On Youth
* * *
The old man was waiting at the gates of 123 Harry Smith Avenue, named after that colonial cradle snatcher who had thought it meet to decapitate the paramount chief of the Xhosa nation. We greeted each other as I drove through, down, past, over and parked out back. Beyond the bay I saw that one of the trees, which had survived his scythe after Ma had died, was carrying fruit. So I got out and helped myself to a fig as he came through the door, over the apron and across the lawn towards me. The fig was as decadently swollen and sweet as ever and the old man said he would put some in a bag for me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, giving him my left hand to crush, since the fingers of my right were too sticky, wondering why a fig had been used to depict the beginning of all schmertz between man and woman. Was it because the inside of a fig was sweetly vaginal, or was it because figs just happened to come from that neck of the arids – or was it an even later imposition? I would have to look it up, knowing I’d probably forget.
“You know,” he said, ignoring what I said as usual, “when I grew up we had figs, avocados, mangoes, bunches of bananas. All in our garden, all growing wild. We had a whole acre of garden.”
“Good,” I said, elongating the word in that Afro-Afrikaans way of filling up space, seeing a low, spread-out house surrounded by orchards and monkey-vine forest in the place we’d gone to every holiday since time immemorial. “That’s probably why you’re still so healthy.”
“Not only that,” he said, as I started body languaging us towards the cement apron. “It’s because I’ve never smoked, drunk or slept with another woman.”
“So you’ve said,” I muttered, about nine-hundred thousand times, I thought.
“What?”
“Shall we have some coffee?”
“Good idea,” he said as we stepped onto the apron, which formed a rough U between the main bedroom’s one wall, the small back stoep, the washroom that we called the laundry, and what used to be the servant’s quarters, which then became my teenage bedroom and was now a dusty storeroom. Under the shortened gutter leading down the long arm of the U’s wall was a grey 45-gallon drum. This was to catch the rain water but it also caught about a thousand cigarette butts, which I’d known nothing about, honestly. In the opposite corner stood a silver javelin I had once brought home from school and never returned. It and the drum were fairly rusty in places. There were also two white wire chairs and a matching table that always had bits of cardboard under its legs because, like so many Joburg coffee bars’, it wobbled.
We were about to ascend the three steps onto the back stoep when something unusual happened: my cellphone rang. It was Kay, who hoped I didn’t mind her calling me out of the blue like this. “I’m sure I’ll survive,” I said, but she was going away on a job for the week, but would be back next Saturday. That’s two “buts” in a single sentence, I thought, but could we possibly go out for a walk then, she continued. Watching the old man go into the laundry on the left and emerge with a vomit-yellow Checkers bag to fill with figs, I responded that I’d have to consult my diary, but that it should be okay: I’d call her if Random House or Hollywood suddenly rang. You never know, she said much too positively for my liking. After enquiring and hearing that she was working on a job with Ed Mhlophe, I said good luck. See you next Saturday, she laughed, and rang off.
The old man said he’d put the figs in the car. All I’d wanted was to eat one or two bloody figs, but no, and he told me the Civic was dirty.
“Maybe I’ll wash it after coffee,” I said.
“I’ll help you,” he replied.
This was just what I needed after a night of heavy drinking with Jay and Veron as we went up the three steps, past his flimsy security gate and halved door into the kitchen, which still had its original 1950s oven, sink and cupboards. The tiles and wooden furniture had replaced the old linoleum-covered floor, table and chairs some time since. I’m sure Ma had told me about it, but like so much else it had passed me by in a haze of anti-detail impatience.
One of the objects that had survived her demise was her hefty, fake-marble bust of Beethoven, which had spent years on the rarely used piano in the no-longer-utilised living room, staring way beyond the modestly naked torso of J.H. Lynch’s ubiquitous Tina on the opposite wall. But Uncle Ludwig had moved to a kitchen shelf for reasons unknown and always seemed to be looking at me from under his eyebrows, no matter where I stood. Maybe he was accusing me of preferring African music to his pomposity, and I think the only reason why the old man never got rid of him was because he’d paid for it. Ma had never really listened to old Thunderballs (Gé Korsten, yes) and the old man didn’t just hate classical music, he hated most music. As for those long-haired rock ’n roll bastards with their reedy voices on Popshop, “they should all be shot”. The only kind of music he liked was the stuff that had rhyming lyrics from the Thirties and Forties, none of which he collected. But right now he was telling me about how he’d bought himself a floral coffee mug at Checkers for two rands ninety-five.
“Oh?” I grunted.
“They’re usually six ninety-five,” he crowed.
“Goo-ood,” I said, trying to sound positive, absently, thinking of Kay’s musical arse as she walked ahead of me in an open-plan office awash with testosteronal egos and oestrogenic strategists.
“Which mug do you want?”
There was now a choice of five floral vessels and one that had half-pleasing rings around it and showed no hint of Biggie Best inclinations.
“I’ll take this one,” I said for about the eight hundred-thousandth time.
“Everybody likes that one,” he said for the corresponding number of times.
“Really?” I managed to exhale.
“I got us some Lemon Creams,” he jumped ahead.
“Good,” I said, wishing my mother a good rest.
“But, you know,” he said, pouring water onto his one spoon of insipid instant mud and my five spoons of the same to make up the deficit, “someone said to me the other day I should stop taking my coffee with two spoons of sugar and two spoons of condensed milk.”
“Dad, you’re eighty-eight; you’re as healthy as a pig. If you’ve made it to here I don’t see why you should suddenly change anything.”
“Ja, but I want to make it to ninety-three.”
“I know,” I said, my temples starting to throb.
Bring on the SFX
* * *
Back at the office we had two political obsessions. In the case of foreign affairs it was that old fruitcake just north of our border, Robert Gabriel Karigamombe Mugabe. In national affairs it was our Supreme Leader, who was another foreign affair since he spent a great deal of his time placating, if not brown-nosing, the nut job up north. And if he wasn’t there he was pointing his fingers at the West at the United Nations while insisting on investment, quite content with what he would have learned was called a contradiction – or possibly tactic – at a colonialist university during his extensive time in exile.
The honeymoon period of Nelson Mandela was over and Comrade Mugabe had started appropriating white-owned farms left, right and centre. In essence, he was telling the world to go and get stuffed in a perfectly – and unintentionally ironic – Oxonian accent. Everything was the imperialists’ fault, which was largely true, but then he was hardly acting in a manner less vicious and expedient than his predecessors. Blaming the past always proves a point, even if it rarely solves present problems. This, however, didn’t matter because, like so many left-wingers, he somehow thought criticism was only his to give, not receive.
Obviously we white subs and mainly black editorial thought he was barking mad or just plain impractical, but it wasn’t half as cut and dried as that. There were people in the office who became silent when we mouthed off about Uncle Bob, and when he came to the country for some or other convention in which the only decisions reached were when to have the next bloody summit or symposium, he was not greeted with boos. He was hailed
as a hero of the revolution in a manner that seemed to veer between idolatry and sheer, infantile spite. His speeches were eloquent and made perfect sense to all those ex-exiles who had been schooled in an ideology that had been formulated in the nineteenth century by a European, whose watered-down philosophy only seemed to work properly in countries like Hamlet’s old stomping ground.
No matter. He was always invited as a matter of protocol by our Supreme Leader, who maintained a successful, though inherited, infrastructure – which most people seemed to think was astute instead of calculatingly strategic – but also personally oversaw a mainly black populace dying like flies thanks to his deliberate inaction on treating the symptoms of AIDS. His greatest transgression, from my point of view, was that he was the most boring little mass murderer I had ever listened to. “His” people were being raped and murdered at such a rate that, statistically, it made the war in Iraq look like a Women’s Auxiliary tea do.
But, as with most things South African, it was all invisible. The violations happened elsewhere, meaning mainly in the townships or on the farms, both of which he, as an outsider and theorist, knew squat about. Most of the tortured and then murdered farmers were Afrikaners and, because their tribe had previously been the supposedly sole oppressors, they weren’t given much ear time by the powers that be, including the English media: us, we, who tried to convey the impression that we were looking at the bigger picture of building a constitutional et cetera, et cetera.
Most of the white intellectuals had fallen silent or resorted to class analyses, while the black heavies were in a bind because this was what they’d clamoured for all along. We couldn’t expect everything to be perfect immediately. After the Big Bleed we’d have the Big Build, even though it felt like we’d need another three and a half centuries to sort everything out. But our glorious leader’s rhetoric was very much the same as in the past: we had to stand together as one nation (with eleven official languages), fight the injustices of the past and the resulting poverty of the present, so that we could have a renaissance for the future. Not a renewal or a rebirth or something truly African, but a renaissance. I fantasised about seeing him fall asleep over one of his own speeches, as I tended to, but as far as I was concerned the enemy was still those who abused power, regardless of their skin colour, which was a dangerous thing to say. In fact, it was seen as unbridled racism in those halcyon days of carrot-up-the-arse correctness. You couldn’t criticise the new lot, since they had come from the moral high ground, and this is what annoyed them most about the Daily News. Somehow they’d expected the so-called liberal, white-owned press to fall over backwards and praise them to high heaven, no matter what they did. The problem was they weren’t doing much that was worthy of praise. Sure, they were making all the right noises, even laws, but the people who were supposed to execute those orders were either fired because they were white or appointed because they were related. These so-called leaders were screwing their own people more than their fascist predecessors by abusing the principle of ubuntu in its most cynical guise possible. If they were what they were through others, then surely they couldn’t be held individually responsible for being caught with their fat fingers in the till, could they?
Of course, the News was by now owned by blacks, run by blacks and edited by a black man, but they, of course, had been co-opted by the white, capitalist pigs. This from male and female comrades who were as obese from the proceeds of our taxes as those clunky, petrol-guzzling 4x4s they drove. They truly hated us for not applying their brand of democracy, which was to defer everything to the Supreme Leader – who could and did deny anything that took his paranoid fancy – and I truly liked the fact that they hated us, because we were at the frontline of another battle. There was a passionate debate raging for the soul of South Africa, and we literally had it at our fingertips. All things considered, our office was a fully functional, integrated and therefore sexy social democracy.
But the likes of Mhlophe and Greenwood bothered me; they were unknown quantities. Now she had invited me out for a chat in broad daylight on a summery Saturday afternoon, so it didn’t exactly appear to be any kind of sexual come-on. And I needed sex. Badly. Or maybe she first wanted to check me out, as such. Assess me. Maybe this was the modern, liberated way of doing things. I certainly had no idea how to ask someone out. What did you do? Call them up and ask them to go to a movie or eat out with you? Talk about one thing and think about something completely different? Why couldn’t you just call someone up and say, would you like to have sex with me tonight? Surely that’s all it boiled down to in the end? The Ex and I had had an argument in the office, had continued it in a bar and then got sidelined by sex. After that initial distraction, which lasted about a year, we had only had arguments. Unfortunately by then we had also been married. Big mistake.
Kay wasn’t in the Zoo Lake parking lot as agreed, so I smoked a cigarette and three of those later she arrived, looking as sartorially challenged as ever.
“You’re late,” I said.
“I’m, like, sorry,” she said.
“You could have called.”
She had run out of air time and we started walking as I tried hard to ignore the duck shit, the litter and a pair of conjoined hounds showing what they thought of social decorum.
“How are you otherwise?” I said.
She was cool and I was fine and I wondered what I could “do for you, Ms Green Wood?”
“Nothing,” she virtually sang. “I just wanted to, like, talk.”
“Okay, if you want to talk, please do me a favour. Please try to talk without, like, using that expression the whole time, and if you must use the word ‘cool’, could you please keep it to a minimum.”
“Sorry.”
I don’t know which was worse: the abuse or the apology.
“But what, pray, would you just like to talk about? And why with me?”
“I don’t know. I just found you interesting.”
“What? Like an old rock in a museum?”
“No,” she said, laughing, “you’re funny, and not many South African men are –”
“– funny. Have you been out with all of them?”
“No, but all of those I have been out with are –”
“– what?”
“Dull.”
“You see, you can use the occasional adjective,” I said as two middle-aged women strode past us, talking simultaneously and held together, respectively, by their Spandex attire. “But maybe you’ve been moving in the wrong circles.”
“That’s quite possible,” she gamely said.
“Then again,” I said, “I haven’t met too many laugh-a-minute South African women either.”
“Have you been out with all of them?” she shot back somewhat annoyingly.
“No, we usually just stayed in,” I replied.
At which point she slapped my arm playfully, almost intimately, as if we were a couple already. I asked her to tell me about herself and she didn’t know where to start.
“Well, where did you go to school? Which university did you attend? What do your parents do? Do you have any siblings, friends, hobbies? What kind of music, art and writing do you like? You know, all that stuff that nice, white, middle-class liberals like ourselves talk about.”
She had gone to upper-middle-class schools in Cape Town and her mother was a businesswoman, her father a retired advertising executive who had started out as a copywriter and had opposed apartheid, “obviously”. He was a “witty, creative type like you”.
“Excuse me, I’m not retired, creative is out to lunch and only some people find me funny.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Siblings?”
“My brother is a really interesting accountant who loves cricket,” she said.
Her best friend was currently the art director for a women’s magazine (the kind that has models breaking the aquamarine surface in the Seychelles for hair products, toothpaste and tampons).
After school she
had done a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Cape Town, gone on the almost obligatory overseas trip (OT) afterwards, working her way around Europe as a barmaid. She had met a French businessman and they had started importing African fabrics to Paris. Business boomed. But the man had been a racist and a sexist and she’d finally dumped him “after five, like – sorry – intense years”. She returned to Africa, not Cape Town, and did an additional Bachelor of Commerce while working as a journalist.
“I heard you’re doing an MBA now.”
She was, she said, with an emphasis on that great oxymoron: political science.
“Ah, business, politics …”
“You say that as if they smell bad.”
“No. Rotten,” I said, warning myself that I was being way too negative for a seducer, but I couldn’t help myself, seeing a tramp half sitting, half lying but fully asleep on a bench beneath a willow: drooling democracy in action.
“Why?”
“Because they do.”
“But that is what society consists of,” she said, getting ready for an argument.
That explained a lot, I said, which of course she wanted explained.
“Do you think it’s working?” I asked.
“Yes I do.”
“Then why are you writing so critically about it?”
“Because it’s still in process.”
“That’s a real hey-shoo-wow Cape Town expression,” I said.
She wanted to know what I meant, again, as a group of men and boys played cricket on the kikiyu lawn and the women in their saris sat on blankets where the food was, chatting away – the quintessence of what The Ex had opposed.
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