‘You’d no business,’ I told him panting furiously, ‘to fetch him here!’ The village moralist was still pursuing the fleeing multitude with his whip. ‘Why didn’t you go home as I told you?’
A few of the boys who had not yet fled apparently heard my words for on the way home whenever we passed groups of excited boys in the street obviously discussing the fight and the respective merits of the two performances, they gave me a look of approval. But for my brother there was only a scornful glance. He did not protest but walked silently beside me like a condemned person. Occasionally I could feel him trying to get me to look at him. However, I kept my outraged eyes firmly on the street watching our shadows thrown up by the fast-westering sun behind us growing longer and longer, darkening the scarlet dust of Africa and taking the colour out of the pink, red and white berries of the heavily scented pepper-trees which lay like the beads of a broken necklace around our feet. To this day I have only to smell the whiff of green peppers in the air to see our shadows, side by side, staining the hungry dust, and to feel again the retarded horror of the inflexible condemnation in my heart.
When we did get home my brother rushed straight to our father with an account of what had happened. He made me out to have been a kind of David who had faced a village Goliath. Before he had finished, the whole family had come in to listen, absorbed, to his tale. As I went to bathe my bruised face in the bathroom I heard the murmur of their spontaneous approval. The tone of their words warmed me through like wine. Even so I noticed that no one expressed approval of my brother for his deed of rescue in my need.
That night, as we lay in our bed on the stoep listening to the jackals barking with frantic mournfulness on the margin of our little village so deeply marooned in the black bush-veld sea, I heard a sob break from my brother.
‘What’s the matter, ou klein Boetie?’ fn5 I asked quickly turning over towards him.
The unexpected note of concern in my voice was too much for him. He began sobbing without effort at self-control, and then gasped out, ‘I don’t want you to have to fight for me. . . . Please don’t always fight for me. If you do you’ll end up by hating me one day. And – and I don’t want you to hate me too, Ouboet . . .’
I was a witness then of the starry prancing impisfn6 of the night throwing down their assegais and watering the heroic heaven of Africa with their gentlest tears.
fn1 Afrikaans for old brother: a term of endearment.
fn2 Little brother.
fn3Totsiens: Au revoir.
fn4 Little old ones: Afrikaans term of endearment among boys.
fn5 Literally: Old little, little brother: term of great endearment.
fn6 An Impi is a Zulu or Matabele regiment of war.
3 The Initiation
HALF-WAY THROUGH MY last year at school my family decided to send my brother to join me. He could have done with another six months or year at the village school because he was still backward in his studies, but my family thought it would be easier for him if he had me to introduce him to life in a great public institution and help guide his awkward paces. I was not consulted but merely told of the decision, because, I expect, my family took it for granted that I myself would like the idea. It was another instance of what everyone expected of me and I received the decision, as far as I am aware, with an ease which confirmed my place in the estimation of my elders and betters.
The year had gone well for me at school. I had never been more successful and popular both with boys and masters. I was in the first eleven, captained the first fifteen, won the Victor Ludorum medal at the annual inter-school athletics, and was first in my final form. I was head of the senior house and would have been head of the school, I think, if I had not been a year or two younger than most fellows in my form. Both masters and boys confidently predicted that at the close of the year I would be awarded the most coveted prize of the school, that for the best all-round man of the year. It was to this brilliant and crowded stage that I returned from vacation with my strange brother at my side.
We arrived the afternoon before the re-opening of the school. I don’t think I was over-sensitive as a child except, perhaps, to the reaction of people and the world to me. But as the school slowly became aware that the awkward, graceless shadow at my side was indeed my brother even I could not help feeling the surprise that merged into the ineffable condescension of public pity in the atmosphere around me. More subtly still I got an inkling of the relief that can surge through the hearts of the many when they begin to suspect an infliction of fallible humanity in the lives of their popular idols. My contemporaries were surprised and for one brief moment I was able to see how ready are the mass instincts to seize an excuse for pulling down the very thing that they themselves have need of elevating. Perhaps I imagined myself to be beyond the reach of all these influences. But they had their effect on me. They could not, to put it at its lowest, make me love either myself or my brother more. I was young enough to hope that once he had gone through the various rites and the tough period of initiation which tradition prescribed for newcomers to the school, his oddness would be accepted as part of the daily scene, and that the qualities which endeared him to his family would have their chance to emerge. Yet, from the very first evening, the start was not encouraging. First impressions are important to the young and never more important than when there are initiation rites to perform.
After all, the purpose of initiation ceremonial is first, by a process of public humiliation, to make the victim aware of his inferiority and then to extract from him, through some painful form of ordeal, proof of the courage which alone can entitle him to redemption from his shameful singularity in membership of the privileged community. Moreover, I have noticed that among those to be initiated there is always one who seems to be predestined to bear an extra burden of ritual because he alone appears to personify most clearly the singularity that has to be humiliated and sacrificed. I use the word ‘appears’ deliberately because in my school it was this appearance, this first impression, which decided the degree in initiation that the candidate was to be forced to endure. All crowds seem to possess an instinct for determining with diabolic accuracy the most suitable sacrifice among its prospective victims. My school was no exception. Even if I had not been apprehensive I could not have helped noticing how everyone who met my brother soon found their eyes drawn in puzzled focus to the spot where his padded coat concealed his deformity.
I watched one boy after another come up to him and fire the usual questions: name, age, address, form in school, games, favourite books, hobbies and so on. My brother answered them all in that artless manner of his without concealment. Yes, his name was the same as mine: he was indeed my brother. Was that so surprising? He was eleven, and in the first form. Yes, he probably should have been out of it long ago but he was no good at books. No, he didn’t play any games either. He didn’t like games much and never played them unless forced to. His hobbies were music and growing things, if you could call that a hobby!
This catalogue of unorthodox answers completed, his questioners hastened away to spread the news of how strange a fish had been thrown up on the school beach in the shape of the brother of the head of the senior house. Soon I was left without doubt that he would have to bear the main burden of initiation if the school were free to have its way. Only one thing stood between my brother and such an unenviable fate: the fact that he was my brother.
Now to be fair to myself I had discussed initiation many times with my brother. He knew all there was to know about it. He knew the details by heart and even remembered some that I had forgotten. He was as ready for it, intellectually, as any newcomer could be. Also, he had great physical strength and resistance to pain. Nothing I had told him about running the gauntlet in pyjamas with the school drawn up in two long rows and hitting out hard at the runners with wet towels plaited to a fine lash-like point; about waking-up at night and finding some boys sitting with pillows on his head while others put a slip-knot of a fishing line round his toes and pulled at them, one by one, until they bled in a perfect circle; nothing about being made to measure the distance from school to town with his toothbrush on his half-holidays, or having to wear boot-laces instead of a tie into town, or being forced to look straight into the sun without blinking for as long as some older boy commanded, or being trussed up and left on the frosty dormitory balcony all night, none of these things, I repeat, had unduly dismayed him. There was only one thing he truly feared: exposure and mockery.