Embrace (82 page)

‘Well, I’ll meet you right here then. On your way out, okay?’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘And what about the others, have you already said goodbye? Have you been backstage?’

‘No, Ma’am. We’ll see how much time there is after the concert. Lukas s plane leaves at ten.’

‘Well. They must go and say goodbye to their friends.’ She cast Bok a stern look. ‘This shouldn’t finish later than eight thirty. Surely there’s time for that, Mr De Man?’ Bok said he’d have to drive like a madman if they were running late. Ma’am smiled. ‘Let me find you backstage, then. Directly after the concert, yes?’ And they agreed to meet as soon as the performance ended.

The diminuendo brings him back into the hall. Silence reigns and he’s amazed that he has missed virtually the entire first movement. He sees Jacques’s head turn briefly to Dominic. The boy nods. What’s going on, he wonders. Has he missed something? He tells himself to concentrate, to keep himself within the immediacy of the music, not to let his mind wander. Jacques’s back, the black of his jacket, isunmovmg. Television cameras glide closer to the stage. Someone in the choir coughs. An echo. A hush over the hall.

Jacques lifts his hands. A pause. His arms shoot forward a torrent as choir and orchestra together burst through
Gloria, in excekis Deo, A
riveting tempo, awesome volume like waves rushing over and back through the audience, colliding with walls, balconies and ceilings. On
et in terra pax hominibus
the male bass voices almost drown the boys’ and there’s a swift, almost invisible tremble of Jacques’s right hand, a single shake of the head at which Karl imagines him scowling at the men; opening his eyes wide and pursing his lips at the boy altos. Remarkable. This is artistry. This is mastery and grandeur unleashed.

There is a largo transition before the
Gratias agimus
that he awaits. There the soloists will come in and he may be able to assess the meaning of Dominic’s nod. Is there a problem with his voice? There was last week’s slight sniff from which he said he’d recovered completely. Horror if Johan Rademan has to take over halfway. Would spoil everything.

When Dominic’s chin rises and his lips open and his notes lift into the
gratias,
joining with Gerhard Conradie’s, it is again the voice of an angel. Rich, dark, long, elongated, perfectly pitched and controlled notes. Every tremble of the vibratum just as it has always been. Karl breathes out. His chest swells. His legs tingle in the sound; turn to gooseflesh. Still aware of Alette and Bok on either side of him, he hears Dominic’s voice alone, sees nothing but his friend’s mouth, the concentration of the body, the slight heaving of the stomach and chest beneath the blue of the waistcoat. Oh Dominic, to have been able to sing like you, he thinks for a moment. For me to have been able to be like you. How I will miss you, Beloved. How I love you. Yes. Love you till eternity comes. Once the bird’s beak has made the hollow in Mphafa’s boulders, I will begin to stop loving you. That is enough. Yes. To have wanted to be like you would have been avaricious. And I was not. Not when it came to you. What I felt for you and what you were to me is love and to that no impediment can everbe admitted. Star, you were, always, to my every wandering bark. How, ever, could I have resisted? In that June, in your parents’ Saxonwold house, in a night when the country must already have been burning, when your mother brought into our room, where you and I lay talking, a can of Condensed Milk. And your father, a moment later, an anthology,
Sonnets For My Scotsman,
from which he said the two of us may want to read. And while I drank from the tin, you read to me:

and this, more than any other memory you must have

if time ravages our love and leaves us separate

and these lips no longer give you the joys we’ve had

should your beauty or my lust go stray, leave me desperate

longing for days, nights we were one as we are now:

when no more than your glance fills me to love’s brim

over your voice, skin, teeth, taste, smell of brow

when just thought of you invites mine to never trim

the sky so huge the universe made for us alone

and nothing nor anything is of meaning but you

where no world’s treasure’s worth a stone

without you lover beloved, no word’s more true:

      no altered state we might reach will cut or sham

      that for knowing you: the better, wholer man I am.

The last Parents’ Weekend had offered the two their final chance to be alone with each other, mostly in the Websters’ suite at the Champagne Castle Hotel or outside in the car listening to cassettes. At the hotel they had dinner on the Friday evening before the boys had to return to sleep at school, cursing the regulation that no sleep-out was allowed. On Saturday morning Dr Webster collected them again and they were together until Dominic had to return at four p.m. to sleep till six in preparation for the evening concert. Karl had returned to dairy duty with Lukas. And so, while there was the pleasure of being away from the school amongst people he cared for, Karl was all too aware that the break was barely a temporary recess. Each time Dr Webster collected him and Dominic from the parking lot, the fact that they had to return, that there was again a law governing the limits of their liberty, bore down on him and he struggled to enjoy himself. While hotel lunches and suppers with the Websters lifted his spirits, he remained guarded. Being daily in the company of adults now frightened him. That he probably had nothing to fear from the Websters was something he almost accepted as they were kind and generous and Dominic adored them as much as they did him. Still, Karl was cautious. Kept a guard at his lips, not allowing escape to the occasional urges for words he could taste against his pallet.

Unlike what Karl had imagined would be the case, the Websters barely referred to the incident between Dominic and Ma’am. The issue was over and resolved as far as they were concerned. On their part no ill feelings lingered. Instead, talk moved often to Canada, where Dr Webster had bought into a Toronto private practice. It was now definite: Dominic and his family were leaving the country. As Canadian school terms commenced only in September, Dominic would be doing a catching-up course before officially starting school in the second half of 1977. Mrs Webster clinched her teeth at talk of Canada’s snow in winter. And while they spoke of a new homeland over lunches and dinners, or lay on the double bed with the two boys between them, Karl thought obsessively about his return to Toti, to Durban, moving into a flat, going to Port Natal. The Websters invited him to visit in Canada. At once he set to a fantasy of running from Bok and Bokkie. Stowing away in a ship like the
Jessye Likes
on which Bok had taken the rhino to America. How he wished he could leave with the Websters. Maybe his parents would be killed in a car crash. That would free him. Instantly he felt sorry for his mother and his sisters. Imagined their despair. He felt nothing for Bok. And he thought he would not mind staying in Durban if only his fatherwould die. Or if his parents could get divorced, then he could take care of his mother in peace and maybe convince her to go to university and train herself so that she could get a job. Make something of herself and be rid of her dependence on Bok. He felt guilty, telling himself over and over that Bokkie had never done anything but her best for him and the girls. She’s my mother, he thought. She does love me. Of that I’m sure. But she loves me and the girls too much and her love feels so heavy. Like we could smother. Mother. There’s a poem in that. Do I love her or hate her, he wondered even as he glowed with shame. And what with Bernice gone, next year? Who in that house — that flat — will I speak to? Who will be left for me to trust? During the concert for the parents in the Winterton Town Hall he sat in the audience between Dr and Mrs Webster. Throughout found himself again imagining he could leave with them. That he was their son. A prodigal.

As a belated birthday gift Mrs Webster gave him an Abba tape named
Arrival
Outside the hotel Karl and Dominic sat in the Benz listening to the recording: ‘Dancing Queen; ‘Money Money Money’ and ‘Fernando’ — catchy tunes to which both could sing along after a second hearing. For that while alone, in the car only, Karl again allowed Dominic to hold his hand.

They had the whole of Sunday free. They went hiking with the parents to Nandi’s Falls and Karl told them the story of Chaka’s illegitimate birth, how he had been terrorised by the other Zulu boys, and how, when he later became king, he had taken his revenge on everyone that had been cruel to him and his mother. How when he had grown big and handsome, he bathed naked every day in full view of his underlings so that word could spread throughout Zululand of his physical beauty.

Returning to the hotel from the falls, the boys stuffed themselves at the huge buffet lunch. Karl thought he would burst from too much trifle. When the Websters wanted to take a nap the boys lay between them until they fell asleep and then again went out to the car wherethey again listened through Abbas
Arrival.
Near sundown, with only hours to go before the parents would have to bid the boys farewell, the Websters drove to the airstrip at El Mirador where Mervyn’s father was to take everyone on a flip in his Cessna. The Clemence-Gordons, with Bennie along for the weekend, were there already, waiting. The four boys stood around the cars while first the parents took to the sky. After three years of drop-offs and Parents’ Weekends they were all familiar with the Sunday afternoon heaviness. The pending farewell and the return to prison. Dominic said he had just the right thing to cheer them up. He stuck into the player a cassette he said was his mothers favourite. Emmylou Harris blared into the sunshine over the grassy field, and at once all but Karl faked puking sounds, holding their stomachs and wrenching. ‘Look, there’s Marabou,’ Karl shouted and the others spun around, laughed at their own silliness. An even deeper sadness came to cling to the afternoon.

Bennie convinced them that he had to sit beside the pilot as he was the only non-moffie and the only one who wouldn’t go hysterical if the plane were to fall. When the craft returned with the Websters exclaiming how breathtaking it had been, the four boys scrambled into the small cabin, Bennie at the front and the three others squashed onto the two seats behind. Karl, his mood lifting with the plane, was filled with awe at seeing the green and brown landscape fold out beneath them, then the mountains jagged, red and shaded to the west, rising like mammoths into the blue. From up there they pointed out the school and the rugby fields — small and insignificant, Karl thought, how pathetic, really, miserably out of place against the landscape, a strange white L or lopsided T possible to erase with one swipe of a rubber — the pool like a tiny blue tile, the game pen where Karl could see zebra and the others said he was lying, and tried to see who could spot the fort, Copper Falls, the Bushmen paintings, to where Sterkspruit wound itself from sight. Soon they had climbed to 3500 metres, approaching the cliffs of Cathedral Peak. Then, on the return flight, with the sun setting and the Drakensberg in a red and pink haze, Dominic started ‘Boulder to Birmingham’. The others joined and when they came to the chorus they harmonised, eclipsing
r
with their voices the drone of the engine as they sang:
I would rock my soul, in the bosom of Abraham, I would hold my life, in saving grace.
From behind the control panels Mr Clemence-Gordon hummed along. As they approached the strip to land, he said he wished the choir could 1 sing songs like this instead of all the heavy Latin hocus-pocus. And Mervyn told his father he clearly knew very little about Art with a capital A.

The Clemence-Gordons and the Websters said goodbye to each other and confirmed that Dominic would fly up from the Durban concert with them and Mervyn. The Websters themselves were missing the concert — Mrs Webster said she’d be watching it on TV — as their entire household was being shipped off to Canada around the time of the performance and Dr Webster would already have left.

‘So, we’ll see you in Jo’burg,’ Mrs Webster said to the Clemence-Gordons and then they bade Bennie goodbye. They told him that if he ever came to Canada, he should be sure to look them up. And , Bennie smiled and said thank you, but he wasn’t sure that was going to happen anytime soon. His one chance of overseas was blown this year.

Mervyn’s parents said they’d see Karl again in Durban for a goodbye.

Sunday night the boys had to be in at eight. Karl and Dominic had . a small supper with the Websters on the hotel terrace and then they drove down the gravel road from Champagne Castle to the school. Dr Webster again told Karl that he was welcome to visit them in Canada. ‘We’ve grown very fond of you, Karl,’ the man said from the front seat. ‘And we know that Dominic loves you deeply.’ It had felt to Karl as though his heart would bounce from his throat. Instead of feeling gratitude for the Webster generosity, he could only fear that Dominic had told his parents something. In the dark he felt blood rush into his face and he barely managed a thank you from a mouth gone instandydry. Thank God they were soon leaving the country. Away. Emigrated from his life as if they had never been part of it. ‘Then you and I, Karl,’ Mrs Webster said over her shoulder, ‘can listen to country music as much as we like and leave these two snobs to the classics.’They had laughed. Dominic said Abba wasn’t country: it was plain and simple sugar-pop with an extra lick of cream and a cherry on top.

At the school the four of them stood in the night while other families were saying goodbye to their sons. The Websters kissed Dominic goodbye, wishing him good luck for the final performance and again congratulating him on the success of his Grade Eight exam. And I’ll see you in Toronto, Dom? Make sure this woman dresses warmly, won’t you, my boy? She’s in for a shock when she walks out into that snow.’