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Embrace

Page 64

by Mark Behr


  S. Sanders

  Evaporation and condensation. Only snatches reach my ears. It’s time for you tofly!The longest commentary she has ever written me. It’s time for me to fly! I return to her red-ink handwriting. Over and over, hiding the Essay book behind Natural Science For Standard Six. Only that one sentence matters to me. I hardly see the rest. A rush of adrenalin that makes it almost impossible to sit still. Through Maths. Through Latin — Karl are you paying attention? Yes, Ma’am. In front of the class she gives scarcely a hint of her emotions. But for the loss of weight, the tired voice, there is no evidence that she has suffered or continues to mourn. At the funeral pain was all over her face, borne on her hunched shoulders. Now that is gone, and the old, steely resolve is back in her eyes in the upright, graceful carriage. When she turns to write on the blackboard, the gauntness of her profile is again obvious, her nose seeming more pronounced than I have remembered. Under what circumstances did she mark my essay?

  And also a little regret at my own lost dreams of being a novelist.

  The saddest line, I think. Is it in there, somewhere, she tries to relate to me a hint of her heartbreak? How I want her to know that she is always in my thoughts. How I adore her. I should get us all to make some gesture of condolence, for we all must see that she is not over it. As Bokkie says: A parent never gets over the death of a child.’ Kaspasie and Lynette can speak about the death of their father, even Aunt Barbara can laugh and tell anecdotes about how Uncle Gert was. But Oupa Liebenberg only weeps. Uncle Klaas. Are they still here! I think of taking the essay for him to read. No, I’m not going to sneak out. I’m going nowhere until Jacques tells me to come. In front of me Dominic has been quiet since Ma’am broke him off. Is he angry about her intrusion into his outburst this morning? I would love to speak to Ma’am alone. Let her cry against my shoulder, to give her strength, to say she may take me as a son. That she is the mother I always wanted. Through Geography. r

  At short break I hand Dominic Ma’am’s commentary. He is wearing new jeans, a new charcoal black T-shirt, new veldskoene. His entire wardrobe has been replaced. Struggling to suppress his anger at her, he none the less congratulates me on Ma’am’s evaluation, saying hard work always pays off. He himself has to practise like hell. The Grade Eight is weeks off.

  The question about spending Parents’Weekend with the Websters I put off for now. When the time comes, I’ll use the Bernice-is-writing-matric excuse.

  Are you angry with Ma’am?’ I ask.

  ‘Disappointed in her.’

  ‘It must be a difficult time for her, Dom.’

  ‘That doesn’t give her the right to treat my opinions like shit. Andshe’s not the first mother to lose a child.’ He speaks about black mothers, hundreds, grieving all over the country for their young children who are being killed because they’re fighting for the right to learn. Hoping to still his rage at Ma’am, I suggest he see her intervention merely as her giving her opinion. Just as he was giving his.

  The bell rings for choir.

  Staring at the floor, he sits listening from a chair behind Raubenheimer, who takes us through the warm-ups. Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-hooo, breath, semi-tone up, hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hiii, breath, semi-tone up, mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mooo, breath, semi-tone down, fi-fi-fi-fi-fi-fi-fi-fi-fi-fiiiii, breath, semi-tone down. His hands are folded, fingers plaited into a clasp. Ankle resting on his knee. Beige longs, leather shoes. A green long-sleeved shirt rolled up, exposing his hairy arms and the curls on his chest where the shirt is unbuttoned at the throat. His hair has been cut. The stirring of desire, again at seeing him. Feel myself go stiff, from just looking. My legs feel warm and heavy, waiting for him to look up and tell me something with his eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, rising. Raubenheimer immediately falls into the front line.

  Someone, now filling the tallest spot in the back formerly held by Lukas, asks Jacques whether there’s any chance of us still going overseas. He smiles and says no, it is definitively off and there’s nothing to be done about it. Shrugging his shoulders. We must get on with it and put everything we have into the Prime Minister’s concert and the album recordings. A mere six weeks away. He tells us to open our scores at the Agnus Dei.

  My spirits soar as we begin to sing. Our voices fill the hall, the windowpanes rattle in their frames, it is only a wave of sound, harmony as we take up Dona nobis pacem. There are moments I hear my voice carrying the second sopranos. He notices and gestures to me tobe careful, lifts his hand towards the second altos, nods his head vigorously. The sombre and painful B minor key is in direct contrast to the way I am feeling: I am on a high, I am ready to fly. I take him in, miss his fingers up my spine, yet its as though nothing really matters other than the richness of our singing and beating within it like wings Ma’ams opinion of my essay. Into E minor. He stops us.

  ‘Beethoven wanted it to be clear here. Look at the orchestration, can you see the trumpets and the drums — that were struggling with the tensions between war and peace. The resolution is unclear. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. And then here, Give us peace. Here,’ he points from bar 268 onwards, ‘remember that from that B flat we’ve got trumpets and war, almost like a march from the orchestra, and from there it is again the deep, deep prayer for peace that takes over. Were prostrating ourselves before God, begging for peace in a time of war.’ He touches the accompanist’s shoulder and lifts his hands. And I’m wondering whether there is a chance I could spend Parents’Weekend with him, rather than with Dominic. Maybe a part with him, a part with Dom.

  Along the broad gravel road to Champagne Castle, at a canter, slowing to a walk in single file as we reach the S bend, cautious of possible vehicle traffic coming from above. Somewhere in my mind there’s a memory of a rider and horse being struck by a car — a movie, a book — maybe still a Secret Seven or a Famous Five, a short story — making for disease whenever were riding along a road. My fingers in the reins above Rufus’s main are blue. From rubbing graphite dust into paper to create gradated tones of blue for the table-cloth around the empty vase Ma’am had us draw.

  She has become more aloof as the week passed. Art class, the last on a Friday afternoon, has always been the source of pleasant concentration, discussion, and occasionally laughter. Today’s mood was quiet. No whiff of the passion I usually sense she controls or is holding back, giving it to us in small select doses. Today it was notpassion she was holding back, instead it seemed like more sadness and more of the sharpness that has been growing towards Dominic. In contrast to the way she treats him, my every word is taken seriously. She answers me, engages, smiles, encourages. But Dominic she virtually ignores, though not so obviously that one could be certain. Curt. She is curt to him, not sharp. Always leaving room for doubt as to what she means when she acknowledges something he says. Were doing pencil, charcoal and carbon drawings. The history of graphite. How pencils are graded according to their hardness and softness: 8B, the softest, to B and up to 8H, the hardest. Different textures of paper. She showed us how to combine pencil and crayon, shade and texture by rubbing lines, blending different colour pencils. The illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and sketches by Degas, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso and Rodin. When Dominic said he had visited Rodins home in Paris, where the Masters sculptures adorn the garden, and that he had seen the original sketches for The Kiss, Ma’am looked at him with tired, irritated eyes and said: ‘It is an education to travel, isn’t it, Dominic?’ And then she’d gone on, leaving Dominic and the other four of us perplexed. She told us to draw the huge metal milk jug around which she draped a piece of blue velvet. Our prac was done in silence. She barely moved around to look at what the five of us were doing, offered no suggestions, no comments. Today she may not even have been there.

  I stare at the blue against my fingertips. It has stained right into the grooves where I bite the skins around the nails. T
here it is a dark ultramarine, a lighter cobalt blue the farther it goes from the nails until the skin is again flesh colour against the dirty leather of the reins and the copper of Rufus’s coat, the thatch of his mane. These blue fingers against the bridle and the red or copper coat, I think, that’s something I should draw.

  Choir time Lukas now spends down at the dairy with or in place of Mr Walshe. In the evenings before supper he supervises the milking and the horses. In two weeks’ time he wants to shoe the horses andthere’s a Jersey cow about to calf. He says he’ll monitor her closely and let me know so that I can be present for the birth.

  I ask what he thinks the matter with Ma’am. He pats King’s neck, glances at the Juniors behind us and says it’s obviously Graham’s death. ‘But what about the way she treats Dom?’ I ask. ‘She’s always curt with him, cutting him off. He’s always been one of her favourites.’

  ‘He’s a bit brass-arsed lately, that’s what’s gotten to Ma’am.’

  ‘He says she’s not the first nor the last mother to lose a child. He says you just have to go to every black location to see the grief; hundreds of mothers mourn for fourteen-year-olds, killed by the police.’ ‘Those kaffirs are burning down the country. I feel fuck-all for their mothers. Graham was trying to protect this country. Ag, anyway, who knows, I haven’t noticed anything.’

  ‘You wouldn’t notice if the school burnt down now, Lukas. What a life. The only thing you see is what’s going on in the dairy, hey!’ ‘Don’t be so sure of yourself, De Man.’

  ‘I envy you not having to sing anymore,’ I say automatically, then realise I don’t mean what I’ve just said. Every moment of choir has become a treat, each session something to look forward to.

  ‘That’s what a man gets for having such big balls,’ he says, turning on a gruff voice.

  ‘Kak, Lukas! Yours are no bigger than mine.’ And I go on to ensure him that according to my knowledge the break in a voice has nothing to do with the size of testicles.

  ‘Why do you think the castrati had such high falsettos?’ he asks, tipping his riding cap at me.

  ‘They had no balls, they were castrated! Still doesn’t prove anything about ball size. Mervy s balls are like goose eggs and he was a high alto. And what about Johan Rademan! Fifteen years old, dick like a hosepipe and balls down to his knees and he goes even higher than Dom.’

  *

  With Dominic now all but sleeping behind the piano, Mervyn, without my asking, buys my weekly tm of Condensed Milk. Mr Buthelezi punches in two gaps and I walk from the store, sucking from the slits. Mervyn takes a sip and says he cannot understand how I drink the stuff. I say Dominic says it’s because I’m a sweet and sentimental fella.

  Past the game pen, where I mimic the zebra, getting them to look at us with ears erect, we walk from the holiday park towards the river and the rugby field. I tell him about Mkuzi, about the rhino cow and calf, the herd of buffalo we saw wading in the mud of the White Umfolozi. The purple-crested lourie, gliding downhill and disappearing in the bushes, its purple head resplendent in the sun, its wings spread out like fans. That Chaka wore the crimson feathers in his head-dress, alongside the feather of a blue crane.

  On the embankment above the pump-house, arum lilies grow in clumps of thirty, forty flowers, the enormous creamy spathes with yellow stamens a natural garden in the wet soil. Into the marsh we plod, pulling the long stalks from their waxy green bases. Half the stalks we’ll cut off. Place the bunch on Ma’am’s desk. On a piece of cardboard I have sketched in charcoal and then coloured with pastels the blue fingers, the brown reins in black and burnt umber and then Rufus’s mane Venetian red faintly glossed with again raw umber. On it I wrote, inanely: Welcome back, Ma’am. Then I got the whole class to sign. I tried to compose a verse, just a haiku or a couplet, but nothing has wanted to come. For days now I have been unable to write a word. That I’m ready to fly seems to have had only the opposite affect: I’m not ready to write a word, let alone fly with the word. I keep at Dominic’s orange poem, finding new words in the encyclopaedias. There’s an essay due in a week’s time, titled: ‘A Remarkable Vision. I toy with the sight of the White Umfolozi from our front lawn, or the movement of animals at Bube. Or the dream. God, the dream I had in Umfolozi, with all the colours, and Jacques! I know it could be interesting, but I couldn’t possibly write that for her. That quote she has given me, seems, if I understand it correctly, to suggest that Ishould write about the dream. Yes, the dream, surely, is my inner-most idiosyncrasy? A few times I try, but give up, knowing it is scandalous. I could never give it to anyone to read, let alone Ma’am. So I have begun working on another dream, one I fabricate, of a man trying to cross a river, trying to achieve a state of perfection. The card, together with the flowers, will go to Ma’am. I was thinking about using a small watercolour I did last term, called Poplars in Spring, but have let go of the idea because of her comments about me having to find my own style. Bennie comes walking up from the rugby field with Radys and a group of Standard Sevens. He sees us and runs through the long grass to join us. Soon, our arms are filled with flowers. The three of us make our way back up the hill, occasionally stopping to shake ants and bugs out of the deep open spathes that look like white rhino ears or ice-cream cones with an orange waver straw in the middle.

  I sit at a desk in the music room while Dominic’s head is bent over the keyboard. There is growing resentment from many in class about his blase attitude towards the cancelled tour. Increasingly I see friends going silent when he’s near. Bennie, who has become more and more friendly with Radys Dietz, refuses to play a game of tact, making sure all note the way he leaves any group at Dominic’s approach. Dominic himself either is or pretends to be indifferent.

  Parents’ Weekend is three weeks away and I’m yet to ask about spending it with the Websters. On the phone I have lied to Bokkie and said Lukas has invited me to join his family at Cathkin Peak Hotel. Nor have I told anyone that I will not be back next year, that I’m going to Port Natal. I plan on writing a letter to Aunt Lena, asking her whether she might be able to pay for me to stay. If that works, any announcement on my part would have been premature. To tell Dominic or Lukas — or anyone — that Bok doesn’t have the money to keep me here or even to drive up for the last parent weekend is unthinkable. To tell him that Mumdeman is ill would be a lie of commission. Lies of omission are something else. Those I indulge in, alsoto Dominic, with little more effort than it takes to sneeze. Then, also, in my minds shadows hovers the treasonous possibility of not spending time with the Websters at all. Of instead getting Jacques to take me on a hike into the mountains. If I were to tell Jacques that my parents couldn’t come — because were so poor — he may take pity on me. Allow me to come to his room as often as I wish. No. I can do without his pathetic charity. And now, for the first time I feel a tinge of guilt. Not towards Jacques, but towards Dominic. Clearly I am keeping my options open, and that, maybe, is the worst reason I’m not asking him about the weekend. That flicker of hope and thudding desire, that maybe the thing with Jacques is not, after all, quite over. I cannot understand the recurring need to be with him. At home and in the bush I barely thought of him. But setting eyes on him, finding him still ignoring me, has fuelled my love; my lust. No. I want him to want to be with me. To want me. How I’d enjoy saying: no, I’m sorry, Mr Queer, I’ve tired of you and I love someone else. Or, better yet, to take the key and place it on the piano in front of him, letting him see I’m through with waiting for him. I could do that, for I still have the extra one cut in Toti. But even as I think these thoughts I already know there will be no following through into action. I miss being with him too much. Yearn. Even once more, even just one more time starfishing! Yet, I also treasure the moments with Dominic. Wish we could be alone, that his exams are over so that we can again lie in each other’s arms and talk and kiss and play and tease. I love them both. I want them both. I cannot possibly choose. At night, disallowed from visiting either and sure that Uncle Klaas and the
Silent One have left, I stay in my own bed. I masturbate, sometimes twice, three times in the space of two hours. My fantasy is often one of penetrating Steven Almeida. Then I alternate between doing it and being done by Jacques, and when I receive a letter from Alette, it is her I hear saying yes, yes, oh god, yes, as I suck on her lips and run my tongue to her belly button. Occasionally I am sucking Harding’s dick or Reyneke is licking my starfish, groaning that he wants me to stick my dick into him. I imagine Marguerite Almeida, her long hair loose on a white pillow and her brown breasts hard in my mouth, her vagina tight and hot around my penis. I can think myself into kissing or stroking anyone or anything. I picture Cassandra’s dripping cunt, my one hand guiding King’s sausage into her or me, on a small hill, with King’s dick gliding in and out of me, his come flying over my back. Or of Dominic, sitting on top of me, his rectum opening and contracting like an anemone around my middle finger, his hands flat on my chest, his head thrown back, groaning like the night in their house. These are fantasies I can never discuss with anyone. During breaks we talk about tossing off, compare boasts on who takes the longest, who can ejaculate the quickest. Who has fucked a girl. But each image that comes to me so easily makes me feel ashamed and guilty. They confirm that I am a child of Satan. I can fantasize about Harding, of him lying beneath me, and I can wonder where in the world he is this year, and then the moment I have ejaculated can hate myself for wanting to have had sex with him. A fantasy is as good as a sin. And my sins are unutterable. I am as good as standing in hell. But a fantasy is not reality! I could never be fucked by King. He’d rip me apart. It’s just something to imagine and enjoy. No. That’s already a sin. There is no hope for my salvation. Wiping my belly I am ready to grab the Bible from my locker, read by torch under the covers. When I was with Dominic or Jacques, when fear had spread its ugly thorns in my mind, I told myself that at least hell would not be so bad with either of them there with me. Or I’d simply think of something else, like the bush, of wild animals, or of my life as an artist. But alone I have the fear of Dademan or Uncle Gert having access to my perverted mind, or Great-Grandfather and Grandmother Liebenberg. That they’re there, in the dorm with me, watching as guardian angels; horrified at the scenes playing out in the mind of their grandson and great-grandson.

 

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