Portrait with Keys

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The box in which I kept these badges had belonged to my mother when she was a schoolgirl. It was a wooden casket half the size of a pencil case, decorated with forest scenes made of inlaid segments of stained wood, now faded to a perpetual autumn. There was a secret mechanism for opening the drawer, a wooden switch concealed beneath a small tile that could be slid aside–it fitted so perfectly you could not even insert a fingernail into a crack, you had to moisten the tip of your finger and pull gently. Pressing the switch caused the drawer to spring open.

  I liked to spread the badges out, arranging them by shape and colour, or more often by date. The older ones from the thirties and forties had a butterfly stud at the back, but modern jackets did not always have a buttonhole in the lapel and so the more recent badges had pins. My grandfather came to life in these small things, which evoked his hands, resting on the paper and holding the pen. When I grew up, I realized that they were also signs of his belonging in the world, the world of the railway goods yard, the pub, the working-man’s club. I imagined him wearing them when he went down to the Berea to watch the football on a Saturday afternoon, or when, on any day of the week, he walked up to the Vic in Paul Kruger Street for a pint. They were badges of identity, simple markers of a life story. The mere gesture of spreading them out, with a casual sweep of the hand, produced a plot. My grandfather’s absence during the war years, his time ‘up north’, was never clearer to me than in the missing chapters in the story told by the badges.

  Two boys came to my door one day begging for food, a teenager and his smaller brother, both in rags and looking pitiful. While I was fetching bread and apples from the kitchen, they slipped into my flat and pilfered what they could stuff in their pockets. They did not run away. When I came back with the food they were waiting dejectedly on the doorstep, and they accepted the packet with thanks and quietly withdrew. A day or two passed before I noticed the small absences: a stapler, a travel clock, my grandfather’s badges.

  Later, I came across the splinters of the box at the foot of an oak in Saunders Street, not far from my home. A few sticks of wood and a rusty spring. Frustrated by their inability to open the box, they had smashed it. Instead of the coins it must have promised when they shook it, the box had coughed up a handful of trinkets. I searched in the roots of the kikuyu on the verge, and scuffed through leaves and litter in the gutter, convinced that something must have been left behind, but whether or not they were disappointed with their haul, they had carried off every last one.

  A single badge finally did turn up in my wardrobe, pinned since the previous winter to the lapel of a sports coat. Nothing special, just a variation on a theme: a small gilt shield, with a red banner at the top saying SOUTH AFRICAN RAILWAY RECREATION CLUB and two white banners at the bottom saying PRETORIA and BEREA PARK. In the middle, in gold on a black shield, is a winged wheel and the date, 1951.

  60

  Mementoes of District Six is a cabin made of resin blocks. Enclosed in each block is an object or fragment that the artist Sue Williamson collected among the ruins of District Six after the removals: a shard of pottery, a scrap of wallpaper, a hairclip, a doll’s shoe.

  ‘It made me cry like a baby,’ says Liz.

  ‘You? Never.’

  ‘Really. I’m no pushover, but it was just so moving, standing there like a kid in a Wendy house surrounded by these relics, worthless things made to seem precious, glowing like candles. As if each trinket and scrap had been a treasure to someone.’

  We talk about trifles and their meaning.

  After another glass of wine, she decides to show me her most treasured memento. This is what she would like enclosed in glass and kept forever. She opens her fingers.

  A lucky-packet fish with a breath of her childhood in its belly.

  61

  On the eve of the millennium, South Africa’s new police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, entered the Brooklyn Police Station in Pretoria to make an inspection. According to subsequent news reports, the commissioner was not impressed with what he found. Incensed by the casual attitude of the charge-office staff and their failure to recognize him, he called Sergeant Jeanette Mothiba a ‘fucking gorilla’. Sergeant Mothiba responded by laying a charge of crimen injuria against the commissioner.

  The incident was widely reported. Some treated it as a joke or at worst a blunder. Others felt that the commissioner’s language was not just inappropriate, but unforgivably derogatory and racist. It was an echo of the insulting ‘baboon’ used so often by white racists against black people, and all the more shocking in this instance because a prominent and powerful black man had used it against a black woman under his authority. One black female journalist wrote that the phrase conjured up the image of a gorilla mask of the kind worn at fancy-dress parties, superimposed on a black woman’s face. The image would linger, she said, and be used against other black women.

  After a fortnight of controversy, the Independent Complaints Directorate, to which the case had been referred, issued a report finding that Commissioner Selebi had not used the word ‘gorilla’ at all, but the word ‘chimpanzee’. This word, unlike the word ‘baboon’, the report said, was not commonly used as an insult. Although it was safe to assume that the word had been used in an insulting fashion, it was not sufficient to warrant prosecution.

  In its front-page report on the Directorate’s findings, the Star ran an article titled ‘What’s the difference between a chimpanzee and a gorilla?’ The article pointed out that both are anthropoid apes of central West Africa, but whereas the chimp is ‘gregarious and intelligent’, the gorilla is ‘stocky with a short muzzle and coarse dark hair’. The anthropoid apes belong to the order of primates, the article concluded, and so do human beings.

  In the end, it was hard to say exactly who the joke was on. Commissioner Selebi, who had started this grotesque drama with his ill-judged comment. Or Sergeant Mothiba, who had vanished behind the headlines. Or the Independent Complaints Directorate, earnestly offering dictionary definitions as a legal defence. Or the reader, poking a stick through the bars at his own beastly nature.

  62

  In every corner of the library built by Canetti is an idea that could flare up and scorch the passing reader.

  Originally, he tells us, laughter was an expression of the pleasure taken in prey or food. This is why we laugh when someone falls. Their vulnerability reminds us that we could spring on them now and tear them apart. Our lips are open, our teeth are bared. But we restrain our animal appetites, and instead of eating, we laugh. ‘Laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food.’

  63

  A Saturday in July. The air is tinged with wood smoke, clean sunlight falls on dirty surfaces, bands of sun and shadow laid precisely over man-made crusts of tar and brick, over cement kerbstones, painted black and white, and stencilled with street names. A sagging fence holds panes of sky in its frayed mesh. Smells of dust and whitewash rise from the rugby field on the other side of the fence, reduced to red sand and straw at this time of year. The edges between light and dark, hot and cold define the peculiar thrill of a winter morning, when you are out in the frosted air wearing a warm jacket.

  I am standing on the pavement outside the Plaza Pawn Warehouse in Primrose, delighted to be alive. Minutes ago, on a set of shelves in a corner, a dead end in a labyrinth of old tables and chairs, I uncovered a row of books. I had to shift a chair or two to get to them, and hang over the back of a brown corduroy sofa that smelt of baby food, before my dangling fingers could pick out a tune on their spines. I chose the book I am holding in my hand. The cashier, a tubby old man in a pale-blue pullover, studying the form in a newspaper at a counter behind wire mesh, seemed surprised that someone would actually buy a book in his shop, and he was almost embarrassed to charge me for it. After a moment’s hesitation, he asked for fifty cents, and I counted it out in silver to avoid the further embarrassment of change. Instead of putting my coins in the till, he dropped them among some others in a china sau
cer, a stray piece from a Beatrix Potter set, dismissing me. Parking-meter money, perhaps, or something for the beggars who come to the door.

  The book is The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by William Gaunt, published by the Reprint Society in the early forties. It is not particularly beautiful and it has seen better days; although the cloth binding on the covers is emerald green, the spine has been bleached to khaki by the sun. But that does not bother me, as I did not buy it for its looks. I also have no particular interest in the Pre-Raphaelites. I had to have it purely for its title. Sometimes the name of an author and the title of a book fit one another so perfectly you can scarcely imagine one without the other. William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream. It is as familiar as a favourite, a book I have been living with for years.

  The encounter with the cashier, feeling the sting of his sublime disdain, and now emerging from the gloom of the shop into the icy sunlight, have made me self-conscious. I become aware of my own incongruity, not just of race and class and language, but of predilection, of need. Far from making me feel uncomfortable, the whole situation pleases me. The sunshine on the tar, which is sugar-frosted with automotive glass from the smash-and-grabs, the Saturday-morning bustle, the East Rand detail–the massive palm near the Plascon paint shop. the Solly Kramer’s. a buckled bus shelter. dim-witted robots blinking into the glare. parking meters along Rietfontein Road all ears, absurdly attentive to petty transgression. the yellow stripes on the fascia of Spares Link. the notices about diffs and carbs and shocks scrawled on the window glass in shoewhite. the pink towels behind the burglar-proofing in Top Creations Unisex Hair Salon. the yellow-brick flats above, the potted cactus and caged budgie on the balcony. the women in blankets on the verge across the way, beside their enormous lumpy bags of mielies. Myself in the midst of it, held by the air, with this beautifully inconsequential book, scrounged in a bioscope junk shop, clutched in my hand. I should feel utterly out of place, but instead I feel that I belong here. I am given shape. I do not follow but I conclude, as surely as a non sequitur. It’s enough to make me laugh.

  The men coming down Thistle Road are laughing too, as if they see my point. Black miners just off shift, wearing helmets with lamps on them pushed back on scarf-wrapped heads, their overalls unbuttoned to the waist despite the chill, their boots unlaced and gaping. Beyond them, against the sky at the end of the road, a church spire. Dutch Reformed is my guess.

  I open the book. It was so dark in the shop I could hardly make out the type. The frontispiece is Rossetti’s The Beloved, captioned with a quotation from the Song of Solomon: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his.’ The chapter called ‘From King Arthur to Karl Marx’ turns out to be about William Morris. I flip through the plates: Holman Hunt painting on the shores of the Dead Sea, with his palette in his left hand and a rifle resting in the crook of his elbow; Millais’s Ophelia; Rossetti’s How They Met Themselves; designs for stained-glass panels and tapestries by Burne-Jones. Everything in black and white, yet this is not a colourless world. You cannot look at these images without seeing silken red hair, gold thread in an embroidered tunic, the plush blue velvet of a skirt. It all seems more intriguing, with the colour draining into it off the palette of your own memory.

  Then I hear a voice raised. A man is teetering on the kerb, haranguing the mineworkers. A young black man, so steeped in last night’s booze he can hardly stand. He is wearing a greatcoat many sizes too big for him. He steps down into the street, goes towards the miners and stumbles in among them, shouting words I do not understand, waving his arms and making the tails of his coat flap.

  And this makes me even more satisfied with myself. It makes my whole situation more interesting: me standing here, with my irrelevant book, the women on the verge with their mielies for sale, the men in their sweat-stained overalls, made pale by deep-level dust, faces turned to the weekend, the comical drunkard. Together, we are theatre, we are high drama and low comedy.

  Then one of the miners takes the drunkard by the collar of his coat and hurls him to the tar. It is an act of such explosive volition that his feet shoot out like a clown’s and one slapstick shoe goes flying. You could have knocked him over with a finger and so the blow seems that much heavier. He is not merely tripped up, he is hurled backwards with all the force the other man can muster. He throws him down on the tar as if he is made of an obdurate material he wishes to break. There is a sound like a rock cracking. The miner’s companions laugh and come closer, leaving the drunkard lying still in the street.

  A car approaches down Thistle. The driver blows his hooter, a pinched white face looks over the steering wheel, demanding that this obstacle be removed.

  The miners have stopped to talk to the hawkers. A woman strips the leaves from a mielie cob, exposing a row of white kernels, and hands it to one of the men, and he bows his head to smell it.

  64

  Here comes a kid with his pants reaching only to mid-calf. From a distance, I think he is wearing hand-me-downs, much too small for him, and feel a pang of sympathy, but when he gets closer I see that he has rolled the bottoms of his pants up to show off his garish sneakers.

  Nigel Henderson: ‘A new boot is a fine monument to Man–an artefact. A worn out boot traces his image with heroic pathos and takes its part as a universal image-maker in the Suburbs of the Mind.’

  65

  The house was enormous, made up of five or six bedrooms, a lounge with a fireplace so huge a man could stand upright in it, and a rambling kitchen. A stoep curved around two sides of it and an overgrown courtyard lay at its heart. The two halves of the front door opened inwards like the gates of a castle.

  The room I remember best was the smallest in the house, but like all the others it was very tall, so that it seemed grander than it was. The bed was just a mattress on the floor, covered by a floral sheet and a mohair blanket. The height of the ceiling allowed for an immense fall of grey curtain in front of the window. This curtain was the most solid, impenetrable surface in the room, lined with satin and thickly woven, cross-hatched in black and white threads, each as thick as a charcoal stroke. Drawing it would have been superfluous, it was already a study in pencil.

  Beside the bed, on a red-polished hearthstone, lay a spill of mysterious objects, communing in delicate shades: yellow gourds, cobs of Indian corn, shells, sand dollars, perlemoen, sheaves of grass, twigs of coral, small unfired ceramic tiles that seemed to have been split from the bed of a dried-up lake. This sun-bleached still life brought the sea into the room. The woman whose room it was smelt like the sea too, especially when she came back from her home at the coast with her hair cut short and her skin burnt brown. In a landlocked city, in a place with no water, I was swept away in the salt tides of her body.

  We had lived there for a year when our landlady sold the house to the Apostoliese Geloofsending, who had established a theological seminary next door. Before we even moved out, she brought her salvagers to cart away the details we could do without, the brass plates around the light switches, the cast-iron dados and porcelain door handles. And we had hardly left when they arrived to tear out fireplaces, light fittings and pressed-steel ceilings.

  Within the week, the new owners knocked the walls flat and paved the plot for a parking area, as if the lives we lived there had no more substance than a pop song.

  66

  I am stripping the bedroom door down to the wood. The paint comes off in layers: layers of taste, of personal preference, of style. I wish I could read these strata the way a forester reads the rings of a felled tree, deciphering the lean seasons, the years of plenty, the catastrophes, the triumphs. Instead, I see nothing but fashion. Nineties ochre, eighties ivory, seventies beige, sixties olive. Paging back into the past.

  I am reminded of the Ndebele mural up the road. It is still there, of course, under a thick, lemon-yellow skin. All summer, after every storm, I have been waiting for it to reappear through the paint, its black edges and angles coming to light again like an old master’s pentimenti. But apparently P
lascon on plaster does not behave like oil on canvas. To effect this revelation, one would need some paint stripper, a blowlamp, a sharp-edged scraper. Or one of those X-ray cameras they use to hurry on the work of time.

  There is an easier way, I suppose. Someone must have photographed that wall. Style magazine or the local rag. A dozen kids from the youth hostel around the corner.

  But I do not want a photograph.

  Sunday morning. The new owner of the house with the secret mural–or perhaps he is just a tenant–is coming down Blenheim Street as I am going up. He is wearing rubber sandals with reptilian soles, satin running shorts, a pair of narrow sunglasses curved like the front end of an expensive car. Under his arm, a folded newspaper; dangling from his hand, a plastic bag full of groceries, the aroma of freshly baked rolls. He slips the bag over his wrist as he unlocks his security gate. I want to tell him what he’s missing. I can see myself drawing him back onto the pavement, I can see him gazing at his yellow wall with new eyes. I want to describe the mural, and the man who painted over it.

  But I cannot picture this man clearly any more. His work of obliteration hardly took a weekend, and so I couldn’t have seen him more than two or three times in all. Now he has vanished behind an impostor. The man I’ve written down here, the tall one in the overalls, has displaced the one who might have been loitering in my memory. Every time the memory man tries to come from the shadows, this written man, this invention you’ve already met, steps in front of him. Like a naughty child in a photograph, a Branko, jumping in front of his meeker brother to annoy him, waving his arms, bullying him out of the picture.