The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  It’s a long drive from Clubview to Bapsfontein and it feels even longer out in the country, rolling down the bluegum-shaded back roads through the plots. Joe is sitting in front between Mom and Dad: the Impala has a solid seat like a sprung sofa. I’m in the back with Sylvie and her boyfriend. Out of the corner of my eye I see his slim brown fingers on her leg, just touching the hem of her miniskirt. Billy Darling is an appie at Iscor. Despite the name, he’s an Afrikaner, like most of Sylvie’s boyfriends. No one knows why she goes for the boys with thick accents and ducktail styles, the rough diamonds, as Mom calls them. Billy’s wearing white hipster jeans and a black polo neck that causes the shampoo jingle to play in my head: look who’s here, the man in black, he never worries about dandruff. Billy’s crinkly blond hair makes a sort of gutter over his eyebrows and he tends it every now and then with a comb he keeps in his sock.

  Joe turns around on the front seat, with the road spooling behind him, and leans over the backrest. He begins trying out his new Frisian dialect on Billy Darling.

  Hy sleep in my room, he says with a nod towards me.

  I’ve been introduced to the rules of this argot, which involves pronouncing certain English words in a weird Dutch accent to make a grammatically correct, semantically dubious almost-Afrikaans. To an Afrikaner Hy sleep in my room sounds like ‘He drags in my cream’, but what Joe actually means is ‘He sleeps in my room’. Either way it sounds suggestive.

  Billy Darling doesn’t get the ins and outs but he knows it’s funny, because the rest of us are laughing, so he laughs along. This brother of yours! He comes out with the strangest things. Sylvie is enjoying herself: her brother is amusing her new boyfriend.

  Smeek hom in die vaas, Joe says to Sylvie, jerking a thumb towards Billy Darling. It’s just possible that Billy hears this nonsense as: ‘Beg him in the vase.’ But we know he means: ‘Smack him in the face.’

  We all laugh like crazy, except for the butt of the joke.

  Joe’s new language is imperfectly simple. It uses only the present tense – the het ge- form won’t translate – and the simplest nouns and verbs. It can’t cope with polysyllables and abstraction, the leafy verbiage of language, but it clings to the Germanic roots like clay. It favours the imperative. The logic of it is unruly and it’s always about to fail. Sometimes ‘Smack him in the face’ comes out as Smeek hom in die vaas and sometimes as Smook hom in die fees. Problem is a smook is also a ‘smoke’: Gee my ’n smook en leet hom. ‘Give me a smoke and light it.’ If a ‘smoke’ is a smook, then ‘spoke’ should be spook, but just as often it’s speek or spuik. In the end, he’s milling a set of Netherlandish diphthongs into his own half-baked kitchen Dutch. He’s a one-boy experiment that demonstrates the hazards of making and breaking your own rules.

  Leet haar ’n smook, he says to Billy Darling. He wants him to give Sylvie a smoke. The laughter dies in the back seat. Sylvie’s been smoking the odd fag on the sly and if Dad finds out he’ll hit the roof.

  Billy Darling has a pack of Texans in his sock (the other one). The sock is white to match his jeans, and his shoes are white too, soft white moccasins.

  Darling Billy as Dad calls him looks glum. He still hasn’t picked up the language, but he knows the joke is on him.

  Sylvie catches Dad’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

  That’s enough, he says to Joe.

  But with Joe it’s never enough.

  Joe

  The first two pages of the ALi III scrapbook are devoted to the Ali-Frazier return, which took place at Madison Square Garden on 28 January 1974. Superfight II went more or less as the scribes foretold. From the bell, Frazier bulldozed Ali relentlessly, and Ali backed away, used the ropes, and peppered Frazier with every counterpunch and combination in the book. The bout went the full twelve rounds and Ali won a unanimous points decision.

  This was Ali’s first fight after he started training at Deer Lake – Muhammad’s Mountain as the press took to calling it – and he attributed his victory to the new camp, saying he was in the best physical shape of his life.

  The rest of the scrapbook deals with the buildup to the Rumble in the Jungle. Fully nine months passed between Frazier in January and Foreman in October, and Foreman actually had a fight in between, against Ken Norton in Caracas in March, which was over in two rounds. The amount of coverage on the buildup is extraordinary. Roughly half of it concerns the time just after the announcement of the fight, while the other half deals with the time just before the event, once the boxers had arrived in Africa.

  From the start, many of the sportswriters predicted that the fight in Zaire would be Ali’s last and few gave him any chance of winning. In August, Archie Moore came to Johannesburg at the invitation of Maurice Toweel to attend the Trek multiracial tournament at Rand Stadium, and stayed on the 16th floor of Joubert Park’s Landdrost Hotel, which had ‘international status’. Moore told Norman Canale that he had taught Foreman how to beat Ali: George is like a little pink elephant…he never forgets what you teach him. Later he contrasted Foreman the elephant with Ali the racehorse. Whereas the elephant can pick its way through the jungle, the racehorse keeps banging into trees: Yes, I see Ali panicking in the jungle and the trees he’ll be running into are Foreman’s left hooks and straight rights.

  The prospect of a boxing match in Africa got everyone’s blood up. Ali told reporters: When we get out in Africa with all my soul brothers and everyone rooting for me, he won’t want to fight. He knows they’ll put him in the pot. Foreman begged to differ. Ten years after Ali’s conversion to Islam, Foreman goaded him: I’m going to beat your Christian tail. When ticket sales were slow, promoter Don King complained that Ali’s talk about voodoo dolls had scared off US fans. But Ali was sure he’d have plenty of company in Zaire. En route to Africa, he told a press conference in Paris: …I shall be fighting in my homeland. For 400 years I have been separated from my homeland. Me and thousands of other Black Americans are going home.

  Under the headline ‘It’s goodbye to eternal butterfly – Annihilation awaits Ali in Darkest Africa’, Alan Hubbard predicted the end: If the setting for the forthcoming ‘superfight’ is primitive, then this is as it should be. For there will be nothing sophisticated about the way Foreman sets about the final, brutal annihilation of Ali. It is a fight that belongs to the jungle. The Rumble flushed the animal imagery out into the open in Hubbard’s piece too: Two men alone drawing others from their kraals in Kinshasa and their semi-detacheds in Kilburn. They’ll come out of fascination, tugged along by a legend and the prospect of an exhibition of animalism normally reserved for the dark secrecy of the jungle itself. Ali’s predictions of victory, Hubbard joked, were just a case of whistling in Darkest Africa.

  In mid-September, Foreman cut his eye during a sparring session and the fight had to be postponed for six weeks. The citizens of Zaire, wrote Hubbard, [r]eared in tribal wars of harrowing intensity, found it hard to believe that such a tiny cut could stop the champion – boxing’s chieftain is how he put it – from fighting. In fact, some American commentators said the postponement was a godsend because the television communications facilities for broadcasting the fight were not yet ready.

  One New York Times reporter quoted in The Star thought the problem ran deeper than that. He was struggling to get through when he called. ‘Oh, Zaire,’ replied the operator. ‘You know, they don’t pick up the phone in that country.’

  Meanwhile, the Zairean censors were cutting perceived criticism of the country from reports by foreign correspondents. Ian Wooldridge of the London Daily Mail had his copy ripped from the telex machine in mid-sentence for referring to Mobutu Sese Seko as Joseph Mobutu. Had the arrangements been left to Zaire, ran one joke the censors did not find amusing, Stanley and Livingstone would never have met. When it came to criticism, Hubbard wrote, the government was as sensitive as the skin around Foreman’s eye.

  The last few cuttings in ALi III date from late Sept
ember and early October 1974, three weeks before the fight. Foreman was at the airport in a denim shirt and a floppy jockey cap seeing off Miss Viki King and Miss Trina Booker, who had been doing some PR work to promote the fight and were now going home to the US. Meanwhile, Ali was fooling around in the training ring, slumped on the canvas, pretending that singer Philippé Wynne of The Spinners had knocked him out.

  A cartoon from late September shows the interior of the Zaire Press Club. Half a dozen scruffy newsmen are propping up the bar or playing snooker. There are posters of Ali and Foreman on the wall, an ‘Out of Order’ sign dangles from the doors of a telephone booth (perhaps the very one the New York Times was trying to reach), a notice behind the counter, where a buxom barmaid is preening, advertises ‘Your Ali Lunch’. A man in a dark suit, who looks a bit like Don King, introduces a newcomer to the sceptical scribes: Meet our Mr Mongo – ringside commentator Regional News. Mr Mongo has curly white hair and a goatee and is dressed in a loincloth. He carries the tools of the trade: a talking drum and two sticks.

  Branko

  Curious idioms wash through our schoolyard conversations. Peculiar ways of saying things, odd intonations and catchphrases come and go. ‘It must be Thursday’ means you’re behaving like a moffie. ‘Psssshaw!’ means absolutely, go right ahead. We pick up and toss aside crude terms for making every kind of judgement: tit, grand, evil, scaly. But nothing rivals the weird inventiveness of the inverted lingo that arrives with a single phrase – ‘Did I feel large?’ – and then infects all our talk.

  ‘Did I feel large?’ This means: I felt small. I was belittled, embarrassed, made a tit of myself.

  The inversion is simple to grasp: you take a statement, replace the key word with an antonym and pose it as a question. You lay an exaggerated stress on the key word, which carries the weight of the line. ‘Did I feel large?’ And you can add a Gallic hand gesture, used in no other circumstance, in which the right hand shoots out, palm open, drops emphatically to the groin, so that the bottom edge of the hand strikes the body just as the key word is uttered, and then rebounds slightly towards the listener. It’s a double underline. ‘Did I feel large?’ No, I felt very fucking small.

  The Large is a flourish rather than a language and has obvious limitations. It’s not the double Dutch the girls speak to conceal their secrets. You can’t say much with it, but you can twist the tail of a story, underscore a punchline or turn a spotlight on the moral. When we stand around in circles at break, retelling the best parts of the latest Trinity film or acting out scenes from The Party, let’s say the one where Bakshi loses his shoe and covers his foot with a piece of paper, the back-to-front interrogative, which always carries an element of mockery, threads through the laughter like a knowing chorus. Jack Barnard, who knows entire scenes by heart, is our most eloquent exponent. Bud Spencer taps the bandito on the shoulder. Excuse me? He turns around. There’s the double take, the roundhouse, the duck and counterpunch. Bam! We laughed like crazy. ‘Did we cry?’

  The rhetoric of The Large allows even a compliment to be charged with ridicule. Vince van Lingen hails Derek Gibbs who’s just won the cross-country: ‘Shot hey Gibbs! Did you come last?’

  Joe

  Ali’s schoolboy rhymes still make me laugh. A month before his fight against Foreman, he recited his poem of the day to Joe Durso at Deer Lake: If you think the world went mad because Nixon resigned, / You just wait till I whip Geroge [sic] Foreman’s behind. Later, before he left for Zaire, he aired a variation on this theme: If Evel Knievel can make that jump, / I can beat George Foreman’s rump. As the anonymous author of the article in which this poem appears points out, Evel Knievel’s jump across Snake River Canyon in September 1974 ended in failure.

  When Henry Cooper turned 32, Ali sent him a poem: After I’ve finished whipping you, / you’ll think that you are forty-two. Happy Birthday. Your London Bridge will fall down. The couplet is no more than amusing. The afterthought, on the other hand, is superbly silly.

  I didn’t know then that stylized boasting was an American tradition. This is Ali at the press conference to announce that Madison Square Garden would telecast the Rumble in the Jungle: I’m fearless…I wrestle with an alligator, I tussle with a whale. The other day I murdered a rock. I injured a stone. It’s Davy Crockett. And sometimes, thirty years in advance, it’s Chuck Norris: Last night, testing mah speed, I hit the light switch on the bedroom wall and I was in bed before the room was dark. It started raining last week. I handcuffed lightnin’ and threw thunder in jail. I’m so mean I make medicine sick.

  In a press conference, Ali referred to his first fight with Frazier and the fact that the referee and all three judges were white: I know I have the wrong complexion to get the right connection and the right protection. This is proto-rap.

  At the time of the Norton fight, two Oxford dons supported an invitation for Ali to take up a professorship in poetry at the university. One of them said: This is not simply a joke. We should like to see him win. Apparently Ali could picture himself in the role. When Durso asked him what he would do if he won the fight in Zaire, he said: I’ll get my briefcase and retire. No more fighting. Lots of speaking at all those colleges, nice-looking guy carrying the briefcase around. I’ll be fine. They’ll all have to bow and smile.

  Angelo Dundee always assured reporters that Ali wrote his own doggerel. Ali himself used to joke about it. He told students at Harvard: I can’t read or write very well, but I’ve got enough money to buy someone who can.

  Branko

  At the back of Joe’s chest of drawers is a secret compartment. Except that it’s more of a gap than a compartment and it’s not exactly secret. The chest was mine before it was his. Why would I not have discovered the space behind the drawers when a sock or a pair of underrods disappeared into thin air? Before it came to me, the chest belonged to Uncle Eddie, which is why the interior smells of Vitalis hair oil. I reach into the splintery space and feel around with careful fingertips. First out is the blue exercise book full of names from the Bible. Huppim and Shuppim. Nothing new there. I drop it back into the dark. Next: a diary with Reliable Appliances on the cover. Some rep must have given it to Dad, but he has no use for such things. Promising. And finally: the blue exercise book Joe’s always scribbling in with his arm crooked over the page so that no one can see. Why write it down then? If you want to keep your secrets, don’t put them on paper. Even then I suspected what I know now: we are a family of secret-keepers, secret-stealers and secret-dealers. We want to be found out.

  The diary disappoints. Page after page of useless information, revealing nothing. Rode to school with Bob. Double Maths with Shillo. IDA after break. Worked on paperknife. Burger lent me new Bowie album. Read in the afternoon. Mom made pork chops. Listened to Test the Team after supper. Cool day. Jesus Christ. Pork chops! It’s enough to make me puke.

  But the exercise book wakes me up. The first five pages are all about Chloe Woodward. Bingo. Sonny Woodward was Dad’s boss when he was still at the warehouse in Pretoria North. The Woodwards had money. More than us anyway. They lived in Irene in a house with French doors and a patio (which Lois Woodward called the pay-she-oh, as if it was also French) and a pool and a stone wall with a lychgate that was meant to look like England. Mom thought the Woodwards put on airs. When they invited us for supper she said she could do without it, but she came along anyway because you can’t say no to the boss. Afterwards Dad said the beer tasted of Brasso: the Woodwards’ houseboy must have polished the inside of the beer mugs. And Mom said that wouldn’t be surprising, because didn’t he once polish the soles of their shoes? Can you imagine. The first time Sonny went out in them he fell on his guava. One shouldn’t laugh, he nearly broke his neck. He could have ended up in a wheelchair. We didn’t have a girl at home, never mind a houseboy. Mom did all the housework. That’s the difference between us and the Woodwards, she said, we don’t have houseboy stories. That’s why we’ll never be friends really. And a
lso if we fall on our guavas it’s no one’s fault but our own.

  Chloe was Sylvie’s age. She had thick brown hair and the walls of her room were covered with posters from Jackie magazine. In front of her spindly wooden desk stood a fibreglass chair, the latest thing, a glossy scarlet pod like a wine glass on a slender stem. Fibreglass. The word made it seem fragile. Joe went mad, darting around the chair like a tribesman confronted by a pocket watch. Chloe invited him to sit on it, but he cowered behind the door as if it was about to explode. Everyone laughed like crazy. Then she demonstrated how strong the chair was by standing on the seat and twirling around like a fashion model and I couldn’t stop looking at her legs. Joe must have been looking too because he made all these notes in the exercise book. He goes on about her alabaster skin and the hollows behind her knees and the rich coils of her hair all bristly with static as if she’s just brushed it. Also her kindness and her tinkling laughter and her smell.

  Then a blank page.

  Then a page about the Afrikaans girl from three houses down. I’ve seen her slinking past in the street with her low-slung hips and her big nose. I didn’t think he’d noticed her, never mind the little graph-paper checks of her skirt. Apparently she’s called Lianie, which is a strange sort of name.

  Another blank.

  Then ten pages of love poems in his blocky print with a fountain pen, the mawkish things you’d expect from a schoolboy. I’m on poem three, which describes a girl with black curls and yellow bell-bottoms, before I realize it’s the girl from the ice rink, the one who obviously fancies him, the Greek. But he’s so terrified of her, terror being one of the more powerful manifestations of love, that he can’t pluck up the courage to speak to her. Whenever their paths threaten to cross, he veers away and watches from afar. Usually I would keep the book, that was my plan when I fished it out of the shallows, and use it to blackmail him into mowing the lawn or washing the Zodiac. But the poems have a strange effect on me. He’s got a way with words, that’s what everyone says, but I’ve never understood it. Suddenly Chloe Woodward is interesting. I wouldn’t have said she was much of a looker, but now I can’t get her musk-scented mouth out of my mind. Of course, he didn’t get anywhere near her mouth, he just saw the box of Beechies lying on her bed, but knowing this makes no difference. I put the diary and the exercise book back in the hidey-hole and say nothing. Until now, when it no longer matters.