I feel a keen, primal thrill. I run down to the low white viewing wall between tarmac and sea. I lean out over the gaping drop to the old harbour below. I see the professor standing on the harbour wall. The whale flips up its fluke as if bidding the professor hallo. The professor swivels his head and squints up (at me?) before sinking into his deckchair again. I feel he was mocking me:
Convex hull? Why can’t you see the world without turning it into a metaphor?
Only now does the whale crier’s horn sound and tourists give up their place in the queue in front of a pink ice-cream van, leave off their curio hunting in the market, and abandon their fish and chips in the Burgundy to flock to the viewing wall.
I turn to wave goodbye to Phoenix. But he’s gone.
I feel jilted amid this circus of foreign jabbering.
S
EA POINT, CAPE TOWN
. Dusk.
On the beachfront a band of wheezing, floppy-jowled old men in deckchairs blow a slow, slurred Dixie tune. A madman conducts with a frenetic chopstick. One lone vampire tooth juts randomly out of his jaw.
Zero, Canada Dry and Dove Bait go reservoir-dog-style over the road: their feet swing all loose and jazzy.
Jabulani lags a few beats behind, like the old men falling behind the pace tapped out by the vampire.
Then Phoenix follows after, his eyes panning for unforeseen flak.
Outside the door a beggar jingles coins in a tin. The coins sing:
Where do carp dart? Where do carp dart?
Zero digs his hands into his pockets and drops a coin into the tin.
The beggar foretells a myriad virgins for Zero as if he’s on a
jihad
. Zero laughs. And flips him another coin.
In the dim hallway a whore pouts gaudy lips and flashes a secret snatch of skirt skin.
Dove Bait lapses into a charmed daze.
Zero pinches his ear.
– Focus, man. You’ll get us shot if your eyes detour.
The lift smells of piss and Jeyes Fluid. Zero holds the lift till Phoenix catches up. Phoenix draws an Uzi out of his kit bag. Compared to this stubby spitfire-demon of a gun, Zero’s Colt is just a popgun.
– No shooting to kill, Zero intones. We go in. We teach them a lesson. We let them feel pain but survive. If they die, they learn zilch.
Dove Bait nods in awe of Zero’s profound logic.
Canada Dry jokes:
– Yes, sir. May I wipe off the blackboard after class, sir?
– But this is radical. There has to be another way, Jabulani pleads.
– Teacherman, what
they
do is radical, tunes Zero. This is not just slitting a fish and flinging it into a pan while its heart’s still beating. This is not just cooping a dog in a birdcage or hacking the fin off a shark for soup. Monkeys are just a notch away from being
human
.
His thumb and finger, two inches from Jabulani’s nose, measure out that notch.
– But to shoot ...
– This is the way to deal with monkey-gobblers.
– Why not call the police?
Canada Dry and Dove Bait laugh and shake their heads as if this is a damn good joke.
– We have to take the law into our own hands. It’s a war out there and the police are as outfooted as the Americans in Nam.
– But it’s not your war. What has this to do with you? With your wife or your son?
– When they hurt an animal or a child, they hurt me. I feel it in my bones. So it is my war. You see?
He hands Jabulani a handgun.
– I’ve never had a gun in my hand. I’m against violence.
Jabulani does not confess to his bid to kill a dazed sheep with a stone.
– I have always told my students ...
– You and Gandhi. And they shot him. But Mandela gave his nod to violence when there was no other way. And unfortunately, there are men who understand just this one language.
The
pinging
of the lift ends the dialogue. Again Jabulani hangs a few yards behind.
Zero halts in front of door number 113 and signals like a Nam jarhead for Jabulani to catch up.
Beyond the door they hear men laughing and joking in a sing-songy foreign lingo.
Over the lintel a gecko eyes a moth’s frenzied orbiting of a light bulb.
Zero nods at Canada Dry and Canada Dry back-pedals a few steps. Zero and Dove Bait draw their pistols from their pockets. Phoenix levels his Uzi.
The gecko zips after the moth. Moth wings flicker from his gob.
Canada hurls himself at the door like a rugby forward bent on barging his way over the try line. The door cracks and Canada Dry falls into the next filmic shot.
– This jig is up, yells Zero.
He swings his Colt as if he’s a marine on camera.
Eyes gape, gobs call out to pagan gods, hands flutter haphazardly as bullets sing over the round table with that gory thing at the hub.
A monkey-gobbler draws a Black Star pistol and aims at Jabulani.
Jabulani puts up his hands.
Zero shoots that monkey-gobbler in the collarbone. The Black Star spins out of his hands and blood spits like gust-flung dandelion darts.
Canada Dry, still down on the floor, stalks after the fallen Black Star.
The shot monkey-gobbler sinks to his knees.
Canada Dry’s stoked with gun:
Waha!
Chinese pistol!
Another monkey-gobbler slides a tinted glass door ajar and hops onto the balcony wall.
There’s a hiatus as all characters freeze (Jabulani’s hands still up in the air). The soundtrack goes dead. There’s an unscripted camaraderie to their staring at that comical figure see-sawing on the wall.
Then he’s gone and they all flinch for the clichéd silver-screen yowl:
Yet the man falls soundlessly.
The most curious thing about this silence is that the scalped monkey (surrounded by half a dozen monkey-gobblers) is still thinking with the brain they were about to spoon out of his skull and he sends an unworldly whine into it.
And Jabulani’s hands fall and his spine folds as his mind fades to black.
H
ERMANUS OLD HARBOUR. JUST
after dusk.
The professor is dozing on a deckchair under a sun-faded beach umbrella on the wall of the old harbour. He has guyed the umbrella down to stones with fraying string. The dog-eared paperback in his hands has lost its cover: either a short book or a torn-out sliver of a longer book.
Moonfleet’s barks wake him.
He scowls at me.
– You.
– Yes. That a novella you reading?
– Honed and bare-boned.
– Hemingway?
– Camus.
The Outsider
.
– I thought he wrote
The Stranger
.
– Same book.
– That’s a loophole in my reading.
– Gist is: white guy shoots an Arab.
I recall being sent to a fancy
white
school in Cape Town when we came from Amsterdam. On paper apartheid had been dead for two years (since Mandela was freed in 1990), but the other boys gawped at me. To them I was an alien. My name did not conform. They had no pigeonhole in their head for a half Jew, half Muslim. In the schoolyard they called me
dirty Arab
. On the athletics track I lapped them. I licked them hollow and mute. But in the schoolyard the baiting went on for another two years, until Mandela was voted in.
– So why’d he shoot that Arab. Revenge?
– Not revenge. Nor any other kind of rancour. He hated no one. And he loved no one. That Arab just happened to be on the beach at the same time.
– That’s hardly a crime.
– Was for dark folk in South Africa, not long ago.
– So he just shot him in cold blood?
– No. The sun fucked with his head.
– You can’t blame the sun.
He stares out beyond me and I realise he’s remembering again the way the sea ravaged his wife.
I think I’ve lost him, but then he says:
– Was it not the sun that illuminated that girl for you?
I am stumped by this. He saw me see her. How does he travel unseen along the path? Swing through the milkwood
bundu
like some kind of spider monkey?
– I’d have fallen for her anyway.
– She’s just a girl. The sun tricked you.
– She’s beautiful. Not in the fake way of flick girls, but somehow innately beautiful.
– You love that word.
Beautiful
. A beautiful dog. A beautiful girl. What is beautiful? What are your yardsticks? Is all life not beautiful? Was that Zimbabwean they killed not beautiful? Is my sun-wizened face not beautiful? Why do you need to label things? This is good. This is evil. This is beautiful. This is not.
– But you must see that she’s an angel. Her skin’s flawless.
I just so happen to have the milky, unsunned skin of her breasts in mind.
He laughs.
– And her eyes are magic. They’re this sublime, lagoony blue-green. I think you’d call it viridian.
– Viridian’s more green than blue. You more Arab than Jew?
– My father’s half Malay, half Cuban. My mother’s a Jew.
I drift in reverie. Recall the day Miriam fired Zero’s Colt to scare baboons from a picnic we had on Noordhoek beach. The shot spooked a horse that threw its rider. And I thought: This could never happen in Amsterdam.
– All I see is a girl. All I see is a man dead. Why call her an angel? Why call him a refugee?
This old professor must have left his students reeling. I want to tell him you have to label things to get by ... but I’d sound like my old man, wouldn’t I? Yet it’s hard to deny labels are handy. My father’s
coloured
. So am I. Just less so, if such a thing can be measured.
I recall learning in school that a crude yardstick in the old Cape for finding out if a man was coloured was to put a pencil in his hair. If he shook his head and it fell out, he wasn’t.
– So they condemned him, then? The guy who shot the Arab?
– They condemned him, in the end, for not crying when his mother died. And for putting milk in his coffee. That’s the fucked-up thing about this world. They damn you for random, irrelevant things. For the tint of your skin. For being gay. For being Zimbabwean.
I just stand there wondering if I will cry at my mother’s funeral.
C
APE TOWN. NIGHT.
Jabulani studies the things in Jerusalem’s room. A pansy-shell fossil. A cricket bat. An old guitar, the rim sheen worn away by years of strumming. A row of books: Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
, Camus’s
The Stranger
(no sign of him having read it), Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
(a first printing from 1954 with a guineafowl feather tucked in it), Paton’s
Cry, the Beloved Country
(an old copy pinched from a school library), Mda’s
Ways of Dying
(pages warped from falling into liquid ... perhaps the pool, or the sea) and (inevitably) Coetzee’s
Disgrace
(subtle cracks of the spine).
No books by South Americans or Indians. Maybe he took them along to that town by the sea. He finds it curious that the books are free of annotations ... just yellowed by time and perfumed with dust.
Zero, Canada Dry, Dove Bait and Jabulani study a map on the kitchen table. An array of glasses tells the story of a long night.
Phoenix gazes out the window at Miriam dancing a
t’ai chi
waltz in the moonlight. She weaves among her colony of gnomes with an unseen wind-lover. The gnomes smile at his fiddling with her skirt. They smile at the smile he conjures from her lips. They smile at the yellow ghost snake (the memory of a hosepipe) winding through the yard to the empty pool.
– The girls get caught by the
gumagumas
on the border.
Zero’s finger travels south from Limpopo province to Bloemfontein in the old Orange Free State.
– Then they end up in a brothel, or get sold as maids. There’s no register of such a girl. She can vanish without the world blinking an eyelid.
He blows through his lips.
Poof.
– My man in Polokwane took these shots.
He scatters photos of a girl bundled into a Cherokee.
– Just yesterday afternoon. Fake licence. But check this out.
Zero holds up a blurred shot he’d radically zoomed into. Part of a blurred garage logo:
TOLK
-.
– Folk? Jabulani wonders.
– No.
Tolk
.
– Turns out there’s just one garage beginning with Tolk – in this country. Tolkien Jeeps in Bloemfontein. And there’s just two Jeep Cherokees on their books. One belongs to a butcher. The other to a farmer. One of them’s going down. I figure it’s the farmer. The butcher shop’s in downtown Bloem. Too tricky to hide a girl. Besides, the butcher’s never the evil guy in a crime novel. Too tacky.
They all laugh, other than Jabulani and Phoenix.
– So this too is your war? Jabulani taunts.
– You’re learning, teacher, Zero laughs.
He focuses on the map again.
– I have to figure out how to find this farm.
Jabulani studies the lurid pink scar in the V of his hand.
– What about the story I told you guys? What about Ghost Cowboy and Jonas and that girl on the marijuana farm?
– I have to get this girl out. We go tonight. Then we’ll figure out how to catch your cowboy ghost. And we’ll find that ox-head on a post.
– What post? Dove Bait wonders.
– You tell, Zero nods to Jabulani.
– You see, the skull of an ox impaled on a pole marks the dirt road to the marijuana farm where they held me captive. There’s no other sign.
Jabulani wonders if she’s surviving, the girl he howled at. He wonders if another Zimbabwean has had his corpse flipped from the flatbed of the truck into the croc pond. He wonders if they still play football at dusk and if old Jonas still
pangas
a watermelon to sweeten their bitter lot. And if he thinks Jabulani forgot.
He walks out into the moon-silvered yard. Miriam’s cat zeroes in on him. She rubs her leopardy fur against his shins, as his cat did. He gathers this cat in his hands and combs his fingers through her hair. She stares turquoise eyes at him.
Miriam abandons her dance. Now she sees this hitherto unseen stranger through the eyes of her cat.