Читать книгу The History of Man - Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu - Страница 12

As hard as it was for him to accept it, in time, Emil had to admit to himself that he preferred to be at school rather than at home. He felt guilty about this, to be sure, but even with the sporadic bullying that he received at the hands of the boys that he collectively called ‘The Bootlickers’, he was never alone at the Selous School for Boys. At the Selous School for Boys, Emil always had Courteney.

It was with Courteney that he sought the sanctuary of the library before supper and after the gruelling sessions of compulsory sports and cadet training. Together, Emil and Courteney consumed the entire oeuvre of the school’s namesake, Frederick Courteney Selous. Within the pages of such books as A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa, Twenty Years in Zambesia and Sunshine and Storm, Selous captured the imagination of Emil Coetzee and soon became his second hero.

In all honesty, Emil did not actually read the works of Selous, Courteney did. Emil began well enough with A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa:

On the 4th of September 1871, I set foot for the first time upon the sandy shores of Algoa Bay, with 400 pounds in my pocket, and the weight of only nineteen years upon my shoulders. Having carefully read all the works that had been written on sport and travel in South Africa, I had long ago determined to make my way into the interior of the country as soon as ever circumstances would enable me to do so; for the free-and-easy gipsy sort of life described by Gordon, Cumming, Baldwin, and other authors, had quite captivated my imagination, and done much to determine me to adopt the life of ever-varying scenes and constant excitement, which I have never since regretted, and for which an inborn love of all branches of natural history, and that desire so common amongst our countrymen of penetrating to regions where no one else has been, in some way fitted me.

In spite of this awe-inspiring beginning, Selous’s dense and dry prose soon started to drift away from Emil and so, as a result, it was Courteney who, in summary, would tell Emil all that he needed to know about the man who had been the inspiration for H Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Emil’s first hero.

Emil often imagined himself, at nineteen, setting off on a great quest – an adventure that would be the making of him, and he could hardly wait for this future to come into being. While he waited for this future, he sat next to Courteney in the school library and reread the works of Haggard, Burroughs and Kipling. He would occasionally gaze up at the portrait of Frederick Courteney Selous that hung in the library and admire the quintessential outdoorsman with requisite hat, boots and rifle. Some day that will be me, Emil would think with pride.

Courteney was not as taken with Selous as Emil was and actually read him only in order to provide Emil with summaries and to improve their collective vocabulary. An uninspired Courteney wondered if his parents had named him after Selous, but never remembered to ask them this in the biweekly letters that he sent home.

They were not exactly cut from the same cloth, Emil and Courteney, but the friendship of the Two Unfortunates of 1937 had taken root fast and held strong.

It was with Courteney that Emil enjoyed Master Archie’s English class, struggled through Master Findlay’s Science class and suffered through Master Duthie’s History class. In truth, Courteney was too intelligent to struggle or suffer through anything academic. Preferring to challenge himself mentally and not exert himself physically, where Courteney truly suffered and struggled was on the sports field, where he was expected to participate in rugby and cricket, and in the wide open veld where he was expected to build a fire, pitch a tent and shoot a moving target with equal degrees of determination. Yet he made every effort to enjoy these pursuits because of Emil, who was happily in training to be an outdoorsman. In return, Emil understood and appreciated the particularity of Courteney’s friendship and made every effort to love poetry and enjoy plays the way that not only Courteney but Master Archie would wish him to.

By the time Emil returned home after his first term away, his parents had already grown accustomed to their quiet existence. In Flat 2A, notes were delicately written back and forth on pastel-coloured paper. Collars were now starched and shoes were now laced without a word being spoken or a song being sung. Meals were eaten at the kitchen table and Emil used as an emissary to pass the salt, the butter, the gravy and the vegetables. For most of the day, the only voices to be heard within their flat came from his mother’s His Master’s Voice gramophone and his father’s Philips wireless radio.

During Emil’s absence, it had been Gemma who had written the first note and put it on the kitchen table. Johan had responded to the note and left his response on the kitchen table and thus had begun something that was not quite new between them, a relationship that was lived out through correspondence.

Gemma and Johan struggled at first, jotting down only a few hesitant and halting lines, but with the passing of time the notes became longer, more elaborate, containing much more than just what was deliberately not being said. Eventually they began to enjoy the silence. Gemma would take trips to Haddon & Sly to buy reams of paper in pretty pastel colours. She particularly agonised over the type of pen to be used and often bought more than one for them to try out. He was the first to sign the note ‘with love’, to which she responded with a ‘Dear Johan’.

‘Dear Johan, just back from H&S. I trust that I have found the perfect pen. Try it out and let me know what you think.’

‘Dear Gemma, it writes like a dream. I believe this is the one.’

‘Remember that first letter that you sent with the bleeding ink?’

‘I was too excited and nervous to notice what the ink did.’

‘Oh … Dear Johan …’

It was this particular correspondence that Emil found on the kitchen table when he returned home from his first term at the Selous School for Boys.

His parents spoke to him, of course. His mother had pointedly superficial conversations with him: He appeared thinner; was he being well fed at school? He was getting positively brown; was he spending too much time in the sun? He was growing taller; did he need new uniforms already? He was getting handsomer by the day, was it not such a pity that there were no girls at the school? Did he know that blushing became him? His father, still unable to meet Emil’s eyes, asked more or less the same questions about school to the space above Emil’s head: The schoolmasters were all right, were they? He had since heard something of a Master Duthie; not causing any problems, was he? He understood how older boys could be towards newcomers; how were things on that score? This friend that he had made, this Courteney Smythe-Sinclair, was proving to be a good friend, was he? And this Master Archie, was he the proper sort? And the animal’s warm heart; he really had had to eat it, had he?

The fact that his parents broke their silence for him must have seemed to them to be an act of kindness. Emil wished that he could have felt it as such, but he could not. The little that they said to him made him feel as if they had brought him into the world only to have very little interest in him.

He knew that this was unfair, but he felt the cruelty of his situation keenly because he remembered the days on the BSAP outpost – days that were filled with laughter, love and lukewarm lime cordial. Days lived together with his mother, and not his father, wearing the red cloche hat.

His father’s wearing of the red cloche hat had created a crisis within the Coetzee household and it had taken only a term at the Selous School for Boys to teach Emil why. In his Religious Studies class, Emil had been taught that God created man to have dominion over all the other living things of the land and sea and that it was man’s mandate, as the superior being, to not only name all living things but also to categorise them and thus create an order of things from the seeming chaos. The primary pursuit of man, therefore, was to make the world not only habitable but knowable, and known as well, which was why the voyages of discovery and imperial expansion had been so important; they fulfilled the sacred covenant between God and man. God had chosen the European man to spread the light of Christianity and civilisation to the rest of the world. As a result, men, real men, men like Frederick Courteney Selous, held sacred their covenant with God. They wore it as a badge of honour and made it a point of pride. Emil understood that no European man working in the service of God and King would willingly give up this destined and privileged position, even for a brief moment, and in that same view, Emil understood that his father, in choosing to appear feminine, had, for a brief moment, given up his position and irredeemably and irreparably upset the natural order of things. There was no hope of return from such a sorry state of affairs.

Due to the many silences that the flat contained, Emil always felt that he had to escape it. He found refuge in the places that he had struggled to love before: the Centenary Park, the Municipal Bathing Pools, the theatre. He tended to go to the theatre whenever he acutely missed Courteney, who spent his holidays in Essexvale being fattened, pampered and cossetted by a mother and six sisters who were hell-bent on restoring his cherubic state.

As the years went on Emil found himself, during his school holidays, seeking solace in the peaceful jacaranda-, flamboyant- and acacia-lined avenues of the suburbs that he could get to within five minutes of walking down the perfect straightness of Selborne Avenue. Here in the suburbs, Emil would listen for sounds, any sounds, of family life – children playing and laughing; dogs barking and being told to voetsek; wives screaming and demanding that their husbands tell them why they liked dancing with Victoria so much; husbands saying that they had had enough; the sound of a slap and the slam of a door – in an attempt to experience, albeit vicariously and briefly, the lives of others. Emil welcomed all of the sounds but they were few and far between in the serenity of the suburbs and he often wondered if the silence that had taken hold in his family existed in other families as well.

Emil’s walk through the suburbs would usually end at a colonial-style house with French windows, a red wraparound veranda and an English rose garden that was so much like the house that his mother had dreamt of living in once upon a time, not so long ago. Emil would stand outside this house and stare at it for a moment and wonder … just wonder if things would have been different if …

The house had been built by and belonged to Scott Fitzgerald and even though he called it home, it seemed to need more than one person to make it so.

Scott Fitzgerald, who was no longer a policeman and was now an advertising agent, was more often found at home than at work because, while he had a comfortable office in the city centre, he rarely used it. Since he still harboured dreams of becoming an author, he preferred to be at home, where he could labour over his manuscript on his Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter whenever inspiration struck. Although that was the idea, what he usually did with his time at home was dash off memorable phrases of preferably less than six and definitely not more than twelve words, and he did this so easily and wonderfully that he was permitted to work from home.

He was the best in the country at writing advertisements. A housewife would, while comparing prices (as housewives always do), recollect one of Scott Fitzgerald’s six-word jingles that she had heard on her 1940 HMV New Yorker Smart wireless and make what she believed to be a highly informed decision. A retired engineer knew that by providing for all his needs through Morrison’s Mail Order Catalogue, he could best stretch his pension funds because a carefully placed advert in the Railway Review had told him so. A young man, wanting to impress his sweetheart and his boss alike, went to buy his first Rolex watch at T Forbes & Son, Ltd, on Abercorn Street because, according to the intertitle he had read at the bioscope the night before, the watches sold there were for men who meant business. The newly engaged young lady who wanted the best honeymoon that money could buy knew to subtly suggest the New Woodholme Hotel in East London to her fiancé because it was said by The Chronicle to be modern, situated on a golden beach and overlooking the sparkling Indian Ocean. The frugal housewife, the retired engineer, the impressive young man and the aspirational fiancée acted individually without knowing that they had all been spurred to action by one man, Scott Fitzgerald, such was the amorphous nature of his power.

Ever since he had arrived in the City of Kings, Scott Fitzgerald had encouraged Emil to call him Uncle Scott. When Emil visited him, Uncle Scott would, as soon as Emil arrived, gratefully stand up, move away from the typewriter and the bottle of whisky (a sad cliché if ever there was one, he often lamented), grab his overcoat, regardless of what the weather was like outside and say, over his shoulder, ‘Ah … the prodigal returns. Let us go forth and be men,’ before leading Emil out of the house and back onto the tree-lined avenues of the suburbs.

‘Being men’ according to Uncle Scott consisted of going to Scobie’s on Selborne Avenue where he ordered a whisky on the rocks for himself and an ice-cold lime cordial for Emil. Uncle Scott’s frequent patronage of Scobie’s, and the six words – The place with a pioneering spirit – that he had written that made Scobie’s the favourite haunt of a particular type of man, brought with it such privileges as bringing his underage ‘nephew’ into the bar with him.

Emil scrutinised the men sitting at Scobie’s. They were a constant at any hour of the productive day and he strongly suspected that they were what Master Duthie called ‘the rejects of empire’ – men who, with all the superiority of their European race, had not been able to amount to much because their dashed prospects had rendered them men too disappointed to do anything other than feel sorry for themselves. Master Duthie would constantly caution, ‘I never want to hear that any of you sitting here before me today grew up to be the rejects of empire. The imperial project is the greatest event in the world’s history. It takes men, real men, to carry it out. And we here at the Selous School for Boys are in the business of making men, real men.’

After a few years at the Selous School for Boys, the last thing in the world Emil wanted was to be a reject of empire. He wanted to be a man, a real man, a man like Frederick Courteney Selous.

In spite of the fact that he spent a lot of time at Scobie’s, Uncle Scott was, most certainly, not a reject of empire. He spent his days writing words that would transact in the necessary exchange of goods and services for money. As Master Duthie often pointed out, commerce was the hallmark of a civilisation and capitalism the hallmark of a superior civilisation. Uncle Scott was the oil that made the entire imperial machine run smoothly. He wrote words that made people want to buy things. In a fledgling capitalist country, there was a lot to be admired in that.

Uncle Scott’s own thoughts, on the other hand, were often far from imperialism, capitalism or civilisation. ‘How is your mother?’ he would ask after his first sip of whisky. ‘Still as lovely as ever, I’d wager. Still sweetness and light. I have almost captured her in the novel … tell her that. This time … this time she will love the portrayal. I can almost guarantee it.’ Uncle Scott would take another sip of whisky and then say the words Emil had been waiting for all along, ‘Remember the outpost? Remember the wonderful time we had there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember how she danced the Charleston and the foxtrot? She made us fall in love with her, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, it is really not our fault that we are in this sorry state now, is it?’

‘No.’

Even at a young age, Emil understood that Uncle Scott’s frustration lay in being able to persuade everyone but the woman he loved with his words.