The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Please sit for a moment, will you, in the middle of the yard at 88 Honey Street, in the shade of the peppercorn tree with a gnarled old trunk, under the pendulous olive-green leaves hiding white flowers that, in every season, produced a succession of peppercorns, small and green at first, turning to bright red. Sit on the sturdy wooden seat of the swing suspended from metal arms that might, in spasms of excitement, propel you as high as the top of the red water tank, or lull you, in moments of contemplation, with a rhythmic swaying. Listen to the sounds: the crowing of the cock as the dawn breaks; the frequent afternoon thunderstorms in summer; the rain beating against the red corrugated iron roof of the one-story house and rushing from the gutters into that mysterious tank; the clucking of two dozen hens lorded over by the cock in the wire-fronted henhouse against the neighbors’ fence, pecking and scraping in pursuit of scatterings of corn, or squawking in terror if picked for the Sunday roast; pickaxes rising and falling in unison in the street outside to a haunting Zulu chorus as a trench the length of the block is laid by a phalanx of black convicts and filled with brown earthenware sewage pipes whose arrival marks the demise of the bucket privy in the yard; the resounding clatter of coal being unloaded from sacks into the store next to the garage; the sizzling of the kosher sausages for Saturday lunch; the creaking of wooden wagons drawn by blazing-eyed mules with nostrils flared, the cries of street vendors, and the churn and thud of construction as the great, restive mining city spreads over the hill onto the high plateau.

  Watch from that seat in the shade of the peppercorn tree as Mac and Daisy, the black staff, go about their domestic duties, he compact and lithe and bare-chested, she ample in a bright floral cotton dress with a head scarf wound tight and knotted at her neck where beads of sweat form. Mac clamps the chosen hen under a garbage can lid, head and neck protruding. Knife in hand, he proceeds with a swift decapitation. Once in a while a bird escapes and manages a brief weaving, headless sprint. Mac plucks the bird. He kindles a wood fire in the yard to burn away feathery remnants. The smoke mixes with the waft of Morris’s Loyalist cigarettes, oval-shaped in cross section and made from Turkish tobacco.

  Follow Daisy inside as she dusts and cleans. She prepares the chicken. She moves with a lively grace across the stoep, or veranda, where flowers tended by Polly cascade. Mystery accompanies Daisy, a smile that hides something. Wander, as my father was occasionally allowed to do, into Mac’s concrete-floored, low-roofed, single-windowed sleeping quarters in the yard, an enclave of faint menace. Mac has a sideline as the local medicine man. My father contemplates the throwing of the bones. First they are shaken in a rough linen bag. Then, to the accompaniment of Mac’s rhythmic chant, they are spilled onto the bare floor. Mac, a hunched figure, assumes an air of such intensity that the child sees the bones tremble. Mac snaps the long forefingers of his clasped black hands. What message the trembling bones convey remains an enigma. The child, trembling himself, learns to snap his forefingers but not to decipher meaning in the fragments. That is Mac’s ancient shamanic secret, a mystery to the city’s ingenuous white prospectors.

  Morris works with little respite. Cohen & Sons, established in Johannesburg by his father, Shmuel, as the twentieth century dawned, opened its doors at 103 Pritchard Street, a downtown wholesale grocery selling local produce and goods imported from England. Anything from Britain had my grandfather’s approval. It was the home of liberty and liberal thought. Opposite was a motor accessories shop owned by a Barry Cohen, who changed his name to Colne.

  Business gets done item by item, guinea by guinea. Orders are delivered on a trolley, or wagon, pulled by six mules kept behind the store and tended by Elias, hat always perched on the back of his head. Morris is busy. When he and Polly have something to hide, they speak in Yiddish: Red nich vor die Kinder—Don’t talk in front of the children. The code conceals secrets. It is freighted with something, a topic in the background, the European past. In this past lurks anxiety, something carried over. It is a good life but a worried life on Honey Street. Precariousness lingers. It is about more than money. It is the puzzle of belonging, a quandary borne around the globe.

  Deep within the earth a vibration stirs. Tremors follow a rockfall. What is the unceasing throbbing in the soil? Thousands of feet beneath the ground, frenzied activity underwrites the growth of Johannesburg. The city spreads on the surface because of the rich seams below it. The heart, arteries, and ligaments of the metropolis reside at the bottom of shafts. Drills and scrapers and hammering and falling ore fuse in the cacophony of an underground labyrinth with its murky sumps. Black workers flock to the city the Zulus call eGoli—City of Gold. They provide much of the labor force at the white-owned mines, crawling along narrow gullies to extract gold from the reef that keeps giving. This is no land without a people waiting for a people without a land, as Lord Shaftesbury suggested in 1853—with equal heedlessness and onerous consequence—of Palestine and the Jews. Out of Africa’s immense horizons come Africans in search of a living wage.

  At night the workers are housed in hostels and squatters’ camps on the outskirts of the city. They sleep ten to a room on concrete bunks in bleak dormitories far from Honey Street and still farther from the mansions of the gold barons and the British colonial administrators. Denied the right to form unions, they come as contract labor. It is this separation and exploitation that will be codified after World War II by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party into the system of white domination and racial segregation called apartheid. Racist hatred, defeated in 1945 in the ruins of Berlin, found new expression in the “Bantustans” created in South Africa in 1948. Blacks, shorn of dignity, were to be the human raw material of South African growth.

  Two months after his Bellagio sojourn, Capt. Bert Cohen found himself in Padua, in the Po Valley. It was August 24, 1945. A Rabbi Podashnik, attached to South African forces, invited him to visit a refugee camp. Bert’s diary records the following:

  Among the many thousands there were 950 Jews. These were the people we visited. They lived in a large room, sleeping side by side on the stone floor. No beds, few blankets. Their possessions were wrapped in small bundles. Many struck me as being less human than animal. My companion took out his cigarette case and the scramble that ensued appalled me. Many of these people are starved and stunted. Why do they cling so preciously to life? Is it so important to stay alive that one should surrender everything, succumb to any humiliation, in order to preserve the precious spark? I looked at their eyes and sometimes I saw ugliness. Sorrow elicits sympathy, but I saw more than sorrow. I saw cunning and slyness and hatred too, for was I not well dressed and well fed? I did not feel drawn to these unfortunate people. Instead I was repelled. I could not feel that they were kith and kin of mine. This worried me and I felt ashamed.

  Extreme suffering engenders revulsion. Bert felt what Saul Bellow would call the “sense of personal contamination and aversion” engendered by the “disintegrating bodies” of the survivors of the Nazi camps. He hated himself for it. He felt shame but could summon no sympathy. The humiliated Jew was a pathetic figure, his humanity shredded. As Joseph Roth observed, “No one loves victims, not even their fellow victims.” Israel arose to consign that figure to the past.

  Podashnik told Bert these survivors of the Holocaust had come from Dachau. Bert could not have known to what degree the bedraggled Jews scrambling on that Italian concrete floor were indeed “kith and kin of mine.” He could not have known then that the few Jewish ghetto survivors of his father’s Lithuanian hometown, Šiauliai, had been marched by the Nazis to Dachau in 1944. A circle had been closed.

  Life consists of what is but also of what might have been. What happens only just happens; then inevitability is conferred upon it. Sometimes the hypothetical meets reality in the mirror, and the confrontation is intolerable. Those Jews on an Italian concrete floor in 1945 might have included my grandfather. Dreams complete pictures the conscious mind will only half-acknowledge.

  It was Jean-Luc Godard who remarke
d that a movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end but not necessarily in that order. So it has been with my family. Like Chagall’s fiddlers, we have been looking in various directions at once.

  My parents were South African immigrants in postwar Britain, part of the great transcontinental reflux from retreating empire. Their priority was assimilation in a country of shrinking ambitions but enduring pretensions. Jewishness was the minor key of their identity. They were not about to change their name, a move urged on my father by a concerned relative back in Johannesburg and met with the retort that the only alternative to Cohen that he would entertain was “Einstein”! Nor, however, were they about to rock the boat.

  Dispatched to learn Hebrew at Johannesburg’s Yeoville synagogue in 1933, in preparation for his bar mitzvah, and having retained from that experience only a couple of Hebrew phrases, my father reached England with scant inclination to inflict such instruction on me. To the quest for assimilation was added distaste for the Jewish experience insofar as he had lived it. He was inclined toward the silence, or at least discretion, shared by many Jews—whether Holocaust survivors or not—in the postwar years. There was after Auschwitz something shameful about survival that no Jew could abjure. The horror went latent for a long period after Nuremberg. Better to look forward, work hard, say little, and confine protest to shunning German cars.

  A cultural and spiritual vacuum resulted from this attempt to begin again with the mark and scar of each generational upheaval effaced. England was embraced as if we had always had it. We lived as if we had always taken tea and Jaffa Cakes at four o’clock in the afternoon and always bought the chicken for our Sunday roast at the supermarket. We came from South Africa and nowhere. Industrious and circumspect, we adopted habits of silence that cloaked the fortuitousness of our deliverance. There were no screams in my garden suburb other than those issuing from my imagination.

  The synagogue in the Yeoville district of Johannesburg where my father had his bar mitzvah in 1934. All he recalled from long study was the Hebrew for “Go down from your bed and run to the House of the Book.” THE ARCHIVES—SOUTH AFRICA JEWISH BOARD OF DEPUTIES

  The London house stood halfway up a hill, a solid redbrick affair with a large back garden steadily embellished by my father’s deft hand. It was acquired when I was six. A cable, dated December 21, 1961, to family in South Africa expressed joy and gratitude at its purchase: “Greenaway finalized. Everyone thrilled. Many thanks.” Here was an anchor at last in the English fog. Ice-blue hydrangea and luxuriant rhododendron spread along one wall. Along another, red, pink, and vanilla-yellow roses grew in bright abundance. My father mowed the lawn in straight up-and-down swaths, with the grass in one swath at the opposite angle to the adjacent one and so a different tone of green, one dill-pickle light, one pool-table dark. He would pause to detach the receptacle at the front of the mower and dispose of the cut grass on a compost heap in the far corner of the garden. The lawn, soft where it had been prickly in South Africa, was smooth enough to putt on. An ivy-clad stone birdhouse shaped like a small tower stood watch over this flourishing patch of London suburbia like a gray sentinel. Spring brought daffodils and tulips to the garden’s wilder depths. A large bay tree of perennial green shaded a corner where caged hamsters and rabbits lived and died, usually rather fast. Beyond the flowers, against the picket fence, lay a ditch into which stray soccer and tennis balls would fall. In fear, knee-deep in the weeds and nettles, I would forage for them, swatting away the gnats. I played for hours, happy in the summer sunlight, shooting balls across the length of the grass into a goal constituted by the wooden legs of a bench. The only question in my mind then was which form of sporting glory would be mine.

  We lived on the ground floor. Upstairs there was a tenant, an American Jew with a Mark Twain moustache and an elaborate aquarium that held pride of place. It was full of colorful, pouting fish and a jellyfish detonating silky orbs of light. He would be killed in an auto accident during the annus horribilis of 1978. An L-shaped corridor formed the axis of our floor, with my parents’ bedroom at the tip of the long stem and my sister’s and mine at the other end. It was impossible within that space to be farther apart. At the elbow of the hallway, tethered by a hook, was a heavy, fire-resistant door of ominous thickness. I would imagine it swinging shut and wonder where I would find the strength to reopen it. Between that door and my bedroom was the cellar, accessible by a staircase and housing a clangorous boiler, piles of suitcases, and assorted bric-a-brac. The cellar afforded, through rectangular breaches in the wall, glimpses into the tenebrous foundations of the house, recesses easily peopled with ghouls. These dark hideouts held a powerful fascination.

  The house was proper. The red tiles at the entrance shone. The umbrella stand was always in its place. My father’s snack, kosher salami on rye and a sliced gherkin, awaited him every evening on a dresser in the hall. Opposite the dresser was an alcove where the telephone sat on a shelf beneath net-curtained windows. “Hampstead-double-one-nine-five”: my mother never modulated her greeting when she picked up.

  The closet beside the phone contained a safe hidden behind a wooden panel with a hook on it. There was a “lounge,” containing the best settees (not sofas) and rugs and bibelots, the silver Ronson table lighter (a de rigueur wedding gift in my parents’ time), and a vintage soda siphon bottle. It was sealed at all times other than in the presence of guests, often friends of my mother who would come for tea. The door to my father’s study was usually closed, penetrable only with trepidation. Immersed in his papers and his Brahms concertos, he was impatient with interruption, increasingly so with the years as frustration hardened him.

  Family life was centered on the kitchen, where my mother’s braised tongue sat in the pantry and we always had a good roast for Sunday lunch, and on the “playroom,” where the furnishings were functional and the black-and-white television set did not give way to color until my late teens. In the lounge, over the fireplace, hung a good Dutch painting of a field of haystacks stretching away toward a small village with a church. The scene was bathed in a golden light. Its summer air shimmered with life. Everything in that flat, ordered Dutch countryside glowed. The earth was bountiful; surely the churchgoing folk who worked it were, too. I could not take my eyes off the scene. There was so little of that light where I lived. After South Africa, my mother never got used to London’s dirty-bathwater skies and the dullness seeping from them. The sun might never have set on the British Empire, but it set early on Britain, and it rose late.

  Her soft hands were cool. She craved heat. She would breathe heat in as voraciously as the smoke from her Rothmans cigarettes, their toffee-colored filters stained with her bright red lipstick. From the small pale blue cushions that she would rest her head on while reading in bed emanated the bittersweet scent of tobacco and Chanel. She was an avid reader. She was often in bed.

  My mother wanted everything just so. She needed insurance against disorder. My father added a conservatory abutting the garage from which the garden he had created could be admired. He would sit there with a gin and tonic and admire it. There was no peppercorn tree, no clucking chickens in a coop, no tropical storms, and no Mac reading the bones of Africa in an outbuilding. No avocados dropped from trees. Things were tamer in the Northern Hemisphere. Twilights were longer, impossibly long. The day lingered, where it died in Africa like a guillotine dropping.

  Colors muted themselves; the horizon closed in. But there was freedom. Apartheid corroded the soul. My father had arrived in London for the first time on May 18, 1945, a just-qualified doctor come to treat the war victims of a victorious nation at the brink of rapid imperial decline. He returned to South Africa in 1948, spent almost a decade going back and forth between the two countries, and then settled with my mother in England in 1957, when I was almost two.

  In a greenhouse down near the ditch, tucked away in a corner, my father nursed to life cuttings he had brought from scientific trips to Gambia, Kenya, and other African countries.
They flourished in big-leafed splendor and rich blooms. Often he gave cuttings to friends. Nothing he touched, nothing in the plant kingdom, ever withered. No graft failed to take. He had a touch inherited from his mother, Polly, who had wandered among the willows of Žagarė. He understood nature’s mystery. A sensitive soul, alive to beauty, attuned to nature, resided within the stiffening carapace of his professionalism and what would become an increasingly divided life.

  He was busy trying to rid the world of malaria, a demanding task setting human ingenuity against the endless adaptability of the tropical mosquito. I would ask about his efforts as he drove me to school. His responses left me perplexed. My mother tried to be busy—when inertia did not grip her. She hid her fragility as best she could. Children experience things they cannot express. I could never identify the nature of the loss, but I knew elements were missing from the domestic picture, so unblemished on the surface. Our past was a secret, not just the Jewish past of moving on to skirt horror, the transcontinental hopping, but some specific event. All the order was a shield against its recurrence. The locked doors were a bulkhead against the eruption of the uncontrollable.

  In my bedroom at night, yellowish streetlights glinted through a mullioned window set high in the wall. Rain beat against the panes. Then it would begin: a high-pitched ringing just within the range of audible sound. The house always seemed vast. The hallway outside my room was too dark and too long to broach, and it ended at a closed door to my parents’ bedroom. At most I might get a third of the way down the corridor, to the turning where the heavy door was hooked, before the sight of my parents’ closed door and the murky distance to it turned me around.

  Now as I shrank in my bed, the spaces grew bigger still. What if the heavy door at the L-shaped corridor’s right angle, so like the door to a mental ward, had come off its latch and swung in slowly shrinking parabolas? The ringing rose to envelop me. This is what it feels like to be smothered by blankness. Hands clamped to my ears, limbs immovable, I would awaken and watch the rainwater drip down the windows. An occasional car, changing gears as it strained up the hill, projected shifting lozenges of light onto the ceiling.