Just when I started to learn something, I dropped out of university, although this makes it sound more decisive than it was. I slipped sideways. After two years of English Literature and Classics, not to mention History, Sociology and Political Science, as we used to call it, my head grew heavy and I no longer wanted to be a student. Once my studies were over I would have to go to the army, which I did not have the stomach for either, so I registered for my majors at the beginning of the academic year and stopped going to lectures. When my father found out, he was furious. I was wasting my time and his money. The fact that I was living under his roof again, after a year or two of standing on my own feet, made it worse.
How can I explain it now? I wanted to be in the real world, but I wasn’t sure how to set about it. My studies had awakened a social conscience in me, on which I was incapable of acting. So I wandered around in town, seeing imperfection and injustice at every turn, working myself into a childish temper, and then I went home and criticized my parents and their friends. We sat around the dinner table arguing about wishy-washy liberalism and the wages of domestic workers while Paulina, who had been with my family since before I was born, clattered the dishes away through the serving hatch.
After an argument in which my father threatened to cut off my allowance, I drove over to the Norwood Hypermarket, in the Datsun he’d bought me for my eighteenth birthday, to look at the community notice board. Most of the adverts for part-time employment were for students, which suited me. Technically, I was still a student, while having no real studies to pursue made me flexible.
I flipped through the handwritten notices with their gap-toothed fringes of telephone numbers. Door-to-door salesmen, envelope stuffers, waiters. It might be amusing to watch the middle classes fattening themselves for the slaughter. ‘Record shop assistant’ was appealing: I knew someone who worked Saturday mornings at Hi-Fi Heaven and she always had the latest albums. But it all seemed so bourgeois. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I would have gone picking tomatoes if that had been an option, following the seasonal harvest like some buddy of Jack Kerouac’s.
The ad that caught my eye looked like a note from a serial killer. Not everyone was a graphic artist in those days, a cut-and-paste job still took a pair of scissors and a pot of glue. I tore a number from a full row.
Jaco Els painted lines and arrows in parking lots. This kind of work was usually done with brushes and rollers; Jaco was faster and cheaper with a spray gun and stencils. He got more work than he could handle on his own.
First impressions? He was my idea of a snooker player, slim and pointed, and a bit of a dandy. Slightly seedy too. He gave me a powdery handshake while he sized me up, working out an angle. Later I discovered that he had acquired the chalky fingertips in the line of duty.
Jaco himself did the skilled part of the job, for what it was worth. He wielded the gun and managed the tanks, which were mounted on the back of a maroon Ranchero. My job was to move the stencils and do the touching up. The stencils were made of hardboard and hinged in the middle for easy transport and storage. They opened and closed like books, oversized versions of the ones I was trying to get away from. This was a library of unambiguous signs. Turn left, turn right, go straight. On a good day, we repeated these simple messages on tar and cement a hundred times.
Being a worker was even harder than I’d hoped. I pinched a dozen blood blisters into my fingers on the first day and breathed in paint fumes until I reeled. The next day I brought along gloves and a mask from my father’s workshop. We had to wikkel, as Jaco put it. A section of a parking garage would be beaconed off or a lane on a ramp closed while we painted, and it had to be done on the double. Together we marked out the positions with a chalk line, and then Jaco sprayed while I set out the stencils and touched up the edges with a roller. From time to time, he would move the van and turn over the tape. Music to work by.
Within fifteen minutes of meeting him, I learned that he had employed a string of black assistants before me. ‘None of them could take the punch,’ he said. ‘Now I don’t mind working on my own, hard graft never killed anyone, but I’m a person who needs company.’ You mean an audience, I thought, a witness. ‘I reckon it’s worth laying out a bit extra and having someone to shoot the breeze with when I’m on the road.’ No black labourer would have ridden in the cab, of course, he would have gone on the back like a piece of equipment.
My new boss was a storyteller with a small, vicious gift: he knew just how to spin out a yarn and tie a slip knot in its end. ‘You’re bloody lucky you’ve still got to go to the army,’ he told me. ‘My camps are over. I volunteered for more, but the brass said no. Suppose they’ve got to give lighties like you a chance to get shot.’ He was full of stories about floppies and terrs. Once he got going, you couldn’t stop him. Chilled as I was by the brutality of these stories, they drew me in, time and again, and even made me laugh. In the evenings, as I rubbed the paint off my hands with turps in my mother’s laundry, among piles of scented sheets and towels, I felt queasily complicit. But I told myself that this was also part of the real world. I was seeking out bitter lessons, undergoing trials of a minor sort, growing up. Such things were necessary.
Strangely enough, of all the violent stories Jaco told me, the one that comes back to me now has nothing to do with the war on the border or patrols in the townships. It concerns a woman who caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her dress as she alighted from a Putco bus, and fell, and knocked the teeth out of the plastic comb she was holding in her hand.
Jaco and I drove from one end of Johannesburg to the other with Hotel California blaring from the speakers. The knives were out but the beast would not die. A revolution was afoot in the retail world: the age of the mall was dawning (although we had not heard the term yet). Corner shops were making way for new shopping centres, and the pioneering ones, already a decade old, were growing. The parking garages were growing too. Jaco could not have been happier. We drove and drove, he talked and I listened, and then I scrambled for the stencils, hurling them open like the Books of the Law, and he zapped them with the spray gun. Turn left, turn right, go straight. It tickled him when I didn’t get out of the way in time and he put a stripe of red or yellow over my wrist.
There were hours of calm pleasure, when Jaco went off to buy paint or do his banking, or more secretive duties in the service of the state that he hinted at too broadly, and left me behind in some parking lot to join the dots. Working alone, in silence, I sometimes thought I was achieving something after all. In my jackson-pollocked overalls – I had to stop Paulina from washing the history out of them – in a clearing among the cars defined by four red witch’s hats, I was a solitary actor on a stage: a white boy playing a black man. In a small way, I was a spectacle. Yet I felt invisible. I savoured the veil that fell between my sweaty self and the perfumed women sliding in and out of their cars. I flitted across the lenses of their dark glasses like a spy.
One afternoon, I was painting little arcs in the parking area at Hyde Square, turning the sets of parallel lines between the bays into islands, when there was a bomb scare in the centre. Businessmen ran out through the glass doors clutching serviettes like white flags. And then a woman in a plastic cape with half her hair in curlers, who looked as if she had risen from the operating table in the middle of brain surgery with part of her head missing. Everyone flapped about, outraged and delighted, full of righteous alarm. Model citizens. Along the façade of the building was a mural, a line of black figures on a white background, and this separate-but-equal crowd drew my attention. They looked on solemnly, although their eyes were popping. The masses, I thought, the silent majority, observing this self-important European anxiety with Assyrian calm. I took my cue from them. I went on nudging new paint into the cracks in the tar, cold-blooded, maliciously pleased.
The bomb turned out to be a carry case of bowls left behind by an absent-minded pensioner.
In time, Jaco’s stories got to me. I could laugh off the knowing asides on brainwashing and espionage, which were straight out of The Ipcress File, but the nightlife in Otjiwarongo was less amusing the third time around. It shamed me that I said nothing when he launched into one of his routines. Why was I silent? If I am honest, it had nothing to do with needing the money or enjoying the work: I was scared of him.
When I was living in a student house in Yeoville, we had played a party game, an undergraduate stunt called ‘The Beerhunter’. A game of chance for six players. It was Benjy, I think, who picked it up on a trip to the States as an exchange student. The ringmaster would take a single can out of a six-pack of beers and give it a good shake. Then the loaded can was mixed in with the others and each player had to choose one and open it next to his head.
Jaco was like a can that had been shaken. For all his jokey patter, he was full of dangerous energies, and if you prodded him in the wrong place, he would go off pop. He pointed the spray gun like a weapon. He was a small man, but he made a fist as round and hard as a club, spattered with paint and freckles. I could see him using it to donner me, the way he donnered everyone else in his stories.
While this was happening, my parents acquired new neighbours. Louis van Huyssteen was a young public prosecutor, just transferred to Johannesburg from his home town of Port Elizabeth. He had a wife called Netta and two small children.
The first thing that struck us about them was how much they braaied. ‘It’s a holiday thing,’ my father said. ‘When the chap goes back to work in January, it’ll stop.’ But they picked up the pace instead. ‘Perhaps they still have to connect the stove,’ my mother said, ‘or organize the kitchen?’
That was not it. They simply liked their meat cooked on an open fire. Minutes after Louis came in from work, long enough to kick off his shoes and pull on a pair of shorts, a biblical column of smoke would rise from their yard, and before long the smell of meat roasting on the coals wafted through the hedge that separated their place from ours. The braai was an old-fashioned one fit to feed an army, half of a 44-gallon drum mounted on angle-iron legs, standing close beside the kitchen door. Often, Netta would lean there in the doorway holding a paring knife or sit on the back step with a bowl in her lap, and they would chat while he turned the meat over on the grill. Once I watched him pump the mince out of a dozen sausages, squeezing them in his fist so that the filling peeled out at either end and tossing the skins on the coals. And I saw her lift the folds of her skirt and do a little bump-and-grind routine to an undertone of music, until he pulled her close and slid his hands between her thighs. It sounds like I used to spy on them, I know.
When it came to outdoor living we were not in the same league, but we had the patio and the pool, and my dad could char a lamb chop as well as the next man, so when my mother decided to invite the new neighbours over to break the ice, a pool-side party was the obvious arrangement.
Jaco and I worked on Saturdays – we could get a lot done in the afternoons after the shops closed – and the braai was nearly over when I got home. Usually I flopped into the pool to wash off the sweat and dust of the day, but the Van Huyssteens’ sun-browned kids were splashing in the deep end. The toddler could swim like a fish. Her brother, who was a few years older, was dive-bombing her off the end of the filter housing. They looked unsinkable.
I remembered my mother’s remark, some personal history gleaned when she went next door to invite them over: ‘They used to live near the aquarium.’
By the time I had showered, the girl was asleep on the couch with the damp flex of her hair coiled on a velveteen cushion. The boy was reading a photo comic, lying on his back on the parquet near the door, where I used to lie myself when I was his age, keeping cool in the hot weather. Brother and sister. They made the house seem comfortably inhabited. I was grateful suddenly for the parquet; my dad was making money in the craze for wall-to-wall carpets, but he couldn’t stand them himself, said they turned any room into a padded cell. Stepping through the sliding doors on to the patio, I paused to feel the heat in the slasto on my soles, enjoying the contrast, and thought: perfect. A perfect summer evening. A breeze carried the scent of my mother’s roses from the side of the house, moths and beetles made crazy orbits around the moon of the lamp, the pool water shifted in its sleep like a well-fed animal, breathing out chlorine. The sky over the rooftops, where the last of the light was seeping into the horizon, was a rare pink. The seductive mysteries of things as they are, the scent of the roses and the pale stain in the west ran together in my senses.
I can picture myself there, long-haired and bravely bearded, in patched jeans and a T-shirt. The smell of that evening is still in my clothes.
My parents and their guests were talking, and you could tell by the sated murmur of conversation, the outstretched legs and tilted heads, that the meal had been good. My mother had put something aside for me, although there was so much left over it hardly seemed necessary. While I was helping myself to salads, I heard Netta ask for the chicken marinade recipe and my mother fetched an airmail letter pad and wrote it out for her. The recipe was a sort of family secret – it had been devised by Charlie, my Auntie Ellen’s houseboy – but it was shared often and eagerly. Usually, Charlie’s idiosyncrasies were part of the rigmarole of handing on the secret, but tonight my mother made no mention of him at all.
My father and Louis were hanging around the braai, as the men must, and I joined them there with my heaped plate. My dad had a little cocktail fridge from the caravan set up on the patio and I fetched a Kronenbräu from the icy cave of its freezer. The dessert was already on the coals: bananas wrapped in foil. Louis had commandeered the tongs. As he turned the packages idly, the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar melted into the overburdened air.
For a long time the talk was about children, the neighbourhood, the new house, the quality of the local primary school, things I did not have much to say about. I busied myself with the food, drank the beer too quickly, fetched another one. My father told Louis about the new wall-to-wall carpet lines and the problems in the factory with the union. ‘But enough shop talk,’ he said, and moved on to the caravan park in Uvongo where they’d spent their last holiday. It was the height of luxury: there was a power point at every site so you could plug in your generator. ‘The newer vans are moving to electricity. One of these days gas will be a thing of the past, you mark my words.’ Then they argued playfully about the relative merits of the South Coast and the Cape as holiday destinations. My father ribbed him a little, and demonstrated that he could speak Afrikaans – ‘Julle Kapenaars,’ he kept saying – and Louis took it all in good humour.
It might have gone on like this, until my mom put the leftover wors in a Tupperware and the Van Huyssteens said thank you very much, what a lovely day, and went home. But of course it didn’t.
At some point, Louis slipped into the repetitive storytelling I had to endure every day as I drove around Joburg with Jaco Els. The shift was imperceptible, as if someone had put on a record in the background, turned down low, and by the time you became aware of it your mood had already altered. An odourless poison leaked out of him. His dearest childhood memories were of the practical jokes he had played on the servants. Stringing ropes to trip them up, setting off firecrackers under their beds, unscrewing the seat on the long drop. You could imagine that he had found his vocation in the process. His work, which involved jailing people for petty offences, was a malevolent prank. The way he spoke about it, forced removals, detention without trial, the troops in the townships were simply larger examples of the same mischief.
I was struck by the intimacy of his racial obsession. His prejudice was a passion. It caused him an exquisite sort of pain, like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue or scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds.
In the mirror of his stories, however, the perspective was reversed. While he was always hurting someone, doing harm and causing trouble, he saw himself as the victim. All these people he didn’t like, these inferior creatures among whom he was forced to live, made him miserable. It was he who suffered. I understand this better now than I did then. At the time, I was trying to grasp my own part in the machinery of power and more often than not I misjudged the mechanism. Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, my friend Sabine had told me. Seid unbequem. Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject. Surely one could be a spanner in the works rather than a handful of dust? I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
These thoughts were driven from my mind by Louis’s suffering face, the downturned lips, the wincing eyes. Even his crispy hair looked hurt. You could see it squirming as he combed it in the mornings, gazing mournfully at his face in the shaving mirror.
I could have shouted at him. ‘Look around you! See how privileged we are. We’ve all eaten ourselves sick, just look at the debris, paper plates full of bones and peels, crumpled serviettes and balls of foil, bloody juices. And yet we haven’t made a dent in the supply.’ The dish on the edge of the fire was full of meat, thick chops and coils of wors soldered to the stainless steel with grease. The fat of the land was still sizzling on the blackened bars of the grill. You would think the feast was about to begin.
I knew what had produced this excess. Through the leaves of the hedge, light gleamed on the bonnet of Louis’s new Corolla, sitting in his driveway like an enormous piece of evidence.
I should have challenged him to play the Beerhunter. We were drunk enough by then and he had the face for it. Instead, I decided to argue with him, as if we had just come out of a seminar with Professor Sherman and were debating some point in Marx on the library lawns. The details escape me now, they’re not important. Racialized capital, the means of production, the operation of the military-industrial complex, I was full of it. ‘Just imagine,’ I remember saying, ‘that you’ve worked all your life down a bloody gold mine and you still can’t afford to put food on the table for your family. Can you imagine? No you can’t. That’s the problem.’
‘The commies at Wits have spoken a hole in your head,’ was the gist of his reply. ‘What do you know about the world? When you’ve lived a bit, seen a few things, you’ll know better. If your black brothers ever get hold of this country, they’ll run it into the ground. It’s happened everywhere in Africa.’
My father cracked a few jokes and tried to change the subject. When that failed, he gave me a pointed look, a stare that seemed to stretch out his features and make his nose long and sharp. It was the look he used to give me as a boy when I wouldn’t listen. Go to your room, it said. Now. Before I lose my temper.
We went from calling each other names to pushing and shoving like schoolboys behind the bicycle sheds. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Netta getting to her feet and my mother turning in her chair to see what the commotion was about.
Louis had what Jaco liked to call a donner my gesig. His sorry mug was begging to be hit. I would have done it, I suppose. Apparently I raised the beer bottle like a club. But before I could go further, my father slapped me hard through the face. One blow was all it took to knock the world back into order. Louis straightened his shirt and his mouth. I was told to apologize, which I did. We shook hands.
Then, in fact, I went to my room.
On the way, I stopped in the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. There was a red mark on my jaw. My father was all talk when it came to discipline. He would unbuckle his belt and say, ‘Do you want me to give you a hiding?’ Don’t be ridiculous. He had never raised a hand to me. That he had hit me at all was as shocking as the blow itself. I found the shapes of his fingers on my cheek like the map of a new country.
The Van Huyssteens stayed for coffee, to avoid the implication that the whole day had been a catastrophe. Later, I heard them gathering up the sleeping children, Ag shame and Oh sweet, and going down the driveway. It was the last time they ever set foot in my parents’ house.
Voices rumbled in the kitchen. Then my father came into my room.
I was still a little drunk or perhaps I was drunk again. The room was drifting, and so I stayed where I was on my bed, with my hands behind my neck, insolent. I was ready to be furious, but the look on his face made it impossible.
‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ he said.
‘It’s okay.’
‘You understand that I had to do this? I couldn’t have you hitting a visitor in this house.’
‘Ja.’
‘You were spoiling for a fight.’
Spoiling. To spoil for a fight. What exactly does it mean?
‘I had to hit someone.’
‘Then you should have hit him,’ I said. ‘He was asking for it. Fucking fascist.’
I imagine the expletive was more surprising to my father than the political persuasion, which I had been bandying about lately.
‘Perhaps. But you don’t settle your differences with your fists. Not under this roof.’
We spoke a bit longer. My father made a joke about watching your step around Afrikaners with law degrees. Never klap a BJuris! Finally, he reached out to show me something in his palm. It was a moment before I understood the gesture. When I stood up to take his hand, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.
My father’s remorse lasted for a week. Then one evening he called me into his study, sat me down in the chair facing his desk as if I were a sales rep who’d pranged the company car, and read me the Riot Act.
My argument with Louis had given him the jitters. The family motto had always been: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ He was worried, although he did not express it in so many words, that I would get involved in politics, that I would fall in with the wrong crowd. There was really little danger of that. Politics confounded me. The student politicians I had encountered were full of alarming certitudes. By comparison, my own position was always wavering. I was too easily drawn to the other person’s side. Half the time I was trying to convince myself, through my posturing, that I knew what I was talking about, that I got it.
I went to demonstrations against detention without trial, the pass laws, forced removals. I helped to scrawl slogans on sheets of cardboard and carry them over to Jan Smuts Avenue. But then I hung back, making sure there were two or three students to hide behind. My girlfriend Linda was always in front; her parents were proud of her for doing these things. I was not made for the front line. The police on the opposite kerb scared me, it’s true, but I was more afraid of the men with cameras and flashguns. I did not want to see my photograph in the security police files. More importantly, I did not want to see it, I did not want anyone else to see it, on the front page of the Rand Daily Mail.
The world beyond the campus, where the real politicians operated rather than the student replicas, was a mystery to me. Realpolitik. The new term with its foreign accent clarified nothing. People I knew from campus, writers on the student paper, the members of theatre companies and vegetable co-ops, were finding their way into the Movement, as they called it, but I had no idea how to seek out such a path, and no inclination either, to be honest. The Movement. It sounded like a machine, not quite a juggernaut but a piece of earthmoving equipment for running down anyone who stood in the way, crushing the obstacles pragmatically into the churned-up demolition site of history. Construction site, they would have insisted.
Towards the end of my university days, a farmer near the Botswana border drove his bakkie over a landmine and his daughter was killed. The newspapers carried photographs of the child’s body and the parents’ anguish. The gory details. Soon afterwards, an activist recently released from prison came to speak on campus. He spoke passionately, provocatively, about the bitter realities of the struggle, quoting Lenin on revolutionary violence without mentioning his name. ‘There will be casualties,’ he said more than once. When a girl in the audience questioned the killing of soft targets, the murder of babies, he rounded on her as if she were a spoilt child: ‘This isn’t a party game – it’s a revolution! There are no innocent bystanders.’ She sat down as if she’d been slapped.
Thoughts like these must have run through my mind while my father was lecturing me about dirty politics and the things the security police did to detainees at John Vorster Square. He was looking for reassurance, you see, but I felt it necessary to fuel his unease, acting up, dropping in phrases from books – ‘the ruling class’ – repeating points made by radical students on the hustings during SRC elections. The need to Africanize ourselves and our culture, the morality of taking up arms against an oppressive regime, colonialism of a special kind. I may have mentioned Frelimo. No doubt I quoted Prof Sherman – Hegemony Cricket, we used to call him.
The button eyes in the leather couch winked as if they were in on the game.
After a while my father changed the subject. He began to talk about my national service. ‘If you’re not planning to go back to university,’ he said, ‘you should go into the army in July. Get it over with sooner.’ He knew my feelings on this subject. He was just reminding me of the unpleasant consequences of my decisions and it was a pretty good strategy. I began to watch my words.
The talk wound down. When I was on the point of leaving, he said, ‘Are you busy Thursday?’
‘Well, I’m working with Jaco as usual.’
‘Take a day’s leave. Tell him you have to go to a funeral. There’s something I want you to do for me.’
It was not a question. My first thought was that he wanted me to help with the stocktaking in the warehouse, which I’d done before, but he had something else in mind. He pushed a large book across the desk.
‘Have you heard of Saul Auerbach?’
The photograph on the cover looked familiar.
‘He’s a photographer, a very good one. Also happens to be a friend of your Uncle Douglas.’
Now I placed the photo. There was a copy of it in my uncle’s lounge. It had caught my eye mainly because I was not used to seeing a photograph framed and hung on the wall like a painting.
‘Doug’s arranged for you to spend Thursday with Saul. He’s doing some work around the city and he’s kindly agreed to let you ride along.’
‘What for?’
‘I think it will be good for you. You might even learn something.’
‘I don’t want to be a photographer.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s not about finding a profession, you’ll make your own way in the end, I’m sure. It’s about this anger you’re walking around with, this bottled-up rage against the world. It worries me: it’s going to land you in trouble. And that’s why you might learn something from Saul. He’s a man with strong convictions, but he’s learned to direct them.’
‘I don’t even know the guy.’
My father tapped on the book. ‘Just look at the pictures.’
If you want to find out about Saul Auerbach, go ahead and google him. He has three pages on Wikipedia and gets a mention on dozens of photography sites. Saulauerbach.com, which is maintained by his agent, has the basic facts of his career. If you’re after the details, there are blogs devoted to particular periods of his work and squabbles about its merits. Specialized search engines will guide you to his photographs in museums and you can find others scattered in online journals and galleries. Writing a paper? There are articles, freely accessible or available for purchase, on his style, his influences, his politics, on his use of black and white, on the question of whether he is a photographer or an artist or both. Planning to buy? Getart.com offers investment advice. If, after all this, you still need a book on the subject, the online retailers will show you what’s in print and bookHound will direct you to the bargains. You could become an expert on Auerbach without getting up from your desk.
In those days, before everyone’s life was an open secret, research involved a trip to a library or a newspaper archive, and the pickings were often slim. While I was curious about Auerbach, I did not have time to find out who he was. They might have had something about him in the Wartenweiler on campus, but I did not want to go there. I had declared the university out of bounds.
All I had was the pictures. I sat on my bed, with the book propped against my knees, and flipped through it. It was a great book, according to my father (quoting my uncle, the artistic side of the family). I had no way of telling, although I was ready to disagree. Between the covers were two hundred of Auerbach’s photographs: he had made the selection himself. The images were dense and sunken, they seemed to have settled beneath the glossy surfaces like gravestones. These black and white boxes weighed on me. Worlds had been compacted into them and sealed in oil. If I tilted the book the wrong way and exposed some pinhole to the air, they might burst into their proper dimensions. I imagined one of these rooms inhaling, filling itself with life, breaking back into scale with a crack of stage lightning. The images were familiar and strange. I kept looking at a hand or a foot, a shoe, the edge of a sheet turned back, the street name painted on a kerb. Have I been here? Is this someone I’m going to meet? I turned the pages with the unsettling feeling that I had looked through the book before and forgotten.
The title page was inscribed: ‘To Doug and Ellen, with my very best wishes and thanks for your kindness and support, Saul, 12th September 1980.’ The book had been closed before the ink dried and fragments of the letters had come off on the opposite page, lightly curved strokes like eyelashes. What kind of support had my uncle given Saul Auerbach? Auntie Ellen was a music teacher and dancer of note, prone to demonstrating her skills extravagantly at family weddings when she’d had one too many. Perhaps she’d taught Auerbach to rumba in an unguarded moment.
In the flap of the dust jacket I found a handful of exhibition reviews clipped from newspapers and magazines, none more than a few paragraphs long. One reviewer spoke about the rigour of Auerbach’s composition and his fine understanding of light. Another praised his dispassionate eye but questioned the grimness of the images it gave rise to. A third, more enthusiastic offering from Scenario said that the humanity of Auerbach’s vision transcended politics and enabled a deep engagement with his subjects.
I read the reviews twice, trying to see if or how they contradicted one another. Was technical proficiency an element of style, perspective or personality? Could one be dispassionate and deeply engaged at the same time? I paced through the book, going to the edge of the world and back, over and over, without finding an answer.
‘Why does the old man want me to meet this Auerbach guy? What’s he up to?’
My father had gone to his Sunday morning golf game, my mother was baking – cheese straws, one of her specialities – rolling out the dough on a board at the kitchen table. She looked at me over her glasses while she floured the rolling pin. ‘He thinks it will be interesting for you, Nev. Instructive. He’s at the top of his field, you know.’
‘What must I do?’
‘Just tag along, watch, learn, I don’t know.’
‘I already told Dad I’m not planning to become a photographer.’ I had belonged briefly to the camera club at high school and learned to do my own developing, but it was never more than a hobby, and given up faster than philately. It was years since I’d taken more than a holiday snap.
‘More’s the pity,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve got a good eye. Even Mr Marshall said so and he wasn’t free with his compliments.’
My high-school art master, old Marshall Arts himself. In fact, he’d done nothing to discourage me when I dropped his subject in Standard 8 to do Latin. My father was still hoping then that I would study Law.
‘Do you know Auerbach?’
‘I’ve met him once or twice, in passing. He was at the theatre once with Ellen and she introduced us.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘You should really talk to Dad about this, it was his idea.’ She dipped a knife in the flour packet and made four long cuts through the dough, carving out a perfect square and sweeping the ragged edges aside. When she was done, she would knead the offcuts together into another ball, dust the board and the pin, and roll it out again. Waste not, want not. ‘I’m sure it’s not about the photographs at all but Saul’s way of doing things. He’s famously patient, quite happy to wait all day until the light strikes a wall just so, a total professional. Maybe he can teach you something about perseverance, learning to do one thing properly. Your father is very disappointed that you’ve dropped out. And this whole line-painting business, he thinks it’s beneath you, and I agree. We’ve given you a bit of time to find yourself – but you’re getting lost instead.’
When he spoke about things like this, my father always used the word ‘gumption’. A word that stuck to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter.
I gathered that Auerbach was supposed to teach me a lesson about life. He was to be an example to me (we did not say ‘role model’ then).
There had to be more to it than that. Between them, my father and my uncle must have briefed the man about me. Me and my problems. He would give me a talking-to, this gloomy stranger. I was irritated with him before we even met.
Moving back to Bramley was not a good idea. The year before, my girlfriend Linda and I had shared a room in a house in Yeo Street, but when she decided to finish her studies in Cape Town, we parted company. The relationship had run its course. Our housemates were graduating and starting jobs or going abroad, and so the house broke up too. I might have found a place in another commune, but the thought of dropping out was already in my mind and I moved back under my parents’ roof instead. It was convenient and cheap, but I would have done better taking a flat on my own.
How could I not feel like a child here? To be reminded of how young I really was, I had only to glance at the jamb of my bedroom door, where a succession of dates and heights scored on the paint in different inks, rising year by year, charted my physical growth to the age of sixteen. Just a few years ago. That ladder, observed from my bed with an open book forgotten on my chest, would draw my eye up into the heights of the room, where two model aeroplanes were suspended in perpetual combat against the blank sky of the ceiling. A Messerschmitt and a Spitfire. There had been others, Flying Fortresses, Stukas, Bristol Blenheims, but they had all gone down in flames over the years, leaving a solitary dogfight. I had built the planes myself from kits and suspended them on fishing line. They never turned out like the pictures on the boxes: you got glue all over the cockpit glass, and the decals, the impudent English bullseyes and angular German crosses, went on skew or came apart on your fingertips. But from a distance they were convincing enough. It was part of the training of ground-to-air gunners, my grandpa told me, to learn the distinctive silhouettes of aircraft, your own as well as the enemy’s.
I had tidied away my childhood, but traces remained. The Hardy Boys had migrated to the bottom of the bookshelf to make space for my university textbooks. A NUSAS poster about forced removals was taped to the wardrobe door, alongside Joanna Lumley in a leotard and tights, packing a pistol. Linda laughed out loud the first time she saw it and then I refused to part with it on principle. The imitation-leather beanbag I’d picked up along the way was squashed into a corner. My spray painter’s mask and gloves lay on the pine desk where I’d crammed for my matric exams. At my mother’s insistence, I stored the overalls in the garage. Even so, there was a fume of turpentine in the air.
In these clashing currents, on the eve of my meeting with Auerbach, I leafed morosely through his book. What was he hiding? What had he missed?
I parked the Datsun in the street outside Auerbach’s house in Craighall Park and waited for five to nine. I would give him no excuse to find fault. The house was low-lying and roughly plastered, set in a garden full of old trees. There was something Mediterranean about the dappled pergolas, the walls as creamy as feta, the succulent shadows of fig leaves and thick-tongued aloes cast by the late-summer sun. Years later, I read in Chipkin’s book that it was House Something-or-Other, named for the original owner, and that the architect was quite famous for his Hellas on the Highveld mannerisms.
Auerbach answered the doorbell and showed me through to the kitchen. He was matter-of-fact to the point of rudeness, as I expected. ‘No nonsense’ was the phrase my father had used.
A still life on the kitchen counter: apples in a wooden bowl shaped like a dhow, two quarters of lemon on a ceramic tile decorated with a spiral, salt in a finger bowl. Ritual objects, I thought.
‘Breakfast?’
‘I’ve eaten thanks.’
A slice of toast sprang up on the counter. While he was buttering it, I had time to glance into the lounge, a cool cavern of honeyed slate floors and paper-white walls that set off dark linocuts and African masks in smoky wood, rough-hewn creatures with horns, apparently bootblacked, a beaded doll. Kilims, leather, a bit of chrome. A dated modern style that suited him.
‘Coffee then?’
‘Yes please.’
I had never seen a cafetière before. He leaned on the plunger and gazed out of the window. It seemed to me that he was doing it in slow motion, building up tension in the room along with the mass of grounds in the bottom of the pot, drawing attention to the device. But why? After a minute in his company I felt off balance, provoked to speculate about trifles.
I sat at the table with my coffee while he picked through his camera bags to make sure everything was there, fetched odd pieces of equipment from other rooms, pausing every now and then to take a bite out of the toast or eat a segment of orange. He was a family man, as I knew from the dust jacket of his book, but there was no sign of a wife or child. You would have thought he lived on his own. He was excessively crumpled, in khaki shorts and a shirt with epaulettes and brass buttons left over from the North Africa campaign. An old soldier. My father’s age, I guessed, but my dad would have looked plump and office-bound beside him.
The car in the driveway was a Rambler, more than a few years old. He packed the gear into the boot – refusing my offer of help on the grounds that it would disrupt his rhythm – and we drove into the city.
‘You’re at Wits?’
‘I was.’
‘Yes, your father tells me you’re having second thoughts.’
‘I’ve already dropped out, actually.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m bored.’ This was not strictly true and it sounded spoilt. ‘Not bored so much as impatient. I want to get on with my life. Do things.’
‘Life will get on with you soon enough,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be in such a cast-iron hurry.’
Then I expected him to ask: ‘So what are you going to do?’ But he did not.
He drove with careless expertise, as if his mind were on other things, weaving through the traffic along Jan Smuts Avenue, gunning the car into empty space. There was an armrest between us, a soft block of sponge hinged out of the seat-back, and he drummed on it with his left hand as he drove. Stubby fingers, no sign of the taper that Mr Marshall claimed was a sure sign of the artistic temperament. That and nerves. Perhaps the story really was an excuse to hold the boys’ hands, as my more suspicious schoolmates used to say. I examined my own hands on my knees. Red crescents under the fingernails, road-marking paint rather than artists’ oils.
The silence was stifling. I said bluntly: ‘This was my father’s idea.’
‘I hope he didn’t force you to come.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I could drop you off if you’ve got something better to do. Just say the word.’
‘No, no, it’s fine.’
Another pause. ‘You know my father.’ It was obvious I was making conversation.
‘A little. I know Douglas better. We were at varsity together.’ He was fiddling with the radio, and before I could answer a pop song burst out of the dash (‘like an airbag’, I almost said, but that belongs in another period).
The concrete slabs of the Civic Centre stood among flower-trimmed lawns like cinder blocks on an embroidered tea cloth. Some joker had once pointed the place out to me as the municipal mortuary and it was years before I discovered that the trade was in licences and title deeds rather than corpses. I thought of telling Auerbach this story as we dropped down into the city, but evidently he did not appreciate small talk.
He was silent until we pulled up outside the King George in Joubert Park. ‘We’ve got company for the day, journalist by the name of Gerald Brookes, a Brit but a decent fellow. Afraid you’ll have to move to the back.’
He crossed the pavement and vanished into the lobby of the hotel.
Listen to me, don’t listen to me! Talk to me, don’t talk to me! Jesus. He’d left the radio on for my benefit. I turned off the ignition and got out of the car. One of my more imposing affectations was a pipe, a Dr Watson with a bowl the size of an espresso cup; the dropped bowl hung a perpetual question mark on my lip, made me appealingly wry, in my own estimation. I tamped down the crust of my early-morning smoke and sucked the flame of my lighter through it. Then I leaned on the bonnet as the bowl warmed in my palm. Company. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
On the opposite pavement, against the railings of the park, a couple of portrait artists were already waiting hopefully for customers. In midsummer, when the Art Gallery attracted more visitors, there would be half a dozen of them. They set up their easels and camping chairs under the trees every day. I sometimes went past there on my way into town and stopped to watch them working: it was more engaging than the amateur chess on the big outdoor board in the park itself. Chalky old men in berets with dandruff on their collars, and one wild-haired woman with an expressionist mask of a face. She was the only caricaturist among them, a lover of crayon; the others went for realism in pencil, pastel or charcoal. Most had samples of their work sticky-taped to a portfolio leaning against the fence as an advertisement. Usually they showed a photograph and a drawing so that you could judge whether the likeness was true. It was easier to capture someone from a photograph. A photograph was the presentiment of a portrait, stilling an expression, freezing the blood. When the living subject sat before you, breathing, sweating, with an expectant smile budding in the corners of her mouth, it was another matter altogether. Or so I imagined. Perhaps it was the other way round? Perhaps that was precisely what separated the artists from the copyists. The real artists worked from life.
But what did I know?
Auerbach came out of the hotel and went along the pavement with his head down and his fists bunched in the pockets of his shorts. For a moment I thought he was heading off into the city, having forgotten about me entirely. But on the next corner he stopped and looked through a plate-glass window. It was a men’s hairdresser, not a barbershop, mind you, but a salon. Marco’s or something like that. I had no use for it myself, but I had seen men sitting in there enveloped in linen, getting themselves shaved or coiffed, red linen, as if they expected the worst. Sometimes, the clients reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold. They actually washed your hair before they cut it. Auerbach stood at the window with his hands peaked over his eyes. He came back. In passing, he tilted his head in my direction, gave an open-handed shrug – And now? – and went back into the hotel.
What do I know?
This question ran like a hairline crack through my thoughts. I had read sociology and political philosophy, I had worked through a few of the key texts of the radical tradition, some of them written in the previous century. In order to read these books, I had sat in a booth in the Cullen Library, where the banned books were kept, as if I were suffering from a contagious disease. My head was like the stacks in the basement of the Cullen. New ideas fell out of old volumes and I tried to unriddle them in the gloom. The air was full of dust. I could scarcely breathe in the space between my ears.
I was in a room with two windows, speaking to myself in Latin – or was it Greek? – about reification and alienation, surplus value and exchange value, base and superstructure. Class consciousness, false consciousness, petit bourgeois, proletarian – the terms fell through a gap between two kinds of knowledge. Through one window I could see the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace and Lenin addressing the crowds in Sverdlov Square; through the other, schoolchildren battling the police in the streets of Soweto and Oliver Tambo addressing the General Assembly. Through one, Trotsky and Breton working on their manifesto in Mexico City; through the other, Breytenbach writing poems in his cell at Pretoria Central with a greasepaint moustache on his lip. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and the Top Star Drive-in. I wanted to bring these views together like the two images in a stereoscope, but I couldn’t see through both windows at the same time. I went up and down like a prisoner, until I was dizzy. Finally, I stood in the middle of the room, under the chandelier, with my head aching.
It wasn’t a dream: I had never been more awake in my life.
What exactly is the radical tradition? In one of the elections for SRC, a student politician, a long-haired boy from a suburban home like mine, had styled himself as Kropotkin. He went around in a cossack coat and riding boots like an extra from Doctor Zhivago on Ice. And I had nearly voted for him. What to make of Marx with his Boer War beard and his watch chain? He was treated like a patriarch in War and Peace, but he was more at home in David Copperfield. He might have been a chum of Mr Micawber, always expecting something to turn up.
I am more flippant about this now than I was then. Had you seen me there, with the cold shell of the car against my bum and the morning sun on my face, you would have thought I was an overly earnest young man. You could not see Benjamin’s Angel – Klee’s Angel, strictly speaking, memorably captioned – leaning beside me with his wings folded across the bonnet. I was troubled. For all my uncertainty about the sacred texts, they had dumped me into history and I had a suspicion that I would never be out of it again. Looking back over the brief span of my life, I felt like some object left on the shoreline, toyed with by a rising tide. If you had a sense of historical destiny, if you were sufficiently drunk with it, you might expect to ride out any storm. But I did not imagine I would be carried in one piece to a classless shore. History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates.
Gerald Brookes was a red stump of a man with a bald head curiously creased in the middle like an apricot. The lenses of his black-rimmed glasses were as thick as metaphors. He was wearing a black leather jacket belted at the waist and had a camera on a strap around his neck. He was my idea of an East German spy or an ageing bass guitarist. Gerry and the Pacemakers.
As we pulled off, he leaned over the seat and shook my hand. ‘Gerry. Saul says you’re a journalist in training.’
Auerbach’s eye flashed in the rear-view mirror.
‘Well, I’m training for something, but I’m not sure what.’
Then they forgot about me. Brookes wanted to know what Auerbach had been up to and he told him. They chatted about mutual friends, new jobs, divorces, property prices. They passed on good wishes and sent regards. Old mates, apparently.
Soon enough they moved on to politics. Brookes was full of questions. Was Botha pushing ahead with the Tricameral Parliament? Would the right-wingers split from the Party? And the extra-parliamentary campaign against the so-called reforms? Was it gathering momentum? What was happening on the ground? Auerbach said he was not really the person to ask, as Brookes should know by now, he could only say what he read in the papers, Brookes was probably better informed than he was. But Brookes insisted: you get around, you speak to people, you’ve got your finger on the pulse. You must hear things. What are people saying?
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Show me something, baby, I want action,’ Brookes said with a peculiar inflection.
‘You’re a journalist,’ Auerbach said. And then, after a pause, ‘The action is everywhere.’ And he looked out of the window as if something very interesting was happening just then.
We were in Twist Street, waiting for a robot to change. Everything was still. The little red soldier, standing to attention against the black gong of the light, had stopped the world in its tracks. The people on the pavements had their heads turned in different directions, each listening for a signal only they could hear. Across the intersection, a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd. A skinny man in a floral shirt and an alpine hat made of white raffia was sitting on a bus-stop bench with his hands clasped behind his neck. The second I gazed at him, at the pitted skin of his cheeks, he lurched forward, pulled something from his sock and threw it into a rubbish bin. The lights changed and we took off. Looking back, I saw the man walking swiftly in the other direction.
I wish I could remember clearly what was said that day. Between them, the photographs Auerbach took in the next few hours and my own disordered memories, which by comparison are mere snapshots with the heads cut off and the hands out of focus, have displaced everything else. They hang down like screens I cannot reach behind. I’ve read a dozen interviews with Auerbach since then, I can imagine what he might have said, but I’ve done enough ventriloquism as it is.
Duty. That comes back now. They kept circling around it. Thou shalt and thou shalt not. Brookes was obsessed – so it seems in retrospect – with the responsibilities of good people in bad situations, people like Auerbach in places like South Africa, people who were opposed to apartheid. The pros and cons of the cultural boycott, the rights of the individual versus the collective good, the value of contemplation in a state of crisis. How could you go on writing poetry, was the gist of his argument, when you had the wherewithal to take down an affidavit?
Any minute now, I thought, he’ll be quoting Adorno, misquoting Adorno, like everyone else. Sabine had written an intricate essay on the subject.
The notion of duty was very much on my mind, not least because I was about to be conscripted. What should I do? Brookes was asking some of the questions I had been trying to formulate for myself ever since it had dawned on me that I was living in a grossly unjust society. But the judgement in his tone riled me. He had all the answers too. He knew exactly how he would behave if the two of them traded places. Auerbach did not live up to his standards; he admired him, but he was disappointed in him. He should be doing more for the Movement. He had a duty. I thought of machinery again, an industrial loom for weaving everyone into a single fabric.
Auerbach was adept at answering questions. He must have heard them all before. He insisted on his independence and regretted his limitations as a photographer and a human being. This peculiar passivity also annoyed me. I wanted him to make a better defence of himself and therefore of me. If he was failing in his duty, he should at least be able to explain why. I couldn’t speak up for myself. Brookes made it sound so easy to do the right thing, to make a stand, but it was difficult. Wasn’t it?
Of course, it didn’t come out in one piece like this, I had to put it together afterwards. Through all of this, we were driving. We went to the end of Twist Street, so that Brookes could see the base of the Hillbrow Tower, driven like a stake through a city block. Then we headed for Yeoville. As we went, Auerbach pointed things out and Brookes leaned out of the window and took pictures – of WHITES ONLY benches, separate entrances, a uniformed servant eating her lunch on the kerb. Auerbach’s subjects, you could say. In Berea, he got Auerbach to reverse so that he could peer down a service lane where a man and a woman were arguing among the rubbish bins.
Brookes was overheated, he was pink and damp, and I almost felt sorry for him. But he must be a bit thick too, thick-skinned at least, firing away with his Instamatic in the company of a real photographer.
Then, or perhaps it was later in the day, Brookes asked, ‘How do you know that a subject is worth photographing?’
Auerbach answered, ‘I’m like you: I wait for something to catch my eye.’
‘Everything catches my eye,’ Brookes laughed. ‘You choose your subjects very carefully.’
‘Film is expensive.’
Brookes pulled a face.
Then or later, Auerbach said warily, ‘The subject draws me, I don’t have words for it really, something strikes a chord, rings a bell. Sometimes it’s as if I’ve found a thing I’ve already seen and remembered, or imagined before, which may not be that different. Perhaps I recognize something in the world as a “picture” when it captures what I’ve already thought or felt.’
‘Evidence.’
‘You make it sound like a crime, but it’s not that. And it’s not proof either, I’m not trying to demonstrate a proposition or substantiate a claim. I’m just looking for what chimes. Let’s say there’s a disequilibrium in me, my scales are out of kilter, and something out there, along these streets, can right the balance. The photograph – or is it the photographing? – restores order.’
‘So it’s therapeutic?’
‘No, I wouldn’t go that far.’
We were parked somewhere. Brookes was half-turned in his seat, looking at Auerbach with an ironic smile, and Auerbach was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. Although he’d been speaking slowly, searching for the right words, his expression was frank.
‘Look, if I could explain it to you, then you could take my photographs for me. But you evidently can’t. Even if I show you what I do in the darkroom, the tricks of my particular trade, where I like to crop things, the lines that hit the spot, I can’t tell you how I see. I can only show you the result. Essentially, the process is beyond explanation and what I say doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of it. By the same token – and this is more important – the work is perfectly clear. It’s self-explanatory. You should write this down, Ger. It explains itself.’
The presence of a great photographer (to quote my Uncle Douglas), the pressure of his calculating eye, created subject matter. Wherever you looked, you saw a photograph. Not just any photograph either: an Auerbach.
We went down Rockey Street. On Scotch Corner, Auerbach double-parked while Brookes took a photograph of a man in a kilt and platform shoes touting for custom through a megaphone. This black highlander was peering through sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers. Then Brookes wanted to see the water tower on the ridge. He said it was like a tripod in War of the Worlds, only the heat-ray was missing. The whole place was science fiction. ‘That’s what people fail to understand about South Africa,’ he said. ‘It’s a time machine. It’s the past’s idea of the future.’
‘Or vice versa,’ Auerbach said.
We took Stewart’s Drive down into Bez Valley. Auerbach territory, as I knew from the book. Brookes wanted to stretch his legs, and so we stopped on a corner with an Apollo café, a Farmácia and a BP garage, and the two of them got out. I stayed in the car, brooding over the discussion earlier, sulking, I suppose. All around, the houses turned their good sides to the street and held their breath.
When they came back, Brookes was carrying a paper bag. While Auerbach aimed the car deeper into the valley, he rummaged in the bag and took out a can of deodorant. ‘If it’s good enough for Henry Cooper,’ he said, putting on an accent I couldn’t place. He unbuttoned his shirt and sprayed under his arms.
Auerbach drove us into Kensington. I hardly knew the area, although I recognized the playing fields at Jeppe Boys, where I had once kept wicket for a school side. We wound through smaller streets to Langermann Kop. A track led to the top of the hill. Auerbach put the shift in low and we ground up the slope with the middelmannetjie scraping against the bottom of the car. He stopped in a rubble-strewn clearing and we all piled out.
There was a path going up the koppie that only Auerbach could see, enfolded in veld grass and flowering cosmos. He plunged in and we followed. Brookes burrowed through the veld like a glossy black beetle with his jacket creaking and the camera bumping against his chest. The plume from a long haulm came off in his teeth and he spat comically. When we emerged into the open, Auerbach was atop a rain-streaked outcrop with his hands on his hips, grinning. The gloomy inwardness of the morning had lifted entirely. ‘You won’t find a better view of the city,’ he called out as we approached. ‘You can see clear to Heidelberg. That’s Jan Smuts over there.’
Beneath us, along the spine of the Reef, the land lay open like a book. Auerbach pointed out townships and suburbs, hostels and factories, mine dumps and slimes dams. His pleasure in the exercise was infectious. Brookes took some noisy photographs and hopped about, laughing and steaming. He was redder than before. He looked as if he had just got out of a scalding shower and stepped straight into his clothes.
We followed our guide back through the grass. Brookes fetched the paper bag and opened a Fanta orange for each of us, and we sat on the rocks looking out over Bez Valley like a gang of schoolboys playing truant. William and Henry and Ginger. A drowsy calm descended. It was a relief after the movement and chatter of the past few hours. I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest. I could almost have dozed off.
The slopes below were dotted with black wattle and sisal. Beyond them the houses began, first the side streets that ran dead against the ridge and then the long avenues that streamed away to the east, dragging your eye through a wrack of rooftops and chimneys in the green foam of oaks and planes, all the way out to Kempton Park where the elephantine cooling towers of the Kelvin Power Station stood on the horizon.
Stunned by the sunlight, we slumped against the rock with our faces turned to the sky, while Auerbach spoke about the history of the valley and the people who had lived there as it passed from gentility to squalor and back again. You could still see some of the grand mansions on the opposite slope. Down in the dip, there were houses that went back to the beginnings of the city, that had survived the cycles of slum clearance and gentrification and renewed decline.
‘You think it would simplify things, looking down from up here,’ he went on, ‘but it has the opposite effect on me. If I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn’t do it in a novel, let alone a photograph.’
Brookes started as if something had bitten him. ‘You were talking earlier about how you choose your subjects, or rather how they choose you. How does that work from up here?’
‘It doesn’t. There’s no way of telling from here what’s interesting.’
‘Oh, I thought your point was that everything looks interesting from up here.’
‘I said complicated, not interesting.’
‘I’ll say interesting then. That’s what I think. Everyone has a story to tell.’
‘But not everyone is a storyteller.’
‘Fair enough. Everyone has a story, full stop. Someone else might have to tell it. That’s where you come in.’
Brookes was fiddling a pen out of an inside pocket, as if he was thinking of writing this down.
‘I’m not a storyteller,’ Auerbach said. ‘Even so, some stories are better than others.’
‘Why?’
‘They reveal something new. Or maybe they just confirm something important – or unimportant! They put something well. I don’t know.’
‘Now you’re arguing my point. It’s not the story at all, it’s how you tell it. Even I know that and I’m just a bloody journalist.’ He scrambled to his feet and teetered on the edge of a rock. A comet of pebbles was stuck to the back of the jacket where he’d been sitting on it. ‘I’ll bet you could find something worth photographing in every single house down there. Jesus, I’d love to know what’s going on behind those doors. Can you imagine! You’re the man for it, Saul! Pick one at random and let’s see what it turns up. Throw a dart at the map.’
‘That’s exactly what some of my colleagues are doing these days,’ Auerbach said, ‘or it looks that way to me. Just point the camera out of the window and hope for the best.’
Brookes eased the strap of his own camera out of his collar and said, ‘Why don’t we test my idea? Seriously. Let’s pick a house from up here, where one looks very much like another, and then go down and see what you can make of it.’
To my surprise, Auerbach jumped up rubbing his hands together, saying, ‘Action, Gerry, action!’ and the two of them riffled through the valley. After some joking about church spires and water towers, Brookes settled on a red-roofed house on our side of Kitchener Avenue.
‘I’d better take a green one then,’ Auerbach said, ‘it’s only fair,’ and pointed further down into the valley, holding the pose until Brookes had squinted along his arm and approved the choice.
‘And yours, Nev?’
Caught unawares.
‘Come, come,’ said Brookes, ‘you mustn’t be too careful, that would defeat the object. Eeny, meeny …’
In the game they had started, a miss was as good as a mile. ‘I’ll take the house next door to yours,’ I said to Auerbach, ‘the one with the orange tiles.’ A glimpse of the roof was all you could see of it in the greenery.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Brookes.
Auerbach noted a couple of landmarks near the places we’d chosen, counting off the avenues north of Kitchener and the streets east or west of a steeple or a factory yard. Then we climbed into the Rambler and headed back down the koppie.
There was a lighter mood in the car now that we were setting off on an adventure. On safari, with Auerbach to cut the spoor.
In the back seat, with the window down, I worried about my choice and wished I could change it. The neighbours. The next best thing. It was meant to surprise, but it was dull.
We looked for the house with the red roof – ‘Visitors first,’ Auerbach had insisted. It did not take him long to find the place at the end of Emerald Street. He made a U-turn and drew up at the opposite kerb.
Brookes’s choice was a city house with country manners. A corrugated-iron roof in need of paint beetled over a long stoep. On a balustrade with pillars shaped like pawns stood a fern in a rusty watering can and a birdcage made of bamboo, a Victorian replica by the look of it. A gate hung open across a faded red path.
‘It’s a student house,’ I said.
‘Watch out for tigers. They’re not keen on cutting the lawn.’
‘I was thinking of the curtains. Anti-Waste sells that cloth by the kilo. Every student place I know is full of it.’ Linda had an entire wardrobe of dresses and pinafores cut from disfigured prints, factory rejects caused by a jammed roller or a spilt dye. When she sat on the sofa, you couldn’t tell where she ended and the scatter cushions began.
‘Let’s see if anyone’s home.’
‘What will you say?’ I asked.
‘I’ll think of something.’
The front door was framed by leaded panels, the regular pattern of blue and yellow spoilt by lozenges of clear glass where broken panes had been mended. Auerbach rang the bell. No one came. While we waited, Brookes strolled to the end of the stoep.
‘What the hell!’
We all went around the corner.
At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbour, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centrepiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at – rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them seem less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.
‘Is it an altar?’ Brookes asked.
Auerbach snorted no.
To my fingertips, the bones felt slily manufactured. There were hard plates, smooth as china, and porous edges like baked goods, bread or biscuit.
‘It’s almost art,’ Auerbach said, with his hands cupped to a windowpane and his voice fogging the glass.
I also looked into the room. The familiar mess of a student life: mattress, desk, bookshelves of bricks and boards, beanbag, coat hangers on a broomstick angled across a corner on the picture rails, clothes mainly on the floor. Here on the window sill, an overflowing ashtray and a candle, and something else, a bird perched on a branch, a mounted specimen like a display in a natural history museum. The creature in its natural habitat.
Brookes took a photograph of the skulls.
‘Time stood still,’ Auerbach said, leaning close to the face of the watch.
A path led down the other side of the house, blocked at the end by a wooden door. Just as Auerbach and I rounded the corner, the door swung open and a woman looked out. Whether she had heard the bell ringing in the house and the sound of our voices or just happened to be on her way to the front, I cannot be sure, but she recoiled at the sight of us and jerked the door shut.
Waving me back, like a game ranger concerned for the safety of his charge, Auerbach hastened towards the woman, greeting her in Afrikaans. She opened the door, a slight woman with an elfin face, and spoke to him through the gap. He pointed to the sky and then to Brookes, who had appeared at my side. She smiled uncertainly with downcast eyes and answered so softly her words did not carry to me. They spoke at length, with their heads inclined towards one another as if they were sharing a secret.
Then he waved us closer. ‘This is Veronica. She lives here at the back with her husband, who’s gone to work.’ And he told her our names. Brookes stuck out his hand, but she didn’t seem to recognize the gesture.
We all went into the backyard. It was cramped, cluttered, and garish in the sunshine. Facing us was the long side of a garage and the front of an outbuilding that was no more than a shack. Like the fences on either side, the corrugated-iron walls of the buildings were the colour of old scabs, as if they’d been sluiced with blood a long time ago. A washing line strung between two poles held some baby clothes and nappies, two bed sheets and a pink pleated skirt. There were thick pads of moss between the flagstones underfoot and lichens on the concrete doorstep. From a bucket under a tap came the yellow smell of soiled nappies and sucking sweets.
Veronica stood aside. What had he told her? Perhaps she thought we were officials of some kind: Brookes could have passed for a municipal inspector, especially now that he had taken out his notebook. What would she make of me, though, with my long hair and ragged jeans? I must spoil the picture. Then again, it hardly mattered whether she grasped what we were up to. Who we were was clear. We were white men. We would do as we pleased.
She was wearing a light summer dress and silver sandals with a wine-glass heel. You could see the bones of her face beneath the skin, the shape of her skull under her doek. In the jagged cage of the yard, with the air full of iron filings and rust, she looked out of place. Did she really hang up the washing in high heels?
I was embarrassed. On my own behalf, for being there; on hers, for being unable to prevent me. I remembered my father speaking to Paulina in the yard, how she always came out of her room and pulled the door closed behind her, drawing the only line she could.
For a moment, we hummed like a delicately balanced mechanism with an experimental purpose, keeping the sun in the sky overhead, let’s say, or measuring the whiteness of the linen hanging down like sheets of paper: Auerbach with his hands on his hips, gazing into the doorway of the shack, Brookes concealed behind the washing as if he were a prompt in the wings, scribbling in his notebook, Veronica swaying gently, testing the blade of the air against her skin. And me, looking on, standing by. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stop staring. Below her left breast were three wooden clothes pegs with their teeth in the fabric of her dress and they moved with her like a shoal of fish.
A baby began to cry in the shack. Auerbach motioned her to go to it. Then he spoke to her from the doorway again, so softly I could not hear. When the baby had been hushed, he half-closed the door and went to fetch his camera.
As soon as he was gone, Brookes stooped under the washing line, thrashing through the sheets like a pantomime ghost, and peered around the door. ‘May I come in?’ His voice was a spill of white enamel on red brick. He ducked his head and went inside.
I hung back, flustered by my own discomfort, repelled by Brookes and the haze of deodorized sweat and proper English that had begun to emanate from him.
The room felt even smaller inside than the view from outside suggested. Daylight, poking holes through the walls everywhere, drawing dotted lines along their seams, made the place seem temporary, like something you could tear up and scatter to the wind. Most of the space was taken up by an iron bed on which the woman sat, nursing two infants; what remained was occupied by two tea chests lined with blankets, which evidently served as cradles, and a third chest standing on end and holding a Primus stove, a candlestick, plates and mugs, a medicine bottle.
I know this because I have seen Auerbach’s photograph. Probably you have seen it too and my description is redundant, or worse, inadequate.
Alone in the yard, I suddenly felt anxious. If the owner of the house were to come home now … a student might understand – perhaps it would be someone I knew. But even so, trespassing is trespassing. What would my father think if he could see me? He was such a stickler about the law and doing the right thing. A parking ticket threw him into a moral panic. He might still regret this little exercise.
When Auerbach came back with his camera bags, Brookes was wetting his handkerchief under the tap. He wiped the top of his head and watched Auerbach setting up the tripod, telescoping rods and tightening thumb nuts with the practice of a movie-screen assassin.
Going closer, Brookes said, ‘That’s one nil to me. You’ve found a subject. Not just Mother and Child but Mother and Children. Twins.’
‘I’m afraid it’s more interesting than that,’ Auerbach said coldly. ‘Or perhaps I should say complicated. There were triplets, but one of them died.’
‘My God! That’s terrible, Saul. You should have said something.’
‘They were burning a brazier in the room to keep warm this past winter. It’s a miracle the others didn’t suffocate too.’
‘Is that them?’ Brookes asked. He was back in the doorway.
‘It’s the only picture of all three.’
‘May I?’
It was unclear whose permission he was asking. He brought a snapshot out into the sunlight and studied it. ‘Also a boy? This one who died?’ Auerbach nodded. Brookes wrote in his notebook. Then he thrust the photograph at me, with an impatient grunt, as if to say, ‘Here, see what you’ve done. Happy now?’
Veronica came out of the shack. She had taken off the doek and fluffed her hair into an astonished halo. She unpegged two woollen caps from the line – the pompomed caps you can see in Auerbach’s photograph – took the snapshot from me and went back inside.
In a moment, Auerbach gathered the legs of the tripod into a sheaf and followed her.
A car door slammed in the street. Brookes did not seem to notice. He found a kitchen chair in the corner of the yard, sat down with the notebook resting on his knee, and went on writing. His head looked like an egg extruded from the glistening shell of his jacket. Once again, I had the sense that he was directing us. Not that he was writing down what we were doing, but that we were moving or standing still, turning left or right according to his design. Dialogue was no longer possible: all we could do was act. Respond to stage directions.
The photograph is one of Auerbach’s best. Of course, it has a special significance for me because I was there when he took it, but it is singled out by the experts too. You can look it up on the internet. They say it embodies those apparently contradictory qualities you read about on the dust jackets of his books. The tender way the woman holds the babies, presenting them in their innocent perfection: her head is turned aside, as if to make it clear that the children are the subject of the photograph, but also showing the lovely line of her cheek and the hoop in her ear. The twins are identical, you really cannot tell them apart. The mere handfuls of their heads in the soft caps, lolling against her breast, make you fear for the slender stems of their necks. Their eyes are open, their fingers are curled, and for all their delicacy, they look vital and ready to grow. Behind the mother, over her turned shoulder, is the snapshot of the triplets, propped on a wooden crossbeam against the iron wall. It is possible to miss that picture-within-a-picture entirely, but once seen it looms larger, or you wish it would. It makes you bend your head to the paper, trying to get closer, although you know this distance cannot be altered. The depth of field is fixed, once and for all. The third child, the dead one, irreplaceably absent in Auerbach’s photograph, persists in that smaller frame like an echo. But who can tell which child it is? The mother could say, perhaps, but she is absent too. In the circle of your eye, they all go on, living and dying, then and now.
Yes, the embarrassment I felt on her behalf was entirely misplaced.
Auerbach packed away his equipment and wrote their names in a notebook. He said he would bring her a copy of the photograph when it was printed. Again, he refused my offer of help with the bags. Brookes was waiting for us on the stoep, still writing, pausing between lines with his hand going up and down like a sewing-machine needle, as if he was covering the page with dots.
We had lunch at Raul’s in Troye Street. The place was packed but Raul – the man who put the king back in kingklip – found a table for us in a corner near the bar. The atmosphere was oily and submarine. Aquarium light seeped from a tank where a little deep-sea diver, lead-soled boots sunk in drifts of gravel, opened and shut a treasure chest, over and over, spilling pieces of eight and an SOS in air bubbles. The fringes of seaweed waving in the depths were the colour of the kale in the caldo verde.
Brookes ordered the seafood platter for two and the waiter thought he was joking. But he was deadly serious, he said in a menacing way. ‘I am deadly serious.’ And he laughed like a mad scientist. He was always famished after a long flight. Who can eat that crap? A hijacker? And now a tough assignment on top of it all. While we were waiting for the food he moulted the jacket, at last, and tucked a serviette into his shirt collar. One after the other, he took four bread rolls from the wicker basket in the middle of the table, broke them in half and ate them. The waiter cleared away everything except the piripiri sauce to make space for the plates.
Then Brookes ate and talked and ate. He had filled up with questions again, and after a glass of wine they streamed out of him. He kept working the food into the pouches of his cheeks so that he could ask another one: Do the prawns still come from Lourenço Marques? Not Marx, mind you, Markesh. Is Frelimo maintaining the fisheries? How large are the regime’s stockpiles of foodstuffs, fuel, ammunition? Is it true that the N1 was designed for troop carriers and armoured cars like Hitler’s autobahns? Is Sasol running at full steam? Will there be another bombing? Are the Boors still in bed with the Israelis? Do they have an atom bomb? Are sanctions biting?
Auerbach said he only knew what he read in the papers, but he would do his best to answer. While he was speaking, Brookes peeled his prawns and licked his fingers, and scratched in his notebook, which lay open on the seat of the fourth chair, pinned by an ashtray.
Between mouthfuls, Brookes suddenly said, ‘I can’t get that woman out of my mind. What did you say to her? When we arrived, I mean.’
Auerbach was eating prawns too. He sucked the juice out of a head while he considered this question. ‘I said I wanted to take her picture.’
‘Oh, come on, don’t be coy. I’m just interested to know why she let you in.’
‘She wanted her picture taken.’
Brookes rubbed his fingertips with his thumb and drew a figure of eight on the table top. Formica with a pattern in it, almost a texture, like brawn.
‘They always want their pictures taken,’ Auerbach went on. ‘Nine times out of ten. Believe me, it’s the easy part.’
I was halfway through a sole, picking at its pale flesh, every mouthful bristling with bones. Another stupid choice. I should have had prawns too, it would have given me reason to splash butter and lemon juice, to suck at my teeth and burn the hell out of my mouth and leave a manly amount of wreckage on the plate. Instead I was sorting through this skinny fish, something a girlfriend would order. Usually prawns were too much like insects for my stomach: the piles of translucent shells and crumpled feelers reminded me of the beetle sediment that collected in the light shades in my parents’ lounge. But I would have ordered them – especially had I known Brookes would insist on paying. Expenses, expenses, shovelling the proffered cash aside with the back of his credit card.
‘What are the odds of giving birth to identical triplets, I wonder,’ Brookes said.
‘Must be pretty rare,’ Auerbach said.
‘You’d think the doctors would follow up on something like that.’
‘That’s the system for you, Gerry. The government spends the bulk of the health budget on whites. Meanwhile black babies are dying of gastro and pneumonia, Third World diseases, the kind caused by malnutrition, overcrowding –’
‘Yes, I know all that, but I’m talking about the interest, the human interest. They’ve done something special. You’d think they’d have been in the papers, that they’d attract some attention, some sponsorship or other. A pharmaceutical company, a nappy supplier, Nestlé, something in that line. How is it possible that these poor people have just been left to get on with it? In a one-room shack.’
I pulled another bone from the corner of my mouth. On the ocean floor, the diver went on opening and shutting the treasure chest, while a dazed and sated guppy drifted out from behind some seagrass.
‘Why didn’t the people in the house help them? They could have run out an extension or given them a heater. That’s what would happen in a normal society.’
‘They’re just students,’ I said.
Brookes turned his magnified gaze on me. ‘Then they should know better. They should be asking questions. It’s the least you’d expect to develop at a bloody university – an enquiring mind.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Complicated! You’ve infected him, Saul. What’s so complicated about a bit of human decency?’
A slurry of sociology surfaced in me, more feeling than thought, a thickening of the blood. I felt myself redden, as if I’d taken a swig of the piripiri.
‘Is there a more complacent creature than a white South African? You’ve mastered the art of self-deception. In a normal society, you wouldn’t have a bunch of overfed students living like lords in a rambling house while a family of five squat in a shanty out the back. It’s like Russia under the tsars. Students are supposed to go hungry, like artists, it helps them see things more clearly. It’s a shed, for God’s sake, it’s no bigger than a fucking play house. The right sort of mortuary for a child.’
Brookes had hold of the table as if he meant to turn it over. Any moment now. Now. I saw the wicker basket in a swarm of breadcrumbs, the dirty roses of the serviettes, a wine glass and the fat speech bubble of grand cru spilling from it, fishbone thatch, a fried egg moored to the bloodshot eye of a plate by a crimson thread of chilli, all of it afloat between heaven and earth, every single thing thrown irrevocably out of order, beyond retrieval but not quite ruined, yet. Suspended. Surprising though it was, the scene seemed familiar to me, as if we had rehearsed the conversation before and could only push on now to a foregone conclusion. ‘What sort of people are they?’ Brookes would say with his leaded boots in the debris. ‘Are they empty inside, are they dead?’ The dead white interior resounded. But the plates were still on the table top, the food was still on the plates. Brookes was still on the other side of the table, which was still unturned, with a maggot of rice on his chin, waiting for my reply.
Repetition. Things had begun to double. There must be a term for it. Is it a natural process or an historical one? Should it be encouraged or suppressed? Or simply endured? Perhaps every gesture will beget its twin, every action find an echo, every insight become a catechism, like some chain reaction that can never be halted. The concatenated universe.
I found my ordinary voice. ‘I’ve come across many student houses where there are people living in the servants’ quarters, and not just neat little nuclear families either, uncles and aunts and cousins from the countryside. At least they have a roof over their heads. It’s not ideal, but you can’t expect a bunch of students who aren’t even earning a living to look after ten people.’
‘You mean every student commune has its own native village? What do they do for their keep – gather firewood? tend the cattle?’
In most of the houses I knew, the people ‘at the back’ brawled among themselves and the people ‘in the house’ insisted on keeping the peace. The intelligentsia, lightly dusted with Social Anthropology, confronting the lumpenproletariat, thoroughly steeped in Late Harvest. I remembered Linda staunching a knife wound in a woman’s back with a beach towel while I called for an ambulance that did not come (it was Friday night). In the end, we loaded her into Benjy’s Beetle, wrapped in towels and a groundsheet from someone’s hiking kit, and drove her to the hospital ourselves, and Linda talked to her the whole way to keep her conscious. The next day her husband, grateful and contrite, washed the cars in full and final settlement of their debt.
But I couldn’t say any of this to Brookes. Every story I could tell to clarify my situation only confirmed the point he was making. The order we lived in was perverse. It could not be improved upon; it had to be overthrown. Kindness did not help. Guilt and responsibility were not the same thing.
Later, as we were rinsing our mouths out with bitter little coffees, Auerbach said, ‘Veronica will find it easier to raise two children than three.’
Brookes’s mouth turned down in clownish dismay, but before he could speak, Auerbach went on, ‘That’s what she said, anyway. Poor woman. I suppose it makes her feel better.’
The mask, the thing that could have been a scrap of rubber torn from a doll’s head, was in fact a face. The other bits and pieces were easier to identify as human – a foot in a shoe, a hand with the fingers curled, intact. There was even a ring on the middle finger. The rest was meat and cotton waste.
He had not been run down by History or the Movement: he had been blown up by a bomb. He was planting a bomb outside a police station when it detonated prematurely and tore his body to pieces. There was nothing metaphorical about it. Thinking in metaphors is not always a good idea. It was Benjy who rebuked me for the habit one night when we’d both had one too many. ‘You can call it an empty barrel if you like. You can say, “This conversation is an empty barrel.” But what’s the point? Why not just say what you mean? Maybe I’ll get it then. Give me a sporting chance.’
I swallowed the sea water in the back of my mouth and leaned closer to the photograph. It was a cutting from a newspaper, covered in clear plastic like a school project and stuck to the wall above the urinal where you could not fail to see it, standing there with a soft target in your hand, your manhood. Alongside was a typed sheet – BE ON THE ALERT – explaining that it was my responsibility to keep my eyes open and report suspicious packages to the Manager, in brackets Raul. The man who took the snap out of the snapper. The picture seemed to me like the conclusion of an argument, the coup de grâce. But whose argument? Perhaps it was just a lesson in looking. I was too inclined to turn my head away, it was in my nature and my upbringing. I buttoned my fly and washed my hands at the basin. Then I went back to the cutting and made myself look at it squarely.
In search of the second house, the one he had pulled out of the hat on Langermann Kop, Auerbach drove us back to Bez Valley. Brookes made me sit in front as if it was a special treat, so that he could stretch out in the back with his eyes closed. Auerbach switched on the radio, although he did not need to tune me out. We were all distracted. The house in Emerald Street had proved the magnanimity of chance so fully it hardly seemed fair to test it again.
We rumbled down the long hot avenues.
There’s the cover of his book! – I thought – it’s that picture of Uncle Doug’s, I swear. But I held my tongue. Just as there was no point anticipating a photograph Auerbach might still take, so there was no point recognizing one he had taken already. What could one say about it? Snap! And then?
He’s playing a game – I thought this too – he’s having some fun. All this wandering around the city is nothing less than a guided tour of the places he’s captured on film. He’s letting us know we’re on his turf. There! That place with the palm tree! And what about that one covered in ivy? It was like counting caravans, Gypsy caravans like our own, when we drove down to the coast on holiday, a game my father dreamed up to keep me occupied when I got bored and restless. Who’ll be the first to see the sea?
When we pulled up outside the house in Fourth Avenue, I had a more cynical thought: is this really the place he picked from up on the koppie? Neither Brookes nor I can contradict him. He might have chosen it this minute, relying on those intuitions he makes so much of. All you can say for certain is that the roof is green. Racing green. Groendakkies.
While Auerbach went to see if anyone was home, and Brookes got out of the car to stretch and peel the fabric of his shirt off his belly like dead skin, I strolled a little way along the pavement to look at the house next door. My choice. It was as long and narrow as one side of a semi, a place that had lost its better half. The half left behind was yellow. A dozen steps led up to a stoep with a metal railing of diamonds and quoits. Beside the gate was a letterbox with a pitched roof and a chimney standing on an iron plinth like a maquette of the larger structure: they matched one another perfectly, down to the orange tiles and the red door. I could not wait to see what was behind that door. It might take another man’s charm to pass through it, but the choice was mine.
Then Auerbach came back to the car to fetch his bags and invite us in. This knack for getting people to open up surprised me less the second time round.
Mrs Ditton lumbered ahead of us down the passage, swaying at every step to sweep one thigh past another, almost brushing the walls. We followed her into the lounge. The room was lined with dressers and display cabinets, and for all its clutter peculiarly hushed and drained, like a little-visited annex in a museum. I remember stepping lightly from a patterned rug on to dark floorboards, aware that all around things were asleep on their shadows. Even Brookes took the boom out of his voice. Set out in cabinets of coffin wood and pillared glass were toby jugs and cruet sets, upturned port glasses, cut-glass dishes, fragile and flowery ornaments, iced frivolities for wedding cakes in lilac, rose and leaf green. Of course, you cannot see these shades in Auerbach’s photograph, although the black and white is perfect for lacquered wood and tarnished mirror. The ball-and-claw suite is ankle-deep in shadow, the curtains are so densely grained they could be carved from the same heavy wood as the furniture. There is a murderer behind every one.
An object stood out in the gloom: a low coffee table with a cracked top.
‘Is this from a lorry?’ Brookes asked incredulously, shifting aside a pewter urn on a tea cloth. Now I also saw the table for what it was: a windscreen welded at each of its four corners to a shell casing.
‘A hippo,’ she said. The flesh of her arms shook with laughter.
‘Military vehicle,’ Auerbach glossed it for him, ‘troop carrier.’ After a glance at the table, he went back to rifling out the legs of the tripod.
‘They drove over a landmine with Jimmy inside.’
‘Jimmy?’
‘My son.’
She watched Auerbach suspiciously. I saw that the pads of her bare feet were so thick and round that her toes did not touch the floor when she stood still. She seemed to be balancing on pontoons. Only her hair was stiff and angular, arriving swiftly at contradictory points below her ears. It looked like a hairstyle she had copied from Jackie Kennedy and forgotten to change.
‘Was he killed?’
‘No, thank God. I always say to him, Jimmy, God was watching your back. His mates had broken bones and stuff, but he walked away without a scratch. That’s why they gave it to him when he klaared out.’
So this piece of scrap was a good luck charm. Or a medal.
I had a look around with Mrs Ditton at my shoulder. Jimmy’s room was easy to spot: he had a Kawasaki poster on the door and Farrah Fawcett-Majors above the bed. The room smelt of fish. In the channel between the bed and the wall lay a clutter of flippers, tanks and masks crusted with sea sand, and a couple of wetsuits like bloated body parts. A speargun leaned against a wardrobe. Jimmy was a diver in Port Nolloth, his mother told me, but he’d been called up to the border again and so he’d brought his gear home. Couldn’t leave it in Port Jolly, it would all be swiped. He loved the sea, she said, even as a baby you couldn’t get him out of the water. Swimming before he could walk. It was a crying shame they wouldn’t take him in the navy because of his feet.
Auerbach called her for the shot.
The main bedroom was as gloomy as the lounge. A pair of brogues, side by side under the bed, polished for a funeral. The suit they went with was on a round-shouldered dumb valet. Through a window, I saw the window of the house next door, almost close enough to touch and so perfectly aligned it might have been a reflection. I shifted aside the edge of a net curtain and saw that the window opposite had venetian blinds tilted against the outside world. I could not imagine what was going on in that room. Anything was possible. Everything.
Brookes was like a visitor in a museum whose point he cannot fathom. He stooped to look at objects on the lower shelves of the cabinets and ran his fingers over the embossed spines of a set of encyclopedias. He paused in the doorways of the rooms as if they were spanned by chains, leaning in for a better view. There must be something interesting here, his attitude suggested, perhaps it’s hidden in the corner over there. In the kitchen, where the makings of a stew lay on a chopping board, he held a chunk of butternut up to the light as if looking for a flaw. Once he fanned himself with his notebook, but wrote nothing in it.
When I returned to the lounge, Auerbach had the focusing cloth over his head. For a moment, the darkness seemed to emanate from him, running out from under the stifling hood. Then the flow reversed and the cloth appeared to be soaking up the shadows that had lain there already. Mrs Ditton sat in the armchair beside the fireplace. The coffee table had been dragged away – there is no trace of it in the photograph – to expose the floorboards and a corner of the rug. Looming on the left is the largest of the cabinets, so imposing you would say it belongs in a department store. The chair has wooden arms with ledges for teacups and on each of these lies a pie-crust of crochet work and a coaster. The chair sprawls with its arms open wide and its fists clenched, and she wallows in its lap.
Auerbach shrugged off the cloth and stood beside the camera with the cable release in his hand. The shadows scuttled and settled again. He waited for something to happen. Or not happen. Something imperceptible to the rest of us had to become clear before he could release the shutter. Twice he stepped away from the camera and looked towards the door with a grimace, as if the situation pained him and he had made up his mind to leave. This caused her to look at the door enquiringly as if someone had just knocked.
I imagined the door opening, I imagined the room opening rather than the door, the door standing still while the house swung away on small hinges and closed into the eye of the camera with a bang. Patience, something is bound to happen. And if nothing does? That is unthinkable. We cannot be left here in this half-formed state.
While my thoughts were elsewhere, Auerbach took the picture. For only the second time that day, the shutter fell through the moment like a guillotine. You can see the relief on Mrs Ditton’s face as she drops from the fulness of life into a smaller, diminished immortality. She looks grateful to have the air knocked out of her. Anticipating a paper-thin future, she floats free of the fat-thighed cushions and the sticky shadows, she levitates. It is there in the photograph, you have only to look.
For a moment after the picture was taken, she was reluctant to leave the chair. Captured and released in the same instant, she was unsure of her will. She had two destinies now. One of them she still occupied, the other had stepped away from her; it was receding into the past, but with its face turned to the future. She hovered in the chair, unblinking, afraid to move a muscle, as if stirring would smudge that other body in the camera and she needed to match it for as long as possible to preserve a resemblance.
For the first time since the game with the houses started, Auerbach’s spirits sagged. Some charge had gone out of him and into the camera, which stood there primed and ticking. Still, I heard him laughing as he chatted to Mrs Ditton and wrote in his notebook. Where do you come from? All these years, hey? What’s that Jimmy of yours up to? And Mr Ditton? Have you ever worked? Do you get a pension? With questions that opened into the rest of her life, into her complications, she was charmed back into the well-lit room of the present.
I went on to the stoep and fired up my old man’s briar. Through the bay window, I had a new view of the lounge. Standing there alone, the camera looked like a detached observer, an expert on a fact-finding mission, with its chin up and its eye steady, drawing its own conclusions.
Auerbach entered the picture and began to dismantle the device, while Mrs Ditton floated on the edge of the frame. Now that it really was done, the pose abandoned once and for all, she wanted us out of the house, that was clear, she was like a woman hurrying her lover from her bed, urging him to be gone before her husband comes home from work. Her eye kept flicking over the shelves and table tops, dusting and adjusting, measuring the spaces between knick-knacks to assure herself that nothing had been taken.
Brookes came to perch beside me on the balustrade. Where had he been all this time? He had faded into the background like a song on the radio and now he became audible again, rolling his pen between his palms as if he was trying to start a fire.
‘Well, I was right. That’s two out of two.’ When I gave no answer, he went on, ‘Did you pick up some tips?’
‘Sure, I’ve learned a bit about talking your way in. Perhaps I’ll go into insurance.’
‘It’s been an eye-opener, I must say.’
‘More like a door-opener.’
Next door there was no sign of life. The curtains were drawn, the rooms were dark. We would not be ringing that bell, I was sure of it now. When Brookes said he had an interview with a chap from MAWU, he had to get back to the King George – ‘The place has international status, you know’ – I was not disappointed. Nor that Auerbach agreed so readily. It had been a long day.
Nothing more was said about the third house. Two out of two is good enough. Perfect.
The car smelt of middle-aged men, of garlic, Brut and sweat, and thanks to me a whiff of pipe smoke, the finishing touch.
I asked to be dropped off in Hillbrow, I would fetch my car later, and Auerbach obliged by sweeping up Hadfield Road into Berea. He did not ask what I had made of the day. To be frank, I meant to avoid that question at all costs. Young people learn things intensely. They’re impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into us, skilfully or clumsily, it’s the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there, hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue. Experience swirls through these channels like water over rock, being shaped in turn and given a new direction. The day had diverted a current in me, but I could neither express this change nor predict its issue. If I joked with Brookes about what I had learned, it was only because I found the lesson baffling.
In Kotze Street, near the High Point Centre, Auerbach pulled over. We all shook hands. Brookes gave me his business card and wished me luck in the profession. ‘Remember to write things down – ’ the door swung shut ‘– on an empty stomach!’ They swerved out into the traffic.
I had said I was meeting a friend in the Café Zürich, but this was just an excuse. Even before the Rambler turned down Twist Street, I was walking. The streets were lit with purpose, the surge of energy released when people knock off from work, when they come out of offices and shops and the evening lies ahead. Every intersection, where the stream pooled impatiently waiting for the lights to change, was a small spectacle. Long strings of brake lights glowed like coals, exhaust fumes mingled with the smell of rosemary and roast chicken. I walked from one end of Hillbrow to the other. White boxes full of blunt objects turned over in my mind, thumping at every step. I drank a beer in Willie’s Bar, I drank another on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel. Pulsing with words and pictures, Exclusive Books drew me. Auerbach’s book felt light in my hands. Perhaps his images, those dark things floating on milk, had finally sunk? I imagined that I opened the book and the pages were blank.
Long after dark, I walked over to Sabine’s house in Honey Street and found her making supper, trying to turn the usual strange assortment of cut-price goods from the vegetable co-op into a casserole. She had a sackful of parsnips and runner beans. We sat at the kitchen table, with wine from a box in glasses filched from some exhibition opening, and peeled and chopped the vegetables. I meant to tell her about the day, but in the end I left it lying in the back of my mind, pressed to my memory by a pencil of light.