The sun rose at 6:27am on 13 November 2007 over the municipality of Centurion.
At 123 Harry Smith Avenue the old man whose wife and sisters had called him Son was awake already, for he was an old soldier, an old warrior and an old worrier. His dog, which had lain next to his head through the fitful night, needed to go out and relieve itself. The old man got up, probably cursed as he had his whole married life, and opened the door’s two halves and the flimsy security gate. The sun streamed in from beyond the Waterkloof air base and the dog went outside and did its business. The old man put on the kettle and started preparing their oats for the day. Then he probably went to the toilet to relieve himself too.
When he came back into the kitchen the dog was done and the old man didn’t close the doors or gate; he liked the sun shining into his kitchen, even though the gate would not have blocked the sun in any meaningful way. He and the dog had their porridge and tea and possibly watched the news on the scratchy black-and-white TV in the bedroom across the passage. At about 8:30am the phone rang down the dark passage and the old man probably cursed that too. Then he possibly switched the TV off and went to answer the phone to talk to his Empangeni sister, and the dog faithfully followed him.
Outside, the street was fairly empty, for school had just started. The unlocked gates opened and closed. Feet started walking down the brick driveway, probably two pairs, probably male. Their owners didn’t know or care that a black-and-white photograph had been taken on that driveway, long before the new bricks and rough heart had been laid. The photograph was of an upright, sun-tanned man and a scowling boy. The man’s hair was combed straight back and was already going grey, but he looked like a matinee idol. He wore a light-brown check jacket, an open-neck white shirt, Oxford trousers with turn-ups and his leather shoes were polished. His big, brown right hand was resting on his son’s chest. The boy was shyly leaning against his father’s leg, his feet turned inwards. He had a big, dark, square head and was squinting into the sun. He was wearing a bright red cowboy shirt and blue jeans that were too big for him; they probably had to last a while. They were rolled up at the bottom and rested on veldskoens.
The boy liked to think it was his mother who took the photograph of the two people she loved most in this world, even though they hurt her so much.
The feet kept walking down the driveway, over the brick heart and past the garage where the lifeless Valiant now stood and the bottle-green Chev used to, the car in which the man in the photograph used to take the boy down to the military base every Saturday afternoon. This was the highlight of the boy’s week and he loved the movies, but he desperately wanted his father to come with him. One day he’d thrown a colossal tantrum about how no one ever wanted to do anything with him, about how he had no friends, and the old man had come into that bughouse with him. The boy liked to remember that it was the World War Two film in which an Italian father and son are on the run from the Nazis. They hide in a hollow in a forest and the soldiers come with sword-long spikes, poking the earth to feel if there are any shallow caves. A soldier stops right above them and pushes the blade down and the only thing the father can do is put his hand in the way so that it feels like there is solid earth beneath the soldier. The father shudders with pain while he holds his other hand over his son’s wide-eyed mouth. The soldier pulls the blade out and of course the ground wipes away the father’s blood as the feet of the men passed the side of the garage and onto the back lawn.
This is where the old man used to make their potjiekos and the boy used to re-enact the films he had seen, falling off the wooden steeds his father had made for him, playing the cowboys and Indians, for he had no one to play with him, so he had to make do, dying a thousand deaths on both sides. Uncle Vern had once said if those deaths had been real the back lawn would have been a veritable bloodbath.
The feet now stepped onto the cement apron, passing the silver 45-gallon drum in which the man in the photograph had bathed the boy of a balmy summer’s evening, after the boy had scraped his knees and elbows bloody, dying, his eyes swollen and leaky from his grass and dust allergies, his chest wheezing, yet that dusky world had been timeless and filled with endless possibilities.
The feet approached the three steps leading onto the back stoep, passing the laundry on the left, which may have been locked, unless the old man had forgotten to close it, for he had become forgetful of late. He had sometimes bathed his son in there too, standing him in one of the stone sinks and letting him son rub his feet over the serrated part meant for washing. The son had once, and only once, painted a symbol on the inside wall. He had seen that symbol in The Sound of Music and had painted a Shoeshine swastika on the wall and the old man has asked him whether he knew what it meant. Sensing something was terribly wrong, the boy had said no. The man had told his son that he had been prepared to die fighting against everything that symbol represented, and the boy had felt a deep sense of shame.
Meanwhile, the old man probably lost his temper with his sister, much as he loved her, for she insisted on telling him what to eat and do, and now the feet went up the three steps and their owners saw the back door was open. So they went into the kitchen where the son had once walked into the kitchen, yawning, as the dog started barking. The boy’s mother had made her husband bacon, eggs and toast. It was unusual for the son to be up so early, for he was a night person, but on that particular morning he had stood up and entered the kitchen in his pyjamas. His father had sat him on his knee and given him a square-inch work of culinary art. On the prongs of that fork were a piece of hot bread, cold, salty butter, tangy bacon, egg white and yolk, salt and pepper. It was a taste the son would never be able to replicate, much as he tried for the rest of his life. Then his father had finished his tea and the son and his mother had walked with his father to the front door, past the phone and the mirror, where he kissed his wife and son goodbye and started walking down to Sportpark station in the cool spring dawn, the son’s hero.
Back in the present the old man had started shouting at the dog to shut up, had said goodbye to his sister and had then come into the kitchen, where he’d either been attacked immediately or after he’d told the men to get the hell out of his house. He had fallen with “severe blunt trauma” injury to the head and was tied up while the dog continued barking. The old man’s nose had been broken again and he started drowning in his own blood as the men ran through the house, seeing what was there for the quick taking, watched by an indifferent Tina in the living room. They would also have rushed through Len’s old bedroom, where he’d sometimes had terrible nightmares as a child and lay whimpering until his father got into bed with him and told him it was all right, it was only a dream. Go to sleep now. It was just a bad dream.