This welter of detail, and the offhand tone of the delivery, produced in Strickland the usual baffled silence.
“Not many people know these things.” Reddy slid the point of the knife onto the girl. “This is Hector’s sister Margot, a.k.a. Tiny, now living in Soweto.” The knife slid again. “And this is Mbuyisa Makhubu, whereabouts your guess is as good as mine. Not many people know them either. We have come to the conclusion, here at the Museum, that the living are seldom as famous as the dead.”
The knife moved again. It creased Mbuyisa Makhubu’s lips, which are bent into a bow of pain, like the grimace of a tragic mask, it rasped the brick wall of the matchbox house which we see over his shoulder, skipped along the top of a wire gate, and came to rest on the small figure of a woman in the background. “And who on earth do you suppose this is?”
Strickland gazed at the little figure as if it was someone famous she should be able to recognize in an instant, some household name. In fact, the features of this woman – she is wearing a skirt and doek – are no more than a grey smudge, continuous with the shadowed wall behind her.
I looked at Hector Peterson’s left arm, floating on air, and the shadow of his hand on Mbuyisa Makhubu’s knee, a shadow so hard-edged and muscular it could trip the bearer up.
The child is dead. With his rumpled sock around his ankle, his grazed knee, his jersey stuck with dry grass, you would think he had taken a tumble in the playground, if it were not for the gout of blood from his mouth. The jersey is a bit too big for him: it was meant to last another year at least. Or is it just that he was small for his age? Or is it the angle? In his hair is a stalk of grass shaped like a praying mantis.
“Nobody knows.”
Strickland sat back with a sigh, but Reddy went on relentlessly.
“Nevertheless, theories were advanced: some people said that this woman, this apparent bystander, was holding Hector Peterson in her arms when he died. She was a mother herself. She cradled him in her lap – you can see the bloodstains here – and when Makhubu took the body from her and carried it away, she found a bullet caught in the folds of her skirt. She is holding that fatal bullet in her right hand, here.
“Other people said that it didn’t happen like that at all. Lies and fantasies. When Nzima took this photograph, Hector Peterson was still alive! What you see here, according to one reliable caption, is a critically wounded youth. The police open fire, Hector falls at Mbuyisa’s feet. The boy picks him up and runs towards the nearest car, which happens to belong to Sam Nzima and Sophie Tema, a journalist on the World, Nzima’s partner that day. Sam takes his photographs. Then Mbuyisa and Tiny pile into the back of the Volkswagen – did I mention that it was a Volkswagen? – they pile into the back with Hector; Sam and Sophie pile into the front with their driver, Thomas Khoza. They rush to the Orlando Clinic, but Hector Peterson is certified dead on arrival. And that’s the real story. You can look it up for yourself.
“But the theories persisted. So we thought we would try to lay the ghost – we have a duty after all to tell the truth. This is a museum, not a paperback novel. We advertised. We called on this woman to come forward and tell her story. We said it would be nice – although it wasn’t essential – if she brought the bullet with her.”
“Anyone respond?”
“I’ll say.”
Reddy opened his lunchbox and pushed it over to Strickland with the edge of his palm, like a croupier. She looked at the contents: there were .38 Magnum slugs, 9 mm and AK cartridges, shiny .22 bullets, a .357 hollow-point that had blossomed on impact into a perfect corolla. There were even a couple of doppies and a misshapen ball from an old voorlaaier. Strickland zoomed in for a close-up. She still didn’t get it.
“If you’ll allow me a poetic licence,” Reddy said, as if poetic licence was a certificate you could stick on a page in your Book of Life, “this is the bullet that killed Hector Peterson.”
* * *
—
So we didn’t advertise. But Strickland stuck to her guns about the WHITES ONLY bench: we would have the real thing or nothing at all. She made a few enquiries of her own, and wouldn’t you know it, before the week was out she turned up the genuine article.
The chosen bench belonged to the Municipal Bus Drivers’ Association, and in exchange for a small contribution to their coffers – the replacement costs plus 10 per cent – they were happy to part with it. The honour of fetching the trophy from their clubhouse in Marshall Street fell to Pincus. Unbeknown to us, the Treasurer of the MBDA had decided that there was a bit of publicity to be gained from his Association’s public-spirited gesture, and when our representative arrived he found a photographer ready to record the event for posterity. Pincus was never the most politic member of our Committee. With his enthusiastic co-operation the photographer was able to produce an entire essay, which subsequently appeared, without a by-line, in the Saturday Star. It showed the bench in its original quarters (weighed down by a squad of bus drivers of all races, pin-up girls – whites only – looking over the drivers’ shoulders, all of them, whether flesh and blood or paper, saying cheese); the bench on its way out of the door (Pincus steering, the Treasurer pushing); being loaded onto the back of our bakkie (Pincus and the Treasurer shaking hands and stretching the cheque between them like a Christmas cracker); and finally driven away (Pincus hanging out of the window to give us a thumbs-up, the Treasurer waving goodbye, the Treasurer waving back at himself from the rearview mirror). These pictures caused exactly the kind of headache Reddy had tried so hard to avoid. Offers of benches poured in from far and wide. Pincus was made to write the polite letters of thanks but no thanks. For our purposes, one bench is quite enough, thank you.
You can see the WHITES ONLY bench now, if you like, in Room 27. Just follow the arrows. I may as well warn you that it says EUROPEANS ONLY, to be precise. There’s a second prohibition too, an entirely non-racial one, strung on a chain between the armrests: PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THIS BENCH. That little sign is Charmaine’s work, and making her paint it was Strickland’s way of rubbing turpentine in her wounds.
When the genuine bench came to light, Charmaine received instructions to get rid of “the fake.” But she refused to part with it. I was persuaded to help her carry it into the storeroom, where it remained for a month or so. As the deadline for the opening neared, Charmaine would take refuge in there from time to time, whenever things got too much for her, and put the finishing touches to her creation. At first, she was furious about all the publicity given to the impostor. But once the offers began to roll in, and it became apparent that WHITES ONLY benches were not nearly as scarce as we’d thought, she saw an opportunity to bring her own bench out of the closet. The night before the grand opening, in the early hours, when the sky was already going grey behind the mine-dump on the far side of the parking-lot, we carried her bench outside and put it in the arbour under the controversial kaffirboom.
“When Strickland asks about it,” said Charmaine, “you can tell her it was a foundling, left on our doorstep, and we just had to take it in.” Funny thing is, Strickland never made a peep.
* * *
—
I can see Charmaine’s WHITES ONLY bench now, from my window. The kaffirboom, relocated here fully grown from a Nelspruit nursery, has acclimatized wonderfully well. “Erythrina caffra, a sensible choice,” said Reddy, “deciduous, patulous, and umbrageous.” And he was quite right, it casts a welcome shade. Charmaine’s faithful copy reclines in the dapple below, and its ability to attract and repel our visitors never ceases to impress me.
Take Mrs King. And talking about Mrs King, Mr King is a total misnomer, of course. I must point it out to Reddy. The Revd King, yes, and Dr King, yes, and possibly even the Revd Dr King. But Mr King? No ways.
It seems unfair, but Charmaine’s bench has the edge on that old museum piece in Room 27. Occasionally I look up from my workbench, and see a white man sittin
g there, a history teacher say. While the schoolchildren he has brought here on an outing hunt in the grass for lucky beans, he sits down on our bench to rest his back. And after a while he pulls up his long socks, crosses one pink leg over the other, laces his fingers behind his head and closes his eyes.
Then again, I’ll look up to see a black woman shuffling resolutely past, casting a resentful eye on the bench and muttering a protest under her breath, while the flame-red blossoms of the kaffirboom detonate beneath her aching feet.
The Omniscope (Pat. Pending)
I am the one who invented the Omniscope – and I don’t mind telling you that it came to me in a dream. The secret of my success as an inventor, modest as it is: turn no dream visitor away from your door empty-handed. Feed him, invite him to freshen up, send him out into the waking world in a suit from the Little Eden Charity Kiosk (or a frock as the case may be).
Hauptfleisch – that’s me – reveals all.
This dream was no action-packed adventure; this dream was an invitation to attend.
I espied a person at a wooden bureau, below a lattice window, in a room enamelled with light. No monk in a cell limning parchment, no burgomaster’s daughter making lace while the sun shines, but a man in an orange overall, patched at the elbows and torn at the knees, and on his bowed head a helmet with a miner’s lamp, unlit, and on his feet rubber sandals made from tyres, and on his back the legend: BEARING WORLD (PTY) LTD.
On the slanted top of the bureau lay a wooden casket, nothing fancy, tomato-box pine inlaid with bottle-tops and drawing-pins, about the size of a telephone directory, and emerging from it, at an angle of 60°, a narrow brass-plated tube like a sea dog’s telescope. (In the interests of depth, which is also distance, let me point out that “telescope” comes from the modern Latin telescopium, from the Greek tele, far off, and skopeo, look at, naturalized as -scope, an instrument looked at or through, a viewer, hence mutoscope, microscope, bioscope. The settler draws closer, acquires the accent, becomes a citizen. Acknowledgements to follow.)
As I looked on, which is what I do in dreams, the miner-monk bent his head to the eyepiece and looked into the casket, then fell into a reverie, beholding in slack-lipped wonder whatever it was he beheld at the end of the tube. From time to time he roused himself, took up the casket by two crooked handles twisted from coat-hanger wire, shook it gently, set it down, and looked into it again.
After endless minutes, during which I longed to go closer but could not – frustrating for a man of action, a man good with his hands – he sprang to his feet, knocking his chair over backwards, slapped his thigh, and cried out in a joyful voice: Swords! He took a striped carpenter’s pencil with a chiselled black lead from behind his ear and wrote in a spiral-bound notebook which I saw for the first time as the pencil-point bore down upon the paper.
I was now able to look over his shoulder and on the blue-lined page, in cuneiform print, saw this list:
(1) ……
(2) fires
(3) swords
(4) ……
(5) library
(6) behemoth
(7) mountain
(8)
(9)
I looked down the tube.
Had the onlooker vanished? Had I been the onlooker all along? Am I a miner-monk?
The eyepiece was sweaty and smelt of Old Spice aftershave. At the end of the tube I saw a meaningless fragment of whorled silver. I took up the casket and shook it gently, as I had seen it done, set it down and looked in again.
Now it was revealed to me,
fluted silver, grey dove, corded light of the river in flood, water in flight, pewter purl and marbled midnight of the sky above, fluency of blue, buoyancy of floe, flesh and blood, fowl, fish,
I could have gone on in this fashion indefinitely, but I roused myself and slapped my thigh, as I had seen it done, and wrote on the list:
(8) river
Eight down, one to go.
If I am not the miner-monk, why do I understand the rules of the game so well?
I gave the casket a vigorous shaking and mumbled an incantatory phrase or two for luck. I looked in: mountain…already on the list. I shook again and looked: a corner of the library. Again: another corner. Again: mountain. What’s this? A razor-blade. A razor-blade! Again! Again! Again!
In this way I rattled myself awake.
It was a Saturday morning. I was able to lie in bed for some time, with the pillow over my face as is my habit, breathing in the musty siftings of sleep lodged in the pores of the pillowslip, while the dream grew accustomed to the half-light. Then, yawning and stretching and tossing off the blankets, I rose and led the dream, pale and shivering with fright, to the window, drew the curtains and, by the gentlest of pressures between the shoulder-blades, with a great show of warmth and hospitality, pushed it out into broad daylight. Dreams are more easily domesticated than people think.
I nicked the sardonic corner of my lip, of all things, while I was shaving, bled a lot, annoying. The safety razor was invented in Paris in 1762 by a cutler named Jean Jacques Perret (coincidentally the same year in which Jean Jacques Rousseau published his Social Contract). Perret’s invention was based on the cutthroat razor and cost an arm and a leg. The conventional T-shaped safety razor, as we know it today, was invented by William S. Henson of London in 1847, let’s give him his due. But the blade of Bill Henson’s razor had to be sharpened by a qualified expert, which was costly and inconvenient. It was only in 1901 that King Gillette, a Boston commoner, began to mass-produce disposable wafer blades, which permanently transformed the act of shaving (the pogonotomy, if you like) and helped to drive the beard from the face of the earth. It was a blade of this sort I had seen in the casket in my dream. I wouldn’t swear to it, but to judge by the characteristic hourglass shape of the central aperture, it may actually have been a sensational Blue Super-Blade, introduced to the public in 1932 when the $2 Kroman De Luxe was withdrawn from production. Emphatically, and without reservation, these are the sharpest, smoothest-shaving blades ever produced.
I would find it interesting to trace the whole question of facial hair back to antiquity, exploring developments in pogonology (to be technical again), quoting from the ancients, but you can have too much of a good thing. Let me just say then that even with a so-called safety razor it is possible to cut yourself, and I was only able to staunch the flow by applying a swab of tissue-paper liberally moistened with saliva to the cut. With this unsightly wad stuck to my lip I descended for breakfast.
The sunlight, seeping through the blinds and pooling on the chequered vinyl Marley tiles of the kitchen floor, reminded me of Vermeer, and then, by association of warm scented light, light that smelt of starched linen and churned cream, linseed oil and the nape of the dairymaid’s neck, I was reminded of my dream, and of the casket with its perfumed eyepiece.
Why was the thing so fascinating to the onlooker? Let’s say to me.
I puzzled over this as I prepared my cereal and set my coffee to perk. Here is my explanation, and a rather feeble one it is, in the way of the waking world. Firstly, the tube – the scope? – was of such a narrow gauge that I could gain only partial glimpses of the objects contained within the casket. (Set aside, for the moment, the seemingly impossible magnitude of the dream-made contents, the fact that I had glimpsed a mountain in a space that could not even accommodate a molehill. The effect – which was to entice, to offer and withhold – would have been identical had I glimpsed the mysteriously magnified curve of a thimble.) Secondly, the casket contained a finite number of objects: the allure was to identify them all. I felt sure that once all the objects had been identified, the device would lose its power: the onlooker would cast the casket aside and hold fast to the list, which he had made himself. (If only I hadn’t woken up!) In both cases I, the poor onlooker, had been seized by an unwholesome urge to make a whole greater than the part
that was given.
Hopelessly inadequate, I know. Already I was speaking of the casket as if the dreams had been drained out of it, and groping for an analogy that was bound to disappoint. It was a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, I said, and a bit like a kaleidoscope. Ah, but it was also a bit unlike a kaleidoscope! Brewster, my champion!
Breakfast was a disaster with all this thinking going on. The milk was sour and I had to mix up some powdered, which I detest. Then my bloodstained swab fell off in the Post Toasties, which spoilt my appetite completely. I took my coffee (black) onto the stoep. The day lay before me like an empty page, feint ruled, prepunched, marginated.
And it was then, as an act of resistance you could almost say, that I decided to build the first Omniscope – although I wasn’t calling it that yet. I am the one who invented it, born Hauptfleisch and still going by that name.
People will ask me: How did you do it? Did you sketch it in advance? In pencil or pen? Felt-tip or fountain? In two elevations or three? What was the scale? Large or small? Did you cost it out on the back of a cigarette box? Filter or plain? What did it come to? Did you have a marketing strategy?
Flashback Hotel Page 17
