short story in the activity below is unusual in that it doesn’t really tell a story. A chance meeting recalls to the mind of the narrator, Felix, incidents from his childhood, about which he reminisces. We are not given much information about the setting or the characters and have to fill this in for ourselves.
Activity 3.7 - Reading a short story (individual and group)
Pre-reading:
Skim the story looking for the usual features: characters, setting and theme.
Listen while your teacher reads the story to you or read it silently to yourself. During reading, focus on making sense of the narrative.
Enemy
by Lionel Abrahams (1928-2004)
A strange elation overtook Felix a few minutes after he had bumped into Willem Prinsloo one day in town. Over the years, chance meetings with other former fellow-inmates of the Home had usually rather depressed him, reminding him too keenly of how disliked he had felt there (‘unpopular’ was the word used then), how often displaced and endangered. Yet Willem Prinsloo was the bully he had particularly hated and feared, while most of the other boys in the senior section for children over fourteen had shared his feelings, had been his allies against the tyrant.
His throat contracted when he recognised the robust man limping toward him across Harrison Street with a young woman on his arm. He had often toyed with fantasies of facing Willem in the grown-up world, but now that it was really about to happen he did not know what to expect. He was trembling a little as he spoke the first words of greeting.
‘Willem … Hullo. How goes it?’
‘No, it’s okay with me, thanks. And you?’
The perfectly civil answer amounted to a reprieve, and not now needing to escape, Felix dared, ‘And what are you doing nowadays?’
‘Oh, diamond cutting, you know …’ There was no sarcasm, though Felix ought to have remembered, that being the trade many of the boys became apprenticed to. Then, unprompted, Willem added, ‘This is my wife.’
And so, with a minute of cool politeness while they waited for a robot’s permission to move on, the encounter passed and they walked away from each other. Perhaps it was simply relief that accounted for the elation that now swept Felix up. There had been, on Willem’s part, none of the old harshness or rudeness or menace, and no sign of recrimination – and this softening might have had to do with his wife’s presence, the public place, or some ten years of forgetting. But on his own part, Felix was surprised to discover a complete freedom from bitterness. So there was more to his little euphoria than just relief. That decade-old toxic element in his memories of Willem seemed suddenly to have been neutralised. He allowed himself a fanciful regret that he had not invited the pair to join him for coffee in a nearby tea-room, so that once more after so long he and Willem might partake at the same table. How different it would have seemed, how delicious the contrast with those many meals at the long tables when all he wished from Willem was not to be noticed by him.
Why had he been so daunted? It must have been some particular degree of unripeness in his adolescent outlook that had induced him to hug his fear and caricature Willem into a monster. Reflecting now on the face he had just re-encountered, Felix found no quality there, after all, that necessarily bespoke brutality and arrogance. Those quick-moving eyes under the brow that so readily rumpled in heavy frowns, need not seem fierce or suspicious. He recalled noticing just such features on someone he knew only as mild and tractable.
And Willem’s gestures and habits also appeared in a new light. Even the way, with his grin or laugh, his tongue-tip would protrude, pressed against his lower lip as though to restrain his eagerness, keeping the curve wet and hungry-looking, had lost its malign aspect. Felix had recognised that old habit, when it had reappeared while they chatted, with something like a secret greeting for himself.
But he could remember how in the old days when Willem Prinsloo laughed, when his tongue-tip showed and his bull voice leaped up the scale into a shrieking giggle, smaller boys would melt with terror. It made Felix smile. What queer exaggerations had stifled their reason and moused their courage. How grossly their lack of perspective had distorted reality.
In the hierarchy of physical strength that framed the society of thirty or forty boys at the Home, Willem Prinsloo’s place was at the summit. Felix’s was usually near the bottom. The only boys on whom he could impose his will were bed-patients – like Nemus Marais who was paralysed from his chest down and who died during his second winter there. He was a thoughtful, older boy with gentle manners whom Felix liked to chat with and play at chess, drafts or Chinese checkers. Yet from time to time he could not resist teasing Nemus for a little, pretending to try to push a cake of soap into his mouth, amused by his helpless giggles and breathless protests as they came by turns.
But Willem Prinsloo, with his cabinet of strong henchmen, ruled the whole community. And regarding him from his station in the system Felix was bound to perceive him wrongly. He figured as a simple, all-powerful instrument of motiveless cruelty, at once despicable and fearful. Felix would freeze in a stupor of dismay as Willem appeared and strode toward him, bawling one of the contemptuous nicknames he favoured – ‘Joodjie … Pigmeat … Proffessorr…!’
What followed was often a treacherous game. Taking his subject gently into the strong circle of his thick arm Willem would adopt an almost fatherly tone, murmuring, ‘Come on , come, Joodjie, it’s about time I got you a bit tough. Let’s teach you how to take it, eh …’ Then he would begin, flicking Felix’s ears with his fingernails, perhaps, grappling knee muscles with timber-hard hands, punching biceps, blowing illicit cigarette smoke into his face. There was always the chance that his mood would push him across a certain boundary, and he would bring the burning end of his cigarette closer and closer to blistering point, until enough terror showed. Once he rubbed with a moistened thumb at a spot on Felix’s hand until the skin broke and was left to leak and fester …
‘I’m only playing with him,’ he invariably explained if any of the staff happened on the scene of his game.
With his new perspective, Felix judged that he would feel quite differently about such things if he had to undergo them again, far less negatively. After all, the bully only rarely inflicted a real injury. The way things appeared now, if Willem puffed smoke at him, the knowledge that cigarettes were strictly forbidden to the boys would add to his sense of grazing up against Life as he choked and struggled to turn his face away, a touch of admiration, a tickle of mirth at Willem’s bravado. And he played with the thought that the other ex-inmates of the Home, similarly broadened by experiences of life away from that protected hilltop, ought also to see the remembered Willem cloaked in this benign nimbus of revised appreciation. When, with the benefit of maturity and detachment, they recalled the things he had done to them, they ought to chuckle nostalgically, or even feel grateful.
There was, for instance, the tall big-boned fellow whom Willem once dealt a black eye. Granted some perspective, that boy might find the memory more than a little amusing – especially recalling that the bruises round his eye were outlasted by the days that Willem’s sprained hand first had had to be wrapped in sticking plaster – and laugh out loud while rocking on his callipered legs and crutches.
And the feelings of the dwarfish boy whom Willem had swung round in the air while holding him by the ankles should be, whenever he looked back on the incident, a surge of gratitude for a unique experience. Counting up the number of times his head touched the floor as he whirled round and round through that switchback circle, his gratitude should
