The Smell of Apples

It is Friday in late November 1973. Marnus Erasmus just celebrated his 11th birthday. He received a tabletop racing car set, which he loves. His father, the boy tells us, is a much respected and very powerful figure in the South African army. Marnus recalls the night in the spring when Marnus’s parents dressed up for a fancy dinner honoring his father, who had just become the youngest South African ever promoted to the rank of major general. His mother is a classically trained opera singer who walked away from a promising musical career to assume the responsibilities of wife and then mother. She still maintains her interest in music, giving piano and voice lessons to neighborhood children. Sometimes, when his father is not home, Marnus hears his mother singing alone at the piano or in the bathroom.

Marnus talks about his best (and perhaps only) friend, Frikkie Delport. Frikkie struggles in the classroom, but he is physically commanding, stronger than most of his classmates, and he has a reputation for being a bully and a merciless tease to kids intimidated by his size. Frikkie’s father is a banker and an investment advisor; his mother runs a clothes shop. Like the Erasmuses, his family is well off. Marnus’s family has a roomy house overlooking False Bay. They employ a longtime housekeeper, Doreen, and a gardener (although the gardener recently disappeared along with several expensive fishing poles). Both servants are Colored, which under apartheid means they are mixed race.

Initially, Marnus and Frikkie bond through Frikkie’s problems in mathematics. Marnus tries to tutor him but ends up agreeing to help Frikkie cheat on a test. When the teacher catches him, Marnus coolly lies, although later he struggles with the idea that he has sinned. In another recollection, when Marnus and Frikkie are arguing over the approximate size of a whale’s penis, Frikkie acknowledges that his father swears aloud, a trespass Marnus says will send Frikkie’s father to hell.

Marnus himself is hardly exceptional in his schoolwork. He lives in the considerable shadow of his sister, the beautiful Ilse, six years his senior. She is an accomplished presence in the classroom, well read, and quite sophisticated and progressive in her thinking (she is working her way through Moby-Dick in her free time). She has a striking soprano voice that earned her the opportunity to study voice for a summer in the Netherlands. “Because she’s good at everything she does,” a petulant Marnus whines, “she’s much too big for her boots and she treats me like I’m still a pipsqueak” (13).

As the school term is winding down (summer in South Africa runs from December to March) and the holidays approach, Marnus’s father announces that the family will be hosting a visitor from South America, an important general from Chile, but the father cautions them all not to mention the visitor to any of their friends and to call the visitor “Mister Smith.” The visitor will stay in the guest room directly below Marnus’s bedroom.

Within the free-style associative memory narrative, Marnus recalls when he was four how his grandfather, an accomplished seaman, washed overboard from his fishing boat during a storm in False Bay. The body was never found. Then, within months, his grandmother died during a routine hospital procedure to remove a pair of scissors inadvertently left in her stomach years earlier during the Caesarian birth of Marnus’s father.

The arrival of the house guest changes the dynamic of the Erasmus household. The charismatic general is dashing and exotic. He ogles Marnus’s mother and Ilse, commenting about how beautiful both mother and daughter are. “Obviously,” he says suggestively to Ilse, “you are your mother’s child” (35). As part of introductory chatter, the father tells the General about how his family came to be in South Africa: Some 50 years earlier, Marnus’s grandfather fled their home in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, in the midst of that country’s racial unrest and the emergence of its militant black majority, a political and social upheaval in which rich farmland long held by whites was summarily confiscated by the new black government. Marnus’s family emigrated to South Africa, one of the last bastions of white power in Africa. The bitter history of Tanzania is not lost on Marnus’s father: “A Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory. That man is useless” (38).

Friday is always a special day for Marnus. He looks forward to Friday afternoons when, despite his own hectic schedule at school and his father’s pressing engagements with the government, father and son find time to head down to the beach at nearby Sealrock and fish. Sometimes they even strip down and skinny dip in the surf. “Then it feels like Dad and I are the only people in the whole bay” (50). Marnus recalls how after some cajoling, his father finally convinced Frikkie—who was initially afraid of seals in the churning breakers—to strip down and join them in the waves. This Friday is even more special because Frikkie is coming to spend the weekend.