Karoo Boy (10 page)

I nod, as Hope has told me vivid tales of the stumpy hobgoblin with the fiery red eyes.

– As a boy it was forgiven to cry, to curl up against your mother, to piss out of fear for the tokoloshe.

I laugh so hard the Coca-Cola fizzes out of my nostrils.

– Ewe. It is true. I pissed out of fear. But the longed-for time came when my father said I was to become a man. I was sixteen then, just two years older than you are now. I hardly knew my father, who was away on the mines all year. I too wanted to be a miner, to follow in my father’s footsteps. To be a miner was to be strong and brave. My father told me it was hard down the mines, that he wanted his sons to follow another path. He said it was better to work on a farm in the Cape, for though you still left your wife and your children behind, you were outside, under the sky. To be under the earth was to die a slow death. But I did not believe him. I saw the men who came back from the mines, flashing money and shiny shoes.

Now that my father has sailed away, he is becoming a stranger to me. In my mind his face is fuzzing at the edges. His eyes are a deadpan, soulless stare. The glint is gone.

– To prove our manhood we had to do one daring deed. In the old times you would hunt a leopard or a lynx, but they were hard to find. So we chose to kill a dog that barked at us whenever our mothers sent us to buy bones or a pig head at the butcher. The butcher in our village was a bitter white man who lived in an old caravan. We hated that dog, the way he snarled and lunged at us, baring his teeth, fighting the rope that tied him to the caravan. One night I stalked up to the caravan when the dog was snoring and cut the rope. Then, from a distance, we whistled to wake the dog. When he ran to us, we speared the dog with sticks we had knifed at one end. It felt good to kill the dog. Years later, I saw that it was not the dog that was evil, but the man who taught the dog to hate.

The memory of it bends his white-fringed head and a sigh whispers from his lips. Then he lifts his head to suck long at the cigarette stompie. Wisps of smoke flow through his yellowy, cobby teeth as he goes on.

– My father and the fathers of my boyhood friends sent for the old tribal doctor, the ingcibi, to come with his assegai and make men of us. On the day the ingcibi came to our village, we boys of sixteen or seventeen smeared each other from head to foot in white ochre. Painted white, we would stay unseen by the evil spirits that waylay boys on the journey to manhood. For a moment I wanted to laugh at the sight of my black boyhood friends standing there white as ghosts, but I did not laugh, for I remembered the pain to come. The time for boyish fooling was over.

Moses stubs his cigarette out under his boot.

– We sat naked on our heels, the way bushmen do, waiting in a row for the ingcibi. We were surrounded by our fathers, and the other men. I wanted to catch my father’s eye, but knew I was not to glance around like an inquisitive boy. I was to stare ahead, and go through with it. If my face pinched with pain, I would shame my father. The shame of being a coward would dog me forever. I would never walk among men with my head held high. I would never be a soldier or a miner. I would run away, my bleeding tail between my legs like a scared, stoned dog.

I glance down at the scar, recall the fish hook in my finger on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, recall my father’s words: Be brave, Douglas. Cowboys don’t cry.

– I heard the drums and I saw the ingcibi shuffle his scaly feet towards us, his spine bent, so his head was level with the earth, as the head of a tortoise is. Tixo, guide the hand of this old man, I prayed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ingcibi swing his assegai. Ithi uyindoda, he said. Say you are a man. I heard a young voice cry out: Ndiyindoda! I am a man!

I shudder at the thought of an assegai scything through my skin. Instinctively, I clasp at my songololo.

Moses sees me squirm. Laughs.

– For one crazy moment, I too wanted to save my cock. To run for it. But then I saw my father’s unsmiling eyes on me. I wanted him to give me a sign that the pain to come would not be too bad, but his face was as cold as a mask. The ingcibi stood before me. I would not shame my father. He pinched my foreskin in his fingers, tugged at it and sliced through me in one swing. The burn flamed through my guts, my bones, my head. It was a pain way beyond the pain of a deep thorn or a dog bite. I saw the mouth of the ingcibi chewing unheard words. I saw, as if it was a leaf falling slowly slowly, my foreskin fall to the sand. I heard the cry of a man escape my mouth: Ndiyindoda! I saw my father’s teeth smile. I picked up my foreskin and swallowed it before the evil spirits could get their hands on it and bewitch me.

I feel faint. I hold the cold can of Coca-Cola to my forehead to keep from keeling over.

– Afterwards the ingcibi wound a weed around my burning cock, bound it on with a leather thong. Then, we draped blankets over our heads, for no women should see us abakwetha during the time of change. For three months, my friends and I camped out in the bundu, far from the village. It was winter, a good time for healing. We made a grasshut shelter, a boma, where our cocks would heal in the smoke of burning wet wood, where the men came to visit, one by one, to teach us the things of a man: the history and traditions of the Xhosa, how to kill a man, if need be, and how to sow your seed in a woman.

I turn my face to Delarey Straat, where oleanders flower pink down on the island that splits the road. How will I learn to sow my seed in a woman if I do not go into the bundu and I have no father to teach me?

– At the end of the time in the bundu, we burnt down the boma. The men of the tribe came to fetch us abakwetha, still covered in white ochre. We sang as we went, imagining how the girls would eye us, how our younger brothers would skip at our heels. Down at the river, below the village, we stood on the bank. My father, his eyes smiling, undid the thong. At the sound of the drum, we threw off our blankets and ran into the water. We ran to dodge the gaze of the girls and the sticks of the men which bit at our backsides. We ran to outfoot the evil spirits who try to catch you, just before you reach the far side of this in-between world. In the river we rubbed the clay away, laughing at how black we were after months of being white. We came out of the water, fully men, no longer boy-men, abakwetha. They rubbed red ochre on us, a sign of our manhood, and gave us new blankets. We hugged the given blankets to our shoulders, and walked tall up to the village. At the place where the men gather, we were given our first beer to drink. The beer had been brewed in deep pots by the women. As we solemnly sipped at the sour beer, we saw our old blankets burn in a bonfire, along with the things of our boyhood: oxen made out of bone, wild animals out of wood or clay, our catapults and sticks. Then the dance, the umgidi, began with the killing of a cow.

I think of the way my father let me sip the foam off his beer on the stoep on summer evenings in Muizenberg. Sometimes if he was deep in his newspaper, I would gulp down a mouthful of beer. The first time he gave Marsden and me a beer to hold in our hands and sip was when we watched the fireworks shot over the lagoon on bonfire night. Amstel beer. Originally from Amsterdam, where Miss Forster flaunts her flimsy frocks. We had turned fourteen just two days before. My mother said we were too young. My father said to her: when you were fourteen you went to a beach party in Clifton, on the back of a motorcycle. He pinched her behind and she swatted his hand away. Boys, he said to us, your mother was a frisky filly. You are lucky I lassoed her. Though I sipped it slowly, over hours as the fireworks flowered the sky, the beer made my head swoop, and the stars spiral. After the fireworks, Marsden and I jumped naked from the bridge, Bessie Malan’s bridge, and fished dead fireworks out of the seaweedy lagoon.

– Douglas, I think this dying of your twin brother, the going away of your father, was the beginning of your bundu time, the time of your hardship. You are in the in-between world, when the spirits will try to catch you. It is a lonely, hurting time. But you will come out of it a man. Look at you. Though you bleed, you do not cry. A pity your father does not see you become a man.

T
HE ENGLISH CLASS. WE
are taught by a man called Mister McEwan. He is bitter about being stranded in this dull Karoo after teaching in England.

– In my school in England the buildings went back to the time of Shakespeare. Here in Klipdorp the oldest building is the jail, built as an English fort during the Boer War. This place is devoid of history or culture. I try to teach you Wordsworth and Blake, and your heads are full of boerewors and sheep dipping.

Joost yawns. It is a story they have all heard before.

– You know Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein. A monkey stole his clothes from the washing line. A tarantula bit his head.

Joost and the others pack out laughing.

– A baboon spider maybe, goes Joost. I never heard of a tarantula in Africa, sir. Maybe he was born in Brazil?

– Anyway, frowns Mister McEwan, after the monkey and the spider, his mother took him back to England.

– Moffie, jibes Joost.

– He never came back to this damned place, spits Mister McEwan.

I put up my hand.

– Why did you leave England, sir?

He looks confused for a moment. Giggles swirl around me. Perhaps he finds the question rude. I wish I had shut up.

– It’s a long story. One thing led to another, he sighs.

He fumbles in his leather bag for his book.

– Now, open your poetry books to the poem by William Wordsworth.

He reads us a poem about daffodils, something you will never see in the Karoo.

– Daffodils are like cannas, only yellow instead of red or orange, Mister McEwan tells us.

I see the others stare out of the window. The world of dancing daffodils is too foreign for them. Marika, of the tangling gypsy hair, is reading a library book hidden behind her poetry book. Mister McEwan believes he has reached one soul in this barren land and glances her way whenever he draws in a breath. Marika scratches her knee and leaves those white lines you lick to make go away.

– Douglas, surely you have seen daffodils?

– Yes, sir.

Joost van der Berg wanks his fist at me.

Then Marika looks up from her book and smiles, at me, daffodilboy. A wonderful cappuccino feeling fans through my stomach. She turns back to her book, but I rewind her smile again and again in my mind.

The bell goes. As I walk out the class, Joost comes up to me, slings his arm around my shoulders.

– Hey, china, he tunes.

I wonder if maybe Joost is not biltong hard after all.

– I just want to warn you, McEwan fancies your melktert ass.

He winks at me and runs to catch up with his friends.

Not Joost or anything can pull me down, for Marika smiled at me.

I cycle to the Shell to tell Moses. He is filling up an orange Ford Capri with 93. I help him by wiping the windows. The woman inside is so fat the motorcar sags on her side. The suddy water warps her face. As I pass the window she catches my hand. The sour smell of her sweat wafts to me as she digs a finger in the dashboard ashtray. She flips my hand over and puts a coin in my palm. Fifty cents.

– You are a good boy, she says.

– Thank you, ma’am, I say, wishing she would let go my hand.

In the end, the Capri splutters to life and lurches lopsidedly away. I sniff the coin for sweat, but it smells of cigarette. I am glad to be alone with Moses.

– Moses. You know the girl, Marika? She smiled at me.

– Hey hey hey, Douglas. A good sign. And what did she say?

– She just smiled.

– Ah. No matter. She smiled. A good sign, he laughs. You know the time I came out of the bundu? After being painted in red ochre, there was the dance, the umgidi. All the village was there. My mother too. I was sad I would never sleep in her khaya again, but all the girls came to see us young lions and I could not dwell on my sadness. There was one girl with beads on her hips, and cheeky breasts. I longed for her to smile at me, but she stared down at her feet. I danced wildly, my sweat dripping like blood down my redclay skin. When the moon was high, and I wanted to drop to the sand, she looked at me and smiled. And then there was wildfire in my feet again.

I laugh.

– Just one smile and it makes you crazy. You know there was a time when a young man would lie with a girl, one who might become his wife, so she would wipe the red ochre off him with her skin. Sadly, I had the red ochre wiped off with fat and had to dream of the girl.

Moses pinches tobacco from an orange packet of Boxer tobacco and drops it into a furrow of newspaper.

– You know all my man years went down the mine, Blue Reef. Sounds beautiful, Blue Reef. But there is no beach down there: no sun, no sugarcane, no banana palms. Just black like death. The lamps on the hard hats burn like fire.

He rolls the newspaper and runs his tongue along the edge.

– As you drop down miles and miles in the cage, the sun is a far memory. You wonder if you dreamed your boyhood herding cows under the sun. You wonder if you dreamed the green hills, for when you come up out of the black, the sun goes down. There is a bus to the barbed-wire compound for Zulus and another bus to the barbed-wire compound for us Xhosas.

One end of the cigarette he twists, the other end has tobacco dangling from it.

– Through the window of the bus the land is flat and foreign. No mountains or rivers or cow kraals. Just black-and-white roads, and the far orange glow of Jo’burg over the mine dumps.

Flecks of tobacco fall from the cigarette. A mossie lands to peck at the tobacco, then flits away. Moses lights the dangly end. It flares, then dwindles to a glow. It fires orange again when Moses sucks in.

– In the Transkei, as a man, you smoke a pipe and drink sour homemade beer at dusk, the time when boys steer the cows home and children chase chickens and the women make a fire. In the Transkei it is the magic time when voices carry across the valley and you can hear a dog bark miles away.

He sucks at the cigarette, and goes on while the smoke filters through his teeth: