The Lion Seeker (12 page)

—Magnus!

It's a shout from the gate. A woman there. Very tall, with long straight sandy hair and a face that is peculiarly narrow, like a horse or a bird, the eyes seeming almost to touch through the thin pipe of the nose.

—Hibbly bibbly tibbly, the man says to Isaac. He burps. —Hey Morris. Let us make a deal hey. Hibbly bibbly Doornfontein. Hey? Hey?

He gets up slowly, in stages, the hinged sections of his massiveness unfurling. He makes some kind of bobbing gesture. Like an oak door swinging shut he turns and lurches off. Only then does it touch Isaac what he has just seen, a parody of the religious, the oldsters rocking as they pray in shul. He wants to shout but his voice dries in him and he just stands there, feeling the blood slowly peeling away from the back of his face.

It is the woman who comes out to make the arrangements, he doesn't see the man again. But when they are packed up and on the road, he tells Silas to pull over.

—What is, baas?

—Just ganna check something hey.

He gets out, climbs up onto the flatbed. The drawers of a desk have been removed and lashed down under a tarp. He lifts the tarp. He had noticed a glimpse of papers before. There's nothing much in the first three he looks at, just envelopes, stationery. But then he finds articles cut from copies of
Die Transvaler
, and whole folded editions of another newspaper he's never seen before. It has a bilingual title,
Die Waarheid
on the left side and
The Truth
on the right; in between is an emblem with a springbok and a kudu and between them a standard with a fat black swastika right in the middle. Under the title it reads,
Official Organ of the South African Greyshirts
. The articles are a blend of Afrikaans and English. Headlines he sees:
THE JEWISH QUESTION. DIE JOODSE VRAAGSTUK. ANGLO-JEWISH-BOLSHEVIK AXIS. JEWISH WAR CRIMES. DIE JOODSE PROTOCOLS: WAT BEDOEL HULLE
? There's also clippings from the
Transvaler
newspaper full of anti-Jewish stuff, cartoons of a character called Hoggenheimer, a fatty with a fat nose plus cigar and Star of David. Ja, he's looking at the very thing. He can barely believe. Man's one a them, a fucken Greyshirt: those toxic newsreel arrows leaching across the map of the world have poured into the back of his own stuffing truck.

He folds some of the papers into a pocket then straightens up and unbuttons his trousers. Hosea, Morgan and Fisu are big-eyed with interest. The passing cars can see everything but Isaac doesn't care, his pulses beat the red rage into his head. He feels the air on his dick and then he is pissing. His boys shout, they cover their mouths, they stamp the flatbed and whoop and laugh. Only Silas looks unhappy, Isaac sees him through the back window with his own face superimposed (and ja, it does have a lot of nose—what did he call me, big nose, long nose?—under the orange hair, but it's more the freckles and the widespread ears that make it what it is).

Meanwhile he is aiming his circumcised penis with great care, making sure to give all the drawer's contents a thoroughly democratic soaking. When he has no more piss to give he hawks up lumps of green snot from the back of his throat and chobs them in for extra measure. —Read that now, you Greyshirt piece a shit. Read it nice.

Back in the passenger seat, Silas has worried eyes for him.

—Cheer up hey, Isaac tells him. Happy happy.

—Can make troubles, Silas says.

—Just relax max. Let's roll.

They drop the goods at number forty on Isaac's very own street. The old lady shrivel-dried as a stick of biltong stands there holding a shawl close around herself and gives no sign that she recognizes Isaac as a neighbourhood kid. Cats ooze around her legs, peering. It turns out that, ja, she is a chutus lady after all, even with a name like Smith (it happens sometimes), and who ever imagined it? After unloading, Isaac tells the boys to head back to Jeppe Street without him since the workday is almost over and by the time he gets to the warehouse he'll just have to turn around and take the tram back into Doornfontein.

Then he walks up the street to his home, where Mame is at first suspicious as to why he's back early but then she sits him down in the kitchen and serves him a plate stacked with French toast dusted with her mixture of cinnamon and sugar. He is chewing and swallowing down this good stuff with mouthfuls of sweet milky tea when their new telephone rings. It's Sol Morris, his voice clipped, telling Isaac to come in. Isaac tries to explain that he'll just have to come back home again and that he's sorry he's knocked off a little bit early but—Just come in, Isaac. Now. Oright? And then he hangs up.

When Isaac gets to the warehouse all the Morris brothers are waiting and he knows his feeling of gathering dread has been justified. He reckons they've heard about what he's done so he jumps off with a pre-emptive apology, saying he is really sorry but the oke is one of the Greyshirts, for real hey, genuine scum, and what's he supposed to do, nothing? But it's not about the pissing on the customer's things in full view of the whole world. At least not only. Much worse, they've found out about the money he's been making on the side giving lifts to Blacks into town.

He goes quiet.

—Who is it that you think you are hey? says Solly. Just who the bladey hell do you think you are?

He says sorry again. Then: —I just seen how we always had this empty truck like. We going into town anyway. So why not . . . I mean it seems like a waste . . . 

—Ja so why not turn it into a bladey stuffing kaffir taxi service? Make a quick buck and chup it all and not tell us a thing. So clever.

I didn't grab it
all
, Isaac wants to say. I split it with the boys. But he checks himself, not wanting to get them also in shtoch.

Errol says: —Jesus Christ. He says
why not
to us. What do you mean why not? Like what kind of people do you come from that you could even
think
why not?

—Hey. Hey hang on. Was my idea. Don't start on my—

—Ja, brilliant idea. We get caught being a taxi and we lose our whole business licence. Brilliant.

—You a real genius, Solly says. A real little operator.

A redness wells up in him, blotting. — . . . Well it's better than having no ideas like you got! Doing the same things over and over.

—Oright, we finished, says Solly. Overs kadovers.

They hand him his last pay packet. Isaac takes the envelope with a dead hand and walks out, his eyes burning. Round the side he goes. The wheels are turning in his mind and he realizes that the only way they could have found out about the taxi was from one of the boys—his boys that he tried to protect!

He waits. When he hears their voices, coming round from the back, he steps out. He sees Silas and the change in Silas's face.

—Ai wena! Indoda!

Hey man.

—Wena, it was you!

Silas backs away, the others disperse from him. Silas is their leader, the driver, Silas with his beads on the mirror and his family photos of the kraal back home in Zululand, in verdant Natal, tucked above the visor. Silas the whistler who laughed so much when Isaac came downstairs from that divorcée that time.

—No, no, he keeps saying.

Isaac mimics him. —Noh-noh. I can't believe you'd do that, man. Noh-noh. Where the hell you going?

—I never—

Silas puts up his hands but too slowly, already Isaac has punched his mouth, quicker than thought (even Isaac is a little surprised to see his quick flicking fist shoot out), splitting the top lip to the teeth. Silas balls over, covering his head with both arms. Isaac hammers, kicks, pushes him back into the brick wall and drags him up. He's so close he can smell the fear in the man's sweat, African-tanged sweat, the scent of all those hours together in the cab of that truck. He's got him by the throat. —Man, he says. How can you
do
that. I thought. Thought we were . . . 

—Mr. Morris, Silas says. He gives me this job so long time. He take cares for me, my family. Now he say for me to watch on you. Say if he catch you later, I'm losing this job, good job. Mr. Morris the baas, I'm wanting loyal for him.

Isaac has his fist pulled back. Silas's nervous tongue goes across the fractured lip like a windshield wiper, clearing the blood; but more drips onto Isaac's wrist, the hot blood of this Black man, this Zulu with his stretched earlobes and his sad eyes. Something in them holds echoes of his own father, somehow, and of the couchers and the watery sadness in theirs.

For a moment Isaac's cocked fist wilts; but then another counter-instinct rears in him, hard as steel, and he squashes down the other Stupid sentiment: —And
my
job hey? he shouts into Silas's face. Is my job nothing? They just bladey fired me! Where's loyalty to me? To
me
hey? When you were happy to put in your pocket all those times what I gave you. Now I lost my job cos a you, I've
lost
it, you . . . you . . . You're a
kaffir
, man. Bulala wena!

I'll kill you.

There're shouts behind. One of the Morrises. Isaac runs. He keeps on: he is running through town and there's liquid fire in his lungs and his heart is a firing cannon in him. Only a dark flaw can draw such rotten fate, it must be. Some sickened twist of wrong in his soul. His eyes are streaming to make a blur of the world. And then he hears that question of Solly's again, and it's just like when he got expelled from high school, so clear, as if hissed directly into some innermost secret ear: Just who the bladey hell do you think you are?
Who?

HE CANNOT BEAR TO FACE
what his parents' reaction will be, Mame's especially, so he pretends to go to work every morning, spending the days wandering in town. Something nameless in him holds him paralyzed, keeps him from looking for another job. Maybe it's letting down his parents, maybe it's that his work record is already tainted now and he's worried about what he might have to tell a potential employer. For sure it makes him sick to think about, so as much as he can he does not. There must be a solution and maybe it will come to him soon. Idly, he reads the Greyshirt and Nat papers he took: the Jews cause all the war, the Jews suck the nation's blood, the Jews are inciting the Blacks to destroy White civilization. It makes him tired and sad instead of angry. He doesn't even bother to burn them, just leaves them in a diner.

He goes up to Parktown on the bus and walks past the Linhurst residence at number eighteen Gilder Lane: The Castle. There is that municipal park a little way downhill, on the opposite side, and he sits on a green wooden bench there with his back against the sign saying
Whites Only / Slegs Blankes
.

He sees her once, walking up from the school bus stop. He keeps hidden behind the long fronds of the willow trees.

On impulse one afternoon he buys a half-litre of Cape brandy, like the kind the couchers used to have. It fits in his pocket and as he wanders he sips from it. It burns in the throat but banks a sweet heat into the belly; the heat dissolves into the blood and he feels better about himself. So easy, like medicine. He buys more bottles.

At the end of the week he pays his ma from the severance envelope so that she does not suspect his unemployment. At night, when everyone's gone to bed, he sips from his brandy bottle and sits on the low wall in the backyard, his eyes looking up the alleyway to the back of the Oberholzer house at number forty. That looming totem of ill luck: he moved the Greyshirt in there and the same day God took his job away. Often he will sit till it's early morning, brooding in psychic pain on number forty till his eyelids curl down with the weight of his brandied exhaustion; it suits him better than sleeping. Some nights in that evil house he can see their shadows behind the lace and hear their voices, the shouting. Everyone on Buxton Street by now knows about the new chutus couple that's moved in. How he hits her (what else do you expect from a chutus?), how the police have already been. One night Isaac witnesses it himself, or at least he hears them. The meaty slugging noises of human hands whacking human flesh. Yet she doesn't scream.

There is another reason to stare at number forty that is not all baleful: the Oberholzers have brought with them a fine vehicle of their own, a DeSoto Airflow. He admires its lines, speculates about the engine under its peaked bonnet. They keep it parked in the alley. She—the wife, the tall thinfaced one with the sandy hair—comes out around eleven, usually, and sits low down on the running board in her blue nightie and slippers to have a cigarette. Maybe she's not allowed to smoke inside, who knows. But he gets into the habit of waiting for her, watching her from his shadowed seat on the low wall. The Oberholzers' story (word in the street, that infallible word) is that they got evicted in Booysens and he doesn't have a job; the old lady is her aunt and she's putting them up.

As the third aimless week begins, Isaac sees he will soon be discovered; he is almost out of severance pay to give to his mame. She seems also to be growing suspicious, there haven't been any excited conversations about houses at the kitchen table lately, no laying out of fresh schemes for his future, he's been avoiding her by staying out late. This is when his brooding mind turns again to the cashbox and the secret that is in it, underneath the money. Papers that Mame weeps over on a Shabbos morning; prays over. One night he takes the locked box out and sits with it on his lap under the moon. He takes a bit of wire and fishes in the lock then chokes on a bone of self-disgust. Look at me. A person who would betray his own mother is the lowest scum there is. He puts the box back and the next day he goes to Gordon Court, a block of maisonettes in Bertrams where the Bernsteins live. Being Communists, lots of these Bernsteins don't work and there are always funny people at the apartment, Coloureds and such, and even, it's been rumoured, one time a Black wearing a three-piece suit. There's a big dog named Brutus and jammed bookshelves in the front hall, a smell of greasy cooking. The doormat seems saturated in mould. The old man of the house wears big square glasses and has food stains on his vest, standing there scratching his chest, telling Isaac where he can find Yankel, the one closest to Isaac in age, who approached them that night on the tram coming back from City Hall.