Embrace

by Mark Behr

  ‘As wide as you want them.’

  I crossed to the curtains and almost tugged them off their rails. Below me, only a hundred metres away, was a beach whiter and an ocean bluer than I’d ever seen. To one side on the dunes stood a cluster of small white houses where coloured children were playing soccer in a split-pole enclosure. On the shore a boy was fishing with a man a short distance behind him. I unfastened the latches of both windows and smelt the sea as the fresh air streamed into the room, rustling the lace curtains. I felt him behind me; smelt his body, the faint scent of sweat from the hot car. No aftershave. I kept gazing at the ocean and the white beach, deserted except for the boy fishing and the man watching. I felt his lips in my neck and his body push against mine. His arms draped across my shoulders and he kissed my neck, then my cheeks. I felt for his thigh, and ran my hand along his stomach and down, clutching the fabric of his jeans where it was hard against my lower back. He reached around my shoulder and unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my jeans and unzipped my fly, pushed his hand into my underpants and gently squeezed my stiff penis in his palm. I felt his chin resting on my head. The boy’s fishing rod was bending as if he’d caught something. We stood, quiet, and neither of us moved. I wanted it never to change, wished that we could stay like that in the window for ever, would never have to leave that place. The man had moved closer to the boy with the rod, seemed to be talking to him while he tried to reel in the fish.

  ‘I want to tell you to use my name, but I’m concerned someone may overhear,’ he broke the silence, keeping his chin on my head, ‘here or in choir.’ For a while he was quiet, then he said; ‘Just now, in the lobby, I was paranoid that you might call me Meneer.’ He laughed, his stomach moving against my back.

  Facing the receptionist, when he asked me about the mattress, I had thought fleetingly of calling him Pappa or Pa, but couldn’t get the word over my lips. My father was Bok and had never been Dad to me except in the letters I wrote home on Saturdays. And that merely formality in a letter so I didn’t have to explain to teacher-on-duty that Bok’s my father and Bokkie my mother. And writing differed from speaking. In writing I could say almost anything; talking, there were a myriad things I could not even think of uttering. Not Father, Pa, Pappa, Pappie or anything else. Just plain Bok, when I talked to him.

  ‘Do you want to use my name?’

  I knew his name. But I could not get my mind around calling him that. Not to his face. Amongst ourselves in choir we sometimes used it playfully or sarcastically. Dominic might whisper: ‘Looks like Jacques is in one of his moods. Sopranos beware.’ Or: ‘Something’s eating Jacques . . . Having his periods, perhaps?’ It was like Jean Jacques of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, which we were doing with Ma’am in History. The other teacher’s name that was a source of playful sarcasm was the Hildegaard of Miss Marabou. Marabou’s name lent itself beautifully to histrionic flair: ‘Hildegaard approaching!’ one of us would whisper and dash for our desk when the hateful woman patrolled the stoep supervising prep or letter-writing. Or, hidden in the branches of the rondavel oak when we first got to the school: ‘Hildegaard entering the line of fire!’ Then pelting her with acorns from our hide-out, suppressing our giggles as she searched around her, then up into the branches, unable to see us clinging like tree frogs flattened to the enormous branches. Or, when as juniors she chose to sit with us at lunch, Dominic, speaking as if in serious conversation with me, just loud enough for her to hear: ‘Quitite tithe ugogloeliesoostit soospopecociesoos, tithisoos Hiloeldidgogaardid, didoneetit you tithineekyk?’ And she’d glare, ready to snap, but not sure what handle she had on him. As soon as she took another mouthful of food, I’d say: ‘Tithisoos soospopecociesoos hasoos eyesoos loelikyke a bokloelacockyk mimamimboka.’ And when she’d finished chewing she’d set her mouth in disdain and say: ‘You two may think yourselves cute now, but wait till you grow up. Just you wait. I promise you. When you grow up, you’ll be outcasts.’

  ‘I don’t mind calling you Sir,’ I said.

  ‘But when were alone it sounds completely absurd.’

  ‘I can call you . . . by your name when were alone, if you want. And Sir in front of the other boys. I won’t get it wrong.’

  The boy was up to his calves in the water. Behind him the man gestured angrily, instructing him on how to bring in the fish.

  ‘Can you manage Pa or something while were here?’

  A chuckle escaped from my lips. I said: ‘I just won’t say anything, I won’t call you anything. I can’t call you Pa — that sounds absurd.’ ‘But if you don’t call me Pa you’ll sound insubordinate, or disrespectful. You can’t just say: yes, no. These people are nosy as all hell. They aren’t accustomed to having strangers around.’

  ‘I’ll call you Pa here . . . sir at school, and your name when were alone.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My name.’

  I sighed. ‘I can’t just say your name out of the blue. It will have to be in a sentence or something.’

  ‘Say it in a sentence then.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I giggled. For a moment it seemed he would let it go. ‘Come on, Karl, say my name.’ I glanced again at the boy battling the fish, then turned around in his arms and brought my lips to his mouth, letting them rest there, feeling his stubble, again smelling his sweat as we looked each other in the eyes.

  ‘I love you, Jacques,’ I whispered against his lips. My voice sounded hoarse and I wanted to cry; not from sadness, but from embarrassment and bliss. I dropped my forehead to his chest.

  9

  The hidden grain, the layers and rings and twists beneath the bark normally obscured in the deepest recesses of the wood, had been brought to the surface as if burnished till, to us, they looked like tambotie shined with high-gloss furniture polish. Leaning backwards as though they were to sit down on their haunches, the rhino rocked to and fro against the severed trunks, the rough hide of their hindquarters having worn off long ago the splinters and sharp edges of the tree’s breakage. With varying degrees of ardour, they swayed, their heads turned up, horns almost slanted backwards; then turning around, rubbing another side or lifting a leg to rub a thigh or a portion of the belly. Each session made the tip of the stump first smoother, eventually shinier, leaving it after years as resplendent as any piece crafted at a carpenter’s hand.

  I recall at least three rubbing stumps in the Mkuzi veld, all near mud-pans where water only temporarily gathered before it evaporated or was slurped away by the earth’s thirst. In Umfolozi I saw a stump once only. It was the time Bok took Tommie Bedford and some other tourists for photographs. Tommie Bedford was the Springbok rugby captain at the time. It was a thrill to meet him and have our photographs taken with him and his girlfriend who had blond hair down to the small of her back. Bok went out of his way to make select trips memorable, guiding visitors to outlying locations most tourists rarely entered; taking them also to places without the reserve like Dingaan’s kraal and Isandlwana, to the site of England’s most bloody battle against the Zulus. Tommie Bedfords girlfriend wanted to buy beadwork so Bok took them to kraals where Zulu women threaded bracelets, trinkets and necklaces of bright, shiny beads.

  People like the Bedfords were called VIPs, an abbreviation whose significance I knew a while before I understood its literal meaning and could fill in the words. When Bok left the Parks Board to become a white hunter with Southern Safaris he frequently took VIPs — rich Americans and Europeans — to hunt for trophies in Botswana and Rhodesia. One of the most famous was the astronaut Wally Schirra, who went into space before Apollo. Bok told us of how he and Wally Schirra were sitting around the camp fire late one night when Schirra turned to him and said: ‘Ralph, you are the first man I’ve met who has not asked me how it was to walk in space.’

  ‘I know,’ Bok says he answered. ‘Those things don’t matter in the bush.’ Only then did they talk about what it had been like and Wally Schirra said that it was there in outer space that he realised the
minuteness of human beings within the infinite scheme and timelessness of the universe.

  In our sitting room we had an autographed photograph he later sent Bok. The picture was taken while the spacecraft had been in orbit. On it one could see the whole of Africa and parts of Europe, the continents surrounded by blue oceans and smears of white that must have been clouds. Bernice did a project on planets and took the photograph to Kuswag to show her class. Her teacher said the picture with its signature was extremely valuable and would accrue further in years to come. With the whole earth already mapped, explored and understood, space, Bernice told us afterwards, was man’s new frontier and the astronauts its courageous reconnoitrers.

  10

  It was cold and windy outside, so he went back upstairs to fetch our jerseys. How unusual to wear a jersey on the beach, I thought, waiting for him out there in the car. In Zululand and Natal you take off your clothes and in the Cape you put more on.

  We drove south along the narrow road pointed out by the receptionist. Everything along the way looked different from the Indian Ocean coast. Only fynbos, grass, very few trees. And dryer in a dull green and cinnamon-coloured sort of way, not green and colourfullike around St Lucia or Toti. Inland from the coast was veld, unlike Natal where the end of the beach was the beginning of the dizzyingly green bush. The plants at Paternoster were different: small and spindly, succulents, stringy creepers that clutched the surface of the sandy soil. It is all, he said, the function of the winds, the cold Agulhus tide and the less moist climate. Out of the car, the differences became even more stark: here we walked in powder-fine white sand, not the little yellow grains I knew. Beaches with barely any waves were broken by bays between black boulders where huge waves rushed, spurting froth skyward and groaning as they churned and drew back, then came flinging themselves once more against the rocks. The further we walked the rougher the sea became and the waves roared down on the beach, ‘like porcupines storming with their quills erect,’ I said. He frowned and I showed him how the wind scooped the tips off breaking waves making them look like quills, bending in a forward rush. I could not recall the poem — Opperman perhaps — from which I had filched the image. I left it, allowing him to think it my own.

  Dense forests of kelp swayed in the tide. Pieces of green and black stems, broken loose, washed up onto the beaches where we walked bent forward against the wind. The water was freezing. Nothing like Toti or St Lucia where one could swim all year round. We clambered up the rocks and sat hunched over rock-pools pointing out tiny fish, hermit crabs and knobbed seaweed I had never seen before. I picked up crabs and held them up to show him where they carried their eggs. He asked whether I wasn’t afraid and I said no, animals and creatures rarely harm you if they know you’re not going to hurt them.

  ‘How do they know your intention?’

  I said they just know; they can sense it. I said I knew the sea and the beach from when Bok had been a ranger at Lake St Lucia after Umfolozi. But things did look different in the Atlantic Ocean, I said. Here were different kinds of starfish, brighdy coloured and patterned, which I lifted from the rock-pools to let sit in my palm.

  And anemones, their tentacles long and stringy, ten times the size of the ones on the East Coast. I tried to stick my fingers in before they could withdraw into their tight-lipped cylinders. Running the tip of a finger along the tight folds of the slimy lips feels kinky, I said, and he asked me what I meant. I laughed and looked away.

  A sea urchin. Its black spikes a pom-pom in my palm. He cautioned that I should put it down as it was poisonous.

  ‘If you hold it carefully, it won’t harm you,’ I said and unsuccessfully tried to get him to take it from me.

  ‘If that thing squirts poison into you, your hand will wither and fall off’

  ‘They don’t do it for no reason. It’s if they are stepped on or hurt or if they need to eat or protect themselves. It’s like porcupines,’ I said, ‘it’s not true that they shoot out their quills. They ruffle them out and run into whoever is threatening them and then leave the quills behind. They don’t shoot them out.’ I told him about Suz, when she got quills stuck right through her flanks and into her face. Bok pulled them out, but the poison still almost killed her. I knew, and Chaka probably too, that something was wrong one afternoon when she didn’t come running from the trail to meet us. There was no Suz when Bok came into sight through the bush that day and my heart sank. Had a leopard at last taken her? Or a lion? A crocodile? Before I could ask, Bok said she was okay. Motionless she lay across the donkey’s saddle bags, unable to wag her tail when she saw us. At night she slept beside my bed, all the while making small sounds while Chaka cried and yelped outside my window. I feared she would die. But within a day or two she had regained her strength, was back to her old self, running through the grass; chasing meerkats and warthogs, and barking at eland with Chaka and me when we were out of Bok’s sight.

  ‘What if the urchin thinks you’re trying to hurt it? It will sting you, you know that.’ I could hear he was teasing, patronising me. I didn’t believe for a moment that he was really afraid or concerned that the creature might cause me harm.

  ‘A little bit of poison won’t kill me! A scorpion once stung me and we just put some Scrubbs Ammonia on and I was fine.’

  ‘Oh, for the invincibility of childhood.’

  ‘I’ll be fourteen in October.’

  I returned the sea urchin to its pool and we walked back down onto the beach, heading for the car. Waves licked up to where the sand was dry. The tide was coming in. The wind now in our backs. A few paces behind me I heard his voice:

  ‘Karl-who’ll-be-fourteen-in October, I love you.’

  I turned and pulled a face at him. He laughed and asked whether he was embarrassing me. I shook my head; glad he had said it.

  I lay on the bed searching for decent music while he took a bath. Nothing caught clearly, except Radio Good Hope and a few black stations.

  After him, I went in and filled the tub almost to the brim. Water splashed over the sides as I submerged my body and head. What a pleasure opening the little containers and washing my hair with shampoo that was not from my cone-shaped Colgate bottle; unwrapping each little soap a different fragrance and new colours. It reminded me of our holidays in Klerksdorp with Aunt Lena and Uncle Joe. Two full-time maids — Ragab and Liesbet — kept the household going there and the bathrooms had bath salts, bubble bath and an endless supply of big fluffy towels. Ragab and Liesbet were superb workers and the mansion was always spotless and fragrant. Once, when Aunt Lena found a grime ring inside the bath-tub she called Ragab from the kitchen. Ragab insisted she had cleaned the bath and that perhaps one of the Brats had taken a bath. Aunt Lena told her to tell the truth or else face the sack. Ragab again insisted she had washed the bath, at which point Aunt Lena grabbed the hosepipe from the washing machine and beat the screaming and begging Ragab all the way down the passage. Lena and I laughed as we followed the two women. By the time they reached the lounge Ragab had wet herself and Aunt Lena instructed her to clean the mess from the carpets.

  The other house I loved was the one I had been in only twice, the second time just a few weeks earlier on tour: it was the home where Dominic grew up and where we’d stayed with the Websters. What classy people Dr and Mrs Webster were, I thought. Both had university degrees and Dr Webster had studied in the United States. Their house in Saxonwold was set on an enormous piece of property that sprawled down to a small lake at the bottom of the garden. The Websters had a speed boat for water-skiing and inside the house was a separate room with nothing except a snooker table. They had thousands of books, whole walls covered from floor to ceiling, as well as the biggest collection of record albums I’d ever seen. Amongst the Websters’ albums of modern and contemporary music were a few I knew, as Mrs Webster liked the music I had grown up with. Dominic said his mother was as sentimental in her tastes as I was. But most of the Websters’ collection was music Dominic had had to tell me about, much I’d
never heard of. He said that many of the albums were from the mid-sixties when his parents had still been socialists — a concept I researched from the dictionary — and Dr Webster had had long hair: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Miriam Makeba, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Donovan, The Beach Boys, Mercedes Sosa, Pablo Milanes, Janis Ian, Kris Kristofferson, The Monkees, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong.

  The houses where I felt at home were where you could fill the tub and then pull the plug, not places teabags had to be used twice, where you were not shouted at for dripping syrup while spooning some from the jar, where you didn’t get told you wanted everything you laid your eyes on. Because most of what you wanted was already there.

  Jacques had pulled back the cover and top sheet. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, eyes shut, listening to the radio. From around his waist the towel had fallen open. I thought he had done it deliberately, that he was pretending. I stepped closer to the bed. The motionless eyelashes, the rise and fall of his chest and stomach said that he had indeed fallen asleep. His damp black hair lay in slithers on the pillow and against his upturned wrists. One arm was diagonally below his chest; his legs slightly apart: white, skinny and also covered in a haze of black hair. For the first time in daylight, I saw his penis, limp and pale in the pubic tangle that ran up to his navel. Head to toe I took him in. He was like something from a book I had seen; like Christ or one of the men in the black and white photo romances Bokkie prohibited us from reading. I had gone stiff and stood waiting, wondering what to do. When I looked at his face again he was staring back at me. His eyes ran down my chest and tummy and stopped where I knew there was now a dear bulge in the towel draped around my waist. He smiled and told me — no, asked — whether I would not drop the towel: ‘Sal jy nie die handdoek laat sak nie?’ Holding my breath, I lowered the white fabric. I walked over to the bed and stood, facing him. Half raised on his elbow, he lifted himself and took me into his mouth. His other hand went around my buttocks and for a while he rocked me. Then I was on the bed; on top of him; my face between his legs; taking him into my mouth; afraid I might choke feeling it grow harder as the head moved through the foreskin; inhaling the smells of soap and moss. His tongue ran from my scrotum backwards. I gulped, almost bit him, closed my eyes. Stubble, sharp and rough like sandpaper, grazed the skin of my scrotum and buttocks. Nothing I had known — ever — felt as good as that. Every nerve of my body, it seemed, came together there and his tongue had found me out. It was too much to bear. I pushed him away, lifted myself off him, keeping my lips around his penis. I moved my head up and down, taking in as much as I could without choking. In an urgent voice he told me to stop, but I continued, refused to remove my mouth. I found his hand and placed it between my thighs.Then I feltit, suddenly, a rush into my mouth. I held it there, not breathing. I wanted to spit it out; feared it could be poisonous. That I would die. Then I felt the burning in my own loins, shudders in my lower body. I had to breathe. I swallowed. Felt it burn down my throat. I lay thinking that mine had probably been over his face or chest. I held onto his skinny white ankles. When I opened my eyes I watched the stiff organ slowly draw back into itself, leaving a silver drop hanging where the foreskin had now drawn into a tiny flower, folded into a closed anemone. “Long Legged Woman Dressed in Black’ was playing on the radio as drowsiness began to overcome me. My tongue ran around the inside of my mouth. It was impossible to know whether at the back of my mouth I was tasting or smelling or, both at once, unmistakably, the scent or after-taste of salted almonds.