Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  When I pick the loop up again, I realize for the first time that it has a twist in it. It is a Möbius strip. A one-sided figure, a three-dimensional object with only one surface. I have fallen over a paradox. This thought makes me feel better. I put my pen gingerly on the loop and run it along the surface, like a child guiding a hoop with a stick, and after a while I arrive back at the starting point.

  5

  I live on an island, an accidental island, made by geography and the town planners who laid out these city streets. Roberts and Kitchener, avenues in the uniforms of English soldiers, march away to the east, side by side. A spine of rock, an outcrop of the gold-bearing reef on which the city depends, blocks every thoroughfare between the avenues, except for Blenheim and Juno. When I am driven to walk, which is often, only the long way round, following this shore–Blenheim, Roberts, Juno, Kitchener–will bring me back to the beginning. Johannesburg surges and recedes like a tide. I come home with my shoes full of sand, empty my pockets at the kitchen table and pick through the findings. The roar in the air is the absence of water.

  My friend Paul had a house on the cliff in Bellevue Street. As we leant on the parapet one night, looking out over the rooftops of Bez Valley, with the lights twinkling in the distance on Yeoville ridge like beacons on a headland, he said that it would be a fine thing if they built a dam and filled this valley up with water, drowned every house and factory, every aerial and chimney. Then he would have an ocean to complement his ocean view. If you closed your eyes, the traffic on Kitchener Avenue in the valley below, a rubbery squish of tyres on tar, sounded very much like surf.

  For a moment the shell of the city was pressed to my ear.

  Johannesburg, as people often remark, is one of the few major cities in the world that has no river, lake or ocean. It has a reef, of course, but no diving.

  I walk, in the afternoons, along something as unnatural and persuasive as an extended metaphor.

  6

  A few days after the auction of the Marymount, the cobbler who has set up shop on the corner of Nourse and Hillier Streets was putting one of the posters to good use by spreading his tools out on it. The neighbourhood’s first street-corner hawker. He has chosen an auspicious location, opposite the neighbourhood’s national monument: the house where Mahatma Gandhi lived in the first decades of the century. You can see the little plaque from the National Monuments Council on the west-facing wall as you come down Nourse Street. The house is a double-storey on a promontory between Hillier and Albemarle Streets, with a beautiful panel of stained-glass sunshine to light the stairs and a second-storey balcony like the rounded prow of a riverboat.

  For a while, the people who live in the Gandhi House, as we call it around here, kept a tree in their garden made entirely of metal, no doubt highly resistant to drought, with fanciful, curly branches like a candelabrum, where a cast-iron owl was perched. But it is gone now, dead of rust or carried away in the night by a scrap-metal dealer.

  7

  When my car, a white Ford Meteor with eighty thousand kilometres on the clock, was stolen from outside my house, I immediately phoned my father. He listened sympathetically. Then he asked: ‘Did you ever get yourself a Gorilla?’

  He had been pestering me for months to buy a steering lock, and I had been putting it off. Now the car was gone. I was on the point of lying: Yes, Dad, I got myself a Gorilla, just as you suggested, but the thieves cut it off with an angle grinder. Went through it like butter. But you cannot deceive my father about such things. ‘No,’ I said sheepishly. ‘I meant to, I really did. But for one reason or another I never got round to it.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’ There was a long, crackling silence. ‘You know, the guys who make the Gorilla are so confident about their product, they offer the purchaser a special guarantee: if your car gets stolen with the Gorilla in place, they’ll refund half the excess on your insurance. Ah well, once bitten, twice shy. Perhaps you’ll be more careful next time.’

  8

  The town planners who defined the boundary between Troyeville and Kensington did not follow the suggestion of a street, which seems to be the norm; instead they drew a line behind the houses on the western side of Albemarle Street, where the back walls of the plots adjoin those of the houses behind them. Rather than meeting face to face, the two suburbs turn their backs on one another.

  The recent history of the house at 22 Albemarle Street, strictly in Kensington, is nonetheless typical of the frontier suburb which Troyeville has become, a contested zone between inner-city suburbs like Fairview and New Doornfontein, which have evolved into black areas, and Kensington, which still holds on to its white identity.

  The house is a renovation of the kind found in suburbs with a large Portuguese population (Troyeville and Bez Valley in the east, say, or Rosettenville and La Rochelle in the south). In a standard Portuguese renovation the structure is squared off, the fat pillars that once held up the verandah roof are replaced with angular, painted piping and the stoep and pathways are tiled; in more extreme versions, the entire facade may be tiled and the garden cemented over, with the occasional porthole provided for a scrawny rosebush to stick out its neck. In the Albemarle Street house, there is a low garden wall of brick topped with wrought-iron curlicues, a tiled path bisecting two squares of lawn, leading to glass doors in a rounded archway. The verandah has been closed in and provided with four lancet-arch windows, in pairs on either side of the doors. These windows are outlined in narrow panels of frosted, bottle-brown glass. Across the top of the flat facade is a single row of mosaic tiles–or it may be some kind of veneer–stuck to the guttering.

  The house was put up for sale in 1997. Perhaps the owner was frightened off when the old lady at 17 Blenheim Street was murdered. The murderers, surprised in the act by a neighbour, jumped over the back wall into the yard of the house behind, just a few doors up from No. 22, and escaped into Albemarle Street. After several months on the market and a string of show days, there were still no buyers, and for a time the house stood empty. Finally, it was put up for rent.

  The first black tenants moved in. It was around then that a sticker bearing the slogan of the anti-crime campaign–I DON’T DO CRIME–appeared on the glass door: either an appeal to the better nature of prospective burglars or an attempt by the new tenants (or their landlord) to reassure the neighbours.

  For a while the new tenants stayed indoors. Then, as they grew more comfortable in the area, they became more visible. Soon there were children pushing toy cars on the path or playing soccer in the street. Tricycles and dolls lay on the lawn. Men lounged about on the steps or worked on cars at the kerbside, and women sat on upturned oildrums, catching the sun on a wintry afternoon.

  ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ my brother Branko said during one of our walking tours. ‘Why don’t they stay inside like normal people? Why are they always lazing about in the yard? Have they got nothing better to do with their time than sit around in the sun?’

  ‘But you’re the one who’s always complaining that there’s no life on the streets,’ I said, ‘and how terrible it is that people feel trapped in their own homes. Just last week you were remembering how we used to play cricket under the street lights at night after supper, when we were kids.’

  ‘What’s with the paint tins?’ he said grumpily. ‘Can’t they get proper garden furniture? You can pick up a plastic chair for twenty bucks at Dion’s.’

  A few weeks later, Branko was insisting the place had been turned into a brothel. On his way down to see me one morning, he noticed a woman sitting on the kerb outside, with a towel draped over her shoulders that said ambassador hotel. She was separating the strands of her thick braids so that they would dry in the sun, her fingers moving over her scalp as if she was working the fibres of some plant into matting. He slowed down to get a good look at her, he said, and she gave him a sly smile.

  A brothel? It seemed possible. But the very next Sunday, as I was walking to the shops to fetch the paper, a black chur
chman, like a biblical prophet in his white cotton robes, came out of the house and made his way up the hill to Roberts Avenue ahead of me. He carried a stick carved into a cross, and a Bible with golden edges stuck out of a pocket in his tunic. In the small of his back, stitched to a broad red cummerbund, was a pure blue circle the size of a coaster.

  Where would his congregation meet? In a clearing in the veld near the municipal dump in Elandsfontein; in a sealed room under the motorway in Newtown, filled with pitted wooden benches and the incense of exhaust fumes; beneath a tree on Langermann Kop?

  As he walked he patted his hair with the palm of his hand, and looked at the shadow of his head on the ground. Involuntarily I smoothed my own hair by combing it through with my fingers, and was reminded that we live differently in our bodies and our houses. But I had resolved not to pursue such difficult and divisive lines of thought, especially over weekends, and so I veered into Tile City in Op de Bergen Street for a chat with the hardware man.

  9

  The house at 18 Eleanor Street is another Portuguese modernization, but more restrained. It once had three notable features, all of them amulets against danger, but only one has survived. In the left-hand corner of the severely cropped lawn sat a life-size statue of a German shepherd dog, with painted fur and a grinning jaw. It looked like a large-scale version of the SPCA collection boxes that used to stand on shop counters. On the right-hand facade of the house, the second and third amulets were arranged symmetrically on either side of the central window (a bedroom, to judge by lacy curtains behind Spanish bars), like icons at an altar. On the left, a rectangular panel composed of six blue ceramic tiles, together depicting the Virgin Mary; on the right, a signboard, of exactly the same size and colour, declaring that the house was protected by the N.I.S.S. armed response company.

  This house has been sold to a coloured family, who apparently have no taste for Roman Catholic iconography. After tolerating her presence for a few months, they chiselled the Madonna of Eleanor Street off the wall, leaving behind a patch of white plaster as clear as a conscience in the cream-coloured paintwork. Or was it the previous owner who came back to fetch her? The dog is gone too, but the N.I.S.S. sign endures.

  The spot where David Webster was shot dead by an apartheid assassin is just across the road.

  10

  Not long after Minky and I came to live in Blenheim Street, new people moved into the house at No. 10. And not long after that, they employed a woman to paint a Ndebele design on their garden wall. As I was passing by one morning, I saw her marking out the pattern with a felt-tip pen on the white surface, and over the following days I went up the road regularly to watch her progress. When she had finished the pattern, an immense maze of black lines, six or seven metres long and two metres high, she began to fill it in with paint–mainly blue and green, if memory serves me correctly. She used little tins of Plascon, the standard household enamel, and ordinary brushes of the kind you can buy at the hardware store.

  There was a fad for Ndebele painting at the time. A woman called Esther Mahlangu had been commissioned to coat a BMW 525 in Ndebele colours as part of an advertising campaign. Or was it an art project? Either way, it was a striking symbolic moment in the invention of the new South Africa, a supposedly traditional, indigenous culture laying claim to one of the most desirable products our consumer society had to offer, smoothly wrapping this contemporary symbol of status, wealth and sophisticated style in its colours. Perhaps this same woman had wound up here in Kensington? No, I decided, Mahlangu’s saloon had been seen all around the world, she had made a name for herself. She would surely have moved on to commissions larger and grander than garden walls–churches, convention centres, hotel dining rooms, the lobbies of health and racquet clubs.

  My friend Liz said the whole Ndebele fad was kitsch. ‘It’s like that braai sauce people slosh over everything to give it an African flavour. Tomatoes and onions and too much chilli. Someone just made it up.’

  ‘But that’s how culture evolves,’ I said. ‘People make things up. Who’s to say what will be regarded as “authentic” a generation from now? Why shouldn’t we have Ndebele patterns on suburban walls? What if the people living there happen to be Ndebele? Anyway, only someone with a custodial view of African culture would regard as “traditional” an art form that arose so recently. Ndebele wall painting is no more than a few decades old, it’s constantly changing, and it’s full of contemporary references.’ We were standing on the pavement outside No. 10 as we spoke, and so I could refer to the bright new mural in support of my point. ‘This funnel shape here, which looks like a geometric abstraction, is actually a stylized light. One of those cheap industrial light-shades you’d see in a factory or a servant’s room. Once you know that, you’ll realize that the little dab of yellow at the bottom is a lightbulb. Charming, don’t you think? And this shape here, which looks like a bow tie, is derived from a sweet. A boiled sweet in a plastic wrapper.’

  Liz was impressed with my analysis (which I’d found in a magazine article about Esther Mahlangu, to tell the truth), but sceptical about the mural. ‘It’s so cheerful,’ she said, ‘it makes me want to spit. Like a kiddie’s colouring book, with nothing outside the lines. That’s why you whites like it so much. Nice and tidy.’

  I thought it was bravely optimistic. It suited the early nineties perfectly: Africa was coming to the suburbs in the nicest possible way. I grew to love that wall. My only fear was that some racist would deface it. I could already see the insulting graffiti, dripping bile. But no one ever laid a finger on it.

  Long afterwards, it occurred to me that I might have documented the making of the mural. It would have made a wonderful photographic essay. Or even better, a film. That intricate pattern, vibrant and complex as stained glass–it was no child’s drawing, never mind what Liz said–spreading out, segment by segment, over a blank white wall. What a metaphor for the social transformation we were living through!

  ‘If only you were a film-maker,’ Minky said, ‘or a photographer.’

  ‘But I’m a writer, for Pete’s sake, I could have spoken to the painter. I should have got her name, at least. I’m walking around with my eyes wide open, taking everything in like a vacuum cleaner, coughing bits of it out on paper. But I never bother to get the facts.’

  11

  The father of one of my high-school classmates was a part-time inventor, and his brightest idea was the telephone dixie, a little desk-top cabinet for the tidy and convenient storage of telephone directories. The open-fronted box held three heavy-duty ledger files, hinged at the bottom so that they could be tilted out and opened flat. Using a simple mechanism of springy clasps, you could secure in these files the Yellow Pages and two directories of your choice–let’s say Johannesburg and the West Rand–and they were guaranteed to stay spick and span through a year of regular use. It was a fine and necessary invention. There was an executive model, as I recall, in lightly padded vinyl, but even the plain metallic models were superbly made. I have forgotten the exact finishes, but the colour schemes of the day were culinary: mustard, burgundy, cream.

  The school holidays came, and my friend and I were engaged as salesmen. For my friend, who lived in what is now Midrand, then known with more charm as Halfway House, ‘town’ was not Pretoria, as it was for me, but Johannesburg, and it was to that thrillingly unfamiliar city we went to do business. Every morning for a week, I tramped through the endless corridors of the Carlton Centre, in my school flannels and my father’s tie, hawking the telephone dixie.

  It was 1972 and the Carlton Centre had just been built. An enormous complex of offices and shops, with a total floor area of 3.5 million square feet, of which 1.9 million square feet were below street level. Colour scheme: orange. You could smell the paint on the walls and the latex adhesive on the wall-to-wall carpets. There was an air of supreme sophistication about the entire complex. One index of this was the colour-coded maps on shiny boards, showing the different blocks and shopping levels, and the
numbers of individual shops; and alongside the boards an information booth, where a uniformed official sat ready to offer guidance if you lost your way. Surely such elaborate precautions had never been required before inside a building? They confirmed the vast and labyrinthine dimensions of the place.

  Then I had not yet read Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, which Dale Carnegie himself adjudged the most helpful and inspiring book on salesmanship he had ever read, and so my expertise was slight. My friend fared little better. But despite our evident lack of success, we laboured steadily up the floors of the office tower, my friend plying the even numbers and I plying the odd, demonstrating the virtues of the telephone dixie to anyone who would listen, and praying for orders. Our rise to the top took several days. Often I got no further than the receptionists, who sometimes made me wrestle with the spring-loaded clips for their own amusement. Occasionally I made it into the offices of junior managers and senior clerks. Here, with the whole city for a backdrop, every white person capable of sitting up straight behind a desk appeared to be a business magnate. Up we went, floor by floor. The higher we toiled, the more spectacular the views became. On a clear day, it was said, you could see Pretoria. I began to relish the moments when the person whose precious time I was wasting would leave the room to attend to more pressing concerns, so that I could stand before the window and look down at the immensity of the city, assured that even a hawker of telephone dixies could occupy the centre of it all. It was in those reflective moments that my sense of the unnatural beauty of Johannesburg was born and that I resolved to seek my fortune in these streets.

  At the end of a busy morning, the sales team had lunch at the Pumpernickel on Level 200. The food was unlike anything we had ever seen. There were frankfurters with notches carved into their convex curves and skinny potato chips with corrugated edges. There were bangers wrapped in bacon and dribbled with melted cheese, all held together with toothpicks. The fruit juices had little umbrellas unfurled in them; the paper sleeves of the drinking straws had been teased into decorative ruffs. While we scoffed the only material rewards of our efforts, the demonstration dixies stood at heel beside our chairs like well-trained dogs.