The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The photo jostles a memory loose in my mind. You were always worried about Ali’s colour, I say.

  What do you mean?

  You don’t remember?

  No.

  It puzzled you that he didn’t really look black.

  You mean he didn’t look like one of our Afs. Like Caiphus.

  After all these years, he still thinks I’m a racist. Caiphus is the guy Dad used to bring home from the warehouse on a Saturday afternoon to work in the garden.

  I’m serious, Joe. We used to puzzle over these pictures and try to figure out who Ali was. What he was. He was black, that was obvious, but he didn’t fit the familiar definition.

  He takes this in. Then he surprises me by saying: I can believe it. You know, he was the great hero of my schooldays, but I never told my friends. I couldn’t admit to it. It must have felt wrong to me. Embarrassing somehow.

  I gave you a hard time about Ali, I say. I’m sorry.

  You weren’t as bad as the old man.

  Still. It’s weird to think about it now. Foreman looked black to me, I remember, he looked like an African. But Ali looked like something else. Maybe it was the first time I ever had second thoughts about these categories.

  Joe is poring over a cutting that shows Ali at three different ages. Look how dark he was as a kid, he says, and how fair he is in this one here. Like a different person. Did they do it deliberately?

  Who?

  The newsroom.

  For a moment I thought you meant the authorities.

  We examine the photographs like a couple of clerks in the Bantu Affairs Department.

  Check the kuif, I say. He looks like Elvis.

  Jissus, Branks.

  Before he became a heavyweight, of course.

  I can tell you that the hair took a lot of work. He had a guy on the payroll whose only duty was to comb it, so he’d look good for the camera.

  No way. The conversation about Elvis the Pelvis and Evel Knievel comes back to me. I say: I reckon he’s just stepped out of a roadster into the ring.

  Now Joe can’t help laughing. Viva Las Vegas!

  But our talk has unsettled him. Soon enough he gathers up his papers and goes. Em’s working overtime at the museum, he says, and he’s got to pick up a pizza on the way home.

  Night falls with a hush and the neighbourly scent of wood smoke. The rumble of the traffic recedes, the birdcall of a car alarm sounds and falls silent, and then the dark comes up over the lawn and the pool like a wash of Indian ink.

  I should get up, put on the lights, switch on the heater. But the twilight has dazed me and I can’t move. The backs of my thighs soften against the cushions of the armchair. I’m becoming part of the furniture. Sometimes I sits and thinks, Dad used to say, and sometimes I just sits. A line he picked up in a movie, I always thought, he and Mom were great moviegoers when they were young. Then Joe came across it in an old Punch miscellany. The caption of a cartoon from the Belle fucking Époque!

  It’s annoying that Joe didn’t ask me about my so-called writing. My contribution to the book. He was so excited to hear that I’d made a start – and now he loses interest. Just when I’m finding my voice, he wants to talk about silence.

  There was a time when I went to the movies just to listen. Training my ear. I’d sit through the whole film with my eyes shut. An old foley man at Reverb told me it would sharpen my ear. Or was it my eye? It’s not enough to hear, he said, you must listen. Sounds have shapes, they’re long or thick or rounded, they have colours, textures and weights, they’re solid or hollow, sharp or flat. And it’s all true. But it was a trial sitting there in the dark, eyelids itching to open, head reeling with talk and sound effects, doing my best to picture the thing in my mind. I sat through Raging Bull like this – or is it just my brother’s obsession that makes me think so? – and my bones ached for a week afterwards. It’s something the kung fu directors discovered long ago: half the power of the blow is in the sound it makes. That’s why the boxing fans want to sit ringside and up close: they want to hear the fight. The real fans, I mean, not the frauds like my brother who can’t stand the sight of blood. If it wasn’t for the calm world of the broadsheets – I should have told him so – he would never have ‘fallen in love’ with Muhammad Ali.

  I get up to close the blinds. And when I switch on the pendant over the kitchen counter, there it is, like a fighter in the ring: the ALI I scrapbook. Sneaky bastard! He thinks he’s putting one over on me again, but actually I’m pleased to take another look at it without his Mickey Mouse gloves directing the traffic. I hook a stool closer with my foot and flip through the book from beginning to end and back again. I can’t be bothered to keep order in his cuttings and a couple slip out onto the counter. Although many of them have come loose, others, for reasons a specialist might be able to supply, are still stuck to the paper. I page onwards and cuttings fly. Perhaps I’m doing it deliberately, flinging the pages flat in the face of Jimmy Ellis, Buster Mathis, George Chuvalo and scrambling up his little system.

  Lights in the driveway. It’s Jordan in the Corsa. After a few minutes he comes in with his girlfriend, who goes by the name of Gaia, a mousey little thing, or she would be if it wasn’t for the strange haircut, soft bristles on the scalp and then a long yellow tail like a badger. Not that I’ve ever seen one of those.

  What is this thing? He recognizes it from the last time.

  It’s your Uncle Joe’s Ali scrapbook. One of several.

  Awesome, says Gaia, prodding one of the cuttings with a sharp fingernail as if to check whether it’s alive. She’s studying to be a physiotherapist.

  Uncle Joe the fight fan, says Jordan. Are you shitting me?

  He talks like this, as if he’s in an Elmore Leonard story. I’ve stopped trying to correct it. I say: It was a long time ago, Jordy.

  No shit. This looks like it came out of the Ark.

  Escape from the Planet of the Apes, says Gaia. She’s reading the back of a Joe Frazier cutting. It’s the Saturday matinée at the Capital Theatre.

  That was the place to be seen, I say. In my own ears I sound like a voice-over on African Mirror. One of the movie palaces. It must have seated a thousand people. When I was a teenager it was past its heyday but it still had a sort of moth-eaten glamour. There was an enormous screen and a velvet curtain, and plaster statues of the muses – maybe – in alcoves. Overhead a midnight sky full of twinkling stars.

  Like Montecasino, says Jordan.

  Something like that.

  ‘Police raid party in Waterkloof.’ Gaia has moved to the back of Chuck Wepner. The good stuff’s on this side, she says. It’s like the return of the repressed. The cops raided this place because there were rumours that blacks and whites were dancing together. Scandal! Doesn’t say what happened. It’s cut off in the middle. Look.

  He wasn’t interested in that side, I say. Suddenly I’m protective: he was just a kid.

  But the reverse world has become compelling. I’m surprised it never held my attention before. We turn the pages and look at the backs of the cuttings. Most of it is sports news, of course, the soccer at the Callies, hockey at the Iscor Club, athletics. But Ali was often on the front page of the papers too and the second page has all kinds of things on it, including politics and advertising. A world comes back to me. It rises from the yellowed pages like a kind of soundtrack. Mineworkers die in an accident…The tea room at Garlicks…is alleged to have taken his thirteen-year-old daughter to a shebeen where he flirted openly with Indian girls…The Publications Control Board…Capital Motors…involving the Chinese in proclaimed White group areas…Lawnmower Services in Bloed Street…Internal squabbling in the Rhodesian Front…after stabbing to death his four-year-old playmate Podromis Heotellis…found Bierman wearing only a ‘see-through’ nightgown and Enozi in a state of undress, standing beside the bed…he took flashlight photographs of the
m and –

  My phone rings. It’s Rita. Are you okay?

  She sounds anxious. I’m fine, Reet. What’s up? Where are you?

  I’m in the street outside, she says. I got the fright of my life. The whole place is in darkness! What the fuck’s going on?

  When she comes in a minute later, she’s still got the panic button in her hand to signal how much of a fright she got.

  Jesus Branks. I thought something had happened. Oh, hello Gaia.

  Hello Mrs B. She should only know what Rita says about her look: like a tennis ball with a growth disorder.

  We’re just getting a history lesson, says Jordan.

  It’s freezing in here!

  She stomps around switching on lights and drawing curtains, pushing the dark out into the garden, back to the wall.

  After Jordan and Gaia go to his room, I reach for the scrapbook but Rita gets there first. And this?

  It’s a scrapbook about the Fight of the Century. Made by Joe.

  Was he here?

  About an hour ago.

  So I have to tell her the whole story, how he pitched up with the scrapbooks, the archive I mean, asking for my help, and wanted me to collaborate on his book, and insisted that I read part of the manuscript. I meant to tell him to get lost but instead I offered to write some things down, and it’s harder than it looks. I’m worried about him, he’s drinking too much, he might be cracking up, what if his mind’s going, you’d think I was his editor. He was here again today to talk about the pictures, and their silence, actually it’s quite interesting, you know, you remember things you thought you’d forgotten. There was a time, I tell her, long before we met, when I went to the movies just to listen.

  Reet is a good listener herself. She lifts and angles her chin and holds her head still, and listens through the whole spiel without interrupting. She should have been a therapist.

  Then she asks: What are you going to do?

  Think I’ll just see where it goes.

  You’re too involved already. You should get out while you can.

  It’ll be fine.

  He’s using you again.

  He wants me in his corner.

  Nonsense. He’s trying to pick your brain. He always takes advantage.

  You shouldn’t be so hard on him. I think he wants us to be closer. You know we’ve drifted apart in the last while.

  The drama about the car thieves wasn’t my fault.

  I know, Reet. It’s more than that anyway. Our lives are just too different.

  We go on talking while we get the supper together.

  How’s your mom? I ask. She was summoned to Silver Oaks earlier. The second time this month.

  In trouble again, Rita says. She’s set up a poker school.

  That’s against the rules?

  Apparently bridge is acceptable but poker is frowned upon. It has the wrong ethos. They play for drugs. And Mom’s the dealer.

  When we go through to the lounge and switch on the TV, the news is all about the miners’ strike in Marikana. The name is familiar: we used to pass the turn-off to Marikana when we drove out to the Magaliesberg for the weekend, to Mountain Sanctuary Park or Tonquani Gorge. I didn’t know there was a mine out there.

  Before I take the scrapbook back to Joe’s place, I phone to make sure that he and Em are out.

  I need a soundtrack for the drive. Last time Chris Gordon’s salty swells worked well enough, but when I stick Master and Commander in the player it sucks me down in an instant. I skip to the battle theme and head for Troyeville in a broadside of drum rolls and brass.

  The neighbourhood looks dodgier than ever. Flaking walls and sagging fences on all sides, three bursting garbage bags on his doorstep, lilac leaves crushed to yellow dust in the gutters. Could it have run down so much in a couple of months? Perhaps he’s right that I can’t see the improvements. His next-door neighbour has started a B&B. At least, he’s got a handpainted sign with a cellphone number wired to his gate, FULL ENGLISH BREKFAST, it says.

  My plan was to roll the scrapbook up and stick it in the postbox, the loudmouth box he had installed for his book deliveries, but now that I’m here I have second thoughts. What if some passer-by lifts it? He’ll never forgive me.

  The charlady might be here. I get out and rattle my key in the diamond grille of the back gate. The yesterday, today and tomorrow is budding early, thrusting small bruised fists out of its woody twigs. It senses a change in the season that’s still hidden from us. Violet comes out in eyeglasses with pink lenses. She’s just had her cataracts done at the Gen. She says Joe will be home in ten minutes, I should come in and wait. She’s got the key in her hand and she’s reaching for the padlock, but I say no, I’ve got to be somewhere, and I push the book through the bars.

  Joe

  To convey the brute force of the heavyweight boxer, the scribes portray him as a machine. His fists are sledgehammers, his punches are pile-drivers, and where normal men have a heart, he has an engine. Joe Frazier is described as a motorized Marciano. After Superfight II, one writer states that Ali was never able to douse the fire completely in the Frazier engine room.

  During Ali’s first fight against Joe Bugner, the British boxer was cut for the first time in 49 outings. But Danny Holland, the man who used to repair Henry Cooper, did a magnificent job of patching up the wound. Cooper’s battered bodywork was a good place to learn your trade.

  If Frazier and Cooper are steam engines or lorries, Foreman is a piece of earthmoving equipment. Alan Hubbard, looking ahead to the Rumble in the Jungle, says that Ali will be unable to avoid Foreman’s thudding, bulldozer fists.

  Boxers also reach for this metaphorical toolkit. Cooper’s fist is like a well-used tool. The ‘ammer, he calls it. It went in – bang – short and sweet and hard…When he talks about his hook, it sounds less like a punch than a piece of tackle attached to his arm.

  These tools are strangely debilitating. A boxer with his gloves laced on is as helpless as a baby. He can work on his opponent, but he can do nothing for himself. He cannot pull up his pants or comb his hair or put in his gumshield – although many boxers bat themselves in the mouth with a glove to make sure it’s lodged. If a gloved-up boxer needs to piss, someone has to hold his dick for him.

  Sometimes it’s as if the tool has a life of its own. Describing the moment he hurt his right hand during the Norton fight, Ali says: It hit Norton on the head and something went pop.

  Cooper has a similarly detached view of his eye. He talks about it as if it belongs to a stranger and is out to get him. I could feel the blood dripping down. It was coming from above the left eye…the suspect eye…the eye that always seemed to go at the most crucial point of a fight. Occasionally the perspective tilts and you become aware that it’s not him talking but a boxing writer. In less than half a minute my face was a mask of red. It’s hard to imagine any boxer seeing his own face from the inside in these terms. This is the view of a spectator at the ringside.

  The mechanics of the blow should not obscure the fact that the boxer is nothing if not a feeling body. Cooper knows when his punches are connecting because he can feel the jarring right up his arm. Jerry Quarry describes this feeling with anatomical precision: I knew it was all over. I threw in my Sunday punch and felt it jar all the way from my second knuckle to my shoulder. This is the punch that knocked out Jack Bodell in 64 seconds.

  Boxers know where to find their organs – and the organs of the other guy. They have a special love for the kidneys. Before the Fight of the Century, Quarry, still smarting from his defeat four months earlier, makes it clear that he’s rooting for Smokin’ Joe: Clay will get his kidneys busted! This is exactly what Frazier has in mind: Clay can keep that pretty head, I don’t want it. What I’m going to do is try to pull them kidneys out. I’m going to be at where he lives – in the body.

  Branko

 
There are cinemas in town like the 20th Century and the Pigalle, but we only go there if someone has a birthday party. Mainly we go to the bioscopes down the road in Voortrekkerhoogte. Sylvie likes the Garrison Hall on a Friday night when the oumanne from the army camps arrive in their step-outs with their berets moulded to their bristly heads. Joe and I prefer the 1AD on Saturday mornings. That’s 1 Ammunition Depot.

  Dad drives us there. Besides Joe and me, there are always two or three boys from the neighbourhood. Dad likes to pull their legs. We can tell when he’s talking bull, but they don’t know him. If Tim Knowles or Herbie Mitchell asks what film we’re going to see, he says, Buck Jones in The Daring Dive for the Dying Stompie.

  You can’t really call the 1AD a bioscope. I suppose it started out as an ammo dump or quartermaster’s stores, a prefab put up in a hurry during the Second World War. It’s a corrugated-iron half-barrel like a big oil drum that’s been cut through lengthways and painted khaki. There’s a heavy black curtain over the door where a soldier leans through a hatch to take our five-cent pieces and then we run down to the front and sit on the fold-up seats clutching our rolls of sweets. It’s stifling inside and the air is thick with cigarette smoke from the troepies who fill the rest of the hall. These okes haven’t had a weekend pass for a month and the girls know to stay away. The place smells of sweat, dust, boot polish, fruit gums. When the dangling bulbs go out the kids in the front rows whoop and whistle. Tiny beams of light drop from the iron vault as if the place has been pierced by shrapnel. Then the projector clatters at the back and an image reels onto the screen.

  At the Garrison you’ll see a film with Bette Davis or Alain Delon in it, but here the films are left over from the war years and my big hero is Gene Autry, the singing cowboy. I also like the black-and-white serials in the supporting programme, even though I always miss an episode or two and they sometimes show them in the wrong order. The Martians in the sci-fi serials are slimy lizards and live in underground caverns of papier mâché. The robots are tin toys made in Hong Kong and even a ten-year-old can tell there’s a midget inside. In the adventure serials the hero always hides behind a pile of wooden crates to spy on the smugglers, and their trucks are just like the Bedfords waiting outside to take the soldiers back to the barracks. You know the episode is about to end when the truck goes on a mountain pass after the brake cable has been sawn through with a Bowie knife. The hero pumps the brake pedal but the music puts its foot down and drags you on, faster, faster, until the truck veers off the road and disappears over the edge of a cliff.