The Smell of Apples

Marnus’s father is a commanding presence. We should want to admire him as much as his young son does. Johan Erasmus is successful—the youngest major general in South African history. He has provided a beautiful home for his family. He dotes on his family. His fierce love of white South Africa despite (or because of) its pariah status within the international community, and his unshakeable conviction that the native black culture is inferior and threatening, drive his considerable career success. “You can say a whole lot of things about the Afrikaners, but no one can say we’re dishonest. We don’t hide our laws like the rest of the world” (66). The reader, however, knows what Marnus does not: The father is scared, as all about him the long-standing edifice of apartheid is being threatened. At the core of his character is the fierce need to control. He bullies his family, relying on that autocratic stability to provide him some measure of control in a country that he sees as having just begun to spin into chaos.

Even as our narrator, Marnus, slavishly worships him, the father reveals a more menacing personality. He has an unsettling propensity to violence (he was a champion boxer in his youth), and the belief that might makes right controls his character. He is intolerant of those he sees as inferior—any display of love for his son is tempered by a distorted code of discipline and his cartoonish sense of machismo. He is, in essence, a white supremacist. Whenever he shares with his son stories of his own family history or his view of current events, those stories reflect his poisoned view that blacks are to blame for his family’s troubles.

There is something increasingly unsavory about the father’s character. He takes too-long showers with his son; he asks his son inappropriate questions about his penis; he pays far too much attention to young Frikkie when the three are swimming in the ocean. Unlike Marnus, we are not entirely shocked by the revelation of the father’s rape of Frikkie. Marnus rejects the evidence and returns to the cozy familiarity of his family, but the reader clearly sees the stark reality of the father’s brutality, hypocrisy, and amorality. 

We understand the hypocrisy of Marnus’s mother in a way that her son cannot. Marnus sees his Mum as the epitome of the maternal ideal: She is beautiful, elegant, cultured, deeply Christian, and devoted to her family. We come to see a different Leonore, however. We understand that, in the name of social convention, she abandoned a promising musical career to accept her secondary status within the conservative patriarchal society of Afrikaner South Africa. Her life is now devoid of passion (symbolized by her decision to cut her lustrous hair to a trim and austere Dutch-boy look) and emptied of any self-expression or creativity.

There are even suggestions that perhaps Leonore had an affair (she sings with aching pain an aria from Dido, a tragic opera about a woman pining for a lost lover; and later she sings “The Desperate Ones,” a mournful Jacques Brel song about hippies who have lost touch with the life of sacramental promiscuity).

If we are tempted to sympathize with Leonore as a victim of patriarchal oppression, we also see evidence of her profound hypocrisy, her unexamined racism, and her tidy sense that, whatever happens, a white God is in His white heaven and that everything in white South Africa is for the best. When her sister accuses her of abandoning her very self to accept a married life of submission, Leonore’s reaction is telling: She stops talking to her sister. We see what Marnus cannot: Leonore has reshaped her moral identity and sacrificed her integrity to her husband’s toxic racist worldview—and as such, she is complicit in creating and sustaining the environment of bigotry that poisons her son.