The Lion Seeker (15 page)

—This, says Hugo Bleznik, is Miracle Glow.

Isaac looks again. A little wheel, dull green.

—Miracle Glow, says Hugo. Shines in the dark. Forever. No electric, no battery. Same stuff what they painting now on the hands on special watches like your father I'm sure would know, bless him. This green stuff, it eats sunlight. Then at night it shines it back. Miracle Glow, latest from America, and I am telling you it is a killer. A stone killer.

Isaac looks up and almost pulls back from the feeling in the blue eyes, the ruddy crinkling flesh around them.

—A killer, says Hugo. Think on the savings. Whatever needs a light. A coupla strips of Miracle Glow instead. Think, where is it there is no light ? You realize, not here, the city. No.
Out there
.

Isaac looks at the wall Hugo has lashed at. —There?

—The platteland. The open bladey country, man. Home on the bladey range. Where you breathe proper. Where our good Afrikaner friends is grafting day and night to feed this nation, bless their busy little hearts and hands.

—Hey?

—Stay with me, tiger. Think a farm, any farm. Fences, wheelbarrows, chop machines.

—Chop what?

—Ach, whichever. The point is no
electricity
.

The bill comes. Isaac presents his half-crown. Is refused by Hugo Bleznik, Esquire. —Absolutely no ways. But I want you to listen to this. Tiger.

—Ukay.

—Serious business. A proposition.

Isaac looks down at the dull green wheel on the lush cloth.

—Serious business, says Hugo Bleznik.

IT'S FATE, IT'S A MIRACLE
. Reap a fortune from Miracle Glow. There are historic opportunities and your son, he has blundered into one: the luck of youth, how it is to be envied. Without Hugo behind these words, Isaac knows his life would have collapsed; but Hugo is there in the night to do all the talking to both parents, to win them to his entrepreneurial cause. It's like when Isaac was expelled from high school, which his parents still don't know: he tells them he's left Morris Brothers voluntarily and, as with school, his mother is all for the move, the risk, the new venture, but his father is long-faced and calls a conference in the shut bedroom. Only Rively deviates from the pattern, not hovering in the passage; she's in the kitchen laughing aloud to Hugo's stories with an open packet of Marie biscuits between them.

His father with his long hands tucked into the front of his work apron, his Adam's apple bobbing with every swallow: You were supposed to be learning the trenshport, that business, something with cars, your favourite. You only just got going there at Morris.

Mame: Didn't you hear the man? Once in a life can get such a chance.

God gives chances, not sales reps.

You're the one who bought from him. How many pounds for a few few little piggish cloths!

Ach!

Don't ach. If he learns anything, Isaac can learn how to do
that
.

That's not a trade for Isaac.

Who is to say? Let him learn how to sell.

Isaac watches his father turn to him. —Nu? Yitzchok? Vos daynks du?

—I wanna go, Da. Wanna learn.

And what happened with cars, which I know how much you love? I can still talk to Ginzburg, to be a mechanic.

Mame asks no one why it is that Abel wants so badly for his son to be a shvitzer, an arbeiter, all his life. A sweater. A labourer. A Stupid (maybe even a bladerfool) is the final designation she does not have to say aloud.

Let him have this chance for something else, she says.

Is it really what you want, Isaac? This? This bit of nonsense? The roll of tape is in his hands, being turned, shaken like an accused. Earlier, Hugo had given a demonstration of Miracle Glow, switching off all the lights at number fifty-two Buxton Street, telling them in the dark to watch, watch now as he unveils the truly miraculous, a sight their eyes will neither believe nor ever be able to forget.

In truth Isaac has to admit to himself that he was not quite as overwhelmed as he'd expected to be. When Hugo, muttering in the darkness like some pagan wizard issuing incantations over an unholy ritual, had removed the dishcloth covering the strips of Miracle Glow he'd applied to the kitchen table, what was revealed was not so much a glow per se but a rather meagre smear of luminescence, certainly nothing like the burning bars of molten lime that had lived in Isaac's imagination till that moment. But it seemed that Hugo's personality had made up in glow what the product seemed to lack; Mame seemed satisfied when the lights came back on, and even Tutte had been slowly nodding with his eyebrows lifted. Not bad, he'd said. A good idea.

But in the closed room afterwards, the good idea has become nonsense and pech, a shtik drek, a piece of crap, this puny roll of tape in his long fingers, not something that his son should dedicate himself to purveying to Afrikaner farmers, what is the point?

Mame shakes her head. Even a blinder can see the point. This can become a big business.

And if your eyes are too big, Abel says, sometimes you miss what's in front of you. Then with a sigh he limps out of the room while Mame gives Isaac his victor's hug. Looking over her shoulder at the blank wall, bound inside her strong arms, Isaac is thinking how sorry he is, how one day she will find out about this new lie he's told about leaving Morris Brothers. But then again, Mame has her own secrets, doesn't she? Probably everyone has.

 

Just five days after the teahouse meeting, Isaac is on the road with Hugo Bleznik, Esquire, cruising the northern Transvaal in Hugo's big black Opel P4. The boot of the Opel so full that it hangs its dragging steel arse, unscrolling red dust from the unpaved rural tracks they take to tinroof farmhouses where often a leathern old matriarch squats on the stoep rocking chair, shotgun close to hand. In their stiff new black suits (collected gratis from an Indian tailor on Fourteenth Street who owed Hugo a favour), they pay visits to Boers on horseback in the mielie fields, overlooking the toiling Blacks in their rags and broken sandals. These horseback farmers have leopard-skin hatbands and the thumbs they use to prop up the brims are hardly smaller than the heads of ball-peen hammers. And Hugo knows how to talk to them all. He has some guiding sense that is a mystery to Isaac. How he catches the right mood at once, the right word. Isaac is silent—the magician's assistant. He carries boxes and he holds the lightproof camera blanket that they use as part of their act, getting the potential buyers to put their heads under to witness the Miracle Glow, to see the Miracle of its Glowing with their own two eyes. No kerosene, no battery, no electricity—forever. A one-time investment. The savings unimaginable. Put it on fence rails, put it on gates. On vehicles. Along roadsides so you won't go off in some bladey ditch and bust your neck. Hell, stick some stripes on the backs of your kaffirs to keep tabs on them in the night ha ha ha.

They make their individual sales on the farms and sleep over in the dorps, the tiny country towns, where they always visit the local gazette, if there is one, to win some free press for their product. Also, at the local general store, almost always run by a fellow Jew, they make sure to drop off a box of Miracle Glow on consignment, to collect on the way back.

Isaac's Afrikaans improves through necessity. Ja, there are Greyshirt bastards like Oberholzer, but he is also amazed by the hospitality they are accorded here in the Afrikaner heartland. These pious chutaysim are steeped in the Old Testament and Jews often hold a fascination for them bordering on awe. Hugo genially exploits this phenomenon without hesitation, muttering Hebrew prayers or even on occasion producing a set of tefillin, invoking cryptic benedictions of good luck on one arid stretch of farmland after another, in this time of the drought that obsesses every conversation. The dry air, the dry sky, the desiccated crops.

New experiences accrue. Isaac learns the taste and crunch of morning bacon with his eggs (so this is what those strange banners of reddish meat were on the laden table at The Castle that morning). Once, he kisses a bucktoothed farm girl he bumps into on the way to the outhouse. She feels sorry for him, touching the grey bruise still rimming his eye socket. The bucktoothed girl is blond and tall and smells of the earth; it makes him think of Yvonne The Princess, and his heart dims a bit in him, that she is so far away and not merely in distance.

Another time he watches Hugo sell a box of Miracle Glow to a family who are eating boiled potatoes and salt and sitting on upturned pails around a table made of crates covered by newspaper. The wind is musical in holes rusted through the corrugated iron walls, the cracked glass shudders in the windowpanes. Hugo makes the rolls of Miracle Glow seem like powerful totems of good fortune, summoners of God's very grace. To pay them, the woman of the house scrounges last coins from a tiny purse so weathered it's beginning to crumble. Afterwards, Isaac murmurs his bad feelings about the transaction. Hugo wrenches the Opel over to a stop. —We are grown people and so are they grown people. Human beings and adults. Who are you, God? Let the people make up their own minds. This is business. This is life.

Isaac looks away. It's the first time he's seen any anger in his travelling companion. He doesn't say anything, but when they go on he's thinking of the way that Hugo charmed them, amazed them. Thinking they didn't really have a chance at all. Ja, but what does that mean? Aren't they grown people and humans just like us? Who have mouths and can say no—can't they? Then he thinks of the Linhursts, the Mad Queen and her husband the Cruel Duke, standing there with his ivory cigarette holder and telling Isaac no, because the Cadillac is more important. Now
those
are people who know how to refuse. Take away the fancy liberal words and underneath they're ruthless as blades. Then he thinks maybe that is the defining difference between them. The ones who live in the shacks on boiled potatoes with salt and the other ones in their Castles. The Clevers and the Stupids. The little word
no
is all that separates them. Or at least the will to use it.

That night in his bed at the inn, Isaac dreams that pieces of watches spew out of his mouth when he tries to talk. Springs and cogs, the taste of copper. Unloading boxes of Miracle Glow in the morning he sees a strip of paper flutter loose. It's an invoice from a factory in Durban. American product my arse. But he says nothing to Hugo. Good old Hugo, jolly as a party balloon.

—Hey Hugo, hows about you let me drive for a change?

—Boychik, no ways no how.

 

Now and then, in this dorp or that, Hugo disappears. Isaac doesn't need to ask him about these gaps: the floral whiff of perfume and the lipstick on his rumpled collar the next morning over breakfast is always enough. In his chatter Isaac detects Hugo has assembled extensive data on the married ladies of this region which he's passed through before more than once in his time; this data set includes useful knowledge of when certain husbands are or are not around. Isaac requests no specifics of these adventures, but he does seek more general advice, not going so far as to tell him Yvonne Linhurst's name but describing her pretty well nonetheless.

—The female, says Hugo, sighing back with a toothpick. Tiger, I could write an encyclopedia on the female and maybe one day I will. Be a bestseller but they'll have to lock me up in chookie and throw away the key. No one's ready for the truth on the female. All I can advise you, go the opposite.

—The opposite.

—Don't drool yourself on their feet like a stick from a dog. That's number one and number ten. But you can be nice. Spend on the good wine. Best time to make that first move is six a clock. Never the lips, go for the neck right here. Slow and easy. And never forget the female is like a bus, there's always another one coming round that corner.

Like a bus. Somehow Isaac thinks not. Lonesome country wives are one thing but a rare and shimmering Parktown bird like Yvonne Linhurst is a different species entirely. Nothing that Hugo says could possibly apply except for the admonition that if he wants something to happen he's going to have to
do something
. That part is true. Make a move or you're not even in the game. But to make a move could also only serve to prove that you've never had a chance in the first place . . . that he's not even a forgotten blip to her by now.

 

They are travelling eastward and despite the drought the farther they move the more green the land becomes, even accumulating a veneer of tropicality that starts to feel slightly alien to Isaac. There are woods on the koppies and not just anthills and cacti like he's used to; a moist heat seems to seep up off this land in the angle of the waning sun.

It's getting close to four and Hugo is driving very fast and muttering. Isaac knows what he wants: a telephone. That morning he got hold of a new racing paper and now he needs to ring Joburg and lay down some bets before it's too late. A familiar fever. Hugo gets edgy if he doesn't put down some money now and then.

—Slow down, hey Hugo. You ganna prang us in another sec man.

—Speaks the expert.

—I'd rather drive than talk.

—There's a shock.

They pass a sign too fast to read and Hugo mutters. Isaac says,—You know Hugo I's thinking maybe you should let me have the takings hey. I'll stick em in envelopes and whatnot for us.

Hugo doesn't answer.

—I mean like I gotta be straight hey. It's like if my ma saw how you just sticks it all in your pockets, and we don't even write nothing down, man she'd have a bladey cadenza on the spot.

—Boychik, be quiet. You starting to grate just a tiny bit. Believe me, I know exactly down to tuppence what is what. And I don't need your mother in my head this second oright.

Isaac looks out the window thinking, Ja, cos you all twitchy to get your bets down, that's why. They come around the next corner too fast to track their lane and the Opel drifts out. There's oncoming traffic, luckily a slow truck with the black muzzles of doomed sheep pointing out the sides, but Hugo overcompensates getting back over and they mount the shoulder and cross it and bounce and judder over rocks. They flatten a fence post and the bonnet flips up, blinding them. Stones bang steel. They flail in their seats and the Opel slews up short in a wash of gritty dust.