Portrait with Keys

Point A

Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.

Michel de Certeau

When a house has been alarmed, it becomes explosive. It must be armed and disarmed several times a day. When it is armed, by the touching of keys upon a pad, it emits a whine that sends the occupants rushing out, banging the door behind them. There are no leisurely departures: there is no time for second thoughts, for taking a scarf from the hook behind the door, for checking that the answering machine is on, for a final look in the mirror on the way through the hallway. There are no savoured homecomings either: you do not unwind into such a house, kicking off your shoes, breathing the familiar air. Every departure is precipitate, every arrival is a scraping-in.

In an alarmed house, you awake in the small hours to find the room unnaturally light. The keys on the touch pad are aglow with a luminous, clinical green, like a night light for a child who’s afraid of the dark.

How bad a man was Scrooge, that model of solitary mean-spiritedness?

‘Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.’

The unequal exchange of directions is one of the most touching relations possible between people in the city, and so it is a measure of Scrooge’s inhumanity that he was never once, in all his life, engaged in it. Asking for directions, city people, who set great store by their independence and hard-won knowledge of the streets, who like to think that they ‘know their way around’, declare their vulnerability; giving directions, they demonstrate a capacity for dealing kindly and responsibly with a life put in their hands by fate.

In the countryside it is different. Strangers and locals stand in a simpler relationship to one another. Strangers are few and far between, and they are therefore less threatening rather than more so, as one might suppose. Locals know the world around them like the backs of their hands, as the saying goes, and landmarks are more conspicuous and easier to describe. In any event, a country person (if he did not have the whim to send you on a wild goose chase) might think nothing of walking along with you, or driving ahead, to show you the way.

The busy city person must rely on words and gestures to guide the stranger through a clutter of irrelevant detail, with dead ends and false turns on every side, some of which might prove disastrous to the unwary. Giving directions is a singular skill, and doing so well a reliable measure of character. We need not be judgemental: the way we live in cities today, it is possible to lead a useful, happy life without learning the names of the streets in your own neighbourhood. It is also true that the complexity of cities, the flows of traffic across ever-changing grids, coupled with the peculiarities of physical addresses, occupations, interests and needs, produces for each one of us a particular pattern of familiar or habitual movement over the skin of the earth, which, if we could see it from a vantage point in the sky, would appear as unique as a fingerprint. It is literally impossible for certain of these paths to cross, which is why acquaintances may live in the same city, meeting by appointment as often as they choose, without ever running into one another in the daily round. But this is all the more reason why the crossing of paths, the places where they touch like wires in a circuit, for no better reason than chance, should be taken seriously.

When I was a child, my father, a city man through and through, a lover of walking and driving, finely attuned to change in the world around him and therefore able to give directions with creativity and precision, taught me that it never harmed anyone to have a map in hand. No lost soul was ever turned away from our door without a set of directions that would take him to his exact destination. We lived in a new suburb then, carved out of the veld on the outskirts of Pretoria; the world belonged to us, we were masters of all we surveyed. These were the days of the garden-variety wire fence, long before the advent of the candy-striped boom and the two-metre wall, when some stranger who had lost his way might hail a man mowing his lawn or tinkering with the engine of a car in the driveway. More often than not my dad would recognize the place at once and be able to give directions off the cuff. But even when he knew the way himself, he liked to send me or my brother Branko to fetch his map of the area, a detailed one acquired specially from the municipality, and spread it out on the bonnet of the stranger’s car to point out the route. Perhaps the whole exercise was an excuse to have the stranger get out from behind the wheel and pass the time of day.

Since then, experience has taught me, and a host of writers have confirmed, that getting lost is not always a bad thing. One might even consider misdirecting a stranger for his own good.

I live just around the corner from the Marymount Nursing Home. In fact, I often use it as a landmark when giving people directions to my door. In the winter months, when you can see through the naked branches of the oaks in the dead end of Blenheim Street, the building announces itself in large white letters on orange brick. In summer it all but disappears behind the foliage.

Several times over the years it has happened that a guest in my home, leaning on the parapet of the stoep with a cup of tea and looking out over the treetops into the valley, has suddenly recognized the building jutting out on the ridge, and exclaimed: ‘Is that the Marymount? I was born there!’ A silence always falls after this unexpectedly intimate revelation, while the spirit of place casts a spell over our hearts. But it only lasts a moment, for there is something about the marmalade-brick building, with its white plaster and corrugated-iron roof, that prevents us from thinking too deeply about our origins.

I used to consider it a remarkable coincidence that so many people in my circle should have had their beginnings within a stone’s throw of my house. But my brother Branko, who is more of a realist than I am, boiled it down to statistical probabilities. In the fifty years of the Marymount’s operation, more than two hundred thousand babies came into the world within its walls. Ten or eleven babies a week, on average, with peaks around September. You can hardly turn a corner in Johannesburg without bumping into a Marymount baby.

Branko also took the mystery out of why I was always being called upon to direct anxious parents-to-be towards the nursing home, a service I performed half a dozen times in as many years. ‘It stands to reason,’ he said, ‘that anyone following the sign from Kitchener Avenue will lose their way on the corner of Blenheim and Argyle. It’s the first unmarked intersection, the first point at which they have to make a decision for themselves. And seeing that your house is right there, and that you must go in and out through the front gate every day, someone casting about for directions is bound to seize upon you from time to time. It’s the law of averages.’

Although I cannot claim to have chosen my house on the strength of its proximity to the Marymount, like some peasant eager to live in the shadow of the church or within walking distance of the well, its presence was always reassuring (I would never admit this to my brother): every week, a flock of new human souls came into the world on my doorstep. And so it is a pity that the home has closed down. The last baby was born there in June 1997. The number of births had been tapering off for years, as more and more white doctors moved further north, taking their patients with them. People in the northern suburbs no longer believe that a decent person would want to be born on this side of town.

It was a year before posters went up in the neighbourhood advertising the public auction of the property. Two groups with very different plans for the place made bids for ownership: a consortium of midwives and doctors intended to revive it as a nursing home; a consortium of businessmen proposed to transform it into low-cost housing or a park for light industry. Dry-cleaners and panel beaters. New lives of a different sort. But neither group has been able to raise the finance.

Hurrying home, half my mind on the work I’ve just delivered to a client in Doris Street, the other half on the soccer. South Africa is playing Denmark in the first round of the 1998 World Cup and I’m supposed to meet my brother Branko at the Ab Fab to watch the game. I don’t want to miss the kick-off. Suddenly it’s as if a lasso tightens around my ankles. I’ve got one hand in my pocket, the other hooked by the thumb into the strap of my rucksack, so I can’t even put out a hand to break my fall. I go down full-length, just managing a slight twist to avoid falling on my face. There’s an almighty crack somewhere below my jaw, like a bone breaking. I lie there dazed and winded for a moment. My feet seem to be tied together. Am I being mugged? I have an impression of people nearby, so I play possum. No, it’s just me here on the pavement in Roberts Avenue. I roll over and sit up. There is a loop of thick white paper around my ankles. I try to break it but it holds, and I have to slide it down over my shoes and squirm out of it. One seamless piece, barely large enough for my feet to fit through. How on earth did this happen?

Just beside me is the palisaded boundary wall of the medical suites at the Kensington Clinic. Useful. A security guard is sitting there, on the edge of his seat, looking at me through the bars with a worried face. ‘Haai shame,’ he says. On the other side, on the grass verge of the street, another worried face, a woman, a hawker. The two of them were talking as I came up. He was slouching in a garden chair, she was sitting behind her counter, a pine plank balanced across a cardboard box, displaying a few oranges and apples, half a box of cigarettes, little plastic bags full of peanuts and Chappies bubblegum. I have fallen like a drunkard over the guy-ropes of their conversation, jerking them both towards me.

She comes closer. If we were different people, if we were the same people in a different place, she might put an arm around my shoulders; instead she lifts her hand and drops it a couple of times, meaningfully, and clucks sympathetically. Something wet is running down my side. Am I bleeding? I feel around inside my jacket. Red wine, seeping out of the rucksack. The crack was a bottle breaking, my thank-you present from the people in Doris Street. I am leaking nothing more essential than merlot.

The usual adult embarrassment at falling down overwhelms me. I assure the guard that I am fine, I even show him the paper loop with an incredulous laugh. Then I get to my feet, dust off my knees and hurry on, leaving a bloody trail of wine. As soon as I’m out of view of the witnesses, I begin to limp. For some reason, I appear to be putting this limp on a bit, exaggerating, as the physical expression of feeling sorry for myself. Haai shame, my limp says to me, you’ve had a fall. A damp patch of wine spreads down my side. I must smell like a tramp. When I look for my keys at the door, I realize that the white strip is dangling from my hand like an unravelled bandage.

Aching too much to watch the soccer, and annoyed with myself, I take a hot bath and go to bed. The game ends in a draw.

The next day, my right arm is so bruised and painful that I cannot work. I sit at my desk and examine the loop under the reading light. It seems to be a piece of packaging, an innocuous oval, about twenty centimetres across. Somehow, I must have stood on one end, stepped in the other…it looks so improbable. The feeling that I have been the victim of a practical joke will not leave me. I drop the loop on the carpet and it lies there like a snare. Stand on the near end with the tip of my left slipper, slide the toe of my right slipper under the far end. Now for the left. Never mind improbable, it seems impossible. But standing on the thing reawakens the sensation of falling and makes my shoulder ache.

When I pick the loop up again, I realize for the first time that it has a twist in it. It is a Möbius strip. A one-sided figure, a three-dimensional object with only one surface. I have fallen over a paradox. This thought makes me feel better. I put my pen gingerly on the loop and run it along the surface, like a child guiding a hoop with a stick, and after a while I arrive back at the starting point.

I live on an island, an accidental island, made by geography and the town planners who laid out these city streets. Roberts and Kitchener, avenues in the uniforms of English soldiers, march away to the east, side by side. A spine of rock, an outcrop of the gold-bearing reef on which the city depends, blocks every thoroughfare between the avenues, except for Blenheim and Juno. When I am driven to walk, which is often, only the long way round, following this shore–Blenheim, Roberts, Juno, Kitchener–will bring me back to the beginning. Johannesburg surges and recedes like a tide. I come home with my shoes full of sand, empty my pockets at the kitchen table and pick through the findings. The roar in the air is the absence of water.

My friend Paul had a house on the cliff in Bellevue Street. As we leant on the parapet one night, looking out over the rooftops of Bez Valley, with the lights twinkling in the distance on Yeoville ridge like beacons on a headland, he said that it would be a fine thing if they built a dam and filled this valley up with water, drowned every house and factory, every aerial and chimney. Then he would have an ocean to complement his ocean view. If you closed your eyes, the traffic on Kitchener Avenue in the valley below, a rubbery squish of tyres on tar, sounded very much like surf.

For a moment the shell of the city was pressed to my ear.

Johannesburg, as people often remark, is one of the few major cities in the world that has no river, lake or ocean. It has a reef, of course, but no diving.

I walk, in the afternoons, along something as unnatural and persuasive as an extended metaphor.

A few days after the auction of the Marymount, the cobbler who has set up shop on the corner of Nourse and Hillier Streets was putting one of the posters to good use by spreading his tools out on it. The neighbourhood’s first street-corner hawker. He has chosen an auspicious location, opposite the neighbourhood’s national monument: the house where Mahatma Gandhi lived in the first decades of the century. You can see the little plaque from the National Monuments Council on the west-facing wall as you come down Nourse Street. The house is a double-storey on a promontory between Hillier and Albemarle Streets, with a beautiful panel of stained-glass sunshine to light the stairs and a second-storey balcony like the rounded prow of a riverboat.

For a while, the people who live in the Gandhi House, as we call it around here, kept a tree in their garden made entirely of metal, no doubt highly resistant to drought, with fanciful, curly branches like a candelabrum, where a cast-iron owl was perched. But it is gone now, dead of rust or carried away in the night by a scrap-metal dealer.

When my car, a white Ford Meteor with eighty thousand kilometres on the clock, was stolen from outside my house, I immediately phoned my father. He listened sympathetically. Then he asked: ‘Did you ever get yourself a Gorilla?’

He had been pestering me for months to buy a steering lock, and I had been putting it off. Now the car was gone. I was on the point of lying: Yes, Dad, I got myself a Gorilla, just as you suggested, but the thieves cut it off with an angle grinder. Went through it like butter. But you cannot deceive my father about such things. ‘No,’ I said sheepishly. ‘I meant to, I really did. But for one reason or another I never got round to it.’

‘That’s a pity.’ There was a long, crackling silence. ‘You know, the guys who make the Gorilla are so confident about their product, they offer the purchaser a special guarantee: if your car gets stolen with the Gorilla in place, they’ll refund half the excess on your insurance. Ah well, once bitten, twice shy. Perhaps you’ll be more careful next time.’

The town planners who defined the boundary between Troyeville and Kensington did not follow the suggestion of a street, which seems to be the norm; instead they drew a line behind the houses on the western side of Albemarle Street, where the back walls of the plots adjoin those of the houses behind them. Rather than meeting face to face, the two suburbs turn their backs on one another.

The recent history of the house at 22 Albemarle Street, strictly in Kensington, is nonetheless typical of the frontier suburb which Troyeville has become, a contested zone between inner-city suburbs like Fairview and New Doornfontein, which have evolved into black areas, and Kensington, which still holds on to its white identity.

The house is a renovation of the kind found in suburbs with a large Portuguese population (Troyeville and Bez Valley in the east, say, or Rosettenville and La Rochelle in the south). In a standard Portuguese renovation the structure is squared off, the fat pillars that once held up the verandah roof are replaced with angular, painted piping and the stoep and pathways are tiled; in more extreme versions, the entire facade may be tiled and the garden cemented over, with the occasional porthole provided for a scrawny rosebush to stick out its neck. In the Albemarle Street house, there is a low garden wall of brick topped with wrought-iron curlicues, a tiled path bisecting two squares of lawn, leading to glass doors in a rounded archway. The verandah has been closed in and provided with four lancet-arch windows, in pairs on either side of the doors. These windows are outlined in narrow panels of frosted, bottle-brown glass. Across the top of the flat facade is a single row of mosaic tiles–or it may be some kind of veneer–stuck to the guttering.

The house was put up for sale in 1997. Perhaps the owner was frightened off when the old lady at 17 Blenheim Street was murdered. The murderers, surprised in the act by a neighbour, jumped over the back wall into the yard of the house behind, just a few doors up from No. 22, and escaped into Albemarle Street. After several months on the market and a string of show days, there were still no buyers, and for a time the house stood empty. Finally, it was put up for rent.

The first black tenants moved in. It was around then that a sticker bearing the slogan of the anti-crime campaign–I DON’T DO CRIME–appeared on the glass door: either an appeal to the better nature of prospective burglars or an attempt by the new tenants (or their landlord) to reassure the neighbours.

For a while the new tenants stayed indoors. Then, as they grew more comfortable in the area, they became more visible. Soon there were children pushing toy cars on the path or playing soccer in the street. Tricycles and dolls lay on the lawn. Men lounged about on the steps or worked on cars at the kerbside, and women sat on upturned oildrums, catching the sun on a wintry afternoon.

‘What’s wrong with these people?’ my brother Branko said during one of our walking tours. ‘Why don’t they stay inside like normal people? Why are they always lazing about in the yard? Have they got nothing better to do with their time than sit around in the sun?’

‘But you’re the one who’s always complaining that there’s no life on the streets,’ I said, ‘and how terrible it is that people feel trapped in their own homes. Just last week you were remembering how we used to play cricket under the street lights at night after supper, when we were kids.’

‘What’s with the paint tins?’ he said grumpily. ‘Can’t they get proper garden furniture? You can pick up a plastic chair for twenty bucks at Dion’s.’

A few weeks later, Branko was insisting the place had been turned into a brothel. On his way down to see me one morning, he noticed a woman sitting on the kerb outside, with a towel draped over her shoulders that said ambassador hotel. She was separating the strands of her thick braids so that they would dry in the sun, her fingers moving over her scalp as if she was working the fibres of some plant into matting. He slowed down to get a good look at her, he said, and she gave him a sly smile.

A brothel? It seemed possible. But the very next Sunday, as I was walking to the shops to fetch the paper, a black churchman, like a biblical prophet in his white cotton robes, came out of the house and made his way up the hill to Roberts Avenue ahead of me. He carried a stick carved into a cross, and a Bible with golden edges stuck out of a pocket in his tunic. In the small of his back, stitched to a broad red cummerbund, was a pure blue circle the size of a coaster.

Where would his congregation meet? In a clearing in the veld near the municipal dump in Elandsfontein; in a sealed room under the motorway in Newtown, filled with pitted wooden benches and the incense of exhaust fumes; beneath a tree on Langermann Kop?

As he walked he patted his hair with the palm of his hand, and looked at the shadow of his head on the ground. Involuntarily I smoothed my own hair by combing it through with my fingers, and was reminded that we live differently in our bodies and our houses. But I had resolved not to pursue such difficult and divisive lines of thought, especially over weekends, and so I veered into Tile City in Op de Bergen Street for a chat with the hardware man.

The house at 18 Eleanor Street is another Portuguese modernization, but more restrained. It once had three notable features, all of them amulets against danger, but only one has survived. In the left-hand corner of the severely cropped lawn sat a life-size statue of a German shepherd dog, with painted fur and a grinning jaw. It looked like a large-scale version of the SPCA collection boxes that used to stand on shop counters. On the right-hand facade of the house, the second and third amulets were arranged symmetrically on either side of the central window (a bedroom, to judge by lacy curtains behind Spanish bars), like icons at an altar. On the left, a rectangular panel composed of six blue ceramic tiles, together depicting the Virgin Mary; on the right, a signboard, of exactly the same size and colour, declaring that the house was protected by the N.I.S.S. armed response company.

This house has been sold to a coloured family, who apparently have no taste for Roman Catholic iconography. After tolerating her presence for a few months, they chiselled the Madonna of Eleanor Street off the wall, leaving behind a patch of white plaster as clear as a conscience in the cream-coloured paintwork. Or was it the previous owner who came back to fetch her? The dog is gone too, but the N.I.S.S. sign endures.

The spot where David Webster was shot dead by an apartheid assassin is just across the road.

Not long after Minky and I came to live in Blenheim Street, new people moved into the house at No. 10. And not long after that, they employed a woman to paint a Ndebele design on their garden wall. As I was passing by one morning, I saw her marking out the pattern with a felt-tip pen on the white surface, and over the following days I went up the road regularly to watch her progress. When she had finished the pattern, an immense maze of black lines, six or seven metres long and two metres high, she began to fill it in with paint–mainly blue and green, if memory serves me correctly. She used little tins of Plascon, the standard household enamel, and ordinary brushes of the kind you can buy at the hardware store.

There was a fad for Ndebele painting at the time. A woman called Esther Mahlangu had been commissioned to coat a BMW 525 in Ndebele colours as part of an advertising campaign. Or was it an art project? Either way, it was a striking symbolic moment in the invention of the new South Africa, a supposedly traditional, indigenous culture laying claim to one of the most desirable products our consumer society had to offer, smoothly wrapping this contemporary symbol of status, wealth and sophisticated style in its colours. Perhaps this same woman had wound up here in Kensington? No, I decided, Mahlangu’s saloon had been seen all around the world, she had made a name for herself. She would surely have moved on to commissions larger and grander than garden walls–churches, convention centres, hotel dining rooms, the lobbies of health and racquet clubs.

My friend Liz said the whole Ndebele fad was kitsch. ‘It’s like that braai sauce people slosh over everything to give it an African flavour. Tomatoes and onions and too much chilli. Someone just made it up.’

‘But that’s how culture evolves,’ I said. ‘People make things up. Who’s to say what will be regarded as “authentic” a generation from now? Why shouldn’t we have Ndebele patterns on suburban walls? What if the people living there happen to be Ndebele? Anyway, only someone with a custodial view of African culture would regard as “traditional” an art form that arose so recently. Ndebele wall painting is no more than a few decades old, it’s constantly changing, and it’s full of contemporary references.’ We were standing on the pavement outside No. 10 as we spoke, and so I could refer to the bright new mural in support of my point. ‘This funnel shape here, which looks like a geometric abstraction, is actually a stylized light. One of those cheap industrial light-shades you’d see in a factory or a servant’s room. Once you know that, you’ll realize that the little dab of yellow at the bottom is a lightbulb. Charming, don’t you think? And this shape here, which looks like a bow tie, is derived from a sweet. A boiled sweet in a plastic wrapper.’

Liz was impressed with my analysis (which I’d found in a magazine article about Esther Mahlangu, to tell the truth), but sceptical about the mural. ‘It’s so cheerful,’ she said, ‘it makes me want to spit. Like a kiddie’s colouring book, with nothing outside the lines. That’s why you whites like it so much. Nice and tidy.’

I thought it was bravely optimistic. It suited the early nineties perfectly: Africa was coming to the suburbs in the nicest possible way. I grew to love that wall. My only fear was that some racist would deface it. I could already see the insulting graffiti, dripping bile. But no one ever laid a finger on it.

Long afterwards, it occurred to me that I might have documented the making of the mural. It would have made a wonderful photographic essay. Or even better, a film. That intricate pattern, vibrant and complex as stained glass–it was no child’s drawing, never mind what Liz said–spreading out, segment by segment, over a blank white wall. What a metaphor for the social transformation we were living through!

‘If only you were a film-maker,’ Minky said, ‘or a photographer.’

‘But I’m a writer, for Pete’s sake, I could have spoken to the painter. I should have got her name, at least. I’m walking around with my eyes wide open, taking everything in like a vacuum cleaner, coughing bits of it out on paper. But I never bother to get the facts.’

The father of one of my high-school classmates was a part-time inventor, and his brightest idea was the telephone dixie, a little desk-top cabinet for the tidy and convenient storage of telephone directories. The open-fronted box held three heavy-duty ledger files, hinged at the bottom so that they could be tilted out and opened flat. Using a simple mechanism of springy clasps, you could secure in these files the Yellow Pages and two directories of your choice–let’s say Johannesburg and the West Rand–and they were guaranteed to stay spick and span through a year of regular use. It was a fine and necessary invention. There was an executive model, as I recall, in lightly padded vinyl, but even the plain metallic models were superbly made. I have forgotten the exact finishes, but the colour schemes of the day were culinary: mustard, burgundy, cream.

The school holidays came, and my friend and I were engaged as salesmen. For my friend, who lived in what is now Midrand, then known with more charm as Halfway House, ‘town’ was not Pretoria, as it was for me, but Johannesburg, and it was to that thrillingly unfamiliar city we went to do business. Every morning for a week, I tramped through the endless corridors of the Carlton Centre, in my school flannels and my father’s tie, hawking the telephone dixie.

It was 1972 and the Carlton Centre had just been built. An enormous complex of offices and shops, with a total floor area of 3.5 million square feet, of which 1.9 million square feet were below street level. Colour scheme: orange. You could smell the paint on the walls and the latex adhesive on the wall-to-wall carpets. There was an air of supreme sophistication about the entire complex. One index of this was the colour-coded maps on shiny boards, showing the different blocks and shopping levels, and the numbers of individual shops; and alongside the boards an information booth, where a uniformed official sat ready to offer guidance if you lost your way. Surely such elaborate precautions had never been required before inside a building? They confirmed the vast and labyrinthine dimensions of the place.

Then I had not yet read Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, which Dale Carnegie himself adjudged the most helpful and inspiring book on salesmanship he had ever read, and so my expertise was slight. My friend fared little better. But despite our evident lack of success, we laboured steadily up the floors of the office tower, my friend plying the even numbers and I plying the odd, demonstrating the virtues of the telephone dixie to anyone who would listen, and praying for orders. Our rise to the top took several days. Often I got no further than the receptionists, who sometimes made me wrestle with the spring-loaded clips for their own amusement. Occasionally I made it into the offices of junior managers and senior clerks. Here, with the whole city for a backdrop, every white person capable of sitting up straight behind a desk appeared to be a business magnate. Up we went, floor by floor. The higher we toiled, the more spectacular the views became. On a clear day, it was said, you could see Pretoria. I began to relish the moments when the person whose precious time I was wasting would leave the room to attend to more pressing concerns, so that I could stand before the window and look down at the immensity of the city, assured that even a hawker of telephone dixies could occupy the centre of it all. It was in those reflective moments that my sense of the unnatural beauty of Johannesburg was born and that I resolved to seek my fortune in these streets.

At the end of a busy morning, the sales team had lunch at the Pumpernickel on Level 200. The food was unlike anything we had ever seen. There were frankfurters with notches carved into their convex curves and skinny potato chips with corrugated edges. There were bangers wrapped in bacon and dribbled with melted cheese, all held together with toothpicks. The fruit juices had little umbrellas unfurled in them; the paper sleeves of the drinking straws had been teased into decorative ruffs. While we scoffed the only material rewards of our efforts, the demonstration dixies stood at heel beside our chairs like well-trained dogs.

Every month for the past fifteen years, on the second Thursday of the month to be precise, I have met my brother Branko for coffee at the Carlton Centre (to which he is also sentimentally attached, for reasons of his own). I could chart the life and death of this great complex by the sequence of coffee shops which came to serve as our regular meeting place over the years: from the Koffehuis, where the waitresses were got up as Dutch dairy-maids in clogs and lace caps, to the Brazilian Coffee Bar, where the cups and saucers arrived and departed on a conveyor belt.

When we first began meeting, the parkade in Main Street, opposite the hotel, was always full. You would have to wind up the spiral ramp to the fourth or fifth floor to find a bay. Little arrows and neon signs saying full and up, in red and green respectively, kept you circling higher until a floor would accept you. There were attendants too, the obligatory middlemen between motorists and machinery, waving you on. The shiny concrete gave unexpected squeals of delight beneath the tyres. When you finally came to rest, you had to memorize the colour of the floor and the number of the bay or you would never find your way back. There were four lifts, large enough to park a Volkswagen in. Even here, in the parkade, the slightly unsettling smell of food, which came to circulate in the atmosphere of the entire centre once the paint fumes had worn off, reminded you that pleasurable consumption lay ahead.

Then, in the mid-nineties, the parkade began to shrink. The demand for parking fell, level by level, like a barometer of change in the city centre. The people with cars were clearly going elsewhere. You could find parking on the fourth floor now, and after a while on the third, and then always on the second or first. Finally the illuminated arrows were switched off.

In May 1998–it would have been Thursday the 14th–when I turned into Main Street, there was a chain slung across my usual entrance. The middleman, who had always been there at the boom to catch the ticket the machine spat out and hand it to me through the window, was nowhere to be seen. Instead a sign urged me down an unfamiliar ramp into the basement. A long tunnel, with odd twists and turns in it, peculiar level landings and sudden lurching descents, took me down below the ground. I soon lost my sense of direction. Eventually I found myself in a crowded corner of the basement, where the cars were all huddled like refugees. An armed guard oversaw my arrival. I made my way to the nearest lift, but there was a label pasted across the crack between the doors, as if to prevent them from opening: hotel closed. It reminded me of a crime scene in an American TV series. The guard appeared at my shoulder and directed me to a distant lift, which brought me out in an unpopulated alley of the centre, an area I had last ventured into with a telephone dixie in my hand.

As we sat drinking our espressos at the little counter in the office block, which has the knack of making you feel like you’re in New York, my brother told me that he couldn’t face the city any more. It’s too dangerous, he said, and unpleasant anyway, what with empty shops and echoing corridors and the smell of piss in the doorways. We should move our monthly meetings to Rosebank or Illovo. There are coffee shops in the suburbs where you can still read your paper and eat your biscotti in peace. What about Eastgate?

When I resurfaced into the chilly air a little later, a fierce white light caught my eye. Welders in overalls were sealing off the canopied entrance to the Carlton Hotel behind a palisade fence.

Sophie Calle’s exhibition The Detachment/Die Entfernung is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park. She describes her way of working: ‘I visited places from which symbols of the former East Germany have been effaced. I asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories.’ The photographs show empty niches, overturned pedestals, unscrewed plaques. In the accompanying texts, the citizens of East Berlin recollect the displaced memorials as best they can, accurately or not, with or without fondness; there are also photographs of the old times, when the symbols of power still occupied their places with confidence, and these allow us to stand in judgement on the veracity of the recorded memories.

A bell rings to signal that the gallery is about to close. I stop at the toilet in the basement on the way out. A street child, as filthy as a chimney sweep, comes out of one of the cubicles with a length of toilet paper dangling from his pocket and starts to wash his face at a basin. While I’m wringing my hands under the dryer, a security guard bursts in, grabs the boy by his arm, and hustles him away.

I go out into the deserted gallery. On my left, set into the curved wall that discreetly screens the toilets from the exhibition space, is a concrete ledge, and happening to glance down as I pass it, I see a grubby white sneaker sticking out. I bend down and look under the ledge. There is an oddly shaped recess I would never have noticed. Two small boys are crammed into it. They smell of wood smoke and sweat. They draw in their legs and look at me with big eyes. What should I do? Should I tell the security guard? Or should I let them have a warm bed for the night? Like a true art lover, I go on my way ambivalently, turning the options over in my mind. I pass through the empty halls, past African crafts and nineteenth-century oils, I go down the steps into the parking lot, and the guard locks the door behind me.

Chas is going to live in Cape Town at the end of the year. For some months, ever since Branko abandoned me, I have been accompanying my friend on his goodbye walks, revisiting, recalling and relinquishing the parts of Joburg he expects to miss despite himself. The city, we agree, is no more than a mnemonic. Where do we go? Here and there. What do we talk about? This and that. What do we see?

In July, for instance, as we made our way along Empire Road through the S-bend at Helpmekaar Hoërskool, we discovered, atop a wall on the left, an innovative anti-scaling device known as ‘Hercules Cacti’. Stepping gingerly through tangled ivy, and assuring ourselves first that the device was not electrified, we examined it in detail. ‘Hercules Cacti’ consisted of cylindrical segments, fiercely spiked and barbed all round with outgrowths like pineapple tops, apparently of metal but coated for durability, mounted horizontally on long axles fixed to the top of the wall. Ingenious, we said to one another, spinning a segment and watching it whirr. The thief hasn’t been born who could get over here. More expensive than spikes, undoubtedly, but twice as effective. Probably more expensive than electric fencing too, but then there would be no running costs or maintenance. Looks indestructible. And quite natural, almost like thorn branches, especially in that olive drab. Then we backed away to the pavement, dusted the turn-ups of our trousers, and went on.

Further discoveries awaited us in Pieter Roos Park, where Victoria and Empire meet. In the south-western corner, the remains of a primitive outdoor gymnasium, from the heyday of jogging and Jane Fonda, with apparatus made of wooden posts for jumping over and hoisting oneself up on, all quite unfit for use. In the north-eastern corner, a metal sculpture, vaguely suggestive of a prehistoric bird, with two black men asleep in the shade of its belly. One opened an eye and glared at us balefully. The only other white men in the park appeared to be tramps.

In the middle, a grove of bluegums. The scent of eucalyptus reminded Chas of his boyhood home in Vereeniging, and that he is saying goodbye not just to Joburg but to the Transvaal, which no longer exists, to the Highveld, to the interior.

Then I too was reminded of my childhood, in a new suburb laid out in the veld on the edge of Pretoria. The houses were new and in the American style, or so we thought, with their big glass windows and garages attached to one end; and the roads were long, straight and newly tarred, and fragrant with cow dung. In the mornings the herdboys would drive the cattle along Von Willich Avenue to graze in the veld on the edge of the suburb, and in the evenings they would bring them back again to the whitewashed stalls of the smallholdings, where the bluegums shed long smooth curls of bark on which it was possible to write the life story of a marooned man. Electricity pylons marched to the east and west across the veld, and the Voortrekker Monument squatted on the distant horizon.

On a midwinter morning in 1997, a householder in the suburb of Saxonwold surprised an armed man trying to break into his home and raised the alarm. The burglar fled along Jan Smuts Avenue with the police in pursuit and took refuge in the grounds of the Zoo. When he was cornered, he jumped over a wall into an enclosure that happened to house Max, the Zoo’s 180 kilogram gorilla. Perceiving his partner Lisa to be under threat, Max grabbed hold of the robber and bit him, whereupon the man fired three shots from a .38 special, hitting Max in the shoulder and neck. The police, who had gathered on the viewing platform, returned fire, hitting the suspect in the groin.

Four policemen and two zookeepers then entered the night enclosure in an effort to evacuate the wounded man. Sergeant Percy Alberts managed to handcuff him–he was still full of fight–but as he and his men were withdrawing, the enraged gorilla attacked them. He threw Constable Amos Simelane on the ground and roughed him up a bit. Then he seized Constable Robert Tshabalala and bit him on the upper arm and buttocks. Finally, he dislocated Sergeant ‘Rassie’ Rasenele’s arm. At this point one of the zookeepers managed to drive Max off by turning a fire extinguisher on him, and the men made good their escape.

The injured policemen and the suspect were taken to the Garden City Clinic. The Zoo’s own veterinarians sedated Max and tried to treat him on the spot, but their X-ray equipment proved inadequate for the bulky frame of a Western Lowland gorilla and so he was conveyed under police escort to the Milpark Hospital. ‘There were emotional scenes as the unconscious primate was gently placed on the back of the bakkie,’ one paper reported. Indeed, there was an outpouring of tender concern from all quarters. Pictures showed Max lying on a stretcher under a blanket, with his head thrown back and his teeth bared, while a veterinarian tended to a drip. Another burly vet cradled Max’s head, the fingers of one hand shielding his eyes, the others cupped under his chin. Perhaps it was this man who held Max’s hand during the surgery to locate and remove the bullets. Some of Johannesburg’s finest surgeons assisted in the procedure at no cost. On the admission form, Max’s profession was given as ‘Gorilla’, his employer as the Johannesburg Zoo.

There are three approaches to the Gem Supermarket on the corner of Roberts Avenue and Blenheim Street: steps rise from the pavement to the door in the middle of the facade, and two L-shaped ramps slope up to the same point from left and right. On either side of the steps, each ramp encloses a space like a stall, edged by a low wall and a metal railing behind, and open to the pavement in front.

In the right-hand stall a cobbler has set up shop. He has a plastic milk crate for a workbench and an empty paint tin for a stool. His blades, awls and files are laid out on a strip of cloth. After he packs up in the afternoon and goes home, black crosses and arrows, sprinklings of rubber filings from the past day’s work, which have stencilled the corners of boxes and crates on the cement paving, still mark the space as his.

The focal point of the cobbler’s stall is a collection of old shoes waiting to be repaired, or already repaired and offered for sale. They’re usually displayed in a cardboard box, but sometimes he sets them out in a long row of pairs, one on top of the other. Most of them are worn-out and misshapen, with the uppers caved in and the toes turned up, the unlaced vamps folded over one another like the cuffs of a corpse. When you prise them open, you find the X-ray outlines of toes, heels, the balls of the feet on the insoles. You cannot help thinking that the people who wore these shoes are dead now. Even when they’ve been resoled and restitched, and given a coat of polish, just looking at them is enough to make your feet sore.

All day, the cobbler bows over his work. Sometimes he jokes quietly with the kids waiting for the bus or chats over his shoulder with the Gem’s security guard, who has a chair in the shade on the ramp behind him, but his hands keep busy, kneading the unyielding leather, punching through it with an awl, pushing a long needle into the holes.

A young white man with a bristly face and yellow hair has occupied the other stall. He is strong and energetic, but even in the summer he appears to be cold. He wears thick, checked shirts and scarves, and his skin is pink and drawn. He paces up and down in the narrow stall, four paces to the right, and a clockwise turn, four paces to the left, and an anticlockwise turn, up and down for hours on end, looking at his feet. Sometimes he swings his arms, beating them against his sides as if he’s freezing, trying to keep the circulation going. His pacing is hypnotic, up and down in front of the railing, like a caged animal. The fact that the cage has no bars on one side, that he could simply walk out of it if he chose, makes his ceaseless pacing more compelling. People stop to stare at him, especially children. When they realize that he is oblivious they sometimes go close and examine him, as if there really were bars between them to authorize an intimate scrutiny.

I stare at him myself, more discreetly. He lives in the boarding house on the other side of the intersection, according to Mannie the pawnbroker. That’s where you’ll find him when he’s not here outside the Gem. I want to see him stop, pick up the rucksack that’s lying in one corner and go across the street. I want to see him step out of the cage. But I always grow tired of watching before he is tired of pacing.

Four strides, a clockwise turn, four strides, an anticlockwise turn. It would be better if both were clockwise: then one might console oneself that he is accumulating distance. As it is, these turns in opposite directions cancel out progress, create the impression that he is constantly retracing his steps, always forgetting why he is moving and going back to the starting point. He is going nowhere, fast. He has a bitter set to his mouth, a muscle throbbing in his jaw.

Although I have seen the cobbler and the caged man in their places many times, it is months before the two scenes fold together like the wings of an icon: the black man quietly working, with the pile of old shoes beside him, and the white man restlessly pacing. Both with their heads bowed, both intent on what they are doing. A connection crackles between them that will not easily be broken. They are figures in a parable. The caged man is wearing out shoes as fast as the cobbler can mend them. But where does it start? Which panel of the diptych should we favour? Is the caged man making the cobbler work? Or is the cobbler making the caged man walk?

I parked my car in Prospect Road and headed into Hillbrow. It was winter, night was falling early and it felt like the millennium fading to black behind the high-rises. I’d left my wallet at home, I had nothing but a notebook and a ballpoint in the breast pocket of my shirt and a twenty-rand note in my sock. On the corner of O’Reilly and Fife, where Aubrey Tearle, the hero of my novel in progress, was supposed to have come across an abandoned supermarket trolley and loaded it with his shopping bags full of papers, I made some notes. I was walking Aubrey’s route to check the details, doing some retrospective research. I passed the ghosts of the cafés, the Pigalle and the Zürich, the Café Wien and the Café de Paris, and came to the OK Bazaars in Twist Street, where Aubrey had left his trolley in the hands of a security guard before ascending into the quiet interior of the Café Europa. I couldn’t remember when last I’d sat down in Hillbrow for a coffee. I made some more notes, retraced my steps to Prospect Road and drove home.

Dave has the historian’s gift of seeing time whole. On his clock, the millennia are no more than minutes, the individual lifespan is a sharp intake of breath. It is a perspective that knocks the self-importance out of people and restores us to our proper place in the scheme. On the other hand, Dave has the storyteller’s gift too, which can make the smallest cup of time overflow.

Not so long ago, he says, in a tone which makes a delicious blend of earnestness and irony, we were all hunter-gatherers. Ten thousand years is nothing on the cosmic calendar. This explains why certain kinds of landscape appeal to us so strongly. A meadow sweeping down to a river, a view from the patio over a rolling lawn, a spruit at the bottom of the yard, a koppie on which to loll, with the veld streaming away to the horizon–vistas like these call to our hunter-gatherer hearts.

We are sitting on my stoep. A thunderstorm has just fumed away over the skyline, leaving behind a long smear of cloud. Now the sun dips below this cloud and animates every surface with golden light. The keels of the clouds are ablaze. The falls of rust-red stone on Langermann Kop are as vivid as coals, they seem to glow from within like paper bags holding lit candles, the veld grasses turn to coral.

In Joburg now, Dave goes on, the hunter-gatherer is in the ascendancy. In fact, African cities everywhere are filled with roamers, intent on survival, plucking what they can at the roadside. When people steal the wheels off our cars at night, or scale our walls and make off with the garden furniture, or uproot plants on the embankments beside the freeway, and we raise a hue and cry about law and order and respect for property rights, it’s like the Khoikhoi accusing the San of stealing their cattle.

Stop Crime

For peace of mind I secure your car while you shop

For a donation I guard your car

If harassed by guard, phone number on reverse side

S.O.B. No:……

Guard Name:……

This guard is scanned for criminal and security purposes

We also do functions and house parties

During my first conversation with Eddie, when I was new in the neighbourhood, I admired his gladioli, which were in bloom. He said I should come back in the last week of May and he would lift some bulbs for me. He knew my garden well. He had been a frequent visitor in my house, way back, when Mrs Williams (I think he said) lived there. He remembered when her daughter got married, there was a reception in the garden, quite unusual in those days. I had good soil for glads.

Once they reach a certain age, it is difficult to see the child in most people. Eddie is one of the exceptions. Although he was nearly eighty when we met, the boy in him was still there, ghosting through from a black-and-white past. He had moved into Blenheim Street long before I was born. His own children, he told me, pointing to the house, had been born under this roof. These same children, now scattered across the Reef, were trying to persuade him to move. They said he shouldn’t be living on his own, what with the area going to the dogs, and he needed taking care of. But he was quite capable of looking after himself. Still, he might take them up on the offer, one of these days, for their sake, if he could get the right price for the place. It might be nice for his daughters, too. He could spend a couple of months with each of them in turn and do some handiwork to earn his keep. He was always working on his house, there was always something to patch or paint. He thought nothing of hanging off the end of a ladder to repaint a gutter.

One year, he decided to put all the leftover pots of paint in his garage to good use by painting a mural on his garden wall. It is the ugliest mural in the whole city: a basket of flowers; a dog with mad eyes and spiky whiskers; a dim-witted sun, with a wry mouth and a set of stiff rays standing out like a bad haircut; a bird of paradise perched on one of the sunbeams; a red-brick wishing-well.

The tenants of the semi-detached at 21/21a Kitchener Avenue have started a shop in one of the rooms of their house. A handpainted sign rigged on top of a tilting carport says: COCA-COLA, BREAD, MILK. It is unclear where the shop is, exactly, but through an oval window, feint-ruled by venetian blinds, one can make out what seems to be a hairdressing salon. Perhaps it was for the convenience of their customers that the proprietors of these businesses spray-painted the numbers of their house on the wall of the property. The numbers appear to either side of the gate, crooked black digits scrawled across three or four courses of yellow brick, 21 to the left, 21a to the right. A short path leads to the house where the number 21a appears again, ambiguously, spoiling the symmetry, on the central pillar of the stoep.

These numbers incensed Branko. The first time he saw them he started fuming, and he cannot pass the house without commenting. You’d think they’d been put there to offend him.

‘But what is it?’ I ask him. ‘Why does it bother you so much? Why can’t you leave it alone?’

‘On a brick wall!’ he says. ‘How could they?’

(They. Branko, being a bit of a racist, means: blacks. The blacks.)

‘It’s just a garden wall, for God’s sake,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing special about it.’

‘You don’t take an aerosol and spray numbers on a brick wall. Even a child knows that. That’s it: they’re like badly behaved children drawing on the bedroom walls with their wax crayons. They’ve defaced their own property, they’ve vandalized themselves. What kind of people are they? Go on, you explain it to me.’

With just six weeks left on the millennial clock, a Johannesburg computer specialist claimed that he had been savagely bitten in an attempted car hijacking. The 40-year-old man, who did not wish to be named in the newspaper report on the crime, was stopped at a traffic light in the early hours of the morning, with his car window slightly open. Two thieves reached into the vehicle and released the central locking mechanism. Then they both jumped into the car and began biting him. ‘The one in front attacked his arm and bit it all the way up while the other started biting his neck and back, both of them drawing blood as they bit him.’ The driver managed to get out of the car, but his assailants pursued him and continued to bite him. ‘One was saying: “You taste good, white boy. I want to bite you more.”’ Eventually he managed to get back into his car and drive off. The man, who said that being bitten was worse than being attacked with a weapon, underwent medical tests and was given antibiotics and a tetanus injection. ‘The doctor said a human bite is very poisonous.’

The Star has a policy of not identifying individuals by race in their reporting. Here it makes no difference. Even if the phrase ‘white boy’ had been omitted, who would doubt that the computer specialist was white and the cannibals were black?

As Martin draws up to his garage one afternoon after work, he sees two men standing at his garden door, where there is an alcove in the wall covered by a canopy of green corrugated plastic, an ‘improvement’ made by the previous owner. His first thought is that they’re up to no good, but when they do not take flight at the approach of his car, he thinks again. They must be waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. Perhaps they’re looking for Cynthia? Then he suddenly understands the body language: they’re taking a piss.

The men glance his way. One of them is wearing a denim jacket, the other has a sky-blue cap with something written on it. The one in the cap makes a remark, the other nods. They go on pissing against the door.

An unfamiliar feeling takes hold of Martin. It drains through his body, he says, like cold water. It is rage. His hand drops onto the Gorilla, which he keeps on the floor beside his seat, and closes round it like a club. But he does not get out of the car, because there is another feeling too, which even this caustic anger cannot scour out of him. Fear.

The man in the jacket zips up his pants and lolls against the wall, while the other one finishes. Martin glowers at them and shakes his head. He wants them to feel his disgust. But he’s afraid that even this gesture might provoke a confrontation. When the one in the jacket glances at him, with a smirk, he has to look away. They stroll off.

Vicky is smoking a cigarette in the lounge. She jumps as he slams the front door. Before he’s even in the room, he’s shouting: ‘I’ve had it with this place. These fucking people. They’re like animals.’

‘What is it?’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Lifting their legs everywhere like dogs. Honestly, I’m sick to death of it. If one more kaffir pushes me, I’ll ride over him.’ He sees the amazement on his wife’s face and tries to check himself, but he cannot. He rages out of the room. She trails after him into the bedroom, trying to calm him, trying to find out what it’s all about. ‘Look for yourself!’ he yells at her. ‘Go take a look at your stinking doorstep and then tell me to calm down!’

His incomprehensible mood is turning on her. She goes back to the lounge. He hears her closing the kitchen door.

He changes out of his suit, hurling jacket and tie and shirt into different corners of the room. These soft, yielding things just add to his frustration. Only when a shoe hits the door of the cupboard and leaves a mark does his rage begin to abate. Instead of flowing out of him in a torrent, words freeze on his lips and fall around him–dogs, kaffirs, cunts–and he comes to his senses. He wonders suddenly whether Cynthia is busy with the supper. He flings himself down on the bed like a child, starts up again immediately, and goes to sit at Vicky’s dressing table. He would like to cry, as an expression of remorse, but he is filled with nothing but shame. He looks at his white face in the mirror. His lips are in tatters. His mouth tastes of soap.

‘You’ve got every right to be angry,’ Vicky says later when they’re trying to talk it through. ‘It was obviously provocative.’

‘Provocative? It was a calculated insult. There’s a park three blocks away where you can piss against a fucking bush if you want to. But they choose to piss on my doorstep.’

He’s losing his temper again. She says, ‘The problem isn’t that you’re angry, it’s the terms you’re using to express it. You should have heard yourself.’

In fact, he’s astonished at how easily it came to him, the repetitive, fixated language that has always sustained racism. Colonists everywhere have portrayed indigenous people as brutes unable to control their urges. But Martin is not a ‘settler’. He’s a middle-class professional, a fourth-generation South African, a political liberal, a democrat. He’s not a racist–at least, he’s no more of a racist than anyone else, as he always says. He gets irritable, for good reason. He hates the mess, the clutter, the disregard for other people and their property. But he can distinguish between the unthinking behaviour of an individual and the supposed disposition of a race. Now this. kaffir? He can hardly believe this archaic language is lodged in him.

Highlands is one of those tiny suburbs most people don’t even recognize, but I know someone who lived there as a child forty years ago, in a block of flats on the very edge of the ridge.

On weekends, he once told me, there would be skokiaan parties on the slopes below, where women sold their home-brew among the bluegums, and a blend of dagga smoke and mbaqanga melodies would drift up on the breeze. Inevitably someone would call the police. The vans would arrive in Hunter Street with squealing tyres and the cops would go chasing after people with their batons, while others lay in wait for the fugitives on Stewart’s Drive. White policemen and black partygoers, crashing around in the veld, bawling and swearing. The balconies of the flats offered a grandstand view, and whole families would gather to watch, as if they were at the pantomime.

Once one of the neighbours, vaulting over a couch in his haste to catch every minute of the entertainment, cracked his skull on the keystone of an archway and had to be taken away in an ambulance.

Herman Charles Bosman shot dead his stepbrother in the family home in Bellevue on a Saturday night in 1926. The house at 19 Isipingo Street was pointed out to me one day by my friend Louise, as we drove past on the way to my flat in Webb Street (the extension of Isipingo on the Yeoville side of Bezuidenhout Avenue). After that, I hardly ever passed by there without being reminded of murder.

As an admirer of Bosman’s work, I thought that people should be made aware of this historic site. I imagined a marker; nothing brassy, mind you, just a simple tablet, like those paving stones that carry the impress of the manufacturer. The spot should be marked on the tourist maps as a place of interest, I thought. Death by shooting was less common in those days, in my suburb at least, and seemed more benign. Bosman himself had given it a romantic sheen. Today I would want a map that is more complete, more representative, recording every violent death on the Witwatersrand, above ground and below, by axe and blade and bullet. What a title deed to despair it would be, this map of the city of the dead, cross-stitched in black, crumpling under the weight of sorrow as you struggle to unfold it on the dining-room table.

Louise finds this morbid. Why not a map of the living? she asks. Why not a map showing every room, in every house, in every street of this bursting city, where a life began?

Homemade (Roll 1)

a brazier. a 25-litre drum–BEETLE RESIN–with triangular holes punched through it (the tines of a garden fork?). an aureole of ash and cinders on the pavement, when the brazier has been carried away. a black sun of burnt grass on the yellow verge. a cob with blackened kernels caught in its teeth. stainless-steel shelving from gutted fridges, planks from construction sites encrusted with dried cement, splintered chipboard, printed metal sheets from bus shelters–‘It’s a pleasure dealing with the professionals’–estate agents’ placards, lengths of angle-iron chained to a no-parking sign. an apple box full of the green spearheads of mielie leaves and the golden shag of their plucked beards. a wire fence brown with rust, wavy as fishnet. a grey-paper shopping bag with the stars and stripes on it. rows of plastic plates arranged on paving stones like counters in a board game. the broken propellor of a banana skin. a canvas awning with its aluminium legs moored to rocks. exhaust pipes and baffles dangling like the day’s catch on a line strung between two bluegums. a flattened cardboard carton–FIVE ROSES QUALITY TEA. a window pane glazed with twentieth-century news. the driver’s seat of a car standing on its metal runners like a sleigh. a silver bucket with a rag wrung hard as a root in its bottom. a white plastic milk crate like an architect’s model in a drift of red sand. a green plastic garden chair, with one leg missing, propped on a paint tin–WALL & ALL. a greasy mattress with a trumpet flower fallen upon it like an omen–‘It’s starting to look like a township around here.’ cardboard fruit trays stacked into spirals like gigantic snail shells. two gigantic snail shells in the fists of a black woman. a black woman. a brazier

My people are islanders. I am happy enough on the edge of the city, combing its long shores while the weather drives currents through the veld. My English blood makes me go clockwise, the rest urges me the other way around.

As we sat in the kitchen of Jeff’s house in Rockey Street, drinking beer and eating prawn rolls from his uncle’s restaurant in Chinatown, he shared with Branko and me the scheme for his next artistic project: a wall of remembrance.

The city is passing away, said Jeff, even as we speak, and everyone in it, including ourselves. We must build ourselves a memorial while there is still time. Every person in the Greater Johannesburg area, identified by the voters’ roll, must be required to donate an object to the artist for use in the work. This object, which shall be no larger than a standard brick, will be enclosed in due course in a transparent resin block of those very dimensions. These object-enclosing bricks will be used in turn to construct a wall. The Great Wall of Jeff.

There and then, with a feverish sense of our own impending demise, we began to work out the costs. Or rather, because Branko insisted that we be realistic, the extent of the funds we would have to raise. ‘Europe is awash with cash for installations and stuff like that,’ said Jeff. ‘Asia unfortunately not. An input from the Mainland would be good–but Taiwan is out of the question.’

‘Let’s say you manage to raise the money for a mountain of resin and a sea of glue,’ said Branko. ‘The objects will still be a major headache. How on earth will you get people in this greedy town to give things away?’

‘But we’re not looking for diamond rings and Krugerrands,’ said Jeff, ‘although I’ll bet we get a couple of them. We’re looking for any little thing the donor can be induced to part with. It could be nothing more than a button or a piece of string. Everyone has something they could live without.’

In the small hours, when we had broken out the whisky, we did the quantity surveying, totting up the number of bricks in a ten-metre length of wall, two metres high, two courses thick. Jeff fetched the calculator his brother had sent him from Hong Kong for his birthday. Later we moved on to the likely numbers of everyday objects–keys, coins, lapel badges, pencil sharpeners. Even later we worked through the conventional body parts–appendixes, gallstones, wisdom teeth–and the run-of-the-mill fetishes.

I had started out thinking this was one of those artistic projects that would be easier to realize on paper than in the world. It had been on the tip of my tongue to offer to write it down, to work the idea up into a scrap of fiction, relieving Jeff of the responsibility of having to pretend that practical steps were necessary. But I came away convinced that the Great Wall of Jeff belonged in the city. I even had my eye on a patch of parkland in Bertrams for the construction site.

The next morning Branko phoned to say that he had come to his senses and wanted nothing more to do with this mad scheme. Frankly, I was relieved. Once my sensible sibling, with his litany of costs and constraints, was out of the picture, we would be free to build as we pleased. And, indeed, the scheme immediately took an interesting new direction.

‘Calling it an art work will create the wrong impression,’ I said to Jeff. ‘People are so ill-disposed towards art. Let’s make it a public works project.’

‘What difference will that make?’

‘We’ll employ brick-makers, we’ll create jobs, the whole thing will be voluntary and transparent. Instead of dictating to people, we’ll ask them nicely to donate the materials, it will improve the quality of the objects. Anyone can be coerced into parting with a safety pin. But what’s the point? Let’s say the whole initiative is aimed at those people who wish to belong to it, who have an active desire to be commemorated.’

It was this line of thinking that introduced the question of values.

Jeff’s idea: ‘Why not have them donate an object that really means something to them. And let them put a price on it, an estimate of its worth, which we can etch upon the brick along with their names. This is the Golden City, after all, the capital of buying and selling. And what is a city if not a showcase of subjective attachments?’

My idea: ‘Why a wall? Half the city has already vanished behind walls. Even a semi-transparent one can only make things worse. Why not something useful?’

At which point there arose before my mind’s eye a building that owed something to the Crystal Palace, and something else to the Transvaal Museum in Paul Kruger Street, Pretoria, and something more to the OK Bazaars in the Eastgate Mall. It was the Hyperama of Sentimental Value. I was walking along its shiny corridors, surrounded on all sides by a peculiarly impenetrable transparency, where objects hung suspended, attached by nothing but space to the names of the people who once loved them.

Occasionally, when Louise was teaching at the Twilight Children’s Shelter in Esselen Street and I was working as an editor at Ravan Press in O’Reilly Road, we would meet for lunch at the Florian in Hillbrow. If the weather was good, we sat outside on the first-floor balcony. Then she would slip her arms out of her paint-stained overalls and tie the sleeves in a big bow across her chest, so that she could feel the sun on her bare shoulders. Despite the chocolate-dipped letters of its Venetian name, the Florian offered English boarding-house fare: chops and chips, liver and onions with mashed potatoes, mutton stews and long-grained rice. We drank beer, although it was sure to make us sleepy, watched the traffic in the street below, and stayed away from work longer than the lunch hour we were entitled to.

The discovery of something unexpected about the world always filled her with an infectious wonder. Once, she tugged me over to the balcony railings at the Florian to point out the iron covers on the water mains set into the pavements. Did I know the spaces below these covers, where the meters are housed? Well, the poor people of Joburg, the street people–we did not call them ‘the homeless’ in those days–the tramps, car parkers and urchins, used them as cupboards! They stored their winter wardrobes there and the rags of bedding they used at night, they preserved their scraps of food, their perishables, in the cool shade, they banked the empty bottles they collected for the deposits. It tickled her–she laughed out loud, just as if the idea had poked her in the ribs–that such utilitarian spaces should have been appropriated and domesticated, transformed into repositories of privacy for those compelled to live their lives in public. Any iron cover you passed in the street might conceal someone’s personal effects. There was a maze of mysterious spaces underfoot, known only to those who could see it. And this special knowledge turned them into the privileged ones, made them party to something in which we, who lived in houses with wardrobes and chests of drawers, and ate three square meals a day, could not participate. Blind and numb, we passed over these secret places, did not even sense them beneath the soles of our shoes. How much more might we be missing?

The food came. While we ate, I began to argue with her about the ‘cupboards’ and what they represented, as if it were my place to set her straight about the world.

‘It’s pathetic,’ I said, ‘that people are so poor they have to store their belongings in holes in the ground.’

‘No it’s not. It’s pathetic when people don’t care about themselves, when they give up. These people are resourceful, they’re making a life out of nothing.’

‘It’s like a dog burying a bone,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ll never understand.’

When we’d finished our lunch and were walking down Twist Street, I wanted to lift up one of the covers to check the contents of the cavity beneath, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t right to go prying into people’s things.

‘What about the meter-readers?’ I asked. ‘Surely they’re always poking their noses in?’

‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘They’re professionals. Like doctors.’

‘They probably swipe the good stuff,’ I insisted.

‘Nonsense. They have an understanding.’

Then we parted, laughing. She went back to the children and I went back to the books. And this parting, called to mind, has a black edge of mourning, because she was walking in the shadow of death and I am still here to feel the sun on my face.

Ten years later, the domestic duty of a tap washer that needs replacing takes me outside into Argyle Street to switch off the mains. There is a storm raging in from the south, the oaks in Blenheim Street are already bowing before its lash, dropping tears as hard as acorns. I stick a screwdriver under the rim of the iron cover and lever it up. In the space beneath I find: a brown ribbed jersey, army issue; a red flannel shirt; a small checked blanket; two empty bottles–Fanta Grape and Lion Lager; a copy of Penthouse; a blue enamel plate; a clear plastic bag containing some scraps of food (bread rolls, tomatoes, oranges). Everything is neatly arranged. On one side, the empties have been laid down head to toe, the plate balanced across them to hold the food; on the other, the blanket has been folded, the shirt and jersey side by side on top of it, the magazine rolled up between. In the middle, behind a lens of misted glass, white numbers on black drums are revolving, measuring out a flood in standard units.

I kneel on the pavement like a man gazing down into a well, with this small, impoverished, inexplicably orderly world before me and the chaotic plenitude of the Highveld sky above.

Walking along Viljoen Street in Lorentzville one day, I saw a black man in overalls sitting on the kerb, taking off a pair of broken boots and putting on a brand-new pair of running shoes, which he had just finished lacing. I was reminded of Douglas Spaulding, the American kid in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, who exchanged his winter shoes for a pair of Litefoot sneakers at Mr Sanderson’s shoe store. Douglas cleverly persuaded the proprietor to try on a pair of Litefoots himself, to feel how quick and lively they rendered the wearer. Not only was the old man moved to give the boy the sneakers at a discount, he offered him a job selling shoes in his emporium. While I was recalling this, the black man finished tying his laces and walked quickly away with a spring in his step, leaving the old boots side by side in the gutter. The whole episode seemed like a parable about the dignity of labour, the moving congruence of hard work rewarded by simple but intense pleasures. I went on my way with a lump in my throat.

A few blocks further there was a commotion on the pavement outside Seedat’s Outfitters in Kitchener Avenue. A passerby had flung a brick through the plate-glass window and snatched some goods from the display. The brick was still lying there among the dusty satin drapes, chrome-plated pedestals and handwritten price-tags. It was a wonderful brick, a model brick, with three round holes through it the size of one-rand coins, filled with chips of broken glass.

Out of the blue, the tenants of 32 Albemarle Street were evicted. Their furniture piled on the pavement made it look like a forced removal. In passing, for the record, I counted ten double beds, and not much else.

Branko’s explanation of why people looking for the Marymount always got lost on my corner revealed something crucial about movement through the city. The way and the walker (and the driver, too, if he has time for such things) are in conversation. The ‘long poem of walking’ is a dialogue. Ask a question of any intersection–say you are looking for company, the centre of things, water, the road less travelled–and it will answer, not always straightforwardly, allowing a quirk of the topography, the lie of the land, a glimpse of a prospect to nudge you one way or the other. This conversation is one of the things that makes city walking interesting, and one of the masters of the art was Dickens.

Long before he invented London, Dickens knew that cities exist primarily so that we can walk around in them. The Sketches by Boz, his earliest published writings, collected for the first time in 1836, no less than the essays published thirty years later as The Uncommercial Traveller, arose largely from such wanderings. In each of the books there is a piece devoted to walking in the city at night. ‘The Streets–Night’ starts with the declaration that the streets of London, ‘to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter’s night’, and the descriptions that follow are confined mainly to the savoury side of midnight, to muffin men and kidney-pie merchants and playgoers. In the later piece, ‘Night Walks’, the insomniac author, in the figure of ‘Houselessness’, walks and walks and walks, from midnight to daybreak, and presents a fuller and more sombre picture of the city.

Yet even as he tells us how quiet and empty the streets are when the last drunkards turned out by the publicans have staggered away, and the late pie men and hot-potato men have gone off trailing sparks, and even as he yearns for a sign of company, there seems to be life and light around every corner: the toll-keeper at his fire on Waterloo Bridge, the ‘fire and light’ of the Newgate turnkeys, a watchman with a lantern. In his most threatening encounters with other creatures–a furtive figure withdrawing into a shadowed doorway, a ragged beggar–they are as suspicious and frightened as he. In a coffee room at Covent Garden, where there is toast and coffee to be had at an early hour, he comes across the most alarming figure of all, a man who produces a meat pudding from his hat, stabs it with his knife, tears it apart with his fingers and gobbles it down. It is enough to make one envious, that the darkest villains of the piece should be possessed of such extravagant habits and showy appetites.

When daylight comes and the streets begin to fill with workmen and hawkers, Dickens admits what we have begun to suspect–that he and the streets have not just been conversing, but arguing, that it has taken him some effort, and given him some pleasure, to pursue his solitary way: ‘And it is not, as I used to think, going home at such times, the least wonderful thing in London, that in the real desert region of the night, the houseless wanderer is alone there.’

Dickens was blessed to live in a city that offered the walker ‘miles upon miles of streets’ in which to be lonely and ‘warm company’ at every turn once his loneliness had been satisfied. Moreover, to live in a city that collaborated enthusiastically in its own invention. I live in a city that resists the imagination. Or have I misunderstood? Is the problem that I live in a fiction that unravels even as I grasp it?

A stranger, arriving one evening in the part of Joburg I call home, would think that it had been struck by some calamity, that every last person had fled. There is no sign of life. Behind the walls, the houses are ticking like bombs. The curtains are drawn tight, the security lights are glaring, the gates are bolted. Even the cars have taken cover. Our stranger, passing fearfully through the streets, whether in search of someone with open hands of whom he might ask directions or merely of someone to avoid in the pursuit of solitude, finds no one at all.

The range of steering locks available in South Africa is impressive–the Wild Dog, the MoToQuip anti-theft lock, the Twistlok, the SL2 AutoLok, the Eagle Claw by Yale, the Challenger…All these locks work on the same principle: they are attached to the steering wheel and immobilize the vehicle by preventing the wheel from being turned.

The locks also have the same basic design. There is a hardened steel shaft and an extendable bar. The two parts are connected by a locking ratchet mechanism and each part is furnished with a U-shaped hook or ‘claw’. To engage the lock, you place the shaft diametrically across the steering wheel, with the bar retracted and the shaft claw around the rim. Then you extend the bar until the second claw fits around the opposite side of the rim. The ratchet engages automatically and locks the bar in place. If an attempt is made to turn the steering wheel now, the protruding end of the bar strikes the passenger seat, windscreen or door. To disengage the device, you insert the key in the lock and retract the bar, freeing the claws on both sides.

In some devices, the U-shaped hook on the shaft is replaced by a corkscrew hook, which is twisted around the rim of the steering wheel before the bar is engaged. The Twistlok, for instance, has such a hook, which is called the ‘pigtail end’.

The selling points of the various locks are similar. They are made of tough, hardened steel which cannot be drilled, sawn or bent, and they are coated with vinyl to protect the interior fittings. They are easy to install, thanks to the automatic locking system, and highly visible to thieves; to heighten their visibility, and therefore their deterrent value, they are often brightly coloured. They have pick-resistant locks and high-security keys: the MoToQuip has ‘cross point’ keys; the Challenger has a ‘superior circular key system’; and Yale offers a ‘pin tumbler locking system’ with ten thousand different key combinations and exerts strict control over the issuing of duplicates, by approved service centres only.

Some of these products draw explicitly on the symbolism of the predatory animal. The Eagle Claw, for instance, suggests a bird of prey, a raptor with the steering wheel in its clutches. The logo of the Wild Dog depicts a snarling Alsatian, more rabid and vicious than the conventional guard dog. The association with wild animals known for their speed, strength or ferocity is also found in other areas of the security industry: tigers, eagles and owls appear on the shields of armed response companies, and rhinoceroses and elephants in the logos of companies that supply electrified fencing and razor wire.

The day after I acquired my new car, a bottle-green Mazda Midge, my dad arrived on my doorstep. He was carrying a long package wrapped in mistletoe paper, although Christmas was a long way off. I knew at once what was in this package, but I pretended that I did not.

My dad works in the motor trade and I have always respected his opinions about cars. He gave the Mazda a thorough check-up, doing all the things men do to determine the quality of a second-hand vehicle–kicking the tyres, bouncing up and down on the fenders to test the shock absorbers, looking in the cubbyhole, jiggling the steering wheel, gazing under the hood. He announced that I had made a sensible purchase. Then he gave me the present. It was a Gorilla.

He showed me how it worked, engaging and disengaging the device with practised ease. When it was my turn, the lock suddenly seemed like a test of perceptual intelligence, an educational toy of some kind. My fingers felt thick and clumsy, my hand-eye coordination had deserted me. The ‘pigtail’ kept slipping off the rim, like one of those magician’s hoops that has a secret join in it.

Finally I managed to engage the Gorilla.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I have a couple of tips for you. Before you do anything else, you want to engage the standard steering lock that comes with the car. Just turn the wheel anticlockwise until it clicks in.

‘Never install the device so that it’s touching one of the windows. I know a guy who did that, and the bar expanded in the sun and cracked his windscreen.

‘Then you must find a place to store the lock when it’s not in use. I suggest you put it down here next to the seat. It’s out of the way and there’s no danger of it getting caught under the pedals.

‘Finally, you need to put a drop of oil in here from time to time. Just a drop, very occasionally. You don’t want to get it on the upholstery.

‘Right. Let’s see you do it again.’

The Gorilla is the best of the breed. It is made in one solid piece. There is no ratchet and no extension; instead the lock, like a jointed metal jaw, slides up and down on a single bar. This bar is made of naked stainless steel, harsh on the eye and cold to the touch–until it is exposed to the sun, whereupon it gets hot enough to blister the skin. The ‘pigtail’ is bright red. The shiny metal bar is not coated with protective plastic and so the device is leaner than the average lock, but if anything it looks stronger. It has nothing to hide. One is never tempted to wonder what material is concealed beneath the plastic. This is ‘super hard steel’, as the packaging declares, designed to put an end to the ‘monkey business of car theft’.

The brutal style of the device is echoed in one of the manufacturer’s slogans: ‘There’s no substitute for brute force.’ The pun on ‘brute force’ furthers a play of meanings already suggested by the trade name ‘Gorilla’. Brute force is unthinking material force: there is no substitute for unbending steel. But it is also unfeeling animal force: there is no substitute for a powerful, dull-witted beast like a ‘Gorilla’.

In English, mechanical devices are very commonly given the names of animals. In mechanics and mining, for instance, there are countless devices designated as ‘dogs’. A ‘dog’ may be any form of spike, rod or bar with a ring, hook or claw for gripping, clutching or holding something. ‘Dogs’ form part of machines used in mines, sawmills and engineering works. ‘Firedogs’ are used to support wood in a fireplace, ‘raft dogs’ to hold together the logs forming a raft. Various machines and implements are also named ‘monkeys’, either arbitrarily or because of a supposed resemblance between the object and the animal. A ‘monkey’ is a crucible used in the manufacture of glass, for instance, or a weight used in the manufacture of iron. In the nautical environment, ‘monkey’ usually indicates that something has a peculiar use or location; it may also indicate that something is easy or simple. A ‘monkey link’, for instance, is an easily inserted repair link for a chain. This may be part of the derivation of ‘monkey wrench’, a tool which is a close cousin of the Gorilla.

The ambiguous identity of a single device as dull object and dumb animal is captured in the logo of the Gorilla, which shows a stylized steering wheel gripped by two huge, humanoid paws, with the shaggy suggestion of an animal body in the background. Attaching this particular lock to the steering wheel is like leaving a Gorilla sitting in the driver’s seat. Elsewhere on the packaging we read: ‘Find your car where you left it–get a “Gorilla” to protect it.’ This slogan hints at a more covert layer of meaning. Colloquially a ‘gorilla’ is a powerfully built, brutish, aggressive man. So the device may be seen as a sort of simian watchman.

One former owner of our house was a DIY man and fond of wood. The house is full of his handiwork. He must have been very tall, Minky says. Her feet don’t touch the floor when she sits on the window seat, and the rails of the built-in cupboards are so high she can hardly reach. Even his little touches were large ones–the door handles were made for a heavyweight’s fist, the window sills would hold a set of encyclopedias.

On the inside of the wall beside the front gate he installed a letter-box for a person with large appetites, someone capable of sustaining extensive correspondences and making extravagant purchases by mail order. On the outside was a brass slot, with a peak like a postman’s cap for keeping out the rain, covering an aperture in the wall. That slot was generous enough to admit a rolled newspaper or a thickly stuffed A4 envelope.

A small letterbox is more than an inconvenience, it is the mark of a mean nature. But if our letterbox had been smaller, if there had been less brass in it, it may have been less attractive to a thief. One night some scavenger after scrap stuck a crowbar under an edge of the slot and broke it out of the plaster. Now the box is filling up with dust and dead leaves. The hardware man at Tile City offered us a replacement in plastic, not as durable as brass but unlikely to be stolen. People were coming in all day, he said, wanting plastic numbers for their gates.

Afterwards Minky and I took a walk through the neighbourhood, from one shadowy number of unvarnished wood to another of unpainted plaster, following the trail the thieves blazed up and down the blocks, breaking brass numbers off doors and walls.

In the front door of our house is a hinged flap marked LETTERS, left over from a time when the postman, unhindered by locks and barbs and security grilles, could open the garden gate, come up the path, climb the steps, cross the stoep, and drop the letters through a slot onto the hallway floor.

Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the winter of 1886. Until then the veld had offered no more than grazing for a handful of cattle farmers, but soon it was dotted with wagons, tents and reed huts, as gold-seekers poured into the area. Within three or four years a town of brick houses, offices, hotels and government buildings sprang up, and within a generation the city was home to half a million people.

Commissioner Street, the backbone of Johannesburg, follows the old wagon track between two of the first mining camps, from Jeppestown in the east to Ferreirasdorp in the west. So the city’s spine was fused to the gold-bearing reef that called it into life. Today, going down Commissioner into the high-rise heart of the city, I am reminded that here we are all still prospectors, with a digger’s claim on the earth beneath our feet. Where Commissioner passes the Fairview Fire Station, cracks have appeared in the tar, long, ragged creases following the curve of the road. Here and there chunks of tar have broken loose and rusted steel glimmers in the roadbed. The tramlines, tarred over in the early sixties, coming back to the surface.

On the pavement outside No. 10 Blenheim: a tall man whose splattered overall and abstracted demeanour spoke of long experience in house-painting. He had spread a strip of plastic at the foot of the garden wall, beneath our Ndebele mural, and was stirring a tin of paint with a stick. The mural must have been two or three years old by then. He’s touching up the cracks, I told myself hopefully, although it was obvious what he was really doing. As I drew near, he laid the stick across the top of the tin and went to stand on the other side of the street. Like a woodsman sizing up a tree, just before he chopped it down.

I couldn’t watch. I went on to the Gem to fetch the paper. Coming home, I nearly made a detour along Albemarle Street to avoid the scene entirely, but it had to be faced.

He had started on the left. He was hacking into the pattern, obliterating it with extravagant swipes of the roller. Standing back, from time to time, to admire his handiwork. As if there was anything to be seen but an act of vandalism. The man must be a brute, I thought. It would be a man, too, the very antithesis of the woman who had painted the mural. I tried to remember her, but she had faded in my memory. I saw a middle-aged woman with a blanket knotted about her, wearing neck rings and a beaded headdress–but this was Esther Mahlangu, the painter of the BMW, whose photograph had been in the newspapers many times! In any event, they were not opposites. She was not an artist and he was not a vandal. They were simply people employed by the owners of a suburban house to perform a task. What the one had been employed to do, the other had now been employed to undo.

It was unthinkable that the same person could have commanded both tasks. The house had been on the market for some time and my theory was that it had finally changed hands. The new owner was remaking the place in his own style. Ndebele murals are an acquired taste, after all.

My brother Branko had a less charitable interpretation. They haven’t found a buyer, he said, and it’s no bloody wonder. They’re finally taking the estate agent’s advice: paint it white. It’s a dictum. Matches every lounge suite.

However, they did not paint it white. They painted it a lemony yellow with green trim, a petrol-station colour scheme. It took a couple of coats; after the first one, you could still see the African geometry developing, like a Polaroid image, as the paint dried.

Having missed the opportunity to document the birth of the mural through a lack of foresight, I now lacked the inclination to document its demise. This would make a wonderful film, I said to myself. But I did not call my friends the film-makers. I did not rush home to fetch a camera. I did not even take out a pad and pencil like a cub reporter. I just stood on the other side of the street and watched for a while, as the design vanished stroke by stroke, and then I went home with a heavy heart.

Here he is, the security guard at Gem Pawn Brokers, relaxing outside. It is the end of the working day and I’m heading to the Jumbo Liquor Market for some beer. He has already helped his colleagues to carry in the jumble of pine tables and metal shelves displayed on the pavement today as ‘specials’, but a single chair has been left behind in which he can lounge until the doors are shut. When Mannie comes out with the key, the guard will carry in this last item, a fat, balding Gomma Gomma armchair, and oversee the locking and barring.

He always ignores me, though I can tell that he recognizes me, passing by, just as I recognize him, sitting there. It irks me, this denial of the everyday pleasantries that set people at ease. Why won’t he acknowledge me? Is it the neighbourhood that makes people so guarded? I have been shopping in the Gem Supermarket for years and still no one greets me at the till. Any hint of friendliness is met with brooding suspicion, as if it must be a prelude to asking for credit. The scrawny manager with his support hose and his Fair Isle jerseys, the slant-eyed women and their toffee-stained children, they all look through you if you’re on the wrong side of the counter, sloping their shoulders defensively. After ten years of patronizing the Jumbo, I once found myself short of a couple of rand on a bottle of wine. I offered to make up the balance the next day, but the cashier wouldn’t have any of it. The manager was summoned. Grudgingly, he produced a two-rand coin from his wallet and put it in my hand, informed me that I was now indebted to him personally rather than the business, as if that would guarantee my honesty, and went away with a long face. The shopkeepers have reason to insult us, I suppose, for people are quick to take advantage. But what could I possibly want from the security guard at Gem Pawn Brokers?

An experiment. I greet him one afternoon, putting my heart into it. He returns the favour. Hello! Hello. It is no more than an echo, but it gives me some pleasure. Hello! Hello.

After a month of this game, a follow-up experiment becomes necessary and is made one afternoon. I don’t say anything; he keeps silent too. The next day I try to catch his eye as usual, but he looks away, bewildered and resentful. He thinks I’m up to something. I had no idea my experiment would produce this irrevocable reversal. Now, when he sees me coming, he draws back into himself and glazes over. Even if I throw out a cheery greeting, he pretends he hasn’t heard.

The grand old cinemas of Johannesburg, the bioscopes, were driven out of business years ago by the multiplexes. Most of the defunct bioscopes have been appropriated by people who own junk shops. Perhaps they were the first to arrive at the Plaza or the Regal or the Gem when the curtain fell, hungry for spills of red velvet and rows of seats joined at the hip, and so much echoing space proved irresistible. You can trundle a piano through the wide doorways and pile things to the rafters, or even put in a mezzanine to double the floor space, as they’ve done at the Plaza. If there are windows at all, they are small and high, and do not even need bars.

The junk shops, like other businesses in the neighbourhood, take the names of the old establishments, as if it is important to preserve the association. The Plaza Pawn Warehouse in Primrose specializes in outmoded office furniture, a film-noir decor of grey steel desks and filing cabinets, wooden in-and out-trays, adding machines, fans, typists’ chairs with chrome-plated frames and imitation-leather cushions. Regal Furnishers opposite the Troyeville Hotel sells plywood bedroom suites and kitchen cabinets. Gem Pawn Brokers buys and sells anything of value, as their sign declares. In its heyday, when the Gem was the grandest bioscope in the eastern suburbs, a back door gave on to a small landing, where the usher could loaf between features smoking a Lucky Strike, gazing over the tiled roof of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, to the lights of Bez Valley and Bertrams, one ear tuned to the mutter of the spooling picture. Now this doorway is a frozen frame bricked in to keep out thieves.

The alliance of dark cinemas and second-hand goods is a happy one. In this deconsecrated space, objects that would appear lifeless in an ordinary shop throw flickering shadows. The profusion of goods evokes a storehouse rather than a market. These are the cast-off properties of people’s lives, mementos of their hopes and failures, and the signs of use that should be off-putting seem poignant. A piano stool with a threadbare cushion, a dented toolbox, a Morris chair with cigarette-burned arms, a vellum lampshade dotted with postage stamps, a soda siphon, a bottle-green ashtray in the shape of a fish–there is nothing so tawdry that it is powerless to summon a cast of characters.

The proprietors of junk shops do not care for books, preferring to deal in larger items with a more obvious use and a more determinate value. But inevitably they are saddled with a few volumes. For convenience, a seller might refuse to part with a set of shelves if the dealer won’t take their contents, or an odd volume will turn up in a bedside drawer or the bottom of a wardrobe. Usually, there will be a row or two of books somewhere in the shop, on a bookshelf no one wants. If you wish to flip through them, you might have to hang over the back of a couch or kneel in a cramped space. There is no order to these books, their collection was informed by no particular taste. Yet, because of the circumstances in which it is acquired, a bioscope book has a special quality: it is attended by a more vivid retinue of ghosts.

Handwritten (Roll 2)

The sign is painted on the end of an overhanging roof, in glossy blue enamel on a white ground: Dokotela + Ngaka. Between the two words, a wobbly red cross with a broken arm. And then a telephone number, with its last digit teetering on the edge, its face pressed up against the downpipe from the gutter, while the three digits behind jostle together in an impatient queue.

‘It’s starting to look like a township around here.’

The township is written in longhand across the printed page of the white city, in felt tip, in chalk, in gaudy heeltaps of enamel. The new services: Dokotela, Pan-African Financial Systems, Siyathuthuka Tavern Ngubane. White eyes appraise these declarations on flaking facades, accompanied by crude drawings of stethoscopes and knives and forks, and put the premises and proprietors in inverted commas: ‘Herbalist’, ‘Moneylender’, ‘Eating house’…

The white city is made of steel and glass, illuminated from within. It is printed on aluminium hoardings and Perspex sheeting. It is bolted down, recessed and double-glazed, framed and sealed, it is double-sided and laminated, it is revolving in the wind on a well-greased axle.

The township is made of cardboard and hardboard, buckling in the sunlight. It is handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things, on the blank reverses, unjustified, in alphabets with an African sense of personal space, smudged. Tied to a fence with string. leaning against a yield sign. propped up by a brick. secured with a twist of wire. nailed to a tree trunk.

Paiter. Call Tymon. Tell 725 6918.

I turn my gaze from this message, scarcely decipherable in the dusk, to the crisply edged signage of the petrol station across the intersection. The light changes to green. The driver behind, who has never heard the joke about the definition of a split second, leans on his hooter.

On the Blenheim Street facade of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, between two sets of doors that have never looked quite so inviting since their brass handles were nicked, is a foundation stone inscribed with this plainspoken injunction: • LOVE • On either side of the word, the mason scooped a stud out of the stone. This incidental punctuation keeps an abstract concept, which might otherwise have floated away, pinned to a hard surface. In the bottom right-hand corner, a second, lopsided inscription–1927–tips the stone into the course of time.

In a corner of the parking area at the Darras Shopping Centre, near the Engen garage, a man is standing, a tall black man in a suit, a collar and tie, shiny shoes, a hat. He is standing to attention, rigidly upright, with his hands at his sides. A priest or a teacher, someone who would make a good character witness in a trial. At his feet is a square metre of cardboard and in the centre of it a bathroom scale wrapped in clear plastic. It is pale yellow with a white oval dial. A small white card beside the scale says: 50c.

My God, I think, he could get more than fifty cents for the thing! I should tell him so. I’d give him twenty rand for it myself, if I needed it.

Then the deception occurs to me: there must be a scam involved. When you offer him fifty cents for the scale, he’ll say he has another two thousand of them in a warehouse in Heriotdale. Give him a small deposit, say a hundred bucks, and he’ll fetch them for you. And that’s the last you’ll see of your cash. Transparent.

And then, ten paces further, I realize how perfectly simple it is.

Strolling home with the morning paper under his arm, Branko passes a salesman dragging a large briefcase. He looks like a salesman anyway, in blazer and flannels, white shirt and striped tie, a door-to-door man lugging a set of samples. Branko feels sorry for him in this heat, trying to give the heavy case an extra little shove with his calf at each step, his free arm sticking out like a wing, pigeon-toed with effort.

At his own door, Branko nearly falls into a hole in the pavement. The iron cover that’s supposed to conceal the connection to the water mains is gone. It was here ten minutes ago, when he stepped out to buy the paper. He stands there puzzling.

Shit!

He jams his paper in the letterbox and runs down the street, looking for the man with the case, unsure what he will do with this white-collar criminal when he catches him, but he has already vanished.

Returning from a reception in Sandton, we find ourselves locked out of the bedroom. I have got into the habit of half-turning the latch on the inside so that the door doesn’t swing open in the breeze, and now it’s clicked shut on its own. At two in the morning. We phone the Lock King and negotiate a price. Then we pour ourselves a couple of stiff whiskies and sit in the lounge to wait. Half an hour later a tough-looking kid and his blonde girlfriend arrive. She is wearing fluffy pink slippers with her jeans. While he sets about picking the lock, she leans against him, rubbing the back of his neck, stroking his forearm. We sit in our armchairs, in black tie and ball gown, and watch them at work. They look like thieves.

I’m coming home along Roberts Avenue, when I see Eddie dithering on the pavement by the substation near the Black Steer steak house. He’s looking up and down Blenheim Street, walking a step or two downhill and then hurrying back up again. Homing.

It must be six months since he sold his house and moved, and this is the first time I’ve caught sight of him in the old neighbourhood. I’m pleased to see him, and yet I don’t feel like talking to him. Even in the moment, this impulse strikes me as uncharitable, but I cannot suppress it. So I stop in the shade of the fig tree on the corner to watch. He hasn’t seen me and he doesn’t seem likely to either; he’s too engrossed in his own dilemma. Up and down, up and down. His pacing is like paging; he has lost his place in the world. Finally, he goes downhill decisively towards his house. I’ve seen him do this countless times, hobbling back from the Gem with a loaf of bread under his arm, going up the garden path. But he doesn’t live here any more. When he’s one door away from his old home, he veers across to the other pavement and stops, watching from a distance, on the bias. He cannot face it. He starts coming back up the hill again.

Now a meeting is unavoidable, and I’m suddenly delighted to see him. He’s just as pleased to see me: he seizes upon me like a bookmark. But he also looks guilty, as if he’s been caught out doing something discreditable. Before I can ask, he starts telling me how much he enjoys it in Germiston. Been gone eight months already, can you believe it? His daughter had business in town today, so she dropped him off. He’s been visiting with George at the Black Steer and old Mrs Ferreira. Looking around. George is closing down, did you know that? Mrs Ferreira used to own half the block. Now she’s reduced to her place and the place next door, and not even a decent tenant for that.

I let him tell me yesterday’s news. Then I ask: ‘What’s it like to be back? Have we changed?’

We both turn and face down the hill.

‘My garden’s not looking so good,’ he says.

‘No.’

‘New chap’s not much of a gardener.’

‘It’s a pity.’

‘This has always been a beautiful part of town,’ he says. ‘The streets are so wide, and the oaks are grand, and the houses are set back just right, don’t you think? You notice it when you’ve been away for a while. I was saying to my daughter this morning: There isn’t a finer street in Joburg than Roberts Avenue.’

Eddie’s mural comes and goes with the seasons; in the summer, it is obscured by the shrubs growing wild in the front garden, in the autumn, when the leaves fall, it reappears to haunt us.

Louis Fehler stayed with me in my flat in Webb Street before he emigrated. At the last minute he asked me to keep some papers for him just until he was settled on the other side, and then I was stuck with them. I lugged his blue trommel to half a dozen addresses, cursing him every time. I put it on the bathroom scale once and it weighed thirty kilos.

When he died I should have surrendered the trunk straight away, but I was curious about its contents. One weekend–I often get round to chores on a Sunday afternoon, like a schoolboy doing his homework–I sawed through the padlock. The first thing I came to was a file called ‘Heydays’, which turned out to be fragments of an unfinished autobiography. Beneath it lay a dozen cardboard folders containing notes, chronologies, clippings, photographs and letters (including copies of his own).

It was flattering to think of this as a posthumous commission, but I had no interest in being Louis’s biographer. He had his admirers and I might have passed the papers on to one of them, but there again the thought of handing over my windfall irked me. So I closed the trommel and put it away. From time to time I’m reminded that this legacy is in my hands, as I was again last week when I started packing up the spare room, and the blue trommel came to light behind the exercise bike and the broken chairs.

It took three days to frame Ilona Anderson’s exhibition. Having no workbench or tub, I had to wash the flimsy sheets of glass in the shower, resting the bottom edge on a sponge, then carry them wet to the table in the hallway, where I dried them with crumpled sheets of newspaper. The drawings showed puppets and dolls, made to squirm by many huge, puppet-masterly hands, every surface trembling with theatrical colour, applied as thickly as lipstick or toothpaste, and always on the point of smudging. Three dozen works were finished without a hitch. But on the morning of the opening, a wine glass broke in my hand under the kitchen tap and sliced my forefinger to the bone. It is twenty years since the wound healed, but if a rim of glass even brushes against the scar those livid colours bleed out of my memory.

Minky’s brother Alan phones: ‘You won’t believe what’s happened.’ He sounds so dejected that for a moment she thinks someone must have died. He goes on: ‘Have you driven down Scott Street lately?’ Then she knows, before he tells her: the Scott Street house, where they once lived, has been demolished.

In his fifty years in Joburg, Alan has lived in four houses, all within walking distance of one another. In fact, when he started jogging, he laid out his route to take him past three of them–Murray Street, Scott Street, William Road. Passing by these landmarks, he would retrace his passage from child, to teenager, to young married man, and return to the present, in Victoria Street, his fourth–and, he says, final–address, more fully himself. But one after the other, over the years, the houses have been knocked down. Scott Street was the last.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ he says. ‘It was there last week and now there’s nothing left but the foundations. I’m starting to feel paranoid. It’s as if someone is trying to erase me from the record. I half expect to come home from work one day and find my house knocked down.’

Minky’s father built the house in Scott Street in the mid-sixties, when she and Al were teenagers. He oversaw every step of the construction and spared no cost. Tiles of Italian marble, doorframes of Rhodesian teak. Even the roof-trusses were imported from Canada, because Canadian pine is stronger and straighter.

‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ he used to say, ‘but you can leave something behind. This house will stand for a hundred years.’

The last day of 1998. I stop at the Jumbo Liquor Market in Op de Bergen Street on the way home to buy something for the New Year celebrations. Perhaps I should pick up a bottle of whisky? Or champagne?

The usual hawkers are gathered on the verandah outside. The tall cobbler and his pals. For years, he wore a springbok-skin cap, a hand-sewn thing that Crusoe would have given a sack of nails for, with flaps standing up like ears and a peak like a snout. With his bony cheeks and goatee, he looked like a buck himself or a part-time Pan. But then he abandoned the cap in favour of the conventional black imitation leather Tyrolean.

While I’m engaging the Gorilla, a man appears at the window. I’ve never seen him before. He puts his face close to the two-inch gap between the top of the glass and the frame. A face made in the make-up department: a droll and drunken coloured face below a greasy cloth cap, missing teeth, smashed nose, boozy breath. ‘I must watch this car, this place is full of skollies,’ he tells me, gesturing vaguely towards the cobbler’s circle and then pointing very definitely down Eleanor Street. ‘Just last week they stole that car.’ The car in question is a bakkie, drawing up that instant outside No. 12, having come the wrong direction up the one-way from Nourse Street. Two men get out of the bakkie and go into the house. What does he mean they stole that car last week? Who would have taken such a battered old pickup? And how did they get it back again so soon? Then logic turns his sentence inside out. He means it’s a stolen vehicle. Those are the thieves! Probably a thief himself. Takes one to know one. I barge him aside with the door and go into the bottle store.

Champagne bubbles up again briefly. But I think of the obligatory cork-popping in a year’s time, and two years’ time, and buy beer instead and a half-jack of J&B.

When I get back to my car, the coloured guy is hanging around on the other side of the street, shamefaced and jumpy, trying hopelessly to disguise his expectation. I dump the packet in the boot. I’m starting to regret my bad temper, starting to feel guilty. It’s the season for giving, after all. I call him over and give him five bucks.

Now he wants to earn it, he wants to deserve my generosity. And he wants me to see the point too. ‘I’m watching,’ he says vehemently, ‘I’m watching.’ He points to his eyes, forefinger and little finger extended, the other two tucked into his fist by his thumb.

I get into the car.

‘I’m watching.’

‘Thank you,’ I say through the diminishing gap, as I shut the door, ‘thank you very much.’

His face is close to the glass again. Talking. Gesturing. Prongs of forefinger and little finger waggling, roving, suggesting tireless vigilance. I stick the key in the Gorilla but it won’t disengage: in my haste to get away, I’ve jammed the lock somehow. He goes on talking. I cannot ignore him. Elias Canetti once said: ‘I will be dead when I no longer hear what a person is telling me about himself.’ This cannot be what he had in mind. I open the window two inches. His face comes closer. He’s tilting it to one side, so that I can see more of it through the gap. He wants me to know who he is, to look at him. He wants me to recognize him when I see him again. His nose is almost inside the car. As if he wants to squeeze in, to seize the hard edges of this opening, pull them wide, and climb through into the sweetly scented interior. When they serviced the car last week, they spilled some green pellets in the ashtray that make it smell like new. New-car scent. I jiggle the Gorilla irritably and it finally pops loose. I put it in its place next to the seat. He’s still talking, quickly, urgently, about thieves and cars and honesty and how we all have to work together against the scourge of skelms. Waving his arms around, pointing up and down Eleanor Street. Making peculiarly graceful movements with his hands, palms pressed together, as if he is praying or preparing to dive into a small pool.

I start the car but he won’t let me go. He’s talking and talking through the gap. Phrases out of the newspapers. Crime wave. rainbow nation. Decent South Africans. standing together. People of God. thieves. liars. love. I start edging away from the kerb, cranking the steering wheel with my left hand and winding up the window with my right. My face is turned to him. We are staring at one another through the narrowing space.

‘I’m not a security,’ he says as the gap closes. ‘I’m not a security, I swear, but I wanna work with the people of the land.’

Apie is a wooden steering lock carved by Renier le Roux. Other works in wood by the same sculptor include a spanner (Sleutel No. 13), a security gate (Welkom Tuis) and a brick, which may be used as a doorstop, a weapon or a purse.

In 1998, 107 675 cars were stolen in South Africa (295 cars per day). There were 14 965 cars hijacked (41 per day). The incidence of hijacking was directly related to the efficacy of vehicle security systems. The increasing application of alarms, electronic immobilizers, and steering and gear locks, especially to luxury motor cars, has made it almost impossible to steal an unoccupied, stationary car.

In 1998, a survey by the Labour Research Service in Cape Town found that the executive directors of South African companies earned an average of R99 916 per month, or R1.2 million a year, excluding bonuses and other benefits. Executive salaries were sixty times higher than shop-floor wages. A factory worker earning R1 800 a month–the average minimum wage–would have taken five years to earn what the average company director earned in a month. Yet these workers had to consider themselves fortunate, because 40 per cent of black South Africans were unemployed.

In 1999, crime cost South Africa an estimated R30 billion (R80 million a day). However, crime also created jobs. In the past two decades, the private security industry has grown faster than any other economic sector. At the end of August, according to Martin Schönteich of the Institute for Security Studies, the official South African Police Service employed 127 000 people. By contrast, the private security industry employed between 300 000 and 350 000 people, and had an estimated annual turnover of R11 billion.

In August 1999, the prices of new cars available in South Africa ranged from R38 086 for a Fiat Uno Mia to R2 389 000 for a Ferrari 550 Maranello. The prices of steering locks ranged from R59 for the SL2Auto-Lok to R325 for the Gorilla. The price of brown bread was fixed by the government at R1.90 a loaf.

My name is……

I am a trained Guard to fight Vehicle and Street Crime

ABACUS Crime Watch

Endorsed by the Mayor of Greater Johannesburg

Guards do not receive Wages

Donation appreciated when parking

Tip on your return, if satisfied with service

Have a nice day A/h 972 6897 Cell 082 6896 181

The avenues in Bez Valley around First Street are narrow one-ways lined with red-brick factories, workshops and warehouses. In places, brick facades or corrugated-iron walls front directly onto the roadway as in an old city. However, the area is no warren: the avenues are long and straight, the buildings seldom taller than two storeys, the sky above blue and vast. In the south of Johannesburg, in the manufacturing areas like Selby and Village Deep, similar streets are to be found, but none with exactly this atmosphere. The buildings are occupied by small manufacturers of goods like garden furniture, burglar-proofing and fireworks, alongside businesses offering marquees for hire, cured and smoked meats, or geyser repairs–an assortment that is only superficially incongruous.

Dorfman’s specializes in corrugated cartons and packaging materials. The cardboard boxes are stacked flat in towers on wooden pallets or leant together in long rows against the walls, thousands of boxes in dozens of standard sizes, classified alphanumerically. Most are bundled tightly into fifties or hundreds with plastic straps, as if they would spring into three dimensions without this restraint. Selling is by weight and the new boxes are twice the price of the used ones. The new boxes are generally factory rejects. You will find a minor misalignment in the stapled sides, or a more annoying discrepancy in the dimensions of the flaps, which must be trimmed by hand before the box will fold, or, less often, an error in the printing–and these are the real bargains, of course, because a box with a typo on it is just as useful for moving house as one without.

I need two sizes, something small and sturdy for books, and something larger, flimsier if need be for household effects. A worker shows me the range, folding together samples with the flamboyant ease of a magician making something reappear. I settle for the small B6, which has chevrons on its flaps and four Ls arranged in a square on its sides, like corners in an album where a photograph has fallen out, all printed in red; and the larger D14, which is absolutely plain. We lug the boxes to the scale next to the office. Seventeen kilos. The scale is calibrated to five hundred.

‘Anything else, sir?’ They have self-adhesive tape in thirty-or fifty-metre rolls, clear or brown, masking tape, double-sided tape; bubble wrap by the metre; sisal, nylon, twine; plastic and steel strapping. They have labels, staples and pots of glue, but no mothballs.

There is an animal smell in the air, a gluey effusion of hoof and horn. It suits this uneasy place. The boxes are in an unnatural state, mere suggestions of their fully assembled selves. So many cubic metres of space collapsed into square ones, so many roomfuls of compressed air in every corner. Space in captivity seems as full of explosive potential as a fireworks factory.

The windows of the house at No. 58 Kitchener Avenue have been blinded by black film. There could be a funeral parlour behind that morbid porch. An all-seeing eye, the Masonic sign of the defunct neighbourhood watch, peers out through the burglar-proofing. The garden wall is chocolate brown. On either side of the gate there are decorative patterns in the brickwork, holes in the shape of a diamond, five holes across at its widest point, ranging down to a single hole above and below. I am compelled to make the calculation: twenty-five holes in total.

As I pass this house one afternoon, on my island walk, a small object comes into focus. In the very centre of one of these diamonds is a tiny model of a man. A plastic figure from toy-town, as tall as my thumb, standing in the aperture as if in a doorway. In the instant that it catches my eye, I reach out with my left hand–scarcely breaking my stride–scoop it up, and slip it into my pocket.

Turning the figure over in my fingers as I go, I try to work out what it is. Why did I pick it up? A reflex. The way you might take a snack from a plate in passing, even though you’re not hungry, or break a switch from a tree, just to have something to tap on the toe of your shoe as you’re walking. After a block, I bring it out into the light and look at it. A zookeeper grasping a pitchfork with a large cut of red meat impaled on it. He is wearing grey pants tucked into black galoshes, a mustard pullover, a black tie, a peaked cap. A keeper of the old school, a little chipped and faded.

The whole of the next day, the zookeeper stands on my desk as I’m working, beside the jar of pencils. The desk happens to be covered with green baize, and the little green island he is standing on matches the cloth exactly. It is odd, I think, that he is wearing a tie, in his line of work, although he has also rolled up his sleeves. The meat looks like a bloody comma. An oversized chop, a buffalo chop, fit for a tiger. The zookeeper’s head can swivel–it fits into a socket between his shoulders on a tapering peg–and I turn it so that he is gazing at the meat on the end of his fork.

He looks at home among the dictionaries and terminals. And yet he bothers me. What was he doing standing in the wall? A child must have left him there. A boy swinging on the gate, waiting for his dad to come home from work, watching the traffic. I have never seen a child in that funereal yard, but throughout the day a potential boy grows clearer and clearer in my mind, until he is as familiar as the figure itself. I can see this toy in his sticky hand, I can smell the orange he is softening by rolling it between the sole of his foot and the garden path, the better to suck the juice, while his other foot curls on the bottom bar of the gate.

By five, I have decided to take the zookeeper back. I have deadlines to meet and no time for walking, so I drive down to the house in Kitchener, although it is just around the corner. A tricky business. Should I go straight up to the wall and put the thing down? What if someone is watching from behind the windows, which are as blank as dark glasses in the afternoon sun? Should I find some pretext, like pulling up my socks, for returning the toy to its place unnoticed? I park the car in Essex Street and walk back down the hill. For a moment, as I approach the house, I consider dropping the figure in the letterbox, but in the end I simply put it back where I found it, in the hole in the wall, and walk away, half expecting some suspicious voice to call after me.

The zookeeper stands there for a month. Every time I pass, I expect the figure to be gone, but it is always there. Am I the only person who ever looks at this exact spot? Any child going by should notice it. Is this object invisible to everyone but me?

After six weeks, history repeats itself. As I’m passing, my hand rises, involuntarily, and takes the little man from the hole, and puts him in my pocket. He is here now, as I write, flourishing a fresh chunk of meat at me like Tolstoy’s punctuation.

Excess (Roll 3)

the shoes, the socks, the button-down collars, the corduroy jackets. the tables, the chairs. the pavements, the grass on the verges, the flower beds, the impatiens, the Barberton daisies. the street names on the kerbstones, the white lines, the street lights, the bulbs in the sockets. the buckets, the spades. the cars, the caravans, the motorboats. the sheepskin seat covers, the halogen spotlights, the retractable aerials, the loudspeakers, the rubber mats. the driving, the parking, the driving back. the money in the parking meters. the walking in the parks, the drinking in the bars, the talking, the laughing, the eating in the restaurants, the glasses, the wine in the glasses, the knives, the forks, the plates, the food on the plates, the baby potatoes, the stuffed trout, the chocolate mousse, the brandy snifters. the reading, the writing. the paper, the pen, the ink in the pen. the books, the books, the books

A table in the Springbok Boarding House, a round table covered with a plastic cloth, in a room with a tall window. There is something lemony about the table. Is it an image on the cloth? The smell of cough mixture? Or perhaps there is a bottle of Rose’s lime juice, with limes and their leaves in relief on the glass, a helpful braille for blind tipplers. An old man is sitting at the table, drawing a field of racehorses with numbers on their saddlecloths. Thoroughbreds at the gallop, their muscles tautly sculpted, the fine threads of their manes and tails flying. He is drawing with a blue pen on a lined page from a school exercise book. He is drawing for the child beside him, who kneels on the seat of another chair, leaning forward to see every stroke. There is a jar on the table with a flower in it. The room smells of food, the plastic tablecloth sticks to the child’s forearms. A sugar bowl, a wireless, an ashtray. The rest of the room is dim, as if the table stood under a spotlight, but its position in the room is clear: it is in the corner farthest from the door, near the window, and the old man is facing towards the light. Now he has put aside the horses and is drawing again on a fresh sheet, drawing bicycles, racing bicycles, and the cyclists on them as small and neat as jockeys. The child marvels as the blue wheels take shape, spoke by spoke.

When my grandfather died in the early sixties, this memory was the largest part of my inheritance. The material part was scarcely more substantial: a handful of lapel badges. One of them showed the chevrons of the Citroën marque, another the outline of the African continent on a long pin. All the rest had been issued, at the rate of one a year, by the Railway Recreation Club at Berea Park, where the old man was a member. There were around three dozen of these ornate little enamelled shields, with gilt edges and the initials of the club and year of issue inscribed on scrolls, and not much to distinguish one from another except the dates. But once or twice in the fifties, some creative temperament on the committee had asserted itself (I imagine) and a badge with an unusual shape or colour was produced. There was one in the shape of a fish, coloured the pale sea-green of salmon scales. It must have delighted the club’s anglers.

The box in which I kept these badges had belonged to my mother when she was a schoolgirl. It was a wooden casket half the size of a pencil case, decorated with forest scenes made of inlaid segments of stained wood, now faded to a perpetual autumn. There was a secret mechanism for opening the drawer, a wooden switch concealed beneath a small tile that could be slid aside–it fitted so perfectly you could not even insert a fingernail into a crack, you had to moisten the tip of your finger and pull gently. Pressing the switch caused the drawer to spring open.

I liked to spread the badges out, arranging them by shape and colour, or more often by date. The older ones from the thirties and forties had a butterfly stud at the back, but modern jackets did not always have a buttonhole in the lapel and so the more recent badges had pins. My grandfather came to life in these small things, which evoked his hands, resting on the paper and holding the pen. When I grew up, I realized that they were also signs of his belonging in the world, the world of the railway goods yard, the pub, the working-man’s club. I imagined him wearing them when he went down to the Berea to watch the football on a Saturday afternoon, or when, on any day of the week, he walked up to the Vic in Paul Kruger Street for a pint. They were badges of identity, simple markers of a life story. The mere gesture of spreading them out, with a casual sweep of the hand, produced a plot. My grandfather’s absence during the war years, his time ‘up north’, was never clearer to me than in the missing chapters in the story told by the badges.

Two boys came to my door one day begging for food, a teenager and his smaller brother, both in rags and looking pitiful. While I was fetching bread and apples from the kitchen, they slipped into my flat and pilfered what they could stuff in their pockets. They did not run away. When I came back with the food they were waiting dejectedly on the doorstep, and they accepted the packet with thanks and quietly withdrew. A day or two passed before I noticed the small absences: a stapler, a travel clock, my grandfather’s badges.

Later, I came across the splinters of the box at the foot of an oak in Saunders Street, not far from my home. A few sticks of wood and a rusty spring. Frustrated by their inability to open the box, they had smashed it. Instead of the coins it must have promised when they shook it, the box had coughed up a handful of trinkets. I searched in the roots of the kikuyu on the verge, and scuffed through leaves and litter in the gutter, convinced that something must have been left behind, but whether or not they were disappointed with their haul, they had carried off every last one.

A single badge finally did turn up in my wardrobe, pinned since the previous winter to the lapel of a sports coat. Nothing special, just a variation on a theme: a small gilt shield, with a red banner at the top saying SOUTH AFRICAN RAILWAY RECREATION CLUB and two white banners at the bottom saying PRETORIA and BEREA PARK. In the middle, in gold on a black shield, is a winged wheel and the date, 1951.

Mementoes of District Six is a cabin made of resin blocks. Enclosed in each block is an object or fragment that the artist Sue Williamson collected among the ruins of District Six after the removals: a shard of pottery, a scrap of wallpaper, a hairclip, a doll’s shoe.

‘It made me cry like a baby,’ says Liz.

‘You? Never.’

‘Really. I’m no pushover, but it was just so moving, standing there like a kid in a Wendy house surrounded by these relics, worthless things made to seem precious, glowing like candles. As if each trinket and scrap had been a treasure to someone.’

We talk about trifles and their meaning.

After another glass of wine, she decides to show me her most treasured memento. This is what she would like enclosed in glass and kept forever. She opens her fingers.

A lucky-packet fish with a breath of her childhood in its belly.

On the eve of the millennium, South Africa’s new police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, entered the Brooklyn Police Station in Pretoria to make an inspection. According to subsequent news reports, the commissioner was not impressed with what he found. Incensed by the casual attitude of the charge-office staff and their failure to recognize him, he called Sergeant Jeanette Mothiba a ‘fucking gorilla’. Sergeant Mothiba responded by laying a charge of crimen injuria against the commissioner.

The incident was widely reported. Some treated it as a joke or at worst a blunder. Others felt that the commissioner’s language was not just inappropriate, but unforgivably derogatory and racist. It was an echo of the insulting ‘baboon’ used so often by white racists against black people, and all the more shocking in this instance because a prominent and powerful black man had used it against a black woman under his authority. One black female journalist wrote that the phrase conjured up the image of a gorilla mask of the kind worn at fancy-dress parties, superimposed on a black woman’s face. The image would linger, she said, and be used against other black women.

After a fortnight of controversy, the Independent Complaints Directorate, to which the case had been referred, issued a report finding that Commissioner Selebi had not used the word ‘gorilla’ at all, but the word ‘chimpanzee’. This word, unlike the word ‘baboon’, the report said, was not commonly used as an insult. Although it was safe to assume that the word had been used in an insulting fashion, it was not sufficient to warrant prosecution.

In its front-page report on the Directorate’s findings, the Star ran an article titled ‘What’s the difference between a chimpanzee and a gorilla?’ The article pointed out that both are anthropoid apes of central West Africa, but whereas the chimp is ‘gregarious and intelligent’, the gorilla is ‘stocky with a short muzzle and coarse dark hair’. The anthropoid apes belong to the order of primates, the article concluded, and so do human beings.

In the end, it was hard to say exactly who the joke was on. Commissioner Selebi, who had started this grotesque drama with his ill-judged comment. Or Sergeant Mothiba, who had vanished behind the headlines. Or the Independent Complaints Directorate, earnestly offering dictionary definitions as a legal defence. Or the reader, poking a stick through the bars at his own beastly nature.

In every corner of the library built by Canetti is an idea that could flare up and scorch the passing reader.

Originally, he tells us, laughter was an expression of the pleasure taken in prey or food. This is why we laugh when someone falls. Their vulnerability reminds us that we could spring on them now and tear them apart. Our lips are open, our teeth are bared. But we restrain our animal appetites, and instead of eating, we laugh. ‘Laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food.’

A Saturday in July. The air is tinged with wood smoke, clean sunlight falls on dirty surfaces, bands of sun and shadow laid precisely over man-made crusts of tar and brick, over cement kerbstones, painted black and white, and stencilled with street names. A sagging fence holds panes of sky in its frayed mesh. Smells of dust and whitewash rise from the rugby field on the other side of the fence, reduced to red sand and straw at this time of year. The edges between light and dark, hot and cold define the peculiar thrill of a winter morning, when you are out in the frosted air wearing a warm jacket.

I am standing on the pavement outside the Plaza Pawn Warehouse in Primrose, delighted to be alive. Minutes ago, on a set of shelves in a corner, a dead end in a labyrinth of old tables and chairs, I uncovered a row of books. I had to shift a chair or two to get to them, and hang over the back of a brown corduroy sofa that smelt of baby food, before my dangling fingers could pick out a tune on their spines. I chose the book I am holding in my hand. The cashier, a tubby old man in a pale-blue pullover, studying the form in a newspaper at a counter behind wire mesh, seemed surprised that someone would actually buy a book in his shop, and he was almost embarrassed to charge me for it. After a moment’s hesitation, he asked for fifty cents, and I counted it out in silver to avoid the further embarrassment of change. Instead of putting my coins in the till, he dropped them among some others in a china saucer, a stray piece from a Beatrix Potter set, dismissing me. Parking-meter money, perhaps, or something for the beggars who come to the door.

The book is The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by William Gaunt, published by the Reprint Society in the early forties. It is not particularly beautiful and it has seen better days; although the cloth binding on the covers is emerald green, the spine has been bleached to khaki by the sun. But that does not bother me, as I did not buy it for its looks. I also have no particular interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. I had to have it purely for its title. Sometimes the name of an author and the title of a book fit one another so perfectly you can scarcely imagine one without the other. William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream. It is as familiar as a favourite, a book I have been living with for years.

The encounter with the cashier, feeling the sting of his sublime disdain, and now emerging from the gloom of the shop into the icy sunlight, have made me self-conscious. I become aware of my own incongruity, not just of race and class and language, but of predilection, of need. Far from making me feel uncomfortable, the whole situation pleases me. The sunshine on the tar, which is sugar-frosted with automotive glass from the smash-and-grabs, the Saturday-morning bustle, the East Rand detail–the massive palm near the Plascon paint shop. the Solly Kramer’s. a buckled bus shelter. dim-witted robots blinking into the glare. parking meters along Rietfontein Road all ears, absurdly attentive to petty transgression. the yellow stripes on the fascia of Spares Link. the notices about diffs and carbs and shocks scrawled on the window glass in shoewhite. the pink towels behind the burglar-proofing in Top Creations Unisex Hair Salon. the yellow-brick flats above, the potted cactus and caged budgie on the balcony. the women in blankets on the verge across the way, beside their enormous lumpy bags of mielies. Myself in the midst of it, held by the air, with this beautifully inconsequential book, scrounged in a bioscope junk shop, clutched in my hand. I should feel utterly out of place, but instead I feel that I belong here. I am given shape. I do not follow but I conclude, as surely as a non sequitur. It’s enough to make me laugh.

The men coming down Thistle Road are laughing too, as if they see my point. Black miners just off shift, wearing helmets with lamps on them pushed back on scarf-wrapped heads, their overalls unbuttoned to the waist despite the chill, their boots unlaced and gaping. Beyond them, against the sky at the end of the road, a church spire. Dutch Reformed is my guess.

I open the book. It was so dark in the shop I could hardly make out the type. The frontispiece is Rossetti’s The Beloved, captioned with a quotation from the Song of Solomon: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his.’ The chapter called ‘From King Arthur to Karl Marx’ turns out to be about William Morris. I flip through the plates: Holman Hunt painting on the shores of the Dead Sea, with his palette in his left hand and a rifle resting in the crook of his elbow; Millais’s Ophelia; Rossetti’s How They Met Themselves; designs for stained-glass panels and tapestries by Burne-Jones. Everything in black and white, yet this is not a colourless world. You cannot look at these images without seeing silken red hair, gold thread in an embroidered tunic, the plush blue velvet of a skirt. It all seems more intriguing, with the colour draining into it off the palette of your own memory.

Then I hear a voice raised. A man is teetering on the kerb, haranguing the mineworkers. A young black man, so steeped in last night’s booze he can hardly stand. He is wearing a greatcoat many sizes too big for him. He steps down into the street, goes towards the miners and stumbles in among them, shouting words I do not understand, waving his arms and making the tails of his coat flap.

And this makes me even more satisfied with myself. It makes my whole situation more interesting: me standing here, with my irrelevant book, the women on the verge with their mielies for sale, the men in their sweat-stained overalls, made pale by deep-level dust, faces turned to the weekend, the comical drunkard. Together, we are theatre, we are high drama and low comedy.

Then one of the miners takes the drunkard by the collar of his coat and hurls him to the tar. It is an act of such explosive volition that his feet shoot out like a clown’s and one slapstick shoe goes flying. You could have knocked him over with a finger and so the blow seems that much heavier. He is not merely tripped up, he is hurled backwards with all the force the other man can muster. He throws him down on the tar as if he is made of an obdurate material he wishes to break. There is a sound like a rock cracking. The miner’s companions laugh and come closer, leaving the drunkard lying still in the street.

A car approaches down Thistle. The driver blows his hooter, a pinched white face looks over the steering wheel, demanding that this obstacle be removed.

The miners have stopped to talk to the hawkers. A woman strips the leaves from a mielie cob, exposing a row of white kernels, and hands it to one of the men, and he bows his head to smell it.

Here comes a kid with his pants reaching only to mid-calf. From a distance, I think he is wearing hand-me-downs, much too small for him, and feel a pang of sympathy, but when he gets closer I see that he has rolled the bottoms of his pants up to show off his garish sneakers.

Nigel Henderson: ‘A new boot is a fine monument to Man–an artefact. A worn out boot traces his image with heroic pathos and takes its part as a universal image-maker in the Suburbs of the Mind.’

The house was enormous, made up of five or six bedrooms, a lounge with a fireplace so huge a man could stand upright in it, and a rambling kitchen. A stoep curved around two sides of it and an overgrown courtyard lay at its heart. The two halves of the front door opened inwards like the gates of a castle.

The room I remember best was the smallest in the house, but like all the others it was very tall, so that it seemed grander than it was. The bed was just a mattress on the floor, covered by a floral sheet and a mohair blanket. The height of the ceiling allowed for an immense fall of grey curtain in front of the window. This curtain was the most solid, impenetrable surface in the room, lined with satin and thickly woven, cross-hatched in black and white threads, each as thick as a charcoal stroke. Drawing it would have been superfluous, it was already a study in pencil.

Beside the bed, on a red-polished hearthstone, lay a spill of mysterious objects, communing in delicate shades: yellow gourds, cobs of Indian corn, shells, sand dollars, perlemoen, sheaves of grass, twigs of coral, small unfired ceramic tiles that seemed to have been split from the bed of a dried-up lake. This sun-bleached still life brought the sea into the room. The woman whose room it was smelt like the sea too, especially when she came back from her home at the coast with her hair cut short and her skin burnt brown. In a landlocked city, in a place with no water, I was swept away in the salt tides of her body.

We had lived there for a year when our landlady sold the house to the Apostoliese Geloofsending, who had established a theological seminary next door. Before we even moved out, she brought her salvagers to cart away the details we could do without, the brass plates around the light switches, the cast-iron dados and porcelain door handles. And we had hardly left when they arrived to tear out fireplaces, light fittings and pressed-steel ceilings.

Within the week, the new owners knocked the walls flat and paved the plot for a parking area, as if the lives we lived there had no more substance than a pop song.

I am stripping the bedroom door down to the wood. The paint comes off in layers: layers of taste, of personal preference, of style. I wish I could read these strata the way a forester reads the rings of a felled tree, deciphering the lean seasons, the years of plenty, the catastrophes, the triumphs. Instead, I see nothing but fashion. Nineties ochre, eighties ivory, seventies beige, sixties olive. Paging back into the past.

I am reminded of the Ndebele mural up the road. It is still there, of course, under a thick, lemon-yellow skin. All summer, after every storm, I have been waiting for it to reappear through the paint, its black edges and angles coming to light again like an old master’s pentimenti. But apparently Plascon on plaster does not behave like oil on canvas. To effect this revelation, one would need some paint stripper, a blowlamp, a sharp-edged scraper. Or one of those X-ray cameras they use to hurry on the work of time.

There is an easier way, I suppose. Someone must have photographed that wall. Style magazine or the local rag. A dozen kids from the youth hostel around the corner.

But I do not want a photograph.

Sunday morning. The new owner of the house with the secret mural–or perhaps he is just a tenant–is coming down Blenheim Street as I am going up. He is wearing rubber sandals with reptilian soles, satin running shorts, a pair of narrow sunglasses curved like the front end of an expensive car. Under his arm, a folded newspaper; dangling from his hand, a plastic bag full of groceries, the aroma of freshly baked rolls. He slips the bag over his wrist as he unlocks his security gate. I want to tell him what he’s missing. I can see myself drawing him back onto the pavement, I can see him gazing at his yellow wall with new eyes. I want to describe the mural, and the man who painted over it.

But I cannot picture this man clearly any more. His work of obliteration hardly took a weekend, and so I couldn’t have seen him more than two or three times in all. Now he has vanished behind an impostor. The man I’ve written down here, the tall one in the overalls, has displaced the one who might have been loitering in my memory. Every time the memory man tries to come from the shadows, this written man, this invention you’ve already met, steps in front of him. Like a naughty child in a photograph, a Branko, jumping in front of his meeker brother to annoy him, waving his arms, bullying him out of the picture.

Now who’s to say whether this painter, this tall man in overalls, was even tall, was even wearing overalls? And who’s to say what was in his mind as he finished stirring his paint and stepped back to look at the wall?

A ‘pentimento’, in the jargon of art historians, is a place where the painter ‘repented’ or changed his mind, revealed with the passage of time as the concealing paint ages and becomes transparent. In her book Pentimento, Lillian Hellman took this process as a metaphor for the writing of a memoir. The appearance of the original conception and the second thought, superimposed within the same frame, is ‘a way of seeing and then seeing again’.

There is something to be said for falling back on the fallible memory, the way one falls back on a soft bed at the end of a working day.

This is the version of the painter I will persevere with: he is a sensitive man, not a butcher. It pains him that he has to wipe out this mural, which reminds him of his own past. When he stands in the glow of these colours, he feels the light of childhood on his skin. But he is a pragmatist too, and has to put food on his table. He steps back to look at the wall, to get the whole thing clear in his mind, to let it settle on the damp soil of his memory. He knows that he is the last person who will ever see it like this. Then he takes up his roller and gets on with the job.

In Vienna, at the end of the nineteen-twenties, Elias Canetti befriended a young invalid named Thomas Marek. Marek, who was almost totally paralysed, spent his days in a wagon outside the house at No. 70 Erzbischofgasse, reading a book propped on the pillow beside him and turning the pages with his tongue. He was always intrigued to hear from the able-bodied what it felt like to run, to skip, to jump over hurdles. But what fascinated him most of all was falling. Once, when Canetti tripped and fell in his presence, he was so delighted that the writer resolved to fall again, from time to time, just to amuse him. And he did just that, he says, through the course of their friendship. He became so adept at stumbling and falling ‘credibly’, without hurting himself, that Marek suggested he should write an essay on the subject, called ‘The Art of Falling’. I wish that he had written this essay, I would like to read it.

Johannesburg is justly renowned for its scenic waterways. The finest body of water in my part of town is generally held to be the pond at Rhodes Park, established when the city was young on the site of an existing vlei, but I have always preferred Bruma Lake, which replaced the old sewage treatment works on the banks of the Jukskei. When the lake was first excavated in the eighties, as the focal point for a new shopping centre, there were teething troubles: the Jukskei kept washing down garbage and clogging the drainage system. Not long after the grand opening they had to drain the water to make modifications to the filters, and the system has worked well ever since. In 2000 and 2001, when the Bruma serial killers were at work in the eastern suburbs, the bodies of several men were discovered in the water, and the police had the lake drained to search for clues. It was a salutary reminder that the lake was artificial, that it was nothing but a reservoir lined with plastic. There was something fiercely reassuring about that reeking muddy hole in the ground, and it was almost a pity when the frogmen and the waders in gumboots had finished scouring the silty bottom, in vain, and the thing could be filled up with water again.

In Johannesburg, the Venice of the South, the backdrop is always a man-made one. We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places. We are happy taking the air on the Randburg Waterfront, with its pasteboard wharves and masts, or watching the plastic ducks bob in the stream at Montecasino, or eating our surf ’n turf on Cleopatra’s Barge in the middle of Caesar’s.

When Bruma Lake was brimming again and the worst of the stench had dispersed, Minky and I had supper down on the quay at Fishermen’s Village. Afterwards we took a stroll over the little pedestrian replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, with its stays and cables picked out in lights, and watched the reflections dancing on the dead water.

A schoolgirl turns in from a side street a block away and comes towards me. A little girl of nine or ten, in a Jeppe Prep uniform and short socks, with a satchel on her back. A perfectly ordinary little girl on her way home from school. Or she would be, perfectly ordinary, I mean, if she were not wearing a diving mask and snorkel. Coming towards me, on a spring afternoon in Roberts Avenue, snorkelling through the slanting sunlight.

Assuming that her performance must be for the benefit of spectators like me, for the woman sweeping the stoep at the old-age home or the barber under his canvas awning, I expect her to be giggling or suppressing a giggle. But her face behind the glass is serious. The snorkel tube is transparent, the mask is rimmed with pink rubber, her eyes look out with the astounded, strained expression of a diver who has just sunk below the surface for the first time and discovered a second world. She gazes at me as if I am a fish, a creature covered in spines, trailing poisonous filaments, jagged with exotic colour, and passes me, moving slowly through the air, with bubbles of anxiety breaking around her.

I walk on for a few paces, then glance over my shoulder. She will be looking back to giggle at my bemused reaction, I am sure. Or her skinny shoulders will be shaking, at least. But she is neither looking back nor laughing. She is simply going on, her head drifting slowly from one side to the other, her open palms floating back on the air. There are steps cut into the verge, where the tram used to stop, and she goes slowly down them to the kerb, holding onto the metal railing, puts a foot in the roadway, fords fearlessly out into the traffic on Roberts Avenue.

My feet have turned to lead, my head is round and deaf. She has submerged the world, and me in it. The light streams like water over everything, the grass on the verges shifts in currents of astonishment, as I press on into the deep end of the city.

I found Sunset by Marios on a Yeoville street corner, left out for the garbage men, along with an illustrated edition of A Nest of the Gentry by Turgenev. My first impression–that two more ill-matched objects would be hard to imagine–proved to be superficial. Despite the silken thread of the bookmark and the richly textured, cream-coloured endpapers, the book, produced by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1951, is poorly designed and printed. The moody theatrical illu-strations (by Konstantin Rudakov) would have appealed to Marios. His painting is pure kitsch. It shows a tropical island, with palms and seagulls in silhouette against a sky of layered oils like a complicated cocktail. For many years, I contemplated turning it into an art work by Neil Goedhals. I have the rubber stamp with Goedhals’s name, there is an inviting patch of beige beach sand in the foreground waiting for such an imprint, it would be simple. But I always baulked when I saw that meticulously painted ‘Marios’ coiled like a serpent in the bottom right-hand corner. Now I have given Sunset away to the Little Eden charity shop (I’ve kept the Turgenev). I miss it already. If I didn’t have foreign exchange to organize, I would drive out to Edenvale and try to bargain it back.

The SPCA book shop in Edenvale is open on Saturday mornings only. Volunteers, nearly always women, sell the books donated to the Society from a ramshackle room adjoining the kennels. Sheep graze in the paddock next to the parking lot, while a lumbering tortoise scrapes its shell against the fence. Occasionally, a dog will get into the shop and clatter around in a frenzy of delight, sniffng everywhere, bumping into boxes of magazines, dusting the lower shelves with its tail, mad with the scent of ten thousand dog lovers on a million pages. The combination of second-hand books and stray animals is unnerving.

I have employed the Gorilla for some years now, engaging and disengaging it once, twice, a dozen times a day. ‘Never leave it off,’ my dad warned me. ‘Even if you’re just popping into the shop to buy a newspaper. It only takes a minute to steal a car.’ The action has become second nature. I reach for the lock on the floor beside the seat, hook the pigtail over the rim, lower the arm, clamp the jaws. My mastery is complete. In a few seconds of smoothly habitual movement, I extend my power over my property, laying claim to it in my absence, seizing it in leathery paws with an iron grip; and then I withdraw that power again and reduce it to its proper, meagre dimensions. I can do it in the dark. I could probably do it with one hand tied behind my back. I am a persuasive advertisement for the product and the security it offers.

After an absence of six months, the owner of the bathroom scale is back in the parking lot at the Darras Centre, renting it out to passers-by. To protect the device from wear, he has covered it in bubble wrap secured with packaging tape, leaving a window of clear plastic over the dial.

‘How much do I weigh?’ asks a scruffy white boy, stepping onto the scale and looking down between his dirty feet.

The proprietor of the weighing stall leans over to look. ‘Thirty-two kilos.’

‘What does it cost?’

‘Fifty cents,’ the man says wearily.

‘Phew! That much!’

And the boy gets off quickly, grateful that he is not expected to pay.

A letter to my cousin in China (a film by Henion Han about a Chinese family in Africa)

I Henion and his father travel to the island of Hainan in the South China Sea. Chi Ho Han was born here in the village of Wenchang. As a young man of eighteen he left home to seek work, travelling first to Singapore and then finding work on ships. The Second World War left him stranded in Johannesburg, where he spent most of his life, before emigrating to Los Angeles in 1990. He has been dreaming for nearly sixty years of returning to Hainan, his ‘real home’.

But the homecoming is not what he expected. The island has changed, he cannot place friends from his distant childhood or recall the times they shared. The people he meets are equally unsure of him: he cannot explain where he has been or who he is. With the recognition that he does not belong here, that the gap between them will never be bridged, his bewilderment grows. After a day of frustrating questions and half-understood explanations, he is exhausted and confused. Rather than returning him joyfully to the remembered past, the visit has cast him adrift in an uncertain present.

II Henion and his father journey to Taiwan to retrieve the family bones. Henion’s mother and grandmother are both buried on the outskirts of Taipei. His father wants to disinter their bones and take them with him to his new home in Los Angeles. And there is something else: he has been diagnosed with cancer. As he prepares for his own death, he wishes to gather the dead around him.

The mother’s tomb is easily found. There is a neat slab surfaced with small white tiles, a lettered plaque on the retaining wall, a memorial portrait. Twenty years have stained the wall with lichen and damp, and the portrait is faded and pitted, but the slab is as shiny as a kitchen floor. A workman in a checked shirt and bright red baseball cap breaks off the edges of the slab with a sledgehammer and levers up the panels to expose the coffin. Then he tears away the lid with a pickaxe. Lying on its side within, as if resting on a pillow, is a small skull. This moment of revelation sends the old man reeling. The workman gathers tibia and fibula, rib and scapula and skull, and puts them in a white bag. A denture remains behind in the wet black pulp.

The grandmother’s tomb is more difficult. They expect to find a well-tended and orderly cemetery, where it will be a simple matter to identify the tomb, but instead the place is overgrown and neglected, the paths choked by jungle fern and bamboo. They have a photograph showing a tomb with a convex lid, a small white vase at its foot, but even the caretaker does not recognize it. Their search reveals nothing. Then a family friend who attended the funeral arrives to help them, and they find the tomb in the undergrowth, the site marked miraculously by the white vase, standing clean and whole in the tangle of roots and leaves.

III Henion and his sister convey the bones of their mother and grandmother to a crematorium. This is no discreet furnace, where the bones slide politely out of sight and are reduced to ashes behind the scenes. Instead, the cremator scoops handfuls of the bones from a tray into a wok. He squats, in the age-old posture of the artisan, and blazes away at the bones with a blowtorch. In the blue breath of the torch the bones whiten and flake. Is it chance that the cremator and his assistant are costumed so well for their work? From a distance, her blouse has a bony print, all knuckles and vertebrae (from closer up it appears to be writing). He is wearing an abstractly ashen check. They are on close terms not just with the bones, but with the light and the air. Ash and smoke wreathe through the sockets of the skull, fragments of bone and ash are gathered on a sheet of newspaper like crumbs after a meal. There is mortality on the air, they are breathing it in. Bones stand around in basins and tubs, as matter-of-factly as clothes at the laundry or vegetables in the kitchen. The young woman uses tongs and brushes; the hands of the man are bare. The mark of a craftsman. What carpenter would put the unfeeling fabric of a glove between himself and the grain of the wood?

When the heat has made the bones brittle, he smashes them into small pieces. The splintering is unspeakably violent, it makes you aware of the bones in your hands, the teeth in your mouth. The skeleton, especially the skull, preserves the semblance of a unique human form: we can imagine the flesh on this armature. (We know the imaging processes by which forensic scientists–or are they artists?–put flesh and features on the skulls of those who have been dead for years, even for centuries.) So the pulverizing of the skull seems like a long-delayed second death, an obliteration of identity more final than the original burial. The last echo of the physical body fades away. Now even the bones have been reduced to anonymous substance.

The cremator funnels the bones into two funerary urns, gathers the splinters in a pink plastic dustpan. He grinds the fragments smaller with the handle of his hammer, and his assistant flicks the lip of the urn with her brush. Finally, he wraps the urn in a golden cloth. The young woman, with the elegant ease of a magician’s assistant, lifts the fourth corner into his grasp. With a practised flourish, a magical sleight of hand, he ties a bow in it. Then he stoops, as if he is going to undo the knot with his teeth or devour something, but the movement is involuntary, a sign of the effort required to pull the knot tight.

IV The final scene of the film: Henion takes a family portrait in Wenchang. We look at these people through the camera, sensing the film-maker standing among us. Thirty villagers are gathered together before a doorway. In the middle, an old man in a white shirt and glasses, whose belonging is uncertain. Someone calls to them: ‘You must sit closer together!’ Perhaps Henion is making the appropriate gestures with his hands, nudging them into the frame. They shuffle tighter in, closing the spaces between them, absorbing the old man into a collective body. Then Henion appears suddenly in the corner of the camera’s eye as he rushes to take the place that has been kept for him in the group.

The camera keeps rolling.

They gaze out, shuffling and commenting, settling down. For a moment they fall silent and solemn, even the babies stop their squalling and gurgling, but as the image fades to black, they burst out laughing. Perhaps it is the laughter of recognition? They recognize themselves as a family, as a community of being, for no other reason than that they are all side by side, contained within a single frame. Or perhaps it is relief? Having held still for the camera, which supposedly immortalizes them, they are released back into life.

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A stoep in Good Hope Street. The deep-blue garden walls hold a precise measure of the twilight still. The smell of grass is quenching after a summer day, the dusk lays a cool hand on the back of your neck. We are talking, my friends and I, with our bare feet propped on the wall of the stoep, our cane chairs creaking. We have been talking and laughing for hours, putting our predicaments in their place, finding ways to keep our balance in a tide of change. We could fetch fresh beer glasses from the door of the fridge, but these warm ones, stickily fingerprinted and smelling of yeast, suit this satiated conversation better. We speak the same language.

This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on the skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.

The women come back from the pool at Jeppe Girls’ High with their hair still wet, with the damp outlines of their swimming costumes showing through their cotton dresses. (Sally teaches history at the school and has a key to the gate.) The kids are crunching potato chips from the corner shop. They smell of salt and vinegar and chlorine. The suns of our own childhoods fall on their freckled arms.

‘Look!’ says Nicky, feigning surprise, as they come up the steps. ‘Three drunk men.’

‘Wise men,’ says Chas.

‘We’ve been exploring the limits of our disgruntlement,’ I say.

But Dave says that’s unfair. I make it sound as if we’re going in circles, when in truth we’re going forward. And he tells the story about Little Jannie–in Dave’s stories the schoolboys are always called ‘Little Jannie’–who arrives late for class one morning.

‘Why are you late, Jannie?’ the teacher wants to know. ‘And it better be good.’

‘Well, sir, for every two steps I took forward, I went three steps back.’

‘Really!’ the teacher says with a laugh of triumph. ‘Then how did you ever get to school at all?’

‘I turned around, sir, and tried to go home.’

Wood’s Self Storage consists of five long salmon-coloured buildings, each comprising two rows of units, back to back, identified by a letter of the alphabet. Each row contains twenty numbered units: a ‘unit’ is a storage space of 60 square metres, roughly the size of a garage, with a rolling metal door (attributed to the Krazi-Door Company) and a steeply canted roof. The alleys between the rows are paved with interlocking bricks, and the entire complex is surrounded by walls and electrified fences, not the usual stave of strands but elaborately wired constructs as twangy as zithers. The caretaker lives in a bunker on the edge of the property, where several new units are under construction. They cannot keep up with the demand, he says. Our unit is designated as F13.

I like the area. In the shop-soiled veld around these scatterings of factories and warehouses you could stumble on the essence of Joburg–if such diffuse, fleeting qualities exist in concentrate–bursting into the air like the sap of a plant crushed thoughtlessly underfoot. Or it may be wafting less urgently from the spare poetry of the landmarks and the street names here: Rand Airport Road, Simmer and Jack, Refinery Road.

By the time we arrive at Wood’s, André and his workers have already unloaded everything into the alley in front of the unit: tables with chairs upturned on them as if it’s closing time, shelves, desks, bed, fridge, trunks, boxes. Suitcases stuck with labels to forgotten destinations. A portrait in a frame, averting its eyes like a bashful café patron. I hate to see my things stacked up in public; but the pavement outside my house was infinitely worse than this semi-private place. A sort of walled community for goods.

Minky and I pick our way through the boxes labelled with thick black Koki. Kitchen–crockery–fragile!!! MS: summer clothes. IV: manuscripts (Missing Persons). MS: study–stationery. But mainly, the boxes say: IV books–MS books–IV books.

‘Three or four boxes of books,’ says André, ‘is normal. Ten or twelve would be unusual, excessive. But this…it’s unreasonable, man. If I’d known we were moving a bladdy library…’

He’s preparing me for the surcharge, and watching the workers sweating under the writing man’s burden, I know I won’t be in a position to argue.

André has done this a hundred times. He has a special relationship with Wood’s–indeed, they recommended him to us. He has cast an eye over our goods, and as extravagant as the quantities of books and papers seem to be, he knows it will all go in.

‘Are you sure?’ I ask. ‘What if it doesn’t fit?’

‘Please, don’t even think about it. I once packed the entire contents of a big double-storey, one of those old Houghton mansions, into a unit like this. They said it couldn’t be done. But in the end there was so much space left over we could have set up a ping-pong table in there and played a game.’

So now it’s just a question of packing well, of arriving at an elegant, sensible arrangement.

André has a rugby player’s moustache, and he’s wearing a tiny pair of shorts of the kind you see when they rescreen the Currie Cup finals from the eighties, but he’s not the physical type. He messed up his knees (he doesn’t say how) and now he can’t lift so much as a hatbox. He is a conductor of bearers. He stands in the alley, with the goods ranged around him, facing into the unit, and directs the bearers to one item after another. ‘Bring vir my daardie groen tafeltjie daar: sit hom links agter, onder die stoel…Bring vir my nog ’n boks…Bring vir my die groot stoel met die rooi kussing.’ He is constantly appraising the goods out here, scattered on the brick, and the goods in there, stacked in neat and logical configurations, and calculating the balance between the two. Another layer here? A buttress there? He has a sculptor’s sense of negative space: he can see at a glance that this coffee table, stood up on end, will fit into the space between those two boxes, with its legs through the back of that chair. He is assembling a huge, three-dimensional puzzle, filling the space methodically and precisely. He must take weight and accessibility into account too. Never so much as scratched a surface, he says, let alone broken something. He is so still when he gives his orders that he appears to have memorized the location of every box, bag and item of furniture. He seldom gestures; a pointing finger would seem like vulgar overstatement. He never raises his voice; all his commands are delivered in the same even, polite tone, so that they seem like the merest suggestions. The workers have absorbed his style, they fetch and carry and stack with the same busy composure, padding softly to and fro, suppressing their groans when they heave up my boxes of dictionaries and manuals, the Uniform Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Complete Works of Joseph Conrad in odds and sods. ‘Bring vir my die rottangmandjie…Nog twee groot bokse…Die klein koffertjie: sit hom vir my bo-op die kombuisstoel daar agter…Die suitcase…Die blou trommeltjie.’ The space fills up. I am more and more convinced that it will not fit. But in the end it goes in comfortably. The last few items are slotted in. The computers are stacked on the tall bookshelf on the left, where we will be able to reach them easily when–if–we return; the concertina file of personal papers, the briefcases, the boxes marked ‘desk drawers’ go under the kitchen table; two standing lamps and a bicycle in the last scrap of floor space, and it’s done.

It is surprising to discover that all one’s worldly goods can be assembled together in such a confined space. Countless people have more, of course, and countless others have less. But this is a peculiarly satisfying estate: a unit’s worth. Perhaps that is the genius of André, the removal man, the great leveller? To ensure that no matter how much one possesses, or how little, it finally amounts to a unit. Neither more nor less. Having accomplished this miracle again, for another grateful client, he tactfully departs.

Now we are alone with ourselves, with this concentrated, material sense of ourselves. Aardse goedere. We stand there for a while mesmerized. Then we roll down the metal door and lock it, insert the extra metal clip and bolt it. I put the key in my pocket. We step back and look at our unit, in a row with nineteen others, in a block with four other blocks. It is a filing system. I have put my whole life on file.

While we’ve been preparing to leave the country, I have been tempted to get rid of things, but Minky has sensibly restrained me. We’ll just have to buy them again when–if–we come back, she says. What are we going to sit on if you give away the chairs? You’ll need a desk, you’ll need a bed. What’s the point? And she’s right, of course. I would get rid of every useful thing for which I feel no affection and keep a lot of junk we really could live without.

But self storage is a perfect solution. Now I have everything I need, but I do not have to live with it. I am a man of property, but I no longer need to defend it. Everything is contained, everything is contingent. I have created a community of objects, touching one another reassuringly. If ever I need something, I’ll simply come here and get it, as easily as a secretary flipping through a filing cabinet. I’ll send someone else to fetch it for me. ‘Bring vir my…’

In this orderly universe in which everything has a place and nothing can be mislaid, only Fehler’s hard and shiny trommel, embedded among my flimsy boxes in the warm interior of the sealed unit, is not at rest. Why did I hold on to this other life? Did I hope to ballast my own record with one that was weightier, more complete? This proximity repulses me.

‘We are stories.’ It’s a notion so simple even a child could understand it. Would that it ended there. But we are stories within stories. Stories within stories within stories. We recede endlessly, framed and reframed, until we are unreadable to ourselves.

The plane takes off. I am looking forward to seeing Joburg from the air. It is always surprising to discover how huge and scintillating the city is, that it is one place, beaded together with lights. As the aircraft lifts you out of it, above it, it becomes, for a moment, comfortingly explicable. Personal connections dissolve, and you read your home from a distance, like one of De Certeau’s imperious voyeur-gods. Lionel Abrahams, flying over Joburg by night, saw the ‘velvet obliteration’ of all his landmarks: ‘Everything familiar had been forgiven.’ But there is another, more intimate comfort in the vastness: it assures you that someone, inevitably, is looking back. At one of those millions of windows, on one of those thousands of stoeps and street corners, someone must be standing, looking up at the plane, at the small, rising light that is you, tracing your trajectory, following your flight path. But we have hardly lifted into air when the plane banks to the left and the lights dip below the horizon of the window ledge. It is sudden enough to be alarming, this lurch and slide, but I am merely annoyed. I look across the dim sloping interior, but the dull-witted economizer in the window seat opposite has pulled down the shade. Through the other windows I catch the briefest sparkles and flares. The plane continues to bank. We are going to spiral out of here, I can just see it, rising like a leaf in a whirlwind until the entire city has been lost in the darkness below. Disappointment wells up in me, disproportionate and childishly ominous. This failure to see Johannesburg whole, for the last time, will cast a pall over the future. Tears start to my eyes. And then just as suddenly the plane levels out and the city rises in the window, as I knew it would, a web of light on the veld, impossibly vast and unnaturally beautiful.

…