The Lion Seeker (56 page)

—Ganna cut it off, Ma?

—The hell's going on here? says Barney.

She says, You think I'm joking, Isaac?

—She's ganna do a Captain Hook, he tells Barney. Chop a doodle doo. I suggest you fetch a bucket with lots of ice, my mate.

Isaac, she says. I won't leave you here. You come home with me.

—Just gimme that thing, Ma. Give it a me and stop performing like a meshugena.

I want you to come home with me. I want this to stop.

Isaac says,—I'm not hurting no one.

Look at me, Isaac, my eyes. This is nothing for me, to bleed. I bleed every day for you.

Studying the bar, Isaac begins to laugh, his head shaking.

You come with me and you promise on your life never to come back here.

He must have been laughing harder than he realizes because his eyes get full of wetness, the grain of the bar blurring. He wipes at them and senses Barney edging towards her, his hands busy under the bar. —Just relax, Barn.

—What's she saying?

—Says she ganna chop off her bladey hand if I don't go with her.

—Then bladey go.

—There's the thing, Barn. I just don't happen to want to.

—Missus, says Barney, just put it down, ay. Stop acting mad.

Isaac looks at his mother and watches with a sick unfolding in his innards as she lifts her chin at him, stretching the scar tissue. He sighs. —Ja, he says. She's not acting, Barn. She's ganna do it. Better get a tourniquet too.

He glances to his left. Along the silent bar the heads look down in a staggered formation that makes him think of dominoes. When he looks back at her she asks him again in Jewish, Are you coming with me?

—The big question, he says.

I give you till five, Mame says. One. Two.

—What is that, counting? says Barney.

—There you go, says Isaac.

—Druy, says Mame.

—What the hell is this shit, man? says Barney.

—Another of the big questions, says Isaac. I got lots more.

—Fier, says Mame.

Isaac looks at the sharp edge of the hatchet; it barely trembles; the scar on her face still stretched. He yawns, lifting his arms. —Oright Ma, he says to the roof. Let's go. You win.

—Fimf! says Mame.

And Isaac feels his guts swoop and jerks around to catch the hatchet flashing at the living meat and bone of her forearm. He screams then, starting to jerk from his stool. But Barney has already lunged, stabbing the truncheon from behind the bar across the hand and the blade hits it, biting deep. He jerks it back and the hatchet, caught, comes with and he snatches it in with his other hand.

Isaac shouts: —Didn't you goddamn hear me Ma? I said I'm going with you!

Mame looks at him, her brown eyes like two dark washed stones glittering against sunlight. That's another thing, she says. How is a person supposed to understand you when you go around mumbling like an old man all day? You've got to start speaking up, Isaac. You‘ve got to start behaving like you're alive.

SHE WON'T LET HIM FLUSH
after vomiting, she checks the bowl to note what doesn't stay down. No bread, no milk. She feeds him hard-boiled eggs, some porridge unbuttered and unsalted. Skinless chicken well cooked, plain rice. Marrow bone in broth. He starts to eke on a little weight. She has a new task for him every day. Light manual labour, the kind she says men enjoy, not sweeping or scrubbing but the fixing up of broken things. One instance: an old nail barrel she found in the street that he strips and sands and de-rusts with steel wool; he rubs raw linseed oil into the pine staves till they shine a honey glow, and paints the hoops silver. He works in the yard with his shirt off, using a table made from an old door set on folding trestle legs. After a while he starts to like this simple work of his hands and the feel of the sunlight and air on his skin. Likes the way she brings him tea and looks in on him every hour through the afternoon. At night she puts Epsom salts in a hot bath for him and shaves his face and trims his hair if it's needed. After supper she reads him the newspaper, translating the stories into Jewish with the dictionary on her lap while he lies on his old cot in Rively's old room, the cot hard enough for him to be comfortable on and at least keeping him off the floor, and more often than not he passes into sleep with the steady burble of her reading voice in his ears. He holds a silent gratitude that they don't come into his room anymore when he wakes screaming but leave him instead the space to fall back asleep in his own time. Grateful too that they do not try to wake him early in the morning and make no mention of his sleeping in late; and the empties that sometimes roll around under the cot get periodically cleaned away without comment. He hasn't gone once back to the pub.

In time he begins to feel a strength take root inside himself and then he is ashamed if he thinks back on how he has been. One day he stands in the alleyway, looking along it and is not aware of Mame watching him till he turns. —There used to be that DeSoto.

That couple, she says. With Mrs. Smith. They moved out.

—When?

Mame shrugs. Long time already. Things change.

 

Now, gradually, there steals into him the urge to go back to work again, stronger day to day. Perhaps Mame can sense this new stage in the vitality germinating within him for she sits him down and places some papers in front of him that she says are very important for him to see. She says that she hopes he doesn't mind but when he was away she went through his things and organized them nicely, including his papers. There is something that she found folded in his jacket pocket that she has always kept. Remember how he left that day without even taking his jacket with him? It was on the back of the kitchen chair. She points to it, the very one.

And the papers, she says, They were in the pocket.

He looks at the first page and sees it is the articles of incorporation with regard to the
business enterprise hereinafter referred to by its trading name as “LION MOTORS PTY. LTD.” or “Lion Motors”
, and that changes have been made to the text in pen, initialled by three parties and signed at the bottom of each by same.

Memories. He turns the contract over quickly. The stuff underneath is all ads scissored neatly from the weekend papers and from barbershop magazines like
Radio Fun Time
and
Polisie Nuus
and
He Man Monthly
. Full- or half-page ads, none smaller. Each with a vast photograph of vast Hugo, and his arms, in one, are widespread like some overweight Jesus in a three-piece with silky lining.
RADIATORS? IT'S A BLOWOUT! CARBS, SHOCKS, SPARKS? WE GOT “EM” ALL AS “GOOD AS NEW” OR MY NAME'S NOT BLEZNIK!!!
There were photos of parts in what looked like a warehouse and salesmen behind a counter. Convenient parking located on De La Ray Street. Three other locations. The company name stops him: Bleznik AutoMetals.

When he looks up Mame is leaning over the table. I spoke with Mr. Rothstein.

Who?

The lawyer.

Isaac's nose twitches; he sits back.

Hope you don't mind.

Isaac says nothing.

He says if it was the same what the firm had to start, the what-you-call-them, assets, then half, more, is yours.

He doesn't look at her.

—Yitzchok?

He stands up. —Don't talk to me about this. I don't want to see this again.

Where you going?

That night he finds a crowded snooker hall in Jeppe that serves only house beer by the pitcher. Two hours later the police arrive to bright blood on the green tables, broken cues, splintered teeth lying where flung billiard balls sit on the vomitory carpet. Isaac is released with a warning and dropped off at emergency where they give him an X-ray and a dozen stitches to close the gash across his knuckles and a package of painkillers. He proposes to one nurse and gets kicked by another for sticking his hand up her skirt.

It's dawn when he comes in through the back door at home, easing the door closed quietly before seeing Gitelle asleep upright in a kitchen chair, waiting for him. He looks at her in the pale blue light through the window: she is sitting with her chair against the counter and her head leaned sideways resting against the bottom of the wall cabinet, her one arm flat on the counter and her other folded over her lap, her eyes closed and mouth slightly open. He stands without moving, watching her for a long time. She is wearing a white nightgown and her plump feet are like small bricks in the slippers beneath its hem. He watches the way her chest lifts so slightly with every inhalation, how her lips blow outward with the opposite. The shallowness of her fluttering life. Under the hair clipped down, her plain unhandsome mutilated face in its heavy stillness seems dense as thick leather, a thing of flesh made for enduring. How much that tough face has had to take from this life of hers and how she was here, now, waiting for him and only him.

He cannot look anymore and turns away. To stop the mewling sounds that come up his throat he jams fingers between his teeth. A part of him wants to rip the stitches off his other hand, to bleed as he should. He grips the door frame to stop that hand moving and he watches her, his fingers aching in the squeezing teeth.

The very least you could do for her. The very least, you traitor scum.

ON THE MORNING
that Isaac has his stitches removed he puts on his best khaki trousers and nicely ironed tan shirt plus a good hat and takes a short bus ride up to Vrededorp. This is the headquarters of Bleznik AutoMetals and says so in red letters on a white sign six foot tall. The building takes up a block of its own on De La Ray Street, made of yellow brick and with green sliding doors in front and a big walled yard behind. When Isaac asks the lady with spectacles to see the man himself, he is told Mr. Bleznik is not immediately available. Maybe the manager, a Mr. Teasedale, could be of some assistance?

—That's all right. I'll wait for Bleznik.

—It could be a long time, sir. What is it that's your problem exactly?

—The problem isn't mine, Isaac says. You tell Bleznik that Malan is here. Malan from the Receiver of Revenue's office. Tell him if I don't see him as soon as possible, I'm not the one who'll regret it. You understand?

—Yes sir, certainly.

They show him up carpeted stairs to an office where he stands looking down through barred windows onto the open yard where wrecked automobiles are piled in stacks such as he remembers so well. There is a crane below, farther out a crusher and several parked two-ton trucks. In half an hour there are steps and a voice behind him that seems not to have been changed by the passage of the war years. —Would you like to sit down, Mr. Malan?

Without turning around, Isaac says,—I reckon you the one should be sitting down for this, Mr. Bleznik.

—Ha ha, says the voice. Well let's have a cuppie tea should we? And you can call me—

Isaac has his hat off, facing around. —Hugo. I know.

Hugo is more tanned and fleshier, his stomach and the fat under his chin have grown and his face has a good rich buttery shine to it and his clothes are soft and well cut, fitting his thick body tightly, a dark blue suit and a striped tie, a smooth hat matching the shade of the suit, no hatband.

Of course the face does not cease its grinning but Isaac sees the flicker behind it as if a light is being briefly dimmed behind a curtain; then it shines again even brighter. —Boyki! Holy fuckerolee! Come here man!

He advances with arms spread for a hug into his soft bulk that goes on and on, the flats of his hands thumping Isaac so much that when he speaks his voice vibrates. —Oright, oright, easy. I survived the war, what a you tryna finish me off now?

Hugo pushes him back, hands on his shoulders. Isaac can just see the shape of a chunky gold watch under his left eye, the bright gems marking the dial. —Tiger, you thin as a stick but I tell you what, I'd hate to get a klup from you—your muscles are like bladey rocks man! . . . What the hell you tell them downstairs, Malan from Revenue, you tryna give old Blezzy heart failure man! Cheeky bugger, I should throttle you. Since how long have you been back?

—A few months.

—Months! Why in hell didn't you ring me up straightaway?

Isaac smiles.

—Come on, says Bleznik. Let me take you out for the biggest steak you ever had in your life. You need some vleis on your bones, I say.

He starts for the door but Isaac drifts calmly in front of it. —Couple things I'd like to chat on first, Hugo.

—Ja man, absolutely. Let's go ta lunch and you can fire away.

—Not right away, says Isaac.

—What, you don't believe in free lunches? Ha ha. Don't worry Tiger, it's all on Blezzy.

—That's generous of you, Hugo.

Hugo puts his hand past Isaac, to the doorknob. Isaac catches it in a friendly fashion. —Maybe talk a little business first hey.

Hugo hesitates. Isaac's grip pulses ever so slightly.

—Why not hey? says Hugo.

—Exactly, says Isaac.

 

Hugo is full of good news: it starts hosing out of him before he's even sat behind the desk. That Isaac has absolutely nothing to worry about even though he knows Isaac must be concerned, nothing to worry about at all.

Isaac doesn't sit. He leans his shoulder on the wall beside the window, says: —Why would I be worried?

—Listen, Hugo says. I look after my friends, ask anyone. You tell me what job you'd like and you got it, hunned percent. Sit. Siddown.

—Job, says Isaac.

—Absolutely, name it. You want to run this yard, it's yours. Hugo Bleznik doesn't forget his friends.

—A steak
and
a job, says Isaac. I think you overdoing it.

—Hey?

Isaac looks out the window. He straightens the fingers of his left hand and rubs the fingernails with the ball of his thumb. —I seen your ad there in the paper. Doing well hey.