Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  In Pretoria Street, outside the Ambassador Hotel, a coloured hobo, barefoot in the snow, took me by the arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, boss. It’s just God defrosting His fridge.’

  Louise was in Durban when the snow fell. She drove all the way back just to see it, but by the time she arrived most of it had melted. Within a day or two the city had returned to its cool normality and there was nothing left of the snowfall but a few snowmen, fainting away on the grass in Joubert Park like foolish Europeans who had had too much sun.

  90

  The cage occupied by Max the Gorilla has the blatant charm of a garden in Meyerton. There is an expanse of rolling kikuyu and a water feature over on the left. The perimeter wall is good red face-brick covered with greenery (I recognize it as the same creeper I have on my own garden wall, with its yellow flowers and string-bean pods). The gates set into the wall are Windsor green. Here and there, clumps of trees and shrubs have been ringed by fences topped with electrified wires; a sign says that gorillas are destructive creatures and that the new plants must be protected until they can establish themselves. The insulators and strands of wire lend the enclosure a surprising sophistication. What suburban landscape is complete without these things? They are as evocative as river pebbles and railway sleepers. It’s as if Max’s keepers have set out to cultivate an environment that parodies our own. It is not even a parody. All he needs is a gazebo and a pool, and any one of the spectators would trade places with him.

  Max’s status as a crime fighter has been acknowledged in many ways. After he was shot, members of the public sent him gifts and donated cash so that a ‘burglar-proof’ cage could be built for him. He was declared Newsmaker of the Year by the Johannesburg Press Club. Radio 702 sent a man dressed in a gorilla suit to the Milpark Hospital with a message for Max’s attacker: We’re looking forward to seeing YOU behind bars. Fanie Booysen, a retired zookeeper who had looked after Max for nearly twenty years, came to visit him, and the invalid rose from his sickbed to greet his old friend. The police gave him a bullet-proof vest and tried to recruit him as a reservist.

  But the single greatest accolade came when Maxidor, a company that specializes in physical security such as gates and grilles–‘Your home can be the safest place on earth!’–decided to adopt Max. In an official ceremony at the enclosure on 15 April 1999, Max, already embedded in the name of the company and its products, was incorporated into Maxidor as the embodiment of the corporate vision. ‘We view our adoption of Max as a long-term relationship. Max will become part of our family as much as we will become part of his. We commit ourselves to be there for him and to support him through anything. With him we will share the growth and changes of life and society in our country.’

  If you visit the Johannesburg Zoo, you will find a notice-board on the viewing platform overlooking Max’s cage, where a couple of clippings about his adventures have been pinned up. My American friend is amazed. Where’s the merchandise? she wants to know. If Max was an American, there would be a multimedia presentation, a souvenir store, a museum. This would be Max-the-Fucking-Gorilla-World.

  91

  Piet Retief disarmed me almost from the first word. He had come to my window in the parking lot at Kensington Gardens in Langermann Drive. A sunburnt Afrikaner, with a drinker’s complexion under the tan, obviously a tramp, but holding on to his dignity enough to trim his beard and wash his hands. ‘How are you, sir?’ he asked me.

  ‘Very well thanks,’ I said unkindly, ‘and how are you?’

  ‘Can’t complain.’

  Can’t complain? Kannie kla nie. It was such a peculiar thing for a man in his situation to say. He meant it too, apparently, for there was no sob story and he did not ask for money. We just spoke about this and that, the weather, the fact that the jacarandas make a mess of the pavements. In the end I gave him some small change anyway, with the usual awareness that the first instalment would set the standard for any future transactions there might be, and he accepted it with an air of mild surprise, as if it were my idea entirely, which strictly speaking it was.

  There proved to be many continuations. Piet Retief (as I christened him) and I had the same territory. He was a parking-lot specialist. Perhaps he had figured out that someone packing groceries into the boot of a car feels their privilege rather more sharply than an empty-handed pedestrian. So he would pop up in the parking lot at the Darras Centre, or outside Game at Bruma Lake, or around Queen Street, where I had first encountered him. Less often at the Bez Valley Spar or in Derrick Avenue in Cyrildene. He always wanted to have a chat, so that it felt less like begging, I supposed, and more like borrowing a couple of bucks from a mate. Sometimes, if I reached for my wallet too soon, he would carry on speaking as if he couldn’t see the money in my hand. And he always pocketed whatever I gave him without looking at it in my presence. In this way we colluded in the fantasy that he was not a beggar.

  (Just once, he avoided talking to me. I happened upon him in the toilets at the Darras Centre, in the corner next to Capri hairdressers, washing a shirt in the basin. He pretended that he didn’t know me; he threw up a wall of ignorance so impenetrable it made me feel as if I didn’t exist.)

  The second or third time I saw him, he asked me how the wife was doing. And the kids? I don’t have children. He must have mistaken me for someone else, another one of his patrons. But I was in a hurry and so I said, ‘Fine, thanks,’ and drove off. Probably I was thinking that it was just part of the spiel. What did it matter? He would not be around for long, he would drift away after a few months, the way hoboes do. Let him think whatever he thought. But he stayed. And he never failed to ask after the people at home–die mense by die huis. There must have been opportunities to break the pattern, but I let them slip.

  ‘Is the little boy at school yet?’ he asked me once.

  ‘Ja, he’s in Grade 2 already,’ I replied.

  I think that was my first actual invention. In time, there was a little girl too. Still at nursery school, cute as a button. It was pleasant having an imaginary family, for a fraction of the effort and expense demanded by the real thing.

  Eventually, I acquired a respectable occupation. ‘How’s the business?’ he asked me, out of the blue. ‘Pretty good,’ I said, ‘considering how badly the economy’s doing.’ ‘Ja well,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter how bad things get, people still like to swim, hey?’ So I went into swimming pools. Later it transpired that I wasn’t actually a contractor myself, but a supplier of pool chemicals. Mr Chlorine.

  When I told Branko about all this, in a sentimental hour after Christmas lunch at the folks’, he was outraged. ‘What’s your case? Haven’t you got relatives of your own? Aren’t we good enough for you? You should be ashamed of yourself, lying to this poor sod. Piet Retief…Jesus. If I bump into him–I know exactly who you mean, I’ve seen him a dozen times and never gave him a cent–I’m going to tell him the truth.’

  ‘You keep out of it,’ I said, ‘it’s none of your business. In any case, half the time I think he was on to me from the beginning. He’s invented more of my life story than I have. He’s playing games with me, I’m the one you should feel sorry for.’

  92

  ‘Kafka,’ says Elias Canetti, ‘truly lacks any writer’s vanity, he never boasts, he cannot boast. He sees himself as small and proceeds in small paces.’ Whereas Canetti, by his own account, is ambitious: ‘I cannot become modest; too many things burn me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.’

  Canetti is also at his best in small paces. Raising an unexpected possibility, asking ‘What if?’ in a quiet voice: ‘A city with secret street-names; policemen tell you where you are if they trust you.’ The more ambitious he becomes, the less persuasive he is. Crowds and Power, the compulsive enterprise to which he devoted much of his creative energy for a quarter of a century, is his most impressive and least engaging book. It seems always like a monument
to a vain cause. For his theory of the crowd to gain the currency of Freud’s theory of the individual, people would have to be as interested in their relations to the larger group as they are in the workings of their own psyches. In spite of its significance in the history of the twentieth century, which Canetti set out to grab ‘by the throat’, and its persistence into the twenty-first, the crowd has begun to seem like an archaic phenomenon. We are becoming fields of disparate beings, according to my friend Leon, the dotcom man, and we no longer need the proximity of others, the press of elbows and shoulders, to confirm our belonging.

  93

  Herman Wald’s Leaping Impala sculpture was installed in Ernest Oppenheimer Park in 1960. Eighteen animals in full flight, a sleigh-ride arc of hoof and horn twenty metres long, a ton and a half of venison in bronze. In the sixties and seventies, fountains splashed the flanks of the stampeding buck, while office workers ate their lunch-time sandwiches on whites-only benches. Although the park deteriorated along with the inner city in the following decades, until it came to be used primarily as a storage depot by hawkers, the herd of impala seemed set to survive the century unscathed. But towards the end of 1999, poachers started carving away at it, lopping heads and legs with blowtorches and hacksaws. At the end of October, a civic-minded hawker, who arrived at the park to find a man stuffing two severed heads into a bag, called the police. They arrested the thief, but he was subsequently deported as an illegal alien and the heads disappeared without trace. A fortnight later, an entire impala was removed from the park by four men, who told security guards they were transporting it to another park. Stock thieves. A week after that, another ten heads were lopped. Police later rescued one of these heads from a Boksburg scrap-metal dealer. A leg was found in a pawn shop in the CBD.

  Johannesburg has an abundance of wildlife, and the poachers have taken full advantage of the open season. They’ve bagged a bronze steenbok from Wits University; a horse from outside the library in Sandton (first docking the beast, to see if anyone would mind, and then hacking off its head like Mafiosi); a pair of eagles nesting near the Stock Exchange; and another steenbok in the Botanical Gardens at Emmarentia. This little buck, which had been donated to the Gardens by the sculptor Ernest Ullmann in 1975, was taken in 1998. The head turned up afterwards in a scrapyard and was returned to the scene of the slaughter, where it was mounted on a conical pedestal like a trophy, along with a plaque explaining the circumstances of its loss and recovery. But before long the head was stolen for the second time and now the pedestal is empty.

  Of course, urban poachers are not just hungry for horseflesh, any old iron will do. They are especially fond of the covers on manholes and water mains. When Kensington Electrical Suppliers took over Tile City (the cobbler with the goatee had to move on) they painted the covers on their pavement bright yellow to deter thieves, but the logic was flawed: now thieves could spot them from a hundred metres.

  Elsewhere in the city, the council has begun to replace the stolen iron covers with blue plastic ones. These bits of plastic tell the scrap-metal thieves to go ahead and help themselves as the authorities have given up on protecting their resources. The council could wrest back the initiative by lifting all the remaining iron at once and selling it off. They could apply the same argument the Botswana government uses for the controlled sale of ivory. Get the jump on the poachers by selling the booty yourself.

  The urban poacher is a romantic figure. In unequal cities, where those who have little must survive somehow by preying on those who have more, the poacher scavenging a meal from under the nose of the gamekeeper may be admired for his ingenuity and daring. AbdouMaliq Simone: ‘There are young people in Johannesburg who spend twelve and more hours a day simply passing through different neighbourhoods, different parts of the city, seeing what can be taken easily, but also running into others like themselves, who pass along information and impressions, sometimes teaming up to do “jobs”, sometimes steering each other in the wrong direction.’

  Colour is not the strong point of Kensington Electrical Suppliers. The proprietors painted the building charcoal in an effort to discourage graffiti, but it served as a very effective ground for certain colour schemes and before long the walls were splashed with drawings again. After enduring the insult for a couple of years, they painted over all the graffiti and added a sign: these premises are under 24-hour surveillance. Is that really a camera? A rickety contraption has been suspended from the gutter, a Heath Robinson scarecrow.

  94

  Chas is halfway across the garden, fishing in the pocket of his pants for the key of the cottage, before he sees the burglar on the window ledge, silhouetted against the sunroom panes, caught in the act. The dramatic backlighting of yellow squares on a black grid, the looming, foreshortened figure, arms and legs spread to brace himself against the glass; afterwards, when he tells the story, Chas will be reminded of a Soviet poster depicting the rise of the proletariat.

  (The sunroom is a soft spot, everyone says so, including the man who installs security gates.)

  For a moment they both stand frozen, and then the burglar leaps down and rushes at him, raising a knife in his hand. Chas trips and falls back on the lawn beneath the washing line, and the man stoops over him, shoulders hunched, slashing the air in front of his face. This ostentatious calligraphy still hovers, luminous and pulsing, preventing Chas from stirring as effectively as if he had been pinned to the earth by the blade, even after the knifeman withdraws, which he does slowly, when no resistance is offered, with a nonplussed air, towards the garden wall.

  (Another soft spot, everyone says, lapsing into the technical language of security, the wall isn’t high enough, the perimeter can be breached.)

  On top of the wall the burglar pauses, as if he has forgotten what he is doing here, and calls down:

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past seven,’ Chas guesses, and these ordinary words stick to the roof of his mouth.

  With a satisfied grunt, the man jumps down into the street.

  Later, beneath the arrowheads of arum leaves, we find the monkey wrench the burglar dropped, a chunk of rusted iron as long as his arm, weighing all of three kilograms, with a jaw that can stretch to ten centimetres. A hyperbolic restatement of something useful. We keep it beside the fireplace, less as a trophy than a measure of everyday abnormality.

  95

  A guard is waiting for us at the end of the row of parked cars, semaphoring with his torch. We coast down the avenue towards him, over a familiar surface of wet tar, pushed up into humps and ridges by the roots of the trees, acorns crunching under the tyres. He directs me into a parking place and then retreats to a well-trained, discreet distance. His uniform is black, almost military, with a leather bandolier over his shoulder, combat boots, regimental flashes on the sleeves. There was a shower earlier and the air still smells of wet earth and trimmed foliage. On the garden wall, the ivy has been trained along a lattice of wires to form diamond patterns against the white plaster. I pull the little lever next to the seat to open the boot, and Minky gets out to fetch the present and the bottle of wine, while I engage the Gorilla.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ says the guard as I join Minky on the pavement. ‘My name is Sifiso and I’ll be looking after your car this evening. Johnson will show you the way.’ He casts the beam of the torch on his colleague, waiting twenty metres away. I see that Johnson has a pistol on his hip. Top Flight Security: We mean business.

  ‘Damn, I forgot to take the price off the wine,’ Minky says.

  ‘Give it here. You’ll break a nail.’

  We go along the pavement towards Johnson, who is smiling genially. I scratch at the sticky tag with my thumbnail.

  ‘Should I give them something?’

  ‘When we go.’

  ‘If the car’s still here.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  An enormous drop of water explodes against the lens of my glasses.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam.’ He u
nlocks the wrought-iron gate, ushers us through, locks the gate again behind us. Then he leads us up the driveway, shining the torch backwards, expertly. ‘Watch your step, it’s slippery here.’ Minky, who is wearing heels for the occasion, takes my arm. The beam slides over bricks, leaves, the shiny toes of our shoes.

  At the end of the drive, there is a gap in the creeper-clad wall. He passes through that and stands aside. ‘It’s not this door here, but that one over there, in the white wall. Just follow the path. Enjoy the party.’

  There is music on the air, laughter, talk. The path is a string of slate islands in a glistening sea of lawn. We go along it, hand in hand, towards the murmur of hidden voices.

  96

  Laden with groceries, I push open the door from the garage into the garden with my foot and take two steps along the back path. Stop dead as a stranger appears at the corner of the house. My height more or less, my age, neatly dressed in a leather jacket, jeans, three or four days’ stubble on his cheeks.

  Before I can speak, he points urgently to the garden wall and says: ‘Soontoe!’ That way! as if I am late for an important appointment or he wants to get me out of harm’s way. I look at the wall, which is blank, I look at him. He is earnest, healthy, tense. I can see the ball of his fist in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Wat maak jy hier?’

  ‘Daar was ’n dief, baas.’

  It is mid-morning, sunlight pools like oil on the black leather, the garden is damp but the clouds have lifted. I feel my heart beating near my collarbone, but I am not afraid. We are having a reasonable conversation, chatting like neighbours. If my neighbours called me baas.

  ‘What do you mean: There was a thief?’

  ‘A tsotsi was stealing here. I am chasing him away.’

  He gestures again towards the wall. Now I understand: the thief went that way.