The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Gardening in South Africa
A story about the deep roots and relentless tug of first love — by Mechiel Boshoff
When the 10:15 bus to Hoedspruit rounded the corner to reveal nothing but more shrubs, Wandile thought he was going to be sick. Where was his tiny hometown? The Klein Drakensberg that crashed through Limpopo’s border and soaked up the sun as far as his bespectacled eyes could see?
“We’ll get there soon enough.”
Wandile turned to catch the old woman on the other side of the aisle staring at him. “Excuse me?”
“Wherever you’re so eager to get off.”
“I could’ve sworn…” Wandile let his sentence melt into the hot air inside the bus. After seventeen years, his memory of Hoedspruit had taken on a ghostly quality, and his mother had always warned that ghosts liked to play tricks.
Wandile repositioned himself on his scalding seat and wiped at the palm print haunting the sweaty polyester. The old woman had boarded the bus after him, accompanied by nothing but a knock-off handbag and a walking stick that had, at some point or the other, parted with its rubber ferrule. Much to his shame, Wandile had watched her massage her bony knee and imagined stealing her walking stick to steady the vertigo and doubt that had plagued him the past six days.
When the bus eventually stopped opposite one of the two Total garages in Hoedspruit, he collected his overnight bag from underneath his seat, trundled down the narrow aisle, and stepped onto a wide street with too few streetlights. He surveyed the looming Klein Drakensberg with a stiff neck.
Home.
Wandile let his legs carry him towards a corner store he vaguely associated with a bad can of cream soda. He paid his R94.98 and sat down on a bench with his bottle of sparkling water and box of effervescent tablets. The orange disc fizzed in the water, and Wandile hoped the citrus-flavoured booster would stop him from falling over, again. Ever since that Monday morning, when he had felt a snipping deep inside him, and then a rumble-tumble as though a potato sack had split wide open, he had become a man who stumbled through doorways instead of walking through them. A man whose organs seemed to bounce around inside of him. And a husband who couldn’t smile at his wedding ring without remembering the vows he was no longer certain he could keep. Yesterday, he’d even had to abandon his rental car in Middelburg and climb onto a bus for fear of the straight driving his route required.
Sitting so close to it now, the Klein Drakensberg’s shadow felt small against the measuring stick of his memory. He had always remembered the entire town being engulfed by its sloping embrace, but now the sun was shining hot and lonely on his little bench. He remembered the same sun beating down on him and Luca seventeen years ago while they studied a caterpillar. He remembered Luca flinging the caterpillar at his neck, then their bodies wrestling and writhing against a boulder.
Wandile threw his empty bottle into a nearby bin and tried to block the sun out with his thumb. He couldn’t decide whether it was his and Luca’s mountain that had shrunk or their tiny hometown that had expanded since he’d left for Ulwaluko¹ and then Cape Town. The cashier had told him there were now three petrol stations in Hoedspruit.
The front yard of 17 Eland Street was as colourful as Wandile had always imagined. Although he and Luca used to meet outside the Hoedspruit Mall, Luca had liked to fill uncomfortable silences with the scientific names of new additions to his grandparents’ garden. Although their silences had quickly stopped being uncomfortable, Wandile had learnt enough to recognise the Barberton Daisies and Impala Lilies poking out in every direction outside the tiny house. He wondered if these were the flowers that Luca’s oupa² had planted when Luca moved in at the age of on-on and hide-and-seek.
Wandile inspected the front door. For the first time since he’d followed his father into his gogo³’s bedroom, where she lay cold and wrinkled like bread, the sight of a doorknob scared him. Wandile took a deep, nose-whistling breath and knocked on the door. A man with a thick grey beard popped his head out of the neighbouring house and smacked his lips together.
“Better luck next time.”
“Sorry?”
“You looking for the rickety boy?”
Wandile paused, uncertain. He had no idea whether Luca ever put on the muscle he had entrusted his oupa’s dumbbells with.
The man grew tired of waiting and pointed at Luca’s driveway. “Truck’s gone. Probably out on a job.”
Wandile fished his phone out of his pocket to check the time but struggled to look past the missed call from Benathi. He did his best not to picture her sitting alone on their bed. He had tried taking her hand while holding onto his kidneys, but once he’d realised whom his organs were reaching for, he couldn’t find it in himself to even touch her. That’s why he had to find him. He had to find the string that had snapped and tie everything back into place.
Wandile dragged his attention back to the man opposite him. “How long does a job normally take?”
Wandile slapped the back of his neck. The air felt thinner, cooler despite the large sun, yet the snap of skin cells rearranging themselves still echoed on the mountainside.
“Shh!”
Luca was crouched beside him. The tall boy’s fierce gaze returned to the tropical boubou perched in a nearby tree, his knuckles all white and tight around a homemade slingshot. Wandile could still feel that morning’s caterpillar sliding down his neck. He tried to rub the sensation away as he watched Luca’s mouth drawn above a puckered chin. It wasn’t working and, as Luca took a deep, readying breath, Wandile glimpsed an opportunity for revenge.
“Gqum! Satsh’isibham!⁴”
The startled boubou launched itself into the air, the flap of its blue-back wings daring the slingshot to misfire. Wandile watched a pock-marked stone hiss through the air. Even Luca bit down on the flurry of curses stacked on his tongue to hear the clump of dirt shatter against a large rock. He brought his slingshot down with a crash.
“Jesus! Can you just stop with that stupid rhyme!”
Wandile shifted his weight off his left foot, which had gone numb somewhere in the last fifteen minutes of them sitting there, and smirked at his friend. He cleared his throat as loudly as he could.
“Gqum! Satsh’isibham!”
Luca jumped up and grabbed a stone from the fanny pack around his waist. He sent it hurtling in Wandile’s direction, narrowly missing his thigh.
“You’ve been pissing me off all day!”
Wandile lunged forward and plucked the slingshot from Luca’s fingers. The tall boy’s grip was far weaker than his large hands implied, and Luca scrambled backwards like a crab before shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet staan stil!⁵”
Wandile’s first shot hit its mark. Luca yelped and clutched at his right shoulder, but the battle wound only provoked him further. “Jan Pierewiet! Jan Pierewiet!”
“Shut up!”
Wandile fired off another shot, this time at the patch of dirt on the rump of Luca’s hiking shorts. Wandile had always thought of the Klein Drakensberg as separate from the rest of the world, and he feared Luca’s howling would make their tiny town raise its head and spot their hiding place.
But, suddenly, Luca had moved on, eyeing a delicate yellow umbel peering over the mountain’s edge. Wandile watched him walk to his backpack, held together by tattered straps, and pull out the thick book he never left home without.
The impressive encyclopaedia of plant life held a curation of flower pressings dating back over several years. Every time Luca took it out, Wandile was surprised to learn that the spine hadn’t given in yet. Dropping down beside him, long grass tickling the backs of his knees, Wandile eyed the mummified petals that popped up between the book’s pages and thought of the museums he’d one day like to work in.
Luca flipped through the encyclopaedia — index finger, tongue and bottom corner of each page caught in a love triangle — until finally he came to a page void of any colourful pressings. Wandile watched as Luca’s gritty fingernail traced a large illustration of a trumpet-shaped umbel in a bush of long, dark leaves.
Wandile knew what to do. He picked one of the yellow flowers from the cluster before them and laid it to rest on the open page. Luca slid a sheet of parchment paper from the back of the encyclopaedia and carefully pressed it over the tiny petals. His tender movements reminded Wandile that he shouldn’t think of Luca’s grip as weak, but instead soft and gentle. Luca slid a pencil out of a cavity in the encyclopaedia’s spine and marked the page in a clumsy scrawl:
YELLOW CLIVIA. KLEIN DRAKENSBERG. 29 NOVEMBER 2002.
Then he turned to Wandile. “When are you leaving again?”
Wandile’s throat felt suddenly dry. “Saturday.”
Luca closed the encyclopaedia and, together, he and Wandile pressed down on the cover as though kneading dough. They worked in silence for several minutes, every passing second more earth-shattering than Luca’s earlier howling.
Luca wiped his nose. “And you’re ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Luca nodded curtly, then stood up and returned the encyclopaedia to his backpack. The smell of the yellow flower clung to Wandile’s fingertips, making him want to sneeze.
There was only one place Wandile could think to go while waiting for Luca’s return. The Hoedspruit Public Library was in Springbok Street next to the local municipality and opposite the community church. To Wandile’s parents, these three buildings had marked Hoedspruit’s city centre, a sentiment the atlases and maps certainly didn’t share. Wandile had frequently visited the library with his mother and could still remember the day a special film was installed on its windows. The goal had been to shade the thousands of pages housed in the library’s books, but peering out at the window punctuating the end of Aisle 8 — African Folklore, Greek Mythology, Egyptian and Norse Mythology — he could see that the film had started bubbling like the second cellophane skin of the books it was meant to protect.
Wandile skimmed African Folklore three times before accepting that the paperback he was after wasn’t there. He wondered if Luca had ever returned it after their final trip up the Klein Drakensberg. He was certain the boy had, because Wandile’s father had never received an angry phone call or letter, and if he had, Wandile knew his behind would have received several more hidings than he remembered it getting.
He could still see the return date stamped in red at the front of the book. The two boys had spent the entirety of their September holiday looking for a solution to their predicament, only for Wandile to find the answer in a sun-blanched book two days before he was set to drive off in his father’s Volkswagen. When he had come across that illustration at the top of page 37, all black-and-white and mystical, the old book had become as important to him as the Bible had been to his parents and the encyclopaedia had been to Luca.
The driveway was still empty when Wandile found himself back at the house with the flowers. He thought it a good time to check in back home, not sure he could put the phone call off any longer. Benathi was probably already upset with him — he had missed Nandipha and Fikile’s bedtime story last night. But before he could commit, he heard the sputter of a tired engine and saw Luca appear around the street corner.
There was no sudden braking, no squealing of tyres, yet Wandile watched his estranged friend stumble out of his oupa’s truck as though shocked by the sight of him. Standing in front of him, the tall, slim boy had become a tall, slim man. Wandile hadn’t expected this natural progression to unsettle him so. Save for his pale complexion, Luca looked the same as he had in front of that yellow umbel, or naked on the mountain peak. His patches of facial hair had itched then, and his calloused hands scratched at the stubble now. Wandile could still hear Luca’s voice echoing somewhere up on that mountain: “Umgubo…elimthubi…elinhle.” And then his own, gently correcting the Xhosa his tongue couldn’t place: “Umgubo elimthubi elintle. Beautiful yellow flower.”
Wandile followed Luca into his living room and stared at the hardness of his calves, remembering the softness of his skin. The tall man stopped walking only when a plump couch and rocking chair blocked his path.
“You look good.”
“You look different.”
“The glasses maybe?”
“Maybe.”
When Wandile had first arrived in Cape Town, each day had started with an urgent reach for that familiar presence behind his belly button. Before he’d fall asleep on his dorm room mattress, he’d wrap his hands around that invisible string and feel the familiarity of it, remember the mountain and the tall boy and the caterpillar. And sometimes, late at night, he’d feel a slight pull from the other side and get the sudden urge to buy Summer Snapdragons and Black-eyed Susans. But now, standing in front of Luca, there was only his twitching stomach and the empty space between his fingers.
Luca was rocking on the balls of his feet. Wandile watched as he stuck a pill beneath his tongue and stuffed the near-empty bottle back into his jeans pocket.
“Have you also felt like shit?”
“Just motion sickness.” He had tried to sound casual, like he was referring to the sort of motion sickness brought on by the potholed tarmac leading into Hoedspruit.
“So you feel it too?”
Luca said nothing.
They were right there, right under the Klein Drakensberg’s nose, yet Wandile felt like he was walking on the warm waters of the Indian ocean one province over. Unstable, left-footed, drowning. He had to do something.
“I was jogging six days ago and felt something loosen as though my shoelaces had untied themselves. They hadn’t. But something came undone and now my organs don’t know — ”
Wandile only realised that Luca was leaving the room after he had already left. He wondered whether he should follow him but decided to stay put. If he moved so much as an inch, he might fall over, throw up, or both. He tried to listen for the slamming of a door or rummaging-through of a drawer, but there was nothing except the pressure on his eardrums, so sharp he swore he could hear the knife’s edge.
When Luca finally returned, he brought with him two books, one of which he handed to Wandile. It was the library book he had failed to locate in Aisle 8. Wandile peeled open the cover to reveal a set of stamped dates. He tasted the bitterness of dirt between his teeth, the tangy chlorine of plant sap on the insides of his cheeks, and flipped to page 37.
“You find anything in here?”
Sweat had broken out across Luca’s hairline. He tugged at his belt as though it were wringing his waist. Wandile remembered slipping his shorts down his legs and over his ankles. He remembered standing naked in front of the boy Luca had once been, how his mouth had tasted like the chewed root of a Leopard Orchid.
Wandile tore through pages 37, 38 and half of 39 too. “It wasn’t night-time when we did it. Maybe the…whatever it was…wore off?”
Luca didn’t sit down as much as he dropped. Wandile studied him from this new vantage point. Bent over, his hands digging into the nooks at the meetings of his thighs and waist, elbows sharp and out like two defence mechanisms. The second book, this one bursting at the seams, slid out of his lap and landed on the floor. Wandile recognised it as the dilapidated encyclopaedia his ouma⁶ had given him. She had had bad arthritis and couldn’t help with the digging and planting on Saturday afternoons, so it became her way of being a part of it all. But upside down on the living room floor, her gift was an omen.
“Luca, what did you do?”
“I think you should go.”
Wandile yanked the book off the floor and scratched his way to the page he knew wouldn’t be there anymore. He stopped when he came across the jagged tear where a pressed Leopard Orchid had been.
“What did you do?”
Luca shifted on the couch, his cheeks the same shade of green as the missing orchid’s stem and leaves. “Please, just get out.”
“Luca!”
Wandile stopped shouting when the smell curled into his nostrils. Wet, pungent. Luca had deflated like an old balloon, his skin and bones sagging. He tried backing himself into the furthest corner of the couch, but his feet swung aimlessly on the ground. Finally, he gave up.
“I burnt it, okay…”
“What? When?”
“Monday morning… It’s gone.”
Wandile keeled over and vomited onto the glass-topped coffee table, not sure if his nausea was brought on by the smell or the news of what Luca had done.
Wandile finished wiping down the coffee table and carried the tub of dirty water back to the kitchen. He had to look away as the oat-coloured liquid leapt out of the bucket and into the sink. He rummaged through Luca’s fridge and found some meat-and-potato stew to heat up in the microwave.
When Luca stuck his head into the room ten minutes later, his hair was wet and he smelled of peppermint. His washcloth had gotten rid of everything but the blotches of red that had hounded his cheeks since trying to convince Wandile that he was okay. Both men ignored the stubborn blush and bit into the stew, pretending the meat was chewier than it was so they wouldn’t have to speak. Their dinner conversation was the scraping and clanging of cutlery, and one strange, breathless confession from Luca:
“I’ve moved on. His name is Hendrik. We’re moving in together. I can’t take you with me.”
Wandile heard Luca’s stone crash into the boulder atop the Klein Drakensberg. Gqum. Satsh’isibham.
The drive to the motel was just as quiet as dinner had been, save for a few monosyllabic instructions from Luca. He had insisted on driving Wandile but couldn’t even lift his legs high enough to clamber into his oupa’s truck. Wandile had had to ignore his protests and help him slide into the passenger seat. Now, Luca’s hands were wrapped around the grab handle above his head, desperately trying to soften the flopping of his body to a less noticeable swaying. It wasn’t working, and Wandile kept glancing at the mackereled man out of the corner of his eye.
“You just passed it.”
“Sorry.”
Wandile pulled the truck over and unclasped his seatbelt as slowly as he could manage. Every action felt violent.
“Will you be okay to get home?”
“Hendrik’s coming to get me.”
Wandile knew he should be climbing out of the truck. “Did you really burn it?”
Luca spoke in a whisper. “I didn’t know all this was going to happen. I’m sorry.” He let go of the grab handle and pointed at the gear stick between them. “But we don’t need it anymore.”
Wandile realised the tall man was trying to point at his wedding ring and felt like Benathi had caught him in bed with someone else. He shook the thought from his mind, then chastised himself as fresh dizziness crashed over him. He managed to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose without poking himself in the eye.
“If you bit into a Leopard Orchid now, it wouldn’t want anything to do with me, Wandi. You — ”
The retired nickname dropped onto the dashboard like a pebble. Wandile could just about feel the icy Klein Drakensberg water around his ankles. He could see the tiny tadpoles circling his toes. He heard Luca ask him about Ulwaluko, about manhood and circumcision. The trees had rustled as though offended by the lewd word, but Wandile had simply continued digging dirt out from underneath his toenails with the sharp end of a stone.
Wandile dug his fingernails into the discoloured steering wheel.
“You know it’s true.”
“How do you know that?”
Luca smiled weakly. He leaned over and, for a moment, Wandile thought he was going to place his hand on his thigh. Instead, he pushed open the driver’s-side door. The screech of metal tore into the night.
“You didn’t come back.”
The Leopard Orchid had been hiding in a forest scrambling up the side of the Klein Drakensberg. It was a spot, Wandile thought, well-suited to the mystery of the fragrant epiphyte. Way up there where the leafless trees impaled the sky, the sheer scale distracted the eye from tiny flowers anchored to low branches. But once Wandile saw them, all yellow and jumping-jacked and spotted, it was impossible to look away.
They had been searching for so long that, right there in front of them, Luca and Wandile didn’t quite believe they had actually found it. It had taken Luca fifteen minutes to convince Wandile to let him pick one, and when he finally bent down to grip the orchid’s stem, his trembling hands sent shivers through the petals.
“Let me help.”
Wandile stepped forward and pinched the bottom of the orchid’s stem between his thumb and forefinger. By the time he realised Luca had started counting down, he couldn’t remember where exactly the sequence had started, and instead used each descending digit as a reminder to breathe. When Luca’s clock ran out, the two boys tugged at the yellow flower and were surprised to feel the tree tugging back. There was a soft ripping and the next thing they knew, they were holding the Leopard Orchid between them.
Almost immediately, the mountain breeze fell away. It was as though the forest was mourning the tree’s loss, and Wandile had to pluck two short rootlets from the orchid’s stem to stop himself from apologising to the air around him. He had a terrible feeling that if the tree could talk, it would howl louder than Luca had yelled Jan Pierewiet’s name.
He scrubbed the rootlets clean on his shorts. “The book says it’s the roots we want.”
Luca watched him. “They’re not going to shine like apples, Wandi.”
When Wandile didn’t stop, Luca grabbed his shoulders and asked him to explain page 37 again.
“You chew the root before you go to bed and, from that moment on, the person you love won’t be able to think of anyone but you.”
Wandile handed Luca one of the rootlets and lifted the second to his own mouth.
“You sure you want to do this?”
“On the count of three.”
Both boys tilted back their heads and opened their mouths, Wandile’s so wide his jaw began to ache.
“One… two… three!”
Wandile hadn’t known what to expect, but nothing could have prepared him for the feeling of Luca filling every cavity in his teeth. He felt the tall boy slip down his throat and coat his vocal folds in the syllables of his name. And when Luca trickled into his stomach like a cup of warm milk, he nearly threw up from the richness of it all. When the wave of nausea passed, Wandile looked up to see Luca bent over, calloused hands gripping scuffed knees, and knew that his friend had also felt him swirling deep inside of him. And when their eyes met, Wandile felt a tugging behind his belly button as though the Leopard Orchid’s rootlet had embedded itself like an umbilical cord.
Luca clawed at his wispy facial hair, and then he clawed at his clothes. Wandile yanked his shirt over his head and wondered if the small forest scrambling up the side of the mountain was the Garden of Eden. He closed his eyes as he heard Luca step out of his underwear and imagined they had just taken a bite of the forbidden fruit. It tasted sweet and fresh and so undeniable that when he opened his eyes and drank in the softness of Luca’s body, he knew why Adam and Eve had disobeyed God.
It had taken Wandile four years after arriving in Cape Town to go up Table Mountain. Back then, every time he had contemplated the famous summit, the flat slab of rock seemed only to pale in comparison to what he’d left behind. Ulwaluko had already meant three weeks atop another mountain, and Wandile hadn’t wanted to dilute the memory of Luca any further.
But now, he stared up at the Klein Drakensberg from his Hoedspruit motel window and didn’t recognise any of it. He didn’t recognise the mountain peak he and Luca had offered their clothes to — that famous site where two boys had given each other their bodies. He didn’t recognise the leafless trees that sagged under the weight of the moon. And when his phone rang and it took him a second too long to recognise his wife’s voice, he pressed his face into the bedding and cried.
There were now three petrol stations in Hoedspruit.
- Ulwaluko (Xhosa) — Initiation
2. oupa (Afrikaans) — grandpa
3. gogo (Xhosa) — grandma
4. Gqum! Satsh’isibham! (Xhosa) — Boom! A gun went off!
5. Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet staan stil! (Afrikaans) — Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, stand still!
6. ouma (Afrikaans) — grandma
Mechiel Boshoff is a South African writer and copy-editor currently completing his masters in creative writing.
