Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [40]
I asked, “So why do you think your parents sent you to a Jewish school?”
K took such a long time to answer that I almost repeated the question. Then he said abruptly, almost angrily, “I don’t know. I don’t think they knew it was mostly Jews. You know? They hardly came to the school. They just put me on the train in Vic Falls and, ‘Bye, chap, see you in three months,’ and off I went.”
“Did you ask your folks to take you out?”
“Ja, every time I went home. But my old lady wouldn’t listen. Anyway, I begged her—on my hands and knees—not to send me to Mweni Senior because that’s where all the big brothers of all the little Jews were, and I knew they would make mincemeat out of me. So she sent me to Wilson High in Que Que.” K chopped at a heap of onions angrily and tears flooded down his checks. “And the bullying didn’t end there. You know? Anyone who went to a boys’ boarding school in those days will tell you, if they’re being honest, it was savage. If you couldn’t stick up for yourself, you’d end up being rammed by every prick in the school.”
There was a long pause while K sniffed, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he said, “When I was fourteen, I was held down by two guys from my class while this older boy raped me.”
Another long pause. Dispatch sat down abruptly and whined.
“That was it,” said K, turning around and thrusting his knife into an eggplant. “I am not saying that being raped damaged me for life or anything, and it didn’t make me hate homos. I have nothing against moffs as long as they leave me alone. I don’t think that guy was a moff in any case; I think he was just a bully. But that was it for me. I had had enough. So I was in the shower one day and the guy—the arsehole that raped me—came in and I stepped out of the shower and I punched him. One time. Flat. That’s when I realized I knew how to hit. Not even to talk. One punch right there”—K pointed to the tip of his chin with the knife—“and then in the goolies on the way down, and then a kick to the head when they’re on the floor. That’s all it takes. That’s when I started to get a reputation as someone who could fight. People three and four years older than me picked fights with me because of that reputation. Half the fights I got into weren’t even my fault.”
K cut some bread and fed slices of it to the dogs.
“After that . . . I don’t know, there probably wasn’t a week when I didn’t get into a fight with some damn idiot. All the little squirts wanting to see if they could get the better of me and all the big monsters trying to see if they could squash me. I learned the hard way—smack them hard first. Soon as you see them coming. One, two, three. Then it’s over. Pointless dragging the thing out. You know, all these ous dancing about, flapping their fists all over the show? What’s the point?”
“Did you ever box?”
“Ja. But I was shit at it. I wanted to kill my opponent the first time he punched me and there’s all these rules about you can’t nail an ou in the goolies or paste them in the head and anyway, who wants to fight for sport? I spent enough time fighting for real, I didn’t need to do it in my spare time too.”
“Did you ever lose a fight?” I asked.
K held the bread knife in the palm of his hand, as if weighing it. “Not once I figured it out,” he said at last. “No, not that I can remember.”
THAT NIGHT, K slept on the veranda and I took his bed in the single room overlooking the river. He