“It is not just trucks,” he said, “but also truck parts and truck accessories.” I was just raising a spoon of cornflakes to toast the fact that I am not a Romanian TV columnist when we were back in the studio. William Schneider was thumping his forehead on the Big Desk, softly keening: “When can we go home? When can we go home?”
“Breaking news!” announced Bernie gamely. “The election is not over. Let me repeat that: the election is not over!”
William Schneider looked up hopefully. “Are you wrapping up, Bernie?” he asked.
“No, no,” said Bernie, “I just wanted to say that before I forgot it.”
By that time I was beginning to flag. Twelve hours is a long time to watch someone else’s election. Unlike Bernie, I was not being paid overtime. As I staggered to bed, I heard William Schneider’s head hit the desk again.
“Wake up, Bill,” begged Bernie, “we’ve got Ed Kast back on the line.”
A Christmas story
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 24 DECEMBER 2000
THERE ARE FEW good Christmas stories. Christmas stories, by and large, are too caught up in their own Christmasness to be any good as stories. Indeed, Christmas stories are similar to Christmas cards – their purpose is not to be honest or to entertain, but to perform a dutiful and imprecise sort of gesture.
They always have a message. Messages do not make for good stories. Messages should either be sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea, or written in lemon juice in the white space between the lines of the story. If the readers want the message badly enough, let them hold up the page to a naked flame.
(I have tried that, incidentally – faithfully following the good Ms Enid Blyton’s instructions. But perhaps the lemons available to English children in the 1930s were of a more subtle sort than those available today. I never had the invisible writing resolve itself into brown lines before my eyes. All I had were scorched fingertips and on one occasion an invisible map of my back garden that went up in a frightening burst of yellow flame. It didn’t matter, I suppose. I hadn’t buried anything at the spot marked X more valuable than a silver napkin ring, and I had no one to whom to pass the secret map who would have had the slightest idea what to do with a loamy napkin ring.)
Worse than a message is the burden of a Christmas message. Christmas stories are supposed to embody in some way the true meaning of Christmas. The trouble is that no one really knows what the true meaning of Christmas might be, which leads to an awful lot of guff.
There are only so many times that a sensible person can stomach Jimmy Stewart discovering what a wonderful person he really is (It’s a Wonderful Life) or those two chumps in O Henry’s Gift of the Magi giving each other overpriced Christmas presents. Closest to the truth was Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who discovered that you can buy the affection of the townsfolk by being free with your cash.
I am dwelling on the problem of the Christmas story, you may have guessed, because I don’t feel like writing about television. I feel like telling a Christmas story. I couldn’t invent one that I liked, so I turned to real life.
I considered telling the true tale of a girl with whom I went to school, whose name was Carol. We called her Christmas Carol, partially because she was head of the choir, but also because she had a bulbous, shiny nose. The last I heard of Christmas Carol, she had married a man from Qatar, converted to Islam and is now living somewhere in Yemen, where I can only hope she has found a veil large enough to conceal her nose. But the story of Christmas Carol lacked zip.
Let me tell you this story instead. It has no message, but that is as it is in real life. My grandfather was a prisoner in an Italian camp during the last world war. He had been a gunner with the Eighth Army in the deserts of North Africa, and had been captured and interned somewhere in Italy. He was hazy with the details: men of my grandfather’s generation seldom spoke about the war. He did tell one tale. It involved Christmas Day, 1943: the day he called and made slam in no trumps while playing bridge in the shade of a pine tree beside the camp’s exercise yard. Never before and never since would my grandfather call and make slam in no trumps.
His bridge partner on that occasion was an Italian guard, whose name I have forgotten. If I tell you it was Luigi, you will guess that I am guessing. Luigi was a young man, almost a boy, just like my grandfather. He was friendly and occasionally brought the prisoners chickens. My grandfather taught him English, but didn’t bother to learn Italian in return.
They spoke about home, and played bridge and football together. Luigi didn’t get along with the other Italian guards, for reasons that can only be guessed at, but thanks to Luigi, my grandfather always said, the day that he called and made slam in no trumps was the happiest Christmas of his life.
After the war my grandfather returned home and played out the remainder of an undistinguished bridge career, pausing only to set in motion the chain of events that led to, well, me. Luigi disappeared into the gloom of post-war Naples.
In 1993 I was living in Cape Town. A week before Christmas, I went to a local picture shop to frame a sepia photograph of my grandfather as a young man. I had recently discovered it in a dusty box in a garage; it would be a Christmas present for my mother.
The framer was an old man. He stared at the photograph a long time. I was anxious to be going, but he told me a story. It was a story about being a young man in the war, and working as a guard in a prisoner-of-war camp, and about a South African friend, a prisoner, who made the unhappy months bearable, and how later he had remembered the stories of Cape Town, and had moved south, and been happy since.
He spoke in perfect English, with an Italian accent. He had never seen his friend again, but hoped he would. Perhaps they would share Christmas lunch together again. Perhaps they would play some bridge.
And there the story ends. My grandfather had died a month before, and Luigi died a few months later. They had lived the past 40 years within five kilometres of each other, and had never stopped playing bridge.
It would have been nice if they could have met that Christmas, and called and made one final slam in no trumps. Sometimes it would be nice if life were like a Christmas story.
The more the marrier
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 22 APRIL 2001
I AM NOT IN the habit of judging other people’s lifestyles. Well, actually I am, but I wasn’t about to admit it in the very first sentence. I am informed that some people are in the habit of reading only the first sentence of each article in the newspaper, and I want to leave them with a good impression of me. Although, now that I come to think of it, I don’t really give two hoots (which in owl currency is the equivalent of one human damn) for the opinion of the kind of individual who would only read the first sentence of this column. If I could take that sentence back I would, but what’s done is done, I suppose.
So yes, actually, I am in the habit of judging other people’s lifestyles, but of all the lifestyles I have had cause to tut over, it is Alex Joseph who gets the most unequivocal thumbs-down. Who is Alex Joseph? You may well ask. Alex Joseph was a featured guest on The Jerry Springer Show (DStv, Series Channel, daily, 10pm). Unusually, Jerry ventured out of the studio to visit Alex on his ranch. It was a dusty sort of a ranch, without much by way of grass or crops or even livestock, but Alex was happy. Alex purred and preened like a cat that has managed to get its paws on some other cat’s saucer of milk. But there the comparison ended. Despite a small and scrubby beard, Alex is not as furry as a cat, and whereas a cat has nine lives, Alex Joseph has eight wives.
To have one wife, you might say, is good fortune. (You also might not say it, especially if you have one.) To have two wives is careless. To have six and seven and eight wives is to be interviewed by Jerry Springer, and when you’re being interviewed by Jerry Springer, you must have some inkling that somewhere on life’s bendy byways you’ve taken the wrong turn.
Mind you, the extended immediate family of Alex Joseph was a good deal more harmonious than most of Jerry’s guests. They huddled t
ogether in the yard and beamed for a group photograph, like a box-framed collection of sun-faded Tretchikoffs.
Alex told us that he and his wives have produced 25 children and 733 grandchildren. Well, he may not actually have said 733, but after a certain point what difference does it make? Alex’s ranch is located outside Big Water, Utah, which would encourage a lesser and cheaper columnist to make a series of leering jokes involving, you know, bigness and water. But Big Water, Utah is beyond a joke. Big Water, Utah is one of the ugliest places I have ever seen. There is nothing there except wives. We took a tour of the compound. “All the wives have their own houses,” said Sarah, the chief wife, “except for some wives, who share.”
The houses were decorated with home-made cushions and bean bags and quilted things. On the wall of each house was an embroidered motto: “The more, the marrier”. No, I just made that last bit up.
Why would Alex do such a thing?
“To take a wife is a responsibility,” said Alex, squinting philosophically into the dust, “and the bigger the man, the more responsibility he bears.”
Marrying eight women at the same time struck me as a foolhardy way of proving your manhood. On the whole, I think I prefer the Xhosa tradition, where all they do is cut off a piece of your penis.
Alex has started his own church, and in a sense his own congregation. It is called “The Church of Jesus Christ of the Solemn Assembly”. It’s almost as if he wants to be laughed at. We had dinner with the family. Now that was a solemn assembly. “The problem with the world today,” said Alex as he buttered both sides of his bread, “is that women get married when they’re 20 and change their minds when they’re 30. They change men like diapers.” Which made you fear a little for the personal hygiene of the little ’uns. They must be looking forward to turning 10, so they can change those diapers already.
Alex’s plan to eliminate the problem of the changeability of women involved marrying his most recent wife when she was 15 and he was 53. She had been signed over as his bride when she was nine years old. The only thing Alex’s wives change like diapers is their diapers.
And yet they all seemed content enough. Whatever the disadvantages of plural marriages – I can imagine, for instance, that one would be reluctant to take the family on a cruise ship with a “women and children first” policy – Alex wasn’t complaining and the ladies weren’t contemplating a change. And who am I to criticise? I can scarcely get a date on a Saturday night, and this nutter in Utah lands eight uncomplaining wives. He should be a hero to us all. But he isn’t.
TV in Yemen
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 13 MAY 2001
SALAAM ALEIKUM, my friends. You will notice that I begin this column with a common Arabic expression. That is because I have just returned from Yemen (or, as some would have it, the Yemen), where common Arabic expressions are even more common than they are elsewhere.
That particular expression either means “Peace be upon you”, or is a way of ordering extra salami and cucumber on your pizza. I am rather inclined to the first interpretation, because I frequently said salaam aleikum in my travels through the wadis and highlands of southern Arabia, and not once did anyone point me in the direction of the nearest Italian trattoria.
Of course, when you are in the Yemen, the nearest Italian trattoria is a continent away. There is a Pizza Hut in Aden, mind you, but no one really knows what its purpose might be. Locals stand outside and giggle at its architecture. The only customers are CIA investigators probing the sinking of USS Cole last year.
You can tell the CIA investigators a mile away. They have tattoos of mountain lions and biceps the size of a Yemeni waist and are always eating pizza out of cardboard Pizza Hut boxes. I shared a lift with one in an Aden hotel, and as the doors closed I asked how the investigation was going. He raised his head from the Pizza Hut box and adjusted his black plastic earpiece. “How do you know who I am?” he demanded. I smiled cryptically and tapped the side of my nose. He had to restrain himself visibly from throwing me in a headlock.
Western foods haven’t made much impact in Yemen. I ate a camel-meat kebab somewhere in the Hadhramawt, the lush, palm-filled valley on the fringes of the endless sandy wastes of the desert the locals call Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. It was tasty. It tasted like chicken. No, it didn’t – it tasted like beef, but leaner. I suppose you might say it tasted like ostrich. Most of the time I ate chicken. That, I am pleased to say, did taste like chicken.
Yemen has shunned most of the eyesores of Western consumerism, but I have yet to visit the country that doesn’t boast more satellite dishes than a man on horseback can count in a hundred days of galloping, as the old Yemeni saying goes. In Al-Hudaydah, on the Red Sea coast, I lay back under a spinning ceiling fan, draped myself in a swatch of muslin and settled in for an evening of television.
The greatest hazard to anyone thus approaching the intriguing and often opaque Arabian culture is the ubiquitous Arabic music video, in which, without exception, a portly fellow wearing loose shirts and immodestly snug-fitting trousers dances around a foxy lass with handmade eyebrows. He tries unsuccessfully to plight his troth for two minutes, 25 seconds of the song, while the foxy lass jangles her jewellery and looks unavailable.
How depressing, you might think, but fear not: you can tell by the waggle of the gentleman’s eyebrows and the suave way he ruffles his moustache that he knows how the song ends. Finally, in the last five seconds, the foxy lass smiles and melts and accepts his troth and the pair scamper off screen, presumably en route to a good plighting.
Fortunately, the satellite service offered a full bouquet of channels from around the Arabic-speaking world. I tuned in to a Moroccan channel, or was it from Dubai? It was a live broadcast of a stage play. Two Moroccans in chinos and bowling shirts stood on stage, just outside the spotlights. Every time the spotlights tried to settle on them, they sidled away again. The spots danced around on stage trying to find them, a delicate pattern of loops and squiggles, as though the lighting guy were spelling out swear words in Arabic. In the foreground, a dwarf was speaking on a phone.
I couldn’t follow what they were saying, of course, but apparently it was a comedy, because the two Moroccans kept slapping each other on the back and yelling their lines in unison, which is something they also do on e.tv sitcoms to signify a punchline. Ah, the universal language of comedy.
You could also tell it was funny because the 17 people in the audience kept chuckling. You could tell there were 17 people because a camera kept panning over them. Every time they noticed the camera, the audience members would wave and pull faces and try to pull their friends’ jerseys up over their heads. It must have been a little puzzling for the performers. It was puzzling for me, but perhaps it was an innovative scheme for luring audiences back to live theatre: “Come to our play – you could be on television!”
I tried to tune in to the Saudi Arabian channel, but the service wasn’t operational. What an opportunity lost. I lay there a long time, trying to imagine the wonders of Saudi television. A curtain draped over the screen, perhaps, with low voices in the background discussing the price of oil and laughing. (“Tell me, how much oil actually goes into a barrel, Sheik Ahmed?”
“Hmmm, not entirely sure, Ali. As much as we feel like, I suppose. Don’t tell the Americans, heh heh heh.”
“Heh heh heh.”)
There are many reasons to visit Yemen, the land of Sheba and Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights, but television is not among them. I left the hotel and took a walk along the seafront, where groups of men sat and smoked and played dominos and drank strong, sweet coffee. Everyone invites a stranger to sit with them.
I chose a table that spoke English. “How you like Yemen?” someone asked.
“I like it better than Jerry Springer,” I said, which is my way of giving a strong compliment.
“Who is Jerry Springer?” they said. Suddenly I realised all over again what a beautiful country I was visiting.
Father’s Day
LAST SUNDAY WAS Father’s Day, and I forgot all about it until The Story of Fathers and Sons (SABC3, Sunday, 5pm) reminded me.
It was a documentary celebrating what some goof wearing a back-to-front baseball cap was pleased to call “the mystical, spiritual bond between father and son”. I have always wondered why people mistrust the emotional and the material so much that they feel obliged to reach into the ether to account for the strength of their feelings.
No matter. Much of what was most moving on the show was conveyed without words: the scene in which Dad hugs his son who has just struck out in Little League; Dad kneeling to hug the son who cannot walk; Dad and son standing together in the fine awkwardness of a pair who love each other, but aren’t sure what to say to one another. As is usually the case, when words were used they tended to flatten the experience.
“Love is painful,” said one dad, “because it hurts when the one you love is taken away.” Well, yes.
“I think it’s hard to plant a tree,” said some bearded hippie dad, “and then watch it, uh, walk away from you.”
I could forgive the show much. It is a subject that is especially close to me. I have wanted a son for precisely 22 years now, which is also the length of time that I have wanted a father.
When I was a small boy the wallpaper in my room was decorated, somewhat mysteriously, with recurring patterns of cowboys, locomotives and trout. The cowboys wore chaps and six-shooters, the locomotives billowed soot, the trout leapt high, eyes wide, fishing line trailing from their mouths towards an unseen rod. In order to calm myself after a particularly alarming episode of Squad Cars on the radio or Bonanza on television (the Ponderosa ranch had cowboys and locomotives aplenty, but I was always troubled by the conspicuous absence of trout), I would lie awake in the half-light, counting the figures on the wallpaper. On bad nights I would count a full wall-and-a-half before falling asleep.
But I Digress ... Page 6