Gem Supermarket, Blenheim
‘Salvation!’ (black aerosol on advertising chalkboard headed ‘Today’s Special’)
Substation, Blenheim
jailbird with stubble, shaven head (black aerosol on beige PVA)
Substation, Blenheim
‘blank’? ‘black’? (black aerosol tag on beige PVA)
129
‘Now I don’t mean to be insulting like,’ says Ben, ‘but your plumber is useless.’ And he waits for me to say:
‘How so?’
‘These taps are the wrong way round.’ And he waits again for:
‘Why?’
‘The hot tap in the bath should always be against the wall.’
‘Why?’
‘If a toddler comes in here, see, and wants to open one of these taps, chances are he’ll try the one that’s closest to him. And if it’s the cold, then he won’t scald himself. Maybe he won’t even be able to reach the hot if it’s at the back. Plumbers are supposed to know these things.’
130
The oaks in Roberts Avenue have shackles around their ankles. These iron hoops, which were used to edge the holes when the saplings were planted, look like the rims of wagon-wheels. With the thickening of their trunks and spreading of their roots, the growing trees have often dislodged the hoops from the paving, breaking them loose into the air. Sometimes bark has grown over part of the hoop, sealing it, healing it into the woody flesh. I imagine that here and there a tree must have engulfed its shackle entirely. My friend Liz says the shackles are there to stop the trees from wandering off, the poor things are no better than slaves. My brother Branko says she’s read too much Tolkien, it’s the other way round: the trees are there to keep the shackles from being stolen.
131
Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defences multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes. In the wealthier suburbs the pattern is to knock things flat and start all over. Around here people must make the most of what they’ve already got, and therefore the walls tend to grow by increments. A stone wall is heightened with prefab panels, a prefab wall is heightened with steel palisades, the palisades are topped with razor wire. Wooden pickets on top of brick, ornate wrought-iron panels on top of plaster, blade wire on top of split poles. These piggyback walls (my own included) are nearly always ugly. But sometimes the whole ensemble achieves a degree of elaboration that becomes beautiful again, like a page in the Homemaker’s Fair catalogue.
The tomason of access is our speciality. There are vanished gateways everywhere. On any street, you may find a panel in a wall where the bricks are a different colour or the courses poorly aligned, indicating that a gap has been filled in. A garden path leads to a fence rather than a gate, a doorstep juts from the foot of a solid wall. Often, the addition of a security fence or a wall has put a letterbox beyond reach of the postman. The ghosts come and go.
The tennis courts at the corner of Collingwood and Roberts are on a terrace. Once, a flight of stairs cut into the stone-faced slope led up from the pavement, and then a few paces would bring you to a gate in a low wire fence. Now a curtain of stone has been drawn across the stairway halfway up and a tall palisade fence raised on the edge of the terrace, through which you can see the old fence posts, like sentries standing guard on a fallen frontier.
The most common tomason of access by far is the metal hinge. Set into brick or stone gate posts, and thus too difficult or costly to remove, these hinges remain behind to mark the places where the old gates swung, before they were taken down and replaced by security doors or remote-controlled barriers.
132
When I lived in Eleanor Street, I used to pass by No. 13 on my way to the shops. One day I saw a man pottering in the garden and we nodded to one another, and from time to time after that we exchanged a greeting or a wave. Then I moved to Malvern. After David Webster was killed outside his house, Chas, who had been a student of his at Wits, took me past there to pay his respects. And it was only then that I put the man in the news reports together with my nodding acquaintance from the old neighbourhood.
Whether it’s because I only ever saw him in his garden, or read somewhere that he’d just come back from the nursery and was unloading plants from his bakkie when he was shot, I often wonder whether he planted the creepers and shrubs still thriving in the yard. Gardeners must have faith in the future. What became of the seedlings he bought that morning? Did his widow get round to planting them? Did someone remember to water them? Or were they left to wither in their black plastic bags?
The mosaic that commemorates his life spills along the garden wall. The panel on the left says: ‘DAVID WEBSTER 1940–1989. Assassinated here in the name of apartheid. Lived for peace, justice and friendship.’ The rest of it is a surf of brightly coloured tiles and glittering mirrors that turns the wall to water.
133
Wherever I go in Joburg, I bump into Herman Charles Bosman. I see him at the City Hall, talking from the steps or heckling from the edge of a crowd; gazing into a shop window in Eloff Street, barefooted and in his shirtsleeves, suffering from the recognizing blues; marching at the end of a procession along Commissioner Street; enquiring after books at the desk in the Public Library (where he is supposed to have met his second wife, Ella Manson); strolling along under the oaks at Jeppe Boys’ High on his way home to Grace Street. Long past midnight, he is wandering down Plein Street with his friend George, so deep in conversation they don’t even see me. And there he is again scrambling up the side of a mine dump with Ella (they are going to write their poems in the sand). And climbing over the wall of the municipal tram sheds.
Most vividly of all, I see him at High Court Buildings in Joubert Street where he had an office in the forties, standing on a tiny second-floor balcony–it is no more than a crow’s-nest with a flagpole sticking out of it like a sail yard–scattering seed for the pigeons. This is curious, because Bosman himself never described the scene in his work. Rather, it was Lionel Abrahams who saw him there, ‘shirt-sleeved, bare-headed, sunlit, in a cloud of fluttering birds’, and brought the moment to life in his memoir ‘Mr Bosman’. It is the privilege of writers that they are able to invent their memories and pass them on between the covers of a book, to make their memories ours.
Speaking of Abrahams, I bump into him too all over town, although these days he can seldom be lured from his house in Rivonia. I see him further along Joubert Street on his way to Vanguard Books (he is going in search of a copy of Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets). I bump into him on top of a mine dump too–he has gone up there with some friends to read Herbert and Holub. One of my dearest memories has him waiting for the tram at the stop outside his house in Roberts Avenue. Again–let’s not consider it odd–this is not my memory but someone else’s, passed on in a book.
Lionel Abrahams has written about the significance that certain stray corners of the city assume through personal association, places where we feel more alive and more at home because a ‘topsoil of memory’ has been allowed to form there. Louise Masreliez is concerned with the ‘private niches’ memory creates in the public space of the city. The image aptly suggests the small and fugitive nature of the association (a ‘niche’ may be as fleeting as a mood or atmosphere). Both writers present memory in intriguingly concrete terms. Whether as topsoil or niche, whether substance or receptacle, memory is endowed with a hand-warmingly physical quality. This most intimate faculty, residing in the heart or the mind, in the softest organs, might yet carve out or fill a space in the material world. So we allow parts of ourselves to take root and assume a separate life. These marks, the places where our thoughts and feelings have brushed against the world, are not just for ourselves. We are like tramps, leaving secret signs for those who come after us, whom we expect to speak the same language. Our faith in t
he music of this double address, in the echo chambers of the head and the street, helps to explain why apartheid deafened us to the call of home.
134
Every year, Piet Retief goes away for Christmas, not to Durban, I’ve decided, which is the mythical holiday destination of tramps, but to some farm in the Free State, where the child in him is remembered and loved. The people at home, die mense by die huis, parents, brothers and sisters, ex-lovers and old school-friends, believe his lies about the city, or pretend to. I want him to have a happy story.
135
The weather’s thumb crushes stone to gravel and rubs wood down to the grain. What comes to the surface is stubborn. Our meanings are tender sheaths, but the heart of things is fibre and flint, and will not yield to the hand or the eye.
A hand slipped here. This pane is spattered with paint from the bristles of a brush. The glass whispers its secrets to my fingertips, tells them the colour of a wall that cannot be seen. But here a hand meant to leave a mark. On this pane, in a moment of anger, idleness or thoughtless delight, fingers toothed with a coin or a key scratched out the view.
Where am I? Another window stops me in my tracks. But the eye goes on ahead, it plunges through glass, between bars, through cracks into the other room. The other room is almost there, a trick of light and shadow. The eye explores its sudden edges and returns with a warning: the wide world is at your back.
136
Yang-Ti, the second and last emperor of the Sui dynasty, ascended the throne in 604 after assassinating his father. He was one of the great builders in Chinese history, commissioning palaces and extending the Great Wall, and sparing no cost in materials, labour and the lives of workers. He built the city of Lo-Yang, the second of his capitals, on the edge of the eastern plains, and the Grand Canal, which linked the city with the southern capital of Chiang-tu on the Yangtze river. Like his father, the emperor was a generous patron of art and literature, and painting flowered during his short reign. The frescoes of the Sui dynasty were matchless.
When Yang-Ti went travelling to the outposts of his empire, he took with him a painting on silk two thousand paces long. Every evening when a halt was called, his painters and soldiers unwound the silk and spanned it in an immense circle, like a laager, and the emperor rested within. The painting, as complete as the horizon, showed a prospect of Lo-Yang. To the south, over the roofs and battlements and the suburbs where the tradesmen lived, the mountains. To the west, the setting sun. To the north, the black lands where the ancestors were buried, the furrowed hills full of sepulchres. To the east, where the moon was swimming, the forecourts of palaces, ministries, halls of justice, houses of pleasure. In the middle of his resting tent, in a small tower, the emperor dwelt, suspended in space and time, between west and east, yesterday and tomorrow. Even in the desert, Yang-Ti kept his city with him, believing that it was unbecoming for an emperor to live like a vagabond in the wilderness. He would not countenance a change of scenery.
Victor Segalen: ‘That was not understood in his time. Yang-Ti left behind the reputation of an egoist and a sedentary, since, true to Himself, he disliked to contemplate the world in any other way but at its centre.’
137
The Argonaut Mine was first proposed in the early nineties. It has been estimated that this ultra-deep mine, operating at up to five kilometres below the surface, would cost R8 billion to commission. The developer, Durban Roodepoort Deep, is conducting a feasibility study and the decision on whether to proceed will be made in 2007. Argonaut would undermine a huge swathe of the Witwatersrand, stretching from Roodepoort in the west to Boksburg in the east, in an arc roughly thirty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide. Examine any map of this land and the goldfields ghost through from below. The names of the companies that pegged the original claims are honeycombed into the ground beneath our feet: Durban Roodepoort Deep, Vogelstruisfontein, Consolidated Main Reef, Crown Mines, Robinson Deep, City Deep, Simmer and Jack. The developer of Argonaut has some revolutionary ideas for the mine, such as generating electricity on site using subterranean water flows, partially processing the ore before it is conveyed to the surface, and housing the miners themselves in underground hostels.
138
As I’m coasting down the ramp to the Harry Hofmeyr Parking Garage, I remember the back way into the reading room, which I discovered the last time I came to the library. Should I use that door? I’m not sure I’ll be able to find it. Anyway, I should resist this scurrying about underground, this mole-like secretiveness. I park as usual near the cashiers’ booth, take the tiled tunnel under Harrison Street and go up the steps that come out beside the City Hall. I like the walk, never mind the broken paving stones and hawkers’ clutter. I want to approach the library along a city street like an ordinary citizen, passing from the company of people into the company of books. I won’t go sneaking up the back stairs like a thief.
I cross over Harrison and pass the cenotaph. The library gardens are full of people. It looks like a rally of sorts. Men, men in uniform, thousands of them, a ragtag army in blue, black and grey fatigues, wearing berets of every colour, combat boots, flashes on their sleeves.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask the man next to me at the Simmonds Street crossing.
‘Strike,’ he says. ‘Security guards’ strike.’
Cut-off whitey, he’s thinking to himself, doesn’t know what’s going on. Actually, I’ve read about the strike, and I know the library gardens have long been a rallying point for popular causes, but I wasn’t aware the strikers were gathering here. Probably wouldn’t have made the trip if I’d known. There’s a current of tension in the air and it swirls round me as I approach the hawkers’ stalls, a mood as pungent as the smoke from the braziers where women are roasting mielies and frying thick coils of wors in a froth of yellow fat. Up ahead, on the plaza in front of the library, between the lawns and the stairs ascending grandly to the main doors, a man is speaking through a megaphone. Perhaps the tension is rippling out from him? He could be announcing a breakthrough or a deadlock in the negotiations. Who are they negotiating with? One can guess at the issues: wages, benefits, conditions of employment. I climb up on a bench so that I can see the man with the megaphone over the heads of the crowd. There’s a statue to the left of the plaza, a family group in bronze, and he’s joined them on the pedestal, hooking a comradely arm through one of theirs. A knot of men at the pond on the right. What are they doing? Some sort of tussle going on in the water, it looks like a baptism or a drowning. All these berets. You can tell by their headgear which of the companies are run by military men, the out-of-work soldiers of the old SADF: these guards wear their berets moulded tightly to their heads, scraped down over their right ears, whereas the guards employed by businessmen have soft, spongy berets, mushrooms and marshmallows no real soldier would be seen dead in.
Familiar faces on all sides. There are security guards everywhere in Joburg, and now they all look like people I’ve seen before. If I had time I could probably spot Bongi, the apprentice security guard from my faraway birthday party. He must be a seasoned pro by now and uniformed from boot to beret. Strangers keep catching my eye, casing my white features. No doubt they’re wondering what the hell I’m doing here. This thought could make me apprehensive, except that no one focuses on me for long, their attention keeps being tugged to the left, to the Market Street side of the gardens.
What kind of crowd is this? What were the categories devised by Canetti?
Before I can follow the thought there’s a loud bang, a shotgun report, I think, and the crowd bursts apart like shrapnel from the heart of a blast. Some of them rush away in an anticlockwise whorl like water down a drain, others surge at me and carry me back towards President Street. I am running too, without thinking, and then stopping, as the wave subsides and wheels back intuitively towards the sound. We all turn, crouching, or huddled together, or craning boldly as if the whole range of attitudes has been choreographed. I am pinned between two men in front of the haw
kers’ stalls with the mesh of a gate pressing against my back.
Tumult on the opposite side of the gardens, men in blue pouring in from both ends of the row of stalls. Riot policemen. Their quarry, the security guards, are also policemen of a kind, but in their berets and boots they look more like soldiers. The front lines clash, men go sprawling over the low walls onto the grass, there are more reports, bouncing back off the office blocks all around, rubber bullets or shotgun pellets, I don’t know. But I do know, with every bone and muscle, that I am in the wrong place, I shouldn’t be within a day’s hike of this madness. I cannot get myself shot in a security guards’ strike, especially not with a rubber bullet. No amount of irony could erase the ignominy.
A teargas canister comes arching over the green roofs of the stalls. The frozen moment thaws in an instant into flight. We scramble through a gap in a curving wall, buffeting one another. I plunge out of the stream on the pavement beyond and crouch behind the wall, among hawkers trying to defend spills of oranges and apples, relieved to have brick and mortar between my soft flesh and the guns. My fingers sink into orange pulp on the stone, my feet scatter Quality Street toffees and little building blocks of Chappies bubblegum. All around there is a strange blend of fear and hilarity, faces wincing and laughing. Impossible. I cannot stay here. The sensible thing would be to go east along President, there’s a staircase into the parking garage close by. But when I look over my shoulder, the intersection is a blur of men and vehicles and gas–it’s drifting downwind! So I must go the other way, crouching behind parked cars, feeling absurdly like a child playing a game. To my right a lane runs through to Pritchard Street, but there are armoured vehicles at the end of that too, beyond the frivolous jet of a fountain, and policemen with helmets, shields and batons.
I peep around the corner of the last stall. The police have taken the plaza, which is almost empty. Three dripping, bedraggled men, scabs the strikers were teaching a lesson about solidarity, are sitting on the edge of the pond with their hands in the air, coughing up water. Blood and slime bearding their chins.
Portrait with Keys Page 17