The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  Auntie Fleur was different to the rest of the family in every possible way. When greeting each other in our family, men kissed women and women kissed each other. Men shook hands. And the kissing was not just a rubbing of cheeks together and smacking of lips in thin air. When you met relatives again after an absence of some time, you were kissed on the mouth, a robust pressing of lips. Whether the person you were greeting was old Auntie Sarah from the Highveld, breathing pungently into your mouth through her rotten teeth, or a young female cousin who smelt like roses: either way, that was how you were expected to show your pleasure at seeing them again. To turn your head away was a shameful act of coldness. Once, when Uncle Piet Brother-in-law, who was married to one of my mother’s sisters, kissed my older sister, Michie, his false teeth clacked like castanets as he leant forward to perform the act. She spent the next ten minutes in the bathroom gargling and brushing her teeth.

  Auntie Fleur was the exception to the kissing rule. She did not kiss, not even family members. I remember Auntie Virginia, Abraham’s mother, and the outrage in her voice as she told Uncle Stefan, ‘When I came close to kiss her, she stepped back and shook my hand. You’d think we were strangers.’

  So it was probably not the best idea when we took her two boys, Jean-Pierre and Alain-Robert, climbing in the quarry. Their names were another thing. ‘Where have you ever heard such foreign names?’ I remember Mama asking.

  It has to be said that Auntie Fleur had her doubts about entrusting the two of them to us. Before we left, she pointed a long, wrinkled finger at me and said, ‘You, young man, you look responsible. I’m placing my boys in your care.’

  The way things worked out, we looked even worse than usual when we reached the top of the quarry. ‘Oh hell,’ Abraham said, looking at the two of them. ‘Auntie’s going to be bedonderd. She’s going to slit our throats.’ He had reason to fear her anger. If Jean-Pierre and Alain-Robert closed their eyes, you could see no skin, no clothes, no shoes, only red clay. Abraham and I looked the same, but no one would care much how we looked. Using our hands and a stick, we tried to scrape some of the clay off Jean-Pierre and Alain-Robert, but our efforts had practically no effect.

  At her first glimpse of her sons, the auntie had to sit down and fan herself. ‘What have your little monsters done to my poor sons?’ she yelled at Uncle Stefan. Her sophisticated ways went only so far. ‘They look like a pair of kaffir children now. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought they came from some old Zulu’s kraal in KwaMashu.’

  She left almost immediately after that, her sons in the back seat wrapped in towels, having been hosed down in the garden, and their clothes dumped in the refuse. Uncle Stefan burst out laughing on and off for the rest of the day. ‘You little monsters,’ he would say to us, ‘what did you do to those poor children?’ Then he would start laughing again. For a month or so after that, he called us the little monsters.

  Auntie Fleur’s strangeness did not extend to the language she spoke. Like the rest of us, Afrikaans was her language. In fact, she did not approve of my sisters, Michie and Annie, and Abraham and me attending an English school.

  I know that my father saw us as a boer family, Afrikaners first, and South Africans second. So it came as a big surprise to all three of us when he insisted on our attending an English school, instead of the nearest Afrikaans one.

  I have few memories of him from that period. I was six or seven at the time and I remember being puzzled by why, as such a strict Afrikaner, he had sent us to a school where we were to be taught in English. After pondering the question for some weeks, I did what I always did in those days: I asked Mama.

  She looked at me in that slightly amused, slightly exasperated way that she had. ‘Well, there is no Afrikaans school close by,’ she said. ‘You would have had to travel far every day.’

  ‘But shouldn’t we be good Afrikaners?’ I had difficulty believing that a bit of inconvenience should get in the way of being good patriots.

  This time she thought about it for a moment before answering. Then she told me about how impressed he was by the politeness of the high-school boys at the English school. ‘When we first went to choose a school for the three of you, your father by chance had business at the English school. We had been to visit the Afrikaans school, but he felt that the boys were surly and ill-mannered there. On the other hand, when he was shown around the English boys school in Durban North, the headmaster took him into the library where seven or eight boys were seated. When he and the headmaster entered the room, the boys all rose and only sat down when the headmaster asked them to. Your father said that he wanted you to behave that way, and the girls too. He feels it is important to be a good Afrikaner, but it is also important to be a good person. Good manners are very important to your father.’

  I had no doubt that Mama’s memory was accurate. Everything I knew of my father confirmed that. There were few things more important to him than that his children should have manners that were as good as his own. Everyone we had dealings with should be able to see that we were good-quality people.

  At that age I already knew enough about our country to know that we, the white people, were a minority, but that we were in charge. I also knew that the Afrikaners, our own group, were the majority among the white people, so we ran the country. I had heard my father say, on more than one occasion, that English-speakers called us prejudiced and voted for other parties, but that they sheltered behind our apartheid policies and thanked God that we were there to protect them.

  Yet he was proud of our schooling and how well we spoke English. He made a point of attending all school events, whether they were plays, rugby matches, bazaars or parent evenings. On all these occasions, he made a point of seeking out the principal and our class teachers to shake their hands and thank them for the fine work they were doing.

  That was as far as his contact with them or any of the parents went. Unless he was directly involved in something or Mama was present, he would keep to himself at every function. He might be waiting for us, watching a match in which one of us was playing or attending a concert, but he would always be silent, seeming to pay attention, but never participating. At such times, he spoke only when it was altogether necessary.

  I once suggested to Mama that they would have had friends among the other parents if we had attended an Afrikaans school. She had taken a little while to answer. ‘Perhaps not. Your father’s only real friend is Uncle Stefan. I’m not even always sure that he thinks of me as a friend.’

  three

  Sharing the house with my two sisters was not always easy. It was not a big house, but I had my own bedroom from the time I was four, while they had to share a room. So they fought with each other more than they fought with me.

  Apart from me, Annie was the only real business person in the family. It was because of this inclination that she and I became business partners of a sort. To Annie, everything had a price. While Michie and I spent our pocket money on entertainment, Annie saved hers for useful things that she could then hire out to us. She charged Michie five cents a time for the use of her hair dryer. She bought a set of the board game Risk, and wanted to charge the rest of us fifty cents a time to play with her, but Mama told her, if she did that, another set would be bought and she would have to pay to play with the rest of us.

  Growing up with my sisters, I got to know things about women that some men only learn much later in life. For instance, I discovered that they have an inherent need to keep you waiting.

  I cannot remember why I got picked for the job, but once when Annie needed a swimsuit, Mama instructed me to go with her to Broadway, Durban North’s little shopping centre. The way I remember it, I was no more than seven.

  There was only one shop that sold that sort of thing in Broadway and Annie looked through every swimsuit they had in stock, finding some imagined fault with each one. It was a hot afternoon and eventually I found a chair in a corner of the shop and tried not to look at her. And can you believe that she
was angry with me? ‘Why are you sitting there with a thick face looking so cross?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t I even pick what I want?’

  I felt as deeply offended as only a seven-year-old can. After all, I was the injured party, the one who had to wait for hours while she pretended not to like any of the swimsuits, until she eventually settled on a blood-red one-piece that, I believed, was the first one they had shown her when we came in.

  But one thing about Annie is that she was not one to let the sun go down on her wrath. On the way home she had forgotten her anger and confided in me that an amazing change had come over her. ‘I’ve given my heart to Jesus,’ she said. ‘I love Jesus now.’

  ‘Everybody loves Jesus,’ I said. ‘You have to. The Bible says so.’

  ‘But this is different. I care deeply about the Lord now.’

  ‘So are you going to do nothing but read the Bible now like Uncle Gawie?’ I asked. Uncle Gawie was my mother’s brother. He was a member of the Apostolic Faith Mission, which my father said only fools belonged to, and he was always preaching to you and quoting the Bible. If you said, ‘Oh Lord’, he would say you must not take the name of the Lord in vain. If you hesitated when putting something into the plate at church, he would tell you afterwards that the Lord loves a cheerful giver. Once Michie said to him that, in that case, it would not help for her to give. She said she knew that afterwards she would resent having given and would definitely not be cheerful about it, preferring to have kept the money, so she might as well not have put it in the plate. Then he wanted to pray with Michie to cleanse her heart, but my father would not allow it. In fact, there was not much about Uncle Gawie that my father would allow, so we did not see much of him.

  ‘No, don’t be silly, I’m not going to be like Uncle Gawie,’ she told me. ‘Our teacher spoke to us about Jesus and told us that you have to give your heart to Jesus. And I did, so now I just care deeply about the Lord.’

  Despite myself, I was impressed by her declaration and wondered if, perhaps, I should also be giving my heart to Jesus. On reflection all these years later, I think that by the time we got home she had forgotten how deeply she cared about the Lord. A few weeks after that she told me that she had talked to another girl, one from a family that mothers warned their daughters against, and now she wondered if she should not become a pagan. She used the English word. There did not seem to be a good Afrikaans word for it. Or, if there was, Annie did not know it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘You dance round a fire in a forest at night—’ she paused for effect, ‘stark naked.’

  ‘The kids at school would love to hear about that,’ I told her. ‘The whole high-school camera club will want to take pictures.’

  But I do not believe that she ever did dance around a fire in the forest – naked or otherwise. Before the year was out she confided that she was developing a scientific state of mind. In future everything she believed would need to be proven. That also only lasted a few days.

  After every new declaration of faith she would swear me to secrecy. ‘Put your hand over your heart and swear,’ she would say. It was a wise precaution, because to Mama and my father there was only one religion and that was the Dutch Reformed Church. It was a comfortable religion, one you could exercise on Sundays and pack away for the rest of the week. Not like Uncle Gawie’s, where you had to be at it all the time or the pagan one, where you had to dance around a fire in the forest naked.

  Every time she swore me to secrecy, I would do as she instructed and say, ‘I swear on the graves of my forefathers.’ That usually satisfied her. But long before the year was over I had stopped admiring Annie’s philosophical leanings. In fact, I stopped listening to her when she tried to tell me about her latest inspiration.

  Despite everything, Annie was always the more practical of my sisters. Her current philosophy, whatever it was, never got in the way of business. Michie was different. She saw the world as a glamorous place. Once, when I was about eight and we were driving into town of an evening, we had passed a young woman at the roadside, wearing a short skirt, fishnet stockings and an almost transparent blouse that revealed the absence of a brassiere. She seemed to be studying the occupants of the cars that were passing. Michie leant forward in her seat and murmured under her breath, ‘She’s beautiful.’ A moment later her head banged against the side window as the flat of Mama’s hand found its mark. ‘What did I do?’ she whimpered.

  ‘Saying that bad woman is beautiful? How can you say that to your family?’

  ‘I didn’t mean I want to be like her,’ Michie protested.

  As for me, I turned right round to get a glimpse of the cause of the dissension. I could not imagine how Mama could tell someone was bad just by looking at her. ‘What bad things does she do?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing to do with you,’ Mama said.

  This is not to say that Michie was only interested in looking glamorous. In her own way, she was as competitive as Annie and me – and that was very competitive indeed. I remember an occasion, even earlier than the incident with the prostitute, when a plague of frogs descended, if that is the correct term, on the quarry. Michie won the competition we held that afternoon, having smashed two hundred and sixty-one frogs with half a brick – in just two hours. Abraham was a distant second with one hundred and fifty frogs flattened. I only managed forty-five. I do not remember how many frogs the others destroyed, but we all joined in enthusiastically.

  As it happened, the frog plague coincided with another visit of Jean-Pierre, Alain-Robert and their mother, the first since the incident when the boys had been plastered with the quarry’s red clay.

  Down the years, a number of people have tried to explain synchronicity to me. As I understand it, it is a spontaneous synchronising of incidents that have no apparent relation, but affect each other profoundly. The experts on the subject need not have bothered. The appearance of the boys and their mother on that day was the finest possible example of synchronicity at work.

  We again took Jean-Pierre and Alain-Robert down to the brickworks. Before we left, we had been made to swear that we would stay away from the red clay of the quarry and we did as we had been told. No one said anything about not crushing frogs.

  We arrived back home with our cousins who, except for some perspiration, looked almost as neat as when they had arrived that morning. For her part, their mother looked at peace with a world that included Abraham and me, until Jean-Pierre took his handkerchief from his pocket. A dead, utterly crushed frog came out with it. He had kept it as a souvenir. At heart, he and Alain-Robert were real boys. It was not their fault that their mother made them dress that way. That was the last time we ever saw them. Mama had to use smelling salts to revive their mother.

  The year I turned twelve, pierced ears became the fashion among Durban schoolgirls. There were shops in town where they could go to get the job done. The shops had special guns that shot tiny holes into girls’ ear lobes. Michie wanted to be one of the first in Northlands Girls’ High to have her ears pierced, so she persuaded Annie to go with her. The last thing Annie had said before they left was, ‘I’m not going to get my ears done. I like them without holes.’

  When they came back, Annie’s ears had been pierced, but Michie’s were untouched. ‘She said I should go first,’ Annie complained to Mama. ‘But I said no. Then the shop lady said I should go first and she was sure Michie would go after me when she saw it wasn’t so bad. So I went and I told her it wasn’t bad, but she was still too scared to go herself.’

  After that Michie went to have her ears pierced with Glenda, who lived up the road from us. When they came back, Glenda had pierced ears, but Michie’s were still the way God had made them. Then she tried Mama. ‘I’ll go with you,’ Mama said, ‘but you have to promise me that you will do it this time.’

  ‘I promise, I promise, I promise,’ Michie said.

  I am hesitant to recount that she did not keep her promise. Only Mama had pierced ears when they came back.
After that she turned to me. ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m a boy. I’m not going to have pierced ears.’

  While my father was the head of the family, it was Mama who ran things. She worked in the nursery school on Northway during the mornings, teaching drawing to the little crabs, as the boys at school called the smaller children, whose parents left them while they were at work. Apart from doing all the typical motherly things like cooking, cleaning, ironing, knitting, directing the Zulu garden boy and giving him hell if he did not follow her instructions properly, she fixed cut knees, grazed hands and black eyes, grew orchids and made beautiful macramé creations that she used for hanging plants from the veranda roof, the eaves and the branches of the avocado trees that grew in the back garden.

  Mama had a quiet way of handing out discipline. She never shouted at anyone. She spoke firmly and quietly to us when she felt we needed speaking to. We all argued with her and then immediately did what she told us to. I remember a fourteen-year-old Michie vehemently disputing Mama’s instruction that she had to be home from a party by eleven. ‘Everyone will laugh at me,’ she said.

  ‘My girl, I don’t want you pregnant at this age,’ Mama said. ‘Be sure that you’re home by eleven.’

  I could not understand what a particular time on the face of the clock had to do with getting pregnant. I had begun to realise that pregnancies had an entirely different cause. Obviously Michie saw the connection. The next day I heard her speaking to Glenda on the phone. ‘I’m leaving at quarter to eleven,’ she said. ‘You’d better also. We don’t want to get pregnant.’

  Mama loved to make the place beautiful and the most beautiful thing she could think of was her collection of orchids. Other aunties coming to visit always remarked on them. Mama said that one of the wonderful things about living in Durban was that, in the city’s subtropical climate, she could grow her orchids out of doors. She had saved for a small hot house, but only the young plants and the most delicate were kept in it.