Once they reach a certain age, it is difficult to see the child in most people. Eddie is one of the exceptions. Although he was nearly eighty when we met, the boy in him was still there, ghosting through from a black-and-white past. He had moved into Blenheim Street long before I was born. His own children, he told me, pointing to the house, had been born under this roof. These same children, now scattered across the Reef, were trying to persuade him to move. They said he shouldn’t be living on his own, what with the area going to the dogs, and he needed taking care of. But he was quite capable of looking after himself. Still, he might take them up on the offer, one of these days, for their sake, if he could get the right price for the place. It might be nice for his daughters, too. He could spend a couple of months with each of them in turn and do some handiwork to earn his keep. He was always working on his house, there was always something to patch or paint. He thought nothing of hanging off the end of a ladder to repaint a gutter.
One year, he decided to put all the leftover pots of paint in his garage to good use by painting a mural on his garden wall. It is the ugliest mural in the whole city: a basket of flowers; a dog with mad eyes and spiky whiskers; a dim-witted sun, with a wry mouth and a set of stiff rays standing out like a bad haircut; a bird of paradise perched on one of the sunbeams; a red-brick wishing-well.
22
The tenants of the semi-detached at 21/21a Kitchener Avenue have started a shop in one of the rooms of their house. A handpainted sign rigged on top of a tilting carport says: COCA-COLA, BREAD, MILK. It is unclear where the shop is, exactly, but through an oval window, feint-ruled by venetian blinds, one can make out what seems to be a hairdressing salon. Perhaps it was for the convenience of their customers that the proprietors of these businesses spray-painted the numbers of their house on the wall of the property. The numbers appear to either side of the gate, crooked black digits scrawled across three or four courses of yellow brick, 21 to the left, 21a to the right. A short path leads to the house where the number 21a appears again, ambiguously, spoiling the symmetry, on the central pillar of the stoep.
These numbers incensed Branko. The first time he saw them he started fuming, and he cannot pass the house without commenting. You’d think they’d been put there to offend him.
‘But what is it?’ I ask him. ‘Why does it bother you so much? Why can’t you leave it alone?’
‘On a brick wall!’ he says. ‘How could they?’
(They. Branko, being a bit of a racist, means: blacks. The blacks.)
‘It’s just a garden wall, for God’s sake,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing special about it.’
‘You don’t take an aerosol and spray numbers on a brick wall. Even a child knows that. That’s it: they’re like badly behaved children drawing on the bedroom walls with their wax crayons. They’ve defaced their own property, they’ve vandalized themselves. What kind of people are they? Go on, you explain it to me.’
23
With just six weeks left on the millennial clock, a Johannesburg computer specialist claimed that he had been savagely bitten in an attempted car hijacking. The 40-year-old man, who did not wish to be named in the newspaper report on the crime, was stopped at a traffic light in the early hours of the morning, with his car window slightly open. Two thieves reached into the vehicle and released the central locking mechanism. Then they both jumped into the car and began biting him. ‘The one in front attacked his arm and bit it all the way up while the other started biting his neck and back, both of them drawing blood as they bit him.’ The driver managed to get out of the car, but his assailants pursued him and continued to bite him. ‘One was saying: “You taste good, white boy. I want to bite you more.”’ Eventually he managed to get back into his car and drive off. The man, who said that being bitten was worse than being attacked with a weapon, underwent medical tests and was given antibiotics and a tetanus injection. ‘The doctor said a human bite is very poisonous.’
The Star has a policy of not identifying individuals by race in their reporting. Here it makes no difference. Even if the phrase ‘white boy’ had been omitted, who would doubt that the computer specialist was white and the cannibals were black?
24
As Martin draws up to his garage one afternoon after work, he sees two men standing at his garden door, where there is an alcove in the wall covered by a canopy of green corrugated plastic, an ‘improvement’ made by the previous owner. His first thought is that they’re up to no good, but when they do not take flight at the approach of his car, he thinks again. They must be waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. Perhaps they’re looking for Cynthia? Then he suddenly understands the body language: they’re taking a piss.
The men glance his way. One of them is wearing a denim jacket, the other has a sky-blue cap with something written on it. The one in the cap makes a remark, the other nods. They go on pissing against the door.
An unfamiliar feeling takes hold of Martin. It drains through his body, he says, like cold water. It is rage. His hand drops onto the Gorilla, which he keeps on the floor beside his seat, and closes round it like a club. But he does not get out of the car, because there is another feeling too, which even this caustic anger cannot scour out of him. Fear.
The man in the jacket zips up his pants and lolls against the wall, while the other one finishes. Martin glowers at them and shakes his head. He wants them to feel his disgust. But he’s afraid that even this gesture might provoke a confrontation. When the one in the jacket glances at him, with a smirk, he has to look away. They stroll off.
Vicky is smoking a cigarette in the lounge. She jumps as he slams the front door. Before he’s even in the room, he’s shouting: ‘I’ve had it with this place. These fucking people. They’re like animals.’
‘What is it?’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Lifting their legs everywhere like dogs. Honestly, I’m sick to death of it. If one more kaffir pushes me, I’ll ride over him.’ He sees the amazement on his wife’s face and tries to check himself, but he cannot. He rages out of the room. She trails after him into the bedroom, trying to calm him, trying to find out what it’s all about. ‘Look for yourself!’ he yells at her. ‘Go take a look at your stinking doorstep and then tell me to calm down!’
His incomprehensible mood is turning on her. She goes back to the lounge. He hears her closing the kitchen door.
He changes out of his suit, hurling jacket and tie and shirt into different corners of the room. These soft, yielding things just add to his frustration. Only when a shoe hits the door of the cupboard and leaves a mark does his rage begin to abate. Instead of flowing out of him in a torrent, words freeze on his lips and fall around him–dogs, kaffirs, cunts–and he comes to his senses. He wonders suddenly whether Cynthia is busy with the supper. He flings himself down on the bed like a child, starts up again immediately, and goes to sit at Vicky’s dressing table. He would like to cry, as an expression of remorse, but he is filled with nothing but shame. He looks at his white face in the mirror. His lips are in tatters. His mouth tastes of soap.
‘You’ve got every right to be angry,’ Vicky says later when they’re trying to talk it through. ‘It was obviously provocative.’
‘Provocative? It was a calculated insult. There’s a park three blocks away where you can piss against a fucking bush if you want to. But they choose to piss on my doorstep.’
He’s losing his temper again. She says, ‘The problem isn’t that you’re angry, it’s the terms you’re using to express it. You should have heard yourself.’
In fact, he’s astonished at how easily it came to him, the repetitive, fixated language that has always sustained racism. Colonists everywhere have portrayed indigenous people as brutes unable to control their urges. But Martin is not a ‘settler’. He’s a middle-class professional, a fourth-generation South African, a political liberal, a democrat. He’s not a racist–at least, he’s no more of a racist than anyone else, as he always says. He gets irritable, for good reason
. He hates the mess, the clutter, the disregard for other people and their property. But he can distinguish between the unthinking behaviour of an individual and the supposed disposition of a race. Now this. kaffir? He can hardly believe this archaic language is lodged in him.
25
Highlands is one of those tiny suburbs most people don’t even recognize, but I know someone who lived there as a child forty years ago, in a block of flats on the very edge of the ridge.
On weekends, he once told me, there would be skokiaan parties on the slopes below, where women sold their home-brew among the bluegums, and a blend of dagga smoke and mbaqanga melodies would drift up on the breeze. Inevitably someone would call the police. The vans would arrive in Hunter Street with squealing tyres and the cops would go chasing after people with their batons, while others lay in wait for the fugitives on Stewart’s Drive. White policemen and black partygoers, crashing around in the veld, bawling and swearing. The balconies of the flats offered a grandstand view, and whole families would gather to watch, as if they were at the pantomime.
Once one of the neighbours, vaulting over a couch in his haste to catch every minute of the entertainment, cracked his skull on the keystone of an archway and had to be taken away in an ambulance.
26
Herman Charles Bosman shot dead his stepbrother in the family home in Bellevue on a Saturday night in 1926. The house at 19 Isipingo Street was pointed out to me one day by my friend Louise, as we drove past on the way to my flat in Webb Street (the extension of Isipingo on the Yeoville side of Bezuidenhout Avenue). After that, I hardly ever passed by there without being reminded of murder.
As an admirer of Bosman’s work, I thought that people should be made aware of this historic site. I imagined a marker; nothing brassy, mind you, just a simple tablet, like those paving stones that carry the impress of the manufacturer. The spot should be marked on the tourist maps as a place of interest, I thought. Death by shooting was less common in those days, in my suburb at least, and seemed more benign. Bosman himself had given it a romantic sheen. Today I would want a map that is more complete, more representative, recording every violent death on the Witwatersrand, above ground and below, by axe and blade and bullet. What a title deed to despair it would be, this map of the city of the dead, cross-stitched in black, crumpling under the weight of sorrow as you struggle to unfold it on the dining-room table.
Louise finds this morbid. Why not a map of the living? she asks. Why not a map showing every room, in every house, in every street of this bursting city, where a life began?
27
Homemade (Roll 1)
a brazier. a 25-litre drum–BEETLE RESIN–with triangular holes punched through it (the tines of a garden fork?). an aureole of ash and cinders on the pavement, when the brazier has been carried away. a black sun of burnt grass on the yellow verge. a cob with blackened kernels caught in its teeth. stainless-steel shelving from gutted fridges, planks from construction sites encrusted with dried cement, splintered chipboard, printed metal sheets from bus shelters–‘It’s a pleasure dealing with the professionals’–estate agents’ placards, lengths of angle-iron chained to a no-parking sign. an apple box full of the green spearheads of mielie leaves and the golden shag of their plucked beards. a wire fence brown with rust, wavy as fishnet. a grey-paper shopping bag with the stars and stripes on it. rows of plastic plates arranged on paving stones like counters in a board game. the broken propellor of a banana skin. a canvas awning with its aluminium legs moored to rocks. exhaust pipes and baffles dangling like the day’s catch on a line strung between two bluegums. a flattened cardboard carton–FIVE ROSES QUALITY TEA. a window pane glazed with twentieth-century news. the driver’s seat of a car standing on its metal runners like a sleigh. a silver bucket with a rag wrung hard as a root in its bottom. a white plastic milk crate like an architect’s model in a drift of red sand. a green plastic garden chair, with one leg missing, propped on a paint tin–WALL & ALL. a greasy mattress with a trumpet flower fallen upon it like an omen–‘It’s starting to look like a township around here.’ cardboard fruit trays stacked into spirals like gigantic snail shells. two gigantic snail shells in the fists of a black woman. a black woman. a brazier
28
My people are islanders. I am happy enough on the edge of the city, combing its long shores while the weather drives currents through the veld. My English blood makes me go clockwise, the rest urges me the other way around.
29
As we sat in the kitchen of Jeff’s house in Rockey Street, drinking beer and eating prawn rolls from his uncle’s restaurant in Chinatown, he shared with Branko and me the scheme for his next artistic project: a wall of remembrance.
The city is passing away, said Jeff, even as we speak, and everyone in it, including ourselves. We must build ourselves a memorial while there is still time. Every person in the Greater Johannesburg area, identified by the voters’ roll, must be required to donate an object to the artist for use in the work. This object, which shall be no larger than a standard brick, will be enclosed in due course in a transparent resin block of those very dimensions. These object-enclosing bricks will be used in turn to construct a wall. The Great Wall of Jeff.
There and then, with a feverish sense of our own impending demise, we began to work out the costs. Or rather, because Branko insisted that we be realistic, the extent of the funds we would have to raise. ‘Europe is awash with cash for installations and stuff like that,’ said Jeff. ‘Asia unfortunately not. An input from the Mainland would be good–but Taiwan is out of the question.’
‘Let’s say you manage to raise the money for a mountain of resin and a sea of glue,’ said Branko. ‘The objects will still be a major headache. How on earth will you get people in this greedy town to give things away?’
‘But we’re not looking for diamond rings and Krugerrands,’ said Jeff, ‘although I’ll bet we get a couple of them. We’re looking for any little thing the donor can be induced to part with. It could be nothing more than a button or a piece of string. Everyone has something they could live without.’
In the small hours, when we had broken out the whisky, we did the quantity surveying, totting up the number of bricks in a ten-metre length of wall, two metres high, two courses thick. Jeff fetched the calculator his brother had sent him from Hong Kong for his birthday. Later we moved on to the likely numbers of everyday objects–keys, coins, lapel badges, pencil sharpeners. Even later we worked through the conventional body parts–appendixes, gallstones, wisdom teeth–and the run-of-the-mill fetishes.
I had started out thinking this was one of those artistic projects that would be easier to realize on paper than in the world. It had been on the tip of my tongue to offer to write it down, to work the idea up into a scrap of fiction, relieving Jeff of the responsibility of having to pretend that practical steps were necessary. But I came away convinced that the Great Wall of Jeff belonged in the city. I even had my eye on a patch of parkland in Bertrams for the construction site.
30
The next morning Branko phoned to say that he had come to his senses and wanted nothing more to do with this mad scheme. Frankly, I was relieved. Once my sensible sibling, with his litany of costs and constraints, was out of the picture, we would be free to build as we pleased. And, indeed, the scheme immediately took an interesting new direction.
‘Calling it an art work will create the wrong impression,’ I said to Jeff. ‘People are so ill-disposed towards art. Let’s make it a public works project.’
‘What difference will that make?’
‘We’ll employ brick-makers, we’ll create jobs, the whole thing will be voluntary and transparent. Instead of dictating to people, we’ll ask them nicely to donate the materials, it will improve the quality of the objects. Anyone can be coerced into parting with a safety pin. But what’s the point? Let’s say the whole initiative is aimed at those people who wish to belong to it, who have an active desire to be commemorated.’
It was t
his line of thinking that introduced the question of values.
Jeff’s idea: ‘Why not have them donate an object that really means something to them. And let them put a price on it, an estimate of its worth, which we can etch upon the brick along with their names. This is the Golden City, after all, the capital of buying and selling. And what is a city if not a showcase of subjective attachments?’
My idea: ‘Why a wall? Half the city has already vanished behind walls. Even a semi-transparent one can only make things worse. Why not something useful?’
At which point there arose before my mind’s eye a building that owed something to the Crystal Palace, and something else to the Transvaal Museum in Paul Kruger Street, Pretoria, and something more to the OK Bazaars in the Eastgate Mall. It was the Hyperama of Sentimental Value. I was walking along its shiny corridors, surrounded on all sides by a peculiarly impenetrable transparency, where objects hung suspended, attached by nothing but space to the names of the people who once loved them.
31
Occasionally, when Louise was teaching at the Twilight Children’s Shelter in Esselen Street and I was working as an editor at Ravan Press in O’Reilly Road, we would meet for lunch at the Florian in Hillbrow. If the weather was good, we sat outside on the first-floor balcony. Then she would slip her arms out of her paint-stained overalls and tie the sleeves in a big bow across her chest, so that she could feel the sun on her bare shoulders. Despite the chocolate-dipped letters of its Venetian name, the Florian offered English boarding-house fare: chops and chips, liver and onions with mashed potatoes, mutton stews and long-grained rice. We drank beer, although it was sure to make us sleepy, watched the traffic in the street below, and stayed away from work longer than the lunch hour we were entitled to.
Portrait with Keys Page 4