Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  ‘I knew it! You get a feeling about someone. The minute I saw you, I thought you were in the market. This area has gone to the dogs and some stupid people are giving their houses away. You’re not the first greedy agent to come snooping around here pretending to be looking for your cousin or collecting money for Boys Town.’

  For a moment, my surprise that she was on to me obscured the fact that she was also entirely mistaken. It was tempting to go along with this new fiction, I felt like trying it on for size, but it was time to confess.

  ‘You’re right, I’m not an historian … but I’m not an estate agent either.’

  She wouldn’t listen. ‘You work for Wanda Bollo?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Tony Braz?’

  ‘No, I’m a photographer, a commercial photographer, and not a very good one.’

  That stopped her dead. ‘A bad photographer?’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was here more than ten years ago, not in your house but next door at the Dittons. I came with a photographer called Saul Auerbach, a real professional. We were going to knock on your door and ask whether we could take some pictures but we never got that far, we ran out of time. I never stopped wondering what this place was like inside. When I found myself in your neighbourhood last week, I decided to try my luck.’

  ‘After all this time?’

  ‘I’m sure it sounds strange, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you just say so?’

  ‘It seemed too complicated.’

  With a disapproving click of her tongue, Mrs Pinheiro went to the sickroom, listened briefly at the door and slipped inside. As the door opened and shut, a tattered pennant of noise blew out through the gap. A moment later the door opened and shut again, and she was back with a photograph in a frame.

  ‘Dottie left it to me when they moved,’ she said. ‘Something to remember her by.’

  The frame was ornately leafy with the gilt chipped off its edges. Various photo-booth strips, creased passport photos and snapshots with pinked edges, tucked into the gap between glass and frame on either side, made it look like a stage with people peering out from the wings. Behind these rubbernecks, I saw Mrs Ditton in her lounge.

  It was years before I came across Auerbach’s book. Despite myself, I’d started taking more care over my photos. Using a camera nearly every day, watching people pick through my amateurish location snaps on the boardroom table – What on earth is this? – made me want to do better. Looking for guidance rather than inspiration, I turned to the photography shelves in the bookshops. On a Saturday morning, in the clutter of the Africa Centre, there it was: Accidental Portraits. Ignoring the viewing copy on top of the pile of books, I bought one sealed in plastic, sight unseen, and carried it home like a guilty secret.

  The photo of Veronica was near the front. As I paged, I had been picturing her in the yard, against the red iron walls and bright lines of washing, but of course she was inside the shack in black and white. For the first time I saw into the dim interior, where she sat on an iron bed cradling her two babies.

  The caption read: ‘Veronica Setshedi and her children, Joel and Amos, the surviving pair of a set of triplets, in their backyard shack in Emerald Street, Kensington, 1982. The third child, pictured in the smaller photograph, died the previous year from inhaling the poisonous fumes of a brazier. Veronica’s husband Zeph is employed as a scooter driver by a large bank. They receive no special assistance from his employer or the state.’

  My account of the day flickered in the glare of this image. So this is what will be left, I thought, for better or worse. This moment.

  I paged further, through a long procession of Auerbach’s people, municipal clerks, deep-level miners, shop assistants, a policeman with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, a flat cleaner with leather pads like shoes strapped to his knees, a house painter with freckles of PVA on his forearms. Absence had sharpened my relationship to these strangers. Without making the heart grow fonder, it had thinned the skin of my eye until every one of them could seem representative. In the flesh, on the same street, I would have kept my distance; at this scale, at this remove, they drew close and felt familiar. All their names were on the tip of my tongue. I kept thinking: I know this person. I know this kind of person.

  And there was Mrs Ditton among her bruised artefacts, displayed like an idol on a cross-stitched cushion full of horsehair and gristle, her fingernails gaping like mouths.

  When I turned the page, I almost expected to see the house next door.

  Later I showed the book to Richard, thinking I might speak of my small part in it. He laughed as he leafed through it, smoothing the gloom out of every page with the flat of his hand. ‘Can you believe these people? It’s like Louisiana without the bayous. Son of a gun we’re having fun anyway.’ He was about to audition for some Sam Shepard play at the Tricycle – True West, I think it was, or Buried Child – and he said this was just what he needed for his research. ‘Look at this moustache. Can you see me in one of those? I can use that.’

  Richard’s girlfriend Faith was less diplomatic. ‘Ugly people in ugly places,’ she said. ‘The whites I mean. You must be relieved you’ve escaped from all this.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re not an estate agent,’ said Mrs Pinheiro, ‘because I need to get out of here. Never mind seeing the world, I’d just like to see the other side of town. If I could get a room at Nazareth House, I’d be the happiest woman alive.’

  She was behind the desk squinting at the photograph of Mrs Ditton. I thought of telling her how much it was worth: not exactly a pension, but more than pocket money. Now that South Africa had rejoined the global community, Auerbach’s reputation was on the rise, he had become collectable. The experts were beginning to say that he was more than a photographer; that he was an artist.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re not a historian either. You could have written something about Dr Pinheiro. Such an interesting man.’

  She tugged a photograph from the frame and held it out to me. It was a passport photo embossed with an arc of print like the inscription on a coin. A man with black hair swept back, a veined and bony forehead, and dark eyes gazing regretfully down a nose that was too long for his face. Not a bad likeness, I thought, less hair on the head, more flesh on the bones, a little less Bela Lugosi and a little more Marlon Brando, and he was the spitting image of the man I had imagined languishing in the room behind the door.

  ‘I am not Mrs Pinheiro.’ She left the words lying between us like the settlement of a debt. ‘I may be the love of his life, but we never married. Sometimes I wonder whether there isn’t a Mrs Pinheiro somewhere else, waiting for him in Mozambique or Portugal. People do not always tell the truth about who they are, as you know.’

  Some people are born liars, I thought, and others acquire the skill through patient effort.

  ‘Dr Pinheiro was a gifted physician,’ she continued. ‘He had a thriving medical practice in Lourenço Marques. He came down here after the Revolution, as they call their crazy carnival, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He was not the only one, of course, there were thousands of refugees like him, but he lost more than most, even his stethoscope.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘My brother found him at Our Lady of Lourdes and sent him to me. He arrived with a suitcase, and in it, a suit. That’s all. I thought it was funny but he didn’t see the joke. He was suffering. I took him in as a boarder, I had the room, and I let him stay for nothing until he got back on his feet. I could see he was a gentleman.

  ‘He couldn’t work as a doctor. They said his medical degree was invalid. There was an exam he could take and he was willing to study for it, he said, his English was improving every day, but the problem was that he couldn’t speak Afrikaans. He got a job in the post office sorting letters. Can you imagine? A doctor, a man who should be giving injections and saving lives, standing all day throwing letters
into pigeonholes. Sheltered employment for poor whites, for people with deaf ears and crooked feet. Yes, he used to say to me, it suits me, this job: I am a poor white.’

  This must have been in the mid-70s, I thought, when I was still a schoolboy. Where would the depot have been? Perhaps at the Jeppe Street Post Office. I tried to imagine the doctor there, poring over the addresses on letters and postcards as if they were secret codes, while I sat at my desk with the plans for a Flying Fortress spread out under the reading light and the picture of the finished model on the lid of the box standing on end like a screen. No matter how carefully I dabbed glue on the tiny parts, they ended up stuck to my fingers.

  ‘Can you hear it?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I thought you were listening to the voices. It gets so loud sometimes I can’t hear myself think.’ We listened. ‘At first, it was just one or two, but lately it sounds like a crowd. Talk talk talk.’

  The silence had a texture to it now, an undercurrent like a tap running in another room of the house.

  ‘The doctor seems like a clever man,’ I said. ‘Did this job really suit him?’

  ‘It was very hard for him. He didn’t know the names of the big towns, never mind little villages or farms or railway junctions. Even the suburbs were new to him: how was he to know whether Troyeville was in Johannesburg or Pretoria or Blikkiesdorp? He had to learn everything from the beginning. It’s a wonder he managed.

  ‘Every sorter had a pigeonhole for letters that were not properly addressed or illegible. A few times a day, the Chief Sorter would go around the depot and collect all these letters, and then he would try to decipher them. In the beginning, Dr Pinheiro’s pigeonhole for unsorted mail was fuller than everyone else’s, and he worried that the Chief Sorter would notice and give him the sack. So he started to bring these letters home with him. He would have lost his job anyway if he’d been caught, but it was worth the risk. Together we went through the letters and I helped him decipher the addresses. It was like solving a crime. That’s how we fell in love.’

  Make-believe is easier to catch than truth-telling. I was beginning to hear things, a radio playing in a distant room or a dance party in the next block, a burst of laughter going up like a balloon slipping from a child’s hand, and then an angry voice trying to talk over the others, insisting on something, making demands. And rushing beneath it all, so quietly it was almost imperceptible, an undercurrent of my own thoughts like a subterranean river under the house.

  In the dark room, many mouths were working away at English, crunching it between their teeth and pushing it around with their tongues, grinding the edges off the parts of speech and breathing out the dust. Even the oldest words, the hardest and heaviest ones, could not hold their shape; sharp tongues peeled the patina off them like pencil shavings and revealed a green new meaning.

  A single voice became audible. It was my old history teacher Prof Sherman, Hegemony Cricket himself, the most remarkable lecturer of his day, renowned for his clipped accounts of the migrant labour system and the rise of the African working class on the Rand. He had published five books with ‘under apartheid’ in their titles. I tried to follow his argument now, but all I heard was an insistent chiming. He was naming names. They fell from his lips, glittering and precise as newly minted coins, and sank away in the wishing well of talk.

  ‘Where is your camera?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘When you came here, you said you wanted to take my picture.’

  ‘I said I wanted to take a picture of the house.’

  ‘Call me a liar. Even a bad photographer must have a camera.’

  ‘It’s in the car. I could fetch it, but I don’t really like using it. It keeps a roof over my head, that’s all. I suppose it’s like Dr Pinheiro sorting letters.’

  ‘You should find something else then. That’s what the Doctor did. He moved on to bigger things.’

  ‘Did he go back to medicine?’

  ‘No, that was impossible. He worked for contractors, for builders and demolishers. He did the books. But he never forgot his years at the post office. It became a point of pride with him and also a bit of a laugh. He turned it into a sweet-and-sour joke at his own expense.

  ‘One day, he came in with a letterbox shaped like a golf ball on a tee. I thought it was for my gate, but he set it up in the backyard. He’d salvaged it from some derelict semi they were tearing down in Bertrams, but he used to tell people it once belonged to Gary Player.

  ‘When I asked him what it was for, he said it was the start of our museum. Somebody has to keep an eye on posterity. Before you know it, things have outlived their purpose. To the people of the future, letterboxes will be as interesting as penny-farthings are to us. He brought others over the years, gimmicky boxes shaped like shoes and dice, and many more that had nothing special about them, those common little rondavels and cabins with pitched roofs and a tube for the newspaper.

  ‘It got funnier as he went along, but it was also serious. When we made a braai in the yard with our friends, he would tell stories about these things, where they were made and why they were special. He said the dice was a gift from Sol Kerzner. You never knew what he was making up and what was true. As I say, it’s a pity you’re not a historian. You could have separated the truth from the lies and written it down.’

  ‘Well, I’d be happy to speak to him, if you like.’

  ‘Not today,’ she said with a weary smile.

  ‘Is he ill?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘To hospital?’ And when she did not answer: ‘To Portugal?’

  ‘To paradise, I hope.’

  ‘He’s dead? When did he die?’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘But I thought he was in this room!’

  ‘I didn’t want you to think I was alone,’ she said, laying a scrawny hand on my arm. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  Some people believe in premonitions. In the popular wisdom, if you mistake a stranger for someone you know, you are bound to bump into that person soon. Mistaken identity is a kind of warning. I am not a believer. For a time after I came back to Johannesburg, I kept catching sight of people I thought were friends and acquaintances from my past, only to find I was mistaken. But I never bumped into the real person afterwards. It puzzled me that so many of the old crowd were gone. Some of them must have emigrated, others must be living in suburbs I never visited – the paths through the forest of the city do not all cross – and by the law of averages, a few might well be dead.

  Then one day, without forewarning, I bumped into Benjy. We arranged to meet, and later that week we had a drink together at the Sunnyside. It was pleasant enough. We spoke about our student days in Yeoville and he told me about his newspaper work. I gave him the brief version of my life abroad and we parted with a promise to get together again soon.

  It was the time of the Rugby World Cup, which Benjy was following keenly. When he called to see whether I wanted to join him and his mates for the final, I felt obliged to go, although most of the tournament had passed me by. We watched the game on television in a marquee put up specially on the playing fields at the College of Education, a place I hadn’t set foot in since Linda and I went there to build floats for the rag procession. It was a peculiar day. I drank too much beer and did my best to get involved, but my dislike for the game had only deepened since I’d last seen a Springbok team in action. Even when the Boks won, I was not as overjoyed as I might have been. The sight of Benjy and his mates, beers raised in clenched fists, tears streaming down their cheeks, while Nelson Mandela in his rugby jersey hoisted the trophy, will live with me for ever. A flanker. Who could have imagined such a thing?

  The scale and intensity of the victory celebration took everyone by surprise. The city plunged into a delirious carnival of song and dance that went on all night. I ended up in Yeoville with Benjy’s crowd, where a massive street party was going on. I drank more beer and did my best again. In Rockey Street,
people were doing some sort of square dance and the sight of a huge troupe of strangers, hundreds strong, moving effortlessly to such complex choreography, was compelling. In a moment of weakness – or perhaps strength – I plunged into the formation. A woman took my hand and tried to steer me through the moves. It was a kindly act, one of many the day was blessed with, and I accepted it with all the grace I could muster. But I just couldn’t get it. I was congenitally out of step.

  When I brooded about it afterwards, I was reminded of an anti-apartheid march I went to in London. There was a picture in the Independent of the march passing down the Strand and I am in it, although I would have to show you which one is me. There I am, in the thick of the duffel-coated crowd, with my chin tucked between my lapels and a woollen cap pulled down over my ears. You would think I am trying to fool the photographers. All around me, people have linked arms with their neighbours, their comrades, but mine are pressed to my sides, I’m drifting along on my own. I am not a broken link, mind you, but I am a break in the chain.

  My mother started writing to me again.

  One Sunday, we went walking in the botanical gardens in Emmarentia. The rosebushes and the signboards in the Shakespeare garden with quotations from the Sonnets reminded me of England, and I mentioned how much I missed her letters. The enclosures especially, those snippets that turned a letter into a gift. Now and then, I would still come across a story in the newspaper and think, ‘That’s exactly the kind of thing she would have sent me.’ I had clipped some of these items for my notice board, but they intrigued me less than her surprise packages.

  A week later, I found a letter from my mother in my postbox. A note on airmail paper sent me greetings from Melrose and hoped that the weather and everything else was fine in Killarney. Folded into the sheet was a square of newsprint.

  It told the story of a funeral at Avalon cemetery. A young woman was being buried and the mourners were gathered around the open grave at the end of a row of new mounds. Just as the priest gave the sign for the coffin to be lowered, a phone began to ring softly, as if from the bottom of a handbag or deep in a jacket pocket. Cellphones were less common then than they are now and the intrusion was jarring. The priest gave his flock an irritated look and a few people patted their pockets. The phone went on ringing. It dawned on them that it was coming from under the ground: the phone was ringing in the grave next door. There was a deathly silence, the report said, the mourners paused and held their breath, waiting to see whether someone would answer.