Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  Why an English-speaking boy felt so deeply about the Afrikaner people’s defining event, and what it all had to do with terrorists, puzzled me.

  I knew from Ma and Elliot to ignore the South African History syllabus. ‘They did not meet at the Fish River,’ Ma had told me, referring to the official textbook fiction of black and white settlers entering an empty promised land at precisely the same time.

  Black people barely featured at all in the lessons. Ours was a land wrested back and forth between English and Boer and finally united in peace and prosperity. (Presumably, Barry felt terrorists were about to upset this peace.) For the textbooks, black people were simply the furniture of history, or the acacias of an empty Pierneef landscape. Instead, the schoolbooks described the history of Mr Coetzee’s people, Boer War and Great Trek. Not the history of my people, whoever they were. Certainly not of Shadrack’s.

  * * *

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s me, Shadrack. Ben.’

  ‘He’s not here!’ he yelled back.

  ‘No, it’s Ben here, Shadrack. Where’s Ma?’

  ‘Where are you?’ he shouted down a crackling line.

  ‘In Natal. At a hostel.’

  ‘You coming back now?’

  ‘No. Tomorrow we go to the Church of the Vow, then we’re in Umdloti for two days, then Joburg, then back.’

  ‘Come back soon.’

  ‘Where’s Ma, Shadrack?’

  ‘She’s out now.’

  ‘Where, Shadrack?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe with her friend.’

  ‘Which one?’

  I was uncertain of Shadrack’s response.

  ‘Shadrack, did you say “Fein” or “fine”?’

  ‘Yes-thanks.’

  The call dropped and I heard the coins tumbling into the payphone’s guts. It was all I could do to choke back a sob as I handed the receiver to the next kid in line.

  I hadn’t thought of home at all, so swept up had I been in the tour, the girls, blood and piss. It was only when some of the other kids had said they were going to call home that I’d joined the queue at the payphone.

  Now my room, my encyclopaedias, Shadrack, Shadrack’s desiccated meals, and my mother all tugged at my heart. Leo Fein’s invisible force field around Ma troubled me, it’s true. But whatever latent feeling for home I possessed sprouted now like a long-forgotten seed: that’s what brought the tears, and the lump in my throat.

  * * *

  Our tour had stumbled so to the coast that when we did reach Umdloti, I was surprised to be released onto the beach. I had to put aside my fear of things in the sea and the exposure of my blank skin to other, more outdoorsy, children; but between that and the big drag of the Great Trek lessons there was no contest.

  There were always the strict eyes of teachers on us but not even they could stop boys showing off for girls with handstands in the ocean, feet over the surf. Someone shouted, ‘Look at Sir!’ when Mr Coetzee removed his brown trousers with the matching fabric belt to reveal floral-pattern Speedos. No one had anticipated that he owned anything of such good-humoured feminine abandon in his wardrobe.

  I noted that his entire body was of a uniform colour, like he’d been dunked in coffee. Mr Coetzee didn’t react to our shouts and laughter but only folded his pants while tugging on the Gunston below his moustache.

  Mrs Verwey arrived later, though, and she opposed our shouts and giggles with various shouts and orders of her own. When none of it abated our good spirits, she singled out Angelique for bringing a bikini instead of a school-regulation one-piece. ‘What are people going to think of us, Angelique? We’re representing our school, you know.’

  Angelique stood in one place, unsure of what she should do. Mrs Verwey waved her on.

  ‘Vroeg ryp, vroeg vrot,’ said Mrs Verwey to Mr Coetzee, who neither agreed nor disagreed but helped her spread her towel. I knew it translated as ‘quick to ripen, quick to rot’ but didn’t then understand the cruelty of its meaning.

  Though our enthusiasm flattened slightly, it was only for a short time, and we quickly built up a head of steam again. Even Angelique forgot her embarrassment and joined in.

  I saw Shoshana, with her belly stretched under the shiny blue of her swimming costume, standing with her toes curled in the sand and arms crossed under her little spud-breasts. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘you like to swim?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘But we’re only here for a bit. At least get your toes wet.’ She followed me in and both of us, I think, lost our funk for the tour in that ocean, crashing our bodies into the breakers.

  Everyone was learning to ride the waves and the boys pulled their biceps at the lifeguards up on their chairs. Even Coetzee and Verwey swam and seemed to enjoy themselves. A current would drag you to the side and beyond the line of the orange buoys, and you’d have to swim back between them, or back to shore to run again to the starting point. The force of it was powerful but imperceptible, and you’d be surprised every time by how far you’d drifted, before you had to return.

  It was into this cycle of play that an almost strangled, violently dipping yelp was released. It came from just next to me and it was Georgina Melck, her wrist tangled with the stinger of a bluebottle. I helped her onto the sand, a little thrilled, I’ll admit, to have an arm around her cool, ocean-wet body, and waved for the lifeguards. One came running towards us and picked her up in his arms.

  We followed them, me and a few others, to the lifeguard hut where whimpering Georgina was placed on a chair. She let out another scream when the lifeguard rushed at her with a pair of shining scissors. By now the teachers were there to reassure her, and the lifeguard scraped the stuff off her arm with the blade and poured vinegar over the wound.

  Mrs Verwey took Gina back to the hostel, her arm still stinging. I didn’t want any more swimming after that, and neither did some of the other kids who’d been close enough to hear Gina scream. The little group sat on the beach, sifting sand between their fingers and watching the others. Shoshana sat near me but my thoughts were with Gina; I felt a secret joy at having been the one to help her first, though I’d done nothing but call the lifeguard.

  At the hostel we had a braai outside in the warm evening air and it finally felt like a holiday. Even Mr Coetzee and Mrs Verwey seemed to have a lightness come over them and the hostel chief shared his brandewyn with them.

  ‘It was nice of you to help Georgina,’ said Shoshana when we were taking our plates back to the mess hall. ‘It was nice of you to take me on tour.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘I like being on tour with someone so nice. I know you didn’t want to.’

  I didn’t feel nice at all. I felt like a shit and had the sensation that I’d been found out, foolishly, because my feelings must have been on the surface, not hidden like I’d imagined. Shoshana didn’t wait around for me to protest her assertion, which was a great kindness to me.

  After my part in Georgina’s emergency, it was only natural that Brian would be cross with me. I almost expected it, even though he had no right to be, since I was merely the closest to her on the beach. But I could understand it; I might’ve been upset, too, had our roles been reversed.

  It was why, after we were already asleep, deep in the dormitories of the seaside hostel, Brian and Vaughan and Wilson crept into our room, pulled me out of bed and threw my bag and clothes out the window.

  ‘Hey!’ I cried. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Wrong hostel!’ said Brian.

  ‘You’re supposed to be in the girls’ hostel!’ said Vaughan.

  ‘We’re helping you move,’ said Wilson.

  Sean was up and next to me in a flash, elbowing in my defence while the invading party tried to pull my pyjamas off me too. Markos was late to react, sitting up in bed, but eventually it was he who turned the light on and tried to pull Brian off me.

  I don’t know if it was th
e clothes flying out the window or the noise but something brought Mr Coetzee into the dorm. The light made him squint, which gave Brian, Vaughan and Wilson time to stand up straight.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Mr Coetzee, ‘jacks for all of you.’ He was pointing to each of us. ‘I don’t care about your stories. If this isn’t your dorm, get out. And if I see any one of you up again tonight, you won’t sleep for a week from the klap I’m going to give you.’ The three infiltrators scrambled down the linoleum to their own dorm.

  While the others confined themselves to bed, I had to wrestle with Mr Coetzee’s last threat and the thought of my clothes downstairs. ‘What should I do?’ I asked Markos and Sean, but they’d been frightened into silence. I decided I’d have to take the chance.

  I estimated that enough time had elapsed for Coetzee to go to bed, and tiptoed out the dorm. When I’d crept downstairs to the square of grass, I wished I’d waited longer because I heard Mrs Verwey crying and Mr Coetzee cooing in a voice so different from the one he’d threatened us with upstairs. The two teachers were in a room downstairs, together, and I had to pick up my clothes silently from the bushes and flower beds opposite their window.

  My first confused idea was that they were Mr and Mrs to each other, but then I remembered that there was already a Mr Verwey, the Guidance teacher. I convinced myself logically, although not in deep truth, that Mrs Verwey was missing Mr Verwey and that this was what Mr Coetzee was trying to comfort her about when he said, ‘Dis okay, liefie,’ – it’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay.

  I crept back to bed and didn’t tell the others what I’d heard. We spent a difficult night thinking independently of the punishment that would meet us in the morning.

  ‘I think he was drunk,’ said Sean as we dressed the next day. ‘He smelt like brandy. Maybe he’ll forget.’

  And we began to believe he might when we arrived in the mess hall and Mr Coetzee wasn’t there. But he walked in soon after the boys from the other dorm entered the hall and beckoned for us all to follow him. He looked worn, like he hadn’t slept much either.

  As our two groups met, our eyes were wide and the enmity between us was swallowed deep down by the fear of what was to follow. The hostel head unlocked his office door and let us all in, then left the six of us alone with our teacher. Mr Coetzee placed on the desk the wooden bat, purpose-made for punishing youths and packed for just such an event.

  ‘In a straight stripe,’ he said to us and yawned. We lined up. He pointed to a spot on the rug and Sean, first, stepped up to it. He took the strike – louder than I expected – with a grimace and rubbed his rear with both hands. We all followed and didn’t mind showing to one another how it stung, since we all felt it just the same.

  I was fourth in line to get the beating and it stung and stuck to me as I walked back down the corridor to the dining hall.

  We sat down to breakfast and ate. ‘Fucking Coetzee,’ said Markos.

  ‘Fucking arsehole,’ said Sean.

  ‘We didn’t even do anything. It was those guys – they came into our room.’

  ‘He just likes hitting kids,’ I said. ‘I mean, why be a teacher at all if you hate kids so much?’

  ‘Fucking psycho,’ said Sean.

  Beyond the sting of the bat, the events I’d overheard between Mr Coetzee and Mrs Verwey still lingered. And if I thought of them together, just a man and a woman, not two teachers (those strange creatures wrought of adults), it brought to mind my mother and Leo Fein. If these unlikely beasts – fierce and inhuman teachers – could find the tenderness to couple, well, there was surely nothing stopping Leo Fein from ensnaring my mother.

  We had another morning on the beach but I didn’t care to swim, partly because of the mood that had come over me and partly because of the bluebottles. There was a flat grey sky over us while Shoshana and I sat on the sand watching the others.

  Georgina was scared, too. She sat with us and showed us the welt on her forearm. I showed her the triangular divot in my shin from climbing walls and told her I couldn’t feel anything on the scar tissue.

  ‘Mine’s not that sore any more, either,’ she said.

  Brian was swimming and looked back at us several times. Between him and Shoshana, I held back from saying too much to Georgina.

  * * *

  The tour turned around and reached Joburg in the late afternoon. We boys changed into the long pants we’d saved for this most anticipated event. I flung aside my escape tactics and resigned myself to my fate.

  The cinema had six movies showing at once which was impressive in itself, compared to the single-screen Astra Theatre we were used to back home. ‘Come on,’ I said to Shoshana, and we found two seats together.

  I don’t remember which movie we saw, and probably not many of us would. It was over halfway through and I hadn’t followed it at all, because Shoshana had taken my hand after ten minutes. Our fingers locked together like combs and we sat, sweaty palms and pins-and-needles until the end.

  When we were outside waiting for the bus, boys and girls split instantly to compare notes. I didn’t own up to having held Shoshana’s hand.

  While Mrs Verwey and Mr Coetzee counted heads I saw Brian and Georgina walk out the cinema, hands still clasped, clinging till the last minute before the teachers noticed and they’d have to split for the gender-assigned buses.

  * * *

  We had one final stop before home the next day. The granite block of the Voortrekker Monument towered over us like a bully. Mr Coetzee described the Great Trek as the country’s most important event, the one that shaped us into what we are. We all wrote this down into our workbooks, even though, since we were an English-speaking school, most of the kids were from families who had not arrived with the Voortrekkers.

  Mrs Verwey wore a mournful look on the way back to the Transvaal, and she’d begun sitting with the bus drivers at mealtimes while Mr Coetzee sat alone. But her will reconstituted in the face of this strange and mystical building. She explained the messages contained in the figures of the mother and child, the stories captured in the frieze, the light from above that shone onto the cenotaph every year on that one sacred Day of the Vow.

  There were messages in every inch of the construction. ‘These are the fathers of our nation,’ said Mrs Verwey of the four sentinels at each corner of the square mass. Her jaw was set as firmly as the stone of the monument. ‘Great men like these don’t come along every day.’

  It was an impressive building. This was not just the monolith we saw from the highway. It had subtlety that took explaining. It was the major representation of a people many of us English kids, in our prejudice and fear, spoke of as mongrels and blockheads, thickset dimwits. But here, they had established a culture of their own and we were in the heart of it. And what, after all, did we – the English-speakers, the rooineks – have of our own?

  Mr Coetzee told us about dragging the wagons over the teeth of the Drakensberg, the same mountains we had travelled across to get from Natal yesterday, up Van Reenen’s Pass, into the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. ‘Young boys and girls like you, in ox-wagons, carrying the ox-wagons sometimes over the mountains.’

  The frieze inside finally introduced black people into the picture, whitewashed in smooth marble.

  Not the cinema, but this great mass, was what Mr Coetzee, Mrs Verwey and Barry Jennings regarded as the pinnacle of the tour. But by now I was beginning to feel the full dreariness of the Trek. The stones of commemoration, so cold and drab, left me feeling dry and bilious.

  I wanted the monuments to fall away, even the mountains – especially the mountains, though I wouldn’t have been able to say exactly why. Perhaps there was comfort in nature’s power to sweep away history in a breath.

  And these low feelings brought on the future that awaited me at home. An intruder in my life, perhaps in my home: Leo Fein, thief of my mother, as I’d longed to be the thief of Georgina Melck but landed with Potato Latke instead. I didn’t want to be on tour any more and I didn’t
want to go home.

  I drifted away from everyone, around the corner where the Unknown Trekker stood in his niche. ‘I already had my bat mitzvah,’ said Shoshana, behind me. ‘I’m a woman, you know.’ She took my hand and placed it on her forming breast. ‘And you’re only a boy because you’re not even thirteen yet.’ Then she thrust my hand down again and skipped around the corner to return to the rest of the group.

  Shoshana didn’t try to stand next to me again, like she did at the other sites. She’d cut me loose, it was clear, right at the end of the Standard Five Tour. We stepped onto our separate buses and drove north, back to our homeland, and I felt lonelier on this homecoming leg than I had at any other time on the tour.

  * * *

  My mother was there to pick me up from the bus outside school. Who went with whom on tour was forgotten, since we were all longing by then – some openly and some secretly – for our mothers. I was happy to see mine.

  After being away from her, I felt filled with my unspoken account of the past five days but before any of it could unfurl, I caught sight of him. The white streak of hair, standing atop his head, and the straight line of his mouth presented themselves.

  ‘Welcome back, china,’ he said. He opened the boot of the Mercedes and let me drop my bag into it. The corner that had forced the doors of Roy’s Uptown Liquor open was smooth again and lacquered with silver paint like the rest of the shell.

  ‘Tell us all about it, Ben,’ said Ma.

  I suppressed the story of the tour, not offering up any anecdotes and answering questions as briefly as I could from the constricting jump seat of the Mercedes. Leo Fein let a hand rest on Ma’s leg as the car slid up Grobler Street.

  9

  TERRORISTS

  Three days later I was waiting for Ma after school under the fever tree. It wasn’t unusual for her to be a few minutes late but when some of the other kids had been picked up and the cars cleared, I saw the silver Mercedes standing there with its nose pointed at me.