Embrace (10 page)

‘Flat as a sheep being slaughtered,’ Sarel Raubenheimer quipped from where he lay on his elbow beside Mr Walshe. ‘I wouldn’t brag if I was you.’

‘Flat like your big black nose and putu-smackers,’ I smirked down at him before turning back up the incline.

‘Anyway, you’re not meant to be shrieking into the mountains,’ Raubenheimer called after me.

I turned, a sarcastic smile now hooked to the corner of my mouth, ‘Well, run and report me to Mr Cilliers, klik-bek. Let’s see what he says.’ ‘Arse-creeper . . . go any deeper and all we’ll see is your feet.’

‘I can’t help it if I was born with more talent than you, Raubenheimer. Feeling a little lonely since Harding and Reyneke left? No more big bully prefects to take care of you.’

‘Be careful up there, Karl,’ Mr Walshe interrupted our bickering. ‘I want you boys down here in ten minutes.’

‘Yes, Mr Walshe,’ I answered with my eyes still on Raubenheimer: ‘Jealousy makes you nasty.’ And with that I turned and trotted up the path. The suggestion that I was sucking up to Cilliers galled me, even as I knew indeed that was what I had been up to. Still, I had not meant for things to be obvious enough for anyone other than Cilliers himself to note. Then again, what the hell! For a moment I almost wished Raubenheimer could know that I had been in our conductor’s bed. What a
jay
being able to challenge Raubenheimer to tell Cilliers — about me shouting a single note into the mountain; accusing him so publicly of petty envy.

And then, in the heat of the afternoon sun, I went cold and frightened at my own recklessness. Felt ashamed of myself with Cilliers. Of me and Dom. Swore to God I’d put an end to it all.

‘Lukas still up there?’ I asked the two who had emerged and were sitting in the sun a couple of paces from the front overhang.

‘He’s waiting in the back.’

Lukas and I moved farther along the ledge than we had been before, breaking and pushing branches as we went. More water dripped in a steady stream ahead of us, from somewhere behind the screen of branches and creepers. I was about to flick on the lighter to check the rock face when Rons voice reached us, calling that Mr Walshe was ready to leave. We cursed and carefully backtracked along the ledge.

‘We must come when we have more time,’ I said. ‘I want to find that cave.’

‘It’s around here somewhere. All the farm kaffirs know about it. We must bring a panga to chop open a path,’ Lukas said, and we made our way back to the group.

I felt the crown of my head still damp from washing my hair in the shower. And the brittle winter-grass shave around my ears and in my neck from the afternoon’s hair cut. How I hated, hated it when you did that to us. To me. Destroyed my hair once a month. So that there wasn’t enough even for my fingers to pass through. Robbing me of my looks. When I grow up, I swore again, I will have hair, long blond, into the small of my back. Call me a hippie, a communist, a sissy I don’t mind. I hate you all. I could weep from rage at the school. The barber. It would be a week before I could face myself in the — no, I’m not going to cry, don’t think of it, think of something, something—

Like a giant undulating shongololo, Jonas’s forefinger along the blade’s ridge seemed to steer the tip of the knife, grrrts, grrrts, grrrts, into the wood. His grip around the handle applied the pressure to make the tiny incisions, scratches, hollows. Sometimes, for the faint lines of wrinkles on the mask’s forehead, he used the fingernails of hisright hand, the splintered tips as hard and sharp as broken tortoise shell. He was the smallest man Lena and I had ever seen and when he sat beside Boy outside the hut with us watching his work, I thought his mammoth fingers would be better suited on Boy’s body, for the latter s hands, as if through a trick of irony or fate, while every bit as ashen and strong as Jonas’s, had in turn nine of the shortest, stubbiest fingers in the world. The tenth, the pinky on Boy’s right hand, had been severed by a panga in a fight with rhino poachers. That is why — Bokkie warned the boys — Lena and I were not allowed to carve wood; the blade would slip and cut off our fingers.

We were allowed at the huts of Jonas and Boy’s compound until late afternoon. Then, before sunset, one of the men would tell us it was time to go home. Suz at our side, we set off through the bush along the half-mile walk to Mbanyana. Bokkie did not mind our spending time at the strooise, though she made it clear that once Lena went to school and like Bernice brought back homework for the weekends, there would be no sitting around kaffirhutte. The same held for when I one day went to school.

‘It’s fine while you’re kids but when you get bigger it’s not a good influence. Anyway, I don’t want you turning out like Groot-Oom Klaas, niksnut, good for nothing tramp.’ Groot-Oom Klaas was the brother of my Oupa Liebenberg on Bokkie’s side. Groot-Oom Klaas, the cleverest man in the family, so we were told, was once a law professor at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education before he suddenly went crazy and became a tramp. Ever since, he just turned up at the Liebenberg family in Klerksdorp whenever he needed money. When the frost bit the Transvaal veld, Uncle Klaas took off for Durban where it never really got cold. Then, with summer’s return, Uncle Klaas headed inland, back to Johannesburg and Klerksdorp where the family whispered that sometimes he slept on park benches and in train stations. No one seemed to know exactly what had made Groot-Oom Klaas go mad, but we’d all heard Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg say it was a woman. A dark-haired girlhe loved, had been engaged to, who left him for another man. Groot-Oom Klaas couldn’t take it and went off his trolley. Others said the madness runs in the family; that it strikes the cleverest Liebenbergs in every generation; just look at Aunt Lena. She had to drop out of school after getting seven distinctions in Standard Nine and could never finish matric. If she hadn’t eventually married rich Uncle Joe Mackenzie, what would have become of her? But Bokkie maintained that her sister wasn’t mad; she only had mood swings and suffered from anxiety because of epilepsy when she was younger. No, others said: there’s madness in the Liebenberg family and it strikes once every generation. They said that Great-Great-Grandfather Liebenberg, whom we kids never knew, used to sit on an anthill in Kroonstad barking like a baboon at the full moon. Then there was Great-Grandfather Liebenbergs brother Serphaas: used to get so angry he beat his wife and eight children half dead till eventually a vein burst in his head and they locked him up in the madhouse. And then there was Great-Uncle Klaas. Bokkie told a story of how when she and her brother Gert went to boarding school in Brei in the Molopo, Uncle Klaas arrived there and stood calling them from outside: ‘Katie and Gert Liebenberg! Katie and Gert Liebenberg! Are you in there? Come out and speak to your Uncle Klaas.’ Then Bokkie laughed and told us how ashamed she and Uncle Gert were when the teacher told them to go outside and get rid of the old poor white. And then there was Aunt Lena: in and out of Tara in Johannesburg where she had shock treatments that made her better for a while. Once we could all understand the meaning of generational madness, the idea that I carried our generation’s mad gene was immediately brought into play, if I recall correctly, by Lena.

Walking back from Jim and Boy’s compound, I thought of Lena and I as Hansel and Gretel moving through the bush, escaping from the wicked witch. I ran my closed fist up the thick yellow stalk of grass and then, from my palm filled with golden kernels, dropped markers along the route from the kraal to our house. Noticing what I was up to, Lena said:

‘It’s the wrong direction, stupid. The birds are anyway going to pick them up and you’ll be lost, so we! And we know the path home and we’ve got Suz. So stop being stupid.’

I despised her when she was like that. I knew full well she was right; could say nothing other than possibly: ‘I’m just playing a game, stupid yourself? And then add: ‘I can’t wait for Bernice to come home. She’s clever. I like her more than you.’

‘And you’ve got the mad gene,’ she said. ‘Watch out or you’ll burst open your brain.’

I pictured my head bursting like a ripe monkey-apple on a rock, bits of my bloody skull and fragments of brain clinging to the red-grass. ‘Then you’ll be sorry,’ I said to Lena, ‘when I’m dead. For teasing me and calling me stupid.’

They had dressed up to drop me off for my first term at boarding school in the Berg. Bok wore his long beige safari suit and Bokkie the smock-and-hot-pants of floral cotton; only that day she decided to not wear the hot-pants beneath the smock. ‘Don’t want to create the wrong impression . . . that were common or something. Those are smart people.’

Ag, Bokkie, they won’t see anything except your legs, anyway. Don’t worry,’ Bok said.

The night before they left me we spent with the Therons, who farmed near Winterton. The Therons were friends of ours in East Africa who also came out in the middle sixties. Their sons and daughters attended boarding school in Estcourt and we usually saw them over Parents’Weekends when Bok and Bokkie and the girls stayed over on the farm.

The excitement of the months leading to my arrival at the school now barely overshadowed the dread I felt at the prospect of leaving home. There had been first Bok’s decision to allow me to audition; then the weeks of preparatory voice training and a brief furthering of my paupers knowledge of music theory by Juffrou Sang; ‘This white note is middle C next to the white D with the black donkeys ears.’ She too was the one who told me that musicality and a good voice alone would not secure my acceptance to the school — and even on that score I wasn’t in the top league; I needed to perform academically with straight As on my school report. I would have to answer in full sentences when questioned by the panel; to smile and look them in the eye, to exude confidence: ‘Use that charm, those blue eyes’; to say that I had always wanted to play the piano and to sing in a choir of international renown: ‘It won’t hurt if you say that you’re a little frustrated at singing in a school choir that doesn’t sing Bach or Beethoven or Brahms.’ Having never heard the names or the music, I copied down the Three B’s along with the titles of a piece by each; committed them to memory, practised in front of the bathroom mirror to say the names as though I had grown up with them in my ears and spilling from my lips.

There had been the drive up from Toti with me dressed in the new green Terylene trousers and the brown corduroy jacket Bok brought me from America when he went to see how things were going with the three rhino he had taken to Texas. Then, the horrible waiting where we sat amongst other boys and their parents for my name to be called. Into the auditorium drifted the occasional song from the room where the auditions where taking place. Voices like nothing I had ever heard: heavenly. I knew already I could never make it. And when at last I stood at the black grand piano in the room adjacent to the principals office, I felt raw terror. All I knew was that my six-month training in the Three B’s, to answer questions, to control my breathing and open my mouth aa, ee, oo, uuu, iii, oeee — everything Juffrou Sang had taught me — was wiped from memory as I faced the two men in the room.

One behind the piano, the other behind the desk. Later, in the Peugeot back en route to theTheron farm, I would be unable to describe either of my auditioners to my parents. One, I thought, had been the conductor at the concert Juffirou Sang had taken me to in the Durban City Hall. But during the audition, concentrating, trying only to remember what I was meant to do and say, I took in little but the two mens words that seemed a ready ambush for each of my insecurities.

The man at the piano asked me what I was going to sing and I said, ‘“BlessThis House in D”.’

‘You mean, “Bless This House”.’

‘Yes, Sir. I must start it in D. That’s the song that was sung in church when my parents got married.’

‘How interesting. D . . . and what if you started it in F? Could you manage?’

A, B, C, D, E, F ran through my mind. I was certain he could see me calculating. F was higher than D and I knew there was no way I could reach there without sounding like a squealing warthog: ‘I learnt it in D, Sir. D with the donkey’s ears.’

The pianist smiled and began improvising an introduction, nodding for me to start when I was ready. Horror, for I had no idea of how to begin without Juffirou Sang’s head nodding
one, two, three.
I just began, not listening to the piano, singing and looking into the corner of the room above their heads. I heard my voice, hoarse and breathy, threatening to crack on the high notes. I dropped my jaw as Juffirou Sang had taught me, pushing out my chest and taking deep breaths at the exact moments I had been coached. But the voice — even to my own untrained ears — was not as good as it had been in Juffirou Sang’s living room or when I played the Pied Piper in Kuswag Primary’s operetta. I knew, even as I sang, that I sounded ghastly. The song was coming to an end without a semblance of synchronisation between voice and piano. I wanted to weep with despondency and for a moment considered breaking off and asking them for a glass of water and another chance. Then the scales, still in the strained voice, andwhile doing these I decided I didn’t want to be at the school, anyway. Between knowing I wasn’t good enough and telling myself I didn’t belong there, I wanted to get out of the audition and back to Kuswag Primary as soon as possible. Briefly wished I might be accepted only to decline and say I’d rather stay at home.

Then the two men asked more questions. And here, at last, the rehearsed answers scrambled back to the front of my mind.

‘You say you’ve always wanted to play the piano. You’re eleven. Does that mean you don’t read music?’

Could I take a chance, disregard Juffirou Sang’s advice; lie? What if they asked me to show them? No. Just tell them the truth, ‘I play the recorder and I’ve just started learning to read music. We don’t have a piano at home, Sir. But we re getting one because my Dad’s business is growing. I’ll learn to read music before the end of the year.’