Abraham was on his back, his lips parted slightly. He looked paler than he had in life. Uncle Stefan was touching his face. But I did not want to touch him or even come near him. I could still feel the pressure of his arms around my neck, and his belt gripped tightly in my left hand. This time I had no desire to demonstrate my piety by praying over Abraham’s body. This was real, not the imaginary corpse of a boy called Tjol whom I could not even remember having met. Abraham was dead and it seemed to me in the cold damp of that early morning that the world had ended.
twenty-seven
A call from home came for me one afternoon while I was out with a client. Nathan and the others were unsmiling when I came in. He called me into his office and asked me to sit down. ‘You have an uncle called Stefan?’ he asked. When I told him I did, he looked at me with an expression that seemed to be anticipating the pain he would have to inflict. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Chris, your uncle has died. Your sister, Unny, phoned.’
‘Annie,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry about your uncle. Unny said you were close.’
‘At one time we were.’
That had not been an entirely accurate way of describing our relationship. After Abraham’s death a slow dissolution of the warmth between Uncle Stefan and me had begun. It was much later that I realised, whatever I told myself, that all my childhood I had been closer to Uncle Stefan than to my father. All my young life, he had been more than my uncle. He had been a guardian during my childhood and a protector in my youth.
I am aware now that, in my adult years, I have not been fair to Uncle Stefan. He meant so much to me in my boyhood, but in later years I had neglected him. The last time I saw him was only because he had persisted in contacting me until I eventually promised to come.
Uncle Stefan had phoned, e-mailed me and sent messages with other family members that he wanted to see me. He had heard that I was selling my company and planning to emigrate. He wanted to talk to me before I made a final decision.
I had already made my decision, but he did not deserve the way I had been avoiding him. He and Auntie Virginia had stayed in their home in Red Hill. I had rarely visited my home city and, when I had, the visits had all been for business reasons and much too brief, I told myself, to see family members as well. But he had finally worn me down. So it was that one Saturday afternoon, after I had signed the documents that transferred my company to the new owners, I undertook the six-hour drive from Johannesburg to Durban to see him for what proved to be the last time.
He had been retired for eight years, but I had not seen him for more than twenty. And I had not expected him to look as old as he did.
I knocked on the kitchen door, just as I had done as a child. It took a while for him to open it. Standing on the stoep and looking at him for the first time in so long, it took a moment before I was sure that the man before me was my uncle. ‘Is it you, Chrissie?’ he asked at last. I could as easily have asked the same question of him.
He shuffled aside to let me enter. Auntie Virginia had been sitting in the kitchen embroidering, a picture I had seen many times before. She seemed to search absently on either side of her chair for a place to put down her embroidery. She found it in a little side table that had been next to her chair all along. Then she rose, fussily smoothing down her apron. ‘My world,’ she said, as she looked at me. ‘He’s got grey hair too, like us.’
After the greetings were over, Auntie Virginia dished up a supper of spaghetti and sausages. The evening was far progressed, but they had waited until I arrived so that we could eat together.
When he had let me in, Uncle Stefan had shuffled slowly away from the door, breathing heavily. Every movement seemed to leave him gasping. Seeing me watching him, he explained. ‘I’m finished, Chrissie. My heart’s giving in. The doctor told me I ate too much red meat and drank too much red wine. So I told him that I had a good time doing it.’ His chuckle ended in coughing. He had to hold onto the table for support.
The evening with my uncle and aunt was surprisingly free of complexity. His message to my office had been that he wanted to talk to me before my decision to leave the country was final. But throughout the evening he avoided the subject. Perhaps he felt that the right opportunity had not arisen or perhaps he wanted to be alone with me when he did raise it. Whatever it was, he led his wife and me into the lounge, wheezing with every step, and set the television onto a sports channel. The python skin was still on the wall, looking dried out and dusty now, and not nearly as big as I remembered it. He saw where I was looking and chuckled briefly. ‘You remember that? He was right in the Hudsons’ garden.’
‘I’ll never forget it. I arrived just as Uncle Stefan was finishing him.’
‘Those were good days. But there’s not much I can do now,’ he said, ‘so I decided to be a little extravagant and get the digital service. Every night I watch a bit, specially if there’s a good game.’
Auntie Virginia said little, working away at her embroidery and rarely looking at the television screen. Every now and then Uncle Stefan made an attempt at conversation, usually starting with, ‘I’m finished, Chrissie.’ There seemed to be little else that occupied his mind.
When the game we were watching had ended, he said, ‘I’m glad you came, Chrissie. You and I are not going to see each other again. This is the last time we will be together.’
But the real message had to wait till the next morning. I had told them I was only going to spend the one night and had to leave again the next day. So the next morning, when Auntie Virginia gave us a breakfast of bacon and eggs on the back stoep, she stayed inside. We had finished the meal and were drinking our coffee before he started. ‘I understand what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘I think I understand everything. You were right and your father and me, we were all wrong.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that,’ I said.
‘I want to talk about it.’ He was speaking very slowly. Even speaking was an effort, causing him to stop to breathe between words. ‘You must understand that we were brought up that way. And it wasn’t Oupa’s fault either. He was also brought up that way, in fact much harsher. He was a good man.’
‘Uncle Stefan, you don’t need to tell me these things. I know that. And I don’t feel that I was right or that you were wrong. I feel that I was wrong in too many ways. I still feel that.’
He seemed not to have heard me. ‘I just want you to understand that we were not bad people.’
‘I know,’ I said to him. ‘I didn’t think that and I loved you all then. I still do. I don’t think you were bad. And I know I’m not specially good.’
‘But now I’m finished, Chrissie.’ His voice had become uneven and I realised that he was crying. ‘Life was good when you and Abraham were children.’
‘Yes.’
‘We had wonderful times.’
‘We did.’
‘Do you ever think of Abraham?’
‘Yes, I do. I often think of him. To me, he was my brother.’
‘I know he was, Chrissie. For years I didn’t think about him. I covered up the memory of him. But now I think about him all the time. At least now I’ll soon be joining him. Do you believe that we meet again after death?’
‘Yes,’ I said, but I was not sure that I was speaking the truth. ‘Yes, I believe that. I am sure you will see Abraham again. I believe that.’
‘I feel it,’ Uncle Stefan said. ‘I feel that I will.’ After that he was silent for a while and I could find nothing to say. When he started speaking again, he seemed to be returning to his earlier topic. ‘I do understand everything you did and I think you were right.’
I said nothing. After all that I had not done, I did not want to be seen as right and I certainly did not want to accuse him of anything.
‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘I want to ask just one thing of you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If I can, I will do it.’
‘The thing of the name, please don’t do it. I understand abou
t all the other things, but please don’t do the thing of the name.’
Remembering that day now, he had not been able to say fully what it was he wanted to ask me. ‘The thing of the name,’ he had said. ‘Please don’t do it,’ he had begged. ‘Your father … it would have been terrible for him. With Abraham gone, you’re the last in our family with our name.’
Sitting and drinking beer in Nathan’s office one evening after the others had gone home, he had questioned me about my accent. ‘In childhood, English was not my home language,’ I told him.
‘What was your language?’
‘Afrikaans. It’s rather like Dutch, derived from Dutch a hundred and more years ago.’
‘But you changed to English?’
‘As an adult. I had always been able to speak English, of course. I grew up in a city where most of the people spoke English. I went to an English school and married an English-speaking girl.’
‘But your name sounds English.’ Nathan had a way of pursuing subjects until he was sure that he understood them perfectly. ‘Christopher Foster.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘Just one of those things,’ I said.
‘Just family history?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ve known other people with names that don’t seem to fit,’ he said. ‘I knew a Jewish guy called Hardcastle once.’
‘There you go,’ I said.
‘Family history,’ Nathan said. ‘It happens all the time.’
twenty-eight
Everyone said I had changed. Since Abraham had died, I smiled less, stayed inside more and read more. I cannot say that I remember it that way, but that is what people said.
I do remember buying tide charts for twenty cents from a convenience store on the Umhlanga Rocks Road so that I could go down to the beach at low tide when the wet sand was firm under foot. I would run for miles on the hard sand, sometimes splashing through the shallows. At those times, I stayed away from the more public beaches, usually leaving my bike hidden in the rough at Beachwood Golf Course. I would run north, past the light aircraft airfield and the big houses of La Lucia, but stop before I reached the crowds on Umhlanga Rocks beach.
More than once my mother tried to talk to me about Abraham. ‘It was terrible,’ she said, ‘but we all have to go on living. We have to put his death behind us.’
‘I have put it behind me,’ I told her.
‘It doesn’t look like it, Chrissie.’
‘I have. I hardly ever think about him.’
‘I’m worried about you, Chrissie,’ she said.
The more I think back to that time, the more I realise that I rarely thought about Abraham. What I did was remember him. The memory that comes to me most often is that of our last moment together, his weight on my back and then the weight gone, holding his belt, and then not holding it.
To my surprise, Jill Burgh was deeply affected by Abraham’s death. She stopped me in the school corridors a number of times to ask more questions about him and the night he died. Her face looked drawn and she was not as pretty as she had been. I heard that she stopped attending the parties where kids played Postman’s Knock. I also stopped attending them, but I was told of her absence by other boys, who all expressed their disappointment at her discontinuing their education.
Had I been less absorbed with my own state of mind, I would have noticed the effect on Uncle Stefan and Auntie Virginia. Although Uncle Stefan lived long after that, his ways seemed increasingly to be those of an old man. He would sit alone for hours, his head shaking slowly from side to side and his lips moving. When involved in a group discussion, he rarely seemed to be paying attention to what was said, sometimes falling asleep in company.
After Abraham died, consciousness seemed a burden Uncle Stefan could not bear. And being in his company was an impossible burden for me. What could we have talked about, I often wondered. That moment in the storming river would always be present, no matter what the subject of conversation.
From the time I learnt to talk, my mother had taught me to pray. And until the day Abraham died, I had prayed almost every day, listing my many needs in case the Almighty forgot any of them. That I stopped praying that day was not intentional. I had made no decision to renounce religion. No intellectual conversion had taken hold of me. It was just that something else had ended when Abraham’s life did. It was not something I understood then, and I am not sure that I understand it now.
One Saturday I rode my bicycle all the way to Oupa’s farm, a ride of seven hours, only to find that Ouma and Oupa had gone away for a few days. Some of the servants were there though, so I got fed. That night I slept in the same outbuilding where we had always slept in the past. Ouma saw to it that there was always bedding in the cupboards, just in case an unexpected guest like me turned up. So I slept in relative comfort.
The next morning I walked down to the dam where Abraham and I had hunted fish. The water level was low again now, so I stood on the bank and threw a few stones at shady spots where I knew the fish liked to gather. More than once I had them scattering across the pond to avoid my stones, leaving their telltale trails on the surface. This time there was no hunt though.
I tried to start my motorbike, but after ten minutes of kicking I gave up. I could not find Oupa’s toolbox for the plug spanner to see if the spark plug might be gummed up.
By mid-morning I was on my bicycle again to make the long journey home. One of Ouma’s kitchen servants had made me sandwiches for the trip. I deliberately avoided the barn where Abraham had fallen.
As I rode down the dirt road that connected the farm to the main road, I saw a column of dust in the distance. Without any reason that I could give myself, I got down from my bike and waited at the roadside. When the truck got closer and I could see that it was Oupa’s, I pushed my bike into the long grass and lay down next to it. As Oupa drove past, I could see Ouma sitting next to him on the passenger side. When I was sure they were too far down the road to see me, I got back on my bike and rode as hard as I could in case one of the workers told them I had just left.
The ride home went no faster than the ride to the farm. In fact, I stopped three times to rest, adding perhaps another hour and a half to the trip. By the time I reached Umhlanga Rocks, just half an hour from home, the afternoon was fading fast, the sea water was a deep blue and the few clouds on the horizon were trimmed with gold. This time I turned into the town, cycled down a narrow road between the holiday hotels and stopped at one of the access points to the beach. I carried my bike down the steps to ensure that it would not be stolen and walked to the water’s edge.
There was no wind. The waves were flatter than usual. Only a few surfers were sitting on their boards in the deep water about halfway to the shark nets, waiting for the one good wave that surfers always seem to be waiting for. A little way down the beach, an Indian fisherman was casting from the rocks. Behind him on the sand his wife was crouching in the mouth of a small tent warming something over a gas flame. Clearly this was going to be an all-night picnic. On the promenade I could see a pair of aged holidaymakers holding hands as they strolled along on their stiff old legs.
In the back of my mind, I was aware that Mama would be waiting for me. I had told her that I would be home before nightfall. I had a momentary picture of her coming to the front door and looking up the hill to see if she could see me coming. That was her way.
I do not remember how long I stood there, but I remember the surfers all coming out of the water and trotting up the beach, their surfboards under their arms, and I remember the sea going from deep blue to a metallic grey. I remember also that I had sat down on the sand, still staring out to sea, when I heard a voice at my shoulder. ‘Hey, boy, why are you looking so sad?’
I recognised the voice immediately. Turning, I looked straight into Ruthie’s dark eyes, almost black in the gathering twilight. I answered with the first words that came to mind. ‘Abraham’s dead,’ I told her.
youth’s sweet-scented manuscript
Alas, that spring should vanish with the rose!
That youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!
– THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM
twenty-nine
RUTHIE AND I sat on the beach till no daylight was left. She was there to help her mother with the samoosa stall that a hotel had allowed them to set up in its food court. ‘It’s a much better business than the junk we sold at the flea market,’ she told me, ‘specially during school holidays when the hotel is full. And we don’t just sell samoosas. Ma has curry and rice and everything. We do quite well.’
She told me that two years before someone had seen us together on our only motorbike trip and had told her mother. The incident had caused a crisis in their family. Everyone had shouted at her, she told me. They all wanted to know if she intended to be another coloured girl who gets pregnant by a white boy and is then deserted. As a result, her mother had moved to a flea market on the Bluff and forbidden her even to think about me. That was why their stall went empty so suddenly. She was also sent to live with her grandmother in Cape Town for six months.
I told her about Abraham and the way he had drowned in the flooding river. I also told her that I thought I had let go of his belt to save myself. I hoped it was not that way, but I thought it may have been. Perhaps his belt had just slipped from my grasp. I told her how it had happened straight after my father’s fiftieth birthday party when we had all been so happy.
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