Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The next day Ben and Chico covered the floor with tarpaulins and sheets of thick plastic. They spent two whole days building a platform of scaffolding and wooden boards almost as large as the room itself. To save time, Ben said, you have to spend it. Once the platform was in place, they would be able to move freely while they installed the extra joists and the ceiling itself. It would save an enormous amount of time and effort not having to go up and down ladders constantly.

  Ben is seventy-five years old. His stolid presence evokes a vanished metaphorical order: as strong as an ox, as placid as a carthorse. He works methodically, precisely and implacably. When he drives in a six-inch nail he uses an eleven-pound hammer, it takes three or four blows, evenly spaced, it goes in straight. He wants to pass these skills on to Chico, who is not yet twenty. Ben thinks of Chico as his apprentice. He speaks to him with unshakeable patience and expects him to work no harder than he does himself.

  As he works, Ben talks, in his long-winded, relentless way. Often he tells stories about the other things he has built or repaired–a garden pavilion in Sandton, the kitchen in a house near Sir Edmund Hillary Primary, a roof in Yeoville. He has just finished raising the wall around a house in Norfolk Street. He noticed that there was a jacaranda planted too close to the perimeter and predicted that in a couple of years’ time the roots would start pushing the wall over. He could have broken out an arch and put in a lintel, giving the roots room to breathe, but it was costly and the owner said no, he’d rather wait until the wall fell over–if he was even alive to see it–and claim for a new one against the insurance. Well, when it does, Ben told him, give me a ring.

  These stories hold me pinned in the doorway of my study. I have work to do, the texts are lying under my desk lamp, lit up like a museum exhibit. But he rolls on like a wagon-wheel or a plough. His stories have no clear beginnings or endings. Like some artful piece of handiwork, one slots seamlessly into the next, so that the opportunity to interrupt is lost.

  Occasionally, as if he senses my impatience, Ben talks about the room in a way that is bound to interest me. ‘This bit of the chimney is called the breast,’ he says (and by his intonation makes it sound anatomical). ‘You can look it up in your dictionary. Go on. And this bit is the flue. I’m not making that up, I promise. And all the way along the edges here we’ll be putting in cornishes. They’re under the scaffolding there in the corner, you can take a look. These are six-inch cornishes. The last lot were the four-inch. Too small, cutting corners again. Look it up in your dictionary, see if it’s there. Cornish.’

  Ben’s tools, his scaffolding, his tarpaulins, his overalls are steeped in the work he has done. The smells of wet cement, rusty water, linseed oil, paint, sawdust are in these things. It is months since the new ceiling, as perfectly flat and blank as a new page under a coat of PVA, drove the outside world back to a proper distance, but still the house smells of this specific history of labour.

  83

  Hello! says the slip of paper the man has just handed me. It is the size of a business card and has been cut from a photocopied sheet. buona vista car guards is typewritten across the top. The other side says: I am not a beggar. My name is……I will watch your car while you are shopping. I am here to ensure your peace of mind and the safety of your property. If you are satisfied with the service, you may offer me a small reward. Have a good day!

  ‘What is your name?’

  He takes back the paper, borrows my pen and leans on the bonnet to write: Victor

  84

  ‘Do you mind if I take a picture of your keys?’ the journalist from Sweden asks.

  We are chatting in the garden, under the pagoda tree, and the bunch is lying on the table between us. The table top is sprinkled with soft, pale blossoms like tiny dropped handkerchiefs.

  ‘Not at all.’

  She aims the camera, stands up into a better angle, wrings the lens and presses the shutter. So much for the candid shot, now for something posed. She jangles the keys at arm’s length, as if shaking water off them, puts them down again near an edge where the blossoms are thickest. Shifts the foot of a wine glass into the frame, then out again.

  ‘Such enormous collections of keys! I’ve never seen anything like it. In Sweden, only a janitor would need this.’

  A tribe of turnkeys.

  ‘I think I’ve got four keys on my ring at home–and that includes the bicycle lock. You’ve got dozens here.’ She fans them out with her forefinger, flips over the immobilizer jack for the car, takes another shot. They shame me now, lying there like the keys to my psyche, a feeler gauge for every insecurity. ‘How do you keep track of them all?’

  The first principle of key management is to separate working groups on interlocking rings. Coming and going through the front: street-door deadlock, Yale, security gate (outside), front-door deadlock, Yale. Coming and going through the back: back-gate padlock, back-door deadlock, Yale, security gate (inside). Coming and going by car: garage door, car door, steering lock, immobilizer, ignition. Miscellaneous: window lock, cellar door, postbox.

  I have threaded them on to the rings with their profiles facing in the same direction, like a dressed file of soldiers. Their noses and chins are familiar to my fingertips, I can find them in the dark.

  ‘Only seventeen, by the way.’ I’ve been totting them up in my head.

  ‘Well, that’s not too bad then,’ she says.

  85

  Genpei Akasegawa’s most beautiful sculpture is A Collection of End Bits of Lead from a Mechanical Pencil, a small and delicate china bowl containing a frittering of pencil leads, none of them more than five millimetres long. These are the stubs that were too short to be gripped by the mechanism of the propelling pencil with which he draws and so had to be ejected. If you look closely you can see–or imagine–the flat edge at one end and the rounded edge at the other where the lead pressed against the paper, a contour that captures the size of the hand that held the pencil, the strokes it preferred to make, its chosen paths across the page, unique as a brush stroke. What this bowl of leavings represents is time spent, work done, measured against an insignificant deficit.

  (Of course, I cannot be sure that this sculpture is evidence of an actual process. It is presented as the accumulated labour of years, but it may have been manufactured in ten minutes, which is all you would need to snap ten cases of unused pencil leads into fragments. I take the artist at his word.)

  This sculpture could be a companion to my own Autobiography, and that may be a good part of its appeal, for nothing is more pleasing than the echo of one’s own voice, even if it is no longer clear which is the voice and which the echo. Autobiography is a shallow wooden box resembling a picture frame, containing 392 pencil stubs (at the last count). The pencils that these stubs commemorate were used and sharpened down to nine or ten centimetres, and then inserted in a pencil extender made from a joint of the bamboo that grows outside my window, and used and sharpened again until there was nothing left for the sharpener to pare. None of the stubs is more than two and a half centimetres long. If you look through the glass front of the box, the stubs form a layer ten centimetres deep, like the leaves and twigs fallen beneath a tree in the woods. Ten years of tinder. Shake the box and you will see the different colours of the shafts. The six-sided barrel of a pencil lends itself to stripes, and so you will see dog-ends of red and black mainly, the ubiquitous Staedtler, but also blue and gold Faber-Castell and solid green government issue. There is very little lettering left, most of it was scoured off in the sharpening, just here and there an ‘–astell’ or an ‘HB’ at the chewable end of the stub.

  86

  The old man used to sit on the pavement outside the Jumbo. He had a piece of cardboard which he put down on the kerb for the cold, creating the impression that he was fastidious about his ragged clothes. He was a small man with a grizzled white head and beard, made to look even smaller by his oversized army greatcoat. His hands were enormous, good for a man twice his size, and the skin was har
d and smooth. I discovered this when I started to give him money. Sometimes, when I put the coins in his hand, my fingertips brushed the skin of his palm. It was leathery, but not folded or creased like a glove. It reminded me of a shoe. The fat pads of his palm, the swollen base of his thumb, the bulging fingers were like the often-polished uppers of old shoes. Why were his hands so big? What work had he done to give them this shape? What substance, grasped or stroked or kneaded over a lifetime, could have given his skin this sheen? It could not be soil. Perhaps it was skin. Is this what skin does to skin?

  87

  The cross in the parking lot at the Church of the Holy Angels is tall enough to challenge the palm tree it stands beside. Our padrão has a shiny metallic frame with panels of blue and white Perspex, lit from within, and glowing in the rush-hour haze at dusk it signals that a bit of Las Vegas has come to Bez Valley. Yet on the whole, the churchyard of this Portuguese parish smacks appropriately of the sea rather than the desert: the white plastered walls offset the colour-coded blues of the roof tiles, the palisades and the notices of the Chubb armed response company.

  From the southern side of Kitchener Avenue you can see the blue cross as well as the minaret of the mosque down in the valley, rising above the rooftops like an opened lipstick. The dome of the minaret is exactly the same blue. Was the cross a riposte?

  As I’m passing by one day, a priest is coming out of the church. When he sees me, he reaches for a remote control device dangling from his belt like a crucifix and jabs it with his thumb. The security gate someone has inadvertently left open to the pavement trundles shut between us like a curtain drawn in the confessional.

  88

  We have left the security arrangements for my birthday party until the last minute, resisting the imposition of it, hoping the problem will resolve itself. Once, your responsibilities as host extended no further than food and drink and a bit of mood music; now you must take steps to ensure the safety of your guests and their property.

  ‘I think it’s irresponsible of us to have a dinner party at all,’ I say to Minky. ‘There should be a municipal by-law that only people with long driveways and big dogs are allowed to entertain. We should call the whole thing off.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Just stop obsessing.’

  The last time we had people over, I had to keep going outside to check that their cars were still there. It spoilt my evening.

  ‘We’ll get a guard,’ she says. She phones the armed response people. It is too late, all their guards are booked. But they recommend the Academy of Security, where trainees are registered for on-the-job experience. She phones the Academy. Yes, they do supply security guards for single functions. A dinner party? Sevenish? Can do. That will be the half-shift deal, unless you want him to stay past midnight, and pay the full-shift rate? Being inexperienced, the guard cannot be armed, of course, but he will be under constant supervision. They could arrange an armed guard from another company, probably–but at such short notice, it will be more expensive, you understand? We settle for inexperienced, unarmed, half-shift.

  ‘The security costs more than the food,’ I say, ‘and he’s still an appie. We should have gone to a restaurant.’

  The apprentice security guard is called Bongi. So far, he has only acquired the top half of a uniform, a navy-blue tunic that is too short in the sleeve. The checked pants and down-at-heel shoes are clearly his own. By way of equipment, he has a large silver torch and a panic button hanging around his neck. My theory is that he is earning the uniform item by item, as payment or incentive. After six months or so, he’ll be fully qualified and fully clothed.

  ‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ I say to Minky. ‘He’s just a kid.’

  Bongi is standing under a tree on the far side of the road. He looks vulnerable and lonely. It is starting to drizzle. Minky takes him an umbrella from the stand at the door, the grey and yellow one with the handle in the shape of a toucan, which once belonged to her dad. With this frivolous thing in his hand, Bongi looks even more poorly equipped to cope with the streets.

  ‘This is unforgivable,’ I say, ‘this is a low point. I’d rather live in a flat than do this.’

  ‘What difference would that make?’ says Minky, who always sees through my rhetoric. ‘People have still got to park their cars somewhere.’

  ‘A complex, then, I’d rather live in a complex. Some place with secure parking.’

  The guests begin to arrive. Bongi waves the torch around officiously, and then stands on the pavement under the toucan umbrella, embarrassed.

  When dinner is served, Minky takes out a plate of food and a cup of coffee. ‘Poor kid’s starving,’ she says when she comes back.

  Excusing myself from the table, on the pretext of fetching more wine from the spare room, I sneak outside and gaze at him from the end of the stoep. He’s squatting on the kerb, with the plate between his feet on the tar, eating voraciously.

  ‘He’s a sitting duck,’ I say to Minky in the kitchen, when we’re dishing up seconds. ‘What the hell is he expected to do if an armed gang tries to steal one of the cars, God forbid. Throw the panic button at them? This whole arrangement is immoral. Especially our part in it. Our friends are insured anyway, if someone steals Branko’s car, he’ll get another one. What if this kid gets hurt while we’re sitting here feeding our faces and moaning about the crime rate? I think he’ll have seconds too.’

  With a plate of Thai chicken under his belt, and another in prospect, Bongi is looking better. We exchange a few words. He comes from a farm near Marikana, out near the Magaliesberg, and he’s been in Joburg since June. His uncle found him this job, his uncle has been a ‘full-time security’ for five years. He looks quite pleased with himself. Perhaps he’s thinking this is not such a bad job after all.

  But we cannot see it that way. At ten-thirty, Minky calls him inside to watch the cars from the stoep, over the wall. When the supervisor arrives an hour later, there’s a hullabaloo. You’ve got to maintain standards, he says, especially when you’re training these guys. You can’t have them getting soft on the job.

  That’s it, we say to one another afterwards. No more parties. Never again.

  89

  In September 1981 it snowed in Johannesburg for the first time in decades. I was working for a mining house in the city. It was company policy that I should sit with my back to the window, to avoid the distractions of blue sky and sunshine, and I might have missed the onset of the snowfall entirely had a colleague in the next office not telephoned and told me to take a look outside.

  I tilted the blades of the venetian blinds and watched the flakes sifting down, thinking that it would blow over in a few minutes. One by one, the lighted windows in the surrounding buildings filled with people. Snow falling on Joburg, in spring. It was inconceivable.

  At first the snow just speckled the tar and the roofs of the cars in the parking lot in the next block. Then the whole scene whitened. And still it kept falling. People from other departments came into my office, which had one of the better views, giggling and joking. Someone hauled up the blinds so that we could see better, and one of the typists opened a window and caught a few flakes on her palm.

  As the snow thickened, you could sense the expectation rising, a wish transmitting itself, binding us into a new community with a single exhilarating thought. Don’t let it stop. Let it go on snowing, let it go on until there are drifts in the streets, let’s be snowed in, just for once.

  Soon the windows in some of the other blocks began to go dark and we saw people coming out into the streets and running around like children let out of school early. But my boss was a stickler for regulations and we had to go back to our desks. By the time we were allowed to leave, just half an hour earlier than usual, six inches of snow had fallen, and it showed no sign of stopping.

  The snow changed the city miraculously. We were all in it together. There were traffic jams everywhere, but it didn’t matter because they prolonged our time outside. In the s
treets, white businessmen and black newspaper vendors were throwing snowballs at one another. My double-decker inched its way up Eloff Street. Our bus, our whites-only bus, came under repeated attack from gangs of black snowballers, messengers and cleaners from the office blocks, free to bombard us. They took aim at our windows, so that we would have to open them to clean off the snow if we wanted to restore the view, and then they had a chance to pelt us. After a while some strategist on the upper deck realized that there was snow to be had on the roof of the bus, and, braving a bombardment, leaned out of the window and scraped together enough to fashion a counter-attack. It took an hour and a half to reach the busway on the edge of Joubert Park, where the first snowmen were already standing. But no one minded. Every vehicle had become part of a carnival procession. Every driver, marvelling at the unexpected slipperiness under the wheels, felt out of his element and part of a great experiment.

  White kept falling, this cold and foreign substance. People threw colour at one another. ‘You want to be white?’ the newspaper vendors said, ‘Well here it comes. How do you like it?’ And the businessmen said, ‘You think you’re white, chucking snowballs at us? Try this for size.’ And this ‘being white’, this ‘white’ itself, was nothing more than a froth that melted between your fingers or burst apart on a turned shoulder, was something improbable and silly that you could play games with, that did no real harm, that would not last.

  Janice and I had an arrangement to meet in Hillbrow. On the bus, I decided that Christmas would come early this year, and so I went into Exclusive’s and bought her a book, the Thames & Hudson Matisse. It was beyond my means–but the snow had made me generous. I wanted to go through the streets with the brightly wrapped package under my arm like a character in an O. Henry story. We met in the Gattopardo coffee shop and I gave her the book, and she gave me a jersey to put on under my jacket. Then we walked and walked, slipping and sliding like everyone else, clutching at strangers to keep from falling.