Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  12

  Every month for the past fifteen years, on the second Thursday of the month to be precise, I have met my brother Branko for coffee at the Carlton Centre (to which he is also sentimentally attached, for reasons of his own). I could chart the life and death of this great complex by the sequence of coffee shops which came to serve as our regular meeting place over the years: from the Koffehuis, where the waitresses were got up as Dutch dairy-maids in clogs and lace caps, to the Brazilian Coffee Bar, where the cups and saucers arrived and departed on a conveyor belt.

  When we first began meeting, the parkade in Main Street, opposite the hotel, was always full. You would have to wind up the spiral ramp to the fourth or fifth floor to find a bay. Little arrows and neon signs saying full and up, in red and green respectively, kept you circling higher until a floor would accept you. There were attendants too, the obligatory middlemen between motorists and machinery, waving you on. The shiny concrete gave unexpected squeals of delight beneath the tyres. When you finally came to rest, you had to memorize the colour of the floor and the number of the bay or you would never find your way back. There were four lifts, large enough to park a Volkswagen in. Even here, in the parkade, the slightly unsettling smell of food, which came to circulate in the atmosphere of the entire centre once the paint fumes had worn off, reminded you that pleasurable consumption lay ahead.

  Then, in the mid-nineties, the parkade began to shrink. The demand for parking fell, level by level, like a barometer of change in the city centre. The people with cars were clearly going elsewhere. You could find parking on the fourth floor now, and after a while on the third, and then always on the second or first. Finally the illuminated arrows were switched off.

  In May 1998–it would have been Thursday the 14th–when I turned into Main Street, there was a chain slung across my usual entrance. The middleman, who had always been there at the boom to catch the ticket the machine spat out and hand it to me through the window, was nowhere to be seen. Instead a sign urged me down an unfamiliar ramp into the basement. A long tunnel, with odd twists and turns in it, peculiar level landings and sudden lurching descents, took me down below the ground. I soon lost my sense of direction. Eventually I found myself in a crowded corner of the basement, where the cars were all huddled like refugees. An armed guard oversaw my arrival. I made my way to the nearest lift, but there was a label pasted across the crack between the doors, as if to prevent them from opening: hotel closed. It reminded me of a crime scene in an American TV series. The guard appeared at my shoulder and directed me to a distant lift, which brought me out in an unpopulated alley of the centre, an area I had last ventured into with a telephone dixie in my hand.

  As we sat drinking our espressos at the little counter in the office block, which has the knack of making you feel like you’re in New York, my brother told me that he couldn’t face the city any more. It’s too dangerous, he said, and unpleasant anyway, what with empty shops and echoing corridors and the smell of piss in the doorways. We should move our monthly meetings to Rosebank or Illovo. There are coffee shops in the suburbs where you can still read your paper and eat your biscotti in peace. What about Eastgate?

  When I resurfaced into the chilly air a little later, a fierce white light caught my eye. Welders in overalls were sealing off the canopied entrance to the Carlton Hotel behind a palisade fence.

  13

  Sophie Calle’s exhibition The Detachment/Die Entfernung is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park. She describes her way of working: ‘I visited places from which symbols of the former East Germany have been effaced. I asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories.’ The photographs show empty niches, overturned pedestals, unscrewed plaques. In the accompanying texts, the citizens of East Berlin recollect the displaced memorials as best they can, accurately or not, with or without fondness; there are also photographs of the old times, when the symbols of power still occupied their places with confidence, and these allow us to stand in judgement on the veracity of the recorded memories.

  A bell rings to signal that the gallery is about to close. I stop at the toilet in the basement on the way out. A street child, as filthy as a chimney sweep, comes out of one of the cubicles with a length of toilet paper dangling from his pocket and starts to wash his face at a basin. While I’m wringing my hands under the dryer, a security guard bursts in, grabs the boy by his arm, and hustles him away.

  I go out into the deserted gallery. On my left, set into the curved wall that discreetly screens the toilets from the exhibition space, is a concrete ledge, and happening to glance down as I pass it, I see a grubby white sneaker sticking out. I bend down and look under the ledge. There is an oddly shaped recess I would never have noticed. Two small boys are crammed into it. They smell of wood smoke and sweat. They draw in their legs and look at me with big eyes. What should I do? Should I tell the security guard? Or should I let them have a warm bed for the night? Like a true art lover, I go on my way ambivalently, turning the options over in my mind. I pass through the empty halls, past African crafts and nineteenth-century oils, I go down the steps into the parking lot, and the guard locks the door behind me.

  14

  Chas is going to live in Cape Town at the end of the year. For some months, ever since Branko abandoned me, I have been accompanying my friend on his goodbye walks, revisiting, recalling and relinquishing the parts of Joburg he expects to miss despite himself. The city, we agree, is no more than a mnemonic. Where do we go? Here and there. What do we talk about? This and that. What do we see?

  In July, for instance, as we made our way along Empire Road through the S-bend at Helpmekaar Hoërskool, we discovered, atop a wall on the left, an innovative anti-scaling device known as ‘Hercules Cacti’. Stepping gingerly through tangled ivy, and assuring ourselves first that the device was not electrified, we examined it in detail. ‘Hercules Cacti’ consisted of cylindrical segments, fiercely spiked and barbed all round with outgrowths like pineapple tops, apparently of metal but coated for durability, mounted horizontally on long axles fixed to the top of the wall. Ingenious, we said to one another, spinning a segment and watching it whirr. The thief hasn’t been born who could get over here. More expensive than spikes, undoubtedly, but twice as effective. Probably more expensive than electric fencing too, but then there would be no running costs or maintenance. Looks indestructible. And quite natural, almost like thorn branches, especially in that olive drab. Then we backed away to the pavement, dusted the turn-ups of our trousers, and went on.

  15

  Further discoveries awaited us in Pieter Roos Park, where Victoria and Empire meet. In the south-western corner, the remains of a primitive outdoor gymnasium, from the heyday of jogging and Jane Fonda, with apparatus made of wooden posts for jumping over and hoisting oneself up on, all quite unfit for use. In the north-eastern corner, a metal sculpture, vaguely suggestive of a prehistoric bird, with two black men asleep in the shade of its belly. One opened an eye and glared at us balefully. The only other white men in the park appeared to be tramps.

  In the middle, a grove of bluegums. The scent of eucalyptus reminded Chas of his boyhood home in Vereeniging, and that he is saying goodbye not just to Joburg but to the Transvaal, which no longer exists, to the Highveld, to the interior.

  Then I too was reminded of my childhood, in a new suburb laid out in the veld on the edge of Pretoria. The houses were new and in the American style, or so we thought, with their big glass windows and garages attached to one end; and the roads were long, straight and newly tarred, and fragrant with cow dung. In the mornings the herdboys would drive the cattle along Von Willich Avenue to graze in the veld on the edge of the suburb, and in the evenings they would bring them back again to the whitewashed stalls of the smallholdings, where the bluegums shed long smooth curls of bark on which it was possible to write the life story of a marooned man. Electricity pylons march
ed to the east and west across the veld, and the Voortrekker Monument squatted on the distant horizon.

  16

  On a midwinter morning in 1997, a householder in the suburb of Saxonwold surprised an armed man trying to break into his home and raised the alarm. The burglar fled along Jan Smuts Avenue with the police in pursuit and took refuge in the grounds of the Zoo. When he was cornered, he jumped over a wall into an enclosure that happened to house Max, the Zoo’s 180 kilogram gorilla. Perceiving his partner Lisa to be under threat, Max grabbed hold of the robber and bit him, whereupon the man fired three shots from a .38 special, hitting Max in the shoulder and neck. The police, who had gathered on the viewing platform, returned fire, hitting the suspect in the groin.

  Four policemen and two zookeepers then entered the night enclosure in an effort to evacuate the wounded man. Sergeant Percy Alberts managed to handcuff him–he was still full of fight–but as he and his men were withdrawing, the enraged gorilla attacked them. He threw Constable Amos Simelane on the ground and roughed him up a bit. Then he seized Constable Robert Tshabalala and bit him on the upper arm and buttocks. Finally, he dislocated Sergeant ‘Rassie’ Rasenele’s arm. At this point one of the zookeepers managed to drive Max off by turning a fire extinguisher on him, and the men made good their escape.

  The injured policemen and the suspect were taken to the Garden City Clinic. The Zoo’s own veterinarians sedated Max and tried to treat him on the spot, but their X-ray equipment proved inadequate for the bulky frame of a Western Lowland gorilla and so he was conveyed under police escort to the Milpark Hospital. ‘There were emotional scenes as the unconscious primate was gently placed on the back of the bakkie,’ one paper reported. Indeed, there was an outpouring of tender concern from all quarters. Pictures showed Max lying on a stretcher under a blanket, with his head thrown back and his teeth bared, while a veterinarian tended to a drip. Another burly vet cradled Max’s head, the fingers of one hand shielding his eyes, the others cupped under his chin. Perhaps it was this man who held Max’s hand during the surgery to locate and remove the bullets. Some of Johannesburg’s finest surgeons assisted in the procedure at no cost. On the admission form, Max’s profession was given as ‘Gorilla’, his employer as the Johannesburg Zoo.

  17

  There are three approaches to the Gem Supermarket on the corner of Roberts Avenue and Blenheim Street: steps rise from the pavement to the door in the middle of the facade, and two L-shaped ramps slope up to the same point from left and right. On either side of the steps, each ramp encloses a space like a stall, edged by a low wall and a metal railing behind, and open to the pavement in front.

  In the right-hand stall a cobbler has set up shop. He has a plastic milk crate for a workbench and an empty paint tin for a stool. His blades, awls and files are laid out on a strip of cloth. After he packs up in the afternoon and goes home, black crosses and arrows, sprinklings of rubber filings from the past day’s work, which have stencilled the corners of boxes and crates on the cement paving, still mark the space as his.

  The focal point of the cobbler’s stall is a collection of old shoes waiting to be repaired, or already repaired and offered for sale. They’re usually displayed in a cardboard box, but sometimes he sets them out in a long row of pairs, one on top of the other. Most of them are worn-out and misshapen, with the uppers caved in and the toes turned up, the unlaced vamps folded over one another like the cuffs of a corpse. When you prise them open, you find the X-ray outlines of toes, heels, the balls of the feet on the insoles. You cannot help thinking that the people who wore these shoes are dead now. Even when they’ve been resoled and restitched, and given a coat of polish, just looking at them is enough to make your feet sore.

  All day, the cobbler bows over his work. Sometimes he jokes quietly with the kids waiting for the bus or chats over his shoulder with the Gem’s security guard, who has a chair in the shade on the ramp behind him, but his hands keep busy, kneading the unyielding leather, punching through it with an awl, pushing a long needle into the holes.

  A young white man with a bristly face and yellow hair has occupied the other stall. He is strong and energetic, but even in the summer he appears to be cold. He wears thick, checked shirts and scarves, and his skin is pink and drawn. He paces up and down in the narrow stall, four paces to the right, and a clockwise turn, four paces to the left, and an anticlockwise turn, up and down for hours on end, looking at his feet. Sometimes he swings his arms, beating them against his sides as if he’s freezing, trying to keep the circulation going. His pacing is hypnotic, up and down in front of the railing, like a caged animal. The fact that the cage has no bars on one side, that he could simply walk out of it if he chose, makes his ceaseless pacing more compelling. People stop to stare at him, especially children. When they realize that he is oblivious they sometimes go close and examine him, as if there really were bars between them to authorize an intimate scrutiny.

  I stare at him myself, more discreetly. He lives in the boarding house on the other side of the intersection, according to Mannie the pawnbroker. That’s where you’ll find him when he’s not here outside the Gem. I want to see him stop, pick up the rucksack that’s lying in one corner and go across the street. I want to see him step out of the cage. But I always grow tired of watching before he is tired of pacing.

  Four strides, a clockwise turn, four strides, an anticlockwise turn. It would be better if both were clockwise: then one might console oneself that he is accumulating distance. As it is, these turns in opposite directions cancel out progress, create the impression that he is constantly retracing his steps, always forgetting why he is moving and going back to the starting point. He is going nowhere, fast. He has a bitter set to his mouth, a muscle throbbing in his jaw.

  Although I have seen the cobbler and the caged man in their places many times, it is months before the two scenes fold together like the wings of an icon: the black man quietly working, with the pile of old shoes beside him, and the white man restlessly pacing. Both with their heads bowed, both intent on what they are doing. A connection crackles between them that will not easily be broken. They are figures in a parable. The caged man is wearing out shoes as fast as the cobbler can mend them. But where does it start? Which panel of the diptych should we favour? Is the caged man making the cobbler work? Or is the cobbler making the caged man walk?

  18

  I parked my car in Prospect Road and headed into Hillbrow. It was winter, night was falling early and it felt like the millennium fading to black behind the high-rises. I’d left my wallet at home, I had nothing but a notebook and a ballpoint in the breast pocket of my shirt and a twenty-rand note in my sock. On the corner of O’Reilly and Fife, where Aubrey Tearle, the hero of my novel in progress, was supposed to have come across an abandoned supermarket trolley and loaded it with his shopping bags full of papers, I made some notes. I was walking Aubrey’s route to check the details, doing some retrospective research. I passed the ghosts of the cafés, the Pigalle and the Zürich, the Café Wien and the Café de Paris, and came to the OK Bazaars in Twist Street, where Aubrey had left his trolley in the hands of a security guard before ascending into the quiet interior of the Café Europa. I couldn’t remember when last I’d sat down in Hillbrow for a coffee. I made some more notes, retraced my steps to Prospect Road and drove home.

  19

  Dave has the historian’s gift of seeing time whole. On his clock, the millennia are no more than minutes, the individual lifespan is a sharp intake of breath. It is a perspective that knocks the self-importance out of people and restores us to our proper place in the scheme. On the other hand, Dave has the storyteller’s gift too, which can make the smallest cup of time overflow.

  Not so long ago, he says, in a tone which makes a delicious blend of earnestness and irony, we were all hunter-gatherers. Ten thousand years is nothing on the cosmic calendar. This explains why certain kinds of landscape appeal to us so strongly. A meadow sweeping down to a river, a view from the patio over a ro
lling lawn, a spruit at the bottom of the yard, a koppie on which to loll, with the veld streaming away to the horizon–vistas like these call to our hunter-gatherer hearts.

  We are sitting on my stoep. A thunderstorm has just fumed away over the skyline, leaving behind a long smear of cloud. Now the sun dips below this cloud and animates every surface with golden light. The keels of the clouds are ablaze. The falls of rust-red stone on Langermann Kop are as vivid as coals, they seem to glow from within like paper bags holding lit candles, the veld grasses turn to coral.

  In Joburg now, Dave goes on, the hunter-gatherer is in the ascendancy. In fact, African cities everywhere are filled with roamers, intent on survival, plucking what they can at the roadside. When people steal the wheels off our cars at night, or scale our walls and make off with the garden furniture, or uproot plants on the embankments beside the freeway, and we raise a hue and cry about law and order and respect for property rights, it’s like the Khoikhoi accusing the San of stealing their cattle.

  20

  Stop Crime

  For peace of mind I secure your car while you shop

  For a donation I guard your car

  If harassed by guard, phone number on reverse side

  S.O.B. No:……

  Guard Name:……

  This guard is scanned for criminal and security purposes

  We also do functions and house parties

  21

  During my first conversation with Eddie, when I was new in the neighbourhood, I admired his gladioli, which were in bloom. He said I should come back in the last week of May and he would lift some bulbs for me. He knew my garden well. He had been a frequent visitor in my house, way back, when Mrs Williams (I think he said) lived there. He remembered when her daughter got married, there was a reception in the garden, quite unusual in those days. I had good soil for glads.