The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  When we get back there’s a commotion. Some clot in a Studebaker has got stuck in the mud reversing his boat trailer down to the water’s edge.

  Dad insists we go to the rescue. I’m in my new running shoes with the red and blue stripes on the side and I want to take them off before I wade into the shallows, but Dad won’t let me. You’ll stand on a hook or something, he says. You’ll get lockjaw like Uncle Franjo. Now get in there and push.

  They’re just a pair of tackies, Joe says. Everyone knows there’s a difference between tackies and running shoes. He’s wearing his old slip-slops.

  The driver of the Studebaker revs the engine, the wheels spin and the car sinks deeper into the mud. Dad talks to him through the window. Then the man gets out, high-stepping to dry ground, and Dad gets behind the wheel, and he knows how to do something with the clutch, and with all of us pushing, the car and trailer come free. The driver applauds.

  My shoes are covered with thick black mud. Joe rinses his slops off in the water, but there’s not much I can do.

  We’ll touch them up with shoe white, Mom says. They’ll be good as new.

  But they’re never the same again. Dad makes me put them in the boot so they don’t spoil the mats, even though he has extra mats on top of the standard ones to keep them clean. One day when he sells the Zephyr, one day soon, the mats will be in perfect nick.

  Brainless bloody monkey, he says when we’re driving home, meaning the man who got stuck in the mud.

  Why did we have to help him then? I ask.

  He says nothing. So Mom says: That’s what you do. You help your neighbours and when you’re in trouble they help you back. You hope.

  On the way we stop off in Sunnyside. Normally the rest of us go window-shopping for a block or two while Joe hunts around in the book exchanges, but I won’t get out of the car. I’m not going to walk around kaalvoet in town like a rock.

  Joe

  The Fight of the Century was promoted by a theatrical agent called Jerry Perenchio, who blithely told the world: I really don’t know the first thing about boxing.

  Perenchio was an innovator. Even before the fight he had the idea of auctioning off the fighters’ shoes and gloves. If a movie studio can auction off Judy Garland’s red slippers…these things ought to be worth something. You’ve got to throw away the book on this fight. This one transcends boxing – it’s a show business spectacular.

  The purists were not pleased with the turn boxing had taken. They railed against the playacting, the vaudeville routines and costume changes, and their resentment just fuelled the fire. The circus was in town and there was no turning back. At the head of the parade, fitting the new style like a fist in a glove, was Muhammad Ali. He had been annoying the authorities for years: his showboating at the weigh-in for the first Liston fight had seen him removed from the venue and fined. But this seemed innocuous by comparison with the carnival atmosphere before the Frazier fight. Time magazine’s description of Ali’s retinue, published on the eve of the fight, captures it vividly: There is Bundini, the cornerman and personal mystic who calls him ‘the Blessing of the Planet’; a handler whose sole job is to comb Ali’s hair; assorted grim-faced Muslim operatives; imperturbable Angelo Dundee, his trainer since 1960; Norman Mailer; Actor Burt Lancaster; Cash Clay Sr. in red velvet bell-bottoms, red satin shirt and a plantation straw hat; the Major, a high roller from Philly who tools around in a Duesenberg; and Brother Rahaman Ali (formerly known as Rudolph Valentino Clay), his yeah-man. Ali had said before that white America was unsettled by the spectacle of black people with money to burn, by the men in mink coats and hats, the women in spangled gowns, the customized Cadillacs.

  The sight of two men pummelling one another senseless for prize money must always have attracted the merely or morbidly curious, those with no understanding of the finer points and a taste for blood. But as the era of the mass media dawned and boxing became less like sport and more like entertainment, it found a new audience among people like me, the know-nothing fans who could hardly tell a hook from a jab.

  While boxing in general did not appeal to me, my interest in Muhammad Ali was all-consuming. I might have forgotten the full extent of it, as we forget so much of what we thought and did in the past, had it not been for the archive of cuttings.

  When my obsession faded away, I put the scrapbooks and loose cuttings in a cardboard box. In time, I moved out of my parents’ house and went to university, and I left the box behind in a cupboard. But the past is not so easily disposed of. I wanted to be a writer and the box came to seem like a key to my past. It was a journal written in code, the most complete record of my teenage life to which I had access, despite the fact that I was not mentioned in it once. I retrieved it from my parents’ house and carried it with me to a dozen homes of my own.

  Over twenty years, I went through the scrapbooks so many times I lost track, intending to write something about them, intrigued anew by what they might reveal of the world I grew up in. A book eluded me. Why? I wasn’t sure what I was looking for: I didn’t know what questions to ask of these yellowed pages. Each pass through the archive produced some sketchy drafts of this chapter and that passage. It also produced pages and pages of notes and outlines, scattered associations and half-formed structures, summaries and quotations, all added to a lever-arch file, and then revised and annotated at each revisiting. Finally, this file stuffed with contradictory notes became as intractable an obstacle as the scrapbooks themselves, a shadow of obscure intent over the blank page on which a book might actually start.

  Branko

  We’ve been living in Clubview for five years. Before that we were renting in Pretoria West, but this house belongs to us. It’s in the ranch style, which means the bedrooms are all in a row and the garage is joined on next to the lounge. The plate-glass windows are nearly as big as a garage door. It’s like we’ve moved to America.

  One wall of each bedroom in the house is covered in wallpaper. If it’s just one wall it makes the place look modern, don’t ask me why. Sylvie’s room has scenes from the Ming dynasty. You can see pilgrims making their way through the landscape, which is the colour of tea, or resting under frilly trees and pagodas. In the room I share with Joe the paper is a sky-blue backdrop for hot-air balloons, paddle steamers and Bugattis. It’s like a page out of Jules Verne. The wall behind the fireplace in the lounge is papered to look like knotty pine. The mantelpiece is made of real slate.

  An oil heater stands on the hearth like a lunar module. Dad doesn’t believe in open fires: apart from being a fire hazard, he hates the smell of coal smoke and soot. He likes things to have more than one purpose. That’s why he brought home the side-table-cum-lamp (as he calls it) with a green Formica tabletop and two pendant lights with orange plastic shades.

  The homework has been done and the dishes have been washed. Dad is relaxing in the armchair next to the radiogram, with his legs stretched out and his head cocked towards the speaker. No one else ever sits in Dad’s chair. We’re as attached to our chairs as the chairs are to their places in the lounge: their legs have made little hollows in the pile of the carpet and so they must occupy that spot for ever. Dad is reading the Pretoria News. Before supper he read as far as the editorial; now he’s busy with the sports pages and the classifieds.

  Some joker in Villieria is selling a Sprite 400, he says.

  Mom ignores him. She’s supposed to ask what he wants for it.

  Only wants seven hundred rand for it, he says regardless.

  Nothing escapes him. If some joker in Villieria has a caravan for sale, if Harlequins beat CBC Old Boys 2-1 in the Sunday hockey league, if the Russians are threatening to put a man on the moon – bloody Russkis, that’ll be the day – he knows about it.

  The devil finds work for idle hands and so Mom’s are always busy. Every summer she knits each of us a jersey for the coming winter. She crochets baby clothes, bootees, matinée jackets, bedspr
eads, runners, doilies. She knits cardigans and pullovers for the rest of the family on order and presents them to the buyers wrapped in cellophane as if they came from Garlicks.

  This evening she’s cutting out a top for Sylvie. She kneels on the carpet with the material and the tracing-paper pattern that’s pinned to it spread flat. It’s always better to do your cutting on the floor, she says. She makes a lot of my sister’s clothes, so she can keep up with the latest fashions without breaking the bank (as Dad puts it). We’ve had tent dresses and granny-print pinafores. Now it’s bolero tops. Joe’s been saying the word all evening as if he’s learning another language. Bolero, bolero, bolero. When he gets like this I want to hit him.

  Dad puts down the News and picks up the Reader’s Digest. There’s a red silk poppy sticking out of it like a tongue. The Digest comes every month and the volume of Condensed Books every second month. It’s a racket, he says. They send them whether you want them or not and then you have to pay for them. He piles the books on the floor next to his bed, and the pile never grows because whenever he puts a volume on top, Joe takes one from the bottom.

  For your edification and your delight / our headline’s the deadline on Thursday night.

  Turn that up, Dad says, the news is about to start, but Joe pretends that he can’t hear. He’s at the dining-room table, squeezed into the narrow space between the wall and the tabletop, with a big drawing book and a pile of Koki pens. He’s making the first Ali scrapbook. I go and turn up the radio.

  Mom picks three pins from between her lips like fishbones and stabs them into the pincushion. What’s happened to my scissors? She starts unpacking her knitting bag. That green thing is the front of my winter jersey. I wish she’d ask. They’ll have to kill me first. That fat stack of cuttings in a bulldog clip is crossword puzzles. And that black notebook is where she writes down the LM Hit Parade every Sunday so we can see which songs are on the way up or down and take bets on what will be number one. And those things are rabbits. She’s knitting them for the school fête and each one has a different jersey.

  Jissimpie, Pats, Dad says. Are they multiplying in there?

  That’s not funny Bo. Anyone seen my scissors?

  Joe is using the sewing scissors to cut an article out of the paper. That won’t be funny either when Mom finds out. The sewing scissors are meant for nothing but silk and satin. They’re supposed to fall through chiffon like a hot knife through butter. We’re strictly forbidden to use them on our school projects. But Joe always gets away with murder.

  It’s half past nine – way past your bedtime, Dad says – before Sylvie tries on the bolero and then it’s just a waistcoat.

  2

  Lessons

  By attaching a few hooks to a plumb line and testing the depth and bottom for signs of grass or mud one can soon find the mud banks. Eric Willsden got a 5k mirror carp at Meerhof on Sunday.

  – Pretoria News, June 1971

  Branko

  On 7 November 2011, Joe Frazier dies of liver cancer. It’s on the news, it’s in the papers, it’s all over the Internet.

  A few days later Joe calls me and he sounds upset. Maybe he’s been mugged again, I think, he’s a magnet for trouble, terrible things are always happening to him. But no, it’s some problem with his work, and by work he means writing, as if everything else is leisure. We need to talk, he says. I’m not usually the person he turns to for feedback and anyway it’s not a good time. My last-minute son Jordan – we thought Louis, people assume Michael – is making a film on his laptop, a mash-up (his word) of Pulp Fiction and something else, presumably, and I’ve promised to give him some help with the sound this afternoon. I’m curious to know what you get when you pulp pulp: a purée? But I’m more curious about my brother’s latest crisis.

  He arrives with a cardboard box that has Pres Les printed on it. While I’m trying to remember where I’ve seen it before, he unpacks it on the dining-room table. The Ali scrapbooks! It’s thirty years since I saw them. We start paging through the first one, or rather, he pages and I look. Many of the cuttings have come loose and he’s careful to keep them in order, slipping a palm in under the tracing-paper sheets and turning them tenderly as if he’s an archivist with a set of rare prints. All that’s missing is the white cotton gloves. He’s marked the loose cuttings in pencil to show where they belong: the numbers and keywords in the corners of the cuttings match those between the brown sticky-tape scars. Why bother to keep order in this mess?

  I start asking a question but he shushes me like a stern librarian. Look. Just keep looking. The archive will clarify everything.

  The archive! I see. Here’s an incredulous little report under the headline ‘Taken as red’ that says the Soviet news agency TASS devoted no more than a couple of lines to the Fight of the Century, simply noting that Negro sportsman Cassius Clay, also known as Muhammad Ali, had lost a fight to Joe Frazier on points. Here’s a picture of Ali punching Jimmy Ellis over the headline ‘Ali says he showed mercy’. And another taken after the fight, headlined ‘Cassius Snarls’. In the article below: Cassius Clay says he has received a visa to visit South Africa. But Government spokesmen in Pretoria contend they have had no application from the boxer. I don’t remember this. Did he come to South Africa? Before I can ask, Joe starts paging again. Now it’s ‘Buster broken’. Poor Buster Mathis on all fours after taking one of Ali’s linger-on punches. A headline calls it ‘Clay’s new weapon’. Paging again. Pausing here and there so I can get a good look or scan a paragraph, pointing to a headline with his pen, unfolding a concertina of newsprint to show me a photo of Ali swallowing flies. The loudmouth pose.

  Here’s a fact: Joe was a terrible archivist. He should have kept full pages from the newspapers and magazines, he could have put them in box files, conveniently numbered and indexed, or sorted them into cardboard folders, fight by fight. Instead he cut them and folded them into ludicrously complicated origami, and attached part of the cutting to the paper with sticky tape, fitting as many items as possible on a single page. Some of these assemblages are ingenious, with five or six articles unfolding from a single surface like a clever layout in a pop-up book for children. But the sticky tape was inexcusable. Any archivist will tell you it’s the last thing you want near a news cutting or photograph you intend to preserve. The glue discolours and spoils the paper, the tape dries out and curls up. The cuttings are a dirty yellow-brown, the colour you’d see on the fingers of a Texan Plain smoker, a pack-a-day man. That’s one thing we can’t blame Joe for: this was long before acid-free paper, or wood-free paper, not to mention paper-free news. Or the fact-free stuff. But the sticky-tape scar tissue is his fault. No question.

  Then again, the thought that he was creating an archive never entered his head. It’s amusing to hear him talk about it this way. They’re a bunch of scrapbooks. Sylvie also had a couple devoted to Cliff Richard. Or was it the Fab Four? The notion that he was doing something for posterity is ridiculous. A thirteen-year-old with bum fluff on his cheeks? His horizons stretched as far as the school bell on Friday afternoon. If he imagined the future at all it was to fantasize about driving an E-Type Jag like Mark Condor, a red one with spoked wheels, and having a girlfriend who was very beautiful but didn’t know it because she’d been struck blind by a mysterious illness at the age of six. Obviously not something I would make up.

  Years later, when Joe was living in California, I was getting my balsak out of the built-in cupboard in Clubview for an army camp when I came across this box and opened it out of curiosity. On the first page of the first scrapbook, the one we’re leafing through now, was a handwritten header in Koki, ALI VS FRAZIER – BEFORE, the chubby cartoon letters surrounded by coloured lines like shock waves, the faintest echo of psychedelia in suburbia. I could see him hunched over the dining-room table to ink this Henry-Mooreish script, with his hand bent in the peculiar way it was when he held a pen, as if his wrist had been broken. He was maniacal
about school projects, going to endless trouble to copy line drawings out of encyclopedias and cut photographs out of pamphlets. Not just doing enough, like a normal lightie, doing too much, always. Desperate to please, I suppose. Making everyone else feel lazy and ashamed of their hand-eye coordination. Terrified of being wrong, of not knowing the right answer, of looking a fool. I should have thrown his precious scrapbooks away when I had the chance.

  What does he want from me?

  We come to the end of ALI I. There’s a page of cuttings about Ali’s visit to South Africa. Wilbur, the cartoon commentator, asks: Is the Government shadow boxing with Clay? Another page on the fight against Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in Dublin in 1972. Lewis got his nickname because he liked blue suits and blue cars. It reminds me of the joke about the South African champ Mike Schutte. What kind of car do you drive, Mike? Mike (scratching his head): A blue one. Neil Allen, who watched the Ellis fight for the Times, said it provided evidence that Clay did not have a power punch. Then again the Pretoria News said that Clay had calmly and brutally despatched another opponent. Chuck Nary, the loser’s manager: It was more exhaustion than anything else that beat Lewis.

  I’m tired too of these faded images of men throwing punches. How many different ways are there to hit someone? Jab, straight, hook, cross…The photographs of Ali clowning for the camera, mouth stretched to swallow the lens and the viewer, take me back, but there’s no warmth in the recognition. He’s had a hard time, I know, with the Parkinson’s and everything, but my old antipathy for him stirs. I study the faces of the men he beat, Jimmy Ellis with his Elvis sideburns like two tabs of Velcro, Broken Buster with his spitty gumshield jutting, all the men who made a living out of being knocked silly. Christ. Whatever became of George Chuvalo?