The Lion Seeker (58 page)

It had happened after she and Abel had gone to the Alhambra to watch a special screening of a film that was prohibited most strictly to those under the age of twenty, presented by Hashomer Hatzair raising funds for the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine suffering badly under the twin ills of British occupation and Arab attacks. But the film had no scenery of the Holy Land, nor was it concerned with the immediate present. It showed instead scenes taken by film crews at the liberation of Buchenwald and other slave labour camps and industrialized liquidation centres, though Gitelle never saw the others. Buchenwald was enough. There was a bulldozer sloughing hillocks of naked bodies into a pit, the bony limbs of men and women entangled, the mouths hanging open in the skull faces, a yawn of death with eyes rolled back, shaved skulls lolling on stick necks, shin bones and backbones and the scooping hollows in the pelvic girdles still covered with skin, bodies humped on the bulldozer blade like so many bundles of wet straw. She stumbled out of that dark and flickering chamber of horrors, went home and collapsed. Abel found her writhing on the floor. Till that point, she had continued to send letters to Dusat. Perhaps some relatives lived yet under the Soviets; the stories of mass graves in the forests of der haym could not apply to her own. But the film made her body accept what the mind had long since suspected. Old weak points hurt the most when the body is stressed and that is perhaps why the pressure sites in the back and ribs flared into such an unendurably skewering flame. Dr. Allan came and examined, tapping her kidneys, pressing her belly. The Pain had receded a little and she was left with a script for painkillers and told to drink lots of weak tea. The doctor was certain it, like the back spasms of long ago, was nothing but the shock of what she had seen, but he prescribed a few tests to be sure, a visit to the weekend clinic he kept at Johannesburg General Hospital.

Abel thanked him and telephoned Isaac who rushed home from work. Gitelle was badly upset. It was nothing, they both told her, nothing, like the doctor said. But in truth she could see that neither of them quite believed it.

NOW IT IS LATE FEBRUARY
in the year 1948, trace beginnings of the cooling season in the air in high-up Johannesburg where the sky is hazy and the grasses brown and dry. Isaac is walking on the banks of the Emmarentia Dam, a reservoir in the northern suburbs bottling the waters of the Braamfontein Spruit. Ducks bob, fishermen hunker with odd hats in the willow shade of the muddy banks, little bits of bread mashed on their lines to make them visible. —It's quiet here, he says to Maureen Venter.

—Oh absolutely.

Maureen is a short and worried lady with long brown hair and big square glasses, a tweed skirt suit. Newest agent for the Golden Era Realty Corporation, specializing in suburban developments. She takes him in her car to see the next house, five minutes from the dam across the avenue named after ex-Prime Minister Hertzog and into Greenside. There are many elegant art deco-style homes here, most dating from before the war, but the house she brings him to is newly built, a bungalow in the modernist style with a slanted tile roof on a corner lot. It was erected after the neighbours decided to subdivide their immense garden, gifting the plot with many mature trees and flower beds and a fine kikuyu-grass lawn.

Isaac likes the nice high wall enclosing the garden. A little orchard of a sort stands in one corner, peach trees with grey trunks speckled with nuggets of dried sap; across on the other side stand two dark-trunked plum trees with maroon leaves; and in between, against the garden wall, is a pomegranate tree with tough sharp-edged leaves.

Isaac stops on the path to the front door. —I think I'm ganna take it.

Maureen gives her laugh that is not a laugh but a nervous giggle like an involuntary twitching of the lungs. —You haven't even seen the inside, meneer.

—I don't think I have to.

It's the tranquil span of this corner lot that draws him, a quarter acre of open lawn from the carport behind the main gate sweeping around to a fifteen-foot hedge marking the boundary with the next house. Down that way on the far side there is a gap in the brick wall with some steps down to street level to a garden gate, both cute and secure, onto Shaka Road. It all feels safe and green to him, a section of defended countryish land in these tranquil suburbs, so far from the jabber and mire of the inner-city streets. He can see his mame sitting there in the cool of the shade in summertime. The bee noises in the pollen'd air, the quiet wind in the bending leaves. They go inside.

Big rooms have huge windows to flood them with natural light; the master bedroom has its own bathroom and there are two other bedrooms off a passageway opposite another bathroom and a study. The kitchen has two doors and like the one at Buxton Street opens onto a concrete yard but this yard is expansive and has a solid brick hut for the girl, while a tall wooden fence privatizes its connection to the neighbouring property behind. Isaac goes out front again and stands in the garden and sees how there is plenty of room to build an extension between the carport and the house. It could be a kind of private wing. He sees it.

—What are they asking? he says.

—Nine two.

More than double what a basic house would go for. He reaches into his jacket and takes out his chequebook. Miss Venter giggles.

—I'll give ten to make sure. Who should I make it out to?

—We have to go back to the office, she says. There's a lot of things . . . 

—Like what?

—Lots of things, Meneer Helger!

—Like what?

—Ach, first approval of the bond, then all the paper for putting in the offer.

—Bond, says Isaac. Listen. I don't take bonds. I give them.

And he smiles at her and begins to laugh.

—What's it, meneer?

—Nothing, nothing hey. It's just someone else once said that before me. I've come a helluva long way for the taste of the same words in my own mouth. So now you tell me who to make this out to, and don't worry about no bonds or papers or nothing else. Don't you worry.

 

At the end of that month the transaction goes through and work begins under Isaac's directions on the extension. He tells no one about this project, not even Hugo, with whom he now lives, having long ago moved out of Buxton Street to take a room in the shambling monstrosity of a home (neo-Grecian statues in fake marble, furry carpets, rotting ponds) in Northcliff, which Hugo got at a discount since the previous family all had their White throats cut by unknown assailants in an infamously bloody mass slaughter the previous year. (What the hell do I care? was Hugo's line. It's only a few stains).

By April, the work is finished, the extra wing freshly painted. Isaac walks through the bare rooms of his new house, running his hands on the clean white walls of what will be his parents' bedroom. The bathroom is almost as big, with a beautiful ceramic bathtub on claw feet. All their lives they've had tin baths and a bladey outhouse—now let them luxuriate, let them have ease in their autumn years. The oak closet has a full-length mirror on the door and he stands looking at himself. A young man of property, dark suit this day, with hands in the jacket pockets, a good fedora and some orange hair touching the bat wings of his ears, freckles over the fleshy nose. He likes to think these days that in his suits he has a certain wiry resemblance to the popular American singer and movie actor Frank Sinatra, the same doggish thrust around the mouth, a certain brute narrowness to the eyes, but he knows that's wishful: in truth it's only the feeling of confidence from the business and the work behind him that would make him see himself this way. He lights a cigarette and turns away. No more mirrors. And don't you cry, there's nothing to cry about.

The following week the drapes and the carpeting go in, then the furniture, every piece chosen by him. There is a new Bakelite wireless and a refrigerator, an electric stove, an extra-large geyser so they will never run out of hot water. Some antique clocks he knows Tutte will enjoy, including a grandfather clock from Russia.

At work he gets an odd message, the secretary telling him that Miss Venter from the real estate says someone has been asking her questions about him. —About me? What kinda questions?

—She didn't say.

But when he phones her she says it was a misunderstanding, that she just wanted to wish him well with the purchase and make sure everything was going well with it. —It's fine, he says. Perfect.

She giggles a lot before ringing off.

 

The final touch is a maid for the back room and he interviews a dozen before he finds the right one, a gentle and calm Basotho lady named Gloria, with a church badge on her overalls, whom he thinks just right for Mame and Tutte. She will start work in May, as well as a gardenboy who will visit every Thursday. Meanwhile, he has the lawyer draw up new papers, transferring title to his mother's name. He places these documents on the shining pine table in the living room, with a new silver pen. He wants to show them their house, their new lives, and then have it end with the signing, the beautiful surprise of this gift he has been working all his life to give.

And it is a very fine omen that Mame has been feeling well lately. She will have to go into the hospital for a kind of surgery that has no purpose other than to look inside her, but Dr. Allan says she will be fine and they must believe him. In the meantime Isaac invites them most casually to come and visit him on Sunday; they have not been to where he lives yet, he says, and it's really past time. He will come in the car and he will fetch them for Sunday morning tea and then he will bring them back home afterwards. They both agree, though it takes a little pressuring as Mame has dress work to catch up on.

On the Saturday he begins to feel his nerves. Debates with himself whether to buy the fresh flowers this day or wait till tomorrow, have them be as fresh as possible. He picks up a vase of fine crystal—Lalique it is, making him wince to remember the Mad Queen—and then decides to do the flowers as well. He drives to the new house and arranges the flowers in the crystal vase on the table with the title papers in front of it, proteas exactly like the ones he once bought her the night she threw them in the rubbish, and vivid strelitzias with their long green necks and beaked buds of jungle colours. He puts fresh water in the vase to keep the flowers nourished overnight and then he goes home and has a bad night shot full of sleeplessness and thrashing.

Finally he gets up around half past five and makes coffee on the kitchen stove. He can hear a woman's voice and her silvery laughter, Hugo busy with someone new in the main bedroom. He goes out before the noises get too gruesome and has a cigarette in his bathrobe, looking at the overgrown garden and the mildewed ponds. The sky turns the colour of an eggshell and the security lights are very bright against its pale looming.

Around half past nine, Isaac has a shower, then shaves and dresses in his best suit. He spit-shines his shoes in the hallway. He takes the keys to Hugo's Chev coupe. The sun is bright, the bonnet gleams. He puts the top down, puts on the radio and drives to Doornfontein. Coming down Harrow Road, they start playing the new Frank Sinatra song called bim-bam something and he takes it as another good omen to feel the imprint of that wiry successful American over his own image, the similarity between them in his good suit in a shining convertible.

He parks on Buxton Street, a space halfway down the block. The old lady down there at number forty, the chutusta with the unlikely name of Smith, auntie of Oberholzer's wife, is bent over, watering a pot plant with cats on the stairs. He whistles and gives his biggest wave, his sweetest Sunday morning smile. She stares at him and her small mouth tenses, then she goes inside. There is losers and there is winners, Isaac thinks. Good night Greyshirts, good night. Hardies to you. Your cities are burned, your country is gone, your day is done, and we're still here.

He's whistling that Sinatra tune as he leaves his car. There is an older-model Studebaker parked two spaces ahead with a squat man leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. Something familiar about him to Isaac as he draws up, about the car also. As he looks, slowing, the back door opens and a short hatless man emerges, bald spot flashing as he straightens. Sad dark eyes behind a spaniel nose.

—Holy shit.

—Morning.

—The hell
you
doing here?

Isaac looks up then down the street as if an answer could be read there, but it's only Sunday morning empty.

—I've just been in, had a word with your people.

—Hey?

—You didn't forget about me did you? Forget about our friend?

Isaac stands with his mouth open: nothing comes out. His heart roars blood like an express train and the red mass slams his head, his eyes swell in their sockets, pulses crash both ears.

—You must have known what you did would catch you again, Isaac. What did you think? That we wouldn't know?

Isaac's voice comes out hoarse, the words half coughed.

—Know what?

—Let's not play nursery games, Isaac. I was just in with them. He nods towards the house, reaches into a pocket, takes out two sheets of paper and holds them up beside his olive face. Notepad paper lined from folds. Block letters in English on one, Hebrew script the other. Signatures on both. —Showed them these, says Papendropolous.

Isaac feels can-opened, gouged, inverted.

—Did she write this or not? Did she sign? I came here to make perfectly sure.

Isaac finds himself taking a step forward, reaching for the papers. Papendropolous eases back and the man on the car moves in, his chin rolling a little towards his shoulder, hands coming out of his pockets.

Isaac wheezes, his mouth wordless. Papendropolous folds the papers back away, says: —We were never exactly sure. You went off and I tried to contact you, I came back to Vance and we thought then we understood what had happened. But you were gone.