The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Any second now he’s going to start on ALI II.

  Why are you showing me this?

  His fingers drum on the cover of the second scrapbook, where I see a picture of Goofy in boxing gloves. Irritable or just unsure of the answer. Then he says: I need your help. I’m trying to write something about this time of my life.

  Fucking hell, this is a new one. My brother, the novelist, asking for my help. I’m no good at making things up, I say. That’s your department.

  That’s the whole point. Making things up won’t do any good. I need to remember things as they actually were.

  And what makes you think I can help with this?

  You were there.

  He takes a blue lever-arch file out of the box, flings it open, cuffs angrily through some dense handwritten pages, in pencil nogal. I’ve been trying to write something about this stuff for ten years, no, more like twenty. I just can’t get anywhere. My memory’s not what it used to be. I can’t tell if I’m remembering something or imagining it.

  I turn the file to face me. He’s always been fanatical about one thing: no one can read a line of the book he’s working on until it’s published – or publishable at least. But he does nothing to stop me now.

  I read the page that happens to be facing me. I remember a prissy, upright script, but this is drunk and disorderly. There’s a column of untidy cursive in pencil with arrows sticking out of it and bubbles full of second thoughts, and I wind my way through three paragraphs. Notes about the Rumble in the Jungle.

  You’re writing a book about Muhammad Ali? I want to add: You can’t be serious, but I restrain myself. What he knows about boxing has always been dangerous, especially to himself.

  No, no, he says, exasperated. It’s not about him, it’s about us. Our lives together.

  I don’t know what’s worse. Especially because I can’t place the tone. His voice is trembling a little and there are tears in his eyes. Maybe he’s hitting the bottle? I scan the page for names and there’s nothing about me there. It’s all Ali.

  Just then Jordan comes in with his Mac dangling from his hand like a paperback. In the doorway the atmosphere sticks to him like a wet shower curtain and he shuts the laptop with a flick of the wrist. What’s this old stuff?

  Joe scrambles the scrapbooks and files into the box. It’s like he’s been caught reading Playboy under his desk. We’ll speak, he says.

  Joe

  Paul Skinner gave me a boxing lesson I never forgot. On a summer afternoon, under a Highveld sky that was nearly the blue of my school blazer, he punched me in the mouth and started to like me.

  The lesson began in Mrs Worsnop’s Arts and Crafts class when Skinner pulled the chair out from under me as I sat down. I’d risen to answer some question, correctly no doubt, and he decided to bring me down to earth. He couldn’t help himself. He reached for my stool, which had a slot in the middle of the seat made for a child’s hand, and moved it aside, so that I fell on my arse.

  I couldn’t help it Miss. That’s what he told Mrs Worsnop when the laughter had subsided. She was a sluggish, ginger-fuzzed toad of a woman with a fondness for popping green grapes between her teeth and spitting the pips at whatever boy was within range. The floor around her desk was slimed with this spawn. She never stood up if she could help it and even the commotion caused by the prank did not rouse her. I thought she would send Skinner to the office to explain himself to Mr Hobbs or make him stand in the corner with the wastepaper basket over his head, familiar punishments, but apparently not being able to help yourself was an acceptable excuse.

  The fall hurt no more than my feelings, but it enraged and humiliated me. I’d been taught at home that pulling the chair out from under someone was not funny. It was close to the top of the list of things that a certain class of person thinks are funny but are actually dangerous, like stirring Brooklax into someone’s coffee or jumping out from behind a door and shouting Boo! The victim might die of dehydration or heart failure. A person who has a chair pulled out from under them might break their back and be paralysed for life. I knew a girl this happened to, Mom said, and she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. A wheelchair! When Donny Drummond had surgery on his fallen arches he was in a wheelchair for months and we had to carry him up and down the stairs at school. What if this happened to me? Perilous possibilities were at the heart of our family philosophy, such as it was, which consisted in keeping your head down and making the best of a bad job.

  Unfortunately, another somewhat contradictory family principle required one to stand up for what is right. So I found myself challenging Paul Skinner. I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t sure where my indignation would lead, I hadn’t thought as far as the consequences, and I wasn’t exactly planning to duke it out, but that was the language he spoke, and before I knew it I had challenged him to a fight.

  I’ll meet you at the taps after school, he said.

  Ja, I’ll be there Skinner. Don’t worry.

  As soon as my challenge had been accepted, I wished to retract it. But how to do so without losing face? This question throbbed in my head all through Arts and Crafts. We were making objects out of papier mâché. We’d brought clay for modelling, newspaper to tear into strips and flour to mix the glue. Terrence Jones and Melanie Fuller arrived with modelling clay bought at the art supplies shop in Barclay Square, the new shopping centre in town. But Dad said he wasn’t going to waste good money on something you could sommer dig out of the ground. So one afternoon Branko and I rode our bikes down to the Sesmylspruit and left them leaning against the railings of the bridge while we scrambled down to the river and dug some clay out of the bank. Melanie Fuller’s clay looked like fudge and smelt like the inside of a Mercedes. But this stuff of mine, wrapped in newspaper and taken home on the carrier, was mud, thick brown mud spiked with willow leaves and insect wings, and reeking of the spruit’s stagnant shallows. A pile of it, moulded into a grimacing face, lay on the Arts and Crafts workbench as I tried to figure out how to avoid meeting Skinner at the taps. The glue made of flour and water had cloves in it, for reasons known only to Mrs Worsnop, and the spicy aroma of Irish stew barely masked the smell of river mud – three times worse than Bon Accord Dam – as I dredged my strips of newsprint and laid them over the face-mould like mucus-laden bandages. It was a clown’s face, actually, with astonished eyebrows and a bulbous nose. When I took it home at the end of term, glossily made up with model aeroplane paint, Branko said: Really, Joe. Tickey the Clown. Is that the best you can do?

  After break we had Hygiene and then English, where Miss Drysdale read to us from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These closing lessons often dragged, but not today. Skinner caught my eye a few times and gave me a sly smile. When the bell rang, he was first through the door.

  I hung around in the classroom, hoping he’d forgotten about me and gone home. Miss Drysdale was at her desk leafing through exercise books and making notes. When she began to pack up her papers, I looked around the door, willing the coast to be clear. And there he was, waiting at the taps, as promised, with his hands in his pockets. His fists.

  He was a wiry, red-headed boy whose fair skin was sprinkled with rust-coloured freckles. He had broad hips and turned-out feet, and his shoes were flattened and gaping, as if his elder brothers, who were at high school with Branko, had walked in them first.

  I might yet have escaped: all I had to do was go in the opposite direction and loop around the school hall to the bicycle sheds. Instead I put my schoolbag over my shoulder and sauntered down to the taps with my heart pounding. He looked surprised to see me. Even then I expected that showing up might be enough to prove my courage and that we’d talk it out. I was turning my first words over in my mind as I came up to him. Now listen here…But before I could get them out, he punched me in the mouth. It was a straight right, I think, with his shoulder behind it. For the second time that day I fell on my arse thanks to Paul S
kinner. As hard as the blow was, there was something speculative in it. He wanted to see whether I would fight back. He might have gone on punching me until both of us were blue in the face, but he did not. He was admirably restrained. Somewhere behind me a classroom door closed and Miss Drysdale’s heels clicked along the verandah. For an instant, in my fogged-over mind, I thought of calling out to her. Then Skinner reached out a hand and helped me to my feet. He was smiling. I didn’t know it yet but the punch, or rather taking the punch without complaint, was a kind of deposit, an expression of good will.

  My lip was split and I was bleeding down the front of my shirt. I rinsed my mouth under a tap while Skinner scuffed his boat-like shoes in the dry grass of the playground. So that’s why he wanted to meet me at the taps, I thought.

  We walked together to the bicycle sheds and he waited while I unlocked my bike, and then he came with me as far as the school gate and stood there at the kerb as I rode away down Monument Road.

  By the time I got home, my lip was throbbing and jutting like the spout of a kettle. Mom called Auntie Jilly from over the road and they put me in the Volksie and drove me to the doctor in Kloofsig, who put three stitches in the cut. For the next week I looked like I had a skinny fly sitting on my bottom lip.

  I stuck to my story: I’d been hit in the mouth by a cricket ball during fielding practice, but Branko soon winkled the truth out of me.

  Paul Skinner! he said. You got in a rort with Paul Skinner! Are you mad? I wouldn’t fight with Clyde or Henry if you paid me. Their dad’s a sergeant at the Tiffie School in Voortrekkerhoogte and he bliksems them all the time, to toughen them up. Nobody looks for grief with the Skinners, you moron.

  Branko

  Going to the rofstoei on a Saturday night is a big thing for two teenage boys, especially when we don’t have to take care of the lighties. Dad drops me off at Kelvin’s in the afternoon and the two of us head out early. Charlie’s Caffie in Paul Kruger Street is close to the City Hall and we stop there for a steak and kidney pie. Charlie’s an old mate of my dad’s, he always says they went to different schools together, and when Dad drops in for a chat he’ll go in behind the counter and help himself to a cabanossi stick from the jar. It’s strange to see my own Dad behind the till. It doesn’t seem right. But it’s a good thing Charlie knows me because he gives Kelvin and me free strawberry milks with the pies.

  The City Hall is a strange venue for wrestling matches. The ballroom has plaster mouldings and flowery carpets as if it’s in Vienna. They have official functions here, wedding receptions and chamber-music recitals. It’s no place for all this grunting and sweating in the name of sport.

  The ring sits in the middle of the room surrounded by rows of fold-up chairs. An immense chandelier hovers high above. At each corner are flower arrangements on meranti pedestals left over from some function hosted by the Transvaalse Landbou-Unie, tall vases of proteas and sprays of baby’s breath like clouds of flies. The grand double doors opening into the foyer are policed by bouncers in leather jackets. It’s easy for a rort to start and they keep an eye on the troublemakers. Alcoves in the foyer hold the busts of statesmen with sagging bronze jowls and verdigrised moustaches. Some boys from the railway reserve are leaning there. I recognize that breker Billy Darling who was cased to Sylvie. When I wave he just tips his ash into a statue’s ear.

  The crowd is restless and noisy, everyone is talking and smoking, shouting the odds. Kelvin and I join the okes standing behind the last row of seats. We call this part of the hall the peanut gallery even though it’s on the ground floor. You can see better from back here. Anyway we’re too excited to sit down. No one can keep still, we’re all moving, easing from one foot to the other like boxers before a fight. The lighties are bouncing on their seats, twisting and turning, writhing with anticipation.

  Then the room goes dim and four spotlights directed by operators in the balconies bore down through the haze of cigarette smoke. Circus music blares from speakers and the crowd roars, drowning out the voice of the announcer who’s introducing the wrestlers. The main doors swing open and the Masked Marvel comes in. He’s dressed all in black with a leather mask laced over his skull. He dances down to the ring and swings up over the ropes. While he’s taking his bows to the four sides of the room, his opponent comes in and another roar goes up. It’s my guy Rio Rivers in a satin robe, hopping and feinting down the aisle. He’s an old streetfighter, a skate from Danville with Comanche eyes and a yellow brushcut. He swirls up into the glare and stalks around the Marvel, who’s standing like a statue centre-stage, pulsing out energy. Now here’s the referee, a slick, darting little dancing master with Brylcreem in his hair. He needs to be quick, he needs to fling himself onto the canvas to get up close to a pinned wrestler and beat out the count with his hand. At some point tonight he’ll be struck by a stray haymaker or pinned beneath a crashing body. It has to happen. He must be able to roll with the punches, squeeze out from under the deadweight.

  Tonight’s wrestlers aren’t professionals, they’re policemen, smallholders, fitters and turners, panelbeaters who make a bit of bread on the side by pretending to fight one another. Of course the fights are rehearsed and the results are predetermined. You can’t have Sammy Cohen knocking the crap out of Jan Wilkens in the Pretoria City Hall. But the contest is still brutal and sometimes the wrestlers get the hell in. No one likes to be hurled to the floor or fallen on by a fat man, even when they’re being paid for it.

  The fight begins. Rio Rivers and the Masked Marvel go through the motions. They grapple and throw, spin and kick, slap and stagger. Rio ties the Marvel up in the ropes. The Marvel gouges Rio’s eyes when the ref is unsighted. It’s all routine. Then in the middle of the second round Rio starts to lose his temper and the mechanism falters. There’s a flat spot, like when an engine burns a valve, and the machine goes out of kilter. The wrestlers begin to make up their own moves and these are more convincing than the choreographed ones. Rio gets a finger in under the Marvel’s mask and jabs him in the nose. The Marvel punches Rio in the belly. It makes a less satisfying smack than the heel of the hand but it hurts more. It knocks him halfway through the ropes. The wrestlers throw away the script. A new mood comes into the room like an ill wind and the skylights darken. We go berserk. Even the lighties are screaming blue murder. The wrestlers pummel one another from one side of the ring to the other. Rio Rivers has a dodgy eye – everyone says he’s held together by scar tissue – and it starts to bleed. Soon his pale chest and sky-blue trunks are drenched in real blood. Every time he takes a blow to the head, bloody sweat sprays out like water from a lawn sprinkler and the punters in the front rows reel back in delight and disgust. The news photographer who’s been stalking around the ring has to borrow a hanky to wipe his camera lens. When it’s over the ref awards the victory to the Marvel even though he’s been pinned twice. We bay for the ref ’s blood but it’s too late.

  We’re supposed to go straight home after the fight, but since Uncle Arthur died my cousins do what they like. There’s start left over from Charlie’s because we didn’t pay for the strawberry milk, so we head for the Mikado near the Square, where they’ve got a soft-serve machine and they’re open late on a Saturday night. As we cut through the gardens, we surprise a couple smooching under the statue of Andries Pretorius on his horse, and she pulls down her skirt while he shouts over his shoulder: Fokkof! Julle draadtrekkers! We run down Paul Kruger Street, exhilarated and shit-scared. The whale skeleton outside the museum sways in its hawsers. In the window of a laundry an automaton bows over his washboard. We go along the arcades, bouncing on our toes, chasing our shadows across the shopfronts.

  Joe

  In March 2011, the fortieth anniversary of the Fight of the Century rolled around. The newspapers and sports shows were full of reminiscences. Forty years! Who would believe it? The passage of time sent me back to the cuttings with new urgency. I read through all the scrapbooks, made more notes towards a book and
slotted them into yet another outline.

  Just eight months later Joe Frazier died. None of the obituarists could separate the man and his boxing career from his legendary rivalry with Muhammad Ali. In the early years, before their first match, Frazier had told reporters that Ali, regarded by many fans as the legitimate champion who’d been unfairly stripped of his title, was a shadow hanging around him. This shadow never lifted. In his obituary in The Star, Dan Gelston said that Frazier had spent his life trying to ‘fight his way out of Ali’s shadow’.

  In the months before he died, Frazier had been on the ‘autograph circuit’, signing photographs for fans at boxing matches. Gelston wrote about his polite generosity and how he would always introduce himself with the line: ‘Joe Frazier, sharp as a razor.’ The rhyme, imagined in a punchy slur, made me sad.

  There were striking differences between the historical reporting on the Fight of the Century and the reporting on the anniversary forty years later. Some aspects of the fighters’ background and character had come to the fore and others had faded away. The story of a life is always evolving. The early reports made much of Frazier’s humble beginnings as the son of a one-armed sharecropper, the second-youngest of thirteen children, a tough little boy who spent his childhood in the fields or tending hogs, acting as his father’s left hand, even steering the car while his father changed the gears. Some of the boxing writers noticed early on that Frazier was essentially a one-armed boxer, relying heavily on his left hook. Only later was it revealed that he’d injured this arm as a boy and could not straighten it fully. This potential weakness was a closely guarded secret while he was active in the ring.

  Frazier’s openness about his weight problems and his rejection by the military was either naïve or disarmingly frank. The reports from the 1970s made no bones about the fact that he was not the sharpest blade in the barber shop and liked to tell the story of how he flunked the IQ test when he tried to join the Marines. Then again, a similar story was told about Ali: this was the reason he’d first been classified as unfit for military service. It was often reported that he could not read. Time magazine’s article published just before the Fight of the Century made a point of mentioning that Clay had graduated 376th in a high-school class of 391. I never said I was the smartest, he told their reporters, I said I was the greatest. At the same time, Ali frequently ridiculed Frazier’s intellect, and these slights rankled with him all his life. By 2011, sensitivities about such judgements, and the nature of the judgements themselves, were very different, and the news reports on the famous rivalry offered no comment on the intelligence of either boxer.