Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  She is still puzzling over it when Josh arrives. He glances at it, says it’s probably something at her mother’s place–she’s got the spares to her mom’s townhouse–and then he hurries her off to the Metro. He always makes her sit through the ads, tells her to pay attention.

  All through The Truman Show Tammy is thinking about the key. She knows it’s not her mother’s, she keeps those separate. But the next afternoon she drives over to Craighall Park anyway. Her mother doesn’t recognize the key either. They try it in the obvious places, they check it against her mother’s bunch, they even get out the spare keys in the old cutlery tray in the kitchen dresser. No match.

  A few months later, Minky and I are introduced to Tammy and Joshua at a dinner party. Over dessert, Tammy tells this story. Then she takes out her bunch and shows us the mysterious black key. Her keys are passed around the table. At first, there are tipsy jokes about alien abductions and love nests, but soon the conversation turns serious. It’s an unsettling idea, already people are fidgeting in their pockets, where their own keys are beginning to weigh more heavily.

  We offer logical explanations. The most persuasive, I think, is Leon’s. He says someone at the garage must have put the key on her bunch the last time the car was in for a service; perhaps they parked the car outside in the street and used a security device of some kind, and then forgot to remove the key afterwards. She should call them up and ask. Or it might have been a careless locksmith. When last did she have a key cut?

  A woman whose name I’ve forgotten, a therapist apparently, says it’s obvious Tammy put the key on the ring herself and knows exactly what it’s for, but is repressing this knowledge. It must be something unpleasant. Does she have a gun-safe? the therapist asks. She has one herself and the key is weird. She takes out her own bunch and shows it to us.

  This theory doesn’t win much support. But there are a few takers for the idea that the thing is a hoax. Someone’s playing a joke on her. A colleague at the paper perhaps? Dave suggests that someone might have put it there with a more serious purpose, to provoke some thought about security. Or rather insecurity. Less a practical joke than an object lesson. By then half of us have our keys out and are picking over them. Even Liz, who’s been laughing the whole thing off, fetches a bunch from her handbag in the lounge, which proves to be bigger than anyone else’s, and names them one by one, looking distractedly at their profiles as if they are the members of an extended family.

  On the way home, Minky says she thinks Tammy has made the whole thing up. It’s some sort of party game. That bizarre moment, when everyone stopped talking and just sat there, hunched over the table, picking through their keys in the candlelight…She’ll write an article about us. You watch.

  102

  ‘A week ago,’ Lesley says, ‘someone dumped a pile of rubbish on the pavement in Bezuidenhout Street. If it was a small pile, I would swallow my pride, go out there with a bag and clean it up. But you’d need a bakkie to take it away. It’s too big for one person to manage. Now it’s come to the notice of everyone looking for a place to drop their shit. So the pile keeps growing.’

  Supper on the back stoep of her house in Ellis Street. A cool, clear sky through the vine leaves of the pergola, a warming yellow light from the open doors of the lounge, from buttercup walls dotted with Amnesty prints in black and white, and Ndebele beadwork in full colour. On the table, summer-squash soup from the vegetable patch. Earlier we browsed through the herb garden, picking leaves to crush under our noses, and those sweet-and-sour juices are still on our fingertips. Lemon thyme, marjoram, mint. The sage in the butter sauce came from the garden too.

  This is a farewell dinner.

  ‘You’re the last person I thought would emigrate,’ Minky says. ‘You’ve always been such a…South African.’

  ‘It’s time,’ she answers with a laugh. ‘Signs and omens, things unplugging themselves, cutting me off. The TV is broken. My cellphone has been stolen. Two nights ago someone broke into the shed and stole the gardening tools.’

  The ties to people and places, the bonds of work, friendship, conviction we thought would have to be hacked through with a will, have loosened too. The writing, the photography, the filmmaking on working people, colonial history, Aids, the political work, the teaching, the activism, none of it can hold her. She no longer believes she can make a difference; or rather, she no longer believes in the difference she can make. She has lost faith, she is afraid of living alone, of growing old in this violent city.

  Under the carport, against the wall of the house, stands a row of seedlings in small pots. She gives us a chilli plant and instructions on how to care for it. Now we know what this evening will taste like in years to come. As we drive back to Troyeville, Minky holds the plant on her lap, a pale sprig sticking up out of the damp soil, with two curved leaves like the flukes of an anchor.

  103

  As it turned out, Isaac Mofokeng, the man who shot Max the Gorilla, was no lovable buffoon, he was a violent rapist. Earlier in July, before his encounter with Max turned both of them into media celebrities, he broke into a Johannesburg house where a young woman and her boyfriend were relaxing after a shower. He abducted the couple at gunpoint and drove them to Soweto, where he locked the man in the boot of the car and raped the woman in a field. When he was brought to trial, the charge of malicious damage to property arising from the shooting at the Zoo paled beside the other charges of robbery and rape. Just a week before Max was adopted by Maxidor, the Johannesburg Regional Court sentenced Mofokeng to forty years in jail.

  104

  The caged man, the one who paces up and down outside the Gem Supermarket like a creature in captivity, begs from time to time, in an offhand way, as if it does not really matter to him. He’ll beg for a while, breaking off his walking to ask for money in a low voice, and then he becomes more and more engrossed in his own rhythm, carried away by it, until he stops accosting people altogether.

  One Sunday morning, I was spying on him when he asked a young couple for money, and the woman emptied the change from her purse into his palm. He examined her offering curiously. Before she could walk off, he began to pick through it and give the smaller denominations back to her. After a moment’s puzzlement, she held out her hand to accept the rejects. She seemed fascinated by the exchange: his raw fingers picking the coppers out of the pile and laying them on her soft white palm, occasionally dropping a ten-or twenty-cent piece that took his fancy in the breast pocket of his shirt. I imagine that he would have winnowed the entire handful, but the woman’s companion, who had been edging impatiently towards his car at the kerb, suddenly realized how improper it was, how ungrateful and insulting, strode back, struck the caged man’s wrist so that coins flew everywhere, grabbed her arm and hurried her away.

  105

  Ag no, it’s Piet Retief. I’ve come up behind him on Kitchener Avenue in the late afternoon, labouring along towards the Darras with all his possessions slung over his shoulders in two enormous shopping bags. I could cross the street to avoid him, but surely it won’t be necessary, he’ll never keep up with me, not with those bags. So I just greet him as I pass and pick up my pace a little, meaning to leave him behind as quickly as possible. He lengthens his stride at once and falls in beside me, asking as always about the wife and kids. I offer a few brusque replies and step out even faster, but still he matches me, heaving the bags up on his shoulders every few metres. I cannot shake him. After two blocks I relent. No point in killing myself.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I’m not used to seeing him so far from his base at the Darras.

  ‘No, I’ve been to the bioscope by the Carlton. Do you know it?’

  ‘The Kine Centre?’

  ‘Ja. For seven rand fifty you can watch films all day. Only at six everyone must go outside and then you must pay to come back in again. Anycase, it gets boring afterwards because they show the same films over and over.’

  ‘Sounds like a bargain.’

  ‘They chip y
ou two beers as well. Long Toms.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘There was one about the war.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘And there was a porn show about some people in Las Vegas. On honeymoon.’

  So we stroll on, side by side, shooting the breeze.

  106

  I have to speed on Stewart’s Drive, especially at night. There’s something in the powdery light on the roadway, the old rock of the ridge raked by the headlights, the arches in the stone parapet. Whether or not it was built by Italian prisoners of war (who are given credit for every decent piece of stonework in the country) this is a seaside wall, and it makes you long for water in the dip below, where the lights of Bez Valley and Kensington are flickering. My spirits lift, ascending or descending, and I put my foot down, leaning into the corners a little harder than usual.

  I am in this mood one night, one early morning, as I drop down into the Valley from Yeoville. I have been drinking at Rumours and I am on my way home with a skinful of jazz. I follow the curve around the playground, accelerate to the first sharp bend and barrel through that. As the bend straightens, my lights pick out a motorcycle lying on its side in the middle of the road. The headlight is burning, pointing south. Plenty of time to brake. I ease up to the bike and go round it, looking for the rider, expecting to see him sprawled somewhere beyond the machine, but nothing. I roll down to the bottom of the hill.

  I have half a mind to leave this problem for the next person and go straight home, but of course I cannot. At Terrace–Daisy de Melker’s old address, it occurs to me–I turn around and go back up the hill. The fallen bike looks desolate. This time I approach more slowly. Still no sign of the rider or anyone else. Now I have no option but to go to the top of Stewart’s Drive again to turn around.

  As I swing into the U-turn my headlights sweep across familiar things: a tree branch poking through a wall (instead of lopping it off when he raised the wall, the builder decided to cement it into the structure) and a painted slogan–BRON YOU BISCUIT. It is impossible to turn from Stewart’s Drive into Jolly Street without seeing this graffiti and wondering who and why. It has been amusing me for years, but the vanished motorcyclist has cast an uncanny light over the moment and now the dead branch reaching through the wall and the dripping message chill me. I coast back down the hill for the second time.

  Another car is coming up. We both stop thirty or forty paces from the bike. We are Joburg Samaritans, wary and wily, and not particularly good. We are waiting for a sign. Finally, I get out of the car, leaving the engine running, and take a couple of steps down the hill.

  Someone gets out of the other car and calls to me: ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Did you knock this guy down?’

  ‘No ways, he saw his arse all by himself.’

  We both take a few more steps towards the bike. I can smell petrol. My neck is bristling.

  ‘Hang on a second. Don’t I know you?’

  ‘Christ! Nick. Is that you?’

  ‘Vlad? I don’t fucking believe it. What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Same as you.’

  I haven’t seen Nicholas for years. We reach the bike at the same time and shake hands. For a moment everything seems normal, and then it seems more bizarre than ever. Like something out of Twin Peaks, he says, and I agree. In that spirit, we do some sleuthing: the engine of the bike is still warm, so the accident couldn’t have happened too long ago. And of course the headlight is still burning. No skid marks. No sign of a collision. Key in the ignition.

  ‘But where the fuck is this guy?’

  ‘Perhaps he was thrown over the parapet.’

  ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘No.’

  We hunt up and down along the stone wall, calling into the darkness, but get no response. We look up into the trees. We look down into the veld. In all this time, there is no sign of another vehicle, coming or going. Eventually, we have to get on with our lives, there’s only so much you can do in the middle of the night. We leave the bike lying where it is, shake hands again, and go our separate ways.

  At home, I call the Yeoville police station and tell them the story. It sounds like an urban legend, even to me, but they say they’ll send someone.

  ‘Be sure to take a torch.’

  The bike is still there the next day and the day after, standing upright on the pavement. Then it’s gone.

  107

  Someone turns up a video clip on a computer in the Salaries Department at police headquarters in Pretoria, showing Nelson Mandela’s face morphing into that of a gorilla. President Mandela brushes the insult aside. We should not be unduly alarmed, he says, by the fact that there are racists among us. But Commissioner Jackie Selebi is furious. Although it is just eight months since he called Sergeant Mothiba a gorilla, or rather, a chimpanzee, the Commissioner says that racism will not be tolerated in the South African Police Services. ‘The employee responsible for this show of utter disrespect will face the harshest disciplinary measures permissible in terms of the regulations.’

  108

  Blenheim Street is a thoroughfare from Roberts to Kitchener, and people coming down the hill from the shops drop their peels and papers in our gutters. But when Eddie lived at No. 19, the pavement outside was always perfectly clean. He tidied up in his own way, by punting the litter downhill. The street rises steeply there, and so a cooldrink tin usually needed just one stiff kick to send it trundling off his turf. A milk carton might have to be harried all the way to the border. Eddie’s law was precise: as soon as a piece of rubbish crossed into a neighbour’s territory, it ceased to concern him.

  Although Eddie is gone now, gravity and summer thunderstorms still ensure that most of the litter in Blenheim Street washes up on my doorstep further down the hill. There is no point in being angry with the forces of nature. From time to time, I go out with a garbage bag in one hand and a gardening glove on the other and pick everything up. In my lazy moments, I follow Eddie’s example and boot a crust of bread or an orange peel or an empty mageu carton down the storm-water drain.

  After a storm, everything is transformed. The cannas burst into wet flames, the dark scents of the earth seep out. Eddie’s gladioli, the ones grown from the bulbs he gave me, pop magically from the clean cuff of the air. The sound of water rushing in the storm-water drains makes me grateful that I am neither on top of the hill, nor down in the valley, but somewhere in between.

  109

  ‘Could you bring me a loaf of bread?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Eddie and I were chatting at his garden gate. I was going to the shop anyway and it was a small favour to ask, but he had never imposed on me before and so this signalled a new stage in our friendship. He gave me the warm coins from his pocket.

  ‘What shall I get you then?’

  ‘A government loaf thanks, brown, unsliced.’

  The bakery at the Gem Supermarket produces round loaves and square loaves, hamburger buns and hotdog rolls, baps we identify as Italian or Portuguese, wholewheat or rye. On this day, the bins were brimming with every option except the standard brown loaf. I chose the next best thing, a wholewheat loaf with a seeded crust, and went back down the hill.

  When he saw what was in the packet, Eddie’s face fell. He looked so disappointed that I offered to take the loaf myself and give him his money back.

  ‘No no, it’s fine, really, one loaf is as good as the next.’

  But I had failed a test. It was the last favour he ever asked of me.

  110

  ‘I am selling these.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Very cheap. Only ten rands.’

  ‘I don’t need one, thanks.’

  ‘Must I be a criminal?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I can be a criminal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You people, you say we mustn’t do crime, so we try to sell things. Then you sa
y we mustn’t do selling.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t say you mustn’t sell things, I said I’m not interested in buying what you’ve got. I don’t need a cap, that’s all.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Will you give me ten rands?’

  111

  In 1966, Takis Xenopoulos opened Fontana Foods, the country’s very first 24-hour bakery and takeaway, in Hillbrow’s High Point Centre. At the official opening, the owner made a public statement of faith in his idea: he threw the keys of the shop into the crowd. It was one of the grandest gestures ever made by a Joburger. And it seems even grander now in this barred and gated city. Somewhere, on a street free of sentry boxes and booms, we should raise a statue of Mr Xenopoulos lobbing his keys into the blue.

  112

  It has taken Chas and me the entire day to repair the carport. The new wooden crossbeams, which I bought at Tile City up the road and carried down the hill over my shoulder, have been screwed into place on top of the poles. No nails for me, 60 mm screws made of brass, I mean this thing to last. By the end of the day, our palms are raw from twisting the screwdriver at awkward angles, our fingers, more used to paper and keyboard than pine and saw, are full of splinters and aching, the backs of our necks–rooinekke, that’s what you can call us–are stinging from too much sun. All of these symptoms are relieved by the application of two cold Windhoek lagers, and then the carport looks like a job well done.

  The next day I give the whole structure a coat of creosote, and in this acrid marinade it seems to brace itself and look sturdier than ever. I’m glad I decided against tearing it down. The shade-cloth the beams will be covered with has already been purchased at the Hypermarket in Norwood and is lying in a cool green accordion in the spare room. Next weekend I’ll stretch that, and lace it tight with nylon cords, and the carport will be ready. Then all I need is a car.

  The following Saturday morning, I hear a rattle at the gate. It is Ben, the builder. I see the ladder on the roof of his bakkie sticking up above the wall, and then his round face, stringy hair awry, framed in a metal diamond at the top of the gate.