Embrace (38 page)

Grade Two. Knew I would pass with flying colours. No B or C would ever again adorn my school report. Bs and Cs were the property of my sisters. School in Matubatuba had become less boring as time passed; I could read aloud without a stutter; Juffrou Goosen made me class captain; I was always asked to wipe the blackboard; I was the teacher’s pet. And something else: by virtue of the separation into Afrikaans and English streams, I was becoming more friendly with Afrikaans boys. I was making other friends and Sam Pierce, while we still played after school, was moving to the margins of my life. Instead I spent breaks with Gysbert Mentz, Johan Richter and Marie Smith, who pronounced her surname with a silent h.

With both parents away at the funeral and only Mumdeman crossing the estuary for supervision, the long-awaited opportunity to take Camelot onto the beach now presented itself. Through threats to and trade-offs with Lena and through pleading and sulking with Bernice, I got both my sisters to accompany me. From behind the seat of Bok’s Land Rover we took a long rope to tie to Camelot’s halter. Along back roads behind the camp and caravan park, we led the excited horse through the bush, up through the dune pines and down to the beach. Simba ran ahead, spinning in circles, clearly aware that something was up. The long rope was for the girls to hold onto in case Camelot threw me and tried to run away. My faith vacillated between a confident ability to stay on the horse’s back by clinging to his mane and a subconscious certainty of being thrown; the latterlargely informing my insistence to take him to the beach where I could not get hurt when — rather than if — landing on the soft sand. We led Camelot to North Beach where out of season there were rarely people on the long white stretches. At the estuary mouth we could hear the hum of the dredger pumping sand. While Lena held onto the halter and the rope, Bernice gave me a hand up. I told Lena to let go of the halter and hold only the rope. The moment she let go, Camelot’s hind quarters shot up and I slid down his flank, landing on my side in the sand.

‘That’s it!’ Bernice commanded. ‘Your little experiment has failed and were taking this animal back to the paddock.’

‘No!’ Lena snapped. ‘First give me a chance. Karl is too much of a sissy. Why did you jump off? You’re meant to hold on, sod, even if he bucks. Coward!’

I flew into a rage, screaming at Lena who was still holding the rope: ‘Camelot is mine! You’re not getting onto him before I’ve ridden him. Willy Hancox gave him to me, not to you!’ I wept and flung myself onto the sand, begging Bernice not to allow Lena onto Camelot’s back. Lena said I was a cry-baby and she hated me and Bernice threatened to tell Mumdeman unless we stopped our fighting. Eventually Lena gave up and Bernice said I could have one more try but if I was thrown that was
it,
we had to get the horse off the protected beach. She again gave me a hand up but before I was even on Camelot’s back, he bucked and I landed — face first in the sand — with the girls screaming. When I looked up Camelot was cantering away from the dunes to the sea. Bernice was running after him and Lena, clinging to the rope, was being dragged on her stomach four metres behind the horse with Simba sprinting and barking by her side. Camelot, on the canter, kicked and bucked a few times, then — with Lena still clasping to the rope — took off on a full gallop when he reached the wet sand. He was moving at an incredible speed. I was up on my feet.

‘Let go, Lena, let go!’ Bernice howled, running. I followed. Lenaclung as the horse galloped, then swerved landward, dragging her towards the road behind the dunes. Simba barked, turned, looked back at us, then again followed Lena.

‘Let go, the rope, Lena!’ I screamed.

Ahead of me, Bernice was also screaming. ‘Let go, Lena, please, please, he’s going to kill you!’

Camelot was heading straight for the road. Still Lena held, bouncing as she hit the gravel. Suddenly a truck came around a corner. Bernice screamed Lena’s name and both of us came to a halt, waiting for the truck to strike the horse. Camelot swerved and the truck, in a cloud of dust, came to a halt. The horse stood still, ears erect, facing the vehicle. Lena, nine years old and as if nothing had happened, stood up, walked up to Camelot and took him by the bridle and started leading him back to us. The driver got out and shook his fist at us. Bernice and I ran to Lena. She was bleeding down the side of her arms and from her knees. Her shorts were ripped and threadbare. Simba tried to lick the blood from her legs.

We lied to Mumdeman and said Lena — covered in red mercurochrome — had fallen while running along the jetty. But then a guard came to say that someone on the dredger had seen a horse dragging a little boy along the beach and they were wondering whether I was all right? So, Mumdeman caught us out. Bernice cracked and said it was I who had insisted and begged and threatened. Bernice and I each got a hiding — though Mumdeman couldn’t hit hard and we barely cried. Mumdeman said that while we might lie to the living, we should remember that Dademan could see us from heaven and that he must be heart-broken to know that I — his favourite grandson, to whom he had left the cines and slides and the priceless trophies — had not only taken a horse onto a beach in a nature reserve and endangered my sisters’ lives, but, moreover, that I had been able to lie to Mumdeman, the only woman Dademan had ever loved before he was so brutally snatched from us by the jaws of death.
That
she could scarcely believe. ‘The recklessness of my grandchildren! Where do you come from? Girls, how could you, older and responsible, listen to a boy of seven when you are almost adults? And, Karl, how is it you go from sitting quietly reading your books to being like Satan’s right-hand man? And you, Lena? Meant to be a girl. Why can’t you two behave like Stephanie and James? Examples of virtue, those two grandchildren of mine. But you three, given half the chance, would turn into barbarians.’

We had to do homework. We were not allowed to listen to the radio serials and I was not allowed to listen to records for two days. Ouma forced all three of us to learn Psalm 100 so that we could say it aloud to ourselves whenever temptation for recklessness or lying threatened to overwhelm us.

And Bernice said: ‘You see, accidents come in threes: first I almost died of the poison; then I almost went over Karl’s head with the Land Rover; and now Lena was almost killed by Camelot.’ Lena said she thought Bernice had said it was death that came in threes, not accidents. Eh-eh, Bernice said, accidents and deaths. Three accidents, completed. Two deaths, one to go. All we could do was wait...

The Malawi tour would let me make memories of myself, for the first time, being physically beyond the borders of the country.

Direct recollection — from Lena and the turtle-dove — comes from after our family’s arrival in South Africa. With racking strain I try to reach further, deeper, grasping at recall from before two and a half. May there exist something, coded in the most obscure folds of memory — a single moment of smell, sight, sound, taste, feeling, instinct —
experienced
and
recalled,
that might by force of will be salvaged and translated from those first two years in East Africa to now or to the months before Malawi? Might I be witness to myself lying in awicker cot on the green banks of the Ruvu? The sight of mobiles drifting from the canopy’s slats; Bok or Bokkie’s face smiling down on me where I gurgle in pleasant recognition prior to and outside of language? Sucking Bokkie s aureole, kneading her filled white breast with tiny pink fists? The first waddling steps on the Mbuyu lawn at ten months? Taking the fall on the Kenia ship that I am told has left the scar on the forehead? But, try as I may, before two and a half there is nothing of which I am or was even then certain: for all I knew I was an orphan adopted in Nairobi, or, in truth of Lena’s jest, picked up in a plastic bag from a park bench when they arrived in Durban harbour after the escape. Still, there were the photographs, slides, stories, cines, sagas that had been shown, told, retold, rephrased, dialogued, contested, restated in varied forms. Those meant it was true: it all happened, somehow in some form determined as it may even by what had been sliced off the borders of Kodachrome and flickering celluloid. Bokkie pregnant; Lena and Bernice holding me on the farm’s stoep at two weeks with Mount Meru behind us; godparents, Aunt Siobhain and Uncle Michael, holding me in a white lace dress at my christening, Oljorro’s Dutch Reformed church behind them; the girls and me on Bok and Bokkie s laps in front of the blue Mbuyu house, Mount Meru always in the distance. Those memories did not exist from conscious experience; only on paper and from stories. They — and the fact that increasingly I saw my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, facing back at me from mirrors — attested that I was indeed their child; not John Wayne’s son born from a secret liaison with Bokkie while he was there filming Hatari; not an orphan or a European prince abducted at birth or washed onto the white beaches of Mombasa. Not anyone’s but theirs. Even if all the stories of the entire family were an intricate landscape of lies, a network of deception designed to protect me from my true genealogy, could so many cines, slides and photographs be fakes? I had decided — trying for chronology and narrative that moved in one direction — that Lena’s fifth birthday in Mkuzi was indeed the first. From there, even as Iselect and border what to tell, everything follows. Occasionally, perhaps from a temptation to project grandiose genius, I contemplate the fabrication of earlier more dramatic memory: the charge of an enraged elephant cow at me and my sisters; being held on John Waynes hip; being bathed by Rajabu the male servant who looked after me. But, for now, for here, I resist. The truth is that I feel certain, indeed, of my ability to distinguish what is photograph, relayed and retold family story, cine, from what has been remembered from personal experience rather than other representations.

In the weeks after the death wish in sick-bay, in hours when Dominic was in the conservatoire and I not out riding with Lukas, I returned to the library, though now without the despondency that had driven me there after the holiday with Dr Taylor. Simultaneously maintaining the slow progress through the encyclopaedias, there came a wide reconnaissance of the other shelves.
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
by Alexandre Dumas.
Gone With the Wind,
by Margaret Mitchell, which at 1100 pages was too thick for the short time before the tour, but a book and a film I’d heard so much about from Aunt Siobhain.

Only days before we left for Malawi I discovered a myriad of books and an atlas in which Tanzania was still called Tanganyika and Malawi, Nyassaland. The map showed that the land of my birth was connected to the country we would tour by a huge expanse of water named Lake Nyassa. I deduced that Nyassaland’s change to Malawi had something to do with the blacks taking over — just as Tanganyika became Tanzania after uniting with Zanzibar and the black government came to power and we lost our land. While the name Tanzania appealed to my sense of sound and it furthermore seemed to make logical sense to include a z of Zanzibar that rolled so beautifully from the tongue, Nyassaland sounded far more exotic than Malawi; Lake Nyassa more ancient, expansive, expressive, than the current bland Lake Malawi. I found copies of two books by Livingstone, the firstwhite man to see the lake. I860. Exactly a century before Lena was born. There was no time to read the entire thing, but from skimming I got an idea of how the Yao tribe near Lake Nyassa caught members of — was it the Mangosa? — and sold them to Arab slave traders who in turn sold them to merchants from America. How thousands of slaves died on the ships and were cast overboard in the Atlantic en route to Virginia, Mississippi and Georgia.

In the far north of Malawi, across the lake, the map read: ‘Livingstone Mountains of Tanganyika’. One book contained pencil sketches of a Zanzibar slave market, as well as of an Arab slave dhow with three layers of decks where little black figures huddled in their hundreds; another an actual drawing of a slave caravan by David Livingstone. In the sketch, all the people were tied together by chains as they marched through the veld; some of the bigger men have poles tied around their necks like oxen spanned between yokes and on the side of the columns other black people carrying guns. I assumed them to be the traders, or the traders’ sentries. It looked ghastly and I could not believe that a system such as slavery, so brutal, so inhuman, could have existed. On another sketch, by an unnamed artist, a slave dhow is sailing across Lake Nyassa with both the large fore and smaller aft sails taut in the wind, huge waves crashing up the sides of the boat. Waves that size, on a lake, I thought, impossible. There was a photograph taken of the missionaries, all dressed in white, sitting with their feet on leopard skins after they had come out from Scotland to spread the Word of God to the heathen. There were some wonderful sketches by a man named Thomas Baines, whose name popped up everywhere. Beautiful sketches — or were they, I wondered, perhaps paintings reproduced as sketches — Baines had done of the rapid channels at Kebrabasa, which, the book said was where today the Kabora Basa Dam stood. Baines, I saw when my eye caught his name again while skimming a text, had been Livingstone’s official artist and had accompanied the great discoverer. I envied Baines, imagined how it must have been for him to be both artist andadventurer. That was what I wanted to be! Not merely an artist, also an adventurer. Someone like John Ross who at fourteen years of age travelled eight hundred miles through the untamed bush from Port Natal to Delagoa Bay and back to bring medical supplies from the Portuguese to the English. Only a year older than me and eight hundred miles through the bush! No wonder King Chaka adored him. I wished to know more about John Ross, how he had come to Port Natal, where he had come from, what he had thought as he hacked his way to Delagoa Bay: was there a chance he too had faced black mambas and leopards, had dreamt of painting, or writing, being a poet or a playwright? And what did they speak of, him and Chaka, when they were alone in the king’s royal hut?