The Lion Seeker (40 page)

The old man takes off his hat as they rumble past. Isaac lifts his hand. The old man salutes him. Isaac feels slightly better.

 

At the bottom of the hill is a dead tree still standing, the only one in sight, nothing more than a bare forked trunk, the trunk charred. Beyond, there's a lineup for a tap in the centre of a swamp of churned mud. People with pots and buckets of all sizes. Women who have hiked up their skirts to wait in the mud, men with trouser legs rolled to the knees, shoes in hand. Now as they get closer comes stronger that sweetrot tang of burning rubbish mingled with raw sewage. Under the forked tree men are sitting on wonky stools and barbers are clipping at their skulls. Mirrors dangle down on strings like strange crystalline fruits. Chicken legs yellow and singed rest on grilles over an open fire. Every single face watches them. Isaac steers wide round the marsh around the tap. So many eyes.

—Thought they'd all be at work, his mouth says. Be empty like.

Yvonne doesn't speak. Is her door locked? The dream feeling in Isaac not going away but the opposite, getting thicker, deeper. He's drowning in dream. They are passing hills of rubbish now, an undulating rubbish land of rotting things, smouldering things. Dunes of ash, newspapers, tires, scrap, jagged tin cans, flaps of cardboard, feathers, bones. Skinny dogs and children who were climbing and playing but have frozen to stare.

They cross a ditch full of dark fluid and when the tires splash through it he is ready for the stench of the shit yet it's still like a foul cloth forced down the back of the throat till he tastes the first acidic intimations of his own vomit. Insects ripple up in silver clouds. Isaac steers for a laneway through the shacks ahead, the boxes with stones holding down their roofs.

The Cadillac barely fits; faces come to the doorways, the hatchlike windows. He sees a tiny separate garden of dirt and twigs and coloured stones. Sees a planted white cross. Sees a stout woman with her fists buttressing her wide hips, squinting at them. Dry face under a beret, wrinkles and high cheekbones. In the rearview more children running, smiling. The open doors and the shaded worlds within. To bring a Cadillac here. Do you see what you've done? His heart has been kicking in him all the time but he only feels the force of it now. The sweat on his hot skin. Some little hands tap on the rear, the roof. The laneway goes on, on. He realizes it is impossible to turn around here. This dream of utter inversion: the White Black, the Black White, positive negative and negative positive. The insane wrongness of what he has allowed himself to be persuaded to do here keeps coming down like bricks on him, like tumbling rubble. Dustblasted earthiness, dirtafrica. Another species nests here. Not for him. It is not for him to be here.

And the dream feeling falls. Everything turns clear and hard. A need fills him like a scream. To get out. Get out, survive, leave, go. It shrieks in him so that his body twitches as if electrically pulsed.

—We have to go. This is mad.

She hasn't heard, she's rolling down the window. —Slow down hey. I've got to ask someone where he lives.

—Have to get out.

—Hello, she calls out to some children. Hello. Hi. Sowbona.

Isaac swears; yet he does slow a little. —Careful, they're like birds, he tells her. You start feeding one, there'll be ten milyun.

Little hands come through the window, little pale palms. Yvonne giggles. Isaac accelerates. —Hey! What're you doing?

—You keep asking me that.

—Isaac!

—Well you weren't getting directions were you.

—Stop. Stop!

But ahead he sees another laneway opening, to the left. He shoots the Cadillac, Yvonne still telling him stop over and over.

—It's ukay, he tells her. But truly it's not. As he swings this big vehicle he finds the lane isn't wide enough to make the turn and he ends up having to stop at an angle. He puts it into reverse. Edges back, then a little forward. Again Yvonne asks him what he's doing. The most irritating question there is and blindingly bladey obvious: getting the hell out. Enough is enough and the panic is on him now, almost fully, it makes his scalp shrivel and parches his mouth, his armpits stream. When he revs forward again the tires rip up red clouds, but it's still too tight. He licks his dry lips, grinds back into reverse.

From out of the dust behind he sees in the sideview mirror a tall young man in neat pressed clothing. A flat cap and pleated trousers. Others behind him. He comes to Isaac's window, taps. Isaac ignores him.

—Isaac!

—Oright.

Slowly he lowers the glass. The young man, leaning down, says: —What kind is this? E-Chevrolet Special?

He has a triangular face, a thin chin with wide-set eyes under his cap, good-looking with caramel skin. —No, Isaac tells him. It's . . . something else.

—Why you have this side?

—American car. From America.

The young man has a way of staring down into Isaac's eyes without blinking. Almost as if under the influence of the bottle or the smoke, but the eyes are clear and unbloodshot. Isaac has never been stared at by a Black like this. He notices one eyebrow is spliced in two by a thin scar.

—What kind engine?

More young men keep coming out of the red dust behind him; they have an unhurried way of walking, leaning back from their steps, their arms dangling slack.

—Um. Big. Sixteen cylinder.

The young man whistles but it is not a sincere whistle. He moves his chin, pointing inside, past Isaac. —This one is your wife.

—Look, Isaac says. He doesn't have much breath. His chest so tight. —Look.

—Hello, Yvonne says, leaning across.

Isaac puts his hand on her shoulder, tries to press her back into her seat. She pushes his hand down.

The young man says,—You look for police?

—Me? What for?

The young man makes a laugh-like sound. His eyes never waver. —Police not here, he says.

—Beg a pardon?

—We looking for Mr. Luthuli, Yvonne tells him.

—Not police? the young man says. He has a sporting look now, he tugs on the brim of his flat cap.

—No, Isaac says.

—Yes, police.

—Not police.

—For Chlistmas now, the young man says.

—Pardon?

—Chlistmas time. Merry Chlistmas.

—Hu hu, not yet, Isaac says. Have a long time still.

The young man appears to grow serious, for his split eyebrow clenches in toward the other. —I am say for you. Is Chlistmas. Chlistmas today.

—I don't.

—
Today
.

—No, Isaac says, the word winded on his lips.

—Isaac, Yvonne says.

He feels the car rocking slightly. The dream feeling comes back but different, dualistic now: as if he is not only here in the dream but elsewhere also. It's not a useful perception.

—You know what is Chlistmas box? says the young man.

—What is what?

—Chlistmas box, for give present. Now you give for me my Chlistmas box.

—Hu hu, Isaac says.

—What is your name?

—Me? says Isaac. No one.

—You sixteen cylinder, says the young man. You give for me my Chlistmas box, sixteen cylinder.

—Good one, says Isaac.

—Yes, says the young man. You give. I want American car.

—Sure, sure, my mate.

—Shore yes. Why you laugh?

—Hu hu hu, says Isaac. He begins then without pre-thought to speak in Black: the Zulu phrases that Silas taught him come to his mouth with amazing fluidity.
We go now just and sorry trouble sorry
.

The young man ignores this. —I have say for you, he says. You give it.

Isaac has stopped looking at him. The faces of the other young men are at every other window, the same flat caps and direct eyes.

Tsotsis: it comes to him, the word, for these are them, the very ones, here and now. The newspaper term given flesh and life. Tsotsi: always it held for him a joking ring, the harmlessness of some little township gangster, a tsotsi, the joke of their strutting, lords of dungpiles.

But here, now, he finds nothing to disdain.

The young man—the tsotsi—is speaking again. Isaac searches past the handsome triangular face. Searches with eyes that are like hands grasping up out of drowning waters. He finds a woman passing behind. She has on a doek and overalls, she could be a maid on Beit Street. The motherliness of her thick hips. Isaac sucks a deep breath and shouts. —Hey! Hey mama! Hey!

The woman pauses, shades her eyes.

—Please! Mama can you help? Please!

She comes forward. Without looking at her, the tsotsi speaks the liquid full-mouth clacking of Black to her, not Zulu or Sesotho because Isaac doesn't understand a single word. The woman looks at him and takes a step back.

—No, no, please, Mama! says Isaac.

She leans down a little. —What is?

—I, he says. We. We come.

—Mr. Luthuli! Yvonne shouts past him. We looking for Mr. Luthuli. Moses.

—Heh? The woman dips in closer, to see Yvonne. Isaac can tell she had not noticed a girl in the car before, the way her face changes as she looks in.

He leans back and hisses to Yvonne: —Yes, tell her. Explain it.
Tell her
.

Yvonne says it again and the woman's eyes thin, her head cocks. —Luthuli?

—Yes, Moses Luthuli. We've come to see him, to help.

—Ohhh, says the woman.

—Yes, please, if you can help us, Yvonne says.

The woman talks to the tsotsi, he turns around and leans his back to the car, crossing his legs and scratching at his nostril (Isaac sees in the sideview). Now the woman is turning, calling a child. She bends to the little girl; the girl listens then runs.

The maid woman stays at their window beside the tsotsi and the tsotsi speaks to her but she does not look at him. He tries to bend down to Isaac again and she grips the door, her arms in his way. The tsotsi's voice gets louder, harder. But the woman does not let go. Her hand on the window frame is curled inside the car, thin mud-coloured fingers with fine paler lines like rings from the knuckles to the nail beds. Isaac looks at the hand and wants to kiss it. What's happening? Yvonne keeps saying.

Now the tsotsi is shouting. The woman is shaking her head in a kind of dumb rhythm. The tsotsi steps, giving room to his lanky elbows, shaking them out. Oh shit no, is what Isaac thinks. The girl comes back and behind her is a man wearing a black suit with a wine-coloured shirt with a white ring collar at the throat, one of those Christian ministers. He has a beard of tight curls along his jawline and his arms sweep as he speaks, speaking not just to the handsome tsotsi but to all of them, lifting his voice. They shift back, but not far. Pleated pants and flat caps and hands in pockets. One of them whistling a clever cutting note like a bird chirp.

When the minister's face drops to the window, Isaac can see the flecks of spit caught in the wires of his beard and his eyes are very big in his dark face. He shouts: —Go! Drive it!

—Can't, says Isaac.

But the minister has already skipped up onto the running board. —That way! Fust, man. Go fust. Ride it man!

So Isaac accelerates. The rear side of the Cadillac rakes the rusted iron corner of a box house, crumpling it in. The noise of this lifts an answering sound from the young men standing in the dust, as if in echo, a moan of outrage. Whistles break out. Yay! Yay! they shout. There's a thump from the back, a boot or a rock. The minister is shouting the word
go
. Isaac gives more gas and they bump up over some kind of cornerstone and come down hard and keep going. Behind, the tsotsis come running through the dust, whistling and throwing.

The minister has one hand inside pressed flat to the soft ceiling. Isaac gives it: the shacks blur: there are no signs here, the lanes twist. The piles of tin, the dust and wire. Then a more open space where Isaac can slow.

The minister's face dips in again. —Ow ow, he says. Who is it you people are searching for here, that you come in here like this?

Yvonne leans across. —Thank you so much.

The minister's face shaking. —Ow ow ow.

—It's Moses Luthuli, she says. He's been hurt.

—Luthuli.

—Yes, Moses.

—Yes yes. I shall direct you.

Behind the minister in the more open space is a listing concrete rectangle with a missing door; before it is a small lake of dark urine coated in slime and shimmering with insectile life.

The minister catches their staring. —What they give us for toilets, one for maybe fifty thousand persons. We have only last week a little girl who fell in and drowned to the death. In that.

—Christ.

—Yes, you can say Christ. Eight years old.

They go on more slowly. Past the urine swamp of the toilets are the grey concrete homes that he saw from the top of the crest before and these are made of pale breezeblocks with cracks but their walls don't reach all the way up to the roofs. The minister signals to stop, jumps down and walks ahead. They watch him from the car, knocking on a tin door: him in the sun with the sun shiny on his black coat sleeve and the door in shadow and all of the doors in the long row behind him in the same shadows in the pale concrete, the concrete facades all the same as if stamped by one machine.

Isaac looks at Yvonne. What to say? He tries her name. —He's coming, she says. He looks back and the minister is jog-stepping back. Yvonne gets out and then Isaac.

—See that one there, says the minister. Luthuli.

—Thank you so so much, says Yvonne.

The engine of the Cadillac is still running; with no key he won't chance shutting it off. —I'll stay here with the car, he says.

—It's all right, the minister says. I will look after it.

Isaac pulls on his nose. —Maybe better not, he says.

—Isaac
, says Yvonne.

—Ja oright, he says. He puts his hand in his pocket and starts to bring out his wallet. The minister steps back, his face screws as if hit with spit. Yvonne is the one who says sorry. Isaac mumbles and follows her.