The Lion Seeker (43 page)

 

Oberholzer's presence in the shop makes a feeling of shock in Isaac that he ignores, day after day, pressing on with his good work, finishing off the Norton and then going back to working under Jack Miller on the Chev. He learns from him that Oberholzer came looking for a job out of the blue, a godsend to Labuschagne who has been looking for a good mechanic. It seems that Oberholzer knows his job, too. No complaints on him from the okes, or from Labuschagne. It doesn't make sense to Isaac that Oberholzer would have come here by chance but neither does it seem sensible that he would have arrived just because Isaac is here—what for? Maybe the gas incident is the answer to that. It happens one day after Jack Miller arrives. Isaac stands up from his work to say good morning and sees the wrongness in Miller's face, the folded arms. —Whatzit Jack?

—Bladey tank's empty.

—Hey?

Miller elbows towards the big oxyacetylene tanks racked on wheels. —Tap got left open last night. You know how much oxygen costs man?

—Me? Jack, I diden—

—You supposed to check, Isaac. I don't want to hear. The whole bloody place can blow up like a bomb.

—Jack, seriously, it wasn't me.

—Don't want to hear. Let's just work oright.

The rest of the day his hands are not his hands. The soaring feeling does not come, he's been thrown off. Where usually his fingers are drawn into the work with a nimble intelligence of their own, this day he has to wield them with his conscious mind. Doing it this way is clumsy and full of errors, as if he's got thick gloves on. He battles in vain to regain the deft feel, the easy confidence, to focus his mind so that the energy will come and lift him and the hours dissolve into a seamless moment but, no, he cannot take off, he can't get over the injustice of the accusation.

When Miller curses at him for the first time, after he almost destroys a panel with his clumsy banging, he knows it's justified. But there's nothing he can do. On his locker that night there is a cartoon from an Afrikaans newspaper cut out and stickytaped at eye level. Showing a Jew with a trumpet nose and swindling hands pickpocketing a Boer. But from above, a Nazi grips a Star of David with its sharp point aimed down at the bald Jew's skull. Isaac rips the paper off, whirls. The men in there look away. Again he does not go to the pub.

The weekend is another gloriously decadent interlude of sleeping in. He fights the temptation to head out to Parktown or to the Reformatory. Tries not to think about either of those places at all. When he returns to the shop, he finds that the boot panel of the Chev that he had almost straightened is now buckled in again. Sledgehammer marks. He waits for Oberholzer to arrive. Stares hard across the shop at him. Oberholzer waves, smiles. Isaac's breath comes in small gasps, his heart pumping hard under the tight cable of his throat. He goes back to work. Works badly. At the end of the day he finds two of his dollies are missing, including the one that he spent so much time machining himself. He catches a harsh lecture from Jack Miller. Isaac nods, packs up the rest of his tools carefully, and goes home without saying a word.

 

Tuesday: More tools go missing.

 

Wednesday: The oxygen tap has been left open again. By now Jack Miller knows something very strange is going on. He hardly meets Isaac's eyes.

 

Thursday: A drawing of a pig with a Semitic nose pinned to his locker. His mug on the tea table has paint in it. He glances around and Oberholzer is pointing from across the shop; other men turn and look at him and laugh. When he gets back to his station, Jack Miller is shaking his head.

Once again, after he gets his pay packet and pays into the kitty, he skips having a drink at the Great Britain Hotel. Oberholzer will be there, his giant shoulders taking up a mass of space at the bar, his booming laugh pressing on eardrums. He goes home and has powerful dreams of Yvonne in the night. He's swimming in lakes in shimmering caverns under mountains of slumber, chasing the pale jewel of her ankle, her thigh, her laughter held in bubbles.

He wakes to a hollowness. When his mind pronounces her name he knows he is in trouble. It's not finished, he tells himself. Let it rest, just wait and she will come back, she must. He has a bottle in the sewing room and he goes out to get it, telling himself he won't look at the ring in its hiding place behind the mirrors with the immigration forms—but then he does, clenching and unclenching the bright stone on the engraved silver hoop in his hand for a long time before putting it back. Outside, a dry African windstorm slings mine dust against metal roofs. He drinks from the bottle and looks at the Oberholzer place and considers going over there, banging on the door, wake the man up and demand from him, What is it you're doing? Got nothing better to do with your pathetic life than come all the way cross town and work at Gold Reef to give me shit? Why would you
do
that? What the hell's
wrong
with you?

I'm not scared to do it, he tells himself. I could. But his body doesn't move. His body hasn't forgotten the massive force of the man's bulk, like a sweeping wind, and that grip like a vise of industrial steel. So he drinks until there's no more to drink, till he feels drool on his chin. He weaves back inside and picks up the telephone and dials without pausing. It rings seven times and a man answers, the voice of broken sleep. —Zat Mr. Linhurst?

—Who is this?

—Look, Mr. Linhurst. I can tell you this cos I am a man. And you are a man.

—What?

—Hang on. Hold your horse, Linny. You a man, I'm a man. What I saying, a man he owns up hey. A man takes the responsibility.

—I don't like games. Who is this?

—You know, you know. The boyki from Doornfontein.

A silence.

—Ja, how things at the old Castle hey? Grounds in order? Queen get her medicine? Everything
chipper?

—See here, you little drunkard.

—I wanna pologize for the Cadsy, okay Dadsy?

A woman's voice behind his now. Pecking. The muffled sound of a hand swooshing over the receiver. Then Linhurst says: —I'm going to ring the police.

—Police, says Isaac. Woo.

—If you dare talk to any of us again—

—Aw, Dukey.

—See here you little swine. We'll charge you with breaking in, with stealing the car, vandalism. With kidnapping and confinement. Get that through your drunken skull, can you understand how serious?

Isaac sways, breathing heavily. His lips slowly working, his tongue making sticky noises that echo back in the buzzing line. Kidnapping.

—The full weight of the law. I can make sure. I—

Isaac takes the telephone from his ear. He watches it for a time. The little voice buzzes. He puts the handle on the hook and goes to bed.

 

He does good work all day, and at closing time he finds a new little something waiting for him on his locker, an advert for Cushman motor scooters that's been torn out of a magazine, a picture of some woman sitting on the scooter with a fountain and a church behind. Someone has used a crayon to give her head a wild mop of orange hair. Her nose has been lengthened and elephant ears drawn on in dark ink.

Isaac looks at it and snorts. He takes it off and he holds it to his chest to show the room. —You okes only wish you had a chick as lekker as me. This sentence catches the right tone, snapping the room's tension, showing them he can take a joke, that he knows the Cushman is funny, and they laugh with him half in relief. He sees the heavy shape of Oberholzer for a second in the doorway, turning back out. Got you, you bustud.

This Friday night he goes with the okes to the Great Britain Hotel instead of home even though it's Shabbos supper, and all the way there he feels very good about his little triumph in the locker room on top of the good day of shop work. At this moment there is no thinking of Yvonne, there is nothing hollow in him. Only the full happy feeling from the way he worked well on the Chev and afterwards how he dismantled the trap that had been laid for him, turning it on its owner, using it to make himself popular for this night, with a couple of the okes even paying for his Scotches with jokes about where is his lipstick. The best is that there is no worry about going out to Brakpan that night; if he has uneasy thoughts about the Reformatory he lets them float off, like the Yvonne thoughts, floating away, the way he later on will drift in the steam of his hot bath.

 

In the night come the dreams of her laughter and her touch. He wakes early with a pang of need that is like the necessity to draw breath. He has to get up and walk around the workshop. It's in the middle of his chest, the feeling, hard as a cricket ball, a pain that cannot be shaken. He has to speak to her, to see her. Why does she not contact him? Every day she is falling further away, becoming a stranger. They were only just sitting together in the crisp air on the ledge talking and touching and loving, she was going to be his bride. That is real and this is not. He is stuck in the wrong reality, a left turn in a dream and he can't get back to waking. Why will she not contact him? Why? What must he do, what can he do, what is the right thing he must do and the wrong thing he must not? The gesture that could banish her from him forever versus the move that will bring her into his arms where she always should be? It's bad, he thinks. I've got this really bad. Admitting this to himself brings on fresh nausea, his scalp shrivelling, a wave of weakness fluxing through the bowels.

He is bent over, heaving for breath, when his father comes in, ready for shul in his good clothes, and asks him if he is sick.

I'm worse than sick, Isaac thinks. I'm dying. He says,—No one rang for me hey Da?

He shakes his head. When?

Anytime, Isaac says in Jewish. Or a note? No one came here to see me, nothing, the post?

Isaac, what are you talking, the sun isn't even properly up yet.

 

He goes in to work Monday and when he gets there he finds waxen threads of bright lipstick drawn all over his tools. You don't mess with another man's tools: that's an iron rule of the shop. He's been like a patient who thinks he is clear of the disease but here is the fresh symptom, it's spreading and it's worse. This is not going to stop. A lipstick tube is still open beside the marked tools; beside it are puffballs of rouge and a dark little brush on a stick that Isaac thinks is what girls use for painting the eyes.

Aloud he says: —What the fuckun
hell
.

Jack Miller walks up with a mug of tea in his hand, chin pressing wide bulges of throat fat. —You telling me, he says. Listen, I don't need any more of this fucken crap, right?

Jack Miller is not a man to swear. This is only the second time that Isaac has ever heard him do it. —You better sort this out, he says. I am telling you.

Looking across the shop Isaac sees the faces watching him, sees Oberholzer sitting back in the corner: the smirk under the moustache.

He crosses to the office, raps on the open door.

—Gotta talk to you, boss.

Wearily, Labuschagne looks up. —I run a business here, man. If this's about any other thing like this kuk for two-year-olds that's been going on, I don't wanna know it.

—But boss.

—Sort it out yourselves man. Running a business here.

Isaac takes himself to the tea table, to put his back to the shop. He's scooping sugars with a shaking hand when Vernon, the other apprentice, comes to fill his mug.

Isaac nudges, hisses. —The bladey hell man, what's going on now?

—It's not me hey.

—I know that. What the okes saying?

— . . . 

—Hey? He nudges harder.

Vernon's glasses are fogging in the steam from the shrilling kettle in which his whisper is almost lost. —They say you queer.

—
What?

—It's not
me
.

—Who told you that, a queer?

He shrugs. —Going around.

Isaac says the eff word three times. He forgets his tea—this isn't the time for the soothing of bladey tea—and he uses turps and rags to clean off his tools and takes the used rags with the rest of the lady crap to the big oil drum used for rubbish. He drags the bin out from the corner and he slams his rubbish in and kicks the drum hard enough to make them look at him, to scoop out a pause in the hammering. He fills his chest, shouts: —You better watch it hey! Whoever messing my stuff, I'm telling you. Telling you all now. Watch it!

He searches the faces, the stopped work, for Oberholzer, but can't find him. Someone somewhere gives a whistle, two long notes, one up one down, like the ones that get fired at passing girls. Someone else laughs: a different laugh to the locker room because this time Isaac is on the outside of it, he gets the teeth end of this cutting sound. Then someone else, invisible, maybe from under a car, gives out a call in falsetto. —Skattie, skattie wil jy my 'n soentjie gee op jou mooi Cushman neh?

Oh darling, darling, throw me a little kiss on the back of your sweet little Cushman won't you?

This time the cutting laughter comes from everywhere. Teeth and teeth. Red blood slams in his head: he makes a sound at them that is like a cat's howl. Now Labuschagne is coming towards him from the office, Labuschagne shouting at the shop to drop this kuk and get to work. Isaac goes to his station where Miller won't meet his eyes.

All day his work is very bad. What's happened is that the joke he made about being a girl on a Cushman has been turned around against him. This new queer thing is very bad and he must stop it now before it destroys him.

After his shift is over he can only breathe in the locker room once he sees there is nothing on the steel door. He decides he will not go to the Great Britain Hotel but straight home; and he packs up his tools to take with. When he reaches the Cushman parked in the back he finds the petrol tank is open and there are white granules all around the rim. In lipstick someone has written,
Suiker soontjie vur n skattebol
. Sugar kisses for a sweetheart. He doesn't try to start the engine. Maybe there is a chance of saving it if he drains and cleans the tank, but if it's been run already, the sugar will have clogged the filter, maybe even ruined the carb. The worst part is that the handwriting is different to the other from before.