As usual, it took me hours to fall asleep, meaning I overslept and was late and only thought of putting on a quartet, the eleventh, halfway to the capital. This somehow helped me focus on the old man and got me thinking about a creature I’d once met.
Oliver had also been a war survivor. He was the uncle of my first intense flame, B, at varsity and he had been in an explosion. After the war Uncle Oliver had walked into the Standard Bank for his first job interview, stopped, turned around and went home to spend the rest of his life having breakfast, lunch and supper with his mother. These rituals were interspersed with tea at precisely ten and three. He would also go for two walks a day, one in the early morning and one in the late afternoon. All the small seaside town’s dogs would follow Uncle Oliver on these walks. The rest of his day was spent reading the classics. Homer, Tolstoy, Dickens. That was it and at least my father wasn’t like that, I’d thought, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. All I knew was that he too would never stoop to talk to anybody about his problem because a) he would say there wasn’t a problem and b) those people spoke rubbish anyway.
Right now, however, I had something else to worry about as I got to the old man’s house at the end of the ultra-quiet second movement of the serioso: he wasn’t standing at the gates. And they were locked with a small chain. This got me fretting about his safety again. As a child I had spent sleepless nights worrying that he would die, but now I’d more or less accepted that he would “go” with nothing being resolved between the two of us. Why should it? If it hadn’t happened between my mother and I, who in many respects were closer, why then between him and me? But the thought of finding him dead in his back yard or kitchen was still not a pleasant one, so I parked outside, locked up, put my hand on one of the gates and swung over. That’s when I saw what had distracted him from waiting for me faithfully, worrying.
It came running towards me as soon as my feet touched the driveway: another canine nightmare, another dachshund, charging at me, tan ears flapping, barking as if I had just committed the most appalling crime imaginable. I shouted at the low bastard and took aim to kick its head through its delayed arse, whereupon it promptly lay down and proceeded to spray a neon yellow fluid all over itself and the paved rose bricks. The old man came out through the middle door, looking as pleased as pie.
“What the hell is this?” I shouted, distantly aware of the fact that not only was I adjusting my curses, but I was doing so in a way that sounded scarily like him.
“I’ve decided to call him Howfy.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Listen to him when he barks. He’s saying his name is Howfy!”
“Jesus,” I said, whereupon the creep jumped back onto its feet and started barking at me again, as passionate and almond-eyed as its new owner.
“Howfy!” the old man shouted, and the pooch duly melted and crawled up to his new master’s Hush Puppies, one seriously traumatised quadripet.
The old man had changed in another way too. Instead of wearing the usual flannel trousers, golf shirt and check jacket, he had now switched to a pair of baggy black woollen pants, a frayed black V-neck jersey and a grey windbreaker, its blanket-like lining hanging down in raggedy strips. To top it all, he wore a beige beanie that resembled a tea cosy, which kept his fine, silver hairs in place. The only thing that remained of the old, external uniform was the HPs.
“That jacket’s on its last legs,” I said.
He ignored that statement and, after we’d made the coffee, done the bargain speech and proceeded to the back apron, said: “Can you believe it?”
“What, Dad?”
“I was at the doctor’s and this bastard comes in and says he’s going to have Howfy put down. ‘I’ll take him,’ I said, right there and then. And now he’s here with me, aren’t you my dog?” the old man said, getting all gooey. And said canine looked up at his saviour with soulful eyes, his tail whipping your hung-over leg so hard you want to puke.
“You know, there’s a special place in hell for people who abuse women, children and animals.”
“So you’ve said, but what were you doing at the doctor’s?”
“Agh …”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing …”
“Dad, what is it?”
“He wants me to have an eye operation,” he said, looking very uncomfortable.
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve only got about fifteen per cent vision in my one eye. Everything’s milky. It feels like I’m seeing everything through cellophane.”
“This is news to me.”
He gave me his usual dead moment.
“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
“No, I’ll just walk over.”
“Dad, this is serious.”
“They say there’s only a small chance of it being successful. My eye will be in a bandage for two weeks. I’m not allowed to bend or pick up anything heavy.”
“Then that’s what you must do.”
“Bladdy optometrist gave me specs and they helped bugger all, too.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ve got to work.”
“I don’t mind taking you, Dad. In fact, I’ll be happy to,” I lied.
“No, you don’t want to get into your bosses’ bad books. They might fire you. He said he’d take me,” the old man said, jerking his head in the direction of his kind neighbour, Vernon Brown.
“Are you sure?”
“Ja.”
Silence.
“So how have you been,” he suddenly said.
“Not good,” I said, surprised. “Did you hear about that woman who was tortured to death with her own iron?”
He nodded bitterly: “They don’t want us here.”
“Who?”
“The kaffirs. Who do you think?”
“Dad, you can’t talk like that anymore. You never could. In fact, if you ever use that word again you won’t see me. Okay? I fought hard to get blacks into power, if only in my head. I work with them, for them, and I’m quite happy to do so. In fact, if it wasn’t for ‘them’ I wouldn’t have a job and I wouldn’t be able to drive over here on Sundays. Okay?”
He didn’t like it, but nodded grudgingly.
“This isn’t something I learned at university,” I continued. “Do you remember how I used to hitchhike around the country, how I went to Zimbabwe?”
He nodded.
“Black people helped me as much as white people did. In fact, they helped me more because they didn’t have any reason to. They didn’t see me as representative of someone or something, they saw me as a fellow human being and treated me accordingly. If anybody threatened my safety it would have been whites, because I didn’t fit into their neat little compartments.”
He was silent.
“Do you think it’s only whites who are being targeted now?” I persisted.
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s not true. That same day I read about a township girl who’d been raped and killed because she was too young to have a child grant. Both her parents were dead from AIDS. She was trying to parent her younger siblings.”
“Bastards. Bastards.”
“The point is, it’s mostly blacks who are being targeted. I blame the people who allow this to happen,” I said. “Their own leaders.”
“What about those who vote for them?”
“Would you vote for a white after what happened?”
He didn’t like this either, so he said it wasn’t going to get better.
“So what do we do?”
“You must get out of here. Go and start a new life somewhere else.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got my dog, haven’t I, my dog?”
Whip, whip, whip.