Читать книгу My Only Story - Deon Wiggett - Страница 10

Willem has not crossed my mind in two decades, but now the memories of him bullet thick from the ocean floor. A few weeks after the death of Dadda – the late, great Mannie Wiggett – I am suddenly forced to think of a man who could not be more different from him.

It is time I introduced you to Willem Breytenbach, who is one of the men this story is about. Before I knew him, Willem was a teacher. An excellent teacher, most of his students will tell you.

‘If none of this had happened, and this was an interview about my school days, he is one of the teachers that really stood out,’ Anton Visser tells me. We are at the back of Table Mountain in a windy suburban park.

Willem was Anton’s debating coach at the famous Grey College, and was a teacher unlike anyone Grey had seen before.

Anton, who now directs TV ads, tells me about an afternoon in 1990, when Mr Breytenbach ran the debating society. Outside, it is conservative Bloemfontein in apartheid South Africa. Just a few weeks ago in Parliament, President F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress, signalling the dying days of white minority rule.

But in Bloem, nothing has changed yet. The whites-only boys of the debating society are sitting in Mr Breytenbach’s classroom. He is a teacher so creative, so unconventional, that you just never know what will happen.

For debate, Mr Breytenbach shows the boys something they were never supposed to read: the Freedom Charter, which states that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ – including, appallingly, the nine-tenths of South Africans who are not white. But Mr Breytenbach is not done! He has also brought the lyrics to ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, the banned hymn that will become the national anthem. These are grave things to be discussing in Bloem.

‘At the time, as a white kid you were cut off from that kind of stuff, so we knew it was quite daring [of him],’ says Anton. ‘In a school where most of the teachers were cut from the same cloth, he brought a totally different energy to things. He was a big influence on a lot of people.’

Another ex-pupil, Victor Yazbek, talks to me about happy afternoons laying out the school newspaper with Mr Breytenbach, the teacher in charge. Home computers were still new, and Mr Breytenbach had started preaching the possibilities of tech.

Then Victor, who seems a bit prim, tells me a story about teenage hormones. In his year, some Afrikaans classes were split between Mr Breytenbach and one Mrs Hattingh. ‘Lots of boys wanted to be in Mrs Hattingh’s class for …’ he says, and then tries awkwardly to convey her chesty magnificence. ‘So the guys [in my class] were quite bummed when we got him.

‘I liked him, though. I was quite an academic student and I enjoyed the challenge of a really good teacher. He was funny, kind and jovial. Always happy and smiling.’

But for all the magic that he brought, there was something Willem could never shake: he is a deeply unattractive person. More than anything, I have always thought he looks like a bullfrog. He is a large, flabby man; he sweats by the gallon; and when he sits, he plonks.

And then there is the problem spit.

Due to an overactive gland, perhaps, Willem produces more saliva than he can swallow. A steady streamlet is always damming up in the corners of his mouth. When he speaks loudly, which is often, the volume of his speech propels the spit forward, and drops of it land on faces and on keyboards and in hair.

To an old friend, Willem might say: ‘Morné, it’s so good to see you!’ But this will dislodge some of the spit, and as Willem moves in for a big old bear hug, Morné’s neck may experience a localised spurt.

Combined with the sweating, it creates the impression of a man overfull of liquid. Like there is no way for Willem’s bulky mass to contain all the fluids it produces.

By the time my memory returns, Willem lives in the picture-pretty Cape Town neighbourhood of Three Anchor Bay. On the left-hand side is Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain; on the right, the Atlantic Ocean.

It is the nestled district where Willem shares a house with Danie van Rooyen, his life partner. They bought the property together in 2010 and have done it up nicely. The years since Willem left teaching have been good to him.

I do not know it yet, but it was an unfortunate affair that saw this natural-born teacher cast out of education. It was the same problem as always: Willem does what he does.

I know what he does, because I suddenly remember it all.

On a warm spring afternoon in Stellenbosch and a cool autumn morning in Minnesota, Dr Anna Salter talks to me on Skype. She is drinking coffee while an enormous black cat balances everywhere around her, demanding relentless petting.

I am at Nella’s house and we have been drinking white wine since lunchtime. My interview with Anna, who is seventy-three and an indefatigable expert on men like Willem, has crept up on me. I now have to Skype Minnesota from Nella’s booky study.

I have, professionally, ensured that my wine glass is not in the shot, and as Dr Salter drinks her coffee, I discreetly sip my wine by leaning out of frame.

I am talking to her because my therapist said something I would like to confirm more widely.

‘Could it have been an accident,’ I ask, ‘or did Willem plan the whole thing from the beginning?’

‘Typically, it’s a plan,’ she says. ‘It’s not like he becomes friends with a kid and gets carried away by it. He’s planning, thinking … it’s on his mind absolutely all the time.’

It is like my therapist said: I was not Willem’s only target, and I am not his only survivor. I was one of the boys he wanted, but not an aberration or an anomaly. It was not particularly exceptional when he raped me in the mouth when I was seventeen.

This is not a story of rape and molestation. It is not Leaving Neverland, where two men about my age talk about how they were raped by Michael Jackson. I am supposed to say that James and Wade ‘allege’ they were raped by Jackson, but they look and talk like men who remember. If paedophiles do exist, and Michael Jackson was one, these two men are what his survivors would look and sound like. They are James Safechuck and Wade Robson, and it feels to me like they are my brothers.

But Leaving Neverland is not what this is. I am not going to tell you all the engorging details of what Willem did to me – and neither will the other men in this story. Each instance was thoroughly illegal and a devastating personal invasion, and let us not dwell overly on teenagers’ penises.

This story is not about that. It is about how we might go about catching a bullfrog like mine. Once you know what to look for and where, you begin to spot the common bullfrog.

It cannot be too hard, I think in 2018, three months after Dadda died. I am sitting on my stoep, or terrace or veranda, and I am on my laptop. For the first time in decades, I want to know what Willem has been up to.