The idea that the Salvation Army had come especially to ridicule us seemed suddenly feasible. Why did they carry on playing like this? Did they deem it their duty to provide a soundtrack for our squabbles? Why wouldn’t they shut up? Why didn’t they go away?
“It’s not us they’re laughing at,” said Cliffie, as if I had spoken aloud. “It’s you Sarge.”
“Is that so?”
Cliffie was always a troublemaker. We all looked at Sergeant Dundas, at his lumpy knees, at his fat stomach, at his red-veined cheeks puffed up with air. The sun glanced off the iridescent frames of the conductor’s glasses. Sergeant Dundas flushed.
“They’ll laugh on the other sides of their faces!” And he marched across the street to his house.
“Now throw down the money, Rich,” Cliffie called into the greenery.
* * *
—
The last of the big money had changed hands once before. A man had come knocking at the door on a Saturday morning, asking to weed the flowerbeds and mow the lawn. He wanted twenty rand for the morning’s work, but Cliffie offered him a bonus if he would wash the car. When he was finished we were summoned as an audience, and Cliffie handed him the wooden coin.
After their initial surprise, the victims of Cliffie’s pranks usually became angry and started to argue with him. Some of them begged for the real money that was owed them. A few joined in with the laughter – and they were nearly all white, Cliffie said, which just went to show that your blacks didn’t have a sense of humour, it was the funny thing about them. But this one saw the joke immediately and began to weep, resolutely, in a language we did not understand. He walked to the end of the verandah and back, while I stared at the sponge in the bottom of the bucket. Then he laid the coin on the top step and walked out of the yard. His reflection slid over the polished surfaces of the car in the driveway. Cliffie called after him, but he did not even look back.
I thought Richie would cry too, but his eyes were hard and dry. It made my lids itch just to look at them.
* * *
—
The tuba started up in Sergeant Dundas’s house. I heard it before anyone else, my ears were always good. But I think the conductor heard it too, because he waved his arms, scooping the music up in his hands and splashing it over them, and they played louder and began to shuffle from foot to foot. Ding dong! merrily on high.
The tuba grumbled and spluttered as it warmed up. It was not a melody, just a noise, like the beery passing of wind in the belly of an oompah band, and soon it settled into a two-stroke rhythm: oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah. Then Sergeant Dundas appeared in the doorway of his house. He stooped as he crossed the threshold, so that the brass bell of the tuba could scrape under the lintel, and chugged down the garden path.
A few members of the band turned their heads to look over their shoulders but the conductor jerked them back as if they were attached to strings.
“Give them hell Sarge!” Cliffie shouted.
The Sergeant crossed the street, picking up his feet and plumping them down to the rhythm of his own music. His cheeks blew out like bellows. He was jammed into the instrument, with his fat breasts propped on the tube above and his belly bulging out below. He bore down on the band and shouldered his way into the semicircle. He puttered up and down in the space between the conductor and the musicians, huffing and puffing louder and louder, trying to drown them out or break their rhythm.
The music faltered for a moment, the sounds dislocated one from the other, seemed about to fly apart into chaos. Sergeant Dundas swelled up inside the tuba, his flesh peeled over the valves, the big mouth boomed. But the conductor, with his head thrown back, gazing up into the sun, gathered the drifting parts and pulled them together again. A new melody assembled itself from the disjointed components of the old one and to our great surprise, and his own, Sergeant Dundas was at the heart of it. He stopped short and the band rolled on without him. It was a tune I had never heard before, a flow of sound with the careless power of a river.
In this extremity Sergeant Dundas found a new rhythm, a difficult one he had never conceived of until now, three rising notes full of hurt and resentment dredged up from the depths of his being, which he began to blast out, as if he was hurling stones from the throat of the tuba. This time the faltering was barely perceptible. The music closed over the Sergeant like brown water.
Harrumphing, bleating, wheezing, waving his head from side to side, he churned up and down, butting at the players with the bell of the tuba. They whirled aside and shuffled along beside him, as if they were all being dragged hither and thither by the same currents. Suddenly they were swirling on the pavement, in a gathering cloud of dust, and with each pass there seemed to be more of them, and the music grew louder and more forceful. In the midst of the mêlée Sergeant Dundas thrashed, pawing at the tuba as if it were no longer a weapon but a serpent in whose coils he was entangled, trying to throw it off, trying to escape. But they would not let him.
Then the woman was on one side of the Sergeant and the conductor on the other. All smiles. The woman shook the tin in his ear and the conductor tapped on his shoulder with the baton. Sergeant Dundas’s legs jerked, his arms twitched, he began to dance, nodding his head and stamping his feet, swimming in slow motion. They all moved off along Chromium Street and as the din faded I heard the television commentators chattering on about the wicket, and the pages on the music stand fluttering, and the wooden coin clattering down through the branches.
* * *
—
I would choose to be with Richie, in the tree, nested in leaf-green shade, with rough bark scratching pleasantly against my spine, with the tang of the itchy-balls stirring a monumental sneeze in my nostrils. I would be the one to let fall this useless currency. But I am unable.
What does he see from up there?
Basil, crossing the lawn, carrying the puzzle uncomfortably in his body like a full bladder, saying: “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Cliffie, with tears of laughter hardly dry on his cheeks, tipping the charred meat into the ashes, saying: “I went all the way to Greenside for these, and they cost a bomb – but it was worth every cent.”
Me, rooted to the spot, earthbound, saying: “It’s all right boy, you can come down now.”
And I imagine he sees a multitude, something more than a mass, growing larger and clearer as it recedes, and Sergeant Dundas borne along in it, his spot marked by the big mouth of the tuba, growing smaller and fainter, passing out of our neighbourhood, our lives, and our times.
Propaganda by Monuments
I
Grekov
Pavel Grekov paused for a moment in the overheated lobby of the apartment block to turn up his coat collar and smooth down his hair. He glanced sceptically at his watch – five to two – and then at the pinched face of the city behind the glass. He would have to hurry, which he was not in the habit of doing, but at least a brisk walk would get the circulation going. He pulled on his gloves, jammed his fists into his pockets and shouldered through the door.
He walked with his head pulled down into his collar and his eyes fixed on the toes of his boots. He saw from above the tentative splayfooted gait foisted on him by an icy pavement, and was not amused by it. The streets were almost deserted. Did it get this cold in the Transvaal? he wondered. Did it snow? Probably not, it was too close to the Tropic of Capricorn. Then he pulled his right hand out of his pocket and pressed three fingers to his chest, where a letter from those unimaginable latitudes was stored in an inside pocket. He might have been taking the letter’s temperature through the thick cloth, or trying to feel the patter of its heart above the pounding of his own. Get more exercise, Grekov! he lectured himself. Out from behind that desk!
Grekov was a junior translator in the Administration for Everyday Services, an English specialist. Slowly but surely over the years he had established an interdepartmental r
eputation for his command of a fractious and somewhat eccentric English vocabulary. In recent months he had discovered his forte: rendering broken English in indestructible Russian. In the departmental estimation this was a highly desirable skill, and there were rumours, none of which had made an impression on Grekov himself, that he would soon be transferred to Foreign Affairs. He would have leapt at the opportunity.
The fact is that Grekov was bored. In the course of nearly five years in the same position no more than a handful of interesting documents had crossed his desk, precious messages in bottles carried to him on a tide of mundane communiqués and news clippings. It goes without saying that these rarities never originated in Everyday Services, but rather in the Ministry of Culture, or Foreign Affairs, or even Sport and Recreation, and they were so scarce that he was able to remember them all without effort.
He remembered them now, in chronological order, as he hurried through the snow-struck city. His career had started auspiciously with an exchange of telegrams about an inheritance and an itinerary issued by a travel agent in Kingston, which he could have sworn was in code – although this notion may have been put into his head by the security restriction stamped on the docket. In any event, this scoop had been followed by a dry spell of several years, until at last he was called upon by Culture to translate a menu for an official function. How many people could there be in Moscow who knew what a madumbi casserole was? Then another drought. More recently the tempo had started picking up: he’d done several love-letters full of double entendres and a set of instructions for assembling a Japanese exercise bicycle. There had also been poems by a Malawian dissident and the lyrics of a song by a band called The Dead Kennedys. But nothing had gripped his imagination like the letter he now carried over his heart.
It had washed up in his in-tray a week ago, and its contents struck him as so unlikely that at first he thought someone higher up was pulling his leg – probably that Kulyabin character in Housing. Just the day before, Kulyabin had made faces at him in the men’s room and told him to keep his pecker up.
But the letter proved to be genuine. The Chief confirmed it: the translation had been requisitioned by Foreign Economic Relations. Still Grekov wasn’t convinced. He phoned the Ministry himself, on the pretext of finding out how urgently the translation was required, and got hold of a certain Christov, the aide whose signature was on a covering note pinned to the envelope. Christov was adamant: the letter had come all the way from the Republic of South Africa, signed, sealed, and delivered. He hadn’t actually opened it with his own two hands, but he had seen it done with his own two eyes. Grekov knew where South Africa was, of course? Of course.
As he neared the river Grekov became anxious that he had somehow lost the letter, or left it at home, and he had to lean against the parapet and fumble it out of his pocket. The envelope was green and edged around with blue and orange chevrons, and it was grubby, as if it had been dropped on a dusty floor. In the top left-hand corner was a pale blue rectangle containing the phrases PER LUGPOS, BY AIRMAIL, and PAR AVION in a tidy stack, and beside it, in a smaller orange window, some sort of winged mythological creature, a crude representation of Pegasus, perhaps, or a griffin with a human face. In the right-hand corner were three stamps, crookedly affixed: the largest, apparently the most valuable, depicted a pastoral scene, with herds of fatted sheep and cattle grazing on fertile steppes; the smallest symbolized energy and industrial progress in a collage of cooling towers, dynamos and pylons; the other was a portrait of a man – a politician, he assumed, or a king. All three were shackled together by a postmark that read PRETORIA – 6.01.92.
The address was in blue ballpoint pen, in a hand that had something childishly precise about it. The letters were all flat-footed, as if the writer had ruled lines in pencil to guide him and rubbed them out afterwards. The wording itself suggested a touching faith in the reliability of the postal service. It read:
The Ministir of Foreign Affairs
PO Kremlin
Moscow
Russia (“USSR”)
If he hadn’t been wearing gloves Grekov would probably have taken out the letter and read it for the hundredth time. Instead he held the envelope up to the light to see the rectangular silhouette of folded paper inside. He turned the envelope over. On the back, in pencil, he had jotted down Christov’s telephone number. He had also taken down some directions given to him by an acquaintance in Roads and Pavements. He studied them now, plotting his course to the monument, and suddenly regretted that he had spoilt the envelope by scribbling on it. He put the letter away with a sigh and went along the embankment towards Borovitskaya Square.
The people he passed were like himself, bundled up in their own thoughts, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary until he reached the end of Prospekt Marksa, where a dozen middle-aged men – tourists, to judge by the primary colours of their anoraks – were standing together in a frozen clump gazing at the outside of the Lenin Library. He was struck firstly by the fact that they were all men, and then by the more remarkable fact that every last one of them wore spectacles.
He went up Prospekt Kalinina, looking out for the park that was his landmark, and when he found it turned left into a side-street. He became aware of a high-pitched buzzing in the distance, like a dentist’s drill, and felt reassured that he was going in the right direction. In the middle of the next block he came to an even narrower street, a cul-de-sac called Bulkin, and at the end of that was the nameless square that was his destination.
The square at the dead end of Bulkin Street was surrounded by apartment blocks. In the middle of the cobbled space, on an imposing pedestal, was a large stone head. Not just any old head – a head of Lenin. And not just any old head of Lenin either. According to Roads and Pavements it was the largest head of Lenin in the city of Moscow. If Roads and Pavements were correct on that score, Grekov speculated, why should this not be the largest head of Lenin in Russia, or the broken-down Union, or even the whole out-of-order world?
The eyes in the head of Lenin looked straight at Grekov.
On this particular afternoon, as expected, two workers in overalls were standing on Lenin’s bald pate, one wielding a noisy pneumatic drill and the other a gigantic iron clamp. A ladder rested against the cliff of a cheek, and at its foot a third worker was lounging against the pedestal. A lorry surmounted by a crane, and braced at each corner by a huge hydraulic leg with an orthopaedic boot on the end of it, stood to one side. Grekov judged that he was in good time, and so he crossed to the opposite pavement, which had been shovelled more recently, slowed his steps and strolled on at a leisurely pace, his usual one, enjoying the progressive revelation of detail.
Naturally, the stone head loomed larger the closer he got. The features, at first indistinct, now clarified themselves. The eyes were still looking straight at him, even though he had changed pavements. On a smaller scale this phenomenon might have qualified as a miracle; on this scale it was undoubtedly a question of perspective. They were kindly eyes, if not quite grandfatherly, then more than avuncular; but as the mouth came into focus, beneath the sculpted wings of the moustache, the whole face changed, it became severe and irritable, it took on the cross expression of a bachelor uncle who didn’t like children. And then, quite unaccountably, as he came closer still, the face foreshortened into friendliness again.
The workers clambering about up there made the monument seem even more colossal than it was, and Grekov couldn’t help but admire their gleeful daring and lack of decorum. The one with the drill was skating around on the great man’s icy dome like a seasoned performer; and even as Grekov watched, the skater’s companion, the one with the clamp, slid audaciously down the curvature of the skull, unloosing a shower of scurfy snow from the fringe of hair, and found a foothold on one of the ears.
Along one side of the square stood a row of empty benches, five in all, and Grekov made his way there. With a characteristic sense of symmetry he chose t
he one in the middle, wiped the slush off it with his cuff and sat down, tucking his coat-tails underneath him. He gazed about the square. Two little boys had climbed up on the lorry and were using the crane as a jungle gym, dodging the snowballs thrown by their earthbound companions. The yells of the children clanked like chains against the frozen facades overlooking the square. There were a few smudged faces at peep-holes in the misty windows, but apart from the workers, who presumably had no option, Grekov was the only grown-up who had ventured out to watch this monumental lump of history toppled from its pedestal. The workers themselves, in their oversized mufflers and mittens and boots, looked to him like children dressed up in their parents’ cast-offs.
How soon people become bored with the making and unmaking of history, Grekov thought, remembering the hundreds of thousands who had taken to the streets to watch the first monuments fall. Looking about at the empty square, becoming conscious of his singularity, he felt an uncomfortable sense of complicity with the overalled figures and their vandalizing equipment.
The driller finished his trepanation and called for an eye. This turned out to be a huge metal loop with a threaded shaft. It was toted up the ladder by the lounger from below, and the same man brought down the drill. The man balancing on the ear secured the eye with the clamp and screwed it into place. Three similar eyes already protruded from the skull, and the fourth completed the all-seeing square. The man with the clamp now climbed down, leaving the driller alone on the summit with his hands on his hips and his nose in the air, like a hunter dwarfed by his trophy.
The clamp, lobbed carelessly onto the back of the lorry, woke up the crane operator, who had been dozing unseen in his cubicle. Under the clamper’s directions the operator began to move the boom of the crane so that its dangling chains and hooks could be secured to the eyes.
Flashback Hotel Page 12
