The invitation-key promised that our reception would be lavish. Yet, in my unsuspecting way, I was surprised by the venue. The Industrial Arena was not a makeshift stage in some factory or warehouse, but a convention centre on the outskirts of the city, just beside the motorway, with its own squash courts, a miniature golf course, and facilities for simultaneous translation. I had to leave my car in a parking lot and take a shuttle bus to the main complex.
The bare concrete façade of the banqueting hall, where I had been conveyed along with several other guests, reminded me again of a factory. But once I had made my way up an angular ramp and passed through some sliding doors, I found myself in a luxurious lobby, with carpets underfoot and chandeliers overhead.
Apparently I was early, for the place was nearly empty (six for six thirty, the invitation said). Near the entrance was a long table laden with glasses and I went hopefully towards it. A waitress handed me a brimming champagne flute. Another woman shook my hand and bade me welcome. A third ushered me towards a desk, where the early arrivals were having their names ticked off on a list, and I joined the end of a short queue.
I felt a flutter of panic when I saw the same black key ring dangling from three different forefingers in the queue ahead of me. What if Natalie had forgotten to notify them about our special arrangement? But there was no need to worry. My name was soon located on the list and my table pointed out to me on a seating plan. I went on into the hall.
All around me table tops floated like pale rafts on a dark sea. In the centre of each was a tower supporting a candle and a number. Here and there, a figure submerged in shadow clung to the edge of a table. I passed between them, repeating my own number to myself under my breath.
My place was in a corner near the emergency exit. It was as far away from the stage, an empty space flanked by loudspeakers and overhung by lights on metal bars, as it was possible to be. A card with my name on it indicated that the seat reserved for me was the worst in the house: if I sat here, I would have my back to the action. I quickly switched my card with that of a Mr Madondo on the opposite side of the table. Though I was now fractionally further away, I would at least enjoy a comfortable view.
On the seat of my chair lay a goodie bag containing several items of commemorative clothing, a sticker for attaching a licence disc to the windscreen, a sheet of plastic, and some booklets about the new Ford Kafka. The compilers of these publications had evidently been forbidden to depict the product, for there were no photographs at all, only glossy black rectangles and squares.
I turned my attention to the table decorations. The centrepieces proved to be parts of engines, artfully arranged with indigenous fruits and gourds, and proteas and veldgrasses spray-painted black.
The first course stood ready to be consumed: a number of pink shrimps curled up in a nest of alfalfa sprouts. Good manners required that I wait until all my dinner partners were seated. But then Mr and Mrs Rosen arrived, introduced themselves, tucked their napkins into their collars and began to eat. I followed their example. More and more guests appeared. Some opened their goodie bags as eagerly as children, others stored them under their seats without a glance. The air was filled with the clinking of cutlery on china, waiters began to circulate with wine, and soon the seats to the left and right of me were also occupied – Dr and Mrs Immelman, Ms Leone Paterson, Mr Bruintjies. Mr Madondo, whose place I had usurped, seemed not at all bothered by his situation, and my conscience was clear.
Despite our head start, Dr Immelman was the first to finish and, flinging down his fork, he challenged me to a conversation. Only then, when he stared at my lapel, did I realise that all the others were wearing badges with their names on them. However, that was the only uniformity I could discern. Mr Madondo was clad in a well-tailored tux, for instance, whereas Dr Immelman, in the name of the ‘traditional’, had gone for a khaki lounge suit and a hunter’s hat. I asked about the badges. There was a table in the lobby, Dr Immelman said, where they had to be collected. Being new at the game, I had failed to notice it. I rose to rectify the omission – a badge with my name on it would be a far more desirable memento of the evening than any number of T-shirts and caps – but just then the stage lights dimmed, ominous music welled out of the loudspeakers, and the show began.
II
Midnight in Bohemia. In the distance, the silhouette of a castle on a rocky outcrop. At its foot, scraps of alleys and squares, the ruined pergolas of roadside inns, islands of cobble in rivers of shadow. On one of these moonlit islands, some lucky survivors, down at heel and pale as corpses, are trudging endlessly up a single stair. On another, a solitary girl lies writhing. Meanwhile, a boy in striped pyjamas confirms the dimensions of an invisible cell with the palms of his hands.
Then a droning undercurrent in the music surges to the surface. Driven aloft by this sound, a dozen narrow columns begin to rise from the floor. On top of each column a limp figure lies supine, limbs dangling, like a sacrificial victim upon an altar.
Natalie had intimated that Kafka himself would put in an appearance and that this pivotal role might be played by a woman. I was sure she meant herself, but her tone warned me to postpone my surprise for the forthcoming launch, and so I probed no further. Now something in the attitude of the victims, with their bulging middles and bulbous joints, reminded me of her. They looked as if they had been fattened on purpose. I climbed up on my chair – several other guests had already discovered this singular advantage of being at the back – and trained my opera glasses on each of the figures in turn. Their shins and forearms were encased in shiny armour, their knees and elbows in quilted pads. They had round faces and thickly padded bellies. Though I pried at the edges of their shells, I failed to uncover familiar flesh.
The columns continued to rise, each attaining its proper height at its own pace, until it became apparent that they were ranged in two rows to form a colonnade, tapering away towards the backdrop. Just as the last one reached the limits of its extension beneath the stage lights, the droning rose to a pitch of intensity. Crockery rattled and lights flickered. And then the outcrop burst apart, with a crash of cymbals and drums, and a cloud of mist boiled out. For a moment, there was nothing to be seen but furious red light and roiling cloud, nothing to be heard but thundering drums and bleating trumpets. Then an object issued from the crack, and though it was no more than a shape in the mist, charged with pent-up velocity by the laws of diminishing perspective, we knew with certainty that it must be the new Ford Kafka. Upon a narrow ramp it advanced, while elemental forces twisted and turned all around.
It was just as well that Natalie had enlightened me on the difference between industrial theatre and the conventional kind, or I should not have known what to make of this disconcerting excess of effects. Industrial theatre, she said, is not drama but spectacle. Its point is not character but action. And the only action of real import is the climax. There are peaks and troughs, it’s true, but the troughs are short and shallow, and their sole purpose is to separate one peak from another.
To my relief, we now entered such a trough. Figures appeared suddenly with carnival music trailing after them like scarves. A party of young men and women went by, arm in arm. Chinese lanterns glimmered in the chestnut trees. Someone whistled in the dark. A spotlight pointed out an opening and a descending staircase, which technical wizardry had caused to appear in the floor, and the young people walked down it, laughing and talking, sinking away into the underworld. The lanterns swayed on the boughs, fragments of bandstands came and went on a damp wall. Another spotlight played across the shattered castle. Then that beam was broken too by a girl on a trapeze, who flew down from the moon and swooped over our heads, reaching out with one slender arm to catch us up – and missed – and vanished into the darkness.
On the ramp, in the barred shadows of the colonnade, the new Ford Kafka had begun to revolve, metamorphosing by painful degrees into another object. It was long and hooked at one end: that would be the bonnet, curving downwards like a bea
k. At the other end it was blunt, as if its tail had been lopped by a carving knife. I thought I recognised what the booklets in my goodie bag called the ‘unique Kafka profile’. And yet it still wasn’t clear, it was out of focus, like something wrapped in gauze. This lack of definition made it menacing.
As if to confirm my misgivings, the atmosphere thickened, the music took on a shriller tone, and another peak imposed itself. A pencil-thin spotlight slid down out of the gods and prodded one sacrificial victim, and then another, stirring them into action. One by one, they raised their stiff arms and legs, and scratched at the hot air. That was Natalie at the back, I would swear on it, enormously enlarged by a trick of the light, and quivering to beat the band. The spotlight kept poking and jabbing, like a stick in an anthill, until the stage was in an uproar.
The chirping and chafing reached a crescendo, and trailed off into a grey silence. In a distant corner an archway opened, and a lamp winked within, grew brighter, drew closer. A gondola floated out into the gloom. In the stern stood Death, in a cloak of sorrow. And in the bow stood Kafka, in a trenchcoat and a broad-brimmed hat, with the shadow of Death upon him, gazing unblinkingly ahead.
It was a mistake to use a woman, I told Natalie afterwards. And not just because she plays a socialite in that comedy on TV. It involved too much covering up. The stubbled chin was lifelike, I admit, and the ears were right. But the hat was only there to hold her curls and the coat to flatten out her curves. What was the point? They should have found some scrawny boy, with the right dash of Malay blood, and put him in his shirtsleeves, or a vest to show some ribs. Let him shiver!
The gondola bearing our disappointing Kafka rolled onwards, unable to change a thing about itself, but effecting a magnificent transformation in its wake. Spring-loaded thorn trees sprang upright, a ballooning sun rose to the end of its tether, the mist dissolved. Leopards and impalas and monkeys skipped out of the cardboard bushveld. The victims came out of their shells too, as the sacrificial columns sank down to earth, and joined the dance of life. There was Natalie, unfurling her wings.
While the bushveld bloomed, the gondola bearing Kafka arrived at the last remnant of Prague, a sooty archway in another distant corner, and passed through unhindered, dragging away the tail end of the twilight. When the steersman snuffed his lamp, the parade of the wild animals began. It was a relief to find oneself back in Africa.
Yet this is not the summit either! The show goes on. The animals prance, and pose, and prance again, and depart. The new Ford Kafka remains at centre stage. The revolving platform has restored it to its original shape, levelled at us. For some time, it stands there without moving. Then the platform tilts and the car rolls off it, bursting through its wrapping into a state of gleaming certitude, bearing down upon us. Those at the back feel safe, of course, but some in the ringside seats start up in alarm. Then we all see that we have no reason to be afraid, there is a young man at the wheel, smiling pleasantly and waving, and he guides the car expertly between the tables. He is an actor too, Natalie says, and made a name for himself playing a political prisoner. It was a daring bit of casting, even by today’s standards. In the passenger seat, letting her hair down and tossing away the hat, so that we cannot fail to identify her, is our Kafka. Now that I see her properly, I recognise her from the TV. At the sight of her plump cheeks, I imagine Kafka, in the final days of his consumption, and my heart goes out to him.
The car comes to a halt in our midst and everyone has to get up to see what’s happening, creating the impression of a standing ovation. At which point the lights come up and the waiters move in with the main course: beef.
III
The most remarkable thing about the new Ford Kafka, as I discovered when I took a closer look at it after the dessert, was that it was not black, as I had supposed, but blue. Midnight blue, Mr Bruintjies said. Even the puffiness of the leather seats, which I had never seen the likes of before, was apparently quite normal, just another ‘style’. I walked around the vehicle several times, but failed to find it as impressive as I’d hoped. I even queued to sit behind the wheel. It smelt good, I confess; it smelt healthy and prosperous. I breathed in the aroma, twiddled a few buttons, expecting something unpleasant to happen. And then all at once I was seized by the language of the motoring press. The bucket seat embraced me assertively. The gear lever became stubby and direct. The dashboard looked clean, the instrumentation unfussy. Gazing through the windscreen, I found that the bonnet had lost its Semitic curve and now looked nothing but businesslike. I gripped the steering wheel in the requisite ten-past-two formation. Or was it the five-past-one? What do I care? I could have sat there forever, with the Kafka logo floating between my wrists. But the queue was restless.
When I returned to my seat, an informal atmosphere had settled over the table. Mr Rosen had taken off his jacket, unselfconsciously exposing a pot belly and braces, and put on his commemorative cap, with the peak turned to the back. Mr Madondo was wearing Dr Immelman’s hat. Apropos of the leopard-skin band, Mr Madondo declared that the next time the invitation said ‘traditional’ he was going to come in skins. Everyone laughed. There followed a diverting discussion about the value of tradition. After a while, I steered the conversation back to the new Ford Kafka – I was keen to get my companions’ impressions. Mr Bruintjies was the dark horse: so great was his admiration for the marque, he had ordered the new model months before, sight unseen. It also emerged that Ms Leone Paterson had designed some aspect of the invitation-key, and she promised to send me one ‘for my portfolio’.
I was by no means the first to leave. I had passed a pleasant evening, as I assured the company when we parted. But the moment I was alone, a mood of tense despair descended upon me.
In the lobby, heading for the shuttle bus, I remembered the lapel badges. The table was against the wall near the cloakrooms. There were several dozen badges no one had collected, a roll call of the missing – a Mr Ringwood, a Mrs Foote, me. And yet here I was, as large as life, a walking contradiction. On an impulse I swept the badges into my goodie bag and hurried away.
One day, the opportunity to test-drive the new Ford Kafka might present itself; for the time being, I will have to make do with a second-hand Mazda Midge. Before driving off, I took out a handful of the lapel badges and studied them again. Whereas the new Ford Kafka has a reading-light in the ceiling just like an aeroplane, the Mazda Midge has a little bulb you can hardly read a map by. I could make out Mr and Mrs Granger, a Mrs A. Chopho, a B. Capstine, a Mulligan. Unknown factors. Kafka’s face, looking back at me from every badge, should have been a consolation. And yet it was as strange, as remote and inhuman in its familiarity, as Colonel Sanders.
I took the M1 South. As soon as I found myself in the fast lane, I began to speed. I wound down the window so that the wind could tear through me and pressed the accelerator flat. There was music in my head, a relentless droning I had never heard before but knew by heart, the soundtrack of industrial theatre. I let the car float to the left of the lane until the wheels on that side were thumping over the catseyes on the dotted line, and this gave the music a driving rhythm and made me go even faster. The towers of Johannesburg rushed closer. I drifted, I could hardly remember it afterwards, and all the time I was turning the names of the absentees over in my mind, as if they were members of one broken family, and wondering what, if anything, could be done about them.
Dead Letters
NEVILLE LISTER
Neville Lister, b. 1962, Johannesburg. Commercial photographer (mainly advertising: ‘nation-building epics’, magazine features, property portfolios). Recently some exhibited work. Contact: Claudia Fischhoff, Pollak Gallery, Johannesburg
Neville Lister grew up in Johannesburg and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand without completing a degree. He left South Africa in the early 1980s and lived for a decade in London, where he began his photographic career as a location scout. After assignments for department-store catalogues, property portfolios and ‘everything
in between’, he found a niche in the women’s magazine market.
Soon after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, Lister returned to Johannesburg to pursue his commercial work. In the early 2000s, he began to photograph on his own account, although it was some years before he exhibited or attracted critical attention. His photographs of walls appeared in the Public][Private group show at the Switch Box in 2008; and his Thresholder series, portraits of people with their letterboxes, was shown at the Pollak Gallery the following year. At this time, he was mentored by renowned photographer Saul Auerbach.
Lister’s current project involves a cache of undelivered letters that once belonged to a Dr Pinheiro, a medical doctor who sought refuge in South Africa after the 1975 revolution in Mozambique. Unable to practise without the proper certification, Dr Pinheiro found work in the sorting room at Johannesburg’s Jeppe Street Post Office. Here he came into possession of the ‘dead letters’, various items of mail intended for people in the city but never delivered because the addresses were incomplete or indecipherable. Lister acquired the letters in turn shortly after his relocation from London. For many years, he was unsure what to make of them and could not bring himself to open the envelopes.
In 2010, while scouting for one of his Thresholder photos in downtown Johannesburg, Lister was attacked and robbed of his camera. The thugs strangled him and left him lying unconscious in the street with his pockets turned inside out. In an account of the incident, he writes: ‘I remember fading to black; and I remember coming round again, sprawled under a blue sky, amazed to be alive. I am troubled by the derangement of consciousness I experienced in these moments: random images flickered through my mind like slides falling through a broken carousel or letters through a slot. People say your past flashes before your eyes at the point of death and perhaps this is what they mean, except that I was not dying but coming back to life. The light was blinding.’
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