The Smell of Apples
38 pages • 1-hour read
Mark BehrThe Smell of Apples
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Pages 150-200Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: Pages 150-200
The family returns home after the assembly. Ilse verbally spars with the General over Moby-Dick. Ilse, still feisty and confrontational from the assembly, points out the moral dilemma the character Ishmael faces in deciding between the angry extremism of Ahab and the gentle stoicism of the harpooner Queequeg. After Leonore sings at the piano (Ilse declines to entertain the group), the family retires. The General is set to depart in two days. Marnus, intrigued by the General’s jagged scar, wants to see it once more. He rolls back the rug in his room and squints through the knothole into the General’s bedroom below. He is shocked to see what he thinks is the reflection of his sister. The General is in his underwear. Marnus cannot be sure, however—the light is bad and his view obscured.
The next morning, Marnus is off to his last day of school. His teacher announces that an essay of his on a trip he made to the National Museum has been selected as best in class and appears in the school’s annual, which the teacher distributes. At home, Marnus’s mother makes a fuss over the honor. Frikkie will stay with the family until they leave for their summer holiday in two days. When the boys are sent on errands, they happen to meet with Chrisjan, the Erasmuses’ former gardener. Marnus is surprised to find Chrisjan does not recognize him; Chrisjan begs for scraps of food. His conversation is fragmented and nonsensical. The boys just laugh at the man’s addled behavior.
For the General’s last night, the father gathers everyone to show slides of his recent secret trips north to Tanzania and Rhodesia. The slides from Tanzania are of stunning landscapes of the Serengeti, but the Rhodesian slides record the father’s military activities: images of brutality and violence that show the mutilated bodies of native militants fighting to upend Rhodesia’s white minority rule. Marnus struggles with the images, until one, of “a [white] soldier holding up a black arm with pink meat hanging out where it was cut from the body” (172), compels him to close his eyes.
Later, as he gets ready for bed, Marnus hears voices from the guest bedroom below. He rolls back the carpet and peers into the knothole. He sees Frikkie sitting on the bed with whom he assumes is the General. As Marnus watches in horror, the General begins to manipulate Frikkie’s penis through the boy’s pajamas. Frikkie does nothing. Marnus knows that masturbation is a sin and wants to tell his father what is going on. When he runs down the hall, he finds that his father is not in his bedroom. Panicking, Marnus returns to his bedroom and peers again into the knothole. This time, the General, now naked, is behind Frikkie and is pushing himself into the boy’s rear end. It is then that Marnus notices the General does not have a scar—and he knows in a moment of horror and confusion that the man in the gray early morning shadows molesting his best friend is his father.
The next morning, before the family leaves on holiday, Marnus tries to get Frikkie to confide in him. They have taken a blood oath never to keep secrets. The two grab some apples from a bowl in the kitchen and go out for a walk—but the apples have gone bad and smell funny. When Marnus presses him, Frikkie says nothing except that he wants to go home now.
After Frikkie returns home, Marnus accompanies his mother and sister to the Coloreds-only hospital to visit Doreen’s son. The boy’s back and legs are badly burned. Marnus cannot bear the sight or the antiseptic smell, and he turns away: “I put my hand over my nose. I don’t want to see anymore. I move away and look out the window” (189). On the way home, a deeply moved Ilse, who sees the implications of white violence in ways that Marnus cannot, says it would better if the boy died: “Just imagine what he’s going to feel like once he starts remembering what happened to him. Think of how he’s going to hate white people” (191).
Before the family departs for the holiday, they open gifts the departed General has left for each of them. Marnus receives a set of the General’s own epaulettes. When the father offers to help Marnus affix the epaulettes to the army-issue camouflage outfit the boy already has, the boy recoils and starts to cry. The father, uncertain over why his son is acting up, first strikes his son over and over and then hugs him tightly: “Bulls don’t cry” (197). Ilse tries to comfort the boy. That fails. In a moment of insight, Marnus decides it was better that Frikkie didn’t tell him anything; some things should be kept secret. That night, Marnus has a nightmare in which he and Frikkie ride horses along the surf, chasing little Zelda. When he turns to Frikkie, it is not Frikkie but Doreen’s son on the horse.
The next morning dawns radiant; the new year approaches. The family loads up the Volvo to leave for its cottage in Sedgefield. Before they leave, the father leads the other family members in a traditional moment of prayer and thanksgiving: “He asks God to bless our country in 1974, and to strengthen the defence force so that we can conquer the enemy bearing down on us from all directions” (200). For a moment, Marnus pauses and looks out across False Bay—never has his world seemed more perfect: “I don’t know whether there’s a more beautiful place in the world” (200).
Analysis: Pages 150-200
In four potential moments of insight, Marnus has the chance to grow up, open his eyes, and accept the reality of the corruption and amorality around him. Each time, however, Marnus refuses the evidence, returning to what he knows best: the belief that his parents are good, a white God is in heaven, and the world is better white.
First, when Marnus squints through the knothole in his floor and sees what he thinks is his sister visiting the General’s room late at night and the General half naked, Marnus cannot process the implications. We see that the repartee between Ilse and the General has led to this: Ilse’s expression of her own empowerment, her determination to follow her passion (unlike her mother), and her decision to experience freedom from the restrictions and narrow expectations of social convention. Marnus decides in the morning he probably was dreaming.
Then later, when Marnus, who has been told the gardener left the family after pilfering expensive fishing equipment, happens to meet the man in the street, we see that this supposed thief is actually a sad old man suffering from dementia, his ragged clothing indicating he lives on the streets. To us, the idea of his masterminding the theft is ludicrous—we pity the doddering man. Marnus and Frikkie, however, merely find the confused old man’s disconnected ramblings and clumsy movements amusing.
The father’s family slide show occasions the next opportunity for Marnus to understand the nature of white South Africa and, more importantly, the specific role his father plays and how the military is suppressing the insurgent natives. As they sit about on the couch and in their Lazyboys, and as the father does an impromptu tour guide presentation, the family watches slides of mountains and baskets of coconuts and bananas, and even of a sun lit up by a rainbow. Without any hesitation or apology, the slide show quickly moves into grizzly shots first of Marnus’s grandfather poaching bull elephants and ripping their tusks off, followed by slide after slide recording the brutal treatment of the Rhodesian black freedom fighters, whom the father repeatedly dismisses as “terrorists,” at the hands of the Afrikaner army under the father’s direction. Marnus cannot stand to watch the gore. He covers his eyes. He stares down at the floor. He does not want to process the implications that a man he so admires is capable of such barbaric acts and then of taking photos of those acts and sharing them with his family—a display of braggadocio that we see as pure racism uncomplicated by morality or shame.
Little prepares the boy for what he glimpses through the knothole the last night of the General’s visit. “With my one eye shut,” suggesting Marnus’s reluctance to accept full sight, “I look down into the bottom room” (174). The figures are obscure in the gray half-light of early morning, but the movements are unmistakable. “He takes Frikkie’s one hand and puts it between his legs. His mister is standing up out of his pyjama pants” (175); and later: “He pulls Frikkie’s legs apart and it looks as if he’s rubbing something into Frikkie’s bum” (177). Symbolically, the sun is just rising outside, suggesting illumination and new vision. When Marnus and Frikkie are alone in the kitchen a few hours later, however, Marnus says nothing, refusing even to look at his best friend.
Finally, there is the trip to the Coloreds-only hospital to visit Doreen’s son. Marnus has been told to brace himself for the sight of the badly burned little boy. Perhaps, we hope, the sight of what white racism and blind hatred can provoke might at last free Marnus from his self-inflicted blindness. Instead, the visit overwhelms him. Marnus is told the boy’s burns will never entirely heal and he will be scarred for life. Even as his mother sanctimoniously invokes the sufferings of Job, Marnus cannot bring himself to look at the small boy, tubes running into his nose, his body naked and scarred by burn marks. When he does look down at the boy, he says nothing about the actions that brought the boy there but rather makes odd comments comparing the boy’s features to his mother’s.
Marnus refuses insight. When he is forced to wear the military getup with epaulettes the General gifts him just to placate his father, Marnus has an ironic moment of non-insight: “I shouldn’t have looked through the holes in the floor” (196). He blames himself for snooping. Marnus closes his narrative wishing he had not seen anything, wishing to remain within the stability and comfort of his father’s world. Marnus’s glowing peroration celebrating the beauty and wonder of South Africa—is there a more beautiful place in the world, he asks—then disturbs the reader, because we understand that Marnus has decided to ignore evidence, to refuse judgment, to interdict his outrage. In short, innocence gives way to complicity; in rejecting awareness, Marnus decides to be complicit in the doomed apartheid culture of his parents.
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