Embrace Page 4

  Days Bok and Suz were due back from the bush, Chaka and I awaited them down the hill at the Parks Board office. I watched Chaka closely. When his ears started to twitch and stand upright, I knew: he could hear or sense their approach. He’d snort and from inside his throat make puppy-dog sounds. He’d look up at me, eyes pleading for permission to run ahead.

  ‘Behave yourself, Chaka,’ I would say in my gruffest Bok voice. And, if he went on to yelp: ‘You better stop. I’m warning you. Enough is as good as a feast.’

  A mile away, so Bok would later say, on some footpath edging along a ravine, he would be pointing out to his trailists the performance being put on by Suz. She ran ahead of the short line of people, then, knowing the length of the imaginary leash, would turn, running back past the group to where the donkeys followed ahead of Jonas andgoy. Down the line again she’d fly, stopping to spin around, then dash back to Bok who strode along with the rifle across his shoulder. Yelps, almost inaudible; small, muted barks; talking to Bok; asking, as she half turned ahead, then flew back again to look up at him. He did no more than shake his head. She fell into step, now silent, beside him. The tourists, smiling, would say:

  ‘Oh, Ralph!’

  ‘Oh, come on, let her go.’

  ‘Poor Suz.’

  ‘Ralph, you’re being cruel! You brute.’

  ‘Look, she’s dying to run off?

  Then, if he had been satisfied with her over the three-day trail, and if the distance I would have to run alone seemed safe, he’d say, ‘Go, my girl.’ And the bitch, without a sound, darted from the group, tail a streak behind her. When she’d made distance enough to know she would not be called back, she’d break her sprint for a second and bark, three short sounds ricocheting up the Mpila hill. Beside me, without a second’s pause, Chaka would answer and run, sand flying from behind his paws. I’d follow, calling for him to slow down, knowing he couldn’t be stopped by anything. Soon, jumping on each other, playful in their nipping and licking, the dogs would return as a pair to my side. Then I run with them, calling them to heel when they try to dart ahead. Rounding a corner or a clump of trees I see nothing but the figure in the path ahead of me. He lifts an arm and I reach out mine and as I near him he lifts me still running and hugs me to his sweaty chest.

  Sitting on his hip, I could then look back at the line of people behind us, totally amused by what they had seen. Self-conscious, I’d look away from the hearty smiles, to the end of the line, and wave at Jonas and Boy. Bok sat me down on the side of the path. ‘Meet my Philistine,’ Bok grinned as the line of people drew together. I nodded modestly as he said:

  ‘This is Sylvia Porter from Louisville, Kentucky.

  This is Professor Jans Groningen from Bloemfontein.

  ‘This is Mike and Rhoda Jones from London.

  ‘This is Senator and Mrs Pat O’Hare from Washington.

  ‘This is Leanne and Joan Hepburn from Cape Town.’

  I waited in the grass as Bok and the group moved off and the donkeys and the boys approached.

  ‘Sawubona, Jonas. Sawubona, Boy.’

  ‘Yabona, Umfaan.’

  Jonas would lift me and deposit me somewhere amongst the leftover victuals, water bottles and folded tents, astride the front donkey. At the office the tourists were packed off in the VW Combies that had come to transport them first to the camp for ablutions and packing, then on to the airport in Empangeni. Before they departed, and after the final group photo in which I was invariably included, I heard them tell Bok that their lives had been changed for ever; that they would never forget him or the wilderness; that they would write; that Bok must come and visit in The States; that they’d be back. Sometimes the women would cry.

  6

  Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatus, amant. First Latin word and conjugations we were taught.

  By Ma’am. Learnt. From Ma’am.

  7

  The batteries had begun to dim as I finished The Day of The Jackal Book and torch back in my locker, I lay listening to the breathing and the light snores around me. And the frogs, their croaking bobbing from the orchard into the dorm. Dormire, to sleep. Still unable, despite my Mkuzi dream. I wondered if Dominic was. Should have organised to go theretonight instead of lying here wasting my time with insomnia — nice word — waiting for Saturday. I still prefer him coming here, I thought. Somehow feels less dangerous. And once a week wasn’t enough. Somnia, somniae, f. Sleep. No, that was dead wrong. Somnus, is sleep. Do verbs have a gender? Only nouns. Is sleep female? Insomnia. Must be where the word is derived. Insomnia. Somnambulate if you combine somnus and ambulare. To sleepwalk. That’s what we had decided we’d say happened if were caught. No one would believe us, I knew already then. Jesus, sweet merciful Father, please don’t let us ever be caught. Three faces over a desk. Bok. Bok’s Chevrolet parked in the street beneath the Natal Mahogany at the gate. Our new car that couldn’t go into the garage as that had become Bok’s office. He and Uncle Michael fixed six rows of metre-wide pine shelves to the walls. Easter I’d return. Would Bok see through me? Guess about Dom and the thoughts of Mr Cilliers? Forget it. On the shelves and on the floor, the stock was stored. Almost every inch of wall — other than a section beneath the square of burglar-barred window — covered in neatly ordered rows of curios. From the moment the roll-up garage door opened I would be overwhelmed by the scent of grass, wood and wood polish, and, I thought, the smoke of fires, which was distinct from the smoke of Bok’s Paul Reveres. Dusk smells, shadow smells. Curios. Turn on the double-tubed fluorescent ceiling light and the mood was radically altered, changed into that of a rude store room and office: on the shelves and stacked on the concrete floor the entire trade of Bok’s Sub-Saharan Curios.

  On the broad surfaces to right, human figurines from all over Zululand: men in dugouts, women stooped with children fastened to their backs, warriors carrying spears, women grinding corn in bowls, figures cross-legged on a wooden slab in front of beehive Zulu huts, small black boys extending hands in supplication, begging, women praying on slates of wood inscribed with Biblical scriptures and popular slogans: The meek shall inherit the kingdom of heaven; or Zululand — Wilderness Kingdom; and, commissioned from the Zulus through a contact who traded with curio stores north of the Limpopo: Rhodesia is Super! Sometimes two or three exclamation marks.

  Beside the human figures, the animals. Amongst those, also stock from before the fall of Lourenco Marques: wooden crocodiles, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, marabou storks on one spindly leg — yes, they did look exactly like Holloway. Warthogs, giraffe, buffalo, lion and cheetah. Some the whole animal, some only the head.

  Next, the masks from all over the country. The most profitable Bok bought from the girls in the Eastern Transvaal: masks made us our biggest money. Cheap and easy. Bok, buying directly from the girls, tripled the price when he sold to the curio shops, who in turn doubled or quadrupled theirs. Every tourist seemed to want a mask to take back home: Aberdeen, Bonn, Copenhagen, Dijon, Edinburgh, Florence, Geneva, Hamilton, Ipswich, Jerusalem, Kristiansund, London, Munich, New York, Ottowa, Paris, Queenstown, Rome, Stockholm, Tokyo, Utrecht, Vienna, Washington DC, X, x, x — must be some place in China with an X but Chinese don’t come here — Yazoo City, Zurich.

  Then, a disorderly mix of ashtrays cut from coloured sandstone; wooden heads and busts of bald indunas and bare-breasted girls; salad spoons; small and large spears.

  Against the back wall were the cotton crocheted doilies sown in with beads; then necklaces, bracelets in copper and silver. Postal cable woven and plaited into bracelets. The postal cable bracelets, made from sources unknown and not enquired after, Bok said had been particularly popular of late. On a stretch of open white wall, above these, were the four trophies Dademan had left me in his will: the two Grant’s gazelle heads, the small dick-dick and the huge sable antelope with its eyes that followed you everywhere you went in the garage. These, Bok said, we could hang in my room once I returned from the school and went to Port Natal with Lena. For that wa
s where I’d go, to the best Afrikaans school in Durban, not to Kuswag High where

  Bernice would matriculate. Bernice had remained there, Bok told family and friends, only because a change midway through high school would have disrupted her studies.

  Stacked in piles after the bracelets were watercolour and oil paintings from near the Mozambique border. Less abundant since Frelimo took over. Some of these were on paper and some on canvas, mostly of sunsets and dugout canoes with palm trees and villages. Unlike the paintings in the books Ma’am shows us or those I’ve seen in galleries while on choir tour, these in Bok’s garage have no names signed in the bottom corners.

  The semi-precious stones: boxes full of tiger’s-eye, amethyst, malachite, jade and onyx. Running my fingers through the smooth stones, letting them slip across my palms, endlessly, daydreaming, thinking of nothing in particular, my eyes taking in the shadows of woodcuts, scents, the play of light on glinting varnish and matt wood, grey silhouettes against white walls.

  Beneath the back shelves were the woven grass baskets and to the right of those the rolled-up grass mats and then rows of brown, ochre and black kaffir beer pots in various sizes and shapes.

  On the shelves to the left, the cow-hide shields and assegais, many of which Bok commissioned from kraals in Zululand. Then, on the last section of wall to the left of the window, smaller narrower shelves were taken up by ostrich eggs from Oudtshoorn. While most of those were white, Bokkie had written in one of her letters that Bok had asked James to decorate a few eggs with black figures and sunsets, as demand for adorned eggs had suddenly increased.

  In the middle of the floor was Boks huge work-desk with the phone, neat piles of paper and ledgers and a small two-door filing cabinet.

  Bok had still been a game ranger when he got the curio idea from Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain, though the notion of doing curios as an own business was from after Uncle Michael started his fish and chips shop near the Amanzimtoti Drive-In. The curio idea had been a long time in the make, starting on a smaller scale while we were in Mkuzi. When Uncle Michael was still with the municipality, he and Aunt Siobhain, who was in medical supplies with Lever Brothers, were trying to save money to buy their own house in Toti. Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain had different schemes going, one of which was the curios, while the other was the ironing of surgical masks. Aunt Siobhain got the surgical mask contact through her work at Lever Brothers, and she passed on the idea and the know-how to Bokkie in the bush. Bokkie used two irons and an enamel jug of water from which she sprinkled. While she pressed the white tissues into their right shapes with one iron, the other stood with its face up to the stove’s gas flame. When a pile of the tissues had been pressed, I was allowed to help her cut-knot-and-fold-in the elastic bands into the masks. The elastic was there to go around the surgeons’ and nurses’ ears. While we cut-knot-and-folded-in, I usually wore one or more masks, often not only over my nose and mouth, but occasionally over my head, arms and forehead, so that I watched our labour only through slits. Once every two months or so, when our cousins came from the city, Aunt Siobhain collected the masks and Bokkie received five or six rand. That was the one scheme, and it kept Bokkie busy in Umfolozi while Bok took out trails and assisted with Save the White Rhino.

  The other was the curios. Uncle Michael would give Bok cash with which Bok bought things mostly from the Zulu girls in the villages outside the reserves or from Dademan’s staff at Charters Creek. Jonas’s wife Nkosasaan and some rangers in Hluhluwe also spread the word. When Boy and Jonas returned from near Ulundi, where Nkosasaan lived, they sometimes brought along masks and other woodcuts. From Umfolozi the boys could go home more often then they could from Mkuzi, so the curio trading increased. Jonas himself carved crocodiles and hippos on weekends when he and Bok were back from trail. Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain then bought these andsold ata profit to the tourist shops along the Durban Beach front. On Friday afternoons we went to pick up my sisters from the bus, the black girls with clay pots, baskets and trinkets had at first tried to sell to Bokkie. But as the girls at the Hluhluwe gate often sold directly to tourists for higher prices, Bokkie never bought. Occasionally a small load of baskets or kaffirpots was dropped off at Mr Watts’s store. While Bokkie was ironing masks, she sent me up to Mpila to carry the goods back to the store room beside the carport. A camp guard came to tell her that something had arrived and I would be dispatched. Once, around the time of the hornbill invasion, a guard came to say eight pots were delivered at Mpila. I was sent up while she stayed bent over the ironing-board. She told me to make eight trips — not carry two at a time and to take Suz along.

  The eight brown beer pots stood polished and shining in a row in the sun outside the store. On either side of the elegant necks were oval handles. The adorned openings were ridged with different patterns of leaves, beads, criss-crosses and antelope spoor. On the first trip back I balanced a pot on my head as was customary for the black girls. I imagined a blanket wound around my waist, swinging my hips, humming as I sashayed down the footpath. As far as I walked, hornbills followed me, flitting from branch to branch. ‘Go away,’ I shouted, from beneath the pot, ‘I’m not feeding you anymore. Go away.’ But they followed, squawking like the plastic toys of Molly Hancoxs baby. I managed fine with the pot on my head until Suz got in my way. I caught the pot by a handle as it was about to crash into the ground. The pot had not broken, but the handle came off in my hand. I swore and kicked Suz in the ribs. Fearing another hiding as I’d recently had for feeding the hornbills, I threw the handle into the long yellow grass beside the footpath. The next seven trips passed without incident and I packed the merchandise in the store room with the missing-handle pot at the very back, angled away from the door. Instead of going in to report the completed task I went to the sand-pit. With another kick Suz was banished to the side yard. I knew Bokkie wouldgo out to inspect the goods, but hoped that the longer I stayed away, the less likely she was to discover the damage. I played with my Dinky cars and started building a new guest camp beside the Black Umfolozi.

  ‘Kaaarl,’ I heard. She had found it. I ran to the store room, trying to look cheerful. She asked about the missing pot-handle and I said it had been like that when I fetched it.

  ‘Then why is it standing at the back, turned so that I cannot see?’ ‘It was the first one I brought down, so that’s why it’s in the back.’ ‘Well, I don’t have money to pay for broken things.’

  She told me to get Suz, because we were going to Watts’s store. ‘Why is the dog locked in the side yard, anyway?’

  ‘I’m playing in the sand-pit.’

  ‘Get her out. Were going up to the store.’ Letting Suz out I muttered that she had me in deep trouble and that if I got another hiding she would live only to regret it. I went into the kitchen, where Bokkie had already turned off the stove and was placing both irons on the sink. Up we went, Bokkie striding ahead, Suz trotting in the middle and me behind.

  At the store Mr Watts said he’d personally seen to the off-loading of eight clay pots, each with handles attached. Bokkie apologised for bothering and we headed back towards the footpath. She asked how I had broken the handle.

  ‘I didn’t break it off, Bokkie! I promise. Maybe it just fell off somewhere along the way.’

  Our eyes skimmed the footpath all the way home and to the store room.

  ‘Did you leave the path, Karl?’

  ‘No, Bokkie, I walked straight home. I promise, Bokkie.’

  Back up to the store. Nothing. Then, as we went down the path and the hornbills were going crazy in the trees around us, she reminded me of how I had lied about feeding the birds and how my lie had returned like Lena’s plastic boomerang to catch me out. For weeks she had been aghast at hornbill droppings and an occasional feather everywhere, inthe window frames, all over the veranda, in my bedroom. Discovering for the umpteenth time a ragged cut from the loaf of bread, she had at last asked, ‘Are you feeding the hornbills?’ I said no, I knew better than to feed any wil
d animal. Still I continued the feeding: lumps of porridge from Chaka and Suz’s bowls — a place the birds were too cowardly to venture near; pieces of bread, either stolen from the loaf in the kitchen or morsels snuck off my own plate while my mother wasn’t looking. I lured them into the house while she was in the kitchen, eventually feeding them in my bedroom. If they fought or screeched so that their sounds were sure to reach her, I’d hurriedly shoo them from the window.

  ‘Was that a hornbill I heard?’ Bokkie shouted from the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bokkie, it was just sitting here in the shade in my room when I came in to fetch my Mustang. It’s gone now.’ Soon the birds had become so confident they were flying into the open kitchen door, sitting on the bottom door, squeaking at Bokkie who chased them away. Soon I was waking in the mornings with the tick-tick-tick of their enormous bills against the glass pane of my bedroom windows. I feared a glass pane may shatter, a shard pierce me as I lay on my stretcher. This was a full-scale hornbill invasion. Soon it seemed my parents were content that the strange pattern of bird behaviour had developed spontaneously — probably because of the hornbills growing accustomed to me from the hours I spent in the bush with the dogs and in the front garden. Then, while I was sitting in my room one day — the huge birds by then eating from my hand — Bok, whom I didn’t know was in the house, snuck down the passage and, before I knew what had struck me amidst the fluttering of hornbills, laid into me with his palm until I was screaming and begging for him to stop.

  I’ve told you a hundred times not to feed wild animals.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bok,’ I hollered.

  We fine tourists for feeding them and here you sit! The game ranger’s son, feeding them in your own bedroom!’ I looked at Bok with pleading eyes. ‘How long,’ he growled, ‘before you have the elandeating from your hand! Until they gore a tourist, or one of your pet baboons rips out an old lady’s throat!’