The Lion Seeker (28 page)

I've got a big mouth, he says.

What does that mean?

I said what I shouldn't have. I don't know anything.

I'm not one of your car cronies. Talk straight to your mother.

He inhales slowly and deeply.

Isaac. What is it you think that you know?

I'll tell you.

Good. I want this to be a cleaning out, right now and here. Everything. Before you start to drive. It needs to be cleaned out between us.

Cleaned out.

She makes a gesture toward the back. I've shown you what is in there. Now you tell me what is in here, hidden. And she presses warm fingertips to his temple.

He takes another heavy breath. That box, he says. One day I looked in the front window and I saw you crying with it. Then someone on the street said you weren't sick.

Sick?

I always thought your face, the thing you wore to cover it, was a sickness.

Did I ever tell you sick? Did Tutte?

No. I don't know. But Dr. Graumann . . . 

And this someone on the street said what?

Said something bad happened. I asked some questions. They said a pogrom. I found out about . . . 

Yes, about?

It's good that they are sitting facing forward because he couldn't have done this facing her, her eyes, across a table or on their feet. Never. He speaks the date.

She sighs, sighs again: weary sounds filling the interior. People make grannystories, Isaac. I'm surprised you a grown-up man now doesn't know this.

It's not true?

They make grannystories. Tell me what.

Isaac's shoulders lift and fall. Bad things happened and one of those bad things happened to you. That's all. Nobody said more to me.

—Yitzchok.

—Ja Ma?

Are you lying to me?

Surprised, Isaac blinks. No.

Here and now. Is this all that you know?

Yes.

Everything?

Yes.

Good. I will tell what happened. First you promise—no more questions behind your mame's back. No more grannystories on her. I am the only one that knows the truth of me.

—Ja, Ma.

Yes?

Yes Mame.

You swear to your mother.

He glances at her and she's staring at him now. Serious as a wall of iron. I do, he says.

She doesn't speak, he waits motionless. Then: It was an accident, Isaac. I was riding with a cart to get away. The cart fell over. No, not sick, but hurt. That's all.

A kind of dizzy cloud moves behind his eyes.

The dead look backwards. There's never a good reason for the living to.

I know.

Do you?

I feel scared, Mame.

Don't be.

Why did you take all that money out? I never knew you had so much.

Don't worry, it's only mine, not yours or Tutte's. It's my hard work for a long time. Don't be scared. You'll see.

He thinks of all the brandy bottles, the sewing, the broken furniture repaired; the sum is more than he can earn in a year as an apprentice. He turns to her and tries a smile but feels its crookedness on his face. Only forward, he says.

That's right, she says. My love. My Clever.

Her hand cups the nape of his neck and he lets his head be tilted in to her, feels the kiss on his brow, the harsh scar tissue on one side of it. Are you ready now to go forward with me, my love?

Yes Mame.

Good. Good. Then start up the car.

SIX HOURS THEY DRIVE
in the borrowed Austin, stopping once for petrol. First through the west Rand outside of Johannesburg and then into veld, brown grasses and mielie fields made haggard by drought. Little dorps with names like Black Hole and Death River. Beehive huts or shanty cubes of the Black villages. It's like the Miracle Glow trip only going the opposite way.

They stop for final directions in Lichtenburg; he has to ask for Bakerville. The men he talks to call it Bakers. The flat land on both sides of the road has been grassed till now, but now when they go on the country changes. Paved road turns to rutted track that splits off to paths like veins into veins. The dry grasses have been ripped away and the red and bonewhite soil exposed and dug down into to make deep potholes and shallower pits like so many graves abandoned between piled mounds of gravel. Crumbled edges of plots abandoned are strewn with rotting claim sticks and wires laid flat or snarled in their rusting. Flagpoles flutter rags. They have to keep the windows up against the dust. Mame is telling him all about this place when they see the first workers, distant lonely forms in the heat ripples. These parts are called the diggings because years before there was a diamond rush, men running from everywhere in the world for a chance to find a diamond like the one a farmer turned up while digging a trench to dip cattle. Turned out there were plenty: diamonds lying everywhere on the surface or just under like ordinary stones. It was too early for Isaac to have remembered but Mame does. A fortune in bright stones was lifted, but the findings ran down and now only a few diehards still cling on, those labourers like tethered smoke. Closer, the vapours harden into shirtless Blacks with hats and suspenders, the long crescents of their picks lifting and dipping or shovels stabbing low. By a long table, some Whites work with big squares of wire, shaking them hard over water barrels. Mame says some of the diamonds once found here were stones too big for the crowns of European princes, picked up by hand sitting on the dirt like so many bird eggs under the naked sky.

Bakers is a tin town. Raw streets. Rust and boards. A man on a horse with a hanky tied over the bottom of his face. A stripped-down Ford flatbed hoo-hawing at him to move over more in the narrow track. Faint piano notes plink from a corner tavern and men with hands in their pockets stand in front and watch them, a blank unshaven dirtcollared watching. From the windows above women with bright faces dangle cleavage.

Mame says, You will have to stop and to ask.

Yes.

A Mr. Suttner.

—Suttner, whozat?

Go ask.

He watches her for a span then pulls over and reaches down with his left to the T-bar of the handbrake and cranks it back and gets out and walks across the street, stiff down his back and into both legs from all the day's driving. No relief of coolness in this tin-beaten place, this treeless reservoir of hot wind from the great desert to the northwest.

He tries some lizard-eyed men on the corner; when he says he wants Suttner they move around him. A knife comes out, lifts. Without thought he pushes it away and someone punches him in the cheekbone with brass knuckles: a drilling pain that makes his eyes water. They press him to a tin wall. Someone runs out and waves both arms and when Isaac looks down the street there's a tan Nash LaFayette coming up very slowly, the wheels crunching on the grit. He sees a Black behind the wheel and on the passenger side a long arm hanging out that sways like a great pendulum. Two faces in the back.

A nervous feeling from the men around him as the Nash pulls up. Isaac looks at the passenger: a tough face and Asiatic eyes, flat nose and milk-coffee skin. He lifts a thumb to prod up his hat brim, a homburg. —You bleeding, jong, he says to Isaac. An accent and slang word for lad that confirms he's a Coloured. And there's Hottentot blood there also, Isaac thinks, looking at the slant of the eyes. Maybe even a touch of Bushman.

Meanwhile he presses his cheek, examines red fingertips.

The knifer bends to the window. —Andre, he looking for chief he says. Says it to me all cocky.

—What you got? says this Andre to Isaac. What you want?

Isaac eyes the faces in the back of the Nash; one of them has one of those little moustaches sharp on both sides and a mouse face over a bow tie.

—Who you? says Isaac.

—See, see, says knifer. Cocky little bustud.

The door opens and Andre comes down over the running board like spilled quicksilver, a very lean tall gentleman with the collar loose around his weathered neck. Wearing a green tie and grey suit with the homburg. —Who is it you are looking for here?

—Mr. Suttner, says Isaac. He glances past the Nash and down the road to the Austin with Mame in it facing the other way and Andre's eyes follow the motion. Andre whistles a quick cutting note. —Hai! he gestures to the ones in the back then circles his hand in the air and they slip out and swing up onto the running boards and stand looking back toward the Austin as the Nash revs and moves off.

—Put your hands out to your sides.

—What?

—Like this.

Isaac lifts his arms, watching the Nash U-turn and drive out to the Austin. —Hey man, where they going?

—Don't move.

This Andre patting his sides, feeling his waist, bending down to touch his ankles even.

—It's my ma there man, what they doing?

—Your who?

—My ma. My
mother
, man, that's all. What the hell they doing? Who're you?

The quick patting hands—knowing touch of an expert—have done with his shanks, he can let his arms down and Andre looks back up the road where the car is beside the Austin. Now one of the men is leaning into the window. He climbs back onto the board and gives an easy wave. Andre lifts up his own thumb, turns back to Isaac. While he's been faced away a number of the men have left, first backing up then spinning and jogging.

—What you people want with Mr. Suttner?

Looking at the Austin, Isaac says: —S'a family thing.

—What you mean family?

—My ma, she would like to see him.

—Who's your ma?

Isaac shrugs. —Family thing. We the Helgers. We come all the way from Joburg. I promise you, ask her.

Isaac watches this sinking into Andre, Andre nodding. Meanwhile more of the men have skittered off; but when the knifer starts to go Andre looks up and clicks his tongue. —Uh uh, he says. And he points for him to stand over there.

A pulsing grimace has taken hold of the knifer's face. He drops the blade like a hot iron. He starts to speak then wheezes.

— . . . Andre . . . 

—Be quiet.

The wheezing sounds like a hole in working bellows. — . . . diden know, Andre . . . 

The Nash has U-turned again and its thin needling nose with the narrow radiator has started back toward them. The new model, Isaac thinks. A hundred horsepower from six cylinders and a clever new kind of heater that sucks in air from outside. Andre looks at the knife on the dust. —That yours?

The knifer says no five times, shaking his head, criss-crossing his hands with spread fingers so quickly that they blur.

—Pick it up, says Andre. Then he looks at Isaac. —Sorry about this hey.

—It's oright, says Isaac.

The car is almost back. —Pick it up, says Andre.

—No no, says the knife man.

—Not ganna say again.

Another man steps forward. —Get it, he tells the knifer.

—You can shut up, says Andre. The man looks down.

The knifer stoops for his weapon. This Andre makes a short motion with his left hand, as if he's waving a fly off the back of the bent neck, stepping out and back to the bowed man with a longlegged stride easy as a dance step. He's next to Isaac and he's over there and he's back: the whole of it at once without strain and the knife man falls on his face and lies still, snoring heavily in the dust. His hand is awkward on the hilt of the blade, twisted under the wrist angled up. Andre puts his dancer's foot on it and makes a quick swivel; certain small bones drily crackle.

Andre moves to the car and opens the passenger door. When Isaac steps up to get in he glances down from the running board and sees the stocks of rifles on the floor at the feet of the men in the back, and pickaxe handles and one or two pangas. He sits on the passenger seat and Andre shuts the door and stays on the running board. As they pull off Isaac sees him point his hand shaped like a gun, making it shoot, pow, and the man standing there that he told to shut up tries to grin but sits down slowly in the dust as if plugged truly through the belly. When Isaac looks at Andre he can see up in the armpit under the jacket that he is wearing a real pistol, a flat black semi-automatic like the guns in the Warner movies that he's watched in the Alhambra on Friday and Saturday nights. This is not good. What is this? A numbness. How nothing else can be done.

When they reach the Austin, Andre gives him a hanky. —Better maybe if you don't tell your old lady how it happened, keep it calm.

Isaac nods, pressing cloth to cheek.

In the side mirror he sees this Andre get into the Austin then the Austin passes them and he sees Mame looking at him through the windshield and he waves but she doesn't wave back. The Austin goes in front and they follow after. When the bleeding has stopped he uses the hanky to clean the dust off both shoes.

 

They are taken across to a better side of town, brick buildings and one of them with a sign, Orange River Trading Co., Proprietor Abraham J. Suttner Esq. Inside is a big clean shop full of miner's wares and above is an office with a lawyer named Papendropolous. Waiting for this man, Mame wants to know how Isaac hurt his cheek; he says he caught it on the car door. The lawyer proves to be short and rotund, bald on top, with a spaniel nose and olive skin. Mame refuses to believe he is not a Jew, keeps talking only in Jewish to him.

—I regret I can't understand you, madam.

Says Mame: —Ret mameloshen, chulleriuh!

Speak mother's tongue, you cholera.

The lawyer looks at Isaac.

—She says she's pleased to meet you.

Mame says, You tell him, this crook, tell him we are family of Mr. Suttner.

Family, says Isaac. What the hell Mame? I don't know any Suttner.

Just tell
him
.

Papendropolous coughs, asks who exactly they are.

Why should I answer him? says Mame. Who does he think he is to ask me—God? Look at him so arrogant.

He works for Mr. Suttner, Ma.

She grimaces, huffs. Avrom Suttner is my nephew.