The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  It’s the first time Joe and I have been to a pro boxing match. We’re at the top of the stand and can’t see much of what’s happening in the ring, but we can tell the boxers apart easily, because Fourie looks so pale under the lights, and their styles are so different. Fourie has a light-footed, dancing style and he uses it to keep out of trouble. Halfway through the fight he’s clearly ahead on points. But Galindez is fitter and stronger and just keeps coming at him. In round 8 Galindez is cut above the right eye, but his corner works on it and it doesn’t seem to affect him. By the last few rounds Fourie is exhausted, trying to trade punches with the bigger man, and clinching and holding for all he’s worth. Galindez takes the fight on points. When the announcement is made there are so many people in the ring, we can’t see the boxers. All we see is the cops hanging over the ropes.

  We talk about the fight for weeks afterwards. The main thing is being able to say: I was there. And also: We was robbed – it’s never ‘were’ – our guy should have won. Cops everywhere and they didn’t lift a finger.

  Joe’s gone to university in Johannesburg but I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my life. I’m not inclined to study and I don’t have the pass marks anyway. Everyone’s talking about television. In a year’s time the SABC is going to start broadcasting and we’re waiting for the switch-on. Mom and Dad already have a TV set sitting dumbly in the corner of the lounge. There are jobs to be had, Dad says, you can get in on the ground floor. The corporation is recruiting and training technicians. You could be a cameraman, a sound man, a lighting man. Put your name down. I put my name down and get a job in a furniture store in Paul Kruger Street. It’s an excuse to bugger around with their hi-fi systems.

  I learnt to drink in the army and keeping my hand in seems like a good plan. Most nights I’m at the Rose and Crown or the Assembly Hotel with Gordie Bradshaw or Louis Ferreira. Once I see Clyde Skinner at the Edward, slumped over a brandy and Coke like an old barfly, and I bump into Ronnie Baker at the Oklahoman Motel in Silverton and he tells me he’s married with a kid and the second’s on the way. In the spring there’s a beer festival at the Harlequins Sports Club, our Oktoberfest, with a big marquee on the hockey field and an oompah band, and Bradshaw creeps in under the canvas at the back of the bar and swipes a fifty-litre keg of beer. He rolls it across the field in the dark and down the embankment to the fence, where we pick it up later in his car. The next weekend we open the keg with a shifting spanner and throw a party. It’s the biggest blowout in living memory. On the way home Ferreira crashes into a jacaranda tree and totals his Fiat. He’s thrown through the windscreen but emerges with hardly a scratch. No one can understand how his big body went through such a small opening. Being drunk probably saved your life, the doctor says, and Ferreira takes this as a compliment. When I came to (he says later) surrounded by purple blossoms, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  One night Bradshaw and I are at the Assembly and I’m coming back from the bar with a couple of ginger squares for some girls we met on the dance floor, when I’m attacked by the manager and his sidekick. Eloff is built like a prop forward and his helper – some say it’s his son – is a little runt with one leg shorter than the other who spends all his spare time lifting weights. They fall on me like a loose maul. If it was Bradshaw they wanted to bliksem I would understand, he’s always looking for grief, but I’ve done nothing to upset them. Unless I checked someone’s girlfriend skeef or bumped someone’s elbow and spilt his beer. Or maybe my long hair offends them. Or maybe they just feel like moering someone. The boere of Snor City don’t need an invitation.

  The two of them haul me onto the pavement – no point getting blood on the carpets – and start beating the hell out of me. The band is taking a break and a crowd gathers to watch the show. The girls we were chatting up are standing at the back waiting for their cocktails. A couple of cops stroll out of the lobby to keep an eye on things. Eloff is insane with rage. He hits me on the top of my head with his elbow. He pulls a clump of my hair out and stuffs it in his mouth. The runt keeps kicking me in the knees with his orthopaedic boot. This is a good time for him. When I’m rolling around on the tar it looks like all the spectators are wearing corrective footwear, but it’s just the fashion for platform shoes.

  After a while, I see Bradshaw in the front row pumping his arms. I think he’s showing me a boxing defence, but he’s actually telling me to run away, which I do, leaving most of my shirt behind in the manager’s paws. I run all the way down Visagie Street and hide behind a little ornamental hedge outside a block of flats while the boere go up and down shouting and cursing and looking under cars. At last they give up the search and I walk over to my flat in Sunnyside in my shirtsleeves. When I get into the lift, Chuck Wepner comes at me out of the mirror.

  We should fetch Ferreira and go round there with a wheel spanner, Bradshaw says when he pitches up, we’ll teach that rockspider a lesson.

  But it’s just talk.

  12

  Inheritance

  April 1st is OK TV day in the Transvaal when OK will present its TV line-up. Sparing no expense to bring you colour and monochrome receivers.

  – Pretoria News, March 1975

  Branko

  Joe’s last will and testament leaves me with two timepieces: a chunky Seamaster wristwatch that belonged to Dad and the Ali archive. By the time I bring this inheritance home, my brother has been dead for eight months. The cuttings that say ‘Writer dies in attempted hijacking’ and ‘City writer shot’ are pinned to my noticeboard, but I don’t believe the perpetrators will be caught. People get away with murder.

  The archive consists of a cardboard box and a plastic crate. Of course, the Pres Les box is familiar. Easy Care Linens it says on the lid. I remember when Mom ordered these sets of sheets and pillowslips from a factory in the Cape. They were olive green and made of a synthetic material that dried in five minutes – a jiffy, we must have said – and did not need pressing, and they were so slippery you had to be careful not to slide out of your own bed when you turned over. ‘Muhammad Ali’ is printed on the side of the box in black Koki.

  The crate is called Big Jim. It looks like a gigantic Tupperware lunch box and still has the Makro price tag on the lid. Its contents are a mystery. All I know is that it’s the heavier of the two.

  The reception is a family affair. Jordan slices Muhammad Ali open with a box cutter, folds back the flaps and lifts out the first scrapbook. This old crap again, he says. Sorry Dad, that’s not what I mean.

  Rita says: It’s as if he had a premonition, coming around here all the time with his papers, trying to drag you into it.

  How could he have known? He was just looking for someone to hold his hand.

  He knew he’d never finish it, she insists. She believes in signs and hunches.

  He thought he would live for ever. It’s a common delusion among writers. Em had to package this stuff for me. It was in twenty different places.

  It doesn’t amount to much, does it? After a lifetime of effort.

  Oh, there’s plenty more but it’s all gone to the Literary Museum. This is just the stuff he wanted me to have.

  Rita pages through the scrapbook while Jordan and I rummage around in the box. As I thought: drawing books and folders.

  What’s in this one? She gives Big Jim a kick.

  I’ll bet it’s some weird shit, says Jordan. Do you remember when that English poet died and they found a huge collection of porn in his house?

  Erotica, I say. Your uncle would spin in his grave.

  It could be teddy bears, Rita says, or snow globes.

  You must be joking.

  She sucks her cheeks in to show that she is.

  We could sell those on eBay, Jordy says. My son the online ontroppanaw.

  Enough, I say. He left this stuff to me and I’ll open it when I’m ready. Now get out of here so I can do some work.
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  I really do intend to sit down at the Avid. But the archive is unavoidable.

  There are six items in the Pres Les box: three scrapbooks and three collections of loose cuttings in cardboard folders. The books are marked I, II and III, and the folders have schoolbook labels attached to them marked V, VI and VII. No sign of IV.

  The books are held together by spit and Brylcreem, as Dad used to say. And love, the especially blind kind of love called hero worship. Here’s a measure of it: sometimes Joe would find the same piece in two different newspapers, articles derived from the SAPA bureau and identical except for the headline or the size of a photograph, and he’d clip and paste both of them into the scrapbook. On the same page.

  Hardly any of the cuttings have a source attached to them. The exceptions are those clipped from the top of a page that includes the newspaper’s name and the date. No wonder he tried so hard to keep order in this shambles. If cuttings start falling out of the books I’ll have the devil’s job figuring out where they belong. No one will ever be able to quote from this stuff and say where it’s from.

  The reverse world comes back into view, a jumble of interrupted stories, jokes without punchlines, dismembered images. It was Jordan’s girlfriend, ex-girlfriend Gaia who said this was the real thing…Introducing the radio cassette player. You’ll see knobs and switches, buttons and gadgets such as you’ve never seen before…Mark Saxon and Sergei…Haig whisky. Don’t be vague – insist on Whatchamacallit…painless metrication is within easy reach of all…Regent Conversation Ties. The mood sweeping the world…Modesty Blaise. The left side of Modesty Blaise, one enormous, fiercely lashed eye…These bits and pieces, which owe even more to chance than the ‘archive’ that produced them, reek of the past. I could cut them into a soundtrack, something you can almost hear and half understand. But I’m not making a film.

  I pop the lid off the Big Jim crate and it exhales vegetable matter. More paper. Books, files, magazines. Here’s José Torres’s Sting Like a Bee and Mailer’s The Fight. A tattered issue of Sports Illustrated. The Fighters by Chris Greyvenstein. An Autobiography by Henry Cooper. A faded photocopy of ‘The Fight’ by William Hazlitt. The Fire Next Time, I Write What I Like, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Piles of Leslie Charteris. A dozen copies of Boxing and Wrestling and The Ring from the fifties. A VHS cassette of On the Waterfront. Also a.k.a. Cassius Clay. And Michael Mann’s Ali with Will Smith in the title role. Joe thought there was something creepy about Smith’s ears, said he’d had them surgically relocated, raised or lowered, I can’t remember which. The disk is still sealed in cellophane.

  Here are the files too. The blue one, which he showed me once, holds the manuscript. It’s mainly accounts of Ali’s fights and foibles, in no apparent order, and ruminations about the scrapbooks, with here and there a half-written piece about his own schooldays. Going to the rofstoei in the City Hall, getting punched in the mouth by Paul Skinner, losing all his marbles to Ferdi Kouters. Frankly, I thought he was further along. Then there’s a file full of outlines and structures, notes towards this and reminders about that. Also half a dozen folders holding ‘discards’. Where’s the book? It’s as if he thought the notes were the most important thing. If he’d put all this pencil lead and elbow grease into an actual manuscript, I’d have a sporting chance of making something of it. He should have taken his own advice and finished the thing while Ali was still alive. While he was still alive, the prick. If he wasn’t dead already, I swear I’d wring his neck.

  A page in the second file has my name on it. For Branko it says. For a moment I think it’s a dedication, but then I see it’s just for my attention, and it’s another outline of the book. This one has alternating voices, his and mine, past and present. Straight out of the modernist writing manual, he says in a note, but that’s not always a bad thing.

  I tear the page up and throw it in the wastepaper basket. Posthumous control fucking freakery! Then I retrieve the pieces, stuff them in an envelope and put them in a drawer. You never know.

  There’s one more thing in the crate, an old State Express cigarette tin, triple sevens, cork-tipped. To judge by the weight it’s empty, but when I flip the lid there’s something inside. It looks like a stash of insect parts, the wings we boys used to knock off flying ants after a storm. No, it’s strips of crackly yellow sticky tape, brittle and desiccated. All the strips that have come loose in the scrapbooks. What possessed him to keep them? It reminds me of the appendix he brought home in a bottle from the Little Company of Mary after his operation. And the bone-yellow conch the size of a child’s fist given to him by Sonny Woodward that was supposed to be a whale’s eardrum. Surely not. I empty the tin into the basket.

  I told my brother I’d made a start on my side of the book and I wasn’t exactly lying: I have twenty or thirty pages in a manuscript book. Now I’ve got his papers too. What a laughable double bill we make: his nickel-and-dime biography of Ali and my five cents’ worth of memoir.

  Jordan is right: it’s a lot of old crap. But it needs to be unpacked anyway, I’ve already cleared space on my shelves. As I lift Big Jim onto the trestle table, I feel the full weight of my inheritance.

  Joe

  People stared out of the drawings, daring me to look away: voluptuous women, all lips, breasts, hips and thighs, pop-eyed urchins huddled around braziers, a man whose head was the shape of Africa. Their eyes followed me like Jesus on the cross in the cathedral.

  The first art exhibition I ever saw was the one I chanced upon in the Barclay Square shopping centre with Rollie. It was a Saturday night. We’d eaten at the Sirloin Steakhouse and were heading downtown to see which folk singer was playing at the Keg and Tankard. Probably Ronnie Domp, he was a fixture. As we ranged through the centre, full of red meat and Lion lager and windgat notions, the exhibition distracted us. The drawings were pinned to boards or laid out on a table, and the artists sat to one side on fold-up chairs, three black men of our age. It must be a special arrangement, I thought. I had been at university just long enough to know that the absence of black people from places like this, places my cousin and I thought of as ours, was not the natural order of things.

  We moved from the pinboards to the table and browsed through the images set out there. Prices on little paper squares were pinned to the tablecloth beside the artworks. I thought they might be etchings but I wasn’t sure. The artist came over and stood on the other side of the table, watching us as we watched his work.

  What do you think? he said at last.

  I think it’s a load of rubbish, Rollie said.

  You can’t say that, I said.

  No he can, said the artist, if he doesn’t like it, he must say so.

  Sure, but there’s ways of saying things.

  The artist grinned at me. He obviously can’t stand up for himself, I thought, in this situation.

  Check at all the work that went into this one, I persisted. At least he’s trying to do something.

  He better try harder, Rollie said.

  This one’s pretty good, I said, although I was no longer convinced.

  Hmm. The artist picked it up and turned it towards the light. I had some problems with this one.

  It’s fucken terrible, Rollie said, finding that the horse’s mouth was speaking up for him. What’s this thing here? A hand. Are you serious? I can do a better job than that and I can’t draw to save my life.

  Now I thought this would upset the artist, but he pushed his beret to the back of his head and burst out laughing. His colleagues came over to see what was happening.

  He doesn’t like this one, the artist said to them. He says it’s fucken terrible.

  They all laughed as if Rollie had said something wonderful.

  I felt my gorge rise, the acid swill of two terms of History of Art and two more of tutoring black matrics for Race Relations. Fuck them. Sloping away.

  Branko

  Among other th
ings, nearly all of them made of paper, my brother leaves me his collection of books featuring The Saint, forty rat-eaten paperbacks whose pages have the texture of old banknotes and give off the same odd mix of dust and damp as his archive. Simon Templar – the initials explain the nickname – was Leslie Charteris’s great fictional invention.

  One of the first things you learn as an editor is to order the material before you start working on it. Laying down timelines and logging shots is a bind, but without it you can’t find your way.

  I sort the books by date of first publication, from Enter the Saint published in 1930 to The Saint on TV in 1967. This last one is not actually by Charteris: it’s Fleming Lee’s adaptation of two stories from the TV series starring Roger Moore. Charteris stopped writing The Saint books in 1963, although he edited and revised some that were written afterwards by other people and published under his name, including this one. In his foreword to Lee’s book, Charteris calls it ‘an interesting and perhaps unprecedented experiment in teamwork…I have done the back-seat driving and added a few typical flourishes of my own.’

  The Saint books were popular for more than forty years and some of them ran to twenty impressions and half a dozen new editions. I reorder Joe’s collection by the date in which they actually appeared so that I can see the different imprints and series designs. The best covers were painted by J Pollack for the Pan editions of the early fifties and show Templar in a collar and tie and a fedora. His eyebrow is cocked and his lip quirked. He looks ironic and debonair, and cheerfully, uncomplicatedly masculine. According to the back cover note he is a ‘man of superb recklessness/strange heroisms/and impossible ideals’.

  When Joe bought these books, they already looked out of style. Yet their lurid jackets concealed how old-fashioned they really were: most of them had been written before the Second World War. It surprises me now.