The Lion Seeker (23 page)

He tries a joke again. —Serious in your mother's head hey, hu hu.

She'll be with him on this, the craziness of the mother, she's said as much before. But no: he gets instead a hard, hurt look.

—I diden mean it, he says.

—I'm
being serious, she says.

—Ach. Ukay. Serious? You want serious. What's it you trying to get at?

—Just answer me that question. African apprentices, why not?

He feels his body twitching, his eyes roam, his feet kick. —Because it's a joke, man. You talking about some coonboys in the shop. What? They are what they are. And you want me to be all . . . It's like every shop, every place. Like here, like I said. Who cooks, who sweeps hey? Who does the roses and your lovely swimming pool?

She's looking away completely now. Not good.

—Am I saying anything wrong? I'm just saying what's true.

— . . . I wish you wouldn't have used that word.

—Which, about your ma? I said sorry.

—You don't even know.

— . . . hey?

—It's so ugly.

—What? What'd I say?

She only shakes her head.

— . . . Coons? . . . Jeez hey, it's just a word.

—It's ugly. It's horrid.

—Oright, ukay. Africans. Blacks. Is that a better one? If we used a different word is it all oright like? All of a sudden.

— . . . It just makes it sound like they are . . . like they're complete animals or something. Animals. Not even people.

He shrugs. Feels the weight of even where to start with this rich girl from this rich dizzying place, how it is, how life is. She just doesn't have the first clue, her head full of the craziness from the mad mother running around with her crazed towel on her meshugena head. —Listen, he says. I dunno all about this word stuff,
Africans
. But lemme tell you, they are them and we are us. They have their words for us too, you know hey. I can speak with them a little bit in their own language.

—They are
people
, she says.

—They different, he says. I can speak with their language even, can you? Can you hey?

—Oh, come
on
, she says.

—What?

—They're human bloody beings, Isaac, like me and like you.

That alarms him. He sits up: —You don't know! You don't know how it is.

She hugs herself, hiding her eyes from his.

—Oright, he says. You call them humans whatever, fine. Well and good. People say shvartzers. Shochedikah. Or kaffirs or coons or floppies. Moonts, whichever.

—Don't
say
that, she says. Don't!

—No, but I'm saying. It's just words.

—How would you like it if I said—

—What?

—Nothing.

—What?

She whispers three words. Bloody Jews and then he doesn't quite hear all of the last one but he sees her mouth and it's like being slapped, he goes breathless and a pang shrivels his scalp. —You don't know, he says. You don't know nothing. You don't know what happened to us, what was
done
to us, or you wouldn't open a dirty filthy jaw like that.

—I thought they were just words.

—How could you say that to me? His lips are twitching and he gnaws on them to keep them still. To think of Greyshirts and pogroms is not in the head, it's in the guts, a sucking death. How he was lifted and slammed, pissed on. How the crooked crosses leach their black toxins over European maps and onto the walls of the shul in Doornfontein. And three Jewish brothers standing on a brick house aflame. The screaming when they cut their
balls
off, Jesus she has no clue. And his mother was somewhere there at the same time, huddled, shivering.

Moisture gets into his eyes then. He can feel her looking at him. —Isaac.

— . . . 

—Isaac, can you look at me?

— . . . 

—Isaac, I didn't mean it, it was just to show . . . 

—Show what? He comes up angry, the redness is better for him than crying, it always has been. —One has got exactly nought to do with the other.

—Oh Isaac.

—It doesn't! One is just all those lies. I mean what we are is what we are and what they are is a different thing.

—And what would that be?

—Hey?

—What do you think they are that's so different?

—You know. You know exactly what I'm saying.

—No, Isaac. I actually don't.

He takes an unsteady breath, scrubs at his nostrils with one knuckle. —Come on. He is what he is, a Black. Everyone knows. How it is that they look, how they smell. How they sound with their language. How they move like this. The way they do with their girls and that. How they dance around. Different,
different
. You can't compare with a Jew. A Jew like me is a White. We Whites. You can't say any White is anywhere near the same. Maybe you can say it if you live here in Parktown all the time and it's only the maid and the gardenboy you ever see, but even then—please. The Black is completely different to the White. Everyone knows what the Black is.

—Don't lecture to me, Isaac, saying how things are and I don't know anything. I am quite aware as well as you are that African people appear to be different. What I am saying is that those differences are actually superficial.

Her accent has gone even more larney, getting almost prim. Using these hard posh words that she knows he isn't very sure of. It seizes him with irritation. He writhes, his heels knocking. —Ach why are we even jawing on all about this hey? What for?

—I don't know, she says, looking off again. The long green curtains swelling and easing from the breath of the sky through the open panes.

— . . . You were asking about work, what they do . . . 

She doesn't move or say anything but he can tell she's become attentive. Whenever he talks about his work she listens like this. She cares because he cares: the sincere love of the labour that he has entraps her. It links with what his father was always trying to get across to him, the special gravity that having a real trade can bestow. But think how bladey messed up that is, in a way. Girls will only care about an oke if he doesn't care about them the way he cares about his work. Like they want to be off to the side a bit. They want to be there while you go for it but off to the side; it can't be
them
that you go for. Yasis, but that's messed. Girls are so messed.

She is looking at him again, pressing with the green eyes.

—At work, he says, they bring us things. Bring you tools and that. They clean them too except for the okes like me and my journeyman who don't let no one else touch our stuff. They jack up the cars for us. They push them and that. They do all the cleaning out, all the prepping up and that.

—But not what you do. They don't do that.

—Hu-uh. No ways. That is skilled labouring. They can't touch a panel hammer, not unless they passing it or cleaning it for us.

—A White you mean.

—Ja man, well who'd you reckon invented panel beating the first place? It's ours. It's in the Industrial Council regulations and all hey. Strict. We got our jobs and we give them jobs too—their jobs.

—And you've got your pay.

— . . . What's that supposed to mean? You know how hard I work? I deserve.

—Yes, but if there was an African who could do what you do? Why can't they have a chance to make the same?

—Ach don't be all silly. You know what you sound like?

—What?

—I won't even say it. You think I haven't heard communistic stuff before.

She blinks at him.

—Oh ja, he says. I know commies. I even gave out commie papers the one time.

He's got her now, he doesn't know exactly why but he's knocked the words right out of her. —Ja you see, he says. I been around hey. You listen to me and don't talk about what you don't know. What I do, it has got thinking in it, oright? You might just scheme it's nothing but bashing and banging and whatnot, but I promise you, it's your brain hey. That's why you need a White.

—Because only a White has a brain.

—Well ja, he says. One big enough.

—That's such rubbish!

—No it's not. It's scientifical. It's proved. Listen. Who do you think made the business, the shop, in the first place? Not one a them, I guarantee.

—Cos they not allowed to!

—Oh sure, ja. And when the first Whites ever got here they found a big city full of cars and streets and buildings, ja. They found fancy schools all like yours. Beautiful
castles
.

—Stop saying that.

—More words I'm not allowed.

—I don't believe you that you gave out any Communist papers. Not if you talk such absolute—

—Ach I never read that kuk, I just did it for a favour one time.

—Well maybe you should have. Maybe you would have got we are all the same. All just people.

—Then how come they live in huts made of cow shit when we have aeroplanes? Hey? How do you explain that one?

—I don't know, I hadn't thought—

—Exactly!

She gives him a long bad look. —I was going to say I hadn't thought about it all like that, aeroplanes and huts. Whatever that has to do with it. I just know that they are people too, people like us.

—No. They different. I told you, it's proven. Their head is thicker with more bone.

She gapes. — . . . And where exactly'd you learn that bit of
scientific
knowledge? Which school exactly?

That pumps heat into his face. —Well not everyone gets sent to lord-whatever private school for pukkuh-pukkuh yoks from bladey Parktown. But I can read hey. I can think.

—Of course you can. You have such a big White brain.

He is not sure what to make of that one. Getting mocked in some way. Later on, at work, he finds the conversation has stuck with him. Not just because it's disturbed things between him and Yvonne and he's scared of losing her, the ritual every week of entering The Castle together that has become such a vital portal to all of his yearnings, such a stoker of his finest ambitions, like confirmation from the world that his path is true at last, but also in the way he's started to observe the Blacks at the shop. What does she know? Ja, they are jolly and that. A good one can make you want to smile like nothing else. When they sing and dance it can make your skin go all prickly. It's like a happy kid or something. But she doesn't see through to the truth that he does with his burning angered gaze: how they also got no human feeling. How a shoch will take a goat and just stab it as casual as nothing. Stab each other. Fuck each other anywhere, anytime. How they kick puppies to death and live there in filth. Remember Silas and how he told on Solly Morris that time because Solly was the baas, Silas too simple to juggle a little bit of action on the side. Remember them in the country with Hugo, the way they live there, which is their true natural way. Squatting in the dirt and the shice. Well, it is a kind of animal isn't it, what else? When you get down to it. How wrong she is. It's also there in the Bible somewhere, he's sure. But you only have to look and see. Look at that one, Johannes, and tell me that that is not a gorilla nose, a gorilla face. So bladey obvious. How can a person not see the obvious! A little kid sees it and smells it, but she has to be taught to lie about her own senses by that insane mother. Isaac sees the mother again in his mind, with that jewelled cloth wrapped around her head, saying in that pukkuh accent like she is sucking a plum, saying,
the Nay-tive Question
. Ooh, the Native Question. Hell, come down here to Marshall Street, Mrs. Linhurst. Come down here and learn all about the
Native Question
in the back with the boys. You'll get your rich puss pounded, they'll native-question your bladey arsehole if they ever get a hold of you, Mrs. Queen from her Castle up on the Parktown ridge . . . 

 

One afternoon Labuschagne needs a frame hammer. The boy he works with is an older Shangaan called Pieters. Instead of a frame hammer he brings the slide hammer built into a puller. Labuschagne shouts at him. Pieters is one of these proud boys, Isaac knows, so he watches. Pieters answers back. Labuschagne stares at him. Here it comes: but there's no blow, instead Labuschagne snags the hat off Pieter's head. This is another thing about Blacks that Isaac knows that Yvonne would not, how much a hat means to them, cos of how they need to cover up that chunky springy stuff they have instead of normal hair. Now Labuschagne has dropped the hat on the ground, telling Pieters stay where you are. Labuschagne picking up an oxyacetylene torch, Pieters standing very stiffly. Other Blacks watching, Whites too. Pieters takes a half step and Labuschagne tells him no, lights the torch. Pieters is holding himself very stiffly all over, but then the bottom of his mouth starts to twitch. Labuschagne flicks the hat over with his foot. The sweated inner leather smoothed to a shine with wear, the brim almost worn through in places with pieces of newspaper pasted around inside the crown to make it last longer. Something very sad about that to watching Isaac, the pasting of the newspaper over the thinning leather. When the blue flame touches there's a corkscrew of smoke, a peculiar stink. A shout jumps out of Pieters—a bellow of raw pain as if it's being ripped out of him with a hook.

He drops on his knees, his quick hands snatching back the hat. Already it's burning. He shakes it hard, slapping the flames out on himself. There is laughter and whistling and clapping from the Whites. Labuschagne adds a slogging kick to Pieter's backside to punctuate his shame. Back to work everyone. But Isaac is doing something he would not have before: looking at the other Blacks, their silence and their watching. There is no laughter in them, only hooded eyes. Crouched back in the shadow spaces like a single presence they are, brooded and hurting. It makes him uneasy.