Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  He fries the black mustard seeds with wedges of brown onion in sunflower oil and adds a few drops of sesame oil: his father, he was such a fiery, proud man. He could never or would never have admitted that nothing remained of the family, that the family ties were in tatters (his relationship with Ma was a mess). Sissy is now following in his footsteps with words that he knows and actually yearns for, but has heard from her lips so seldom: love you, Mattie.

  With half a pocket of oranges, a chunk of beef and one of the 2-litre cans of Italian tomatoes, and his pay up to and including his last day, plus an extra week, Emile leaves that afternoon.

  The last thing they share is the customary triple handshake and ‘Thank you, sir’ from Emile, accompanied by a gaze from those dark, liquid eyes. What he should make of it, the ‘Thank you, sir’, he doesn’t know. Emile has never addressed him like that, without his name. There is, to say the least, some malice in it, a trace of sarcasm, unexpected – he’s always thought of him as not articulate enough to talk back like that.

  Ag, fuck him, he’s out of his life and thank heavens for that, and he pulls up at the Common, takes a beer from the cooler bag in the boot, looks for the nail clippers in the side pocket of the jumbled suitcase without finding them, goes and snaps off a sharp pine twig, and sits against the back wheel with his beer and the twig and starts cleaning his nails systematically. After each swipe from left to right under the edge of the nail, he examines the product – kitchen grime and soil and other unidentifiable detritus – and looks up when a sudden cold gust blows straight from the mountain towards him, and is surprised at how good it is just to sit there. He already has a new worker in mind, Eliad, a Jewish guy who came looking for work, had experience in a restaurant in Tel Aviv and then in Cape Town, and who reassures him about the future of Duiker’s Takeaway, which, on top of everything else, did very well today. And he’s still surprised at how mercifully little he has to mull over in the late afternoon while waiting for Jack, who arrives (the sun is setting earlier) either in the bakkie or jogging, his school stuff in his rucksack with the two straps expanding his chest, his sweatiness that cools down then and eventually dries on his skin, only to be rubbed off on him throughout the night, the man’s smell of the day’s dirt, his own, Jack’s. He drains the last half of the bottle in one swig, takes out another and sits down again. In the meantime, about six bakkies and cars have arrived with dogs for their late-afternoon walk. He feels good about Jack, and hesitant about his slow, half-unwilling retreat from his porn cocoon: there’s a life to be lived out there, with Jack.

  Then he remembers that he’s left the damn Beretta in the lentil drum again; with Emile being fired, the daily routine was disrupted. He lifts himself to stand up and get into the car to fetch the weapon when he sees Jack’s figure approaching in the shadow of the row of pines along Campground Road, the road he’d have followed from Zilverbosch across Park Street. Rhythmically, he runs nearer, except that he swings his left arm less than the right (the practised eye) and passes Norfolk Avenue as far as the new traffic circle. At that point he’s closest to Poinsettia Road: his father, oh hell, it’s impossible to think of his father as a fuckup as Jack wants him to; he’d be knocking one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial, pillars from under his feet.

  ‘Jack,’ he calls out when Jack is close enough. How grassy Jack’s skin is at times, almost a kind of cud, and if he keeps his nose against it long enough, say for instance against the part from his underarm to his hip where there’d be sweat trails after running, he eventually also smells something like meat, aged at room temperature.

  Mattheüs leans on the roof, beer bottle in hand, and when Jack turns into the parking lot he notices how he grabs his white vest to wipe the sweat from his eyes and how the last light catches his white, flat belly: ‘Hey, Jackie!’ he calls. The Beretta will have to stay where it is. He’s good-for-nothing-lazy, he feels good, pleased with the handsome man who comes walking towards him to greet him with a kiss, buggered if he’s going to fetch that weapon now.

  He parks behind Duiker’s and takes the bag with his toothbrush and a fresh towel he found in among Jack’s rubbish, and a bunch of rosemary for today, walks round to unlock the front (first thing, he always gets the dry beans and today’s pot of potatoes boiling), when he sees it: ‘Fucking hell.’

  The shutter of his takeaway has already been pushed up, and he’s looking down onto the back of Emile’s round head busily at work in the kitchen. He runs closer and stops, completely overwhelmed – three builders in overalls walk past and notice his expression, instinctively realising that something is happening to him. The inside of his arms feels clammy as he tries to figure out exactly what’s going on here, and: the Beretta is not in his pocket where it belongs.

  One comes from behind and grabs him around the chest, a short arm with fingertips that only just reach his breastbone. Hot, his blood against his skin, he struggles, twists himself around in the iron grip and looks into the oil-black eyes of one of Emile’s comrades, when two more come running through the crowd of early-morning workers, aiming swiftly and surely at their prey, preventing him from reaching his shop. A small hand grabs his pinkie and pulls it out of its socket. Emile has meanwhile turned around in the kitchen and is leaning on the counter; he’s already dressed in his white chef’s jacket, the dirty piece of shit, and is today wearing the black leather glove with his fingers and knuckles exposed, the glove he wore on the very first day, and next to him that monster of a dog jumps paws-first up to the counter, the dog’s been taken into the kitchen in defiance of every health regulation, with Emile tugging at his chain to lift his dog’s head even higher, the paws with their nails on the counter and inside its open mouth Mattheüs sees a thread of saliva forming from the upper canines to the lower jaw, and all the while a determined Emile holds him with his gaze and he looks manlier, bigger, than he’s ever seen him, and under his right hand the Beretta lies flat on the counter.

  ‘You fucking bastards, you can’t do this. This is a country with laws,’ Matt shouts, and with his fury at full bore he succeeds in dragging the three men with him right up to the counter of his takeaway, when Emile yanks the dog up on its chain, and eggs it on so that it snaps three-quarters of the way across the counter, inches from Mattheüs’s spiky fringe. The three holding onto him again grab at him and wrestle him to the ground. People have stopped to watch; across the road at the Total garage on Albertyn Street, the attendants have dropped what they were doing.

  ‘They’ve hijacked my takeaway,’ he shouts at a man who’s carrying a computer under his arm, ‘call the police.’ The man with the computer stares at him with blank eyes. Emile tugs at the dog again and spurs him on through his tiny teeth, it’s only a matter of opening the steel door and that thing will tear him to pieces in full sight of everyone. Two policemen quickly arrive from the direction of the city centre and the three holding onto him let go. The policemen come right up to him, both with their right hand on their holsters, look at the three short Congolese who have formed a semicircle around him, at Emile who has calmed the dog and made it lie down on the tile floor of the kitchen, his kitchen. Emile beckons the policemen closer, smoothes out a form on the counter, and pushes it across to the dark-skinned guy with the pencil moustache and the neatly trimmed goatee.

  Mattheüs manages to hold his aching pinkie with his other hand, his eyes blurred with his own sweat as he tries to make sense of what’s happening here in front of him, the soaked lentils that he hadn’t soaked, all the clues from yesterday and the day before, from the day the evil monster first greeted him, his plan probably already in place by then, and then wormed his way into his takeaway, always against his will, always against his better judgement.

  When he again tries to break free to see the form for himself, the form that has become the main focus of the operation (it’s clear that that’s exactly what it is), the three Congolese pin him down right there, two around hi
s legs, one around his waist, until the policeman with the moustache, almost a work of art, comes across and addresses him in Afrikaans.

  ‘You’ll have to read it for yourself, sir. Cape Town Municipality. His name,’ he points at Emile, who’s standing there showing his teeth, the Beretta suddenly gone, ‘appears here as the registered licensee of the food enterprise Duiker’s. There you are,’ he taps the form, ‘he is the legal operator of the shop.’

  He grabs the form and speed-reads. It’s the official licence to trade as a food business, made out to Emile Guillaume Youlou, and at the bottom, like a slimy smear, the signature of Lucinda Symes of Media City Building, second floor, the one and the same woman who way back had so wholeheartedly assisted him: a business like this is exactly what Cape Town needs.

  ‘Where is his contract with Mr Alexopoulos, the owner of the building? I have proof. I can call all my customers here. This is my shop and it will always be mine. Are you too damned stupid to see what’s happening here?’

  ‘You’ll have to watch your language, sir. We are the law,’ says the policeman with the moustache, and takes the form back to Emile.

  Mattheüs calls the policeman aside, the three Congolese at his heels. He’s fuming, he’s been driven to an extreme, and for a few seconds there’s a gap, where the physical demands of his work, the funeral and everything before and after it, don’t weaken him but give him strength. When he makes his case to the policemen, he is calm and collected, he speaks clearly and concisely, in every respect it’s the way a grown man speaks. My fingerprints are on all the pots and pans, they’re everywhere here, this is my shop. From the very first day to this moment. That short guy has just been working here. He’s got an unlicensed weapon with him, go and see for yourself. And watches the one with the moustache, how comprehension dawns on him, these words are real, hard-hitting, the shop there, right in front of them, indeed belongs to nobody other than him, Mattheüs Duiker, it would be beyond all reason to conceive of it in any other way; but then, at that moment, the policeman’s eyes shift once, twice, three times, this side and that side, reptilian, and he sees how he deliberately switches his understanding and follows another, insane logic, and without saying a single word, his decision is made: he’ll turn his back on this whitey even if he is the legal owner.

  Then he realises that he’s up against superior numbers, like the enemy at the Battle of Blood River, only more cunning; the two policemen and Emile and that dog of his and his three comrades are all in cahoots, bribed cunts all in place at the planned time this morning – he hasn’t got a chance.

  ‘How much did he pay you?’ And the moment he says this, he knows that his last chance to win them over has just been buggered. They’re furious, or so they claim, one more word and they’ll chuck him into the van.

  Smoked paprika he smells, Emile is busy cooking his lamb stew. He’ll have to retreat for the moment and work out a strategy that’s smarter than theirs. Slowly, a numbness takes possession of his calves, then his thighs and eventually his torso. He sinks down between the two who are still clinging to his legs and squats on the pavement, sucks his pinkie, takes a cigarette out of his pocket and lights it upside down and remains sitting like that, hollowed out from the inside (that’s what it feels like), overpowered, no matter how hard he’s fought it up to now.

  My attorney, he wants to say and can’t, he doesn’t even have one, and then gets up so suddenly that the three men surrounding him are caught unawares. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he shouts at Emile, the dog’s docked ears showing above the counter, and rushes around the corner to his car.

  In the car, his shirt sopping wet and his heart still galloping, he phones Jack immediately, then remembers that he’s invigilating an exam, which will keep him busy till four-thirty that afternoon. He jumps out again, grabs two bricks from a pile to the right of the entrance to the laundry and rushes back, but the three Congolese are waiting for him around the corner. They make an immediate grab for his arms, one tries to tackle him again. Behind them, he sees the steel door at Duiker’s swing open on its sturdy hinges and the dog bearing down on him. He manages to free his right hand and throws a brick at the charging animal, turns round and dashes back to the car. He’s in, safe, speeds across Main, the light on the corner changes from yellow to red, and almost immediately he takes the ramp past Groote Schuur that puts him on De Waal Drive, then past the bare patch where District Six once was, and he refuses to see the correspondence between those people who were so hideously thrown out of their homes and his own expropriation, he’ll never give up, he’ll fight to the last drop of blood, as people always say.

  He’s now remembered Uncle Wannie du Plessis, Colonel Wannie, one of his father’s best friends. Whenever anything went wrong, old Wannie du Plessis was there to lend a hand; he was a high-up. Even though he’s retired, he’s the man he’ll ask for help, Uncle Wannie will still have some contacts operating outside the present police system, from that shadowy realm, its powers only revealed to the criminal when the crackdown happens, that little scumbag with his underhand operation will be nailed.

  He drives along with the city on his left, his legs only just capable of braking and accelerating, his state of mind in constant flux, revving up to fury and then subsiding again, and by the time he finds parking opposite the Sea Point swimming pool and has paid the security guard R5 to keep an eye on his car, he’s cleared a space for a mix of hopeless failure followed by grief, a raging, tearing grief, like a fury, but (he suspects) lacking the punching power of rage that he needs. He has a terrible attack of heartburn and gets out of the car, tears in his eyes.

  After a while, he thought he was going to puke, he leans in and takes a swig from his water bottle, locks the car, checks that it’s locked and starts walking along the broad promenade to Mouille Point, presses the remote of his car once again and then carries on next to the narrow strip of beach with its black rocks and black kelp washed up by the tide, wishing he felt free to shout it out here in public, vomit it out, anything, about the unreal situation he’s been forced into and which he now has to solve, but he can’t rid himself of a recurring sadness that now, under the gaze of Benjamin Duiker, makes him a child again: and now, my son, what now? The power of that challenging voice knocks him over: so he has not succeeded after all, not with his business, not with anything, he simply isn’t able to.

  After a while, he swings to the right and shelters under one of those clumps of windswept coastal trees, lies flat on the lawn on his stomach, his head on his arms; he really doesn’t care any more.

  He wakes up when his bare, sweaty arms start itching on the grass, and phones Jack again, but he’s on voicemail. He walks up one of the side streets to Main Road, Sea Point, to buy a plaster for his pinkie and phones Sissy, but he can’t reach her and is pleased at this – with her do-or-die attitude that she’s acquired out there on the farm, she’d put the blame on him: so where was Uncle Hannes’s Beretta?

  He again tries to phone Jack, and ten paces further on tries again, keeping to the shade of a block of flats on the left-hand pavement. In the end he phones Samantha; she’s between classes on the UCT campus, and clearly, even on the phone, she’s overjoyed to hear from him, really, he can feel it, and he’d always thought that she didn’t have much time for him.

  Law and order, she says when he tells her about the hijacking of his takeaway. No way, she says. That can’t happen in this country. She believes in this country. Okay, she’s heard of flats in Hillbrow being hijacked by Nigerians, but this! Has he been to the police? Must she come and help him? Oh dear, she has to go, her class starts in a minute. Won’t he please phone her mother, she’s been nagging for ever, she’s got something she wants to tell him. She’ll business-card the number to him.

  When he receives the number, he stands under an overhanging loquat tree in the sun on Main Road and phones Auntie Mary. As children they called her Mary; as times changed, ‘auntie
’ was added out of respect. His parents should never have permitted the disgrace of calling the woman, older than his father, by her first name like that. Oh well, that was the way it was. It’s not his fault that he was born in those times and his father and mother were of their time, if he now has to make excuses on their behalf.

  ‘Auntie Mary? It’s Mattheüs.’

  ‘Ag, my dear child.’ He sees her at the kitchen table covered with a plastic cloth with a rose pattern; he remembers it from the time he and his mother drove to Jakkalsvlei Avenue, something urgent, he remembers his mother’s mouth that said not a word the whole way, on a mission to get Auntie Mary as a witness to something bad that had happened between her and his father, his mother insisting on getting proof that he’d been wrong. Tea was served at the table with the rose tablecloth, and they could hardly hear each other over the congregation next door in the church, singing or rather jubilating evangelical hymns; it was a Sunday morning that they’d gone there – that’s his strongest recollection of that house in Athlone.

  She just wants to say, says Auntie Mary, she’s discovered an old photo in a shoebox. It’s of him as a boy and of Mister Bennie and she’s even in the photo, all three of them on the steps of their nice house. He’s sitting on Mister Bennie’s lap, too cute, waving his little hand. Must be his mother who’d taken the snap.