Life Times (51 page)

The way you ended up, Franz. The last woman you found yourself. It wasn't our wish, God knows. Living with that Eastern Jewess, and in sin. We sent you money; that was all we could do. If we'd come to see you, if we'd swallowed our pride, meeting that woman, our presence would only have made you worse. It's there in everything you've written, everything they write about you: everything connected with us made you depressed and ill. We knew she was giving you the wrong food, cooking like a gypsy on a spirit stove. She kept you in an unheated hovel in Berlin . . . may God forgive me (Brod has told the world), I had to turn my back on her at your funeral.

Franz . . . When you received copies of your book ‘In The Penal Colony' from Kurt Wolff Verlag that time . . . You gave me one and I said ‘Put it on the night-table.' You say I never mentioned it again. Well, don't you understand – I'm not a literary man. I'm telling you now. I read a little bit, a page or two at a time. If you had seen that book, there was a pencil mark every two, three pages, so I would know next time where I left off. It wasn't like the books I knew – I hadn't much time for reading, working like a slave since I was a small boy, I wasn't like you, I couldn't shut myself up in a room with books, when I was young. I would have starved. But you know that. Can't you understand that I was – yes – not too proud – ashamed to let you know I didn't find it easy to understand your kind of writing, it was all strange to me.

Hah! I know I'm no intellectual, but I knew how to live!

Just a moment . . . give me time . . . there's a fading . . . Yes – can you imagine how we felt when Ottla told us you had tuberculosis? Oh how could you bring it over your heart to remind me I once said, in a temper, to a useless assistant coughing all over the shop (you should have had to deal with those lazy
goyim
), he ought to die, the sick dog. Did I know you would get tuberculosis, too? It wasn't our fault your lungs rotted. I tried to expand your chest when you were little, teaching you to swim; you should never have moved out of your own home, the care of your parents, to that rat-hole in the Schönbornpalais. And the hovel in Berlin . . . We had some good times, didn't we? Franz? When we had beer and sausages after the swimming lessons? At least you remembered the beer and sausages, when you were dying.

One more thing. It chokes me, I have to say it. I know you'll never answer. You once wrote ‘Speech is possible only where one wants to lie.' You were too
ultra-sensitive
to speak to us, Franz. You kept silence, with the truth: those playing a game of cards, turning in bed on the other side of the wall – it was the sound of live people you didn't like. Your revenge, that you were too cowardly to take in life, you've taken here. We can't lie peacefully in our graves; dug up, unwrapped from our shrouds by your fame. To desecrate your parents' grave as well as their bed, aren't you ashamed? Aren't you ashamed – now? Well, what's the use of quarrelling. We lie together in the same grave – you, your mother and I. We've ended up as we always should have been, united. Rest in peace, my son. I wish you had let me.

Your father,

Hermann Kafka

S
tanley Dobrow, using the Canonball Sureshot, one of three cameras he was given for his barmitzvah, photographed it. He did.
I promise you
, he said – as children adjure integrity by pledging to the future something that has already happened. His friends Hilton and Sharon also saw it: Stanley jacked himself from the pool, ran through the house leaving wet footprints all the way up the new stair carpet, and fetched the Canonball Sureshot.

The thrashing together of two tree tops – that was all that came out.

When other people claimed to have seen it – or another one like it: there were reports from other suburbs, quite far away – and someone's beautiful Persian tabby and someone else's fourteen-year-old dachshund were found mauled and dead, Stanley's father believed him and phoned a newspaper to report his son's witness.
Predator At Large In Plush Suburbs
was the headline tried out by a university graduate newly hired as a sub-editor; the chief sub thought ‘predator' an upstage word for a mass-circulation Sunday paper and substituted ‘wild animal', adding a question mark at the end of the line. The report claimed a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been the first to see the creature, and had attempted to photograph it. Stanley's name, which had lost a syllable when his great-grandfather Leib Dobrowsky landed from Lithuania in 1920, was misspelt as ‘Dobrov'. His mother carefully corrected this in the cuttings she sent to her mother-in-law, a cousin abroad, and to the collateral family who had given the camera. People telephoned: I believe your Stan was in the paper!
What
was it he saw?

A vet said the teeth-marks on the dead pets, Mrs Sheena McLeod's ‘Natasha' and the Bezuidenhout family's beloved ‘Fritzie', were consistent with the type of bite given by a wild cat. Less than a hundred years ago,
viverra civetta
must have been a common species in the koppies around the city; nature sometimes came back, forgot time and survived eight-lane freeways, returning to ancestral haunts. He recalled the suicidal swim of two elephants who struck out making for ancient mating grounds across Lake Kariba, beneath which 5,000 square kilometres of their old ruminants' pathways were drowned in a man-made sea. A former pet-shop owner wrote to
Readers' Views
with the opinion that the animal almost certainly was a vervet monkey, an escaped pet. Those who had seen it insisted it was a larger species, though most likely of the ape family. Stanley Dobrow and his two friends described the face reflected between trees, beside them on the surface of the swimming pool: dark face with ‘far-back' eyes – whether what broke the image was Stanley's scramble from the water or the advance of the caterpillar device that crawled about the pool sucking up dirt, they never agreed.

 

Whatever it was, it made a nice change from the usual sort of news, these days. Nothing but strikes, exchanges of insults between factions of what used to be a power to be relied upon, disputes over boundaries that had been supposed to divide peace and prosperity between all, rioting students, farmers dissatisfied with low prices, consumers paying more for bread and mealie meal, more insults – these coming in the form of boycotts and censures from abroad, beyond the fished-out territorial waters. It was said the local fishing industry was ruined by poaching Russians (same old bad news).

Now this event that was causing excitement over in the Johannesburg suburbs: that was the kind of item there used to be – before the papers started calling blacks ‘Mr' and publishing the terrible things communists taught them to say about the white man. Those good old stories of giant pumpkins and – Mrs Naas Klopper remembered it so well – when she was a little child, that lion that lived with a little fox terrier in its cage at the Jo'burg zoo; this monkey or whatever it was gave you something to wonder about again, talk about; it had something to do with your own life, it could happen to you (imagine! what a scare, to see a thing like that, some creature jumping out in your own yard), not like all that other stuff, that happened somewhere else, somewhere you'd never seen and never would, the United Nations there in New York, or the blacks' places – Soweto.

Mrs Naas Klopper (she always called herself, although her name was Hester) read in
Die Transvaaler
about the creature in the Johannesburg suburbs while waiting for the rice to boil in time for lunch. She sat in the split-level lounge of what she was always quietly aware of as her ‘lovely home' Naas had built according to her artistic ideas when first he began to make money out of his agency for the sale of farmland and agricultural plots, fifteen years ago. Set on several acres outside a satellite country town where Klopper's Eiendoms Beperk flourished, the house had all the features of prosperous suburban houses in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The rice was boiling in an all-electric kitchen with eye-level microwave oven and cabinet deep-freezer. The bedrooms were en suite, with pot plants in the respectively pink and green bathrooms. The living room in which she sat on a nylon-velvet covered sofa had pastel plastic Venetian blinds as well as net curtains and matching nylon velvet drapes, and the twelve chairs in the dining area were covered with needlepoint worked in a design of shepherdesses and courtiers by Mrs Naas Klopper herself; the dried-flower-and-shell pictures were also her work, she had crocheted the tasselled slings by which plants were suspended above the cane furniture on the glassed sunporch, and it was on a trip to the Victoria Falls, when Rhodesia was still Rhodesia, that she had bought the hammered copper plaques. The TV set was behind a carved console door. Stools set around the mini bar again bore the original touch – they were covered not exactly with modish zebra skin, but with the skins of impala which Naas himself had shot. Outside, there was a palette-shaped swimming pool like the one in which Stanley and friends, forty kilometres away in Johannesburg, had seen the face.

Yet although the lovely home was every brick as good as any modern lovely home in the city, it had something of the enclosing gloom of the farmhouse in which Naas had spent his childhood. He never brought that childhood to the light of reminiscence or reflection because he had put all behind him; he was on the other side of the divide history had opened between the farmer and the trader, the past when the Boers were a rural people and the
uitlanders
ran commerce, and the present, when the Afrikaners governed an industrialised state and had become entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, beer millionaires – all the synonyms for traders. When he began to plan the walls to house his wife's artistic ideas, a conception of dimness, long gaunt passages by which he had been contained at his Ma's place, and his Ouma's, loomed its proportions around the ideas. He met Mrs Naas now in the dark bare passage that led to the kitchen, on her way to drain the rice. They never used the front door, except for visitors; it seemed there were visitors: ‘Ag, Hester, can you quickly make some coffee or tea?'

‘I'm just getting lunch! It's all ready.'

There was something unnatural, assumed, about him that she had long associated with him ‘doing business'. He did not have time to doff the manner for her, as a man will throw down his hat as he comes into the kitchen from his car in the yard. ‘All right. Who is it, then?'

‘Some people about the Kleynhans place. They're in the car, so long. A young couple. Unlock the front door.'

‘Why'd you say tea?'

‘They speak English.'

A good businessman thinks of everything; his wife smiled. And a good home-maker is always prepared. Her arched step in high-heeled shoes went to slide the bolt on the Spanish-style hand-carved door; while her husband flushed the lavatory and went out again through the kitchen, she took down her cake tins filled with rusks and home-made glazed biscuits to suit all tastes, English and other. The kettle was on and the cups set out on a cross-stitched traycloth before she sensed a press of bodies through the front entrance. She kept no servant in the house – had the gardener's wife in to clean three times a week, and the washwoman worked outside in the laundry – and could always feel at once, even if no sound were made, when the pine aerosol-fresh space in her lovely home was displaced by any body other than her own.

Naas's voice, speaking English the way we Afrikaners do (she thought of it), making it a softer, kinder language than it is, was the one she could make out, coming from the lounge. When he paused, perhaps they were merely smiling in the gap; were shy.

A young man got up to take the tray from her the moment she appeared; yes, silent, clumsy, polite – nicely brought up. The introductions were a bit confused, Naas didn't seem sure he had the name right, and she, Mrs Naas, had to say in
her
English, comfortable and friendly – turning to the young woman: ‘What was your name, again?'

And the young man answered for his wife. ‘She's Anna.'

Mrs Naas laughed. ‘Yes, Anna, that's a good Afrikaans name, too, you know. But the other name?'

‘I'm Charles Rosser.' He was looking anxiously for a place to set down the tray. Mrs Naas guided him to one of her coffee tables, moving a vase of flowers.

‘Now is it with milk and sugar, Mrs Rosser? I've got lemon here, too, our own lemons from the garden.'

The young woman didn't expect to be waited on: really well brought up people. She was already there, standing to help serve the men; tall, my, and how thin! You could see her hip bones through her crinkly cotton skirt, one of those Indian skirts all the girls go around in nowadays. She wore glasses. A long thin nose spoilt her face, otherwise quite nice-looking, nothing on it but a bit of blue on the eyelids, and the forehead tugged tight by flat blonde hair twisted into a knob.

‘It's tiring work all right, looking for accommodation.' (Naas knew all the estate agent's words, in English, he hardly ever was caught out saying ‘house' when a more professional term existed.) ‘Thirsty work.'

The young man checked the long draught he was taking from his cup. He smiled to Mrs Naas. ‘This is very welcome.'

‘Oh, only a pleasure. I know when I go to town to shop – I can tell you, I come home and I'm finished! That's why we built out here, you know; I said to my husband, it's going to be nothing but more cars, cars, and more motorbikes—'

‘And she's talking of fifteen years ago! Now it's a madhouse, Friday and Saturday, all the Bantu buses coming into town from the location, the papers and beer cans thrown everywhere—' (Naas offered rusks and biscuits again) that's why you're wise to look for somewhere a bit out – not far out, mind you, the wife needs to be able to come in to go to the supermarket and that, you don't want to feel
cut off
—'