Embrace (8 page)

I lifted the fork. Pushed it into the half Raised it to my lips. Opened my mouth and held my breath. Closed my mouth over the cold mushy blob and tried to think of playing down by the river, feeling Rufus’s canter beneath me. I chewed. I could not swallow. Mystomach was refusing. I heard the boys fall into line, prepare to go into class. Again tried to swallow. Felt my throat begin to bulge.

‘Swallow that food, De Man.’

I swallowed. Half to go.

‘Please may I have water, just for this piece, Miss Holloway?’ Eyes wide as they could go; pleading. She did not answer, just sat, quietly, head to one side, now smiling at me. I looked at the plate and brought the piece of vegetable to my mouth; felt her look down on my head. Could she see the movement of my scalp beneath my thick hair as I chewed? Dominic’s hair, I thought, is so fine you can see his scalp in even the slightest breeze. I lifted my head and met her gaze. I glared at her.

Later, so I would hear from Dom who’d heard from a giggling Beauty, Holloway swore to the headmistress that she had seen in my eyes a glint of hatred. She told Erskin Louw a day or so later — who in turn told Mervyn — that she had never seen a child’s glare so devoid of respect, so viciously intent on showing contempt for adult authority. As if plucked by an upward force I half lifted myself from my chair; she mouthed something; the knife and fork dropped to the empty plate and in the same motion she said I seemed to bring both hands to my mouth while my body doubled forward. Most of it caught her sidelong across the chest, but because she flew up from her chair the barely masticated food slid down her front and dripped onto her shoes. Beneath the droplets on her chin I could see nothing save astonishment I kept waiting for her to wipe her face; to say something. Instead, without taking her eyes off me she called for Matron Booysen and told me to go and wash my mouth before returning to class. When Matron entered from the kitchen I was already approaching the glass sliding doors. Behind me I heard her asthmatic voice:

‘Precious! Beauty! Bring a bucket and rags. Hurry up.’

‘Oh,’ Dominic said as the class sat listening to my story while we awaited the return of a refreshed Miss Marabou, nee Holloway. ‘That lovely brown and yellow frock of mine from Milady’s in Escourt. Ruined, I tell you, ruined by that monstrous De Man boy’s fish and veggies.’ And we laughed at his gestures and facial expression, more simian than fowl.

‘Bring on a pot of Brussels. This is Marabou’s vomit marathon!’ I said and half the class practised gagging sounds, the short and long bullfrog noises of vomiting.

Right into Standard Six, Marabou might suddenly be stopped in her spindly tracks when from somewhere behind a pillar in the dining hall, the back of a classroom or a tree trunk, she heard a sound exactly like the first wrench of a vomit cut short. Certain that she’d heard it, could not again be mistaken, she looked around. Her long nose was turned up like a red beak, the eyes with green eyeshadow rolling around in search of the culprit. We giggled, stayed down behind cover.

wasrond the wold in
aty
80 days an bernice was a red shinees and lena eskimow to dademan and mumdeman cum aso to look The red chinese are bad and the yellow chinese are good like we die eskimos kiss their wifves with there noses, so lena hat to rub hers with a boy and everyone at the konsert lafed and lena looked like lena was going to cry on the verhoog. Daar was ‘n feetjie was a feary The best in a white dress who lost the
ailfe sta
silver star on the end of her wand. The feari can do not anything without the sta beakose her silver wand does do no toor magik anemo. she walk round and round and said I lost my silver star. Then she sits down again on throne and says I lost my silver star. The poor fairie cried all the time and the
dwergics
elfs look for her star but they did not find it. so, filias frog told the elves to come on his ship so they can go look for it all over the world. They wend every where in the whole world and everywhere the people were singing and dancing. In america are red indians with feathers in the hair and dance around fires and call each other who, who, who, who, with your hand over your mouth like. In red russia the kossakke fold their arms and go down like this with one leg under them and one kicking out. In one place they wikkel their tummies and make their hands as if they are a cobra going to spit like in sheresaad. The eskimos live in snow houses that’s why lena had white fur on her hat. They dance in sirkels and eat raw meat because the fire will melt the snow and then the poor eskimo will all drown, one shot, dead, who’s scared of eating a bit of raw meat. The eskimos are the best. No one speaks latin because the romans are dead but I can speak some of it because I know the names of plants in Afrikaans and English and some Zulu that Jonas teaches me but I speak kitchen-kaffir and fanagalo like Bokkie but Bok speaks Zulu better. My best word is Kukumakranka. Kukumakranka. Kukumakranka. Like a guinea fowl got a fright. But it’s a flower Gethyllis afra, see, that’s Latin. Just like Ebenaceae. Ebenaceae is my lucky word because it is the family, like grampa De Man, and the children like Bok are things like Euclea and the grandchildren like me are Euclea divinorum is magic guarri in zulu ncafuzana this one is easy to remember it sounds like you put kaffir and kosasana together, magic guarri grows all around our house. I can write, see, Bokkie and Bernice showed me even though I’m only four. The arabins ride on camels and they live in the desert where they make oil so filias frog got some for the stove on his ship, in charterscreek Phinias works for Dademan and Mumdeman but that’s not filias frog, phinias in charters Creek has funny feet that look like a truck went over them because his toes are all out like krokodyl toes sticking over his pategas. Then they went to a place where they wear long dresses and black suits and do waltzes. One two three, one two three, one two three, like this. Bok and Bokkie have showd me how to Waltz, like this, one, two three, one two three and the two-step where you two-step on the turn. In Israel is where Jesus was born and Filias Frog and the elves sang Silent Night and the shepherds and the wise men and everyone is there. Bernice was the queen of Red China and the king has a big sword and he chops off people’s headswho don’t listen to him. In Lapland they have reindeer got horns nearly like Njala but Njala are bigger and they live in tents. And Filias Frog and the elves looked everywhere and asked everyone they met on the trip if they know where the fairy lost her silver star. No one knew anything. It was like it vanished. Vanished is when things just go away, like just gone to nowhere. You can vanish things with magic. Like with Euclea divinorum the muntus vanish sickness and with Euclea undulata headaches. Someone put curlers in Undulata’s leaves. So Filias Frog came back on the ship and upon their return found the fairy on her throne still weeping and repeating; I’ve lost my silver star Then she cries even more when Filias Frog and the elves report that the star, the source of her magic and happiness, is nowhere to be found in the whole wide world. Then the fairy raises herself up from her throne. And
suddenly
a light shines from the centre of the spot where she’d been sitting! She bends down.
Picks up her star
and puts her hand to her mouth. Then Filias Frog and the elves laugh and holler and they say: she’s been sitting on it, she’s been sitting on it, she’s been sitting on her silver star. Everyone from all over the whole world came running onto the stage and I could see Bernice and Lena as they all danced and sang ‘Joy to the World’ and were happy because the fairy had found her silver star. And because the fairy was happy everyone was very happy and they all lived in consummate joy happily ever after.

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.

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.’