Midnight Missionary, by Kleinboer

Midnight Missionary, by Kleinboer. Randomhouse Struik, Zebra Press. Cape Town, South Africa 2006. ISBN 9781770071148 / ISBN 978-1-77007-114-8

More delinquent than Nabokov, more gung-ho than Hemingway, more verbose than Kerouac, and more self-obsessed than Kafka, the writer of the novel Midnight Missionary, Kleinboer, introduces himself as probably the weirdest activist ever to rise up in an absolutely literal sense.

Kleinboer  

It starts in the year 1998 as a letter to my twin brother, Sarel Sambok. You broke the water first, at birth, and later you dived from the diving board before me, and then you kissed a girl before I did, and you were the first one to tear the wrapping off a packet of cigarettes. Remember? Our first five years at Zesfontein, the plot outside Benoni. The big fig tree, the windmill, the sunsets orange beyond the blue-gum trees. Poplars in the wind. Grandpa's underground mine stories, Grandma's Boer War stories. Khaki bush. Brown chickens scratching in red soil. Only the colour boundary did I cross before you. This afternoon in the Crumbling Pillar bar in Yeoville's Rockey Street I heard, by chance, that Maria was buried this morning. Maria was my first real girlfriend. We jolled, or went together, or did what consenting people always do for a while after they've met up. That was for two months, in November and December 1985. How did we meet? I was dancing on my own in the Midnite Star disco nightclub in Doornfontein, and she pinched my back. She was wearing dark glasses, a wig, a long shirt hanging down to her knees. We danced together and only later did we talk. Maria was from Port Elizabeth. She stayed in Sunbeam House in Van der Merwe Street in Hillbrowwith a handful of other women. There was Jessica - the plump one - and I also remember a short little one without front teeth who laughed a lot. Maria was nineteen. She said she'd only had one boyfriend before me, a Portuguese who rushed her to hospital one night - it was a tubal pregnancy. There was a tickey box in the hallway of Sunbeam House, on the second floor. Sometimes I phoned the number there and somebody would go and call her. 'Hello, it's me, Maria Kaptein speaking.' Those were always her first words. Maria told me that she worked at the Simba factory in Isando. 'Do you have any idea how those hot chips burn your fingers?' she asked. But I soon realised she was unemployed. She told me that her brother flicked cigarette ash into his beer - he believed it made him drunk that much quicker. It was in Sunbeam House that I saw lice for the first time. Maria left love bites on my neck. I grew a little clump of beard under my mouth because she liked it. Whenever I told her something that she wanted to confirm, she'd say, 'Already.' The little holes in her ears festered when she wore earrings that weren't pure gold. Sometimes she'd stay the night at my flat. 'Ooh, look at that madam looking at us!' she once laughed. She was thin, no serious maker or eater of food. If at night I tried for affection, she'd say, 'But you know you get your little bit in the mornings.' One night, she pulled open the sheet on the bed and, seeing a stain there, she got cross.  […]

This is an excerpt from the book: Midnight Missionary, by Kleinboer.

Title: Midnight Missionary
Author: Kleinboer
Publisher: Randomhouse Struik
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2006
ISBN 9781770071148 / ISBN 978-1-77007-114-8
Paperback, 15x23 cm, 256 pages