Embrace (21 page)

He took the suitcase from the back seat and we walked into the small foyer. The receptionist was a young Afrikaans woman who welcomed us with a burr — like the people from the Swartland — in her voice. He said I was his son and that we’d be staying two nights.

‘Oudtshoorn number plates, I see. I have family there.’ She smiled.

‘Pietermaritzburg,’ he answered. ‘This is a friend’s car,’ nodding his head.

‘Long way you’ve driven, hey! You must be exhausted!’ Heartiness glowed on her face.

He smiled and nodded, pursing his lips in agreement.

‘Good that you came today,’ she said. ‘Lots of space because it’s middle of the week. You’re probably going to be alone unless some lost tourist shows up. And were expecting crayfish from the boats.’

‘Good, good, good,’ he answered and winked at me.

‘Your first visit to Paternoster?’

‘To the Cape, for him,’ he said, gesturing to me. ‘His first time in die kolonie.’

I had of course been in the Cape the previous year, though clearly this was not the time or place to remind him.

The receptionist chuckled: ‘Have you, Menere, had Cape Crays? Nothing like Cape Crays I tell you.’

‘No, no. We haven’t have we . . . son?’

I shook my head, not knowing how to respond.

‘Single or double, Menere?’

‘Double’s fine, your nicest room, please,’ he said and roughed my hair. ‘If he kicks I’ll let him sleep on the floor.’

I grinned at her. She asked whether she couldn’t send up a klong with an extra mattress just for in case: ‘The carpets are threadbare and the nights are cold! Be warned!’

‘What do you say, Karl?’ he smiled at me. ‘Would you like a mattress, or are you going to lie still?’

‘I’ll lie still . . .’ I said, holding his smile.

He looked at her and said no, really, it wasn’t necessary to send up a mattress. She handed him our room key and suggested we tell her in advance if we wanted crayfish for dinner. With the place as quiet as it was, there were no plans for dinner and they’d really only be cooking for us. I took the suitcase and we started up the stairs. She called after us: ‘You must take a drive or a walk to Tietiesbaai. This way,’ and she pointed over her shoulder, ‘there’s a dust track down the coast. Not flower time, but still stunning.’

He gave me the key. Upon reaching our room he nodded for me to go ahead. I unlocked the door, glanced up at him. The place was dark and a hint of mould hung in the air. From the door he still watched me as my hand glided along the wall feeling for the light switch. A thick blue carpet covered most of the wooden floor. A four-poster double bed stood with its foot-end towards the windows, which were hidden by heavy velvet curtains with a golden sheen. The bed’s cover was a patchwork in different patterns and hues of blue. On the one bedside table a radio-alarm clock flashed electronic time and above a huge antique dressing table hung an oval mirror, embossed in gold leaf. I turned back to the door. He inclined his head, indicating he wanted me to go into the bathroom. Had he indeed guessed my initial scepticism? Was he letting me look it over to tell him it was to my liking? The washbasin had small bottles of shampoo and neatly packaged bars of soap. On wooden racks above the white enamel bath and toilet were stacks of neatly folded white towels.

‘Does it please you, sir? May I come in, sir?’ he asked from the door.

I laughed and said: ‘Of course you may, Klong.’

The door closed behind him. He smiled as he passed me. He laid the suitcase on the bed, sat down beside it, and looked up at me. I grinned and looked away, my eyes settling on the drapes.

‘As wide as you want them.’

I crossed to the curtains and almost tugged them off their rails. Below me, only a hundred metres away, was a beach whiter and an ocean bluer than I’d ever seen. To one side on the dunes stood a cluster of small white houses where coloured children were playing soccer in a split-pole enclosure. On the shore a boy was fishing with a man a short distance behind him. I unfastened the latches of both windows and smelt the sea as the fresh air streamed into the room, rustling the lace curtains. I felt him behind me; smelt his body, the faint scent of sweat from the hot car. No aftershave. I kept gazing at the ocean and the white beach, deserted except for the boy fishing and the man watching. I felt his lips in my neck and his body push against mine. His arms draped across my shoulders and he kissed my neck, then my cheeks. I felt for his thigh, and ran my hand along his stomach and down, clutching the fabric of his jeans where it was hard against my lower back. He reached around my shoulder and unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my jeans and unzipped my fly, pushed his hand into my underpants and gently squeezed my stiff penis in his palm. I felt his chin resting on my head. The boy’s fishing rod was bending as if he’d caught something. We stood, quiet, and neither of us moved. I wanted it never to change, wished that we could stay like that in the window for ever, would never have to leave that place. The man had moved closer to the boy with the rod, seemed to be talking to him while he tried to reel in the fish.

‘I want to tell you to use my name, but I’m concerned someone may overhear,’ he broke the silence, keeping his chin on my head, ‘here or in choir.’ For a while he was quiet, then he said; ‘Just now, in the lobby, I was paranoid that you might call me Meneer.’ He laughed, his stomach moving against my back.

Facing the receptionist, when he asked me about the mattress, I had thought fleetingly of calling him Pappa or Pa, but couldn’t get the word over my lips. My father was Bok and had never been Dad to me except in the letters I wrote home on Saturdays. And that merely formality in a letter so I didn’t have to explain to teacher-on-duty that Bok’s my father and Bokkie my mother. And writing differed from speaking. In writing I could say almost anything; talking, there were a myriad things I could not even think of uttering. Not Father, Pa, Pappa, Pappie or anything else. Just plain Bok, when I talked to him.

‘Do you want to use my name?’

I knew his name. But I could not get my mind around calling him that. Not to his face. Amongst ourselves in choir we sometimes used it playfully or sarcastically. Dominic might whisper: ‘Looks like
Jacques is
in one of his moods. Sopranos beware.’ Or: ‘Something’s eating Jacques . . . Having his periods, perhaps?’ It was like Jean Jacques of
Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood,
which we were doing with Ma’am in History. The other teacher’s name that was a source of playful sarcasm was the Hildegaard of Miss Marabou. Marabou’s name lent itself beautifully to histrionic flair: ‘Hildegaard approaching!’ one of us would whisper and dash for our desk when the hateful woman patrolled the stoep supervising prep or letter-writing. Or, hidden in the branches of the rondavel oak when we first got to the school: ‘Hildegaard entering the line of fire!’ Then pelting her with acorns from our hide-out, suppressing our giggles as she searched around her, then up into the branches, unable to see us clinging like tree frogs flattened to the enormous branches. Or, when as juniors she chose to sit with us at lunch, Dominic, speaking as if in serious conversation with me, just loud enough for her to hear: ‘Quitite tithe ugogloeliesoostit soospopecociesoos, tithisoos Hiloeldidgogaardid, didoneetit you tithineekyk?’ And she’d glare, ready to snap, but not sure what handle she had on him. As soon as she took another mouthful of food, I’d say: ‘Tithisoos soospopecociesoos hasoos eyesoos loelikyke a bokloelacockyk mimamimboka.’ And when she’d finished chewing she’d set her mouth in disdain and say: ‘You two may think yourselves cute now, but wait till you grow up. Just you wait. I promise you. When you grow up, you’ll be outcasts.’

‘I don’t mind calling you Sir,’ I said.

‘But when were alone it sounds completely absurd.’

‘I can call you . . . by your name when were alone, if you want. And Sir in front of the other boys. I won’t get it wrong.’

The boy was up to his calves in the water. Behind him the man gestured angrily, instructing him on how to bring in the fish.

‘Can you manage
Pa
or something while were here?’

A chuckle escaped from my lips. I said: ‘I just won’t say anything, I won’t call you anything. I can’t call you
Pa — that
sounds absurd.’ ‘But if you don’t call me Pa you’ll sound insubordinate, or disrespectful. You can’t just say: yes, no. These people are nosy as all hell. They aren’t accustomed to having strangers around.’

‘I’ll call you
Pa
here . . .
sir
at school, and your name when were alone.’

‘Say it.’

‘What?’

‘My name.’

I sighed. ‘I can’t just say your name out of the blue. It will have to be in a sentence or something.’

‘Say it in a sentence then.’

‘I can’t,’ I giggled. For a moment it seemed he would let it go. ‘Come on, Karl, say my name.’ I glanced again at the boy battling the fish, then turned around in his arms and brought my lips to his mouth, letting them rest there, feeling his stubble, again smelling his sweat as we looked each other in the eyes.

‘I love you, Jacques,’ I whispered against his lips. My voice sounded hoarse and I wanted to cry; not from sadness, but from embarrassment and bliss. I dropped my forehead to his chest.

The hidden grain, the layers and rings and twists beneath the bark normally obscured in the deepest recesses of the wood, had been brought to the surface as if burnished till, to us, they looked like tambotie shined with high-gloss furniture polish. Leaning backwards as though they were to sit down on their haunches, the rhino rocked to and fro against the severed trunks, the rough hide of their hindquarters having worn off long ago the splinters and sharp edges of the tree’s breakage. With varying degrees of ardour, they swayed, their heads turned up, horns almost slanted backwards; then turning around, rubbing another side or lifting a leg to rub a thigh or a portion of the belly. Each session made the tip of the stump first smoother, eventually shinier, leaving it after years as resplendent as any piece crafted at a carpenter’s hand.

I recall at least three rubbing stumps in the Mkuzi veld, all near mud-pans where water only temporarily gathered before it evaporated or was slurped away by the earth’s thirst. In Umfolozi I saw a stump once only. It was the time Bok took Tommie Bedford and some other tourists for photographs. Tommie Bedford was the Springbok rugby captain at the time. It was a thrill to meet him and have our photographs taken with him and his girlfriend who had blond hair down to the small of her back. Bok went out of his way to make select trips memorable, guiding visitors to outlying locations most tourists rarely entered; taking them also to places without the reserve like Dingaan’s kraal and Isandlwana, to the site of England’s most bloody battle against the Zulus. Tommie Bedfords girlfriend wanted to buy beadwork so Bok took them to kraals where Zulu women threaded bracelets, trinkets and necklaces of bright, shiny beads.

People like the Bedfords were called VIPs, an abbreviation whose significance I knew a while before I understood its literal meaning and could fill in the words. When Bok left the Parks Board to become a white hunter with Southern Safaris he frequently took VIPs — rich Americans and Europeans — to hunt for trophies in Botswana and Rhodesia. One of the most famous was the astronaut Wally Schirra, who went into space before Apollo. Bok told us of how he and Wally Schirra were sitting around the camp fire late one night when Schirra turned to him and said: ‘Ralph, you are the first man I’ve met who has not asked me how it was to walk in space.’

‘I know,’ Bok says he answered. ‘Those things don’t matter in the bush.’ Only then did they talk about what it had been like and Wally Schirra said that it was there in outer space that he realised the minuteness of human beings within the infinite scheme and timelessness of the universe.

In our sitting room we had an autographed photograph he later sent Bok. The picture was taken while the spacecraft had been in orbit. On it one could see the whole of Africa and parts of Europe, the continents surrounded by blue oceans and smears of white that must have been clouds. Bernice did a project on planets and took the photograph to Kuswag to show her class. Her teacher said the picture with its signature was extremely valuable and would accrue further in years to come. With the whole earth already mapped, explored and understood, space, Bernice told us afterwards, was man’s new frontier and the astronauts its courageous reconnoitrers.

It was cold and windy outside, so he went back upstairs to fetch our jerseys. How unusual to wear a jersey on the beach, I thought, waiting for him out there in the car. In Zululand and Natal you take off your clothes and in the Cape you put more on.

We drove south along the narrow road pointed out by the receptionist. Everything along the way looked different from the Indian Ocean coast. Only fynbos, grass, very few trees. And dryer in a dull green and cinnamon-coloured sort of way, not green and colourfullike around St Lucia or Toti. Inland from the coast was veld, unlike Natal where the end of the beach was the beginning of the dizzyingly green bush. The plants at Paternoster were different: small and spindly, succulents, stringy creepers that clutched the surface of the sandy soil. It is all, he said, the function of the winds, the cold Agulhus tide and the less moist climate. Out of the car, the differences became even more stark: here we walked in powder-fine white sand, not the little yellow grains I knew. Beaches with barely any waves were broken by bays between black boulders where huge waves rushed, spurting froth skyward and groaning as they churned and drew back, then came flinging themselves once more against the rocks. The further we walked the rougher the sea became and the waves roared down on the beach, ‘like porcupines storming with their quills erect,’ I said. He frowned and I showed him how the wind scooped the tips off breaking waves making them look like quills, bending in a forward rush. I could not recall the poem — Opperman perhaps — from which I had filched the image. I left it, allowing him to think it my own.