I could see a flash of the old Beethovian temper for an instant before he asked me whether I would like a cup of coffee and we went through the mugs-and-biscuits speeches. He became completely confused about me hauling out my own bottle of coffee and I explained to him that I’d brought it along the previous week.
“Oh,” he said. “Shall we go and sit outside?”
So we sat in silence out in the autumn sun and he juddered his left leg and used the corresponding index finger to click his right thumb nail by pulling it back and releasing it, a click which used to drive Ma nuts in church when we still did that sort of thing.
Then, in a moment of unusual selflessness, he asked me what the matter was. I wondered what his reaction would be if I told him that Diederick Johannes Reineke and I had become friends because a sweet dopehead I’d met on a film set had said we’d get on well. She’d been right and Dick and I had had much more than dagga in common. He was an anthroposophist, which meant he was an adherent of Rudolf Steiner’s way of thinking. He therefore painted and sculpted accordingly, which meant he never used straight lines because his subject matter was more spiritual and Blakean than jaggedly social or political.
Like most teachers, Dick was mildly in love with his own voice, but I only came to appreciate his skills in that profession when I tried to read Steiner. He may have been profound, but his writing style – or perhaps that of his genuflecting translators – was awful. Dick made that whole universe come alive.
He had given up on teaching and was now an actor, though he didn’t quite play the darling game, either, so his second wife basically kept home and hearth together as a legal secretary. They had had three children together and he had six in the Cape from his previous marriage. Dick and his new family were always broke and they always had just enough food – visitors included – and their children were extremely happy. It was another world from the strictly utilitarian and therefore tense one I had grown up in, and I was intrigued by this highly sophisticated form of Christianity, which was completely comfortable with the idea of reincarnation. No eternal life for you, old pal. You will work on yourself until you get it right.
Dick looked like a German poet of another era, quoted Goethe extensively and looked very tired, but happy, when he heard that his wife was pregnant again. They were anti-contraception and abortion and those spirits who asked to come into this world should be allowed to and he often spoke about how he’d delivered his own children and named them according to their arrival in this world. They all had names from Greek or Biblical mythology.
Dick was actually a lapsed anthropowhateverist and I picked up, through a fog of coffee and double smoke over the years, that he’d been a bit of a messianic character in earlier times and that he’d left behind the more intense types who were all reincarnations of great souls like Aristotle’s second adviser but never, say, a local barfly in Athens, circa 350BC. The point is he could spin an excellent yarn and recite long stretches of Hamlet and tell me everything about the man who had, like one of my youthful literary heroes, Hermann Hesse, seen straight through Adolf Hitler. Most importantly, he practised his faith in the sense that he was generous to the point of embarrassment. He literally would give you the clothes off his back and didn’t exhibit or sell his artworks, good or bad: he gave them away.
After 1999, Dick had first taken his family to Cape Town and then out of the country, arguing that there was an ugly sensibility afoot. South Africa lacked a unified folk spirit, he’d said, which I’d read as elitism. I had resented that, realising that he’d also been a kind of surrogate father to me, but they moved to Albion anyway and raved about how friendly the locals were. A few years later he got a brain tumour and not even the mistletoe could cure him.
“A friend of mine has just died of the same thing as Ma did,” I said, back in the present. “He was only sixty-three.”
“You know,” the old man annoyingly and predictably said, “we were playing rugby in another town and two men came walking towards me. I knew there and then that my father was dead.”
“How old were you?” I said, absently again.
“I was in my second matric year. I was seventeen.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-eight,” the old man said. “He had never liked the idea of converting from horseback to motorbikes. But he’d been called out to a farm in the hills and drove up the dirt road, went round a corner, skidded, and a 1936 Ford Whitehound was coming from the front. His head hit the silver emblem on the bonnet and he died instantly.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I miss him every day of my life.”
“Did he leave you anything?” I said, feeling about as sympathetic as the Supreme Leader.
“Only a walking stick, which you’ll inherit. But do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“We were supposed to inherit a pen nib factory in Bonn. We’re supposed to be multimillionaires.”
“So why aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Great.”
That was the end of that and we lapsed into a long, awkward silence in which he clicked his nail and juddered his foot before he said: “I wish I could win a hundred and … twenty-three million rands.”
“What would you do with it?”
“I’d give most of it to the poor and you, but I’d take the Valiant down to Elgin and fill it with apples.”
“What for?”
“So it can smell like apples, obviously.”
“Right.”
Another clicking silence. After an unbearable while I said I’d better go and he seemed almost relieved and walked to the front gates as I started up the Civic, reversed to between the wash line and fence, forward past the garage and onto the driveway, where the old man was standing at the open gates. As I got there I rolled down my window and was reminded of my mother as he squashed my hand.
“Bye, Dad.”
“Take care, my boy.”
“You too,” I said, and left, watching him close the gate in my rear-view mirror.
When I got to the traffic light it turned red, of course, and I wondered whether the old man’s father had sensed he was going to die (about which Steiner no doubt would have had something to say) and therefore became more lenient towards his son, or whether his son had felt he’d painted his father too negatively prior to that and wanted to now show him in a better light, for the sake of balance, or whether this was just a personal mythology. If not a completely distorted memory. If not downright fiction. I decided it was probably a little of everything. And that was fine, but we have to work with what is presented to us, which is no doubt influenced by what we ourselves present. When the lights changed I turned up towards the hospital and saw that the old man was still standing at the closed gates, as upright and silver-haired as ever.
I couldn’t wait to get out of his sight to light a smoke.
The Leafy Suburbs
* * *
Somehow I made it through the rest of that Sunday: driving to work, enduring Bob Black’s bigotry, the facts, the opinions, the endless opinions. I looked forward to one thing and one thing only: sleep. I collapsed into bed and it felt like five minutes had lapsed before Ms Motsepe almost broke the door down: I had forgotten to put the key out for her in my desire to sleep. She wouldn’t even bother to grace my apology with a reply, so I decided to get the hell out of that house. The last thing I felt like was Beauty’s pout as she sat at the kitchen table, eating her oats and drinking her over-sweet tea in staring silence.
So I got dressed and gave The Ex and my “love child” a look he knew as clearly as if I’d said “We are now going for a walk, Butch.” He started jumping about like an over-sized lamb until I managed to calm him sufficiently to get the choker around his neck. Thus we proceeded down Emfuleni, its leaves starting to turn and occasionally see-saw down to the tarmac, me holding him back or him dragging me along, I wasn’t sure. We were giving every locked-up canine a chance to exercise
its jaws and lungs, barking up a storm.
Down in the park there was the usual crowd of dog lovers living out their controlling or nurturing fantasies through their hounds. Here was the literary grand dame with her bossed-about Dalmatian, there that intensely friendly man with his wild eyes, camouflage pants and two highly strung Dobermans. Now I passed that environmental hottie bossing her blood-thirsty white bull terrier with its pink, plasticky gonads, then that old fart with his equally half-dead Lab. Next up was that grim Afrikaans women with her Alsatian, this bore with his check shirt and over-energetic Border collie and, finally, the shrivelled German raisin with her troupe of terrifying Rottweilers.
Circling one or two of the small top dams, depending on my body’s mood, was more or less the sum total of my exercise, which nevertheless earned me praise from the quack in terms of that Barnardian pump, the heart. After I’d finished my circuit and Butch had luxuriated in an avian corpse by rolling in it, we passed the marsh separating the higher dams from the lower, larger public one. The marsh was drying out and its tall reeds would soon be control-burned for winter, adding to the hard, dry Highveld beauty of the Botanical Gardens.
At the entrance was Mandla, the car guard, a giant tub of a man in his forties who wore laceless army boots, faded jeans and an unravelling orange jersey beneath his filthy old khaki coat. He had somehow appropriated the dusty parking lot as his exclusive domain and made a point of greeting the animal lovers when they arrived in their dog-laden vehicles, the back seats often torn, curled up from the sun and half covered with smelly old blankets. When these people returned from their ball-throwing strolls he’d hover in their vicinity, rubbing his forehead with the knuckle of his thumb, and they would pay him for having been prepared to protect their cars with his very life. I could just see him pursuing youthful thieves down the road with his heavy frame, in those loose boots and coat, but never mind: these guilt-ridden contributions presumably kept him fed. I tried to find out whether he had dependants and where he lived, but he only spoke rural isiZulu (like the old man could), so we settled on just greeting each other.
When I got home Ms Motsepe was having her ten o’clock tea break, so I skulked upstairs and, instead of writing, made a list of requirements for the next exciting item on the day’s agenda to avoid her. I had been too nafi (no ambition, fuck all interest) to go shopping that Saturday and, once at the supermarket, started seeing the old man’s point when some white, probably long-haired idiot wailed that the object of his affection was “beeyatiful” – over and over. All right, I thought, I get the picture. She’s beautiful. Move on. More importantly, why was this junk being forced down my ears while shopping on a Monday morning? The singer was just about to have a castrato orgasm when he was interrupted by another one of those morons who has a deep and abiding affection for his own voice box, the supermarket DJ. He was telling us, no, loudly enthusing at breakneck speed that there was a bargain for spaghetti meatballs in tomato sauce and we should get ours now. Naturally I chose the customer queue that had a credit card hold-up as clients in other queues sailed by.
I went home and packed out my groceries during Ms Motsepe’s lunch break and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to burst out laughing or crying in that crinkling, thudding silence. Something had to give. A yellow leaf had inveigled its way in under the door and into the kitchen, Ms Motsepe’s efficient eye notwithstanding. Autumn had arrived in the city of gold like a mild-mannered man with a very sharp knife; pleasant during the day, ice cold at night.
My life, basically, was a mess. My job thrived off others’ misery. It seemed as if I was caught up in yet another unsatisfactory affair, an almost mirror image of my marriage to The Ex on the professional and sexual front. That is, I wasn’t getting a lot of sex, thanks to corporate imperatives, but when I did get some I wasn’t exactly inspired to write poetry or something. Talking of which, I had created an expectation that I was writing something of import when I didn’t even know where to start. I had thought I’d have something of value to offer my fellow citizens, a little pleasure amidst the resolute misery, but it didn’t seem to have turned out that way. Hopefully I hadn’t caused others too much distress, since everything in this country seemed to be measured in degrees of complicity in others’ pain. But what was I to do? I was too much of a coward or sensualist to commit suicide, and I had more or less outgrown drugs. Alcohol? Been there and still doing it. Religion? Did very little for me. Academe? Too disciplined and difficult.
You don’t have to write or pretend you’re writing, I told myself. Go for a drive in the country; you’re allowed to.
So I locked up, said goodbye to a puzzled Butch, drove down the road and got as far as the Gardens’ bigger dam, which had a road running along it and therefore had parking for scenic purposes. Water helped, but not much. A Chinese couple were teasing crabs from the muddy bank beneath a yellowing willow, probably for a restaurant. I looked at the radio and thought maybe I’d give the classical station a try, even though it usually gave me nothing but bombast from other centuries while I tried to negotiate the traffic and ignore beggar babies growing up on narrow islands next to increasing potholes. But not this time. The host – DJ wasn’t the word – said listen to how full the composer makes four simple string instruments sound. He had already mentioned the maestro’s name before I’d tuned in, but I was pretty confident I could work it out anyway. I couldn’t. But what I did hear was a thinking, feeling life in all its rich diversity. The piece was shorter and faster than a pop song, driven by an up-down sequence of rapidly building but logical argument, sparking with seriousness, defiance and discipline, then released by satire, laughter, freedom, before returning to seemingly improvised order, beauty and a no-nonsense stop.
The music was so unbearably beautiful that everything else was bearable again. I could carry on living. Others had religion, drugs, maths, motor cars and shopping lists to stay deluded, but I called the station, got the composer’s name – of course it was him! – and drove straight to a music shop, where I bought myself the entire collection of the man’s quartets. I had something coursing through my veins apart from blood, cholesterol and self-pity again. I no longer cared whether this genius was considered clichéd, overly emotional or out of date. As far as I was concerned the artist had done his work so well, over a hundred and fifty years ago, that he had saved my life right now.
I was listening, of course, to Ludwig van Beethoven.
On Dreams
* * *
The rest of the week slowly got better as my hangover receded and Kay and I greeted each other with detached intimacy. She would be away for the next week on some or other top-secret investigative job, about which Jay was seriously sceptical.
“She needs to first investigate the basics of journalism,” he said. “You know, the five double-u’s and an aitch: the facts, not to mention readability.”
In other words, things were returning to normal. Ms Motsepe was emotionally stable, as was Desiree, and I enjoyed listening to Van Beethead driving home after work at night. I had always only wanted to hear the fast movements of “classical” music but was now perfectly content to hear the long, slow, melancholic genius of the second quartet’s rewritten adagio, always maintaining that dramatic tension in case one should get complacent, jolting one towards the end anyway. The final movement of the third – in effect the first – was equally exquisite. I even saw and reviewed a fairly good film that Friday and had a bit of glad-eye with an older woman at the pub. Jay and I watched an excellent match the day after and only got mildly drunk. Hell, even Veron was in a good mood. All of which was good and well, but it wasn’t solving my primordial problem, which was sex. Still, I felt newly resolved and only slightly hungover when I drove to Pretoria, thinking about what the old man had said about missing his father, and losing him at such a young age.
Had I ever missed him? There had been that one night in Crete. My German girlfriend and her entourage of two had left for another town, and I had sat in an open
-air tavern drinking the local rotgut, retsina. There were two car speakers nailed to posts and they were rattling out ‘Old Man’ by Neil Young. I had gone down some steps and stood there in the middle of the night, the black Mediterranean lapping at my sandaled feet. Just over there was Africa, I thought, North Africa, where the old man had once been, which he never stopped talking about. The next thing I knew I had liquid crocodiles running down my cheeks.
Back in the present we went out onto the back apron with the usual coffee and Lemon Creams.
“What was school like, Dad?”
“I hated it. I clung to the pillars at the entrance on my first day like my life depended on it. I cried like a little baby.”
“And girls?”
Now he shook his head as if this was another one of life’s numerous obstacles that had to be endured.
“Some bright spark thought he would put a girl on the bench next to me, but I refused to sit next to her.”
“Why?”
“I can still remember her name to this day. Ethel bladdy Meriwether.”
“Ja, but …”
“I never wanted to be near girls.”
“Why not?”
At which point his phone rang and he said he’d had one wife and that was enough while I got tense about the phone, which was set at its loudest. I finally said the phone was ringing, excused myself, ran into the kitchen, careful not to slip as I had once long ago, into the darker passage, down towards myself in the mirror above the phone, which stopped at the very last moment.
“So you didn’t like girls?”
“It’s not that I didn’t like them. It’s just that I wasn’t interested in them.”
“What were you interested in?”
“I had colours in rugby, hockey, athletics, gymnastics and cricket.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Hmm,” he said, juddering, clicking.
Son Page 7