Karoo Boy

by Troy Blacklaws

  I glance down at the scar, recall the fish hook in my finger on the Kalk Bay harbour wall, recall my father’s words: Be brave, Douglas. Cowboys don’t cry.

  – I heard the drums and I saw the ingcibi shuffle his scaly feet towards us, his spine bent, so his head was level with the earth, as the head of a tortoise is. Tixo, guide the hand of this old man, I prayed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ingcibi swing his assegai. Ithi uyindoda, he said. Say you are a man. I heard a young voice cry out: Ndiyindoda! I am a man!

  I shudder at the thought of an assegai scything through my skin. Instinctively, I clasp at my songololo.

  Moses sees me squirm. Laughs.

  – For one crazy moment, I too wanted to save my cock. To run for it. But then I saw my father’s unsmiling eyes on me. I wanted him to give me a sign that the pain to come would not be too bad, but his face was as cold as a mask. The ingcibi stood before me. I would not shame my father. He pinched my foreskin in his fingers, tugged at it and sliced through me in one swing. The burn flamed through my guts, my bones, my head. It was a pain way beyond the pain of a deep thorn or a dog bite. I saw the mouth of the ingcibi chewing unheard words. I saw, as if it was a leaf falling slowly slowly, my foreskin fall to the sand. I heard the cry of a man escape my mouth: Ndiyindoda! I saw my father’s teeth smile. I picked up my foreskin and swallowed it before the evil spirits could get their hands on it and bewitch me.

  I feel faint. I hold the cold can of Coca-Cola to my forehead to keep from keeling over.

  – Afterwards the ingcibi wound a weed around my burning cock, bound it on with a leather thong. Then, we draped blankets over our heads, for no women should see us abakwetha during the time of change. For three months, my friends and I camped out in the bundu, far from the village. It was winter, a good time for healing. We made a grasshut shelter, a boma, where our cocks would heal in the smoke of burning wet wood, where the men came to visit, one by one, to teach us the things of a man: the history and traditions of the Xhosa, how to kill a man, if need be, and how to sow your seed in a woman.

  I turn my face to Delarey Straat, where oleanders flower pink down on the island that splits the road. How will I learn to sow my seed in a woman if I do not go into the bundu and I have no father to teach me?

  – At the end of the time in the bundu, we burnt down the boma. The men of the tribe came to fetch us abakwetha, still covered in white ochre. We sang as we went, imagining how the girls would eye us, how our younger brothers would skip at our heels. Down at the river, below the village, we stood on the bank. My father, his eyes smiling, undid the thong. At the sound of the drum, we threw off our blankets and ran into the water. We ran to dodge the gaze of the girls and the sticks of the men which bit at our backsides. We ran to outfoot the evil spirits who try to catch you, just before you reach the far side of this in-between world. In the river we rubbed the clay away, laughing at how black we were after months of being white. We came out of the water, fully men, no longer boy-men, abakwetha. They rubbed red ochre on us, a sign of our manhood, and gave us new blankets. We hugged the given blankets to our shoulders, and walked tall up to the village. At the place where the men gather, we were given our first beer to drink. The beer had been brewed in deep pots by the women. As we solemnly sipped at the sour beer, we saw our old blankets burn in a bonfire, along with the things of our boyhood: oxen made out of bone, wild animals out of wood or clay, our catapults and sticks. Then the dance, the umgidi, began with the killing of a cow.

  I think of the way my father let me sip the foam off his beer on the stoep on summer evenings in Muizenberg. Sometimes if he was deep in his newspaper, I would gulp down a mouthful of beer. The first time he gave Marsden and me a beer to hold in our hands and sip was when we watched the fireworks shot over the lagoon on bonfire night. Amstel beer. Originally from Amsterdam, where Miss Forster flaunts her flimsy frocks. We had turned fourteen just two days before. My mother said we were too young. My father said to her: when you were fourteen you went to a beach party in Clifton, on the back of a motorcycle. He pinched her behind and she swatted his hand away. Boys, he said to us, your mother was a frisky filly. You are lucky I lassoed her. Though I sipped it slowly, over hours as the fireworks flowered the sky, the beer made my head swoop, and the stars spiral. After the fireworks, Marsden and I jumped naked from the bridge, Bessie Malan’s bridge, and fished dead fireworks out of the seaweedy lagoon.

  – Douglas, I think this dying of your twin brother, the going away of your father, was the beginning of your bundu time, the time of your hardship. You are in the in-between world, when the spirits will try to catch you. It is a lonely, hurting time. But you will come out of it a man. Look at you. Though you bleed, you do not cry. A pity your father does not see you become a man.

  blue reef

  THE ENGLISH CLASS. WE are taught by a man called Mister McEwan. He is bitter about being stranded in this dull Karoo after teaching in England.

  – In my school in England the buildings went back to the time of Shakespeare. Here in Klipdorp the oldest building is the jail, built as an English fort during the Boer War. This place is devoid of history or culture. I try to teach you Wordsworth and Blake, and your heads are full of boerewors and sheep dipping.

  Joost yawns. It is a story they have all heard before.

  – You know Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein. A monkey stole his clothes from the washing line. A tarantula bit his head.

  Joost and the others pack out laughing.

  – A baboon spider maybe, goes Joost. I never heard of a tarantula in Africa, sir. Maybe he was born in Brazil?

  – Anyway, frowns Mister McEwan, after the monkey and the spider, his mother took him back to England.

  – Moffie, jibes Joost.

  – He never came back to this damned place, spits Mister McEwan.

  I put up my hand.

  – Why did you leave England, sir?

  He looks confused for a moment. Giggles swirl around me. Perhaps he finds the question rude. I wish I had shut up.

  – It’s a long story. One thing led to another, he sighs.

  He fumbles in his leather bag for his book.

  – Now, open your poetry books to the poem by William Wordsworth.

  He reads us a poem about daffodils, something you will never see in the Karoo.

  – Daffodils are like cannas, only yellow instead of red or orange, Mister McEwan tells us.

  I see the others stare out of the window. The world of dancing daffodils is too foreign for them. Marika, of the tangling gypsy hair, is reading a library book hidden behind her poetry book. Mister McEwan believes he has reached one soul in this barren land and glances her way whenever he draws in a breath. Marika scratches her knee and leaves those white lines you lick to make go away.

  – Douglas, surely you have seen daffodils?

  – Yes, sir.

  Joost van der Berg wanks his fist at me.

  Then Marika looks up from her book and smiles, at me, daffodilboy. A wonderful cappuccino feeling fans through my stomach. She turns back to her book, but I rewind her smile again and again in my mind.

  The bell goes. As I walk out the class, Joost comes up to me, slings his arm around my shoulders.

  – Hey, china, he tunes.

  I wonder if maybe Joost is not biltong hard after all.

  – I just want to warn you, McEwan fancies your melktert ass.

  He winks at me and runs to catch up with his friends.

  Not Joost or anything can pull me down, for Marika smiled at me.

  I cycle to the Shell to tell Moses. He is filling up an orange Ford Capri with 93. I help him by wiping the windows. The woman inside is so fat the motorcar sags on her side. The suddy water warps her face. As I pass the window she catches my hand. The sour smell of her sweat wafts to me as she digs a finger in the dashboard ashtray. She flips my hand over and puts a coin in my palm. Fifty cents.

  – You are a good boy, she says.

  – Thank you, ma’am, I
say, wishing she would let go my hand.

  In the end, the Capri splutters to life and lurches lopsidedly away. I sniff the coin for sweat, but it smells of cigarette. I am glad to be alone with Moses.

  – Moses. You know the girl, Marika? She smiled at me.

  – Hey hey hey, Douglas. A good sign. And what did she say?

  – She just smiled.

  – Ah. No matter. She smiled. A good sign, he laughs. You know the time I came out of the bundu? After being painted in red ochre, there was the dance, the umgidi. All the village was there. My mother too. I was sad I would never sleep in her khaya again, but all the girls came to see us young lions and I could not dwell on my sadness. There was one girl with beads on her hips, and cheeky breasts. I longed for her to smile at me, but she stared down at her feet. I danced wildly, my sweat dripping like blood down my redclay skin. When the moon was high, and I wanted to drop to the sand, she looked at me and smiled. And then there was wildfire in my feet again.

  I laugh.

  – Just one smile and it makes you crazy. You know there was a time when a young man would lie with a girl, one who might become his wife, so she would wipe the red ochre off him with her skin. Sadly, I had the red ochre wiped off with fat and had to dream of the girl.

  Moses pinches tobacco from an orange packet of Boxer tobacco and drops it into a furrow of newspaper.

  – You know all my man years went down the mine, Blue Reef. Sounds beautiful, Blue Reef. But there is no beach down there: no sun, no sugarcane, no banana palms. Just black like death. The lamps on the hard hats burn like fire.

  He rolls the newspaper and runs his tongue along the edge.

  – As you drop down miles and miles in the cage, the sun is a far memory. You wonder if you dreamed your boyhood herding cows under the sun. You wonder if you dreamed the green hills, for when you come up out of the black, the sun goes down. There is a bus to the barbed-wire compound for Zulus and another bus to the barbed-wire compound for us Xhosas.

  One end of the cigarette he twists, the other end has tobacco dangling from it.

  – Through the window of the bus the land is flat and foreign. No mountains or rivers or cow kraals. Just black-and-white roads, and the far orange glow of Jo’burg over the mine dumps.

  Flecks of tobacco fall from the cigarette. A mossie lands to peck at the tobacco, then flits away. Moses lights the dangly end. It flares, then dwindles to a glow. It fires orange again when Moses sucks in.

  – In the Transkei, as a man, you smoke a pipe and drink sour homemade beer at dusk, the time when boys steer the cows home and children chase chickens and the women make a fire. In the Transkei it is the magic time when voices carry across the valley and you can hear a dog bark miles away.

  He sucks at the cigarette, and goes on while the smoke filters through his teeth:

  – But in the compound at night the laughter of men who have escaped the black death another day is mixed with sad songs and the longing for women. When the revolution comes, the men joke as they rub away dirt with cold water: We gonna taxi to Hillbrow, drink Johnnie Walker on the rocks, see the girls shake their skinny white ass at us.

  A gust of wind cartwheels a carton of Lucky Strikes down the street until a sackman spikes it. It reminds me of the way the skollies kill you in the township. Alleysharks hide bicycle spokes up their sleeves. You walk down an alley, whistling maybe, or just jingling the cents in your pocket. A spoke slides between your ribs like a blade through a watermelon. You may be tempted to laugh at the sudden blooming of a red rose on your shirt. So Hope tells it.

  – My dream was not of whiskey and girls, but of Cape Town, sighs Moses. In my dream, I pick an orange, walk down to the sea and let cool water wash over my feet. I peel the skin, bite into the orange and the sweet juice fills my mouth. After a day in the night of the earth my Cape Town dream healed my dogtired bones.

  The driver of a jam-packed taxi van calls out to Moses in Xhosa, all the while hooting at imaginary dogs. Without slowing down he twists his head around to keep Moses in sight, so the van runs blind. When the hub grazes the kerb, the driver swings his eltonjohn shades around to the road again. But just then a black girl goes by, swinging hips for all the world to see, and he twists his head to flick out a pink tongue through white teeth.

  Cape Town. iKapa. Paradise. There is fruit and sand and sea, but the fruit farms lie inland. In Cape Town hawkers sell oranges by the sea, but the oranges come from Zebediela, up north. If you want to pick peaches or plums, Cape fruit, you have to dodge dogs and jump fences. It is even forbidden to pick up the fly-stung, windfall fruit. And, if you are black, you eat fruit on the tar kerb, as the beach sand lies beyond the signs that bark: Whites Only.

  On the junkyard wall, jagged glass teeth glare in the sun like the cracked bottles on the walls of the Roeland Street jail in Cape Town. Roeland Street where, Oom Jan says, they lock up hoodlum coons. Roeland Street where jailbirds sing to the moon of sweethearts running around free: My geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bos, my geliefde hang in die bitterbessiebos.

  Moses fishes in his deep pockets for the junkyard key.

  Across the road Ou Piet Olifant stands on the veranda of the hotel, squinting his eyes at the Xhosa man and the white boy through the island of oleander and the mirage haze hanging over the tar. Empty tables are decked with plaid cloths and pink plastic flowers to lure travellers in.

  Moses unlocks the padlock. The barbed gate swings and basking lizards scutter into the gaping eyeholes of broken headlamps. The junkyard is a graveyard of dented, gutted motorcars. A stray cat combs against my leg. I see the nodes of its arched backbone through its fur.

  Moses points out an old, boxy Volvo. It is sky blue, but in patches it is the colour of the sea after an eclipse, churned rust red by the moon. The roof is caved in and the tyres flat, the rubber cracked dry under the sun. The Volvo stares at me, through one broken eye and one good eye, a sad old hobo of a motorcar begging to be painted, tuned and ridden.

  Moses grins as he flicks a key to me. It catches the sun like a spinning coin. Out of instinct I want to call out: heads.

  – The key was in the cubbyhole, Moses says.

  I look at the husk of a motorcar and think she must feel lonely, stranded south in this desert place, so far from Sweden and her whizzing youth. I wonder if she came over the sea by ship and if she ever wove along the banks of a fjord, dodging moose or whatever kind of buck they have in Sweden. I realise I know nothing about Sweden, other than fjords and buck. And Björn Borg.

  The seats, once the cherry red of the seams, are bleached pink. Wire springs snake out of the gashed back seat. I imagine she feels ashamed of her leaking guts and rusted husk.

  I tap a tune on the dashboard. And Abba. I almost forgot Abba.

  – So what do you say? smiles Moses.

  – She’ll do.

  I can tell I have hurt his feelings.

  – A coat of paint will perk her up, I add.

  – Yes. And we can use the tyres from the jeep.

  The jeep looks as if it was stamped to death by a rogue elephant avenging all the elephants who ended up as elephant-foot stools.

  – I thought maybe we saw the roof off, Moses goes on. There has been no rain for two years. We just throw a canvas over at night.

  I flinch. I am becoming like my mother, who could not bear to look when Byron, the gardenboy, hacked off branches from the coral tree when it reached too far over the lagoon road.

  – So, you can see her on the road?

  A hobo Volvo, jazzed up as a beach buggy on jeep wheels, bopping down Delarey with a black man and a white boy up front, and on the backseat a crazy bobtail dog biting at the wind.

  – Ya . I can see her.

  – Kulungile. I have only Sunday afternoons for working on the car. I need to sand it down and paint it and fix the engine. It growls but does not catch. And when you get your licence we drive down the N1 to Cape Town.

  – But four years is forever. />
  – Forever for a boy, but years go by like river fish for an old man.

  green apples

  I DROP FROM THE window sill and hold my breath. Chaka does not stir. Just a cluck from the coop and the distant din of tin lids as the dustmen empty the bins on Delarey Straat. It is still dark, but there is a hint of mussel-shell pink and blue in the east. Fish-scale dew glints in the grass.

  On the far side of town I hear the cargo train go uloliwe uloliwe uloliwe. This is the time Moses stirs to unlock the pumps. This is the time Marsden and I, rattled out of sleep by the milkman’s clinking bottles, caught some waves before school.

  Marika’s backyard borders on the veld, miles and miles of bare veld. She climbs over the barbed wire, like a boy. Two horses graze the wet yellow grass. They lift their heads and stare at us, their jawbones shifting, as Marika walks up to them.

  I hang back. Dirkie taught me to ride on the farm, but I am wary of horses: the way their nostrils flare and their muscles twitch randomly under a sleek hide, and the way they toss their heads to flick flies away from their wild black glassy eyes.

  Marika whistles and the horses come to her. She combs her fingers through the mane of the patchy horse and rubs the hard bony ridge that runs down from his eyes to deep nostrils snorting smokily in the cold air. Foam from yellow teeth comes off on the white rugby jersey Marika has on. It has the number nine sewn on the back. Some rugby boy must have given it to her. I am jealous. I wonder if she kissed him.

  – Climb on, she says.

  At her words the front feet of the patchy horse do a skittery dance. Marika whispers into his ear, a sound like the wind murmuring through bluegums.

  – Are you sure he’s tame?

  – Come on. You’re not scared, are you?