Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn

Degas' Dust - Carnie Matisonn


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denominator of the orchestra and our music were no longer the most important things in our lives, we would drift apart. And that would be fine.

      I made friends during that time, though, who would go on to remain a part of my life for all its remaining decades. I befriended Ken Koransky in an orchestra pit in my teens and he was next to me at my sixtieth birthday party in Cape Town. He went on to have a stunning career as one of the world’s finest, though perhaps under-­recognised, tenors – he toured many of the great opera houses of Europe and America and dazzled audiences everywhere he went. I once heard him sing the words from a restaurant menu with the great anthropologist Phillip Tobias in a way that was so brilliant, beautiful and funny, it wanted to make you both laugh and cry at once. He is still my close friend today.

      In the orchestra, in our youth, there had always been a lot of laughter and good humour. The biggest jokers in the pack of fifty-­two were usually the brass players. On one occasion, just before a performance at the Brakpan City Hall in honour of the then Prime Minister John Vorster – a former Nazi sympathiser who’d been jailed for his treasonous views against Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts during the Second World War – Freddie Daus, the French horn player, put a few soapsuds into the soloist’s trumpet. It had been lying next to his chair on stage before the curtain call for us to file on to the stage. The opening bars of his rendition of Carnival of Venice were a mix of gurgling music and soap bubbles blown in the direction of the music critics, gathered bureaucrats and townsfolk. Giuseppi Vitali, our esteemed soloist, recovered in style and went on to captivate the audience with his triple-tonguing rendition of the trumpet classic.

      At the end of that evening’s entertainment we were invited for dinner at the mayor’s parlour. The mayor’s opening praise song to the prime minister – the evening’s keynote speaker – was enough of a distraction for us to sneak off to overcome the “Brakpan drought”.

      We brought our empty instrument cases and raided the counter behind the bar of enough booze to fill most of them. Several musicians carried their instruments around in their hands and, as soon as Vorster ended his boring, patronising speech, we offered him an impromptu performance of “Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all…”

      Solly’s embarrassment was palpable and, in an attempt to dissociate himself from our exhibition of disdain for our humourless head of state, Solly ordered us out of the mayor’s chambers.

      We gratefully accepted and returned to the city hall with our ill-gotten gains and had a jam session while opening every one of our purloined bottles of beer, wine and spirits. Our music became ever wilder, with the brass and woodwind instruments dominating the afterparty – until the doors of the town hall were forced open by a group of passing bikers with a nose for a good party. We noticed their arrival, but by then we were beyond caring.

      They began dancing and helping themselves to what was left of the drinks. Finally, Solly appeared from behind the stage and ordered us to pack up and head for the bus.

      By the time we rolled into Johannesburg in the early hours of the morning, the younger members of the orchestra, me certainly among them, looked like a comatose collection of degenerates – in whose company I felt totally at peace.

      For years, many of the people in that orchestra had been in search of accolades, to be recognised by the critics as serious exponents of classical music – but the biker gang had shown more simple, honest, unencumbered and open appreciation for our drunken renditions of music than we’d ever felt before or probably ever would again.

      Chapter 6

      Our principal at Roosevelt High School seemed concerned only with achieving a high matric pass rate. Mr Rees spent large amounts of his time trying to persuade the parents of students he thought would not pass matric to leave school and become tradesmen. He actually denied many pupils the opportunity to write matric, because he had so little faith that they could pass.

      I played in his school orchestra under the wobbly baton of his drunken Scottish music teacher, Mr McMillan, and was soon invited to play in the orchestra of Greenside High School in their production of Chu Chin Chow, at which Rees was guest of honour on the opening night.

      I also had the lead part in our school play, so the school was well aware I was artistically inclined, but none of this mattered to Rees. All that counted was the elusive 100% matric pass rate, no matter the cost – and ensuring that all boys played rugby.

      My interest in Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Beethoven and Bach grew by the day – in inverse proportion to my growing disinterest in the unpredictable bouncing of a rugby ball – the be-all and end-all for most of the other boys my age, and particularly at my school.

      The music also helped to reconnect me, if only fleetingly at times, to my family. At home, our family’s primary rituals revolved around the magic of music, to which my developing skill with the bow began to contribute more. Whenever the opportunity presented itself – which was increasingly less often, as my father’s absences from home grew longer and more frequent – we’d make music together.

      My mother would play the piano, me the violin and my father would sing. The most memorable moments were those when Natie sang the lilting old melodies of his beloved Yiddish. Most of all, I remember the Yiddish song Zogneit Keyn Mol. His deeply felt singing perfectly complemented Eva’s technically perfect touch on the piano.

      He also enjoyed Autumn Leaves, songs from Love Boat and themes from the movies, such as Annie Get Your Gun and Exodus, the political partisan song.

      Sadly, none of those songs and extraordinary evenings were ever recorded.

      At those times, my older brother, Alan, would sit in his bedroom, taking no interest. My younger brother, Jonathan, would gaze at his clarinet until he decided the effort of playing it was not to his liking. My sisters, Kaylene and Joanne, were still very young. But they enjoyed the music and would clap along with pretty smiles.

      In this way we entertained ourselves and wove the fragile illusion of happiness, if only for the length of a few songs. Our melodic soirees, the music drifting off through the house’s open windows, are the warmest and virtually only contented memories I have of my family and childhood.

      Alan, who had been plagued by allergies as a child, was older by twenty-three months, but had never been brotherly towards me in any way. I tried to excuse his lack of kindness or simple consideration towards me by blaming our father for often telling him how worthless he thought I was. Whatever the reason, sensitivity eluded my older brother, and single-mindedness and determination were his best qualities. I would have loved a decent relationship with him – but that was never to be. I did my best to cultivate some connection, but Alan was always too preoccupied.

      Jonathan, known to everyone as John, was four years my junior and a talented and, by contrast, sensitive and troubled boy. Life at home was kinder for him as Natie’s ally, though. John and I, too, had little to do with each other, which wasn’t helped by Natie choosing John as a confidant. Their closeness should have allowed for a healthy relationship between them, but it turned out to be entirely destructive. John seemed willing to subject himself to limitless hours of Natie’s never-ending tales of woe. No doubt, my father despised me because I showed no interest in his self-pity, and made no secret of that. But my brother was deeply affected by Natie’s apparent inability to manage his life.

      And while my little brother wanted to help our father, of course he could not. No one could.

      Natie was a force of constant interruption and distraction for John whenever his work commitments hadn’t taken him away from us. When John sat at his desk trying to study, Natie would spend hours talking to him about the latest saga that was captivating him in his ever-smaller world of theatre, fantasy and failure.

      But our father’s world was not one I wanted to be part of any more, and so we brothers drifted apart and that gap grew wider when we left home. I last saw John when I left the shadow of Aasvoëlkop more than fifty years ago, though he went on to become a brilliant and acclaimed journalist.

      It was a different matter with my sisters, because they had far less contact with our father. Kaylene, ten


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