Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

In the front door of our house is a hinged flap marked LETTERS, left over from a time when the postman, unhindered by locks and barbs and security grilles, could open the garden gate, come up the path, climb the steps, cross the stoep, and drop the letters through a slot onto the hallway floor.

  39

  Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the winter of 1886. Until then the veld had offered no more than grazing for a handful of cattle farmers, but soon it was dotted with wagons, tents and reed huts, as gold-seekers poured into the area. Within three or four years a town of brick houses, offices, hotels and government buildings sprang up, and within a generation the city was home to half a million people.

  Commissioner Street, the backbone of Johannesburg, follows the old wagon track between two of the first mining camps, from Jeppestown in the east to Ferreirasdorp in the west. So the city’s spine was fused to the gold-bearing reef that called it into life. Today, going down Commissioner into the high-rise heart of the city, I am reminded that here we are all still prospectors, with a digger’s claim on the earth beneath our feet. Where Commissioner passes the Fairview Fire Station, cracks have appeared in the tar, long, ragged creases following the curve of the road. Here and there chunks of tar have broken loose and rusted steel glimmers in the roadbed. The tramlines, tarred over in the early sixties, coming back to the surface.

  40

  On the pavement outside No. 10 Blenheim: a tall man whose splattered overall and abstracted demeanour spoke of long experience in house-painting. He had spread a strip of plastic at the foot of the garden wall, beneath our Ndebele mural, and was stirring a tin of paint with a stick. The mural must have been two or three years old by then. He’s touching up the cracks, I told myself hopefully, although it was obvious what he was really doing. As I drew near, he laid the stick across the top of the tin and went to stand on the other side of the street. Like a woodsman sizing up a tree, just before he chopped it down.

  I couldn’t watch. I went on to the Gem to fetch the paper. Coming home, I nearly made a detour along Albemarle Street to avoid the scene entirely, but it had to be faced.

  He had started on the left. He was hacking into the pattern, obliterating it with extravagant swipes of the roller. Standing back, from time to time, to admire his handiwork. As if there was anything to be seen but an act of vandalism. The man must be a brute, I thought. It would be a man, too, the very antithesis of the woman who had painted the mural. I tried to remember her, but she had faded in my memory. I saw a middle-aged woman with a blanket knotted about her, wearing neck rings and a beaded headdress–but this was Esther Mahlangu, the painter of the BMW, whose photograph had been in the newspapers many times! In any event, they were not opposites. She was not an artist and he was not a vandal. They were simply people employed by the owners of a suburban house to perform a task. What the one had been employed to do, the other had now been employed to undo.

  It was unthinkable that the same person could have commanded both tasks. The house had been on the market for some time and my theory was that it had finally changed hands. The new owner was remaking the place in his own style. Ndebele murals are an acquired taste, after all.

  My brother Branko had a less charitable interpretation. They haven’t found a buyer, he said, and it’s no bloody wonder. They’re finally taking the estate agent’s advice: paint it white. It’s a dictum. Matches every lounge suite.

  However, they did not paint it white. They painted it a lemony yellow with green trim, a petrol-station colour scheme. It took a couple of coats; after the first one, you could still see the African geometry developing, like a Polaroid image, as the paint dried.

  Having missed the opportunity to document the birth of the mural through a lack of foresight, I now lacked the inclination to document its demise. This would make a wonderful film, I said to myself. But I did not call my friends the film-makers. I did not rush home to fetch a camera. I did not even take out a pad and pencil like a cub reporter. I just stood on the other side of the street and watched for a while, as the design vanished stroke by stroke, and then I went home with a heavy heart.

  41

  Here he is, the security guard at Gem Pawn Brokers, relaxing outside. It is the end of the working day and I’m heading to the Jumbo Liquor Market for some beer. He has already helped his colleagues to carry in the jumble of pine tables and metal shelves displayed on the pavement today as ‘specials’, but a single chair has been left behind in which he can lounge until the doors are shut. When Mannie comes out with the key, the guard will carry in this last item, a fat, balding Gomma Gomma armchair, and oversee the locking and barring.

  He always ignores me, though I can tell that he recognizes me, passing by, just as I recognize him, sitting there. It irks me, this denial of the everyday pleasantries that set people at ease. Why won’t he acknowledge me? Is it the neighbourhood that makes people so guarded? I have been shopping in the Gem Supermarket for years and still no one greets me at the till. Any hint of friendliness is met with brooding suspicion, as if it must be a prelude to asking for credit. The scrawny manager with his support hose and his Fair Isle jerseys, the slant-eyed women and their toffee-stained children, they all look through you if you’re on the wrong side of the counter, sloping their shoulders defensively. After ten years of patronizing the Jumbo, I once found myself short of a couple of rand on a bottle of wine. I offered to make up the balance the next day, but the cashier wouldn’t have any of it. The manager was summoned. Grudgingly, he produced a two-rand coin from his wallet and put it in my hand, informed me that I was now indebted to him personally rather than the business, as if that would guarantee my honesty, and went away with a long face. The shopkeepers have reason to insult us, I suppose, for people are quick to take advantage. But what could I possibly want from the security guard at Gem Pawn Brokers?

  An experiment. I greet him one afternoon, putting my heart into it. He returns the favour. Hello! Hello. It is no more than an echo, but it gives me some pleasure. Hello! Hello.

  After a month of this game, a follow-up experiment becomes necessary and is made one afternoon. I don’t say anything; he keeps silent too. The next day I try to catch his eye as usual, but he looks away, bewildered and resentful. He thinks I’m up to something. I had no idea my experiment would produce this irrevocable reversal. Now, when he sees me coming, he draws back into himself and glazes over. Even if I throw out a cheery greeting, he pretends he hasn’t heard.

  42

  The grand old cinemas of Johannesburg, the bioscopes, were driven out of business years ago by the multiplexes. Most of the defunct bioscopes have been appropriated by people who own junk shops. Perhaps they were the first to arrive at the Plaza or the Regal or the Gem when the curtain fell, hungry for spills of red velvet and rows of seats joined at the hip, and so much echoing space proved irresistible. You can trundle a piano through the wide doorways and pile things to the rafters, or even put in a mezzanine to double the floor space, as they’ve done at the Plaza. If there are windows at all, they are small and high, and do not even need bars.

  The junk shops, like other businesses in the neighbourhood, take the names of the old establishments, as if it is important to preserve the association. The Plaza Pawn Warehouse in Primrose specializes in outmoded office furniture, a film-noir decor of grey steel desks and filing cabinets, wooden in-and out-trays, adding machines, fans, typists’ chairs with chrome-plated frames and imitation-leather cushions. Regal Furnishers opposite the Troyeville Hotel sells plywood bedroom suites and kitchen cabinets. Gem Pawn Brokers buys and sells anything of value, as their sign declares. In its heyday, when the Gem was the grandest bioscope in the eastern suburbs, a back door gave on to a small landing, where the usher could loaf between features smoking a Lucky Strike, gazing over the tiled roof of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, to the lights of Bez Valley and Bertrams, one ear tuned to the mutter of the spooling picture. Now this doorway is a frozen frame bricked in to keep out thieves.

 
The alliance of dark cinemas and second-hand goods is a happy one. In this deconsecrated space, objects that would appear lifeless in an ordinary shop throw flickering shadows. The profusion of goods evokes a storehouse rather than a market. These are the cast-off properties of people’s lives, mementos of their hopes and failures, and the signs of use that should be off-putting seem poignant. A piano stool with a threadbare cushion, a dented toolbox, a Morris chair with cigarette-burned arms, a vellum lampshade dotted with postage stamps, a soda siphon, a bottle-green ashtray in the shape of a fish–there is nothing so tawdry that it is powerless to summon a cast of characters.

  The proprietors of junk shops do not care for books, preferring to deal in larger items with a more obvious use and a more determinate value. But inevitably they are saddled with a few volumes. For convenience, a seller might refuse to part with a set of shelves if the dealer won’t take their contents, or an odd volume will turn up in a bedside drawer or the bottom of a wardrobe. Usually, there will be a row or two of books somewhere in the shop, on a bookshelf no one wants. If you wish to flip through them, you might have to hang over the back of a couch or kneel in a cramped space. There is no order to these books, their collection was informed by no particular taste. Yet, because of the circumstances in which it is acquired, a bioscope book has a special quality: it is attended by a more vivid retinue of ghosts.

  43

  Handwritten (Roll 2)

  The sign is painted on the end of an overhanging roof, in glossy blue enamel on a white ground: Dokotela + Ngaka. Between the two words, a wobbly red cross with a broken arm. And then a telephone number, with its last digit teetering on the edge, its face pressed up against the downpipe from the gutter, while the three digits behind jostle together in an impatient queue.

  ‘It’s starting to look like a township around here.’

  The township is written in longhand across the printed page of the white city, in felt tip, in chalk, in gaudy heeltaps of enamel. The new services: Dokotela, Pan-African Financial Systems, Siyathuthuka Tavern Ngubane. White eyes appraise these declarations on flaking facades, accompanied by crude drawings of stethoscopes and knives and forks, and put the premises and proprietors in inverted commas: ‘Herbalist’, ‘Moneylender’, ‘Eating house’…

  The white city is made of steel and glass, illuminated from within. It is printed on aluminium hoardings and Perspex sheeting. It is bolted down, recessed and double-glazed, framed and sealed, it is double-sided and laminated, it is revolving in the wind on a well-greased axle.

  The township is made of cardboard and hardboard, buckling in the sunlight. It is handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things, on the blank reverses, unjustified, in alphabets with an African sense of personal space, smudged. Tied to a fence with string. leaning against a yield sign. propped up by a brick. secured with a twist of wire. nailed to a tree trunk.

  Paiter. Call Tymon. Tell 725 6918.

  I turn my gaze from this message, scarcely decipherable in the dusk, to the crisply edged signage of the petrol station across the intersection. The light changes to green. The driver behind, who has never heard the joke about the definition of a split second, leans on his hooter.

  44

  On the Blenheim Street facade of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, between two sets of doors that have never looked quite so inviting since their brass handles were nicked, is a foundation stone inscribed with this plainspoken injunction: • LOVE • On either side of the word, the mason scooped a stud out of the stone. This incidental punctuation keeps an abstract concept, which might otherwise have floated away, pinned to a hard surface. In the bottom right-hand corner, a second, lopsided inscription–1927–tips the stone into the course of time.

  45

  In a corner of the parking area at the Darras Shopping Centre, near the Engen garage, a man is standing, a tall black man in a suit, a collar and tie, shiny shoes, a hat. He is standing to attention, rigidly upright, with his hands at his sides. A priest or a teacher, someone who would make a good character witness in a trial. At his feet is a square metre of cardboard and in the centre of it a bathroom scale wrapped in clear plastic. It is pale yellow with a white oval dial. A small white card beside the scale says: 50c.

  My God, I think, he could get more than fifty cents for the thing! I should tell him so. I’d give him twenty rand for it myself, if I needed it.

  Then the deception occurs to me: there must be a scam involved. When you offer him fifty cents for the scale, he’ll say he has another two thousand of them in a warehouse in Heriotdale. Give him a small deposit, say a hundred bucks, and he’ll fetch them for you. And that’s the last you’ll see of your cash. Transparent.

  And then, ten paces further, I realize how perfectly simple it is.

  46

  Strolling home with the morning paper under his arm, Branko passes a salesman dragging a large briefcase. He looks like a salesman anyway, in blazer and flannels, white shirt and striped tie, a door-to-door man lugging a set of samples. Branko feels sorry for him in this heat, trying to give the heavy case an extra little shove with his calf at each step, his free arm sticking out like a wing, pigeon-toed with effort.

  At his own door, Branko nearly falls into a hole in the pavement. The iron cover that’s supposed to conceal the connection to the water mains is gone. It was here ten minutes ago, when he stepped out to buy the paper. He stands there puzzling.

  Shit!

  He jams his paper in the letterbox and runs down the street, looking for the man with the case, unsure what he will do with this white-collar criminal when he catches him, but he has already vanished.

  47

  Returning from a reception in Sandton, we find ourselves locked out of the bedroom. I have got into the habit of half-turning the latch on the inside so that the door doesn’t swing open in the breeze, and now it’s clicked shut on its own. At two in the morning. We phone the Lock King and negotiate a price. Then we pour ourselves a couple of stiff whiskies and sit in the lounge to wait. Half an hour later a tough-looking kid and his blonde girlfriend arrive. She is wearing fluffy pink slippers with her jeans. While he sets about picking the lock, she leans against him, rubbing the back of his neck, stroking his forearm. We sit in our armchairs, in black tie and ball gown, and watch them at work. They look like thieves.

  48

  I’m coming home along Roberts Avenue, when I see Eddie dithering on the pavement by the substation near the Black Steer steak house. He’s looking up and down Blenheim Street, walking a step or two downhill and then hurrying back up again. Homing.

  It must be six months since he sold his house and moved, and this is the first time I’ve caught sight of him in the old neighbourhood. I’m pleased to see him, and yet I don’t feel like talking to him. Even in the moment, this impulse strikes me as uncharitable, but I cannot suppress it. So I stop in the shade of the fig tree on the corner to watch. He hasn’t seen me and he doesn’t seem likely to either; he’s too engrossed in his own dilemma. Up and down, up and down. His pacing is like paging; he has lost his place in the world. Finally, he goes downhill decisively towards his house. I’ve seen him do this countless times, hobbling back from the Gem with a loaf of bread under his arm, going up the garden path. But he doesn’t live here any more. When he’s one door away from his old home, he veers across to the other pavement and stops, watching from a distance, on the bias. He cannot face it. He starts coming back up the hill again.

  Now a meeting is unavoidable, and I’m suddenly delighted to see him. He’s just as pleased to see me: he seizes upon me like a bookmark. But he also looks guilty, as if he’s been caught out doing something discreditable. Before I can ask, he starts telling me how much he enjoys it in Germiston. Been gone eight months already, can you believe it? His daughter had business in town today, so she dropped him off. He’s been visiting with George at the Black Steer and old Mrs Ferreira. Looking around. George is closing down, did you know that? Mrs Ferreira used to own
half the block. Now she’s reduced to her place and the place next door, and not even a decent tenant for that.

  I let him tell me yesterday’s news. Then I ask: ‘What’s it like to be back? Have we changed?’

  We both turn and face down the hill.

  ‘My garden’s not looking so good,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘New chap’s not much of a gardener.’

  ‘It’s a pity.’

  ‘This has always been a beautiful part of town,’ he says. ‘The streets are so wide, and the oaks are grand, and the houses are set back just right, don’t you think? You notice it when you’ve been away for a while. I was saying to my daughter this morning: There isn’t a finer street in Joburg than Roberts Avenue.’

  Eddie’s mural comes and goes with the seasons; in the summer, it is obscured by the shrubs growing wild in the front garden, in the autumn, when the leaves fall, it reappears to haunt us.

  49

  Louis Fehler stayed with me in my flat in Webb Street before he emigrated. At the last minute he asked me to keep some papers for him just until he was settled on the other side, and then I was stuck with them. I lugged his blue trommel to half a dozen addresses, cursing him every time. I put it on the bathroom scale once and it weighed thirty kilos.

  When he died I should have surrendered the trunk straight away, but I was curious about its contents. One weekend–I often get round to chores on a Sunday afternoon, like a schoolboy doing his homework–I sawed through the padlock. The first thing I came to was a file called ‘Heydays’, which turned out to be fragments of an unfinished autobiography. Beneath it lay a dozen cardboard folders containing notes, chronologies, clippings, photographs and letters (including copies of his own).

  It was flattering to think of this as a posthumous commission, but I had no interest in being Louis’s biographer. He had his admirers and I might have passed the papers on to one of them, but there again the thought of handing over my windfall irked me. So I closed the trommel and put it away. From time to time I’m reminded that this legacy is in my hands, as I was again last week when I started packing up the spare room, and the blue trommel came to light behind the exercise bike and the broken chairs.