the paintings – writing, really – on the wall. The narratives were realistic and fair: sometimes man outmanoeuvred animal, sometimes animal overpowered man. Emil always imagined himself to be part of the hunt; of all the things in the world, this was what he desired most, to test his might and mettle against that of an animal.
In his dreams, he was something beautifully wild and ferocious. He ran barefoot through the grasslands, carrying an assegai in his hand and knowing exactly when to strike at the heart of the dark, looming creature in his environment. He was a hero and the creature was something out of a fable. When he awoke his heart would be pounding with an excitement that made him jump out of bed and run around the small patch of land that constituted their front yard, yowling and brandishing an imagined weapon as he prepared himself to vanquish the creature of his dreams.
What Emil did not recollect of his childhood, his parents told him. According to them, he had been born, after a somewhat lengthy courtship and hasty marriage on their part, at the Sandhurst Private Hospital in Durban on 18 April 1927. Six months later he was baptised and christened Emil Coetzee. Possibly hoping to have the relationship with his son that he had not had with his father, Johan had proudly named his son Emil after his father. While this would prove to be a rather damning inheritance in many ways, none of those ways were apparent at the moment of christening.
Although his name was Afrikaans, and his father’s name, Johan Coetzee, was also Afrikaans, Emil had in fact, for all intents and purposes, been born into an English family. This was because Johan was the product of a relatively short-lived and ill-fated union between a rambling ne’er-do-well called Emil Coetzee and a dancer named Bethany Miller. When he was still in his swaddling clothes, Johan’s mother had taken him to a home for orphans, waifs and strays that was run by the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings. Her name was registered as Bethany Miller and her occupation listed as ‘dancer’, which, as Johan grew older, he began to appreciate was a euphemism for something else entirely. Johan came to know of his father’s name and lack of righteousness because his mother had had enough time to tell the ladies of the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings both these things before leaving her newborn baby son in their care. Consequently, whenever the young Johan did anything that was construed as vaguely untoward, he was warned vehemently against becoming like his father, Emil Coetzee, and, as a result, all Johan had received from his father was his last name, Coetzee.
Bethany Miller had left Johan at the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings without so much as a final glance. This last detail Johan always added to prevent himself from feeling overly sentimental and thus romanticising the memory of the woman who had abandoned him. It was at the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings that Johan received a very thorough and very proper English education. He later used this education to apply for a post in the British South Africa Police and soon, by his nineteenth birthday, became a traffic controller.
This was a new position and both the BSAP and the young colony were extremely proud of having need of persons to conduct their traffic, because it showed not only that the country was growing, but that it was moving forward in a civilised fashion. Whereas in the early days the city fathers had been content to allow the barely manageable melee – the ox-drawn wagons whose span dictated the width of the city’s avenues, the horse-drawn carriages driven by the affluent, the donkey-drawn Scotch carts that were often unpredictable, the always-speeding Zeederberg mail and passenger coaches, the zigzagging joyous jinrickshas, the always-on-the-go Raleigh, Rover and Hercules bicycles, and the hundreds of constantly to-ing and fro-ing feet – to create its own rhyme and reason, now that that most modern invention, the automobile, was added to this commotion they no longer felt safe leaving everything to chance. Man had long had mastery of himself and the animal, but the machine was something altogether different. Order would now have to be created out of the chaos and the BSAP happily provided the men that would do so.
And so, with a starched and ironed crisp khaki uniform, a polished silver whistle and a bleached pair of white gloves, Johan stood in the middle of the muddle and set it to rights. He did more than that, how-ever – he performed his task with the grace, poise and mastery of not merely a conductor but a maestro, a virtuoso at his craft. It was pleasure in itself to watch him work.
The details of how well his father performed his job were contributed by Emil’s mother. She did not tell her son these details solely because she was proud of how well the man who would become her husband did his job; she told her son these details because they helped usher in the part of the story that she loved to tell best of all: the part where she, Gemma Roberts, entered it, brought forward by a force of nature.
An overly enthusiastic gust of wind had blown off Gemma’s straw hat just as she was crossing the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, and she had chased after it unaware of, absolutely oblivious to, the fact that she had stopped traffic on both streets as she ran, giggling, through the intersection.
The way she had laughed, her blonde hair blowing riotously in the wind, had made Johan instantly fall in love with her carefree spirit. Instead of doing his job as the traffic controller, Johan had selfishly stopped traffic on Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue and ignored the hooting, braying and neighing. At that moment all he wanted in the world was to watch the girl with the golden hair and experience her for as long as possible.
When he next saw her, a few days later, Johan had asked her for her name and she had given it to him: Gemma Roberts. She gently rocked her body beautifully from side to side, blushed, and batted impossibly long eyelashes up at him as she also gave him her address, even though he had not asked for it. As Johan wrote down her details he was glad that she did not know that his palm itched with the desire to touch her. He feared that she could hear his thumping heartbeat and worried that the sweat collecting on his brow would give the game away.
If she noticed any of this, Gemma had not been much affected by it for she had long been aware of the traffic controller’s maestro-like movements and matinee-idol good looks and in her mind he was as near to perfection as any man had any right to be.
Gemma gave Johan her name and her address in full view of those who were travelling on Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, even though she had spent many a morning in Beit Hall with other girls in brown cotton dresses with Peter Pan collars whose straw-hatted heads were all turned at the same angle towards the headmistress, Miss Grace Milne Langdon, as she warned them about the inherent dangers of fraternising with the male of the species and strictly forbade them to do so in public, for an Eveline girl had to live each moment of her life with grace, dignity and decorum. Gemma took secret pleasure in the knowledge that her schoolmates from Eveline High School, who stood gawking at the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, were, at that very moment, eating their hearts out.
As Johan frowned down at the address that Gemma had given him, she explained to him that, as she was seventeen, this was to be her last year at Eveline High School and that he would have to write to her when she got home to Durban. In fact, it was the very last day of her last term at the school. Gemma thought, but did not say, how serendipitous she felt their meeting like this at the eleventh hour was. And she felt certain that this man, Johan Coetzee, was to be her destiny.
Gemma received her first letter from Johan on 5 January 1921 and although it was written on BSAP official stationery and written with a pen whose ink tended to bleed and run, she chose to overlook these facts because the words themselves practically amounted to a declaration of Johan Coetzee’s undying love for her and made her heart sing and soar. Gemma found the idea of a courtship conducted solely via correspondence utterly romantic; this was very much like being a Victorian heroine and she could barely bear it. It occurred to her that, in entering her life, Johan had removed it from its trajectory of continued ordinariness and elevated it to a higher plane. As all great love stories with magical beginnings and happily-ever-after endings bloomed from the same bud that their own story had, Gemma had no choice but to feel very optimistic about her future.
She
