Читать книгу The History of Man - Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu - Страница 10

By choosing a post that would settle the Coetzees in the City of Kings, Johan was eventually able to make Gemma happy again. Sadly, this solution came at a great cost to Johan, as he had to accept something of a demotion within the BSAP when he left the outpost two years earlier than initially agreed upon. As a result, he could not buy the colonial-style house with French windows, a red wraparound veranda and an English rose garden that had long existed vividly in Gemma’s imagination. What he could do was rent a flat – Flat 2A to be exact – at the Prince’s Mansions, which were located on the corner of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, opposite Eveline High School, overlooking the very intersection where Johan had first laid eyes on Gemma and fallen in love with her blowing blonde hair and giggling pink lips.

When Gemma saw the flat and gazed out of their bedroom window to see the very spot where her very own Douglas Fairbanks Jr had first approached her, she felt the romance of it all, and the house of her dreams was immediately forgotten and Johan was forever forgiven. The man that she had married might not have been able to give her her own home, but he was able to give her a testament to his deep awareness of her romantic nature. Why would Gemma ever need her own English rose garden to tend when she could forever gaze on the place where her true love had first blossomed?

Not only was the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue the location of their first meeting, it was also the heart of the city, and Gemma was soon determined to be part of its heartbeat. If the City of Kings had an oppressive heat, Gemma did not feel it. She was too busy to feel anything but happiness. Besides, if a day in the city did present itself with any heat worth feeling, she could always go to the Municipal Bathing Pools on Borrow Street with Johan, Emil, or by herself. Of an evening, if Gemma found that she needed cooling down, all she had to do was put on her best dress, accept Johan’s arm and walk a short distance down Selborne Avenue to the theatre. All of life’s pleasures were suddenly within easy reach.

Gemma was so contented that she finally said goodbye to the halcyon days of the Roaring Twenties and accepted the more sober joys of the 1930s by becoming a member of the Women’s Institute. Soon enough she began to take a genuine pleasure in making her own tea cosies, embroidering and crocheting her own tablecloths, baking Victoria sandwiches for cake sales and baking competitions, and painstakingly embossing the linen with the words Mr and Mrs J Coetzee.

To top off this new-found contentedness, Gemma’s mind was finally at peace again when Emil started attending Milton School on Selborne Avenue. On the BSAP outpost, he had attended the only school available in the vicinity, which was the government school that had been begrudgingly built for the natives. He attended the school because it had been suggested to his father, by the governor, that this would be the best way to encourage education in the region. Native education, as long as it was not of a very high standard or to a very high degree, was instrumental to the successful running of a self-governing colony. Gemma, who felt certain that Emil was receiving a negligible education at the school, agreed to this arrangement with the understanding that when he was nine, before any real damage had been done, Emil would attend Milton School in the City of Kings. She had imagined that he would attend the school as a boarder and this had filled her with guilt and apprehension, and so she was ever so pleased when the move to the Prince’s Mansions meant that she could walk him to and from school.

For his part, Emil could not bring himself to love the City of Kings – its wide avenues lined with jacarandas, flamboyants and acacias, its concrete buildings, its rail-line arteries, its noisy motor cars, its parks manicured to unnaturalness, its factories constantly exhaling smoke into the air, its traffic robots that had made the jobs of traffic controllers almost obsolete. When he surveyed the city all he saw was a miasma and all he heard was a cacophony and he was convinced that he could never be at home in such a place.

Emil blamed himself for the move away from the BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills. How could he not? He assumed that the move was all because he had gone native. Being in the city did not help matters; the nightmare of the native girl who had a brown baby persisted, more frequently now that he was away from his natural environment. The nightmare took on more ominous and terrifying details. Whenever he tried to scream his name into the veld, all that came out was the howl of the wounded animal, and when he glanced at the black shadow he cast, it was no longer his shadow but that of an animal-like thing walking on all fours. In the dream he would put his hands out in front of him and expect to see a pair of paws or hooves, but the expectation was never fulfilled because he could never bring himself to discover what existed at the end of his outstretched arms.

Inevitably, Emil’s wheezing chest worsened in the City of Kings. It was all because of the pollution from the motor vehicles, trains and smokestacks, Dr Stromberg explained to Gemma before letting her know that, while there was no cure for asthma, there was a palliative. The result of all this was that after the visit to Dr Stromberg, Gemma religiously took Emil to Galen House every Wednesday morning. Together they would descend the stairs to the basement and while his mother flipped, a bit absent-mindedly, through the latest home or fashion magazine, Emil would sit by a giant machine that churned out foul-tasting vapour, put a pipe to his lips and suck in the vapour. This large machine was the only thing in the basement, save two chairs and a coffee table stacked high with back issues of magazines. It was an eerie, grey and cold place. Emil hated that basement. He hated the weekly Wednesday visits. He hated the perceived weakness in his chest. He stopped just short of hating the nonchalance of his mother as she flipped through the magazines.

Hatred was a new and powerful emotion for the young Emil. While living at the outpost, he had loved everything that his eyes beheld – the veld, the hills, the cave paintings, the rain dancers … even the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda that he called home. He had loved best his black shadow walking on the ground, connecting him to the soil and the history that was all around him.

When he saw how much pleasure his parents, especially his mother, derived from the city, he tried to love the things she loved – the public park, the theatre, the Municipal Bathing Pools – but all he could do was appreciate them. The park with its neatly manicured lawns and landscaped gardens set amidst serene walking paths could not even come close to comparing to the wide open veld. The theatre put on plays that could not capture his imagination the way the San stories of the hunt painted on cave walls could. The Municipal Bathing Pools did not have the depths and possible dangers of the Mtshelele Dam. The City of Kings was just not where he belonged. But, however much he wished it, Emil knew in his heart that there was no going back to the BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills.

Having an entirely different frame of reference to the boys at Milton School, Emil did not make friends because he did not try to. The boys at Milton School tended to love the City of Kings and the delights it had to offer. As they played with or exchanged marbles, compared plastic model cars, set off stink bombs or spun yo-yos, they talked ad nauseam about the hero of the latest Western at the bioscope; about the delights of travelling by rail to Salisbury, Gwelo, Umtali and Fort Victoria to visit relatives; about how they had personally witnessed a potentially fatal car accident that was avoided because the city’s avenues were so wisely wide. These boys loved and took pride in the very things that Emil found fault with.

As a substitute for the incomparable adventures of the veld, Emil found some solace in the books available in the school and public libraries. He, perhaps too wholeheartedly and unreservedly, dived into the imaginations of H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling and found an approximation of the excitement that was now sorely lacking in his life. He would escape into the wild worlds that the authors created and wish that the stories would never come to an end. ‘I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ In a month, he would read those lines at least twice, eagerly opening King Solomon’s Mines and beginning the adventure anew. Emil particularly liked that he shared his birthplace, the place that he no longer remembered having lived in, with the man who had fast become his hero, Allan Quatermain. ‘I, Emil Coetzee, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ he would write over and over again in the margins of his exercise books as he watched the city’s life pass him by and daydreamed about being in the bush again. While this writing in the margins never did make him feel that he was ‘of’ Durban, it did, nevertheless, make him feel that he could perhaps be the hero of a story.

His schoolmaster, Mr Bartleby, was quite a perceptive and sensitive man and noticed that Emil’s transition to city life was not a happy one. When he saw Emil devouring book after book in the library, he supposed that what he was witnessing was a very studious young man. A studious young man whose life had to be filled with adventures – the kind of adventures not found in the city. The kind of adventures found in the savannah of the country they lived in.

Mr Bartleby took the boy’s many scribbles of ‘I, Emil Coetzee, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ as cries for help and set about searching for a way to save him. Once he found it, he called in the boy’s parents. As they sat before him looking like beautiful movie stars straight out of a picture show at the bioscope, Mr Bartleby understood that some people just had serendipitous lives and found their perfect other, and, simultaneously, that he had had no such great fortune visit upon his life.

‘The Selous School for Boys,’ Mr Bartleby said, as he pushed the pamphlet across his desk towards them.

The wife picked up the pamphlet and frowned at it slightly.

‘Best school in the country,’ he explained to her frown as he watched her peruse the pamphlet and deepen her frown before passing it to her husband, whose turn it was to frown.

‘That is where the boy should go,’ Mr Bartleby explained, realising that there was an order in which he should have done things and that it was now too late to try to establish it.

The perfect couple exchanged confused expressions before she said, ‘The boy? You mean our boy, Emil?’

‘Yes. Yes. Emil. That’s the chap. Yes.’

The husband chortled charmingly. ‘I’m afraid we don’t understand.’

We don’t understand, not I don’t understand. Such uniformity of mind must be a wonderful thing to have, Mr Bartleby conjectured.

‘The boy has already secured himself a place and a full bursary.’

They exchanged their perfectly confused expressions again.

‘He wrote an essay in my class about casting his shadow over Rhodes’s grave up at World’s View. Very affecting stuff. I sent the essay to the headmaster of the Selous School for Boys. He read it and was rightly impressed by it. We both agree that the best thing for the boy is for him to leave Milton School at term’s end.’

‘Leave Milton at term’s end?’ the husband mumbled beneath a beautifully trimmed moustache.

‘Yes.’

‘But I have always dreamed of Emil attending Milton. And besides, we live just up the road, the Prince’s Mansions at the corner of Borrow and Selborne. It is so convenient and I do so enjoy walking him to and from school every day,’ the wife said, her mouth beginning to pout becomingly.

Mr Bartleby so hated to go against her desires, but he was afraid that there was nothing else to be done. ‘The boy is not entirely happy here.’

This had evidently come as news to the perfect couple because they looked at each other questioningly.

‘He has the call of the wild, that one, and will never be truly happy or at home in the city.’

‘Oh,’ they said in unison.

‘Where exactly is this school?’ she asked, reaching for the pamphlet that her husband still held in his hands.

‘The Midlands.’

‘The Midlands!’ they exclaimed in unison again.

‘I cannot stress this enough. It is the best school in the country. The very best.’

‘A boarding school? But he is only nine years old,’ she said.

They exchanged yet another look. Mr Bartleby understood the look of dread that passed between them. Their own, probably not so happy, boarding-school memories were flashing before them.

‘The school itself is situated within hectares and hectares of untamed savannah. He will be able to explore, hunt, fish, camp … all while getting the best education that a young man can get in this country.’

‘The best?’ she asked, still a little wary.

‘The very best. The Selous School for Boys turns boys into the men of history,’ Mr Bartleby said, hoping that this would impress upon them how much they were supposed to be impressed.

At dinner that evening, Gemma’s natural flair for detail deserted her. She could not quite capture the essence of the meeting when she announced, as she placed more cucumber salad onto his plate than Emil could ever possibly eat, ‘Poppet, we have met with Mr Bartleby and it has been decided that you shall attend the Selous School for Boys at the beginning of the coming year. Is that not a wonderful thing?’ she concluded with a weak smile.

Johan scrutinised his son’s face. The first thing to register on it was confusion.

‘It is in the Midlands,’ Johan added cautiously.

‘The Midlands?’

The second thing to register on Emil’s face was panic.

‘It is the best school in the entire country,’ Gemma said.

‘The very best,’ Johan corrected.

‘You’re a lucky duck for getting in,’ Gemma said, her smile weaker still.

The third thing to register on Emil’s face was fear.

‘Have I done something wrong?’

‘Wrong? What could you possibly ever do wrong, poppet?’ Gemma said, giving Emil’s cheek a gentle squeeze. ‘This is a good thing, darling. A wonderful thing.’

Emil stared at his father, his eyes pleading with him to, for once, take a view contrary to his mother’s.

‘Lots of hunting and shooting to be had, so we’re told, our boy. Just your sort of thing,’ Johan said, as he reached over and ruffled his son’s hair.

‘It will be just like living on the outpost, but this time you will be receiving the best education in the country,’ Gemma said as her fingers gently righted Emil’s ruffled hair. ‘The very best.’

‘They turn boys into the men of history.’

‘Or some such thing.’

‘In the Midlands?’

‘Yes. In the Midlands,’ Gemma and Johan said in unison, both also trying to reconcile themselves to this fact.

Things moved along with frightening alacrity after that. Term’s end came. Mr Bartleby told Emil that his life was just about to change for the better, that he was very fortunate to have this rare opportunity afforded him and that he had every confidence that Emil would prove worthy of it. As Mr Bartleby said all this, Emil tried not to cast his eye on a postcard of the gargoyles at Sanssouci Palace on the schoolmaster’s desk. After Emil whispered a confused, ‘Thank you, sir,’ Mr Bartleby gave him a cowboy hat as a parting present. Neither Mr Bartleby nor Emil could have known at that moment that a cowboy hat would one day become a permanent fixture on Emil Coetzee’s head.

Gemma stoically went to the Meikles department store to buy Emil’s trunk; this was an extravagance, given Johan’s meagre civil-service salary, but she felt that the boy deserved the best. Once it came home from the store, Johan meticulously stencilled EMIL COETZEE onto the trunk. As the Coetzees were trying to decide what next to do, a letter came from the Selous School for Boys congratulating Emil on his acceptance and providing a very extensive list of required items. Gemma and Johan divided the list into two and set about buying the items on it. Johan wished that they had more than one holiday break and, consequently, more than one pay cheque to prepare for Emil’s departure for boarding school. Emil might have received a full bursary, but school uniforms for both summer and winter needed to be purchased, along with a cadet uniform, several sports kits and a litany of sundry items that included a rifle and a pistol (which were to be the first in a series of firearms that the boy would need to acquire over the years at the school). Emil was a growing boy and chances were that the start of every academic year would see the need for such expenditure. Luckily, Gemma had long learnt how to stretch a civil servant’s salary and had developed an eagle eye for bargains and sales. She managed to successfully stretch Johan’s one pay cheque to afford all that was needed by the Selous School for Boys and graciously accepted Scott Fitzgerald’s Christmas and New Year’s invitations so that the Coetzees could have a wonderfully festive season before Emil left for the school. Scott Fitzgerald had followed close on the heels of the Coetzees when they left the BSAP outpost and, like them, had resettled in the City of Kings. At Scott Fitzgerald’s parties, Gemma hoped that no one noticed that her stockings were darned.

With nothing much required of him, Emil watched as his trunk gradually filled up and he wished with all his heart that he could have found it in himself to have loved the City of Kings better, because that love would have saved him from the fate that had now befallen him.

The trunk, filled to capacity, was finally shut the day before he was to depart for the Selous School for Boys.

‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we went out to Centenary Park?’ Gemma said suddenly, as she latched the locks of the trunks. ‘You could ride the train there. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Emil nodded. Was it too late now to pretend to love all the things the city had to offer?

‘We could go to the natural history museum afterwards … or … or the theatre for the matinée. There’s a wonderful production of Anything Goes, I gather,’ Gemma said, searching for her hat. Just like that, she had decided on a day out. ‘It has a lot of musical numbers. You would like that, I dare say, and we could also get some ice cream. We’ll make an entire day of it. I’ll leave a note for your pa and instructions on how best to warm up the cottage pie. I don’t want him to worry when he finds us not here for lunch.’ Gemma breathlessly inspected her reflection in the hallway mirror. ‘I know you’d like your father to be there for this last hurrah … We can all go to the bioscope in the evening. You would love that, wouldn’t you?’

Emil nodded slowly as his mother set his appearance to rights.

‘Yes. We will make an entire day of it and it will all be lovely … very, very lovely indeed,’ Gemma said, as she wrote a note for Johan.

Gemma, determined to have the best day with her son, crossed Borrow Street with Emil held safely and firmly in hand. The day started out promisingly enough. They rode along on the train through Centenary Park and Gemma, occasionally stroking her son’s blond hair as it was ruffled by the breeze, made herself smile at nothing in particular. When they hopped off the train she bought them ice cream, which they ate as they made their way to the National Museum of Natural History. They spent a little too much time for Gemma’s liking poring over lithographs, letters, pottery, tools, weapons, fossils, menageries and trophies that represented some aspect of the country’s past. Emil was evidently enjoying himself and so Gemma let him peruse at his leisure … until she heard him wheeze as he stood before a miniature bungalow that looked very much like the government-issued house that had been their home at the foot of the Matopos Hills. Probably all the dust in the place, Gemma supposed as she led Emil out of the museum. Hopefully he would feel better at the theatre and they could carry on enjoying the day.

They did not even make it to the intermission of Anything Goes. Emil’s wheezing had at first attracted sympathetic glances that became a few glares here and there and finally a united voice that loudly whispered, ‘I judge that it is best you take the poor fellow home.’

Gemma obeyed the wishes of the many, held Emil by the hand, walked him back up Selborne Avenue to the Prince’s Mansions and led him up the stairs. She opened the door to the flat, immediately stopped short, let out a scream and was very surprised when no sound came out.

When Emil saw his father in his mother’s red cloche hat, black lace and chiffon drop-waist dress, string of pearls, rouge and lipstick, he assumed it was a joke, something funny his father had prepared for his departure, and he was just about to laugh when he saw the look of absolute horror on his mother’s face. When he glanced over at his father and saw the guilt, humiliation and shame on his face, Emil was filled with dread and knew that, whatever this was, it was not supposed to be happening.

Gemma let go of Emil’s hand and went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She left father and son staring at each other. With the comforting aroma of cottage pie wafting between them, Johan’s eyes travelled to a spot just above Emil’s head and settled there, and there his gaze would remain whenever he looked at his son. Gemma returned with Emil’s medication and gave it to him. She then went to her bedroom and shut the door behind her.

The quiet that surrounded them was absolute.

After what Johan had done, both he and Gemma were afraid of what the other would say, so they stopped speaking to each other altogether. In this way she never had to ask him about what she had witnessed and he, therefore, thankfully, never had to explain himself to her or to himself.

Emil was left alone in the confusion of the peace.