by Mark Behr
‘Why?’ Bok asks. ‘What a stupid thing to do. You could have both been killed.’
‘I was afraid I wouldn’t be allowed back down to the forest.’
‘You know he probably saved your life? That’s why he grabbed you. To silence you.’
‘I know.’We sit quietly. Bok says what a good kaffir Jonas was. One of the best game guards the Parks Board ever had.
, And there was another time,’ I say, now enjoying seeing Bok’s surprise, ‘in the krans beneath the office at Umfolozi. Lena and I were down there with Suz or Chaka, I can’t remember which.’
‘You weren’t supposed to be there, you know that.’
‘We never went back, Bok. But before that Lena and I even took Stephanie and James down there.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were playing under the overhang and then I saw Lena in front of me, like she’d turned to stone. I looked up and there, on the cliff above us, was a leopard, looking down on us. Lena grabbed the dog by the collar and just whispered, “Kom,” and we walked up the foot-path, both of us too afraid to look back, afraid of what was behind us, could be coming at our backs any moment. When we got to the road we ran home, with me already telling her from behind not to tell you and Bokkie, because I might be locked up in the yard for the rest of my life.’
Bok sits shaking his head, a smile around his lips. ‘The things you kids got up to. Damn right you would have been kept in the yard. What else?’ And I tell him that was all, the only times we were in danger, other than the time the eland chased us, but that he already knows about. And I say at least I never threw bees into a toilet where an old woman was relieving herself and Bok laughs and says that’s only because there are no more long drops around. He rises, lifts the rifle wordlessly, and still smiling inclines his head towards the road. I follow, slipping the tambotie seeds into my shorts pocket. I can plant these in Toti some time, see if they grow. Maybe Bokkie wants to try some in the church garden. And I must show them to Dom. I walk behind Bok to the van, following his swishing through the grass, neither of us looking back. Of my life, I realise, my father knows nothing. As little as I of his.
As we drive back to HQ to return the rifle, we register what’s around us, the impala — remember how we had to cull thousands — the nyala that Bok says have chased away the abundant bushbuck because they had to share from the same height of shrubs.
I wait in the van while he walks into HQ to return the rifle.
At the Loskop road Bokkie slowed down the car even further, slipped into second gear and carefully took a left turn towards the Therons’ farm to stop in and say a quick hello to Auntie Babs and Uncle Gerrie. I thought of Jacques. Told Bokkie about my knee, that it had healed perfectly. Pulled up the jeans leg and exhibited the scar. We wound our way along the slippery road through pine plantations and through fields of young mielies until reaching the sign ‘Rust en Vrede — Gerrie en Babsie Theron’. The mud still smacked against the car’s belly, down the oak lane leading up to the lawn and the house. The farmhouse was shaded by huge jacarandas now in full purple bloom. Wet blossoms popped as the tyres pressed them into the lawn. The magnolias and seringas too were covered in flowers. Monet, I think, would have found things there to paint. ‘Must have heard the car,’ Bokkie smiled and waved as Auntie Babs came out onto the veranda even before we’d parked the car.
‘Welkom, welkom julle,’ she called and announced that she had fresh scones and tea ready in the kitchen.
-Good rain, you’ve had, Babsie!’ Bokkie said. ‘Gerrie must be happy for the crops.’
‘It’s going to be a good season for mielies,’ Auntie Babs answered from the stoep. ‘Gerrie is just out now, checking on the tractors. They get stuck all the time with rain like this. I’ve sent a girl to go and say you’ve arrived. He wants to say hello. How are the roads from Winterton?’
‘Very slippery, but not as bad as I’ve seen it before. Ooh, Herder, but your garden is looking lovely, Babsie.’ Bokkie glowed as Auntie Babs offered us seats on the veranda.
‘It’s the rains, Katie. And you, Karl? Mense but you’ve grown tall! You’re going to be the size of your Great-Grandfather Mostert. He was the tallest man in East Africa, we always joked that he had Maasai in him.’
I smiled, uncomfortable, proud. Bokkie said that I was sure to be taller than Bok, who was six foot one. And Auntie Babs said she couldn’t keep up buying new clothes for her youngest children and thank goodness they stopped growing around eighteen when they went to university.
‘And how are things at school, Karl? Looking forward to the holiday, I’m sure?’
‘Ja, Auntie Babs, very much.’
And there’s the overseas trip. I saw Miss Roos in Estcourt last week and she says the International Choir is the best ever.’
One would hope so, with three hours a day in rehearsal. Hey, Karl?’ Bokkie said, before I could answer.
You and Ralph must be proud of him, Katie?’
Proud and waiting to see this term’s report!’
And next year it’s Standard Seven?’
‘Yes, Auntie Babs.’
‘How time flies! It seems only yesterday you were here for the audition.’
‘That’s three years ago, Auntie Babs.’
‘Frightening how time flies, hey, Babsie?’
Amazing. Are you staying next year?’
‘I think so, Auntie Babs.’
A maid came onto the veranda bearing a tray with four china tea cups, a white teapot covered in a down cosy. On the one side of the tray was a silver plate filled with scones and a small glass container of strawberry jam, another of fluffy cream. I watched Auntie Babs — sophistication, grace and patience, my mother’s self-confessed ideal woman — as she poured tea for us and asked us to help ourselves to the scones.
Their talk centred around their children. Auntie Babs’s two sons and two daughters. One already at university in Bloemfontein, the pretty daughters, all planning to go there. Bernice’s plans for next year with SAA — she loves working with people, Babsie, you know. Lena’s sport, she wants to go to the Military Academy at George. And about what’s happening to whom of the old guard from East Africa. Bokkie, about Mumdeman, retiring from the Parks Board and might marry a rich Englishman — a Mr Shaw — and about Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain. Stephanie who’s overseas and James. Sanna Koerant, so Auntie Babs said and Bokkie confirmed she’d heard, has not recovered from the terrible stroke in June and no one knows how long she’ll live — looks like she’s got Parkinson’s disease. Shakes and trembles and sputters that the end is nigh. ‘You know what I mean, Katie, still the old Oljorro Sanna?’
‘Santa Sana!’ And we all laughed.
‘Same old skinnerbek until she breathes her last breath.’
And I thought of Mumdeman once when I was nine, when I told her how Bokkie wept when Bok stayed out drinking with tourists; Mumdeman told me to never shit my own nest, like Sanna Koerant:‘Always telling everyone what was going on in her bedroom and in her life. Every fight, every disagreement, every little detail of her life.’ Ouma said, ‘Everyone in East Africa from Mombasa to Nairobi knew what was going on in Sanna Koerant’s life. Now that’s shitting your own nest, Karl. What goes on in your own bedroom is private. That’s why we call those things private parts. Never shit your own nest.’
‘Yes, Ouma.’ But now I wonder if they are so private why is everyone so concerned about them. Why were we beaten for what we did with our private parts if they’re so private? Why did Mathison ask me to report to him about other boys if those are private parts? Why were Harding and Reyneke so afraid of me telling, if those are private parts? Why must I sneak to Dominic and Jacques at night? Why does Dominee Steytler preach Sunday after Sunday about the sins of the flesh? No, they’re not private, Ouma, as much as we keep them covered, our-private parts are more public then our faces. Our private parts are the most public parts of our bodies.
And I tried not to hear Bokkie as she told Auntie Babs al
l was going well with Bok’s business. Tried to block out the overconfident tone in which the complicated rationale for him now thinking of going into insurance was presented. While they spoke, I savoured my scone, each bite from the fork, my eyes in every bed and tree of the incredible garden. Everything was dripping, leaves dripping, branches dripping, the roof dripping: tick, tick, blob, blup, tock, bip, bip, ts, ts, ts, tick, blop, blop-blop, tick, tsss from rain gutters: watertunes as the sun again wanted to break through and shine. Cups of white magnolia drooped after the rain, as did the roses, heavy and overturned with drops perched like balls of quicksilver on the petals. Seringas’ scent clung to every breath. Dahlias too, shy, their heads bent down, away from last night’s showers. Azalias and rhodedendrums, all bright but spent. Part of Aunt Babsie’s garden’s beauty was that it seemed to go on forever, even though I knew from Parents’ Weekends that it ended after about an acre, against the cultivated fields of mielies andkaffircorn. The sun broke through the dark clouds. At once bright shafts of light fell against the mountains from which the mist was lifting. Then, for a minute a few drops again fell from the sky — drowning the drip-drip — even as the sun broke more cloud. Jackal marries wolf’s wife. The lawn was like wet green lucerne and purple velvet where the jacaranda blossoms had been knocked by the torrent. The sun shone, the clouds dissipated, and within no more than the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, eat both halves of a scone, the garden’s tempo of dripping had changed to something slower, quieter, as if pausing; waiting for the bluster of birds and beetles, the breath of bees and butterflies. The mist had lifted from the mountains and I was struck by how the shapes of Champagne Castle and Cathedral Peak had altered from the angle at which I was seated. The two mountains, together, no longer looked like one flat bastion of rock. From the Therons’ stoep they were separate from the surroundings and from each other. From there they were all merely parts of the Drakensberg’s sandstone range, blended in as if they had no life or form of their own. From there Cathkin Peak was nothing like the rectangular mammoth it was from the school, a mere ten kilometres up the road. It is the angle, I decide. The shape of a mountain is determined by the angle from which it is viewed. It has no shape of its own. Like Table Mountain too. From Paarl, at a distance, it is completely different from when you’re standing below it, say at the Cape Town City Hall or on The Parade facing its ragged cliffs. Or from up there, when you’re seeing Cape Point, False Bay and the Hottentot Hollands Mountains and the blues of ocean and the blues of sky become the world’s most spectacular dome. And how different again it all was from behind, at Muizenberg, and how must it not look from Robben Island? Changing, changing, all the time. A million different views. Quite remarkable.
When after forty-five minutes Uncle Gerrie had not shown up from the fields — I’m sure one of the tractors got stuck, Auntie Babs said — we took our leave and Bokkie promised to pop in again whenthey brought me back in ten days’ time. As I walked ahead to the car my mother whispered something to Auntie Babs. Probably, I realise now, that it would be Bok and not she dropping me off.
Where is he? I alight from the car and stand outside, looking at the cycads. Two nyala ewes tread carefully in the shade. I hoist myself onto the rim of the van’s pick-up and sit in the sun, watching the antelope.
I relayed to Bokkie the funeral procession in Pietermaritzburg, Ma’am in the black dress, aided by her twin sister and her daughter Jenny. The husband from whom she’s divorced. Soldiers, brass instruments and drums, flags and tears. Bokkie made clicking sounds with her tongue. Sounds of pity for Ma’am. The horror of a parent losing a child. Ja, Bokkie said, sounding like Ouma Liebenberg, she doesn’t know where it’s all going to end. What It and End she was talking of I had no specific clue, yet I believed the It and the End had to do with everything that was going on in the entire world: the onslaught of the Antichrist. The communist threat. The threat of poverty. The threat of losing our house. The threat of the Arabs. The threat of the Americans. The threat of the Dutch Reformed Church. Of permissiveness. Of narrowness. Of blacks. Of time. Of war. Of sex. Of age. Of parenting. Of childhood. Of middle age. Old age. Comets striking planet earth. Going deaf. Exposure. Revelation. Love. Everything in the whole entire history of the universe. I felt her gaze turning from the steering wheel to me. I glanced at her.
‘My child, I beg you to get your fingers out of your mouth,’ she said, casting her eyes momentarily back onto the road. ‘Let me see.’ Again looking away from the road and shaking her head at the sight of my fingertips: white, torn, uneven, flesh curling backwards, cuticles broken and upright, miniature antlers.
I thought you said you’d stop? Just like Lena, fingers always in her mouth. You both have the most beautiful hands, but you insist onmutilating yourselves. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense. Can you explain it to me? You’re almost fourteen years old; have you any idea what it looks like when a young man has his fingers in his mouth the whole time? Like this,’ she says, looking back at the road and pulling her lips from her teeth, running her painted red fingernails to and fro across her clenched bit.
‘Nice? Hey? What do you think it looks like?’
‘Like a baboon eating watermelon,’ I said, and we both laughed.
‘Well, there you have it, Baboon,’ she said.
Lena and my nail-biting is a leitmotif that has run with our lives since each of us first started school. When I went to the Berg, Bokkie was convinced that learning the piano would force me from the habit as I would be ashamed of my fingers on the keyboard. Great was her horror when instead of quitting nail-biting I quit the piano. Once, in my first year, she had brought Juffrou Sang along to fetch me from the Berg. I had been taking piano for two months. While I was showing Juffrou Sang the school she asked me to play, to show how much I had learnt. I played a short piece on the auditorium’s grand and made about five mistakes in the space of fifteen bars. Juffrou Sang acted impressed, but Bokkie seemed wounded, embarrassed. When I announced later that holiday that I was giving up piano and going back to recorder, Bokkie looked as though I had informed her of someone’s death or of a rape. Or as if I had bitten her in the heel.
‘Why?’ Bok asked, his tone cautioning that I had better offer a plausible excuse. ‘Why do you want to stop?’ I said I couldn’t master a new instrument while I was trying to train for swimming. Sport was keeping me from music.
‘There’s no swimming in winter,’ my father said, his face expressionless.
‘There’s rugby,’ I said, and he nodded his head, expression altered to a mixture of hope and mistrust.
I myself know all too well that quitting the piano had nothing to do with swimming. Even less with rugby. At best, the summer swimming season could be stretched to eliminate a few weeks of autumn rugby. The problem with piano, rather, was that it had not come as easy as I had imagined: sitting down, my fingers running up and down, no heavenly sounds emanated from beneath my hands through the strings. No, piano was like learning anything else. Moreover, there was Miss Holloway, her wheezing vulture breath — halitosis, Dominic corrected me — threatening to make me throw up. But even Marabou herself probably had little to do with it, for she taught the recorder too, anyway. The long and short of it is that I f could not concentrate on anything that needed to be learnt from scratch. Maths had gone well until we started fractions. Music Theory was fine because I had started learning it from Juffrou Sang, and those basics carried me through the Berg. Thank God Music Theory required only a pass/fail and I had managed by the skin of my teeth. I had the attention span of a mousebird when faced with new things I had to commit to memory. Reading, drawing, riding, writing, swimming and dreaming I can manage for hours, T thought. But I read something once, only, and, if I don’t get it, grasp it and commit it to memory, I find myself unable or unwilling to repeat. Only since Ma’am has been re-marking my essays, has been inspiring me to develop my talent as a writer, have I been willing to go back and rework, rewrite, reimagine, reconceptualise, redra
ft. I loathe Maths, I loathe rugby, I loathe the recorder, I loathe anything I cannot do well. I love reading, writing, drawing, swimming, riding. Beyond that the world, academics in toto, might as well not exist.
And I’ll bite my nails. Even in my sleep I’ll bite my nails.
We passed Midmar and spoke about Mumdeman’s retirement. About Mr Shaw, the wealthy Englishman from Durban North who had asked her to marry him. Then Bokkie told me that the Lategans had bought my East African trophies. ‘Just to help out a little bit and we were sure you won’t worry because it does help to keep you in the Berg.’ I didn’t respond. I glared from the window. The broken stripes m the middle of the road, flashing by, seemed to torment me. Ilooked out of the passenger window. I tried to see how I would paint the green hills of Howick and Merryvale as they glided by and not the Grants gazelle heads, the dick-dick, and the sable antelope that were what Dademan had left me. All he had to leave me. My inheritance. That’s it, my entire inheritance gone to the Lategans, the rich cunts who give Lena their daughter Anka’s old school uniforms. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream: ‘How could you let him do it? How could you let him sell what was mine without asking me! Just like he sold Camelot, mine, all I had, without asking me.’ Seething, I felt my mother’s presence around me in the car. To keep me in the Berg! Fuck you, bitch! I was the one who told you and him, begged, begged — wept and made a fool of myself — that I didn’t want to go back to that school, that deformatory! When that fucken excuse of a father of mine had sworn that he was going to make it big; that I, as a child, should not worry about adult business, that I could go back to the Berg with a smile on my face. How I detested you, Father, looked up against having to face you when we got home. Cad, liar, fuck-up, smart Alec, bastard, cunt, poes, shit, kak, hoer, fokker, doos. And Bokkie, you useless, useless, mother. What do you do to protect me from him? Whimpering with that thinness of timbre just like Grandfather Liebenberg in those moments before he is about to cry. Again. ‘We were sure you won’t worry because it helps keep you in the Berg.’ I feel like slapping you. Feel my hands around your beautiful, useless neck. So, you do not want me to worry. But you must know that I will. Both because of what I know and because of what I don’t know but am wise enough and you know am wise enough to infer from between the lines, the noise that comes thundering through the interstices of your silences. You and he: tell me not to worry, but you know, ensure, already in the instruction, that I will worry.
