Someone – a driver, a pedestrian – had carelessly flicked a burning cigarette away and the butt had landed next to a bone-dry tuft of yellow winter grass. It had lain smouldering there for a while before a faint Highveld breeze had made the tuft’s fringes touch the butt’s heat and started smoking, then crackling into life. The flame spread to the next tuft and soon the fire had a little life of its own, smoking blue, spreading rapidly under that distant but unobstructed sun. Soon the fire was a quarter of an acre big, then a hectare, roaring towards the highway and greedily licking at it and trying to reach across as I drove through under a pungent black cloud.
The old man was standing at the gates with an equally dark cloud circling his silver head as I passed him and went to the back. After getting my hand squashed, I asked him how things were going.
“Up to shit thanks.”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“They sent me a letter and said they want to take my pension away. I’ve been worried sick.”
“You’re looking pretty good for someone who worries so much,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Let’s have a look,” I said, relieved that we weren’t going to go through the whole mugs-and-eats and you’re-late-and-haven’t-shaven routines. We went to the kitchen and he gave me the Department of Internal Affairs letter.
“I put the kettle on,” he said, by way of contributing.
“Good,” I said.
“Do you know how much I paid for this mug?”
“Let me just read this, Dad.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking lost.
Silence.
“All they’re saying,” I said, “is that you have to prove to them that you’re still alive.”
“Of course I’m still alive!”
“I know that, but they don’t.”
“So what must I do?”
“We must just go to the cop shop and have you certified.”
“Let’s go right away.”
“Do you know why they want this,” I asked.
“No.”
“Because people claim against their dead relatives’ pensions.”
“Bastards,” he said. “Bastards.”
“People are desperate.”
“No, they’re just bladdy dishonest!”
“Get your ID.”
“I’ve got it right here,” he said, feeling in his jacket pocket, then the other, then the inside pockets, getting panicky.
“Now where the bladdy …? I could have sworn …”
“It’s on the table, Dad.”
“You know,” he said gravely, “sometimes I think I’m going out of my mind.”
“You’re just getting a little forgetful, and that’s at your age. I often find myself running downstairs, standing in the living room and wondering what the hell I’m doing there. Then I go back upstairs and, as I’m about to sit down and write again, I remember I wanted to get a CD to listen to for reference purposes.”
He didn’t react to that, as usual, so we drove down to the police station and got the old man certified and, as we got back into the car, he said: “Did you see that cop?”
“Which one, Dad?”
“That one standing there.”
“What about him?”
“Look how fat the bastard is.”
I had to agree it didn’t look good.
“And he’s smoking – in uniform!”
“Times have changed, Dad.”
“I have never smoked a single cigarette in my life! Not in uniform or out of it! Nor have I had a single drink!”
“And you didn’t sleep with any other woman except Ma.”
The old man looked slightly taken aback by that.
“Do you want to go to her grave?” I said, the cemetery being just down the road.
“No. I’m not in the right frame of mind.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Let’s go and have some coffee.”
“That’s a very good idea,” he said as we left the new station, which was opposite a vast old-age home, situated on a piece of land that used to be a lush expanse of Highveld.
“How’d you like to live there?”
“Over my dead body,” he said. “If I die it’ll be in my own house and they will carry me out of there, feet first.”
If he died, not when.
“But do you know what?” he continued.
“No, Dad,” I said, wondering what was coming.
“I worked for thutty-six years to get a pension. Then I was declared medically unfit because of that horse.”
“What horse?”
“A horse threw me before I even went to the war. My neck has been calcifying ever since.”
I remembered that he’d had to stay at home for a year while the medical board decided on his fate. He had stayed within hearing distance of the telephone for a year of working week days, but then that wasn’t so unusual; he never went out anyway. Over weekends he’d still go into the garage, put his neck in a leather halter and creepily hang there, stretching his spine.
“So I was boarded, got my pension and left the police. And do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“The day after I left the cops I started working for the State Tender Board and stayed there for another eighteen years. Do you know what that means?” he said, eyes glinting triumphantly.
“No, Dad,” I said, wondering about what Jay had said concerning Kay.
“It means I get two pensions!” he laughed.
“Amazing,” I said, not meaning it at the time.
“One big and the other not so big. But all those bastards who smirked behind my back about what a menial job I was doing: where are they now? Dead, most of them. Or sick. Or broke. Or both!”
It was true that most people his age were not self-sufficient. In fact, everything he said was annoyingly true.
We drove home, went through the whole panic of finding the keys for the security gate and back door, so that we could finally go through the coffee-mug-and-eats speech to end up in the warm winter sun on the cement apron.
“Are you still walking around the yard?”
“Ja. But I only managed going around once this morning.”
“Why’s that?”
“I got this band of pain across my chest.”
“That would be your heart.”
“Other days I can make up to ten times.”
“Well, you’re not a chicken anymore.”
“No,” he said, that storm still brewing around his head.
“You used to walk around the perimeter of the concentration camp as well …”
“Summer, winter, everything,” he said, juddering his left foot and clicking his right thumb nail.
The hayfork wound in Italy had given him malaria, somehow, and so he’d never worked for the Italians. But then he and his fellow POWs had been transported to Eastern Germany soon after, where they weren’t required to work. They were just held. The Germans had even given him some experimental medicine that had cured him of the malaria.
“Didn’t you get depressed – claustrophobic?”
“Not really. But others did. One night I was on toilet duty and someone said I better go and check on Rudolph Hendricks, who was a poet. He had written a beautiful poem called ‘The Mountains of the Moon’.”
“So what did you say to him?”
“Nothing. He’d hanged himself.”
“Jeez!”
Click. Click. Click.
He had often told me about how he’d been the richest man in the camp, saving up all his cigarettes so that he could get luxuries like condensed milk. Then one fine day he’d received a pipe in his Red Cross parcel and it had never left his mouth during his waking hours for three and a half years.
“But I never smoked. Never … Do you still smoke?”
“Ja.”
“It’ll kill you,” he said.
“I know.”
He was somewhere else and I couldn’t work out why, so I just continued asking him questions.
“But how did the Germans treat you in general?”
He stopped juddering his foot and worrying his nail.
“Generally, very well …”
“But?”
He was quiet for a while and then said: “We used to play sport every day, summer and winter. One day we were playing cricket and the ball rolled into one of the officer’s yards, which were strictly verboten. Old Johnny van Heerden put his hand through the fence to retrieve the ball, the officer took out his Luger –”
“– and?”
“– he shot him through the head,” the old man said for the first and only time, his voice shaking. “Like a dog.”