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Son

Page 12

by Sonnekus, Neil


  It was true that most people his age were not self-sufficient. In fact, everything he said was annoyingly true.

  We drove home, went through the whole panic of finding the keys for the security gate and back door, so that we could finally go through the coffee-mug-and-eats speech to end up in the warm winter sun on the cement apron.

  “Are you still walking around the yard?”

  “Ja. But I only managed going around once this morning.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I got this band of pain across my chest.”

  “That would be your heart.”

  “Other days I can make up to ten times.”

  “Well, you’re not a chicken anymore.”

  “No,” he said, that storm still brewing around his head.

  “You used to walk around the perimeter of the concentration camp as well …”

  “Summer, winter, everything,” he said, juddering his left foot and clicking his right thumb nail.

  The hayfork wound in Italy had given him malaria, somehow, and so he’d never worked for the Italians. But then he and his fellow POWs had been transported to Eastern Germany soon after, where they weren’t required to work. They were just held. The Germans had even given him some experimental medicine that had cured him of the malaria.

  “Didn’t you get depressed – claustrophobic?”

  “Not really. But others did. One night I was on toilet duty and someone said I better go and check on Rudolph Hendricks, who was a poet. He had written a beautiful poem called ‘The Mountains of the Moon’.”

  “So what did you say to him?”

  “Nothing. He’d hanged himself.”

  “Jeez!”

  Click. Click. Click.

  He had often told me about how he’d been the richest man in the camp, saving up all his cigarettes so that he could get luxuries like condensed milk. Then one fine day he’d received a pipe in his Red Cross parcel and it had never left his mouth during his waking hours for three and a half years.

  “But I never smoked. Never … Do you still smoke?”

  “Ja.”

  “It’ll kill you,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He was somewhere else and I couldn’t work out why, so I just continued asking him questions.

  “But how did the Germans treat you in general?”

  He stopped juddering his foot and worrying his nail.

  “Generally, very well …”

  “But?”

  He was quiet for a while and then said: “We used to play sport every day, summer and winter. One day we were playing cricket and the ball rolled into one of the officer’s yards, which were strictly verboten. Old Johnny van Heerden put his hand through the fence to retrieve the ball, the officer took out his Luger –”

  “– and?”

  “– he shot him through the head,” the old man said for the first and only time, his voice shaking. “Like a dog.”

  Flirting with the Foe

  * * *

  They awoke in the deepest recesses of a cave in the Waterberg, a cloud of velvety black moths, each one as big as a steelworker’s hand. Then they made their way south in the winter’s cold, dry nights, laying low during the day, entering Pretoria and paying tribute around the grave of one of their most famous victims, Eugene Marais. Onwards they went, towards Johannesburg, fluttering steadily parallel to the busy highway down below, then over the naked jacarandas and into our building, past the dozing security guard, up the stairs, into our open-plan floor with its cancerous neons, heading towards their target, sitting there in his Liverpool jersey, as if awaiting them. They came to rest on his head, his shoulders, and then started gnawing through his hair, skin, skull, nerves, gristle, blood and other matter, until they finally got to his soul. You could see Jay going elsewhere. He carried on functioning, but he became slightly glazed, very pale, his head sunk into his body, virtually paralysed by depression.

  It was Thursday night and Kay called just after I told the old man I’d see him that Sunday, having learned not to specify a time anymore. She was calling me on my cell so I scuttled out onto the icy balcony, where the new deputy editor was talking to her girlfriend. Kay wanted to know whether she could see me on Saturday night.

  “What for?”

  “I’d like to make up to you for being such a pain.”

  “You don’t have to make up for anything. It’s fine.”

  “You can come to my place,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, principled as ever, thinking about what Jay had told me. It made sense that she might very well be doing coke in the week to keep her multitasking self awake and then coming to me for comfort and some dope-induced sleep, though I suspected that wasn’t the full story. Still, I wasn’t going to confront her about it just yet; I wanted to see just where the whole thing was going.

  Driving there, I wondered what her one-bedroom flat would look like, expecting it to be as chaotic as her life seemed to be, but I was wrong. It wasn’t so much minimalist as bare, functional. This was someone who was too busy carving a steep upward graph to collect fine art or colourful posters, though she had black-and-white photographs of unpeopled cityscapes and the prescribed books she needed for her MBA, nothing more.

  “Welcome,” she said, looking a little less stressed out, dressed in a stay-at-home kind of way in clashing colours.

  “Thank you,” I said, migrating towards her ribbed heater. “So what’s it like being a suit?”

  “Hectic,” she said.

  I said I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just wait until she was finished with her eternal MBA.

  “Well, there’s some urgent stuff that needs to be managed.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Of course not. So have they created a special post for you?”

  “Ja. Me and Ed.”

  “The plot thins. Has he come up with any more nuggets?”

  “Yes, he told me on the phone from PE that he now thinks all whites should be driven into the sea, women included.”

  “Send him to me. I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”

  She said she still thought it was all talk and why didn’t I pour us a drink?

  “Good idea,” I said, feeling distinctly ill at ease in that soulless apartment, pouring us two of her Johnnie (not Johnny, I couldn’t help thinking) Black Labels and wondering why she wanted to see me.

  “I don’t know,” she said, lighting a pre-rolled jay. “I’m not good with expressing myself like you.”

  “Then you must be an ideal candidate for business,” I said, taking a long, crackling drag.

  “Can’t you just accept me for what I am?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly know what you are. You’re someone who hangs out with me occasionally, mainly on a Saturday night. But you don’t seem to want sex with me – or regular sex anyway – nor do you want anyone to know about ‘us’. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not very useful.”

  Now she came back with an equally difficult question: “Why have you never dropped me?”

  “Well, I want sex, I’m at a loose end, and I suppose I’m a little intrigued.”

  “And you’re holding out for a little more …”

  “Probably.”

  “Is it just my body?”

  “I thought it was, but I’m finding I get confused between desire and an instinct to protect.”

  “I like that.”

  “Well, I don’t know whether I do. Am I supposed to be some kind of surrogate father figure? Would I be bad for your career if other people knew about ‘us’? Would you be embarrassed or ashamed to be publicly associated with me? I mean, if you get invited out to a function, who do you take with you? Me, that other arsehole, someone else, no one?”

  “Are you being all possessive?”

  “I hope not. But I know I’m starting to sound like a housewife who nags her husband
because she thinks he’s knobbing his secretary.”

  “Well, that’s also partially why I wanted to see you.”

  “You’re fucking the secretary?”

  “No,” she said, ignoring, if not missing, my jibe and taking a drag. “I’ve been invited to a dinner party next Saturday night. Do you want to come?”

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  “Some people from management.”

  “Great, a bunch of golf-playing, car-talking wankers,” I said, letting the amber fluid luxuriate down my throat.

  “There are some perks to it, you know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Come here,” she said.

  So I did and she hooked her fingers into my pants and pulled me closer.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Have a cigarette.”

  “Wait a bit. Experience tells me this is going to go nowhere.”

  “Don’t worry. This time I’m well stocked up.”

  “Okay. Do you want a smoke?”

  “No thanks,” she said, undoing my belt, “there’s something else I want to put in my mouth.”

  I was still feeling distinctly uneasy, but I was seriously compromised.

  “Tell me a story,” she said.

  “Again?”

  “Yes.”

  “My thoughts are elsewhere right now. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll play you a piece of music,” I said, producing a CD from my jacket and leaning over to insert it into her sound system. “And if you give me a theme, I’m sure I could come up with a story.”

  “Africa.”

  “Okay,” I said, and played the second movement of the C major quartet, the other immortal ninth. If the first movement started with a heavy, dusty, experimental air before it broke into light sunshine, then the second was very slow and very sensual and stayed that way for a very long time.

  Kay pulled my zip down and started kneading me in that area.

  “You know, a cousin once gave me an album when I was fourteen and I didn’t like it at all. It had a man on its cover in a spastic kind of pose. So I swapped it for another, Benefit, by Jethro Tull. I loved that album. It represented everything I was against. Rules, short hair, cadets, crap music. I loved its combination of rural English and electronic rock, which it combined in songs like ‘Son’, a nicely sarcastic piece about teens. But soon after that I started seeing films like Woodstock and Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and then I really liked that man who made those contorted moves.”

  She took out and unfurled my half-stiff flag as I told her the man’s name was Joe Cocker.

  “What a, like, coincidence.”

  “Ja,” I laughed, as she put my tumescent IMP in her mouth.

  “And I only realise now that he must have been a kind of bridge to what I’m about to tell you now.”

  “Hmn?”

  “I mean, I’m still a great fan of his. He just keeps going, and I like that. I like it when people just … keep going.”

  She just kept going, which caused all kinds of micro-commuters to run up and down my spine.

  “But let’s get on with the story, shall we?”

  She nodded as Mr Beethoven’s strings almost sounded like woodwinds.

  “Okay. I had just arrived at varsity, fresh from twelve years of Christian National education and two years of being an officer in the air force, bursting with my own self-importance. All I had was an instinct that something was wrong, though there had been plenty of glaring, neon indications along the road. But there was a band that was going to play at our Great Hall one night.”

  “Hmm?” she continued as Ludwig and I shuddered in unison.

  “There were three men on the stage. Black men. The middle one was a short guy with a huge guitar. He was wearing … running shoes, old jeans and a kaftan top … Sitting behind him to his right was a man on a Yamaha or something.”

  She removed the IMP from her mouth and asked why there was a motorbike on stage before resuming her task. I told her it was an, ah, organ. Feeling her laugh that way just increased the number of commuters running amok along my spine.

  “Sitting there was a man … behind dark glasses and beneath a black beret. He was … he had a heavy, political air about him … but then we’re talking late Seventies here. Those were very heavy times … Biko had just been kill … Oh God, that’s nice.”

  She took my cock out, said “carry on” and put it back in her mouth.

  “To his left was a man in a loin cloth,” I continued, aware that I was once again invoking the Old Man while sexually compromised.

  “The only other thing he was wearing was shakers around his ankles. He was surrounded by … traditional Venda drums, he was … shaven bald and he’d covered his whole … he’d covered his body … in oil.”

  “Cool,” she said, taking another breather, looking up at me through her specs. “This is great music,” she said.

  “Jazz before there was jazz …”

  “Yes,” she said, and carried on doing what women do in giant ice-cream ads for children’s fathers.

  “Take your time; this piece still … has a way to go.”

  She nodded.

  “The organ … the organ had started a floating kind of sound … creating a huge sense of expectation … Now the guitarist started playing a completely unrelated jazz riff … I was hooked … hanging … mesmerised … And then the drums came in.”

  Kay made an encouraging sound.

  “I felt as if my head had turned three hundred and sixty degrees … In fact, I didn’t just feel it … I knew it. But just as I was getting into a particular groove it felt like I’d been waiting for all my life, the guitarist … Philip Tabane, stopped and started playing something completely different.”

  She mimicked him and took the IMP from her mouth.

  “It was pure theatre. He would twist his shoulders and face this way and that … He was saying … we can’t get complacent … Not in art, South Africa, life …”

  I was close to the point of no return and got the sense that she was trying to coordinate that with my story and the music.

  “It took me a hell of a long time to realise … that what he and his band, Malombo, were really saying was that black people … aren’t the sum … or result of … their political aspirations … or white liberals’ projections. They quite clearly have a … they quite clearly have a life … and a culture … and a universal one at that … beyond … the politics of the day.”

  “What did it make you feel like?” she said before she took to the task at hand again and I waited for that long moment in which the four instruments breathe out to formulate everything into one desperate, grateful, synchronised meaning in which I said exactly what I didn’t feel right now.

  “Home.”

  On Freedom

  * * *

  As usual, Kay fell asleep and, as usual, I didn’t. After about two hours of duvet boxing I had to go for a pee and saw a rather bulky African necklace, which dozily bothered me, above her washbasin. I decided I was going to be sleepless in my own house, where I fretted.

  If I had failed to prove to my mother that I could succeed as an artist, then I was dead on track to do more of the same with the old man. Had I more or less ended up the same way as him, stuck in a job that employed about five per cent of my potential?

  It would seem so, I thought, driving towards him, listening to the opening of the so-called harp quartet’s first movement, realising it could be as if someone was waking up slowly, washing, getting dressed, locking up, getting into the car, driving through the suburbs and hitting the highway as the out-of-character adagio breaks and bursts into delighted pizzicatos for what is, after all, supposed to be a brisk movement. You’re alive, you’re moving and the man is cajoling you onwards, popping in and out of styles and eras, but always himself, always true to the centre of the piece, building up a good, complex head of steam. Now that you’re fully awake you can indulge in the real adagio, a progressive sermon for what is,
you recall, a Sunday, ending as it does on what could easily be the breathless departure of gentle Jesus’ soul from this earth. But we’ve also been primed for the presto, bursting with comedic, cascading vim. There is a tiny break and we move on to some lusty, Bach-like hacking, giving the viola its mellow voice, then letting the cellist tap away as if he’s a rock bassist. The final rush is frenetic before it ends with a polite, gently ironic, conclusion.

  The old man is standing at the gates of 123 Harry Smith and after we’ve gone through the usual rituals I ask him what happened after the Russians liberated him from the camp.

  “Two friends and I slipped away, walked to Brussels and flew to England. There I had to wait for the ship. I thought it would take a few days but it went on for weeks. So every day I went for these long walks. And every day the dogs from the neighbourhood would join me and follow me until I had a whole bunch of them behind me. I’d do the circuit twice so that they could stop off at their houses again and I’d get back to the base without a single dog.”

  “Is that it?”

  “I saw a woman one day …”

  “What, an English rose?”

  “Ja.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. The ship was leaving.”

  “Were you glad to see Africa again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you stop?”

  “Lagos. Cape Town.”

  “How exotic.”

  “We weren’t allowed off in Nigeria and I didn’t even bother to get off the ship in Cape Town.”

  “Amazing. And when you got to Durban?”

  “My mother and sisters were waiting for me.”

  “Were you glad to see them?”

  “My mother’s hair, which used to be dark brown, had turned the colour of ash.”

  “What did you do at home?”

  “I was there for a week or two and then I was posted to Springs.”

  “What did you do there?”

  He had worked in the state mortuary, where he’d sometimes have to dive out corpses from the lake.

  “As you grabbed them their skin would come off.”

 

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