When it came to outdoor living we were not in the same league, but we had the patio and the pool, and my dad could char a lamb chop as well as the next man, so when my mother decided to invite the new neighbours over to break the ice, a pool-side party was the obvious arrangement.
Jaco and I worked on Saturdays – we could get a lot done in the afternoons after the shops closed – and the braai was nearly over when I got home. Usually I flopped into the pool to wash off the sweat and dust of the day, but the Van Huyssteens’ sun-browned kids were splashing in the deep end. The toddler could swim like a fish. Her brother, who was a few years older, was dive-bombing her off the end of the filter housing. They looked unsinkable.
I remembered my mother’s remark, some personal history gleaned when she went next door to invite them over: ‘They used to live near the aquarium.’
By the time I had showered, the girl was asleep on the couch with the damp flex of her hair coiled on a velveteen cushion. The boy was reading a photo comic, lying on his back on the parquet near the door, where I used to lie myself when I was his age, keeping cool in the hot weather. Brother and sister. They made the house seem comfortably inhabited. I was grateful suddenly for the parquet; my dad was making money in the craze for wall-to-wall carpets, but he couldn’t stand them himself, said they turned any room into a padded cell. Stepping through the sliding doors on to the patio, I paused to feel the heat in the slasto on my soles, enjoying the contrast, and thought: perfect. A perfect summer evening. A breeze carried the scent of my mother’s roses from the side of the house, moths and beetles made crazy orbits around the moon of the lamp, the pool water shifted in its sleep like a well-fed animal, breathing out chlorine. The sky over the rooftops, where the last of the light was seeping into the horizon, was a rare pink. The seductive mysteries of things as they are, the scent of the roses and the pale stain in the west ran together in my senses.
I can picture myself there, long-haired and bravely bearded, in patched jeans and a T-shirt. The smell of that evening is still in my clothes.
My parents and their guests were talking, and you could tell by the sated murmur of conversation, the outstretched legs and tilted heads, that the meal had been good. My mother had put something aside for me, although there was so much left over it hardly seemed necessary. While I was helping myself to salads, I heard Netta ask for the chicken marinade recipe and my mother fetched an airmail letter pad and wrote it out for her. The recipe was a sort of family secret – it had been devised by Charlie, my Auntie Ellen’s houseboy – but it was shared often and eagerly. Usually, Charlie’s idiosyncrasies were part of the rigmarole of handing on the secret, but tonight my mother made no mention of him at all.
My father and Louis were hanging around the braai, as the men must, and I joined them there with my heaped plate. My dad had a little cocktail fridge from the caravan set up on the patio and I fetched a Kronenbräu from the icy cave of its freezer. The dessert was already on the coals: bananas wrapped in foil. Louis had commandeered the tongs. As he turned the packages idly, the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar melted into the overburdened air.
For a long time the talk was about children, the neighbourhood, the new house, the quality of the local primary school, things I did not have much to say about. I busied myself with the food, drank the beer too quickly, fetched another one. My father told Louis about the new wall-to-wall carpet lines and the problems in the factory with the union. ‘But enough shop talk,’ he said, and moved on to the caravan park in Uvongo where they’d spent their last holiday. It was the height of luxury: there was a power point at every site so you could plug in your generator. ‘The newer vans are moving to electricity. One of these days gas will be a thing of the past, you mark my words.’ Then they argued playfully about the relative merits of the South Coast and the Cape as holiday destinations. My father ribbed him a little, and demonstrated that he could speak Afrikaans – ‘Julle Kapenaars,’ he kept saying – and Louis took it all in good humour.
It might have gone on like this, until my mom put the leftover wors in a Tupperware and the Van Huyssteens said thank you very much, what a lovely day, and went home. But of course it didn’t.
At some point, Louis slipped into the repetitive storytelling I had to endure every day as I drove around Joburg with Jaco Els. The shift was imperceptible, as if someone had put on a record in the background, turned down low, and by the time you became aware of it your mood had already altered. An odourless poison leaked out of him. His dearest childhood memories were of the practical jokes he had played on the servants. Stringing ropes to trip them up, setting off firecrackers under their beds, unscrewing the seat on the long drop. You could imagine that he had found his vocation in the process. His work, which involved jailing people for petty offences, was a malevolent prank. The way he spoke about it, forced removals, detention without trial, the troops in the townships were simply larger examples of the same mischief.
I was struck by the intimacy of his racial obsession. His prejudice was a passion. It caused him an exquisite sort of pain, like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue or scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds.
In the mirror of his stories, however, the perspective was reversed. While he was always hurting someone, doing harm and causing trouble, he saw himself as the victim. All these people he didn’t like, these inferior creatures among whom he was forced to live, made him miserable. It was he who suffered. I understand this better now than I did then. At the time, I was trying to grasp my own part in the machinery of power and more often than not I misjudged the mechanism. Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, my friend Sabine had told me. Seid unbequem. Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject. Surely one could be a spanner in the works rather than a handful of dust? I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
These thoughts were driven from my mind by Louis’s suffering face, the downturned lips, the wincing eyes. Even his crispy hair looked hurt. You could see it squirming as he combed it in the mornings, gazing mournfully at his face in the shaving mirror.
I could have shouted at him. ‘Look around you! See how privileged we are. We’ve all eaten ourselves sick, just look at the debris, paper plates full of bones and peels, crumpled serviettes and balls of foil, bloody juices. And yet we haven’t made a dent in the supply.’ The dish on the edge of the fire was full of meat, thick chops and coils of wors soldered to the stainless steel with grease. The fat of the land was still sizzling on the blackened bars of the grill. You would think the feast was about to begin.
I knew what had produced this excess. Through the leaves of the hedge, light gleamed on the bonnet of Louis’s new Corolla, sitting in his driveway like an enormous piece of evidence.
I should have challenged him to play the Beerhunter. We were drunk enough by then and he had the face for it. Instead, I decided to argue with him, as if we had just come out of a seminar with Professor Sherman and were debating some point in Marx on the library lawns. The details escape me now, they’re not important. Racialized capital, the means of production, the operation of the military-industrial complex, I was full of it. ‘Just imagine,’ I remember saying, ‘that you’ve worked all your life down a bloody gold mine and you still can’t afford to put food on the table for your family. Can you imagine? No you can’t. That’s the problem.’
‘The commies at Wits have spoken a hole in your head,’ was the gist of his reply. ‘What do you know about the world? When you’ve lived a bit, seen a few things, you’ll know better. If your black brothers ever get hold of this country, they’ll run it into the ground. It’s happened everywhere in Africa.’
My father cracked a few jokes and tried to change the subject. When that failed, he gave me a pointed look, a stare that seemed to stretch out his features and make his nose long and sharp. It was the look he used to give me as a boy when I wouldn’t listen. Go to your room, it said. No
w. Before I lose my temper.
We went from calling each other names to pushing and shoving like schoolboys behind the bicycle sheds. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Netta getting to her feet and my mother turning in her chair to see what the commotion was about.
Louis had what Jaco liked to call a donner my gesig. His sorry mug was begging to be hit. I would have done it, I suppose. Apparently I raised the beer bottle like a club. But before I could go further, my father slapped me hard through the face. One blow was all it took to knock the world back into order. Louis straightened his shirt and his mouth. I was told to apologize, which I did. We shook hands.
Then, in fact, I went to my room.
On the way, I stopped in the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. There was a red mark on my jaw. My father was all talk when it came to discipline. He would unbuckle his belt and say, ‘Do you want me to give you a hiding?’ Don’t be ridiculous. He had never raised a hand to me. That he had hit me at all was as shocking as the blow itself. I found the shapes of his fingers on my cheek like the map of a new country.
The Van Huyssteens stayed for coffee, to avoid the implication that the whole day had been a catastrophe. Later, I heard them gathering up the sleeping children, Ag shame and Oh sweet, and going down the driveway. It was the last time they ever set foot in my parents’ house.
Voices rumbled in the kitchen. Then my father came into my room.
I was still a little drunk or perhaps I was drunk again. The room was drifting, and so I stayed where I was on my bed, with my hands behind my neck, insolent. I was ready to be furious, but the look on his face made it impossible.
‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ he said.
‘It’s okay.’
‘You understand that I had to do this? I couldn’t have you hitting a visitor in this house.’
‘Ja.’
‘You were spoiling for a fight.’
Spoiling. To spoil for a fight. What exactly does it mean?
‘I had to hit someone.’
‘Then you should have hit him,’ I said. ‘He was asking for it. Fucking fascist.’
I imagine the expletive was more surprising to my father than the political persuasion, which I had been bandying about lately.
‘Perhaps. But you don’t settle your differences with your fists. Not under this roof.’
We spoke a bit longer. My father made a joke about watching your step around Afrikaners with law degrees. Never klap a BJuris! Finally, he reached out to show me something in his palm. It was a moment before I understood the gesture. When I stood up to take his hand, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.
My father’s remorse lasted for a week. Then one evening he called me into his study, sat me down in the chair facing his desk as if I were a sales rep who’d pranged the company car, and read me the Riot Act.
My argument with Louis had given him the jitters. The family motto had always been: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ He was worried, although he did not express it in so many words, that I would get involved in politics, that I would fall in with the wrong crowd. There was really little danger of that. Politics confounded me. The student politicians I had encountered were full of alarming certitudes. By comparison, my own position was always wavering. I was too easily drawn to the other person’s side. Half the time I was trying to convince myself, through my posturing, that I knew what I was talking about, that I got it.
I went to demonstrations against detention without trial, the pass laws, forced removals. I helped to scrawl slogans on sheets of cardboard and carry them over to Jan Smuts Avenue. But then I hung back, making sure there were two or three students to hide behind. My girlfriend Linda was always in front; her parents were proud of her for doing these things. I was not made for the front line. The police on the opposite kerb scared me, it’s true, but I was more afraid of the men with cameras and flashguns. I did not want to see my photograph in the security police files. More importantly, I did not want to see it, I did not want anyone else to see it, on the front page of the Rand Daily Mail.
The world beyond the campus, where the real politicians operated rather than the student replicas, was a mystery to me. Realpolitik. The new term with its foreign accent clarified nothing. People I knew from campus, writers on the student paper, the members of theatre companies and vegetable co-ops, were finding their way into the Movement, as they called it, but I had no idea how to seek out such a path, and no inclination either, to be honest. The Movement. It sounded like a machine, not quite a juggernaut but a piece of earthmoving equipment for running down anyone who stood in the way, crushing the obstacles pragmatically into the churned-up demolition site of history. Construction site, they would have insisted.
Towards the end of my university days, a farmer near the Botswana border drove his bakkie over a landmine and his daughter was killed. The newspapers carried photographs of the child’s body and the parents’ anguish. The gory details. Soon afterwards, an activist recently released from prison came to speak on campus. He spoke passionately, provocatively, about the bitter realities of the struggle, quoting Lenin on revolutionary violence without mentioning his name. ‘There will be casualties,’ he said more than once. When a girl in the audience questioned the killing of soft targets, the murder of babies, he rounded on her as if she were a spoilt child: ‘This isn’t a party game – it’s a revolution! There are no innocent bystanders.’ She sat down as if she’d been slapped.
Thoughts like these must have run through my mind while my father was lecturing me about dirty politics and the things the security police did to detainees at John Vorster Square. He was looking for reassurance, you see, but I felt it necessary to fuel his unease, acting up, dropping in phrases from books – ‘the ruling class’ – repeating points made by radical students on the hustings during SRC elections. The need to Africanize ourselves and our culture, the morality of taking up arms against an oppressive regime, colonialism of a special kind. I may have mentioned Frelimo. No doubt I quoted Prof Sherman – Hegemony Cricket, we used to call him.
The button eyes in the leather couch winked as if they were in on the game.
After a while my father changed the subject. He began to talk about my national service. ‘If you’re not planning to go back to university,’ he said, ‘you should go into the army in July. Get it over with sooner.’ He knew my feelings on this subject. He was just reminding me of the unpleasant consequences of my decisions and it was a pretty good strategy. I began to watch my words.
The talk wound down. When I was on the point of leaving, he said, ‘Are you busy Thursday?’
‘Well, I’m working with Jaco as usual.’
‘Take a day’s leave. Tell him you have to go to a funeral. There’s something I want you to do for me.’
It was not a question. My first thought was that he wanted me to help with the stocktaking in the warehouse, which I’d done before, but he had something else in mind. He pushed a large book across the desk.
‘Have you heard of Saul Auerbach?’
The photograph on the cover looked familiar.
‘He’s a photographer, a very good one. Also happens to be a friend of your Uncle Douglas.’
Now I placed the photo. There was a copy of it in my uncle’s lounge. It had caught my eye mainly because I was not used to seeing a photograph framed and hung on the wall like a painting.
‘Doug’s arranged for you to spend Thursday with Saul. He’s doing some work around the city and he’s kindly agreed to let you ride along.’
‘What for?’
‘I think it will be good for you. You might even learn something.’
‘I don’t want to be a photographer.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s not about finding a profession, you’ll make your own way in the end, I’m sure. It’s about this anger you’re walking around with, this bottled-up rage against the world. It worries me: it’s going to land you in trouble. And that’s why you might learn something from Saul. He’s a man wit
h strong convictions, but he’s learned to direct them.’
‘I don’t even know the guy.’
My father tapped on the book. ‘Just look at the pictures.’
If you want to find out about Saul Auerbach, go ahead and google him. He has three pages on Wikipedia and gets a mention on dozens of photography sites. Saulauerbach.com, which is maintained by his agent, has the basic facts of his career. If you’re after the details, there are blogs devoted to particular periods of his work and squabbles about its merits. Specialized search engines will guide you to his photographs in museums and you can find others scattered in online journals and galleries. Writing a paper? There are articles, freely accessible or available for purchase, on his style, his influences, his politics, on his use of black and white, on the question of whether he is a photographer or an artist or both. Planning to buy? Getart.com offers investment advice. If, after all this, you still need a book on the subject, the online retailers will show you what’s in print and bookHound will direct you to the bargains. You could become an expert on Auerbach without getting up from your desk.
In those days, before everyone’s life was an open secret, research involved a trip to a library or a newspaper archive, and the pickings were often slim. While I was curious about Auerbach, I did not have time to find out who he was. They might have had something about him in the Wartenweiler on campus, but I did not want to go there. I had declared the university out of bounds.
All I had was the pictures. I sat on my bed, with the book propped against my knees, and flipped through it. It was a great book, according to my father (quoting my uncle, the artistic side of the family). I had no way of telling, although I was ready to disagree. Between the covers were two hundred of Auerbach’s photographs: he had made the selection himself. The images were dense and sunken, they seemed to have settled beneath the glossy surfaces like gravestones. These black and white boxes weighed on me. Worlds had been compacted into them and sealed in oil. If I tilted the book the wrong way and exposed some pinhole to the air, they might burst into their proper dimensions. I imagined one of these rooms inhaling, filling itself with life, breaking back into scale with a crack of stage lightning. The images were familiar and strange. I kept looking at a hand or a foot, a shoe, the edge of a sheet turned back, the street name painted on a kerb. Have I been here? Is this someone I’m going to meet? I turned the pages with the unsettling feeling that I had looked through the book before and forgotten.
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