Brookes’s mouth turned down in clownish dismay, but before he could speak, Auerbach went on, ‘That’s what she said, anyway. Poor woman. I suppose it makes her feel better.’
The mask, the thing that could have been a scrap of rubber torn from a doll’s head, was in fact a face. The other bits and pieces were easier to identify as human – a foot in a shoe, a hand with the fingers curled, intact. There was even a ring on the middle finger. The rest was meat and cotton waste.
He had not been run down by History or the Movement: he had been blown up by a bomb. He was planting a bomb outside a police station when it detonated prematurely and tore his body to pieces. There was nothing metaphorical about it. Thinking in metaphors is not always a good idea. It was Benjy who rebuked me for the habit one night when we’d both had one too many. ‘You can call it an empty barrel if you like. You can say, “This conversation is an empty barrel.” But what’s the point? Why not just say what you mean? Maybe I’ll get it then. Give me a sporting chance.’
I swallowed the sea water in the back of my mouth and leaned closer to the photograph. It was a cutting from a newspaper, covered in clear plastic like a school project and stuck to the wall above the urinal where you could not fail to see it, standing there with a soft target in your hand, your manhood. Alongside was a typed sheet – BE ON THE ALERT – explaining that it was my responsibility to keep my eyes open and report suspicious packages to the Manager, in brackets Raul. The man who took the snap out of the snapper. The picture seemed to me like the conclusion of an argument, the coup de grâce. But whose argument? Perhaps it was just a lesson in looking. I was too inclined to turn my head away, it was in my nature and my upbringing. I buttoned my fly and washed my hands at the basin. Then I went back to the cutting and made myself look at it squarely.
In search of the second house, the one he had pulled out of the hat on Langermann Kop, Auerbach drove us back to Bez Valley. Brookes made me sit in front as if it was a special treat, so that he could stretch out in the back with his eyes closed. Auerbach switched on the radio, although he did not need to tune me out. We were all distracted. The house in Emerald Street had proved the magnanimity of chance so fully it hardly seemed fair to test it again.
We rumbled down the long hot avenues.
There’s the cover of his book! – I thought – it’s that picture of Uncle Doug’s, I swear. But I held my tongue. Just as there was no point anticipating a photograph Auerbach might still take, so there was no point recognizing one he had taken already. What could one say about it? Snap! And then?
He’s playing a game – I thought this too – he’s having some fun. All this wandering around the city is nothing less than a guided tour of the places he’s captured on film. He’s letting us know we’re on his turf. There! That place with the palm tree! And what about that one covered in ivy? It was like counting caravans, Gypsy caravans like our own, when we drove down to the coast on holiday, a game my father dreamed up to keep me occupied when I got bored and restless. Who’ll be the first to see the sea?
When we pulled up outside the house in Fourth Avenue, I had a more cynical thought: is this really the place he picked from up on the koppie? Neither Brookes nor I can contradict him. He might have chosen it this minute, relying on those intuitions he makes so much of. All you can say for certain is that the roof is green. Racing green. Groendakkies.
While Auerbach went to see if anyone was home, and Brookes got out of the car to stretch and peel the fabric of his shirt off his belly like dead skin, I strolled a little way along the pavement to look at the house next door. My choice. It was as long and narrow as one side of a semi, a place that had lost its better half. The half left behind was yellow. A dozen steps led up to a stoep with a metal railing of diamonds and quoits. Beside the gate was a letterbox with a pitched roof and a chimney standing on an iron plinth like a maquette of the larger structure: they matched one another perfectly, down to the orange tiles and the red door. I could not wait to see what was behind that door. It might take another man’s charm to pass through it, but the choice was mine.
Then Auerbach came back to the car to fetch his bags and invite us in. This knack for getting people to open up surprised me less the second time round.
Mrs Ditton lumbered ahead of us down the passage, swaying at every step to sweep one thigh past another, almost brushing the walls. We followed her into the lounge. The room was lined with dressers and display cabinets, and for all its clutter peculiarly hushed and drained, like a little-visited annex in a museum. I remember stepping lightly from a patterned rug on to dark floorboards, aware that all around things were asleep on their shadows. Even Brookes took the boom out of his voice. Set out in cabinets of coffin wood and pillared glass were toby jugs and cruet sets, upturned port glasses, cut-glass dishes, fragile and flowery ornaments, iced frivolities for wedding cakes in lilac, rose and leaf green. Of course, you cannot see these shades in Auerbach’s photograph, although the black and white is perfect for lacquered wood and tarnished mirror. The ball-and-claw suite is ankle-deep in shadow, the curtains are so densely grained they could be carved from the same heavy wood as the furniture. There is a murderer behind every one.
An object stood out in the gloom: a low coffee table with a cracked top.
‘Is this from a lorry?’ Brookes asked incredulously, shifting aside a pewter urn on a tea cloth. Now I also saw the table for what it was: a windscreen welded at each of its four corners to a shell casing.
‘A hippo,’ she said. The flesh of her arms shook with laughter.
‘Military vehicle,’ Auerbach glossed it for him, ‘troop carrier.’ After a glance at the table, he went back to rifling out the legs of the tripod.
‘They drove over a landmine with Jimmy inside.’
‘Jimmy?’
‘My son.’
She watched Auerbach suspiciously. I saw that the pads of her bare feet were so thick and round that her toes did not touch the floor when she stood still. She seemed to be balancing on pontoons. Only her hair was stiff and angular, arriving swiftly at contradictory points below her ears. It looked like a hairstyle she had copied from Jackie Kennedy and forgotten to change.
‘Was he killed?’
‘No, thank God. I always say to him, Jimmy, God was watching your back. His mates had broken bones and stuff, but he walked away without a scratch. That’s why they gave it to him when he klaared out.’
So this piece of scrap was a good luck charm. Or a medal.
I had a look around with Mrs Ditton at my shoulder. Jimmy’s room was easy to spot: he had a Kawasaki poster on the door and Farrah Fawcett-Majors above the bed. The room smelt of fish. In the channel between the bed and the wall lay a clutter of flippers, tanks and masks crusted with sea sand, and a couple of wetsuits like bloated body parts. A speargun leaned against a wardrobe. Jimmy was a diver in Port Nolloth, his mother told me, but he’d been called up to the border again and so he’d brought his gear home. Couldn’t leave it in Port Jolly, it would all be swiped. He loved the sea, she said, even as a baby you couldn’t get him out of the water. Swimming before he could walk. It was a crying shame they wouldn’t take him in the navy because of his feet.
Auerbach called her for the shot.
The main bedroom was as gloomy as the lounge. A pair of brogues, side by side under the bed, polished for a funeral. The suit they went with was on a round-shouldered dumb valet. Through a window, I saw the window of the house next door, almost close enough to touch and so perfectly aligned it might have been a reflection. I shifted aside the edge of a net curtain and saw that the window opposite had venetian blinds tilted against the outside world. I could not imagine what was going on in that room. Anything was possible. Everything.
Brookes was like a visitor in a museum whose point he cannot fathom. He stooped to look at objects on the lower shelves of the cabinets and ran his fingers over the embossed spines of a set of encyclopedias. He paused in the doorways of the rooms as if they were spanned by
chains, leaning in for a better view. There must be something interesting here, his attitude suggested, perhaps it’s hidden in the corner over there. In the kitchen, where the makings of a stew lay on a chopping board, he held a chunk of butternut up to the light as if looking for a flaw. Once he fanned himself with his notebook, but wrote nothing in it.
When I returned to the lounge, Auerbach had the focusing cloth over his head. For a moment, the darkness seemed to emanate from him, running out from under the stifling hood. Then the flow reversed and the cloth appeared to be soaking up the shadows that had lain there already. Mrs Ditton sat in the armchair beside the fireplace. The coffee table had been dragged away – there is no trace of it in the photograph – to expose the floorboards and a corner of the rug. Looming on the left is the largest of the cabinets, so imposing you would say it belongs in a department store. The chair has wooden arms with ledges for teacups and on each of these lies a pie-crust of crochet work and a coaster. The chair sprawls with its arms open wide and its fists clenched, and she wallows in its lap.
Auerbach shrugged off the cloth and stood beside the camera with the cable release in his hand. The shadows scuttled and settled again. He waited for something to happen. Or not happen. Something imperceptible to the rest of us had to become clear before he could release the shutter. Twice he stepped away from the camera and looked towards the door with a grimace, as if the situation pained him and he had made up his mind to leave. This caused her to look at the door enquiringly as if someone had just knocked.
I imagined the door opening, I imagined the room opening rather than the door, the door standing still while the house swung away on small hinges and closed into the eye of the camera with a bang. Patience, something is bound to happen. And if nothing does? That is unthinkable. We cannot be left here in this half-formed state.
While my thoughts were elsewhere, Auerbach took the picture. For only the second time that day, the shutter fell through the moment like a guillotine. You can see the relief on Mrs Ditton’s face as she drops from the fulness of life into a smaller, diminished immortality. She looks grateful to have the air knocked out of her. Anticipating a paper-thin future, she floats free of the fat-thighed cushions and the sticky shadows, she levitates. It is there in the photograph, you have only to look.
For a moment after the picture was taken, she was reluctant to leave the chair. Captured and released in the same instant, she was unsure of her will. She had two destinies now. One of them she still occupied, the other had stepped away from her; it was receding into the past, but with its face turned to the future. She hovered in the chair, unblinking, afraid to move a muscle, as if stirring would smudge that other body in the camera and she needed to match it for as long as possible to preserve a resemblance.
For the first time since the game with the houses started, Auerbach’s spirits sagged. Some charge had gone out of him and into the camera, which stood there primed and ticking. Still, I heard him laughing as he chatted to Mrs Ditton and wrote in his notebook. Where do you come from? All these years, hey? What’s that Jimmy of yours up to? And Mr Ditton? Have you ever worked? Do you get a pension? With questions that opened into the rest of her life, into her complications, she was charmed back into the well-lit room of the present.
I went on to the stoep and fired up my old man’s briar. Through the bay window, I had a new view of the lounge. Standing there alone, the camera looked like a detached observer, an expert on a fact-finding mission, with its chin up and its eye steady, drawing its own conclusions.
Auerbach entered the picture and began to dismantle the device, while Mrs Ditton floated on the edge of the frame. Now that it really was done, the pose abandoned once and for all, she wanted us out of the house, that was clear, she was like a woman hurrying her lover from her bed, urging him to be gone before her husband comes home from work. Her eye kept flicking over the shelves and table tops, dusting and adjusting, measuring the spaces between knick-knacks to assure herself that nothing had been taken.
Brookes came to perch beside me on the balustrade. Where had he been all this time? He had faded into the background like a song on the radio and now he became audible again, rolling his pen between his palms as if he was trying to start a fire.
‘Well, I was right. That’s two out of two.’ When I gave no answer, he went on, ‘Did you pick up some tips?’
‘Sure, I’ve learned a bit about talking your way in. Perhaps I’ll go into insurance.’
‘It’s been an eye-opener, I must say.’
‘More like a door-opener.’
Next door there was no sign of life. The curtains were drawn, the rooms were dark. We would not be ringing that bell, I was sure of it now. When Brookes said he had an interview with a chap from MAWU, he had to get back to the King George – ‘The place has international status, you know’ – I was not disappointed. Nor that Auerbach agreed so readily. It had been a long day.
Nothing more was said about the third house. Two out of two is good enough. Perfect.
The car smelt of middle-aged men, of garlic, Brut and sweat, and thanks to me a whiff of pipe smoke, the finishing touch.
I asked to be dropped off in Hillbrow, I would fetch my car later, and Auerbach obliged by sweeping up Hadfield Road into Berea. He did not ask what I had made of the day. To be frank, I meant to avoid that question at all costs. Young people learn things intensely. They’re impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into us, skilfully or clumsily, it’s the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there, hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue. Experience swirls through these channels like water over rock, being shaped in turn and given a new direction. The day had diverted a current in me, but I could neither express this change nor predict its issue. If I joked with Brookes about what I had learned, it was only because I found the lesson baffling.
In Kotze Street, near the High Point Centre, Auerbach pulled over. We all shook hands. Brookes gave me his business card and wished me luck in the profession. ‘Remember to write things down – ’ the door swung shut ‘– on an empty stomach!’ They swerved out into the traffic.
I had said I was meeting a friend in the Café Zürich, but this was just an excuse. Even before the Rambler turned down Twist Street, I was walking. The streets were lit with purpose, the surge of energy released when people knock off from work, when they come out of offices and shops and the evening lies ahead. Every intersection, where the stream pooled impatiently waiting for the lights to change, was a small spectacle. Long strings of brake lights glowed like coals, exhaust fumes mingled with the smell of rosemary and roast chicken. I walked from one end of Hillbrow to the other. White boxes full of blunt objects turned over in my mind, thumping at every step. I drank a beer in Willie’s Bar, I drank another on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel. Pulsing with words and pictures, Exclusive Books drew me. Auerbach’s book felt light in my hands. Perhaps his images, those dark things floating on milk, had finally sunk? I imagined that I opened the book and the pages were blank.
Long after dark, I walked over to Sabine’s house in Honey Street and found her making supper, trying to turn the usual strange assortment of cut-price goods from the vegetable co-op into a casserole. She had a sackful of parsnips and runner beans. We sat at the kitchen table, with wine from a box in glasses filched from some exhibition opening, and peeled and chopped the vegetables. I meant to tell her about the day, but in the end I left it lying in the back of my mind, pressed to my memory by a pencil of light.
Dead Letters
The end of apartheid put my nose out of joint, I must confess. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another. They wouldn’t shut up. Every so often one of them wo
uld wave a fist or shout a slogan, but it did not stem the flow. The world looked on amazed that these former adversaries had come together to talk the future into a different shape. After a decade of wilfully excluding myself, I felt left out of the club.
I was reminded of the old line on wishy-washy liberalism (the adjective is stuck to the noun like a price tag). Black people, it is said, prefer a straight-shooting Afrikaner to a duplicitous Englishman. What sort of people are these ‘English-speaking South Africans’, how can you trust them when they don’t even have a proper name for their group? You never know where you stand with an English liberal; but you can bet your life on a racist Afrikaner.
I had always been sceptical about this notion, but now I began to think it might be true. We are all caricatures, I decided. Let the houseboy unstrap his kneepads and the madam unbutton her mink, let the freedom fighter lay down his rusty machine gun and the piggy-eyed politician throw his fedora in the river. Who am I to judge them? They’ve taken the punch and now everything’s working out for the best. As for me, the hensopper in the seven-league boots, there’s really no excuse. I didn’t go the distance. Looking on as the country became a symbol of hope – of all things – I couldn’t help feeling I had squandered the chance to make my small bit of history.
For all that, I did not go home as soon as I might have. Apparently, I needed to go on excluding myself a little longer.
I voted at South Africa House. There was a carnival atmosphere, every newspaper would use the phrase afterwards. It’s not often history steps down from its pedestal and comes to meet you in the street. Yes, we were making history too, I could see it that way if I squinted. So what if there were no proper ballot boxes, just bins with plastic liners? People did not want to leave afterwards. They lingered on the pavements around the embassy, greeting friends in the queue, laughing at faces masked in black, green and gold. I bumped into acquaintances I hadn’t seen for years, even swapped phone numbers with a couple I knew from the anti-apartheid rallies way back when.
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