I had turned fifteen earlier that year. I was now a lean, rawboned kid, taller than almost all the adults I knew, including Uncle Stefan, and about the same height as my father. Ruthie was the same age as me, but when I had last seen her, she had the figure of a child. Now she was developing the shape of a woman. The light leanness that had made her seem so boyish was giving way to a softness and smoothness that caused a constriction in my throat, making it difficult to speak as she sat next to me on the sand.
‘You’re so big now, boy,’ she told me.
‘Are you always going to call me boy?’ I whispered through the obstruction in my throat.
‘Chrissie,’ she said. ‘I meant Chrissie.’
I wanted to say how different she was, but expressing it was beyond me, and telling her was beyond every possibility.
‘You can’t phone me,’ she said. ‘I’ll get into big trouble.’
Her thoughts seemed to be a mirror image of my own. Just looking at her, I had been wondering about how we could contact each other. ‘You can’t phone me either,’ I said. Neither of us needed to discuss the complexities of meeting each other. We both understood that anyone who knew her family or mine was likely to report that we had been seen together. Who knew what the consequences might be?
‘I’ve got a bicycle now,’ she said. ‘I can go for a ride.’
‘Me too.’
‘And the motorbike?’
‘It’s still at my Oupa’s farm.’
‘So long?’
‘I’m still too young to ride it.’
The conclusion we reached was that, every Saturday afternoon, we would go to our place in the sugar cane. We would make no attempt to contact each other if some family matter got in the way. If you got there and the other one did not come, you would wait for half an hour and then go. ‘I’ll stay in the middle of the path where there are no pythons or rats,’ she said.
We sat talking until we heard her mother calling from the direction of the hotel. She leapt to her feet. ‘I have to go. It’s my ma. If she sees you, she’ll kill me.’ Before I could answer she was running up the beach, her hair flying, fading into the shrubbery that was now grey in the deepening twilight along the boulevard.
I cycled the last leg of the journey home, standing up on the pedals for sheer joy, the wild beating of my heart caused by much more than the exertion. I had noticed how much better she spoke English than she had two years before. Now she had said, I have to go. Perhaps it was a new school, or all the reading she loved to do.
It was dark when I bounced through the gutter and onto our driveway, but Mama was too glad to see me to be angry. ‘The farm is too far to go by bicycle,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you should go all that way on your bicycle again.’
That night, as I lay in bed, I was seized by an excitement such as I had never experienced all my life. There was no rejoicing in the thought that I had found her, no ringing phrases to fill my mind. There was only the image of her face everywhere. In the semidarkness of my room, behind the lids of my closed eyes, driving out all thoughts, all memories, the long ride to the farm, even Abraham’s death: Ruthie was everywhere. It never entered my mind that I was in love. If that was love, it had not happened to me before. Whatever it was, it ruled every moment of my consciousness fully, completely and forever. At least that was what I believed.
The two years since I had last seen Ruthie, especially the year since Abraham had died, had an effect on all of us. My father had become an even quieter presence around the house, seldom talking to Mama and saying practically nothing to us kids. Michie was seventeen and it had reached Mama that she had asked her biology teacher if just one fertilisation could cause pregnancy. Her teacher, a severe, religious lady, had apparently looked sternly at her before saying, ‘Yes, my girl, just one.’
Mama had cornered Michie in the girls’ bedroom. ‘So, my child,’ I heard her through the door. ‘Why did you need to know that?’
Michie’s voice always rose an octave and a whole bunch of decibels when she was excited, so I could hear every word. ‘Why can’t I know? I need to know these things.’
‘Nothing needs fertilising yet,’ Mama said.
‘I was just trying to find out. If you told me more, I wouldn’t have to ask the teacher.’
There were more high-school boys trying to come visiting, mostly for Michie, but some for Annie. One who had already started work came to visit Michie, but Mama sent him away. ‘What are you visiting schoolgirls for?’ I heard her ask him. ‘You go away now and visit girls who are also working.’ Mama had very clear views on what was and was not acceptable, and for working boys to be visiting schoolgirls was definitely not acceptable.
I thought it was a pity. I liked him. On the few occasions he had visited us, he had always stopped to talk to me, usually about rugby. He also loved rugby. It came as a complete surprise when he said, ‘You’ve got beautiful sisters.’
‘My sisters?’ I could not believe that anyone saw them that way.
‘They’re beautiful,’ he said.
‘Michie and Annie?’
Afterwards I checked with Mama. ‘Jannie says that Michie and Annie are beautiful.’
‘Of course they are,’ she said. ‘Anyone can see that.’
‘I can’t.’
‘That’s because they’re your sisters. You’re not supposed to see them that way.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘because I don’t.’
Annie, who was sixteen at the time, had decided she was going to become a great classical pianist, but her piano teacher told her that she was too late. So she decided she would be a great composer instead. Like Tchaikovsky, she told me.
‘Do you think he would have been a big star if he had lived today?’ I asked her.
She thought about that for a while, but did not answer. She also never mentioned Tchaikovsky again.
I wanted to tell someone about Ruthie, anyone, but I knew better. Had Abraham still been alive, I would have told him. The closest I had ever come was to talk to Mama about girls in general. I had tried that from time to time, all my life. I remembered how, at the age of six or seven, I had told her that I wanted to marry a pretty girl. The conversation, like so many with Mama, had veered away in a direction I could not have anticipated. She had smiled at me. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘all boys do. But there is a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘You love food very much and pretty girls can’t cook.’
It had been shattering news. I had gone to my room to think about this new revelation, returning just a few minutes later with a solution. ‘If I marry a pretty girl, will you teach her to cook?’
Mama had laughed and ruffled my hair. ‘Certainly, I’ll teach her to cook, if she wants to be taught by her mother-in-law.’
I had gone back to my room to think that over. Was it possible that a pretty girl would not want to be taught by her mother-in-law? And why were they not good cooks? At the time, I thought Mama knew all such things and I never doubted any of her pronouncements.
I remembered the conversation clearly, although it had taken place nine years before. I knew she did too, having referred to it playfully from time to time. She was busy in the kitchen, as she so often seemed to be, when I cornered her. ‘I still want to marry a pretty girl,’ I told her, thinking about Ruthie as I said it.
She looked at me and smiled and I was afraid that she was going to tease me. But this time, perhaps because I had reached the age when girls were becoming important to me, she spoke seriously. ‘You know, Chrissie, it will be much better for you to find the right girl, rather than the prettiest one. If you love her deeply, the girl will be beautiful to you.’
I wanted to say that deluding myself would not be necessary, because I had already found the girl and Ruthie was beautiful. Clearly, though, that was not a good idea. ‘How can you be sure that she is the right girl?’ I asked.
In matters of relations between the sexes, Mama was a romantic. ‘Y
our heart will tell you,’ she said.
In that case, I thought, I was on safe ground. My heart had spoken in clear, unmistakable terms.
During the first meeting with Ruthie in the sugar cane, we did nothing but talk. It was just like the evening on the beach when she found me sitting on the sand, looking at the water. It was also like the only time I had taken her for a ride on my motorbike. It seemed that we needed to tell each other everything about our lives: our thoughts, our friends, our families, everything we loved and everything we hated. And we listened to each other.
Much as I wanted to tell Ruthie everything about me, I wanted to know everything there was to know about her. I wanted to know everything about her family and how she fitted into it. She told me whatever she could think of, including all about her mother’s samoosa business. Her mother had bought a special industrial oven for the pastries she baked to augment her range of samoosas. She had turned their garage into a samoosa kitchen that had been approved by the city council. She now supplied all sorts of pastries and samoosas with seven different fillings to six bakeries and to their kiosk in the hotel in Umhlanga Rocks. She also sold delicacies made by other Greenwood Park ladies. Sometimes Ruthie would bring samoosas picked at random from the selection Ma Peterson produced. She dumped them all into one bag so you never knew what filling you were selecting. It was a lucky dip that I found exciting. I would bring fruit juice and we would have our own picnic.
We saw no pythons and I doubt that she ever really believed in them. I had to swear about the incident when Uncle Stefan chopped off the python’s head with his hand axe before she seemed satisfied. Even then, when I showed her how big the skin was, she laughed. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘your imagination is even bigger than the snake.’ I wished I could take her to Uncle Stefan’s house to see the snakeskin.
We did see cane rats more than once and a family of banded mongooses at another time, so I suppose that was something. ‘Do the snakes eat them too?’ she asked of the mongooses, looking at me out of the corners of her eyes.
‘All the time,’ I said.
The Saturday after our first meeting in the canebreak, she was not there. Two weeks after that, I had to go to visit relatives who were on holiday down the coast at Winklespruit. I tried every possible angle to get out of going. ‘But Sannie and Carel are your age. You’ll love it,’ Mama insisted. ‘And you always like going to Winklespruit.’
But now I did not want to visit Sannie and Carel. I wanted to be in the canebreak with Ruthie. I heard Mama saying to my father that she could not understand teenage children. Something that was wonderful one day was awful the next. Who could understand them?
There was no escaping the visit to Winklespruit. I spent the whole afternoon worrying about Ruthie and whether she was going to be safe waiting for me all alone in the sugar cane.
It was on our fourth or fifth meeting that she made a new suggestion, one that was so tantalising, so breathlessly exciting that I knew we had to find a way to do it. ‘Remember, long ago I said to you there was a kind of music I liked, but I didn’t know what it was called.’
Remembering was no effort. I remembered everything she had ever said to me. ‘I remember you said that.’
‘It’s called opera. Have you heard it?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, they’re having one in town. And there’s standing-room tickets that are not expensive.’
‘Will they let us in?’ She knew that I meant: will they let us in together?
‘It’s a coloured group from Cape Town doing it in the city hall. We can go there.’
Ruthie told me that operas were not all the same and they had names. This one was called La Traviata, which was Italian for something. Ruthie had told me, but even now I do not remember. Not only that, but the whole thing was going to be in Italian. ‘I don’t understand Italian,’ I told her.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said.
The performances that the Eoan Group from Cape Town were putting on were going to be during the school holidays, so being out a bit late was not going to bother my parents. There was a question about where I would tell them I was going. A sudden interest in Italian opera, an art form that, as far as I knew, they did not know existed, would scarcely be believable.
To me, it did not matter what it was about. It could as well have been Greek tragedy, Scottish dancers in kilts, Tibetan monks chanting or anything else. The point was not the nature of the show. The point was that I would be going with Ruthie. I had never gone anywhere with a girl.
‘So, are you coming?’
I think Ruthie had asked the question twice before I answered. ‘Of course, I’m coming. What do you think?’
thirty
It was Uncle Stefan who had taught me that, if you have to lie, make the lie as small as possible. It is easier for the other person to believe a small lie than a big one. ‘But of course it’s best not to lie,’ he had added, ‘if possible.’
But now I was faced with an occasion that demanded lying. The truth would have ruined everything. So I told Mama that there was a boy at school who loved classical music. That much was true. And that he was a good friend of mine. That was close to being true. And I was going to listen to La Traviata (completely true) at his house (altogether untrue). I would be home quite late because La Traviata is long (true enough).
‘What is La Traviata?’ she asked.
‘An opera.’
‘I didn’t know you had developed a taste for that sort of music,’ she said.
I tried to make a face that would convey modesty with a mysterious element, suggesting that there were depths in me that even my mother might not have guessed. Annie told me later that Mama had discussed it with my father and he had said that, deep inside, I was a serious boy. ‘Remember the way he went to pray over Tjol’s coffin,’ he reminded her.
‘Do you really like that music?’ Annie asked me. I gave her my modest, mysterious look, but it had no effect on her. ‘You’re bullshitting Mama,’ she whispered. She had kept her voice low, not to save me from possible embarrassment, but so that Mama would not hear the language she was using.
‘I swear on the graves of our ancestors that I am going to listen to La Traviata,’ I told her.
She snorted and walked away, but I could see that I had her. She knew I would not swear on the graves of our ancestors and lie.
The three weeks between Ruthie inviting me to the opera and the night of the performance passed slowly. We were going on the first night of their six performances. Ruthie had told her mother where she was going, but that she was going with a girlfriend.
We planned the evening carefully. There was an early bus that we would catch into town. At commuter times, there were separate buses for whites, on the one hand, and coloureds and Indians, on the other. The Zulus also had their own buses. But in the evening there was just one bus. Coloureds and Indians sat in the back and whites in the front. I have no memory of a bus for Zulus in the evening, although there may have been one. They were not allowed on our bus.
At eleven there was a bus home. The performance would start at eight and Ruthie said it would take two hours, so there would be plenty of time to get to the bus stop. The way we had worked it out, I would sit in the front of the bus and she would sit in the back, pretending not to know each other. Then we would walk from the bus terminus to the city hall, a distance of little more than a block, on opposite sides of the street. If anyone interfered with her, I reasoned, I would be just across the street. When we got to the city hall she would buy the tickets and we would go in together.
And it worked. Nobody even glanced at us. I was a white boy going into town, probably to the movies, and she was a coloured girl going into town, probably to wash dishes in a restaurant or sweep the floors of an office building.
I was already waiting at the bus stop when she came down the hill from Greenwood Park. She was wearing a plain black dress that fitted tightly and ended just above her knees. A little
shiny object of some kind was pinned to the bodice. She wore flat black shoes and her hair was held back by a silvercoloured Alice band. She looked sensational. I could barely tear my eyes away. And she was going out with me.
In the bus, we were careful to sit where we had planned. To see her, gazing dreamily out of the window, I might not have existed, at least not as her escort. As for me, I had a continuing struggle against an impulse to stare at her.
The bus was occupied by only five other people: a young couple sitting close together, a man carrying a lunch box, probably working the night shift somewhere, and two older women going out for the evening. The bus driver, a white man of fifty or sixty, looked tired and not interested in Ruthie or me or any other of his small group of passengers. Going from the bus terminus in Pine Street to the city hall, a drunken Zulu man shouted something at Ruthie, but otherwise that part of the journey was as trouble free as the bus ride. Again she walked all the way without even glancing in my direction, while I could barely keep my eyes off her. That wild galloping stride that she had when she was thirteen had changed to a dignified gait, head held high, a young woman now, clearly satisfied with who she was.
The crowd at the city hall were mostly coloured, but there were plenty of white people too. There were not many shows for Durban opera lovers to attend in those days and none for people who were not white. People were gathered in a dense mass around the door. Like us, many of them were looking for standing-room tickets. There was no advance booking for standing-room tickets, you could only buy them at the ticket window on the night. Somehow Ruthie wormed her way through the crowd and got to the head of the queue faster than she perhaps should have. Suddenly she had my hand – we had not even held hands before – and was dragging me through the crowd into the hall.
In those days, the city halls in South African towns, big and small, seemed to have come out of an almost identical mould. They were all made of brown sandstone. The floor of the main hall was always flat, not the best arrangement from an audience point of view. The upstairs sections consisted either of fairly narrow balconies or boxes and the whole thing was fringed with assorted offices. If you had been in one town hall, you felt at home in all of them.
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