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  Bokkie’s back from slaving in the church garden. I’m off to say hello. Will write again in the Berg next week. Mumdeman has met an old widower whom she’s thinking of becoming engaged to. He has lots of money.

  15

  Quiet time felt an eternity. The words from the page found no place to take hold in the fever that had become my mind. I paged to Psalm 23. That I could recite by heart, moving my lips, while pretending to gloss the text. I repeated it in my head to the rhythm against my rib-cage. After lights-out, I waited to hear Uncle Charlie’s door shut in the passage between the dorms. I quietly rose as if for a quick visit to the bathroom. I snuck past the house-master’s chamber and glided into G where Dominic waited, listening to the radio through his headphones. I lowered myself onto his bed, my arm across his belly.

  Aren’t you getting in?’ he whispered, removing the headphones. ‘No, I’m tired from riding. I’ll come tomorrow night, okay?’

  ‘Want to listen for a while?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  I stretched out, resting my cheek on the pillow beside him. He handed me one end of the earphones and took hold of my free hand. It was the ten o’clock news. I heard only the reader’s voice; of what he said I took in nothing. At the peep peep signalling the bulletin’s close, I lifted myself onto an elbow.

  ‘Okay. Sleep tight,’ I whispered against his ear.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he whispered back.

  ‘Ja, fine . . . why?’

  ‘I wanted you to stay.’

  ‘Tomorrow, okay? I’m already falling asleep.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday?’

  ‘We can make an exception, okay? Change the routine.’

  I dropped my head and kissed him. ‘Loelovise yokou.’

  ‘Loelovise yokou titoo.’

  I got up quietly and slipped back to my bed in F Dorm.

  Listening to the fugue of breathing as around me boys began to sleep. Another variable came to mind and I prayed: dear Jesus, just this once, be on my side and let big Fat Du Toit not choose tonight for one of his muffled tossing-off sessions. And, if Dademan is somewhere in the ether, please let him not be here tonight to see where I’m going. I waited, anticipated the ritual of squeaking springs. Using hands and feet, I stuffed my blanket and pillow down between the sheets next to me. The squeaking didn’t happen.

  Soon, hearing Du Toit’s light snores, I would rise and pull the covers taut over the dummy in my bed. Barefoot, I would cross the dormitory as if again towards the bathroom. Instead of entering where any wakeful eyes might suspect my figure from going, I will sneak through C Dorm where the Secondaries are already long asleep. I will slowly edge across the stairwell’s landing. I will peer around the balcony door to make sure no teachers or staff are downstairs in the auditorium. When assured — absolutely certain no one is moving about in that vacuous space — I will tiptoe through the library and past the Junior dorms.

  The passage door will be unlocked as he had said it would.

  I’m a big boy now, I’d think and smile a nervous smile to myself. Within weeks, I’d have my own key: an instrument granting liberty of night movement that would initially seem to cost little more than a weekly stop in his bedroom. But it was not freedom I was seeking. In my own turbulent mind, I imagined that mine was the premeditation of a playful revenge and a little adventure — though those alone would not be my dividends. What came before thoughts of freedom or even the attainment of goals, and what for me became my most special discovery, was that squirt tasted like salted almonds on my tongue and against my pallet, that it burnt, long afterwards, quite pleasantly at the top of the throat. Knowing it neither there where I waited, nor understanding it even as it unfolded around me through that winter when I’d have to wear slippers on the cold linoleum passage, I was about to take myself further into that intimate space that in our mountain school, could not but exist at the obscure intersections of love and betrayal.

  16

  Jonas and Boy live in huts. Jonas and Boy make things with wood and Jonas beats the drums. Jonas makes faces and masks that you can put over your face and little men and Tambotie tables Uncle Michael buys for 10 cents and he sells them for RI.00 in Durban and gives some to us but Jonas doesn’t know. Jonas says we can get rich from curios. Nkosasaan makes grass carpets and straw mats. She is Jonas’s girl and Jonas says she’s fat she’s going to have a piccanin. Nkosasaan lives in Ulundi. Boy is not married but he has babies. That’s a sin. Jonas and Boy carry guns like Bok. Because Bok must look after them when they’re scared of elephant in Ndumu. Because Jonas and Boy are kaffirs and kaffirs don’t know anything Bok must take care of them. Kaffirs are dangerous. Kaffirs are stupid. Thick like pap and their lips. They also stink because they never bath. Kaffirs are also niggers and wogs and houtkoppe and boys and coons and baboons and Afs and natives and Zulus and Muntus and Sothos and Xhosas and the piccaninnies hang rocks on their filafoois to make them long like black mambas. Bokkie doesn’t allow Jonas and Boy into the house they must wait outside. Me and Lena go to the hut and sit and drink magou with the boys and they teach me the drums and we sing with the drums and how to cut wood for masks and statues. I love Jonas best. Jonas is best on the drums. Jonas teaches me to sing ‘Ihashi igabane’. I love Boy too. Boy carries me on his shoulders and his hair is like Lossie’s feathers and he smells like fire and grass and if I fall asleep he carries me home. Boy is strong and looks after Bokkie when Bok’s away with Jonas on elephant patrols or chasing the poachers. When Bok’s away on Save the White Rhino then Boy sleeps with the gun outside the kitchen wall so we can call him if something happens. In the bush the kaffirs know their place. In town Uncle Michael says the Munts are getting restless like in Tanganyika.

  17

  Mr Walshe slipped his fingers into the spaces between stomachs and girths; adjusted bits and told some to sit up straight and not look like a sack of mielies. He passed over Lukas and me. The two of us were at the stables as often as the systems rotating roster allowed and Mr Walshe knew us well. Moreover, Lukas was his sometime assistant at the dairy. Occasionally, when Mr Walshe was away, Lukas had permission to supervise Junior rides.

  The pages of our Bibles, the inside lids of our desks and our pencil cases were brought to life by photos of us on our favourite mounts. Alongside these were photos of girlfriends and pin-up girls cut from Scope magazine, which came once a week in the mail for Lukas. In his Bible, Lukas also kept an enlarged picture of Harlequin, his own retired racehorse. My favourite horse was Rufus. I rode him whenever I could, though till ‘75 the horse would frequently be taken by Reyneke or one of the other Seniors before I could get to the stables. Rufus was probably a boerperd of sorts, yet almost as fast as King, who was part Arab, part thoroughbred. Rufiiss copper coat glimmered even in winter’s molt and his mane and tail were the colour of bleached thatch. At my request, Lukas instructed the stable boys to refrain from cutting Rufus s mane. The boys respected Lukas both as Mr Walshe’s right-hand man and because of his fluent Xhosa. While most of the stable boys spoke Zulu, Lukas said they were none the less able to understand the language of the Eastern Cape and they seemed to take delight from their animated conversations with Lukas, transactions from which I was excluded. Knowing that at one point I had spoken at least broken Zulu to Jonas and Boy, I regretted not having learnt their language properly. Zulu could have been put to effective use with the stable boys.

  Lukas alone was allowed to ride King, the farm’s strongest most wilful creature. As happy as I was on Rufus, I did envy Lukas the honour brought by his physical strength and prowess as an experienced equestrian. I do equestrian sport. Something I delighted, unashamedly, in saying. Home for the holidays it could drive Lena up the walls.

  The regular riders constituted a fairly small group. Much of the school up on the terrace belonged to a world whose dwellers seldom ventured down to the parts whence Mr Walshe oversaw the farm’s activities. Dominic, for one, had not come riding more than four or five times. The same with Me
rvyn. Of course Dominic had to take care of his fingers for piano, and Mervy had violin, but still I suspected that even without those commitments neither of them would take much pleasure down there. To me, on the other hand, riding was the reason for being in the Berg. That and the tours. Our fort. And the landscape. And Dominic. When I thought of it, I imagined guiltily that I would sacrifice Dominic, the tours and the forts, but not the horses. Everything about riding, the movement from the horse into my body, the speed and rhythm as the ground coursed by, seeing the world from the elevation of the saddle, the smell. The smell of horse on my hands mingled with leather and dubbin. Prep was a battle as I tried to concentrate on homework while inhaling the odour from between my fingers. After riding I had to be cautious, for the smell of horse, just like that of rain on the dry earth, let something loose in me. I wanted to go wild. Become boisterous, a word I’d learnt from Miss Roos.

  We walked the horses down, past the Dragon’s Ridge holiday resort and over Sterkspruit’s concrete bridge. Lukas was saying that the mare Cassandra would foal within eight weeks. I could not wait. Steven Almeida and I had been there the previous year, watching together, when Cassandra conceived by King. For a moment again Steven was back with us, quiet and unspeaking. Again I wondered what had become of him. I leant forward and patted Rufus’s neck. Somewhere in the mountains heavy rains had fallen, for the river was swollen and the bridge covered with a foot of swift-flowing water. Thick silver jets spurting from the pipes beneath the concrete crashed into the downstream pool. Wading across, the horses were allowed a brief drink. Once over the bridge, the gradual ascent began. Mr Walshe allowed us to canter as we passed beneath V Forest and took the road’s steep curve up the hill onto the grassy plateau. From here the ground rose gradually for another three kilometres before itclimbed again into the next layer of foothills and the base of the wide escarpment. At a nod that were allowed a short gallop, King, with Rufus on his tail, streaked ahead. A good while before the cliffs Mr Walshe whistled for us to rein in.

  Where the road became a dead-end we dismounted and secured the horses to a dilapidated split-pole fence. Tied our riding caps to the stirrups.

  Not everyone wished to go up the hill to the paintings. Most preferred to stay with the horses and talk to Mr Walshe. He sat with his back against a tree trunk, removed his bush hat and lit a Gunston Plain. Only Ron and Gerhand, two Standard Fives, followed Lukas and me along the short path up through the shrubbery.

  ‘Not past the front ones, Lukas,’ we heard from behind.

  ‘Of course, Mr Walshe.’The first overhangs, where the rock paintings could be seen, led to a narrow ledge, completely overgrown, behind which we knew were more overhangs. Somewhere back there, so one of the stable boys had told Lukas, was a real cave, or a series of caves. None of us had seen the cave and we never had enough time to bash through the bramble tangles, old yellow-woods and thick foliage that obscured the ledge where we thought the cave may be. Our party of four, with Lukas ahead, moved on to where the rock face was broken and rugged, overgrown with bramble and monkey ropes, before opening into shallow rock overhangs. Streaks of bright sunlight dappled through the shrubbery, illuminating the smooth walls. A smattering of ferns and moss dung to the rock; from somewhere a trickle of water made damp stains like maps down near the floor; we guessed at the source. Underfoot, sand, refined as white powder, was covered in spoor and droppings.

  ‘They look like raisins.’

  ‘Taste one, see if they taste the same.’ Our laughter running along the cliff.

  ‘This is klipspringer. Look at the spoor,’ I said, going down on haunches and pointing to the tiny imprint of deft tracks.

  And dassie over here,’ Lukas said. Ron and Gerhard moved to the sand beneath the opposite wall to look at Lukas’s find. Ron said something about having read on the back of a Chappies paper that elephant are dassies’ closest relatives.

  ‘Durrrrr . . . Steve,’ I hissed inadvertently and the du, and the sss, and the tt returned.

  ‘Here’s the giraffe.’

  They crossed over to me standing with my neck thrown back, face turned up to where the rock folded back to make the ceiling. They chatted while we stared at the fading yellow drawing of the long-neck with the dark markings. The legs were faded, like natural shades in the sandstone. How quiet I wanted it to be. Like in a museum or at a grave site. This, I thought, is sacred ground. I wanted the others to shut up; to hear nothing but silence and feel the spirit of the place. In another lifetime, before any of us were born or even before we’d arrived in Africa, people lived here, ate here, fought and mated — made love — here. The further back into the dusk, the brighter to my eyes seemed the red, yellow, brown and orange drawings. Most were of small stick figures on the hunt: bows and arrows at the ready to release at a young eland grazing to one side of the herd. Deeper we moved, towards the ledge’s tangled obstruction. There the drawings made up a dense montage of paintings over paintings of human activity around fires and scenes of the hunt, less visible as the sun was absorbed by the dark. Not a montage, I thought, no, I’m sure this is what Ma’am would call a palimpsest. A palimpsest of imagery. Now beside myself with excitement, I wanted only to go deeper along the ledge.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask Walshe for his lighter so we can see better.’ I moved back to the entrance and out into the sun.

  ‘You’re not smoking up there?’ Mr Walshe asked even as he was taking the plastic Bic lighter from his pocket. I grinned. On impulse I turned to the cliff and belted what I imagined a high G. The dart of sound carried up the gullies, seemed to swirl against the stone and thendisappeared somewhere in a faint echo, leaving only us, the grasshoppers and the birds.

  ‘Sound like a smoker, Mr Walshe? You have a go, Sir, lets hear.’ Around him boys egged him on. Mr Walshe blew smoke though his nose and handed me the lighter.

  ‘Flat as a sheep being slaughtered,’ Sarel Raubenheimer quipped from where he lay on his elbow beside Mr Walshe. ‘I wouldn’t brag if I was you.’

  ‘Flat like your big black nose and putu-smackers,’ I smirked down at him before turning back up the incline.

  ‘Anyway, you’re not meant to be shrieking into the mountains,’ Raubenheimer called after me.

  I turned, a sarcastic smile now hooked to the corner of my mouth, ‘Well, run and report me to Mr Cilliers, klik-bek. Let’s see what he says.’ ‘Arse-creeper . . . go any deeper and all we’ll see is your feet.’

  ‘I can’t help it if I was born with more talent than you, Raubenheimer. Feeling a little lonely since Harding and Reyneke left? No more big bully prefects to take care of you.’

  ‘Be careful up there, Karl,’ Mr Walshe interrupted our bickering. ‘I want you boys down here in ten minutes.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Walshe,’ I answered with my eyes still on Raubenheimer: ‘Jealousy makes you nasty.’ And with that I turned and trotted up the path. The suggestion that I was sucking up to Cilliers galled me, even as I knew indeed that was what I had been up to. Still, I had not meant for things to be obvious enough for anyone other than Cilliers himself to note. Then again, what the hell! For a moment I almost wished Raubenheimer could know that I had been in our conductor’s bed. What a jay being able to challenge Raubenheimer to tell Cilliers — about me shouting a single note into the mountain; accusing him so publicly of petty envy.

  And then, in the heat of the afternoon sun, I went cold and frightened at my own recklessness. Felt ashamed of myself with Cilliers. Of me and Dom. Swore to God I’d put an end to it all.

  ‘Lukas still up there?’ I asked the two who had emerged and were sitting in the sun a couple of paces from the front overhang.

  ‘He’s waiting in the back.’

  Lukas and I moved farther along the ledge than we had been before, breaking and pushing branches as we went. More water dripped in a steady stream ahead of us, from somewhere behind the screen of branches and creepers. I was about to flick on the lighter to check the rock face when Rons voice reached us, ca
lling that Mr Walshe was ready to leave. We cursed and carefully backtracked along the ledge.

  ‘We must come when we have more time,’ I said. ‘I want to find that cave.’

  ‘It’s around here somewhere. All the farm kaffirs know about it. We must bring a panga to chop open a path,’ Lukas said, and we made our way back to the group.

  18

  I felt the crown of my head still damp from washing my hair in the shower. And the brittle winter-grass shave around my ears and in my neck from the afternoon’s hair cut. How I hated, hated it when you did that to us. To me. Destroyed my hair once a month. So that there wasn’t enough even for my fingers to pass through. Robbing me of my looks. When I grow up, I swore again, I will have hair, long blond, into the small of my back. Call me a hippie, a communist, a sissy I don’t mind. I hate you all. I could weep from rage at the school. The barber. It would be a week before I could face myself in the — no, I’m not going to cry, don’t think of it, think of something, something—

  Like a giant undulating shongololo, Jonas’s forefinger along the blade’s ridge seemed to steer the tip of the knife, grrrts, grrrts, grrrts, into the wood. His grip around the handle applied the pressure to make the tiny incisions, scratches, hollows. Sometimes, for the faint lines of wrinkles on the mask’s forehead, he used the fingernails of hisright hand, the splintered tips as hard and sharp as broken tortoise shell. He was the smallest man Lena and I had ever seen and when he sat beside Boy outside the hut with us watching his work, I thought his mammoth fingers would be better suited on Boy’s body, for the latter s hands, as if through a trick of irony or fate, while every bit as ashen and strong as Jonas’s, had in turn nine of the shortest, stubbiest fingers in the world. The tenth, the pinky on Boy’s right hand, had been severed by a panga in a fight with rhino poachers. That is why — Bokkie warned the boys — Lena and I were not allowed to carve wood; the blade would slip and cut off our fingers.