Embrace Page 7

  From the moment we returned from my sisters’ first school play, I insisted we rub noses. I no longer wanted to say goodnight in any other way. Bokkie told Mrs Watts at the camp office she imagined the novelty would wear off, but when Bok returned from releasing white rhino cows at Ndumu, he too could not get his mouth near my lips. An entirely new set of games were added to my solitary repertory. Lena’s Eskimo outfit was in tatters from my running through grass and thorn. Aware of my sisters attachment to the costume, Bokkie stitched the torn gown together with her Singer, and convinced me I could not be horse and Eskimo all at once. Eskimos did not even have horses.

  ‘Can you imagine a horse on the snow? Snow is very slippery and you know what happened to Vonk when he slipped in the mud, don’t you?’

  At times I would play with her make-up and her old wig, turning myself into a girl, or, with her mascara, by drawing lines along my eyelids and donning Bernice’s costume, becoming the Empress of Japan. The colours of her lipsticks and eyeshadows turned my face as beautiful as I thought I deserved to be. I got her to use almost a full roll of precious tin foil to cover a piece of bamboo for which Bok cut a star from an old shoebox which was then also enclosed in foil. When he was home I insisted on their audience as I played the fairy missing her silver star. At first they fell about on the couch laughing; later they got bored and told me to play something else. I perfected the Cossack dance, the cobra dance and I begged Bokkie to teach me the real waltz — no! not the one Bok did with me on his hip while he held my outstretched foot in his one hand; and later the cha-cha, the two-step and the polka.

  I begged and my mother would sit, letting me ‘do her up’. Tired of these games for a while, I would again return to my Dinky cars and build roads and bridges in my sand-pit outside in the yard. Then, again becoming Ganaganda galloping through the veld. From the kitchen, so she told Bok, she would see nothing except the patch of shiny hair, level with the tips of red grass. Somewhere in the vicinity of my head, she would see the other movement of grass and she’d know Chaka was there. Exhausted and thirsty from running and the sun, I would come inside and drink from the plastic water bottle. I’d take the jotter to practise words and the making of sentences. Bored with that, I’d put The Sound of Music onto the turntable. Having learnt that the shiny paths in amongst the minute grooves signalled the end of each song, I would skip to track 4, ‘Maria’, or to 5, ‘I Have Confidence’, or 7, ‘My Favourite Things’, or 9, ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ to which I could dance pretending to be a goat, or II, ‘Do-Re-Mi’ to which I could sing along, the first song I learnt independently of Bokkie and Bok andsoon knew by heart. Sometimes Bokkie would let me listen to her Sinatra from where I learnt ‘My Kind of Town’ and ‘Fly Me To The Moon’.

  Much was as it had always been in Umfolozi; only now, there was more.

  12

  In the first year — before Almeida came and we built the river fort and started the kleilat wars — we often played kaffirs and police, mares and stallions, cowboys and Indians (Apaches), racehorses and trainers, hide-and-seek, kings, queens and slaves, and Nazis and Jews. That game could have been Mervyn’s invention as he was not only my first Jewish friend but one of the first Jews to attend the school. He knew everything we needed to about the Genocide and was also the one who gave me The Diary of Anne Frank to read. Our roles, like our games, changed constantly. Lukas, Dominic and Bennie were the millions of Jews as often and with as much abandon as Mervyn and I were the gas-chamber commissars.

  In the grove of young wattles behind the conservatory, any two of us, wielding sticks as rifles, would herd the others into the imaginary gas-chamber. That place, which doubled as our fort, was constructed by tying tips of the still pliable wattle saplings together with clumps of grass. Before the moment of pre-climactic herding, the commissars had first to execute an elaborate search plan of finding and exposing the Jews from their hide-outs. If, say, Lukas and Mervyn had been appointed the hour’s SS commissars, we would be given a diance to go and conceal ourselves in the open veld, or in the tall trees that grew on the side of the koppie due east of the school on which stood Mathison’s house. Within the Jewish category we rotated roles as the whim took us, with either Dominic, me or Bennie being alternately mother, father, son or daughter.

  On any particular day, Dominic could be father, Bennie mother, and me son. I hated being son as the role demanded I obey both Father Dominic and Mother Bennie.

  The three of us were sitting in the branches of an old wattle that hung over the hill’s gradual downward slant.

  ‘The SS is approaching our hide-out,’ Father Dominic whispered and Mother Bennie put her free arm around my shoulders.

  From our vantage we could see down the hill, to where the commissars were combing the shoulder-high grass.

  ‘How did they discover our hiding place, my husband?’ Mother Bennie whimpered. ‘And what will they do to us? Oh, and what about our first-born son?’ She now pretended to sob, stroking my hair.

  Lukas’s deep second alto voice carried up the incline: ‘Come out, you stinking Jews, we know you’re up there in the ghetto. Give yourselves up and be spared your fate.’

  ‘Never,’ Father whispered to the family gathered in the branches around him. ‘Remember Masada.’ Most of us knew Israel’s arid fortress from a framed poster that had been hung in the concert hall after an earlier tour of Israel. Once, before a recital of Hebrew folk songs, Mr Selbourne told us the story of the Jews’ suicide, hoping its invocation could inspire us to reach what he always referred to as ‘music borne from emotional depth and artistic discipline’.

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I whispered. ‘Let us rather kill ourselves than be taken hostage.’

  ‘Karl,’ Bennie hissed, ‘you’re meant to be a child.’

  ‘Now, now, dear wife,’ said Father. ‘Let us love each other in our family’s hour of despair.’

  ‘Yes, husband,’ Mother answered.

  ‘How do they know where to find us, Mommy?’ I asked.

  ‘There are traitors amongst our people, my baby. That is how they know were here. Millions of our people have already been gassed.’

  Now, right below us, the commissars looked up. They aimed their rifles into the hide-out. Mother, Father and I were left little choice beyond immediate and unconditional surrender. Forcing us at gunpoint down the hill to Auschwitz, Commissar Mervyn prodded Father in his back: ‘Come on, you filthy Jews, you’re going to have a shower.’ ‘Mervy, you must call us Hymies.’

  ‘Shut up, you Jewish bitch,’ he retorted; and my mother was pushed so that she stumbled from the path into the long grass.

  Into the gas-chamber at gunpoint; the metal door latched behind us; my mother grasped my father by the chest and wept: ‘This is our end, my husband! Oh, our poor son!’

  Outside, the taps moan as the commissars turn on the gas: ‘Shhhh, shhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.’

  Soon, no longer able to hold our breaths, we are coughing and sputtering. Increasingly cruel laughter permeates the chamber where we still attempt to huddle together. We paw at our own throats, clawing against the fire rushing into our lungs. The laughs turn to vicious howling as our family’s embrace unravels into flailing spasms of slow and dramatic death.

  Then we change roles.

  13

  During the dry season, on an afternoon when there was spite from the sun veiling the world in a thousand gyrating aquarelles, Bok took me to a sandbank in the White Umfolozi to fire my first shot with a revolver. Dressed in only khaki shorts, he steered his Land Rover along the track with me and Bokkie on the front seat beside him while Chaka and Suz panted in the back. I may have chattered about the week past when he had been away in the bush darting white rhino to be transported to other reserves.

  Bok pulled the vehicle deep beneath the branches of a fig, close to one of the few pools that retained its water even when the bush and veld had become a patchwork of browns and yellows as far asthe human eye could see. The previous time we were close to there,
the river had been a churning torrent of muddy water dragging trees and animal carcasses along the angry route we had come to witness. Then Bok had just returned from trail with tourists after bang holed up for three days in the Ncoki caves, cut off from Mpila by the rains. From miles away we heard the roar. Bok, Bokkie, me, with Bernice and Lena back from boarding school, sat in the vehicle, agog at the volume, the movement, the speed that turned the spectacle before us to terror. Now it was an entirely different landscape we entered. At my request, Bok again told of an earlier flood — in the years we were still in Mkuzi — when two game rangers on an inflated tyre tube had seen a Zambezi shark this high up the river.

  Bokkie wanted to be in the shade. Above us in the sycamore fig’s branches, hadidas had built a nest on a shaggy clump of flood debris. Cautioned by the dogs’ erect ears, we looked upstream. Figures as if caught in dancing mirrors, a herd of zebra and wildebeest stooped to drink from another pool in the distance. Bok said we’d have to wait. He didn’t want to scare off the game with shots. Bokkie spread a blanket for us to sit where she would soon lie down to read. She took from the canvas shoulder-bag a beer for her and Bok to share and a Tupperware bottle filled with red Kool-Aid for me.

  I climbed the fig’s trunk. Sliding on my bum, I approached the nest. From below Bok told me to keep a reasonable distance, particularly if there were eggs or hatchlings.

  The game slowly retreated from the pool. Bok said we could go. He instructed Chaka and Suz to stay and they found their resting places in the grass beside the blanket. With the revolver in his holster and an empty five-gallon jerry, we moved into the riverbed. In both hands I carried a small red and black box of ammunition. Behind us, Bokkie Settled down on her stomach, chin resting on a pillow, her Mills and Boon out before her.

  Bok’s eyes scanned the riverbanks. Bokkie and the dogs under thefig disappeared behind us. We halted across from a rocky outcrop rising above the bank on the other side.

  ‘Can I take these out, Bok?’

  ‘In a minute, Philistine. I’m going to put up the target. Stay here.’

  In the pattern of shade cast by dull-green reeds I waited, watching my father cross the white sand and place the can atop an almost round boulder on the opposite bank. I wished Bernice and Lena were there to see.

  14

  25 March 1976

  Amanzimtoti

  Home in Toti for Easter. Due to the June and July tour of the Transvaal and Cape I won’t be back here until the October holidays. How I’m looking forward to the Cape! Last year with the inauguration of the Afrikaans Language Monument we barely saw anything other than Paarl and Wellington. This time we’ll be there for two weeks. There is so much I want to see there: Table Mountain, Cape Point, the vineyards of Stellenbosch and, of course, Groot Constantia. In Art Ma’am has shown us the most wonderful copies of Pierneef lino-cuts, many of the white Cape Dutch architecture and thatched roofing, the oak trees, outside staircases and gorgeous gables. Dom says the Boland is a lot like the South of France.

  Time has flown since my last diary entry. Cociloelloeliersoos has called me only once after that. My excitement and dread was shortlived as he only wanted to ask whether I was catching up in second soprano. Although, he did ruffle my hair (!) and gaze at me rather strangely before I left and he asked whether I was okay not standing right in front of him anymore. I told him I was doing very well, because I am. I’m actually enjoying choir. I told him he could ask

  Erskin Louw who is just two down from me. I’m not the tallest in seconds as I was in firsts and now I’m no longer right in front of him and I’m two rows back. I’m now almost as tall as Lena! Bernice found two pimples — my sisters now call them zits — on my right temple last night while we were all watching Haas Das se Nuuskas. TV is lots of fun but Bokkie moans like a stuck record-player about Bernice and Lena spending their nights in the lounge instead of doing homework. The SABC is planning to screen the Montreal Olympic Games in July, so I do hope we’ll be staying with host families who at least have TV The moment Haas Das se Nuuskas was over Bernice pinned me down on the carpet for my first ever zit patrol! Behind my ears she found at least three blackheads. When she squeezed those it hurt like hell. ‘Use a pin!’ Bokkie shouted from the kitchen. ‘You’ll be scarred for the rest of your life! Why don’t you kids listen to me? Look at these scars on my face, do you want to end up looking like me?’ And Bernice shouted, ‘Yes, of course we want to look like you because you’re beautiful,’ and then she whispered, ‘even though you’re such a bloody moaner.’

  Dominic phoned yesterday afternoon. I told him he has to call during the day because at night we spend family time together. There’s no use in angering Bok. Dom is allowed to phone as much as he likes and I’m a little worried he’ll call while Bok’s here.

  I spoke to Aunt Lena, who says Klerksdorp has frost every night. She’s sure Great-Uncle Klaas and the other tramps are already heading for the coast. She says Uncle Joe’s affair with the bokititcoch Matilda isn’t bothering her anymore because she’s been Born-Again. I told her that Mathison might also be Born-Again and she said, ‘Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus, that Karl is in the company of your disciples. Thank you, thank you, Jesus.’ Since she’s Born-Again she says she knows God is on her side and will stand by her into any further tribulations she and Uncle Joe must pray through to honour the promise they made on their wedding day: through sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. She says she’s praying that Uncle Joe may lose all his millions, so that he may become like Job. God, she says, will never breakour backs with the burdens he places as blessings on our shoulders: he merely wants us to bend our knees. She is filled with the holy spirit Holy Spirit and says she’s so blessed that she may soon be speaking in tongues. I wonder whether Mathison speaks in tongues. That is something I’d love to hear. Maybe do it myself, though I cannot imagine the Holy Spirit coming near me at the moment. Not with everything Didomim and I are doing and my thoughts about C.

  Afternoons I wait at Pahla station for Alette and Lena and we walk home together. On days when Lena stays at Port Natal for sport Alette is alone. Then we can talk about music and books. As usual Lena’s doing only sport and no school work and Bokkie has her hands in her hair. Bernice is working hard for matric and she says she wants a university exemption even though she’s planning on becoming an air hostess so that she can travel.

  For the first time in ages I’ve had a reasonable report: As for English, Latin and Art. B’s for Natural Science, History, Geography and Afrikaans. Pass for Music Theory. E for Maths. Bok is popisoossoose-did off about the E and says I won’t ever find a job if I can’t do Maths.

  Alette is doing Grade Five piano this year. On Sunday she played the organ in church because Juffrou Sang has the flu. I’m deeply in love with Alette. Her and I She and I speak about Europe often. We’ve traced our tour in Prof’s Atlas. When I’m with Alette I don’t even spare a thought for Didomim or Cociloelloeliersoos.