50
It took three days to frame Ilona Anderson’s exhibition. Having no workbench or tub, I had to wash the flimsy sheets of glass in the shower, resting the bottom edge on a sponge, then carry them wet to the table in the hallway, where I dried them with crumpled sheets of newspaper. The drawings showed puppets and dolls, made to squirm by many huge, puppet-masterly hands, every surface trembling with theatrical colour, applied as thickly as lipstick or toothpaste, and always on the point of smudging. Three dozen works were finished without a hitch. But on the morning of the opening, a wine glass broke in my hand under the kitchen tap and sliced my forefinger to the bone. It is twenty years since the wound healed, but if a rim of glass even brushes against the scar those livid colours bleed out of my memory.
51
Minky’s brother Alan phones: ‘You won’t believe what’s happened.’ He sounds so dejected that for a moment she thinks someone must have died. He goes on: ‘Have you driven down Scott Street lately?’ Then she knows, before he tells her: the Scott Street house, where they once lived, has been demolished.
In his fifty years in Joburg, Alan has lived in four houses, all within walking distance of one another. In fact, when he started jogging, he laid out his route to take him past three of them–Murray Street, Scott Street, William Road. Passing by these landmarks, he would retrace his passage from child, to teenager, to young married man, and return to the present, in Victoria Street, his fourth–and, he says, final–address, more fully himself. But one after the other, over the years, the houses have been knocked down. Scott Street was the last.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ he says. ‘It was there last week and now there’s nothing left but the foundations. I’m starting to feel paranoid. It’s as if someone is trying to erase me from the record. I half expect to come home from work one day and find my house knocked down.’
Minky’s father built the house in Scott Street in the mid-sixties, when she and Al were teenagers. He oversaw every step of the construction and spared no cost. Tiles of Italian marble, doorframes of Rhodesian teak. Even the roof-trusses were imported from Canada, because Canadian pine is stronger and straighter.
‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ he used to say, ‘but you can leave something behind. This house will stand for a hundred years.’
52
The last day of 1998. I stop at the Jumbo Liquor Market in Op de Bergen Street on the way home to buy something for the New Year celebrations. Perhaps I should pick up a bottle of whisky? Or champagne?
The usual hawkers are gathered on the verandah outside. The tall cobbler and his pals. For years, he wore a springbok-skin cap, a hand-sewn thing that Crusoe would have given a sack of nails for, with flaps standing up like ears and a peak like a snout. With his bony cheeks and goatee, he looked like a buck himself or a part-time Pan. But then he abandoned the cap in favour of the conventional black imitation leather Tyrolean.
While I’m engaging the Gorilla, a man appears at the window. I’ve never seen him before. He puts his face close to the two-inch gap between the top of the glass and the frame. A face made in the make-up department: a droll and drunken coloured face below a greasy cloth cap, missing teeth, smashed nose, boozy breath. ‘I must watch this car, this place is full of skollies,’ he tells me, gesturing vaguely towards the cobbler’s circle and then pointing very definitely down Eleanor Street. ‘Just last week they stole that car.’ The car in question is a bakkie, drawing up that instant outside No. 12, having come the wrong direction up the one-way from Nourse Street. Two men get out of the bakkie and go into the house. What does he mean they stole that car last week? Who would have taken such a battered old pickup? And how did they get it back again so soon? Then logic turns his sentence inside out. He means it’s a stolen vehicle. Those are the thieves! Probably a thief himself. Takes one to know one. I barge him aside with the door and go into the bottle store.
Champagne bubbles up again briefly. But I think of the obligatory cork-popping in a year’s time, and two years’ time, and buy beer instead and a half-jack of J&B.
When I get back to my car, the coloured guy is hanging around on the other side of the street, shamefaced and jumpy, trying hopelessly to disguise his expectation. I dump the packet in the boot. I’m starting to regret my bad temper, starting to feel guilty. It’s the season for giving, after all. I call him over and give him five bucks.
Now he wants to earn it, he wants to deserve my generosity. And he wants me to see the point too. ‘I’m watching,’ he says vehemently, ‘I’m watching.’ He points to his eyes, forefinger and little finger extended, the other two tucked into his fist by his thumb.
I get into the car.
‘I’m watching.’
‘Thank you,’ I say through the diminishing gap, as I shut the door, ‘thank you very much.’
His face is close to the glass again. Talking. Gesturing. Prongs of forefinger and little finger waggling, roving, suggesting tireless vigilance. I stick the key in the Gorilla but it won’t disengage: in my haste to get away, I’ve jammed the lock somehow. He goes on talking. I cannot ignore him. Elias Canetti once said: ‘I will be dead when I no longer hear what a person is telling me about himself.’ This cannot be what he had in mind. I open the window two inches. His face comes closer. He’s tilting it to one side, so that I can see more of it through the gap. He wants me to know who he is, to look at him. He wants me to recognize him when I see him again. His nose is almost inside the car. As if he wants to squeeze in, to seize the hard edges of this opening, pull them wide, and climb through into the sweetly scented interior. When they serviced the car last week, they spilled some green pellets in the ashtray that make it smell like new. New-car scent. I jiggle the Gorilla irritably and it finally pops loose. I put it in its place next to the seat. He’s still talking, quickly, urgently, about thieves and cars and honesty and how we all have to work together against the scourge of skelms. Waving his arms around, pointing up and down Eleanor Street. Making peculiarly graceful movements with his hands, palms pressed together, as if he is praying or preparing to dive into a small pool.
I start the car but he won’t let me go. He’s talking and talking through the gap. Phrases out of the newspapers. Crime wave. rainbow nation. Decent South Africans. standing together. People of God. thieves. liars. love. I start edging away from the kerb, cranking the steering wheel with my left hand and winding up the window with my right. My face is turned to him. We are staring at one another through the narrowing space.
‘I’m not a security,’ he says as the gap closes. ‘I’m not a security, I swear, but I wanna work with the people of the land.’
53
Apie is a wooden steering lock carved by Renier le Roux. Other works in wood by the same sculptor include a spanner (Sleutel No. 13), a security gate (Welkom Tuis) and a brick, which may be used as a doorstop, a weapon or a purse.
54
In 1998, 107 675 cars were stolen in South Africa (295 cars per day). There were 14 965 cars hijacked (41 per day). The incidence of hijacking was directly related to the efficacy of vehicle security systems. The increasing application of alarms, electronic immobilizers, and steering and gear locks, especially to luxury motor cars, has made it almost impossible to steal an unoccupied, stationary car.
In 1998, a survey by the Labour Research Service in Cape Town found that the executive directors of South African companies earned an average of R99 916 per month, or R1.2 million a year, excluding bonuses and other benefits. Executive salaries were sixty times higher than shop-floor wages. A factory worker earning R1 800 a month–the average minimum wage–would have taken five years to earn what the average company director earned in a month. Yet these workers had to consider themselves fortunate, because 40 per cent of black South Africans were unemployed.
In 1999, crime cost South Africa an estimated R30 billion (R80 million a day). However, crime also created jobs. In the past two decades, the private security industry has grown faster than any o
ther economic sector. At the end of August, according to Martin Schönteich of the Institute for Security Studies, the official South African Police Service employed 127 000 people. By contrast, the private security industry employed between 300 000 and 350 000 people, and had an estimated annual turnover of R11 billion.
In August 1999, the prices of new cars available in South Africa ranged from R38 086 for a Fiat Uno Mia to R2 389 000 for a Ferrari 550 Maranello. The prices of steering locks ranged from R59 for the SL2Auto-Lok to R325 for the Gorilla. The price of brown bread was fixed by the government at R1.90 a loaf.
55
My name is……
I am a trained Guard to fight Vehicle and Street Crime
ABACUS Crime Watch
Endorsed by the Mayor of Greater Johannesburg
Guards do not receive Wages
Donation appreciated when parking
Tip on your return, if satisfied with service
Have a nice day A/h 972 6897 Cell 082 6896 181
56
The avenues in Bez Valley around First Street are narrow one-ways lined with red-brick factories, workshops and warehouses. In places, brick facades or corrugated-iron walls front directly onto the roadway as in an old city. However, the area is no warren: the avenues are long and straight, the buildings seldom taller than two storeys, the sky above blue and vast. In the south of Johannesburg, in the manufacturing areas like Selby and Village Deep, similar streets are to be found, but none with exactly this atmosphere. The buildings are occupied by small manufacturers of goods like garden furniture, burglar-proofing and fireworks, alongside businesses offering marquees for hire, cured and smoked meats, or geyser repairs–an assortment that is only superficially incongruous.
Dorfman’s specializes in corrugated cartons and packaging materials. The cardboard boxes are stacked flat in towers on wooden pallets or leant together in long rows against the walls, thousands of boxes in dozens of standard sizes, classified alphanumerically. Most are bundled tightly into fifties or hundreds with plastic straps, as if they would spring into three dimensions without this restraint. Selling is by weight and the new boxes are twice the price of the used ones. The new boxes are generally factory rejects. You will find a minor misalignment in the stapled sides, or a more annoying discrepancy in the dimensions of the flaps, which must be trimmed by hand before the box will fold, or, less often, an error in the printing–and these are the real bargains, of course, because a box with a typo on it is just as useful for moving house as one without.
I need two sizes, something small and sturdy for books, and something larger, flimsier if need be for household effects. A worker shows me the range, folding together samples with the flamboyant ease of a magician making something reappear. I settle for the small B6, which has chevrons on its flaps and four Ls arranged in a square on its sides, like corners in an album where a photograph has fallen out, all printed in red; and the larger D14, which is absolutely plain. We lug the boxes to the scale next to the office. Seventeen kilos. The scale is calibrated to five hundred.
‘Anything else, sir?’ They have self-adhesive tape in thirty-or fifty-metre rolls, clear or brown, masking tape, double-sided tape; bubble wrap by the metre; sisal, nylon, twine; plastic and steel strapping. They have labels, staples and pots of glue, but no mothballs.
There is an animal smell in the air, a gluey effusion of hoof and horn. It suits this uneasy place. The boxes are in an unnatural state, mere suggestions of their fully assembled selves. So many cubic metres of space collapsed into square ones, so many roomfuls of compressed air in every corner. Space in captivity seems as full of explosive potential as a fireworks factory.
57
The windows of the house at No. 58 Kitchener Avenue have been blinded by black film. There could be a funeral parlour behind that morbid porch. An all-seeing eye, the Masonic sign of the defunct neighbourhood watch, peers out through the burglar-proofing. The garden wall is chocolate brown. On either side of the gate there are decorative patterns in the brickwork, holes in the shape of a diamond, five holes across at its widest point, ranging down to a single hole above and below. I am compelled to make the calculation: twenty-five holes in total.
As I pass this house one afternoon, on my island walk, a small object comes into focus. In the very centre of one of these diamonds is a tiny model of a man. A plastic figure from toy-town, as tall as my thumb, standing in the aperture as if in a doorway. In the instant that it catches my eye, I reach out with my left hand–scarcely breaking my stride–scoop it up, and slip it into my pocket.
Turning the figure over in my fingers as I go, I try to work out what it is. Why did I pick it up? A reflex. The way you might take a snack from a plate in passing, even though you’re not hungry, or break a switch from a tree, just to have something to tap on the toe of your shoe as you’re walking. After a block, I bring it out into the light and look at it. A zookeeper grasping a pitchfork with a large cut of red meat impaled on it. He is wearing grey pants tucked into black galoshes, a mustard pullover, a black tie, a peaked cap. A keeper of the old school, a little chipped and faded.
The whole of the next day, the zookeeper stands on my desk as I’m working, beside the jar of pencils. The desk happens to be covered with green baize, and the little green island he is standing on matches the cloth exactly. It is odd, I think, that he is wearing a tie, in his line of work, although he has also rolled up his sleeves. The meat looks like a bloody comma. An oversized chop, a buffalo chop, fit for a tiger. The zookeeper’s head can swivel–it fits into a socket between his shoulders on a tapering peg–and I turn it so that he is gazing at the meat on the end of his fork.
He looks at home among the dictionaries and terminals. And yet he bothers me. What was he doing standing in the wall? A child must have left him there. A boy swinging on the gate, waiting for his dad to come home from work, watching the traffic. I have never seen a child in that funereal yard, but throughout the day a potential boy grows clearer and clearer in my mind, until he is as familiar as the figure itself. I can see this toy in his sticky hand, I can smell the orange he is softening by rolling it between the sole of his foot and the garden path, the better to suck the juice, while his other foot curls on the bottom bar of the gate.
By five, I have decided to take the zookeeper back. I have deadlines to meet and no time for walking, so I drive down to the house in Kitchener, although it is just around the corner. A tricky business. Should I go straight up to the wall and put the thing down? What if someone is watching from behind the windows, which are as blank as dark glasses in the afternoon sun? Should I find some pretext, like pulling up my socks, for returning the toy to its place unnoticed? I park the car in Essex Street and walk back down the hill. For a moment, as I approach the house, I consider dropping the figure in the letterbox, but in the end I simply put it back where I found it, in the hole in the wall, and walk away, half expecting some suspicious voice to call after me.
The zookeeper stands there for a month. Every time I pass, I expect the figure to be gone, but it is always there. Am I the only person who ever looks at this exact spot? Any child going by should notice it. Is this object invisible to everyone but me?
After six weeks, history repeats itself. As I’m passing, my hand rises, involuntarily, and takes the little man from the hole, and puts him in my pocket. He is here now, as I write, flourishing a fresh chunk of meat at me like Tolstoy’s punctuation.
58
Excess (Roll 3)
the shoes, the socks, the button-down collars, the corduroy jackets. the tables, the chairs. the pavements, the grass on the verges, the flower beds, the impatiens, the Barberton daisies. the street names on the kerbstones, the white lines, the street lights, the bulbs in the sockets. the buckets, the spades. the cars, the caravans, the motorboats. the sheepskin seat covers, the halogen spotlights, the retractable aerials, the loudspeakers, the rubber mats. the driving, the parking, the driving back. the money in the parking meters. the walking in th
e parks, the drinking in the bars, the talking, the laughing, the eating in the restaurants, the glasses, the wine in the glasses, the knives, the forks, the plates, the food on the plates, the baby potatoes, the stuffed trout, the chocolate mousse, the brandy snifters. the reading, the writing. the paper, the pen, the ink in the pen. the books, the books, the books
59
A table in the Springbok Boarding House, a round table covered with a plastic cloth, in a room with a tall window. There is something lemony about the table. Is it an image on the cloth? The smell of cough mixture? Or perhaps there is a bottle of Rose’s lime juice, with limes and their leaves in relief on the glass, a helpful braille for blind tipplers. An old man is sitting at the table, drawing a field of racehorses with numbers on their saddlecloths. Thoroughbreds at the gallop, their muscles tautly sculpted, the fine threads of their manes and tails flying. He is drawing with a blue pen on a lined page from a school exercise book. He is drawing for the child beside him, who kneels on the seat of another chair, leaning forward to see every stroke. There is a jar on the table with a flower in it. The room smells of food, the plastic tablecloth sticks to the child’s forearms. A sugar bowl, a wireless, an ashtray. The rest of the room is dim, as if the table stood under a spotlight, but its position in the room is clear: it is in the corner farthest from the door, near the window, and the old man is facing towards the light. Now he has put aside the horses and is drawing again on a fresh sheet, drawing bicycles, racing bicycles, and the cyclists on them as small and neat as jockeys. The child marvels as the blue wheels take shape, spoke by spoke.
When my grandfather died in the early sixties, this memory was the largest part of my inheritance. The material part was scarcely more substantial: a handful of lapel badges. One of them showed the chevrons of the Citroën marque, another the outline of the African continent on a long pin. All the rest had been issued, at the rate of one a year, by the Railway Recreation Club at Berea Park, where the old man was a member. There were around three dozen of these ornate little enamelled shields, with gilt edges and the initials of the club and year of issue inscribed on scrolls, and not much to distinguish one from another except the dates. But once or twice in the fifties, some creative temperament on the committee had asserted itself (I imagine) and a badge with an unusual shape or colour was produced. There was one in the shape of a fish, coloured the pale sea-green of salmon scales. It must have delighted the club’s anglers.
Portrait with Keys Page 7