38 pages • 1 hour read
Mark BehrThe Smell of Apples
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPages 102-150Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: Pages 102-150
The Erasmus household is shaken by news that Little-Neville, the 10-year-old son of their housekeeper, Doreen, has gone missing while visiting a nearby all-white township where he attends private school. Marnus shares a recollection about Tannie Karla, his maternal aunt, who has been long ostracized from the family. In a pivotal conversation between his mother and his aunt at an ice cream stand, Karla disparaged Leonore’s marriage and how her sister gave up her music, sacrificing everything for a husband who only oppressed her freedom, her integrity, and her spirit. The remark so angered Marnus’s mother that the sisters did not speak for years. Karla since moved to London. Marnus recounts that earlier that year, a letter arrived from Karla that Leonore promptly threw away unopened. Ilse, who visited her aunt during her trip abroad to the Netherlands, rescues the letter and reads it aloud while Marnus listens. The letter is a passionate plea for Leonore to allow her children to grow up with compassion and open-mindedness and to live unafraid of those who are different. The letter inspires Ilse but merely confuses Marnus.
Although Doreen is quite upset over her missing child, the family continues to entertain the General, driving him to a gorgeous overlook to watch the sunset where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet. The father is awestruck: “Dad said there's nothing more beautiful in the world than what we were seeing in front of us […] nothing and no one would ever take it from us” (122). They take a moment to gather several crates of apples from an orchard near the promontory. On the drive back, the father once again shares the story of his brother being driven out of Tanzania after its new black majority government confiscated his apple farms. The car is rich with the pungent scent of the apples, and the father reminds Marnus that whites brought everything to South Africa—even apples.
The family returns for the last week of the school year. Doreen learns from neighbors that her young son had been caught stealing some coal from a train station to help Doreen’s sister, who could not afford coal. The angry whites stripped the helpless boy, doused him with lard, and then dangled his body against the open flames of one of the locomotive’s massive furnaces, searing the boy alive. When Ilse learns of the attack, she is deeply disturbed and stares with narrow eyes at her mother, who typically pontificates about trusting the will of God. Even Marnus is confused: “Even if Little-Neville’s a Coloured or not, it doesn’t matter, you shouldn’t do things like that to someone, specially not a child” (138).
At the special end-of-term assembly, in which the school announces the student leaders for the next year, Ilse is named the head girl for the incoming senior class. When she goes to the piano to accompany the school choir in what will surely be a rousing and inspirational rendition of Die Stem, the national anthem of white South Africa, Ilse deliberately keeps repeating parts in an act of defiance that confuses and angers the assembly. As Marnus recounts, “When the muddled voices come to an end, Ilse makes a few wild rolls up and down the keys and strikes some loud chords to show it’s over” (146). Afterwards, her exasperated father admits to the headmaster he is not entirely sure what goes on in his daughter’s head. Leonore is not so indirect. She angrily confronts Ilse and reminds her not to throw away her talents by not doing “what society expects” (148), an ironic commentary on her own life of compromise and surrender.
Analysis: Pages 102-150
Because the savage attack on Doreen’s child happens off stage (that is, Marnus is not an eyewitness), the attack becomes less a brutal and violent affront against a helpless child (we never see that, save in conversations) and more an occasion to test Marnus’s emerging sense of the moral wrongness of his own apartheid culture. Growing up in the early 1970s, Marnus (as well as the author) comes of age during a time when street riots and violent, often bloody showdowns between blacks and whites are common, given the white government’s belief at the time that its might alone would secure the future for white South Africa. Protesting blacks were beaten, shot, or rounded up and imprisoned; whites seldom faced criminal charges, protected from prosecution.
The attack on Doreen’s son confirms that disturbing reality. Indeed, the vicious attack on the boy confuses even young Marnus. Such an attack does not seem right to him. His initial reaction, that such things should not be done to a child, indicates for the first time in the narrative a moment’s hope—a flicker of a moral conscience in the boy, in which he might see the evils of the white government that would allow such criminal actions to go unpunished.
The impact on Ilse is far more immediate and far more radical. The certainty that those who perpetrated the attack will never be arrested, much less jailed, angers Ilse. (In a moment of irony lost on Marnus, the family drives along the coast and sees in the distance the craggy rocks of Robben Island, the notorious prison where black activists—among them future South African president Nelson Mandela and liberation poet Dennis Brutus—were sent for violations of free speech). The school assembly is a moment of heroic passive resistance by Ilse, modeled on similar efforts by the followers of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in the United States during the early 1960s.
Our narrator understands only that his sister keeps stopping and restarting the national anthem. As Ilse continues to stop and start, the act of outrageous and deliberate desecration of the national anthem—an anthem that glorifies the place of whites in South Africa and promises them a long and bright future—puts the entire assembly on edge. On the very night the school honors its best students, the future of white South Africa, its very best and brightest upends the ceremony and indicates in all but words that she is finished paying lip service to the glories of white South Africa. In a single moment, Ilse becomes a threat to her family and to its culture; she becomes a liberal activist.
