Childish Things Read online

  I kept my eyes on my hockey stick. Hau Bonm, Khanh Duong, Kien Cu. The names sang in my head. Within three weeks the Communist wave coloured the map of South Vietnam. Important cities were taken almost daily, mostly without resistance. I was overcome by the same stifling feeling I had when I was small and heard that counting-out rhyme, afraid that I wouldn’t be allowed to play any longer, afraid that I would be counted out. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo …

  ‘What about that pal of your brother’s?’

  ‘Which pal?’

  ‘That Pierre guy, man. What about him?’

  ‘What about him?’

  I looked suspiciously at my roommate. Her head was working like one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks, the kind that ticked so loudly one couldn’t sleep. Tick-tock-tick-tock. She had a yen for my brother and she realised that my cooperation would smooth her path. Tick-tock-tick-tock … And she knew how to ensure my cooperation.

  ‘Don’t act stupid, Mart.’ When she was annoyed her voice always sounded just slightly higher; more like other girls’ voices. ‘He’s a much better bet than old Ben. He’s older, he’s brighter, he’s –’

  ‘Uglier,’ I cut her short.

  ‘Looks aren’t everything!’ She almost managed to sound shocked.

  ‘Look who’s talking! When were you last in love with an ugly guy?’

  ‘But Pierre isn’t ugly!’ A quick change in tactics. ‘He’s got an interesting face! Those high cheekbones! And those black eyes …’ Her own eyes were narrowed against the bright light but I could see the flash of the yellow flecks in the grey and the green. ‘He looks like … like a French matador or a Spanish philosopher!’

  I started to laugh and folded my arms round my legs. With my head resting on my knees I listened to the groans of the rugby players and the rhythmic thwack of hockey sticks against a ball. But somewhere behind the groans and the rhythmic thwacking I still heard the counting-out rhyme: Da Nang, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Hau Bonm, Khanh Duong, Kien Cu …

  London

  10 October 1992

  My dear Child

  Now that my story has its own momentum, I can’t get the decade out of my mind. Like that time with the Vietnamese place names.

  If only I could erase my guilt the way Bull’s-Eye erased those historical dates on his blackboard: 1652, 1838, 1948 …

  Speaking of historical dates, I am perfectly aware of the fact that today is Paul Kruger’s birthday. So you see, I’ll never be able to clear my conscience. My memory is engraved with the holy days of a people I want to forget.

  In the meanwhile it seems as if the worst is going to happen in Angola. Jonas Savimbi will continue to fight. Do you know what some smug Western diplomat said on TV last night? ‘The trouble with movements such as Unita – which has fought a sixteen-year civil war after a long struggle against colonialism – is that they believe it is their right to govern the country. Savimbi hasn’t fought a war for thirty years to be vice-president of anything.’

  Thirty years of war. Almost as long as I’ve been alive. With no end in sight.

  In South Africa, too, the blood flows incessantly. No end in sight.

  ‘The sins of the fathers’. That verse in the Bible drove me to a frenzy of rhetorical questions during my adolescence. Why, I asked Simon, why should we even try to be good? Why don’t we simply do as we like? If we’re going to be punished for the sins of our forefathers in any case?

  ‘And our forefathers had no shortage of sins,’ Simon murmured.

  He was dragging audibly on a home-made joint and unexpectedly handed it to me, one of the few times he had ever done so. I felt as grateful and as stupid as a small child allowed to draw something with her father’s pen before really knowing how to hold it.

  ‘That sounds like something Mr Maritz could’ve thought up!’ Snorting, my mouth full of smoke, my head full of uncontrollable thoughts. ‘As though there was a stupid headmaster somewhere in heaven, sucking stupid school rules out of his stupid thumb!’

  Simon shrugged and slowly blew out the smoke. And then, as he usually did when he didn’t know what to say, quoted Bob Dylan: ‘“The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind …”’

  At that moment they were the most profound words I had ever heard. But then they say that everything sounds different once you start smoking pot.

  Love

  M.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  ‘Hey, listen to this bit in the newspaper.’ I looked up from my patch of shadow under the umbrella to where the other four were sitting at the side of the swimming pool. ‘If you smoke pot regularly you can develop breasts. That’s if you’re a male, of course.’

  ‘How regularly?’ Pierre asked.

  ‘At least three times a week it says here.’

  ‘Then we’re still safe,’ Pierre said to Simon without a glimmer of a smile.

  ‘And if you’re a woman?’ Dalena, who was sitting between Simon and Pierre, asked. She was staring at her legs in the water.

  ‘“If a woman smokes marijuana,” I read from the paper, “there is a possibility of one in a hundred that her breasts will be enlarged.”’

  ‘Then it’s probably worth taking the chance,’ Dalena decided and kicked her legs harder. She sounded as serious as Pierre.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind you smoking dope,’ my brother smiled. He leaned back on his elbows, his face turned to the sky like a golden sunflower. Both he and Dalena had the gift of lying in the sun as still as plants without any sign of discomfort. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with your breasts.’

  In my mind’s eye I saw a bold headline on the front page of the newspaper: Van Vuuren Blushes!

  ‘Well … I don’t particularly want to look like Laurika …’ my roommate in her shiny black swimsuit floundered, ‘but I wouldn’t mind being a bit bigger.’

  ‘Who’s Laurika?’ Pierre asked with lively interest.

  ‘A very forward matric girl,’ Suna giggled next to him.

  He actually laughed at her silly little joke. I lowered my head over the newspaper but watched them over my dark glasses.

  Of us three girls, Dalena had the best pair of legs, but as she herself admitted, around the top she wasn’t very well endowed. I couldn’t complain about what went on north of my navel but I would’ve given anything to have smaller hips. Suna, on the other hand, was built like a shop-window mannequin: top and bottom in perfect proportion, her waist so slender she could fit into my mother’s wedding dress (without the girdle, which had pinched Ma so much that she looked as though she was attending a funeral in all her wedding pictures). She wore a white bikini that accented her tanned stomach, with a tiny top which became transparent every time she went into the water, so that her nipples showed through the wet material like two fried mushrooms.

  Just as well that she has an acne problem, I thought, otherwise she would’ve been an unbearable ass. And immediately I was ashamed of my thoughts.

  Meanwhile Dalena had disappeared under the water with a soft splash. After a few seconds Simon sat up to see what had become of her. Only after she had completed five lengths did she burst through the surface again.

  ‘If you smoked dope,’ Simon said, ‘you wouldn’t have so much breath.’

  ‘I’ve been … practising … in the bath … for years,’ Dalena gasped. ‘Seeing how long … I can keep … my head … under water.’

  ‘Now why would someone want to do that?’ I couldn’t decide whether it was interest or sarcasm I heard in Pierre’s husky voice.

  ‘Boredom,’ Dalena sighed in the pool.

  Pierre was tall and slender in his trunks, and I had to admit not as shapeless as he seemed under his clothes. Sinewy, I would’ve said, muscular in a sinewy way. He had the darkest skin of the five of us. Probably born with a dark skin because he didn’t seem anywhere near as comfortable in the sun as my brother or my roommate. His stomach was as hard as a brown stone smoothed by water. Actually, his whole body reminded me of an elongated, water-smoothed stone
, something that would easily slip out of your fingers if you tried to hold it, but would also be heavier than you had expected. As if he weighed much more than Simon even though he was a lot thinner. It was difficult to explain.

  The dark, curly hairs around his navel were damp and ran downwards in a straggling path that disappeared into his trunks. I looked away quickly, at the banana trees which seemed as if they were being dragged sideways by heavy bunches of fruit. Closer to the swimming pool, near the few pawpaw trees, their trunks like slender umbrella handles, a clump of avocado trees also bore abnormally large dark-green fruit.

  ‘It’s terrible.’ Dalena trod water until she reached Simon and Pierre, and hung from her arms at the pool’s edge between the two boys. ‘I sometimes get so bored that I’d do anything just to make sure that I was still alive!’

  ‘Anything?’

  She didn’t see the sharp look Pierre gave her. It seemed as if she didn’t even hear him.

  ‘That’s what scares me most on earth.’ She shivered as if she were suddenly cold. ‘Boredom.’

  My brother frowned, grabbed her by the hand and hauled her out of the pool. On the edge, next to him, her body shook again as she shivered.

  ‘Your sister is never bored,’ she said absently, her arms folded across her chest. ‘There’s always something going on in her head. My head sometimes gets … just black … a big, black hole …’

  Simon and Suna both looked slightly uncomfortable about this unexpected confession. But Pierre nodded slowly as if Dalena were speaking to him only.

  A T-shirt with the slogan Black is Beautiful, I read in the newspaper, had been banned by the Publications Control Board because it was a threat to law and order. A Coloured train passenger had been set alight by two white ticket inspectors because he couldn’t show them his ticket. They poured petrol over his head and set him alight with matches, I read with a growing sense of unreality, saying to him: ‘You’ll burn in hell like this one day, Hotnot.’

  In Saigon there were few signs of fear while the attacking forces approached. Western inhabitants relaxed next to their swimming pools and wondered whether to have Chinese or Vietnamese food.

  I folded the paper and turned on to my back. The umbrella was blue above my head, the sky even bluer above the umbrella. I should’ve been studying history – we were starting exams next week – but it was too hot to concentrate on the Great Trek.

  ‘I wonder what they’re going to do to him,’ Suna said – and not for the first time that day – as we made sandwiches in the kitchen.

  ‘Perhaps you should be more worried about her,’ Dalena suggested.

  ‘She’s OK. She isn’t in the hostel. And they say he seduced her.’

  ‘Old Hein!’ Dalena burst out laughing. ‘He couldn’t even seduce a dog!’

  ‘So you think she seduced him?’

  Suna looked out of the kitchen window, her hands motionless above the slices of tomato as she contemplated this exciting new possibility. I followed her gaze to a few palm-tree trunks which grew like burglar bars in front of the window and wished we could discuss something other than Heinrich and Jolene. But I had to admit I was almost as inquisitive as Suna about what had really happened.

  The rumour had swept through the school on Friday morning like a fire through a suburb of thatched houses, driven by a wild gale of speculation. First we heard that a prefect had caught Hein when he was creeping out of the hostel on his way to sleep with Jolene. Shortly afterwards, Laurika came up with the story that it was the hostel master himself who went to fetch Hein at Jolene’s home early in the morning. After they had spent the night together, she added meaningfully. And barely an hour later, Maggie spread the tale that the headmaster had also been present, that he and the hostel master had caught Hein and Jolene in bed together. ‘On the job,’ as Maggie put it. Jolene’s divorced mother was evidently not at home and there were any number of scurrilous stories as to where she had spent the night.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be expelled?’ Suna wanted to know.

  ‘Hein will be OK. His father and the headmaster are both in the Broederbond.’ Dalena wiped her brown hair out of her face with the back of her hand. The blade of the bread knife whipped through the air, dangerously close to her forehead. ‘I don’t know about Jolene. Her father isn’t a big cheese.’

  ‘Shame,’ Suna said.

  ‘The worst that can happen to Hein is that his father will give him such a beating that he’d rather become a pansy than ever touch a girl again.’

  ‘Shame,’ Suna said again but it was difficult for her not to sound excited. ‘I hear his father usually beats him with the belt of his old Voortrekker uniform …’

  Simon laughed uproariously outside on the stoep, where he and Pierre were helping my father to get the fire going while they drank beer and told dirty jokes. Since Simon’s entry into the army, my father treated him more like a pal than a child, madly buddy-buddy-all-boys-together … In my opinion, my father was green with envy because he’d never had the opportunity to play at soldiers. He was too young for the Second World War – and now he was too old for the war on the border.

  My mother had herded us girls into the kitchen because she didn’t want us to hear the dirty jokes around the fire. We were supposed to make sandwiches to barbecue over the coals later in the evening. We worked as briskly as a row of factory workers. The sooner we finished, the sooner we could join the party round the fire. Dalena cut the bread and buttered each slice, Suna slapped two slices of tomato on the butter, I sprinkled grated cheese over the tomato and Dalena sprinkled salt and pepper on the cheese. (Dalena, of course, was the most energetic worker.) The only problem was that not one of us wanted to work with the onions. All three of us were wearing a heavy layer of Suna’s new aquamarine mascara and it wasn’t water-proof even though it sounded as if it was meant for deep-sea divers. If the onions made our eyes water, we were going to look like we’d just gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali. So we simply pretended to have forgotten the onions.

  ‘But surely he’ll be expelled from the hostel?’ Despite my struggles, I kept being sucked into the conversation. ‘Or do you think his father can prevent that as well?’

  ‘Man, those Broeders can manage anything.’ Dalena listened to the laughter outside, her head at an angle. ‘You can tell your old man isn’t a Broeder. He’s too jolly.’

  ‘He can be pretty impossible at times,’ I mumbled, a piece of dry bread in my mouth.

  ‘Not a patch on my father,’ she assured me at once. ‘My mother says it’s because he grew up the hard way that he’s so miserable, but I think she’s simply looking for an excuse for his lack of humour.’

  ‘My father was always laughing,’ Suna said thoughtfully. ‘He had a gruff kind of laugh like gravel being shaken. I’ve never heard anyone else laugh like that …’

  Dalena and I looked at one another but said nothing. Suna’s father died when she was six. That’s why she still sounded like a doting little girl whenever she spoke about him.

  ‘My mother won’t win a prize for being the friendliest woman in the district, either,’ Dalena said. ‘There’s an American painting, I don’t know whether you know it, of a man and a woman in front of a church – I think it’s a church – the one holding a garden fork or something, two real old sourpusses. They always remind me of my parents. Thin and peevish. As if they’re scared they won’t go to heaven if they have a belly-laugh once in a while.’

  ‘So where do you come from?’ Suna laughed.

  ‘You may well ask. My mother says they found me in the mountain and chopped off my tail. Baboon’s child.’

  ‘My mother told me that story too,’ I said.

  ‘The difference is that my mother still expects me to believe it.’ Dalena sprinkled salt on a slice of tomato and popped it into her mouth. ‘I think if I had to ask her about the facts of life she would rather commit suicide than admit that she and my father … you know … did it.’

  I jumped up to swi
tch on the radio on the windowsill so that my mother, paging through a women’s magazine in the next room, wouldn’t overhear our conversation. I quickly changed the station from Afrikaans to LM Radio.

  ‘And how did you find out … you know, where you really came from?’ I asked when I slid back into my seat at the kitchen table. The music enfolded me, made me feel safe, like the darkness in the hostel room at night.

  ‘Tcha, one of my sisters’ boyfriends told me. I didn’t believe him, of course I didn’t. I can’t imagine it to this day. I mean, if we were talking about your ma and pa, Mart, well, it’s possible to picture something like that. With a little imagination. But my father and mother? Never!’

  ‘I suppose it’s difficult for any child to –’

  ‘Not difficult,’ Dalena cut me short. ‘Impossible!’

  ‘I know,’ Suna giggled. ‘Like old Maritz and his wife.’

  I could just about picture the headmaster without his clothes, a large pink mountain of a man, but the picture disappeared when I reached his head. I couldn’t get the shiny layer of Brylcreem out of his blond hair. Or perhaps he did it Brylcreem and all?

  ‘Ma-art!’ my mother called from the living room. ‘Must you play the music so loudly?’

  ‘Ohhh, Maa!’ I called in return. ‘I thought you liked Abba!’

  But my mother’s voice had disturbed the intimate atmosphere. Dalena’s head was at an angle again to hear Simon’s voice and Suna stared blindly out of the window. I stood up to turn down the radio.

  ‘They say it wasn’t Jolene’s first time.’ Suna sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, and looked at the slowly darkening sky. ‘They say she’s not really –’

  ‘Who the hell are the “they” you toss around so easily?’ Dalena’s voice was fiery with indignation.

  ‘If I didn’t know you better, Dalena,’ I said, ‘I would’ve sworn that you’re jealous of Jolene.’