Portrait with Keys
Page 1
Acclaim for Portrait with Keys
Winner of the South African Sunday Times
Alan Paton Non-Fiction Prize
Winner of the University of Johannesburg Prize
Longlist finalist for the Warwick Prize, UK
“Portrait with Keys knocked me out. It has Vladislavíc’s maverick take on the world and combines a warm and insightful view of Johannesburg with clever irony.”
—Zoe Wicomb
“If Italo Calvino had grown up in Jo’burg and experienced both apartheid and its aftermath, this is the kind of book he would have been proud to have written.”
—Geoff Dyer
“Jo’burg alarms and amazes. Guns, gold and sheer bloody glitz. For those, and you can count me in, who think it the greatest African city south of Cairo, Vladislavíc has done us proud. He has celebrated the city in sharp and lovely images.”
—Christopher Hope
“Among the best South African literature in years…. There is anovelty to his very minting of language into image that matches the perpetual, compulsive ‘start-from-scratch’ ethos of Jo’burg that makes his book an instant, must-read classic.”
—Mark Gevisser, The Sunday Independent (Johannesburg)
“Vladislavíc is a rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it.”
—The Sunday Times (Johannesburg)
“Ivan Vladislavíc writes of Johannesburg as a ‘frontier city, a place of contested boundaries’ where territory ‘must be secured and defended or it will be lost’. But this isn’t just a piece about alarmed houses and razor wire-topped fences. There’s wildlife, together with violent poachers; and scenic waterways and lakes, only occasionally despoiled by bodies. It’s a passionate account by a man who loves his city, shocking because it so embraces the things most people try to avoid thinking about. This collection has the crackle of authenticity about it.”
—Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, The Independent on Sunday
“Ivan Vladislavíc has written a wonderful book about Johannesburg. For me it has been like reading an exceptionally perceptive reviewer on a play or a book I have loved, a reviewer who articulates brilliantly what I have only half perceived…. What Vladislavíc’s book has done is to touch minutely, sensuously, poetically, ironically and exactly on this strange, utilitarian town…and he has also recorded the astonishing variety of people whose lives have been transformed, not always happily, by the changes of the last fifteen years. This is a love letter to Johannesburg and a truly marvellous piece of work.”
—Justin Cartwright, Literary Review
“[A] peculiar tension, between despair and delight, animates the city. In Portrait with Keys, Vladislavíc unlocks it beautifully.”
—Colin Murphy, Irish Times
“Vladislavíc’s acute intelligence and unfussy style make this quite a find.”
—Jonathan Gibbs, Metro
“An outstanding writer and an intriguing subject.”
—Sue Baker, Publishing News
“Vladislavíc writes beautifully about the city he knows inside out, surveying the ways in which it has changed since the end of apartheid.”
—Caroline Sanderson, Bookseller
“Reading Portrait with Keys made me want to walk the city, explore it underfoot rather than in the usual drive-by fashion. The book invites this desire to interact with the city and is an attempt by an intelligent and aware writer to address issues facing today’s novelists…. I (can) wander through the pages of Portrait with Keys and rediscover something about the city, its people and the way we experience life that would help keep the wind at bay.”
—Tynton Smith, Sunday Times (London)
“Vladislavíc seeks the poetry of the city he has known and loved for 30 years…. At his best, Vladislavíc transcends that for moments of mysticism.”
—Ross Leckie, The Times (London)
Portrait with Keys
the city of Johannesburg unlocked
Ivan Vladislavi
W.W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Copyright © 2006 by Ivan Vladislavic
Originally published in South Africa under the title Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vladislavic, Ivan, 1957–
Portrait with keys: the city of Johannesburg unlocked/Ivan Vladislavic.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in South Africa under the title
Portrait with keys: Joburg & what-what”—T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07151-1
1. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Description and travel. 2. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Social life and customs. 3. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Social conditions. 4. Social change—South Africa—Johannesburg. 5. Vladislavic, Ivan,
1957–—Travel—South Africa—Johannesburg. 6. Vladislavic, Ivan, 1957–—
Homes and haunts—South Africa—Johannesburg. I.Title.
DT2405.J654V535 2009
968.22'106—dc22
2009005787
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
for
Tim Couzens
Memory takes root only half in the folds of the brain: half's in the concrete streets we have lived along.
Lionel Abrahams
Contents
Point A
Point B
Notes and Sources
Itineraries
Author’s Note
Point A
Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.
Michel de Certeau
1
When a house has been alarmed, it becomes explosive. It must be armed and disarmed several times a day. When it is armed, by the touching of keys upon a pad, it emits a whine that sends the occupants rushing out, banging the door behind them. There are no leisurely departures: there is no time for second thoughts, for taking a scarf from the hook behind the door, for checking that the answering machine is on, for a final look in the mirror on the way through the hallway. There are no savoured homecomings either: you do not unwind into such a house, kicking off your shoes, breathing the familiar air. Every departure is precipitate, every arrival is a scraping-in.
In an alarmed house, you awake in the small hours to find the room unnaturally light. The keys on the touch pad are aglow with a luminous, clinical green, like a night light for a child who’s afraid of the dark.
2
How bad a man was Scrooge, that model of solitary mean-spiritedness?
‘Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.’
The unequal exchange of directions is one of the most touching relations possible between people in the city, and so it is a measure of Scrooge’s inhumanity that he was never once, in all his life, engaged in it. Asking for directions, city people, who set great store by their independence and
hard-won knowledge of the streets, who like to think that they ‘know their way around’, declare their vulnerability; giving directions, they demonstrate a capacity for dealing kindly and responsibly with a life put in their hands by fate.
In the countryside it is different. Strangers and locals stand in a simpler relationship to one another. Strangers are few and far between, and they are therefore less threatening rather than more so, as one might suppose. Locals know the world around them like the backs of their hands, as the saying goes, and landmarks are more conspicuous and easier to describe. In any event, a country person (if he did not have the whim to send you on a wild goose chase) might think nothing of walking along with you, or driving ahead, to show you the way.
The busy city person must rely on words and gestures to guide the stranger through a clutter of irrelevant detail, with dead ends and false turns on every side, some of which might prove disastrous to the unwary. Giving directions is a singular skill, and doing so well a reliable measure of character. We need not be judgemental: the way we live in cities today, it is possible to lead a useful, happy life without learning the names of the streets in your own neighbourhood. It is also true that the complexity of cities, the flows of traffic across ever-changing grids, coupled with the peculiarities of physical addresses, occupations, interests and needs, produces for each one of us a particular pattern of familiar or habitual movement over the skin of the earth, which, if we could see it from a vantage point in the sky, would appear as unique as a fingerprint. It is literally impossible for certain of these paths to cross, which is why acquaintances may live in the same city, meeting by appointment as often as they choose, without ever running into one another in the daily round. But this is all the more reason why the crossing of paths, the places where they touch like wires in a circuit, for no better reason than chance, should be taken seriously.
When I was a child, my father, a city man through and through, a lover of walking and driving, finely attuned to change in the world around him and therefore able to give directions with creativity and precision, taught me that it never harmed anyone to have a map in hand. No lost soul was ever turned away from our door without a set of directions that would take him to his exact destination. We lived in a new suburb then, carved out of the veld on the outskirts of Pretoria; the world belonged to us, we were masters of all we surveyed. These were the days of the garden-variety wire fence, long before the advent of the candy-striped boom and the two-metre wall, when some stranger who had lost his way might hail a man mowing his lawn or tinkering with the engine of a car in the driveway. More often than not my dad would recognize the place at once and be able to give directions off the cuff. But even when he knew the way himself, he liked to send me or my brother Branko to fetch his map of the area, a detailed one acquired specially from the municipality, and spread it out on the bonnet of the stranger’s car to point out the route. Perhaps the whole exercise was an excuse to have the stranger get out from behind the wheel and pass the time of day.
Since then, experience has taught me, and a host of writers have confirmed, that getting lost is not always a bad thing. One might even consider misdirecting a stranger for his own good.
3
I live just around the corner from the Marymount Nursing Home. In fact, I often use it as a landmark when giving people directions to my door. In the winter months, when you can see through the naked branches of the oaks in the dead end of Blenheim Street, the building announces itself in large white letters on orange brick. In summer it all but disappears behind the foliage.
Several times over the years it has happened that a guest in my home, leaning on the parapet of the stoep with a cup of tea and looking out over the treetops into the valley, has suddenly recognized the building jutting out on the ridge, and exclaimed: ‘Is that the Marymount? I was born there!’ A silence always falls after this unexpectedly intimate revelation, while the spirit of place casts a spell over our hearts. But it only lasts a moment, for there is something about the marmalade-brick building, with its white plaster and corrugated-iron roof, that prevents us from thinking too deeply about our origins.
I used to consider it a remarkable coincidence that so many people in my circle should have had their beginnings within a stone’s throw of my house. But my brother Branko, who is more of a realist than I am, boiled it down to statistical probabilities. In the fifty years of the Marymount’s operation, more than two hundred thousand babies came into the world within its walls. Ten or eleven babies a week, on average, with peaks around September. You can hardly turn a corner in Johannesburg without bumping into a Marymount baby.
Branko also took the mystery out of why I was always being called upon to direct anxious parents-to-be towards the nursing home, a service I performed half a dozen times in as many years. ‘It stands to reason,’ he said, ‘that anyone following the sign from Kitchener Avenue will lose their way on the corner of Blenheim and Argyle. It’s the first unmarked intersection, the first point at which they have to make a decision for themselves. And seeing that your house is right there, and that you must go in and out through the front gate every day, someone casting about for directions is bound to seize upon you from time to time. It’s the law of averages.’
Although I cannot claim to have chosen my house on the strength of its proximity to the Marymount, like some peasant eager to live in the shadow of the church or within walking distance of the well, its presence was always reassuring (I would never admit this to my brother): every week, a flock of new human souls came into the world on my doorstep. And so it is a pity that the home has closed down. The last baby was born there in June 1997. The number of births had been tapering off for years, as more and more white doctors moved further north, taking their patients with them. People in the northern suburbs no longer believe that a decent person would want to be born on this side of town.
It was a year before posters went up in the neighbourhood advertising the public auction of the property. Two groups with very different plans for the place made bids for ownership: a consortium of midwives and doctors intended to revive it as a nursing home; a consortium of businessmen proposed to transform it into low-cost housing or a park for light industry. Dry-cleaners and panel beaters. New lives of a different sort. But neither group has been able to raise the finance.
4
Hurrying home, half my mind on the work I’ve just delivered to a client in Doris Street, the other half on the soccer. South Africa is playing Denmark in the first round of the 1998 World Cup and I’m supposed to meet my brother Branko at the Ab Fab to watch the game. I don’t want to miss the kick-off. Suddenly it’s as if a lasso tightens around my ankles. I’ve got one hand in my pocket, the other hooked by the thumb into the strap of my rucksack, so I can’t even put out a hand to break my fall. I go down full-length, just managing a slight twist to avoid falling on my face. There’s an almighty crack somewhere below my jaw, like a bone breaking. I lie there dazed and winded for a moment. My feet seem to be tied together. Am I being mugged? I have an impression of people nearby, so I play possum. No, it’s just me here on the pavement in Roberts Avenue. I roll over and sit up. There is a loop of thick white paper around my ankles. I try to break it but it holds, and I have to slide it down over my shoes and squirm out of it. One seamless piece, barely large enough for my feet to fit through. How on earth did this happen?
Just beside me is the palisaded boundary wall of the medical suites at the Kensington Clinic. Useful. A security guard is sitting there, on the edge of his seat, looking at me through the bars with a worried face. ‘Haai shame,’ he says. On the other side, on the grass verge of the street, another worried face, a woman, a hawker. The two of them were talking as I came up. He was slouching in a garden chair, she was sitting behind her counter, a pine plank balanced across a cardboard box, displaying a few oranges and apples, half a box of cigarettes, little plastic bags full of peanuts and Chappies bubblegum. I have fallen like a drunkard over the guy-ropes of thei
r conversation, jerking them both towards me.
She comes closer. If we were different people, if we were the same people in a different place, she might put an arm around my shoulders; instead she lifts her hand and drops it a couple of times, meaningfully, and clucks sympathetically. Something wet is running down my side. Am I bleeding? I feel around inside my jacket. Red wine, seeping out of the rucksack. The crack was a bottle breaking, my thank-you present from the people in Doris Street. I am leaking nothing more essential than merlot.
The usual adult embarrassment at falling down overwhelms me. I assure the guard that I am fine, I even show him the paper loop with an incredulous laugh. Then I get to my feet, dust off my knees and hurry on, leaving a bloody trail of wine. As soon as I’m out of view of the witnesses, I begin to limp. For some reason, I appear to be putting this limp on a bit, exaggerating, as the physical expression of feeling sorry for myself. Haai shame, my limp says to me, you’ve had a fall. A damp patch of wine spreads down my side. I must smell like a tramp. When I look for my keys at the door, I realize that the white strip is dangling from my hand like an unravelled bandage.
Aching too much to watch the soccer, and annoyed with myself, I take a hot bath and go to bed. The game ends in a draw.
The next day, my right arm is so bruised and painful that I cannot work. I sit at my desk and examine the loop under the reading light. It seems to be a piece of packaging, an innocuous oval, about twenty centimetres across. Somehow, I must have stood on one end, stepped in the other…it looks so improbable. The feeling that I have been the victim of a practical joke will not leave me. I drop the loop on the carpet and it lies there like a snare. Stand on the near end with the tip of my left slipper, slide the toe of my right slipper under the far end. Now for the left. Never mind improbable, it seems impossible. But standing on the thing reawakens the sensation of falling and makes my shoulder ache.