The Lion Seeker (2 page)

She had to remind herself they had wives she saw in the streets, wives with cutting tongues. This was a neighbourhood full of watching eyes. Always she must take care to be seen as a good wife to her husband—for the sake of the business if nothing else, though truly the last thing she wanted was to disgrace him, demean him. She loved Abel. So she ground her teeth behind her veil and did her duty, left the workshop alone save to serve the men in it the way she was expected to serve. She was the new one to this place, after all, a greener off the boat, and an object of maddening pity in the streets where people still stared at the veil, still made sad faces and shook their heads at the sound of her sloshy words. She knew how their rumours said she suffered from some hideously deforming disease. Let them talk.

Meanwhile her energies transformed the front of the shop. Her husband's dealings, bless him, were a mess: debts forgiven or unknown, charity jobs for sob stories. She gave the business discipline, started writing everything down, and money began to drip steadily in. Like a bull terrier she guarded this accumulating cash, keeping it from her husband's hands and especially the hands of the parasites. She bought a new strongbox with a good lock and a slit in the top so money could be deposited but not withdrawn. The box was always locked if she was away from it and the only key was always in her purse tucked into the groove of her deep bosom. Soon there was enough saved to purchase a used black-and-gold Singer machine like the one she'd worked with in Dusat. She set up a sewing room in the maid's hut in the back, stocked it with fabrics she bought from the Indians on Fourteenth Street in Vrededorp, and began to make and sell dresses and fill alteration orders for a few tailors she went to see. The money from this piecework she spent on used goods at the market on Diagonal Street or at jumble sales. She stored them behind the piles of fabric: cracked vases, wonky coffee tables, broken picture frames—whatever nobody wanted. When she had time she fixed them up and sold them for a profit, quickly reinvested in more goods.

As soon as enough of her money was saved, she went to see a doctor for a consultation, a big surgeon named Graumann. This Dr. Graumann examined her and promised he could remove the need for the veil. His fee was too high; but he said he would take on her case for what she could afford. The news made her weep aloud for the first time in too many years to count. For so long she had worn the gloomy veil that cupped the lower part of her face like a hospital bandage—with its laces passing behind the ears to tie off at the nape, the bottom of it left loose for reaching under to eat or drink—that it had become a part of her being. It marked her out as a patient, a kind of leper. She had gotten free of Lithuania, yes, but she had not yet gotten free of the veil which ever in her mind chained her to that miserable place, that gloomy choking hopeless past.

She had the surgery against the advice of Abel who said he worried it might go wrong; but it went as she hoped it would, as Dr. Graumann had promised. No, she would never be normal, but after the surgery her words sounded as they should and she was prepared to let all of her face be seen by anyone who wanted to look at it.

Once healed, she burned the veil in the yard, as she had burned the shiksa's trash. She felt the clean-burning sun and the dry hot air on her chin, her lips. She went for long walks in the streets, walking around like everyone else. If someone looked at her, she looked them back in the eyes till they looked away. Slowly came the feeling that she had become another person, as if she had been born a second time in this country. Her feet were under her: she stood on her rights. She began to speak up more loudly more often.

But all the while the situation with the men in the workshop had not changed except to worsen. They were always in her way, cluttering the house, chattering uselessly about the old days, the old stories, the old country, a useless deadly nostalgia, circling. The workshop was a kind of escapist bubble for them, like an opium den, a place to inhale each other's memories and exhale their own as they swallowed Abel's brandy and ate his food. Still, she must go on serving them for the sake of her husband and the appearance of being a good wife, but all the time now she was screaming inside her skull. She had changed; she had no more tolerance left for them at all. Her rage, pressed down, seared at her nerves and gave her bellyaches and heartburn, left her thrashing in her sleep like a victim of nightmares to wake with a stiff jaw and a headache from grinding her teeth all night.

Came a day when enough was enough. The inevitable day. One of
them
called her back when she was at the kitchen door. She had forgotten to take his ashtray, he said. His filthy stinking ashes. Out of habit she turned halfway back, she almost went to him. And then, no, she hit the door with her shoulder and passed right through the kitchen and out the other side into the backyard (hardly saw little Isaac spying from the doorway, hardly felt herself brush him aside on her way out). There was a thing in amongst the second-hand goods that she had bought that weekend at a clearance sale on Commissioner Street, and it called to her now beneath the level of words. Funny, she had hesitated buying it, it wasn't the kind of item she'd be able to sell easily, and yet. And still. The weight of it in her square hands. Now again she hefted it and felt resolve pour into her strong squat body. She turned, started back to the house. Nothing could have stopped her then, not even herself.

 

 

 

 

Part One

SKOTS SAYS IT'S FUNNY
how soft the bottoms of Isaac's feet are—man he's always getting thorns or glass stuck in them that everyone else just runs right over. He says it goes with Isaac's funny hair like grated carrots and all the freckles on his face that make it look like them white cheeks was sprayed with motor oil or something; goes with those funny shorts about twenty sizes too big that he can only wear cos his da has made all those extra baby holes in the belt for him. Skots laughs and says also maybe the soft feet have to do with Isaac's skin that turns red as anything from one little tiny poke of the sun, and also look how skinny your legs are man, like two spaghettis.

They are all sitting in the burnt-out piece of veld behind Nussbaum's kosher butchery, eating a pigeon that Isaac shot off the phone wire with his catty when everyone else missed, and suddenly everyone goes all quiet, Isaac feeling them watching him. All he can hear is the noise from Beit Street, a tram clanging and rumbling, Yiddish shouts from the men selling fruit or bread or coal or ice.

Isaac looks slowly at Skots. —You calling me something hey Skots?

Skots seems to ponder the question, bunching and opening his toes in the dust at the edge of the firepit they'd scratched and packed with tomato-box wood since turned to greyblack ashes. Pigeon bones and pigeon grease lie on top; singed feathers still smoking.

Isaac says,—If you not bladey calling me something you better shut your bladey trap, know that Skots.

The others wait. Isaac watching Skots, thinking maybe he'd be a Stupid and try jump at him like last time, Skots a taller older boy with muscles in his arms like hard little apples. But that other time he'd gotten the thumb in his teeth and bitten so hard, to the bone, making Skots cry like a girl, saying I give, I give. Isaac gets his heels under him and leans forward.

Charlie, looking from one to the other, quick and nervous, says,—Hey hey you all know what? And starts telling them about a man was so crazy, so moochoo in his head, that he was doing these
very bad things
that he, Charlie, has seen with his own two eyes.

—What bad things? says Isaac, staring at Skots.

Charlie doesn't want to tell, but after they press him and he tells them everything, Isaac starts to feel hot and sick. His eyes and his throat grow full. He doesn't care about Skots no more, or about anything else. He stands up. —Lez go get him! Lez get that bladey bastid.

When Isaac runs, the others follow. No hesitation. They pass through the alley next to Nussbaum's and into the noise and motion of Beit Street, the Yiddisher jabber of the sellers and the horses pulling carts and the bicycles ching-chinging and the Packards hooting and the doubledecker tram with its twirly stairs rumbling off down the middle of the street, scratching loose blue sparks from the wires above. On the corner, cages of gabbling chickens are stacked high and farther down the iceman with heavy gloves is unloading blocks wrapped in straw from his horse cart. There are tables of vegetables and the noises of sawing and banging from Dovedovitz and tinking noises from Katz the tinsmith while down the next alley the blacksmith's forge glows orange hot, and all along in front of the long covered stoep there are Xhosa women on the side of the street sitting with their legs sideways on their bright blankets with their trinkets of ivory and stinkwood. Behind the glass of the butcher shops there hang black logs of salt-cured biltong and fat bottleblue flies mass on the blooded gobs of sawdust swept into the gutter with the smelly chunks of horse kuk.

On the far side of Beit Street, beyond the shops, they run between row houses with roofs of corrugated iron. It gets quiet here: just their breathing, their patting feet. Lizards on whitewash in the bright sun. They run till the asphalt ends and the dirt is hard as steel, pocked with holes or the glitter of quartz. Here at the end of the road is an open-sided square of tin houses with a single water tap in the middle on the open dirt, where women line up with squalling babies lashed to their backs and clinking buckets in their hands. Men sit on newspapers in the afternoon glow, children wrestle and shout. Someone is playing a guitar made of rubber bands and pieces of a detergent box.

They slow. Isaac touches the catty in his back pocket, a nice one he made from some inner tube stretched on a Y of strong wood; shoots stones beautifully hard and straight. He turns on Charlie. —Where is he, wherezit?

—Hang on, says Charlie. They watch him run to the far corner of the square where there's a gap in the tin and he looks around, then comes jogging back shaking his head. —He not there yet.

—Lez go back and play by the chains park there.

—Lez go to the churu man and tell him kuk banana.

—We staying here, says Isaac. We staying here till he comes. Charlie, you keep an eye.

They wander down to a door where Isaac lets Skots go first. Dark coming in from the bright and sudden close smells of mielie pap and sour piss. Now he sees the table made of cardboard boxes with a bedsheet on it with pictures of strawberries and cigarette holes. Auntie Peaches is there: she passes them sweet real coffee in an old Horlicks jar—coffee he's not allowed at home but Mame will never find out. Coffee to wash down the taste of the charred pigeon. He takes his sip and passes on. Bad coughing rips through the tin wall. Auntie Peaches pokes his tummy. —How's the little devil hey, hey? Little devilhead, little troublemaker.

He rolls on his back with his knees up, giggling. This is happiness in the close feel of this homely space. But Charlie comes shouting: —Ouens, ouens, hy's hier die bliksem!

Guys, guys, the bastard's here.

Outside the sun burns a white disc through a passing cloud as they run to the corner and turn into the alley there, sausages of kuk underfoot to dodge. At the end is the rubbish place that used to be a hole but is now a little rubbish mountain and in front of it is the madman.

—Is the puppy man, says Davey. Thaz the puppy man.

—I know him, says Nixie. He try sell them every day all around.

Puppyman is tall and wears only armless dungaree overalls with holes in them, too big for his lean frame, his cap is stuffed in a back pocket and his head is bald in spots and he is missing one sock and the heel flaps on one shoe. He sways on his feet with a small bottle in one hand. On the ground in front of him is a tall cardboard apple box. Things are moving in that box. He bends down and takes out a little dog that's white with black spots, puts it carefully on top of two stacked bricks and stands looking down at it.

—Come on, says Isaac. But his heart is hammering very big in him and he goes slowly and can feel no one wants to come with as they follow behind. Puppyman looks bigger and bigger the closer he gets. Puppyman has deep wrinkles everywhere in his face like they cut in with a knife. Isaac says to him,—Scuse hey, what you doing with that liddel dog?

Takes a while for Puppyman to find his focus, squinting down at Isaac. —Why you care? You wanna buy?

—How much? says Isaac.

—Ach you got no monies, lightie. Piss off now.
Voetsak!

The pup is standing up on the bricks, the whole of its fat-bellied body trembling; then it squats at the back and some pee runs off the bricks. It's true that Puppyman doesn't look right in the head. His eyes are yellowish and full of red veins and it's like they are covered over with glassy webs. He takes a drink from that bottle and talks some kind of nonsense to himself. His breath smells like petrol. There's dirt crusted in some of the blobs of his hair, and bits of maybe paint or something also. He has red blistery sores on one side of his mouth and not many teeth.

—You the puppy man, says Isaac. You musn't hurt that dog.

—I'm the puppy man, says Puppyman. Is what I am. Is true. He turns and takes a long step, swings his leg like a soccer player: a grunt with the meatbone thud, the puppy only huffs one tiny squeak. It arcs high, drops onto the rubbish and rolls, flops, lies still and strewn as a rag. Puppyman lifts the bottle, wipes his mouth and talks low to himself.

Isaac feels sick right through.

—All you little buggers go piss off, says Puppyman. Is my stock, I does what I want with my own stock. Isaac stares at the box behind Puppyman. Another one moving in there, a bigger one. Puppyman mutters and turns to it. He is so tall and the muscles in his shoulders stand out like they carved in wood and the elbows look pointy as spears, the forearms wrapped in veins like snakes.