Right now, however, I had something else to worry about as I got to the old man’s house at the end of the ultra-quiet second movement of the serioso: he wasn’t standing at the gates. And they were locked with a small chain. This got me fretting about his safety again. As a child I had spent sleepless nights worrying that he would die, but now I’d more or less accepted that he would “go” with nothing being resolved between the two of us. Why should it? If it hadn’t happened between my mother and I, who in many respects were closer, why then between him and me? But the thought of finding him dead in his back yard or kitchen was still not a pleasant one, so I parked outside, locked up, put my hand on one of the gates and swung over. That’s when I saw what had distracted him from waiting for me faithfully, worrying.
It came running towards me as soon as my feet touched the driveway: another canine nightmare, another dachshund, charging at me, tan ears flapping, barking as if I had just committed the most appalling crime imaginable. I shouted at the low bastard and took aim to kick its head through its delayed arse, whereupon it promptly lay down and proceeded to spray a neon yellow fluid all over itself and the paved rose bricks. The old man came out through the middle door, looking as pleased as pie.
“What the hell is this?” I shouted, distantly aware of the fact that not only was I adjusting my curses, but I was doing so in a way that sounded scarily like him.
“I’ve decided to call him Howfy.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Listen to him when he barks. He’s saying his name is Howfy!”
“Jesus,” I said, whereupon the creep jumped back onto its feet and started barking at me again, as passionate and almond-eyed as its new owner.
“Howfy!” the old man shouted, and the pooch duly melted and crawled up to his new master’s Hush Puppies, one seriously traumatised quadripet.
The old man had changed in another way too. Instead of wearing the usual flannel trousers, golf shirt and check jacket, he had now switched to a pair of baggy black woollen pants, a frayed black V-neck jersey and a grey windbreaker, its blanket-like lining hanging down in raggedy strips. To top it all, he wore a beige beanie that resembled a tea cosy, which kept his fine, silver hairs in place. The only thing that remained of the old, external uniform was the HPs.
“That jacket’s on its last legs,” I said.
He ignored that statement and, after we’d made the coffee, done the bargain speech and proceeded to the back apron, said: “Can you believe it?”
“What, Dad?”
“I was at the doctor’s and this bastard comes in and says he’s going to have Howfy put down. ‘I’ll take him,’ I said, right there and then. And now he’s here with me, aren’t you my dog?” the old man said, getting all gooey. And said canine looked up at his saviour with soulful eyes, his tail whipping your hung-over leg so hard you want to puke.
“You know, there’s a special place in hell for people who abuse women, children and animals.”
“So you’ve said, but what were you doing at the doctor’s?”
“Agh …”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing …”
“Dad, what is it?”
“He wants me to have an eye operation,” he said, looking very uncomfortable.
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve only got about fifteen per cent vision in my one eye. Everything’s milky. It feels like I’m seeing everything through cellophane.”
“This is news to me.”
He gave me his usual dead moment.
“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
“No, I’ll just walk over.”
“Dad, this is serious.”
“They say there’s only a small chance of it being successful. My eye will be in a bandage for two weeks. I’m not allowed to bend or pick up anything heavy.”
“Then that’s what you must do.”
“Bladdy optometrist gave me specs and they helped bugger all, too.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ve got to work.”
“I don’t mind taking you, Dad. In fact, I’ll be happy to,” I lied.
“No, you don’t want to get into your bosses’ bad books. They might fire you. He said he’d take me,” the old man said, jerking his head in the direction of his kind neighbour, Vernon Brown.
“Are you sure?”
“Ja.”
Silence.
“So how have you been,” he suddenly said.
“Not good,” I said, surprised. “Did you hear about that woman who was tortured to death with her own iron?”
He nodded bitterly: “They don’t want us here.”
“Who?”
“The kaffirs. Who do you think?”
“Dad, you can’t talk like that anymore. You never could. In fact, if you ever use that word again you won’t see me. Okay? I fought hard to get blacks into power, if only in my head. I work with them, for them, and I’m quite happy to do so. In fact, if it wasn’t for ‘them’ I wouldn’t have a job and I wouldn’t be able to drive over here on Sundays. Okay?”
He didn’t like it, but nodded grudgingly.
“This isn’t something I learned at university,” I continued. “Do you remember how I used to hitchhike around the country, how I went to Zimbabwe?”
He nodded.
“Black people helped me as much as white people did. In fact, they helped me more because they didn’t have any reason to. They didn’t see me as representative of someone or something, they saw me as a fellow human being and treated me accordingly. If anybody threatened my safety it would have been whites, because I didn’t fit into their neat little compartments.”
He was silent.
“Do you think it’s only whites who are being targeted now?” I persisted.
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s not true. That same day I read about a township girl who’d been raped and killed because she was too young to have a child grant. Both her parents were dead from AIDS. She was trying to parent her younger siblings.”
“Bastards. Bastards.”
“The point is, it’s mostly blacks who are being targeted. I blame the people who allow this to happen,” I said. “Their own leaders.”
“What about those who vote for them?”
“Would you vote for a white after what happened?”
He didn’t like this either, so he said it wasn’t going to get better.
“So what do we do?”
“You must get out of here. Go and start a new life somewhere else.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got my dog, haven’t I, my dog?”
Whip, whip, whip.
A Mounting Need
* * *
Kay had moved up a floor or two, so I didn’t see her that often and when I did we greeted each other with bemused embarrassment. It felt good to have her out of my life, but I couldn’t go over to Jay and Veron’s that Saturday because he’d been booked off sick and was only interested in staring at the wall.
I was about to go out to watch some rugby at the local when there was a ring at my gate. It was that grim Afrikaans woman I occasionally saw in the park, looking particularly unattractive as Butch barked at her and the Alsatian she had in the back of her idling old bakkie. I contemplated ignoring her, but I was curious as to why she would suddenly come ring my bell.
Klara Groenewald had a strong, dry handshake, was in her mid-fifties, and had a horsy fringe, steel-grey eyes, a block of a schnoz, a fairly lipless mouth and was still fairly trim, helped no doubt by the amount of daily exercise she got in the park. She and her husband, partner, brother or tenant lived further up in the next suburb, I knew, because I often walked or drove past their house on my way to the Redlands. He was a stocky, bald man with a broad ginger moustache who, according to the sticker on his Japanese generic, supported the Blue Bulls. Occasionally I’d see his whatever drive past my house or me on t
he street, either going to or returning from the park.
Klara was terribly sorry to bother me but she had a very embarrassing thing to ask me and she didn’t really know where to start but she had rearranged her entire living room but now that she had moved all the chairs side tables and coffee table she couldn’t move the sofa it was just too heavy and she felt such a fool this was supposed to be a surprise for her “better half” who was coming back early tomorrow after being away for a week and he was going away on Monday again and she’d wanted to give him a surprise but if I was too busy then it didn’t matter and she was really very sorry for bothering me.
“Let’s move your couch,” I said, leaving Butch looking forlorn as we drove off with her dog, Verdi, barking at me incessantly through the little connecting window. After telling it to shut up a third time she jerked the window closed.
“Verdi?” I said.
“Yes, I love opera.”
“So did my mother,” I said. “And your husband? Does he like it?”
“He hates it, so he calls the dog Ferdie. You’ve got to call them by roughly the same sounds apparently.”
“I know,” I said, and told her about the old man’s new darling.
Her simple house was as neat as any other in this predominantly white, English suburb, which was becoming increasingly Indian due to the new mosque nearby. The living room suite consisted of the couch and heavy chairs covered with faux, chocolate-coloured leather and studs to give them that supposedly learned look. The coffee table had a glass surface, graced with the appropriate book of photographs depicting a soft-focus Cape. At least the bad oil paintings against the walls were originals, even if they were the kind of stuff you bought on Sunday afternoons at Zoo Lake. But my best was the three angels. There they stood on a side-kist from the days of Trekker yore, elongated and playing the violin, flute and trumpet. It was the kind of living room my long-suffering mother would have appreciated, since it was moteless.
Verdi wouldn’t stop barking at me so Klara lost her temper with him again and locked him in the back yard. I couldn’t help noticing she had a flat arse, about which I had another woolly theory: I was convinced such people were sexually dull.
“Geez!” I said in her language. “Do they put lead in these sofas?”
“Do you see what I mean!” she laughed, still embarrassed that she’d imposed on me in such a way.
Once we’d done that she offered me a cup of coffee or a beer and I settled for the latter. Man, her Dolfie (short for Adolf, as in Hitler, I couldn’t help thinking unfairly) loved his beer as much as he loved his brandy and Coke, whereupon I asked whether I could have a shot of brandy too. I liked chasing it with cold beer and she said that was very German and did I like the Blue Bulls too? I replied that, for better or worse, I was a Free State supporter. Wasn’t that a coincidence, she said, she also liked the Free Staters, and she didn’t even know why!
You see, she was actually from Southwest and half German and she was sorry that she was talking so much but sometimes she realised that she hadn’t spoken for days (like the old man) and so talk she did, apologising for it but continuing when I said it was fine. Dolfie used to be a teacher and so she went on about the appalling salaries teachers (and nurses and cops, I dutifully added) got, how the only other employment he could manage after being retrenched at his school – “affirmative action, you know” – was a commission-only job as an agricultural rep. Did they have children? Ja, a twenty-year-old daughter, but she had disowned them because they were too straight, apparently. She was living with some artistic type in Cape Town, Klara said with a bitter twist to her mouth, saying her daughter was actually supporting the man.
“Well, at least you’ve still got Dolfie,” I said.
“Ja, we’re all we’ve got, I suppose. And I should be grateful that he isn’t like most men.”
“What are most men like?” I enquired.
“Oh, they just want to mount each and everyone they see like randy dogs.”
I really don’t know what she said after that, but I suppose I went through all the motions of polite society: making as if I was listening; saying I had better go now; thanking her for the brandy and beer, hoping Dolfie noticed the couch; walking home at dusk; feeding Butch and having quite a few more drinks to blot out waking consciousness. But it wasn’t working. Maybe if I put on the rest of the eleventh it would help, trying not to think of the effect the words “mount” and “randy” had had on me. I continued with the third serioso movement in a swoon, then I listened to the calming first part of the fourth movement before it went all agitato again, like me, because all I could think of – if think was the word – was mounting that older, seemingly unattractive woman in the next suburb.
On Sight
* * *
Driving to Pretoria, I thought about the time I’d been given a holiday job as a student reporter at the Capital News. But what did I do? I hid behind a pillar and tried to write a play. That month was the only time the old man and I ever worked in the same city and occasionally we’d catch the same train in the afternoons, since he got up at five in the mornings, cursing, and I did two hours later, sulking. Then we’d shoot past the Fountains, stop at Kloofzicht and disembark at Sportpark. This he’d been doing for about thirty years by then, every single working day.
That afternoon a typical Highveld storm broke out just as I got to the Herbert Baker-designed station, the rain hammering its high roof. I passed Oom Paul Kruger’s mounted coach and entered the electric one. Waited. As the doors started juddering closed a bunch of white, middle-aged men squeezed in, half wet, breathless, joking. Civil servants in their grey suits and Hush Puppies. The old man, who only wore his HPs at home, was one of them, laughing at their banter. As the train left the station the sun burst through that pouring rain – a baboon’s wedding! – and beamed into that section where the old man was standing at the other end of the dark coach, he and his colleagues illuminated by gold. He was unconscious of his son watching him, his son who never told him they’d been in the same coach that black-golden day, the old man enjoying his fellows’ company, but somehow desperately separate, desperately alone.
Back as opposed to forward in the present he still wasn’t standing at the gate but his dog was charging, already picking up weight. I noticed that his master had forgotten to lock the laughable chain securing the gates so I opened them, drove the car in, closed them again and told the dog to bugger off. It rolled on to its back, micturating itself, so I got back into the car and drove around to the back, wondering whether I was going to find the old man walking around the perimeter or lying dead on the apron, but he was nowhere to be seen.
I walked towards the back stoep, the mutt barking incessantly. Up the three steps. The security gate was open, the bottom half of the door was closed and I called out, but there was no reply. I called a bit louder. Nothing. So I went into the kitchen, shut out the barking sausage, my chest instantly closing up from the smell of dog, my mind running through all the possibilities the Afrikaans media presented us with on a daily basis. I looked in the main bedroom, my old bedroom, the toilet, bathroom, the airless living room over which Tina presided.
“Dad?”
But there was nothing. Maybe he was in the laundry, I thought. Sometimes he had an army bath in there, just for a change. But he wasn’t there, either, and I thought if I had a gun now I would put that barking bastard out of its misery. But under that noise I could hear a sound coming from the garage next door: a low hum. It was the Valiant in the garage. It was running, and then I was running, thinking about what the old man had said recently about doing himself in.
I jerked the garage door open and the Valiant was still running, but I couldn’t see whether there was a pipe leading from the exhaust pipe to the driver’s window for a few seconds because it was too dark in there after the bright winter light outside. The car was so wide it gave one very little room to move on the sides, so he’d nailed rubber bands along the walls to prevent us f
rom accidentally denting the doors when we opened them. As my eyes adjusted I saw there wasn’t a pipe: the old man was just sitting behind his steering wheel, deep in thought in his ship-like yellow automobile.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Ah,” he said, in his new outfit of comfortable, dog-hairy clothes. “Hello my boy.”
“Are you okay?”
“Ja, I’m fine,” he said, switching the car off and pulling the lever that released the car’s hood. “But I want to show you something,” he said conspiratorially.
“Wait a bit. Let me see that thing on your eye.”
His eye was covered with cotton wool, held there by a pink plastic patch and elastic band that made him look slightly dashing, piratical.
“What does it feel like?”
“Gravelly,” he said.
“Remember not to bend or pick up anything heavy.”
“Look at this,” he said, ignoring me as usual, lifting dusty pink and white-checked bedspreads off the Valiant, then displaying the engine with its chromed parts to me.
“Wow,” I said, bored.
Now he carefully, almost religiously, closed the hood again and covered it with the bedspreads of my youth, including the one Bella had sprayed with vomit outside Tembisa.
Next he opened an old briefcase full of silver Parker pen-and-pencil sets and a black Montblanc beauty. Not only did he have good, strong hands, but he also had a beautiful handwriting, which he liked to show off. Now he wanted me to take one of the sets we had given him decades ago for Christmas, not knowing what else to buy a man who wanted “nothing” and wept embarrassingly and shamelessly when he did receive them. So I took a set and said let’s go have some coffee, feeling a bit hemmed in.
“I’ve got something else here,” he said, putting the case away next to another, saying I should remember that that one held his last will, surrounded by about a dozen two-litre Coke bottles he kept filled with water for “just in case”. He opened a dusty bag, which had probably conveyed government documents back in the day, but was filled with piles of paper-clipped notes now; plenty of them.
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