Embrace (73 page)

Bube and Masinga hides. Both he helped build when we first got here. The detail — reeds, creosote, thatch, spoor of antelope in the white sand and silence broken only by the chrrrk of bulbuls and the mournful call of Namaqua doves — at each hide is the split image of my memory: no smaller, as I was expecting after the Lobombos, the gate and HQ. Bok points out the tree orchids in the ironwood above Masinga. Now even those, the way their feet are spread and clutching, almost hidden in the branches above the footpath, are loosed from somewhere I have not fetched them but in the moment of seeing I remember for the first time from a place they were hidden.

We sit for an hour, alone. Baboons cavorting, a nyala bull pranking all white mane and tail as he sniffs an ewe, kudu, ears flapping off ox-peckers, alert, staring at the hide, orioles, bright yellow swinging from branches. I want to say I wish we had the binoculars but catch myself: they, along with his camera, were sold in another month of bad business. Babblers, like a car trying to start and pipits, which I briefly think are crowned hornbills till the second part of their song comes and from the bush the little flock settles at the waters lip for a drink. A murmur of voices coming down the reed alleyway; heads up, ears erect from the waterside; we glance around; three tourists coming up the stairs; back at the water, everything poised for flight; floorboards creek and someone laughs: in a second everything is gone. Bok keeps his eyes on the water and in the bush. I turn and glare at them, shaking my head, wanting them to see in my anger their stupidity. Slowly the movement begins again: impala, turtles climbing back onto branches from where they have slipped. The whispers behind us. I swing around and put my finger to my lips, imploring them with furrows in my forehead to be quiet or get out.

To the Forest of Figs. Pass where we parked this morning to cut through the bush to Mbanyana. On our right the silver blue of Msumu through the fever trees. The cry of spur-winged geese. Pelicans bobbing in the waves and flamingoes gliding in to land.

‘The Mkuzi River is full,’ Bok says. ‘You don’t remember this much water, he?’

‘It’s completely different,’ I say, now unable to remember ever having been here. We park where the road dead-ends and walk along a rhino path to where he says the forest is. I think of Jonas, holding my hand, walking back from here. I know it happened, I can see us, but the surroundings are foreign as if each bush colludes to make me forget. And when we get to the first stream it is full. This is only a tributary of the pan, my father says. The Mkuzi proper is further east. This never existed, I say. There was no river or tributary here. Watch out for crocodiles. He removes his shoes and socks and I take off my sandals. We wade across. From here it starts to look familiar: the reeds, the bigger fever trees, more ficuses, some with red fruit growing from the stems. This is it, I remember this tree, here, on the right, it had ibis nests in it. Yes, Bok says, you’re right. Ahead of us are the yellow, green branches of the fig forest. It was over here, somewhere just here, that we saw the mamba, I say. Well watch out, Bok answers, they grow very old, it could still be here. I laugh. A hippo grunts to our right. Bok points. On we go, now the forest is in front of us. Yes, yes, this is it: this same path, we walked every time he came to show me the louries. Up a slight embankment and were looking down into the water of the Mkuzi. ‘This is the long arm of the pan,’ Bok says. ‘It reaches up north a good two or three miles.’ There is no trace of the little path along which we walked right through the dustbowl that I had never thought was part of a river or the pan. Downstream again the grunts of hippo, water squirting. We cannot possibly cross. Jonas, taking me in there, how we lay on the leaves, looking up, waiting for the louries. And Phinias at Charters. Images of the two black men now almost indistinguishable. How badly I want to go in there. ‘Please, can’t we cross,’ I ask. ‘I really want to go into the forest.’

‘You can hear the hippos, Karl. And there are crocs everywhere.’ ‘Can’t we find a place where it’s shallow and narrow?’

‘It will be two hours’ walk to go up the arm and then cut back theway we came another two hours. Night within an hour. But let’s look down here.’

He leads me up and down the footpaths along the bank, again cautioning me to watch for crocodile. This was never a river, I say, taking in the sounds of birds, the sweet musty scent of ficus, remembering Jonas’s fingers clearing the fruit of the insects, passing them to me to bite out the sweet flesh from the peels. Jonas picking the red fruit to later clean and eat with his pap. Was Boy not with us? I cannot recall. No, it was always just the two of us.

‘It was always a river. But it was dry when we lived here.’ And then they’re calling, two, four louries at once, their voices hidden from the branches into the water and up to us. Bok too stands still, turns around and smiles.

As the sun falls behind the trees from where we’ve come, he says we must turn back. I’m cautious of leopard, he says. There are now quite a few in the reserve. In our time only one was spotted.

The flames of the fire we have built dance in front of Mkuzi’s night bush. We sit listening to the sounds of hyena whooping near Mahlala.

‘Maybe I should become a game ranger,’ I say. For a while he’s quiet.

‘You are the most intelligent in the family,’ he says at last. ‘You can be anything you want to be. You can be rich and famous. Use your brain, become a doctor or a lawyer. Don’t waste your mind on the meagre income of a game ranger.’

‘What if I go mad, like Uncle Klaas?’ I ask and think of telling him about the tramp at school.

Bok laughs: ‘That’s the Liebenberg blood, not the De Mans’. You’re a De Man.’

I remind him how Lena teased me about bursting a blood vessel, letting the mad gene into my bloodstream.

‘She’s a joker,’ Bok says. ‘That’s not why you’re not studying any more, is it?’

The report. That’s what he’s been waiting for. Has this, after all, indeed all been the drawn-out approach to his ambush? I try to ignore the niggling of doubt, my inability to trust him. I speak the truth: ‘No. I find school boring. This is what I want to do, just live alone in the bush. Sitting here, like this, it would not bother me if I never read another book in my life.’

‘You’re an intellectual, for heaven’s sake!’ f .

‘So is Dr Player. He’s a game ranger and a writer. And Nick Steele wrote a book.’ From our little bookshelf:
White Rhino Saga. Game Ranger cm Horseback.
At ten or eleven, when was it, yes, ten, before I went to the Berg. Now, as much as it has thrilled me in the past to be thought clever, I find myself resenting my father’s opinions. They are only ways to point out my failures.

‘How will you support a family?’ he goes on. ‘You know that’s why we left the Parks Board. To give you kids a decent education. Tanzania too, we could have stayed on but it was no place to raise kids.’ Guilt’s load unpacked on me! I am responsible for the loss of Mkuzi, Umfolozi, St Lucia. It is not I who want to be rich, I want to say. It is not I who asked to leave Tanzania or this! It is not I but you who went from shooting wild animals to protecting wild animals to shooting them to wanting to make money! Why is everything my and Lena and Bernice’s fault? And why must Tanzania, an absence, something I don’t know, always be invoked to explain our lives? Can’t we, for once, live now, wipe out the past? A game ranger and a writer,’ he says. ‘Now, with that combination you’re making sure you won’t have money to wipe your arse.’We don’t have money to wipe our arses, I want to cry. Who are you to speak! I would, a million times over, exist rather in this bush without money than live entangled in your lies of fantasizing about non-existent riches.

‘I don’t mind being poor,’ I say. ‘I only want to be happy. And this’ — I gesture with my eyes into the shadows of the veld — ‘is all I’ve ever wanted.’

‘How will you be happy without a career?’

I say that I will have a career: I will be a writer and a game ranger.

‘And what sorts of things will you write? All writers are dead poor.’

‘Not Wilbur Smith,’ I say, agitation growing in me.

‘You want to write like him?’

‘No. Like John Steinbeck and Oscar Wilde and . . .’ while I’m talking a thought strikes me, ‘and like Georgia O’Keeffe.’

I wait for him to pick it up. He doesn’t, and I taste bitter victory. Ignoramus. Idiot. I want to allow myself to force out a laugh, to tell him that O’Keeffe is a painter, and who, who does he think he is to sit and advise me about things he knows about as much of as a vervet of Shakespeare?

‘Ernest Hemingway,’ he says, ‘Dademan took him on safari in East Africa. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t.’

‘There was another woman in Kenia, what was her name, famous writer. Do you know?’

‘No.’

‘Karen Blixen. That’s it. Swedish royalty.’

I resent his trying to tell me what to read. I am not interested in his silly uneducated opinions. I have Ma’am and Uncle Klaas, neither of whom know anything about Swedish royalty, for God’s sake.

And how will you educate your children if you’re a poor writer?’

‘I don’t want children, Bok. Never.’

‘That’s just a phase, Karl. We all go through that and then we ultimately get married and have kids. If you don’t have kids, what will you leave behind?’

‘My stories,’ I say. That is all I want to leave behind. What I want to say is that I’ll leave my art with a capital A. Yet the word,
Art,
is one that doubtlessly will anger him. And what if I don’t leave a damn thing? Why must I leave anything? Leave, leave, leaving things behind for what?

‘Bokkie and I think it’s time that you come back to a normal highschool next year. We know you wanted to come back last year, but we thought one more year away from home would be good for you.’The ambush has been sprung. He waits for a response. At the very least to see me squirm.

How I hate this man.

‘What do you think, Karl?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I say.’

‘Of course it matters, that’s why I’m asking you.’

I cannot be bothered to tell him how deeply I want to go back. How music has opened to me this year. And how I am happy there. ‘I’ll do whatever you and Bokkie want me to do.’

We fall into a passive argument. He asks why I’m now sulking. Having silent fits. I say I’m not having silent fits but that when I asked them to take me out last year they wouldn’t. Sent me back. If I now said I want to go back, what difference would it make? And then he proves my point: ‘We think it’s time to come back now.’

And I know: next year, I’ll be back at home. Fourteen years old, arriving at the Hoerskool Port Natal. Where Lena said she’d make sure I had a reception committee: every high-school bully waiting. ‘I’m tired,’ I say. ‘I want to go to bed.’

‘Well. Tomorrow’s Umfolozi.’

‘Yes, Bok,’ I say, leaving him alone at the fire.

‘Don’t you say goodnight, Karl?’

‘Goodnight, Bok.’

‘Goodnight, Karl.’

I get undressed, neatly folding my T-shirt and shorts at the bottom of the bed. I read from
The Brothers Karamazov.
When I hear him coming towards the hut I put down the book and turn over. He leaves the door open so that Mkuzi can come into the rondavel. I hear him undress behind me. Every movement I picture: stripping out of his shorts, hanging them on the closet door, he never hangs things on hangers, making my mother crazy. The shirt being unbuttoned, also hung over the door, then the sounds of underpants, elastic, thrown onto the suitcase. And then his footsteps to the light switch. Off. But he doesn’t go to his bed. Moves outside. Naked. And I hear the hissing sound of his pee hitting the grass, gurgling into the soil. A middle-aged dog marking his lost territory. For a moment I feel pity for him: my charming handsome father. Turning grey. I could, in this moment, weep for him. Then he comes inside, mattress creaks as he lowers himself onto his bed. Soon he is breathing deeply across the room from me.

Now it is quiet. I let myself forget about him, Dimitri Karamazov, the Berg, my mother, my siblings, and I dream my dream, smiling, of being something that can fly at speed over the brown veld of Mkuzi.

Driving through Hluhluwe to Umfolozi; no more than fifteen kilometres an hour, our eyes in the bush. Our sporadic talk is rarely about anything but the past: Dad and Mumdeman, the Charters Creek years, and how good it was to have had them so close to us at St Lucia. Skip, the Pekinese, what became of that dog? Was with Dad and Mum since Oljorro. Came down with us on the Kenia ship from Mombasa. Yes, the dog went with Mumdeman to Midmar, died there. And Mumdeman now thinking of marrying old Mr Shaw. On a whim I ask Bok where I was conceived. He laughs. Says it was when they drove down to visit Oupa and Ouma Liebenberg in the Molopo. A three-day trip, not much to do on the road. The back of the Peugeot. Could have been anywhere crossing one of the borders between Tanganyika and Zambia, Zambia and Rhodesia, Rhodesia and Bechuanaland, Bechuanaland and the Republic. With the girls asleep on the front seats. And Bernice, where was she conceived? On our honeymoon at Lake Kariba. She was born just nine months and eight days after the wedding. I know, I say, because I’ve calculated. He calls me a little sigabengu, laughing, and asks what I think of him and Bokkie. I say I’m not thick, I know what people get up to. Not your mother, he says, she’d never do anything like that before she was married. I do not say that I do not believe him. I do not say that everyone does It before they’re married. Nor do I ask him about him. I don’t want to know about him. For then he may ask about me. And to ask him about him would be to betray Bokkie; to know more about him from his own mouth than I already know from the tears of the trailists; from one night when he didn’t come home while we were living in Afsaal flats after leaving St Lucia and he walked in sheepishly the next morning and offered a smiling excuse about his car having broken down; and all I could picture for days afterward was his naked body heaving into some woman not my mother. And Lena, I ask. On elephant safari, next to the Ruvu in a tent, or in the Mbuyu house, he says, smiling, hugging a pleasant memory somewhere deep in himself. I was conceived crossing borders. I was not conceived in a place with a name. I belong nowhere. The thought appeals to me.