A Fork in the Road Page 2

  And then another day is gathered into another night. In a few hours the village’s generators at the power station will be cut and medieval darkness will take over while stars the size of huge white flowers descend almost within reach, so close that by turning your head at the right angle, it is said, you can hear them. In the houses lanterns and paraffin lamps will be lit, the smell of wax candles will invade the bedrooms. In those nights it isn’t difficult to imagine ghosts and spectres and poltergeists and revenants; and to risk going to the graveyard after dark, as some of us boys may do in response to a dare or to prove our mettle to ourselves, means risking one’s life in the very portals of hell.

  That this was still another age was evident, too, in the shops, where open bags of flour or mealies, sugar beans, coffee beans and sugar and dried fruit were arranged in tidy rows, beside rolls of wire and wire mesh, boxes of tea, glass containers filled with sweets – jube-jubes and acid drops and sticky Wilson’s toffees and strips of liquorice and twirls of barley sugar and Nestlé chocolates and the special treat universally and offensively known as ‘nigger balls’. It was evident also on Sundays, when scores of farmers, as unwieldy as bales of hay in their Sunday best, would come in to church on their horse-drawn buggies and ‘spiders’ or on decoratively painted mule-wagons or donkey-carts.

  The church. Some of these villages might have a synagogue or an Anglican or even a Catholic church; but the heart of all the communal activities was Dutch Reformed, ruled over by the undisputed trinity of dominee, sexton, and organist. They were the immediate representatives of God Almighty on earth, and the legend painted on the whitewashed wall behind the pulpit, proclaimed that God is Love with the same flourish of conviction as the Mené Mené Tekél Ufarsin on Balthazar’s wall. The only flaw in the presentation was that, over the years, irreverent dampness had created an unsightly rust-coloured stain that nearly obliterated the Love. A sign of the times, no doubt.

  This did not prevent me from seriously considering, at an early stage of my life, following my parents’ fondest wish by taking the cloth. But the closest I ever came to the seat of power – after having finally disappointed them by deciding not to become a dominee after all – was by being allowed to play the straight-backed little harmonium for the children’s weekly prayer meeting on Tuesday afternoons; which I did with great devotion and so much embellishment that most of the hymns were stretched to double their original length. This was where sin was defined – and at least to some extent had its origin – and where much of my youthful notion of evil was conceived.

  Even more than the stories of the brothers Grimm, the Bible had all of us in its thrall with its litany of violence and cruelty, much of it thrillingly mixed with sex and intimations of sex. It started with God’s totally unfair expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden where they only did what he should have foreseen from the beginning. And then Cain clobbering the namby-pamby Abel over the head. And all those violent sons of God taking to wife the comely daughters of men. And Lot offering to throw his own daughters to the mob baying outside his house in Sodom for the two strangers inside whom they want to fuck, or to ‘know’ as the Bible primly phrases it. And after the destruction of the town, these same daughters making their poor old father drunk so that, as the Bible once again phrases it, they can ‘lie’ with him for the sake of allegedly preserving his seed. And God ordering Abraham to cut the throat of his son Isaac just to tempt him. And Joseph’s brothers throwing him into a well to rid themselves of his discomfiting dreams. And the rape of Dinah, and the bloody revenge of Simeon and Levi. And Moses ordering the slaughter of all the Midianite women except the virgins who are reserved to satisfy the lust of his soldiers. And Tamar, disguising herself as a prostitute, cheating her own father-in-law into fucking her. And God-fearing Jephthah killing his own daughter to fulfil a vow to a bloodthirsty God. And Aholah and Aholibah lusting after the young paramours ‘whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses’. The New Testament has its own litany of atrocities, although most of these are committed by the enemies of Israel. But even Jesus is suspect: not so much because of violence as of more subtle cruelties – once when he refuses to speak to his own mother and brothers (But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!); once when his mother asks him for wine at a wedding and he chides her: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ I have heard numerous dominees offering very abstruse explanations of these episodes; but they all sounded too much like whitewashing. It could not efface – even if it did manage to suppress, for years – the impression that just below the surface of the words in the Bible lurked the same kind of menacing darkness that I could sense in the small villages of my youth.

  Even acts of charity and good deeds depended on violence. I had no compunction about the slaughtering of poultry and could laugh my own head off at the mad flutterings of headless chickens in the backyard in preparation for a good Sunday meal, although they tended to return to me at night in terrifying dreams. I never attempted a decapitation myself, even when offered the knife my father had sharpened with consummate skill. But there was something more morbid about cutting the throat of a sheep – stretching the neck back to tauten it to the utmost, the eyes turning white, then the single deft stroke of the long, sharpened blade, and the last smothered bleat subsiding into a liquid gurgle as a fountain of bright red blood gushed from the slash. This ritual used to be performed by my father and some helpers just before Christmas every year, when generous food parcels were prepared in our backyard and kitchen by the Women’s Auxiliary, to be distributed, accompanied by colourful tracts about the mercy of God and the healing powers vested in the sacrifice of his Lamb, among the poor and the needy. And there lingered some atavistic lust in hearing, at nagmaal, the dominee intone: ‘Eat, drink, this is my body and my blood.’

  This was, it seems to me more and more, the clue to all those little villages of my youth, strung like dusty pearls along the endless dirt roads of the interior. And the impact of that awareness was heightened by the loneliness that encompassed each of them, the space of eternity itself that surrounded them under the vast resonant hollow of the sky.

  A hundred miles away might lie another town to which, once every three or six months, one’s mother might drive with a car full of friends, for a day’s shopping, to return with a small orange-brown suitcase crammed with spoils from another world. Apart from Christmas or birthdays these were the only occasions for presents. Even if one’s father were a magistrate there was never enough money to spoil children. Until I was well into high school I never received more than two pennies a week pocket money; which meant that when I saw a little red car in a grocery shop, at the mind-boggling price of ninepence, I had to arrange with the daunting shopkeeper, Mr Levin, to keep it for me for five weeks until I could pay the full amount. I still remember the long, exciting, fearful walk to the shop, with my pennies safely stowed in a buff envelope and pinned into my shirt pocket, and how I kept looking round every few yards to make sure I was not followed by a gang of robbers. Even the knowledge that if I was in fact attacked, the miscreants were bound to be sent to jail by my father, did not altogether make me feel any safer.

  There might be other dangers lurking along the way. I might be confronted by Ria, the ever-smiling hunchback daughter of friends of my parents, who was known without any warning to fall down in the dust where she would writhe and kick and utter terrible sounds and foam at the mouth like something from the Bible. Or Agnes with the harelip, cleft by the Devil himself to visit on her, as we all knew, some unspeakable sin committed by someone in her family, three or four generations back. Or the young giant Neels who after the lingering, painful death of his father was known to beat up his fat mother every Saturday. Or Mrs Oberholzer who had been buried in a shoebox when she’d allegedly died as a baby, and then somehow was salvaged when at the
funeral someone heard a whimpering sound in the box, and grew into a woman of over seven feet tall. Or old Uncle Rohloff, who was a German and therefore under house arrest all through the war, a puny bowlegged old man with a shock of Einstein-like white hair and watery eyes that peered myopically through very thick, and very dusty, glasses. He had in a showcase a most amazing collection of teeth – of sharks and whales and warthogs and a lion. Towards the end of the war it was rumoured that in a hidden chest he also kept the teeth of seven Jews. I once tried to blackmail him into selling the collection to me for sixpence; when he refused I staged a robbery to steal the teeth, but it was foiled by his beautiful daughter Christa who gave me piano lessons. I only desisted after Uncle Rohloff attempted in vain to teach me, with reference to photographs of Toscanini, to conduct the school percussion band. Or I might run into Robert, the black policeman who ate cats. Once, when for some reason never explained to us children, my parents had to get rid of a stray tomcat, my father offered it to Robert, who duly came the next day to thank him and to assure him what a great meal the tom had made; which did not, however, prevent the cat from returning home to us a week later. Or I might be waylaid by any of the ghosts from the delightful horror stories old bearded uncles or moustached aunts used to tell us on weekend visits to farms near the town.

  But in the end I safely reached the shop and got my red car; and then hardly ever played with it.

  I was more interested in playing with my sister Elbie’s dolls. I had one of my own, a boy rag doll called Jannie, with an imbecile painted face, for whom I once tried to knit a tie; but never having been taught how to end off a piece of knitting I gave up when the tie just grew and grew until it started creeping out of the front door. After that I confined myself to Elbie’s dolls, not only because of that tie but because unlike Jannie, her dolls were all girls and it was much more fun undressing them. I also made sure – little shit that I was – that I always claimed for myself whichever one, at any given moment, was her own favourite.

  Only one of her dolls I couldn’t stand. A real spoilt brat, with rosebud lips and blue eyes that opened and closed, and a silly simpering smile. Elbie loved Tootsie. But Tootsie, with her hard, painted head and arms and legs that hypocritically pretended to deny her stuffed torso, gave me no peace of mind. Even at night she would stalk my dreams. I hated her. So passionately that I decided to kill her. Which I did one afternoon by driving an iron stake through her painted throat. Afterwards I buried Tootsie in a shallow grave. Instead of restoring my sleep, guilt made me wake up in cold shivers at night. Only religion could save me. On the vacant plot behind our home I stacked an altar on which I intended to sacrifice my most prized possession to atone for my guilt. For some reason I believed that it had to consist of twelve stones. But the only stones a weak and skinny little fellow like me could handle resulted in a most unimpressive altar barely a foot tall. So I cheated, adding about ten more. On top I placed the little red car. But at the last moment, fearful that it might really be consumed by the fire from heaven I would be praying for, I substituted a nicely shaped soapstone. It took some time to persuade myself that this stone was really my most prized possession. Nothing less, I knew, would find favour in the eyes of the Almighty. I prayed and prayed until I was sure that God was convinced of my utter sincerity. But it was like the priests of Baäl trying to milk rain from their heathen god. No one up there would hearken unto me. And in the end, when my mother called me home for supper, I had to give God up for a bad job. Another sleepless night.

  The next day I confessed to the murder. First I tried to fob it off on the Devil, as the South African cricket captain Hansie Cronjé tried many years later; but long before him I found that the story didn’t wash. I wasn’t killed in a plane accident for it, but my backside burned for days afterwards. At least I am still alive, and no longer plagued by God.

  The murder of the doll was set in a context of pervasive violence. In my readings over many years in the many histories of South Africa, most particularly the eighteenth century, it has always struck me how excessively violent encounters between racial or national groups, or even individuals from the same group, have been. Violent encounters occur in all societies: but in South Africa there almost invariably appears to have been an added edge to it, a fortuitous surplus of violence. A friend at university once told me about a trip he had made with a posse of police in search of some cattle rustlers who had wreaked devastation on his father’s farm. After a day and a night of futile tracking they found a young black man walking along a farm road carrying a bundle on a stick. There was nothing to connect him with the crime. But he was black, and they met him at the height of their rage and frustration; so they jumped out of the police car and started shooting wildly. The youngster, scared out of his wits, started running. A sure proof of guilt. He was shot in both legs, and fell down. At point blank range he was then given a shot in the back, which shattered his spine. Then came the supplement, as they fell on him and kicked and beat him to a pulp before the broken body was flung into the back of the van and taken to the station, where he was kept in a cell overnight. At irregular intervals policemen would come in to beat him up some more. Only the next morning was he taken to hospital. Quite miraculously, he survived. Months later he was taken to court. My father found him not guilty.

  And this goes back for centuries: white violence perpetrated on blacks, black violence on whites, white on white, black on black. As if something in the very geographical make-up of the country stimulated a kind of desperation for which excessive violence became the only manageable expression. Violence as a kind of language in its own right, an articulation which is either preverbal or which begins where language stops. And those people who now flee the country because it has become ‘too violent’, or foreigners who fear to visit South Africa for the same reason, lack perspective on the long, long history of excess that has led to the current situation.

  In the villages of my childhood violence was not necessarily always excessive; much of it, in fact, was muted or obscure, domestic in scope, restricted in pain or effect. But it was always there. And it manifested itself as a mark of the ordinary and the everyday. There was the dominee with his ruddy, fleshy face, who beamed goodwill and the radiant love of God from the pulpit twice every Sunday, and whose thin pretty wife one day, after we’d moved to another town, pitifully confessed to my mother in a long letter about how he slept around among the wives of deacons and stalwarts of the congregation, and how he would beat her if she dared to confront him with it. Once he actually threw a Bible at her, and a hard corner left a purple bruise on her cheek. My friend Katkop whose father, the butcher, a massive man with biceps like hams, ritually rounded up his family – wife and five children, boys and girls – after family prayers on Saturday nights and thrashed the hell out of all of them. Often the mother was unable to take her place behind the counter on Mondays and Tuesdays; Katkop himself would regularly, with a curious show of pride, stagger to school on Mondays to show us his bruised back: sometimes it was so badly scarred that his shirt stuck to it and had to be cut loose. And of course, there were canings at school – girls on their hands or legs, but in serious cases on their buttocks as well, boys on their backsides. Ritual demanded that after such a thrashing the culprits would parade in front of their classmates behind the toilets to remove their shorts and show the damage. Anything less than blood was scoffed at.

  And I remember Elise. She was a year older than I, the daughter of the police sergeant, an attractive blonde girl with long plaits down her back, blue-eyed, with the face of an innocent angel. She taught me the rudiments of stamp collecting. She also introduced me to some of the discoveries she had made through her father’s job. She knew in advance when boys – some of them eighteen or nineteen, others as young as fourteen, or even twelve – had been sentenced to be caned. (My father would have done the sentencing, but he never spoke about this.) The boy would then be brought to the police station, which was built on a corner of our large pl
ot, and taken into a corrugated iron shed depressingly covered in faded, peeling red paint. Inside, the boy would be stripped naked. There was a long narrow table on which he would be forced to lie face down, and his wrists and ankles were held by four policemen. There was a district surgeon in attendance. And of course the man who had to inflict the punishment, usually the burliest cop on the premises.

  We could not see what was happening inside, of course. But Elise knew exactly where to crouch to listen to the blows and screams from inside. For her, the pièce de résistance came when the door was flung open and to the accompaniment of bellowing laughter from the assembled cops, all clustered in the doorway, the caned boy would stagger out and start running frantically this way and that through the gravelled backyard, like a decapitated chicken. How she laughed – even though I think, in retrospect, that there was hysteria in that laughter, a touch of madness – and how she would revisit, in our conversations afterwards, every horrifying little detail of the event: the bleeding stripes on his back and pale buttocks, the streaks of blood and piss and shit down his legs, the pathetic dangling of his prick. On one occasion she was so worked up that she actually lifted her blue dress, her eyes unnaturally and feverishly bright, to show me that she’d peed herself. Once was enough for me. After that I always concocted reasons for missing the show. But Elise never missed one, and afterwards she would seek me out with a glowing account of everything that had happened.