Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

10

My mother thought it was Nagel’s death that had screwed me up. Everyone thought it was Nagel’s death.

Why, when people thought about other people’s lives, did they only add a few large numbers to make a judgment? But with the arithmetic of their own lives, they were prepared to juggle a thousand figures, to multiply, add, subtract, until the books had been cooked, until the sum total suited them.

Had I also been guilty of that? I didn’t know. I had tried to leave the unimportant figures out of the equation. And to allow the negatives equal value. But could we ever be trustworthy accountants of our own lives?

I’d keep trying.

I was fifteen years old when she called me to the living room one evening and said she wanted to speak seriously to me. She had a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on the coffee table and poured a tot into each.

“I don’t drink that stuff, Ma.”

“They’re both for me, Zet. I want to talk to you about sex.”

“Ma…”

“You’re not the only one for whom it’s uncomfortable. It’s just something we have to do.”

“But Ma – ”

“I know you know about sex. I, too, heard all about it from my school friends long before my mother spoke to me.”

“Ma – ”

“I just want to make sure you hear the right side, the other side as well.”

And then she knocked back the first glass of whiskey.

“Humankind is old, Zet. Millions of years. And what we are wasn’t created yesterday. We were formed and shaped and molded when we were still uncivilized, when we still roamed in small groups over the savannas of Africa and Europe, looking for food, using stone knives, and wearing clothes of animal skin. When there was no certainty that we would be the species that would win, we had to survive. And to do that, everyone had to play his or her part. Men and women. The men hunted and fought and protected. And impregnated as many women as possible so that the gene pool wouldn’t stagnate, and because tomorrow they might be lion food. And women had to keep their group together, and to make sure of that they seduced the strongest, fastest, cleverest men, to survive. We still have these urges, Zet. It’s in us and we’re not aware of it, because we no longer know ourselves, and it’s no one’s fault because the problem is that we no longer need it. We’ve won. We’re at the top of the food chain and there are too many of us and if half of us don’t procreate, it wouldn’t matter.”

She swallowed the second tot of whiskey.

“The problem is that the changed situation hasn’t really changed our nature. Someone forgot to tell our instincts we’ve won. And one of these days your hormones will take over and you’ll want to share your seed…”

“Ma – ”

“No, Zet, I know you’re masturbating, but let me tell you immediately that it’s not wrong…”

“Ma, I don’t want to – ”

“It’s just as uncomfortable for me, Zatopek van Heerden, but you’re going to keep quiet and you’re going to listen. Your grandfather van Heerden told your father that masturbation would turn him blind and your father told me that when he was in the school hostel he opened his eyes very slowly every morning because he was so worried. I don’t want you to hear such nonsense. Masturbation is normal and healthy and does no harm, it makes no one pregnant, and it forces no one. If it helps you, carry on. It’s about real sex that I have to speak this evening, my child, because your instincts don’t know we’ve won. You carry two, three, ten million years of the urge to survive within you and soon it will come knocking at your door, and when you open that door I don’t want it to be a stranger confronting you.”

She poured more of the alcohol into her glass.

“Ma, you must watch that stuff.”

She had nodded. “You know I never drink it, Zet, but tonight is different. I have only one opportunity to do this thing right and if I lose my nerve, I’ll have problems. I have to tell you that sex is great. Nature made it great so we can continue procreating, another carrot in front of our noses, just to make sure. It’s a joy from the moment we start thinking about it until the moment of orgasm, with the foreplay and the rising passion and everything in between. Lovely and wonderful and intense, it’s like a fever of the gods, an incredible enchantment that can overcome us and push any other thought out of our heads. And if you add up age-old nature and the deliciousness and the fever, then sex is stronger than any other urge we have, Zet. You must realize this.”

Another gulp.

“And then Nature has another ace in the hole. She makes us beautiful to one another. From fifteen, sixteen, seventeen she gives us bodies that are irresistible to the opposite sex, that attract like incredible magnets.

“All these facts add up…

“The problem with sex, my son, is the product. It’s not only the pleasure. It makes babies. And babies cause trouble if you’re not ready for them. I want to ask only three things of you tonight, Zet. Before you have sex with a woman, think. Think if you want to have a baby with her. Because to have a baby means you’re tied to her for the rest of your life. Think. See in your head the pictures of getting up in the middle of the night with feeding bottles, or lying awake and wondering where the money is going to come from for food and clothes and a decent house. Think whether you want to wake up for the rest of your life with these responsibilities, wake up with the woman when you see her without makeup and without her hair done, and with stale breath, when her body is no longer so slender and so young and so pretty.

“Think, my child, whether you love her.

“Nature doesn’t think, when you want to take her for the first time, whether you love her or not. She gives you instant love like a lightning flash, but when you’ve sown your seed, that instant love is gone. Ask yourself whether you really love her. Because I can tell you one thing: sex with someone you love is a thousand times better than sex with someone you don’t.”

There was a longing in her voice at that moment that I didn’t want to hear but would never forget, the first adolescent glimpse that I had of her love for and relationship with my father.

“The second thing I want to ask you is never to force a woman. There are men out there who will tell you that every woman secretly desires a man simply to take her, but let me tell you that’s bull. Women aren’t like that. It doesn’t matter how high your fever burns, that is the one thing you may never do.

“And the third thing is to leave another man’s woman alone.”

For three weeks after the conversation I didn’t put a hand on my own body, ashamed because my mother knew. And after that, Nature took its course. And like all young men probably do, I remembered one part of her message more easily than the rest: I have to tell you that sex is great.

The rest I had to learn the hard way.

♦

There were three women who would play a role in my sexual awakening. Marna Espag was my first girlfriend; Aunt Baby Marnewick was our neighbor. Betta Wandrag was the third. You know who she is.

I was in eleventh grade, in the winter of 1975, when I fell in love with Marna Espag – my first love – with all the wonderful intensity of puberty. It was as though I saw her for the first time one morning, with her black hair and green eyes and pretty, laughing mouth, and she filled my thoughts and my dreams, fired my fantasies of heroic deeds in which I saved her from death, time after time.

It took me three months to ask her out, after the usual teenage process of finding out whether she liked me and the covert messages indicating my interest. We went to the movies at the Leba in Klerksdorp. My mother obligingly dropped us there and picked us up again after we’d had milk shakes at the steak house adjoining the theater. My mother liked her. Everybody liked her.

I kissed Marna for the first time during a garage party in Stilfontein, to the slow-dance tempo of Gene Rockwell’s “Heart” – the kind of standing still, swaying foreplay that my friend Günther Krause unromantically described as “knobbly-wobbly.” I remembered her overwhelming perfume and the softness of her mouth and my own light-headedness when I tasted a woman’s tongue in my mouth for the first time, a foretaste of the hidden and divine potential.

We necked with the unbridled enthusiasm and dedication of pioneers – outside her front door, at the garden gate, at parties, and sometimes, when the opportunity presented itself, in my mother’s or her parents’ living room. There was a careful, natural progression that happened over weeks and months. In November I slid my hand experimentally onto the curve of a breast, my heartbeat frantic that she would object. In the reckless time between Christmas and New Year’s, with the rest of her family away at a barbecue at Potch Dam, I unbuttoned her blouse in their living room, stroking her small breasts for the first time and feeling her nipple growing in my mouth. And in February my finger, untaught and clumsy, reached the holy grail and we both shuddered at the magnitude of the act, the daring, and the overpowering pleasure.

Two weeks later I told her my mother was going to Pretoria to watch an opera. And I would be at home alone.

Marna looked at me for a long time. “Do you think we should do it?”

“Yes,” I said, the fever already spreading.

“So do I.”

In the following few days I set a world record in the masturbation stakes. The anticipation was terrifying in the way it dominated my whole existence. Mentally I played the Great Moment over and over again, and in my fantasies it was perfect. I could think about nothing else. All I could do was to count the days and eventually the hours before saying good-bye to my mother at the gate with barely restrained impatience and a huge lie that I would “be responsible.”

Marna was late and I thought I was going mad. She was a little pale.

“We don’t have to do it,” I lied again.

“It’s okay. I’m a bit scared.”

“I am, too,” I said, my final lie of the evening.

We drank coffee and discussed school friends and work with little enthusiasm, and eventually I embraced her gently and slowly began kissing her. It took an hour, even more, for her to relax, to change from the terrified Marna to the warm, welcoming girl I knew, for her breath to increase in tempo to the wonderful gallop of complete readiness and for her heartbeat to hammer visibly and almost audibly against her small breasts.

Carefully I took off her clothes piece by piece. Until she eventually lay, beautiful and pale and ready, on my mother’s enormous living-room couch.

And suddenly the time had come and I had to get rid of my clothes and I got up and undressed feverishly and turned back to her and saw her lying there and the whole time of expectation and fantasies was like an irresistible wave and my entire body was burning, and I came, spectacularly, all over my mother’s living-room carpet.