Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  I go out.

  ‘I saw you doing this last weekend,’ Ben says. ‘You and Charles.’ His pale eyes are round and innocent. The carport shivers.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have used that wood. It’s going to warp.’

  My heart sinks. Of course I shouldn’t have used that wood, that dirt-cheap pine. That’s why the bloody thing collapsed in the first place: the clot who built it used wood. Why did I have to go and copy him?

  ‘You should have used conduit,’ Ben says. The way he pronounces ‘conduit’, it sounds like Latin. Like some legal principle, habeas corpus, bona fides. ‘Do you know what conduit is?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘This is conduit.’ He pushes a piece of plastic tubing through the gap in the gate. He’s been holding it in his hand, out of sight. ‘It’s used for electrical wiring. It’s very light and strong, and it won’t be damaged by sunshine or rain. It’s proof against insects and creeping plants. It’s also cheaper than wood. Even cheap wood. This is what you should have used.’

  Conduit. I hold it in my hand like a judgement. Like the mark of a grand presumption, perhaps even a betrayal. I am still holding it after Ben has lumbered away down the hill. Conduit. It is light, strong, weather-resistant, termite-proof, cheap. It is the material I should have used instead of this third-rate pine, which is warping even as my faith in it drains away.

  113

  The old-age home at the Marymount has brought us new neighbours, among them a tall man who walks with a stick. Some malady has left him with a stiff leg, which imposes an awkward, swinging gait on him. Because of this (or so I assume) he walks in the road rather than on the pavements, occupying an entire lane with his stick and his swaying shadow, forcing cars to overtake him. Looking down on him from the stoep, I see that he has musical notes and keyholes shaved into his spiky hair like crop circles.

  One morning, I happen to open the garage door just as he’s passing. He stops and sways towards me, producing an item from his pocket, holding it out to me.

  ‘I sell these to make a living, sir. Personalized key rings. Just twenty rand.’

  The key ring is made of tan leather and shaped like a sow’s ear. It has a silver ring through a loop on one end and is branded with a dark, smoky ‘X’. For…Xavier?

  ‘You don’t have an “I” perhaps?’ I ask. ‘Or an “M”?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ He produces a fistful of key rings from his pocket and fans them out. Five more Xs, two Zs, a Q. Surplus people.

  I choose the one that’s already in my hand.

  114

  Anyone can start a garden-gate telephone service: you just run an extension from the house to the front fence and set up an instrument there. You can put up a sign, if you like, advertising the rates. Later on, when you’ve made a bit of money, you add a metal booth, with an awning that swings up to shade the customer, and this should be painted white.

  The Hillier Street cobbler has built a booth of metal sheeting and plywood. The structure is rickety and unpainted, but the swivel chair, an executive model with a high back and armrests, lends it the air of a professional office. He likes to lean back with his heels propped on a milk crate, looking like a manager.

  The hawker at No. 12 Eleanor Street started with a couple of planks and tins, then added a trestle table, then a lean-to with a canvas roof. But her finest touch is a square of magic carpet laid down across the pavement. When you step from hard cement onto that soft and yielding surface, walls rise from the frayed edges of the square and for a moment you forget that you are under the sky.

  People think that the informal economy rests on hard-edged things like plastic milk crates, cardboard boxes and supermarket trolleys, but it is floating on pillows of softly rounded air.

  115

  I came to the Johannesburg Public Library to read up on Max the Gorilla, our zoo’s most famous resident, and instead I’m absorbed in a trivial mystery. Besides the usual traffic between the reference library and the reading room where I’m working, I see people coming and going through an antechamber that used to be out of bounds. In fact, the sign that says staff only is still propped on the librarian’s desk. Is there a toilet back there now? Or a new wing? It hardly seems likely when the municipal budget won’t stretch to the basics like new acquisitions. What are they doing in there?

  Sorry, Max. I return a bound set of the Sunday Times to Basil, who runs the stacks, and steel myself in the magazine corner. Then I stroll into the antechamber. It is like finding a secret passage behind a shelf of books. I half expect the voice of authority to boom, demanding the password. Stairs. I go down into grey air furred with the animal scent of old books. Scuffed Marley tiles make the place feel like a kitchen, and indeed here on a landing that ends at a closed door is a table just big enough for a kettle and a hotplate. I go down another flight and come to a barred gate through which I can see the stacks, long pent-up reaches of shelves full of books and binders. I retrace my steps to the floor above and try the door on the landing. It opens. I step out into the Harry Hofmeyr Parking Garage. This vast basement, where in years past you’d have been lucky to find a bay, is all but empty. A dozen cars are clustered around the secret entrance where I’m standing; I assume they belong to the staff and other initiates, the visitors I’ve seen coming and going. My own car is in a distant corner near the steps that lead up to Harrison Street. Shutting the door behind me, a featureless grey panel in a cement wall, and making a note of its location in case I ever need it again, I set out across a damp, echoey space as long as a football field.

  Every new building in Johannesburg has secure, controlled, vehicle-friendly entrances and exits. The well-heeled–who naturally are also the well-wheeled–should be able to reach point B without setting foot in the street. Parking garages cling to the malls like deformed twins. Complexes of apparently independent buildings, designed to simulate the neighbourhoods of a conventional city, are undermined by huge, unitary garages that destroy the illusion. Superbasements. Older buildings have to adapt to the new requirements. The Johannesburg Art Gallery has turned its back on the public space it was designed for; instead of strolling in through Joubert Park, visitors leave their cars next to the railway line and hurry in through the back door. Elsewhere, walls have been broken through or tunnels and walkways opened up from existing basement parking garages into lobbies and reception areas. Usually these angular additions conceal their motives beneath a coat of paint, but the makeshift reversal at the Public Library is refreshingly ingenuous: while the black schoolchildren who are now the main users of the facility stroll arm-in-arm up the broad staircase from the library gardens or gather in the grand lobby to giggle and whisper, the few white suburbanites who still venture here park underground and slip in up the back stairs.

  116

  The entrance to the Joburg Metro typifies the understated charm of contemporary South African design. A corrugated afdak with a lazy slant rests on black-wattle posts, roughly dressed and creosoted, rooted in low white walls freckled with mosaic. The Metro-Net logo is picked out in ox-blood and mercury on the lintel. You enter the cage and it drops into the gloom. Light your lamp. You pass through lava and sediment into prehistory, falling back in time towards the pyritic ores of the Main Reef. At last, in the neighbourhood of hell, as you imagine it, the cage shudders to a halt and the doors open. Mind the gap. But you cannot step out at all because the opening is blocked by a sheet of rock. You lean towards this rich confection, a blue conglomerate studded with almond-quartz, and press your tongue to it. The smoky pebbles taste of salt. Swallowing sand, you remember the sign in the window of the ticket booth. Take your pick.

  117

  ‘I don’t want to live under this thing.’

  We are curving from the M2 East onto Harrow Road and by the tilt of his head Branko means the new Coca-Cola sign on top of Ponte. His declaration of independence is too earnest for my liking. I say:

  ‘Have you forgotten the one on the Durba
n beachfront? Things go better with Coke.’ We saw this sign on a family holiday in the sixties, an immense reservoir of effervescent light bulbs with a neon straw three storeys long sticking out of it, drained and replenished and drained a thousand times a day, a perpetual slaking of an insatiable thirst.

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘You couldn’t get enough of the spectacle. The old man had to drive past it fifty times, until the rest of us felt sick. All those lights fizzing up in red and black waves.’

  ‘That had style,’ he protests again, bending until his chin touches the dash to look up at Ponte’s fifty storeys, elongating as we draw closer. ‘This thing is vulgar. And the size of it! Do you know it consumes as much juice as the whole building? That scrap of neon in Durbs would look like a postage stamp beside this monster. It’s like they’ve stuck a label on the whole city, as if it belonged to them.’

  ‘The reason you hate it so much is that it’s damaged the skyline. You can’t cope with the slightest change. I thought I was bad, but you’re three times worse.’

  ‘Three? You know, they wanted to sign their name on the moon. Didn’t you tell me that?’

  This was a couple of years ago. Today Branko calls me in a mood. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to Ponte? They’ve replaced the Coke sign with a hideous thing for Vodacom, blue and green hoops flickering up and down on the tip of the tower. You’d think it was an advert for condoms.’

  118

  When my brother and my sister and I were growing up in Pretoria, Johannesburg was further away than it is now. The people there spoke English, the buildings were taller, the streets were dirty and dangerous, the drivers–the TJ drivers, we called them derisively, after their number plates–were fast and reckless. Real cowboys. It was almost another country, a suspicion confirmed by the adoption of the decimal system, which widened the distance between the two cities from a familiar thirty-five miles to a foreign sixty kilometres. Halfway House, a clutch of shops and houses that lay midway, had come by its name, as my dad never tired of telling us, in the days when the trip used to take so long travellers had to outspan overnight. Even in the sixties, the road through the veld was narrow and crooked, bluegums and pines dawdled beside it, and it was easy to imagine ox-wagons and tin lizzies passing through the shadows. Coming or going, the wagons would have belonged in our city and the motor cars in theirs. Despite the Zephyrs and Zodiacs, Volkswagen Beetles and Hillman Imps that progress had bestowed on Pretoria, we felt like people who had been left behind, who were not fast enough.

  Apart from annual pilgrimages to see the Rand Easter Show and the Christmas lights in Joubert Park, we went to Joburg only for special occasions like family weddings or soccer matches. After a game at Balfour Park my dad would buy supper for Branko and me at Panburgers, a takeaway place off a service road on Louis Botha Avenue. The service road itself was a sign of the city’s American dream-life. In fact, the whole length of Louis Botha, named though it was after the Afrikaner Prime Minister and Boer War general, was an American way, jammed with American cars and lined with American businesses.

  Panburgers was a clash of red and white stripes, sizzling grills and chiming cash registers. Heaps of pale chips lay glistening in glass tanks like aquariums. The cooldrinks were mostly crushed ice, the straws were made of plastic, the cooks wrapped the burgers in waxed paper and called them ‘panburgers’, as if they had invented a marvellous new foodstuff. The kitchen staff were the usual black men, but the counter hands were white children, the unnaturally pale progeny of Bramley Gardens and Savoy Estate. Pretoria children were hard and brown from the sun and bristly; Joburg children had floppy fringes and soft freckled hands and looked as if they never went outside. Yet all the fun we had riding bicycles and kicking soccer balls counted for nothing because they were in here working, wearing paper hats and striped aprons as if they were in an Archie comic. They were already kids and we were still children.

  119

  As he’s running along the Braamfontein Spruit early one morning, Mike sees a man lounging on a scrap of wasteland beneath a pylon, right beside the footpath. Mike is visiting the country, he’s heard the stories about people getting mugged for nothing more than their shoes, and so he’s wary. He slows down, considers turning back. But now he’s close enough to recognize the man: it’s the gardener of the townhouse complex where he’s staying, apparently relaxing before he reports for duty, smoking the first cigarette of the day. The man recognizes him at the same moment and calls a greeting. Mike stops to chat. Their paths have crossed half a dozen times in the past week around the complex, and Mike was struck by his surly submissiveness, but now he seems forthright and approachable. Meeting here on no-man’s-land has freed him to be a different person. Or rather, has freed them to stand in a different relation to one another, because Mike realizes that he must also be a different person, here. When the gardener lights his second cigarette, Mike takes one too, although he’s trying to cut down, although he’s in the middle of a run. They talk for twenty minutes about work and soccer and politics, and then it’s time to go back into the past, where their old selves are waiting.

  120

  The J&C Café in Harrow Road has two plate-glass windows painted over with signs, the one advertising the necessities–fresh bread (daily!), pies, chicken pieces, cigarettes, magazines–the other, Coca-Cola. Suddenly it comes back to me: I saw that sign being painted. Might have been when I was living in Mount Verna in Saunders Street. I had been reading Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, and signwriting struck me as a very fine trade. Woody Guthrie was a true artist, equally at ease painting a sign on a barn or a copy of Whistler’s Mother. Once, when a cop asked him what kind of work he did, he said, ‘Painter. Signs. Pictures. Houses. Anything needs paintin’.’ And this signwriter at the J&C, a coloured guy in a blue overall, with chunky black hair like a Hollywood Inca, he had flair too (although I doubt he had sables from Russia, the best that money can buy). Having chalked the whole design onto a red ground, he was now applying the paint. He was working on the initial C, filling in the flourish that breaks like a wave under Coca-, using a maulstick with a rubber pad as plump as a marshmallow. Making things difficult for himself. Surely it would be easier to do the letters from left to right and put the flourish in afterwards? Perhaps the initial had a momentum he could not resist and he needed to finish it in one gesture, curving the white surf to its breaking, always-about-to-break edge.

  Here I am, twenty years later, gazing at his handiwork from my car as I wait for the lights to change, poetry tingling on my tongue like sherbet. All at once I begin to doubt my memory. I can see the signwriter as clear as day, but the place is vague. How can I be sure it was this sign, of all signs, when its reasonable facsimiles are scattered all over the city? Twenty years is a long time. I shift the signwriter around in my mind, superimposing him and his maulstick, and a short wooden ladder that has appeared unbidden in the frame, against the front of the café in Saunders Street opposite the Happy Autumn Home. He fits there. I put him against the Norana Bakery and Supermarket in Bellevue East. Fits there too. I try the Kenmere side of the Apollo Café in Yeoville, opposite the municipal baths–that window was broken for half a year, I recall, they must have replaced it. When was that? There. I move him from one corner café to another, wandering further and further from home, and even as the places become less familiar (Maha-Vij’s Provisions in Derby Road, Bertrams, the Medusa Street window of the Rhodes Park Supermarket and Takeaways, the Jules Street side of the Marathon Café in Malvern), the signwriter grows more vivid.

  121

  For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albemarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we’d been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history (but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by this unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11.
One of Gandhi’s descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall.

  Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albemarle Streets approach the impostor rather kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albemarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker.

  No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an ornate wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge to the light from the doorway, made them look like whores.

  Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet.

  122

  The war memorial crumbling away on a traffic island opposite the Darras Centre tells the history of the city in a single word. ‘The following men of the Bezuidenhout Valley lost their lives in the Great War,’ it says, and then follows a list of names, some of them scarred by graffiti, others drifting away into the depths of the stone where the leafy reflection of an overhanging oak stirs. A century comes and goes in the definite article. When this memorial was commissioned, the Bezuidenhout Valley was still a feature of the landscape. Now it is impossible to think of ‘Bezuidenhout Valley’ as anything but a suburb.