The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  On the way back to the farm, Oupa said that he wanted to show me something. I asked him what, but all he would say was that it was something my Oupa had done.

  He drove an extra twenty or thirty kilometres in the direction of the city, smiling at me a few times in obvious anticipation of the surprise to come. He suddenly seemed to be in high spirits, as if we had not spent the afternoon at the station bringing the dead boys home. But he had not forgotten it. ‘You made Auntie Marie very happy,’ he said. ‘It was very good, what you did. You know that, don’t you?’ I was not sure that I did know that and chose not to answer. ‘I’m going to tell your Pa when we get back.’ Then he shook off the day’s events. ‘But now I have a special thing I want you to see. I want to show you something I’ve never even shown your pa.’

  It was a surprise when he entered the grounds of the KwaDlangezwa campus of the university the government had built for the Zulus. The university’s fence line skirted the national road. On three sides the campus was surrounded by the ever-present sugar cane and the road on the other. It had handsome buildings and beautiful gardens. ‘Have you been here before?’ Oupa asked.

  ‘Pa always just drives past. I’ve never been inside before.’ I knew what it was and I wondered vaguely if, being white, we should be inside. But no one seemed to pay any attention to us. I had, on a few occasions, visited the campuses of Afrikaans universities to see relatives studying at them and, excepting the fact that the students were black, this one did not look too different. A few groups of students were lying down on a lawn, talking softly. A car passed from the front and in the distance a young man in athletic gear was jogging towards us.

  Oupa waved an arm at the surrounding campus. ‘And they say we oppress these people. Just look at this place. You can’t get better. We can be proud of what we do for the kaffirs—’ Then he remembered that we were not supposed to use that word any more, ‘… the Bantus,’ he finished.

  On our left, a handsome building had a curved façade that made it appear round. It had stained-glass windows and was set back from the road. Oupa stopped outside it. He got out and waved for me to follow. Once inside, he stood back and looked at me for a reaction. ‘It’s a church,’ I said softly.

  ‘A chapel,’ Oupa said.

  I was not sure what the difference was between a chapel and a church or what reaction he wanted from me, so I said, ‘It’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ He was smiling broadly and it was clear that his pride had to be rooted in something more personal than just the government giving Zulu students a nice chapel. I waited for him to continue. When he did, his arm waved in the direction of the rows of gleaming wooden pews. ‘What do you think of these nice seats?’

  ‘They’re also beautiful.’ I was looking at the pride in my grandfather’s face. I had never seen him like this. ‘Nicer than our church at home,’ I added.

  ‘That’s right. That’s right.’

  At last I could see where this was going. ‘It’s the best part of the chapel,’ I told him.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I can see it.’

  ‘Do you know what?’

  I had already guessed, but his eagerness required that I play his game. ‘What, Oupa?’

  ‘Your Oupa provided them.’

  ‘Really, Oupa? They must have cost a lot.’

  Oupa shrugged. ‘I wanted to give the Zulu people something nice too.’ He raised a finger as if admonishing some absent critic. ‘I want people who visit South Africa to come and see this nice university and this beautiful chapel. These black children are getting a better education than I had. Think about that.’

  I tried briefly to think about it. ‘It’s very nice, Oupa,’ I said. ‘The Zulus will be proud of it.’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly it. And I supervised the whole job myself. I was in and out of that woodworker’s factory two or three times a week. He told me that was the biggest job he ever got.’

  On the drive back to the farm, he raised the subject of the chapel and its gleaming wooden pews a few more times. ‘It does look nice, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It looks so beautiful, Oupa.’

  ‘And my seats, my seats look good.’

  ‘They do, Oupa.’

  ‘Something people can be proud of.’

  ‘I think they will be very proud of it.’

  ‘Your oupa is glad that you like it. I’m very glad.’

  And that was Oupa. In my memory everything about him is big. He was physically big, his farm was big, his heart was big for his family and his generosity was big. And he liked the world to see how big he was. Unlike my father, who seemed to want little from any other human being, Oupa wanted praise from his family, his friends, his children and grandchildren, even his farm workers. More than anything else, he wanted to be loved and appreciated. He needed to be told how generous he was, how well he could shoot, what a fair man he was. It was almost as if he doubted that he was a good man. If that really were so, he certainly did not have to worry about me. I thought he was, along with my father and Uncle Stefan, one of the three best men in the world.

  twenty-four

  The first sound I heard as Oupa drove into the farm was the rumble of my motorbike. As we came in through the main gate, Abraham came bouncing up a track from the sugar cane, his hair flying. ‘Good,’ Oupa said. ‘It looks like Abraham feels better.’

  I said nothing.

  At almost the same moment, the Land Rover with my father and Uncle Stefan came down the track from the bushveld side. I ran over to see what they had shot, but this time the back of the truck was empty. When my father got down, I noticed that he was limping and massaging his buttocks. Mama had noticed it too. ‘Bernard? Did you hurt yourself?’

  He shook his head, as if to dismiss the thought. ‘On the Land Rover, going through a dip, I bumped it against a corner of the bodywork. I might have taken off some skin.’

  ‘You’d better let me have a look at it,’ she said.

  Before she had finished, André’s voice cut in. ‘I can help. I’ve got some ointment. I’ll rub it on for you—’

  My father gave him a look that only lasted an instant, but had enough venom in it to kill him on the spot. Mama saved him the need to reply. ‘Thank you, André. I do appreciate that, but I have something for it.’

  Uncle Stefan was close enough to hear the exchange. ‘Don’t be like that, Amanda,’ he said to Mama, chuckling. ‘Let André help.’ My father said nothing, limping after Mama into the house.

  Riding my bike that afternoon with Abraham on the pillion seat behind me was not the joy it would otherwise have been. The thought that he had been riding all over the farm without me while I went to meet Tjol’s dead body in which the wound that killed him had been hidden from my sight, was not easy to bear. I gave it up after only an hour or so when he said he wanted to stop. I went with him to the outbuilding and watched him lie down on the bed. This time he really did look tired. I lay down too, just for a moment or two, I thought.

  When I woke up, the sun was already low in the sky, but Abraham was still asleep. I went outside, straight into a trap. Oupa’s voice boomed across the yard. ‘Here’s the man I need to help me with the braaivleis.’ So I spent the next hour or two stoking the fire, adding the occasional log and turning the meat.

  By the time the family sat down to eat, Ouma had got over the gloom she felt at the thought of Tjol’s death. And my father and Uncle Stefan had put aside the chagrin they felt at coming back empty handed. Oupa had not been able to resist suggesting that they may have done better had they taken his grandsons along. Abraham and I grinned at the idea, but our fathers just gave us each a look that said you had better not take that seriously.

  The dinner went on deep into the evening, as one family anecdote after another, most of them about people I hardly knew, flowed from the senior members of the Vorster clan. I was saved by Abraham. ‘Let’s go hunt fish – now,’ he whispered.

 
; ‘In the dam? It’s too dark.’

  ‘My father brought torches.’ His eyes were glowing with anticipation at the thought of the hunt and of escaping the family chronicles.

  The idea was tantalising beyond my ability to bear it. I looked in the direction of my parents. My father was talking to Uncle Stefan and Oupa. They were drinking beer and laughing a lot. Even my father was. Mama and Auntie Virginia had gathered round Ouma, where they were having their own conversation. I could not help noticing that Michie and Annie were sitting close to learn what they could about being grown-up ladies. And to think they accused me of being an eavesdropper.

  ‘Come, let’s go,’ I said to Abraham.

  From the dam you could see the glow of the braaivleis fire where one of the yard boys was still turning what remained of the meat. You could also see the gas lamps that had been hung in the trees above the tables. The family was out of sight, behind the earth wall that Oupa had left along that bank of the dam. We could hear the sounds of talking and laughter, but even that was soon to melt away as our attention moved to the fish.

  Hunting fish in Oupa’s irrigation dam was a special treat. No water had been run into the dam since the previous evening. It was no more than ankle deep. We each carried a torch and a wooden shaft that we had sharpened with Oupa’s hunting knife. Abraham had borrowed it for the purpose.

  We left our clothes in a pile on the bank and entered the dam in our underpants. Our strategy was uncomplicated. We moved across the dam, two or three metres apart, creating a front broad enough to drive fish ahead of us, spears in our right hands and torches in our left. As soon as a fish moved and we saw the telltale wake on the surface, we dashed forward together.

  Abraham was the first to strike. The fish had turned and tried to dart between us, but instead ran straight into the point of Abraham’s spear. He got another one before I had any success. I was feeling terrible by that time, a bit like Uncle Pietertjie when my father shot the eland.

  But the next one was mine, a nice plump one. Like Abraham’s first kill, he was coming towards us, looking for a way out. My spear struck him from the front just behind the head, stopping him dead in his tracks – literally. Soon we had a pile of seven or eight fish, each of them a little shorter than a grown man’s forearm, in a gasping, dying pile on the bank. It seems a little barbaric, all these years later, but as we dashed through the shallow water, jostling each other, charging, herding, stampeding and finally killing the fish, the only sensation I felt was one of complete exhilaration.

  Let no one tell you that there is any masculine occupation more satisfying than the hunt. Somewhere deep within us lies the need to pursue, capture and kill when killing is necessary, or even when not entirely necessary. The rush of joy at the moment you strike, the deep satisfaction of complete and final conquest: nothing resonates within the soul of men, even fifteen-yearold men, in quite the same way.

  We splashed back and forth across the dam, staying in close formation, spraying water and mud over ourselves, turning our underpants brown, as we drove the fish ahead of us. At any one moment we seemed to have at least two moving. Whenever they reached one of the banks, they would have to decide where to go, often hesitating. At that moment the closest one hurled his spear, sometimes both spears flew at a cornered fish.

  I could have continued all night, but I became aware that Abraham was lagging behind me. Turning to look for him, I saw him splash slowly across to the bank and lean against the mud wall. ‘You stay there,’ I told him ‘I’ll chase the fish towards you.’ That is what we did for a while, but even that was not a success. Abraham was slower now, letting most of the fish get past. Worst of all was that he did not have the strength to climb the bank and get out of the dam. I had to take him on my back and, holding onto protruding willow roots, drag us both up the mud wall.

  Later, we braaied our catch on the bank, using our spears to hold the impaled fish over the flames of the fire we made behind the earth wall. Abraham rested against the broad base of a willow that Oupa had planted fifty years before. We only had Oupa’s knife between us and tonight Abraham was clearly too weak to help, so scraping off the scales took longer than usual. We had brought a plank with a hole in one end for the purpose. It was a method of cleaning fish used by the farm workers. A nail was driven through the tail of the fish and then pushed into the hole to hold it steady while you scraped away the scales. Despite the struggle to prepare them for the fire, they were, from that day to this, the most enjoyable fish I have ever eaten. It was not then, but is now astonishing to me how much a pair of teenage boys can eat if the circumstances are right. As a feast, our fish beat my cousin’s wedding by far.

  We consumed the fish, probably too quickly, sucking the flesh off the bones and being careful not to swallow any. Then we walked slowly back to the outbuilding where we slept. I let Abraham set the pace. Before starting our fish braai, we had washed off the excess mud, dried ourselves round our fire and got dressed. I thought we had done pretty well in the cleaning-up department, but we had the misfortune of bumping into Mama as we arrived at the outbuilding. She threw up her hands as if in shock. ‘Dear Lord Jesus, boys, what have you been doing? It looks like you’ve been having a mud fight.’ But she did not really want to know. ‘Never mind, don’t tell me. You go and shower immediately and put on other clothes.’ In case Abraham might think that she was talking only to me, she pointed a finger, rotating it back and forth between us. ‘You as well, Abraham, before your mother sees you.’

  After we had showered, Abraham slid slowly into bed. He had found an extra pillow in the cupboard and lay, supported by the pillows, his head and shoulders raised slightly.

  Standing next to his bed in my underpants, I looked at his face. In the light from the gas lamp he looked lined, much older than I knew he was. At that moment, I did something I had not done before, not with anyone. I sat down on the edge of his bed. The way I had done it was the way I had often seen my mother do it when one of us was sick.

  I was overcome by what for me was a new emotion. I felt afraid for him. All my life to that time, I had been the object of other people’s concern, mostly that of my parents. Now I was worried about Abraham. Eating the fish we had grilled over the fire, he had looked very happy, but he also looked exhausted. He had stopped being the Abraham I knew. A few months before, he could have chased fish around that dam all day, and most of the night too.

  ‘Do you want me to call your ma?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. It’s all right. It gets like this sometimes, but it goes away again.’

  I nodded as if I knew that was the way it was, but in truth I was bewildered by his calmness and seeming fatalism. ‘What about a glass of milk or something?’ I suggested. Mama often administered a glass of milk when someone was sick. If Mama did it, it had to be a useful course of action.

  ‘No, Chrissie. It’s good now. I don’t need anything. I’ll go to sleep soon and I’ll be better tomorrow morning.’ I saw that as a signal that my presence might no longer be desirable and got up to go. ‘Wait a moment, Chrissie. I want to talk to you.’ There had never been anything like this between us. The many hours, days, even years we had passed in each other’s company had been spent running through the scrub in the undeveloped parts of the cemetery, climbing the clay walls of the brickyard quarry, throwing our bodies around the rugby field, engaging in fist fights with each other and boys from the neighbourhood, avoiding the monkey man from the brickworks, scrambling up the avocado pear trees at the bottom of our garden, being battered by the rough surf of our local beaches and taking part in other similarly robust boyhood pursuits. Something we had never attempted was serious conversation. We had found no need for it. I sat down again and waited for him to speak. At length he asked, ‘You know Jill, of course?’

  It was a strange question. Of course I knew Jill. She had taught me to kiss. Before that I had known nothing of that strange art. I would always know Jill. All my life I would know her. ‘Yes.’

  �
�I’m in love with her.’

  ‘Why?’ I was astonished. I had no way of realising it at the time, but my feeling towards Jill was my first experience of the time-honoured male tradition of a good girl to pay court to and a bad girl to have fun with. In my view, Jill was definitely the bad girl to have fun with.

  ‘She’s so beautiful and when we played Postman’s Knock at Merle’s party, the way she kissed me was so wonderful.’

  I wanted to tell him that she kissed me that way too, but I was looking at his tired young-old face and could not say it. In any event, he would surely not be serious about this when he was feeling better, so what did it matter? ‘She is pretty,’ I said.

  ‘She’s not just pretty. She’s beautiful. I think she’s the most beautiful girl in the world.’ He looked so tired, but just thinking of her, his eyes seemed to light up. ‘I wake up at night thinking about her.’