Zimbabwean beadwork. (On wire. The Zulus do it on string.) That’s the trading goods in the Johnnie Walker boxes: tangled, vivid menageries of animals and birds and fish.
– It’ll be a breeze, Zero tunes. Tourists love this indigenous shit.
I would point out to him that the beadwork being Zimbabwean rather than South African renders it rather non-indigenous, but he’d just tune: Selling shit is all about selling an illusion. In Zero’s eyes there is no objective truth.
– I hope so. I hope they go down well.
– Like selling grass to a hippie. Whatever you make over cost, you pocket. Capito? So haggle hard. Beat folk down.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Haggle hard.
He hands me money for a second-hand Vespa he bid for after seeing an advert in the paper. I just need to pick it up from an old, glass-eyed priest who has not ridden the thing since he lost an eye in the township riots of 1976.
As Zero rides away in his empty Benz, he winds down to call offhandedly:
– Hey, Jero. I love you, my laaitie.
Then he’s gone. I, his laaitie, his boy, feel stranded in the wake of his upbeat bravado. I’m cut off from all that’s defined my life so far, other than a few books. And the tourist trinkets: Zero’s jetsam.
A crow’s wry faawk mocks my loneliness.
The light fades. I go to find this pizza joint.
4
JUST SOUTH OF THE Limpopo River. After dusk.
The scattering of stars reminds Jabulani of fishing pontoons at night on Lake Kariba: the way they lure kapenta with a dazzling light.
He drops from the acacia to his feet and runs on in the loping stride of a distance runner.
He has always run. Run the long dusty miles to school as a boy. Run on the track at the university in Harare. Run at dusk for years to calm his mind after another day of teaching and marking papers.
He runs hour after hour in fear of a snake fanging him or a bullet felling him. And as he runs he recalls how he used to put his feet up for a pipe smoke after putting his son and daughter to bed. He’d let the cat doze on his lap and tune into Billie Holiday. It was at such times, as smoke floated up from his pipe through the overhanging fever tree to the Southern Cross, that he tallied up his good luck:
The magic of drifting into dreams as he lay in the dark against Thokozile’s spine.
Tendai coolly hula-hooping at dusk under the papaya, hardly a hint of lackadaisical lilt in her hips. The way she drew butterflies and angels in fluid lines without lifting her pencil from paper. The way she saw him as her hero for carrying her high on his shoulders through the flaring bazaar, for catching moths and spiders in his bare hands, for reading to her in a range of voices.
Panganai finger-picking Bob Marley on his guitar in the hope of dazzling the girls who drifted by. The way he lost himself so deep in a novel he’d not feel mosquitoes stinging him or the cat rubbing her fur against the soles of his feet.
As Jabulani runs on through a dark savannah under a winking sliver of moon, he thinks: Bob Marley had held out such high hopes for this free Zimbabwe. And now Zimbabwe’s gone to the dogs.
One time he has to sidestep a black cow shifting out of shadow.
A monkey-thorn draws a red thread across his forehead.
He hears shots in the distance. The farmers are out hunting.
The shots recall how, years ago, a band of renegade war veterans under a man they called Hitler had yahooed through his town in a pickup. They had shot their totemic AK-47s at an invulnerable sun, cut a blue sky to ribbons with their panga blades. They had flipped the corpse of a woman from the flatbed of that pickup. Her head had jounced rubberly in the dust. A breast had been pangaed off.
That image spurs him to run harder.
5
HERMANUS. BEFORE SUNUP.
A bird pecking at his refection yanks me out of a dream of the painting of the severed zebra’s head that hangs over my folks’ bed. In my dream a drop of paint fell from the canvas and landed on my mother’s forehead to form a vermilion bindi. Then a gecko slid over her wan skin and sipped at the spot of blood. The sound of his echoing call was the sound of stones being tapped under water till it morphed into the sound of a beak pecking at glass.
I smack cold water over my face. I avoid the stranger in the mirror and look instead at my mother’s watercolour of the seagull.
I gulp silty water from the tap.
This is the time she’d wordlessly put a cup of black coffee and yesterday’s Cape Times next to my bed. She’d draw the curtain and slide the window up. She’d let her palm linger on my forehead, as if she feared a fever. She’d wordlessly pick up my concertinaed jeans from the floor and hang them over a chair. Through the window I’d hear turtle-doves singing their bobbing-headed Jewish chants, and the muezzin cajoling Malays to the mosque.
I yearn for the bitterness of my mother’s coffee and for a gone boyhood of being sandy and sunburnt, of spicy samosas and sweet tea.
Now through this window I discern white foam sparking over dark rocks. The wind is cold and sea-tangy.
As I put on my Nikes and a fraying rugby jersey, I study the fantasy figures I have pencilled on the walls of my cell: mermaid angels, dog sharks, impala-headed girls, a sphinx. Figures borrowed from my mother’s mind.
A few Xhosa girls line up with jerrycans and drums at a tap in a churchyard. They tap water for free. They giggle and gabble a scattering of clicks and pips like record needles snaring on scratches or grasshoppers snapping their wings in the air. They teasingly call baleka baleka after me and this puts vim into my step.
Waves crescendo against a heedless laager of rocks. I see a dead cormorant caught in a rock cleft. I free it and fling it out to sea where kelp bobs like seal heads in the surf. I imagine fish picking at the dead bird and crabs squabbling over the bones.
I follow the cliff path to the old harbour.
A hobo lies under a flipped-over fishing boat.
His bastard dog – half border, half other – tilts his head up and snarls his fangs at me.
The hobo’s eyelids peel to reveal eyes red as raw sores. A milky tear travels along a deep crow’s-foot in his windburnt skin. He murmurs to the dog.
The dog hides his teeth and wags his tail. I hold out my hand and he licks it.
The hobo oozes a weird wisdom from under the earflaps of his hunting hat, as if he’s figured out the riddle of human pain. His bird-like face recalls Samuel Beckett.
– Your dog’s beautiful. He or she?
– Bitch.
– Aha. She has beautiful fur.
– Skunk colours.
– Half border, hey?
– Any fool can tell.
– And boxer?
– Rhodesian.
– Aha. Had her long?
– How do you measure such a thing?
– Hey, I just wanted to say she’s beautiful.
– How do you define beautiful?
– I’m sorry if I caught you in a sour mood.
– I’m not sour. You sidestep questions.
– Maybe we can shoot the breeze another time. I’ll buy you a coffee. How does that sound?
He just snorts and turns his head away.
I stand spurned on the harbour wall. A seagull marks time over my head.
I run on along the path, following the shoreline, through a kind of limbo curiously devoid of all the caterwauling and mosque-calling of a Cape Town dawn. I run past the Marine Hotel, past Kwaaiwater, past Voëlklip and all the way out to a long lagoon beach that reels out forever. The beach is empty. One lone sculler plies the lagoon. A luminous balloon of a sun tints the sea perlemoen pink.
At Voëlklip I stand on the rocks and scan a listlessly lilting sea for the telltale V of spray: a whale’s blow. No luck. Just a distant fishing boat. And the sun tugs free of her low mooring and floats ropelessly.
I run on again. Just before I come to the tidal pool below the Marine Hotel, a hullabaloo of flocking seagulls draws my e
yes to a sun-flared mirage on the path ahead.
Seagulls, flapping like ticker tape in a berg wind, fuss and flock over a sylphlike girl holding half a loaf of white bread in her hand.
My feet falter. The path pivots under me. Out at sea a southern right whale surfaces.
Bread. Girl of skin and hair and bone. She’s no mirage.
The sun skips off seagull feathers like stray sparks. Cocky sparrows land whistling on her sun-haloed head. Ratty dassies gaze beady eyes at her, then dart for the bread she scatters at her bare feet. Her light white dress dances a flirting flamenco in the wind. Sunlight filters through the filmy cloth to hint at her sinuous figure.
Seeing me gawp lamely, she calms her dress with her hands. Then she laughs a string of pearls.
I gasp a draft of air. White noise hazes through my gaffed head.
She casts the last of the bread to the bickering gulls.
A gecko-fingered, sweet-smelling frangipani drops white petals as she walks into a low-walled yard. Hibiscus flares a lurid red. Cannas spit fames of yellow and orange. A sunbird blurs from aloe flower to aloe flower: a dizzying, unearthly green.
Hermanus is no longer a dim, far-flung town. It is the compass foot of a world shot in Fujifilm.
I run on. My feet dance like an impala’s.
6
SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF THE Limpopo.
At first Jabulani thinks the crow-dark shadow under a far acacia is a rock. Then it shifts in a way rocks don’t.
His feet shuffle to a halt in the dust. He squints into the low, shimmering sun to figure it out.
He sees the telltale, inverted double V.
His instinctive, heart-jolting thought is Hyena!
But a hyena would have yipped his lust to the sky by now. This crouching animal eyes him coolly, biding his time.
Fear shoots through Jabulani’s bones. Yet he stands dead still, casting his eyes about for stones.
No stones. Just wiry grass and dark dust.
He drops a shoulder to swing his rucksack free.
The animal unfolds again. The outline’s too slick to be a ragged-skinned wild dog. It has to be a stray farm dog.
Jabulani fiddles his pocketknife out of his rucksack, then takes one slow step backwards.
The dog sniffs his brew of raw fear, smoky sweat and dry blood.
If he turns on his heels now, the dog will go for him. He has to hold his gaze. His life hangs on it.
The dog snarls his snaggle-toothed jaw at him.
Jabulani’s plan is to hurl his rucksack skywards if the dog goes for him. The dog will shift focus to pivot his head after the decoy. Then Jabulani can sidestep and stab the dog in his neck.
If the dog’s momentum plucks the knife from his hand, he’ll just have to go for the eyes with his tatty All Stars.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jabulani sees another black form peel out of the dust. Another dog, he thinks.
Then another. And another. Four demon dogs homing in on him from four compass points.
Change of plan. He’ll have to fight with the knife. Swing wildly, instead of stabbing deep.
He draws his tin canteen out of his rucksack and hurls it at Snaggletooth.
It jangles against his skull. He yelps and his feet jitter and jig.
The other dogs flick their eyes away from Jabulani for a moment to witness Snaggletooth stalking the canteen in the dust and sniffing at it. Then they focus on Jabulani again.
Now all four dogs inch towards him. Now he sees their viscous pink gums. Now the low rattling of their bloodlust sours his blood.
He wonders if his rucksack and passport would ever be found, if Thokozile would ever hear he’d died just south of the border.
A dog with a jagged, tooth-torn ear drops low. Instinct scripts this dog with the sun behind him to make the first move. He leaps at Jabulani.
Jabulani sidesteps and swipes wildly at the dog’s head.
The dog spins away from him, yelping. Drops of blood from his lip fleck the dust. He paws at his bleeding lip. His yelping fades to a mystified whining. He shakes his head and blood fans out from him.
As in a kung fu film the others waver and glance at one another. They are no longer keen to go solo.
The bleeding dog falls in again, due east.
They drop their heads. They lay their ears flat. They no longer growl. It is this silence of unflinching communal focus that tells him this is the kill.
Flinging his rucksack might just off-foot one, and he might wound another with the knife, but two would still be free to gut him.
He begs God: Keep an eye on my sweet-sweet Thokozile, on my soul-boy Panganai and my angel-girl Tendai.
Then, out of the blue, they all tilt their heads in sync, as if to tune into rumours of blood on a high, inhuman frequency.
He sees distant dust float skyward.
The dogs figure they have no time to make the kill, yet find it hard to let their prey go.
Now he hears the motor throbbing deep.
And he sees sand spit up at their feet just before the shot cracks in his ears.
The dogs spin on their heels and lope away, tails tucked. Each time a shot is fired their asses flinch as if a whip tip has stung them.
A Land Rover painted in zebra markings jerks to a halt.
– Lucky bastard, a voice calls through a haze of dust.
As the dust fades he sees two white gunmen standing on the roof of the Land Rover, like tiger hunters riding high on a howdah.
The black man behind the wheel gazes pityingly at Jabulani.
7
HERMANUS MARKET.
The sky is a plane-chalked blue blackboard.
The sun treks doggedly through the blue, painting the surface of things below a kind of yellow. That sunlight in Amsterdam’s too white and thin. This is viscous and chardonnayed.
The fuzzy radio-static zither of the sea echoes the thrum in my blood whenever I conjure her, the seagull girl.
The market echoes with the untuned, behind-the-scenes hubbub of shifting scaffolding, toppling boxes and jockeying vans. Smells waft by of jasmine joss, kelp, gas, dust, coffee, skinned oranges.
Long planks balance on two sawhorses under the tarp roof of my end-of-the-row stand. I lay out the bead things one by one: penguins, seahorses, chameleons, geckos, turtles, fish, sharks, dolphins, whales ...
Next stall along, to my left, a wiry woman fiddles with her printer’s trays of stones and fossils.
I remember now that as a boy I dreamed of having an amber stone with a spider caught in it.
Next stall along again, a guy from Senegal sells vividly painted figures carved out of wood. They hold a myriad of jobs from teacher to soldier. I wonder how he’d depict a poet (pencil and paper in hand? scratching his head?). How he’d make him stand out from a philosopher or a clerk.
In this market no defined measure marks out the time. Trade will get under way once the first tourist moseys along to find a curio, or the first hotel keeper comes to finger fresh steenbrass or mango.
I see the fishing-boat hobo hobble across the cobbled square to the Fisherman’s Cottage, his dog at his heels. The hobo’s spine is curved as a scorpion’s stinger under his ratty herringbone tweed. He hovers at the door to the pub till they give him a take-away cup of something. Maybe yesterday’s coffee.
He slides his hooked spine down the bark of a fig tree just across the square from my stand. He squats on his heels in the sketchy shade and blows into the cup.
I nod his way and he stares through me, as if he’s never seen me before.
His dog lies at his feet and idly surveys the chaos of the market moments before the theatre begins.
I sense the dog loves his hobo, has no sense his master is on so low a rung in the eyes of the world. But then a hawker’s hardly higher than a hobo in any hierarchy.
– Never skips a day, the stoneseller chirps. He’ll be under that fig till noon tying bits of flotsam string together. He was a professor of something or other at
Rhodes University. Philosophy, I think. He and his wife came to Hermanus to watch the whales one September, years ago. The whales were basking just off the rocks down by the old harbour. A fluke wave snatched his wife off the rocks. She died ... and ever since then he’s not gone further than a stone’s throw from the sea.
– Did he tell you?
– It was in all the papers. And I saw it happen from up by the railing. I’d heard the yells and ran over from my stall. He’d gone in after her and folk yelled: Swim out! Swim out! But she was just too scared of the whales. It’s against all human instinct to swim out towards them. And so the sea pounded her against the rocks till her head bled and she went down.
– That’s hard.
– Yes. Another fella dived in and hauled the professor out. The professor fought tooth and nail. He wanted to go down with his wife. The fella had to hit him in the face.
I study the old professor’s wind-lined face. He puts his coffee cup on his head and fiddles a few strands of string out of his pocket.
Then I put my hand out to the stone seller.
– Hey, I’m Jerusalem.
Her forehead furrows as she figures whether I’m dark white (maybe Italian?) or light coloured.
– Jerusalem Cupido.
Cupido. An incurably Cape Coloured name.
She bares sepia teeth through papery lips. Her dry skin scratches my palm.
– Hunter, she says.
– Hunter?
– Lily Hunter. But Lily sounds too sweet for a hardy old bird, hey?
– Hunter’s cool.
– Jerusalem’s exotic, she says. I never thought of it as a name for a boy.
I see in her bloodshot eyes a hint of fumbled coyness, as if recalling dusty lines from a school poem learned by rote.
– Well, I was born Jude, but no one ever calls me that. Jerusalem’s my father’s joke. You see, I’m half Muslim, half Jew. And the Muslim half of me is half Malay, half Cuban. My blood’s a novel of journeys south from Malacca, Havana and Vienna.
Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Page 3
