Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Now who’s to say whether this painter, this tall man in overalls, was even tall, was even wearing overalls? And who’s to say what was in his mind as he finished stirring his paint and stepped back to look at the wall?

  A ‘pentimento’, in the jargon of art historians, is a place where the painter ‘repented’ or changed his mind, revealed with the passage of time as the concealing paint ages and becomes transparent. In her book Pentimento, Lillian Hellman took this process as a metaphor for the writing of a memoir. The appearance of the original conception and the second thought, superimposed within the same frame, is ‘a way of seeing and then seeing again’.

  There is something to be said for falling back on the fallible memory, the way one falls back on a soft bed at the end of a working day.

  This is the version of the painter I will persevere with: he is a sensitive man, not a butcher. It pains him that he has to wipe out this mural, which reminds him of his own past. When he stands in the glow of these colours, he feels the light of childhood on his skin. But he is a pragmatist too, and has to put food on his table. He steps back to look at the wall, to get the whole thing clear in his mind, to let it settle on the damp soil of his memory. He knows that he is the last person who will ever see it like this. Then he takes up his roller and gets on with the job.

  67

  In Vienna, at the end of the nineteen-twenties, Elias Canetti befriended a young invalid named Thomas Marek. Marek, who was almost totally paralysed, spent his days in a wagon outside the house at No. 70 Erzbischofgasse, reading a book propped on the pillow beside him and turning the pages with his tongue. He was always intrigued to hear from the able-bodied what it felt like to run, to skip, to jump over hurdles. But what fascinated him most of all was falling. Once, when Canetti tripped and fell in his presence, he was so delighted that the writer resolved to fall again, from time to time, just to amuse him. And he did just that, he says, through the course of their friendship. He became so adept at stumbling and falling ‘credibly’, without hurting himself, that Marek suggested he should write an essay on the subject, called ‘The Art of Falling’. I wish that he had written this essay, I would like to read it.

  68

  Johannesburg is justly renowned for its scenic waterways. The finest body of water in my part of town is generally held to be the pond at Rhodes Park, established when the city was young on the site of an existing vlei, but I have always preferred Bruma Lake, which replaced the old sewage treatment works on the banks of the Jukskei. When the lake was first excavated in the eighties, as the focal point for a new shopping centre, there were teething troubles: the Jukskei kept washing down garbage and clogging the drainage system. Not long after the grand opening they had to drain the water to make modifications to the filters, and the system has worked well ever since. In 2000 and 2001, when the Bruma serial killers were at work in the eastern suburbs, the bodies of several men were discovered in the water, and the police had the lake drained to search for clues. It was a salutary reminder that the lake was artificial, that it was nothing but a reservoir lined with plastic. There was something fiercely reassuring about that reeking muddy hole in the ground, and it was almost a pity when the frogmen and the waders in gumboots had finished scouring the silty bottom, in vain, and the thing could be filled up with water again.

  In Johannesburg, the Venice of the South, the backdrop is always a man-made one. We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places. We are happy taking the air on the Randburg Waterfront, with its pasteboard wharves and masts, or watching the plastic ducks bob in the stream at Montecasino, or eating our surf ’n turf on Cleopatra’s Barge in the middle of Caesar’s.

  When Bruma Lake was brimming again and the worst of the stench had dispersed, Minky and I had supper down on the quay at Fishermen’s Village. Afterwards we took a stroll over the little pedestrian replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, with its stays and cables picked out in lights, and watched the reflections dancing on the dead water.

  69

  A schoolgirl turns in from a side street a block away and comes towards me. A little girl of nine or ten, in a Jeppe Prep uniform and short socks, with a satchel on her back. A perfectly ordinary little girl on her way home from school. Or she would be, perfectly ordinary, I mean, if she were not wearing a diving mask and snorkel. Coming towards me, on a spring afternoon in Roberts Avenue, snorkelling through the slanting sunlight.

  Assuming that her performance must be for the benefit of spectators like me, for the woman sweeping the stoep at the old-age home or the barber under his canvas awning, I expect her to be giggling or suppressing a giggle. But her face behind the glass is serious. The snorkel tube is transparent, the mask is rimmed with pink rubber, her eyes look out with the astounded, strained expression of a diver who has just sunk below the surface for the first time and discovered a second world. She gazes at me as if I am a fish, a creature covered in spines, trailing poisonous filaments, jagged with exotic colour, and passes me, moving slowly through the air, with bubbles of anxiety breaking around her.

  I walk on for a few paces, then glance over my shoulder. She will be looking back to giggle at my bemused reaction, I am sure. Or her skinny shoulders will be shaking, at least. But she is neither looking back nor laughing. She is simply going on, her head drifting slowly from one side to the other, her open palms floating back on the air. There are steps cut into the verge, where the tram used to stop, and she goes slowly down them to the kerb, holding onto the metal railing, puts a foot in the roadway, fords fearlessly out into the traffic on Roberts Avenue.

  My feet have turned to lead, my head is round and deaf. She has submerged the world, and me in it. The light streams like water over everything, the grass on the verges shifts in currents of astonishment, as I press on into the deep end of the city.

  70

  I found Sunset by Marios on a Yeoville street corner, left out for the garbage men, along with an illustrated edition of A Nest of the Gentry by Turgenev. My first impression–that two more ill-matched objects would be hard to imagine–proved to be superficial. Despite the silken thread of the bookmark and the richly textured, cream-coloured endpapers, the book, produced by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1951, is poorly designed and printed. The moody theatrical illu-strations (by Konstantin Rudakov) would have appealed to Marios. His painting is pure kitsch. It shows a tropical island, with palms and seagulls in silhouette against a sky of layered oils like a complicated cocktail. For many years, I contemplated turning it into an art work by Neil Goedhals. I have the rubber stamp with Goedhals’s name, there is an inviting patch of beige beach sand in the foreground waiting for such an imprint, it would be simple. But I always baulked when I saw that meticulously painted ‘Marios’ coiled like a serpent in the bottom right-hand corner. Now I have given Sunset away to the Little Eden charity shop (I’ve kept the Turgenev). I miss it already. If I didn’t have foreign exchange to organize, I would drive out to Edenvale and try to bargain it back.

  71

  The SPCA book shop in Edenvale is open on Saturday mornings only. Volunteers, nearly always women, sell the books donated to the Society from a ramshackle room adjoining the kennels. Sheep graze in the paddock next to the parking lot, while a lumbering tortoise scrapes its shell against the fence. Occasionally, a dog will get into the shop and clatter around in a frenzy of delight, sniffng everywhere, bumping into boxes of magazines, dusting the lower shelves with its tail, mad with the scent of ten thousand dog lovers on a million pages. The combination of second-hand books and stray animals is unnerving.

  72

  I have employed the Gorilla for some years now, engaging and disengaging it once, twice, a dozen times a day. ‘Never leave it off,’ my dad warned me. ‘Even if you’re just popping into the shop to buy a newspaper. It only takes a minute
to steal a car.’ The action has become second nature. I reach for the lock on the floor beside the seat, hook the pigtail over the rim, lower the arm, clamp the jaws. My mastery is complete. In a few seconds of smoothly habitual movement, I extend my power over my property, laying claim to it in my absence, seizing it in leathery paws with an iron grip; and then I withdraw that power again and reduce it to its proper, meagre dimensions. I can do it in the dark. I could probably do it with one hand tied behind my back. I am a persuasive advertisement for the product and the security it offers.

  73

  After an absence of six months, the owner of the bathroom scale is back in the parking lot at the Darras Centre, renting it out to passers-by. To protect the device from wear, he has covered it in bubble wrap secured with packaging tape, leaving a window of clear plastic over the dial.

  ‘How much do I weigh?’ asks a scruffy white boy, stepping onto the scale and looking down between his dirty feet.

  The proprietor of the weighing stall leans over to look. ‘Thirty-two kilos.’

  ‘What does it cost?’

  ‘Fifty cents,’ the man says wearily.

  ‘Phew! That much!’

  And the boy gets off quickly, grateful that he is not expected to pay.

  74

  A letter to my cousin in China (a film by Henion Han about a Chinese family in Africa)

  I Henion and his father travel to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea. Chi Ho Han was born here in the village of Wenchang. As a young man of eighteen he left home to seek work, travelling first to Singapore and then finding work on ships. The Second World War left him stranded in Johannesburg, where he spent most of his life, before emigrating to Los Angeles in 1990. He has been dreaming for nearly sixty years of returning to Hainan, his ‘real home’.

  But the homecoming is not what he expected. The island has changed, he cannot place friends from his distant childhood or recall the times they shared. The people he meets are equally unsure of him: he cannot explain where he has been or who he is. With the recognition that he does not belong here, that the gap between them will never be bridged, his bewilderment grows. After a day of frustrating questions and half-understood explanations, he is exhausted and confused. Rather than returning him joyfully to the remembered past, the visit has cast him adrift in an uncertain present.

  II Henion and his father journey to Taiwan to retrieve the family bones. Henion’s mother and grandmother are both buried on the outskirts of Taipei. His father wants to disinter their bones and take them with him to his new home in Los Angeles. And there is something else: he has been diagnosed with cancer. As he prepares for his own death, he wishes to gather the dead around him.

  The mother’s tomb is easily found. There is a neat slab surfaced with small white tiles, a lettered plaque on the retaining wall, a memorial portrait. Twenty years have stained the wall with lichen and damp, and the portrait is faded and pitted, but the slab is as shiny as a kitchen floor. A workman in a checked shirt and bright red baseball cap breaks off the edges of the slab with a sledgehammer and levers up the panels to expose the coffin. Then he tears away the lid with a pickaxe. Lying on its side within, as if resting on a pillow, is a small skull. This moment of revelation sends the old man reeling. The workman gathers tibia and fibula, rib and scapula and skull, and puts them in a white bag. A denture remains behind in the wet black pulp.

  The grandmother’s tomb is more difficult. They expect to find a well-tended and orderly cemetery, where it will be a simple matter to identify the tomb, but instead the place is overgrown and neglected, the paths choked by jungle fern and bamboo. They have a photograph showing a tomb with a convex lid, a small white vase at its foot, but even the caretaker does not recognize it. Their search reveals nothing. Then a family friend who attended the funeral arrives to help them, and they find the tomb in the undergrowth, the site marked miraculously by the white vase, standing clean and whole in the tangle of roots and leaves.

  III Henion and his sister convey the bones of their mother and grandmother to a crematorium. This is no discreet furnace, where the bones slide politely out of sight and are reduced to ashes behind the scenes. Instead, the cremator scoops handfuls of the bones from a tray into a wok. He squats, in the age-old posture of the artisan, and blazes away at the bones with a blowtorch. In the blue breath of the torch the bones whiten and flake. Is it chance that the cremator and his assistant are costumed so well for their work? From a distance, her blouse has a bony print, all knuckles and vertebrae (from closer up it appears to be writing). He is wearing an abstractly ashen check. They are on close terms not just with the bones, but with the light and the air. Ash and smoke wreathe through the sockets of the skull, fragments of bone and ash are gathered on a sheet of newspaper like crumbs after a meal. There is mortality on the air, they are breathing it in. Bones stand around in basins and tubs, as matter-of-factly as clothes at the laundry or vegetables in the kitchen. The young woman uses tongs and brushes; the hands of the man are bare. The mark of a craftsman. What carpenter would put the unfeeling fabric of a glove between himself and the grain of the wood?

  When the heat has made the bones brittle, he smashes them into small pieces. The splintering is unspeakably violent, it makes you aware of the bones in your hands, the teeth in your mouth. The skeleton, especially the skull, preserves the semblance of a unique human form: we can imagine the flesh on this armature. (We know the imaging processes by which forensic scientists–or are they artists?–put flesh and features on the skulls of those who have been dead for years, even for centuries.) So the pulverizing of the skull seems like a long-delayed second death, an obliteration of identity more final than the original burial. The last echo of the physical body fades away. Now even the bones have been reduced to anonymous substance.

  The cremator funnels the bones into two funerary urns, gathers the splinters in a pink plastic dustpan. He grinds the fragments smaller with the handle of his hammer, and his assistant flicks the lip of the urn with her brush. Finally, he wraps the urn in a golden cloth. The young woman, with the elegant ease of a magician’s assistant, lifts the fourth corner into his grasp. With a practised flourish, a magical sleight of hand, he ties a bow in it. Then he stoops, as if he is going to undo the knot with his teeth or devour something, but the movement is involuntary, a sign of the effort required to pull the knot tight.

  IV The final scene of the film: Henion takes a family portrait in Wenchang. We look at these people through the camera, sensing the film-maker standing among us. Thirty villagers are gathered together before a doorway. In the middle, an old man in a white shirt and glasses, whose belonging is uncertain. Someone calls to them: ‘You must sit closer together!’ Perhaps Henion is making the appropriate gestures with his hands, nudging them into the frame. They shuffle tighter in, closing the spaces between them, absorbing the old man into a collective body. Then Henion appears suddenly in the corner of the camera’s eye as he rushes to take the place that has been kept for him in the group.

  The camera keeps rolling.

  They gaze out, shuffling and commenting, settling down. For a moment they fall silent and solemn, even the babies stop their squalling and gurgling, but as the image fades to black, they burst out laughing. Perhaps it is the laughter of recognition? They recognize themselves as a family, as a community of being, for no other reason than that they are all side by side, contained within a single frame. Or perhaps it is relief? Having held still for the camera, which supposedly immortalizes them, they are released back into life.

  75

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  76

  A stoep in Good Hope Street. The deep-blue garden walls hold a precise measure of the twilight still. The smell of grass is quenching after a summer day, the dusk lays a cool hand on the back of your neck. We are talking, my friends and I, with our bare feet propped on the wall of the stoep, our cane chairs creaking. We have been talking and laughing for hours, putting our predicaments in their place, finding ways to keep our balance in a tide of change. We could fetch fresh beer glasses from the door of the fridge, but these warm ones, stickily fingerprinted and smelling of yeast, suit this satiated conversation better. We speak the same language.

  This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.

  The women come back from the pool at Jeppe Girls’ High with their hair still wet, with the damp outlines of their swimming costumes showing through their cotton dresses. (Sally teaches history at the school and has a key to the gate.) The kids are crunching potato chips from the corner shop. They smell of salt and vinegar and chlorine. The suns of our own childhoods fall on their freckled arms.