Instantly we would both know that we were referring to the razor-edged hump between his shoulders. Self-contained as he was in his spirit yet this deformity was a breach in my brother’s sufficiency which he could never man, and any enemy from without who discovered it could walk through the breach at will.
I have said we were both extremely sensitive about it but perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was afraid because of it, irrationally afraid of what the world might think, feel and be provoked to do on account of it. My own sensitiveness, on the other hand, although I passed it off to myself as a form of’ minding for him’, was of a different order. This, after all, was a problem in a dimension which was peculiarly my own. I could not readily endure the thought of people setting eyes on this razor-edged hump behind my brother’s broad shoulders because I must have feared that it would reflect on me. I could not bear that anything related to me was not of the best. I had not learned to fear my lack of physical blemish as my brother did his deformity. And the scales, in this matter of our appearance, seemed so unfairly loaded against him. We could never appear together without people being reminded of it. Though it was an inequality which was not of my making and the blame (if such a word can be used for so impersonal a process) lay with life, yet the fact remained that I was, no matter how unwillingly, the main instrument whereby this manifest inequality was kept alive. I think again of the Man from Palestine when He said, ‘It may be that offence has to come in life but woe to him by whom it comes.’ He might have spoken the words for me. My discomfort over my brother’s deformity had yet another powerful stimulus. I must have known instinctively that however much people sympathized with my brother on a perfunctory level, underneath in the more spontaneous world of their emotions, they often felt embarrassed and even threatened by his departure from the norm. They could even secretly resent it and wish him out of the way. I say this confidently because I have found since both in myself and others that the greater the need for individual differentiation from a stagnant normality, the more we struggle and resent those who represent this difference. I have even noticed the same tendency in the behaviour of animals, and I think now of one animal in particular who played a brief, mysterious role in my story. But all I submit here is that, in those far-off days, I and those around me in our behaviour to my brother confirmed this paradoxical law without ever knowing what we did. I grew up showing an excessive solicitude on behalf of my brother’s deformity, firmly believing it was his feelings that I wanted to protect. Yet without realizing it I was obliquely asserting values and defending feelings which belonged to me and my own world. In doing so I was extremely popular with my fellow men. My brother at best was tolerated. It was most noticeable that the moment he entered a room wherein I had company restraint came in with him like winter’s fog. I immediately began to defend and explain him without appearing to do so, and found myself acting out an elaborate apologia on his behalf. My friends then began to feel that they had a duty to deny the effect caused by his odd appearance and soon the conversation became too artificial and self-conscious to be enjoyed. My brother grew up apparently a lonely, friendless person. Yet it sometimes seemed that I had more interests and friends than my life could contain.
And now I come to the final difference between us. I was tone-deaf. I could not sing in tune. It may sound a slight matter scarcely worthwhile mentioning. But for me it was an odd and difficult handicap. Secretly the fact that whenever I tried to join in any singing I spoilt it made me surprisingly unhappy. If I persisted, as I often did when I was younger, I merely provoked a titter which forced me quickly to desist. It was an added irony too, that I, who was so well adapted to my world, was utterly at odds with it in my singing whereas my brother, whose nature always stood at such an acute angle, through his singing became completely at one. Even as a child he had a clear unhesitating soprano which developed as he grew older into a manly and pleasantly-rounded tenor.
I remember going to look for him once in our garden on my first day home from school on the long summer vacation. The garden was immense and I thought I would have difficulty in finding him. But I had just come to the edge of the orchard with its great yellow apricots, ruby peaches, purple plums and figs, pears, scarlet and pink cherries and pomegranates all shining like Persian jewellery in the morning sun, when I heard his voice, lovely as I had never heard it before, soaring up from the centre of the garden. He was singing something I didn’t recognize which had that curiously simple yet urgent up-down rhythm of the African idiom. To me it sounded like primitive music before the mind and worldly experience had worked upon it.
I stood there listening to him singing, feeling more and more shut out from I knew not what – but something that I recognized to be urgent and vital. In the end I was overcome not by a nostalgia for the past (that is simple and well within the capacity of our awareness) but by a devouring homesickness for the future which is precipitated in our hearts through a sense of what we have left uncompleted behind us. The little song became for me, to borrow a platitude of the present day, a signature tune reminding me always of my brother as well as my own unrealized longings.
Ry, ry deur die dag,
Ry, deur die maanlig;
Ry, ry deur die nag!
Want ver in die verte
Brand jou vuurtjie
Vir iemand wat lang at wag.
The words, as you can see, even if you do not know our mother tongue, are simple enough. I can translate them freely in prose: ‘Ride, ride through the day, ride through the moonlight, ride, ride through the night. For far in the distance burns your fire for someone who has waited long.’
‘Where on earth did you learn that tune and who wrote the words?’ I asked as I came on him watering seedbeds beside a tree sullen with the weight of its yellow fruit.
‘Ag, Ouboet!’ he answered smiling in welcome putting down his watering can and stretching his absurd frame: ‘It’s just something that came bursting into my head one day while you were away.’
As he spoke he had the same look on his face as when he made his cross beside the diviner’s in the sand. But if he was waiting for some sort of acknowledgement from me he was again to be disappointed.
‘It’s not bad,’ I replied.
‘Glad you think so,’ he answered. But he looked intently at me for a moment before he resumed his watering.
I suppose, therefore, it was no accident that my brother’s first serious brush with the world of his boyhood was caused by his sense of the musical fitness of things.
In church the family who occupied the pew behind us had remarkably loud voices but no sense for tune. They all sang hymns loudly, usually slightly behind the rest of the congregation and almost two tones out of true, or so my brother said. One Sunday morning they were singing with such magnificent unawareness of their crime against the laws of harmony that my brother was first silenced, then set sniggering and soon we were both shaking with that convulsive merriment which sometimes assails one in places where it is strictly forbidden to laugh. The whole of the offending family gave us a very hard disapproving look after church but I thought no more of it. Yet from that Monday onwards I had an uneasy feeling of something amiss in our village life which I discounted as fantasy whenever it thrust itself upon my attentions and certainly did not connect with the episode of our merriment in church. Yet despite my determination not to recognize it this feeling steadily grew. Unfortunately I did not know then, as I do now, how surely and wordlessly a change in the popular mood can communicate itself to those with whom the change is most concerned. During our school vacation neither my brother nor I had great occasion to go out into the streets, but whenever I did so I came back with a sense of uneasiness. It was as if some hostile force were secretly mobilizing against us. On occasions I would find myself in the main street at the sunniest hour of the day looking over my shoulder because of a sudden suspicion that I was being followed. Instantly I would laugh at myself for being so jumpy since invariably all I saw were the familiar figures of some of the village lads dodging artfully behind the glistening pepper-trees or swiftly round the corner of a wall which stood out like a rock in the sea of summer heat. ‘Obviously playing hide and seek,’ I told myself. And so ridiculous did any other interpretation seem that I mentioned my apprehensions to no one. Nor did I connect them with an added reserve in my brother’s withdrawals.