A Fork in the Road

by Andre Brink

  The Bible was different. Most of its stories I came to know by heart. It became, as Peter Ackroyd described its influence on Shakespeare’s youth, ‘an echo chamber of the imagination’. For me, as for most other Afrikaner children, it provided the only coherent mythology we could consistently draw on. It underpinned the ubiquitous violence of the world we grew up in. We were spellbound by the stories of Cain and Abel or of Esau and Jacob – what a perverse old man their God was – the exploits of Samson with his bare hands or with the jawbone of an ass, Jephthah sacrificing his only daughter and Abraham preparing to slaughter his son Isaac and to drive Hagar off into the desert with his firstborn son Ishmael, the Israelites dancing around the golden calf, the destruction of Jericho, David mourning the loss of Jonathan and later of Absalom, the death of Jezebel, Jonah in the belly of the whale or Daniel in the den of the lions, the passion of Christ, the terrifying visions of Saint John. And there were the darker, more troubling undertones in the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Samson and Delilah, of Onan, of David and Abigail, and David and Tamar, and David and Bathshebah.

  Indeed, religion meant primarily the enthralment of stories, all the more so because of the booming organ tones of the language of the Bible. In many of the families with whom I spent weekends and holidays on their farms, the Bible was still the old seventeenth-century state version in Dutch; but even the much more recently translated Afrikaans version had a grand, archaic ring to it. This, more than any doctrine or liturgy, determined the hold of religion on my youthful mind. And a stranglehold it certainly was, induced primarily, as it now seems to me, by fear of any alternative. Hell was such a dire reality that one really had no choice but to cling to God.

  There was also a theatrical element to it: not just in the tones of the dominee’s voice as he summoned us to salvation or (most gorily and spectacularly, with weeping and gnashing of teeth) to perdition, but also in the games I could devise in our garden. With my sister Elbie I could play Adam and Eve, naturally without clothes, until my father put a stop to it. On my own I could walk in the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar or in the Garden of Gethsemane, I could wrestle with Jacob’s angel or climb up the steep slope of Mount Zion to receive the Tables of the Law, or look on Canaan from the distant summit of Mount Nebo, or test, with Gideon and his kneeling band, the syllables of shibboleth on a host of enemies, or climb in a barren fig tree to watch the passing Jesus, or be resurrected from death with the smelly Lazarus, or preach with the apostle Paul in the Areopagus in Athens, or become a stuttering Moses turning a walking stick into a snake or a snake into a walking stick, or try to suspend myself from a pepper tree branch to die with the crucified Jesus. Those were not just re-enactments, not roles I played: I knew what it was to see the smoke of my burnt offering rejected by God and to be driven to the Land of Nod, I knew what it meant to be thrown into a well by my own brothers and sold as a slave and carried off on the back of a camel to a distant Egypt, even, so help me God, knew what it was – especially after my tryst with the smooth little Maureen – to have the wife of Potiphar groping at me, knew how to kill the giant Goliath, or how to duck when King Saul hurled his sword at me and tried to pin me to the wall. Religion in those days could be dangerously real.

  It was not enough to be a member of a congregation. I had to play an active role. I needed a congregation of my own. After entertaining for some time the notion of running away to what was then Nyasaland, now Malawi, or to China, and devote my life to preaching to the heathen, I decided to avoid the unpleasant risk of becoming a martyr. And it occurred to me that there might be enough souls in my immediate surroundings who were in danger of being condemned to everlasting flames. And so, once a week our garage was converted into a church, with a number of upturned boxes as pews, two big crates precariously balanced as a pulpit; and thither I would summon, with my mother’s small dining bell, all the domestics of the neighbourhood for an hour of blood-curdling preaching, boisterous singing, and passionate prayers. A particularly painful memory is of transposing directly into one of my most fervent sermons a message I had heard in church and at prayers in school: this was based on the sad scene following the Deluge, when the drunken Noah lay naked, in a stupor, in his tent. His dutiful sons Shem and Japheth walked backwards into the tent, to cover their father with a blanket; but poor Ham, who had the misfortune of first discovering the snoring roisterer, and the temerity to laugh his head off, was cursed for all eternity to have his descendants serve as the water carriers and the hewers of wood for the offspring of his brothers. And very conscientiously I transmitted to my congregation the message I had heard in church and school, to the effect that, being black, they were the fruit of the cursed loins of Ham, which meant that it was the will of God that they should be the servants of us whites. In quiet dignity and serene humility they took in every word. If I were still a believer today I often think that a well-aimed bolt from heaven might not have been entirely amiss.

  As a sign that I was truly the messenger of God, I performed a miracle. Before the service I had placed a saucer filled with methylated spirits inside the top crate of my pulpit. Entering the church at the beginning of the service, with a striped towel over my shoulders as a cassock, I brought with me a second saucer filled to the brim with clean water. After my sermon I sipped from it, then passed it round for the congregation to do likewise. Once everybody had tasted it and pronounced the water to be indeed water, I placed this saucer inside the crate, then invoked the power of God to descend upon us all, removed the first saucer from inside the crate and lit a match to set it alight. After that, no one dared to suspect me of not being the anointed of our Heavenly Father, and my congregation grew at a most satisfactory pace.

  In one of my never-ending attempts at making money, I performed the same trick during a more secular show of magic for a group of school friends. But this time it ended in spectacular failure when my best friend, suddenly turned traitor, came rushing up to the table which I used as the main prop of my performance, grabbed the flaming receptacle from my hands, took a sniff at it, and promptly denounced the chicanery. In my attempts to retrieve the saucer, the meths spilled on the table, setting alight the sheet that served as a cloth, and causing a fire that nearly burnt down the garage. It brought an untimely end to my show – which I’m sure was just as well as it prevented me from proceeding to the next item, in which I’d planned to stuff my sister Elbie into a box and saw her in half. In the larger scheme of things, as they say, it also brought an end to the earliest phase in my theatrical career as well as to my ambition of becoming a man of the cloth, since my parents denied me the future use of their premises for the mounting of any kind of performance whatsoever, including services aimed at the saving of souls and the perpetuation of white domination.

  But they could not diminish the lure of the theatre. I was already near the end of my high-school studies before I saw my first live performance – an Afrikaans version of Molière’s Malade Imaginaire in Lydenburg, a town rather larger than Douglas, where performances by theatrical companies must have been nearly as rare as rain. I was about fourteen or thereabouts when the only show deemed suitable by my parents came our way; but at the last moment the leading actor fell ill (an occurrence interpreted by many members of our congregation as an intervention from heaven) and the performance was cancelled, and that was that. Television was still unimaginable. There was a cinema, though, but my parents were very strict about what I was allowed to see. Lassie, yes; and oh, Tarzan. And the occasional Walt Disney and Shirley Temple. But nothing else. What occasions those were. The projector would invariably break down four or five times during a show, and it could take anything between five and forty-five minutes to repair, but we kids had a royal time during the breaks, with cold drinks and ice creams and chewing gum that could be turned into pellets with which to pepper unsuspecting grown-ups in the dark. The menu leading up to the main attraction was utterly predictable, starting with the advertisements, most of them handwritten, each one energet
ically applauded. Then came the news – African Mirror – always weeks after the event, followed by a cartoon that caused howls and screams of laughter. Next came the weekly instalment of a cowboys-and-crooks serial, in which every appearance of the villain was booed, every move of the hero wildly cheered. Then an interval. And only then the lights came down to a hush of anticipation. Even today, when a cinema grows dark, I feel something of the same tingle in the spine. But in those days it was magnified into almost unbearable expectation. Nothing could disappoint us or let us down. Every moment was climactic. And for days afterwards, with my friends on the playground, or on my own in the garden, those stories would be repeated, reinvented, blown up, appropriated, assimilated into a heightened awareness of a magic at the heart of the everyday world.

  There was magic, too, in the shows of a conjuror and hypnotist called Craill who visited the villages of the north-west once every two years or so. This probably meant that he couldn’t make it in the cities. But for us, for me, he was a true magician. On stage, in his black cloak spangled with silver moons and stars, and wearing a top hat from which white pigeons, rabbits or metres and metres of coloured silk scarves could be produced at the flick of a wrist, he was like a messenger from God, or from the Devil, as the case might be. The memories he left behind were intimations of another kind of world altogether. His acts of hypnotism stirred up unruly dreams about the feats I could perform should I ever gain access to that source of demonic power. For several years he was the hero of my dreams. Then something unexpected happened. For weeks every available space in town was plastered with multicoloured posters to advertise The Great Craill’s forthcoming show. It took days of pleading before my parents caved in: as it was on a Saturday, and I’d be accompanied by my best friend, Louis Wessels, they could not very well refuse.

  During the afternoon I went to the café next to the hall where the performance was to take place. As I emerged, eagerly stripping the first bar of chocolate of its wrapping, I became aware of outlandish sounds coming from the hall. With constricted throat and bouncing heart I crept to the door and peeped inside. In the dark foyer, sprawled across an easy chair, was a rather dishevelled old man in loose shirtsleeves and dirty trousers with open flies, snoring like a sawmill in need of repair, an empty White Horse bottle in one hand. He looked more like a tramp than the posters of the great magician with the massive silver mane and aristocratic mien overexposed in the blinding sun outside. Yet somehow I knew it could only be him. I just stood and stared. At some stage I must have made a sound of some kind, for he started in mid-snore and sat up, dropping his bottle, and uttering the kind of imprecation which would have earned me a mouthwash with blue soap. Such an encounter might have stripped him of all his magic forever. But it turned into an unforgettable afternoon. His tongue loosened, perhaps, by the White Horse, he talked in a long rambling monologue that washed over me like a river in flood. For all I know, he was stringing together most of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, with some sonnets thrown in for free. I couldn’t make out very much. But the language, the language alone, was like a torrent in which one could willingly drown. He was a man possessed. This was theatre. This was real magic.

  As his possession wore off, his speech became more intelligible, if less spellbinding. I even dared to start asking some questions about his art. And he answered! He became more and more affable. He even offered to show me a few of his tricks: the less exotic ones, with cards, or producing a scarf from an eggshell, or making a magic wand disappear. Some of these I subsequently repeated, with great effect, to my school friends. But then I pushed my luck. What I really wanted to know, was how to make a girl float in the air, or to put someone in a box, pierce it with swords and daggers, and cause the person to reappear unscathed. He just smiled and shook his shaggy grey head. I pleaded more passionately. That was when he proposed a deal. He would show me if I … The terms of the deal were whispered very fast and wetly in my ear. I did not understand what he meant. He winked and brought his face closer. I could smell his breath. Like a meerkat mesmerised by a snake I just stared at him. He was salivating.

  ‘I shall make you the greatest boy magician in the world,’ he promised. ‘You can ask me anything you want.’

  I swallowed, unable to utter a word or make a move.

  Then I became aware of his hand. An unusually large hand, moving slowly down my back like an enormous spider.

  ‘Would you like that?’ he asked, his face still very close to mine.

  ‘My – my mother is waiting for me,’ I mumbled, and fled.

  That evening I went to his performance nevertheless.

  For years I thought I must have imagined it. But I know I didn’t. The strange thing is that even when that tawdry reality came between the great magician and me, I could not rid myself of my reverence for his greatness. And I still believe in magic.

  Only once in all the years we lived in Douglas, from my eleventh to my sixteenth year, an Afrikaans film came to town, a tear-jerking, chauvinistic melodrama that extolled the virtues of rural life and decried the sins and horrors of the city, played by actors who mouthed their words with grotesque exaggeration and struck poses borrowed from the starkest of Greek tragedy. The experience was unforgettable. Old bearded men and their wives like loaves of bread that had risen outrageously overnight, bedecked in their Sunday best, the men in three-piece suits with watch chains across their ample bellies, the women in floral full-length dresses and broad-brimmed hats and black shoes with buttoned straps, arrived from outlying farms on horse-drawn spiders or donkey-carts, some of the more affluent in straight-backed Fords or heavily chromed Buicks and Hudson Terraplanes and Studebakers, each family lugging a large basket of padkos or food-for-the-road: hams and sausages, blue-boiled eggs, massive sandwiches, fried chickens, sliced legs of lamb, flasks of coffee, even the occasional camouflaged bottle of Mellow-Wood or Collison’s brandy. On the market square they mingled with the townsfolk with their own provisions and accoutrements. And during the interval there was a massive orgy of eating and drinking that spilled from the seats into the aisles and the foyer and right across the market square, which meant that many members of the audience returned late for the main film, missing their seats in the dark or finding the seats occupied by chancers who had slipped in during the interval; which caused such an uproar that the film had to be stopped so that the mayor, the more than life-size Oom Boy Cilliers, wearing his chain of office, could first confer with the projectionist until agreement was reached to start again. But by then the rolls of film had become mixed up, so that the story started in the middle; and it was nearly midnight before the show was over and the crowd, many of them with staggering or swaggering gait, could break out into the streets, women weeping, men singing patriotic songs. It was worse than any New Year’s Eve.

  In the absence of live theatre there was something even better: the circus. It never came to Jagersfontein, but it did pay the odd visit to Fauresmith, which was only seven miles away. Usually my parents found good reasons for not allowing us to go. But once, only once, when there was a performance on a Saturday night and friends of the family offered to take me along, they gave their permission. That night came closer to magic than anything I had ever experienced before. It began from the moment we entered when the legendary Mrs Pagel, wife of the circus owner, dressed in a lion’s skin, sat poised on a multicoloured drum at the entrance to survey the crowd and occasionally, with a huge roar, pounced on a few terrified black children as they tried to slide in under the tent. The trapeze artists, the clowns, the dogs and horses and ponies, the camels and zebras, the lions and striped Bengal tigers, the huge brown bear, were quite literally from another world. The scene of the bear chasing a terrified little clown who finally dived into a doll’s house which promptly collapsed on him, haunted me for years. Later Charlie Chaplin became the only person with whom I could identify as unreservedly as with that hysterical little man; and in the bear was concentrated all the dark, louring, unresolved energies that
haunt the night side of the world and the deepest recesses of dreams.

  The blaring music and blazing lights, the ringmaster with his articulate whip, the wild and beautiful and unbelievable creatures parading before us, stunned me so overwhelmingly that on the way home, afterwards, I couldn’t utter a single word. Tiptoeing into the dark house after I had been dropped at the gate, I was terrified at what might be following me: I would have walked backwards if I hadn’t been even more scared of what might jump on me from inside the house. I don’t think I slept a wink all night. But I might have slept throughout the following day, if I hadn’t been dragged out of bed the next morning to go to church, where in front of my eyes the gesticulating, bellowing dominee kept on changing shape: one moment he was a ringmaster, then a clown, then a lion, then an almost naked girl in a dazzling silver costume, then a bear rearing on its hind legs and preparing to jump on me. I came round with a scream that must have woken up half the congregation, and only my mother’s face, red with shock and shame, made me realise where I was.