Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Gerald Brookes was a red stump of a man with a bald head curiously creased in the middle like an apricot. The lenses of his black-rimmed glasses were as thick as metaphors. He was wearing a black leather jacket belted at the waist and had a camera on a strap around his neck. He was my idea of an East German spy or an ageing bass guitarist. Gerry and the Pacemakers.

  As we pulled off, he leaned over the seat and shook my hand. ‘Gerry. Saul says you’re a journalist in training.’

  Auerbach’s eye flashed in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Well, I’m training for something, but I’m not sure what.’

  Then they forgot about me. Brookes wanted to know what Auerbach had been up to and he told him. They chatted about mutual friends, new jobs, divorces, property prices. They passed on good wishes and sent regards. Old mates, apparently.

  Soon enough they moved on to politics. Brookes was full of questions. Was Botha pushing ahead with the Tricameral Parliament? Would the right-wingers split from the Party? And the extra-parliamentary campaign against the so-called reforms? Was it gathering momentum? What was happening on the ground? Auerbach said he was not really the person to ask, as Brookes should know by now, he could only say what he read in the papers, Brookes was probably better informed than he was. But Brookes insisted: you get around, you speak to people, you’ve got your finger on the pulse. You must hear things. What are people saying?

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Show me something, baby, I want action,’ Brookes said with a peculiar inflection.

  ‘You’re a journalist,’ Auerbach said. And then, after a pause, ‘The action is everywhere.’ And he looked out of the window as if something very interesting was happening just then.

  We were in Twist Street, waiting for a robot to change. Everything was still. The little red soldier, standing to attention against the black gong of the light, had stopped the world in its tracks. The people on the pavements had their heads turned in different directions, each listening for a signal only they could hear. Across the intersection, a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd. A skinny man in a floral shirt and an alpine hat made of white raffia was sitting on a bus-stop bench with his hands clasped behind his neck. The second I gazed at him, at the pitted skin of his cheeks, he lurched forward, pulled something from his sock and threw it into a rubbish bin. The lights changed and we took off. Looking back, I saw the man walking swiftly in the other direction.

  I wish I could remember clearly what was said that day. Between them, the photographs Auerbach took in the next few hours and my own disordered memories, which by comparison are mere snapshots with the heads cut off and the hands out of focus, have displaced everything else. They hang down like screens I cannot reach behind. I’ve read a dozen interviews with Auerbach since then, I can imagine what he might have said, but I’ve done enough ventriloquism as it is.

  Duty. That comes back now. They kept circling around it. Thou shalt and thou shalt not. Brookes was obsessed – so it seems in retrospect – with the responsibilities of good people in bad situations, people like Auerbach in places like South Africa, people who were opposed to apartheid. The pros and cons of the cultural boycott, the rights of the individual versus the collective good, the value of contemplation in a state of crisis. How could you go on writing poetry, was the gist of his argument, when you had the wherewithal to take down an affidavit?

  Any minute now, I thought, he’ll be quoting Adorno, misquoting Adorno, like everyone else. Sabine had written an intricate essay on the subject.

  The notion of duty was very much on my mind, not least because I was about to be conscripted. What should I do? Brookes was asking some of the questions I had been trying to formulate for myself ever since it had dawned on me that I was living in a grossly unjust society. But the judgement in his tone riled me. He had all the answers too. He knew exactly how he would behave if the two of them traded places. Auerbach did not live up to his standards; he admired him, but he was disappointed in him. He should be doing more for the Movement. He had a duty. I thought of machinery again, an industrial loom for weaving everyone into a single fabric.

  Auerbach was adept at answering questions. He must have heard them all before. He insisted on his independence and regretted his limitations as a photographer and a human being. This peculiar passivity also annoyed me. I wanted him to make a better defence of himself and therefore of me. If he was failing in his duty, he should at least be able to explain why. I couldn’t speak up for myself. Brookes made it sound so easy to do the right thing, to make a stand, but it was difficult. Wasn’t it?

  Of course, it didn’t come out in one piece like this, I had to put it together afterwards. Through all of this, we were driving. We went to the end of Twist Street, so that Brookes could see the base of the Hillbrow Tower, driven like a stake through a city block. Then we headed for Yeoville. As we went, Auerbach pointed things out and Brookes leaned out of the window and took pictures – of WHITES ONLY benches, separate entrances, a uniformed servant eating her lunch on the kerb. Auerbach’s subjects, you could say. In Berea, he got Auerbach to reverse so that he could peer down a service lane where a man and a woman were arguing among the rubbish bins.

  Brookes was overheated, he was pink and damp, and I almost felt sorry for him. But he must be a bit thick too, thick-skinned at least, firing away with his Instamatic in the company of a real photographer.

  Then, or perhaps it was later in the day, Brookes asked, ‘How do you know that a subject is worth photographing?’

  Auerbach answered, ‘I’m like you: I wait for something to catch my eye.’

  ‘Everything catches my eye,’ Brookes laughed. ‘You choose your subjects very carefully.’

  ‘Film is expensive.’

  Brookes pulled a face.

  Then or later, Auerbach said warily, ‘The subject draws me, I don’t have words for it really, something strikes a chord, rings a bell. Sometimes it’s as if I’ve found a thing I’ve already seen and remembered, or imagined before, which may not be that different. Perhaps I recognize something in the world as a “picture” when it captures what I’ve already thought or felt.’

  ‘Evidence.’

  ‘You make it sound like a crime, but it’s not that. And it’s not proof either, I’m not trying to demonstrate a proposition or substantiate a claim. I’m just looking for what chimes. Let’s say there’s a disequilibrium in me, my scales are out of kilter, and something out there, along these streets, can right the balance. The photograph – or is it the photographing? – restores order.’

  ‘So it’s therapeutic?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t go that far.’

  We were parked somewhere. Brookes was half-turned in his seat, looking at Auerbach with an ironic smile, and Auerbach was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. Although he’d been speaking slowly, searching for the right words, his expression was frank.

  ‘Look, if I could explain it to you, then you could take my photographs for me. But you evidently can’t. Even if I show you what I do in the darkroom, the tricks of my particular trade, where I like to crop things, the lines that hit the spot, I can’t tell you how I see. I can only show you the result. Essentially, the process is beyond explanation and what I say doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of it. By the same token – and this is more important – the work is perfectly clear. It’s self-explanatory. You should write this down, Ger. It explains itself.’

  The presence of a great photographer (to quote my Uncle Douglas), the pressure of his calculating eye, created subject matter. Wherever you looked, you saw a photograph. Not just any photograph either: an Auerbach.

  We went down Rockey Street. On Scotch Corner, Auerbach double-parked while Brookes took a photograph of a man in a kilt and platform shoes touting for custom through a megaphone. This black highlander was peering through sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers. Then Brookes wanted to see the water tower on the ridge. He said it was like a tripod in War of
the Worlds, only the heat-ray was missing. The whole place was science fiction. ‘That’s what people fail to understand about South Africa,’ he said. ‘It’s a time machine. It’s the past’s idea of the future.’

  ‘Or vice versa,’ Auerbach said.

  We took Stewart’s Drive down into Bez Valley. Auerbach territory, as I knew from the book. Brookes wanted to stretch his legs, and so we stopped on a corner with an Apollo café, a Farmácia and a BP garage, and the two of them got out. I stayed in the car, brooding over the discussion earlier, sulking, I suppose. All around, the houses turned their good sides to the street and held their breath.

  When they came back, Brookes was carrying a paper bag. While Auerbach aimed the car deeper into the valley, he rummaged in the bag and took out a can of deodorant. ‘If it’s good enough for Henry Cooper,’ he said, putting on an accent I couldn’t place. He unbuttoned his shirt and sprayed under his arms.

  Auerbach drove us into Kensington. I hardly knew the area, although I recognized the playing fields at Jeppe Boys, where I had once kept wicket for a school side. We wound through smaller streets to Langermann Kop. A track led to the top of the hill. Auerbach put the shift in low and we ground up the slope with the middelmannetjie scraping against the bottom of the car. He stopped in a rubble-strewn clearing and we all piled out.

  There was a path going up the koppie that only Auerbach could see, enfolded in veld grass and flowering cosmos. He plunged in and we followed. Brookes burrowed through the veld like a glossy black beetle with his jacket creaking and the camera bumping against his chest. The plume from a long haulm came off in his teeth and he spat comically. When we emerged into the open, Auerbach was atop a rain-streaked outcrop with his hands on his hips, grinning. The gloomy inwardness of the morning had lifted entirely. ‘You won’t find a better view of the city,’ he called out as we approached. ‘You can see clear to Heidelberg. That’s Jan Smuts over there.’

  Beneath us, along the spine of the Reef, the land lay open like a book. Auerbach pointed out townships and suburbs, hostels and factories, mine dumps and slimes dams. His pleasure in the exercise was infectious. Brookes took some noisy photographs and hopped about, laughing and steaming. He was redder than before. He looked as if he had just got out of a scalding shower and stepped straight into his clothes.

  We followed our guide back through the grass. Brookes fetched the paper bag and opened a Fanta orange for each of us, and we sat on the rocks looking out over Bez Valley like a gang of schoolboys playing truant. William and Henry and Ginger. A drowsy calm descended. It was a relief after the movement and chatter of the past few hours. I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest. I could almost have dozed off.

  The slopes below were dotted with black wattle and sisal. Beyond them the houses began, first the side streets that ran dead against the ridge and then the long avenues that streamed away to the east, dragging your eye through a wrack of rooftops and chimneys in the green foam of oaks and planes, all the way out to Kempton Park where the elephantine cooling towers of the Kelvin Power Station stood on the horizon.

  Stunned by the sunlight, we slumped against the rock with our faces turned to the sky, while Auerbach spoke about the history of the valley and the people who had lived there as it passed from gentility to squalor and back again. You could still see some of the grand mansions on the opposite slope. Down in the dip, there were houses that went back to the beginnings of the city, that had survived the cycles of slum clearance and gentrification and renewed decline.

  ‘You think it would simplify things, looking down from up here,’ he went on, ‘but it has the opposite effect on me. If I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn’t do it in a novel, let alone a photograph.’

  Brookes started as if something had bitten him. ‘You were talking earlier about how you choose your subjects, or rather how they choose you. How does that work from up here?’

  ‘It doesn’t. There’s no way of telling from here what’s interesting.’

  ‘Oh, I thought your point was that everything looks interesting from up here.’

  ‘I said complicated, not interesting.’

  ‘I’ll say interesting then. That’s what I think. Everyone has a story to tell.’

  ‘But not everyone is a storyteller.’

  ‘Fair enough. Everyone has a story, full stop. Someone else might have to tell it. That’s where you come in.’

  Brookes was fiddling a pen out of an inside pocket, as if he was thinking of writing this down.

  ‘I’m not a storyteller,’ Auerbach said. ‘Even so, some stories are better than others.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They reveal something new. Or maybe they just confirm something important – or unimportant! They put something well. I don’t know.’

  ‘Now you’re arguing my point. It’s not the story at all, it’s how you tell it. Even I know that and I’m just a bloody journalist.’ He scrambled to his feet and teetered on the edge of a rock. A comet of pebbles was stuck to the back of the jacket where he’d been sitting on it. ‘I’ll bet you could find something worth photographing in every single house down there. Jesus, I’d love to know what’s going on behind those doors. Can you imagine! You’re the man for it, Saul! Pick one at random and let’s see what it turns up. Throw a dart at the map.’

  ‘That’s exactly what some of my colleagues are doing these days,’ Auerbach said, ‘or it looks that way to me. Just point the camera out of the window and hope for the best.’

  Brookes eased the strap of his own camera out of his collar and said, ‘Why don’t we test my idea? Seriously. Let’s pick a house from up here, where one looks very much like another, and then go down and see what you can make of it.’

  To my surprise, Auerbach jumped up rubbing his hands together, saying, ‘Action, Gerry, action!’ and the two of them riffled through the valley. After some joking about church spires and water towers, Brookes settled on a red-roofed house on our side of Kitchener Avenue.

  ‘I’d better take a green one then,’ Auerbach said, ‘it’s only fair,’ and pointed further down into the valley, holding the pose until Brookes had squinted along his arm and approved the choice.

  ‘And yours, Nev?’

  Caught unawares.

  ‘Come, come,’ said Brookes, ‘you mustn’t be too careful, that would defeat the object. Eeny, meeny …’

  In the game they had started, a miss was as good as a mile. ‘I’ll take the house next door to yours,’ I said to Auerbach, ‘the one with the orange tiles.’ A glimpse of the roof was all you could see of it in the greenery.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Brookes.

  Auerbach noted a couple of landmarks near the places we’d chosen, counting off the avenues north of Kitchener and the streets east or west of a steeple or a factory yard. Then we climbed into the Rambler and headed back down the koppie.

  There was a lighter mood in the car now that we were setting off on an adventure. On safari, with Auerbach to cut the spoor.

  In the back seat, with the window down, I worried about my choice and wished I could change it. The neighbours. The next best thing. It was meant to surprise, but it was dull.

  We looked for the house with the red roof – ‘Visitors first,’ Auerbach had insisted. It did not take him long to find the place at the end of Emerald Street. He made a U-turn and drew up at the opposite kerb.

  Brookes’s choice was a city house with country manners. A corrugated-iron roof in need of paint beetled over a long stoep. On a balustrade with pillars shaped like pawns stood a fern in a rusty watering can and a birdcage made of bamboo, a Victorian replica by the look of it. A gate hung open across a faded red path.

  ‘It’s a student house,’ I said.


  ‘Watch out for tigers. They’re not keen on cutting the lawn.’

  ‘I was thinking of the curtains. Anti-Waste sells that cloth by the kilo. Every student place I know is full of it.’ Linda had an entire wardrobe of dresses and pinafores cut from disfigured prints, factory rejects caused by a jammed roller or a spilt dye. When she sat on the sofa, you couldn’t tell where she ended and the scatter cushions began.

  ‘Let’s see if anyone’s home.’

  ‘What will you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll think of something.’

  The front door was framed by leaded panels, the regular pattern of blue and yellow spoilt by lozenges of clear glass where broken panes had been mended. Auerbach rang the bell. No one came. While we waited, Brookes strolled to the end of the stoep.

  ‘What the hell!’

  We all went around the corner.

  At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbour, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centrepiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at – rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them seem less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.

  ‘Is it an altar?’ Brookes asked.

  Auerbach snorted no.

  To my fingertips, the bones felt slily manufactured. There were hard plates, smooth as china, and porous edges like baked goods, bread or biscuit.