The Lion Seeker (11 page)

This makes Isaac think of the Quota Act that was passed back in 1930 which he knows now cos it's about the only thing he ever read up on from his old high school textbooks since he left Athens Boys. Looked it up after that time outside the shul when the okes tried to make like he was an ignorant or something. Read how it was true how the Nat government put a block on anyone trying to come to South Africa from Lithuania and some other countries near there. The bastards saying it had nothing to do with Jews when everyone knew it was
only
Jews—that just about every Jewish family in South Africa comes from Lithuania, Kovno province. But at least there's ways round Quota, according to Mame. She told him she was sad for a time when it happened (Isaac too small to remember it, just ten or eleven) but then she realized that all you need to do is get documents showing you were from a country that's not blocked. And there are so many other countries. Mame believes it can be done. With just a little bit of money and patience and organization. Mame the optimist.

She may not be all wrong: the last item on the African Mirror newsreel tells of the recent arrival of the German liner
Stuttgart
in Cape Town. On board were over five hundred German Jewish refugees, lucky to get away from Hitler, free to come here since Germany is not a country affected by Quota. But on the night the
Stuttgart
was expected to dock, a Greyshirt protest marched down to number seven quay to let the Jews know they weren't welcome. The ship didn't show; it rained and the protesters drifted home. Next morning when the
Stuttgart
slid early into harbour there were only a few sodden bastards left to Sieg Heil at the arrivals. Still—they had marched, there had been a
thousand
of them willing to take the time to head down there against the refugees, against Jews. And still more: the government now says it's bringing in a new requirement for every refugee. From now on, cash money only. No deposit, no landing . . . 

Walking home chewing licorice and smoking his Max cigarettes (MEN of the WORLD smoke MAX!) he runs into none other than Shimmy Kahn and them, heading for the tram stop. They say there's a Greyshirt rally and they're going to see what's what. Shimmy Kahn has a steel pipe stuck down his trouser leg. Says his little brother had his arm broken by some Greyshirts two weeks ago. There's families in Bertrams that had bricks thrown through their windows with swastikas drawn on. It's like getting out of hand, he says. Noam Levinson says his old man reckons it's gotten worse since the Olympics, his old man says can you believe in this modern day and age, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-six, that the whole world would have gone to Berlin for the Olympic
Games
when everyone knows that they treating the Jews like absolute dogs over there, worse than dogs. It shows how no one truly gives one kuk about us.

When they get to the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall, Isaac sees a red flag crossed with a yellow hammer and sickle over a crowd. Some faces in there are part of the Yiddisher Arbeiter Klub in Doornfontein, he knows, the Jewish Workers' Club who are such big atheists they have their picnics on Yom Kippur. He sees some blue and white scarves on necks, emblems of the labour Zionists of Habonim, and the newer more extreme lot, the Hashomer Hatzair.

The Greyshirts are on the far side and now, as he and his mates come up, some well-known Communist Jews, the Bernstein brothers, are running back with a bloodfaced man on their shoulders, his head flopping. Mounted police ride in hard to make a wedge between the two sides. Bottles come out of the night air to pop on the street and stones rattle across it, people are everywhere hunching. Someone has a bicycle chain wrapped round his fist. He watches a baton go up and down and hears the oddly high-pitched thwacking noise when it meets a bare skull.

In the shouts from the Greyshirt side there are English voices taunting also, not just chutaysim, Afrikaners, which shocks Isaac more than a little. English Nazis—is it bladey everyone in the world who hates us? Another bottle cracks on the stairs. A blotting redness leaches into his soul. Of his friends, only he wants to get at them, the Greyshirts, truly. He rushes close enough to get a warning charge from a police horse. A baton pointed at his face. He spits. His mates pull him back, laughing. Rabies Helger. Good old Rabies. Oke is so mad in the head he needs a vet, not a doctor.

—Stuff off hey okes. Leeme go.

But they all go home unblooded, three of them singing Zionist Hebrew songs that Isaac doesn't know. That stuff is Rively's department. One of the Bernstein boys, Yankel, is on the same tram and he makes his way over, starts to huck them about the Blacks, about history, about something called imperial something, capital shmapital. They laugh at his nonsense, jeer him away. Isaac, watching him go (what a langer loksh he is, tall and skinny as a strand of egg noodle, with round spectacles under a curly mass of black hair), starts thinking: a family like them Bernsteins, of book learners and historians, they might know what April seventeenth could mean. Ever since that incident with Kaplan on the cart the question still nags at him now and then, even though he decided that he doesn't want to know—about Mame's tears, about the old country: what the hell for? He used to feel sorry for those old couchers but now he sees Mame was righter than right to chase them out of their lives like a bad smell. Forward, only forward. Forget what's behind you, or behind your family, what use is it? But still there remains that stubborn nudging part of him. The part that keeps on wanting to know.

PACKING & MOVING
. The rhythm of daily work that piles into months. At the end of every week he gives his pay to his mother. What is his to keep is the taxi money earned from giving Blacks a lift into town whenever they can, not an insubstantial sum. A good little side business that makes his mame smile to hear about, though she is always urging him to think ahead to the next idea. He likes to sit in the kitchen after work while she is busy making the supper and he will tell her about the different houses he has seen and been into. In Orange Grove and Observatory, in Linksfield and Highlands North. He gives his considered impressions of the neighbourhoods and where he reckons they should buy, which always makes her laugh and say,—Dat's it, dat's it my boy. You'll win them all! Sometimes they'll even get out the real estate section of
The Star
and look at the pictures, talking over the yawning gap between their dream and the real world printed so starkly in the unforgiving ink of the prices. Not all the saved money goes to the dream of a house, though; Mame lets him order them the luxury of their own telephone and a listing for
Helger Watch Repair
in the telephone book.

Meanwhile in secret he has started saving a little something himself, from the taxi business money. He doesn't tell her this—wouldn't dare—but for him buying a car should come before buying a house. Already, soon after he turned seventeen, he passed his driver's licence with a borrowed Packard on the first go, and a few times now at work the urge to drive has been so strong in him that he's had to stop himself from taking the wheel from Silas; but he can't because he's the White and being a White driver with a Black in the passenger seat would feel like committing a crime he is half sure he could be arrested for. So instead he names aloud the model and make and year of almost every vehicle they pass on the road, as well as its engine capacities, and he is rarely at a loss. When the Chev breaks down he gets underneath it and watches and learns from his boys (Fisu and Silas the most handy), who use their clever self-taught fingers to inflict quick and brutally effective repairs not found in any manual. Once, at the warehouse, inspired by his boys, he even replaces a starter in one of the other trucks all by himself when no one else is around, impressing Benny Morris so much that Benny goes so far as to crack open his wallet to buy him a cold Castle Lager.

And all through these accumulating work days he finds he is never quite alone: Yvonne Linhurst slides inevitably into his consciousness. When he's riding in that Chev truck with Silas driving and Hosea, Morgan and Fisu in the back, she is almost like a phantom sixth member of the crew. It doesn't seem to matter how long ago their meeting was, he keeps seeing fresh shimmering images of her that stroke the nerves in his stomach as well as his mind. He might think of her with a book of poetry, reading in her uniform, and if he is eating his lunch of Mame-made sandwiches (leftover white fish on challah; cheese, tomato and onion; fatty brisket or deboned flanken on rye), such a picture will make his guts prickle and steal away his appetite. He might see her going from class to class at her larney private school with plants growing on the stone walls, the rugby posts and immaculate cricket pitches, boys calling each other
chaps
and gold buttons on their blazers. He might imagine that one of the
chaps
is talking to her, holding her hand, which makes his heart thud redly in him. In the nights he holds himself, his belly all slippery inside with ideas of her. He finds himself scheming of ways to make contact with her again, impossible Yvonne. A practical way to do it without being . . . what was that one word she had used, that he had to look up? . . . without being
shaming
. It sickens him to imagine how little he has to offer her.

He studies the clipboard every morning at the Morris Brothers warehouse on Jeppe Street for any address in or near Parktown. Just this looking for it makes his blood jump in him like a trout to the lure; but of course they have no cause to go back to the house with steep stone walls that he thinks of now as The Castle. And she inside is, naturally, The Princess (her mother the Mad Queen, her father the Cruel Duke). The Princess with that golden hair. And what is he then? In this world of castles and royalty? He is a troll and a peasant, with jug ears and mean eyes and empty pockets and coarse ways. If she were to send down her hair like the girl in the fairy tale, he wouldn't climb it, he would yank her out and down to him.

Stop thinking of her so much, he starts to tell himself almost every day. She laughed at you, man, don't forget. Luched you out so bad. And then what you said after she told you sorry—no man face it, if she remembers you at all she doesn't even like you. And she's only a little snob, she's nothing to you, and they're all a pack of loonies anyway. Forget them. But the thoughts of her are not under his control, they are like hummingbirds, they make their own way into his brain to flutter and glitter there, annoying him but also stupefying a little with their beauty if he ever pauses to watch.

 

No Gilder Lane on the clipboard but one day he does see Buxton Street, his own. That's the delivery address, the pickup is in Booysens. The name is Oberholzer. He takes the clipboard to Sol Morris: —Boss, this one checks a mistake hey.

Solly has a look. Goes to the office, comes back. —No you wrong, it's a hunned percent.

—But that's a chutus name hey. There's no chutaysim on that street, believe you me.

He shrugs. —Well maybe they moving in.

Isaac laughs. —Ja, and flying pigs also.

But when they're on their way it hits him. The old lady, that widow at number forty. He checks the number, ja, it's her. A tiny shrivelled-up thing who lives so quietly by herself with a couple cats that she hardly even seems alive, no wonder he forgot her. He knew she was a yok, ja, but not a chutus, an English Christian but no Afrikaner, because her name is Smith. Maybe she's gone and sold up. He wonders who is moving in instead, what the story is, what brings Afrikaners to his Doornfontein now.

When they get to Booysens they find the home on a treeless street of identical houses, all dull yellow bricks with walls made from horizontal plank-shaped lengths of pale concrete. But it's hard to miss the right one, because there are belongings in the driveway and a man also, sitting on a lounge chair, his shirt unbuttoned to the sun.

They pull up and Isaac approaches. This man is a solid trunk of flesh: the areas of fat that hang from him are like sandbags attached to a brick stump, their drooping conveys no sense of softness. His skin has become angry in the rays, a few curls pad the middle of his exposed chest. —Hello there! Isaac says. Cheery and loud: the voice he's learned to use doing this work.

The man takes a sip from a bottle of Lion Lager, his hand so wide Isaac can't see much glass. The other hand comes up as the bottle sinks, curling a lit cigarette to the moustache.

—Uh this is one fifty-eight hey? Isaac says. We the movers.

—Nee, the man says, using Afrikaans. Dis nie hierdie plek nie. No. Not this place.

—Oo-uh. Ek's jammer meneer.

Okay then. I'm sorry mister.

—Morris, the man says. He rolls some beer in his mouth, swallows. —Morris.

—Scuse meneer?

—Is jy dan 'n Morris broer?

No, I'm not a Morris, he says, staying in Afrikaans. Not one of the brothers . . . But he's looking at the number on the garage door behind. He scratches his chin, coughs. —Maar meneer. Dit
is
hondred agt-en-vyftig.

But mister. This
is
one fifty-eight.

The man shows teeth under his moustache. He's wearing shorts from a safari suit and there are lumpy twisted varicose veins on his shins; his massive feet, crossed at the ankles, are pale and long as bread loaves. He touches his ear. —How say?

—It says there one-five-eight, right there.

—You say to me I am a liar?

—Is what it says, man.

—You chirping me? says the man. Don't you backchat to me, boy.

Isaac stands there confused: how fast this is happening. The nature of it.

—You a chirping little backchatter hey, with your long nose. Isn't it so,
Morris?

—Hey.

—Bet you from Doornfontein and all. Isn't it.
Morris
.

—What? Whatzit you calling me?