through the His Master’s Voice gramophone and enveloped Gemma in a melancholic sadness that gave her purpose. She spent entire days exploring the many byways of her heavy moods and emotions. She did not have to do anything but feel blue and she did so wholeheartedly, minutely examining every emotion for sufficient blueness and heaviness. The byways that she travelled inevitably led back to that first letter she had received, seemingly a lifetime ago now, the letter that had arrived on BSAP stationery, the letter that had been written with a bleeding pen. Gemma saw now what she had not seen then – that the letter had not been written with much care, and that there was something she desperately needed that the letter writer could not provide. She was not altogether sure what that something was but she was sure that the missing of it was making her blue.
She did not stop loving Johan, though – he looked too much like Douglas Fairbanks Jr for any woman in her right mind not to love him. She just saw him with clarity now and that clarity made it near impossible for her to get out of bed every morning.
Not knowing the inner workings of his mother’s mind, Emil, at eight, believed that the reason his parents no longer danced to ‘You’re the green in my coffee; you’re the salt in my shoe’ at sundown on the patch of grass that masqueraded as a lawn and stood where a veranda should have been while he sipped on lukewarm lime cordial had everything to do with the fact that he had ‘gone native’ as his mother now often screamed to him that he had.
Although he kept this to himself, Emil knew that he had grown a little wild because of a recurring dream … a nightmare, really. This nightmare of a dream had regrettably taken the place of his favourite dream, the one about the hunt. In the nightmare he would come home, from the government school for natives that he attended, to find the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda empty. Emil would put his rucksack on the kitchen table and the eerie emptiness of the rest of the house would fill his body with apprehension. He would enter and thoroughly check all the rooms of the house and in each room his parents would not be there. When the apprehension turned to fear, he would return to the kitchen to find the native girl and the baby boy with light-brown skin sitting at the very table where his rucksack lay, and the native girl would ask him what he was doing in her house. When he opened his mouth to tell her that he lived in the house with his mother and father, instead of words coming out, the howl of a wounded animal would escape from his throat. The native girl, seeming to perfectly understand the animal sound, would respond and tell him that she and her baby had always lived there. Emil, not knowing what else to do, would howl an apology and run out of the house, instantly regretting that he had left his rucksack behind. He would loiter outside the house waiting for Walter Musgrave to arrive so that he could explain the situation to him. No longer trusting that he would reliably find his voice, he would repeat his name over and over again – Emil … Coetzee … Emil … Coetzee … Emil … Coetzee – until he felt assured that he was still capable of language. But then a question would rudely present itself: what made him so sure that the house belonged to Walter Musgrave?
When Emil woke up from this dream, he struggled to breathe. He was afraid of both the emptiness that his parents created by not being there and the presence that the native girl and baby boy with light-brown skin created by being there. His situation became so dire that sometimes he did not have to dream that emptiness or that presence; he just had to conjure it up and his throat would tighten up and he would start to wheeze.
This recurring dream unsettled Emil and made him feel disconnected, as if he did not belong. It threatened to rob him of that deep love, so much like reverence, that he had breathed in through his first memory. Before, he had gone exploring because of the beauty of the land that lay all around him, but now he did so because he only felt at peace when he glanced down at the black shadow that he cast over the veld and felt it connect him to all that surrounded him. And so he spent more time in the veld than he did in the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda. After all, it was there, in the middle of the yellow, green, red and brown savannah grasslands, that he truly belonged. It was there that he was at home.
CHAPTER 3
By choosing a post that would settle the Coetzees in the City of Kings, Johan was eventually able to make Gemma happy again. Sadly, this solution came at a great cost to Johan, as he had to accept something of a demotion within the BSAP when he left the outpost two years earlier than initially agreed upon. As a result, he could not buy the colonial-style house with French windows, a red wraparound veranda and an English rose garden that had long existed vividly in Gemma’s imagination. What he could do was rent a flat – Flat 2A to be exact – at the Prince’s Mansions, which were located on the corner of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, opposite Eveline High School, overlooking the very intersection where Johan had first laid eyes on Gemma and fallen in love with her blowing blonde hair and giggling pink lips.
When Gemma saw the flat and gazed out of their bedroom window to see the very spot where her very own Douglas Fairbanks Jr had first approached her, she felt the romance of it all, and the house of her dreams was immediately forgotten and Johan was forever forgiven. The man that she had married might not have been able to give her her own home, but he was able to give her a testament to his deep awareness of her romantic nature. Why would Gemma ever need her own English rose garden to tend when she could forever gaze on the place where her true love had first blossomed?
Not only was the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue the location of their first meeting, it was also the heart of the city, and Gemma was soon determined to be part of its heartbeat. If the City of Kings had an oppressive heat, Gemma did not feel it. She was too busy to feel anything but happiness. Besides, if a day in the city did present itself with any heat worth feeling, she could always go to the Municipal Bathing Pools on Borrow Street with Johan, Emil, or by herself. Of an evening, if Gemma found that she needed cooling down, all she had to do was put on her best dress, accept Johan’s arm and walk a short distance down Selborne Avenue to the theatre. All of life’s pleasures were suddenly within easy reach.
Gemma was so contented that she finally said goodbye to the halcyon days of the Roaring Twenties and accepted the more sober joys of the 1930s by becoming a member of the Women’s Institute. Soon enough she began to take a genuine pleasure in making her own tea cosies, embroidering and crocheting her own tablecloths, baking Victoria sandwiches for cake sales and baking competitions, and painstakingly embossing the linen with the words Mr and Mrs J Coetzee.
To top off this new-found contentedness, Gemma’s mind was finally at peace again when Emil started attending Milton School on Selborne Avenue. On the BSAP outpost, he had attended the only school available in the vicinity, which was the government school that had been begrudgingly built for the natives. He attended the school because it had been suggested to his father, by the governor, that this would be the best way to encourage education in the region. Native education, as long as it was not of a very high standard or to a very high degree, was instrumental to the successful running of a self-governing colony. Gemma, who felt certain that Emil was receiving a negligible education at the school, agreed to this arrangement with the understanding that when he was nine, before any real damage had been done, Emil would attend Milton School in the City of Kings. She had imagined that he would attend the school as a boarder and this had filled her with guilt and apprehension, and so she was ever so pleased when the move to the Prince’s Mansions meant that she could walk him to and from school.
For his part, Emil could not bring himself to love the City of Kings – its wide avenues lined with jacarandas, flamboyants and acacias, its concrete buildings, its rail-line arteries, its noisy motor cars, its parks manicured to unnaturalness, its factories constantly exhaling smoke into the air, its traffic robots that had made the jobs of traffic controllers almost obsolete. When he surveyed the city all he saw was a miasma and all he heard was a cacophony and he was convinced that he could never be at home in such a place.
Emil blamed himself for the move away from the BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills.
