A Fork in the Road Page 8

  For weeks after that I performed the circus on our back stoep and in the garden. Elbie and our housekeeper, Mina, had to play all the minor roles, from dog to camel to gymnast to Mrs Pagel to lion. For one whole Saturday Elbie had to squat on the ground tied to a tree, while I was, of course, the ringmaster, the lord of magic. I knew then that I would either acquire my own circus one day, or become a lion tamer. My future was secure.

  Shortly afterwards I made my own debut on stage. Once again it was in Fauresmith, this time in a school concert. All I had to do was to recite a poem. It was short and humorous, and I practised for weeks to make sure I would make a lasting impression on my audience. But none of that could prepare me for the reception I got. The poem brought the house down. I was hugely satisfied, having practically made up my mind that if something went wrong with my designs on a circus career, I might settle for a future on the stage. But when I arrived backstage, the audience still yelling and laughing and cheering in their seats, my father was there, waiting. And I could see that something was very wrong. It turned out that I had gone on stage with an open fly and that a thin tail of the brand new, stark white shirt I was wearing, had found its way through the gap in my navy blue shorts. Not such a propitious beginning. In fact, my career as a public performer might have ended before it had properly begun. For a while I considered a career in the church after all.

  What held me in thrall to the church was not only the stories and their magic, but – even in those arid Calvinist services, in those whitewashed interiors – the sense of ritual. And, undoubtedly, an awareness of authority, of power, pointing ultimately to God Almighty.

  Ritual pervaded everything. Although it had neither the colour nor the variety of Catholicism, the unwavering, predictable order of a service provided a feeling of security, suggesting the presence of immutable laws. Even to lighter moments it lent a gravity, a deeply satisfying sense of coherence. To my writing, over the years, ritual has always been important: Mozart or Chopin in the background and Beethoven’s Third whenever I really get stuck, a pair of scissors within reach to snip at my hair in moments of doubt, the Don Quixote on the shelf above my left shoulder. And although for many years now there has been no religious dimension to it, I believe that the origins of these little rituals lie in the churches of my youth – in Miss Libby’s overambitious skirmishes with Bach and the surprising movements of her floral hat behind the organ, in the way the dominee led his row of elders and deacons in black, my father always among them, from the vestry to their pews before he ascended the pulpit, in his way of opening the big Bible, in the alternation of singing and reading and praying, in the cadences of his preaching voice. Even in the rhythmic swinging of Driekie’s pretty legs opposite our appointed seats there was the gravity and reassurance of ritual: it was the one occasion in the week when I could stare and stare at her to my heart’s content and feel the blessed closeness of the Lord. The fact that it was her father up on the pulpit, so much closer to God than the rest of us in our pews, added an awareness of danger to her presence.

  And week after week the service was repeated, in the same order, with the same portentous weightiness. Whatever else in our lives might change, those Sunday mornings kept their shape, and held us in check. Because behind the ritual loomed the authority of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, on whom everything depended. It was raw fear, it was awe, that circumscribed my world. Until …

  I don’t know how or when the shift came, and it was only much later that I acknowledged what should have been obvious: that it is the very presence of authority, the fact of power that evokes rebellion and makes it possible. Without the threat of power the heretic – the one who chooses – cannot exist.

  I must have been at least fourteen when I broke the ritual for the first time. There was no particular reason: I simply ‘did not feel’ like going to church that morning. And said so, firmly expecting all hell to break loose. But it did not. My father had already left for the church council meeting that always preceded the morning service. My mother merely looked quizzically at me and asked, ‘Are you sure?’

  With a parched throat I said, ‘Yes. I’m not going.’

  ‘All right then,’ she said calmly. ‘You can stay here and think of God.’

  She left with Elbie and little Marita. I remained behind. I couldn’t wait for them to be gone. A whole glorious morning all to myself …!

  It was the dreariest Sunday morning of my childhood. There was nothing to do. Not even cafés were open on a Sunday. On the radio there was only a church service to tune in to. I opened a book, became bored after a single page, and put it away again. I had always thought that the Sunday afternoons of the summer holidays we spent on the farm of my mother’s sister, Auntie Dolly, were the worst imaginable: for there we would be confined to our beds in the steaming heat, instructed to read ‘edifying literature’ on which we were required to report later, dazedly aware of the green and deep blue farm stretching out to all sides around the house, redolent of summer – heavy bunches of black grapes, bees buzzing among yellow peaches and purple plums, the amber water of the farm dam lapping against the banks with their smell of bruised grass. But this Sunday was worse. There was nothing to drag me through the hour of the church service, no relief to hope for, no diversion at all from the utter blankness of just sitting there, waiting and waiting and waiting for the time to pass. The emptiness of God was unbearable.

  And there was another perception of God waiting to break like a huge pomegranate spilling its seeds. After we had moved on to the small Transvaal town of Sabie, my mother started corresponding with the wife of the dominee who had stayed behind, the successor of Driekie’s father: a kindly, thickset man who resembled a large pink pig, with a perennial smile incised on his fleshy face. My mother usually never minded if I read the letters she received from the many friends and aunts and cousins with whom she corresponded. But that particular letter from Mrs Dominee was forbidden territory. For that very reason, of course, I couldn’t wait to read it behind my mother’s back. That was the letter in which I learned about the disillusioning marriage of the couple who represented God the Father in our congregation, about the violent abuse by which it was marked, how Dominee would kick and beat his wife if she dared to confront him with his affairs. I wanted to get rid of the letter, but in morbid fascination I had to read it to the end before I stuffed it back into its blue envelope. I felt sick. This was the man of God who week after week had invoked the flames of hell to scare us on to the straight and narrow, who would hover over us with tear-streaked chubby cheeks as he spoke of the infinite love and mercy of the Lord. There was no reason at all to believe that what I had discovered about him inside that blue envelope was true of all dominees. Certainly, Driekie’s father must have been very different. But this could not redeem the fat one. For a couple of years he had been not only the representative of God but, in a disquieting way, God himself, just like the bread and wine of Holy Communion that turned into the body and blood of Christ. So if our dominee was contaminated, God himself was at risk. At great risk. All of a sudden both the religious and the theatrical became extended endlessly. Good and evil could no longer be readily distinguished. Even without realising it then, something inside me was being prepared for more dangerous and more significant future choices.

  In the meantime another preoccupation, which may be viewed as theatre of a different kind, had begun to claim my interest. It was sport, which even today is one of my deepest passions. My own involvement, inherited from my father, was tennis. From the age of about eight, when I could barely handle a racket, he made sure that I spent a fair deal of my time on the red clay courts of the villages we lived in. Wherever we went, he was the number one player of the local team. My mother played an indifferent game, mainly for the enjoyment, but to him it was serious. It was a pleasaure to watch him, and something of an ordeal to be coached by him. Even though he had infinite patience, his restrained way of showing displeasure was enough to make me
shrivel up inside.

  From the beginning he made it clear that he expected only the best from me, in tennis as in everything else; and he imposed a somewhat one-sided pact with me: if ever I became good enough to beat him, he would retire from the game. For many years this possibility never even entered my thoughts; but as I grew more proficient it became a kind of threat at the back of my mind. I wanted him to be invincible, he just had to be the best. And in later years I have begun to wonder whether it wasn’t this mindset that literally paralysed me to make me incapable of beating him. A theme for a story, perhaps? Certainly, one of the most traumatic moments of my life, when I was about seventeen, was when a group of South Africa’s top players visited Sabie, where we then lived, to play a series of exhibition matches against each other and our local stars. My father was chosen to play singles against Abe Segal, then – following Eric Sturgess, who once made the mixed doubles final at Wimbledon – the country’s number one. Deep inside me, I had no doubt. My father would thrash Segal. Afterwards he would move on to Wimbledon to join the great names from past and present I adopted for myself whenever I was practising in the gravelled yard against the back wall of the house: Fred Perry, The Three Musketeers, Jaroslav Drobny, Ken Rosewall.

  Segal beat my father 6–0, 6–0. It was like a personal humiliation, as if darkness had descended over my own future. Long before my father had his first heart attack, which forced him to abandon tennis, this match stamped him as mortal. Things between us were never quite the same as before. My father dutifully continued to encourage me, but I never even made the second team either at school or at university, although I continued to love the game; and one of my unforgettable experiences was to go to Wimbledon with my friend Naas in 1961, and watch the great final between Rod Laver and Chuck McKinley.

  I continued to play, on and off, while I lectured at Rhodes University, and later at UCT; but I never cherished any secret hopes of grandeur any more. Which did not prevent me from living intensely through every Grand Slam played by Bjorn Borg. Later on, I transferred my enthusiasm to Sampras. Today I watch Federer with admiration, but not with the passion I reserve for Nadal – for the same reason that I adore Beethoven more than Bach, or Dostoevsky more than Tolstoy.

  Rugby is a different matter. I never played, except in a single disastrous practice when I scored under the wrong posts when I was nine; but I have been an aficionado all my life. At university, I regret to say, I often took a book with me to the stadium for an intervarsity match, to do some reading during the interval or when the game became boring. But I certainly went to much trouble to attend the great international games against the Wallabies or British Lions, even if it meant hitch-hiking for most of a day to and from Ellis Park in Johannesburg.

  What had first turned my interest into fanatic enthusiasm, was the All Blacks tour of South Africa in 1949. Our school travelled in a rickety bus from Douglas to Kimberley, where Fred Allen’s team took on, and demolished, Griqualand West, and I cheered for the lanky local full back, Jack van der Schyff, even when he wasn’t on the field. Not long afterwards, Hennie Muller’s Springboks toured the British Isles – the most unforgettable match being the Test against Scotland at Murrayfield; and the final score, 44–0, remains etched into the mind of any rugby-loving South African. I loved the blood and gore, the crunching, death-defying scrums and tackles, of those games, the sheer power of the forwards, while the skill of the successful backline movements – from Fonnie du Toit to Hansie Brewis, to Lategan and van Schoor, and then to a wing like Tom van Vollenhoven – enthralled me like chess, or ballet, or the elegance of a solved mathematical problem. If a bad game can be an insult to the emotions and the intelligence, a good and fluid game may indeed resemble a concerto or a symphony, a tone poem or a ballet.

  In the late eighties, my very good friend Gerrit Geertsema, then director of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal, made a trip to Paris to meet Nureyev and attempt to secure the rights for his company to produce the ballet of Don Quixote, for which Nureyev had devised the choreography. This seemed like a totally impossible idea at the time, at the height of the international cultural boycott of South Africa, but Gerrit is not a person to be thwarted lightly. In Paris he went to the Opéra, where Nureyev was said to be rehearsing; there was some kind of strike going, but he managed to get through the barriers. Inside, he told the receptionist that he had an appointment with Monsieur Nureyev. She much regretted the inconvenience, but said that Nureyev was not available. Gerrit pointed out that he had travelled 10,000 kilometres to keep the appointment. Tant pis, she commiserated. Don’t worry, he assured her. He would just wait here until Nureyev was free. You don’t understand, she said. Oh, but I do, I do, he assured her. A battle of wits began. After about eight hours, the receptionist told Gerrit that she was going to lock up. Don’t worry about me, he said. If necessary, he would just wait there until the next day.

  In a state of near-consternation, she disappeared through a door behind the counter, marked Privé. After ten minutes, she returned, somewhat the worse for wear.

  Monsieur Nureyev was on the point of going into a rehearsal, she said with clipped syllables. But he was prepared to see his South African visitor provided he would not take up more than five minutes.

  Mumbling something unintelligible, Gerrit followed her.

  Nureyev expressed his regret for not being able to have a proper discussion. It would have been a pleasure to spend a few minutes with someone from the country of the Springboks.

  You know about the Springboks? asked Gerrit.

  I never miss any of their games on TV, Nureyev assured him. Unfortunately we do not often have the chance.

  It is not easy at the moment, with the sanctions, said Gerrit. But they are a rather formidable team right now. I saw them a week ago and—

  You saw them a week ago?

  And right there everything changed. For an hour, like two excited schoolboys, they eagerly discussed the Springbok game; and then Gerrit was invited to accompany Nureyev to his rehearsal. In the late evening, exhausted but radiant, Gerrit was reluctantly allowed to go. As a little aside to their eager discussions, Nureyev mentioned that if he really wanted the rights to the choreography of Don Quixote, they were his.

  There is indeed music and poetry in rugby, of a kind I learned years later to admire in a good corrida in Spain: although the beauty of a successful encounter is derived largely from its rarity; as a truly good game of rugby is more often than not achieved only against the background of innumerable wretched and messy failures. Perhaps this is what keeps one hooked to Springbok rugby, which is so often the most brutally awful in the world, allowing the rare gems of perfection to shine with a brilliance seldom encountered anywhere else. But even more pertinently than music, it is drama that has always lured me to rugby. Because I was a timid and scrawny kid, my bloodlust had to be projected elsewhere; and rugby was the ideal theatre of vicarious adventure and drama. Not only did it present the classical struggle between a protagonist and an antagonist, and lots of action, but over the years – throughout apartheid, and ever since – it has served as a spectacular barometer for political and moral issues in the psyche of the nation. The old issue of Boer versus Brit, dating back to the Anglo-Boer War, has been in the foreground since that 1949 All Blacks tour which followed so soon after the election victory of the Nationalist Party a year earlier. By the time the Springboks went to Britain in 1951, they had become the embodiment of Afrikaner hopes. Although the tour was nominally led by a very able lock forward, Basil Kenyon, we all spoke of the group as ‘Hennie Muller’s Boks’, and we were secretly relieved that Kenyon had to withdraw from active combat very early on because of a torn retina. If our school was anything to go by, we were simply not comfortable with an Englishman as our captain. Before that, in the battles against the Kiwis, we could accept Okey Geffin in spite of his Jewish background, because of his prowess as a goal kicker – after five penalties against zero in the first game of the 1949 series: South Afr
icans have always been adept at avoiding problems through semantic strategies. Years later, Japanese could be treated as ‘honorary whites’ because the country imported vast quantities of pig iron from them; sometimes local blacks, like my dear friend Richard Rive, the writer of Buckingham Palace, District Six, found themselves admitted to white areas or events by pretending they were from Malawi, or Mozambique.

  Whenever something went wrong in the nation, it would show up in rugby – either in the administration, or in team selections, or coaching problems, or all of these. In particular, the game would provide a key to the handling of race relations in the country, and very specifically to the state of Afrikanerdom.

  This is why the Springboks’ triumph in the World Cup of 1995, only a year after the first free elections, had such special meaning – comparable, in fact, to the amazing experience of voting on that first election day of 27 April, 1994. When Joel Stransky slotted his drop goal in the final seconds of extra time, the country went berserk, from the mink-and-manure white English bastions of Sandton and the sugar estates of the South Coast in KwaZulu-Natal, to the traditionally staid Afrikaner strongholds of Pretoria or Bloemfontein and the black townships of Alexandra in Gauteng or Khayelitsa in Cape Town, the Indian quarters of Cato Manor and Lenasia, the sprawling coloured areas of the Cape Flats. Everybody was in a state of near-hysterical jubilation, lasting throughout that night and spilling over into the days and even weeks to follow. The most unforgettable moment came at the end of the game, when Nelson Mandela, wearing the number 6 jersey of captain Francois Pienaar, held aloft the Webb Ellis Cup. ‘You have done this,’ he said, waving his arms towards the dancing, cheering crowd in the stands, ‘not just for your team but for more than 50,000 around us.’ And Francois responded in a line that immortalised the moment: ‘No, Mr President,’ he said. ‘We have done this for forty million people.’