The Exploded View

by Ivan Vladislavic

  He filled the basin and squashed the pants into the water. The air-filled fabric popped out like flesh between his fingers, surprisingly resistant, almost muscular. It was like drowning an animal. He lathered one of the little cakes of soap between his palms until the surface of the water was thick with foam. The pants could soak overnight.

  Then he flopped down on the bed again and thumbed the remote. CNN, SABC 3, Channel 1. Simunye, we are one. There was an ‘adult’ channel, but you had to pay for it. Would it show up on the credit card? Or would they employ the financial equivalent of the plain brown wrapper? Raging Bull was on the in-house movie channel at 10:45. That might be worth staying up for. Time for a shower before the show, and lights out by 1:00.

  The shower attachment kept sliding down on its chrome bar. Made for a midget. In the end, he left it at shoulder height. The head – what do you call it? the rose – wouldn’t adjust either. He twiddled the switch, but the water kept thudding out in spurts, too hot or too cold, and eventually he turned his back on it, let it pummel at his shoulders, rinsing away the tension, scalding him a little, while his mind walked the stations of the day.

  Milton Mazibuko had been waiting for him outside the municipal offices in Kempton Park that morning. To tell the truth, he’d been expecting Bhengu, the town clerk, but the great man was otherwise occupied. Mazibuko was the council official in charge of housing subsidies and deed registration on RDP projects like Hani View. He was a small round man in the cruel grip of fashion – thickly treaded shoes that made him look like a wind-up toy, a Nehru collar as tight as a tourniquet, a watchstrap like a manacle on his wrist. He shook hands with Egan through the window of the hired car and then squeezed into the passenger seat.

  Although Egan knew every square centimetre of Hani View on the plans, he had never set foot on the site. Mazibuko gave him directions to the R562.

  They small-talked their way through the morning rush hour.

  ‘How are things in Hani View?’

  ‘No, everything is going good.’ Mazibuko crossed his short legs in the narrow space in front of him and rested his knee against the dashboard. ‘Rubicon finished another fifteen houses last month. The people have moved in already. We had to put them in quick-quick before there was even glass in the windows, so that the squatters didn’t get there first.’

  ‘So you’re on schedule?’

  ‘Well, let’s say we’re not further behind schedule than is strictly necessary.’

  ‘Any more blackouts?’

  ‘No, we sorted that out. It was a mix-up at the substation. The big problem is still with the toilets, I’m afraid. Half the houses don’t have water. I mean, they’ve got pipes, but the people can’t pay, and so we have to cut them off. Then they complain that the toilets don’t work.’

  ‘That’s why we call it water-borne sewage, folks.’

  ‘Some of them say they don’t want a stinking toilet in the house any more.’

  ‘A little bit late in the day to change their minds, don’t you think?’

  ‘Very. Now, when they see the size of the water bill, they’d rather have a long drop in the yard. But when we offered them pit latrines to begin with, they were all up in arms. You remember the story: “I don’t want a hole in the ground, like a dog, I want a throne at the end of the passage.” ’

  ‘It’s the same everywhere.’ If Janine could hear me now, he thought, this petulant tone. ‘People are never satisfied.’

  ‘Exactly. “I want to shit in style and pull the chain, like the madam.” ’

  Mazibuko gave another chubby laugh, and Egan forced himself to join in. This kind of racial humour, or was it interracial humour, made him uncomfortable. He was never sure whether it was for his benefit or at his expense. When a black associate called him ‘baas’, he got the joke, give or take. But when the same associate called himself ‘boy’ or ‘bushie’, Egan was never sure what was really going on.

  He saw the inevitable morning that lay ahead. Air-borne sewage. He would have to take a whole lot of crap. It was one of his jokes: in this line of work, he would say, you have to take a lot of crap from the customer. You could call yourself a sanitary engineer, if you liked, you could even be a sanitary engineering consultant. Sooner or later, everyone figured it out: you were in the shit business.

  From a distance, he’d thought there was a veldfire blowing smoke across the road or something burning in the shack settlement he’d already noticed on the left, a patchwork place of the kind that still made him uneasy, no matter how often he came across it. But as they approached the crossroads, he saw that it was dust from the gravel that traffic between Hani View, on one side of the road, and its informal satellite, on the other, had scuffed over the tar. Both areas were fenced off from the main road and there was just a single dirt track leading off to either side.

  The history of the area was complicated. The formal housing project had been an initiative of the Kempton Park council, designed to take the overflow from Tembisa. Two thousand houses in the usual unbending rows, a school, a community hall, a clinic. Louis Bhengu had scarcely turned the soil for the foundations of the hall – an embarrassing moment: the ground was so hard he could not drive the blade of the spade into it, despite repeated blows from the heel of his Bally slip-on – when an informal settlement sprang up on the opposite side of the road. Sprang up overnight, quite literally. The squatters had been dumped there by the Midrand council, on a tract of waste land acquired from the province. Although Hani View Extension 1, as it soon became known, was nominally under the jurisdiction of Midrand, its proximity to the housing project on the other side of the municipal boundary effectively connected it to the neighbouring council. The people from the shacks sent their kids to school in Hani View, they brought their broken bones and whooping coughs to the Hani View clinic, they drew their water there and carried it back across the road in tins. If these people were ours it would be different, ran one editorial in the Express, but they’ve been left on our doorstep.

  Egan always found it strange to set foot for the first time in a place he knew from the plans. It was like folding out of two dimensions into three. You could almost hear the creases popping as you broke through the barrier. Sometimes it was disenchanting. You had convinced yourself, looking at the neatly inked blocks on the paper, at the street names, the community facilities, the cookie-cutter trees, that the place was rather pleasant. You imagined gardens, shady avenues and parks. And then you got there and found rows of impossibly small houses, not a leaf in sight, dust everywhere, shadowless walls, and the immense blue well of the sky, which reduced the earth to sediment. At other times, the contrast between the flat world of the plan and the angular world of the township galvanized him. It was a beginning, wasn’t it? You couldn’t expect everything to change overnight. That was half the problem – it was like the pop song – people wanted it all, wanted it now, for free.

  They turned into Hani View. The main road had been graded recently and spread with gravel, which rattled against the underside of the car. The whitewashed pegs along the edge of the roadway, where a ridge of sand had been piled up by the graders, suggested that they would be tarring soon. It would make a difference, it would damp down these shifting sands, fix things in place. He turned left into a side street, left again, following the thrusts of Mazibuko’s manacled hand, passed between rows of identical houses, and drew up on the verge at the end of the block.

  The manhole cover, set in a pad of new cement as pale as a mushroom jutting out in the middle of the dusty street, was oddly reassuring. It suggested that something meaningful was going on below the surface: pipes had been laid, a lasting claim had been embedded in the earth, and would not be rooted out too easily. By contrast, the freshly painted houses on all sides rested lightly on their bases, as if they had been set down there just a moment ago and could be brushed aside with the back of your hand. The electricity poles smelt of creosote. Everywhere the earth had been raked until it was raw. In time, as people
lived here, and covered the soil with tar and stone and brick, the human presence would thicken. Permanence grew like a crust. Every layer added depth. In an established city, where every square metre had been patched, paved and repaved, an open ditch could throb like a wound. Workers clustered around a manhole, surrounded by striped barriers under a makeshift awning of green canvas, would remind him of nothing so much as surgeons in the operating theatre, gazing through pegged back skin at the exposed nerve.

  ‘Do you think it is too high?’ Mazibuko asked, gesturing towards the cover.

  ‘Seems okay to me. Once the road’s been surfaced it should be level.’

  ‘Last week, a taxi driver ripped the sump out of his Mazda on one of these in 10th Street. The people have been complaining.’

  That’s hardly my fault, Egan wanted to say. It’s your responsibility to get the roads paved. Why doesn’t the council just get on with it? But he bit his tongue.

  They got out of the car and walked over to the manhole. Mazibuko tapped it with the toe of his shoe as if he was trying to make his mark on it, just like L. Z. Mkhonto, who had scored his name and last month’s date in the cement when it was wet. It was all too new for its own good, it needed time to settle and mature.

  They walked back to the car. Egan took out the development plan lying on the back seat and unrolled it on the bonnet. Mazibuko pinned the corners with his pudgy fists and they pored over the plan together, tracing the branching out of water and sewage reticulation, lighting grids, boundary fences. Egan marked the progress off with a felt-tip pen as they spoke. They had stopped in a good spot, quite by chance, he thought, on a rise at the edge of the built-up area, beyond which the open land sloped gently down to the vlei. He could see exactly where they had got to with the roads and the electrification.

  ‘Those are the new houses down there, the ones I was telling you about earlier.’

  Egan put blue crosses through the relevant blocks on his plan. He dotted in the latest telephone poles and the new roads laid out beside the vlei. There would be trouble there, you could see it from a mile away, they were building too close to the floodline. In the distance, he could see the excavation for the last of the sewage connections, with the pipes laid out on the edges of the trenches.

  When they had been speaking for a while, he became aware that a small crowd was gathering. The usual collection of women and children, and a smattering of men, the old and infirm, the unemployed. Something clutched his chest and passed. So long as the women and kids were in the majority, ridiculous though it was, he felt reassured.

  Mazibuko let go of the plan and it skittered into a roll on the bonnet.

  Egan unfurled it irritably and pinned one end under a windscreen wiper. Mazibuko had turned away to talk to someone in the crowd, an uncommonly fat woman, loud and gesticulating, waving her arms around. There was a smell in the air, a chokingly familiar sweetness, which Egan recognized as Johnson’s Baby Powder. It was coming off the fat woman, from the damp underarms of her floral dress, like the embodiment of her vehemence.

  He left the plan to roll itself up again and turned to Mazibuko. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘She’s complaining about her house. She says everything is wrong with it. Everything.’

  Mazibuko’s tone was tolerantly amused, but Egan’s heart sank. It was always the same. Wherever you went in the townships – although you weren’t supposed to call them that any more – in the former townships, in the black areas, when people saw a man with a clipboard or a blueprint, they assumed he was collecting complaints. There was no point in running away. On his last trip to Mpumalanga, the junior planner who was driving him around had convinced him that the best thing was to listen to people. It gave residents the feeling that their problems were being taken seriously and it gave councillors a chance to lend a sympathetic ear. It was a win-win situation, he said. It might even be of advantage to Egan, Gessing and Malan, Sanitary Engineering Consultants. ‘Perhaps you’ll learn something from the people who actually use your products.’

  ‘We don’t make toilet seats. We’re responsible for the reticulation system. We’re engineers, not bloody plumbers.’

  But the planner had been insistent. ‘Think of it as public relations.’

  ‘We don’t have relations with the public. We have relations with local governments.’

  ‘Then think of it as doing your bit for reconciliation.’

  That seemed to be the end point of every exchange. Reconciliation. A conversation stopper.

  The fat woman was stamping her foot and raising a cloud of dust.

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘She wants us to take a look at her house.’

  Egan did not even bother to argue. He shoved the plan through the window into the back of the car, took out his briefcase – might as well remove temptation and look official – and followed Mazibuko and the woman into her yard. As he went through the gate, he heard liquid sloshing inside the case. The bottle of Johnnie Walker he’d brought for Louis Bhengu. Brightly gift-wrapped, with a card addressed to the town clerk. He must remember to give it to Mazibuko, he could pass it on to his boss.

  The woman opened the door of her house and went inside. Mazibuko stopped on the threshold, leaned in, looked left and right, like someone at a zebra crossing, and followed her.

  Egan paused, with a little crowd of women and children around him. There was a crack through the wall of the house so wide he could see through it. It started in the foundations, at the bottom of the doorframe, ran up to the left-hand corner of the lintel, and then zigzagged to the rafters, disappearing beneath the eaves. The overhang was too slight, he noticed in passing, and there were no gutters. They would have trouble with rainwater sooner or later. But how had such a crack appeared in a brand-new structure? There were still fresh spatters of whitewash on the red earth at the foot of the wall, lying brightly in the dust like counters from a board game, among lumps of doughy plaster in kindergarten shapes left over from the building. He would have to explain that walls and floors and doors had nothing to do with him. A child tugged at the clasp of his briefcase, as if Daddy was home from the office with some promised treat, and now he wished that he’d left it in the boot. It made him feel foolish. They would expect him to open it. Perhaps he should give the fat woman the bottle of whisky; that would be a new departure.

  He went inside. The lounge was cramped and dark. He saw that the window was half-covered by a dresser, an enormous assembly of beige veneer and silver piping that looked somehow like a vehicle, like a truck parked in that end of the room. Chairs in powder-blue velveteen, an old-fashioned coffee table with ball-and-claw legs, muscularly bulging, a chromium lampstand, a vase in the shape of a swan. The table looked like it was about to spring on him.

  The fat woman was pacing out the dimensions of the room, banging into the furnishings and making them wobble. What a performance, Egan thought. And at that instant, as if a flashbulb had gone off in his own mind, the photographer in the doorway opposite pressed his shutter and leapt into focus.

  What’s he doing here? Egan blinked the glare out of his eyes. Noticed now that the sofa on the darkest side of the room was occupied: two men, side by side, both bearded, both wearing black leather jackets. Mazibuko was squatting to talk to them. They must have been waiting here all along.

  Mazibuko beckoned him to join them, and the two men stood up. Ramaramela and Marakabane, Chairman and Treasurer respectively of the Residents’ Association. Good men, Mazibuko said, aside. Ramaramela, Marakabane. They looked very alike to Egan, possibly brothers. But then surely they would have the same name? It was probably just his usual weakness: he did not have a memory for faces. Or names. He made a mental note that Ramaramela was wearing a charm at his neck in the shape of an animal. While they were shaking hands, with the ritual thumb-clasping that always made him feel like a schoolboy playing at being a spy, the man with the camera crept closer and the flashbulb popped again.

  ‘What’s this?�
��

  ‘Oh, they’re doing a piece on the housing question. Delivery.’

  ‘Who exactly?’

  ‘Hang on a second.’ Mazibuko turned away to watch the fat woman going backwards and forwards through a doorway, glancing off the doorposts, keeping up a running commentary. A single word kept leaping out of the flow: fucked. Uttered so bitterly, with such italic emphasis it was almost comical, and Egan had to suppress a laugh.

  ‘Mrs Ntlaka says the doorways are too narrow.’ When Mazibuko spoke near his ear, Egan smelt booze on his breath.

  Mrs Ntlaka came back carrying a grass broom. She knocked against the roof with the end of the handle, a little storm of dust sifted down, the camera flashed, she said fucked several times, as if she was spitting out pips, she went back through the doorway, banging from pillar to post like a medicine ball.

  ‘She says there is no ceiling.’

  ‘I get the idea.’

  ‘Let’s go through.’

  Mazibuko took Egan’s elbow and guided him into the next room.

  There were two beds pushed together. Queen-size, Egan thought. A dressing table packed with shiny things, bottles and animals, a porcelain woman with a parasol, more swans. There was not much room to pace in here but Mrs Ntlaka was managing, making the room shudder, flinging her vibrating arms into the air as if she wanted to get rid of them, intent on demonstrating that she did not fit in her home. Was she trying to knock something over? Would she persist until she had smashed one of the ugly ducklings into pieces of evidence?

  Fucked resounded. She clearly had no sense of the power of the expletive. Despite the stagy vehemence, she might just as well have been saying something innocuous, like on the blink. The incongruity of it had brought a smile to Mazibuko’s lips, a trace of sympathy. The man with the camera was moving around energetically, appreciatively, raising the ancient-looking contraption with its big silver mixing-bowl of a flash, waving it at Mrs Ntlaka, like a creature communicating with its proboscis. How odd it is, Egan thought, that outdated technologies always put one in mind of insects or kitchens.