‘Your father was worried you were smoking pot,’ he said, ‘and I soon began to think it might be worse, although I had no idea what I was meant to do about it. You were so silent and morose for a young man.’
A strange impression I must have made, a boy dressed like a professor, chewing on a pipe with a plumber’s bend and fouling the air with my ditch-digger’s tobacco, brooding.
‘His real concern was that I would end up sweeping the streets, which then marked the bottom of the scale,’ I said. ‘He looked to you to set me on a brighter career path.’
‘Obviously worked,’ Auerbach said with a grim laugh. When I called to arrange the visit, I’d mentioned that I was a photographer.
There was not much left of the day in Auerbach’s memory. What for me had been a revelation, had for him been another working shift, only slightly out of the routine. He remembered Veronica and Mrs Ditton, of course, he remembered the photographs; and that it was poor old Gerald Brookes, whose ticker packed up in a hotel room somewhere back in the ’90s, who’d started the game with the houses up on Langermann Kop. But he’d forgotten that I was also there. ‘Look, it was a long time ago,’ he said, ‘but was that really all the same day?’
‘Yes, I picked a house too, the house next door to Mrs Ditton’s. You were supposed to take a third photo, but we never got round to it.’
‘Let me guess: we lost the light.’
‘The light waned, yes, and also the interest, I think. Years later, I went back to satisfy my curiosity. I knocked on the door, if you don’t mind, and the lady of the house let me in.’
‘And?’
‘You would have liked it. It was a prime example of apartheid gothic and it proved Gerald’s point three times over. You never know what’s going on behind closed doors.’
I kept Dr Pinheiro and the letterbox museum to myself. At that time, I had spoken about them with no one but my mother and the secret had darkened into a superstition. At the heart of my memory something was in quarantine, for reasons I no longer remembered.
‘The light failed, and you never took the photo; the light held, and you did. It seems so arbitrary.’
‘I’m not too sure about that,’ he answered. ‘In a way it felt inevitable, as if I hardly had a choice. I was always drawn to the same things. I could pass by a corner twenty times and have the same thought: I’ve got to photograph this. Until I acted on that urge, it wouldn’t let me go.’
‘But can you square how the work is made and what it comes to stand for? There’s such an air of necessity about your photos, as if it had to be these images and no others. It might look inevitable, read backwards, but it could all have been different. Every portrait could have been of someone else; every house could have been the house next door. If you’d turned down a different street, or passed by ten minutes later, or been less fond of driving.’
‘I agree, a photograph is an odd little memorial that owes a lot to chance and intuition.’ The espresso cup was like an eggshell in his fingers. ‘But I was dogged, even if I say so myself. I used the available light. In the morning, I packed my camera bags and went out to take photographs, while more sensible men were building houses or balancing the books.’
Auerbach had an exhibition coming up. These days, he always had an exhibition coming up somewhere. ‘I’m an artist, you know,’ he joked, ‘I can’t help it. I’ve stopped arguing with the experts.’ He spread some working prints out on the table like a deck of cards and we played rummy with them for a while.
I told him about the pictures I’d been taking. Even when he said, ‘You should have brought them with you,’ I did not mention the orange Agfa box in the boot of my car.
We spoke about my father and my uncle Doug, but what gripped me was the story about his friend Matti. They had known one another for years. The Finn had started coming to South Africa in the ’70s, he said, covering the political situation for the European papers, and was glad of a place to stay when he passed through Johannesburg.
‘We got on famously,’ Auerbach said, ‘although our approaches to photography could not have been more different. He should have been banging around in the war zones, but he didn’t have the nerve. More gung than ho. South Africa was a good compromise. Once, just before he was due to fly back to Helsinki, he asked me if he could leave some clothing behind for safe keeping. His suitcase was open on the bed in the guest room – and it was full of film! Full to the brim with hundreds of spools. It looked like a conceptual artwork. It wouldn’t be so strange today, now that every camera has a trunkful of film in it. Bytes weigh nothing and you don’t pay for the excess. But I was shocked.’
The story reassured me enough to admit that I’d brought a few of my own photos with me. I fetched them and he gave them his attention. He was kind. He asked me questions and gave me pointers. It was more than the photos warranted.
Then, as I was getting ready to go, he said, ‘You’ll be interested in this.’ He took a print from a folder and pushed it across the table. ‘It’s Joel Setshedi.’
A serious young man in a collar and tie, perched on the end of a desk in a panelled office. He is holding a framed photograph of himself, and in this one he is smiling broadly.
‘The smaller photograph is Amos,’ Auerbach went on, ‘the twin brother. It’s the portrait that stood on his coffin at his funeral. He died a couple of years ago, of Aids I suspect, although no one will say so. Joel keeps the picture on his desk. He works for a bank, the same one that employed his father, except he’s in foreign exchange whereas the old man drove a delivery bike. He’s done bloody well for himself, if you think where he started out, and he has his mother to thank. Veronica’s still alive, by the way, retired to the family home in Limpopo. I’m going to photograph her too one of these days.’
Later, I went over this conversation in my mind and tried to name the aftertaste of envy in my admiration for Auerbach. He had a body of work and it held him steady in the world. More precisely: he was a body of work. A solid line. I had wasted my energies on trifles. Layered on one another, they created the illusion of depth, but it was never more than an effect. Most of all, I envied him his continuity. He had soldiered on, one photograph at a time, leaving behind an account of himself and his place in which one thing followed another, print after print. My own story was full of holes.
Janie wrote again re dead letters: ‘It’s a double whammy, isn’t it? You want people to think you’re making up the letters, because the story that they were left to you is so unlikely, but actually it’s true. Fact is stranger than fiction, especially in novels. Your secret is safe with me.’
‘Never should have told her,’ Leora said.
‘I know.’
‘How did you respond?’
‘I haven’t written back, I don’t want to encourage her. Next thing she’ll ask me to be her friend on Facebook.’
‘So?’
‘It makes me think of lonely children with imaginary friends.’
‘You should talk.’
There was a postscript to the email. ‘You’ve got some dodgy role models. Koestler was a real bastard in his relationships with women. And that Eich character you’re fond of quoting was a bit of a Nazi – if one can do such a thing by halves.’
And then a pps, fyi: ‘Still working on your profile. Should be done in a week or two. Let me know what you think.’
It was Wellness Week at the mall. All along the high street, shops had set out tables laden with products for a healthier lifestyle. At the sportswear outlets, lithe young people in bodysuits were spinning, orbiting and rowing. The pharmacies displayed their ranges of vitamins and food supplements, alongside shower attachments, health sandals and bathrobes.
My eyes began to itch.
In the empty space at the bottom of the escalators, Miranda’s Day Spa and Fitness World was offering free back rubs and foot massages to weary shoppers. People reclined in chairs with their pants rolled to their knees and their bare feet on footstools draped with plus
h white towels. Every single one of the acolytes kneeling before the stools to apply the aromatic oils was young, slim and beautiful, I noticed, while all the shoppers were old, fat and ugly. They must have followed their bliss into the nearest Wimpy once too often. One of the shoppers was talking into a cellphone pinned to her ear by a hunched shoulder, but most lay back with their eyes closed, their faces rapt, ready for whatever was on offer, oral sex or a sacrament. I remembered the photograph of Adriaan Vlok, the former Minister of Law and Order, kneeling to wash the feet of Reverend Frank Chikane, the former activist whom he had tried to poison, seeking a biblical absolution for the crimes of apartheid. I noticed the shoes abandoned beside the chairs, high heels that were bashfully pigeon-toed, trainers with their tongues hanging out. I remembered that there was no photograph of Adriaan Vlok and Frank Chikane: the story had simply been reported in the press. The laying on of hands. It should be the other way round! The shoppers should be massaging the feet of the acolytes, doing penance for their gluttony, vanity and sloth.
Sucking in my belly, I went on. The outdoor-living shop had pitched a tent near their door and scattered some cotton-wool snow. There were racks of fleece-lined jackets, windcheaters and thermal vests, and tables full of equipment for extreme sports, adventure tourism, urban exploration and rural survival, like deodorized socks and rubber shoes for wading through streams. For a moment, the long gleaming corridor lined with cosmetic counters and knick-knack booths gave me the impression that I was in duty free, waiting for a flight, and I was overcome by jet lag.
The massage chairs were in the Court of the Sun King, arranged on the many wavy arms of a sunburst in mosaic tiles. Not a minute too soon. Most inviting was a green-leather chair facing the corridor that led to Exit 3. Although there are no exits at the mall, to be honest, only entrances. You can cash up, they say, but you can never leave. I sank into the chair’s soft and yielding embrace and shut my eyes.
The Eagles were touring again, I’d seen them on television. They still had their hair and their teeth, as far as I could tell, but they were having back trouble like the rest of us, they had to sit down through the whole concert. It didn’t seem right.
A human presence fell over me as lightly as a shadow. When I opened my eyes a salesman stood there. He had a bit of beard on his chin like a strip of Velcro. ‘Chronic medical conditions?’ he asked.
I stalled for a moment. Should I disclose my hypertension? Was it any of his business?
‘Varicose veins, high blood pressure, fallen arches, slipped disks,’ he prompted.
‘No.’
‘Taking any medication?’
This time I was ready: ‘No.’
He threw the switch.
The chair stirred to life beneath me as if there was someone trapped in its spongy interior, someone trying to get out, I thought for a horrified moment, and then more worryingly, someone trying to pull me in. Kneecaps pressed into my legs, knuckles ground against my wrists. I was reminded of the playground and how children like to pummel one another, making their presence felt on one another’s flesh. This is a mistake, I thought, I should get up now and go about my business. But the chair was an expert. It worked me over. The will in my muscles dissolved, the marrow of my resolve turned to water, the last hard fact was knocked out of me like a tooth. Whereupon the prisoner in the chair stopped struggling. The corridor stretched away into the distance like a canal. People were walking there on their reflections and I saw them waving as I sank.
Every day for a fortnight, I’d searched for my profile on Janie’s blog. I learned to fold a dinner jacket so that it doesn’t crease in a suitcase, to splint a broken arm with a rolled newspaper and keep aphids off rosebushes without using pesticides. No sign of me.
‘For God’s sake, ask,’ Leora said. ‘Give her a ring. Tell her the exhibition is coming up and she’d better get a move on.’
While I was still weighing the options, my mother left a message on my cellphone to say she’d seen the article in the News. My son the artist! Why didn’t you tell me? She’d taken the paper to her bridge game and everyone agreed it made me seem very clever.
I was in the middle of a job, so I called Leora at home. She’d missed the piece too – who has time to read anything properly? – but she fetched yesterday’s News off the stack under the sink and skimmed through it for me.
‘It’s like a bit of experimental fiction,’ she said. ‘It’s in a dozen pieces with headings like “Motion Pictures” and “Stills” and there’s a quote from some Frenchman and a paragraph in italics. She says you’re a man of your time: disaffected without being disengaged. That part’s in red. Do you get it?’
Yes. History has played a flame over me. I’ve come unstuck, but I’m joined to the world by a few gluey strands of saliva.
‘There’s a lot more,’ Leora said. ‘I’ll put it aside and you can read it this evening.’
I had already decided not to. ‘Just one other thing and then I’ll let you go: what does she say about the photographs?’
When I was a boy, my father invented a game for us to play in the car. Perhaps it was a way to amuse an easily bored only child or a ruse to get an overtired one to fall asleep. I had to lie down on the broad back seat of the Merc, so that I couldn’t see the road ahead, and when we came to the end of the trip I had to guess where we were. Looking up, my view hemmed in by door pillars and bulging seat-backs, I saw streetlights and treetops, sometimes a robot or the roof of a building, coming and going in the windows. Using only these lofty clues, I tried to keep track of our route. Sometimes I already knew our final destination, which made it easier, as my dad might stray from the main roads to fool me but was unlikely to go in a completely different direction. Just as often I had no idea where we were going. My father, for his part, looked for short cuts and detours. If my mother was with us, it was her job to see that I didn’t sneak a look over the horizon of the window ledge, although I was seldom tempted. I loved the challenge. As we drove towards some familiar place, like Rosenthal’s where my father bought his golfing gear or my grandparents’ house in Orange Grove, I had to set what I remembered of the route we usually took against the stops and turns of the car, making rather than following a map and matching it not to the world but to an internal landscape, a journey in memory, keeping it clear until he pulled up and said, ‘Okay, that’s enough. Where are we?’
In the beginning, he always bamboozled me. All it took was one unexpected turn down a street we normally drove past and he could throw me off the trail. Then with every subsequent stop or bend in the road, the map I was making in my mind grew less and less reliable. If I was lucky, some landmark like the turnip-top of a water tower or the pylon lights at a sports stadium would let me pick up the thread, but often it was lost for good. Finally, my father would pull over and ask me the all-important question. After I had given my answer, I would sit up, and then we laughed to see how wrong I was. Once, after we had dropped some letters in the box at the post office, he drove us in a circle, so that when I thought we were close to home, it turned out we were back where we started. And once or twice, with the car rocking like a river barge on its soft suspension, I did in fact fall asleep.
As time went by and I discovered more subtle clues than those unreeling like a strip of film through the frames of the windows, I got better at the game and started to win sometimes. I learned to read the bumps in the road, the rumble of tar under the wheels, the way the car jolted across railway lines or yawed through subways. At night, colours fell through the windows from neon lights and robots, the sky was dark and smoky over Alex, and near the garages along Louis Botha Avenue the air smelt of rubber. My father had to work harder to mislead me. He varied his speed so that I lost a sense of distance, and circled around blocks so that I lost direction. He became as involved in the game as I was and liked to lose as little. A few times we dallied so long my mother thought something had happened to us, and when we got home, in high spirits from the fun, she ticked me off fo
r making my father play silly games, when he was the one who had started it all.
A day came when I could not go wrong. It was a Friday evening. We had dropped Paulina at her bus stop, as she was going home for the weekend, and on the way back we stopped at a new fish-and-chip shop for takeaways. Usually my father would have been in a hurry to get home before the smell of the food got into the upholstery, but the unfamiliar territory drew us both into a game. I scrambled over the seat and stretched out in the back. We went down Louis Botha. Certainty settled over me like a blanket. I knew exactly where we were going. I had X-ray vision, I could see through the leather seats, where springs were coiled in fibre, I could see through the metal ribs of the door. Factory yards, shopfronts, garden fences and houses drifted by. My father turned off the main road earlier than he should have and wound through the crooked streets of Savoy. I saw the yellow-brick chimneys of the houses, the cars parked in driveways, the lights burning in windows. I had become a compass needle. Rather than trying to figure out where he was going, I was giving him directions, telling him when to slow down, where to turn, when to double back.
At last we stopped. The air was thick with the homely smell of food, which the vinegar had not entirely soured. I could see a streetlight on a tall pole, the jigsaw undersides of oak leaves, pieces of sky between branches. My dad’s voice reached me through the wall of the seat: ‘Where are we now, my boy?’
For the moment, I could not answer. I lay in the dark with the bitter knowledge that I had unlearned the art of getting lost.
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