controller. He had been promoted up the ranks to First Sergeant and been assigned to man a BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills.
It was here, at the foot of the Matopos Hills, that Emil would have his first memory and fall in love so effortlessly with the veld. It was here that his mother, missing the humidity of Durban and suffering through the dryness of the savannah, would tell him stories, all of which began with a girl wearing an Eveline High School uniform who, in chasing her straw hat across the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, captured the heart of Johan Coetzee, a truly remarkable man.
To illustrate the highlights of her story, his mother often produced photographs of the moments she described and this is how Emil knew that he had walked into the Indian Ocean for the first time holding his mother’s and father’s hands, that he had once stood in a cloud of smoke tearfully waving goodbye to his father at a train station, that he had sat on his mother’s lap playing with her string of pearls while she wore a black dress and mourned the grandmother she had only been allowed to call Mrs Williams. His mother told these stories with such great detail that he could see images even from those that had not been captured on celluloid clearly in his mind’s eye.
Yet, try as he might, Emil could not feel a real connection to these memories; though they formed a part of his life, the images they conjured did not move with the pace of real life. The people contained in these memories – his younger self, his in-love parents, his formidable-but-frail great-grandmother, his twice-married grandmother, his shell-shocked grandfather, his paedphobic step-grandfather, his dancing paternal grandmother, his never-doing-well paternal grandfather and namesake, the very English ladies of the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings, the tenants of The Williams Arms, the people travelling on Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, the rows upon rows of Eveline girls with their straw-hatted heads turned at the same angle towards Miss Langdon, the soldiers fighting the Anglo–Boer War and the Great War – all lived in a black-and-white world in which their movements seemed slightly speeded up so that everything they did appeared somewhat awkward, hesitant and haphazard. Their rare smiles, which were bashful, seemed to have been coerced, and all around them was a silence so profound that one felt afraid of breaking it. Their inhabited world was so pristine that all Emil could feel for it was a deep-seated nostalgia that would not allow him to connect further for fear of contaminating its bygone-ness.
CHAPTER 2
In the beginning of the Coetzees’ life together at the foot of the Matopos Hills, there was a happiness that made itself most manifest during the sundowners that Gemma and Johan hosted at their government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda, where they held captive an audience of their son, Emil, and Johan’s deputies, Scott Fitzgerald and Walter Musgrave.
When they had first arrived at the outpost that was but a stone’s throw from the Rhodes Matopos National Park, Gemma had been worried because Johan had honestly told her that they and his two deputies were the only Europeans within a ten-kilometre radius. The only other Europeans they would occasionally see were tourists, the day trippers and sightseers that came to visit the national park. Even if Johan did not say it, they both thought it – Gemma was the only white woman for miles around. It was 1933, so by then they had both, separately, read or heard about the Black Peril, and they had both, separately, been frightened by it. Keeping a brave front, neither of them voiced their fears to the other. They chose, instead, to focus on finally being able to live together and start a life together.
As it turned out, there had been nothing to fear. The natives in the nearby village paid very little attention to Gemma except when she did something that amused them, like hiding from the sun, standing in the rain, having her servants transport water from the river so that they could do the laundry in the yard (when it could far more conveniently be washed in the river), having cold, raw vegetables served to her family as part of supper, painting her face even when there was no special occasion or ceremony and buying feeding bottles as presents for the pregnant women in the village, bottles she was always upset to see put to other, more practical uses.
On second thoughts, maybe the natives did pay Gemma a lot of attention, but that was because she did much to amuse them. She gave the distinct impression of having things upside down and back to front. She was cock-eyed or rather kokayi, as their tongues had transmogrified the word. It was a word that the villagers who worked in the industries of the City of Kings had brought back with them to the village in the same way that they had brought back mirrors, tins of that greatest creation of all, condensed milk, and the knowledge that the Europeans, using a highly esoteric system, had deemed them to be an inferior species of human. ‘Cock-eyed’ had fast become a familiar term as it was used often by their baas to chastise them and make them feel inadequate, small or lacking. Like most of the things that they brought back from the city, the word was part of a shift in the order of things. Perhaps in an effort to make things right again, ‘kokayi’ was used often by the natives whenever Gemma Coetzee did something out of the ordinary. But if any of them intended to make her feel inadequate, small or lacking, they found that they did not have the power to humiliate her.
Since there was genuinely nothing to fear from the natives save the occasional giggle or shake of the head, Gemma relaxed and became happy. She was, after all, the only white woman within a ten-kilometre radius, and therefore something quite exotic, like a rare bird with exquisite plumage that attracted ornithologists from far and wide. During those Friday sundowners she held three European men and one European boy in her sway. They loved her and she loved to be loved by them. Scott Fitzgerald said that she resembled Janet Gaynor; Walter Musgrave swore she resembled Carole Lombard and, for her part, Gemma was happy to be anywhere between these two points – angel or vixen – because it meant that her beauty was of a screen-siren quality. She found it comforting to be considered so beautiful that the entire world would want to gaze upon her.
Scott Fitzgerald, who had absolutely no desire to be a policeman all his life, made no secret of the fact that he was using Gemma as his muse for what was to be his first novel. Gemma happily allowed him to find inspiration in her because she could readily see that there was poetry in his soul and that, because of this, they were kindred. Walter Musgrave, after he had met Gemma, would spend his days off no longer painting watercolour landscapes of the veld around them or the Matopos Hills, but would, instead, have her sit for him so that he could immortalise her on canvas because she was, according to him, the ideal of beauty and femininity. Gemma contentedly basked in the warm glow of both men’s adoration and felt that life on the BSAP outpost would never be anything but good.
Johan did not mind the unguarded attention that his wife received from his two deputies because he loved his wife and knew that she genuinely loved him too. Several years of fevered and fervoured correspondence had made him confident in their love for each other. Besides, Scott Fitzgerald and Walter Musgrave could not have known of the nights when Gemma, while performing a tantalising striptease, would sing with persuasive breathlessness about how much she wanted to be loved by Johan and nobody else but Johan.
Yes, Gemma was happy because she was the jewel in the crown, the apple of every European eye that fell upon her in the outpost. She did not mind that her days were usually taken over by an easy ennui because it happily unshackled itself on Fridays and gave way to a frenzied furore as Gemma reinvented herself as something she had fantasised being, but had, in reality, been too busy to be: a flapper girl.
In their collective imagination, Gemma became the quintessential 1920s carefree, daring and modern woman. And this image that they had of her was true … to an extent. She had danced the Charleston in wild abandon at Durban’s Kenilworth Tea Rooms on more than one occasion, and because one could not dance the Charleston in wild abandon at the Kenilworth Tea Rooms and expect to be taken seriously without the proper attire, Gemma had bought herself, for her twentieth birthday, a bright red cloche hat and, to complete the look, her mother, during a rare act of motherliness, had bought her a black chiffon and lace drop-waist dress that came to her knees. So, despite the fact that she had spent
