A small sunlit lawn, enwombed by tall, soft, dark hedges. Angel children playing timelessly with beautiful toys, clay, paper and colours, while an angel lady watches them, guarding their safety and happiness. Felix had given Mommy and Daddy many reminders about his needs and his likes and dislikes to pass on as instructions to the people who were going to be looking after him. But still, his picture of the place was that little garden-heaven, that womb.
Instead, a tarred path flanked by hydrangeas, cannas and stretches of lawn, sucked him and his suitcase of new clothes toward the beetling portal of a rambling stone-and-shingle mansion. And that door thereafter, when Mommy and Daddy had left him, sucked him into a world of routines, hierarchies, disciplines and codes —codes above all, and lacunae, a vast weight of broken history. In the grand staircase-embraced vestibule behind that well-porched door-behind-a-door stood a pedestal bearing the black, gleaming head of a rhinoceros, never to be explained. Nor would the beads be explained — the thousands of tiny red and white beads that lay embedded in the grass of one of the lawns, perpetually to be scraped up in little hoards by children at play. Nor would so many other mysteries of the place ever be explained. But the force of his curiosity faded as his months there made things uncomfortably familiar — certain rooms, corridors and portions of the gardens, the rhythms of the days and the weeks, certain kinds of dismay and lack, and alienness itself.
One of the familiar rooms was called Small Dorm. Between its door and its two big uncurtained sliding windows, its moulded ceiling and bare polished wooden floor, it contained a fireplace with a mantelpiece, eight metal beds and a ghost. This was the quarantine room Felix had to stay in when he caught German measles. Among the boys with him there was his friend Percy. Together they made up stories about being home.
Another was Ronnie Spavic, bigger, hampered only by a limp. He loped about on ropey, tense legs, often muttering through his skew tight lips and teeth, in growls, whines and hisses rather than words. His habit was to sidle close and pounce on a smaller boy, seize on him with a trap of hard fingers and wring his head as if he wanted to test its firmness, but would be gleeful if it caved in. Sometimes a cage of fingers would be clamped over the victim’s face, or bottom, or arm. And sometimes the small boy was wrapped in an embrace while Ronnie pumped at his backside for a few seconds. He seemed to want to do something terrible, violate, damage, kill, if only he dared. But something stopped him. When staff talked to him, making him nervous or angry, his lower jaw would pull back in a sort of yawn then jerk down again and again, like a choking dog’s. Meanwhile he would walk or stand as though nothing unusual was happening. Sometimes when he was quiet he would moisten his smallest finger with saliva, push it deep into his nostril, let it rest there for long minutes, then pull it out well coated, and return it to his mouth. He seemed not to care whether smaller boys saw him at it, as though confident that they found him too dangerous to denounce. This habit must have caused the sourish smell that hung about him.
Felix was not always able to get to the lavatory in time, and one day was trying with Percy’s help to clean away the evidence of a small accident, when Ronnie came on them. “Hey! You shit yourself, little Jewboy? And on the floor? Hey, lemme call the nurse…”
“No!” Felix begged. “We cleaning it up. It’s cleaned up already.”
“Hiding it, hey?” Ronnie clamped his fingers on Felix’s head. “Thought you could get away with it, hmm? But I copped you, didn’t I, little Jewboy, little crook?” He squeezed hard, and Felix’s pleading turned to a moan of pain. “I’ll tell if I want to, you hear me, you dirty little nit?” A last fierce dig of his fingers seemed to satisfy him for the moment. He dropped Felix and turned away.
But from now on the secret was there all the time. He used it to make Felix squirm and plead or give in to his demands. Any reluctance to come and be mauled or queerly caressed or to hand over a toy or a piece of tuck, any complaint, would be met with a clench-toothed mutter: “You want me to tell? Hey, little shitpants! Little Jewboy! Hey? Hey?”
Though Ronnie never really hurt him, Felix never dared to resist or defy him. Their miserable cowards’ partnership went on for long months after the quarantine was over.
Ronnie-the-wolf, and the ghost in Small Dorm, and snakes that came in from the koppie at night, and the beam from the night watchman’s torch swirling shadows through dormitory windows, and the wind in the pines, and the roaring of lions and sad peacocks’ wails from the zoo, and a bleeding nose streaming into the dust where he sat on the floor of the summerhouse rondavel, and boils on his legs, and sharp, impatient nurses…
Two of them, herding a clutch of small children, converse in a code of spelled-out words, and show they are tired and annoyed. The children are “it”. “Oh-oh! Now it’s going to blub, would you believe!” Another, feeding him at lunch, claps her hands in relief when he says he does not want a second helping of the burnt, chloroform-tasting roast pumpkin. When he lies in bed before lights out, proudly reading aloud as he always does, one of them snaps, “Read to yourself”. From then on, he reads silently, for himself alone.
He lies in bed tickling his bottom, thinking of a place, a rondavel like the summerhouse but smaller and all closed up, and hidden deep in a forest. And he is in it with a lady. And they are both naked. And he is doing something to her, he doesn’t know what, but something rude. And it seems cruel, cruel.
Time with Percy was hours of quietly making up some game with stones, sand and grass, string and sticks, pencil and paper, or whatever toy or annual had come their way. Sometimes they wrestled for a while, but even when they hissed, “Now I’m vicious!” they did not hurt each other much. Most often they talked and talked about what it was like at home. Percy’s father was not at home but in an asylum in Pretoria. It was, he told Felix at first, because he was deaf. He had gone deaf on a ship because everyone was shouting and there was an enormous noise. Only much later did he tell Felix that really his father was in the asylum because he was “off his head”. His mother couldn’t walk and nor could his youngest sister and his elder sister was very wild. He never tired of telling about the wild angry things she had done.
But they liked best talking about Gerald. They had discovered that Felix’s cousins’ cousin Gerald lived next door to Percy’s mother’s house. Felix had seen Gerald only about twice, but he was a link. Not like the link of Percy being, as he sometimes said, half Jewish — so that once when a Jewish holiday came he sat outside with Felix instead of going into the Playroom for school. Gerald was a link because he was someone in that other world who was known to someone here. He proved that the other world was real.
And for the Empire, there were two pictures in grandly sober colours, of the king, encrusted in medals and braid, and the queen, doubly encrusted in jewels, her towering neck made all out of pearls. They ruled from above the dining-room mantelpiece on which swam a four foot long model of HMS Queen Mary, the greatest ship in the world. Their mystical Golden Jubilee produced golden confusions and golden-looking medals for the children. And when the king died all the things nurses, children and teachers said about it were as awesome as the endless gossip about the end of the world. A pane of the skylight in the duty-room fell in on the night the king died, which was a sign. His doctors had sewed a green thread through some part of his body: if it had come out stained red by blood they would have known he was still alive, but it had come out green, so they were sure he really was dead. Was that because he was a king? The cruelty of that needle!
There was a war in Africa. Eyetalians in aeroplanes were dropping bombs on Natives who only had assegais and shields. It wasn’t fair, so everybody sang:
“Will you come to Abyssinia, will you come?
Bring your own ammunition and your gun.
Mossaleeni will be there, shooting
peanuts in the air.
Will you come to Abyssinia, will you come?”
Then the greatest empire in the world sent exhibits from all its colonies and dominions to show their colours and their pride, and crowds of people from all over the world came to the Golden City to see the Empire Exhibition. A convoy of cars collected the children one day for their visit. Their route to the showground lay through the university, vacation-hushed, its palaces of learning with their clean new Classical shapes establishing symmetrical order within the light and space of the young country, this obedient arm of empire. In the showground colourful and obedient throngs streamed along a network of roads to pay homage at a score of shrines.
The children were herded onto little open trams whose two long back-to-back benches faced outwards so that passengers could see at least half of what was to be seen. Special nurses, belonging to the Exhibition, rode with them and saw that no one fell off the seats. At one of the shrines black waiters in white nighties and red flower-pot hats served them cakes and drinks at little wickerwork tables on a terrace. In another, a low oval wall enclosed a model of the world, lumpy continents surrounded by real water on which little ships (the biggest, the recognisable Queen Mary, nearly half the size of Madagascar) plied their fascinating courses while their tiny lights and and those that showed where the cities were came on and went off as an electric calendar counted off miniature days and nights. This was better than the Giant and Midgets, the Fat Boy, the Wild Man from Borneo, even the Performing Fleas. Felix could have gazed for hours, gorging his imperialist eyes on this little, visible, orderly earth.