Moffie

by Andre Carl van der Merwe

  ‘I’m just glad it’s not my job to get you into shape. I feel sorry for those instructors.’ He chuckles, looking at my sister for support.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Peet, Nicholas is leaving today! Why make it unpleasant?’

  ‘The sooner they whip some discipline into him the better.’

  The egg has coagulated on his chin, settling in his goatee, stopping its movement just below his smirk.

  ‘You are going to see how the real world works, my boy,’ he says to me, and then to all of us, ‘It’s going to be good for him. Best thing to get boys away from their mothers’ apron strings. Little babies. At your age I was a man.’

  How dare he talk like this? What does he know? He never went to the army. It is his government, it is what he stands for, that I have to go and defend. I am going to fight for him! The thought churns my empty, knotted stomach.

  ‘I don’t believe in what I’m being forced to do.’

  ‘Please, let’s not get into that now.’ But our anger is larger than my mother’s pleading.

  ‘It’s your bloody government that you voted for that I now have to fight to protect!’ My sister, two years my junior but in her third-parent capacity, says, ‘Don’t say bloody.’ She knows this will irritate me.

  Again my mother tries to keep the peace while my father with the egg on his face lectures me on politics in between insults. So I retaliate. Then he calls me a moffie and I say, ‘If I am one, I am what you have made me.’

  When he lashes out, it is a split-second lapse of restraint rather than a calculated attack. It is a strike-and-grab blow, the corner of the table preventing his full weight from following his fist and allowing just enough time for my mother’s pleas to stop the attack. But the blow is strong enough to knock me off my chair.

  I sit on the mottled, dusty carpet supporting myself with one arm, the other hand stopping the blood dripping from my nose. There is a measure of freedom in my anger, for it is stronger than my fear. In the kitchen doorway my dog cowers, ears flat and eyes darting between my father and me. I get up and go to the bathroom.

  Behind me my mother is crying. This is what brings regret; she hardly ever cries. They are arguing—I hear her anger through her tears. They are arguing about him hitting me just before my leaving for the army. What if I don’t come back? How will he feel then? The part I hate to hear is, ‘And how can you call your own son that? You should be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Peet.’

  ‘You mean a moffie?’

  ‘Yes, it’s the most despicable thing you can call anybody, never mind your own son!’

  ‘You know what I meant.’

  ‘What did you mean?’

  ‘I meant he is a sissy, not a homo.’

  ‘Well, you should know better. I never want to hear that word in this house again. Sissy is bad enough.’

  ‘Well, he is one, and I hope they flog it out of him in the army. I sure as hell have had no luck with him.’

  Between my arms supporting me on the edge of the basin, blood drips into the running water. A dark red drop sucks from my nose. As it hits the water, it expands into a stringy, paler red and then spirals down into the drain. In it I detect frail, slimy mucus.

  I see myself framed in the mirror. A red streak flows from my right nostril. Some blood makes its way over my lip and I suck it into my mouth, tasting the metal and salt. Behind the rage in the mirror is my mother.

  ‘When the bleeding stops we must go.’ She keeps quiet for a while. Between a sigh and a sob she says she thinks it’s a good thing that my father and I will be separated for a while. I know she hopes that time will bring change.

  But we have crossed an invisible line, like a layer between two temperatures. So complete is the destruction of this forced kinship, that it cannot be undone.

  I feel hate—shocking, driven hate—and I use it as the fuel to face this day. I wish Frank could be here to see me off; I miss him with raw self-pity.

  They insist on coming to see me off. I question my father and Bronwyn’s motives but say nothing.

  He leaves the house dressed in his usual fastidious way; no trace of the lack of control that drove his fist into my face. His clothes are drab and outdated. So are his rules, which are to be accepted without question. Beating or mentally abusing your child is condoned, particularly if the child doesn’t conform.

  We walk to the pale green, spotlessly clean Chevrolet and put my bag in the trunk. It looks small and insignificant. Like my life, I think. The painstaking cleanness reflects this man who is my father, and I see him personified by the car. ‘If you don’t keep it clean, you don’t respect it.’

  I look back at the house through the rear window and try to catch a last glimpse of my dog. She looks forlornly at the car and turns to the spot she has chosen to wait for my return. Near her hangs the box that was the home of two squirrels I had saved and reintroduced to freedom.

  As I get out to close the first gate behind us, I see moisture dripping from the exhaust. The smoke and vapour of the cold engine seem to muffle the sound of the idling car. Suddenly everything I see is crucially important, chastising me for my previous indifference, mocking me: And now you are going and we are staying.

  To the right of the kitchen door is the table where I stitched my mother’s hand after one of the pigs had bitten her. To the left of the gate is the spot where Bennett beat the woman with a piece of pipe and she fell and hit her head on the lawn mower still smelling of freshly cut grass and pulverised dog shit. All my observations are vividly laid out in front of me, waiting to be acknowledged.

  We drive past the side of the house in which I have experienced so much sorrow, but now don’t want to leave. The structure suddenly looks sad, droopy and empty. But the largest void is Frank-shaped. Touching my tender, swollen lip, I move my finger up into my nose and pick at the caked blood. Then we are through the second gate.

  Once we’ve crossed the last bridge, the gravel road ends, the rattling stops and we accelerate on the asphalt bordered by the greenery that shelters this winding road out of the valley.

  On the left is the old tree trunk where we used to wait for the school bus. We round the slow bend past Van Breda’s packing shed and I turn around to look back, not caring about Bronwyn’s malicious pleasure.

  Through the back window I stare back at Banhoek, stainless in the morning light and slightly warped by the curve of the glass.

  Every inch of the road out of the valley is layered with tiny adventures: the popping sound of jacaranda blossoms as I cycle over them, pockets of air with different temperatures and smells of the rich valley life, the late afternoon sun on closed eyelids. Yes, I love this valley; it’s what happened to me here that scarred. Strange that it never tainted the place—but then, it is so incredibly beautiful.

  And through it all runs the cord of sexual discovery. How mortified he would be if he knew about the sex, his son’s exploration of the unmentionable, the other races. Yes, to him that would be the ultimate evil.

  ‘The heart is dirty.’ This is what the black woman said about my parents, right there, at that very spot, when I caught up with her as she was leaving the valley after being fired, ostensibly for stealing. Is this how she felt when she spoke to the little snot-nosed child clinging to her with a fistful of her skirt? She, too, didn’t know what was waiting for her outside the valley.

  I have learnt so much here: a new kind of love, the first hate. A hate that had started way back but had broken soil here—all part of my initiation between these mountains. Acne, alcohol, sex, religion, loss, revolution, assault, no rights, failure and fantasy, all of it learnt here. But the torture, that’s what I will never forget, the soul-scarring realisation that I am what I have feared and prayed I wouldn’t be.

  We pass the shop with its dry wooden floors and high shelves, old glass display counters with cheap jewellery and sweets. I recall the sounds of the trading mingled with the smell of
soap and paraffin in the dimly lit room.

  The owner was murdered here when the revolution reached the valley. At that time death seemed so distant, only for the old and tired. Death was for others, but now it seems so close. For two years I will be on the vehicle of its pursuit.

  There is little conversation in the car. In front of Bronwyn our father sits neatly. Far to the opposite side our mother looks small and withdrawn.

  Over and over in my head I feel-hear the words, ‘This must stop, this must stop!’ Then it becomes a plea. ‘Please, please, dearest Lord, I beg of you, let something happen, anything, for this to stop.’

  When we turn down into Helshoogte, the valley of my youth becomes obscured and I catch sight of Table Mountain in the distance; where I will board the train . . . today.

  A pool of parents, family and friends has formed on the platform. We enter the station in rough formation after having enrolled at the Castle, and we walk towards our families. They probably still see us as the same people, but on the threshold of our departure we have already been altered—spirits now, walking amongst them, touching them in conversation, but they don’t own us any longer.

  Soot and dirt of trains and many partings lie beneath our feet. Above us the light-blocks through the canopies of the different platforms illuminate the rusty colour of oxidised decomposition, coating stone and concrete. Everything has a metallic dirtiness and the smell of coal, metal and travel.

  I secure a compartment with Gerrie, the only boy from my group of friends to be called up to the same camp. Under his skin are the swollen signs of worry; a brighter red where he has picked at the numb pain. As I put my bag on my bunk, I briefly remember the day we were chosen for student council. Did that really happen to me? Was I really chosen by the people who two years prior didn’t even know my name? From zero to hero . . . and now back to zero . . .

  When I left the hall that day, I was in a state of shock; like hearing about a death, similar in intensity, yet so completely on an opposing clef. I walked from that hall, and for the first time I experienced a feeling of triumph, feeling the sun and the throng of people as they came rushing out, congratulating me, and for once I felt confident. Even during initiation by the previous year’s prefects (when we were dumped in a truck with pig shit and covered with a canvas, punched, beaten and dropped off to walk home in the middle of the night, covered in shit) I didn’t care, because I was one of the chosen. Chosen despite the fact that I didn’t play rugby, just chosen for who I was, or for the part I had allowed them to see. Chosen, for who they thought I was.

  My father becomes agitated. Bronwyn is standing next to him, unnoticed. The atmosphere on the platform gives no indication that I’m about to start a journey to hell.

  The whistle is like a chain of sound running up and down the carriages. Sound with length. Everybody starts talking faster and louder. The whistle has issued a declaration. It cuts like an ice-cold chainsaw through my spine. My mother catches my expression and says, ‘Nicky, you’ll be fine.’ She looks at me intently, and nothing else exists. I can feel my face drain of colour, and the African sun slicing through the dirty roofing has no effect on the shiver running through my body.

  The large hooks join like iron hands between the cars, lock and take up the slack to carry us away, griping with loud metal clunks between the links of this shackle. The screeching of re-leasing brakes and dragging metal on metal—discordant, jarring sounds—gives the impression that the machine is aware of the long trek and bemoans it . . . or the unwilling ones it is carrying.

  I hear the nearest wheels go over the first joint in the tracks: Dik . . . dik. I hold my mother’s stare. The invisible cord of tenderness starts stretching.

  We juggle for position, filling every window. I fight only to see my mother’s face, and she stands there knowing my need. I focus so intently that all else smudges into pixels, with her face in the centre.

  Dik-dik . . . dik-dik, the sounds shorten in step. Eventually I only see the spot that is her face. Then a pylon sweeps past as we enter a long bend. As the train obediently follows the tracks, the pylons arrive faster. Where is she? I search until I can no longer see the platform.

  The sound changes as I pull my head back in.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ someone says.

  3

  The journey is in no way as I imagined it to be.

  For the first part of the day, with tension unravelling, massaged by increased familiarity and the rhythm of the steel wheels, there seems to be a jostling for position. By the time we snake through the Hottentots Holland Mountains all restraint has evaporated.

  Bizarrely my life has now swung even further around, fixing a course directly opposed to what I yearn for, dragging me over uncharted territory.

  We travel through the semi-desert of the Karoo that I learnt to love as a child. For hours on end I block out my reality, escaping to the wild outdoors. The contrast tortures me—I see where I want to be, but I’m so far removed from it, like a caged bird hanging at a window to a forest.

  There are three realities: the outside, the trepidation inside me, and then the chaos behind me bristling against my neck like the cold breath of the devil, who knows what awaits me.

  I take a wire-bound notebook from my top pocket—the first of many such books I will use to diarise what happens to me over the two years. I write:

  The light of the train runs like a scanner over a strip of ribbon, lighting the Karoo desert. From where I cup out the light, with my face close to the glass, I see a transient betrayal of the nocturnal mystery. Untouched-ness is richest in feeling. Our lack of exposure to it has numbed us to the subtle gifts that nature gives, like the emotion locked into a soft desert wind and the scent in its wash when you stumble upon its mystery while opening a gate on a gravel road and you realise for the first time its size and power.

  At De Aar, in the heat of day two, the train is delayed for thirteen hours outside the town. The toilets are a mess and the passages filthy. The railway staff have been hiding in the guard coach since yesterday. In a matter of twenty-four hours the train degenerates to a septic, sick serpent moving towards some disgusting hole.

  Fights break out, people vomit and defecate in the passages. One guy gains instant fame by managing to puke at will—his nickname is Skomgat.

  Drunken men from different social standing, language and culture, made equal by a mutual fate, open our compartment door and demand alcohol. The five travelling with me are part of the decay that is setting in. Gerrie hovers in-between, on a fence of fear, leaving me alone to defend my Kiwi shoe polish and Robin starch, products I didn’t even know existed until a week ago.

  By the afternoon of the second day of my two years I start longing for the discipline of the organisation awaiting me at the end of this journey. It is, after all, run by adults—the government elected by people like my father, people who are staunchly religious and regulated. Not people I relate to, but people who stand for discipline and order. And anything must be better than this anarchy.

  Deep into the day we stop again, this time at a station called Potfontein. Through my window I notice an elderly black man dressed in an ill-fitting but clean suit, its life extended by need and poverty. He carries the signs of this harsh climate, but there is gentleness and calm in his weathered face.

  Window down, my arms resting on the frame, I analyse the scene as if composing it for a painting. There is fortitude in the man’s posture, a humble tolerance of life and circumstance. He seems to have moved beyond struggling, to have arrived at acceptance.

  I draw a small sketch of him. Next to it I write:

  I’ve met such a man; in an intolerable corridor—neither of us wanted to be there—me trapped by youth and he by colour. We became friends . . . No, he took me between the scars to his trust where I had a glimpse of a different wisdom. A man like this has cried and sung for my loss. He doesn’t know the alignment of the planets, but he knows their touch on a cold, crisp Karoo night, away from the
lights that react obediently to the white man’s control.

  From another coach someone starts swearing at him. He looks up and then down. For some reason, what happens next stays with me as my real introduction to the Defence Force. The old man suddenly appears to embody everything that is simple and tender in the world of which I am no longer a part. I wish the train would start moving.

  With a dull thud a beer bottle hits the platform next to the bench where he is sitting. A white triangle of glass and froth explodes and he gets up, but then decides to stay when he hears the conductor’s whistle and the train starts moving.

  I hear cheering as someone running beside the train hurls a full plastic bag at the elderly man and it bursts against the side of his head. A cold fury lodges in my stomach. The perpetrator jumps onto the step between two coaches, as if onto a podium, holding on to the handles on either side. Why do the rivets and screws retain their hold? Why don’t they drop him under the wheels?

  As the vomit-smeared man bends to pick up his stained hat, I see the sign on the back of the bench: Non-Whites Only.

  The sun is low over the vast space and the colours are deepening, the light softening. The sounds around me become rounder, less sharp than in the middle of the day. I change seats to feel the air on my face. When I feel the panic clamp around me, I will search for this balm, try to capture it, to remember what ‘can be,’ I write:

  What do the bridges consist of that I’m traversing from my old world to this one; bridges built by others? I’m looking for bridges that go back—no . . . no, ladders that move higher. That’s what’s calling me . . . to an entirely different plane.

  Poupan, Kraankuil, Witput, Modderrivier. Later that night more conscripts board the train at Kimberley. I feel their frightened energy . . . and then I try to sleep.