The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Yes Mom.

  She doesn’t realize (or she does) that it’s impossible for me to stop playing with Tim Knowles. We’re building a tree house in his garden and the plan depends on me. I’m supplying the materials, the borrowed boards and planks from the stash behind the servants’ quarters and long nails from the jars in Dad’s garage. Tim has the tree.

  Branko

  Joe is reading the Bible. He started at ‘In the beginning…’ and he plans to go all the way through to the last ‘Amen’. He’s been busy for five or six months and he’s got as far as the First Book of the Chronicles. Every night, unless we’ve come in late from the cycle track or he’s listening to Malcolm Gooding’s music show on the transistor, he kneels down next to his bed and says his prayers. Then he creeps under the blankets, takes the Bible from his bedside table, opens it at the bookmark, which is shaped like a shepherd’s crook and has a picture of St Christopher on it, and reads two pages. Neither more nor less. This way he’s calculated it will take him eighteen months to get to the end.

  Joe is a great reader, as they say. In the school holidays, he lies on his bed in the sun all day and reads like a machine. He can devour a book in a day, five books, if you count the Reader’s Digest condensed volumes, which he swallows like an astronaut eating five square meals in tablet form.

  Why don’t you just read the Bible in one go? I ask. That time you had measles you got through Riders of the Purple Sage without stopping to water the horses. You could do one hundred pages of scripture a day and still have time for a couple of chapters of Leslie Charteris. Ten days and it would all be over. Two weeks at a stretch.

  I can’t do that, he says. The whole point is to read it in stages.

  Like the Tour de France?

  Ja, exactly. You can’t sommer beetle on to the end. You’ve got to do one stage a day like everybody else.

  There’s another rule, I discover: no skipping. He has to read every chapter of every book. Not just Exodus and Proverbs, but Nehemiah and Amos and Nahum. Nahum. Who the hell reads him? Every verse of every chapter too and every word of every verse. All the begats and comings to pass, all the instances of this one saying unto that one and that one arising and going forth, all the lists of the sons of the one and the brethren of the other. He says that’s the best part, the lineages. He’s making a list of all the main manne – he waves a blue exercise book – and that’s why he’s got stuck for two weeks in the First Book of Chronicles.

  All of them? I say. You’re making a list of all the Sons of Adam?

  No, he says, only the good okes.

  I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, so I snatch the exercise book out of his hand and take a look. I expect to find the House of David and the Sons of Aaron and David’s Mighty Men, but this is another story. It doesn’t look like the good okes to me. He’s gathered together Gomer and Heth and Lud, Mibsam and Shephi, and Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah. Not to mention Casluhim of whom came the Philistines. And Hadad the son of Bedad, which smote Midian in the field of Moab. The Ithrites, the Puhites and the Netophathites. No sign of the Stalactites and the Stalagmites. But here’s the families of the scribes which dwelt at Jabez. On and on for another ten pages. If I had the original to hand now, I would put it in an Appendix. My reconstruction hardly does it justice. Fuck me George, I say, what’s going on here?

  It’s nothing, he says. Just some lists.

  What for?

  Oh, a couple of names I might use some day.

  For what?

  It’s not easy to explain.

  Take a shot, Joe. Tell me what you’re going to do with Mibsam and Huppim and Shuppim?

  Well, he says, I might call my firstborn Mibsam.

  Your firstborn? He’s making this up, I can see it from a mile away.

  Maybe they’re aliases, he says, as if the two of us have happened upon a list made by a stranger. Or pen names.

  So that’s it. I throw the book at him.

  My mockery of his bookish ways has little to do with the writing. It’s the reading that bothers me. He’s spent half his life in books. Lost in them. It can’t be good for him. All those Louis L’Amours, for one thing, all the places in them, the high mesas and lonesome buttes, and the people there and everything they get up to, the galloping off, the narrowing of the eyes, the declaring and opining. Where does it all go? Maybe it settles in the back of the mind like dust.

  Joe

  Mom kept the hit parades in the knitting bag she’d bought one year in Umhlanga Rocks. There were three or four notebooks with black covers and red spines and they contained nearly all the LM hit parades from the last five years, listed by artist, song and position on the chart.

  In the same bag, which was made of wheat-coloured straw with a girdle of green checks round its waist, was another notebook of the same design in which she’d written out the lyrics of the songs she loved. Some of them we still heard on the radio, like ‘Blue Train’ and ‘The Carnival is Over’, but most were the numbers she used to sing with Ronnie’s Rhythm Section at the Berea Park dance hall: ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘Goody Goody’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now’. Mom had a voice when she was young, it was her Irish blood, everyone knows the Irish have beautiful voices, but we could not get her to sing for us. I don’t like the sound of my own voice, she said. It was beautiful once, if you closed your eyes you would swear it was Connie Francis, people said, but now it grates on my nerves.

  Forgetting herself, she would sing along with the radio when she was cooking. Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be…If there was a new song she liked and she couldn’t work out all the words, she’d call Sylvie or me to put an ear to the speaker when it played. There were lines you couldn’t understand no matter how many times you heard them.

  Sometimes the bag contained another notebook of the same design but bigger, the adult version of which the others were children, and in these pages Mom had written down her dreams. This was long ago, when we children were small, an unhappy time in her life, and she recorded the dreams so that she could read them to Dr K, who told her what they meant and helped her to get well. Dr K saved her sanity, and very likely her life, and he was a hero in our family, although he was seldom spoken of and then only in a quiet, respectful way, the way we spoke about Father Oliver from the Cathedral or Great-Uncle Cedric who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. It was never clear to me how Dr K had helped my mother, how he had cured her, because it was never clear what had ailed her to begin with.

  The dream book found its way into the knitting bag when Mom needed to consult it for some reason, but mainly she kept it in a drawer of her wardrobe. This was part of the bedroom suite Mom and Dad had bought when they started their married life together. The wardrobe was a massive arrangement of doors and drawers all faced with curved and pleated surfaces so that it looked like a stage curtain carved out of oak. The brass handles were vine leaves on sinuous tendrils. We pulled open the drawers from time to time when Mom and Dad were out to see what they were keeping in there. It was always disappointing: nothing but our old report cards and obituary notices from the newspapers. The middle drawer, the one in which the dream book lived, was locked and there was no sign of the key. Mom did not drive and never went out on her own, so the key was not on a ring like Dad’s and must be hidden somewhere in a handbag or jewellery box, but we could never find it. When we tired of hunting for it, my brother would try on Dad’s houndstooth overcoat and walk around with the tails dragging on the floor.

  Mom let me leaf through the song book, but she would not let me touch the dream book. She did not even like me to see it.

  I found her sitting on her bed one afternoon with her legs folded under her like a teenager and the dream book open on the candlewick bedspread. She was bowed over the pages, reading intently, with the sewing scissors in her hand. A few slips of paper with her precise handwriting on them lay scattered beside her knee. As soon as I
entered the room, she shuffled these scraps into the book, closed it quickly and put her fist on it. Paper, scissors, rock. Outside, a thunderstorm was building and the dark wall of the sky was riven by lightning. Before the open windows the net curtains bulged into the room like sails, snagged for an instant on the winged mirror of the dressing table and then collapsed back against the burglar bars. The room appeared to be breathing. I was in the belly of a sea creature sucking the charged air in through its gills. The dream book rattled under my mother’s knuckles. She had shut the storm up between its covers and it was boiling in there like a demon in a box.

  I sat on the end of the bed and we spoke about inconsequential things, perhaps my algebra homework or some funny thing Mrs Mitchell had said when she came over for a cuppa, and all this time we both looked out through the window and watched the curtain being sucked in and coughed out, until the storm burst over the roof of the Mitchells’ house like a madwoman spitting out curses. It was only when the ragged sheets of rain blocked out the view that I rose to pull the windows shut, while she slipped off the bed and put the dream book away in the middle drawer.

  A month or two passed. Then one day when I came in from school, Mom was not at the knitting machine as usual. In the kitchen a gash of pumpkin lay on the chopping board like a dissected smile and a pot of cold water stood on the stove, lid tilted in anticipation. The sandwich she’d made for me lay on a plate, two pale triangles of white bread with something brown between the slices. I peeled one back to see what it was. Through the window above the sink, I caught sight of her in the yard. She was at the drum Dad had cut and welded to use as a braai, with a toasting fork in one hand and a notebook in the other, while a column of smoke rose into the blue air. It was odd to see her standing out there in her apron as if she was cooking something. The simple fact of it held my attention for a while. Then I realized what the black-bound book was. I had always thought the dream book was intended for me, that it was an inheritance of some kind. One day, not when she died but when I grew up perhaps, when I was old enough to understand, the book would be given to me and its meaning would be revealed. But it would not keep. I understood that she had to burn the book and that I could do nothing to stop her. The flames licked up above the lip of the drum, bright and clean as pennants of silk in the sunlight. It would smell of meat in the yard as the fat on the grill began to melt and sizzle. I took the plate from the kitchen dresser and went to my room.

  When she came in with charcoal smudges on her knuckles and her hair awry, I was at my desk. She must have known I’d seen her at the fire, but she gave nothing away. She looked relieved and distraught.

  Later that afternoon, when I was in the yard bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the servants’ quarters, a good enough excuse to get close to the scene of the crime, the drum was still smoking. In the ash of the pages, which looked like shards of pewter, I saw the bloodied spine trailing a nervous system of cotton thread.

  Branko

  My brother wants me to tell his story. Or is it mine? Ours? Can a story ever belong equally to two people? Perhaps I need to answer this question before I can ask another. Where do I start?

  I’m hunched over my manuscript book at the kitchen counter, pressing down on it as if I’d like to submerge it in the granite. Nothing comes. I should try writing on my laptop like a modern-day author, but I can’t get my brother out of my bones: he’s occupied my body, he’s squatting in my muscles, so I just sit there, wrist cocked, pencil poised, ear turned downward to the page. The manuscript book is the family standby. But what kind of pencil does he prefer? Most of the scribblings he’s shown me are in crumbly graphite. A Staedtler 2B? Or could it be a propelling pencil? It’s years since I saw him write anything down. He has a phobia about writing in public, thinks it’s unseemly and unlucky.

  He doesn’t have that problem with reading and I can picture him doing it. The posture is easy to mimic: I slump down on the stool with my head hanging. What would the book be? The Saint Meets His Match. There isn’t a Simon Templar book in the house, I know this for a fact, but I get up and browse along the shelves in the lounge as if there might be. Most of the books are Rita’s: her tastes were always better than mine. The blokes on the bottom shelf, Goodis, Chandler, Hammett, that’s me. Joe outgrew this crew and never thought much of my reading habits afterwards. Which makes it even weirder that he wants me in his book. Unless he thinks my vulgar tastes will add a layer of authentic detail to a book about his youth. A portrait of the artist as his ill-bred brother.

  I drive over to Bookdealers in the Rosebank Mews in search of Simon Templar books. There were long rows of them in the book exchanges, I remember, tatty post-war paperbacks arranged on industrial shelving that looked like giant Meccano, but now there are scarcely half a dozen to choose from. The Saint must have gone out of fashion. The cover illustrations could be movie stills, showing a man with a gun and a prettily distressed woman. The little stickman with his rakish halo lurks near the barcode on the back cover like an undernourished fan behind a police cordon.

  I come away with three books. Two of them – Alias the Saint and Featuring the Saint – were first published within three months of one another in 1931, when Charteris was getting into his stride, and the new editions appeared in 1980 and 1994. The third, Catch the Saint, was published for the first time in 1975 and turns out to be an adaptation of a comic strip ghostwritten by someone called Fleming Lee. That evening I read the first chapter of all three books. I don’t want Rita to know what I’m doing. I haven’t even told her about Joe’s offer, because she’ll think he’s taking advantage as always. He borrowed some money when his geyser burst and I still haven’t heard the end of it. So I sit in the lounge and read while the TV mutters in the background. What am I looking for? I’m not sure. The characters come back to me in my brother’s voice. Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, the bumbler, always sounding off and pronouncing, and always having the wool pulled over his eyes by his roguish adversary. Templar himself had a smooth tongue. Joe would pick up his catchphrases, call me ‘son’ all the time, tell me ‘Mind your head, old son’ and ‘Don’t go eating your heart out, old fruit’ until I felt like hitting him. Until I did. Sometimes it went further than the lingo. I remember when he started going around in disguise, suddenly parting his hair on the other side and walking with a limp. An unpronounced limp. That was The Saint’s knack: the uncanny ability to put on a new identity with a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, a German accent, a shabby coat.

  Jordan comes in and I hear him talking to Reet in the kitchen. I retreat to the edit room. University wasn’t for him. Like father, like son. Now he’s moved to a film college in Kensington where they focus on technical skills and he’s doing better. He’s making a feature, a ‘speculative documentary’, he calls it. A bit like the one I’m currently working on. It’s a three-part series on the history of the ANC and some idiot recorded all the interviews with music in the background. I’m meant to fix it. The films are already six months late – they were supposed to go out when the party celebrated its centenary in January – and the producer is leaning on me. Problem is I can’t keep my mind on what the contemporary commentators have to say: all that interests me is the old footage. Perhaps my brother’s ‘archive’ is infecting me. After fifteen minutes in front of the Avid, I fetch The Saint books and read the second chapter of each one. I could read one of them all the way through, but I like this switching from one to the other. Channel-hopping. At the least it demonstrates how interchangeable they are.

  I make a few notes on Chief Inspector Teal – it’s one way of getting some writing into my manuscript book. He seems ridiculous to me, as florid and affected as a pantomime villain. What did I think when I was fifteen? I read a couple of them then at my brother’s insistence but I can’t recall my response. Templar has a love interest, a blonde girl called Patricia Holm, sometimes referred to as his ‘girl assistant’. And he has an American sidekick called Hoppy Unia
tz, a real meathead, loyal unto death. Joe used to talk like him too. Chees boss, I brung my betsy. I can give him de woiks. This was long after he and Jolyon Barlow had tried to become Americans and given it up as a bad job.

  All week, I worry about Joe. Something’s eating him, I’m sure of it. Should I call Em? The two of us have never got along and we’ve hardly spoken since the dinner-party fiasco. In the end, I decide to go over and see him. I don’t let him know I’m coming either.

  Film music’s about the only thing I can listen to when I’m driving. I’ve got a dozen CDs in the box on the console and I rotate them. Dramas all of them, The Godfather, The Mission, you won’t find Working Girls in the player. These days every second movie is larded with pop songs. I like the big themes, their dramatic effects: the way the music lifts the shallowest day into drama. I remember going along Loch Avenue at sunset with Morricone’s score for Days of Heaven playing and the jacarandas in bloom and it felt like all that purple was coming out of the speakers. That’s right: like I was in a fucking movie.

  Today I go the long way round to my brother’s to avoid Yeoville and Bertrams, snaking up Death Bend to Owl Road and then nipping through Observatory. Christopher Gordon’s score for Master and Commander carries me there. ‘The Far Side of the World.’ It’s not a bad conjunction.

  Dusk is falling when I get to Troyeville and the air smells of coal smoke. It’s five years since I set foot in this neighbourhood and it’s looking worse than ever: the gutters clogged with leaves and acorns, weeds as tall as men sprouting out of the pavements, razor wire uncoiled along the walls. Practically every house needs a coat of paint. It always looks worse in the winter, he’ll say if I comment. When the trees are in leaf and the creepers are flowering, the whole place softens. It’s like Greece around here.

  I have to rattle on the gate five times before he comes to the bedroom window. Then he glares at me through the bars. He thinks I’m a beggar. He kept complaining about that in one of his books. Or maybe he’s not wearing his glasses again. Vanity or forgetfulness, I’m not sure which. At last he sees it’s me and waves the cellphone: he’s busy.