The Exploded View

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Taking Mazibuko’s cue, Egan fixed a concerned frown to his face. Unreasonable thoughts ran through his mind. If she’s so hard done by, so deprived, why the hell is she so fat? Hasn’t it occurred to her that she’s too big for the house? Isn’t it better than living in a shack anyway? Does she need reminding what a really fucked structure looks like? He should give her the talk about counting her blessings, about losing some weight. But the photographer was hovering, buzzing in and out, trying to find his focus, and Egan swallowed his anger. Eating shit again. Now the flash wouldn’t go off. Mrs Ntlaka, having just flounced out of the room very effectively, came back, flounced again, and was even better the second time round.

  ‘You must be in this one.’

  Mazibuko took Egan by the elbow again, but he shrugged him loose, and they walked one after the other into the passageway. Were the two of them related? Egan wondered, at the sight of the little man’s roly-poly backside. Mazibuko and Mrs Ntlaka were fat in the same way, they bulged in identical places. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that they were brother and sister. The door at the end of the passage opened into the toilet. Mrs Ntlaka was settling herself on the toilet seat, about to demonstrate what was wrong with it. But Egan, though he was no plumber, did not need a demonstration. The toilet was too high. Instead of being set straight into the floor, the bowl had been elevated on a cement plinth. The seat would have reached to mid-thigh on a man as tall as himself. What on earth was the contractor thinking? It might have suited a giant, one of those American basketball players, Shaquille O’Neal. The Shaq Attack.

  Mrs Ntlaka sat on the toilet with her feet dangling. She had the same disproportionately tiny feet as Mazibuko, in the same clumpy shoes, a pair of boy’s school shoes, sturdy brown-leather lace-ups. How had Mazibuko put it? A throne at the end of the passage…She hardly looked regal. A queen on the stool.

  Mazibuko’s hand pressed in the small of Egan’s back, propelling him forward. He squeezed into the narrow space beside Mrs Ntlaka, with his hand resting on top of the cistern. Mazibuko squeezed into the space opposite. The room smelt of talcum powder and roses. The rose smell was coming from a crocheted poodle on the window sill. A toilet-roll holder. The dog’s puffy body parts must be stuffed with pot-pourri. Ramaramela and Marakabane squashed into the little room too and sank down on their haunches in front like football players. The team. I must look like the physiotherapist, with my briefcase, Egan thought. The physiotherapist was always white, even when all the players were black. Or do I look like the ambassador from a foreign country come to present his credentials?

  He looked past the photographer, hunched over the camera as if he were hooded in black, at the bank of laughing faces in the passage.

  The photographer was not satisfied with the pose. He rearranged the two men from the Residents’ Association – the squatters, Egan thought wryly – flattening them against the walls on either side, so that the marvellous gap between the soles of Mrs Ntlaka’s shoes and the cement floor would be apparent. Then he scurried back into position and pressed the shutter.

  When they finally left, Egan discovered that his steering lock was jammed. It was an Eagle Claw, endorsed by the AA, supposedly unpickable. But Mrs Ntlaka called an ageing Young Lion from the house next door and he picked it in a minute with a Swiss Army knife and a length of wire.

  Mazibuko dropped him back at his hotel and said he would call for him again in a couple of hours. They were going out for dinner. This time Mr Bhengu would definitely be joining them.

  In the room, Egan took the whisky out of his briefcase. It had gone right out of his mind until now. Spitefully, he tore off the garish wrapping paper and opened the bottle. Bugger Mr Bhengu. He fetched a glass from the bathroom, took it out of its plastic wrapper, and poured himself a stiff double. Probably a bad idea on an empty stomach. Bugger that too.

  As he crumpled up the paper to throw it away the pattern snagged his eye. For God’s sake. A host of little fuckers, a gifts-and-novelties Kama Sutra. Must be some Cosmo promotion or other. All along he’d assumed they were Bushman figures, motifs from rock paintings. He’d give Estelle a flea in her ear when he got back to the office. What if he’d given this to Bhengu? Never mind Mrs Ntlaka.

  He tilted the bottle again, turning a double into a triple, and called Janine. He could hear the kids in the background, listening to something noisy on the television, too engrossed to come to the phone. He told her about Mrs Ntlaka.

  ‘Moaning,’ she sympathized. ‘The national sport.’

  ‘It’s the old problem of expectations. People want too much. They’re unrealistic.’

  ‘Blame the plans.’ Spoken with a touch of irony.

  It was something he always said. ‘Blame the plans, shoot the planners.’ And as usual when he heard his own reasonable contentions in someone else’s mouth, he became defensive, he switched sides. ‘Well, they have a point, most of the time. The paint’s not dry and the houses are already falling apart. But sometimes you wish people would just shut up and make the best of things. This Mrs Ntlaka was such a drama queen.’

  He told her about the fucked monologue and the photograph in the toilet.

  ‘Sounds hilarious. From here.’

  ‘It was infuriating.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I just wish I knew what it was all about. Why did Mazibuko make an arrangement with these characters from the Residents’ Association? Rama-what-have-you and his twin. Sort of secretively. Why didn’t he tell me about it in advance? Instead of setting the whole thing up and then pretending it was all a big coincidence. Who stands to gain? I tried to speak to him about it, to let him know in a subtle way that I was on to him, but he clammed up. I keep getting the feeling that he only tells me what I want to hear.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘So where are you going for dinner?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let on. He just said it would be something different. An experience.’

  ‘Probably a shebeen.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Or maybe a roast-mealie stall on a street corner somewhere?’

  ‘I’m hoping. It’ll be a change from having people piss on your shoes in the name of cultural exchange.’

  After they’d rung off, he realized that he’d forgotten the most important thing. It was the whole reason he was so irritated. The cracks in the walls and the missing ceilings had nothing to do with him. He was a sanitary engineer. And there was nothing wrong with the sewage system, they could say what they liked. He should call her back and tell her. But, of course, she knew all this already.

  Actually, what he needed was a shower. He was reeking, his hair was full of dust, his armpits were itching, but he felt so weary he could hardly move his limbs. He pulled off his shoes and lay on the bed with his fingers laced behind his head.

  A few years back, he’d done some work with a black architect on a low-cost development in Cape Town. It was quite unusual in those days, practically unheard-of. Once, as they were looking over the project together, Meintjies had put his finger down on the plan.

  ‘There’s only one problem with this township of ours. All the people are white.’

  ‘Can you really tell?’

  As if it’s my fault, Egan thought. He was on the point of making a defence. People were obsessed with race, he was sick of it. But when he took a closer look at the figures dotted about on the drawings, he saw that Meintjies was right. The race of these stock figures, these little loiterers and passers-by, was apparent less in the obvious features, like their paper-white skin or ruler-straight hair, than in their styles, their attitudes. The man in the checked jacket sitting on a park bench with his legs crossed, reading the newspaper; the woman walking her dog, the hem of her skirt folded around her calves by the breeze, a scarf – this was patently a scarf rather than a doek – tied under her chin; the little girl on a bicycle with training wheels. They were not just white, they were European. The benches looked French, the la
mpposts Italian. Was it possible? Shouldn’t everything be American? But no, there was a European signature on the plans. Perhaps that was half the reason people were so disappointed in the reality? Letraset or someone should produce a line of black people, of poor black people, a couple of waxy sheets of barefoot street children, barbers with oilcan chairs, coat-hanger hawkers, scrap-metal merchants with supermarket trolleys full of stolen manhole covers. Why not braziers, bricks, rickety wooden benches hammered together out of packing-case pine, instead of this wrought-iron street furniture that made every corner of the world look like Green Park or the Tiergarten? What did Dewar call it? ‘Low-cost clip-on infrastructure.’ You mean benches? Egan had asked him at the last conference. You mean bus shelters? Let’s get real. Let’s have more realism at the planning stage. That’s what you need if you’re going to do your bit for reconstruction and development. Realism.

  The Madiba shirt was a mistake. He’d decided to go casual, although the loose-fitting shirt with its African design – argumentative little people jumping up and down waving their arms in the air, jagged lines sparking from their fists – always made him feel ridiculous. It was a bit like Estelle’s wrapping paper, he thought sourly. He should have gone with his instincts and worn a suit. That’s the tone Louis Bhengu set: a dark blue business suit and a red tie. Bhengu got out of the minibus, which was idling under the canopy at the hotel entrance, to greet his guest. Mazibuko made the introductions and they shook hands. Then Mazibuko opened the sliding door of the bus, a sleek sixteen-seater with tinted windows, and guided Egan into the interior.

  He was surprised to find two men lounging in the back seats, less surprised that they were Ramaramela and Marakabane of the Residents’ Association. They leaned forward at the same moment to shake his hand. They had both discarded their leather jackets in favour of suits, old-gold for Ramaramela, petrol-blue for Marakabane. The Madiba shirt felt even sillier. If he hadn’t got dressed in such a hurry he might have thought better of it! He quelled his discomfort and tried to fix each man’s name in his memory. Ramaramela, Rama, yellow margarine. Yellow Ramaramela. Marakabane was blue. Blue like a marabou. Was a marabou blue? It didn’t really matter. Blue Marakabane. Yellow Ramaramela, Blue Marakabane.

  Bhengu slid into the passenger seat in front, beside Mazibuko, and they drove away from the hotel. It was a while since Egan had been in a vehicle he wasn’t driving. He could sense the two men in the seats behind him, although no one spoke. For a moment, he felt like a child on a family outing.

  He’d been asleep when they called for him, and dreaming about Nicholas, his son. The dream came back to him now, as he moistened the tip of his forefinger with spittle and surreptitiously cleaned the sleep out of the corners of his eyes. Nicky was playing on the floor of the nursery, Egan was kneeling beside him, scattered between them was a set of coloured plastic rings that had to be fitted over a peg to form a cone. An educational toy. Nicky wanted the big ring that belonged at the base of the cone but it was out of reach. As he teetered on his padded backside, Egan picked up the ring that lay at his knee and handed it to him. It was just a plastic ring. And yet it was also the 48 per cent of South Africans who lived below the poverty line. Not an image of them, not a symbol, not even an idea. The thing itself, somehow, the poverty. But that was also just a word, and this was just a piece of plastic, a coloured quoit. Nicky took it in his chubby fingers, banged it against the peg and slid it down to the bottom. The toy was perfectly harmless. That was one of the selling points: no sharp edges, nothing a child could hurt himself with or choke on. It developed motor skills, perceptual skills, judgements about scale and colour. Hand, eye. Egan reached for the red ring, the second largest one. People were always commenting how Nicky’s hands, tiny as they were, were so much like his father’s: the same pronounced curve to the ring finger, the same square nails. In Egan’s own adult fingers, the red ring was the 40 per cent of South Africans who had access to running water. His hands were wet with them. He tried to slide the ring over the peg but it would not fit. Nicky pushed the ring away and put the small yellow one over the peg. It dropped to the bottom where it did not belong. The 19 per cent who were HIV positive. Or was it the 35 per cent who had access to telephones? Egan slid it off again. Nicky grabbed at it. The child’s hands, tender prophecies of his father’s – the only feature of his own body he had once thought attractive, spoilt now by age and use, hardened and coarsened, with hairs curling out of the knuckles, more and more of them as he got older, wrinkled, scarred, veined – the pudgy little fingers were surprisingly powerful. They jerked the ring away.

  And then it was the telephone ringing: the receptionist to say that a Mr Mazibuko was waiting for him in the lobby.

  Bra Zama’s African Eatery was in a peri-urban no-man’s-land, where a dying business district petered out in motor town, to judge by the number of used-car dealers in the dimly lit block they had just travelled down. There was a branch of Something Fishy on the other side of the intersection, a retread shop, a couple of nameless businesses with their windows obscured by grilles. As they pulled into the parking lot, Egan had a fleeting impression of carved wooden posts and thatch. A nightwatchman, dressed in a greatcoat and a balaclava despite the summer heat, came to attention and saluted them, ironically perhaps, and then slumped back into a garden chair under a floodlight against the corrugated-iron fence.

  Coals were glowing in rusty braziers on either side of the entrance and they passed through this fiery gauntlet into the interior, where a man in a bubu, with his elbows propped on a 44-gallon drum, stood ready to receive them. The wall behind him was papered entirely in packaging, like the inside of a shack, Glenryck Pilchards and Motorola phones, while the walls to left and right were dotted with African masks. It was a clever bit of décor. Even now, with only half the tables occupied, there was an air of expectant busyness about the place.

  Bhengu was known to the manager. He led them at once to a table in the middle of the room where another man sat waiting with a bottle of beer in front of him, a very dark man with hooded eyes and a shaved head. Egan wondered whether he had shaved his hair just to show off the scars that covered his skull, like those youngsters who had to wear vests all the time so that people could see their tattooed arms. Mazibuko made the introductions and they all sat down. A kitchen table, covered in oilcloth that stuck to Egan’s forearms, chairs of curved chrome and Formica, insistently nineteen-fifties.

  Mazibuko was right, Egan thought, it was going to be an experience. And he had an odd sense that it would be a significant experience too, that he would remember this evening, that he would look back on it. He could already see himself looking back on it, from a tremendous distance, and understanding, at last, what it was all about. He wished he was there now, at that reassuring remove, on a height, filled with the wisdom of hindsight.

  A statuesque woman, elongated by a knotted head cloth and platform shoes, brought the menus. She said her name was Miriam and that she would be their waitress for the evening. She began to recite the ‘specials’: lamb breyani, nyama ya figo, beef stewed the Nigerian way. The waitresses must have to learn the specials by heart, he thought, like actors. A necessary part of the training. He made a mental note of the LM prawns, drew a line through it. Lourenço Marques smacked of colonialism. He should have something more adventurous, something equatorial. Pounded yam, perhaps. He would ask what was in the chicken egusi, which went with it. While Miriam was speaking, he examined her costume. She was clearly in costume, dressed up as something, although he wasn’t sure what. Some national costume or other. Nigerian, say. Or was she supposed to be a shebeen queen?

  She took the drinks order and left them to consider their options.

  The menu was bound in metal: beer tins beaten flat and stapled together into a patchwork. You were not meant to leaf through it until something caught your fancy; you were meant to read it like a children’s book, for your amusement and education. It was part of the experience. What struck him forcefully, b
ecause it had been picked out in red letters on every page, was the phrase: ‘New South Africa’. How dated it seemed. When had it been coined? Five years ago? Already it was worn out and passing quietly from use.

  He turned with a clank to the top of page one. He was embarking upon a sensory safari, the menu said, unimaginable tastes and smells were in store for him. He would have the opportunity of savouring a range of authentic delicacies, from the warm heart of the countryside to the cool tang of the city streets, from Zulu kebabs to Xhosa dumplings, from Ugandan risi bisi to Malawian paella, from Ma Zama’s fatcakes to Bra Zama’s chakalaka chicken. What the hell was that?

  ‘The beef is good.’ It was the first time Bhengu had addressed him directly.

  ‘Actually, I was thinking of trying the umfino.’ One of the few dishes on the menu he had recognized.

  ‘No, no, no.’ The name of the fifth man had already slipped from Egan’s mind. He stretched out his hand with the palm turned down and tilted it from side to side. ‘It is a city version.’

  ‘They don’t make it the traditional way?’

  ‘No, it is very good. It is better than my wife’s.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll try it then.’

  ‘No, no, no. You will not like it.’

  ‘You will be complaining, “What is this?” ’

  More laughter.

  ‘Also.’ Marakabane tapped on the metal cover of the menu with his forefinger. ‘You must not have the ulusu lwegusha.’