Embrace by Mark Behr Read Free Book Online

and, commissioned from the Zulus through a contact who traded with curio stores north of the Limpopo: Rhodesia is Super! Sometimes two or three exclamation marks.
    Beside the human figures, the animals. Amongst those, also stock from before the fall of Lourenco Marques: wooden crocodiles, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, marabou storks on one spindly leg — yes, they did look exactly like Holloway. Warthogs, giraffe, buffalo, lion and cheetah. Some the whole animal, some only the head.
    Next, the masks from all over the country. The most profitable Bok bought from the girls in the Eastern Transvaal: masks made us our biggest money. Cheap and easy. Bok, buying directly from the girls, tripled the price when he sold to the curio shops, who in turn doubled or quadrupled theirs. Every tourist seemed to want a mask to take back home: Aberdeen, Bonn, Copenhagen, Dijon, Edinburgh, Florence, Geneva, Hamilton, Ipswich, Jerusalem, Kristiansund, London, Munich, New York, Ottowa, Paris, Queenstown, Rome, Stockholm, Tokyo, Utrecht, Vienna, Washington DC, X, x, x — must be some place in China with an X but Chinese don’t come here — Yazoo City, Zurich.
    Then, a disorderly mix of ashtrays cut from coloured sandstone; wooden heads and busts of bald indunas and bare-breasted girls; salad spoons; small and large spears.
    Against the back wall were the cotton crocheted doilies sown in with beads; then necklaces, bracelets in copper and silver. Postal cable woven and plaited into bracelets. The postal cable bracelets, made from sources unknown and not enquired after, Bok said had been particularly popular of late. On a stretch of open white wall, above these, were the four trophies Dademan had left me in his will: the two Grant’s gazelle heads, the small dick-dick and the huge sable antelope with its eyes that followed you everywhere you went in the garage. These, Bok said, we could hang in my room once I returned from the school and went to Port Natal with Lena. For that was where I’d go, to the best Afrikaans school in Durban, not to Kuswag High where
    Bernice would matriculate. Bernice had remained there, Bok told family and friends, only because a change midway through high school would have disrupted her studies.
    Stacked in piles after the bracelets were watercolour and oil paintings from near the Mozambique border. Less abundant since Frelimo took over. Some of these were on paper and some on canvas, mostly of sunsets and dugout canoes with palm trees and villages. Unlike the paintings in the books Ma’am shows us or those I’ve seen in galleries while on choir tour, these in Bok’s garage have no names signed in the bottom corners.
    The semi-precious stones: boxes full of tiger’s-eye, amethyst, malachite, jade and onyx. Running my fingers through the smooth stones, letting them slip across my palms, endlessly, daydreaming, thinking of nothing in particular, my eyes taking in the shadows of woodcuts, scents, the play of light on glinting varnish and matt wood, grey silhouettes against white walls.
    Beneath the back shelves were the woven grass baskets and to the right of those the rolled-up grass mats and then rows of brown, ochre and black kaffir beer pots in various sizes and shapes.
    On the shelves to the left, the cow-hide shields and assegais, many of which Bok commissioned from kraals in Zululand. Then, on the last section of wall to the left of the window, smaller narrower shelves were taken up by ostrich eggs from Oudtshoorn. While most of those were white, Bokkie had written in one of her letters that Bok had asked James to decorate a few eggs with black figures and sunsets, as demand for adorned eggs had suddenly increased.
    In the middle of the floor was Boks huge work-desk with the phone, neat piles of paper and ledgers and a small two-door filing cabinet.
     
    Bok had still been a game ranger when he got the curio idea from Uncle Michael and Aunt Siobhain, though the notion of doing curios as an own business was