The Lion Seeker (29 page)

Mame?

My nephew. I am his auntie. We have come to see him all the way from Joburg and no one here has even offered a cup of tea, a piece of a rusk, nothing—disgust on them all. Scandal and disgust.

Auntie?
What?

Isaac. Clean your ears.

—Jesus Christ, Ma.

Don't say Yoshka to your own mother. And she leans over to mock-spit with force onto the soft carpet. A gesture that causes Papendropolous to angle slightly forward and peer over the edge of his desk; but when Ma whips her eyes onto him again he leans back with a slow creak.

Ma, what are you talking nephew all of a sudden?

By my brother Hershel.

What brother, what Hershel? I never. You‘re joking.

Do I look like a clown?

No one ever told me a Hershel. You never showed me any picture.

You don't know. You don't know the whole long scroll of a story and there's no time now to start into it. Just tell this man auntie. Tell him I want to see my nephew.

—This lady, my ma, she's the auntie of this Mr. Suttner hey.

—I see.

—Mr. Suttner's her nephew, like. That's why we drove in all the way from Joeys. To meet him, see.

—There's an appointment.

—Ja, there's it, ay.

The corners of the lawyer's mouth twitch once very slightly.

ISAAC IS BEHIND THE WHEEL
of the Austin again, this time following the Nash with Andre and his blank-faced friends in it. Following them to The Farm, which it seems is the home of Mr. Suttner who has agreed by telephone to see them but only after a very long and very tense wait where Mame made it clear that they
were
going to this farm to see her nephew, that's what they had come all the way from Joburg for, and no one and nothing was going to persuade her otherwise.

Isaac has held his tongue, is concentrating on the driving. He will wait for her to tell about his cousin, this mystery nephew of hers, this mystery brother Hershel; it's beneath him to have to ask, for a part of him feels badly hurt that he's been left in such ignorance all this time. But Mame doesn't speak either.

An hour and a half passes. Around a long curve there appears a line of eucalyptus trees with their pale twisted trunks and leaves like paper streamers, the line of them stretching off. They drive parallel with the trees and turn in at an arched gateway beyond which a paved road bends. A timber board over the gate hangs down from chains with the name
Leeuklip
burned into it—Lion's Rock. In the lead car the driver is out and opening the gate while Andre is on the running board, his face turning as he scans a circle.

They drive on for another half an hour, sometimes passing through openings in low wire fences, over cattle grids that judder the Austin's suspension. The land is rolling and grassed, with distant clumps of browsing cattle, their long necks dipping and lifting.

The house they reach is large and white on a rise. In the slanted light that hits greenish on the wild grass the house looks like a painting Isaac has maybe seen before, the clean lines and whitewashed walls, the Cape Dutch curve on the top in the front shaped like buffalo horns with the thatch roof behind very dark and then in the distance the line of hills humped low back from the block shadows of the falling day.

Closer, there's an oval full of flowers in front that the driveway loops around.

Mame squeezes Isaac's thigh. Stop here. Stop it here.

—Ma—

Here!

So he parks the Austin on the far side of the flowers while the Nash drops Andre off, then drives on around the back of the house. Mame talks urgently to him while Andre looks back at them from the stoep with its red tile floor and a maid on her knees with a bucket, scrubbing.

She tells him to wait here, to sit in the car, not to come out until she comes and gets him, will he promise her.

—Ja, oright.

She wants him to swear to it.

—Aw Christ, he says, another swear? How many bladey swears do you want from me in a day, Ma?

But he does nod, he swears to wait. Mame gets out and walks around the flower bed to Andre on the stoep. The maid sits back on her heels and shades her eyes to look up as the two of them pass inside. The engine ticks in its cooling. He watches the maid resume, working her slow knee-shuffling way across the big stoep with brush and bucket. Cicadas pulse the dry scentless air. He fidgets against the stickying heat, probes at his tender cheekbone, picks a fleck of crust from the inside of one nostril. The maid has gone in.

When Ma appears he restrains himself from jumping out; he crosses to the porch with hands in his pockets. Up out of the evening light and across the polished tiles, into a hallway cool and dark: his eyes grope out the shape of a tasselled lamp on a sideboard, the head of a kudu with beads for corneas. Mame's face looms, stern as plaster. A form deeper in glides forward on the rug. Isaac takes in the khaki safari shorts, the rolled-up sleeves of a white shirt with collar unbuttoned. Sandals. A slanted ruler of light from the doorway slides up his chest to show a round face with heavy cheeks, the skin with the gnawed look of pimples long ago healed around small dark eyes. Not an old man—thirty-five, thirty-seven—but the hair stroked back from the wide brow is thinning and frosted. What is it that makes the animal presence of another human? There's a moment where they all three stand and inhale whatever it is that they are. Isaac wondering if he should embrace this fleshblood of his. His heart drums and he looks to Mame, who inclines her head so very slightly. He crosses to the man.

 

They are sitting at a long and gleaming stinkwood table, the coffee urn and the teapot radiate heat through skins of polished silver, there are sandwiches without crusts on china platters, there are two cakes, one round, one square. But Isaac can't stop looking at his mother's hand, how it rubs at the varnished wood in a nervous motion he has never seen before from her as she's telling him about her much older brother Hershel whom she hardly remembers, hardly knew. This Hershel was a vilderchuyu, a wilding animal of a boy; still young he ran to the far-off city of great Vilna with its red castles and cobblestone streets. Who can say why, what it was that got into him, only God, or more likely the Evil One. Mame telling of the scandal of how he then had a baby with a woman he did not marry, this child was Avrom and her name was Suttner, which he took for himself, and so here he is, Avrom Suttner, a man across the table. He is my nephew and he is your cousin.

My blood, Isaac thinks, trying not to stare. I'm tied in to this place. He asks about Hershel, where he is today.

Mame says he passed away young. Very sad. Isaac gives in to examining the bulldog face that watches him back and makes no comment, Isaac trying to find resemblances there, perhaps in the nose, the shape of the jaw? But the flesh yields nothing. He settles on a certain feeling of congealed will within, an iron core: some gravity of inner resolve that this cousin and his mother both have and exude.

He's an only child, says Mame. His mother raised him up herself, in Skopishok. She too, rest in peace, passed away. Then he came by himself to Africa.

Avrom clears his pipes with a deep cough. He sits solidly in his seat, well back from the table with his hands on wide-parted thighs, both sandals flat, he would not be easy to lift or push over. —You're the oldest.

—No, says Isaac. My sister, Rively, she's a year ahead.

Mame says: You would know this if you'd read. You don't even know their ages. She has lifted her handbag onto the tabletop and she opens it, takes out bundled envelopes tied in a string. You can ask my son, she says, how I cry over letters, like a baby. He has seen me himself. And these you sent me back every single one. Not even opened.

When I saw you last time, says Avrom, I wasn't even ten. Auntie. I remember you had a cloth on your face, covering.

Mame tells him about Dr. Graumann, the pain she went through.

Avrom looks at Isaac. —Maybe it's better you go outside. Wait while we discuss.

Stay here, says Mame.

The bulldog face doesn't change, with stocky fingers he pinches at the loose skin of his elbow.

She says, And if I telephone here, still no, nothing. Until we have to drive through half the country.

Avrom: —Must really want to see me. And there is hollowness in the eyes over the parody of a small smile: this sombre globular face full of something like a sneer, only harsher.

What does that mean?

Means what it means.

Say what you want to say.

If I was living under a bridge, says Avrom.

What?

A silence.

Of course I would still come, says Mame.
Especially
I would come.

—Really.

The squat cynicism in that English word, the way he hunkers behind his small eyes. Isaac has the feeling of the man's selfencasement in the pocked shell of that skin. So much interior distance from the world that nothing can reach into him.

Because you are family.

—Oh is that so, he says softly. Then: —How's your English, Gitelle?

—Can say veruh well tank you.

—Good. Then let me put this another way. How much?

—Ah vos?

—How much do you want?

Mame elongates herself in the chair, her head rising to the top of a stiffening back. You think I need from you charity? That I come for myself?

—No, worse. You brought your son for it too.

She hisses. That is a vile vile thing to say to me. Yes I brought him. Yes, you must remember that people are alive and not just a word on paper.

His chin moves a little to the left; there's no other motion. I told you send him out, does he understand us?

You stay exactly here Isaac. I want you to see the man that your cousin is.

Avrom folds in his left arm and puts the right elbow on the left wrist and starts to stroke at his face with his fingers, tracing the pockmarks there.

A vile thing, she says.

Vile, he says. I never begged in my life. Begging to me is vile. Does he see that?

Mame hisses again in her next breath, louder, as if she's burned herself.

Avrom creaks in the chair, looks at Isaac. I was much smaller than you when I came by myself. Not one soul, not one penny. The sky for a roof and hunger for an only friend. The debt for my ticket on my back. I shovelled out the crap of ostriches. I was filthy down in a mine with the Blacks. I shlepped skins in an abattoir, my one finger still has no feeling. That debt almost broke me into tiny pieces.

He looks back to Gitelle, dead-eyed. Funny, nobody lined up to help. Nobody knew me then, nobody tried to find me. Now when I get a beautiful letter from Skopishok or Dusat, from New York, London, Doornfontein, I know it will call me
dearest
Avrom. Lots of love. And by the way, send a few thousand quick.

She blinks in silence. Then: Do you think I come here for myself?

By the way
, he says, the dead hollowness floating in his eyes.

We are family, she says.

I sweated my blood, Gitelle, I paid off my debt. Other people can pay their own.

Mame waits, then speaks in a voice that makes Isaac's skin prickle. For me, you could burn your money, I don't care. If you had read what I wrote a hundred times already, if you would've taken one telephone call, you would know. I come to you for them. For
them
.

Oh yes, says Avrom.

You must know what I'm saying. How bad backhome is now, Avrom. Not like before the war. So much worse for the Jews than even the Czar ever was. Everyone so scared. Another war can come any minute. Hitler and Stalin and tiny Lithuania in between, God knows what can happen. How they feel it there, the pressure, the problems—you must know this also! And I must tell you I had a man I was going to send my money who could help to bring them, first to other places, then here. But now the piggish cholera bastards of the government have closed every door and nailed it shut. Avrom—you listening?.

He shrugs. So the doors are closed, you say yourself.

Yes, but with enough grease, everything moves. You of all know this. And not just money. You know people. Big people that respect you. I was never going to ask like this, Avrom, I'm a proud person. But there is nowhere else to go and no more time now. I'm at the end.

Isaac thrums with shock: she's at the end, she says, and she means him, that she's even lost hope in
him
, her own son.

Meanwhile Avrom strokes at the craters in the bulldog cheek.

Avrom, says Mame. Avrom!

I heard you.

I'm talking about Trudel-Sora, Avrom. Orli and Friedke. This is who I speak for. I don't know if you've helped anyone else, maybe . . . I mean of your . . . Skopishok people . . . if there's others . . . 

He makes a horizontal cutting gesture. No, he says. No. You're no different.

Mame is almost panting, as if she's trying to push a heavy weight up a steep hill. She swallows hard and goes on quietly. Listen to me. We have to bring them out.

—Do we.

What's a few pounds to you? Some telephone calls. For family, for life.

He smiles: that tiny parody of good cheer. Isaac gets a sense of the mass of perfect cynicism that is embodied in this Avrom, perfect and impervious as a stone, like the name of this farm. —Ah por foont, he says.

A few pounds.

And when I needed someone, he says. Didn't seem like
a few pounds
then. There was no
we
then.

Past is past, says Gitelle.

—Really.

—Ree-lee
, she says, mimicking the English. She slaps the table hard enough to make the cups quiver in their saucers; Isaac jerks. We have to be serious now, Avrom. This is war and death. This is family. They are screaming and crying for the help.

He shifts in his chair a little, presses down on his thighs, taking in an expanse of air, letting it out very slowly. What are pleas against such a toughened and weary sound? It's like the desert wind. This is a man who's heard all the pleas that there are, Isaac thinks. And his heart dips for his mother, how sad this doomed little mission is now that he can see what it is.