Embrace (3 page)

All five of us remaining had finally achieved the highest rung of the school’s musical ladder: the Senior Choir. Although there were still the Standard Sevens above us, being in choir with them did soften the hierarchy of seniority and the prefect system that remained in place on the passages, the playground, in the dorms, during prep and in the dining hall.

Through the course of the previous two years I had continually imagined the disgrace of being held back, first in the Junior then in the Secondary Choir. In this place and in Bok and Bokkie’s minds, I told myself, being held back in choir will be tantamount to failing a Standard. Each annual choral promotion seemed to me a miracle, a relief begged and divinely granted, for it surely meant that the terrifying secret of my inability to sing the high register of the first soprano score had not been found out; that no one other than Niklaas Bruin and whomever else had stood beside me in choir suspected that in each concert I left out at least a quarter of the entire repertoire; that with time the proportion of what was mimed to what could be voiced had been growing. Who knows how long it will be before the tainted F sharp sinks to a thin F; from wavering F to nervous E? There was a nightmare in which I stood through an entire performance unable to utter a note, mouth opening and shutting like a fish on dry land. But the dreams terror lurked not in the guilt or the silence — which I could and did bear rather comfortably — it crouched in the shame of exposure. At Lake Malawi, where with Ma’ams permission we six had sung informally for our hosts, Dominic and Mervy suggested I consider moving to seconds as my voice was rather good in the lower registers. So, now that we were back and starting on the
Missa,
I was thinking of asking Cilliers to be moved. Still, I kept postponing: the mere thought of being asked to sing alone was bad enough. Then of having to see Mr Cilliers s face contort in displeasure as if at a bad smell when he heard in my voice the breathy sounds coming from trembling, inadequate vocal chords — it kept me from asking, left me in the front row. But, I knew I should. There was the overseas tour! And as Cilliers said: SAA Jumbo Jets have no seats for joyriders. The Mass was the most difficult thing we’d done. Already I was more bored with every rehearsal than I’d ever been in the past. For the third year running and to Dominic’s frustration, I had deceived my way around beginning-of-year voice-testing by faking acute hay fever.

‘Why lie about such a small thing? You’re cutting off your nose tospite your face because you don’t like choir, that’s all,’ he said. ‘You’d enjoy it if you were in the correct voice.’

‘Are you sure you’re comfortable in first soprano, De Man?’ Cilliers had asked suspiciously in January when, snivelling and with red peppered eyes, I walked into the conservatory and offered my excuse for not testing. ‘Else you must come back next week and do the test, okay?’

‘I’m fine, Sir. I’m not up there with Webster, of course not, Sir. But I’m very comfortable in firsts.’

Along with the fear of having to sing alone and then being thrown into seconds was the certain humiliation of having to admit that my voice was no longer — had never been — good enough for that front row. That I was being moved from where I’d been standing five down from Dominic for two years. In Juniors and Secondaries I had loved being the tallest in the front row. Especially for performances. Therein and of itself was reason enough to make me perfect the art of opening my mouth with the rest, when necessary visibly straining the ligaments of my neck in a way I knew concealed, if not erased, the fact of my silence. Adding to my sense of Divine Protection in firsts had been the fact that whenever — in a fit of anger at discerning a discord from the front row to his left — a conductor prowled by with his ear almost touching our lips, he had never once passed mine at that terrifying moment where the score showed anything above a high G and I was again treacherously mute. Still, I was wondering whether I shouldn’t at once pluck up the courage and go and ask Cilliers to move me to seconds. He was not half the ogre Mr Roelofse had been in Secondaries and there was no telling what might transpire if my ineptitude was exposed before Europe. Out on my arse! Probably thrown back into the misery of the Secondaries with Roelofse and Marabou who were going nowhere but on a tour of the ugly Orange Free State. Seconds isn’t bad, of course, I told myself, and Almeida had been essentially a second.

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.

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.