Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “So then you get to matric?”

  “Which I did three times.”

  “Really?”

  “I couldn’t do the maths. I just couldn’t.”

  One of the few things I did recall about Steiner was that if a pupil didn’t understand something, it wasn’t his or her fault but the teacher’s.

  “And in those days you had to do it,” I added.

  “No, most other cops just went up to Standard Eight and then joined the force.”

  “But you stuck to it.”

  “It was hell.”

  “Good for you. And after school?”

  “I went to Police College and broke in horses.”

  “You broke in horses?”

  “Ja. My father had taught me. But I was also a junior PT instructor. Man, there was a course being offered in Denmark …”

  “Yes?”

  “We were preparing to go on it. I could become a senior instructor. I dreamed about that course.”

  “And then?”

  “Then came the bally war.”

  “Why’d you volunteer?”

  “My station commander said if I didn’t go they’d post me to the Cape.”

  “What’s so bad about the Cape?”

  “I don’t like the Cape.”

  “But you’d never been there!”

  “Man, I wasn’t going to the Cape.”

  “You married a woman from the Cape.”

  “So?”

  “And you want to go to Elgin.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “And there I thought you were fighting international fascism.”

  “That too. But you know, I must have been the luckiest guy in the war.”

  “Why’s that?” I said for the four-hundred-thousandth time, trying to reconstruct him from a faded black-and-white photograph, sitting stark naked in the Libyan desert with the Mediterranean behind him, covering his privates and scowling at the photographer who had crept up and tried to surprise this simple man with the temper of a Teuton, the body of a god and the smile of an angel.

  “Every day we’d get a ration of water and I kept mine until I had enough for a bath. But someone ratted on me and they wanted to charge me for stealing water, which amounted to treason. They could have shot me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Some of my friends came up for me.”

  “But why didn’t you go on the course after the war, Dad?”

  The old man either didn’t hear what I’d said or acted as if he didn’t hear me or he wasn’t going to answer it, or it was a dead spot, juddering his foot and clicking his nail, and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to ask the question again.

  Yuppie Pleads Exhaustion

  * * *

  The week passed in its usual way and I was asked whether I wanted to do one of those extra jobs that came along in the Hydra-headed corporation. It would take place over Saturday and would help towards paying off the mortgage, avoiding writing and passing the time. There was only international football that week, so I agreed to co-sub the insert, which dealt with the exciting world of commercial and brand surveys and was about as interesting as bashing your head against the wall and looking forward to stopping. The only mildly exciting thing that happened was that Kay called and asked whether she could come over after work. “Sure,” I said, and went back to editing something that did vaguely interest me: a comparison between the English and Afrikaans media’s sales, since my simple parents had wisely decided that I needed to be bilingual.

  The big difference was that the liberal English media, of which I was a part, tried to deal with the issues of the times while the Afrikaners reported the biblical facts of the day. The issue was that the Supreme Leader was trying to centralise power, which didn’t exactly make for exciting copy. When he was out of the country and boring others to death, which was most of the time, there was always that reliable old crutch of a quiet day at the newsroom, a variation of what I was doing right now: the vox pop survey. Were whites happier now than during the apartheid years? Yes. Were blacks better off than during the apartheid years? Yes. Another survey, of course, would come up with exactly the opposite results, or variations thereof. A sample of a thousand people spoke for the entire nation of almost fifty million, of whom about ten per cent were illegal. People like Ruth were streaming to the new United States. They didn’t care how badly they’d be treated – and they were, guilty as charged – there was money here.

  The Afrikaans press firstly reported on the effects of all this change, which meant they usually led with a murder story, usually black on white, failing which they featured a sport or TV story. The point is their scandals were local and not dependent on the Anglo-American axis of manufactured mundanity. They had plenty of randy stars in both fields to keep their small but loyal readership buying at a handsome profit. Moreover, they had their well-informed opinion pages and made sure to cater for letters from not-so-little old ladies who increasingly expressed their faith in light of all this darkness. But, most impressively, they featured extensive cultural coverage. If the Limeys had given up on reviewing things like the theatre and symphony concerts for commercial reasons, then the Afrikaners still took these events seriously, making sure they could afford them via other areas. It was a cohesive culture that was taking a lot of strain – along with daily reportage of their own being murdered – and we felt it in our office too, since a good portion of us were Afrikaners or half-castes, like yours not so truly.

  One such Afrikaner was Albertus Grey, his English surname notwithstanding. I was just leaving to meet Kay at home when I saw he was still working. There was nothing unusual about that. Albertus – or Al, in office parlance – always worked: early, late and very late. He was our Information Technology man and loved to speak in that language, which might as well have been Mandarin as far as I was concerned. He knew the technology inside out and he had an incurable disease, which wasn’t working; it was talking. Ask or tell him anything, as I did by pointing out the latest farm horror on that day’s front page of my other tongue, and you’d end up hearing his life story.

  Like the old man, he was a genius at coercing anything towards his tale, which was that he and his wife had had a beautiful house with a swimming pool on the Far East Rand. But their two-year-old “laatlam” son, Naas, had been mauled by their American pit-bull and died three days later. The pain of that loss had been so severe that they had emigrated to England (his biological father had been English hence the surname and passport but he had died two years after Albertus was born and the next time his mother married an Afrikaner – man, what a good man – he even let Albertus keep his biological father’s name and how many people let alone Afrikaners would do that?) and his daughter had excelled at acting. She had also started taking drugs. But the damp cold of Blightey had proved too harsh for these white Africans and they had returned home. They had also lost a lot of money, what with the exchange rate being what it was, so Al was always in the office. His face had a waxen screen tan and the few hairs he had left on his head pointed in all directions. He was building a palace for his wife in the east again, and she was driving a Merc again. He had all kinds of technology projects on the side, but the main one concerned a computer-generated story about Nasie, who had been only two when he was mauled by their pit-bull. He looked so peaceful, you know, lying there. And, man, it had broken Al’s heart to blast old Bliksem to kingdom come. Meanwhile, the daughter was occasionally praised, but usually reprimanded loudly on the phone on a daily basis. Albertus Grey was ruling and rearing his nuclear family from the office for all to hear. But he was our IT man and without him we couldn’t function. He was one of the chief workhorses in the office. Come to think of it, most of the workhorses in that office were Afrikaners of one stripe or another.

  Back home Kay was waiting at the gate and Butch got so excited about seeing her that he didn’t know his arse from his eyeballs. She had lost weight and had dark rings under her eyes, pleading exh
austion. Kay wanted to know whether she could sleep over for the night, just sleep, mind you, “because I feel safe with you”.

  “You don’t say.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “How did you mean it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When last did you sleep?” I said.

  “Does it matter, Mr Sub Editor?”

  “Yes, it does. Didn’t your mommy tell you it’s bad for your health?”

  “Oh, what the hell. Do you feel like a jay?”

  So we smoked a pre-rolled joint with Butch standing behind the floor-to-ceiling windows watching us.

  “What was work like?” she asked.

  “Normal,” I said, aware of the fact that I didn’t really want her to sleep upstairs. “And yours?”

  “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” she complained. “I’m doing a nine-to-five job with people dying left, right and centre. Then I’m doing an MBA with people scrambling for the top, and then I’m trying to do you,” she said, breaking into a neurotic giggle about her own weak joke.

  “Don’t think you’re too young to burn out, missy.”

  “Yeth uncle Len,” she said, mimicking a coquettish thirteen-year-old.

  “Do you feel like a drink?”

  “I thought you’d never offer.”

  So I went into the kitchen and got a bottle of Grouse, two glasses and a bowl of ice and went back to the living room. She was sitting on Ruth’s couch, as usual, and wanted to know how the old man was doing. I said he was okay.

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “What for?”

  “You never stop talking about him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t.”

  “This is not good.”

  “He sounds interesting.”

  “What else has been happening,” I said to get off the subject.

  “Ed’s been making the most outrageous comments.”

  “Ed who?”

  “Mhlophe.”

  “Oh him. What’s he been saying?”

  “Well, things like all whites should be driven back into the sea.”

  “Has he said this to your face?”

  “Yes. But I think it was just drunken talk.”

  “That’s even worse. It means he means it.”

  But no, she had challenged him on it and all he’d meant was that those whites who were still stuck in the past had to leave. How the hell were the likes of him going to determine that, I wondered out aloud.

  “I don’t know,” she started giggling.

  “Do you think it’s funny?”

  “Yes, I do. I don’t think it’s serious.”

  “I think it’s very serious. I didn’t like that prick from the very moment I saw him.”

  “He’s got a gentle side too, you know.”

  “So did Joseph Goebbels.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Jesus, Kay! You’re a political reporter, you’re studying for an MBA, but you don’t know who Goebbels was, you’ve never read Disgrace and the only adjective you seem to know is ‘cool’!”

  “I know,” she said, getting all teary. “But I’ll get there. I’m, like: when do I sleep? I mean, what do you know about Richard Cole’s Six Principles of Developmental Economics?”

  “Nothing. And I’m not sure I want to. But if you convince me he’s worth reading and that he writes in English and not Economics I’ll give him a bash. In fact, would you like me to Google him right now?”

  “No,” she said, looking vulnerable.

  We had reached our first stalemate. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I said: “Can I play you some non-thud-thud music?”

  “That would be – that would be really nice,” she said, trying hard not to like anything or find it cool, which of course made me feel like a bully, guilty and therefore mushy.

  So I took out a disc and said I’d been depressed the other day until I heard this. As far as I was concerned it was more rock ’n roll than rock ’n roll and I’d bought the whole set.

  “What is it?”

  “This particular piece is the first movement of the fourth quartet, which was actually the fifth, because even in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were commercial considerations.”

  I could see I’d lost her in my little lecture, but she was looking at me as if I were the font of all knowledge, as others sometimes did when I (and especially the old man) spun a yarn.

  “The piece that got me going again was the second movement of the thirteenth quartet, the B-flat minor, because it could be a scherzo – as in mocking – as much as a presto. That is, fast.”

  “Please don’t shout at me, but who is it?”

  “It’s Beethoven. Have you heard of him?”

  “Yes,” she said, still close to tears.

  “The man who appeals to amateurs and aesthetes alike. And please don’t cry. I’m not good with crying people.”

  “Okay. Shall we have another jay?” she said.

  “Sure, but listen to this.”

  I let the piece play up to that part where you might well imagine Heidi frolicking through the Alpine grasslands, but by then she had lost complete interest.

  “Won’t you please tell me the story of Disgrace,” she asked.

  “Okay, but not while the music is playing. Being a man I can’t concentrate on two things at the same time.”

  So I faded the music and told her about the white academic who half rapes one of his students, refuses to apologise for it publicly, resigns and goes to live with his daughter in the Eastern Cape. She, in turn, is raped by three black youths after they lock him up in the toilet. Her old farmhand tells her she, being pregnant by one of the youths and refusing to abort, can become his wife. He will look after her and the Coloured child, the future. The catch, of course, is that she will cede her land to him.

  “God, that’s rough,” she said sleepily.

  “Very. Not only is the daughter raped, she is gay. That echoes another atrocity: so-called corrective rape, except that those who usually ‘come out’ in the townships are murdered for good measure. But the Supreme Leader and his ilk might have had a point in thinking the novel was racist because, if there is at least some nuance among the white characters, there is none among the blacks. They are like the government itself: predatory, rabidly self-interested, contemptuous, removed. They don’t –”

  Kay was fast asleep and I wasn’t. So I covered her once again, let the fourth continue, softly, looking at her and drifting back to David Lurie’s daughter, Lucy. By accepting the new landowner’s patriarchalism, she more or less becomes a black woman and servant to him, and therefore sacrifices her allegedly decadent desire, her sexuality. If she has to “come out” under Petrus – an ironic name in that it comes from the former oppressor’s language, Afrikaans, and it’s the name of that disciple who insisted on being crucified upside down out of respect for his master, Jesus Christ – she is probably dead.

  All of this to continue working the land, “our fair sister”, to quote Jim Morrison. She’s a noble, compromising survivalist, echoing Carla in Karel Schoeman’s masterly Promised Land. The earthy, fundamental practicality of women. Lucy. The name also conjures up the primal skull found in another part of the continent, further up the Rift, Australopithecus afarensus: good for trees and the plains. In other words, “adaptable”. Lucy. Named after a Beatles hit on the radio at the time: ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Picture yourself on the couch with a woman who’s sleeping just like your wife did. Music. Melody. That was much more comforting. Round and around.

  If we are not going to know much about Lucy it leaves us with Lurie. Coetzee only gives his lead characters personalities and we are mesmerised by this one, however suspiciously. Why are we hypnotised by him? Realistically he’s a prick, a serial womaniser of young students and colleagues’ wives as he gets older. One of his methods of seduction is to play his student the unnamed and very d
ated ballet video Pas de Deux by the named Norman McLaren. It is unbelievably twee. He plies her with Meerlust, which means More Desire and proves costly in more than just the material sense. Moving on, he is only going to stand by his daughter, even though he could get a good job overseas, because blood is indeed thicker than water. Yet the closest he can come to an endearment for her is a Victorian-like “my dearest”. No Luce, no Angel. He is going to cling to his aloofness and never fully interact with mere black mortals. He clearly only judges “them” politically. In a way he represents most white South Africans, who have never bothered to take any kind of interest in their fellow citizens, especially by learning one of their languages. Intellectually he’s seductive because he doesn’t give a hoot about political correctness. He is composing an opera – on a banjo! – about an aristocratic woman pining for another literary letcher, Lord Byron. This has very little to do with the main story, if anything. His daughter protects her privacy concerning her rape like a corolla protects the reproductive parts of a flower, and so the author cleverly makes the father drive a Toyota Corolla, which gets stolen. David Lurie thinks the South African story can no longer be told in English; that speech comes not from a need to communicate but one to fill up our “overlarge” and “empty” souls with song. Why does he prostrate himself in front of his student victim’s mother and sister like a Muslim faithful, touching his head to the suburban carpet? If it is an act of penance towards her and the prostitute he used to see, then the point is, once again, that it’s personal, private. And so his inward journey leads him towards giving dignity to the very lowest of the low: dogs’ corpses. In summary, a real bastard of a charmer who is busy with questionable intellectual pursuits in order to end up saintly, metaphysically magnificent.

  It was getting cold, so I got two blankets again and cursed myself for not getting a number for Ruth, the most recent in a respectable line of prostitutes. The first had been in more exotic circumstances, possibly. I’d been heading to Greece, sunshine, from Paris and thought I’d pop into Venice. But no one had told me to change trains somewhere – not in English anyway. So I’d ended up in Rome, where I’d done that one thing the old man had never done, ever, not even in the flesh pots of Cairo, he’d assured me and I’d believed him. I had bought a woman in the Eternal City, doing my best not to be like him, running away from him, but doing it with the last of the money he’d sent me, via Ma.