Embrace (19 page)

As if wanting to get us away from the war, Mumdeman commenced on the years in East Africa: how they had purchased the Oljorro land at the foot of Mount Meru from the German government. Mount Meru once higher than Kilimanjaro until the volcano spat its crest. How they had cleared the land with the help of thenatives; how she married Dademan in the small Dutch Reformed church at Eldoret in Kenya; lived first for months in tents and in wagons, plowing the land with oxen, killing snakes, hunting down leopard come to snatch livestock; burning unwanted bush that in the fertile soil encroached unrelentingly on what had been cleared. Slowly building a home in their Canaan.

Listening to Mumdeman was better than any occasional movie or the fairy-tales and fables that so addicted me. Movies, like fairy-tales, I told myself,
were
only stories. But, what Mumdeman said was all true, absolutely true. And, what was true was real. When Mumdeman spoke of the Serengeti, with Dademan interjecting detail, a canvas unfurled before me, a visual narrative in scope virtually as vast as my imagination: ‘We always approached from the East, just as the sun broke the horizon: Oh, Karl’tjie, sunrise over the Serengeti... Mm, mmm, mmmmm . . . a hundred thousand wildebeest and zebra, moving in waves across the sprawling savannah. In the dawn you could not see the herds’ beginnings or ends, a river of game as wide as nothing anywhere on earth before or since. Here and there, where the herds ran — from playfulness or from being stalked by lion or cheetah — it was like striped currents flowing in the stream, silent, only the sound of birds or the breeze in your hair, because sometimes they were so far away that the sound of their pounding could not even reach us. You might need binoculars to see what was going on. Oh, and the Thompsons Gazelle, hundreds of them, like jack-in-the-boxes up and out of the grass; you’ve seen on Dademan’s cines, but film can’t capture the feeling of seeing a hundred golden gazelle leap up and away, bouncing, white tails plumed like ostrich feathers in the morning over the veld.’ No one in the world, I was sure, could tell a story as well as Mumdeman.

‘And the times we saw the lions’ kill on the Serengeti,’ Dademan took up, ‘too many to remember.’ And they would go on, telling and retelling safaris and fishing by the Ruvu; hunting elephant bulls — the size of ox-wagons — with tusks that dragged in the sand; of Ahmed, King of Marsabit, the biggest tusker that ever walked the East African plains; setting up camp in the Ngorongoro crater; making biltong; of Bok and Uncle Michael getting a hiding for coming from behind the long-drop and throwing in a bag of bees while Grandma’s best friend Sanna Koerant was doing a poo; how the Maasai and Somali had the most beautiful girls in Africa; of Aunt Siobhain arriving as a nurse in a white uniform from Ireland in the mid-fifties; of how Stephanie was born and the big party they had to celebrate the first De Man grandchild in East Africa; how Bok was sent to the army in South Africa to learn to fight because the Mau Mau were murdering white farmers like flies in Kenia and how he met Bokkie in Klerksdorp; and how Mumdeman loved my mother — full-blooded Afrikaner girl — ‘from the moment she arrived in Oljorro’; how Bernice was born and Bokkie went a little deaf in one ear during the birth; and James was born in the car on the way to the hospital in Arusha because Uncle Michael didn’t drive fast enough; and when Lena came and they couldn’t believe it wasn’t a boy and Bokkie s ear went even deafer.

‘And Auntie Siobhain,’ I asked, ‘when she came from Ireland, did you like her?’

‘Oh yes . . .’ Mumdeman said, pausing. ‘Day I met her I said to her, look, Siobhain, you’re not really English, you’re Irish, and that’s a different beast altogether. Poor Irish, you know, centuries of suffering under the English. Starved by the hundreds of thousands in the potato famine and they had been on the side of the Boers in the war. Ag, besides, by that time the Boer War was a long way off and we all had to stand together against the kaffirs, forgive and forget, I always say. There was the Catholic thing, of course, you know, raising Stephanie and James Catholic and outside of the Dutch Reformed Church, but Uncle Michael himself had gone to the Catholic mission school in Eldoret for a while and it didn’t surprise us that he came out half Catholic himself and that he wanted to marry an Irish girl. There also weren’t that many whites up there, you know, so the young men couldn’t be too choosy. But we liked Siobhain, Catholic of tenot, blood is thicker than water.’ And from the way they spoke about my cousins’ side of the family I deduced that Uncle Michael had somehow become anglicised at boarding school while Bok, who also went to English school in Kenia, sort of kept his Afrikaans. I was never quite able to figure out why Bok, if we were so Afrikaans, spoke better English than Afrikaans or why he, just like Bokkie, Aunt Siobhain and Uncle Michael, called Grandpa Dad, rather than Pa, and Grandma Mum rather than Ma, like real Afrikaners would. I sensed, from all those nights alone with Dad and Mumdeman, that things were never quite the same once Uncle Michael had gone to the Catholic school. It was, so it sounded to me, as though he had come away from there no longer wanting to speak Afrikaans, said he wanted to marry an English girl, somehow thought himself a bit better than the rest of the family.

And by then Tanzania had gone from German to English anyway. So we were half English, too, I suppose. Almost all we spoke. But were we glad when Bok came back with Bokkie. Full-blood Boere girl. From a poor family — didn’t know what money was, I tell you — a woman of courage. Learnt farm Swahili within a year, English, fitted into the Oljorro community like a hand in a glove.’

We had finished eating and Mumdeman gathered the plates. I fed the bones to Skip.

‘We went to Tanganyika,’ it could have been either of them speaking, ‘to get away from the bloody, bloody English. And just when we had a place of our own, the Germans lost the war and East Africa became English. Then, just when we got used to the English running the place; just as everything was coming together for us, farms producing like nowhere else in Africa, just when Bernice was going to school, and you were born, Karl’tjie — jirre, that night Arusha saw a party like never before — the kaffirs came and stole it away from us. Mbuyu, your farm. Your birthright. Gone, overnight.’

And Mumdeman spoke in the way all the Tanzanian expatriates we ever knew spoke: about how she had heard that things had changedwith the black government: poverty and disorganisation. How in the streets of Arusha little boys swarmed like flies down on visitors on the pavements and in their cars, begging. And all the visitors could do was quickly turn up their car windows to lock the urchins out. That nothing functioned in Tanzania since the communists had moved in.

Then Dademan said that it had all happened long ago and I should go to bed. Mumdeman got up to come and tuck me in and to supervise my prayers. Before we left the fire, I would go to kiss Dademan goodnight and he would hug me and hold me against him and then he’d frown and feel my shoulder blades and he’d say, ‘That all happened in paradise, when you still had wings — you feel, here — where these knobs are; that’s where your wings grew when you were still an angel.’ I could smell his cigarettes and the brandy and Coke on his breath. I kissed him again, five quick, small, dainty kisses, and said I knew I was never an angel and that he shouldn’t tell fibs. And he’d say he was an old man who never even told white lies and I’d see: tonight I would dream I was an angel with wings flying over the Ngorongoro crater and the great savannahs of the Serengeti.

Our fort was the furthest upstream, on a slope facing one of the deeper pools where Second Rugby Field ended against the poplar bush. Built when Almeida was still with us. Downstream, hidden amongst poplars and wattles on the school side of the river, was an entire fort village with structures of varying shapes and sizes, fashioned from any material we could lay our hands on. Between forts boys shuffled through the crackling mat of leaves, clearing neat pathways. Up where we were, the bush grew dense where undergrowth and reeds signalled the beginning of indigenous vegetation. We had designed and built our fort around a fallen poplar that had its crest halfway into the river. When the tree fell, its base of tangled roots and a solid block of soil was hoisted onto the surface. I was certain it had been Stevens idea for the clump of roots and soil to form the forts back wall, but Bennie always claimed it as his. The fallen tree’s trunk, a good two metres above ground, formed the structure’s central beam, to which we tied layers of reeds, branches and sticks and, over these, thatch as insulation. The front, facing out onto the river, was open. We had initially thought of enclosing that and leaving just a gap for a door. Later, happy with the river view, we left it. Inside we sat or lay on our backs staring at the white poplar beam: talking, sweeping away leaves, rethatching, discussing the pros and cons of lining the walls with mud. We’d thought the poplar would have died, but that afternoon I noticed that the branches were again budding. We chatted about whether the fallen giant had the strength to grow for many more years, or if its crest — and with it our roof — would sag further into the stream; or if, as its roots grew deeper, it might again lift itself. The biggest trees in the world, I told the others, are the giant sequoias in America. They grow to be three thousand years old, I said, and after they fall may take another thousand years to die. Whatever our poplar did in the decades to come, we knew we would not be there to see.

Sitting in the entrance, we spoke about going overseas, how the Mass was sounding, and whether we’d return in ’77. The year was far over half gone. Maybe it was true what the old people said: the older you get, the more time flies. Though the nights were still icy, all around us were the first signs of spring. Over the mountains black clouds stacked and the sun fell through gaps in golden sprays that reminded me of the lights that bathed holy men in medieval and renaissance paintings and in the coloured illustrations of the
Children’s Bihk.
Our task for Ma’am’s Art class was to sculpt, in clay, a piece inspired by the work of one of the South African sculptors she had introduced. Mine was the figure of a man, like
Narcissus,
by Fanie Eloff, a picture of which Ma’am had shown us. Dominic chose to emulate the style of Anton van Wouw’s
Zulu Head,
only he was making a bust called Beauty Kekana. His figure looked nothing like

Beauty, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. Mervy lay on his back behind us inside the fort, instructing Bennie who was up on the beam about filling open patches that needed rethatching. We knew this would probably be the last spring we would be there together. Steven’s leaving had left five. Who’d be next? For one thing, Lukas s voice was in trouble. In class it jumped and squealed mid-sentence, leaving the rest of us in stitches. And worried. During the July tour his voice had become so tired Mr Cilliers had given his solo part in ‘Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield’ to Mike van der Bijlt. Clearly, there was no way the voice would hold till December. Bennie, carefully perched, tightening ropes and stuffing in handfuls of thatch, said he was definitely coming back. He wanted to postpone school in Ficksburg for as long as possible. Both Dominic and Mervyn’s parents were thinking of taking them out as choir took too much time from their instruments and there were better professional tutors in the Transvaal. Mervyn had spun the same I’m-going-to-leave yarn every year — every few months — so we were less inclined to believe that he would really go. Dominic said he may convince his parents to allow him another year, but that he wouldn’t dream of staying if I left. I’d been saying I was probably going to stay. What I didn’t say was that I might not. That I had been reading things between the lines of Bokkie’s letters and from her voice once a week on the phone: even though she never mentioned it directly, I could hear that things were not thriving with Sub-Saharan Curios.

We sat staring at the movement of the water, the reflections of heavy cloud. For the rest of my life, I thought, I don’t want to go home, want him for ever, will go away with him, fish small trout near surface, want him, resent being without money and dependent on Bok’s big talk, clouds heavy over Champagne Castle,
dance of the rain,
hate you all, won’t go home.

‘Stop it, Karl,’ Dominic muttered, ‘look at your mouth,’ motioning for me to stop biting my nails. I wiped my fingers on my shorts and tried to clear the mud from my lips with my clean backhand.

‘Off?’

‘Yip.’

‘My dad says,’ Lukas said, ‘it’s probably better to get back into normal school as soon as possible; it’s quite a process to adapt from a music school. Settle into high school proper.’

‘We’ll come and visit you, Lukas.’ Dominic said, pressing a hollow into his clay where Beauty’s mouth was going to be. ‘We’ll try and get another tour to the Eastern Cape.’ My mind drifted from the conversation. Bok had been saying the same thing as Lukas’s father: maybe we should make this my last year, so that the Port Natal academic curriculum wouldn’t throw me once I got to the more important Standards. But, as much as I had wanted to get away from the Berg in the past — had begged them after the Malawi tour — I could no longer imagine being anywhere but in the mountains. Cathkin Peak towered like a solid block into the blue, black and white of sky and tumbling clouds. The ridges dropping westward from Cathkin like the scales of a dragon’s tail. Maybe. Was that where the name came from? How did the blacks know about dragons, or was it the Voortrekkers who named the range? Bok said . . . But the mere thought of my father oppressed me. I tried in vain to redirect my thinking. Why was what I wanted always and without fail at odds with what he wanted and expected from me. Last December I had wanted out; begged, cried, begged; he sweet-talked me back. Now, I wanted to stay. He wanted me out.

The sun disappeared behind the clouds heaping over Cathkin and Champagne. Someone called from downstream that the whisde had gone. Two Juniors passed close by the fort and Mervy called them to cross the stream and take a photograph of us. For an hour the clouds had heralded an afternoon thundershower. It was close. Dom and I placed our sculptures in the back of the fort on a ledge Bennie had carved in the roots of the poplar. Then we drifted towards where everyone was gathering on First Rugby Field. I watched the moving bank of cloud and recited: