The Lion Seeker (20 page)

She stops, pivots. —Wayne!

—Ja, that Wayne.

—You could have darned well killed him. Seriously.

—I'm sorry, he says, walking up a bit. The sturdy well-made length of her throws down a pole of shadow between them, standing there with the good breasts and the strong neck and fine legs, the thick hair like a sheaf of new wheat. In daylight, she is a lot older than that first time he saw her and there's even more of that strong calm feeling about her; but what is most lovely is still the contrast between the handsome strength in the body and the soft delicacy in the face, and also the warmth, the special warmth that she radiates. He feels the light come on inside of him.

—You're sorry! she says. You think it matters? She's shaking her head but she's still standing there, not moving away, that's the main thing. Be so careful, he says in himself. Don't drop this moment, made of the thinnest crystal.

—You told me sorry, he says. He can hear the trembling in his voice.

—What?

—Remember, up in your house, outside . . . He moves his shoulders. —It's like that time, that's all. Sometimes you have to say sorry.

She's shaking her head, her eyes scrunched. As if she's trying to focus on him through a storm he cannot see. —You're a little bit mad, she says, aren't you. I mean truly.

He nods. —Ja, I know I am.

—And you told me it's my fault.

It takes a while to realize she's talking about the jazz club again. Did he really say that to her? He remembers getting punched. He says: —This is exactly what I come here for. To tell you the apology, all that. I got like carried away.

—You don't say.

— . . . But it was also a little bit mean hey, how you were to me. And your friends and that. Going on. Laughing me out. I only come up to the table to say hello how you.

—Ja, so try and kill them, she says.

He goes on, dogged. —And you were like ignoring me.

She lifts her forearm to her mouth.

—You were. I think you were like embarrassed.

—I wasn't
embarrassed
.

He shrugs. —Embarrassed of me. I don't know. I just wanted to say hello. And now I come this time all this way, to tell you sorry.

She looks past, then looks up the street. —You drove here, your truck?

—No, the bus.

—Bus?

—Ja. They let me take my lunch late today, I asked. I get an hour and a half on lunch.

—From what's it called again, the packers and movers, Morris?

—No, uh uh. Got a new job. A really lekker one. I really really like it hey.

—What is it?

Isaac grins. —Panel beater, he says. You know what that is, a panel beater? I'm a apprentice class A panel beater now.

He doesn't know whether it's her curiosity that does it but without saying anything she allows him to walk with her up to the driveway of The Castle. He holds his hands behind his back and keeps his distance. Tells himself not to say anything dumb and feels that badshot pool feeling slowly fade as they step together. She asks him about panel beating and he tells her. It's hard for him to keep the excitement that is in him now all the time for his new work from filling his throat and rounding out his voice, making his hands move, his words come tripping in their rush. Trying to relate to her what it is, what he gets from it, this wondrous phenomenon that has the name of panel beating, the whole grand thing of it, a world within the world. The words and the practices and the people. And most of all his hands on crumpled damaged steel, learning to mould it, heal it. How it is both so rough-hewn—the banging, the dirt, the cuts and bruises and scratches—but also at the same time so full of refined concentration, a sensitive feeling, delicacy almost. It is true what Labuschagne said at the beginning and he repeats it now: It's an art.

That makes her smile and the cold light inside his chest gets brighter, his words fade. At last he says,—Ja, I know I'm going on . . . I just . . . It's like I can feel I'm good at this, you know, I can do this . . . and I want to get as good as I can . . . 

—You starting to sound like Father when he talks about his Cadillac. Dadsy and his Cadsy. What is it with boys and cars?

—No, he says. No. It's not just cos it's cars.

They walk for a while quietly and then the need to try to put it across to her wells up in him again, another wave of tumbling words: —This job, it's not even a job, like. How can I explain? Like the money, it isn't a lot. But honestly, sometimes I don't even care about the boodle that much. What it is, it's like you see this smashed-up thing come in, and then you see it going out and it's all brannew. What it is, it feels like we almost making, I know this sounds mad hey, you ganna think I am even more mad, but it is, it's like we making
time
go backwards in there. It only takes one second to smash something to shit, scuse my French hey, but it does hey, it's true. Just one second. But then it's a whole long month of this hard work, all patient, all careful, to turn it back like it was. Like in the movies when they play things backwards sometimes you know? An oke jumps out a window then he comes flying back up with his feet first. We doing that in the shop, only in slow motion. See what I mean?

And he stops. A sick realization. She's looking at him, maybe puzzled. It's the realization of how much like his father this all sounds. Because what his father does, it's not that separate from panel beating is it? Both repairing damage. He fixes accidents and sets the clocks back; his father moves stalled timepieces again into functional ticking, both are ways to close the same circle and return a fallen object into the ceaseless flow of the now. Death back to life: repairing the world. What scares him is that maybe for the first time he understands why his father does it, and it's not to get out of Doornfontein. It's the feeling that such labour gives to you, your life and your self.

Her laugh brings him back.

—Can I come too? she says.

—Hey?

—You dreaming of it, aren't you, actually dreaming of being at work, you lost boy.

He snorts at himself.

—You make it sound like so much fun, she says. I wanna come.

—No ways. Girls not allowed in the shop.

—Then you shouldn't tell me how exciting it is.

Exciting. He sees how he was waving his arms before, hitting his palm with his fist, the motions of panel beating. Something else there, an idea, is spreading in his mind, but when he reaches to bring it into words, it slips away.

—Isaac.

—What? Sorry.

—Look at you. You're in love.

He stares. Blood rushes from his heart, all his vessels seem to flood open; even his mouth hangs.

—You love this job so much, she says.

—Oh, he says, tight-throated. Ja, I do, I spose. I do . . . love it. He studies her. The flowers of a bougainvillea are on the stone wall behind, wavering in the dry air, the browned petals crackly as roasted chicken skin. Her face is so pretty, her eyes so liquescent and alive, there in front of him, after all those nights and days full of mere gliding images. The green in them lighter than he remembers, rimmed with a tawny yellow; and the high cheekbones below, the ripe plum of the small pouting mouth. Beauty: it hits him in the heart, this, her. Makes his blood fat with the need to stay near her.

—He's in love, she says, mocking.

Love: a plunging space between heartbeats.

Then she nods a little bit to herself. —No, Isaac. It's good. To find something you really like. That's really good. Something real.

She seems almost wistful saying this last part, then turns to go and he tells her: —So you know that I'm sorry. For . . . what happened.

She stops. —Maybe you should tell poor Wayne. He had to go to the hospital. Second-degree burns. They shaved off what hair there was left. They don't even know if all of it will grow back. He still comes to school with a huge bandage on. They call him Rajah and Mr. Towelhead and things. It's really quite horrible.

Isaac chews on his lips to keep his glee in. Soberly he says:

—You want me to go to your school, wait for him and tell him an apology?

—Do I? That's up to you, what's it got to do with me?

He looks at her levelly. The fattened blood rising to his eyeballs. —Everything, he says. Everything that happened is all about you.

ALL THROUGH THESE EARLY MONTHS
of his apprenticeship his mother has been gloomy, withdrawn. She takes the meagre pay that he can give her but she is not happy. It's more than just seeing the end of the footwear dreams; more than just losing Isaac to the blue-collar world; he senses there is something secretive to do with the family in backhome that is possessing her moods. She gets letters from over there, of course, he always knew this, but they disappear into her, she never reads from them or even acknowledges their existence. Now Isaac begins to wonder, are such letters the same papers that she keeps hidden in the cashbox? Those lines that she used to rock over, praying out her grief, when everyone else was at shul? And are they connected to her new mood? This sense of grief and anguish that seems to encloud her presence almost all the time nowadays.

Think of the seventeenth day of April. Try to feel and see the word pogrom. He sounds it out in his mind. Thirty, thirty-five years in the past. A scar on his mother's face and inside her secrets bound to papers.
Pogrom:
it has the tang of Russian savagery to his ear. At night he slips into the room in his mind where the shutters are drawn and he concentrates hard and forces those shutters back for the first time in so many years. Sees again in the straining light of his attention his most distant memories: pictures of Lake Sartai, the flat water past the twisted trees (summertime, and dust from the road has settled on the trunks; winter, and patches of snow cling like hives); flocks of kept geese down by the water, the streaks of their green-white dung and their croaking and gabbling. Who were the Russians in the village? Not the farmers who came to the market every Wednesday, those were Lithuanians, Catholics. The Russians had been the owners of the country before the war, the soldiers and Cossacks with a different cross. And there were also Tatars, who lived on the far side of the bridge past the cathedral, the other side of the river ŝventoji that flowed into the lake. Those Tatars with their high slanted cheekbones and how lots of them spoke Jewish and he remembered Tatar boys urinating in the river and how their cocks were trimmed like his own, so they were almost a kind of Jew to him. Of course there was also Branka the old Tatar charwoman; she used to pick him up and she was soft and had yellow teeth.

Pogrom. Russian word, but he could find no fear attached to the Russians. There were a few Jewish families from over there, the Russian east: with funny dangling sidelocks and odd hats and their own synagogue, a half shack in the muddy earth at the waterfront, exuding strangely lilting melodies. These few Jews were called Chassidim, and were suspect, he remembers that now, Rabbi Kapelushnik telling how it was written that a Chassid was not a proper Jew, for they had wandered off into strange practices, unspeakable beliefs most blasphemous.

But the pogrom. Think of what it could have been. If not Russians then it must have been the Catholic poyers, the peasants, the Lithuanians. All he could summon of them were the carts full of produce they would bring into town on market days, to trade with the Jewish shops around the big market square. Their long-limbed bodies and fair hair. How they would get drunk at Yeshi's inn, and that one who fell asleep snoring in the patch of the kitchen garden in front of their house. The Lithuanians with a social place lower than the Russians, still left over from when the Czar was everyone's king, the poyers still closest to the dirt where they made it grow. Names with an
s
on the end like Paulauskas, Kazlauskas, Markunas, Boggus. If there had been a pogrom, was it them? And why? And where was his mother when it happened? Long before she'd even met Abel.

His mind turns back to Yankel Bernstein, who visits Rively now. Yankel who had said that Blumenthal the laundryman, he knew.

But in the morning he goes to work and he does not think about any laundryman or old times backhome. The shutters in his mind are closed again, as they should be, the memory chamber dimmed: he thinks now only about the manifold satisfactions of the job.

 

Now the days add up as they never have before in his life. For the first time a job bolts him into a routine as hard as the steel he works: it forces him to grow as upright and as unbending as a young sapling held by the traction of a gardener's wires. From eight to five every weekday he watches and learns and tries. Gradually he feels the cumulative beauty of an appetite, a talent, recognized and growing and nourished within. He is apprenticed to a man named Jack Miller who is not much of a talker, with a squashed loose-fleshed face and fishlike way of opening his mouth so that his chin presses down into the puddled skin of his throat. At first Isaac thought Miller was always annoyed with him, because of the silences and the grim expressions. But later he finds out that is wrong, that Miller is good inside, and patient. He is also one of the best panel beaters in the shop, humourless and stolid-seeming though he may be (he even eats his home-packed lunch with the same lugubrious care he uses to turn screws or measure a gap with his steel dividers and precision ruler). He never whistles to the tunes of the Boswell Sisters or Benny Goodman's band on the nearby wireless. Doesn't even smoke. At the end of each shift he takes time to clean off and carefully oil each of his tools; he won't let a Black do it, even if it's late after a tiring day. Always the same: steady and calm. What he teaches Isaac through example is how to slow down, to concentrate, to think. Not to rush in and start hammering away but to spend the time to plan and feel each step before taking it.