The Magic Circle (22 page)

“Bambi is an
extremely
talented cellist,” Laf was telling Olivier, which got my attention. I knew what
that
meant. “Everyone knows,” he went on, “that deft fingering and the action of the bowing wrist are hallmarks of all great string artists. But very few realize that, when it comes to the
cello
—”

“It’s how you grip it with your thighs that really counts,” I finished up.

Olivier glanced at me, choked, and reached for the water.

“Yes, indeed,” Uncle Laf agreed as the maître d’ arrived with the menus. “The performer’s body
itself
must become the instrument, completely enfolding the music in a hot and all-encompassing embrace of passion.”

“I can see that,” Olivier managed to croak. His eyes were riveted in astonishment on Bambi’s Olympian body.

“I’ll have the
oeufs Sardou,
” Uncle Laf was telling the maître d’. “But with béarnaise, and plenty of extra lemon.”

Olivier leaned toward me and whispered: “I
am
breaking out in hives.”

“Gavroche, perhaps you young people will like to go skiing this afternoon, after brunch?” Uncle Laf asked when he’d finished ordering for Bambi as if she were a child.

I shook my head and pointed to my injured arm.

“Then we two can have our private chat while the others ski. But just now, while we have our meal, I thought I might tell a story of more general interest—”

“A family story?” I asked, with what I hoped was a tone of cautionary reserve. Hadn’t Uncle Laf told me on the phone that what he had to say was confidential?

“Not really
family,
” said Laf with a smile, patting my hand. “Actually, this is my own story, a story I’m sure you’ve never heard, for your father doesn’t know it any more than did my half brother Earnest. Nor does Bambi here, who thinks she knows every dark and hidden secret behind my transparent and public life.”

This seemed an odd characterization of the vapidly beautiful Bambi, whose demeanor suggested an incapacity for sustained interest in any topic.

“Despite my long and full life, Gavroche,” Laf continued, “I still recall every sight, every taste, every scent. Sometime I must discuss my philosophy that aromas are indeed the keys to unlock such early memories. But the strongest memories are those associated with either the greatest beauty or the greatest bitterness. The day when I first met Pandora, your grandmother, was a combination of the two.”

The procession of waiters arrived, set down our dishes, and simultaneously whipped the lids off with a flourish. Laf smiled at me, and went on, “But to explain how it all began, I must tell you first of the bitterness—then the beauty.

“I was born, Gavroche, toward the end of the year 1900, in Natal province on the east coast of South Africa. The place itself was named four hundred years earlier by Vasco Da Gama to commemorate the Nativity, for he’d sighted the place on Christmas Day. The astrological portents at the time of my birth were extraordinary: five planets at once were passing through the sign of Sagittarius, the archer. The most important of these was Uranus, bringer of the new world order, the planet that was expected to usher in the new age of Aquarius nearly upon us. Or one might call it, rather, a new world
dis
order, since from ancient times it was prophesied that the Aquarian age would begin with the violent destruction of the old order, crushed and washed out to sea as though by a tidal wave. For my family there in Natal, that upheaval had already begun: I was born at the very height of the Boer War, the event that baptized this century in fire and blood.

“For two years after my birth, this war had been raging between the more lately-come English settlers and the descendants of earlier Dutch immigrants who called themselves Boers, like the German word
Bauer
or farmer—those whom we English call simply boors or country bumpkins—”

“
We
English, Uncle Laf?” I interrupted in surprise. “But I thought our family was descended from Afrikaners.”

“Perhaps my stepfather—your grandfather Hieronymus Behn—had the right to claim such
boor
-ishness,” Laf agreed with a dark smile. “But my true father was English and my mother Dutch. My mixed parentage, and my birth into a country torn by such a war, go far to explain what bitterness I felt toward the bloody Boers. This war was the match touching off a chain of events that would soon engulf the world, and propel our family into the very heart of chaos. I have only to
think
of those events and I cannot choke down my gall, nor quench my unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred for those men.”

Holy shit. Unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred? Until this moment, like everyone, I’d regarded Laf as a brilliant violinist but a dilettante nonetheless, whose problems were about as pressing as trying to decide what piece of music to fiddle while Rome burned, or under what social circumstances it was appropriate for a gentleman to keep his trousers on. This change in tone revised that impression.

Olivier and Bambi too, I noticed, were staring at him and barely touching their food. Laf had picked up the cheesecloth-wrapped lemon from his plate and stabbed it with his fork, squeezing some extra juice into his béarnaise sauce. But his eyes were focused on the snow that was just beginning to trickle down from the skies outside beyond the picture windows.

“It’s hard to understand the depth and bitterness of such feelings, Gavroche,” said Laf, “until you know the history of the strange country of my birth. I say strange, for it began not as a country but as a business enterprise—a company. It was known as
the
Company, and this company created from the start a private, completely separate world of its own, upon a dark and little-known continent. It created an isolation as impenetrable as the one created by the thorny hedge of bitter almond, which itself grew into the very symbol of the Boers and their desire to live apart from all the rest of the world.…”

THE HEDGE OF BITTER ALMOND

For hundreds of years, since the Dutch East India Company had first set up garrisons along the Cape of Good Hope, many Boers engaged in animal husbandry, keeping flocks of sheep and cattle, an occupation that made them more mobile than farmers who worked the soil. If they chafed under the greedy and tyrannical whims of the Company, they would simply pull up roots and trek to greener pastures—as it soon became their preference to do, no matter who else might already be occupying the new lands they coveted. Nor did they intend to share.

Within less than a century, these
trekboers
had taken most lands formerly inhabited by the Hottentots, enslaved them and their children, and tracked down the Bushmen like wild prey, hunting them nearly into extinction. When the Boers did settle in a place for long enough, believing themselves a superior race chosen by Divine Providence, it became their practice to wall themselves into compounds hedged with sharp-thorned thickets of the bitter almond tree—the first clear symbol of
apartheid
—designed to prevent the natives both from poaching and from intermingling.

Thus the story might have continued. But in 1795 the British captured the Cape. At the request of the exiled Prince of Orange (Holland itself having fallen to the French revolutionary government), Britain purchased Cape Colony from the Dutch for six million pounds. The resident Boer colonists were never consulted in this matter; it would scarcely have been customary in that day. But it rankled them nonetheless, for they were now to be treated as an actual colony, and subject to law and order quite inconsistent with their former way of life.

Then too, more colonists began arriving from Britain: planters and settlers with their wives and children, and the missionaries who went into the bush to minister to the natives. The missionaries were quick to protest, and report back to England, the treatment they observed of local tribes. After fewer than forty years of British rule, in December of 1834, the Slave Emancipation Act freed all slaves within the British Empire, including those impounded by the Boers, an action completely unacceptable to them. And so the Great Trek began.

Thousands of Boers participated in this trek across the Orange River, through Natal, and into the wilderness of northern Transvaal, fleeing British rule, claiming all of the Bechuana territory for themselves, fighting the warlike Zulus. These Voortrekkers existed as an armed camp, hovering always at the brink of anarchy but still believing themselves the chosen of God.

The Boers’ faith in their racial superiority was a concept fanned to white-hot flame by the Separatist Reformed—or ‘Dopper’—Church, one of whose most fervent adherents was the young Paulus Kruger who later, as president of Transvaal, would foment the Boer War. The leaders of such Calvinist churches were determined to ensure that Boer hegemony would prevail and endure: forever chosen, forever pure, forever white.

To preserve racial purity, the church itself arranged to loot orphanages back in Holland of young girls with no other prospects for their futures. Boatfuls of these, many little more than children, were shipped to the Cape colonies as brides for unknown Boers in the wilderness of the veldt. Among these, in the late winter of 1884, was a young orphan girl with the name of Hermione, who was to become my mother.

My mother was barely sixteen when she was told she would be sent to the African continent, along with other young girls, to be married off to men whose names they were not even told. Nothing is known of Hermione’s parentage, though she was likely illegitimate. Abandoned in infancy, she grew up in a Calvinist orphanage in Amsterdam, and she prayed often to the Deity for some bizarre accident of fate, some adventure to come her way and break her free of a strict, colorless existence. But it wasn’t her idea that God’s response would mean being hauled halfway around the world and bartered off like livestock. Nor did her Calvinist training inform her precisely what the marriage bond entailed. What she gleaned from the whispers of other girls only increased her fear.

As the young women arrived at the port of Natal—shaken from the stormy passage, ill nourished, and sickened by anxiety at leaving behind what little they had known of reality—they were greeted by a mob of drunken Boer farmers, the intended husbands, who were unwilling to wait until the church elders selected each a specific mate. They had come to grab prizes of their own choosing and haul them home.

On deck, Hermione and the others huddled like frightened animals, gazing down in horror at the sea of screaming faces that pushed toward the lowered gangplank. The ministers aboard cried out for the ship’s crew to raise the ramp again, but their voices were drowned out by the mob. Hermione closed her eyes and prayed.

Then pandemonium broke loose. The drunken, unruly Boers swarmed onto the ship. Screaming girls were plucked from their feet and tossed over burly shoulders like sacks of flour. A child clinging to Hermione was torn from her and vanished silently into the roaring swirl of bodies. Hermione herself was desperately pressing toward the railing, thinking she still might act upon her earlier thought of wedding herself to the sea instead of to one of these reeking, brutal men.

Just then, from behind, two arms pinned her own arms to her sides and she was swept off her feet. She tried kicking and biting, but her unseen assailant shoved through the mob, tightening his grasp, and screaming profanities in her ear. She became lightheaded as she was carried down the ramp toward the muddy streets of the port, and began slipping from consciousness. Then something smashed into her assailant and she was hurled to the ground. Freed from her captor, she clawed at the mud and crawled to her feet to run away—though she’d no idea where—when she felt a hand grasp hers. It was a firm, cool hand with a confident grip, unlike the rough paws that had dug into her. For some reason, instead of yanking herself away and making that dash to freedom, she stopped and looked at the owner of the hand holding hers.

His eyes were the same color of pale blue as her own, and they crinkled at the corners when he smiled down at her with the sort of smile she’d never seen: a smile of possession, almost of ownership. He brushed a lock of hair from her face—an intimate gesture, as if they were alone, as if they’d known one another for years.

“Come with me,” he said.

That was all. She followed him without a single question, stepping daintily over the prostrate body of her assailant. The stranger lifted her onto his waiting horse and climbed up just behind, holding her close.

“I am Christian Alexander, Lord Stirling,” he said in her ear. “And I’ve been waiting for you, my dear, for a very, very long time.”

It was fortunate for my mother, Hermione, that she was one of the most astonishing beauties of her day. That silvery blondness served her well in her debut on the shores of Africa. My father, however, was nothing like the lofty lord he pretended to be—though few at the time, including my mother, knew so.

Christian Alexander was the fifth son of a minor yeoman from Hertfordshire, and stood to inherit absolutely nothing. But as a young man, he did go up to Oriel at Oxford along with a childhood friend of his, the son of a clergyman. And when the friend went off to Africa each year for his health, my father had both the opportunity and the foresight to follow him. Eventually, my father would become his most trusted business partner. The name of the childhood friend was Cecil John Rhodes.

Cecil Rhodes had been seriously ill when young, so ill that during his second trip to Africa he believed he had fewer than six months to live. But working and often even living outdoors in that warm dry air restored him to health a bit more with each passing year. It was during their very first trip, however, in the late spring of 1870, when both boys were seventeen, that diamonds were discovered at the De Beers farms, while they were working on the land. Then Cecil Rhodes had a vision.

Much as Paul Kruger believed in the Divine Providence of the Boers, so Cecil Rhodes came to believe in the Manifest Destiny of the British in Africa. Rhodes wanted the diamond fields consolidated under one company, a British company. He wanted a British railroad built “from Cape to Cairo” to join Britain’s African states. Later, when South Africa’s vast reserves of gold were discovered, he would claim those for the British Empire, too. In the interim Rhodes became powerful and my father—thanks completely to their friendship—became rich.