Exit Laughing (23 page)

Whenever Sout and I entered the shed, Sol gaily summoned us to the head of the line. “Boots!
Mishpocheh!
” he’d shout joyfully, favoring family over the several other boys who,
like me, had been sent to supervise the servants. He snatched away the hen I carried in my arms and hefted it upside down, judging its weight of blood. He particularly relished this act because he knew that the poor fowl was something of a pet to me—I tended the chickens we raised from chicks in our backyard pen—and that inspired him to an extra dash of glee as he cut its throat.

If the hen laughed, I was too dismayed hear it. I had to watch while the last drop was drained from the convulsed carcass. Kosher law, as Sol never tired of reminding me, demanded that all the meat be bloodless. When at last I staggered from the shed, my throat was choked with suppressed puke. But Sout was unperturbed. “It’s kosher, baas,” he’d say serenely, hoisting the headless birds.

Sol was not only the town’s shokhet, but also its principal
mohel
, or male circumciser. It was he who had slit my baby foreskin to honor Abraham’s covenant with Jehovah, and every time I saw him, in the shed or at family get-togethers, my scrotum clenched. He used a different knife for circumcisions, of course, but in my nightmares I fancied he was cutting my tiny penis with his heavy shokhet’s blade, before tossing my prepuce into his slop pail, along with the chicken heads.

Like his older brother, my grandfather, Mathew, Uncle Sol had ended up in Africa after a series of misadventures. In the great wave of migration at the turn of the twentieth century, millions fled Europe’s familiar homelands for a variety of far-flung destinations, often as alien as the moon in their provincial experience. My grandpa, for instance, never really understood how he’d come to settle in a remote corner of the
so-called Dark Continent, but Sol seemed to know exactly where he was and why. “I’m in
sheissland
,” he said, “because the Lord,
baruch Hashem
, thinks that I’m a turd—and he has to be right, isn’t it so?” In a final twist, the Lord had seen fit to condemn him to a life of ritual butchery.

All in all, the community didn’t quite know what to make of Uncle Sol. On the one hand he smelled of stale blood, despite the harsh carbolic soap he used to scrub his hands and arms, and his jokes were often off-color or just plain rude. He delighted in pricking pretensions, particularly the Jews’ precarious status as “honorary whites” in a racist culture. “Jews are Asians,” he declared bluntly. “If Israel is our Holy Land, we can’t rightly claim to be Europeans.” In their cultural confusion, he said, “The Yids hereabouts blunder around like farts in a pickle barrel.”

On the other hand, Sol was a noted scholar, a role long appreciated by Jews. The local rabbi regularly consulted him on the interpretation of passages in the Torah for his Sabbath sermons. Sol had the Talmud and its multitudinous commentaries at his fingertips, plus the writings of major Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, his favorite. “As RamBam [Maimonides] said, ‘Only in the days of the Messiah will we know what the metaphors mean …’ ”

At the family Passover Seder, hosted by Grandpa, these opposite aspects of Sol’s character collided. Learned disquisitions upon the meaning of exile for the Jews were interrupted by a barrage of sly anecdotes about family members, plus the odd questionable joke. One moment he was quoting Gershon Scholem—“ ‘Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its
nature a theory of catastrophe.’ That’s to say, Jerusalem is far more inspiring for our people as an aspiration rather than a reality …”—and the next moment he’d sideslip into gossip about who was
shtupping
who in the community, within and without wedlock. He countered outraged protests with his ritual retort, “cashmere in
tochas
,” a play on Yiddish
kush mir in tochas
, “kiss my ass”—a jibe against the genteel pretensions of “honorary whites.” Veering between esteem and disgrace, Sol kept everyone off-balance.

Another of Sol’s unsettling quirks was his rare fluency in Ndebele, the local African language. Most whites spoke to their servants in Fanagalo or “kitchen kaffir,” a kind of pidgin baby talk that made every speaker sound infantile. My grandpa, for example, often jumbled English, pidgin, Afrikaans, and Yiddish in one sentence: “O put
lo manzi und voetsek der hund
.” Translation: Take the dog outside and give it some water. Announcing litigation involving a business rival, he declared, “I am bringing against him a suitcase.” Sol, by contrast, favored polyglot curses, including Yiddish
mamzer
(bastard), Ndebele
masatanyoko
(motherfucker), and English
shit-brains
.

When whites heard Sol chatting to the Africans in their native tongue, they were uncomfortable, as if he were breaching some unwritten code of nonfraternization. “If you talk to your slaves as if they were people, they may soon stop being slaves,” he said. He claimed that truly successful colonizations depended on the absolute destruction of the native culture, either literally as in North America, or figuratively as in South America. “In our area we haven’t quite accomplished that—not for want of trying!” Sol said. “So Africa will soon
shrug us off, kosher and unkosher whites together, like fleas on a dog.”

My feelings about Sol began to change as I grew into my teens. Through the fog of my childish revulsion at his manner and his trade, I began to recognize a truly extraordinary personality, one who might open my eyes to the world beyond our remote corner. After my bar mitzvah, I began to hang around the shokhet shed, hoping Sol would have time to sit down and chat with me. Many afternoons I waited by the door to his small apartment behind the shed until he returned from
Mincha
, the afternoon prayer session at the synagogue. He’d soon appear, carrying his worn blue velvet bag containing his yellowing prayer shawl and much-thumbed Torah that looked as if they had been handed down through the ages.

At first I was anxious about violating his fierce privacy, but he put me at ease with a cheery, “Shalom, Nephew! Welcome to my palace.” His welcome was a momentous privilege for, so far as I knew, I was the only family member ever allowed into his
palace
, a marvelously shabby place submerged in a sea of books and papers, with islands cleared for his bed and desk. I imagined my mom’s horror if she’d ever been allowed to view such splendid chaos; sight unseen, she pronounced it a pigsty. “I modeled my hovel on Karl Marx’s study,” Sol explained. “The man drowned in books. Fortunately, unlike him, I’m not plagued by boils on my bottom.”

I’d sit on the unmade bed, the only place to perch, while he settled into the hard wooden chair at his desk a few feet away. To put me at ease, he removed his battered felt fedora,
leaving his
kippah
to ride his springy salt-and-pepper brush like a small boat in wild waves. He usually stayed very still for a long moment while a gentle silence cloaked us both, calming my habitual fidgetiness. Then he’d begin to speak in a soft, almost caressing deep basso—the rough murmur of an aerial spirit swooping over oceans of wit and learning. He roamed from Abraham of Ur to Karl Marx, “from the ancestral father to the modern renegade son,” a span of close to six millennia, practically the entire history of civilization. Sol claimed that at the end of his life, Marx, grandson of a revered rabbi, had returned to his ancestral faith, an act confirmed by shaving off his iconic beard. “As the proverb says, ‘Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.’ ”

As I listened, the thirsty sponge of my mind soaked up every syllable of Sol’s talk. His wide knowledge and rich experience were a revelation to me, just as I was beginning to challenge the narrow local attitudes and assumptions of my colonial homeland. Day by day my soggy brain seemed to literally swell within the carapace of my skull. Sure, I didn’t really grasp a fraction of his wisdom, but the amazing sweep and generosity of his intellect excited me beyond imagining. What a world out there awaited my discovery! So much to know; so much to do and feel and think …

After a session with Sol, my head buzzed so much I found it hard to sleep. “That man is making you
meshugah
,” my mother grumbled. “I want to be crazy,” I retorted. “Crazy’s the only way to be!”

Though I was fourteen when these sessions began, and he was in his seventies, Sol always treated me as an equal, man-to-man.
As a mark of our newfound closeness, he stopped calling me “Boots.” In effect, he became my best friend, and I think I was his sole comrade, his only truly devoted ear.

As my love and admiration for him grew, I puzzled endlessly over the seeming contradictions in my granduncle’s character. How could a man be simultaneously so intellectually refined and so thoroughly vulgar? Slowly it dawned on me that his high intelligence and his low wit were sides of the same coin. “
Hashem
boasts, ‘Heads I win, tails you lose,’ ” he said, implying that for us the Creator’s cosmos presents a rigged toss of the penny—an everlastingly confounding metaphor only the tardy Messiah could ever explain.

One of the oddest quirks in Sol’s character was his passion for shooting game, rare for a Jew of his generation and origin. However, he told me that, as a boy, he’d hunted pheasants, ducks, and wild hares in the Ukrainian countryside with his father “to supplement the family pot.” Back then, he said, his only gun was an ancient shotgun dating back to the Crimean War. “If you weren’t careful, the
ferkakte
thing could blow your face off.” Now he favored a bolt-action British Army Lee Enfield rifle, “the most reliable point-three-o-three ever manufactured,” suitable for bringing down large antelopes such as kudu, his favorite target. Also, the gun was “handy to stop a leopard or a charging lion.”

Since Sol preferred to hunt at night, we’d set out at dusk in his old Chevy saloon with its battered body and several missing floorboards. The rattletrap’s flickering headlights cut a narrow tunnel along the strip of road whizzing by just under
my shoes. Deep in the bush we made camp under a blaze of stars surrounding the Southern Cross—in Sol’s graphic phrase, “a crucifix awaiting the Redeemer.” Around midnight we fastened hunting lamps to our foreheads, he hefted his rifle, and we plunged into the silvered shadows of the luminous dark, following our twin beams.

Every so often Sol, leading the way, halted in his tracks and cocked an ear. “Listen, listen,” he hissed, and I tried to mimic the intensity of his attention. Sometimes we heard a leopard cough or the brush of an owl’s wings followed by a small scream as it nailed its prey. Then, suddenly, a pair of bright eyes might appear, transfixed by our headlamps. Judging its height off the ground, Sol reckoned it was some kind of antelope, perhaps a favored kudu. Leveling his rifle, he took careful aim.

The gun exploded—a crash of thunder and lightning in all that darkness. The recoil staggered Sol, and it was a moment before he could ascertain whether the bullet had hit home. Most times it hadn’t; but when it had, we rushed to the spot to find the dying beast. More in sorrow than in triumph, Sol put another bullet into its skull to end its agony. Sometimes he allowed me to take a shot at a buck, but the heavy gun’s painful kick threw me off, and I never bagged anything but a bruised shoulder.

On the trek back to our camp, Sol would revert to his jokey persona. If we glimpsed a pack of scavenging hyenas, he’d repeat the corny quip: “A hyena only copulates once a year, so why the hell is it laughing?” Somehow his patter made the African night less strange, and I snuggled in my sleeping
bag beside the banked fire, listening to Sol ruminating about one thing or another, such as the belief that in southern Africa early human beings appeared many thousands of years ago, way before they colonized Europe. “If we open our ears all the way, we may hear an echo of those folk, who first began to wonder about their fate under the heavens …” Soothed by his hypnotic murmur, my drowsy mind slipped away into the deep silence of the dark.

In the morning, if we’d made a kill, Sol stopped off at a nearby kraal to tell the Africans where the carcass lay so they could retrieve it for themselves. “They need the protein more than we do,” he explained. The deal was that the villagers provided him with a portion of sun-dried
biltong
(jerky), a treat we both enjoyed.

On the ride home Sol invariably exclaimed, “So,
chaver
, do you still wonder I could die laughing?” His high-hearted gaiety resonated with many undertones: his delight in the wild glory of the bush and the thrill of the hunt, muted by the darker shades of the slaughter we had shared, along with the sardonic irony of his accidental exile in
sheissland
, an epithet he reserved for colonial Rhodesia rather than the Africa he revered. In those moments, I came close to crying out that I sympathized in my own callow way, that I loved him more than I could say, but I was too shy. Anyway, his fond scowl as he squinted at the road seemed to say, “I know, my friend, I know.”

When I finished school and was about to leave for university in Cape Town, a long way away, Sol invited me for one last
visit to his place. As usual, we sat in silence for a while, but this time Sol did not ease into a monologue. Rather, he let the quiet run on for many minutes, as if there were no words to express what we both felt about the separation. He was a vital part of my life, and I could hardly imagine a world without his close presence; in truth, it was a little scary. How would I survive “out there” without his constant reminder to “listen, listen”? At the last moment, a dreadful thought popped into my mind: Would he actually slit his own throat someday and “die laughing”? Or would it remain a mocking metaphor? I wanted to ask him, but my tongue didn’t dare form the question.

As it happened, Sol did slit his throat. He was diagnosed with a spreading Stage IV prostate cancer, and in those days it was untreatable. Rather than suffer the agonies of a slow demise, he lay down on the floor of his shed and, in my mom’s blunt summation, “he did to himself what he’d done to a million chickens”—a kind of kosher quietus. If I listened intently, as he’d trained me to do, I imagined I could hear the echo of his laughter at “the biggest joke of all, my life.”