Johanna shuts the blinds and feeds the tape to the VCR. More and more, she finds she is not looking at the parts she’s supposed to be looking at. Instead she is searching the minutiae of the room—the grain of the desk and the pattern in the wallpaper, the smudges around the light switch—for clues as to what the rest of their life looks like. Their younger life. There is the door, but she can’t recall much about the hallway beyond it. Was this the house with the outdoor laundry, the blighted lemon tree? The eccentric landlord who would turn up unannounced in the backyard with a bucket and a lemon-reaching device he’d fashioned himself from a broomstick and an empty Coke can? Yes. And a kitchen that smelled of overripe oranges, for no reason they could ever determine. Unable to find the hogo’s source, there was nothing to do but keep a steady supply of oranges to account for it. Piling them into a clay bowl in the middle of the table and leaving them to soften and sprout fuzz. Aland weeded out the more deflated of them with good-humored disgust: There are times I’ve mistaken you for a rational woman.
She rewinds the tape and watches again, nearly the whole way through, trying to see beyond what the camera has recorded, what is imprinted there in the layers of emulsion. But even the things that have been captured in-frame are unreliable. Her body is not that body. The house has probably been torn down. On tape, Aland still has the tiny asterisk of a scar on his cheek, from a cop’s signet ring. But the scar has long since faded, absorbed by the body. Even the camera is gone now, stolen during a road trip, and the film is deteriorating with each view. Remanence decay—a process in which the magnetic particles gradually lose their charge, resulting in colors shifting towards weaker hues. (Comes the absurd thought: Are we doing this to ourselves?)
Through the decaying film she glimpses a sliver of the decaying garden; decaying even at the time of filming. Benign neglect. It has been one of Aland’s few stipulations: there must always be a backyard. No matter how small or shabby or overgrown; no matter how seldom he’ll go out into it to get his hands dirty or fail at vegetables. Corollary of his childhood. The Great Indoors—his mother’s term for the period of years (six? seven?) she’d had to keep Aland inside, hidden from authorities and conservative snoops, his very existence a violation of South Africa’s Immorality Amendment Act. As it was, she’d been spat on more than once, assaulted in the street by women and men both. She now enjoyed scandalizing docile Australians with stories of routine panty raids on those suspected of interracial love, police storming the house and shaking out the bedsheets. Tipping out the wash-basket to scrutinize underwear for signs of unlawful union.
People told me I should abort, Aland’s mother had told Johanna. And when I refused they said I should lie, cry rape. Poor little white Norna! But that would’ve hardly helped anyone’s cause, neither in the short nor long term. We figured better to lie low for a while. You could feel the wind turning, by then. Or we had to believe we did.
Like one long rainy day, those years, Norna and her sister trying to make a game of it, inventing distractions that didn’t bore the three of them senseless—Do you remember Magic Linen Press? Breakfast circus?—while friends were arrested for civil disobedience, high treason, disappeared into exile or simply disappeared. Aland had been allowed into the garden only, when deemed safe. A grassy cubby amidst watchful strelitzia at the end of the yard represented the outer limits of his child-world.
When recalling his childhood for their sons, Aland cloaked it in a near magical allure, as though his cloistered upbringing was a nefarious enchantment, the consequence of some foul sorcery. The more complex version, he insisted, could wait.
Something crashes outside, in the garden. In the off-screen, present-day, presently decaying garden. Johanna pauses the tape, and listens.
… the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world … Foucault, trailing her out through the back door, like a sat-nav she can’t turn off.
There is a shudder in the Photinia hedge, where it separates their block from the back neighbors, and Johanna crosses the lawn to meet it. She trails her hand along the hedge, the young red leaves sun-warmed and tender, slightly clammy under her palm, like the hide of a living animal. She parts the leaves and peers through the cool shadowy network of branches.
A man in gardener’s greens, his old face shaded by a slouch hat, hacking at the branches on the other side with diligent whacks of a machete, his own hands gnarled as tree matter.
This is how Aland’s father would sometimes visit him. Appearing in broad daylight, in the dusty blue cottons of a groundsman, during the Great Indoors. (Although Norna maintains that this is simply not possible: she was watching the whole time. She did recall a phase, however, when he thought all black men were Sifiso.)
But Aland described the meetings in such vivid and consistent detail—the deep burnished hurng hurgh hurgh of his father’s laugh, his genius for bird and animal mimicry, the tiny stick-and-poke tattoo of a date (Aland’s birthday?) on the inside of his right wrist—that Johanna was compelled to believe him. Sometimes even Norna looked swayed.
It wasn’t your birthday, that tattoo, she once interrupted cagily. It was the first day of the Soweto uprising. You must’ve heard Aunt Flossie and me talking about it.
This is the reason, Johanna suspects, for there always being a backyard: so that Aland’s father, apparition or no, might have favorable conditions in which to reappear.
And now here he is, after all, come to wreak havoc on the Photinia.
Excuse me? she asks through the hedge.
The man pauses work to raise his head, face appearing under the brim of his slouch hat. Not him. Of course, not him. Barely older than Johanna, and white—if a very weathered white, the hands extending from his shirt cuffs worked even darker, older.
Hello—yeah?
Why are you whacking up our Photinia?
That how you say it? Owners are selling. Reckon a fence will market better than a hedge, I s’pose. People are very fond of their fences.
But it’s on our side too. Or half of it is. It’s a common hedge.
Same owners, but. Whole-hedge prerogative.
Oh. Johanna hadn’t known this. In fact, she’s never met the owners, only the estate agent, or a rolling cast of them, snipping through the house for half-yearly inspections.
Could you not just … trim it back on that side and put the fence in front of it?
It’d only grow back and wreck the fence. The roots, you see …
I see.
Sorry, love. You still got some running up the sides there.
Not his fault, Johanna thinks, stalking back to the house. Not his fault, not his fault. She scrapes a white plastic chair onto the paving stones and watches a shaggy window appear in the hedge. The window becomes a doorway, the gardener steps into it, notices Johanna sitting there, gives a self-conscious little bow, rolls up his sleeves, and gets back to it.
Johanna, not wanting to unsettle him with her attention, goes inside for a book and a mug of tea, returns to the chair, affects to be taking the afternoon sun, which has grown toothy, vengeful in the wake of the morning’s storm, searing the wet off the grass in green bright steam.
She watches the gardener from the periphery of an Icelandic thriller. Over the course of the afternoon the hedge becomes less a solid wall than a recalcitrant old stage curtain being roughly thrust aside.
At one point she calls out to offer a cold drink, but he raises a thermos as if in toast. She raises her peppermint tea in reply. The crinkling around his eyes, the work-roughened hands, the fur on his arms. His chest and belly, she imagines, similarly furred—not a thing she’s ever thought of as being her thing, but perhaps she could. Very D. H. Lawrence. But after the apparition of Aland’s father it would feel warped, unseemly. Freud would say …
Well, fuck Freud to Whitsunday.
The rain returns. The gardener throws a look at the sky, expression hidden by hat brim, then returns to clawing up the Photinia’s root system.
&nbs
p; Johanna, subterfuge lost, leaves the book on the arm of the chair and goes inside. Two texts on her phone from Aland, in reverse order:
I’ll take that as a No then.
And the first, an hour earlier, letting her know that he and the boys were having dinner with his mother. Want to join?
Sorry, she texts back. Headache. She’s considered leaving Aland only once before, children not yet pictured. Storming out of an argument and driving as far as Mount Baw Baw. Arriving in the St. Gwinear car park after sunset and sleeping all night in the driver’s seat with her coat pulled up to her chin. It might have happened last century, it feels that long ago. In the morning, there it all was: mountains stereoscopic against Polaroid sky, extravagances people traveled great distances to be humbled by. But the ski season hadn’t started yet and she was alone there. She’d rummaged through the glove compartment and discovered a chocolate bar and half a pack of Extra Milds that her friend Silv had stashed and forgotten about. Johanna had leaned against the car’s flank, alternating mouthfuls of smoke and chocolate as she watched the mist lift. God, it was beautiful. Your whole life could be like this. Arriving always in darkness and waking to something extraordinary. You wouldn’t even have to be rich. But she knew it couldn’t be. She warmed the car and pointed it back towards Melbourne. All the lives she wasn’t living lined up uselessly: tacky snow globes from places she had never been, places where it doesn’t even snow.
In their bedroom the tape has started playing again, to nobody. How is this possible? Power surge, some other glitch, divine meddling. Johanna doesn’t know. Unnerving, though. Again, the soundless scream, the confectioner’s red-and-pink and of her mouth and sex. She wrenches the tape out of the VCR, hoping the ribbon might catch and unravel, absolving her, but of course it doesn’t.
One more hour until Aland brings the boys back from his mother’s. One more hour until they bound into the house, crashing from great sugary heights. Delivering covert kicks to each other’s shins and staging vengeful stuffed-animal executions in protest of the sudden dearth of chocolate biscuits and unlimited television.
Johanna takes a marker from a kitchen drawer. She re-labels the tape “Anatomy of Lesser-Known Knowns,” then relabels it “Blank” and returns it to the company of dead French theorists.
Through the sliding doors she sees the hedge is no longer. In its place, a muddy trench, the remnants of Photinia swept into a tall brush pile halfway up the neighboring yard.
The gardener is kneeling on the grass, wiping his tools clean with a rag, packing them away. No suggestion of a fence, not an upright post in sight.
What about privacy? Johanna asks. Standing over him, furious now.
He looks up at her, from under his sodden hat. Long scratches raking his forearms, where the hedge had fought him back.
I’ve got a family to get home to, he says. You know, a life?
Of course, she says, eyes seeking the bottom of the trench.
I’ll be back with the fence things tomorrow, he says. But you don’t need to worry—there’s no one living there now. It’s all just set up for the auction.
She’s still holding the VHS tape.
Haven’t seen one of those for a while, he says, with a chuck of his chin.
Old art project, she says. Very pretentious.
Beauty over bread, hey? Still, nice if you can have both.
Yes, she says, warily, unsure if he’s implying that she does have both.
Well, tomorrow. He nods. He gathers his things and strides up the lawn, a darkening green wave upon which the house floats, lit up like an ocean liner, the windows blazing.
She never paid much attention to this house while the Photinia was up, had little curiosity about the people who last lived there: childless, dogless, not inclined to parties. Though they sometimes ate their meals al fresco and listened to what sounded like Brubeck.
Eventide. Gloaming. Lustrous, lost words. Johanna strides towards the blazing windows, the house all the more adrift, and the wet of the grass soaking her cotton shoes. She leaves them neatly by the back door. Unlocked, unalarmed, nothing to keep her from the smooth cool of the slate floor underfoot, the museum echo of copious space. A house that is made to be moved through, calling her upstairs like a sleepy lover, but she doesn’t. Bowl of hollow glass fruit on the table, the kitchen cupboards empty, the refrigerator lighting up on nothing, save somebody’s half-finished bottle of coconut water. Johanna sets the VHS tape down on the black granite bench-top, turning the dimmer switch down to dark. She looks back across the churned strip of earth, to the meek light of her own home. The sliding door is still partly open. An echo of being six or seven, writing a goodbye note to her parents—becos you dont care about me anymor—packing a small bag for credibility’s sake then hiding under the bed in the spare room, where she could monitor her mother and father’s rising panic. How loudly her own heart pounded, pressed against the carpet.
They arrive home in heavy silver deluge. From the dark ship of the neighboring house, Johanna watches this diorama of her family, sons fighting their way out of raincoats and calling for her, room after room lighting up.
Only a frail guilt. Blown glass.
The back porch light comes on, in the house down the hill. Aland picks up the rain-soaked novel she’d been not-reading. Looking up he must notice the hedge, or the lack of it. His face is tilted towards the house, though it’s obvious he can’t see her, couldn’t possibly see her, there in the dark.
She watches his mouth open silently around her name.
Chavez
For two weeks I have Maria’s dog. For two weeks he wakes me by putting his large head on the bed and making his little howl-yawn to say he wants something—out, food, ear scratch—while Maria is down to the south fighting her mythological husband over their mythological children. No, this is not so fair of me, to say mythological. The children, I know, are not mythological. I have seen their photographs, tacked to the walls of Maria’s studio apartment (colored lights to make it cheerful, paper chrysanthemums, unframed Kahlo prints, bien sûr). I went up there just one time, for one coffee, but I remember the photographs: the boy, the girl, both having glossy dark hair cut straight across their eyebrows. Their heights marked on the kitchen doorway, even though they have never stood there, I know, have never even placed their small feet into this city, or possibly this country. And I have heard, many times, Maria’s side of one same sad conversation—Mi querido, why are you doing this? Don’t do this to me—which she has on the fire escape above mine. Again and again, Por que? Por que? and I watch her cigarette ash falling.
But of her family, only Chavez is real to me.
Maria adopted him when she first arrived here, and he was very small. He was snuffling outside a bakery like a bad cartoon of a lost dog, and she brought him home for company and also protection. Of course she was thinking forward, because at that size he could not have protected so much as a brioche. She named him Chavez, after this hero of the workers, but it is not a suitable name for him, I do not think. The human Chavez, as I recall, was quite wiry. Possibly from all the marching, and from being vegetarian. The canine Chavez seems made up of many pieces of different dogs, but the biggest piece is most certainly wolf, or something wolflike enough that he does not know how to bark; he can only howl and croon.
Maria had brought him to my door with her hand around his fraying collar, and they stood grinning together in the dim hallway. The same-shaped grin, it seemed to me, but with different things going on behind it. Maria: grateful, apologetic. Chavez: who knows? Still grinning, the two trotted into my kitchen, Maria in her too-high heels, her mongrel wolf-dog with his too-long toenails. Maria said to Chavez, Escóndete! and he looked around a moment before curling himself up beneath the table like a big polar doughnut, out of the way.
It is his best trick. She laughed. He understands he is contrabando in this lousy building.
Into my hand Maria pressed two folded bills to buy his food, and a key stamped DO NOT
DUPLICATE, to access the apartment upstairs for toys and extra treats. Also the key for her mailbox.
So you are able to collect my speeding tickets, she said, though in truth she owns no car.
You are very good to do this, Séverine. Saturday twenty-fifth, I will be coming back. Then crouching down, a kiss for one of the dog’s ears, she says she must catch her bus.
Then it is only myself and Chavez.
Until this time, I have only ever kept cats. I left the last one, Debbie Harry, for my sister-in-law Lotti to care for. I feel strangely embarrassed about this lack of dog knowledge.
Well, I say to Chavez, trying to sound casual. From under the table he looks at me (of course; who else would I be talking to?). What do you want? I ask.
Ouut, he says, in that yawn-howl. And in this moment I know that I have either been very smart or very stupid for saying, Yes, no problem, I will certainly care for your wolf-dog, to a woman whose children’s names I do not even recall.
Before Chavez, I would make micro-promises to myself, micro-rewards I could receive if only I would leave the building. Fresh cigarettes, nice underwear, dark chocolate. I even wrote these items onto a list. Then I looked at my list. Was this World War Two? With Grandmother drawing kohl lines up the backs of her legs and thickening the soup with a handful of mealy et cetera, et cetera …? I made it a better list. I added to it soft cheese. Decent Calvados, if it could be located here. One very brave lipstick, red as Rosa Luxemburg. Mangoes. Pomelos. Anything you want, I told myself, because money is not the problem. It is not money or worry for the lack of money that has been keeping me from such things, only the process of getting to them. If I look up my account balance, I will see it is still loaded with all those insurance euros. (Not an act of God, apparently. Of anyone’s God.) In the city so recently known as Home, Lotti has leased my apartment to a couple of architecture students from Norway, and their euros, too, pile up in my account. I am an imposter here, in this rabbity warren with its poor Marias, hiding behind a stranger’s furniture, with a different stranger’s dog. I simply arrived in this city and, like Chavez, curled into the smallest space I could find. And there is—for sometimes days, for sometimes whole weeks—no good thing I can dream up that will convince me to scurry out from it. No color of lipstick, no amount of fine stuff.
Here Until August Page 7