Embrace

by Mark Behr

  Rufus is well. We are going riding again on Monday.

  All my love,

  Karl

  PS. Lukas sends his regards. We’re playing rugby on Saturday against Winterton.

  Ma’am called me to her desk. Holding the folded letter she spoke quietly as if wanting the class not to hear: ‘When someone has been shamed, Karl, you may think it acceptable to kick him and further humiliate him while he’s down and being jeered by the world.’ I was stunned; hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. ‘But for you to stand on his head so that you can gain personal elevation from his shame — that, dear Karl, I find reprehensible. I hope no one ever does that to you.’

  A frown compressed my forehead; worry; at a loss for what I had done wrong. How had I disappointed her? There was nothing, nothing on those pages I thought that may have offended her. She smiled while she slid the letter into its envelope: ‘I will not ask you to rewrite this.’

  ‘Ma’am, I don’t understand? Is there something I should have left out?’ By now most of the class could figure that I was being chastised.

  She shook her head: ‘No, Karl, but I want you to know,’ and then she spoke louder, ‘that I find your and the rest’s responses to Niklaas s disgrace immature and cruel.’ She licked the flap and stuck it down with her fingers, closed her eyes to show I could return to my seat.

  I walked back to behind Dom without meeting anyone’s eyes. Furious at her for letting Niklaas Bruin know his shit had featured in my letter.

  2

  In our first year, some of us took the floor when Marabou was out of class. Dominic did Liberace behind the closed piano and Bennie did Cassius Clay on top of Marabou s desk. My own favourite performance piece was Langenhoven’s poem ‘The Moth and the Flame’. Marabou s desk — already cleared for Bennie’s Cassius Clay — was huge and out of proportion as the flame, but it none the less did the job. Spreading my wings, flapping them at first leisurely, extending them as I spun and recited, slowly, closer to the flame.

  Oh, oh, oh, the other moths were dumb and dense

  but far from the candle I, I, I will remain

  from afar in the dusks I’ll observe

  from this far it is safe and gazing free.

  Ah! I need not look from one side only!

  I keep a clear distance and fly around

  then I know from all sides how it looks

  so to care for not getting too close.

  My circle is — ever so slightly — skew and inward bent

  but even there where closest I was

  nothing happened! Nothing! So there’s no reason

  none! For this wide rim so far from the shaft

  The wheel spins ever faster faster faster faster

  and the light and the glow begets bigger delight

  and the rims grow tauter round the shaft

  aaahhhhh, the end of the wheel, aaaahhhhh

  is the ash ssshhhh of the moththhhhhh

  As the tempo increased, so too did my spinning and circling, arms flailing, until by the last stanza I was almost running. My body was alive with me inside. Even as I recited the lines, my head seemed to shrink tiny, almost not to exist, as all I felt were my limbs, now loose, now taut. And my heart. Like doing ballet. In the final line I threw myself across the desk to shrieks of laughter from the class. More than once, when Marabou was out, someone would ask: where’s Cassius, Liberace or ‘The Moth’? And little more prodding was needed to get us going. As the performances had the propensity to turn rather noisy when in fact we were not even allowed to speak, it came as no surprise that one of us was eventually caught. Miraculously, it was Ma’am who came to investigate the din. As I leapt to throw myself into the flame the class roared. Skidding across Marabou’s desk I saw a shadow at the door. Unable to stop my momentum I flew off the desk, landed on my hands. My feet were still up on the desk when Ma’am walked in. But instead of calling me out and having me caned, she smiled and called it a superb rendition. She told us to be quiet, and then she left.

  It was more than a year till the Malawi tour when I’d speak to the tall, serious teacher again. But I knew she must have remembered the poem, for in September of our Marabou year, during the auditions for new members, when the choirs performed a few songs and a number of boys had to play instruments, Mathison had asked me to recite ‘The Moth and the Flame’, adding: ‘But without the performance I’ve heard about!’

  I stood in the auditorium, delighted, at least in part because I knew I would never be asked to sing alone or play my recorder. The verses of Langenhoven’s poem lent themselves superbly to dramatisation, like many of the twenty-odd poems I had committed to memory by then. So, the recitation in the auditorium — standing still, performing it by voice alone without the running, the spinning and the leap across the desk — was a bit of a personal disappointment. The applause for my solo performance was none the less an inspiration. I learnt more poems, read them aloud in class whenever an opportunity arose.

  3

  On the shores of Lake St Lucia, Charters Creek perched above the estuary that pushed its salt water inland to where it was fed by the veins of the Mpate, Nyalazi, Hluhluwe, Mzinene and Mkuzi Rivers.

  Having passed through the eucalyptus and pine plantations near Matubatuba, the approach to the camp where my grandparents worked for the Natal Parks Board was along a sandy two-track road through lush forests. For stretches of the drive the sky was erased by a ceiling of branches and tangled creepers. Baboon ropes hung like grey swings awaiting young hands and feet. I want to remember that it rained often — afternoon thundershowers — for the land and dense shrubbery was moist and green compared to the tans, browns, beiges, ambers and mustards of Mkuzi and Umfolozi. Here the crests of kaffir-trees — Erythrina caffra — broke the green jungle roof in a haze of red and in September the dull crimson crinkle paper flowers of sausage trees augured spring when one barely knew winter had been. The place, Dademan and Mumdeman said, was almost the tropics. Not quite as wet and humid as Oljorro in Tanganyika, which is right up at the middle of the world, but in some ways similar. Charters Creek, for me, was a paradise akin to my imaginings of Eden astaken from the illustrated Kinder Bybek butterflies, flowers and birds; down at the water and on the shore pelicans, flamingoes, seagulls, swifts and sandpipers; in the forest, duiker and bosbok. And, more than anywhere else in a Zululand I remember, the magical grunting call of the purple-crested louries. No sound of the bush was to me more haunting, more mysterious than that of a loury, no bird more beautiful. A sighting of the bird bouncing along a stem or of its aloof wings overhead was always a surprise, always a tiny secret shared, an annunciation of angels.

  The camp consisted of eight rondavels and a small administration building from where Dademan and Mumdeman oversaw things in the marine reserve. When I visited, Dademan allowed me in behind the receptions flat latch-door counter and I could speak by radio to Bok at Mpila in Umfolozi. When the office was not expecting the crackle of radio contact from other reserves or HQ, I could speak for short intervals on an unused frequency where no one was likely to receive my messages of poachers being shot, crocodiles dragging piccaninnies to their watery deaths, hippo devastating canoes or a cargo of rhino horns intercepted by me while out patrolling on horseback.

  Dad and Mademan’s thatched house stood overlooking Lake St Lucia, on a kikuyu lawn up the hill, away from the main camp, almost hidden from sight by the purple extacy of jacaranda, Natal mahogany, pride of India and different creepers. The bush on the landward side was fought back by Phinias, who tended the beds of blue and white agapanthus, tumbling sweeps of cup of gold, golden shower, hibiscus, frangipani, tree wisteria and barberton daisies as big as my hands in red, pink, white, orange and yellow. Mademan’s pride was the hedge of Strelitzia reginae, with their orange sepals, white bases and blue, almost purple petals which glass-eyes frequented for nectar. Nights were for the call of bushbabies and the nightjars, preceded for the whole day by the emerald-spotted wood doves. Sadly they ca
lled: My mother is dead, my father is dead, aU my relatives are dead. Phinias couldn’t makebird sounds, but Jonas emulated the wood dove best: Don, don, don, I-had-babies-and-they-died, I-had-babies-they were stolen-now-my-heart-is-going-don, don, don, do, do, don-don.

  From dusk the growing clammy, damp smell of the estuary mingled with the fragrance of frangipani, wild jasmine and gardenias from the forest. And there was the hghghg hguum hghghg ghuum of hippo moving somewhere down along the shore. In the morning a scattering of droppings and the trampling of Ouma’s flowering clivias or red hibiscus confirmed that they had come to ravage the garden. I feared the hippo at Charters Creek far more than I did white or black rhino in Mkuzi or Umfolozi. I told myself I would always see a rhino from a distance in the veld, or, if it charged, I could let Chaka and Suz’s barking serve as protective decoys. With Bok on horseback, the tens of rhino we encountered, white and black, always let us be or stomped off to a safe distance from where they might come to a standstill and turn, snorting, to gaze at us. But hippo: fat, ugly, always slyly drifting and peeping up from the water, came out at night, like dark devils from the sea. Moreover, I didn’t have the bull terriers with me at Charters. Mademan’s little Pekinese, Skip, would be a joke thrown sky high by a charging hippo. I had heard story upon story of native canoes snapped in half by the cavernous jaws — not only in South Africa, but in Tanganyika and Kenia. Dademan had cines of us at the Mzima springs near Mombasa, where, from within a glass tank, one could view the fish and the hippo underwater. If hippo run that fast under water, Dademan said, imagine what speed they can attain on land — then add fifteen miles an hour to that. Hippos were monsters, as bad or worse than crocodiles. At least the long scaly reptiles were up-front about their evil. You could see they were dangerous. But hippo I distrusted in the same way as I did hyena. It had something to do with their appetite for the night. I myself had no fear of the night, but in the bush I did fear its creatures. During the day, when the hippo lay with their mouths wide open while dentist birds manicured theteeth inside the pink mouths, I was never misled and imagined that far more than being designed for an ecological function the birds were there in cohorts with the night devils to deceive everything and everyone into believing their hosts docile and friendly. The sickleshaped hippo teeth mounted on our mantelpiece — especially after we moved to Amanzimtoti — had visitors astonished and appalled when they realised they were not looking at small elephant tusks. More people were killed in Africa by hippo than by any other wild animals. It was the first fact I ever learnt and I repeated this fact over and over to myself and to my city cousins whom, to my chagrin, thought themselves bush children after a day at Charters or Umfolozi. I was the bush child. Except for the stray piccanins and little Jeremy Wilcox — and he was so young it didn’t count — I was the only child in the whole of the Zululand reserves. I knew the bush and would not let my cousins or even Lena and Bernice forget that. Fact.

  Old Phinias, the garden boy, sometimes took me into the forest to look for the louries, just as did Jonas in Mkuzi’s forest of figs. Phinias was a bit crippled in one foot and had sleeping sickness because of repeated bouts of malaria. Dademan said he wasn’t quite sure about the malaria-story and a more plausible explanation for Phinias’s falling asleep on his feet was your typical kaffir disease: idleness. Another new word. Still, I worried about Phinias dozing somewhere during one of our bush walks where I may be unable to wake him. I knew there were no large animals to fear. Mostly duiker, the shy bosbok and occasionally nyala and kudu. But there was always a chance of encountering a lone hippo strayed from the river. Or a mamba, the most terrifying and poisonous of the Zululand snakes. But like everywhere, the fear was rarely at the front of my mind; it dozed very far at the back. With Dad or Mumdeman’s permission, Phinias walked with me along antelope path where it was possible to hear the louries. If one were deadly silent, there was even occasion to see them, hopping from branch to branch or swooping off into the green. We approached the forest as quietly as possible, my eyes simultaneously trying to look out for birds and Phinias’s long toes like a frogs spilling over his mpategas and crunching dry leaves. We would stand quietly and look up, our mouths open so we could hear better, and when they called, our eyes swept the branches in competition to see who could spot one first. Soundless, with only a show of eyes, he or I would signal victory. If the birds were not there, I begged him to sit down and wait with me, for I couldn’t imagine returning home without a report of a sighting. If, on an odd chance, we had not seen one, I’d simply bring myself to believe that we indeed had, just briefly, that I had certainly seen one while Phinias was sleeping on his feet. In Mkuzi Jonas couldn’t be tricked and would have told me I was a liar. Sometimes we would have to sit for half an hour, and they might stretch out with their arms behind their heads on the leaves and I’d lie down beside them. But while my eyes and Jonas’s were searching in the branches, Phinias’s soon closed and before long I’d hear the breathing of the man asleep. Jonas also closed his eyes, but I doubted he ever slept. Nothing seemed to pass him by. Suddenly a high-pitched ko-ko-ko-ko-ko-ko, rising in pitch, louder, then transformed to growling and suddenly ending, or a kok-kok or kro-kro-kro broke the forest silence only to be re-called from somewhere in the thickets. Before you could see them fly they tumbled into the centre of a tree, sat quietly, or hopped along the branches. Then you held your breath, waiting for the flight, and, when they swept down, you saw at last the hidden crimson under their wings.

  On one of our homeward walks I suggested Phinias go and see the Sangoma to cure his sleeping sickness. Phinias laughed and asked whether I thought the Sangoma could really cure him. I said no, because only people who believed in Jesus were real doctors and the Sangomas were heathen witch doctors who were going to burn in hell. Then Phinias held his stomach and laughed so much he came to a standstill in the sandy track.

  ‘What you laugh at, Phinias?’ I asked, but he carried on walking, laughing so much the tears ran glistening down his cheeks.

  ‘Is cause you’re not really sick, eh, Phinias? Is cause you have idleness not sleepiness.’ But that just sent him spinning in circles, bent over double, his laughter breaking open the sudden quiet of the bush.

  4

  Sticking loosely together somewhere in the middle as the groups of boys walked along, we had been speaking about the upcoming Parents’Weekend. Letter-writing and lunch were done and under Mr Buys’s supervision we were hiking to Copper Falls. Even though I disliked Buys, feared his anger and temper, I was looking forward to the falls. It was a new route to a place we had not been before. Hiking, like riding, allowed me to feel that my being in the Berg was worth while, after all. With Buys at the head and some prefects at the tail, our line stretched for about half a kilometre along the dust road that wound up towards the Champagne Castle Hotel. Buys cut left into the veld and started along a footpath through the green veld.

  The six of us talking as we fell into single file to follow the overgrown footpath. Bennie: built like a Rottweiler and as strong as one; short, stocky, arms and legs lined with muscle. Of us all, Bennie had the shortest fuse and he was constantly ready to fight. Mervyn: red curls, freckles on his white face, long arms and legs. Steven Almeida: as tall as me, long slender limbs covered in fine black threads, a head of straight jet-black hair and, I knew, a dense tuft sprouting in the centre of his chest. Lukas: towering in the middle, already looking like a man. Dominic, the shortest, his hair standing upright in the breeze. And me, inspecting them from behind. At an angle from which Champagne Castle and Cathkin Peak together looked like a mammoth flat-topped table, the six of us posed for a photograph, Almeida and Dominic on either side of me.

  In two weeks’ time our parents would come for the once-a-term visit. It would be the first time I’d seen Bok and Bokkie after the July holiday. They would again stay on the Therons’ farm. I found myself hoping they would not come so that I could spend the weekend in the hotel with the Websters.

  Mervyn’s pare
nts were again flying down from Pretoria in their Cessna and staying, along with Dominic’s parents, at the El Mirador. After the weekend Mervy was flying back to record an album and a violin solo for TV with the National Youth Symphony Orchestra. We envied Mervy and Dominic the sporadic liberties afforded by their instruments.

  As Bennie’s mother often didn’t come for Parents’ Weekends, he went out with the Clemence-Gordons. Bennie’s mother worked as a secretary at the Ficksburg farmers’ co-operative where his former stepfather was the manager. Bennie told us it was difficult for his mother to get away on Saturdays when most farmers came to the coop. I would later think that her absences were perhaps related more to their not having much money and the story about the co-op an excuse. I resisted asking, but as far as I could ascertain his late father left money for his education that enabled his mother to keep him in the Berg.

  Lukas. Certainly the strongest among us, he was rarely inclined to show off or prove his strength. He was, I sometimes thought, a friend to all of us and to none. Although he mostly hung around with us, he got along with everyone, was respected by everyone, and despite him being as hopeless as Bennie at school — and that he was caned as much as the rest of us — it did nothing to tarnish his reputation as a solid, reliable companion to all. Once in a while his mother or father came to Parents’Weekends alone as the American saddlers and Arabs could not be left alone on Swaargenoeg.

  Steven Almeida. Carrying a makeshift walking stick in front of Lukas. Silent. Soft-spoken. Gentle. Portuguese, and his family had left Angola due to the war. While no one had ever rivalled my friendship with Dominic, I was fascinated by almost everything about Almeida. I was sure the affinity was in part the result of his being from outside South Africa and that it sounded as though his family had been forced to leave their country, just like mine. When we toured Malawi that December, he would be the only one besides me whose passport would show he had not been born in South Africa. Almeidas voice — like good red wine, Mr Roelofse always said — had just garnered for us a standing ovation at the inauguration of the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl. In the glaring lights and zoomed onto by cameras practising SABC TV’s first live concert broadcast, he did a solo of ‘Dit Is Die Maand Oktober’ that, despite his odd Portuguese pronunciation, brought the entire open-air pavilion to its feet. Almeida intrigued me. His voice, his broodiness, his Catholicism, and his ability to take cuts, as phlegmatic and seemingly indifferent to pain as Lukas. Almeida would rise after he’d been caned and seem to glide away without twitching a nerve. Lukas, when caned, grinned, though the steely glint in his eyes gave away the fact that he was repressing the pain. Before and after cuts, Bennie seethed, whispering that he’d return to kill the torturers when he was a grown-up. Dominic and Mervyn, whom we teased as goody two-shoes, had probably been caned no more than ten or twelve times. Seeing Dominic caned was dreadful: worse to see than if it were being done to me. Coming up from bending, his face was white and his huge eyes blinked rapidly to prevent tears from brimming over; the eyes of an impala in spodights. And Mervyn, his freckles hidden for hours afterwards by a red glow: pain, shame, silent, unable to hide or speak a word of the anger and humiliation flushed over his face and into his neck.