The Smell of Apples: A Novel

  Thank you, forgive me, I kiss you, oh hands Of my neglected, my disregarded Homeland, my diffidence, family, friends

  BORIS PASTERNAK

  Only one life we have in which we wanted merely to be loved forever

  ANTJIE KROG

  My name is really Marnus, but when Dad speaks to me he mostly says 'my son' or 'my little bull', and him and Mum also like calling me 'my little piccanin'.

  For my birthday in November, I got a Scalextric with two 918 Porsches, one red and one green. Me and Frikkie Delport helped Dad to mount the whole thing on hard-board and the track has stayed on my bedroom floor ever since. During the week I'm only allowed to play with the set after my homework is finished and once Mum has signed my homework book.

  Frikkie and I have been in class together since Grade One. The only time we weren't together was in Standard One, when he was shifted to the B-class because his Grade Two symbols were so bad. While he was in the B-class, we didn't see much of each other and for that year I became friends with Hanno Louw, whose father was a surgeon at Groote Schuur. Dr Louw was a colleague of Chris Barnard, who did the first heart transplant on Louis Waschkanski. Even though I went to play at Hanno's house some Friday afternoons, I never got to see Chris Barnard. But Hanno did show me some photographs with his father and mother standing in a group with Chris Barnard and his wife, Louwtjie.

  Hanno Louw and I never became such good friends as Frikkie and me. For the first term of Grade One I just

  Mark Behr

  used to watch Frikkie from a distance. By then, everyone was already saying he was the naughtiest child in class. During some breaks he would leave the school grounds and go home to their house in Hofmeyer Street, just above the high school. Many times the teacher had to phone their house and a while later Gloria would arrive back at school, holding Frikkie by the hand. Gloria would be wearing her high-heel shoes and acting like she was a real madam -purple lipstick and bell-bottom pants.

  When Frikkie didn't walk home during breaks, he used to pester the boys in the playground. Some of them always went to tattle that Frikkie was bullying them, and later, when we got to the Standards, he started getting hidings from the headmaster.

  The two of us became best friends in the second term of Grade One. But, if it wasn't for my ears, maybe it wouldn't have happened. I've always had Dad's big ears, and I'm a bit shy about them because they stick out so far. With my Voortrekker beret on my head, the left ear looks even bigger, though at least the beret's fold covers the other one. Dad says these are the Erasmus ears, and I've never told him about the jokes some kids used to make when I was smaller.

  Frikkie had a habit of picking out a victim and then giving him all his attention, whether you wanted the attention or not. Some of the older kids even suffered, because even though he's a bit smaller, he's always been a lot stronger.

  One break Frikkie came to watch us spinning tops behind the woodwork room. He watched us for a while before he tried himself. The day before, when he had also tried, he couldn't get it right either. Every time he threw the top, it would just flop to one side and roll over into the grass. At last he had muttered that spinning tops was stupid and stomped off. Now it was happening again. He

  The Smell of Apples

  couldn't get his top to spin. I peered at him from the corner of my eye, waiting for him to say something and walk off again. He was just about to turn and leave, when he saw me looking at him.

  'What are you looking at?' he asked, and I felt my stomach turn. I knew I was his target for today. I didn't know what to say.

  Tm speaking to you!' I was still thinking what to say, when he shouted: 'What are those things on the side of your head? Hey? Are they ornaments or what?'

  I felt my ears go red, and the other boys stopped their spinning and stood watching us.

  'You look like Jumbo with those ears, man. Are you deaf or something?'

  I was still scared of Frikkie in those days because I could see he was stronger than me. I didn't want to fight him - not only because he was stronger, but specially because Mum says that once you fight in your school uniform your days in school are numbered. Mum is always friends with Use's and my teachers, and I knew she'd be the first to find out if I fought.

  'Are you going to answer me, Jumbo?' Frikkie asked.

  'You're holding your top wrong,' I said, and quickly walked over to him without giving him time to answer. Before he could say anything, I took the top from his hand and showed him how to curl his finger around it before he throws. After a few tries he got it, and soon he was trying to kiss everyone else's tops. We called it kissing when you managed to spin your top on top of one that was already spinning. Before tops went out of fashion, Frikkie had broken quite a few tops in half with his deadly kisses. If he couldn't manage to split them in half, he cracked or chipped them so badly that they were out of balance and useless anyway. Everyone's except my own. And since that

  Mark Behr

  day no one has ever teased me about my ears again.

  So it was terrible in Standard One, when he was moved down to the B-class. But ever since he came back into Two A the following year, we've spent all our free time together. After school, if Mum isn't at the gate to pick me up, Frikkie and I walk up to his house, and I wait there until she comes to collect Use from the high school just down the road.

  Frikkie's father is a big nob at Sanlam, and his mother owns a clothes shop down in Adderley Street close to Stuttafords. Because Mrs Delport is seldom home in the afternoons, Frikkie and I can wander around the streets while Mum thinks we're doing our homework under Gloria's supervision. But Gloria is hardly ever there herself, and even when she's there, she doesn't care two hoots about what we get up to. Mostly she's painting her lips or standing in front of the bathroom mirrors sticking a funny comb into her afro, trying to make it look bigger. Heaven knows when she gets time to clean the house and do the ironing. Gloria speaks Afrikaans without a coloured accent and Mum says that's why she fancies herself as a white. Frikkie says it's only when she's drunk that the real gam-mat accent comes back. When we pester her about her accent, she simply ignores us, or says something like, all our laughing will turn to bitter crying, and then she smiles like a real floozy and turns her back on us.

  Some afternoons after school I have to explain maths to Frikkie. We started doing fractions this year, but even when Frikkie tries really hard, he seldom gets them right. We sit at their big dining-room table, and I mostly have to repeat the same things over and over again. He sometimes gets the sums with quarters and halves right, but the moment he sees an odd number like a fifth or a third, he starts scratching his head with the pencil and then I already know he won't be able to do it. But then he acts

  The Smell of Apples

  like he's really thinking hard, and after a while he just goes ahead and writes any old answer. When I ask him how he got to such a crazy answer he shrugs his shoulders and looks at me with his little brown eyes and says he doesn't understand anything. When he struggles with even the simplest little fraction, I feel very sorry for him, because I know tomorrow Miss Engelbrecht is going to call him a moron with a brain the size of a praying mantis.

  The worst thing is when she comes and stands in the aisle next to our desk in class, and looks over his shoulder while we're busy doing our sums. Sometimes she takes hold of the short hairs next to his ear and then tries to explain the fraction to him while she pulls. I can't stand it when she does that, or when she shouts at him, because I know how hard he tries. Sometimes, when I carry on explaining something for a long time, he does manage to do it right. But the moment I become impatient or irritated with him, he says I'm being a smart-arse and we should rather stop and go and play outs
ide. Even though he's never said so, I know that he almost always clamps up like an oyster when he's unsure of something. Otherwise he gets all hot and bothered.

  By May, when he still couldn't do the fractions, Frikkie asked me whether he couldn't just copy my maths homework. That would save us from sitting at the dining-room table while we could be doing something else. I didn't want to let him, at first, because Mum says that copying from someone else's work is the same as stealing with your eyes. Whether you steal something with your hands or you steal from another's work with your eyes, the sin stays just as big and just as serious. But as time went by I got sick and tired of all the explaining every afternoon, and now I let him copy from me sometimes. When he copies a lot, I pray to God to forgive me. In my prayer I try to explain that Frikkie's only

  Mark Behr

  going to copy until he understands the fractions. It's also not as though he only copies and doesn't learn anything; we're just helping him out for the time being.

  One day, out of the blue, Miss Engelbrecht asked me whether Frikkie had copied my maths homework. The whole class went quiet and everyone turned around to look at the two of us sitting in the back corner. I frowned, and said no, in a way that would let her believe we'd never even think of doing such a thing. But she still called us to the front. We had to stand on either side of her while she swung her red pen across our open maths books.

  'Well, well!' she called out, and made little dents like half-moons in the paper beneath our sums with her long red nails. 4 So what could this possibly mean? Since when can two people both have exactly the same wrong answers to exactly the same sums - unless they've been copying each other's work?' And she went on to make three big red circles around Frikkie's wrong answers.

  'Well, Frikkie Delport?. Come on and tell us you didn't copy these fractions from your buddy's book like a scheming criminal!' I kept my eyes on the open book because I didn't want to look at Frikkie or Miss Engelbrecht. I could feel the whole class's eyes on me and I wanted to sink into the earth with shame. I was petrified that she would draw red circles around my fractions too. Then Mum would want to know why there weren't only little red crosses as there usually are when an answer is wrong.

  Miss Engelbrecht kept quiet for a while and when Frikkie didn't speak she turned her head to me: 'Marnus, look me in the eyes and tell me whether Frikkie has copied from you?'

  She spoke so sweetly that I had to say something, I couldn't just stand there looking at her like I'd lost my voice.

  The Smell of Apples

  'Miss, Frikkie would never ever copy from me. Really, Miss.' The words came out of my mouth as though I'd practised to lie like that a hundred times. She tilted her head slightly and smiled at me in such a way that I would see she didn't believe a word I was saying.

  'Well, in that case, please explain to me how it is that the two of you have exactly the same incorrect answers?'

  I shook my head slowly from side to side. Then, from somewhere I got the answer. In my most serious voice I said: Miss, Miss knows that Frikkie really battles with these fractions . . .' She nodded her head and tapped the desk with her nails to show that she was waiting. 'Because he struggles so much, I explain maths to him in the afternoons . . . and maybe we both made the same mistake because I explained it all wrong.' I bent forward and made as if I was looking closely at the sums to see where the mistake could be. She slammed shut the book in front of my eyes and I gave her a surprised look.

  'It's not your job to explain maths to him. / am the one who gets paid to do that, not you, Mister Erasmus. And besides, it seems more as though you're helping him from the frying pan into the fire!' I looked down on to my black school shoes and said softly, 'I'm sorry, Miss.' But I knew we were safe.

  'If it happens again, ever, I'm going to tell your parents. Do you hear me?'

  I looked up quickly, but before I could answer, Frikkie said, 'It won't ever happen again, Miss.' I felt like kicking him, because now he had gone and made it sound like we had been copying from each other.

  'Miss,' I blurted out, 'does that mean I'm not allowed to explain maths to Frikkie any more - it's such good exercise for both of us?'

  'If you want to practise maths that's fine. But don't let

  Mark Behr

  me catch you practising on the homework that I've given you. Go back to your desk now.' We walked down the narrow aisle and I felt sure the story wouldn't ever reach Mum's ears.

  That night I begged the Lord to forgive me for the lies and for allowing Frikkie to copy. I tried to explain to God that I had only lied to Miss Engelbrecht to protect Frikkie, and that I had only allowed him to copy to help him a little. For a while Frikkie didn't copy my maths, but later on we just started again. Nowadays, we make sure he purposely gets some of his answers wrong, and I try to make double sure all mine are right.

  Afternoons when we're alone at the Delports' house, we sometimes walk down to the Gardens and try to catch squirrels. Or, when we have money, we sit and have a milkshake or a coke-float at the Gardens cafe beneath the big bluegum. One afternoon we went into the National Museum to look at all the exhibitions. There's even a permanent exhibition of stuffed-up Bushmen. They're not real Bushmen and they're actually made of plastic, but they look like they're alive. Frikkie says his oupagrootjte used to get hunters to hunt the Bushmen on his farm in the Cedarberg. The hunters from Cape Town could come and they had to pay twenty pounds for each Bushman they shot. But if they shot more than one, they had to pay another twenty pounds. When we learned about the Bushmen in history class, Frikkie told the story of his oupagrootjte. Miss Engelbrecht said it wasn't true. It wasn't the Boers that killed off all the Bushmen, it was the Xhosas. She said the Xhosas are a terrible nation and that it was them that used to rob and terrorise the farmers on the Eastern frontier, long before the Zulus in Natal so cruelly murdered Boer women and little children.

  There is also the most wonderful collection of old

  The Smell of Apples

  uniforms from all our country's wars in the museum. You can see big wooden dolls that have been dressed up in uniform, and if you walk slowly from one showcase to the next, and if you read the notices carefully, you can get to know our whole history, just by knowing the uniforms and the different wars. I wrote an essay for school about it, and Miss Engelbrecht gave me nine and a half out of ten. She said that in all her years of teaching she's never given anyone else such high marks for an essay, and one could see how well I knew the subject I wrote about. She said she would submit the essay to the school annual at the end of the year, so now I'm holding thumbs because I know how proud Dad will be of me.

  While we were in the museum, we also looked at the gigantic dinosaurs and the stuffed-up fish. There's a huge black marlin right at the very back of one of the showcases. Once, in the deep-sea at Hangklip, Dad caught a black marlin that was almost a False Bay record.

  In one of the smaller showcases there are also some ancient photographs of the Kalkbay whaling station. I love it when Jan Bandjies tells me old whaling stories, and I wondered whether one of the whalers holding a harpoon in the photograph was one of his ancestors. I told Jan that he should come to the museum one day to look at the photos and to see whether it was his family. Then he could also see how small the harpoons were that the whalers used to kill the whales. When I asked Mum whether we could take Jan to look, she said we could think of doing that, but she wasn't sure whether Coloureds are allowed into the museum. I told Jan and he said it doesn't matter, and I'm forever making too much of a fuss about the fish anyway. I told him that whales aren't fish, because they have live babies. But Jan said they're close enough to fish to be called fish and from then on I've also been calling them fish.

  Mark Behr

  'I wish they'd catch a whale and stuff it up,' Frikkie said, while we stood looking at the harpoons. He spoke softly because you don't raise your voice in a museum.

  'A whale would never fit in here!' I answered.

  'Did you know a wh
ale's thing is eight feet long?' Frikkie asked, and I got irritated with him for suddenly thinking he knows something about whales.

  'What thing do you mean?' I asked.

  He looked at me and said: 'Its thing, man!' and he patted the front of his school trousers where his John Thomas is. 'Its bloody cock is over eight feet long. Did you know?' I looked up to see whether anyone had heard what he said.

  'You're mad, man. Eight feet is taller than Dad . . .'

  'I swear it's true. I saw it in the National Geographic?

  'That's impossible! That's as long as me and you put together. Where have you ever heard of a fish with such a big one?'

  'I swear before Jesus Christ it's true!'

  'Don't swear like that!' I said.

  For a while he was quiet, then he said: 'It isn't cursing if you swear on the truth.'

  'It is,' I answered. 'Our Sunday-school teacher says it's a sin even when you just say Good Lord"

  By the time we got outside into the bright sunlight, Frikkie was still going on: 'Well, when my dad's angry he sometimes says Jesus Christ"

  'Then your dad's going to hell one day,' I said, because I know that it's one of the greatest commandments, never to take the name of the Lord in vain. It's one of those sins where the punishment gets carried from one generation to the next. Even if you don't take the name of the Lord in vain yourself, but your great grandfather did, you'll still be punished for it.

  'Are you trying to say my dad's going to hell?' Frikkie

  The Smell of Apples

  asked, and came to a standstill with his hands on his hips.

  'Exactly/ I said, and carried on walking up Victoria Road with Lions Head in the distance. He followed when I spoke again: 'And all of you will end up going as well . . . Your mother and you and Lou-Marie and I think Gloria -and even Chaka - because the Bible says: You and your whole family together with your servants and your livestock will burn in the everlasting fire. I think dogs, like Chaka, are included under livestock.'

  He was quiet for a while. When we turned up Orange Street towards Table Mountain, he said: 'Tonight I'm going to tell my dad you say he's going to hell.' And he walked up ahead of me.