Embrace (20 page)

Oh the dance of our Sister!

First, over the mountain-tops she peeps on the sly,

and her eyes are shy, and she laughs softly.

From afar she beckons with one hand;

and her bracelets shine and her beads glitter;

softly she calls

We paused to look at what Sarel Raubenheimer s gang had done to the fort of Harding and Reyneke. It was the biggest of the structures, made of massive logs, square, almost like a log-cabin, though the walls were not insulated and from certain angles you could see right in. The new occupants — again Standard Sevens — were insulating it with grass, and Lukas teased that they were copying our idea. Harding and Reyneke s fort looked good, quite perfect, though I did not like the location, preferring ours, removed, on the outskirts of the village.

By the time everyone was gathered on First Rugby Field the clouds had stacked into black masses and we ran the hill from the river, up past the orchards. Looking back you could see the rain waving in dramatic grey blankets down the mountains. Winds rushed in from nowhere, lifting dust and winters leaves into flurries. I called for the others to look at the coming rain and as we ran they laughed as I continued:

The big-game chase from the plains,

they dam up on the hilltop

they flare their nostrils

and they swallow the wind

and they stoop, to see her delicate prints on the sand

The small-folk deep beneath the ground hear the swish of her feet

and they crawl closer and sing softly:

Our sister! Our sister! You came! You came!

And I threw my arms into the air as though for a dance. I was about to continue when Buys called from behind:

‘De Man. Stop looking for attention and get a move on.’

We ran, my neck ablaze, my hands tightened into fists, up the hill. I did not look back. We reached the school just as the first heavy drops puttered down on the corrugated iron roof. From the veranda in the arches, we watched it come down, smelling the drops in the dust. Rain, hard, thunderous afternoon showers. Lukas and Dominic stood beside me. Lukas wished the deluge could be falling in the Eastern Cape. Lightning zig-zagged over V Forest — we covered our ears — and thunder rolled down the valley. In an animated voice, gesturing with my hands:

She informs the winds of the dance

and she invites them because the yard is wide and the wedding huge . . .

I stopped. From the corner of my eye I’d seen Buys approach to pass behind us. I dropped my arms.

‘De Man . . .’ he said, coming to a standstill. I turned around.

‘Ja, Meneer Buys?’

‘When are you going to live up to your name?’ he asks in Afrikaans.

He stood shaking his head, the huge Adam’s apple bobbing, his gaze was obliterating mine. I grasped at once what he meant and could kick myself for the moment of lapsed vigilance. His eyes remained on me. How was I to respond? It was not a question. Nor did I hear it as a statement. This was his fist in my face, disguised as eight words. He shook his head again and blew through his lips, from the movement of the Adam’s apple it seemed he wanted to add more. Instead he walked off, still shaking his head. I turned back to face the rain.

‘Ignore the bastard,’ Dominic said.

‘Sticks and stones . . .’ said Lukas.

We watched as the enormous drops burst against the quads paving. I mulled over Lukas’s balmy words. It was the same refrain

Niklaas Bruin had always cried at us when we were teasing him. I wanted to say to Lukas that he was wrong — him and Bruin — that I preferred, infinitely, sticks and stones. But I shut up, resentment at Buys blurring my vision. I had heard my name said into abstraction, into an idea separate from me, existing now for ever in the distance behind me, moving away, beyond my grasp, down the veranda on Buys’s lips. I thought of him going now to his wife. In their bedroom. Kissing her.

After a few minutes, Dominic said he was going to practise in the conservatoire. He left, saying we’d meet at choir. Lukas asked whether I wanted to go with him to the dairy. He and Mr Walshe were expecting an old and very ill cow to calve any day. I did want to see the cow calve, badly, but I had no further inclination to speak — something I would be bound to do if I accompanied him to the dairy. I said no, I had Latin and Afrikaans homework to finish. Lukas left to fetch his raincoat and I lingered for a while on the veranda. Cassandra’s foal it was exciting seeing birth, must also see calf, Dr Taylor, will not think of it, will be, he loves me, in my hands, fuck you Buys, fuck you, die, lightning strike you, turn to salt pillar or black charred acacia in Mkuzi after storm water and red mud and black tree so sad so scared, Bok on Vonk, Bokkie’s wig Aunt Lena’s on the twig, no, stop, kill you — and instead watched the rain dam up on the grass in front of the arch against which I was leaning.

Caught by the paw in the wire of a poacher’s snare, the sow’s struggle was written with deep furrows into the earth, tufts of wiry hair clinging from branches and blood spurted against yellow stalks metres around. Bok and Jonas found her there in the footpath, her body still warm, two piglets trying to suckle from the dusty teats of their mother’s carcass. And Jonas pointed to her front paw: blood was congealed only where the wire had cut into her flesh. High above the cut, closer to the sow’s thigh, the skin itself hung in loose slithers with strips of meat showing through in red. This was where she had tried to chew off her own leg.

Bokkie mixed powdered milk with sterilised water and I fed the piglets from a baby’s bottle. I named them for Jonas’s wife and daughter: Nkosasaan and Nkosi.

After three days the little tummies began heaving and once the diarrhoea began Bokkie coaxed me into keeping the little hogs in a box outside the kitchen. On the morning of the fifth day, when I arrived as usual to give them the bottle, I found the little bodies stiff, the grey skins covered in blotches of dried green excrement.

We buried them on one side of the rockery and Bokkie helped erect a cross made of two bamboo cylinders tied together with a strip from her kitchen rags.

From up there I could watch it come down past the empty auditorium windows. Aloe leaves became bowls, sent waterfalls into the next, in terraces, farther down and down to below window level at the plants’ bases, obscured from view. The rain enclosed the valley in a white haze from halfway down the orchards. If one didn’t know, one could not guess the existence of either the river, its poplars, the hills or V Forest. The school was wrapped in veils of water.

There was no one else there. Ever. There I could always be alone. Doesn’t anyone else in this stupid school read? We were not allowed around the dormitories during the day, yet for some reason my presence up in the library was never questioned. When someone walked by and saw me, I supposed they assumed the books justification enough. I could not imagine being banished from the library. As public a thoroughfare as it was, the fact that no one else used it madeit my own. From March there had been, in addition to the encyclopaedias, another reason for being up there: if he walked through we may exchange a few words or just a quick smile or a wink. I no longer thought of him as Mr Cilliers. He was just him. Or, without ever saying it aloud: Jacques.

Lightning flashed, struck somewhere down the valley with a whip-crack. Thunder. As if on cue, the drops beating on the roof became deafening. I could watch it for hours, but knew that insufficient reason or excuse to be up there. I turned and stood on a chair. Took down C from the line of red leather-bound encyclopaedias. The previous year, after the July holiday with Dr Taylor, I decided to read the entire twenty-five volumes. A—Z. The project was taking longer than I’d thought. I opened at the pressed orange leaf. Soon I may skip past C and just begin on D. Couldn’t sit on C for the rest of the year. Sniffed at the dry parchment. My bitten fingernails were encrusted with the brown and yellow of river clay:
Caledonia, name applied by the ancient Romans to upper Britain . . .
Wonder how the Romans knew about Britain? Must remember to look it up. I skipped a long section in italics. Italics, so I had come to understand, more often than not contained information of such detail it bored me 
. . . In poetic and rhetorical usage the name is a synonym for Scotland.
That’s interesting. Why on earth not keep it Caledonia; that’s so much more fun to say than the short — Scotland — which is nothing more than a muffled dog’s bark. The name rolled around in my mouth. I savoured the different accents and possibilities: Ca-le-do-ni-a; Ca-le-donia; Caledo-nia. All endlessly better than what it’s called now.

Calendar: System of measuring time for the needs of civil life, by dividing time into days, weeks, months, and years. Calendar divisions are based on the movements of the earth (see EASIH: Motion) and the regular appearances of the sun and moon.
I skip a section . . .
Calendars, Ancient: The ancient Babylonians had a luni-solar calendar of twelve lunar months of thirty days each, and they added extra months when necessary to keep the calendar in line with the seasons of the year.
Again I skipped what seemed boring . . .
The Roman calendar . . . About 7th Century
BC had ten months with 304 days in a year that began with March.
Began with March! Crazy . . . skip . . .
Calendar, Gregorian. The Gregorian calendar, or New Style calendar, was slowly adopted throughout Europe. It is used today throughout most of the Western world and Asia . . . The British adopted I January as the day when a new year begins. The Soviet Union adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918. . . The Gregorian calendar is also called the Christian calendar because it uses the birth of Jesus Christ as a starting date. Although the birth of Christ was originally given as 25 December, I BC, modern scholars now place it about 4 BC.
Crazy . . . So, Christmas is not Christmas by a long shot. I must remember to tell Ma’am, though I’m sure she already knows.
The Jewish calendar: The starting point of Hebrew chronology is the year 3161 BC, the estimated date of the creation of the world described in the Old Testament.
I wonder if Mervyn knows? I had no idea the Jews have their own calendar. Ridiculous. Who’s stupid enough to say the world’s only about six thousand years old? As stupid as saying the world was created in six days. Forgive me, sweet Jesus, Father, but it does seem unlikely and I think it may be meant sort of symbolically, even though all the ministers and the teachers and Bok and Bokkie say it is true literally. Skip . . .
Islamic calendar . . . In the Middle East the Islamic calendar is used extensively. It has a starting date of 16 July, AD 622, the day after the Hegira . . .
Skip . . .
For information on the Aztec calendar and the Mayan calendar, see aztec and maya. See also calendar reform; church calendar.
So, who decides what’s what if everyone has their own years, dates, times? About to skip on to Calendar Reform, I heard him, over the racket on the roof, clear his throat. I looked up from the book. Found his smile.

‘It’s rather wet, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said, my spirits lifting. ‘Lovely the rain, don’t you think?’

‘In the mood for some starfishing?’ He asked, and I laughed. Nodded. He said nothing more, only inclined his head down the passage. He showed me with his fingers to wait ten minutes before following.

I could not take in another word. We had done it only once during the day, and that was on tour. Here I’d never seen the inside of his room in daylight. Choir was half an hour away. We’d have to hurry. God.

Sitting, encyclopaedia open on my knees, I recreated pictures of him as he was the afternoon in the hotel. We were off from concerts for two days. Dominic — who always had to be placed in host families with a piano — remained in Oudtshoorn to use the free time for practice. ‘Come with us, Webster,’ he invited Dom more than once, ‘we re going to a magical place.’ And Dominic, as tempted as he was, said he had to stay. It was the year he sat his Grade Eight piano exams, and he wanted to do well.

The night before we had left Dominic told me he was sure Cilliers was interested in boys.

‘No, Dom, I don’t think so.’

‘Well, what are you going to do if he comes on to you?’

‘What would you do?’

‘I’ve told you and you called me a pig!’ We laughed and we kissed and I swore I’d tell him if Cilliers tried anything, knowing I wouldn’t.

We drove to the West Coast in an Audi borrowed from our host family. He said he was taking me to a place he had not been himself, though friends said it was beautiful and very quiet. As we approached the building we were going to stay in I thought he must be mistaken: it bore no resemblance to my idea of a hotel. It was nothing like the Elangeni, the Blue Waters or Malibu that towered over the ocean and where Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe stayed on their annual Durban vacations. The Paternoster, forlorn in the
fynbos
above a flat sea, looked more like a dilapidated and discarded two-storey house that had only been renamed hotel but not revamped to resemble one. There were no other cars. Were we to be the only patrons? I tried to hide my disappointment at the dull building without gardens, no Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs in the tiny gravel parking lot, no fountains, no lifts, no porters running to fetch luggage. I had pictured tall buildings, modern glass windows that slid rather than folded open, Cape Malaywaiters in black waistcoats carrying cool drinks on silver trays, a huge room high above the ocean with room service and fresh white towels in the bathroom every day. I said it was beautiful — and wonderful that we were so close to the beach. It could be that he read my face, for he smiled and said it was very European and
quaint.
The word, in and of itself, made me warm to the place. It will still be quaint, I told myself, even if it doesn’t look very grand.