Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

123

  Impossible. I have walked along this pavement a thousand times, there isn’t a detail I could have missed, never mind something so big. And such a peculiar, pointless thing too.

  I go back, fearfully. It’s still there. A metal pole slightly taller than me, the bottom third painted black, the rest silver. It is too thick for its height: something so sturdily rooted should be as tall as a street light, whereas I could touch the top of it with the point of a new pencil. I try to throttle it, but my fingers barely reach halfway round. It appears to be solid: when I kick against it with the toe of my boot, I get nothing but a dull thud, as if it’s packed with cork. On top is a turnip-shaped stopper, apparently welded to the shaft. Has it been lopped and plugged? Or was it made like this? If it isn’t a telephone pole or a street light cut down to size…then what is it? Exactly?

  Context. Stone wall behind belongs to No. 17 Roberts Avenue, well built, expertly mortared. Sign on the letterbox beside the gate says independent pathology services. Second box with a wider slot to receive specimens for the attention of various doctors. Through the bars of the gate, a yard with space for two or three cars (only one there now).

  I cannot believe that the doctors have anything to do with this. It’s like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can imagine that it was put here by an alien or left behind by an ancient civilization whose monuments I am incapable of recognizing.

  The next day, I take Minky up the road and make the introductions.

  ‘Have you seen this thing before?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t think so. What is it?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Looks like a pole. A short pole.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  She looks at it from another angle. ‘I like it. Must be the same Victorian vintage as the Yeoville water tower. It’s like a little minaret in Omar Khayyam.’

  ‘Yes. But what’s it for?’

  I have been passing this thing for years without seeing it, but now that it’s made itself visible it insists on being acknowledged every time. I look out for it, imagining it from a block away. No sooner have I turned the corner from Blenheim into Roberts than I anticipate its compellingly useless presence. I hope it will have vanished and dread that possibility too. It has become an anchor. No, it is more firmly rooted in the earth than that, it is a bollard to which an anchor might be secured.

  Saturdays are quieter than Sundays on Roberts Avenue. On the Sabbath, you are likely to meet lost tribes of Zionists in salt-white robes, bearing wooden drums and long staffs that wriggle like snakes; or teams of soccer players jogging to the pitch, keeping time with the drum-bounce of a ball. On a Saturday afternoon, then, I stroll up to Roberts Avenue with a tape measure in my pocket. Height: 2.5 metres. Circumference: 70 centimetres. There are no other dimensions. It resists reduction. So I carry these facts home, height and circumference, two dense figures, compact as seeds.

  A year later one of the seeds germinates. What grows is a tomason.

  The term ‘tomason’ was coined by Genpei Akasegawa to describe a purposeless object found on a city street. He has tracked and tagged hundreds of them in Japan and other parts of the world. A tomason is a thing that has become detached from its original purpose. Sometimes this detachment may be so complete that the object is turned into an enigmatic puzzle; alternatively, the original purpose of the object may be quite apparent and its current uselessness touching or amusing. It may be a remnant of a larger fixture that has been taken away, or it may be a thing complete in itself, whose purpose has been forgotten. Perhaps the people who put it there, who used it and needed it, have moved away or died. Perhaps the trade it was meant to serve is no longer practised. The natural habitat of the tomason is the city street. This is not to say that tomasons cannot be found in the countryside, but they are so scarce there that hunting for them would be tedious. Tomasons thrive in the man-made world, in spaces that are constantly being remade and redesigned for other purposes, where the function of a thing that was useful and necessary may be swept away in a tide of change or washed off like a label. They are creatures of the boundary, they gravitate to walls and fences, to entrances and exits. You will find them attached to facades or jutting out of pavements, like the short pole in Roberts Avenue.

  I am grateful to have been given a category that will hold certain chance observations so tidily. More than that, it is a category that casts the world in a different light: having discovered a new shade of interest, I now seem to notice it everywhere. The tilt of my head has been altered and significance flares up in odd places. Every day I trawl along my habitual routes ready to be startled by something else I have missed until now. After a while, however, this deliberate hunt begins to foul the workings of chance, which is one of the pleasures of walking. My focus narrows. Details snag me, every bracket or niche has become a puzzle. Is this a true tomason? Or a doubting tomason whose apparently mysterious function will suddenly become clear? The world at large is lost to me. As my eye becomes attuned to everything that is extraneous, inconspicuous and minor, that is abandoned or derelict, the obvious, useful facts of the city recede and a hidden history of obsolescence comes to the surface. Every time I go walking, I stumble right out of the present. In the end, it is a relief when I have gleaned what I can from the edges of my neighbourhood and the conscious enterprise fades to the back of my mind.

  124

  When Henion finished cutting his film A letter to my cousin in China, he invited us to a viewing. We walked down to his house in Cambrian Street on a summer evening after supper. On the pavement outside, a security guard was sitting on a white plastic chair with his fingers laced behind his head, chatting to a domestic worker from the neighbourhood. We buzzed and Henion let us in. The kids had been swimming: a trail of wet footprints led from the pool to the verandah steps. Henion showed us into his studio, a room of cool, calm surfaces and lightly accented space, where African and Chinese objects conversed in low tones.

  That was three years ago. Last night, Minky and I watched the documentary again on video. A lot has happened to us in the interim–we’ve been abroad and come back again, Henion and Lee have left for Australia–and this overshadowed my understanding of the film. Then I thought it revolved around the ideas of mortality and home. Now I see that I should have paid more attention to a suckling baby, a grieving widow clutching a dead man’s jacket, a group portrait. It is about physical intimacy with the feeling body and its unfeeling remains.

  In a memorable scene, Henion’s father, Chi Ho Han, practises acupuncture upon himself to still the pain of his terminal cancer. Is he struggling to find the exact spot because of failing powers? No, the struggle is rather a sign of precision. As he probes beneath his skin with the point of the needle, a hidden network of nerve comes to the surface, like an acupuncturist’s chart concealed in his own flesh. This sense of intimacy with flesh and blood is heightened because he behaves as if he is alone, although he is not, the narrating camera is also there, yet so close, so much a part of himself as to have made itself invisible. Probing with the needle, he reveals an aged body, a ragged toenail, the relief of veins, as nakedly as any lover in his prime.

  In the following scene, the old man appears to be drifting in and out of sleep. His glasses cast a film of light over his eyes. Earlier we have seen him asleep; later we will see him in his coffin. On this last occasion, the camera goes to his eyes, beneath the glasses–yes, the corpse is wearing glasses–to touch the jagged line of a sealed lid. Has the eye been sewn shut? Of these three views–the sleeping man, breathing yet oblivious; the man on the verge of sleep, fading in and out of consciousness; the dead man, blind and unfeeling–it is the middle man who stays with me.

  Chi Ho Han is dead now and buried in Los Angeles, as far from Wenchang where he was born as from Johannesburg where he spent most of his life. His wife and mother, or rather their substances gathered into twinned ossuaries, are buried beside hi
m. For his father, Henion says, the important thing was proximity. You had to be close together. You had to feel the shoulder of the person beside you against your own. That gentle pressure on the body is the sense of belonging.

  125

  Minky and I talk about moving, but we’re afraid of what might happen to the pagoda tree in our garden.

  When Glynis sold her house in Johannes Street, the new owner chopped down the trees. The first time she went back, she had to step over the trunk of a palm she had nursed to adulthood, swathing it in hessian every winter against the frost until it was tall enough to fend for itself. She cannot bring herself to go there again. She sends Sean to collect the mail.

  In those Joburg suburbs where the stands are small nearly every front garden has made way for a carport or a parking bay. Often the space in front of a semi is so cramped you wouldn’t think a car could fit there. For a while, one of my neighbours had a parking problem: the bay carved out of his front yard wasn’t quite long enough for his bakkie and he had to park it on the diagonal, with the two gates angled outwards and joined by a chain. When he acquired a second vehicle, a better solution had to be found. So he employed a burglar-proofer to weld an extension onto the existing gate, a cage half a metre deep that allows the tail ends of both vehicles to stick out over the pavement.

  Periodically, the municipality savages the oaks on Kitchener Avenue, cuts them down to size to remind them that they’re in Africa. They line the streets, showing us their stumps, and we feel sorry for them, although there is nothing we can do. In spring, they grow a fuzz of leaves, and become big-headed and tender. Then every stump shoots out a clutch of long straight water shoots. They are never themselves again. With their new limbs standing on end, they look permanently startled, deranged. The aloes in between lean out towards the street like old people waiting for a funeral procession.

  Dave comes home from the bush with a dozen saplings on the back of his bakkie. There are no exotics among them, our city is full of those, the newcomers are all locals. And they are not for his own garden, which has already spilled over onto the pavement, they are for us. He plants them a block away, on the verge in Barossa Street opposite the Wits Mental Health Society. The young trees wear their names on paper bracelets around their skinny wrists, where I could discover them if I chose, or I could ask Dave to call the roll by heart, but the rhythm of walking without stepping on the cracks makes me invent: naboom, boerboon, melkhout, ash, yellowwood, ironwood, umbrella tree.

  Details (Route 1)

  126

  4 Kitchener

  This house once had a beautiful fence of wrought-iron vines and sawtooth leaves. In the summer, nasturtiums would twine up and fleck their pale stems among the green-painted iron ones. Then a scrap-metal scavenger snapped off all the iron leaves, clean as figs, and left the jagged stems pointing to holes in the air.

  38 Kitchener

  A house in two minds. Having stripped it of every curve and kink, squared it off and cemented it over, the builder decided that it needed a softer touch after all and put three rounded arches in the facade; and then, doubting himself again, sank a square window frame in one of them. The high wall is topped with curly wrought-iron panels salvaged from the low wall it superseded, but they look strangely displaced at that height, with the sky behind them rather than the garden. The pillars end in cement globes like cannonballs. On the roof of the stoep a plaster eagle, an ugly bird bought from a nursery as an embellishing touch. Could the same person who hacked the features off this house possibly have tethered that bird of prey up there? It was meant to evoke ruined grandeur, but instead it reeks of the graveyard; it belongs in the Church of the Holy Angels across the way.

  83 Kitchener

  On the whitewashed gable, like a holiday destination on the front of a bus: the kloofs.

  94 Kitchener

  The garden path leads to an impregnable barrier of spiky palisades; only the postbox is there to mark the spot where the gate in the old fence must have been.

  105 Kitchener

  White plastered walls with the texture of coconut ice, split into crazy paving by forked black lines. It looks as if someone dropped the house and broke it into a hundred pieces.

  110 Kitchener

  Three cement frogs, each squatting in its own plastic pot, ranged along the garden path like plants.

  118 Kitchener

  Dr Z. Ebrahim’s Surgery has a black palisade fence. A solitary, truncated palisade, just thirty centimetres high including its elaborately spiked crown, is bolted to the top of a pillar in the corner of the garden. It stands on this pedestal like an African idol in the Musée de l’Homme.

  141 Kitchener

  The tiler who lives here has turned his yard into a chaotic catalogue of ornamental stone. It is paved with offcuts of every variety, and more are stacked against the wall of the house, ready to be applied to other surfaces. The only order in the patchwork is created by three cement pots like goldfish bowls set into the paving at regular intervals and holding nothing but dark-brown earth. Beside the front door is a fourth pot with cacti jutting from it like spiky truncheons.

  3 Broadway

  Wavy pillars studded with mud-brown stones on the stoep and patches of tan slate on the gable. Together these features invariably make me think of giraffes.

  127

  City centre (Route 2)

  Go east on Jules Street–he says–all the way to the end. Just before the kink, take a right into Stanhope. You’ll see the Pure & Cool roadhouse on your left (hope it’s still there). Keep on for a kilometre or two, past the rubbish dump and the vehicle testing grounds. At the second or third set of lights there’s a Caltex on the left and one of those outdoor workshops opposite, with exhaust pipes propped up in tripods or strung on lines like wind chimes. Turn right and go down towards the railway line. Just after the crossing take the fork to the left and you’re nearly there. This is mining land. Bluegums on one side, open veld on the other. Look out for the sign that points to the shooting range. Just after that there’s a dirt road where you can make a U-turn. Drive back towards the city for a bit and you’ll see a lay-by. Park there.

  Go at the end of winter. If you’re lucky, a fire will have turned the khaki cotton of the veld to black velvet. Loose threads of smoke are still drifting up, the air smells burnt at the edges.

  Engage the Gorilla and get out of the car.

  The veld slopes down to a highway in the south. On the far side, the sawtooth roofs of factories, the rutted flanks of a mine dump. These are the leavings of the mine whose headgear you can see on the horizon in the west, like a model made of matchsticks, an engine of war. The sky is the colour of a week-old bruise. You may hear the whisper of traffic on Main Reef Road, the crack of rifle shots at the range, which is carved out of another dump among the gums. In the east, beyond that billboard advertising Caesar’s, you will find a vlei full of poisoned water and a suburb cowering beneath power lines.

  Now you must go into the veld–don’t forget your walking shoes–slowly, there’s no rush. Crystals of black ash and charred stalks as brittle as the wing bones of birds shatter under your soles. Already assegais of new grass are thrusting through the scorched earth, prickling your eyes with their pointed green. The black crust crackles underfoot like remembered flames. ‘Charcoal on the hoof.’ What are you looking for?–a greasy bottle with a Smirnoff label. half a brick with a scab of cement and an iron rod twisting out of it. a flattened tin. the foundations of a ruined substation. three porcelain insulators thrown down from the pylons by the Escom electricians, as beautifully wrought as vases. a burnt-out bulb. a signature. smudged lines. pencil stubs.

  Are you still with me? In this dog-eared field, collapsing from one attitude to another, dragging your ghosts through the dirty air, your train of cast-off selves, constantly discovering yourself at the centre, in the present.

  Signs (Route 3)

  128

  19 Barossa

  ‘Please open or nock hard�
� (black marker on white sheet metal)

  cnr Benbow & Barossa

  ‘Wits Mental Health Society’ (red and black enamel on white sheet metal)

  Pavement, Benbow

  ‘Stan the Happy Man’ (blue aerosol on cement paving)

  cnr Kitchener & Benbow

  ‘black’? ‘blank’? (black aerosol tag on steel Marymount Nursing Home sign)

  21/21a Kitchener

  ‘Tuck Shop and Salon’ professionally prepared spaza sign. numbers on wall partly obscured by new municipal power box (enamel on board)

  Vallivue Centre, cnr Kitchener & Appolonia (north-facing wall)

  ‘Salon Africa. We do braiding and relax. 083 9600 052’ (enamel on board)

  Embankment, East Side College

  ‘If you DON’T speak out about HIV/AIDS, it becomes a burden–John, HIV Positive’ message clear, but name of author fading away (white and blue enamel on cement)

  Embankment, East Side College

  ‘Nelson’s Panelbeating, Sppaypanting and repairs to Bumpers and Dash Broads’ (spray-paint on cement)

  Vallivue Centre, cnr Kitchener & Appolonia (rooftop)

  ‘The Gravity Addict’ (unknown)

  cnr Appolonia & Nourse

  ‘Phone & what-what. Bar & pool’ double ‘o’ in ‘pool’ pictured as 3 ball (green) and 12 ball (blue) (PVA on painted plaster)

  Gem Pawn Brokers, Albemarle

  ‘Time will tell, Christ or Hell!’ (black aerosol on yellow PVA)

  Gem Pawn Brokers, Roberts

  ‘These premises has been wired with razorwire!’ final word rests on spiky underlining of electrified barbs (gloss enamel on hardboard)

  6 Roberts

  ‘JiC’ geometric monogram (black aerosol on white PVA)