Embrace Page 3

  While I pondered my voice and my other approach to Cilliers,

  Dominic, Bennie and, again, I remained first sopranos. Voice merely hinting at signs of deepening though not yet leaving him unable to attain the highest second soprano registers, Mervyn had been moved to first alto. Lukas, till now the deepest voice in our other choirs, had again, and to the chagrin of the Standard Sevens, become the vocal foundation of the second altos. Towering head and shoulders over even the older boys, his tall physique, like mine in firsts, had once more also made him the ordering point from which the altos descended. During voice testing Mr Cilliers had noted the altered timbre in Lukas’s voice, possibly the herald of a pending break, an occurrence that would end his life at the school. This was something we refused to believe could happen in the year before the overseas tour. If Lukas could hold out — save your voice, don’t sing so loud, mime, pretend, I advised — who cared if any of us came back in ’77. We had started together in ’74 and we wanted to finish at least the ’76 year and Europe together. Lukas, as dispassionate as ever, said we were all too precious about Europe. He couldn’t understand why we wanted to travel abroad before we’d even seen half of our own country. If my voice goes, it goes, he said, and I’m not complaining about the swelling in my balls. No use crying over spilling the milk, he joked, and anyway, their farm Swaargenoeg with its sheep and horses was all he really cared about.

  Each day of the week we sang for almost two hours: an hour in the morning and another before dinner and prep. As a key tour or performance drew near, the Senior rehearsals were to be extended to six days a week and, if required, up to three hours per day. Till now we had not yet been required to spend the additional hours. But Lukas, Bennie and I already dreaded the two months before Europe. We had heard and seen so much of Seniors’ pre-overseas rehearsals, first as Juniors and then as Secondaries: hours upon hours; conductors’ tempers boiling over; voices and violence booming through the school; canes flying; tears; threats; exhaustion. From the outset we had known there would be no escape. Mr Cilliers, in telling us of the new repertoire, had made no secret of the enormity of what lay in store: a programme almost entirely new; June and July a four-week Transvaal and Cape tour. Then, to celebrate the school’s twentieth anniversary, an end-of-year performance of the Solemn Mass with full orchestra and the SABC Philharmonic Choir in honour of Prime Minister B.J. Vorster. And finally, after that, a three-week tour of Europe! My first ever trip overseas and the school’s first since Israeli and European reviews had begun calling it the best boys’ choir in the world.

  Dominic and Mervyn, eternally enamoured with music, never sounded anything but sheer excitement at the prospect of the whole arduous year. Quite certain that Beethoven’s Mass had never been performed by a boys’ choir, Dominic felt that therein already lay for us an historic challenge. Lukas, sardonic and distant, said we’d survive the musical regime as we always had. Bennie said he couldn’t care two hoots as long as the European pay-off was good: he wanted only to go to Amsterdam where we’d heard blue-movie theatres bloomed on every street corner just like in the kaffir kingdom of Lesotho close to where his mother lived. Dominic had been to London and Amsterdam more times than he could remember and said he hadn’t seen more than a couple of porn shops and they were in districts we certainly wouldn’t be allowed near. Dominic himself had always been refused access to the porn places but while he waited outside his mother and father held up pictures and all kinds of sex toys for him to see through the shop windows.

  It was the very idea of going to Europe — how epic and impressive the notion in and of itself — that so appealed to me.

  ‘We’ll be going to Europe, did you know?’ I asked Lena on the phone after the announcement, knowing well she had already overheard Bokkie’s excited response.

  ‘Just don’t get an even bigger head, Karl,’ Lena said. Besides Bok, when he took the rhinos to Texas, I was going to be the first in our family to experience overseas. Of course Aunt Siobhain had been back to Ireland a few times and Uncle Michael accompanied her oncefrom Tanzania when he first went to meet her family in Dingle. But neither Bok’s nor Uncle Michael’s trips were what I’d call overseas tours. Mine was going to be a Grand Tour of Europe, like something from a novel or a movie. And to think that I’d almost not returned to this place! I smirked. Saying goodbye to Dom and the others at Jan Smuts last year I was dead sure I wasn’t coming back. And then, on the very day of the return as I unpacked in F Dorm, fuming at again being divorced from Dominic, Lukas and Mervy in G, the rumour about the tour reached me. A few hours later, as we stepped into Senior Choir’s first rehearsal, Mathison and Cilliers had made the announcement. Overjoyed, already seeing myself in the major cities of the world, I at once quit sulking about having only Bennie with me in F Dorm. Even to this enormous and’ boring repertoire I can submit, I told myself. Not a negative word. Think positive. It’s in your own hands. Silently I hoped, of course, that we would have loads of free time to spend at the stables and at the river. But in my diary, as if it would come true if it were written in ink, I asserted my resolve to make my contribution to the choir’s success. Instead of homework during prep, I wrote scenes of myself walking through snow in London; eating in dimly lit cafes in Paris and Stockholm where Dominic and I were sure to bowl over our host families and the other patrons with our unusual accents and our charm. In my diary I wrote about visiting the ancient galleries and museums of Holland and England, places that Ma’am and Dominic so often spoke of during Art class and to which I could bring only secondary knowledge gleaned from books. When not engaged in my alphabetical reading of encyclopaedias upstairs in the library, I studied the few texts I could find about the exotic and famous locations where we’d be performing over Christmas and New Year. New Year 1977 — I made a diary entry — you will remember me and my friends eating warm pastries as we walk laughing down the icy canals of Amsterdam. Not watching silly fireworks on the Toti lawn with the Brats and that nouveau riche Uncle Joe.

  5

  At night, unable to sleep after lights-out and, of late, masturbating, tired of reading beneath the sheets, I tried to drift into my dream of floating like a bird or a dandelion seed or anything that could glide, across the brown Mkuzi scrub. If that didn’t work, I went as often as I wished to the Zululand bush where Bernice and Lena returned fortnighdy from boarding school in Hluhluwe to spend the weekend at home. On alternate Friday afternoons after we moved to Umfolozi, Bokkie and I took the Peugeot station wagon and for an hour meandered along the dust road through the Corridor to pick up the girls from the bus at the Hluhluwe Reserve gate. The Corridor was where Bok and the other rangers sometimes came on horseback to dart rhino for the Save the White Rhino Campaign.

  At the approach of another vehicle, our hands automatically went to the window-handles. Winding up, waiting till the white dust was gone, then down again, letting the air spill back into the hot cabin. If we arrived at the gate before the bus, I’d walk around looking at the maids’ crafts. I asked if we could throw coins to the pickanins who stood a distance from the gate, waiting to dance and call ‘Sweeeeets, sceeeeents’ to the tourist cars and buses entering the reserve.

  ‘We don’t have money to wipe our arses and you want to throw coins. You’re just like your father. Forget it,’ Bokkie said and I dreamt of one day showering coins on the poor dancers with their tatty clothes and snotty noses.

  The girls were home for the weekend. Then on Sunday evenings we all returned to the Hluhluwe gate to drop them off I preferred it when the bus driver was off duty and we had to drop them at the hostel in Hluhluwe, as I could then see the comings and goings of the other kids. But invariably the bus was already at the gate, waiting. The forty-seater diesel, empty but for the driver and the two girls waving from the back window into the Peugeot’s headlights and the choking dust, would vanish into the night, not to return for another two weeks. Bernice, already accustomed to boarding in Grade One with Stephanie since the days in Tanganyika from before
I could remember, seemed to take to the routine of being away from home without showing a tinge of trepidation or sadness. At eight she was the smiling big sister whom I adored, who with Bokkie taught me to read when I was only three. Bernice could handle anything. Hidings with Bok’s belt, helping with meals, being away from home, picking ticks from my scrotum, reading and telling me stories. But, whenever my siblings boarded the bus, I felt pangs of sorrow on Lena’s behalf. I could never quite forget her suppressed tears and unspoken pleas the first time we dropped her in Hluhluwe. That once, she had almost wept and again — but of this I’m no longer certain — after the first weekend as she and Bernice walked towards the bus. Barely six, two front teeth missing. And off she went. Cardboard suitcase in hand. Thank God for Bernice. How could you bear to be so alone without an older sister to take care of you?

  ‘Jirre, she’s brave,’ Bok said of my youngest sister. ‘Resilient. A will of iron for such a little girl.’ We drove back through Hluhluwe Game Reserve while Bokkie tried hard to hide her tears. I wondered how it would be for me, when the time came: to leave the game reserve, Bok and Bokkie, Chaka and Suz. Even as I begged to go to school already at three so that I could be as clever as Bernice and our oldest cousin Stephanie, leaving home was a fate too terrible to contemplate.

  During the years home alone with Bok and Bokkie, first at Mkuzi then Umfolozi, and in response to my recurring appeals, Bokkie and Bernice taught me to read and write. Visiting Dademan and Mumdeman in Charters Creek, Mumdeman allowed me to show off my talent to their tourists. Once I could string together a coherent sentence, my other games alternated with writing in the grey school jotters brought home by my sisters. Bernice, Lena and I invented Gogga, a secret language only the three of us could understand. All the vowels of a word were kept the same, and ten of the alphabet’s consonants were changed: b to bok, d to did, g to gog, k to kyk, 1 to loel, m to mim, n to nee, p to pop, s to soos, t to tit.

  ‘Loeletitsoos gogo aneedid poploelay witith tithe didogogsoos,’ I’d say, and Lena might respond, ‘We firsoostit have tito dido tithe didisooshesoos or weloelloel gogetit a hididineegog.’

  Our speaking in Gogga could drive Bokkie and Mumdeman to distraction and eventually the language was more or less banned from our home and our grandparents’ home. ‘You’re Afrikaners now,’ Mumdeman said. ‘You sound like Makoppolanders from the wrong side of Mount Meru when you speak that gibberish. Talk Afrikaans or English and be proud of your heritage.’ Lena and I continued speaking Gogga later in St Lucia and in Toti when we didn’t want anyone to understand what we were saying. In the Berg I began teaching the language to Dominic. Soon he and I could rattle it off faster than English. And so Dom and I had Gogga and English — even when it was an Afrikaans week in the Berg. Though eventually we seldom spoke Gogga, we continued using it to joke, or, when the need arose for secrecy or simply to tease the others by pretending publicly at sharing something exclusive. Dominic and my Gogga had six further altered consonants: c to coc, f to fick, j to jol, v to vis, w to wow and y to yok. The only other place I used Gogga was in my diary. There I put down the stuff I didn’t want in English or Afrikaans. On the off chance of the book being discovered where I hid it in the slit of my mattress, at least my worst thoughts and actions — those I even dared write in Gogga — would be rendered as partly incomprehensible. Once my Latin is good enough, I told myself, I’ll graduate to using that as my secret language, even though Ma’am said Latin was a very difficult — almost impossible — language to use for modern discourse and idiom. Its real use lies in enhancing your understanding of the music you sing, she said, and of the English we write and speak, and, of course, it is essential to understanding Roman Dutch law — which was relevant for those like myself and Radys Dietz who wished to go on to university to become lawyers.

  Umfolozi. When Bok was away taking tourists on trails I played outside the yard amongst the marula trees and hook-thorns. The latter, which I read about and memorised from Bok’s Parks Board Manual, were Acacia caffra, names that came back to me once we started Latin during that Senior year in the Berg. I lay in bed and imagined — thought I’d ask Ma’am — that caffra was the Latin root of the word kaffir.

  In Mkuzi there had been no yard and no fence. Barring a disproven sighting on a dose-by sisal farm, there had been no lions in the park. In Umfolozi I was allowed out as long as one of the bull terriers accompanied me. While large game like eland, nyala rams and giraffe came occasionally right up to the house, we knew that in seasons of good rain, with antelope abundant and no migration to escape drought, the likelihood of leopard or lion venturing close to human activity was remote. Moreover, there was no way that either Chaka or Suz would let a predator — or even Jonas — near me.

  After we left Mkuzi for Umfolozi, and once I had definitely stopped believing that the horse Ganaganda would show up for me to brush, came the horsy game. Sometimes I was the stallion Vonk — before Bok had to shoot him when he fractured his leg. Sometimes I was the mare Ganaganda. A twig between my teeth, I galloped through the bush with a thin stick as riding-crop in one hand while my other handled the invisible reins. Wood from tambotie trees was never used as a bit. I had witnessed in terror and recalled with horror what happened to Bernice in Mkuzi when we thought she had chewed a tambotie leaf or swallowed a jumping bean. And I heard too many times what it had done to the Umfolozi storekeeper, Mr Watts, when the old man had eaten impala grilled over an open tambotie fire. The elasticity of a thin marula branch made for a splendid riding-crop. For hours I would be gone from the yard, Chaka or Suz by my side, or, when Bok was not in the bush, with both of them as my reliable companions. We walked and stalked the veld, played on the boulders above the donkey compound and secretly explored the overgrowncliffs beneath the trail office. After Lena and I saw a leopard there, I abandoned my idea of walking with the dogs all the way down to the Vhite Umfolozi to look for the cave where Dr Ian Player said he had found a young boy’s skeleton. Maybe killed in the times of Chaka, when Umfolozi was the hunting ground of the Zulus. From the house you could see the White Umfolozi snaking its dull water and white sand east towards Chaka Zulu’s hunting pits. Hidden by hills, the river there joined the Black Umfolozi to flow its course to the Indian Ocean below the St Lucia Estuary, close to Dad and Mumdeman at Charters. Bok promised to one day take me to Chaka’s hunting pits, but we never got round to it before we too were transferred to Lake St Lucia.

  I played with my Dinky cars in the sand-pit Bok had built for me and filled with the White Umfolozi River sand. The dogs would be banished to the enclosed side garden from where they could do no damage to the elaborate infrastructure of roads, camps and valleys I spent weeks constructing. Bok gave us instructions so that Lena and I could, with roads, towns, hills, rest camps and rivers, map the whole of Zululand between Umfolozi, Mkuzi, Hluhluwe and Ndumu down to Charters Creek on the ocean, where Dademan was the Park Warden and Mumdeman the Camp Superintendent. Sometimes Lena and I removed the Dinky cars, the towns and the rest camps. Then we planted hundreds of yellow broken Themeda triandra stalks to represent Chaka’s regiments. From up on our hills, smaller impis swarmed down the valleys into the Umfolozi valleys to surround and vanquish the lesser tribes, the evil enemies of the upright and honest Zulu nation.

  Sometimes, in our network of roads, a tour bus would get stuck and one of us, happening by on horseback, would be compelled to radio to base-camp for help.

  ‘Umfolozi HQ, Umfolozi HQ, this is Ranger De Man, do you read me? Over.’

  ‘Roger, Ranger De Man, this is HQ, go ahead. Over.’

  ‘HQ, I found a bus stuck in the sand, RF Ndlovu’s Ridge. We need some help pulling her out. The tourists are getting hungry. Over.’ ‘Roger, Ranger De Man, we have your RF. Will send a tow truck. You’re far out, could take us two hours to get to you. Over.’

  ‘Roger, HQ,’ Lena said one day. ‘Don’t wait too long. There could be terrorists in the bush waiting to kill us.’

  ‘Tourists won’t ki
ll us, silly, the lions will, and the black rhino,’ I said.

  ‘Terrorists, imbecile. Not tourists.’

  ‘Roger, HQ, I’ll get the boys to start digging so long. Over.’ ‘Roger, Ranger De Man. See you in a bit. Over and out.’

  And at night after we went to bed Lena and Bernice told me about the terrorists. Had heard them spoken of at school. Kaffirs. Black and swarming everywhere through Mozambique and Rhodesia. It was the terrorists who stole our land in Tanganyika. With guns from Red Russia. Terrified, I listened for anything that sounded like a tread outside the window. Was ready to scream and flee the room if I heard a twig trod on in the night. I waited till my sisters were asleep. Rose and ran down the passage and crawled into bed between Bok and Bokkie.