Читать книгу Battle Scarred - Anthony Feinstein - Страница 6

What happens if they break you?

‘Report to the infantry base in Upington.’

No sooner have I turned sixteen than the dreaded envelope with the South African Defence Force postmark arrives. I’ve known the call-up is coming, of course, but it is a shock nevertheless to see Upington on the papers. A world away from my quiet suburban life in Joburg, where I pass the afternoons after school with my violin and my chamber music friends, and where the only orders to be obeyed are the fortissimos and pianissimos that came from Haydn and Mozart.

Upington … it is said to be the worst base in the whole army. So bad that the men there once did the unthinkable and mutinied. Upington is where they break boys and turn them into men, or so the official rumours go.

Is that really possible? What happens if they break you and can’t put the pieces together again?

Forget it! Sorry, Brigadier, excuse me, General, I am not for breaking. You will not get your hands on me, not in Upington you won’t.

Anyway, at this point I am still in school with plans to go to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand for six long years of study. The army will have to wait, and there is nothing they can do about it except send me those yearly reminders of a debt still to be paid. A decade of unyielding and dogged call-ups tell me to report to Upington, and every year I reply with a regret that speaks more than the truth: Sorry, I am otherwise engaged.

But the army is patient in the knowledge that sooner or later I will finish my studies and run out of excuses. When that day finally arrives, my country is at war right up on the Angolan border in faraway South West Africa and the army wants me more than ever. It is a stupid, nasty war that anyone with two ounces of common sense knows will be lost, but that does not stop the government from coming after me. Except this time, I too am far away. Fortune has smiled on me. I have recently won the Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging’s music prize for string instrumentalists, which comes with a lovely medal and a generous cheque. Flushed with this success I am now in Paris, living in a grungy building on the rue Puget opposite a brothel and boucherie chevaline, and taking violin lessons with a Korean virtuoso who is Paganini reincarnated. But even here the army finds me. The only thing different about the dirty brown envelope this time is that it has an airmail sticker obscuring my initial. The contents are the same: The State is calling in its marker.

Now what do I do? It’s a sunny day in May and I am sitting on a bench in the Parc Monceau. I have just read that American singer Art Garfunkel, in town for a performance, claims the Parc Monceau is the most beautiful park in all of Paris. He may well be right. It is lovely, which makes me think even more highly of Art, who in truth I always identify with, playing a distant second fiddle.

The Parc Monceau makes me feel good too and then my eye catches the postmark on the envelope in my hand and my homage to Art ends abruptly.

I open the letter. ‘Report to Klipdrif.’

What is this? What happened to the Upington post? It seems that the training camp has been changed now that I am a doctor. The medical corps has staked its claim. Does it make a difference? Upington? Klipdrif? Not really. Both are stink holes. What if I tell the authorities, sorry, I am in Paris, the Korean master has much to teach me, please wait a little longer? Which is true, I do have a lot to learn on the violin – so much, in fact, that my teacher has told me bluntly to stick to medicine. So that rules out that option.

What else can I do? I close my eyes and rehash scenarios I have gone over countless times before. Option one: Stay in Paris, become an exile. Possible? Not really. No money, no papers, just a matter of time before I’m deported, in breach of the law not in one country but two.

Option two: Go back home and become a conscientious objector. Claim that all war is anathema, never mind one to shore up apartheid. That’s a possibility, but it won’t work for me. I’ll be tossed into jail for three years and every now and then just to remind me of my high and mighty principles I’ll have a few teeth knocked out or get my nose moved around my face. I remember those poor Jehovah’s Witness boys brought in to the ER from the local jail, full of pacifism, but bruises and broken bones too. In truth, I don’t have that kind of courage.

Option three: Go home and serve, stop running and get it over with. Two years is a long time, but I’ll be a doctor and an officer and who knows, I may even get to sleep in my own bed. Never mind the rights and wrongs, just keep my head down and watch the shit fly over.

So I pack my bags and go home and I begin to march down a road that not even my fevered imagination could have envisaged. For if the journey is the destination, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, no sooner have I swapped my civvies for brown overalls than I have already arrived at a very strange place. The irony, which is lost on me at the time, is that as much as I mourned leaving Paris and joining a system I loathed, that fateful decision made on a bench in the Parc Monceau will lead me towards a career that comes with much pleasure and professional satisfaction.

But first there is a price to pay.