‘Tell me about the survival tips.’ We were driving back to Kensington.
‘Some of it’s survival per se, with a capital S, and some of it’s health and leisure. Search on Wellness.’
‘For instance?’
She bit her knuckle. ‘Okay. Stuff about cars. Not just the obvious like leaving your windows open a crack so they’re harder to break in a smash-and-grab, everybody knows that by now, including the guys with the spark plugs. More conceptual things. Say you lose your car at Makro or Gold Reef City or whatever. If you press the remote the car will squeal and let you know where it is. It’s like whistling for a dog. A friend of mine found his car like this in a blizzard once. He saw the lights flashing under a metre of snow.’
‘That’s pretty impressive.’
‘It was in Sweden. Every society has its problems, even if it looks perfect from the outside.’
‘What else?’
‘Couple of tips from Oprah. Let’s say someone locks you in the boot of a car, what do you do? You kick out a tail light, put your arm through the hole and wave. Hopefully there’s someone following who understands that this is a crisis. Sometimes you have to be your own hero, quote unquote.’
‘It sounds heavy.’
‘We’re living in dangerous times so, ja, it’s a bit rough. But a lot of it is really useful too. I try to soften the impact by putting in some uplifting sidebars. For instance, true-life stories of survival against the odds. Have you heard of Little Milo Babić?’
‘No.’
‘He’s the poster child of survival. During the siege of Sarajevo, his mom made him a survival kit in case something happened to her or they were separated. She knitted him a jersey with his name and address in the pattern, and he had a backpack with sandwiches and juice, a change of clothes and a space blanket, his favourite storybook and a miniature album of family photos. His picture got into the papers and he became known all over the world.’
‘Did he survive?’
‘Sure, he’s not so little any more, he’s all grown up and working as a butcher in Emmarentia. I want to do a piece on him some time. I’ve made contact.’
‘He must be full of tips.’
‘You know what’s the best survival tip I’ve come across?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, listen up, this might save your life. Don’t touch your eyes when you’re at the mall. I’m serious. That’s the best way to pick up an infection in a public place: take some bug off the escalator rail or the supermarket trolley handle on the tip of your finger and put it into your body via your eyeball. Smart move. The eye is the window of the immune system. What you need to do is keep your hands at your sides or in your pockets and as soon as you get home, give them a good wash. Never mind if your eyes start itching in the Pick n Pay, you can learn not to scratch.’
Vienna Butchery makes the best schnitzel rolls in town, but you need a strong stomach for the decor. A jungle of pot plants on the counters and herds of hunting trophies on the walls have turned the place into a garish diorama. Looking down from on high, their eyes unnaturally bright, their ears permanently pricked for the rustle of predators among the ferns and rubber plants, the heads of the antelopes make the blood run in the fridges. Suddenly the meat looks freshly slaughtered. As soon as our order had been placed, Janie went to wait outside, and she was quiet as we drove back to Leicester Road.
Grabbing two plates off the rack in the kitchen, I led her out to my studio, where there is an excess of plain sunlight. The workspace has windows from floor to ceiling, and on top of that skylights it does not really need, a double-volume shed filled with light to balance the dense cube of the darkroom. I sat in the wicker chair at the door, with my legs stretched out to catch the sun, and she browsed as she ate, glancing over the contents of my pinboard, occasionally lifting the corner of a cutting with her little finger to see what was underneath.
‘What’s all this?’ she asked.
‘Bits and pieces.’
‘Reference material? Research?’
‘That sort of thing, yes.’
‘This looks like it came out of a Christmas cracker.’
‘It’s quite possible.’
The yellow card with the deaf alphabet on one side and a request for a donation on the other had been handed to me by a young man at the airport on my last trip. She hinged the card aside on its pin, chewed and swallowed, and read from the strip of paper beneath: ‘What does history know of nail-biting?’ Her eyebrows arched into a question.
‘Arthur Koestler.’
‘Cool.’
How can I say what these fragments mean to me? The awkward truths of my life take shape in their negative spaces. In the lengthening shadows of the official histories, looming like triumphal arches over every small, messy life, these scraps saved from the onrush of the ordinary are the last signs I can bring myself to consult.
Thank God for the sandwich. Had her hands been free, she’d have used the camera to take a note or two. Just for reference.
The Black Magic box stood empty on the end of a trestle table. She raised the lid by its tassel and studied the drawings of nut clusters and liqueur creams on the underside.
‘World capital of nougat,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Montélimar. In the south of France.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is this cool or what? It’s like Forrest Gump except all the chocolates have been scoffed.’
The dead letters were laid out on a card table covered in green baize. Initially, I’d arranged them by the size and colour of the envelopes, later by postal code, and finally as they are now by handwriting, an entirely subjective order based on perceived affinities between the slope of an l and a t or the morse of dotted i’s.
‘And this?’
‘My next project.’
I am turning into a person with projects. I’ve always hated that word. I wiped my fingers and went over to the table.
‘What are they?’ she asked.
‘Dead letters.’
‘That will scare away the punters. What does it mean?’
‘Letters that didn’t reach their destination. They were posted, but for one reason or another they were never delivered.’
‘Are they real?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘They were left to me. It’s a long story.’
‘Try me, I’m not in a hurry.’
‘I can’t.’
‘So they’re found objects.’
‘Lost objects.’
‘Not stolen?’
‘Lost.’
‘I’ve heard of letters being dumped in the veld by a lazy postman. If that’s the story here, you should turn them over to the authorities.’
‘That’s not it. They were given to me, as I said, a long time ago. Anyway, it’s never been clear who the authorities are in this case.’
‘And the people who posted them, do they know where their letters are now?’
I shook my head.
Without a by-your-leave, as my mother would say, she held one of the envelopes up to the window. Against the light, the dark blade of a folded page floated askew in its filmy container. For a moment she was lost in thought.
‘Have you opened any of them?’
‘No, although I’ve been tempted.’
‘I’m sure I couldn’t resist.’
‘It’s private correspondence, long delayed, but still.’
‘I take it you’re going to use them in your next project.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that okay?’ she insisted. ‘I mean, they don’t belong to you.’
‘I told you already they were given to me.’
‘Do you have the right to keep them though?’
‘As much as the next person.’
‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘I’m not sure yet, that’s the problem. Maybe I’ll deliver them.’
‘Some of the a
ddresses are barely legible.’ She leaned closer to the display. ‘What does this say? I can’t make it out.’
‘I still have to decipher it myself.’
‘These are really old too. Where have they been all this time? Did they fall down the back of some filing cabinet? Is that it? You can tell me.’
‘No, I can’t, and I don’t want you writing about it either.’
‘Look at the stamps. C.R. Swart. He was the President, right? People will have moved. You’ll never be able to deliver them.’
‘Maybe I’ll just work out the addresses and go and drop them in the boxes. I won’t even ring the doorbell.’
‘That’s pretty hopeless, Neville. There has to be a better solution than that.’
‘I could take a picture of the letterbox.’
‘No ways, not good enough.’
‘Why not? Let whoever gets the letter make of it what they will. Isn’t that always the case?’
‘There’s an art to expressing your failures fully, if you don’t mind me saying so. You need to find the people these letters were intended for, it’s the only way open to you, ethically and aesthetically.’
‘Sounds like work for a private eye.’
‘Find the people and talk to them,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine the stories!’
‘I’m not a storyteller. I wish I was interested in stories, other people’s especially, but I’m not.’
‘You never know the lives people have lived until you ask, and asking is an obligation.’ Lecturing me now. ‘Every time someone dies, a whole history dies with them. It’s like each one of us is an archive.’
‘I’m surprised you’re so interested in the past.’
‘Oh, I’m all for it, so long as there aren’t too many grumpy people involved. I’m not exactly a born-free, but I’m not a child of apartheid either. I don’t need all that misery.’
‘People suffered terribly under apartheid, you know.’
‘Ja, but it’s time to move on.’
When I was a child, it puzzled me that there were so many films about the War, that the model planes were Spitfires and Stukas, and the comics were full of Germans shouting, ‘Achtung!’ Why was this ancient conflict so alive? My grandpa had been up north, but he was ancient too and belonged in another era. As I got older it became obvious. Scarcely twenty years had passed since the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. The earth was still trembling. I can feel it trembling now.
We had our own brief lifespans to consider. Janie asked for a copy of my CV and I went inside to print one in Leora’s study. ‘You can email it,’ she called after me, but I wanted to get it done.
When I came back, she was watching her footage on the digicam.
‘Check this out!’
I went with her into the maze of Antoine’s village, twisting and turning between the shacks, on and on as if the place were endless. Once she came to a dead end, quickly doubled back, and found another path. The shacks were so close together, you could reach out and touch the walls on either side. A tangible community. You would not need to go next door for a cup of sugar, you could simply lean out of your window. She swung around a corner, jaunty and unafraid. A woman stooping over a plastic basin of laundry started when she saw her, and then stood up with her foamy hands on her hips, laughing. She focused on the laughing woman and then on a king-size bottle of Sta-soft. ‘Hello ma. Who are you? Tell me your name and what you’re doing.’ But the camera made the woman shy and she turned away, hiding her face. The camera bobbed and reeled again along the ironclad streets, as if it had been set adrift on a raft. Bits of sky flickered into the lens, dented walls fell like shutters, layers of trampled earth flew up. She turned to look back. A gang of kids were following her, excited and alarmed. She focused on a girl with braids standing out stiffly like a crown of exclamation marks all around her head.
I offered to drive her home, but she had called a cab already and it was waiting when I let her out.
On the threshold, she paused and said, ‘One last thing: I need you with your letterbox, obviously.’
‘It’s just a slot in the wall.’
She held the camera out and looked at the screen. The way I study packages in the supermarket when I forget my reading glasses, trying to see how much salt they contain. She said, ‘I see what you mean. Two peas in a pod. Okay, say something cheesy.’
‘And in the alcoves?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You sure?’ Leora inspected the print as if there might be some small object in the shadows. ‘They must be displaying something.’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Weird. What is this style, African Imperial? Sol Kerzner must be behind it, he was the great prophet of the African Renaissance.’
‘I think it’s what Aurelia calls Afrocentric chic.’
I put the prints on the dresser and began to set the table while Leora went back to chopping fennel on the butcher’s block. It was Friday evening. The aromatic essence of her famous salmon soufflé – in individual ramekins, if you don’t mind – came from the eye-level oven; a salad cut down cruelly in its youth, baby carrots, bean sprouts, young spinach leaves, lay in a bamboo bowl. While she mixed the dressing, I opened some wine (it was a compensatory Springfield Life from Stone, nursed to maturity in the rocky soils of the Robertson valley) and told her more about the day with Janie.
‘Tell me, Mr Lister, was it a good interview?’
Leora’s sense of humour: Mr Lister of Leicester Road. ‘It was more like a natter with a friend. She didn’t shut up for a second. Talk talk talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Let’s see. Saul Auerbach, the godfather of documentary photography. Metaphysical acupuncture, the new thing. How to get chewing gum out of a budgie. Her dreams and ambitions.’
‘I thought she was interviewing you.’
‘I made the mistake of asking.’
‘Never show an interest. That’s the first law of self-promotion.’
‘I wish I’d known.’
‘What are her ambitions then?’
‘She wants to be a brand ambassador.’
‘For what?’
‘Herself, I think. She wants her own talk show and to grow and grow and be the best Janie she can be. She could give inspirational talks to young people on overcoming adversity, it’s just that nothing really shit has happened to her yet.’
I was being unfair, but I couldn’t stop.
Leora is a nicer person than I am, but she secretly admires and sometimes encourages this side of me. ‘She might have to settle for something in the performing arts,’ she said, pumping the juice out of a lemon as if she were doing reps at the gym, ‘poetry, say, or weather forecasting …’
‘The trick is to diversify. She’s writing a cookery book and a children’s book and a children’s cookery book. There’s a CD in the pipeline: some minor mogul overheard her scatting in the fitting rooms at the Zone and signed her to his label. Meanwhile, she’s working on a screenplay set in the future when we’ve run out of gas and everyone’s living in ruined Tuscan villages and puttering around in solar-powered golf carts.’
‘She sounds like a live wire.’
‘She’ll be an oober-something-or-other.’
‘You’re quite taken with her.’
‘It was like talking to a time traveller, a mime artist from a distant galaxy come to assure us that all will be well.’
Enough. Leora peeped into the oven, liberating a soothing waft of nutmeg.
‘And how did your side of the conversation go?’
‘Not well. I cast around for a story, some credible version of myself to impart, but I couldn’t find one. This pop stuff is infectious. I started coughing up factoids like a column in the newspaper. Not a columnist, note, a column, one of those last-ditch efforts to look like a website.’
‘You couldn’t find a story?’
‘No, I’ve dropped the thread and I can’t be bothered to pick it up again. I’m all thumbs anyway. What
holds my attention now is design. Show me a pattern in the information and I’m satisfied.’
Leora tasted the salad dressing on the tip of her finger.
‘She was being ironic, obviously,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And so are you.’
‘I guess.’
‘The whole thing is ironic.’
‘Including the ironies.’
‘Maybe they cancel one another out then,’ Leora said, ‘like a double negative.’
She put on the oven gloves that look like sharks and brought the bowls to the table in their soft jaws, the individual ramekins, each with a little chef’s hat of gilded egg. ‘Poor baby,’ carving out a spoonful of soufflé and raising it to my mouth, ‘here.’
Channel-hopping with the sound down is my kind of extreme sport: there is always a story to be gaffed from the sea of televised images. The tide is rising there too, it’s another case of global warming. Every day, an immense shelf of information drifts out into the channels, data, useless entertainment, dogma, edifying documentaries, reality shows, weather reports, travel advice, sport, opinions, views, news, views, news. Mainly, because I have been in a gloomy mood, news of the dead and dying. Two hundred feared drowned as ferry capsizes. Suicide bomber kills thirty in Baghdad market. Twelve die as bus plunges off bridge. Teenager slays mother, brother, self. Nearly 140 cases of horse sickness reported in KwaZulu-Natal. The fatalities keep ticking while the news hounds find another tree to bark up. All the correspondents appear to be embedded somewhere. Even the girl reporting on the interprovincial netball in Potch is tinged with the war-zone green. We are so used to human bombs scattering fragments of their own flesh like leaflets in the rubble that we hardly notice the numbers killed.
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