by Mark Behr
Starting tomorrow! It will be the first day of the rest of his life. His new life. Life is remarkable, truly, re-mark-able, he mimics the word into syllables, feeling the tongue on his pallet, the lips close, then open into a new shape, lips touching on the b and the tongue’s tip coming to rest against the bottom teeth, its front surface rested against the pallet and top teeth, the mouth slightly open. A new Karl De Man! It is going to be fine, everything is going to be just fine. Perfectly, perfectly fine, as they drive through that gate and park beneath the mahogany, he can hear, already feel it! Like applause flowing over him, audience calls of Bravo! More! Massed voices in unison demanding: Encore! Encore! Encore! As he glides back onto stage, beaming, smiling, as if he were back, again poised to perform.
Encore
‘From the heart — may it return — to the heart.’
A boy at ten and a bit. The year before I leave my family. I am at the front door dressed in school uniform with my case in one hand after having placed in there my lunchbox and homework book and the jotter with the essay on what I want to do during the holidays. While I gaze from the door, my mother, in the conjugal bedroom, where she is brushing her thick brown hair, is probably frustrated beyond compare at now, again, finding missing what she is looking for in her closet. She possibly tells my dad — who is almost dressed and freshly shaven — that she has had enough, that she cannot take it anymore. When her voice growing angry reaches my ears, and as she slams the door of her closet and calls my name, I know at once what I have done wrong. Many, many years later, I am able to imagine my mother exasperated at a series of associations now activated at finding, again, something missing from her things and knowing for the umpteenth time that it has to have been her son. Yet, at that front door, I clasp the lost object tightly into my free hand. My father, who knows, responding to my mum and to internal echoes of outrage, fear, anger too long dormant in his own memory, glides down the passage towards me. He must be seething with rage, for over the years he must have become increasingly concerned at a series of words and images he suspects his boy of being or becoming. Having heard the commotion from the bedroom and dreading the approach of the father, I am about to unlatch the bottom door to make a hasty escape and catch up with my siblings who are already halfway down the drive. Coming close, my father does not speak, and I simply wait and watch. He stands in front of me motionless. In later years I will recall that I saw or understood or read from my fathers cold blue eyes only loathing, hatred, a raging calm ready to explode into hands around my throat, pressing in the place where the Adam’s apple would yet appear. My father may say that his anger then was nothing more than an expression of deep concern. Or he may say that no such thing occurred or that if it did he has no such recollection or it happened in a different way, in a different place. But now, still, I picture that father speaking softly, and, when I look down at my brown Bata school shoes, I hear my father telling me to look him in the eye like a man. Perhaps — in some phraseology or another — saying: ‘If you ever go into your mother’s things again,’ holding my gaze, ‘I will cut off your filafooi, do you hear me? If you want to be a little girl, I will turn you into a little girl. If you don’t want to be a little girl, then I’m warning you: if you ever even think of doing it again, or if I or your mother ever even suspect you of doing it again, or of you imagining yourself doing it again, I will kill you.’
Then, my father turns around and I hear his tread down the passage. Again, later I might imagine Bok and Bokkie glancing at each other as he re-enters the bedroom. In an attempt to save their son from what they suspect, know, the world may make of him and from feeling their own shame at being held responsible, they have decided that a good talking to this time — even more than a beating — can save them and the boy from himself.
Pausing at the front door, I can see the driveway clearly and coldly. I do not have tears in my eyes and I can see that my siblings have long since disappeared. I unlatch the door with my forefinger and may notice that my hand is trembling — particularly the three fingers clasping the loathsome object in my palm. I step out of the house. Then, again, using thumb and forefinger I latch the bottom door behind me and start down the driveway. In that instant I know what I am to do. I will go away. And not just away anywhere. I will take myself, by hook or by crook, to the place I have been told about, the place of the boys in the concert. Through my mind rush the photographs on that programme: trips overseas with the Eiffel Tower and London Bridge, hikes in the forest, swimming in rivers, and horses, horses in the mountains! Eland and zebra in a game compound. It doesn’t matter that Mary-Alice next door says it’s mostly singing and music. I suspect — know — that I do not have an extraordinarily good voice and that I can as of yet play only the recorder and that my sight reading is poor. But I have good rhythm, I can carry a tune, I can learn, like one can learn anything. I have resilience and imagination. That is all I’ve got, I might mutter or growl to myself: a will of iron and imagination. I will go to that place where there are others like me; others with imagination who know how fabulous, how filled with colour, sound, scent and texture the universe really is. A celebration of the senses. Out of this house. Away from them whom I believe despise me and whom I in this instant loathe with the heat of white- hot metal. I have not noticed how the trembling of fear has transfigured surreptitiously to the shaking of hatred. I hate and from hatred I draw strength. I will not, cannot cry. I will leave them, I tell myself, will not love them again, ever. And I feel stronger than I can remember from before.
But this is only a child’s rage boiling over in passions of a moment. Who knows how soon all will be forgotten? How soon I will swell with pride at her beauty when she comes to parents’ evenings at school and the other fathers fawn over her. How soon I will play cricket on the lawn with him who teaches me to bowl overhand. How soon I will again giggle as one of them bends over the bed to rub Vicks onto my chest and over my back when I have a cold and a blocked nose, how, in delight, I will squirm when tickled. Certainly, from familiar intimacies repeated, I will love them as much as anything, anything that was ever dreamt or ever existed in the staggering memory of the world.
I can imagine myself in so many ways, my entire life lies ahead. Where do I find an erudition that will most succinctly capture what I become or do in the gorgeous future? And, is knowing those — the signifies bouncing within the space and on the contours of the historyfrom within which I today narrate — perhaps of endlessly greater import or interest than the telling only just begun: an agnostic, a braggart, a charmer, a driver, an enemy, a friend, a gardener, a home-owner, an image, a joker, a keeper of hornbills, a lover, a mountaineer, a nobody, an opportunist, a perpetrator, a queer, a radical, a soldier, a traitor, an upstart, a voyeur, a womaniser, a xenophobe, a yuppie, a zealot? This same space from within which I will complete a poem two decades in the writing: Beloved Dearest, contemplate the sphere in your hands: fleshy, sweet, Southern Asia, sour, Spain, fragrance, wax, planet, bright, oranje, red, yellow, tree, citrus, mandarin, navel, pick, ship, auranja, warm, California, fruit, white, mould, river, leaves, colonialism, naranj, nooi, indentations, skins, tangerine, mampoer, Portugal, segments, health, russet, vomit, fish, sugary, lemon, seeds, transparent, juice, narang, veins, succulent, medicinal, round, naranga, blood, Boland, Beauty, hybrid. But when I whisper through passages of a life’s infinite inventory each time I take up language’s pen, I say none and all of these in a single word: orange. How much is lost, Dearest, in the brutal reduction to concept? Pay heed then as do I, to the elisions of the story and hear me do battle with veracity as it goes to war in the struggle through and against the scars of the tongue. Then, from care-filled recollection and fine weighing of the fruit touching the boniness and skin of your fingers, may you try arid grant the writ’s inability to say anything but duplicitous and shabby half-truth. Of happiness, shame, envy, pleasure, guilt, hatred, resentment, and of love.
None, some, all of these pulse in my veins awaiting the te
rrifying page, every breath and each embrace, as I turn that corner and glance back over my shoulder. Case in hand. The street is empty; no one in sight. With a swift motion of my wrist I flick the hairclip into the bushy sidewalk and head for school.
Oslo, 1993 — Cape Town, 1998
Acknowledgements
During the completion and editing of the novel I made use, amongst others of course, of the following texts: Theodor Adorno: Alienated Masterpiece — the Missa Solemnis’, translated by Duncan Smith, in Telos 28, 1976, and Quasi una Fantasia — Essays on Modern Music, Verso, 1992. R.O. Pearse: Barrier of Spears, Howard Timmins, 1973. Elsa Pooley: A Complete Field Guide to Trees of Natal, Zululand and Transkei, Natal Flora Publications Trust, 1997, and A Field Guide to Wild Flowers: KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Regions, Natal Flora Publications Trust, 1998. Ian Player: Zululand Wilderness, Shadow and Soul, David Philip, 1997. C.T. Binns: Dinuzulu — The Death of the House of Chaka, Longmans, 1968. Donald R. Morris: The Washing of the Spears — The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation, Jonathan Cape, 1968. Hans Fransen: Three Centuries of South African Art, A.D. Donker, 1982. Percy A. Scholes: The Oxford Companion to Music, tenth edition, edited by John Owen Ward, Oxford University Press,, 1993. E.A. Ritter: Chaka Zulu, Penguin, 1986. A.R. Wilcox: The Rock Art of South Africa, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963. Roberts’Birds of Southern Africa, The Trustees of John Voelcker Bird Book Fund/Central News Agency, third edition, 1971, and fifth edition, 1985.
Eugene Marais, C.J. Langenhoven, The Bard, Dickens, Burke and Beethoven are no longer within copyright.
Karl reads the conceptions of calendars from Funk and Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia, 1972.
I relied on and adapted from the technical analyis of William Drabkin in Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Karl’s answers during the test on the French Revolution are translated, paraphrased and adapted from J.J. van Jaarsveld, Geskiedenis vir Standerd Agt, 1973.
Finally, this novel could not have been written without the teaching, criticism, stories, anger, humour, pain, support, friendship and generosity of people who have in divergent ways at different times and to different degrees touched my life in the years of writing. I thank you, from the heart, for the ever fixed mark.