by Mark Behr
‘Yes, Sir.’
Again Karl rode the seesaw of relief and loss. So that was it. This is okay. I’m safe. He’s safe. No one knows. And Dom is staying. Everything is the way it’s always been. Bok and Bokkie won’t ever know. Leaving Mathison’s office, suddenly unable to keep his eyes open and unperturbed at possibly being found by Uncle Charlie, he slouched upstairs to F Dorm. Shoes and all he crept between the covers. He slept, fully clothed, from five in the afternoon till six the next morning, when Uncle Charlie s call woke them for PT.
Again fully engaged in preparations for his Grade Eight exams, Dominic spent most of the next few weeks behind the music room’s door in virtual seclusion. Karl no longer went to sit and work at the table behind his friend s back and so the two boys saw little of each other after Ma’am’s apology. To Karl’s announcement that he was out of choir Dominic, Bennie and Mervyn responded with surprise and incredulity. Dominic expressed regret, for he understood that over the previous months Karl had developed a thorough-going enjoyment of the music, a change that had introduced an element hitherto absent from their relationship. At first Dominic suggested that he would go and speak to Cilliers, convince the man that any cracks in Karl’s voice were but temporary and not at all serious. For surely the change had come on all too suddenly to be permanent? In all likelihood the tear had been caused by nothing more than a cold. In a response that seemed to leave Dominic even more perplexed, Karl angrily prohibited him from doing any such thing. He said he was quite happy with the way things had turned out; that the dairy work and additional time for riding with Lukas was more appealing than Beethoven, ad nauseam. Lukas said that having Karl down at the dairy made the job even more pleasant and jokingly he told Dominic to accept that the two of them were now ahead on the road to manhood. ‘Quite frankly, Lukas, I don’t give a spare shit for where you are in the testosterone race.’ Then turning from Lukas and facing Karl: ‘And if we were still going overseas,’ Dominic asked, scowling at Karl’s implied denial of ever having enjoyed the music, ‘would you then have taken this so,’ he searched for a word, ‘so pathetically? Still be staying down here in the barn chewing straw with your new best friend in the whole world?’
‘Well, were not going overseas any longer. So, it’s a moot point, isn’t it, Dom? Maybe if we were I would have gone begging or something, but not now. Not for one concert and some silly record album. And there’s no reason to be sarcastic.’
Being as busy as he was in the next weeks, Dominic’s frustration offered little reason to concern Karl. The two saw each other only in class and during meals. As for the rest of his friends and the school; Karl thought he sensed from them and from the teachers a hint of awe, as if his altering voice indeed placed him in a league of maturity alongside Lukas. He drew particular pleasure from the fact that both he and Lukas were still a year younger than the Standard Seven prefects, none of whose voices were showing signs of change. On the phone Bok chuckled, delighted when Karl told him that his voice was going. Bokkie too had a smile in her voice when she said: ‘You’re turning into a young man now, Karl.’
From his classmates and the schoolboys generally, the initial antagonism towards Dominic soon waned. By the time Parents’ Weekend came around, even Bennie was back on speaking terms with the boy he now called the Young Ter. The discomfort and silence between Ma’am and Dominic abated and while Karl sensed that Dominic still kept a guard to his lips, surfaces at least returned, and to all intent and purposes seemed the way they’d always been. Karl himself, now spending choir rehearsal time with Lukas at the dairy or out on the farm, had not been to the fort or to the library since the night with Mathison. The idea of returning to the river frightened him. He prayed at night that Uncle Klaas and his companion had left.
The library was taboo. Jacques passed through there regularly and he didn’t want to see him — as much because of Mathison’s imperative as from shame at the prospect of having to face the man he now knew he had certainly betrayed. His reading of the encyclopaedias had been abandoned near the middle of D in September, anyway, and now that he was doing farm work there were other obligations and responsibilities that had to be met. He tried not to think about Jacques. To forget that the man had ever been more than his choir master. Once, in class, briefly, he caught himself daydreaming about Uncle Klaas. Why, he wondered, had he not told Mathison that night about the tramp, instead of about Jacques? Or about both? Had he spoken about Uncle Klaas and thought up a better story about the key instead of telling the truth, everything may have been different. Had his betrayal of Jacques after all not been accidental? He pushed these uncomfortable questions from his mind.
In the weeks leading to school’s break-up, he would see Jacques only twice and each time from a distance: once as he drove by the dairyin his Mazda, and once when Karl and Lukas were walking across the quad as the choirs spilt from rehearsal. Each time Karl changed direction, finding an excuse to look or head elsewhere. Did he ever see me, Karl wondered. What is he thinking? Does he hate me? When their classmates went to rehearsal — at times for three hours a day — Karl went with Lukas down the hill to the dairy. By keeping to his tasks on the farm and out of the library, he made certain never to cross paths with the conductor. Although Mathison was rarely outside of his office, Karl felt sure he was under surveillance. Eyes were on him, on the corridors, the dairy, the classroom, even when he and Lukas snuck off for a quick ride after milking. He allowed himself only rarely to think of Jacques and then mostly when one of his friends spoke of what was going on in choir. Always there was the fear that even his thoughts would show through on his face and that Mathison himself might read it or that Mathison might hear of it from whomever was Mathison’s eyes. Initially, after the first few rehearsals from which he was absent, he had burnt to ask the others how it had been, but he gritted his teeth, relying on information volunteered or overheard in class, in the dorms, on the corridors, in the showers. And when the others asked whether he missed choir, he pulled his nose up and said no, what a silly notion. The thought of sending Jacques a note of explanation and regret had been repressed, again in the face of Mathisons vigilance. Since the fatal night he had not allowed himself to believe that he missed either Jacques or Dominic, the mere thought of intimacy with either causing a heaviness in his legs. He undertook that once Dominic had completed his exam, he would resist from his friend any rekindling of physical closeness that was certain to occur after the other emerged finally from behind the piano. Those were chapters over, closed, written, ripped out and destroyed. They had to be. Yet, they rushed back. How given he now was, more than ever before, to retrospection. How scenes and phrases rushed back to embarrass, haunt, anger and shame like a guilty conscience. I have betrayed twice, he thought. First my friends. Then my lover. Who will I do in next? Could betrayal, like death and accidents, come in threes? And after that, what would come from that?
He read little outside of the Bible at night during quiet time. His struggle to concentrate was not new. But what struck him as different, what worried him, was the inability to concentrate even when reading fiction. For two or three days after the night with Mathison, he had tried the Dostoyevsky, sometimes at night with his torchlight, but to no avail. He once fell asleep with the book and torch in his hand, waking to find the batteries gone flat and his cheeks wet and hot. He abandoned The Brothers Karamazov a bare hundred pages into the text. Instead of trying another novel, he turned for solace to that other book in his locker. It must have been four months since he had read from the Bible and he now plunged in at Genesis, resolving to read it cover to cover, to resist the old ways of singling out favourite passages.
As usual he did his homework only to the extent that he would have something to show to Ma’am in class. Barely aware of the development, he found himself resenting his former mentor. He found it difficult to hold her gaze when she looked at him in dass or if they passed each other in the corridors. He was afraid of her, wondering if perhaps she and the other members o
f staff knew about the thing with Jacques. Caught in a terrible daydream in which the whole school and all the teachers jeered and laughed at him, he found his face aglow, as if he were coming down with fever. He worried about his diary being discovered, vowed to get rid of it, burn it as soon as he could. His passion for writing and drawing had fled. Within days of the events with Mathison he realised he could not complete the statue essay that Ma’am had said held the seeds of promise. Instead of continuing the struggle to complete the essay, he wrote, within an hour of prep, a story about Henry Francis Fynn witnessing ‘the vision of Chaka’s great hunt at the confluence of the two Umfolozi Rivers. Already as he placed it on the pile he knew the piece was an embarrassment. Not only was there nothing original to the story, but he had not used Ma’am’s Oxford Concise once to correct theabominable spelling. Ma’am’s remarks on the returned essay were sparse, the tone curt. He received an abysmal 14/20 and he knew he would receive a B for English. He feared his report. There was no way he was going to get a single A. Your story seems — Ma’am wrote — to be nothing more than another of your excellent ideas into which little or no effort has gone. More like something written at the beginning of the year, she said, before he had known what metaphor or simile or precise language and idiom were. Certainly before he had gleaned the existence of a thing called a dictionary. Embarrassed, ashamed, angry at himself and her, he undertook to try harder in the final essay. But again he dropped the essay on the pile, feeling ashamed, hating himself for the weakness of his resolve. Art class, too, no longer held him spellbound. He soon experienced both writing and drawing as equally boring to all his other subjects. Art prac he presented in simple black and white. The use of colour and shading seemed to him like too much hard work, a waste of time. Ma’am did not broach the question of what was going on with him until shortly before Parents’ Weekend. Keeping him after class she asked whether there was anything he would like to discuss with her, something that may be bothering him.
‘Nothing, Ma’am, not at all.’
She asked about his lack of interest in Art and English. He answered that he was preoccupied with leaving at the end of the year and that he would make good for it with the next assignments. She prodded, saying she had heard his parents were not coming up for the weekend. Was that what was bothering him?
‘Not at all, Ma’am, I’m going to stay in for the weekend and work on Latin and maybe spend a little time with Lukas’s family and maybe a little with the Websters.’
She looked him in the eye and asked: ‘Karl, are you trying to punish me? By not working anymore? Are you somehow trying to tell me you’re angry about the way I spoke to Dominic?’
‘No, Ma’am.’ He emphasized the denial, ‘No, Ma’am. Why would I be angry about that?’
“You do realise that I said what I said only to help him, don’t you, Karl? He must realise what a tough life he faces once he leaves the safe and nurturing environment of this school. The same goes for all you boys. I expressed myself badly, but it was a message I believe the dass had to hear. What do you think?’
‘I agree, Ma’am. You were right and I think he should have apologised to you. I hope you will not think I’m choosing his side if I spend a little time with him over Parents’Weekend, Ma’am?’ And she had said that she held no grudge against Dominic, that she was as fond of him as she had ever been. ‘I know, Ma’am. I’ve never doubted that for a moment.’
‘Good. And, Karl, I wanted to ask you something else. While I was away, with... the funeral... I heard that you and Dominic introduced yourselves to Mr Loveday as Oscar and Johann Sebastian. Is that true?’
‘Yes, Ma’am, it was only a joke.’
‘Why did you choose the name Oscar? Was it because you read Dorian Gray?’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘Who told you to read Oscar Wilde, anyway?’
‘Aag, Ma’am. I just liked the name Oscar, you know, this silly thing of me becoming a writer, and Dominic chose Bach because he’s going to compose.’
She smiled and said, Karl, as remarkable a writer as Wilde was, there is no pride attached to the life of that man. He died in disgrace. Because of precisely the sort of thing I warned Dominic about. Why don’t you find yourself another role model, William, Isaac, Ernest, any of those. Then she looked at him with grave seriousness: ‘Karl, I in no way wish to sound disloyal to this school. This is my bread and butter. But, I want you to count your blessings that your voice is changing. This is an unhealthy environment for boys to be together. Very unhealthy. And someone like you, Karl, could easily go . . . either way in a place like this. Do you understand what I mean, or do I need to spell it out?’
‘I understand, Ma’am. And don’t worry, Ma’am, I’m too wise to be led astray.’
‘You’re strong, Karl. And talented. You’re the strongest fourteen-year-old I’ve ever taught. Truly, from all my years of teaching you’re one of only two or three I will always remember. Hold on to your strength and you’ll make it in the real world out there.’
After the meeting with Ma’am, and in spite of her saying he could have gone either way — a phrase that sucked like a leech at his brain — and knowing he had in some way behaved treacherously by speaking to her about Dominic, he had again felt the urge to write. The term’s quota of Afrikaans and English essays had already been completed, but he fell to trying to complete the statue piece. If only as a gesture of thanks to Ma’am. He could give it to her as a thank you for her unqualified support of him as a person. To show how he would never forget what she had taught him. When his statue project went nowhere, he returned to the orange poem, thinking he could just as well give that to her. But the poem still refused to yield more than a list of words which eventually ran to two foolscap pages. He again thought of his diary. Since the night with Mathison, worry had sat astride his thoughts in case the book were somehow discovered and what he’d written exposed. Badly wanting to keep the book, not quite wanting to destroy its contents, he decided to bury it. Along with some of his poems. From Matron Booysen he asked five or six plastic bags — to pack some of my books to take home, Mrs Booysen — into which he then carefully slid the diary and the poems, knotting each plastic Checkers bag before placing the parcel knot-side in the next. When everyone was in choir he took the parcel down to the dairy. From the shed he took a spade and went to dig a hole exactly halfway between the orchard’s only two almond trees. Satisfied that no one had followed him and none could see him behind the dense green foliage of a large pomegranate bush, he nervously dug to two feet, then placed the bright yellow package at the bottom before dumping the moist black soil and clay back into the hole. I will comeback and fetch you, I promise, he told the parcel as the hole closed in. Just wait for me, I will not forget you. No one will find you here. Only I will know your whereabouts and even of your existence. He covered over the disturbed soil with leaves and twigs, gave the place a last look so that he would remember the location, and saw that it was not at the precise halfway point. It was a little to the left, a little closer to the younger of the two trees. I’ll remember. I’ll come back. One day. Then he rushed to return the spade and attend the milking before he could be missed by either Mr Walshe or Lukas.
He soon felt himself part of the dynamics of the farm, milking, supervising rides, meeting farm labourers — faces he had known got names — and he and Mr Walshe related well. Without needing to be told, Karl understood that he was there in Lukas’s domain and as such there was no rivalry between the boys either in their work or for the affections of the farm foreman. All too aware of Karl’s passion for the horses, Lukas seemed deliberately to place the animals in Karl’s care while he himself focused instead on the dairy. When a number of the horses had to be shod, Lukas and Mr Walshe spent hours showing Karl how to clip hooves, how to heat the shoes, how to assess the depths of each nail, how to ensure that a horse was not hurt by touching a nerve. Karl kept an open mind, taking in new information like a sponge, executing his tasks with rigour, go
od humour and discipline. If he could learn this world, he thought, if he could become part of this rhythm for the last month of being there, he could forget almost altogether the other.
Yet, even as he worked at milking the cows, enjoyed the sense of achievement at having cleaned cribs and mixed feedtroughs alongside the workers, he had to acknowledge to himself that he had the blues. Now he thought that the words ‘to have the blues’ that Bernice and Stephanie had explained to him were inappropriate. It was more like being inside the blues, rather than the blues being inside him. Even as he rode, worked and spoke to the men and Lukas around him, theendless sky and mountain ridges pressed down on him, sometimes so hard that his field of vision seemed narrowed, hulled in a focus of grey mists. A darkness came over the world from inside the sunshine, then, threatening to suffocate him as if he were being systematically encompassed by everything around him in a grip he thought he would never escape. Of this he told no one, and no one could have suspected what was happening. For he continued to talk, to joke, to pretend interest in all that was happening and being said around him on the farm and in class. Only when he was alone did he allow himself to be pressed down, to let go of pretence, to take the full impact of the heaviness. One day he seemed to become hypnotised by the motion of his hands sliding down the teats of an udder: the tss, tss, tss, tss, of the milk squirting against the silver metal bucket between his legs. From then on he looked forward to the task of milking even at the moment he awoke in the morning. At times in the middle of a class discussion or conversation over lunch, he realised he was not hearing a word or a sound from the boys around him, instead he heard the tss, tss, tss, tss of the milk’s jetting rhythm against enamel. He now wanted to be in the dairy more than he had ever wanted to be on horseback. The sound of milk hitting the bucket, the thought of himself astride a bench looking at his greased fingers massaging the teats, appealed to him as if the simple task was the only thing of value left in his world.
