The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  When the glassies are gone Joe tries to call it a day. But Ferdi wants the beauts more than anything else. He’s heard them rattling in the tin every time Joe bent to make another contribution. He won’t let Joe stop, he says it’s unsporting, ungentlemanly. They’re playing keepsies. You can’t say you don’t want to play just because you’re losing. Joe takes out the Mills tin and plays the Chinese checkers, the fire-red, the jade-green, the ivory, and then the pearlies, one after the other. And he plays the arlies, the white one with blood and squid ink stirred into its eyeball, then the blue-green planet with a silver equator, and then the others. Finally he plays his three glass ghoens. Now he has only the ironie left, the flawed one, the imperfect sphere. It’s of no interest to Ferdi. He goes home with his deep pockets bulging. Joe goes inside with the purposeless ghoen.

  When Dad comes home from work, Joe is moping. He was crying as he told me the story earlier, now he’s just sitting on his bed looking defeated. I tried to cheer him up – You’ve lost your marbles, like the rest of us – but it did no good. Dad gets the story from Mom and then from Joe himself. His face goes dark: it’s like when there’s a storm coming and the horizon bruises over. Dad doesn’t lose his temper often. It happened when Willie Cuyler hacked his shin with a hockey stick, and when Uncle Eddie threw an acorn at the Chev to be funny and it cracked the windscreen, and when Granny put her dirty two-way down the back of the armchair. Now he comes out of the room with his fist in the empty pouch. That little bastard, he says. I’m going to warm his arse, so help me, he won’t sit down for a week. Mom doesn’t even tell him don’t you use such language in front of the children.

  Joe doesn’t want to go to the Kouters, he’ll have to deal with Ferdi tomorrow, and the day after, but Dad insists. There’s a lesson to be learnt. What’s right is right. And anyway, who else will know what marbles are yours? I go along for luck. We park in the street outside. There’s a short drive without a gate leading to the back door. All three of us troop up there, with Dad in the lead, and he knocks.

  Mr Kouters opens the door. He’s a big version of his son, who’s skulking in the passage behind him, down to the khakis and the blond brushcut. A maid is at the stove cooking supper. As soon as she sees us, she shifts the steaming pot off the plate and disappears into the house.

  Mr Kouters tries to defend his son, but Dad tells him how things are. Your son, he says, is nearly a grown man. What pleasure could it give him to take marbles off a child? Joe starts squirming: he doesn’t like being called a child. Ferdi hops about from one scurfy foot to another, tugging at his shorts as if he wants to pee. That little craphouse knew what he did was wrong, Dad says afterwards. It was written all over him.

  Dad won’t compromise. He wants all the marbles back. Waving the pouch like a piece of evidence. Every last one.

  Mr Kouters gives his son an earful. We can half understand the Dutch or maybe he’s picked up some Afrikaans, like fokken and bliksem. He sends Ferdi to his room to fetch the marbles.

  He comes back with a cake tin and opens it on the kitchen table. He’s already added his latest winnings to the stockpile. We’ve never seen so many marbles in one place.

  Dad rumbles around in the stock with his fingers. No, it’s not these, he says. He’s curious, he tells us later, to see what else Ferdi has. He just has a feeling there’s more.

  Ferdi goes to his room and fetches another tin, and another. When he opens the fourth one, Dad says, Jissimpie man, how many marbles does one boy need? Come Joe. Take your share.

  One glassie is pretty much like another. Joe puts five or six handfuls into the pouch. Then he takes another one for good measure and funnels it into his pocket.

  Now for the beauts. This is more complicated. Ferdi keeps his beaut collection in old handbags given to him by his mother. He fetches one from his room, a white patent-leather bag with a gilt clasp, and pours the marbles out into a casserole dish. It’s like a feast in a sweet shop.

  You can buy pearlies and chinas with clear colours, but the best beauts are priceless. They’re arlies with colours swirling in them and each one is unique. Some of them may have been in circulation for generations, passed around in the marble economy from father to son. Joe picks through the dish and finds two beauts that belong to him.

  Mrs Kouters appears at the shadowy end of the passage and Mr Kouters barks at her in Dutch and she goes away again.

  Ferdi’s bottom lip begins to quiver. At a word from his father, he fetches another, bigger handbag from his room and empties it into the dish. Nothing.

  All of them! Mr Kouters commands.

  So he brings out two more bags and empties them into dishes. Joe picks through them until he’s found every last beaut that belongs to him and a few he didn’t even know he had.

  By the time we leave, Mr Kouters is fuming. We can hear him shouting as we go down the drive.

  Don’t ever let this happen again, Dad says as we’re driving home.

  I’m waiting for him to ask me where I was when my brother was being picked on, why I didn’t stand up for him, as the Blahavić code requires, but he doesn’t say anything. From the way he changes gears and taps his thumb on the steering wheel, I know he’s pleased with himself.

  At the end of Standard 8, Ferdi Kouters leaves school. A few months later I’m down at the shops when a police van careers around the corner. It’s the Wierda Bridge cops looking for pass offenders. The black men shooting dice on the pavement outside the butchery scatter in five directions. Ferdi piles out of the passenger seat in a constable’s uniform with a peaked cap. One of the men goes up Cornell Street where the Kouters live and Ferdi runs after him waving his baton. Just as they’re passing his front gate, Ferdi’s cap falls off and he stops to pick it up.

  7

  Poems

  The highlight of today’s arena events at the Rand Show will be sabre demonstrations by the SA Gymkhana Union, comprising the country’s five best teams. The SA Police Band will start the afternoon’s events with a performance at 1.30, followed by the grand parade of cattle at 1.45. At 3.30 the gymkhana groups will give a sabre demonstration. At 8.30 they will appear again and spike flaming pegs in the dark.

  – The Star, April 1973

  Joe

  Like many Ali fans, the know-nothings who couldn’t suck out of a sore thumb the name of a single boxer who hadn’t been in the ring with their hero, I was at least as interested in the talk as the fight. I came from a family that set great store by having a ‘turn of phrase’. We quoted the sayings of our grandparents the way other families quote Churchill or the Apostles. My Grandpa Reilly was a carriage fitter on the railways, and a good one too: he used to say he was so good with his hands, he could fit a cork to a duck’s arse.

  Ali was shouting the odds and making up rhymes from the start of his amateur career, but it was before his fight against Archie Moore in 1962 that the posturing and the poesy really got going. The pressmen, writes Gilbert Odd, were anxious to know what fate he [Clay] had in store for the chrdlu cmfwy should they meet. ‘Chrdlu cmfwy’ is a scrap of filler text, nonsense produced by a compositor running his finger down the keyboard of a typecasting machine, and there’s not much you can rhyme with it. But ‘Archie Moore’ is a doddle: It will have to be four, because it rhymes with Moore. At the training camp before this fight, Ali came up with his first sustained doggerel: I have left jabs that fire like pistons / and are twice as fast as Sonny Liston’s…Some say the greatest was Sugar Ray, / but they have not yet seen Cassius Clay.

  The third Ali scrapbook is an Eclipse drawing book the same size as the first, with ALi III inscribed on the cover in black ink. It contains two main sets of cuttings from 1974: those about the rematch against Frazier, Superfight II as it was called; and those about the buildup to the fight against George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle.

  On the covers of the first two scrapbooks, the word ‘ALI’ was all in capita
ls; here it’s a mixture of capitals and small letters. The ‘A’ is a definite, wide-footed cap. The ‘L’ might pass as a cap too, except that the foot of the letter is too short for the vertical stroke and it seems to be caught between upper and lower case. The ‘i’ is undoubtedly small. From a distance the letters look patterned or textured. From close up it’s clear that each of them is made up of many rows of words, some of them sliced off to the left or right, as if the letters were machine-pressed from sheets of densely packed type. The letters are about 20 centimetres tall and contain 50 to 70 lines of neat, hand-lettered print.

  The ‘A’ is made up of Ali’s most famous – though not most poetic – catchphrase, a line that was both a conviction and a challenge, repeated about a hundred times: ‘I am the Greatest.’ After just ten professional fights, and having broken into the rankings at nine, Ali began to tell reporters that he was ‘The Greatest’ and he repeated the claim obsessively over the following decades, drumming it into every head, especially his own. One hundred iterations of ‘I am the Greatest’, packed into the letter ‘A’ like bricks, capture the obsession graphically.

  The top-heavy ‘L’ is made up of another famous catchphrase, ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’, repeated dozens of times. Ask someone for a quote from Ali and this is probably what you’ll get. It’s not Shakespeare, but it has more poetry in it than the version the Ali camp was using at the time of the first Frazier fight: He moves like silk, hits like a ton. The butterfly and the bee first took flight together, according to Gilbert Odd, at the weigh-in for the fight against that Big Ugly Bear Sonny Liston in 1964. Clay (as he then was) turned up twirling a cane, sporting a navy-blue jacket with Bear Huntin’ emblazoned on it in red, and proceeded to rave at Liston about the terrible things he was going to do to him. Ed Lassman, the president of the WBA, had him removed from the dressing room and fined $2 500 for disgraceful conduct. A usually sombre occasion, opines Odd, had been turned into a circus.

  It is worth asking why the weigh-in should be taken so seriously. Even today, the occasion is often determinedly solemn, as if the boxers were condemned men being weighed for the gallows. The handlers and trainers all have long faces to show how much hard work goes into preparing a fighter so that he comes in close to the weight limit without slipping over it.

  The ‘i’ in ALi III is different. Rather than being made up of the same repeated phrase lopped at either end, it reads continuously from top to bottom. Phrases or short passages drawn from twelve news articles have been strung into a text. These quotable quotes are arranged in a narrow vertical bar with a detached block floating above it. That block, a magnified dot moored above the body of the ‘i’, looks like this:

  I AM THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN THE WORLD BUT I DONT LOSE TOUCH I AM LOVED ALL OVER T HE EARTH I AM SO WITTY I AM PRE TTY AND INTELLIGENT I COULD SIT HERE AND HOLD MY OWN WIT H THE MOST BRILLIANT TELEVI SION DEBATERS IN THE WORLD NO OTHER BOXER LIKES TO SIT ON

  In those days I liked to while away an afternoon making drawings in Indian ink, intricate mazes and patterns of tiny words and emblems that required a patient, delicate touch. Ink is unforgiving. Once you’ve put it on paper with a nib it’s almost impossible to erase. You can wait for it to dry and scratch it off with a razor blade, but the smooth surface of the page is invariably marred in the process. You need a steady hand and an eye for detail. I learnt as a child to dot my i’s and cross my t’s. I can imagine the pleasure it gave me to print the title of the third scrapbook, allowing the words to run up against the vertical edge and tumble down to the next line like coins in a fairground game. But I cannot truly remember doing it. How did I choose the constituent parts? I suppose I trawled through the scrapbooks, picking out comments and quips that especially pleased me, that I found funny or clever.

  Here is the text that makes up the body of the ‘i’, with its parts separated out according to the twelve source articles:

  the stage with me. I am too smart…Mr Nixon is the President, but he doesn’t have the people behind him.

  But I’m skilful. I know I’m a great fighter.

  George Foreman is a sissy fighter. He fights like a girl…Joe Frazier is a good fighter. This was a great event.

  If he whips me I will crawl to his corner on my hands and knees. I will look up at him and say, ‘Joe, you are the Greatest.’

  ‘No,’ said Ali, ‘You gotta talk after a defeat. I always talked after a victory. You got to talk.’

  But he still had to have his say. I’m not going to cry, he told reporters.

  I’m out to whup all the hypocrites in the power structure…They’re all afraid of me because I speak the truth and can set men free.

  ‘Now I want security for my wife and three children,’ he said.

  All it would have taken was just three more times, bam, bam, bam…I can’t see possibly giving a man a concussion just to please the crowd.

  Tax men victimise me…Hollering about civil rights, all this integrating mess, just give me my money.

  I’ll say it again, I’ve said it before, / Archie Moore will fall in four.

  My secret is self-confidence, / A champion at birth, / I’m lyrical, I’m fresh, I’m smart, / My fists have proved my

  The first three quotes date from 1974, the rest from 1971. I must have selected lines from the cuttings I was about to stick into ALi III and then from the first scrapbook, and transcribed them into a pencilled outline of the ‘i’ until it was complete. The final quotation breaks off before the concluding worth, thus obscuring the fact that it’s a rhymed verse. All the quotes are Ali’s own words.

  This patchwork of comments that struck a chord with my teenage self may be the clearest index of the qualities that led me to hero-worship Ali.

  It isn’t hard to see why a teenage boy, caught in a rigid, disciplinarian school system, subjected to the short-back-and-sides regime, the cadet platoon and the cane, at the mercy of teachers who wore their army step-outs to cadet parades and headmasters who took pleasure in making a boy bend over a chair-back to be beaten, would respond to Ali’s taunting of the authorities, the hypocrites in the power structure, from the greedy taxman to the lying president. Ali was stroppy – bolshie, my father would have said. He could give you a thousand words without breaking a sweat.

  He had a sense of honour and dignity. You have to talk even when you’re beaten. And his concern for a beaten opponent tempered the brutality of the sport and was surely a sign of true strength. What did my father say? You don’t hit a man when he’s down. There are other middle-class truisms embedded here, such as the virtue of doing an honest day’s work and keeping a roof over your family’s head, indeed of having a family, a neat nuclear family with three children (Ali had only just gotten started). This was something I recognized. Also the notion that integration was a mess, which I heard often enough on the radio or in the classroom.

  What about the boasting? That went against everything I’d learnt about the value of modesty and restraint. Don’t blow your own trumpet! Ali scarcely paused for breath. He would give Dizzy Gillespie a run for his money. I’m skilful, I’m witty, I’m clever, I’m pretty. Pretty. Here he needs it for the rhyme, but he always preferred it to ‘handsome’. There was a double game going on whose point eluded me. He called himself pretty, but he was always childishly baiting his opponents with comments like this: George Foreman fights like a girl. How I would have liked to say that to Paul Skinner – although he could more justifiably have said it to me. Now listen here…bam! There was no clear boundary between the talk and the fight. Ali was, as one of the scribes put it, as quick with a ready quip as a left jab. Boxing was a kind of physical wit; verbal wit was a kind of sparring.

  This is the line that thrills me still: I’m lyrical, I’m fresh, I’m smart. I was smart too, or so I thought. Being smart was not the quality that got you into the egghead class at school: all that required was the ability to me
morize some facts – the parts of the flower or the stages of meiosis, Pythagoras’s theorem or the symbol for hydrochloric acid, the date of the Battle of Blood River or the objectives of communist ideology – and the will to do your homework when you could be playing soccer or chasing after a girl. No, smart was an American way of being clever, being extra-clever, even clever-clever, and it could be a liability. Fresh. Probably he meant that in the American way too – ‘Don’t you get fresh with me, child’ – but my South African ear heard – hears – new, refreshing, fris. Which might also mean fit, robust, well built. Lyrical. He made up little poems, but this had to mean something completely different. He was a floating poem himself, an animate, explosive piece of pop verse, a sprung rhythm. In my awkward adolescent body, with my spotty chin and my unmanageable desires, I did not feel lyrical. But I had a sneaking, embarrassed suspicion that I could be, given half a chance.

  Branko

  We’re on our way to Bapsfontein for the talent show. It’s become our Sunday afternoon entertainment. Usually there’s some professional act like Jody Wayne or Gene Rockwell to make it worth sitting through the roster of amateurs with their off-key renditions of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Distant Drums’. Last week it was Johnny Collini, who had a song in the Top Twenty not so long ago. Also on the bill was a plaasjapie in a shabby dustcoat and a felt hat with a turned-up brim, an Al Debbo lookalike, doing his version of ‘Sousboontjies’, stretching the sooouuus out into a gelatinous yowl that brought the house down. Well, not the house, exactly. The show takes place under a big, tin-roofed afdak in the grounds of the Bapsfontein Hotel and Pleasure Resort. The spectators lounge about on garden benches drawn up in rows and the tannies bring crocheted blankets to throw over the wooden slats. When a special act appears, let’s say Virginia Lee or Dickie Loader and the Blue Jeans, the kids come running from the pool and their mothers pass around Tupperware tubs full of roast chicken. The girls wear ruched swimming costumes scrunched up like the curtains at the Oppies bio-caffie and they change colour as they dry from top to bottom.