The Smell of Apples: A Novel (16 page)

When I've finished I first dry myself with the facecloth and then wrap a towel around my waist. On my way out, Mum says she went over to the Kemps and invited Zelda to come with us tonight. We must go over and pick her up before we leave.

4 Oh, Mum! Why does she always have to go everywhere with us?' I ask.

'Because that's the only chance she ever gets to be exposed to a bit of culture, and she doesn V always go with us. Stop being so selfish, Marnus, and think of your neighbour for a change.'

4 Ja, Ma,' I answer, feeling irritated because Zelda is coming. As I'm walking out, Mum calls me back.

'Mum really loves you, my child. That's all I wanted to say.'

I rub my hands on the towel and say: l I love you too, Mum.'

The door to our bathroom is open and I take the bottle of Mercurochrome from the cupboard. I sit down on the

Mark Behr

toilet seat with a ball of cotton-wool to dab on to the grazes. While I'm dripping it on to the cotton, the General comes in and asks me what happened. I tell him I slipped on the rocks. He squats down in front of me and looks at my knees sticking from beneath the towel. His hair is wet and combed back, and he smells of soap.

'Let me help,' he says, and takes the bottle and the cotton wool from my hands. He smiles at me and says: 'This might sting a little,' and it sounds more like he's saying iietel' than 'little'. He smiles at me and opens his eyes wide.

I nod my head and he presses gently against the grazes, so the red comes through the cotton wool and stains his fingertips. His hands are brown with little black hairs running from his arms right down to his little fingers.

'Does it burn a lot?'

'No,' I answer, shaking my head.

I hand him the plasters and he sticks them across my knees, so that the red patches are covered.

'My son is always grazing himself. It's natural for boys.'

'Thank you, Mister Smith.'

'It is my pleasure,' he answers, and walks to the door. But he stops and turns back to me. 'What shall I do with these?' he asks, and holds out his open palm with the little papers from the back of the plasters.

'Oh . . . give them to me,' I answer. 'I'll throw them away.'

He hands me the little white papers and I stare at his back as he walks from the bathroom.

Sitting in silence, I can feel my muscles slowly going stiff. I should get moving before the body refuses to obey the dictates of the brain. But noon is the worst time of day

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and the sun is hellish, beating every shadow to dust.

I stroke my trouser pants to feel my legs and my hand stops on the flat object in the thigh pocket. After hesitating, I undo the buttons. Unfolding the letter I notice the paper's soggy corners. Around the edges of each page there i a thin yellowish stain of moisture. Sweat. It resembles the sheets of paper we burned around the edges when we were kids, to create the illusion of ancient documents:

18 May, 1988 St James

My dearest Marnus,

I am overcome with the urge to write your name. To call you by name, over and over again, to ensure that you know I'm speaking to only you and to no one else. Sometimes, I think, our most basic needs become fewer and fewer as we grow old.

Through the grace of our heavenly Father everything is going well here. The Cape is as beautiful as you must remember it. And now, in the season of soft rain and cold wet nights, Dad and I sometimes make a fire in the hearth and we listen to music. Dad was in bed for a few days with the flu. (The result of his eternal winter swims, of course. He fancies himself to be not a day older than when we were married.) He's up and about again now, working harder than ever. He travels a lot, and it seems the war may be coming to an end, but nothing is final. I'm not allowed to write anything more than that, you do understand, don't you?

Some pestilence has taken hold of the gardenias and I won't be surprised if we don't have a single flower this year. Beyond that, the garden is green and the

Mark Behr

bulbs we planted a few weeks back have begun germinating.

Evenings when Daddy i away, I sometimes sit at the piano and I think endlessly of the two of you, so far away from me. (We have two permanent guards on duty around the house now; things just aren't safe as they used to be. Last week they were throwing stones again on the highway at Uncle Samuel. A motorist was killed after a rock struck him through the windscreen. My son, you should see the shanties along that road. They stretch as far as the eye can see. When it rains at night I feel terribly sorry for the people who have to live there. I've started a big collection for old blankets and clothes at church.)

Use visited for a week last month while Dad was away. She took time off from work and the two of us carried on like young girls. We saw some wonderful movies in Rosebank and went for supper at that little place on the Hout Bay Quay. (That i the first place Vm taking you when you get back!)

Mister Spiro is selling off his petrol stations and their house has been on the market for three months. Vve heard they're asking such a mammoth sum that no buyer can afford to put in an offer. (When the recession will end, no one knows. Everywhere black people are calling for sanctions against us, and there are stay-away s and strikes all over the country. None of them ever stop to think for a moment that it i their own people who suffer most. But, as Dad says: the government won V ever negotiate with them unless they renounce violence. Justice doesn V carry a sword in its hand.)

Something happened a few weeks ago which I want to tell you about. One afternoon, after my last student

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had left y I came up here to your bedroom to look out at the bay. (I do it at times.) It was one of those grey autumn days when the bay is dark blue and restless. While I was sitting in the window-sill, caught up in my own thoughts and staring out to sea, I saw something in the swell. It wasn V deep, actually quite shallow, just a few metres beyond the rocks. A whale! Marnus, can you believe it? In the middle of autumn and right up close to the beach! And not only that, every now and again it struck the surface with its magnificent tail, sending up a huge spray of water that I could see from right up here in your room.

I ran downstairs and grabbed my old grey jersey and called Doreen to come. Dressed in her overalls she went down with me, through the little subway and on to the beach. I'm not exaggerating when I say he was no more than fifty yards behind the rocks, in the small inlet beside the St James pool. He was so close we could even see the barnacles and other growths on his skin. We stood up there on the rocks, shrieking each time he brought his tail down on to the surface with a deafening blow. It's truly something to witness the mass of water ■he sends up into the air with that tail. Then Doreen said she wished you were here to see the gigantic fish, you who were always so caught up with the whales when you were a boy.

And then your mother started crying because I saw you again as you were, with your shiny blond hair and your eyes the colour of the bay on a summer's day.

I remembered you as you were when you walked around here with your little bare feet and the fishing rod across your thin shoulders. I couldn V look at the whale any longer and like two old women Doreen and I came back up the hill. By this time a strong wind had

Mark Behr

come up, and when we got back to the house I must have looked a sight (you know how wild this hair of mine goes in the sea air), because Doreen's eyes were as big as saucers when she looked at me in the foyer.

My boy, I must say goodbye, because Daddy i calling from downstairs that he's about to leave and I want to send this letter with his office's South West mail. When you were here during December, I asked you so nicely not to go back to the bush, but you wouldn V listen to me. I'm asking for the last time: come home, please, this place is grey and empty without you.

I'm ending this letter now, but never my thoughts of you. I pray for you, my piccanin.

All my love,

Mum

Then I hear something. Just a faint sound somewhere to my left. I sit up and listen, mouth open. It's quiet again. Maybe I only imagined it. I take the R4 and push myself up from the ground. I fold the letter and slide it back into my pocket. The air is still as death. While I'm doing up the buttons I hear it again: a twig snapping beneath a boot, or maybe some dry leaves tugged from a branch by an unguarded webbing. My heart pounds into my ears and the lame feeling of fear wraps itself around my legs like a warm hand. I start running.

While we're waiting for Brigadier Van der Westhuizen to fetch the General, Mum tells him about the Kemps. She says they're also Afrikaners but they're terribly poor. She says many Afrikaners were poor before the National Party won the election in 1948. Before then, the British and the South African English owned almost everything. But since

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we've had our own government, the tables have been turned. But not for the poor Kemps. Mum says she tries to do whatever she can for little Zelda, because Mum knows what poverty is.

The General asks Use why she's so quiet this evening. I wish he'd leave her alone because at least she's quiet for a change, and she's not trying to act like she knows Spanish. Use tells him about Little-Neville. He says he would kill anyone who did something like that to his son, and Mum says yes, it's a terrible thing to happen to anyone.

After the General leaves with Brigadier Van der Westhuizen, we drive to Kalk Bay to collect Zelda. Her brothers and her father are all sitting on the veranda, looking like Makoppolanders. Mum gets out of the Beetle and when Mister Kemp stands up, he shouts something over his shoulder. A moment later Zelda comes on to the veranda and walks down the stairs with him, holding on to his hand. Mister Kemp is only wearing khaki shorts and a white vest.

'She's wearing the green pinafore,' says Use, and rolls her eyes to the roof. 'Good Lord, look what that poor child looks like.'

It's one of Use's old dresses with little yellow squares all over. There's a belt tied round her waist to stop the dress from dragging on the ground, and she's wearing her black lace-up school shoes. There's a green ribbon tied around her hat. Her red plaits hang down her chest, and instead of the bobbles, they're tied up with bright yellow ribbons. She's looking more like someone on her way to Boswell and Wilkie circus than to the school prize-giving.

While Mum is talking to Mister Kemp, Zelda climbs into the back next to me, and Use tells her she's looking very pretty.

Then we drive off along Boyes Drive. Even though the

Mark Behr

sun hasn't set yet, the moon has come up over the Hottentots-Holland. Mum says the mountains look like purple organ pipes against the blue sky tonight.

No one talks any more, and we drive on in silence. When We're near Newlands, Mum tells Use that she shouldn't allow the thing with Little-Neville to upset her so much. Tonight's her prize-giving, and because she's worked so hard, she owes it to herself to enjoy every moment. Mum says we must remember that life isn't always easy. The Lord may cross our paths with hardship at times, but it's at times like these we should always remember Job. It's also not our place to ask why these things happen to us. It's all the Lord's will, and the best we can do is pray for Little-Neville to be healed. Use says what makes it all worse is the fact that it was three white men that did it to him.

'Were they really whites, Mum?' I ask, leaning forward between the seats. Mum's gold earrings swing to and fro as she answers:

'Yes, my son. But that still won't heal Little-Neville -and it probably wasn't right of him to steal charcoal.'

Use turns her head towards Mum and narrows her eyes. She opens her mouth like she's about to say something, but only shakes her head and looks out the window again. I wonder what Mum's thinking and why she doesn't say anything more. Even if Little-Neville did steal charcoal, I still don't think it's right for someone to fry him in front of a locomotive engine. Whether Little-Neville's a Coloured or not, it doesn't matter, you shouldn't do things like that to someone, specially not to a child. It must have been the most terrible thing when they picked him up and held him in front of the burning oven. He must have screamed something terrible and I wonder if anyone heard him.

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'Mum,' I say, and lean through the seats to look at her, 'did someone go and help him when he screamed?'

'Marnus,' she answers softly, 'we don't know whether he screamed, we don't even know what really happened there . . .'

'But Mum, he would have screamed. It must be terribly sore to be burned like that. When we're having a braai and just one little burning coal gets under my foot . . .'

But Mum interrupts me: 'Marnus, please, my boy. Let's wait and hear from Doreen exactly what happened. Speculating won't do us any good.'

'But, Mum,' I carry on, 'why did white people do it?'

'My dear child,' she says, and her voice sounds tired, 'if I knew that, I'd tell you. But all white people aren't Christians. Remember, there are also lower-class whites. Railway people aren't all that educated as a rule, either.'

Use turns to look at Mum, and asks: 'Oh, where did Mummy hear they were railway people?' Mum clears her throat and says she just accepted they'd be railway people because it happened on a locomotive.

I move back in the seat and catch Zelda staring at me with big eyes. Suddenly I remember the other day when she said her father might go and work for the railways next year. I ask her whether she's heard that they fried Doreen's child in front of a locomotive engine at Beaufort West. She shakes her head and I tell her that Little-Neville might even die. I also tell her that it was three white men that fried him.

'What's going to happen to them?' she asks.

I shrug my shoulders and lean forward between the seats: 'Mum, will the men who fried Little-Neville go to jail?'

'Marnus . . . please, my little piccanin.' I can hear Mum doesn't want to speak any more.