“Charming”
“Someone had to do it.”
“And?”
“That lasted for about a year before I was posted back to the college in Pretoria.”
“Is that when your nose got broken?”
“Ja,” the old man said.
“And the other guy?”
“I broke his jaw.”
“Why did you fight?”
“He insulted me.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did it have anything to do with Ma?”
“No.”
“Because that’s where you met her, not so? “Ja.”
One of his extra duties had been to work as a barman in the officers’ mess.
“Even though you don’t drink.”
“Not a drop. Ever.”
“And then?”
“She was standing by the piano, singing …”
“Why are you pulling your face like that?”
“Because she had a drink on the piano, and a burning cigarette.”
“So why did you marry her?”
“Because her mother told me to.”
“Dad, that’s not a very good reason to marry a woman!”
The old man just juddered his left foot and picked his right thumb nail.
“So you got married and rented in Wonderboom South, where you met the De Freitases.”
“Ja.”
The old man had actually worked with Koos de Freitas, whom he said he couldn’t stomach, like everyone else, but Ma and his wife, Jasmine, had remained friends forever. The young families had lived on the steep slopes of that white, working-class suburb, a part of the Magalies range that separated the Highveld and the Bushveld proper, leading all the way up to Messina, the then Rhodesia and the rest of Africa, which of course didn’t exist at the time. The De Freitases had had a son who became a Dutch-Reformed minister and two daughters who had become teachers, typical Afrikaner aspirations of the time.
“Then you came here.”
“Ja.”
It was almost time for me to go so I said let’s go and do the dishes and we went inside. He was rattling on about how the dishes were supposed to be cleaned when I suddenly remembered coming back from my OT in Europe, having taken a year-long break in my so-called studies. I had caught a bus to Pretoria, then the train to Lyttelton via the Fountains, Kloofzicht and Sportpark with the last of my money. My mother had been on the phone when I arrived a week early, as a surprise, and rang off in that voice of hers that got louder when she was happy or stressed. When the old man got home, I’d been standing at this sink and we’d embraced each other, the only time we ever did so in my adult life. His hair had gone snow white.
“But you know,” he came back to where he lived, “I’m not moving again. Ever. People can go and see the world if they want to, but the only place I want to be is here. This place has the best weather in the world. This is my house and I’m staying here until I die.”
“And what if you can’t look after yourself anymore?”
“Then I’ll chase a bullet through my head.”
The Priorities of Power
* * *
Jack Schwartz was hosting the dinner do and was his usual smooth, operating self in his double-breasted jacket, acting the generous, confident host, even though everyone knew his time at the corp was limited. The man had been offered numerous sweetheart deals before, according to Kay, but now that I heard his wife I knew why he would not necessarily want to spend the rest of his days in a damp if luxurious retirement village on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, sipping G&Ts and maintaining comms – if not consulting lucratively – with the office upcountry. If it looked like a lump of old clay had been pasted onto his shoulders and painted deep maroon, then it looked like Chloe Schwartz had been blessed with orange plastic for a hide. The look probably had to do with the fact that she’d had so many visits to the skin sculptor that her forehead was, in fact, her back thigh. She wore a pair of dainty high heels and an ultra-short-skirted outfit, adorned with considerate African patterns, but it was the voice that would have driven me stark, raving bezonkers. It sounded like a glass rim being rubbed until it started squeaking, amplified, non-stop.
Meet the Schwartzes, such a lovely couple.
They lived in one of the many arboreal “park” suburbs, which used to consist of small properties containing mining shacks with corrugated roofs on a rather dull, functional grid. But as the city’s fortunes had moved north, Parkhurst had found itself bang in the middle of a boom that rendered its tiny properties worth more than the last vestiges of gold beneath them. Naturally every arty type with money who hadn’t moved there yet did so now and converted those humble houses into artworks of one kind or another. Chloe had done a reasonable job of creating a “flow” in the extended abode, which still retained its pressed ceilings and Oregon pine floors, complemented by early William Kentridges, which Jack couldn’t help mentioning might be worth a fortune one day. Not that that was why he had bought them, mind you: he was just saying.
Next in attendance was Herman Sebogodi, high chief of HR, a once revolutionary journalist who was now in management, like Jack, because it obviously paid better. He, too, was stocky and only ever wore brown shoes, beige trousers and a button-up chocolate brown sweater to show that he was a township boykie from the Sixties. But if there had been any mapantsula wit about the man it had deserted him years before. It even looked like his neck had melted away over the decades and his impenetrable head had become a roughly rectangular chunk of hardwood, like those adorning the pavements in the Market Theatre precinct. All he seemed interested in was playing golf, usually with Jack. You could talk to him about anything and he would talk about Herman Sebogodi. You could threaten his life and he’d probably drone you into a lull. Nothing excited the man. But to think there wasn’t anything happening behind that deeply blank forehead would be certain folly. Herman also controlled the office purse strings and therefore knew everyone’s movements, from Boeing to virtually bowel.
And, as is often the case with men like these, his wife, Noni, was quite a number. If her usage as a pre-subbed columnist was pathetic – one classic spoke about her living room being scatological with cushions – then her ideas weren’t always that bad. At least she gave one some insight into what was happening across that racial divide, which was still about as impenetrable as the wall of Yisrael. I would certainly not turn her down if she’d offered herself to me, but then I didn’t even make a blip on her and her dickhead of a husband’s radar. In fact, Jack and Herman greeted me as one might greet the Supreme Leader’s driver, not because they wanted to but because they had to make a show of so doing.
Next there was Clive Copeland, a young foreskin who could even see the positive side to being biffed between the eyes with a cricket bat. I had instantly disliked this jock and made it quite clear to him before I realised his father had been a former editor of the national daily. That was when such people still had to find compromises between publishing the truth and keeping the paper afloat. So his son was liberal-to-left-leaning press royalty and I had burned yet another bridge in my scorched earth policy of annoying very important people. I innately distrusted such constantly chipper people, much as persistently glum people cheered me up no end. We always greeted each other cordially, but we knew we really had nothing to say to each other. He would always have a job and was looking to co-steer the ship, while I was on the starboard, talking to the chef during his smoke break.
But the first prize was on the right of him. There she sat in all her smug, serene glory, Shanti Govender, my ex-wife. Beautiful as ever, she looked like she’d just walked off a Bollywood set (wearing a turquoise sari) and I could just see the headlines for their power wedding: he, full of new South Africa hey-ho; she, giving the kind of scheming smile that would be described as “radiant” or “mysterious”.
Stupid me for not asking who exactly would be coming to the party.
&
nbsp; Penultimately there was Edward Mhlophe, wearing a shiny grey Mao suit, and his partner for the night, Ezmerelda Davids. I had never met her incredible highness, but I had seen this sour, arrogant soul on television before she’d started wafting along our corridors like some toxic gas from a B-grade movie, holding her head as if she were the very queen of entitled pain itself. Her whole demeanour spoke of how she had been in the struggle and she had made sacrifices and she would always remind all and sundry that she was therefore political royalty. She would never date a white man, she had written in a column that went as feminist but was nothing more than self-promoting flatulence. She wasn’t Coloured or Khoisan, but black, proud of it and only wore African apparel, like the huge kaftan tent in which she was residing right now, graced with an ethnic necklace of no doubt deep significance. She had a very large face, which went with everything else of hers, and she was going grey, which she didn’t mind showing to the world because she, after all, was a Woman.
“Hi Len,” Shunt said.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I joked, which seemed to put Clive at ease, after which I had to meet Ed and Ezmerelda, “with a zed”. The former forced himself to shake my hand – I kept it Western just to annoy him – but the latter couldn’t even be bothered to give me a three-way. In fact, she wouldn’t touch me. I was white scum, she made it clear, which came as a bit of a relief: at least I didn’t have to pretend that we had anything in common.
And so the night got started and the drunker Jack, Herman, Clive and their partners got, the quieter and more concentrated Ed’s smirks became, as if everyone else was really just part of a sideshow while he waited in the wings with a certainty that was annoying socially and predictable politically. The evening was ostensibly to welcome him and Kay to middle management, but once that little speech was out of the way we could all, bar two, get down to some serious self-mutilation and bantering about anything from who was shtupping the editor to more or less its parliamentary equivalent.
I was way out of my depth and kept my trap shut, as the old man would say, drank steadily and noticed after a while that Jack, “Herm” and Clive would disappear and come back even more aggressively happy, which obviously meant they were snorting lines of cocaine in a toilet Chloe Schwartz had ensured smelled like a reservoir of synthetic strawberries. But what made me ice up was the fact that Kay was holding onto me like a “significant other”. Shunt instantly recognised my temper and then relaxed, realising that it was no longer her problem. In fact, she started enjoying my discomfort as Kay half hung over me and spoke office to Ed past me and the High Empress of Bitch herself.
“Why don’t the two of you go and have your chit-chat outside,” I finally suggested, which they thought was a “brilliant” idea and duly did. The “boys” were out again, Chloe dragged Noni away to show her a “fabulous outfit”, and so I was alone with “Ez” and Shun, discussing who they knew from the struggle days until the former made it quite clear that Indians were effectively as complicit as whites – why was she always involved with white men anyway, they were so useless – in oppressing blacks. Shanti carried on talking, but I could see her withdraw into herself and tick off a subject for her next editorial. In that rancid air I asked Ez whether she’d ever listened to one of my favourite Eighties bands, The Genuines.
“I was too busy fighting the struggle to listen to music,” she said dismissively, not even bothering to look at me and pulling her mouth as if I’d just eased out the kind of stinker Shunt could have told her about.
“That’s funny, my friend Veronica de Waal seemed to find time to listen to them and still work underground.”
“She’s a spent force,” came the instant reply.
I burst out laughing and wanted to ask her whether she was a man in drag.
“By the way Len,” Shunt said. “Is Beauty still with you?”
“Ja, I’ve been listening increasingly to Beethoven’s string quartets.”
Ezmerelda clicked her tongue at my pointed Eurocentricity, still avoiding eye contact.
“I meant Beauty Motsepe.”
“Oh Beauty. Ja, she still works for me.”
“How is she?”
“Why don’t you give her a call and ask her?” I said in a way that she knew accused her of being too busy caring for the masses via her weekly missives to bother about someone as real as Ms Motsepe.
Chloe and Noni came to the rescue and took “the girls” to the kitchen to make coffee and share their alleged gender-specific humanity, as signified by their almost hysterical, sisterly laughter, and “the boys” drifted back in from their balcony smoke, from which I’d been excluded, followed by Ed and Kay from the garden.
“So tell me, Ed,” Jack said as the evening hit the pumpkin hour, “what do you think the digital age is going to do to print?”
“I think,” Ed replied, “we must first get other priorities right.”
“Priorities like what?”
“The priorities of power.”
The room had suddenly quietened, as if everything that had gone before was mere window dressing for what was about to be divulged now.
“Explain,” Jack said, sounding professorial rather than aggressive.
“The media are still in white hands.”
“No, they’re not.”
“Yes, they are. I know we have a black editor and even a black owner, but that is not real power. It’s cosmetic power.”
And now the man of the moment turned to look at me, for some reason. “We’re still acting like a white paper, with white concerns.”
Chloe’s cosmetically lifted eyebrows sagged with a certain weariness, Jack kept his poker face and Herm his usual one, which was the same thing, while Clive looked positively attentive and Noni seemed to imply that even this point of view could be incorporated into the broad church of the democratic doo-dah-day. Ezmerelda stared at the curlicued ceiling with the disinterested air of a dictator being asked to pardon those genuflecting corporals who had plotted to depose her, wondering whether to feed them to the crocodiles or let them make a run for it across a field of African wild dogs with their cute big ears and nippy little teeth. Shanti looked beautiful and Kay squeezed my seething leg to warn me not to speak my mind and thus ruin her career or our relationship or both, such as they were.
“So how would you change the paper and still keep it profitable?” Jack said, as if he was in the process of quite calmly swallowing a live puff adder.
“Profit is a white word. Why can’t the government run the paper?”
“But then we lose all objectivity,” Clive interjected.
“Again, just another white word.”
To which Clive responded by saying “But the Constitution …”
“… can be changed with a two-thirds majority,” Ezmerelda interrupted without losing a beat, as if they’d been through this argument a thousand, tedious times before.
“So you’re saying,” Jack shifted as if to accommodate aforementioned viper in his very accommodating gut, “that we must have a government-run paper.”
“Yes. It’s the only way we can bring about a true people’s democracy.”
There was one of those silences that occasionally befall a dinner party when it reaches a social or ideological stalemate, to which Chloe rose admirably and asked who wanted liqueurs. Everyone suddenly realised they had an early appointment the next day, Sunday or not, and the hugs, air-kissing and three-way handshakes along a row of luxury German cars took as long as the drinks would have. Kay’s old BM, of course, was a luxury model in training.
“What a bunch of arseholes,” I slurred in its moving passenger seat.
“Why?”
“And thanks for telling me my ex-wife was going to be there.”
“But you’re divorced. What does it matter?”
“So you knew she was coming?”
“Sorry, yes,” she said, feigning innocence. “Why?”
“You obviously haven’t been married before,�
� I said, fuming. “And why the sudden open affection? Are we supposed to be an item now, or were you trying to show her something?”
“No, I was just in a good mood.”
“As for Ed and all his dated ideology …”
“It’s just talk,” she said.
“No, it’s not. He means every little syllable of what he said. If he could have a so-called people’s democracy tomorrow he’d sanction it, as long as he could carry on wearing his fancy Mao suits, drive his Mercs, live in Sandton, fuck anything that moves and insult his hosts. Please don’t invite me to one of these things again, unless you want me to completely ruin your career.”
“Okay,” she said, “but I’m telling you, he’s just a hothead. It’ll pass. He’s fresh out of varsity. He’s still got all these ideals.”
“I’ve heard his degree wasn’t exactly earned; more like bought.”
“I thought you were the one who said we deal with facts, not rumours.”
“Fuck him,” I slurred, which got her giggling. And you, I thought.
On Caring
* * *
As usual, it took me hours to fall asleep, meaning I overslept and was late and only thought of putting on a quartet, the eleventh, halfway to the capital. This somehow helped me focus on the old man and got me thinking about a creature I’d once met.
Oliver had also been a war survivor. He was the uncle of my first intense flame, B, at varsity and he had been in an explosion. After the war Uncle Oliver had walked into the Standard Bank for his first job interview, stopped, turned around and went home to spend the rest of his life having breakfast, lunch and supper with his mother. These rituals were interspersed with tea at precisely ten and three. He would also go for two walks a day, one in the early morning and one in the late afternoon. All the small seaside town’s dogs would follow Uncle Oliver on these walks. The rest of his day was spent reading the classics. Homer, Tolstoy, Dickens. That was it and at least my father wasn’t like that, I’d thought, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. All I knew was that he too would never stoop to talk to anybody about his problem because a) he would say there wasn’t a problem and b) those people spoke rubbish anyway.
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