nightmare of the native girl who had a brown baby persisted, more frequently now that he was away from his natural environment. The nightmare took on more ominous and terrifying details. Whenever he tried to scream his name into the veld, all that came out was the howl of the wounded animal, and when he glanced at the black shadow he cast, it was no longer his shadow but that of an animal-like thing walking on all fours. In the dream he would put his hands out in front of him and expect to see a pair of paws or hooves, but the expectation was never fulfilled because he could never bring himself to discover what existed at the end of his outstretched arms.
Inevitably, Emil’s wheezing chest worsened in the City of Kings. It was all because of the pollution from the motor vehicles, trains and smokestacks, Dr Stromberg explained to Gemma before letting her know that, while there was no cure for asthma, there was a palliative. The result of all this was that after the visit to Dr Stromberg, Gemma religiously took Emil to Galen House every Wednesday morning. Together they would descend the stairs to the basement and while his mother flipped, a bit absent-mindedly, through the latest home or fashion magazine, Emil would sit by a giant machine that churned out foul-tasting vapour, put a pipe to his lips and suck in the vapour. This large machine was the only thing in the basement, save two chairs and a coffee table stacked high with back issues of magazines. It was an eerie, grey and cold place. Emil hated that basement. He hated the weekly Wednesday visits. He hated the perceived weakness in his chest. He stopped just short of hating the nonchalance of his mother as she flipped through the magazines.
Hatred was a new and powerful emotion for the young Emil. While living at the outpost, he had loved everything that his eyes beheld – the veld, the hills, the cave paintings, the rain dancers … even the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda that he called home. He had loved best his black shadow walking on the ground, connecting him to the soil and the history that was all around him.
When he saw how much pleasure his parents, especially his mother, derived from the city, he tried to love the things she loved – the public park, the theatre, the Municipal Bathing Pools – but all he could do was appreciate them. The park with its neatly manicured lawns and landscaped gardens set amidst serene walking paths could not even come close to comparing to the wide open veld. The theatre put on plays that could not capture his imagination the way the San stories of the hunt painted on cave walls could. The Municipal Bathing Pools did not have the depths and possible dangers of the Mtshelele Dam. The City of Kings was just not where he belonged. But, however much he wished it, Emil knew in his heart that there was no going back to the BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills.
Having an entirely different frame of reference to the boys at Milton School, Emil did not make friends because he did not try to. The boys at Milton School tended to love the City of Kings and the delights it had to offer. As they played with or exchanged marbles, compared plastic model cars, set off stink bombs or spun yo-yos, they talked ad nauseam about the hero of the latest Western at the bioscope; about the delights of travelling by rail to Salisbury, Gwelo, Umtali and Fort Victoria to visit relatives; about how they had personally witnessed a potentially fatal car accident that was avoided because the city’s avenues were so wisely wide. These boys loved and took pride in the very things that Emil found fault with.
As a substitute for the incomparable adventures of the veld, Emil found some solace in the books available in the school and public libraries. He, perhaps too wholeheartedly and unreservedly, dived into the imaginations of H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling and found an approximation of the excitement that was now sorely lacking in his life. He would escape into the wild worlds that the authors created and wish that the stories would never come to an end. ‘I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ In a month, he would read those lines at least twice, eagerly opening King Solomon’s Mines and beginning the adventure anew. Emil particularly liked that he shared his birthplace, the place that he no longer remembered having lived in, with the man who had fast become his hero, Allan Quatermain. ‘I, Emil Coetzee, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ he would write over and over again in the margins of his exercise books as he watched the city’s life pass him by and daydreamed about being in the bush again. While this writing in the margins never did make him feel that he was ‘of’ Durban, it did, nevertheless, make him feel that he could perhaps be the hero of a story.
His schoolmaster, Mr Bartleby, was quite a perceptive and sensitive man and noticed that Emil’s transition to city life was not a happy one. When he saw Emil devouring book after book in the library, he supposed that what he was witnessing was a very studious young man. A studious young man whose life had to be filled with adventures – the kind of adventures not found in the city. The kind of adventures found in the savannah of the country they lived in.
Mr Bartleby took the boy’s many scribbles of ‘I, Emil Coetzee, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman …’ as cries for help and set about searching for a way to save him. Once he found it, he called in the boy’s parents. As they sat before him looking like beautiful movie stars straight out of a picture show at the bioscope, Mr Bartleby understood that some people just had serendipitous lives and found their perfect other, and, simultaneously, that he had had no such great fortune visit upon his life.
‘The Selous School for Boys,’ Mr Bartleby said, as he pushed the pamphlet across his desk towards them.
The wife picked up the pamphlet and frowned at it slightly.
‘Best school in the country,’ he explained to her frown as he watched her peruse the pamphlet and deepen her frown before passing it to her husband, whose turn it was to frown.
‘That is where the boy should go,’ Mr Bartleby explained, realising that there was an order in which he should have done things and that it was now too late to try to establish it.
The perfect couple exchanged confused expressions before she said, ‘The boy? You mean our boy, Emil?’
‘Yes. Yes. Emil. That’s the chap. Yes.’
The husband chortled charmingly. ‘I’m afraid we don’t understand.’
We don’t understand, not I don’t understand. Such uniformity of mind must be a wonderful thing to have, Mr Bartleby conjectured.
‘The boy has already secured himself a place and a full bursary.’
They exchanged their perfectly confused expressions again.
‘He wrote an essay in my class about casting his shadow over Rhodes’s grave up at World’s View. Very affecting stuff. I sent the essay to the headmaster of the Selous School for Boys. He read it and was rightly impressed by it. We both agree that the best thing for the boy is for him to leave Milton School at term’s end.’
‘Leave Milton at term’s end?’ the husband mumbled beneath a beautifully trimmed moustache.
‘Yes.’
‘But I have always dreamed of Emil attending Milton. And besides, we live just up the road, the Prince’s Mansions at the corner of Borrow and Selborne. It is so convenient and I do so enjoy walking him to and from school every day,’ the wife said, her mouth beginning to pout becomingly.
Mr Bartleby so hated to go against her desires, but he was afraid that there was nothing else to be done. ‘The boy is not entirely happy here.’
This had evidently come as news to the perfect couple because they looked at each other questioningly.
‘He has the call of the wild, that one, and will never be truly happy or at home in the city.’
‘Oh,’ they said in unison.
‘Where
