The Lion Seeker (30 page)

—So we're back to your question, says Avrom. The only question.

—Oon vos iz dos?

—How. Much.

His mother stands. All blood has leached away from the skin of her face save for the livid scar. It's a look that strikes deep in Isaac. Her eyes are fixed on Avrom, the scar glows. It's the look of the day of the couchers. When she came in with that wood axe behind her skirt.

He finds himself standing up but doesn't remember rising. Her right hand is in the handbag, buried to the wrist, groping in there. Time has become very slow, very sticky. He knows she will bring out a gun, a small revolver. She will make this Avrom give what he must or she will fire into his head. It's the couchers all over again, it's that total commitment of her decision.

He reaches out for the wrist; but he is moving so slowly in this sticky time. Her hand comes out of the handbag holding what he takes on the instant to be a pack of cards then no, of course not, it's a wad of folded notes, it's the cash. He falters, freezes. He watches her hand rock back behind her shoulder. She aims it like a stone and throws hard. The notes flutter apart like fleeing sparrows, spreading over the table, the tea things. A few make the other side and settle on Avrom's lap, around his feet. He looks down at them.

—The hell is this?

—Finf oon achtsik foont, she says. Eighty-five pounds.

Are you mad?

I told you I'm not here for myself. This is my sweat also and my blood, you're not the only one.

In my house, he says.

She grabs Isaac's arm, her handbag in the other hand. We're going.

Throw money in my face. In my house. Where you going?

I scraped and saved one penny at a time. It's yours now. Put with it what you can and use it for the right thing. For family. May The Name help you.

She starts pulling Isaac to the door and he moves with her without looking back, not till he hears the chair fall. Avrom standing, finally a little emotion in the bulldog face, some twisting force has trickled in. I am not responsible, Gitelle!

She is in the doorway but stops, pivots back. And if you step on broken glass and cut your foot?

—What?

So tell your foot too bad. Family, Avrom. Blood.

She goes on, gripping Isaac's shirt, and he moves with her and this time there are no noises behind.

 

The sun still clears the rooftop but only by a distance of its own diameter. His mother slams her door so hard the Austin rocks. Isaac tries to start but the engine only clicks.

Go, Isaac, already.

—Can't Ma. I think maybe the battery.

A long shadow and a tall man: through the windshield Isaac watches Andre's approach: he doesn't seem to have come out of the house. He leans against Isaac's door, prods up the brim of his homburg and taps his knuckles on the glass. Isaac rolls down a crack. —Mr. Suttner say you forget this.

He starts to slot the wad of notes at the gap but Mame is quicker, lunging across and rolling up the window with two quick jerks. Andre taps again. Mame checks the door is locked. —You don't oypen for nobody.

—It won't start, Ma.

She sits back in her seat, looking forward, her handbag on her lap. Isaac looks up at Andre and shrugs. There's more tapping which he ignores. Andre goes back to the house. Ten minutes pass in a hot silence. He doesn't even try to look at her, it's crunching steps outside that make him turn his eyes, and this time it's Avrom coming to them, over a gravel path through the flowers, his sandals angled a little outward and his knees a little bowed over each step. He has a pressing belly packed against the belt of his khaki shorts, his bulldog face impassive.

He stops on Mame's side. Still she looks forward. Isaac tries the engine again: useless.

—Open up, says Avrom. Open up the door.

Mame doesn't move.

Avrom switches to Afrikaans, language of orders: Make open.
Make open
.

—Go tzoo hell, Mame tells the window.

It's evening and the sun is waning, yes, but the car is still so hot and suffocating now with all the windows tightshut; Isaac feels sweat already itching on his scalp and starting to slide over his ribs.

—My boys will check the car, says Avrom. Come and sit inside.

She doesn't answer. They sit still in the throttling air. Avrom uses the flat of his fist on the hot roof. Mame says, You go out, Isaacluh. He can fix the car with me in it. When it's ready, we'll go the same minute.

—Ma, what you ganna do?

I stay by here. I don't move. You tell him.

—I'm not going. I'll stay with you.

—Go.

—Uh uh.

She stretches her chin up, looks at him. —I shay go.

He nods slowly and gets out, slams quick and walks round to Avrom, Avrom with the wad of cash in his hand. They stand looking at one another for a while. Isaac says,—She won't—

Avrom jerks his head backwards, turns and walks to the house. Isaac tries to get his mother's eye but she stares only at the windshield, so he turns and follows Avrom, seeing the bulk in the shoulders, the way the calf muscles shift and ripple. How is it possible that he has never been a black-and-white face in the albums of photographs at number fifty-two Buxton? How is it his name was never once a word in his mother's mouth, his mother who dreams of family, thrashing and shouting in the night? A runaway brother called Hershel. This secret cousin. Unreality is the sensation of trying to reconcile life with a parallel dream: Doornfontein over there and this farmhouse here but all the time the two as entwined as the wax of a Havdalah candle. It's a knowledge that refuses to dwell in his body, refuses to take on the rooted feel of a certainty. Who is this man? Who?

 

Through the hallway window Isaac watches the parked Austin outside, the silhouette of his mother's profile motionless, enduring. Avrom wants to know how old he is, then asks him if he's in school.

—I'm a panel beater, apprentice class A.

—You like that?

—Absolutely.

Avrom grimaces and picks up a bush hat; Isaac follows. He looks at a staircase and wonders for the first time if there is a woman above, a wife; but the bare lean furniture, the undecorated walls, lines clean and spartan, speak against it. They pass through the big airy rooms and out the back where a path leads downhill to stables with a garage at the back and living quarters on top.

On a balcony men are playing cards or lying down in the mellow evening sun. They have their hats on and their pleated trousers but their torsos are bare. When they see Avrom below they all get up and some of them start buttoning on shirts. There's a smell of cooking here, mingled with horse dung. Laundry hangs on a line in the brick courtyard. Isaac recognizes one of the men by his odd moustache, he was in the back of the Nash before. Avrom makes a cutting movement with his raised hand and they settle back. In the garage he and Isaac climb into an old Ford truck. —Your mother, he says. Head made from stone.

—I know, says Isaac.

—From stone.

They drive and the road dips and rises in the furrows and humps of low hills at first, but farther out it stretches into a plain towards the bigger range in the distance. The sun has slid to their right, blinding and orange, closing on the cold black line of the horizon where it will douse itself like a suicide. Off to the left the light has that greenish shine on the dry grasses and some thin long clouds in the deep blue dome above seem like sifting banks of windswept beach sand. In the middle distance are the cattle in three separate herds and the tall shapes of horsemen in back of them, cutting across like shark fins.

—I can't actually believe this.

—Believe vot?

—Is it really all yours?

—Someone say, The only rich is land rich. I don't know.

—How many watchmacallit is it?

He shrugs one shoulder. —Few hectares, few tousand.

—Jesus, and all I ever wanted was a house in Orange Grove.

Avrom leans forward and brings up a bottle from under his seat, pulls the cork with his teeth and has a drink, hands the bottle across. Isaac wipes the top on his sleeve, sniffs. —Whatzit?

—Is good bloody mampoer is what.

Isaac laughs.

—What?

The bulldog face is not a laughing one. Isaac muscles his lips into good behaviour. —No, man. Just like I thought you'd be having twelve-year Scotch or summin. Mampoer.

Avrom's shoulder hitches again. —That fancy I don't need.

Isaac swallows the harsh homemade spirits, product of some Boer's hidden still. It rasps his digestive tract like a swallowed rattlesnake then curls up in his belly to throb its venom heat. Avrom steers with his thighs and rolls a cigarette from a pouch of tobacco. —I like to drive, he says. I think good when I drive. Then he asks about Isaac's pay, as a panel beater, is it enough for this house that he wants?

—Maybe in a few years if I save up, for a down payment. Maybe I'll be able to afford a freehold bond. Pay it off thirty years.

Avrom snorts. —Debt. That's all a job can ever get. Jobs are for kuylikers.

Isaac passes the bottle back. Kuylikers: cripples. A stinging word. He presses down an uncomfortable rush of images to do with his father.

—You want that house?

—Yes.

—Then why go on job? You can do what any man can. When I buy this farm, I paid cash. Told the man, he asked me about a bond, told him, Mister, I
give
bonds, I don't take them. Should have given a look at his face.

He drinks without removing the cigarette, the sweetness of that memory (no doubt) making his eyelids hood with pleasure.

Isaac says,—What did you do? When you came here like?

—Furshtayste mameloshen?

Isaac nods, though this must be the third time he's been asked if he speaks mother's tongue, as if cousin Avrom doesn't quite believe he's a real Jewisher. Avrom starts talking about coming to the diggings here in '27. Men were leaving their families and selling their homes then, from all over the world they came for the diamonds. Depending on luck. From the start, Avrom says, he didn't waste time trying to stumble on such lucky stones. He made business with other businesses. Buying into those who equipped the prospectors. When he needed premises he went into construction; when he needed transport he took up trucking. Restaurants he was in needed beef so he got into butcheries also. And then cattle. And there're other ways to get diamonds than by mining. The stones have to be valued and sold, and those are businesses also. Money is a business too, a commodity.

Very simple, he says. Always get your percent. Make sure and get your percent. On everything. Always.

 

When they spin around there's a vehicle, that tan Nash LaFayette, a ways behind them and it pulls off the track to let them pass and when they do Isaac has a glimpse of Andre's narrow-necked shape, his thumb touching his homburg. Avrom seems not to have noticed him. When Isaac looks at the mirror he sees the Nash falling into their trail.

There's a pressure in him now.
Kuyliker
. He looks out his window. It's the grandeur of this other life and how miserable and distant it seems to him to be crawling under cars in the grease and the shmootz. What's wrong with him?
You can do what any man can
. Then why has he chosen to be like his limping father with his tiny clocks in his tiny workshop? Instead of
this:
vastness, space, power, ease. Men with weapons, a lawyer in big offices. Respect. Where even his mother comes to ask for favours. The pressure—it's a feeling like wrongness, like guilt. It makes him want to shake himself as if he's been in a dangerous dream, been sleepwalking. What he's been counting on is Yvonne, yes, that's the truth, marrying Yvonne Linhurst, getting her to let him into The Castle. But what kind of a man does that? Waiting passively for her approval, kissing her tochus and shlupping up to her so that she might bestow gifts on his life—is that the way he wants to be? What has happened to him? He's stopped listening to Mame, but all this time she's been so right! She's been trying to wake him up out of his satisfied trance, the drug of his labours. There is so much more. You can do what any man can. And he remembers Hugo Bleznik looking disgusted, saying to him in the backyard that he could see it in his face how he had lost something because of the female, the bladey female . . . 

He says, his thoughts coming out through his mouth in their unfolding: —But it's also good to do a good job, like for yourself?

Avrom snorts. —Kid, he says. There's an unanswerable weight of cynical finality in that word. A whole world in that word.

Isaac looks at him. He has grey hair and a paunch but he is not that old in years, they're on opposite sides of their twenties, that's all. Avrom says,—I'm going to show you something. Between you and me only, not your mother. Nobody.

—Okay, says Isaac. I understand.

 

In the hilly country behind the farmhouse Avrom steers them off the track, downhill over rough veld then down the side of a shallow donga—a dried riverbed—amongst these prickly yellowstone hillocks, these koppies. The sand along the donga is salt white and gritty. The riverbed twists and the rocky sides grow higher. This is an intruding finger of the desert country they are close to. In time they reach a wide curve and Avrom parks the truck. No sign of the Nash behind. In front, slanted sheet rock with undulant tan and ochre bands in its grain faces them, its gradient mild enough that they walk up and over the top as if climbing some gigantic clamshell. Then the land swoops away before them: there's a kind of open crater below and strange rocks rise from its slopes. The rocks are thin and tall, as if they've been whittled by the wind. They stand apart like stone trees in a kind of scattered orchard, so stark and rooted on the sloping land in the red dust.

At the bottom on the flat of the crater is a singular mass of rock, a different colour to the others, huddled and massive, more yellow in colour where they are rust-reddish and burnt orange. They climb down towards it, wordless, down past the stone trunks and their long shadows. Bird wings clap above but when Isaac looks up he sees no moving shapes, only spilled fire in the sky's last quarter. He feels thirsty, dizzy. The mampoer is to blame. Must be. There is some kind of buzzing in his centre and he shakes his head as if that might clear it. He becomes aware of his own thoughts in his head like a separate voice. Hears himself:
This is the most important thing that has ever happened to me in my life
.