by Trevor Sacks
‘And I’m not telling you, either,’ she said with eyebrows dangerously poised. ‘It was a suggestion.’
‘Well, I’ve got a suggestion too.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. I suggest you stop going out with guys who pretend to be dead.’
‘I thought you’d be happy he wasn’t dead. I thought you two were friends.’
And at once it was confirmed. It was Leo Fein she was skulking around town with. ‘Well, he shouldn’t pretend.’
‘Well, Ben, you don’t know everything, do you? It was a misunderstanding. He went away on business and when his son couldn’t get hold of him, he panicked.’ She was talking to me almost as if to an adult now. ‘He’s very sensitive, is Michael.’
‘What about that business deal he was trying to get out of?’
‘I don’t know where you hear these things. Actually, I do. Of course I do. From Carol. She doesn’t think before she speaks. Leo Fein is a decent man. And we’re just friends, if you must know, with your sneaking around and eavesdropping.’
‘Well, why’s it such a big secret, then?’
‘I’m a grown woman, Ben. And I’m entitled to a little privacy now and then. You might understand one day.’
‘I think I understand now.’
‘Do you?’ she said flatly.
‘Yes. Like who I take on the Standard Five Tour. How about some privacy for that?’
‘I won’t say another word about it.’
‘Good.’
‘If you stay out of who I spend my time with.’
Oh. Right. Hang on. ‘So if I let you tell me who to take on the Standard Five Tour, I can tell you who to be friends with?’
‘No, you’re right. I’m sorry, you’re right,’ she said. And she seemed to mean it, too, which was discouraging. ‘I’ve got no right to tell you who to go on tour with.’
Well, that backfired. I’d been so pleased at Leo Fein’s return and now he was after my mother like a zombie. You can’t trust the dead, dammit. And God, I asked, where the hell are You? I’ve been praying my arse off, going to shul, learning an ancient language and hiding it all from my family like a reverse converso. And you can’t even stop a guy muscling in on my mom? Are you laughing!? Are you laughing too, God?
* * *
On Saturday night, Markos’s parents dropped Markos, Roger, Sean and me at the showgrounds outside town. The town show was an annual affair, a combination agricultural show, funfair, military display, trade fair and flea market we looked forward to every year, and were disappointed by every year. We rode the big wheel and saw how the radio tower and the Nedbank building poked up above the rest of the town, which hid beneath the treetops.
We floated up, elevated too by the promise of the ride, the familiar presented in such an unfamiliar form from up there. And then we were brought low again as that view quickly became commonplace and you wanted to ask, is that all there is?
Back down in the dust of the showgrounds, we strolled through the alleyways of steel tables with people selling their wares – knives, patchwork leather bags, biltong, wooden toys.
A man demonstrated the vast spectrum of bird warbles you could achieve by blowing over a coin-sized disc if you positioned it on your palate just right. So I bought it, and produced nothing but a series of hisses as I strolled; all the while behind us the man continued his kiewiets, barbets and doves, receding as we walked on. I put the disc back into the plastic pouch, all spitty.
We came to the raison d’être of the show: the livestock. There stood a Brahman in his stall, morose and heavy in the mud, a string of transparent snot hanging from his nose.
At the Defence Force’s display there was a tank that looked thirty years old, two armoured vehicles and a soldier in uniform, about seventeen with an Adam’s apple like a shark fin. He was handing out glossy flyers about careers in the army.
Sean saluted him and I think the guy was about to salute back until Sean slowly flipped his palm over and cocked the middle finger at him. The young soldier glared at us and we ran over to the grandstand, hearing a voice come over the PA, announcing the start of the military demonstration. It was getting dark and we took our seats just in time to see the flares launch into the sky.
Three mock terrorists ran out from behind oil drums covered in camouflage netting. From under another net that had been set up on the ground, our Defence Force boys emerged. No one saw that coming and we cheered at the superior camouflage techniques the soldiers had employed.
The Defence Force soldiers charged the ‘terrorists’. Making use of the various obstacles on the field for cover, the soldiers shot blanks at each other. One by one, the ‘terrorists’ were felled.
All the while, the voice on the PA system explained each offensive and counteroffensive of the manoeuvre, without which we would have had little idea of the purpose and outcome of the scene.
It had the air of a sports match, which was in keeping with how terrorists were discussed and reported on. Adults talked about The Terries, attacks and counterattacks, landmines and captures like the ebb and flow of league tables and team transfers. Teachers did their part to pass on their indoctrination from the Defence Force, to warn against communism and godlessness, though nobody seemed to talk convincingly about what it was the terrorists wanted.
I, at least, had the balance of a home life where Ma had told me that to some people they were freedom fighters, not terrorists, that godlessness was desirable, and that the true aims of socialism included fairness and equality. And, of course, I had Elliot.
The first portion of the demo ended with a bayonet attack launched by a brave soldier (ours, of course), stuck behind enemy lines, and stabbing into the space between the arm and torso of the enemy operative, completely incapacitating him.
We clapped and whistled at the victory. I looked over the cheering spectators and noticed a few rows down and to my left a glossy black head of hair reflecting the flare light back up at me. Georgina Melck. My heart beat with the stutter of automatic gunfire.
Out of school, away from snickering girls of the playground, or the hovering boys who wanted to go with her too, this was my chance to ask Georgina on the Standard Five Tour with me.
There was a display of mortar fire (blanks, of course) and then some hand-to-hand combat techniques – throws and such, accompanied by shouts. I sucked in as much air as I could and, leading with the left, shuffled along the row towards Georgina, leaving my friends in their seats.
A large cannon was dragged onto the field, but it only sat there and wasn’t actually fired at any time. Two soldiers lit more flares and spaced them on the ground, the red light shining powerfully back up at us from the dry grass.
I stepped on toes and was almost pushed down into the row below as I blocked the view of some high-school kids who refused to move their legs. Through the entrance of the little open-air arena came a Ratel armoured vehicle. It slalomed through the flares on the ground and swivelled its gun turret around, left and right. I tripped over a crutch and nearly landed on its owner, a glum woman with a cast jutting out into the aisle.
I crossed over into the next block of seats and worked my way through the row Gina sat in. People began to stand up, blocking my passage: one of the flares on the ground had started a fire and the dry grass had carried it to a camouflage net. There was an area of longer grass to the side of the sports field that was beginning to smoke, too, and the man on the PA system asked everyone to leave the stands in an orderly fashion. I found myself pressing against a crowd going in the direction from which I’d come, all of them tense and eager to leave.
The troops were very busy now. Even the terrorists were beating the flames out with whatever was at hand – branches, more camouflage nets – a real show of unified effort in the face of emergency. Unable to fight the evacuation, I was dragged along, away from Georgina Melck. I turned my head several times but she was swallowed in the current, gone.
‘Where the hell did you go?’ asked Mark
os when I rejoined them.
‘I wanted to get closer, that’s all,’ I said.
Adding to the sodden feeling that the failure to engage Georgina Melck produced was the sight of my mother at the town show.
Sean pointed her out, up on the big wheel. ‘Who’s that she’s with?’
‘Come,’ said Markos, sensing the catch in my breath, or my being, with that ability that friends who’ve known each other since babes sometimes have. ‘Let’s get something to eat. There’s boerewors rolls.’
I turned and followed Markos and tried my hardest to not see Leo Fein’s arm around Ma’s shoulders.
* * *
In Standard Five there were still two obvious camps, boys and girls; since most of us boys were skating around the perimeter of the girls’ bloc, it seemed dangerous to approach them head on. I heard Angelique wanted to go on tour with me through Sean.
‘I heard from Karen,’ he said. Sean had asked Karen to go with him a week before.
Angelique was a pretty girl, fragile, with fine brown hair, freckles and large eyes. She was the first girl whose genitals I almost saw. Sean and I showed her our five-year old penises and she was supposed to show us what was in her panties but refused at the crucial moment. That was long ago and I held no grudges, but I was dead set on Georgina.
‘Hey, can you ask Karen if she knows if Georgina’s going with anyone yet?’
‘Okay, I’ll ask,’ he said but I’d delayed until only a few days before the tour to launch this intelligence-gathering mission.
‘Georgina’s going with Brian,’ said Sean a day later. ‘He asked her last week already.’
With only a few days left, I decided I’d better bite the bullet and ask Angelique or face going alone, or worse, with Potato Latke.
And as luck would have it I found myself alone with Angelique when Mrs Verwey asked us to fetch test papers from the Roneo room.
‘Sorry, Ben,’ said Angelique. ‘I wanted to but Joss already asked me this morning.’
I didn’t hold it against Joss, but I blamed myself for being so slow. ‘Oh, no problem,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably just go on my own. I think I want to, anyway.’
But I didn’t want to go on my own, not now that everyone was going with someone. I didn’t want to be the only guy sitting alone at the movies, no one to talk to but Lance, whose father refused him TV and gave him potty haircuts in the backyard and welded a BMX bike together for him that was heavier even than my Raleigh. I had to find someone, anyone, because anyone was better than no one, right? Three days before the tour, I called Potato Latke.
‘Are you going with anyone on the Standard Five Tour?’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Are you?’
‘No.’
‘I heard you wanted to ask Gina Melck.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘She’s already going with Brian,’ she said.
‘Are you going with someone or not?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You have to ask me properly.’
By now I was wishing she’d already been asked by someone else. But if she were going with someone else, I could count on her to tell everyone that I’d asked her and she’d said no. I didn’t want to go on the tour at all any more.
‘Would you like to go with me on the Standard Five Tour?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t say my name.’
‘Shoshana, do you want to go with me on the Standard Five Tour?’
‘Okay, I’ll go with you.’
‘Okay. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
* * *
With my bar mitzvah approaching, a school tour interrupting my studies, and because my Hebrew was stagnant, the Rabbi’s voice entered our home. He’d provided me with a C90 cassette tape with the parsha I’d have to sing. The Rabbi had recorded his own voice so that I could practise in the afternoons when I didn’t have cheder.
It was prudent, on the Rabbi’s part, to have done this. I’d barely mastered the dots and shapes that indicated vowels when he inducted me into the further mysteries of cantillation. The new signs orbited the aleph-bet and were meant to push and pull the voice in various directions, if you knew how to read them.
After school I’d sit at my desk with the blue book whose name I didn’t know but which contained all of the Torah, and the six-button, single-speaker, flat, black tape deck. The Rabbi’s voice emerged to coax mine in the right direction, like a shepherd with a crook.
Whichever great sage of antiquity thought it would be a good idea to thrust a boy in front of his entire community at the very age when his voice is skipping between registers several octaves apart – not just to be ogled at, or to speak, but to sing – must have been a bitter old soul.
The Rabbi’s chanting seemed to go on forever and I was too scared to see just how much of the ninety-minute tape he’d filled. I hadn’t reached the end of side one and he was still going strong.
I sang over the recording, trying to anticipate the movement in the voice according to the symbols. None of the shapes seemed to follow the contours of the melody. An upside-down Y like a wishbone should, you’d expect, slide up, perhaps perform some sort of manoeuvre at the peak, then drop down again. It didn’t. None of the tildes and swooshes did what you thought they’d do.
From the hallway my mother called. ‘I’m going to the shops! Do you want to come?’
The Rabbi’s voice hovered over a syllable as I pressed pause on the deck. ‘I have to learn this!’ I shouted back.
‘Nobody knows the tune, you know. Nobody listens in shul.’
I sighed, not loud enough for her to hear in the passage, although she always knew when I was sighing.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Suit yourself. You’re probably doing the right thing.’
I didn’t want to stay at home and practise my parsha. But I also didn’t want to go shopping for dinner because it would be dinner with Leo Fein.
It still didn’t make sense to me, that the two of them even knew each other. There was some kind of betrayal in the fact that I’d discovered him first, with the robbery of Roy’s Uptown, and that now he was closing in on my mother. I shook my head at the thought and returned to the tildes and wishbones of cantillation for the rest of the afternoon.
The silver Mercedes arrived at six-thirty and I was asked to open the front door. His presence, in a white shirt with vertical lines that curved and disappeared under his belly, shrank my antagonism and I allowed him in, traitor to myself.
‘Howzit, my china,’ he said to me, grabbing my hand in his own fleshy palm.
‘Be there in a sec,’ said my mother from the kitchen. She wasn’t cooking – Shadrack had done that – but she was spreading the snacks into the bowls with the maze-like motif on the sides: her handiwork from before my birth.
‘Okay, sweetheart,’ he said to Ma, sitting on the green velvet easy chair. While I perched on the arm of the brown couch, he leant back and popped out the footstool of the chair and said, ‘Almost your barmy, hey? You’ll be a man then, hey?’
How had this guy inserted himself into my mother’s life? Though the foundations of my dismay were unclear to me at the time, I knew my mother to be a woman who held up the virtues of a broad scope, the big-city sophistication of enlightenment. He was only going to drag us down, anchor us forever in this backwater.
Ma came into the room with a bowl of peanuts and another of sliced, moist biltong. She gave Leo Fein a kiss on his straight lips as he rose to greet her.
‘Some of your design?’ he asked, raising the bowl level with his brow.
‘Oh, they’re ancient,’ said Ma.
‘See? You should think about that gallery – I’m serious. This stuff will sell, Margot. Your mother’s talented, hey boy?’ He scooped up some biltong from the bowl.
‘Ben, can you help Uncle Leo with a drink?’ she asked. ‘Do you know which one is the whisky?’
I looked at Leo Fein but he was gazing at Ma’s ceramic bowl, rotating it on the sidetable. ‘I know,’ I said,
lifting myself and heading to the kitchen.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Ma.
‘I’m getting the glasses.’
‘Use the ones in the bar.’ She sat down in the chair next to Leo Fein.
I hadn’t wanted to use those glasses for this man. I knew my father mostly through the physical objects he had left behind. The photographs, of course, but also his jackets, his cufflinks, the workbench in the garage and the tools in the steel cupboard, the bar, and the crystal whisky tumblers.
I returned with the drinks and they were still talking about the ceramics. ‘Is this Mayan, this design?’ asked Leo Fein, grabbing the peanuts.
‘Well, Aztec, I suppose.’
‘You must do more, Margot. It’s just wonderful.’
‘Oh, I’d like to. It’s just time – it takes time, you know.’
‘You must make time. That’s all.’
‘You’re right. I should,’ she said, taking a sip of whisky.
‘Not “should”. “Will”,’ said Leo Fein. ‘It’d be a tragedy if you didn’t.’
‘All right – I will,’ she said, tucking away a strand of hair.
I’d been trying to get Ma to go back to pottery for ages. Since her friend Father Verhaeren, the Catholic priest and a potter of some ability, had left town, she’d not so much as touched clay.
I wanted a mother who could shape pots, who knew the difference between Aztec and Maya, and I wanted to divert her from all the small-town divertissements she had fallen into over the course of my childhood: lawn bowls (and, with it, the drunken leches at the bowling club bar), the slot machines of the Venda Sun, The Thorn Birds, and even her involvement in Great North Diesel and Auto Electric. All were practices which suggested to me, in muddy washes of ill-defined feelings, that my mother, and therefore I, was here to stay, not upwardly mobile to more enlightened spheres but trapped in the doldrums of my birthplace.
We sat down to dinner and I watched how Leo Fein ate, and listened to his compliments on my mother’s cooking, which wasn’t her cooking, but Shadrack’s, and wasn’t good (although better than my mother’s). When you start to take a negative view of someone, everything they do becomes an act seemingly designed to terrorise and disgust you. I felt it as I watched Leo Fein chewing with his mouth open. It was an invitation to hate him.