light-brown skin created by being there. His situation became so dire that sometimes he did not have to dream that emptiness or that presence; he just had to conjure it up and his throat would tighten up and he would start to wheeze.
This recurring dream unsettled Emil and made him feel disconnected, as if he did not belong. It threatened to rob him of that deep love, so much like reverence, that he had breathed in through his first memory. Before, he had gone exploring because of the beauty of the land that lay all around him, but now he did so because he only felt at peace when he glanced down at the black shadow that he cast over the veld and felt it connect him to all that surrounded him. And so he spent more time in the veld than he did in the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda. After all, it was there, in the middle of the yellow, green, red and brown savannah grasslands, that he truly belonged. It was there that he was at home.
CHAPTER 3
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