A Fork in the Road Read online

  The event did turn me into a murderer, though. Not only in my six-year-old dreams at night, from which I would wake up screaming, but in the games I devised in the afternoons or over weekends when I was by myself. I would take my father’s small hand-axe from the shed where he kept the firewood for the geyser, and set upon some of the thorn trees in the expanse of veld surrounding our house. On other days I would wander among the trees and rehearse my lessons to them, or preach to them from the Bible; but on these afternoons I was bent on killing them. And the bright amber-like gum that tended to cover the wounds in the course of time, gave me a peculiar sense of accomplishment. Often, of course, I would be an investigating policeman discovering a criminal lurking in the shape of the tree, in which case I would perform my noble civic duty. But quite often I indeed assumed the role of the murderer. Until my father discovered some of the mutilated trees and ordered me, by way of punishment, to chop them off properly and cut the branches into firewood.

  There were other incidents that might have ended badly. Quite recently my sister Marita reminded me of how, when she was five and I fourteen, I’d unscrewed a light bulb from its socket in the dining room – one of those lamps that worked with a pulley and a counterweight so you could easily raise or lower it – and then ordered her to climb on a chair and put her finger in the socket, whereupon I flicked on the switch. She could have been electrocuted. But she assures me that her recollection of the event was wrapped in a feeling of glee and accomplishment, as she knew that my mother would give me hell for it.

  One particular act of violence was a consequence of falling in love. I must have been about thirteen at the time. There was a pretty girl in my sister Elbie’s class, the dominee’s younger daughter, whose name was Driekie. Like Orlando in the Forest of Arden I started carving her name on thorn-tree trunks previously disfigured in my murderous frenzies. Or I would climb up to my perch among the fragrant branches of the pepper tree beside the house, where I could weep about the bitterness of unrequited love, as I tried to conjure up the image of her sweet, impish face, her dark blue eyes, her long thick plaits. I would of course never, ever consider making any direct overture or even sending a tentative note hinting at my feelings. That had no place in my notion of true and everlasting love. I would simply pine away and, maybe, one day, her name might mysteriously figure on my tombstone. Unless …

  It is possible that I might have hinted at my suffering in a confession to the only person I could trust, my sister Elbie, and that she was the one who had the idea of playing school in our garage. All that matters is that one Saturday a number of children drawn from Elbie’s class and my own gathered in our garage, which I had fitted out as a classroom. Elbie, Driekie and a few others were the pupils. I was, of course, the teacher. My friend Stephen would be the principal. Although I enjoyed the prospect of running the lessons and imparting wisdom to my young charges, the whole morning was actually conceived around the notion of punishment. Corporal punishment. Which was the only way I could think of, to get close to Driekie.

  The pupils were all subjected to some rigorous and vigorous teaching, and classwork was organised in such a way that mistakes and transgressions could in no way be avoided. Initially it was regarded as great fun, and amid much giggling and sniggering the first culprits had to approach the teacher’s desk to be caned. It was only then that they discovered there was nothing playful or funny about the caning. Elbie was the first to receive the order to offer her hand for three whacks with the sturdy but supple green switch I had cut from a pepper tree. I’m sure it took all the defiance she could muster not to cry, but she was tough.

  After that the pupils became recalcitrant. Driekie refused to put out a hand and was adamant that she would absolutely not bend over. So she had to receive her stripes on her bare legs. At the first blow she started crying, a thin reedy wail. I was horrified. Somehow the reality of her pain shocked me out of the imaginings that had gone before. At the same time I could not give up and suffer the humiliation of being insulted as a teacher. I aimed another serious stroke at her thigh, but she avoided it, kicked over the chair she had been sitting on, and scurried to the far side of my teacher’s table. An undignified scuffle followed. Most of the children were laughing boisterously, but a few of the girls were shouting at me in outrage.

  The only way to salvage my dignity was to order Driekie to the principal’s office for some severe chastisement. And then it all fell flat. Stephen confronted me with a broad smile and said that he didn’t think a silly little offence in the classroom deserved more than a light-hearted reprimand. As I tried to get past him to take the matter in hand myself, Driekie deftly sidestepped me and ran home. No one was in a mood for lessons any more.

  I pleaded with a very reluctant Elbie to placate and beg Driekie not to report the matter to her dominee father, which might unleash the full wrath of God on me; and so I was spared the consequences. It was the end of my first attempts at teaching; it was also, as far as I can remember, the end of my sullied love. What the whole experience brought home to me about the nature of violence, and perhaps of love, I am not quite sure. All I can recall, and the memory still unsettles me, is the amount of unresolved violence there must have been in me at the time; and the relation between this dark, smouldering rage inside me and the angry world that surrounded me. And it seems to me that the excessive energy of my reactions was directly related, not to any masochistic or sadistic urge, but to the simple fact that I have always been terrified by violence.

  I can remember only one fight I was involved in as a schoolboy, with my best friend, Danie Pretorius. For some long-forgotten reason he drove me mad during one playtime, and after school I waited for him beside the tennis court and fell on him with flailing fists until he ran off crying, and then he told his big brother Kokka about it, and Kokka beat me up, and I told my father to take up the matter with their widowed mother, and my father told me to fight my own battles, and then Danie and I were friends again.

  These were the issues that rippled along the surface of our lives: personal upheavals that arrived quietly, or with spectacular suddenness, and then subsided into the even tenor of a small-town existence. There was a benign equanimity over it all; but often something else became visible, a narrowness, something threatening, a sense of danger, of darker forces moving like muscles under the skin of the everyday. Things we either tried to ignore or suppress, or which remained like a lump in the stomach or a clot in the blood, something we knew that ultimately we could not control and which one day, one night, might rise up like a freak wave to engulf us and the little world in which we had, in vain, tried to shelter or to hide for too long.

  WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

  A LONG, LONG time ago, behind the seven mountains, behind the seven woods, behind the seven rivers, there lived a man who had three daughters. For my wife Karina, this was the beginning of writing: the formula with which all stories in Polish began.

  For me, language began on the day we started learning English in school. I must have been six. In Jagersfontein, the small village in which we were living then, English was a foreign language. To us, to me, everything happened only in Afrikaans. For the black people in the ‘location’ at a safe distance from our white enclave in the vast dust bowl of the southern Free State, where you could see forever in every direction, another language, Sotho, also existed, but it was never consciously absorbed by our white-tuned minds. Except – but I shall get to this later. I knew that my parents occasionally spoke English to visitors from other planets; and my mother, who had grown up in the Eastern Cape among the descendants of the 1820 British Settlers, had always cherished delusions of grandeur intimately linked to that language. But to me, as part of a captive audience suddenly addressed in English by our beloved teacher, Miss Gouws, who was small and wide and the guardian of knowledge that spanned the globe three times, this was something wholly new.

  Some of the children – certainly the foul-mouthed Thys, and most certainly the beautiful dark
-plaited Louisa, but perhaps not Fanie, whose father had joined the army to go to war for the English – giggled and elbowed each other; some were stunned into silence. I could feel my scalp shrink and start to itch, could feel shivers like spiders running up and down my spine, could feel my small balls contract and my throat go dry. The lesson itself, read from a bright blue book, must have been unspeakably drab. Something about a boy called Sam and a girl called Pam who lived in a caravan and had a ridiculous little dog called Bob. (See Bob wag his tail.) To me it was like discovering a new hemisphere to the known world. And I remember how, that afternoon after school, I wandered among the pungent lavender bushes and the dry blue smell of the bluegums, reading aloud to myself about Sam and Pam and the caravan and Bob of the perennially wagging tail, and later abandoning the blue book on the gleaming red stoep, to continue my wanderings without help or hindrance, faster and faster, enfolded in a whorl of red dust as I recited from memory the lines I had learned in school. When that was no longer enough, I started improvising, addressing in an English of my own invention the shrubs and diehard zinnias and my father’s beds of beetroot and carrots and peas and beans. I would intone the word caravan and listen to the sound dying in the trembling white heat. Or pronounce, trippingly upon the tongue, the line See Bob wag his tail. Or invent English-sounding words to hurl among the thorn trees and the stunted peach and apricot trees, entranced by their mere sound. There was, soon, no more meaning inhering in the words. It was only sound: rhythms, cadences, vowels, consonants. Language.

  It was my first conscious discovery of words. Suddenly, language was no longer something that happened by itself, a give-and-take that required no effort or concentration, but a material thing that could be shaped and manipulated, a thing that could, in turn, manipulate me.

  I know now that there had been another, comparable discovery of language, years earlier, but this had happened subliminally.

  It had occurred when I must have been two or three years old. At that time my mother had suffered from a long illness, so that I was mostly brought up by my old back nanny, a Sotho woman, who used to carry me in a tightly wrapped bundle on her back, my first intimation of safety and security; and as she went about her chores in the house, she would tell me or sing to me the stories of her people. In our family she didn’t even have a name: she was simply known by the generic name of ‘old Aia’, borrowed from early Malay slaves. Long before I could understand a word, the cadences of her stories were insinuated into me. And there they were to lie dormant for years until in some of my later novels – Devil’s Valley, Praying Mantis and perhaps one or two others – I found myself almost instinctively groping back for those impulses I had long regarded as lost, and began to recover in the arcane processes of my own storytelling.

  After those early discoveries the thrill was repeated every time I tried to learn a new language. I would stroll in some more or less deserted place and haltingly, fumblingly, talk aloud to myself, in Dutch, in German or French, in Spanish or Italian or Portuguese, tuning my ear and my tongue in to the syllables and rhythms of the new words, as if learning their meanings for the first time. In a way the most challenging of the languages was the Latin my father started teaching me when I was thirteen. We never went beyond Fabulae Faciles and an early primer, but this certainly came from a space beyond anything else I’d ever come across. In this case the issue was, perhaps, less language than the fact that it was something to be shared with my father. We never had very much contact; and particularly in later years we seldom went beyond ferociously beaming goodwill at one another from a great distance. But it did teach me something very vital about language anyway: not the meaning of laudo/laudas/laudat, or of agricola/agricola/agricolam, but of the innumerable things language can communicate behind, and even divorced from, the words on the page. Together with those very first discoveries about the materiality of language, this was where, for me, writing began. Not in the thoughts or ideas one can convey through words, but in the very means through which one tries to communicate those thoughts and ideas – that is, in the language itself.

  So if, today, people presume that it was something like apartheid that brought me to writing, they are very far off the mark. It started with language – the language without which a word like apartheid could not even have existed.

  Almost inevitably my first excursions into writing were in poetry. And when my first piece of doggerel was published in a children’s magazine at the age of nine and I received the princely sum of half a crown for it, at a time when my weekly pocket money amounted to twopence, my future was settled. I knew then that whatever else I might choose to do for a living – painting houses, or growing vegetables, or driving a train – writing would form part of it.

  Soon, once I’d followed in the footsteps of Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain and discovered prose, I moved to fiction. At the age of twelve I wrote my first ‘novel’, all of seventy-seven pages long, recounting the blood-curdling adventures of four children on holiday among cannibals and wild animals in Nigeria; my father, with infinite patience, typed it out for me, sagely editing a few of the luridly sadistic scenes. The next novel ran to a full 315 pages, this time typed out by myself. This one dealt with the discovery of what remained of the lost civilisation of Atlantis in the jungles of the Congo, with some Cro-Magnons thrown in for good measure. It was duly returned by the luckless publisher to whom I had sent it, with the comment that, among other things, it was too erotic – notably in the embraces between Arno, the leader of the South African expedition into the jungle, and Menore, queen of Atlantis, who was not in the habit of wearing too many clothes.

  After the rejection letter, I prayed to God for guidance in my hour of dire need, then cried myself to sleep, and when I woke up, swore that one day I would be vindicated. The following morning I started on my next novel, Rajah, Lord of the Highlands, inspired by Tarzan, King of the Jungle; and to my unmitigated anguish at the time and my unspeakable relief afterwards, this one, too, died an untimely if richly deserved death.

  For several years I continued to write feverishly, but unsuccessfully. However, if there was nothing measurable to show for all this activity on the surface, a steady, invisible, subterranean growth was taking place – not through writing but through reading. Both my parents were voracious readers and all four of us children were infected by them. Ever since my paternal grandfather’s involvement in the Boer War, my father had brought with him all the Anglophobia of the stereotypical Afrikaner: although the two great passions of his life were rugby and religion, he would unfailingly turn off the radio whenever a match or a church service was broadcast in English; yet he spoke an impeccable English with an astounding vocabulary – fired no doubt by a belief in knowing thine enemy. And, with the exception of English newspapers, he read anything he could lay his hands on, from Shakespeare to whodunits. My mother, with her Eastern Cape background, had none of his reservations. Her light reading focused on writers like Georgette Heyer, but she loved Dickens and the Brontës and, like my father, worshipped Shakespeare. Even today strangers stop me in the street to tell me how my mother had turned them into lifelong acolytes of the Bard. Every week my parents would make a trip to the library and return, hours later, with armloads of books. And this habit – more than a habit: an addiction, a passion – was inculcated in us too. My whole childhood was awash with books; and it was amazing to see what unexpected treasures could be teased out of the shelves of libraries under the iron-fisted rule of wizened, ancient little ladies in the dusty villages that provided my early years with a local habitation and a name.

  I became so enamoured of libraries that by the time I was about twelve I established my own version among my classmates at school, which had no library of its own. I invented an elaborate system of cataloguing for the twenty or thirty books on my own shelves and began to circulate them, at a rather exorbitant fee, among my friends. But in this case I’m afraid my motivation was less the urge to share knowledge than a venal urge to profi
teer: never in my youth did I pass up an opportunity to make a quick penny.

  Still, the village library continued to form the centre of my most vital enquiries and excursions, the starting point of all the imaginary travels I undertook around the circumference and into the core of the earth. In a very real sense, long before I’d ever heard the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I discovered, at first hand, the truth of that great line from his Tractatus, that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’. There was nothing those books could not explain or illuminate, except, perhaps, the domain of the erotic.

  But the immersion in language, in the magic of words and sounds and invocations, did not come only through books and reading. In unexpected ways the speech of ordinary people brought its own intimation of other words and spaces. It was through my association with two boys from the neighbours’ property, Archie and Thys, that I made the startling discovery that some words were much more equal than others. Archie and Thys introduced me to words like cunt and shit, which I soon found out in a very distressing way could land one in the deepest sulphurous pit of hell. That a combination of some sounds into a word could be harmless or even commendable, whereas other sounds, or the same sounds in a different combination, could be offensive or shocking to others and in fact damning to oneself, was a mystery and a kind of black magic that took me years to figure out. At the time, I had to take my parents’ word for it that there was a direct and immediate connection between the utterance of one of ‘those’ words and the pain inflicted on my backside, or the taste of vile blue soap in my mouth.

  In one case a word led to less predictable consequences. Like all children of my generation I was familiar with the word vry, which is the Afrikaans equivalent of petting. That is, I knew the sound of the word but not its meaning. And no one would tell me. True, my parents were not shocked by it in the way they had been by the vocabulary of Archie and Thys. But they were not to be drawn into explanations. My peers were simply dismissive, or started giggling, convincing me that they all knew something I did not. The lovely Louisa was more willing to help, but all she could tell me, blushing a fiery red and chewing the ends of her black hair, was that to vry meant to kiss. And that I found most unsatisfactory. If the two words meant the same, why did they look different? Like Pantagruel in search of a definition of marriage, I set out to discover the meaning of vry. No go. All the grown-ups I approached branded me as precocious and asking for trouble; the kids of my own age treated me as a dimwit.