Yellowbone. Ekow Duker

for André to make the connection between the angels and classical music. They seemed to be especially fond of stringed instruments. He borrowed his mother’s portable CD player and took it with him wherever he went. She only had the one disc, Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in E minor. He sat by himself and played it over and over again while scanning the horizon like a ship’s captain searching for land.

      One evening when his father came home, he was more pensive than usual. His silence cast such a pall over their family that neither Marietjie nor André could bring themselves to eat.

      They’d gone and given his job to a kaffir, Trevor Barnes said. André was not so shocked at the news. After all, they’d heard the ANC threaten to do that so often on the radio that all the boys at school believed it would happen eventually. It was his mother he felt sorry for. The thought of his father at home all day, seven days a week, would be enough to make her ill.

      ‘What will you do?’ his mother asked. She had gone very white and the tendons stood taut along her neck.

      ‘It’s not for a few months yet,’ Trevor Barnes said. ‘I’ve got one or two things lined up.’

      He wiped his mouth, then his head with its lacquered cap of dark black hair snapped towards André. His eyes were hard with dislike.

      ‘André?’

      ‘Pa?’

      ‘Why do you keep playing that poofters’ music?’

      ‘Pa?’

      ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about! Mr Botha, your headmaster, called me today. People are talking about you, André. They say you’re behaving like a bloody lunatic.’

      Things galloped downhill after that. If his father was going to call him a poofter and a moffie, then he’d play a moffie’s instrument. Just to piss him off. And if he were lucky, the engele just might come back. His father wanted him to play rugby but he detested it. The cold, the mud, the locker room banter, he hated everything about it. They always put him out on the wing, with instructions to ‘Just run’. He hated that. It made him feel like a kaffir running for his life with a pack of heavy white boys panting close behind.

      He gained weight in a subconscious effort to get out of playing sports at the hoërskool. In time, ‘Just give the ball to Barnes, he’s quick’, became ‘Don’t give the ball to Barnes, he’s a fat cunt.’ And as André’s girth increased, so did his father’s disdain. And in response, André played the violin with even more diligence and fervour. He discovered he had a natural facility for the instrument. He struggled with Afrikaans and English because of his dyslexia but to the specialist’s surprise, he could read and write music effortlessly.

      Try as he might, however, the engele came less and less frequently and their absence caused André great distress. He began to suspect that they only came on those occasions when he played particularly well or played a piece of rare beauty. But when the engele did appear, the sheer ecstasy of their presence made up for the tortured longing that had gone before.

      It was still raining when André drove into their yard. He spun the wheels of the car and sent a shower of water and gravel clattering against the side of the house. His mother was standing on the porch, a small, porcelain statue with a furled umbrella at the ready. By the time he’d switched off the engine and looked up, she was right outside the car, the edges of her form blurred and undulating with the rivulets of rain. Mother and son looked at each other for what seemed like several minutes. Then Marietjie’s shoulders sagged heavily and she turned and went back into the house.