The Lion Seeker (13 page)

He goes to a shoe factory in Mayfair, enters stealthily in the back way where it's all Blacks, finds the Black toilets and has to force himself to enter the danger of this forbidden space. Yankel and another White are in there, handing out Communist literature about workers this and workers that, comrades and red stars. They can get away with it inside the Black toilets, Yankel says, cos the management would never come in here. Meanwhile the other one shows him a paper called
Umvikeli-Thebe
which he's told means
The African Defender
, has an ink-smudged cartoon inside with Mussolini and Hertzog slapping chains on a Black, and written underneath,
Tata amakantango ako. Angiwafuni!
Take away your chains, I do not want them. It has to do (Isaac's told) with Mussolini invading Ethiopia plus Hertzog's new laws for Natives that've taken away the vote from the tiny handful of rich Blacks who still had that right, left over from the old British colony days.

Isaac sniffs, looks around at the shit-spattered tin holes, the plugged reeking urinal. He can think of better ways to spend his time. When Yankel comes out for a walk, Isaac asks him does he know anything about what the date April seventeenth can mean. —Whatchoo mean do I know anything?

—Like in history or summin. Is it important?

Yankel stops and takes off his flat cap (not a White cap but the kind darker workers wear), scratches his wiry curls. —What the hell you asking me exactly? What's this about?

So Isaac explains what he can, it might be something big to do with his mother that no one talks about but is known to others (or else it's just the ramblings of a potato seller called Kaplan, but this he doesn't say). He can't ask his ma or his old man cos it's too sensitive, but he wants to know. He thought maybe Bernstein, who's up on all this history jazz, might know something offhand but if not, ukay, well stuff it, he'll just go right now . . . 

—Hold your horses, ay. Don't be so hitzik. Tell me, where is your ma from?

—Dusat.

—I heard of it, ja.

—My da always says it's the size of a yawn.

—It's in Zarasai. Lemme ask and see if anyone knows. Fourteenth April.

—Seventeenth. Thanks a mil hey.

—Here.

—What's this?

—You coming with me to hand out.

—What, me? I'm not a bladey commie, man!

—Quid pro quo, says Yankel Bernstein. Isaac's not familiar with the words, but he gets the meaning. He spends the rest of the arvy pinching his nose with one hand and handing out banned literature with the other in various factory shithouses. Mighty pleased he is when those whistles go off for the end of the day. As for Bernstein's jibber-jabber about the movement of history and workers united, Black and White and Coloured and Indian all together, it's mere fantasy babble to Isaac, most of which is expressed in code words he doesn't understand, about as relevant as the mumbled ancient Hebrew in the shul prayers. What's real to him is the stink of Black shit and Black sweat. The filthy walls and the puddles of piss full of mosquitoes on the cracked concrete and the need to get the hell out of there as quick as he can.

In the end he can't quite reckon who is more mad in the head, Yvonne Linhurst's crazed mother babbling gibberish in The Castle in Parktown, or Yankel Bernstein with his flat cap and round glasses spending his days talking equally senseless kuk in literal sewers. It's a messed-up world hey, Isaac thinks. So messed up.

 

He needs his brandy after a day like today and he does three-quarters of a bottle in Joubert Park then goes home late and sits on the wall under the fingernail moon, sipping the rest. Watching and waiting. How pretty are the curves of that big DeSoto washed in the pale luminescence of the lunar glow, the top of the windshield opaque with eyebrows of settled mine dust. Mrs. Oberholzer does not disappoint. At twelve minutes after eleven she comes out to have her smoke, sits down on the running board next to the side-mounted spare wheel with her long knees sticking up under her nightie. He finishes the brandy as she finishes her cigarette. He watches her stand up and go inside and then he drops down out of his concealment. Sways a little on his feet. Taps the bottle on the edge of the wall, then does it harder and it breaks with a pop and a soft tinkle. Thickheaded, he moves down the alley to the DeSoto. Bladey Greyshirt shit, mamzor chuleriuh: bastard cholera carrier. A geshvir af dir in zeit: a tumour in your side, you piggish pustule. May you be hanged in fire. Drowned in ice. Three times over.

He reaches the blue automobile with its long handsome box shape, the swoop of the curved mudguards and the round headlights like peering eyes low on the front, the criss-crossed spindles of the wheels, and he puts one hand on its smooth steely loveliness and lets his palm taste its coolness. The madwomen get Castles and the Greyshirts get beautiful cars and what do I get but fired. Not even egg noodles to my name. Eff him, this chutus, he deserves nothing.

He bends and slashes at the closest tire with the stub of the bottle; but the jagged edges only break off against the tough rubber. He curses some more, then starts stabbing. This too is ineffective: the thin glass keeps snapping. He drops it and is looking around for something else sharp and harder to use, some stone or nail, swaying from the brandy mist behind his eyes, bent over, when the back door behind him smacks against the side of the house with a heavy clap and a force like a great wind rushes into him. He's lifted before he can even turn. He slams into the car, is pinned without breath. It's Oberholzer who's grunting in his ear, that moustache. Isaac wriggles sideways and kicks loose and goes for the balls on instinct, with a knee. He gets hit so hard in the side of his face that everything explodes the way a firework rocket blooms into arcing tendrils of falling stars. He can only see again as he bounces from the brick wall. Oberholzer there, massive. Isaac pretends to slump then jumps to one side, sets himself, aiming, and punches for the white pillar of the throat in the dimness below that wide head.

This Oberholzer for all his size moves neatly and precisely: he slaps Isaac's arm aside and grips the side of Isaac's neck in the same smooth movement, with the same hand. So close now that Isaac can see he is smiling. Smiling. He's taken cunning hold of the muscle that joins Isaac's neck to his body and his thumb is in the notch of the windpipe and he is squeezing and twisting and the motion feels very precise and very practised. He knows exactly what he's doing and he is incredibly strong: the grip paralyzes Isaac as it chokes him. The huge hand feels non-biological, like a piece of industrial equipment, a vise of iron.

The blotting red rage comes up but it is no good. For the first time in his life Isaac can do nothing against an assault. He is choked down to his knees. All the time Oberholzer talks in a soft voice full of soft meanness. Bad Afrikaans words against the Jews that he digs into Isaac with a great bulking pleasure that Isaac can feel behind them. The white teeth in the smirk under his moustache. Words against Isaac's family, his mother, terrible injurious words that at last make Isaac's eyes stream in his paralyzed face. He blacks away, a mercy. He comes back to himself and he is in his own yard. He feels wetness on his face. Blood? He touches it, sniffs. No, it's pungent. Piss. He rinses off with shaking hands at the outside tap in the yard, goes inside.

In the morning he is stiff in his cot. His father runs to summon Mame. She wails over him. He gets to a mirror and sees the empurpled eye, the swollen forehead. He makes up a story about Blacks trying to rob him on his way home. They got his pay packet this week; Morris gave it to them early. He tried his very best to fight them off.

They want to telephone the police and Dr. Allan. They want to telephone the Morrises to let them know. Absolutely not, he says. No no no. You'll make it worse, promise me you won't tell anyone. They want to know why not. Because I'm ashamed, Isaac tells them. He'll talk to the Morrises himself, ukay, don't worry about the Morrises.

He pretends to phone work, speaking into a dead receiver, telling the phantom Morris brother on the end of the line that he had his pay stolen and that he won't be coming in for a while. A bit ill at the moment, you see, going to need some time to recuperate. The Morris brother is exceedingly sympathetic, tells him to take as much time as he needs.

—Vot a gentlyman, says Isaac's father.

Mame's arms are folded and her scarred face is stern. Tutte goes back to work, stooped and limping. Rively is at school, underlining things with neatness and precision.

HE CONVALESCES IN THE DAYTIME
in his sister's bed. The wounds on his face, his head, are nothing—a bruised eye socket (it's doubtful Oberholzer even made a fist, just an open-handed swat, probably the way he smacks his wife), plus a scabbed scrape on the forehead where there's a bump like a cue ball, and a thick rope of purple lower down that his collar can hide—but he is badly hurt inside, under the skin, in his heart and in his mind, his spirit. He lies there with the curtains drawn. In the next room his father works, tiny clocks tick like toiling beetles. Customers wander through the front door with its jingling bell. Mame brings him thick barley soups but he has little appetite.

What am I waiting for? He realizes it's for the redness, he's waiting for the rage to spark and fire up in him. How the Coloured boys used to sometimes call him Crazy Izey. Later on it was Rabies Helger. That temper that always got him through every scrape, biting and scratching. But this time the brute mass of his enemy, the elemental power in that grip—there was nothing, nothing that he had against it.

He tells himself to get up now and go and get a cricket bat or half a brick and get this bastard back. That's what you need to do.

He lies there and makes dreams of this in his mind but his body knows they are just lies, baby lies. The fact of that tidal force has broken something in him, maybe something more vital than any bone in his body.

To be choked like that, like a dog in a sack in the lake. To be made to hear those words, so intimate, like some obscene parody of a lover. To have the sour taste of piss on your tongue. No place more loathsome to fall, none lower. Nobody must ever know.

Get up and fetch a brick, Isaac, a knife.

He lies there and he turns to the wall. He hears the jingling of the front door. He lets the bowls of soup cool on the floor beside the bed. When he closes his eyes it does not stop the tears. These tears have a viscous quality, they're not surface water, they come up from the broken thing deep in him, they seep up like translucent gel to slowly wet the pillow where he lies on his side.

Choked down, pissed on. Loathsome little worthless thing.

He asks God what he, Isaac, has done to Him, the Almighty, to so deserve His wrath; was it quitting shul? He hears no divine whispers in response: he is not his father.

Mame brings him chunks of ice for the bruising and he holds them diligently against the empurpled tissues and, after a few weekdays plus a weekend, the vivid colour softens, the swelling eases. But not the tainted feeling.

He lies in bed and craves brandy. There's no brandy. Too wounded to even pretend he can get up and walk to the bottle shop. Dr. Allan comes to visit, against his wishes. Allan glances at the bruises, doesn't even need to touch, he shrugs and leaves some aspirins. Look in my guts, Isaac thinks. Look down my throat, in my heart and my guts where it's all smashed in. Gimme pills for that.

He takes a cracked hand mirror from Mame's items in the sewing room and looks at his face in the outhouse. What makes him vomit is not the black eye and the bumped forehead, the bruise around his throat, it's not how he has bat-wing ears and carrot hair and a shapeless mass of a nose and cheeks spattered with freckles, no, none of that, it's the dullness that he sees in his eyes, weakling eyes. Outside he feels the presence of that other house, number forty, the very structure like a stranger always watching him; he can feel it at his back when he's crossing the yard, hurrying to the safety of his sister's bed.

Get a rock, get a baton. Get your revenge.

But all that he gets is more fearful, more sick. He can see the real worry in Mame's face when she comes over to sit on the bed now, in Tutte's also when he leans over behind her.
You'll be all right, my love, my rainbow
. I know, Mame.
No evil eye—you're so strong you can kill a bull
. Yes Mame.
You'll win them all!
She brings him the newspaper, the real estate section. He drops it next to the cold soup in the bowls, unread, unreadable. Soon she will find out what a little fraud he is, pretending to still have that job. All her pride in him will wither. How he begins to loathe himself then.

 

One day Yankel Bernstein shows up. Isaac is having a dream in which Yvonne calls and he tries to jump the wall at number eighteen Gilder Lane but he floats off like a balloon, The Castle becomes small, just a gem glinting in a sea of golden liquid, he's full of dizzy sadness, everything below keeps getting smaller . . . 

When he opens his eyes Mame's warm palm is pushing down gently on his chest. She steps back and he sees Yankel at the door. Your friend comes to visit, very nice, she says. Talmud teaches, when you visit a sick one you take away one-sixtieth of the sickness.

—One-sixtieth! says Yankel. So precise hey, that Talmud, ha ha. Those mathematicians!

Gitelle grunts. The Talmud knows, she says, not like the nonsense in other books. And she gives the smudged manifestos tucked under Yankel's right arm a hard look on her way out.

Yankel closes the door, brings a chair to the bed. —So how you keeping, my mate?

—Had happier days thanks. He sits up, asks Yankel to pass him his cigarettes. They both light up.

Yankel: —So what happened exactly? Your ma tuned me you got robbed.

—Jumped, four of the bastards. Your lovely shvartzer friends.