Embrace (63 page)

If they were to stay another few weeks, they’d have food aplenty. Stealing, thieving from the orchard. And the school would think the broken branches and half-eaten apples, plums and pears the result of some of us boys getting up to mischief.

‘I said my teacher Ma’am Sanders’s son was killed.’ Again, nothing but the river, the crickets, the frogs. Then Uncle Klaas muttered something to the Silent One, who responded in barely a whisper. At last Uncle Klaas took a deep drag from the zol, held it in his lungs while I waited for an answer that might come once he’d exhaled. But again he said nothing to me. Grumbled at the Silent One in a language I didn’t know. The mad gene, I told myself; at work again. I did not understand any of the words that occasionally passed between them, and Uncle Klaas offered no translation: theirs was a secret language, it could have been from any part of the world or it may not have been a language at all. Gibberish or another type of Gogga, for my gratification and entertainment. Frequently I had felt that I would have liked to speak to the Silent One, through him find out more about my uncle. And to have asked where he came from, where he grew up, how he met Uncle Klaas. But there seemed to be no will on the part of this old black man to converse with me. If Uncle Klaas was to be believed, the Silent One spoke neither Afrikaans nor English. When I asked Unde Klaas the man’s name and what language he Spoke, I was told to ask him myself.

‘What is your name?’ I asked, not even getting him to look me in the eye. ‘Me . . . Karl,’ I said, and you, Jane, almost, but of course didn’t. ‘What language do you speak?’ Again he didn’t keep his eyes on me for more than a moment. ‘Hey, what language do you speak?’ He again ignored me, or pretended not to hear. ‘How,’ I hissed at Uncle Klaas, ‘can I ask him anything when he doesn’t understand a word I say? He doesn’t even know I’m speaking to him or about him. Is he deaf?’

‘He can hear you,’ Uncle Klaas said. Sensing that my great-uncle was taking a turn towards the incorrigible aloofness sometimesbrought on ,by the dagga, trying to make me guess what he meant, I changed the topic. He and I spoke for a while about
The Picture
of
Dorian Gray.
A smile played around his eyes and the stringy lips. He seemed delighted at what I was reading, seemed to forgive my earlier engagement with the doings of Scarlett and Rhett. Now I asked him please to translate what had happened to Ma’ams son for the Silent One. Surely, this was news important enough to justify some form of dialogue? Trialogue? Still he ignored me, instead taking another drag from the zol that had been passed back to him by the black hand. With a languid movement of his arm, he holds out the zol to me even before he exhales.

I take it from the grubby claw extending towards me.

‘Suck softly and not too deep, as though you’re breathing.’ He spoke, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils, from his beard, an old flightless dragon. ‘Then hold it in your lungs.’ Doubtful of what I was about to do — aware of crossing an enormous frontier from where there may be no return — he saw the hesitation. ‘Gendy and slowly,’ he said, ‘then you won’t cough.’The wet brown paper was against my lips — cool to the touch, their spit — and I shuddered. My mouth closed around the damp and I dragged feebly, watched the tip turn red, saw the ash grow, felt heat beneath my fingers, breathed in slow and deep like at an extended pause preparing for a long high “note, and then, starting to panic at the burn in my chest, let the , smoke rush from my lungs, watched in relief through teary eyes as it came from my mouth in a clear white jet. I waited for the hallucinations I had heard and read and seen so much of in the films that warned of the dangers of drug use.

‘It’s doing nothing,’ I said. ‘It s just like a cigarette.’

1 fSo,’ he said, over the disappointment in my tone, ‘Graham Sanders is dead.’

‘Yes, Uncle Klaas, killed by his own instructor in Angola. It’s terrible.’

‘And since when did you start caring for Graham Sanders?’

‘Unde Klaas? He’s Ma’am’s son. Ma’am is my favourite teacher.’ ‘You should expend the energy caring for the living that you do on the dying . . . Then the world would be quite a different place. But then, there’s such drama in death, isn’t there? A spectacle of grief that gets your tears flowing, and can make you believe you really cared. As if your tears show how deeply human you are. When in fact you’ve never cared for the life, death’s drama can make you and your witnesses pretend — believe — you did. It’s like a concert, hey? Nothing that happened before matters, just what happens on stage . . . What are you people doing there, in the first place?’ he asked, again passing me the brown zol. I took another drag, this time more successfully. Still hoping to make some contact with the man in the back of the fort I leant past Uncle Klaas and handed it there, felt skin like sandpaper graze my fingers. Again I awaited psychedelic colours, swirling and throbbing beats like rock music in my head. Still nothing. I’d anticipated I would be rolling around on Sterkspruit’s bank by now murmuring, I am an orange, peel me, peel me, please peel me. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘What are you people doing in Angola?’

‘They’re protecting us from the terrorists,’ I say. ‘You know that, Uncle Klaas.’

‘Do I, really?’

‘And, it’s not
you
people, Uncle Klaas. You’re one of us.’

‘I am what I want to be. I’m neither here nor there. Don’t drag me into the quagmire. People make war because they’re afraid or because they want to protect things. I’m not afnjjd of anything and I’ve nothing to protect. Also not the lie you’re all in on.’

His provocation, his indifference to things important, did not infuriate me tonight. Feeling as if I could not get a hold of him, had no way of communicating with him, didn’t bother me. I was sitting in the lap of a huge and extraordinary calm. Like I’d swallowed a whole handful of antihistamine. Uncle Klaas was speaking from a place in a nomanclature that didn’t make any sense, but couldn’t irk me.

‘It’s easy for you, Uncle Klaas, because it’s not your child. How woUld you feel if it were me?’

‘This war will be over by the time you’re old enough to be stupid enough to go and fight.’

1 ‘Bok says it’s like our Vietnam.’

‘What’s
our Vietnam
? An American metaphor? A mere allegory? Is that what Vietnam has been reduced to? Or is it a place where America’s poorer boys killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were doing nothing but trying to live, where there was life before America came to make war, before France came to conquer and pillage. In Vietnam there will be death, love and life after and without America.’

‘What?’

‘You know what happened there: the terrorists won.’

;j ‘‘They won’t here . . .’

, ‘And why is that, Karl’tjie?’

1 I lie down, legs to the water, face to the fire, chin resting in my hands. Smiling into the flames, I say because we have God on our side, because were fighting to safeguard Christian civilization from the fate that befell the countries behind the Iron Curtain. I go quiet at the thought of the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain. Like tightly packed metal bars of a prison. Slicing Europe in half and Russia at its heart. There people live to stand in long queues for food in the blistering snow and are hunted down for being Christians. Behind the Iron Curtain. There people are martyrs for Christianity, spreading tracts and Bibles, in spite of the fact that being caught with the Word ,,of God means incarceration, banishment to Siberia, torture with electrodes and hot needles inserted beneath fingernails, and frequendy death and assassination. The Iron Curtain spreading down Africa, bringing poverty, chaos, communism, starvation, famine, wars. The loss of land. The state gives you a house and if you don’t like the house get out! and live on the pavement. You can’t own land under communism. Just like in Tanganyika. Julius Njerere. Ujamaa. Uhuru.

Everything taken by the black state. No freedom to move as you please. Rules, rules, rules. There’s a song, Little Boxes, Little Boxes we all get put in boxes; our Sunday school teacher said it’s about what communism does to people, making them all the same. Nothing left, taking away. I said to Uncle Klaas, communism means the loss of land.

‘Whose loss of land?’ he asked, and leant back, taking the zol from the Silent One, dragging on its dregs and stubbing it out in the sand.

‘Our land,’ I said, rolling onto my side, still staring into the fire. ‘In Tanganyika, they stole our land. Bok is struggling. Since they left Tanzania, we’ve never had money.’

‘Is that the story? That they took your father’s farms? That’s why you left?’

‘It’s not a story, Uncle Klaas. It’s the truth.’

‘Your father and mother left before their farm was taken. They ran because they were afraid their farm may be taken.’

‘Rubbish, Uncle Klaas. That’s rubbish.’

‘Your parents were afraid that the people of Africa would take back what had been taken from them. A thief always fears thievery.’ ‘They stole it,’ I say in a whisper, ‘after we had worked it free of the bush, turned it to civilisation. Everyone’s, the Therons down the road, Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain’s, all the whites’ stuff was nationalised.’ I left the word hanging, hoping he’d realise I knew what I was talking about. There was to my mind something extremely mature about the discussion.

‘They were planning to recover what you had stolen from them,’ Uncle Klaas muttered. ‘Britain, the nation of rapists, knew that when they handed it back to Nyerere. They didn’t even need a liberation war. You people knew what was coming—’

‘Me?’ I laughed. ‘I wasn’t even born when we got that farm! Neither was Bok. Dademan gave it to him. But I had nothing to do with it, if you please, dear Great-Uncle Klaas. My hands are clean and my pockets are as empty as yours. The . . . plurals stole my birth-right.’

He laughs, and asks why a minute ago I had said they stole
our
land, which
we
had cleared for civilisation. Now I am saying I had nothing to do with it. If, he says, you want to stake a claim on the good parts, you have to take ownership of the bad parts too. I raise my head and look up into his face. He casts his eyes at me: “You have everything you need, Karl. Self-pity doesn’t become you as it seldom becomes anyone. Stop pretending that you’re poor. Jvlost black people are poor. And some whites of whom you are not one.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said and fell back onto my arm.

1 ‘Have you ever been in the locations?’ he asked. ‘Have you ever gone hungry? Have you ever done your homework by candlelight or with a kerosene lamp? Have you ever walked to school through frost in winter with bare feet? Have you ever been shot at by the police?’

‘ ‘They’re accustomed to it,’ I said, giggling, trying to undermine his moralism, his self-righteousness.

‘To what?’

‘It’s their culture, to live in small houses and walk to school. And we walked to school in Toti. Bernice still does.’

‘And being denied your language and fired at with machine guns?’

‘No, and I won’t ever be because I don’t go around burning down schools,’ I said, sitting up and shaking my head irritably. I was bored. I was still not hallucinating, but had begun to feel slightly queasy. A bit nauseous. I moved back from the fire.

‘What if you had to go and live in a black homeland, overnight?’

‘Uncle Klaas, this is our country. I’m not letting them take it away from me again. I love each tree, each mountain, each animal and all the rivers here. Why must I give it all up!’ I now wished the Silent One was not there. Then I could talk more freely.

‘This obsession of yours with loving the land! Ha!’ He throws his head back. ‘It’s enough to make me giggle, Karl’tjie. You all pretend to love the bloody mountains and rivers and the soil because then you can forget your disdain for people. And yourselves. What you call lovefor the trees is no more than a detraction, an alibi, a pretence at not hating humanity of whom you’re a part!’

‘I don’t hate anyone, Uncle Klaas.’

‘You will have to destroy your schools, shoot your teachers, you will have to kill your parents, you will have to die, to live truly in this country.’

At first I wanted to say that I’m willing to do that, then, the sentence sounded ambiguous. It didn’t make sense. ‘How can you expect me to kill my parents? How will I live in this country if I’m dead? You’re mad, Uncle Klaas.’

‘You won’t be dead, but you will have died. Your mother will not be dead, nor will your father, but you will have killed them. Only then will you be free.’ I stared into the coals, trying to remember what he had just said. It was a complicated sentence. ‘Those who deceive themselves as deeply as you do will have to go through that. For many others, thank the gods, it will be easier.’ He’s going into his mad state, again, I could tell. I wondered whether the mad gene hid in the veins of his neck somewhere from where it just snuck out of its cellular lair to occasionally feed on his brain, making him talk mad. Turning my back to them and the fire, I sat watching the drift of the river, the clouds, the half-moon. I felt hot, feverish. I think I should get going, but I’m not sleepy. I glance at my wrist-watch. Almost midnight. Without announcement I remove my dressing gown, my pyjama top and shorts and stand naked, facing the river. A snort from Uncle Klaas and I turn to look across my shoulder. Both men’s eyes are on me. I smile. ‘It’s October,’ I say, ‘surely a boy’s got to have a swim.’

I edge my way down the slight incline, my shadow from the fire casting a long wobbly dance across the water. My toe tells me it’s freezing. Smell the flowers. I decide to dive — shallow, for the water’s flow is light this early in the year. I dive just below the surface and gasp for air as I come up and stroke across to the cliff. I cannot get a foothold on the slippery rock face and fall back into the stream and race back.

‘It’s still too cold and shallow,’ I stammer, scurrying up the bank. Now shy of my own nudity, of the penis shrunk to a drawn-in mopani worm by the cold. Grabbing the dressing gown I turn away and rub the rough fabric over my torso, legs, back. Then my hair; wish it were long, so that I could throw it forward and dry it . . . Sniff, clearing my nose and upper lip. With the dressing gown held in front of me I collect my pyjamas and quickly dress.