‘Look!’ says Nicky, feigning surprise, as they come up the steps. ‘Three drunk men.’
‘Wise men,’ says Chas.
‘We’ve been exploring the limits of our disgruntlement,’ I say.
But Dave says that’s unfair. I make it sound as if we’re going in circles, when in truth we’re going forward. And he tells the story about Little Jannie–in Dave’s stories the schoolboys are always called ‘Little Jannie’–who arrives late for class one morning.
‘Why are you late, Jannie?’ the teacher wants to know. ‘And it better be good.’
‘Well, sir, for every two steps I took forward, I went three steps back.’
‘Really!’ the teacher says with a laugh of triumph. ‘Then how did you ever get to school at all?’
‘I turned around, sir, and tried to go home.’
77
Wood’s Self Storage consists of five long salmon-coloured buildings, each comprising two rows of units, back to back, identified by a letter of the alphabet. Each row contains twenty numbered units: a ‘unit’ is a storage space of 60 square metres, roughly the size of a garage, with a rolling metal door (attributed to the Krazi-Door Company) and a steeply canted roof. The alleys between the rows are paved with interlocking bricks, and the entire complex is surrounded by walls and electrified fences, not the usual stave of strands but elaborately wired constructs as twangy as zithers. The caretaker lives in a bunker on the edge of the property, where several new units are under construction. They cannot keep up with the demand, he says. Our unit is designated as F13.
I like the area. In the shop-soiled veld around these scatterings of factories and warehouses you could stumble on the essence of Joburg–if such diffuse, fleeting qualities exist in concentrate–bursting into the air like the sap of a plant crushed thoughtlessly underfoot. Or it may be wafting less urgently from the spare poetry of the landmarks and the street names here: Rand Airport Road, Simmer and Jack, Refinery Road.
By the time we arrive at Wood’s, André and his workers have already unloaded everything into the alley in front of the unit: tables with chairs upturned on them as if it’s closing time, shelves, desks, bed, fridge, trunks, boxes. Suitcases stuck with labels to forgotten destinations. A portrait in a frame, averting its eyes like a bashful café patron. I hate to see my things stacked up in public; but the pavement outside my house was infinitely worse than this semi-private place. A sort of walled community for goods.
Minky and I pick our way through the boxes labelled with thick black Koki. Kitchen–crockery–fragile!!! MS: summer clothes. IV: manuscripts (Missing Persons). MS: study–stationery. But mainly, the boxes say: IV books–MS books–IV books.
‘Three or four boxes of books,’ says André, ‘is normal. Ten or twelve would be unusual, excessive. But this…it’s unreasonable, man. If I’d known we were moving a bladdy library…’
He’s preparing me for the surcharge, and watching the workers sweating under the writing man’s burden, I know I won’t be in a position to argue.
André has done this a hundred times. He has a special relationship with Wood’s–indeed, they recommended him to us. He has cast an eye over our goods, and as extravagant as the quantities of books and papers seem to be, he knows it will all go in.
‘Are you sure?’ I ask. ‘What if it doesn’t fit?’
‘Please, don’t even think about it. I once packed the entire contents of a big double-storey, one of those old Houghton mansions, into a unit like this. They said it couldn’t be done. But in the end there was so much space left over we could have set up a ping-pong table in there and played a game.’
So now it’s just a question of packing well, of arriving at an elegant, sensible arrangement.
André has a rugby player’s moustache, and he’s wearing a tiny pair of shorts of the kind you see when they rescreen the Currie Cup finals from the eighties, but he’s not the physical type. He messed up his knees (he doesn’t say how) and now he can’t lift so much as a hatbox. He is a conductor of bearers. He stands in the alley, with the goods ranged around him, facing into the unit, and directs the bearers to one item after another. ‘Bring vir my daardie groen tafeltjie daar: sit hom links agter, onder die stoel…Bring vir my nog ’n boks…Bring vir my die groot stoel met die rooi kussing.’ He is constantly appraising the goods out here, scattered on the brick, and the goods in there, stacked in neat and logical configurations, and calculating the balance between the two. Another layer here? A buttress there? He has a sculptor’s sense of negative space: he can see at a glance that this coffee table, stood up on end, will fit into the space between those two boxes, with its legs through the back of that chair. He is assembling a huge, three-dimensional puzzle, filling the space methodically and precisely. He must take weight and accessibility into account too. Never so much as scratched a surface, he says, let alone broken something. He is so still when he gives his orders that he appears to have memorized the location of every box, bag and item of furniture. He seldom gestures; a pointing finger would seem like vulgar overstatement. He never raises his voice; all his commands are delivered in the same even, polite tone, so that they seem like the merest suggestions. The workers have absorbed his style, they fetch and carry and stack with the same busy composure, padding softly to and fro, suppressing their groans when they heave up my boxes of dictionaries and manuals, the Uniform Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Complete Works of Joseph Conrad in odds and sods. ‘Bring vir my die rottangmandjie…Nog twee groot bokse…Die klein koffertjie: sit hom vir my bo-op die kombuisstoel daar agter…Die suitcase…Die blou trommeltjie.’ The space fills up. I am more and more convinced that it will not fit. But in the end it goes in comfortably. The last few items are slotted in. The computers are stacked on the tall bookshelf on the left, where we will be able to reach them easily when–if–we return; the concertina file of personal papers, the briefcases, the boxes marked ‘desk drawers’ go under the kitchen table; two standing lamps and a bicycle in the last scrap of floor space, and it’s done.
It is surprising to discover that all one’s worldly goods can be assembled together in such a confined space. Countless people have more, of course, and countless others have less. But this is a peculiarly satisfying estate: a unit’s worth. Perhaps that is the genius of André, the removal man, the great leveller? To ensure that no matter how much one possesses, or how little, it finally amounts to a unit. Neither more nor less. Having accomplished this miracle again, for another grateful client, he tactfully departs.
Now we are alone with ourselves, with this concentrated, material sense of ourselves. Aardse goedere. We stand there for a while mesmerized. Then we roll down the metal door and lock it, insert the extra metal clip and bolt it. I put the key in my pocket. We step back and look at our unit, in a row with nineteen others, in a block with four other blocks. It is a filing system. I have put my whole life on file.
While we’ve been preparing to leave the country, I have been tempted to get rid of things, but Minky has sensibly restrained me. We’ll just have to buy them again when–if–we come back, she says. What are we going to sit on if you give away the chairs? You’ll need a desk, you’ll need a bed. What’s the point? And she’s right, of course. I would get rid of every useful thing for which I feel no affection and keep a lot of junk we really could live without.
But self storage is a perfect solution. Now I have everything I need, but I do not have to live with it. I am a man of property, but I no longer need to defend it. Everything is contained, everything is contingent. I have created a community of objects, touching one another reassuringly. If ever I need something, I’ll simply come here and get it, as easily as a secretary flipping through a filing cabinet. I’ll send someone else to fetch it for me. ‘Bring vir my…’
In this orderly universe in which everything has a place and nothing can be mislaid, only Fehler’s hard and shiny trommel, embedded among my flimsy boxes in the warm interior of the sealed unit, is not at rest. Why did
I hold on to this other life? Did I hope to ballast my own record with one that was weightier, more complete? This proximity repulses me.
‘We are stories.’ It’s a notion so simple even a child could understand it. Would that it ended there. But we are stories within stories. Stories within stories within stories. We recede endlessly, framed and reframed, until we are unreadable to ourselves.
78
The plane takes off. I am looking forward to seeing Joburg from the air. It is always surprising to discover how huge and scintillating the city is, that it is one place, beaded together with lights. As the aircraft lifts you out of it, above it, it becomes, for a moment, comfortingly explicable. Personal connections dissolve, and you read your home from a distance, like one of De Certeau’s imperious voyeur-gods. Lionel Abrahams, flying over Joburg by night, saw the ‘velvet obliteration’ of all his landmarks: ‘Everything familiar had been forgiven.’ But there is another, more intimate comfort in the vastness: it assures you that someone, inevitably, is looking back. At one of those millions of windows, on one of those thousands of stoeps and street corners, someone must be standing, looking up at the plane, at the small, rising light that is you, tracing your trajectory, following your flight path. But we have hardly lifted into air when the plane banks to the left and the lights dip below the horizon of the window ledge. It is sudden enough to be alarming, this lurch and slide, but I am merely annoyed. I look across the dim sloping interior, but the dull-witted economizer in the window seat opposite has pulled down the shade. Through the other windows I catch the briefest sparkles and flares. The plane continues to bank. We are going to spiral out of here, I can just see it, rising like a leaf in a whirlwind until the entire city has been lost in the darkness below. Disappointment wells up in me, disproportionate and childishly ominous. This failure to see Johannesburg whole, for the last time, will cast a pall over the future. Tears start to my eyes. And then just as suddenly the plane levels out and the city rises in the window, as I knew it would, a web of light on the veld, impossibly vast and unnaturally beautiful.
…
Point B
Reality favours symmetries and slight anachronisms.
Jorge Luis Borges
79
We make our way to Gate A15. SA 562 to Johannesburg will be boarding in twenty minutes. In a brushcut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths tracksuit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.
80
André, the removal man, is supervising the retrieval of our possessions from Wood’s Self Storage. The van is parked in the alley between the rows of storage units, the workers are moving to and fro under André’s instruction. Before a single item finds its way onto the van, he wants everything brought out of the unit and arranged before him, like an orchestra before a conductor. He himself appears distracted–he goes aside to speak on his cellphone several times–but the workers are as calm and unhurried as ever. They carry our furniture and boxes out into the sunshine. It is a relief to see the familiar tables and chairs, it assures us that we are home. Good thing Minky dissuaded me from dumping everything. The only niggle is Louis Fehler’s trommel, hot and glossy in the sunlight, throbbing like a guilty conscience.
André starts orchestrating the loading of the van. ‘Bring vir my daardie boks…Sit hom daar agter onder die tafel…Bring vir my nog ’n boks.’ These familiar formulas collapse time, drawing the year of our absence into a single pause for breath, an ellipsis.
The phone rings again and he retreats along the alley. Comes back pale, grimacing as he lights a cigarette.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘It’s my sister. She’s been missing since yesterday.’
‘Jesus, what happened?’
‘There was a burglary at her townhouse, the TV and the hi-fi are gone, also the car. But the big problem is the burglars seem to have taken her with them. We haven’t heard a thing.’
‘That doesn’t look good.’
‘You telling me.’
The episode overshadows our first night at home. Made insecure by the proximity of our possessions, we speculate about André’s sister, quoting the conventional wisdoms about crime scenes and how to deal with them, repeating the platitudes.
A week passes before the body of André’s sister is discovered in a field near Cullinan.
Although we hardly know the removal man, we feel caught up in his story. As we feel him to be caught up in ours. He has filed us and retrieved us, weighed our shortcomings and excesses, he knows the way we fit together. Minky phones and leaves our condolences on his voicemail.
In the following days, three suspects are arrested, and then the story comes out in the papers. The two men who killed Estelle Greeff were hired by her husband, Dr Casper Greeff, a Kempton Park dentist. The plan was to cash in her life insurance policies. Elliot Masango and Christopher Njeje overpowered the victim in her house and tied her hands behind her back. Masango then strangled her, after which they wrapped her body in a blanket and bundled it into the boot of her husband’s car. They drove to a farm north of Pretoria. When they opened the boot, he was upset (Masango later testified) to find that the woman was still alive. They dragged her out of the boot, and Njeje sawed through her neck with his accomplice’s Okapi. It was so painful that she pleaded with them to get it over with.
Passing sentence at Masango’s trial a year later, Acting Judge Eben Jordaan said that people may use alarms, high walls and bars on their windows to defend themselves against strangers, but there is no defence against someone you know.
81
Two years after first being put up for auction, the Marymount Nursing Home is bought by the Vroue Federasie. It is to be refurbished as an old-age home. Now I understand why Albemarle Street has been so busy lately, cluttered with shiny sedans that look as soft as ice cream when it rains. The architects and accountants have arrived.
An unhappy reversal: a place where souls were ushered into the world is now dedicated to ushering them out.
‘I had a chat with the developers,’ says Mark, ‘and they assured me that the old people won’t be a problem. Just occasionally one might get out and try to barter a dressing gown or a pair of slippers for a pack of cigarettes. What should we do then, I wanted to know. Oh, just humour them and send them home.’
82
For years, a panel in the ceiling of my lounge had slowly been caving in. When its collapse seemed imminent, I climbed up on a ladder and tapped some nails into the board. Two considerations made me wield the hammer with restraint: I did not want to dislodge some other part of the ceiling and I did not want to drive a nail through a pipe or cable. Who knew what lay behind? My feeble repairs had no visible effect and the panel continued to sag. Then a gap began to open up between the cornice and the wall. ‘One of these days,’ Minky said, ‘the sky is going to fall on your head, like you-know-who. It’s time to call Ben.’
Ben Homan breaks things with the casual ease given only to those who know how to build again. He got up on his own ladder and beat on the ceiling with his fist. The whole thing shook. A volley of nails sprang out of the boards and clattered away under the furniture. He looked down on me. ‘It’s had it,’ he said. ‘It’ll fall down before Christmas.’
‘Just this panel?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Nah, the whole thing.’
He looked at me with sad, fatalistic eyes.
Somehow I felt that I had to offer an explanation. ‘A couple of years ago,’ I said carefully, ‘the geyser burst while we were away on holiday. Ball valve was shot.’ I was mimicking the plumber, trying for the familiar, offhand tone that men use to talk about cars and sports teams. ‘The water must have spilled through here and weakened this panel.’
‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s the points of attachment.’
He climbed down off the l
adder and with an outstretched arm pointed out the rows of nailheads, in parallels a metre apart, which showed where the ceiling boards were attached to the beams above. ‘The joists are too far apart to support the weight of the boards,’ he said. ‘There must have been pressed steel here before, see. When they took it out and put up boards, they should have put in extra joists. But the builder was probably cutting corners. The ceiling is weak everywhere. It’s started on this end, but the whole thing is sagging. You can see it over here.’ He took a walking stick from the umbrella stand at the door, the heavy Namibian one with the carved handle, and thumped it against the ceiling. Another bombardment of nails. ‘Won’t last into the new year.’
I could also see it now, all the boards were sagging gently like the roof of a tent. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? It would certainly never look flat to me again. Now that I knew where the joists were, I could see too why my emergency repairs had been so ineffective: I had tacked the board painstakingly to the empty air above.
After he’d gone, I picked up the nails. The old ones had a sugar-coating of white paint on their heads; the shiny new ones were my efforts from recent months.
Ben and his assistant Chico tore the ceiling down in a day, unloosing decades of dust and lumps of brick and plaster. Without a ceiling, the room felt strange and bare. The entire house changed shape and function. I spent half the night in the lounge, looking up into the space below the sheeting. I felt the sky pressing down on the roof as if on my own head. The echoing As of the rafters were a reading lesson. Here and there on the rough beams the carpenter’s marks were still visible, and the stencilled name of the timber supplier. Pipes and wires snaked over the trusses to the light fixtures and the walls, the corrugated-iron sheets strained under the weight of the night. The removal of the ceiling had exposed the house for what it was, a mere shelter, a pile of bricks and boards propped up on the veld to keep out the elements. Suddenly I was aware not just of the icy air above the iron sheets, but of the musty air below the floorboards, and the damp soil below that. I was suspended, between earth and sky, like an afterthought in brackets.
Portrait with Keys Page 10
