The Art of Fighting
Was it the answer to my parents’ prayers? Was it the trick of an evil fairy or pure coincidence? Japan is very far from Riebeek-Kasteel. But it does indeed happen, a judo instructor is prepared to train the town’s sons once a week in an Eastern martial art. We can choose, rugby or judo.
I am almost eight years old and for weeks have felt deeply wronged after the girls at a birthday party were each given a doll with a white dress. These dolls’ clothes are made of a special fabric, you can draw patterns and pictures on it and then wash it, and do it again and again! The boys each received a fire engine. I make a hole in the roof of mine and start filling it with coins, I’ll buy my own drawing clothes.
We have to play rugby or do judo, I tell my mother.
A judo outfit is very expensive, says my mother.
What does a judo outfit look like? I ask.
Like pyjamas, exactly like white pyjamas, says my mother.
I’m doing judo! I say.
I’m going to colour in those pyjamas, cover them in drawings of dragons, perhaps stick shiny things on them, that is what I decide.
We buy the pyjamas at school, the jacket doesn’t have any buttons at all, only a belt. Tuesday afternoon three o’clock we all stand in the hall. There are mats on the floor. We stand in rows, white pyjamas, light-blue belts, we look like dwarfs in a storybook with only one colour. The instructor is young and friendly, he doesn’t look as grumpy as the other teachers who coach sports. He tells us that he gives judo lessons every afternoon in another town, it’s a privilege for him, judo makes the world tolerant and safe.
Judo consists of sudden decisions and movement, he says, We don’t attack, we defend.
This gives me confidence. I raise my hand.
Can I make my belt green or pink?
Some of the boys snort.
In judo we have levels, you don’t colour your belt, you earn it, says the instructor. My heart sinks to the floor, old and young, they all disappoint you, nothing is what it should be, nobody is tolerant, nothing is safe. But it is better than rugby.
Before we can fight, we each have to pick a friend, I pick Gideon. He has a soft face like me and also cries at athletics. The instructor explains grips and throws. And that it is important to know how to fall. One must throw and the other one must fall. Gideon hesitantly grabs at my belt. My jacket falls open.
Don’t, I say.
I lay myself down and Gideon lies on top of me. Later I lie on top. When the judo instructor comes closer, we pull a bit on each other’s clothes. Judo is not so bad. I just don’t know how they will ever decide who is attacking and who is defending.
On a very warm Tuesday afternoon I walk home after another judo class. I’m annoyed because of the heat and because of my clothes and belt that never change colour. I want a vienna at the corner shop, but a judo outfit doesn’t have pockets and so I don’t have 5c with me.
You! Pudding face! a voice says.
I look around. Right behind me is Fudge. (He was a tall child who looked as if he spent every day by the sea, tanned with policeman muscles, brush-cut hair and orange eyebrows. Everyone knew he looked for trouble with children and was friendly to grown-ups. He was bigger than any of the children in school, perhaps he was stupid, but nobody asked.) He’s never spoken to me before. Why now? What’s happening? I look straight ahead.
You! Doll-boy! he says.
I hear all the menace and all the flames of hell in his voice. I feel hot behind my neck, over my whole head. And ice-cold behind my legs, I am shaking like a little machine, it will never, ever stop again, this is how a child changes into a ghost.
Butterfly! I am going to hurt you! he says, now much closer.
Die, pig, die, I say softly, my dry lips clinging helplessly to each other. I had heard it a few months before at the church camp when two cleaners had a fist fight behind the dustbins, die, pig, die. I had put it away and say it now.
There is a sudden whoosh, like the wing of an eagle. Aunt Gagiano stops next to me with her massive Peugeot.
I know you’re just a stone’s throw from home, but get in before you melt in this sun, she laughs.
I get in. And I shiver like after a bath in winter.
Don’t pay attention to that Fudge child, he’s just hot air, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, says Aunt Gagiano.
She stops in front of her home.
Do you want to come inside for orange juice? she asks.
No, thank you, I shiver.
It is only the empty yard next to her house and then it’s our house. Twenty child’s steps, but it takes me a hundred long years before I push open our gate. Not once do I look behind me. I am a little ghost, forward, forward.
I never saw him again. Two weeks later, just before first break, the school principal came to our class and explained in a soft voice that Fudge wouldn’t be coming back to our school, he’d had an accident the day before, he’d been on his bicycle on the Bothmaskloof pass. The principal said it was good to be sad and if anybody wanted to go home, they were welcome to do so.
I went to sit on a low wall outside and opened my lunchbox. Inside was brown bread with peanut butter. I couldn’t believe it, my mother knew I didn’t eat peanut butter, I don’t eat it, I don’t eat it. But she still didn’t stop, once a week it was in my lunchbox. I couldn’t believe it.
Luxurious
Technically I am still little, only three years out of toddlerhood. I am unsatisfied and uncomfortable, but I assume everything will be explained to me at some later point, so I keep quiet as much as possible, I wait like a good boy to be told how things work. All I want to do is round up everyone in town and yell, hysterically and uncontrollably, Right! It’s time! Tell me what is going on! This is wrong! What are you hiding? Why is this lasting so long?
What lasts too long is my darkness and my heaviness. Already I can describe the hours of my day to every rock in the front garden and every reed out back by the failing vlei. Ordinary. Ordinary. Bad. Bad. Very bad. Breathless. Suspicious. Better. Ordinary. Almost good. Bad again. Very, very bad. Dead as a dodo. Still alive. Slightly better. Sleep.
ALMOST GOOD is therefore the best time of my day, that’s how well I’m doing. GOOD or very good is only at Grandmother’s house, not here. So I have to explain to myself: I cannot do what other children do, they are lighter and do not have a Big Grey. The Big Grey lives in my schoolbag. (Where else? The heaviness begins every morning when I pick up my bag, Saturdays are lighter, Sundays the grey starts to pile up again.) What the Big Grey looks like when it is in the darkness of my bag, I don’t know. As soon as I start walking, my bag shakes, the Big Grey finds little holes and starts to leak outside. Like a poisonous fog it hangs around me, then starts to form corners until the gloom is square like a big cardboard box that leaves only my head and feet uncovered. This box becomes heavier and lighter, bigger and smaller, it makes me walk slower, get stuck in doors, stumble over stairs, bump against walls, it makes my fingers stupid near the piano, makes sure that I never learn how to hug or embrace someone, never, ever run into someone’s arms. I know it’s not my imagination, I can hear them whispering – certain walls, the empty house on the corner where the tar ends, the gateposts in front of the church: Here comes the heavy child! Shh, he has his darkness with him!
I tell myself a time will come when a being, gigantic and vivid, possibly clad like many heroes in metal, fleet of foot and very clever, will appear, faster than a falcon. He will grab the Big Grey with a sweep of his arm and take it to the penal colony where all grey must live.
This being does appear, waiting in the hallway one afternoon after school, dressed in a brown pinafore with a mustard-yellow