Embrace (16 page)

An eternity.

I felt cold. Filthy. Disgusting. I wanted to pray. He, down there, sensing something, lifted himself and with his free hand reached towards the floor. Not quite inaudible over the wind, the spurt passing from his mouth into the folds of the towel.

He came up again beside me; placed my head against his chest. I wanted to leave. I never will come here again, never, I swore.
Not even animals; sent to orphanages; San Andreas something; against nature; expelled.
Phrases attacking from nowhere. I was suddenly and irrevocably the child surrendered to Satan. No! Dear Jesus, dear Lord, forgive me. This was a mistake, Saviour, now I know. Never again. I swear to you. Till then he had never touched me. But now, a mouth had been used. I had been given and had taken pleasure. I had allowed a man to spill my seed. Death, that was what I deserved.

Drifted into sleep; let it take me like a fever, a memory of burning cold.

At first I did not hear him speak.

‘Sorry, Mr Cilliers?’

‘Are you dozy?’

‘No, I was just thinking.’

‘I said: when we go on tour, next month, you can sometimes stay with me, if you’d like.’

I lifted my head; found the shine of his eyes in the dark. Eased back into his arm.

‘With host families?’

‘When I’m with one. Or in a hotel. Ever stayed in a hotel? Would you like that?’

‘What about choir? I mean . . .’

‘It’s not unusual for some of you to be put out with a conductor. When there are hosts with a big enough house.’ He was quiet for awhile. ‘Weren’t some of you in PE or East London with Mr Roelofse last year?’

‘Only because he wanted to keep an eye on me and Lukas. To make sure we slept before the concert.’

‘I could do that again.’

‘What about Dominic? I usually stay with him or Lukas.’

‘You can both stay with me. Dominic may have to run through some solo work with me. Almeida had to do that with the Language Monument last year.’

For some reason I did not want to hear about Almeida. Not now. I spoke quickly: ‘But how, I mean, how will we . . .’

‘The same way as this, I imagine.’

Silence. I didn’t want to stay with him. Never. I would think of something.

‘Do you and Dominic do this?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You and Dominic . . . I’m scratching in his salad, hey?’

‘No! Mr Cilliers.’ And hastily added: ‘Tonight is the first time. I have a girlfriend.’ Immediately regretted having said it was the first time.

‘Is this the first time you’ve come?’

‘Sort of . . .’

‘Except in the dreams?’

‘Ja . . .’

He kissed me and I thought I’d choke of the rough, slimy tongue. I pulled away.

‘Did you like it?’

‘I kiss my girlfriend Alette like this. She likes it.’

‘No, when you came. Did you like it?’

If only he would stop talking. Then I could get up and get out of his den.

‘I’m sorry it was in your mouth.’

‘Don’t be silly. I like it.’

Please, dear Father, let him stop being so disgusting.

‘You can use my name, if you like.’Then, as an afterthought, ‘When were alone.’

Silence. I started to drift away. Just for a little while. I had no idea for how long I was gone.

‘You do know I’m playing with fire, don’t you?’

Awake. Nodded my face against his chest.

‘This is crazy. Sometimes I think I’m out of my mind.’

‘I swear I won’t tell, Mr Cilliers. Never. I swear.’

‘It’s not just the telling, Karl. The whole thing, it’s all wrong. All, completely, completely wrong.’

‘No one has to ever know, Mr Cilliers. We just never have to do it again.’ I closed my eyes, again wishing him to silence.

It’s over, anyway. Sweat crackled where we touched. There was a lull in the wind. How awfully quiet outside and in there. I was hot. I dozed; woke.

‘I want to open the window, just a little.’

He moved at once, saying he’d do it.

In the faint light I squinted at the body silhouetted against the curtains, lighted from behind by the bathroom glow. The sounds of the wind again rising entered the room and the curtains ballooned, briefly enfolding his body.

He spoke as he turned from the window: ‘We fell asleep. It’s almost two o’clock.’ Kneeling on the sheets he looked down at me and smiled: ‘You shouldn’t stay too much longer.’

In his gaze I felt it, the unmistakable stiffening, again, still sticky.

Drakensberg Boys School

Saturday, 20 July 1976

Dearest Daddy, Mommy, Bernice and Lena,

Thank you for the Utter I received yesterday when we got back from the Transvaal and Cape Province tour. The Greyhound broke at the summit of Van Reenen’s Pass and the AA had to be called to repair thefanbelt. Up there in the freezing wind we waited for about two hours. Everyone went into the bush to do their business. Niklaas Bruin squatted and accidentally did it in his blazer pocket. He’s a little freak, so his awkwardness came as no surprise. It stank us out. Eventually, when he owned up, we got the driver to put the blazer in the hold with our suitcases. Niklaas was the most unpopular guy around and Bennie’s new name for him is Pong-Pocket. As we only got back here at about six in the morning, we were allowed off school until lunch-time to sleep and there was no choir that day.

After Pretoria, we went to Johannesburg. Did you receive my postcard from the Vbortrekker Monument? I stayed with Lukas and Bennie at the Websters, only for one night and we were so busy we barely saw them. We received rave reviews everywhere and Mr Cilliers was altogether happy with our performances. He says we are sure to be a hit in Europe. In Johannesburg Radys Dietz and Eben Stein stayed with a Mr and Mrs Donnelly and while we were there Mrs Donnelly was on TV news with the riots. Did you see her? We didn’t, because we had a concert, but we were told she really was on the news. She had gone to take their
mate
girl
servant
maid back to Soweto while the children were burning down their schools. The Soweto children surrounded her car and wanted to set it ablaze and kill her but she shouted, ‘I’m English, I’m English, leave me alone, I’m not Afrikaans.’Lucky for her the police arrived and the kids ran away. Mrs Donnelly told Radys and Ehen they were just like savages, pillaging, murdering and marauding. It was the most terrifying ordeal of her life. One can just imagine. The day they left the Donnellys the maid didn’t show up for work and the Donnellys were worried about her. In Jo’buig everyone stays off the streets at night.

To Potchefstroom we had to take a back road so we wouldn’t have to pass near the locations. Although we could see smoke rising into the air all around Soweto, they told us everything was calm in the Western Transvaal. Mr Mathison has asked us all to write and say that our mute never put us in any danger.

I suppose Aunt Lena phoned to say we stayed with her and Uncle Joe in Klerksdorp. We stayed all over the house and she said it was a pleasure having all five of us there. My friends all liked the mansion very much and wished it was warmer so we could swim. Uncle Joe didn’t come to the concert. He was out on the farm . . . But Coen brought Mandy, and Oupa and Ouma also came. Oumafell asleep and only woke later when we were doing the gumboot dance and Sho Shaloza. Oupa reckoned we were very bright to he singing all the Latin and Hebrew music. I didn’t tell him that we hardly know the meaning of the words because I thought it would only disappoint him. Aunt Lena says he cried while we sang the negro spirituals and he cried as usual when we said goodbye. He says he enjoys driving the Mann lorry that he and Coen have gone into business with. Groot-Oom Klaas has gone off by himself again and no one knows whether he’s dead or alive. Aunt Lena says if he’s alive he could have gone your way for the winter.

As a going-away present Aunt Lena gave me RIO, and I still have most of it. From Klerksdorp we went to Kimberley (we saw the big hole), to Beaufort West and Oudtshoom. The ostrich farm we visited there didn’t have rides, so unfortunately that’s something I’ll have to do at a later stage. In BW we stayed with a man who farms chinchillas. They are the strangest looking things, like a cross between a springhaas and a rabbit. Their pelts are very sought after and I thought they’d make a very warm kaross.

In Cape Town we had snow on the mountains. In the City Hall there we had a standing ovation and we did ‘Were You There’ as an encore. It is Mr Cilliers’s favourite part of the repertoire. After the second ovation we ended with Zoltan Kodalys ‘Mountain Nights’. Because all the host families were taken, we stayed withfriends of Mr Cilliers who have a beautiful house on False Bay. Their surname is Erasmus and the mother used to be an opera singer. When I asked where the tusks and Kudu head were from, they said they came from East Africa. Mrs Erasmus said her husband was bom there and I wondered whether you knew them?

Now we are catching up schoolwork and have started doing extra hours for the performance of the Mass at the beginning of December. Information bulletins are to be sent out to all parents so you can order extra tickets if you would like to invite guests. It’s quite a big thing because it will be broadcast live on TV from the Durban City Hall. Do you think Aunt Siobhain and Uncle Michael would like to come, and maybe Mumdeman?

Rufus is well. We are going riding again on Monday.

All my love,

Karl

PS. Lukas sends his regards. We’re playing rugby on Saturday against Winterton.

Ma’am called me to her desk. Holding the folded letter she spoke quietly as if wanting the class not to hear: ‘When someone has been shamed, Karl, you may think it acceptable to kick him and further humiliate him while he’s down and being jeered by the world.’ I was stunned; hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. ‘But for you to stand on his head so that you can gain personal elevation from his shame — that, dear Karl, I find reprehensible. I hope no one
ever
does that to you.’

A frown compressed my forehead; worry; at a loss for what I had done wrong. How had I disappointed her? There was nothing, nothing on those pages I thought that may have offended her. She smiled while she slid the letter into its envelope: ‘I will not ask you to rewrite this.’

‘Ma’am, I don’t understand? Is there something I should have left out?’ By now most of the class could figure that I was being chastised.

She shook her head: ‘No, Karl, but I want you to know,’ and then she spoke louder, ‘that I find your and the rest’s responses to Niklaas s disgrace immature and cruel.’ She licked the flap and stuck it down with her fingers, closed her eyes to show I could return to my seat.

I walked back to behind Dom without meeting anyone’s eyes. Furious at her for letting Niklaas Bruin know his shit had featured in my letter.

In our first year, some of us took the floor when Marabou was out of class. Dominic did Liberace behind the closed piano and Bennie did Cassius Clay on top of Marabou s desk. My own favourite performance piece was Langenhoven’s poem ‘The Moth and the Flame’. Marabou s desk — already cleared for Bennie’s Cassius Clay — was huge and out of proportion as the flame, but it none the less did the job. Spreading my wings, flapping them at first leisurely, extending them as I spun and recited, slowly, closer to the flame.

Oh, oh, oh, the other moths were dumb and dense

but far from the candle I, I, I will remain

from afar in the dusks I’ll observe

from this far it is safe and gazing free.

Ah! I need not look from one side only!

I keep a clear distance and fly around

then I know from all sides how it looks

so to care for not getting too close.

My circle is — ever so slightly
 —
skew and inward bent

but even there where closest I was

nothing happened! Nothing! So there’s no reason

none! For this wide rim so far from the shaft

The wheel spins ever faster faster faster faster

and the light and the glow begets bigger delight

and the rims grow tauter round the shaft

aaahhhhh, the end of the wheel, aaaahhhhh

is the ash ssshhhh of the moththhhhhh

As the tempo increased, so too did my spinning and circling, arms flailing, until by the last stanza I was almost running. My body was alive with me inside. Even as I recited the lines, my head seemed to shrink tiny, almost not to exist, as all I felt were my limbs, now loose, now taut. And my heart. Like doing ballet. In the final line I threw myself across the desk to shrieks of laughter from the class. More than once, when Marabou was out, someone would ask: where’s Cassius, Liberace or ‘The Moth’? And little more prodding was needed to get us going. As the performances had the propensity to turn rather noisy when in fact we were not even allowed to speak, it came as no surprise that one of us was eventually caught. Miraculously, it was Ma’am who came to investigate the din. As I leapt to throw myself into the flame the class roared. Skidding across Marabou’s desk I saw a shadow at the door. Unable to stop my momentum I flew off the desk, landed on my hands. My feet were still up on the desk when Ma’am walked in. But instead of calling me out and having me caned, she smiled and called it a superb rendition. She told us to be quiet, and then she left.

It was more than a year till the Malawi tour when I’d speak to the tall, serious teacher again. But I knew she must have remembered the poem, for in September of our Marabou year, during the auditions for new members, when the choirs performed a few songs and a number of boys had to play instruments, Mathison had asked me to recite ‘The Moth and the Flame’, adding: ‘But without the performance I’ve heard about!’

I stood in the auditorium, delighted, at least in part because I knew I would never be asked to sing alone or play my recorder. The verses of Langenhoven’s poem lent themselves superbly to dramatisation, like many of the twenty-odd poems I had committed to memory by then. So, the recitation in the auditorium — standing still, performing it by voice alone without the running, the spinning and the leap across the desk — was a bit of a personal disappointment. The applause for my solo performance was none the less an inspiration. I learnt more poems, read them aloud in class whenever an opportunity arose.

On the shores of Lake St Lucia, Charters Creek perched above the estuary that pushed its salt water inland to where it was fed by the veins of the Mpate, Nyalazi, Hluhluwe, Mzinene and Mkuzi Rivers.

Having passed through the eucalyptus and pine plantations near Matubatuba, the approach to the camp where my grandparents worked for the Natal Parks Board was along a sandy two-track road through lush forests. For stretches of the drive the sky was erased by a ceiling of branches and tangled creepers. Baboon ropes hung like grey swings awaiting young hands and feet. I want to remember that it rained often — afternoon thundershowers — for the land and dense shrubbery was moist and green compared to the tans, browns, beiges, ambers and mustards of Mkuzi and Umfolozi. Here the crests of kaffir-trees —
Erythrina caffra —
broke the green jungle roof in a haze of red and in September the dull crimson crinkle paper flowers of sausage trees augured spring when one barely knew winter had been. The place, Dademan and Mumdeman said, was almost the tropics. Not quite as wet and humid as Oljorro in Tanganyika, which is right up at the middle of the world, but in some ways similar. Charters Creek, for me, was a paradise akin to my imaginings of Eden astaken from the illustrated
Kinder Bybek
butterflies, flowers and birds; down at the water and on the shore pelicans, flamingoes, seagulls, swifts and sandpipers; in the forest, duiker and bosbok. And, more than anywhere else in a Zululand I remember, the magical grunting call of the purple-crested louries. No sound of the bush was to me more haunting, more mysterious than that of a loury, no bird more beautiful. A sighting of the bird bouncing along a stem or of its aloof wings overhead was always a surprise, always a tiny secret shared, an annunciation of angels.

The camp consisted of eight rondavels and a small administration building from where Dademan and Mumdeman oversaw things in the marine reserve. When I visited, Dademan allowed me in behind the receptions flat latch-door counter and I could speak by radio to Bok at Mpila in Umfolozi. When the office was not expecting the crackle of radio contact from other reserves or HQ, I could speak for short intervals on an unused frequency where no one was likely to receive my messages of poachers being shot, crocodiles dragging piccaninnies to their watery deaths, hippo devastating canoes or a cargo of rhino horns intercepted by me while out patrolling on horseback.

Dad and Mademan’s thatched house stood overlooking Lake St Lucia, on a kikuyu lawn up the hill, away from the main camp, almost hidden from sight by the purple extacy of jacaranda, Natal mahogany, pride of India and different creepers. The bush on the landward side was fought back by Phinias, who tended the beds of blue and white agapanthus, tumbling sweeps of cup of gold, golden shower, hibiscus, frangipani, tree wisteria and barberton daisies as big as my hands in red, pink, white, orange and yellow. Mademan’s pride was the hedge of
Strelitzia reginae,
with their orange sepals, white bases and blue, almost purple petals which glass-eyes frequented for nectar. Nights were for the call of bushbabies and the nightjars, preceded for the whole day by the emerald-spotted wood doves. Sadly they called:
My mother is dead, my father is dead, aU my relatives are dead.
Phinias couldn’t makebird sounds, but Jonas emulated the wood dove best:
Don, don, don, I-had-babies-and-they-died, I-had-babies-they were stolen-now-my-heart-is-going-don, don, don, do, do, don-don.

From dusk the growing clammy, damp smell of the estuary mingled with the fragrance of frangipani, wild jasmine and gardenias from the forest. And there was the hghghg hguum hghghg ghuum of hippo moving somewhere down along the shore. In the morning a scattering of droppings and the trampling of Ouma’s flowering clivias or red hibiscus confirmed that they had come to ravage the garden. I feared the hippo at Charters Creek far more than I did white or black rhino in Mkuzi or Umfolozi. I told myself I would always see a rhino from a distance in the veld, or, if it charged, I could let Chaka and Suz’s barking serve as protective decoys. With Bok on horseback, the tens of rhino we encountered, white and black, always let us be or stomped off to a safe distance from where they might come to a standstill and turn, snorting, to gaze at us. But hippo: fat, ugly, always slyly drifting and peeping up from the water, came out at night, like dark devils from the sea. Moreover, I didn’t have the bull terriers with me at Charters. Mademan’s little Pekinese, Skip, would be a joke thrown sky high by a charging hippo. I had heard story upon story of native canoes snapped in half by the cavernous jaws — not only in South Africa, but in Tanganyika and Kenia. Dademan had cines of us at the Mzima springs near Mombasa, where, from within a glass tank, one could view the fish and the hippo underwater. If hippo run that fast under water, Dademan said, imagine what speed they can attain on land — then add fifteen miles an hour to that. Hippos were monsters, as bad or worse than crocodiles. At least the long scaly reptiles were up-front about their evil. You could see they were dangerous. But hippo I distrusted in the same way as I did hyena. It had something to do with their appetite for the night. I myself had no fear of the night, but in the bush I did fear its creatures. During the day, when the hippo lay with their mouths wide open while dentist birds manicured theteeth inside the pink mouths, I was never misled and imagined that far more than being designed for an ecological function the birds were there in cohorts with the night devils to deceive everything and everyone into believing their hosts docile and friendly. The sickleshaped hippo teeth mounted on our mantelpiece — especially after we moved to Amanzimtoti — had visitors astonished and appalled when they realised they were not looking at small elephant tusks. More people were killed in Africa by hippo than by any other wild animals. It was the
first fact
I ever learnt and I repeated
this fact
over and over to myself and to my city cousins whom, to my chagrin, thought themselves bush children after a day at Charters or Umfolozi.
I was the bush child.
Except for the stray piccanins and little Jeremy Wilcox — and he was so young it didn’t count — I was the only child in the whole of the Zululand reserves. I knew the bush and would not let my cousins or even Lena and Bernice forget that. Fact.