The Lion Seeker (50 page)

—The cops is too easy for you, Jewboy.

—But shit, you see how he was lying before like anything, with a straight face.

—They do that hey. You can't stuffing trust them.

Isaac is looking for faces now. Just connect with one, one human being, one set of eyes. —Vernon! Rastas! Dezzy! Come on okes!

It's me, he thinks, Isaac Helger. But then it's not. It's like with Yvonne: one day you are her beloved and the next you are a nothing. Wake from the dream and find the real. He makes eye contact with Chambers. —Keithy, please man. Come on hey. This is wrong.

Chambers sinks beside his head. —You oright, Ize?

—No man help me. Tell them stop.

Chambers strokes his head like he's a pet. —Shh, shhh, he says. What's a matter? Then he scoops up a handful of yard dirt, sand saturated with black grease and boot filth, and grinds it into Isaac's mouth. —There we are, for you, Jewboy. That's it. Eat it nice.

What Isaac is thinking of as he fights to keep his teeth closed against the vile grit, feeling his lips tear in places, the sand against his gums, up his nose, what he keeps thinking of is the Felder brothers so long ago in Dusat. How the goys chopped them up and threw them in the fire. Cos you can't ever rely on the goyim, sooner or later they will turn on you, every single one of them, they will, and here it is. Mame, I shoulda listened to you only you.

—Nothing lower than to take a kitty, ay.

—The scum.

—Here.

A small point of unbearable pain on his right arm, near the crook. So bad his whole body convulses a half inch off the ground against the pinning boots. He smells burning meat. He twists his head to see a big hand grinding a lit cigarette out in his skin. The face behind the smirk: pale Oberholzer with the pink scars. Isaac's scream makes dirt spray.

Now his head is lifted from behind and hands are on his eyes, gripping him in darkness. He hears the whispering of steel. Scraping cutting pain in the scalp. More things are being stuffed in his mouth, not sand, something fibrous and loose, like strings. It goes on and he starts choking.

He tries to buck but this time they've got him locked. Through fingers he can make out some faces. Chambers, Malcolmson, Veld, Bliksy, Christo Terelli, even Tops. Most of them are standing back, some laughing, some looking disgusted. All the times they asked how he was doing. All the drinks and the jokes. He can't breathe. Where did those parts of them go, what are they now? He can't breathe. Was this their truest self always waiting to come out? Can't
breathe
.

Labuschagne's voice: —Oright now. Let him up.

—Shit no, boss. We haven't even started nothing.

—This is a business and you all late.

—We haven't done nothing good to him yet.

—Looks pretty messed up to me.

—He's getting it easy, boss.

—We finished here. We got work to get to. Let him up.

The weights lift off. Blood tingles into his numb arms and legs and the limbs start to ache brutally, pulsing where the knees and boot heels pressed. He rolls over, roughly, retches up sand and blood and orange strands. What he realizes is it's his own hair, so much orange.

—Hey. Hey Jewboy. He looks up. It's Magnus Oberholzer and Isaac turns his head at once but not quick enough and the boot catches him behind the temple. His brain rings a high note that goes on in one ear.

Labuschagne's voice. —Oright, oright enough. Go in. In, okes.

Isaac lurches up.

Labuschagne: —Get off the property.

Isaac starts to speak.

—You want me to soek them back on you? I said eff off. Out of my shop. You a disgrace. A disgrace to your family and everyone.

Labuschagne turns him and keeps shoving all the way to the gate in the chainlink fence, where Isaac stops. —My tools.

Labuschagne has bunched his overalls in both fists; he lifts Isaac to his toes. —Why? he says. Why man? Why'd you have to do it?

Isaac sees that his lips are trembling, the man's eyes full of hurt.

—I didn't, he tells him.

Labuschagne shoves him out backwards through the gate and slams it after. He goes down hard on the raw earth. He rolls, squats there for a minute, like an African. He fingers his hair, the blood on bare skin. But I just came to work, he thinks. I just walked in here this morning to work, I'm a panel beater apprentice class A. He gets up, the muscles in his legs twitching.

There is a wide unpaved alley between Gold Reef and the garage next door, with Marshall Street at the end where he sees the traffic. He starts down it. There's a hollow with a pool of oily water and there are clouds there as if it's cupping a portion of fallen sky; over this cloud as he watches there floats a balloon with a darkened horror face, some brutal beast of a fallen world with the top half white as the belly of a leech and bleeding and the bottom smeared in soil and blood.

He starts to shake, to feel so very cold, his teeth clicking. A pressure seeks to spurt from his bowels. He sits down carefully next to the puddle, holding himself. Going forward to the street is not possible. He will stay here and sit and kuk his pants and eventually something will happen to him.

In time the gate clangs behind and he hears steps. He does nothing but hunch his disfigured head down into his shoulders.

—Isaac.

He doesn't move but for his shaking.

—Isaac. Here. Isaac. Here man.

The speaker moves around, sinks: it's Jack Miller. —Get this down you hey. He has a tin mug, steaming. Isaac looks at him, dumb. Miller cups a hand behind his neck, feeds him the hot tea. A double heat: tang of alcohol folded in the sweet milkiness under the steam. He coughs some up. —Slowly, slowly, Miller says. Some more. Ja, you need it. There's it, there's it. Get this poison in you. Nice.

The sweet double heat fills his belly and Miller rubs his back. The shaking eases. Miller has a rag saturated with hot water and wipes the dirt off Isaac's face, the blood off his scalp. —People is animals sometimes, he says.

—Jack, I didn't. I swear to God.

—Never mind that hey. It's finished. It duzzen matter. Here. I brought you your tool kit. And this is my hat. You keep it. I moved that scooter in the back behind the shed, if you go round the other side no one will see you. It's got the keys and your helmet and goggles.

Isaac looks up at him, his fish mouth and his soft chins. How much he learned of the beautiful craft, how much twisted metal they righted, how many accidents of time and fate undone. Undo this now Jack. Fix it. Help me.

He starts to cry.

Jack Miller rubs his shoulder. —It's oright. You a youngster. It'll be oright. Youngsters bounce, they don't break, any parent knows it. Put the hat on now and go around and go home. It'll grow back no time, you'll see.

—You. You don't believe me, Jack.

Miller shrugs. —Duzzen matter now. Anyway I know who you are, Isaac. People who are good can sometimes make a bad mistake.

Isaac wipes his arm across his face, fresh blood and tears in one long smear. —That bastard Charlie Steenkamp pickpocketed my key . . . stuck that thing in my locker, so sly, the two a them . . . 

—Shh, is oright, Miller says. I got three boys you know. They younger than you but one is getting up your age. People, they can be animals sometimes. You go home now, have a nice rest.

He stands, the empty mug in one hand. —Goodbye Isaac. You got talent in your hands, don't forget. God bless.

GOD DOESN'T BLESS
, instead He seems to have noticed that it's been a bad day for Isaac Helger and decides to add to its gloom by muffling the morning sun with black and purple thunderclouds and a scratching wind. The bruised sky starts to spit on him as he rides into Doornfontein, turns off Buxton Street, shuts the scooter and walks across the alley in the failing light. He keeps to the side of the yard, away from the kitchen window. The house boils with neighbourhood guests—no one's working on this Rosh Hashanah Friday. Over their voices he catches the bass murmuring of the wireless, that toxic trumpet of ill news. Today the news is all about the Soviets maybe coming into the war in Poland and what will France and Britain do about that.

From the shed he collects a mirror. In the outhouse he closes the door and puts on the light to hold the looking glass before his face, to bow his head to it, as if in worship of the horror on his scalp. Lord, they've sheared me like a lamb. They cut me and marked me but good. Then he vomits.

He has a half-pint of brandy that he picked up on the way home, he drinks deeply then blots toilet paper with the alcohol and dabs the wounds, the little razor cuts where there should be hair, the weird lunar surface of a pale skull studded with bits of orange stubble. His lips aren't bad at all, little cuts inside, and there's only a small knot on the skull behind the temple. What hurts is a bruise on his thigh and the smeared pain in the ribs on the left, and most of all the deep cigarette burn on his inner forearm. It starts to rain hard outside: heavy drumming on the tin roof.

The hat that Jack Miller gave him was too big for him, he left it back there behind the shop where he voided his bowels and started the scooter. He thinks of a watch cap that might be in the sewing room. He puts out the light and runs the five paces there through splashing rain. It's best to leave the light off, but the gloom is too heavy to see. He wraps the light bulb in some fabric and gains enough weak illumination for his search. Bad things happen and there must be a reason, a cause. Searching for a cap to cover his abused scalp is a physical analogue of the way his mind gropes to answer why, why me now? He thinks of the Torah story, the one brother who killed the other and tried to hide from God, then got a branding on his face to mark him out for all time. But what-all did I do? Nothing. They come at you not for what you do but what you are, a Jew. Like the peasants down the hill in Dusat, singing and drinking. You are marked from the word go, boy, never forget it. Yvonne didn't drop you like a hot stone because you didn't cry for Moses or cos you poor, no man, face it, she dropped you cos you a Jew and that's what you are, wherever you go, wherever you work, whatever you want to do, they'll be looking to sink you, trick you, take you down and piss on you and spit on you. Never forget those faces. What people are underneath. Take away the laws and the cops that stop them and you know what it is they will do to us. You can be ten times better than them and it won't matter cos there're so many more of them.

There's a smell of faint burning, the globe is starting to smoulder in its wrapping. He puts out the light and stands by the window, watching rain. You just had your future amputated, mate. How's that feel hey? What's left now, Mr. Ex-shoe store clerk? Forget panel beating shops, apprenticing, your name will go around the pubs and they'll all say, ja, Helger the thief, another Jewish crook.

This thought moves into his body and he hunches with it, a cramp that squeezes tears from his face, his heart. Oh Tutte, I'm really sorry. How is he going to tell him? The way Abel touched those tools and got down the brandy bottle that time. The
properly job
. And now.

And Mame—there's one thing he does have to give, the little shard of hopeful news for her that she doesn't know about yet: the immigration papers, the message coming on the eighteenth. Maybe. If it's true.

But to tell her anything else. About the business. About
this
, today—no, God, unthinkable. No.

Facing it: he no longer has a sacred trade, no longer has a goldmine business, no longer has a gorgeous wife to love forever. It's like the war where no one can stop the Germans, they just keep coming. Bad fate like stormtroopers has taken all three fronts of his life.

What have you got, what have you got left? You were ugly to start with and now you're even uglier, a pauper monster with a bad name. He feels very tired and lies down on the thin carpet. He pulls some fabric over himself and rolls onto his unhurting side, putting his hands between his thighs, and falls asleep at once. As if his overloaded nerves simply switch themselves off. When he wakes he's stiff and his body aches in its throbbing places; the rain is still whispering and it's still dark. He looks at the clock, sees he's been out for hours. He hears the whine of the kitchen door, voices. He gets up and edges to the window and looks across the yard. Lots of neighbourhood folks remain there in the kitchen. After they're all gone maybe get Mame alone and tell her about Papendropolous, but how to do that without telling anything else? And what if it's all bullshit? This lawyer—he does not trust him at the deepest level.

Someone comes out of the outhouse and enters the house. As the kitchen door closes he sees that one of the people standing round the table in there is Blumenthal the laundryman, fellow Dusater, who's told him more about Mame's secrets than anyone on earth. He watches the kitchen window, Blumenthal's heavy-jawed profile easy to track even through the rippling of the rainwater on the glass, the man smoking a cigarette, nodding. The man knows the family. He knows the sisters and he must have known the brother who ran away. Maybe even knows Avrom Suttner himself. That's a thought he stays with, thinking first how good it would be to confirm the truth of the immigration meeting with Avrom directly, if he somehow could. And then the sudden leap of an idea that's been brewing underneath, simple and true and real now: cousin Avrom could save Lion Motors. He could. If he wanted, he could. Isaac turns this around in his mind, being real. Look at it: Lion Motors is still savable. If Avrom is truly giving help with the immigration, then why not the business? The lawyer said at the beginning in the back of the car how Avrom likes what I've done, supporting me, ukay then. If he could put it to Avrom straight, as a straight business proposition, that the wrecks are ganna turn into gold, a sure thing, a solid investment which he'll get every penny back plus so much more . . . then ja, there must be a chance here, there
is
.