Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The title page was inscribed: ‘To Doug and Ellen, with my very best wishes and thanks for your kindness and support, Saul, 12th September 1980.’ The book had been closed before the ink dried and fragments of the letters had come off on the opposite page, lightly curved strokes like eyelashes. What kind of support had my uncle given Saul Auerbach? Auntie Ellen was a music teacher and dancer of note, prone to demonstrating her skills extravagantly at family weddings when she’d had one too many. Perhaps she’d taught Auerbach to rumba in an unguarded moment.

  In the flap of the dust jacket I found a handful of exhibition reviews clipped from newspapers and magazines, none more than a few paragraphs long. One reviewer spoke about the rigour of Auerbach’s composition and his fine understanding of light. Another praised his dispassionate eye but questioned the grimness of the images it gave rise to. A third, more enthusiastic offering from Scenario said that the humanity of Auerbach’s vision transcended politics and enabled a deep engagement with his subjects.

  I read the reviews twice, trying to see if or how they contradicted one another. Was technical proficiency an element of style, perspective or personality? Could one be dispassionate and deeply engaged at the same time? I paced through the book, going to the edge of the world and back, over and over, without finding an answer.

  ‘Why does the old man want me to meet this Auerbach guy? What’s he up to?’

  My father had gone to his Sunday morning golf game, my mother was baking – cheese straws, one of her specialities – rolling out the dough on a board at the kitchen table. She looked at me over her glasses while she floured the rolling pin. ‘He thinks it will be interesting for you, Nev. Instructive. He’s at the top of his field, you know.’

  ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Just tag along, watch, learn, I don’t know.’

  ‘I already told Dad I’m not planning to become a photographer.’ I had belonged briefly to the camera club at high school and learned to do my own developing, but it was never more than a hobby, and given up faster than philately. It was years since I’d taken more than a holiday snap.

  ‘More’s the pity,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve got a good eye. Even Mr Marshall said so and he wasn’t free with his compliments.’

  My high-school art master, old Marshall Arts himself. In fact, he’d done nothing to discourage me when I dropped his subject in Standard 8 to do Latin. My father was still hoping then that I would study Law.

  ‘Do you know Auerbach?’

  ‘I’ve met him once or twice, in passing. He was at the theatre once with Ellen and she introduced us.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘You should really talk to Dad about this, it was his idea.’ She dipped a knife in the flour packet and made four long cuts through the dough, carving out a perfect square and sweeping the ragged edges aside. When she was done, she would knead the offcuts together into another ball, dust the board and the pin, and roll it out again. Waste not, want not. ‘I’m sure it’s not about the photographs at all but Saul’s way of doing things. He’s famously patient, quite happy to wait all day until the light strikes a wall just so, a total professional. Maybe he can teach you something about perseverance, learning to do one thing properly. Your father is very disappointed that you’ve dropped out. And this whole line-painting business, he thinks it’s beneath you, and I agree. We’ve given you a bit of time to find yourself – but you’re getting lost instead.’

  When he spoke about things like this, my father always used the word ‘gumption’. A word that stuck to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter.

  I gathered that Auerbach was supposed to teach me a lesson about life. He was to be an example to me (we did not say ‘role model’ then).

  There had to be more to it than that. Between them, my father and my uncle must have briefed the man about me. Me and my problems. He would give me a talking-to, this gloomy stranger. I was irritated with him before we even met.

  Moving back to Bramley was not a good idea. The year before, my girlfriend Linda and I had shared a room in a house in Yeo Street, but when she decided to finish her studies in Cape Town, we parted company. The relationship had run its course. Our housemates were graduating and starting jobs or going abroad, and so the house broke up too. I might have found a place in another commune, but the thought of dropping out was already in my mind and I moved back under my parents’ roof instead. It was convenient and cheap, but I would have done better taking a flat on my own.

  How could I not feel like a child here? To be reminded of how young I really was, I had only to glance at the jamb of my bedroom door, where a succession of dates and heights scored on the paint in different inks, rising year by year, charted my physical growth to the age of sixteen. Just a few years ago. That ladder, observed from my bed with an open book forgotten on my chest, would draw my eye up into the heights of the room, where two model aeroplanes were suspended in perpetual combat against the blank sky of the ceiling. A Messerschmitt and a Spitfire. There had been others, Flying Fortresses, Stukas, Bristol Blenheims, but they had all gone down in flames over the years, leaving a solitary dogfight. I had built the planes myself from kits and suspended them on fishing line. They never turned out like the pictures on the boxes: you got glue all over the cockpit glass, and the decals, the impudent English bullseyes and angular German crosses, went on skew or came apart on your fingertips. But from a distance they were convincing enough. It was part of the training of ground-to-air gunners, my grandpa told me, to learn the distinctive silhouettes of aircraft, your own as well as the enemy’s.

  I had tidied away my childhood, but traces remained. The Hardy Boys had migrated to the bottom of the bookshelf to make space for my university textbooks. A NUSAS poster about forced removals was taped to the wardrobe door, alongside Joanna Lumley in a leotard and tights, packing a pistol. Linda laughed out loud the first time she saw it and then I refused to part with it on principle. The imitation-leather beanbag I’d picked up along the way was squashed into a corner. My spray painter’s mask and gloves lay on the pine desk where I’d crammed for my matric exams. At my mother’s insistence, I stored the overalls in the garage. Even so, there was a fume of turpentine in the air.

  In these clashing currents, on the eve of my meeting with Auerbach, I leafed morosely through his book. What was he hiding? What had he missed?

  I parked the Datsun in the street outside Auerbach’s house in Craighall Park and waited for five to nine. I would give him no excuse to find fault. The house was low-lying and roughly plastered, set in a garden full of old trees. There was something Mediterranean about the dappled pergolas, the walls as creamy as feta, the succulent shadows of fig leaves and thick-tongued aloes cast by the late-summer sun. Years later, I read in Chipkin’s book that it was House Something-or-Other, named for the original owner, and that the architect was quite famous for his Hellas on the Highveld mannerisms.

  Auerbach answered the doorbell and showed me through to the kitchen. He was matter-of-fact to the point of rudeness, as I expected. ‘No nonsense’ was the phrase my father had used.

  A still life on the kitchen counter: apples in a wooden bowl shaped like a dhow, two quarters of lemon on a ceramic tile decorated with a spiral, salt in a finger bowl. Ritual objects, I thought.

  ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘I’ve eaten thanks.’

  A slice of toast sprang up on the counter. While he was buttering it, I had time to glance into the lounge, a cool cavern of honeyed slate floors and paper-white walls that set off dark linocuts and African masks in smoky wood, rough-hewn creatures with horns, apparently bootblacked, a beaded doll. Kilims, leather, a bit of chrome. A dated modern style that suited him.

  ‘Coffee then?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  I had never seen a cafetière before. He leaned on the plunger and gazed out of the window. It seemed to me that he was doing it in slow motion, building up tension in the room along with the mass of grounds in the bottom of the pot, dr
awing attention to the device. But why? After a minute in his company I felt off balance, provoked to speculate about trifles.

  I sat at the table with my coffee while he picked through his camera bags to make sure everything was there, fetched odd pieces of equipment from other rooms, pausing every now and then to take a bite out of the toast or eat a segment of orange. He was a family man, as I knew from the dust jacket of his book, but there was no sign of a wife or child. You would have thought he lived on his own. He was excessively crumpled, in khaki shorts and a shirt with epaulettes and brass buttons left over from the North Africa campaign. An old soldier. My father’s age, I guessed, but my dad would have looked plump and office-bound beside him.

  The car in the driveway was a Rambler, more than a few years old. He packed the gear into the boot – refusing my offer of help on the grounds that it would disrupt his rhythm – and we drove into the city.

  ‘You’re at Wits?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Yes, your father tells me you’re having second thoughts.’

  ‘I’ve already dropped out, actually.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m bored.’ This was not strictly true and it sounded spoilt. ‘Not bored so much as impatient. I want to get on with my life. Do things.’

  ‘Life will get on with you soon enough,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be in such a cast-iron hurry.’

  Then I expected him to ask: ‘So what are you going to do?’ But he did not.

  He drove with careless expertise, as if his mind were on other things, weaving through the traffic along Jan Smuts Avenue, gunning the car into empty space. There was an armrest between us, a soft block of sponge hinged out of the seat-back, and he drummed on it with his left hand as he drove. Stubby fingers, no sign of the taper that Mr Marshall claimed was a sure sign of the artistic temperament. That and nerves. Perhaps the story really was an excuse to hold the boys’ hands, as my more suspicious schoolmates used to say. I examined my own hands on my knees. Red crescents under the fingernails, road-marking paint rather than artists’ oils.

  The silence was stifling. I said bluntly: ‘This was my father’s idea.’

  ‘I hope he didn’t force you to come.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I could drop you off if you’ve got something better to do. Just say the word.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine.’

  Another pause. ‘You know my father.’ It was obvious I was making conversation.

  ‘A little. I know Douglas better. We were at varsity together.’ He was fiddling with the radio, and before I could answer a pop song burst out of the dash (‘like an airbag’, I almost said, but that belongs in another period).

  The concrete slabs of the Civic Centre stood among flower-trimmed lawns like cinder blocks on an embroidered tea cloth. Some joker had once pointed the place out to me as the municipal mortuary and it was years before I discovered that the trade was in licences and title deeds rather than corpses. I thought of telling Auerbach this story as we dropped down into the city, but evidently he did not appreciate small talk.

  He was silent until we pulled up outside the King George in Joubert Park. ‘We’ve got company for the day, journalist by the name of Gerald Brookes, a Brit but a decent fellow. Afraid you’ll have to move to the back.’

  He crossed the pavement and vanished into the lobby of the hotel.

  Listen to me, don’t listen to me! Talk to me, don’t talk to me! Jesus. He’d left the radio on for my benefit. I turned off the ignition and got out of the car. One of my more imposing affectations was a pipe, a Dr Watson with a bowl the size of an espresso cup; the dropped bowl hung a perpetual question mark on my lip, made me appealingly wry, in my own estimation. I tamped down the crust of my early-morning smoke and sucked the flame of my lighter through it. Then I leaned on the bonnet as the bowl warmed in my palm. Company. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed.

  On the opposite pavement, against the railings of the park, a couple of portrait artists were already waiting hopefully for customers. In midsummer, when the Art Gallery attracted more visitors, there would be half a dozen of them. They set up their easels and camping chairs under the trees every day. I sometimes went past there on my way into town and stopped to watch them working: it was more engaging than the amateur chess on the big outdoor board in the park itself. Chalky old men in berets with dandruff on their collars, and one wild-haired woman with an expressionist mask of a face. She was the only caricaturist among them, a lover of crayon; the others went for realism in pencil, pastel or charcoal. Most had samples of their work sticky-taped to a portfolio leaning against the fence as an advertisement. Usually they showed a photograph and a drawing so that you could judge whether the likeness was true. It was easier to capture someone from a photograph. A photograph was the presentiment of a portrait, stilling an expression, freezing the blood. When the living subject sat before you, breathing, sweating, with an expectant smile budding in the corners of her mouth, it was another matter altogether. Or so I imagined. Perhaps it was the other way round? Perhaps that was precisely what separated the artists from the copyists. The real artists worked from life.

  But what did I know?

  Auerbach came out of the hotel and went along the pavement with his head down and his fists bunched in the pockets of his shorts. For a moment I thought he was heading off into the city, having forgotten about me entirely. But on the next corner he stopped and looked through a plate-glass window. It was a men’s hairdresser, not a barbershop, mind you, but a salon. Marco’s or something like that. I had no use for it myself, but I had seen men sitting in there enveloped in linen, getting themselves shaved or coiffed, red linen, as if they expected the worst. Sometimes, the clients reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold. They actually washed your hair before they cut it. Auerbach stood at the window with his hands peaked over his eyes. He came back. In passing, he tilted his head in my direction, gave an open-handed shrug – And now? – and went back into the hotel.

  What do I know?

  This question ran like a hairline crack through my thoughts. I had read sociology and political philosophy, I had worked through a few of the key texts of the radical tradition, some of them written in the previous century. In order to read these books, I had sat in a booth in the Cullen Library, where the banned books were kept, as if I were suffering from a contagious disease. My head was like the stacks in the basement of the Cullen. New ideas fell out of old volumes and I tried to unriddle them in the gloom. The air was full of dust. I could scarcely breathe in the space between my ears.

  I was in a room with two windows, speaking to myself in Latin – or was it Greek? – about reification and alienation, surplus value and exchange value, base and superstructure. Class consciousness, false consciousness, petit bourgeois, proletarian – the terms fell through a gap between two kinds of knowledge. Through one window I could see the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace and Lenin addressing the crowds in Sverdlov Square; through the other, schoolchildren battling the police in the streets of Soweto and Oliver Tambo addressing the General Assembly. Through one, Trotsky and Breton working on their manifesto in Mexico City; through the other, Breytenbach writing poems in his cell at Pretoria Central with a greasepaint moustache on his lip. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and the Top Star Drive-in. I wanted to bring these views together like the two images in a stereoscope, but I couldn’t see through both windows at the same time. I went up and down like a prisoner, until I was dizzy. Finally, I stood in the middle of the room, under the chandelier, with my head aching.

  It wasn’t a dream: I had never been more awake in my life.

  What exactly is the radical tradition? In one of the elections for SRC, a student politician, a long-haired boy from a suburban home like mine, had styled himself as Kropotkin. He went around in a cossack coat and riding boots like an extra from Doctor Zhivago on Ice. And I had nearly voted for him. What t
o make of Marx with his Boer War beard and his watch chain? He was treated like a patriarch in War and Peace, but he was more at home in David Copperfield. He might have been a chum of Mr Micawber, always expecting something to turn up.

  I am more flippant about this now than I was then. Had you seen me there, with the cold shell of the car against my bum and the morning sun on my face, you would have thought I was an overly earnest young man. You could not see Benjamin’s Angel – Klee’s Angel, strictly speaking, memorably captioned – leaning beside me with his wings folded across the bonnet. I was troubled. For all my uncertainty about the sacred texts, they had dumped me into history and I had a suspicion that I would never be out of it again. Looking back over the brief span of my life, I felt like some object left on the shoreline, toyed with by a rising tide. If you had a sense of historical destiny, if you were sufficiently drunk with it, you might expect to ride out any storm. But I did not imagine I would be carried in one piece to a classless shore. History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates.