, to forget in class that the knowledge was being imparted by Marabous beak and that Bennie, Lukas and I were her ‘most idle students ever’.

  Amidst the excitement of mastering the worlds most complex mass and of beginning my own private love affair with music, I missed Jacques. When my attention lapsed in a moment he was occupied with the other voices, trepidation came to me. A fear of sorts that I might never again be alone with him. A fear that could not be stilled even by my new-found passion for identifying notes, harmony, patterns, instrumental accompaniment, voice. Almost without knowing it or why, I was now again collecting sheet music, putting awaymusic stands, straightening benches. Deep in conversation with the accompanist, he had none the less noticed me tarry. The bell rang for supper. Still I hovered. At last the accompanist left, and he came closer to me, smiling, asking from across the room how I was.

  ‘I’m fine, and you?’ I answered, dropping the Sir I had planned to use as a jab. Standing right in front of me, he said he was fine too, though thoroughly preoccupied with the Mass and the overseas tour arrangements. Only nine weeks away.

  ‘Are you happy with the Agnus Dei?’

  ‘It’s sounding magnificent. Absolutely. Even though I’m hard on you boys. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s great and were enjoying it. Long hours and all.’

  He believed Durban City Hall would be a formidable performance. A dress rehearsal for Europe. And Europe! The continent was bound to be impressed with the Mass extracts and the school had just received a telephonic enquiry from the Amsterdam Symphony Choir as to whether or not we may want to repeat there.

  Is there something different to the way he speaks or looks at me? So clinically enthusiastic. So professional. As if I were just another choirboy. Weeks I had not been with him — and I now wanted him. As secret as my thing with Dominic had to be, at least we could talk, all day, and when he was not rehearsing we could try and be together as frequently as we dared. But with Jacques, I was feeling I was left out in the dark, waiting, wondering when he would call. When he had completed his monologue on what a phenomenon we’d be in Europe, I, trying to sound playful, obscuring my insecurities inside our joke, said softly: ‘Haven’t been starfishing for quite a while.’

  He threw his head back and laughed. Looked around and in a tone instantly serious, said: ‘It’s dangerous now. And I’m busy as hell, Karl. You should be studying for tests, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘I want to come tonight,’ I said, now begging with my eyes.

  He frowned. Shook his head as he looked at me: ‘It’s too dangerous, Karl.’

  I wanted to ask why. What had happened that had positioned him at such a distance from me? On the other side of a chasm? But I did not have the courage to engage further with a mind that seemed made up. I felt weak, fearful, as though I had no voice in this relationship. Not even to talk, let alone insist on being allowed into his bed. He was again the conductor.

  , ‘I’ll let you know, soon, I promise,’ he tried to reassure. For an instant I believed him.

  ‘Oookay,’ I smiled, hiding my disappointment by pretending to blow up my mouth, act fat-lipped and merely frustrated. The holidays ‘ were looming. Then, I wondered, what would happen afterwards? Practice, practice, practice. His preoccupation with the tour and the Durban concert was not going to disappear. It was bound to get worse. What if I didn’t get to see him alone before December? And what if not even in London, or Amsterdam?

  ‘It’s a promise. I’ll see you soon,’ he repeated.

  I turned to leave the hall.

  I began to wonder about him. He’d told me he was from Sabie, about his parents and his brother. But that, and what it said on our programmes of his career as a conductor, was about all I knew of him. What subjects did he do at school? Had he been to the army after university? Did he have a girlfriend? And had he ever had another boy, like me? Had he ever done it to Almeida, as someone had said last year? Would I ask him that? All the questions I never asked in the nights we’d been together. How I now wished we had spoken more. I wished I had asked his favourite colours, his favourite food, his favourite music. Then again, no! Who cared about talking when we could rather do everything we’d done since March. No, I told myself, I don’t want to converse with him; I only want to touch him.

  Afternoons I still went to the library. He occasionally walked by and then hope would fill the air, only to dissipate as he winked and still did not stop for more than a minute to chat and never to say that I should follow h
im. I was becoming angry. Thought of writing hima letter. Began writing, abandoned the idea when nothing looked right on paper and the whole idea of a letter seemed childish and sentimental. Like something from an Abba song. No, I thought, making love to the music he conducted would become my substitute for touching him or communicating in any form. I could act tragic, like Callas scorned by Onassis who married Jackie Kennedy. Turn life into a play. But the substitute act failed to relieve. It became almost unbearable to watch the movement of his hands in front of us.

  And doubt arrived.

  I wondered whether he’d found someone else. Was another against his back at night? Was it the way I kissed or did I stink or something? During breaks I drifted to the parking lot, checking whether his car was there. What had happened; what had I done wrong? What had I done to deserve his distance, why had I been cast aside and who, who in the school had taken my place? I began to reconstruct our every shared moment and brief conversation of the past nine months, little pockets of words that could confirm that his current aloofness was indeed merely a temporary preoccupation, like Dominic’s with his Grade Eight, and not a rejection. After midnight I glided through the dormitories to check whether all the boys were in their beds. I snuck to his room and listened at the door. I could not bring myself to leave the school and visit Uncle Klaas and the Silent One at the fort. That place I knew would bring no respite before Jacques had taken me back. I mulled over and chewed on how his withdrawal had begun, with some unknown fear he said he had, how it had now shifted to an excuse about the Prime Minister’s concert and the overseas tour. Excuses, each and every one. In choir, while we practised a sequence of Negro spirituals, he got angry because we were moving around while singing. He shouted at us to stand still, to not rock like kaffirs around a camp fire. And who, I slowly began to ask, am I to think that I was unique! Who else might have keys to that door? Who else could be doing anything, anything, in this place at night? Suddenly I wanted him to get angry. I imagined he might call me, would need meto cairn him down. I began to think I must do something, to provoke bim, so that he’d be compelled to beat me: in that way he’d have to take notice of me. I could test him. He could touch me again.