The Lion Seeker (6 page)

The following year, 1935, when Isaac turns sixteen, he finds he has surprised himself by managing to scrape through to standard seven where there are a new set of teachers waiting for him. One of them is a woman. She teaches History and English and her name is Jacqueline Winterbourne. Miss not missus. She is not too tall, with black hair and glasses. Not too busty, quite flat really, and she wears a short skirt and the skin of her knees and her fine arms and upper chest is very pale, as if she's been powdered. He can make out the dark puckers of her nipples through that thin blouse, the lines of her bra. He sees too how her slender torso swells wide at the hips. How beautifully wide and full the bum is, how it jiggles a little when she writes things on the blackboard.

He sits frozen, dry-mouthed, staring. His groin throbs almost painfully. His young heart beats hard, transfixed without mercy.

 

In the classroom under the tinted photograph of King George V with his frosted beard and walrus moustaches, Miss Winterbourne tells them how this wonderful country, the Union of South Africa, belongs to us all. We are her citizens and her caretakers. The Almighty has entrusted us with the sacred responsibility to look after her diamonds and her gold, her giraffes and elephants, her mountains and rivers and all of her many quaint Native tribes.

Unfortunately, all through our history we have been divided into two races. The one mostly bad and the other all good. The good ones are Englishmen (like everyone here in this class), and the mostly bad ones, of course, are the Afrikaners. There was a big war at the turn of the century and we the English gave the Afrikaners a good thumping; but being English gentlemen, we let them back up to run things (don't ask me why, Miss Winterbourne's expression seems to say). We gave them votes and there's more of them than us. That is how the Afrikaner Mr. Hertzog came to be our Prime Minister. Up till recently, Mr. Hertzog's National Party has been in charge and has been making a right mess of the economy, but now, touch wood, there has arrived back into power a gentleman called Jan Christiaan Smuts.

Miss Winterbourne smiles and shows them a picture of this Jan Smuts who is bald as an ostrich egg except for a white fringe, has hard eyes, a sharp nose, and a long thin face. She explains how he is one of the good Afrikaners, just a wonderful man, who fought for Britain in the Great War and studied law at Cambridge where he scored the highest ever in exams, being a mental genius. He's an Afrikaner who understands that South Africa needs to be part of the great British Empire and not, heaven forbid, against it. Now General Smuts and Mr. Hertzog have joined up to make one new government called the United Party and the first thing they did was follow Smuts's sound advice and take the country off something called the Gold Standard. Straight away, the economy was fixed! . . . Meanwhile the bad Afrikaners have split away under Dr. Malan, to form the
Purified
National Party . . . 

Isaac is amazed to find this woman is not only gorgeous as hell, she's dincum interesting to listen to. Despite his throbbing crotch he can link in his mind what she's saying to what he knows has been happening on Beit Street over the past year especially. Nowadays there aren't so many men in crinkled suits loitering outside Cohen's Café all day using rolled-up racing papers like blunt swords to impress points of vigorous debate on each other; the shop windows that were boarded have turned back into washed glass with clean new goods stacked up behind; ladies wear bright new hats and the beggars have all but evaporated; the wind has no more loose rubbish to tumble. At home they eat meat and fish again every week. The deadbeat accounts are paying up more easily and new repair jobs are coming into the workshop for Tutte all the time. It's been like strangulation released: that dramatic. He never knew what was behind it before, exactly, never knew that this Jannie Smuts was so clever as to work all that. He pictures this Gold Standard as hillocks of ingots and lines of trucks coming to fetch the glittering bricks, feeding them back into the world so that things can move again, work and breath, the flow of money and life.

In the night come other pictures: of Miss Winterbourne giving him special lessons after class. He grinds his hard shlong under him to these fancies, imagining what her behind would feel like in his hands, squeezing, spreading. This feel of want for her sometimes unbearable as thirst. He finds himself wanking all the time, even in the school bog in the daytime.

He starts to hide things in her desk. A bottle of fancy perfume. A nice brooch. Lots of different kinds of flowers that he picks from the field at the far end of the cricket pitch. One Thursday after class she stays late, busy with papers at her desk, and he takes a long time to buckle up his satchel so that he's the only one left. When he walks to the front she looks up with the line of her dark eyebrows kinked above the nose. —Isaac. He steps closer. The smell of the woman-musk off her skin dizzies him, his eyes this close drink up the liquescent colour of her thick hair, rich black curls of it that come down to the neat earlobes where they tuck behind. He can't stop trembling and his heart like a trapped madman slams the cage of the ribs.

—Ja miss.

—Have you been leaving things in my drawers here?

—Hey?

—You heard me Isaac.

He looks down. —Maybe.

When he looks up she's holding out a paper bag to him with the top angled so he can see it's full of all the stuff he put there, even the old flowers all dry and dead. —Enough funny business, she says. All right? Concentrate on your work. Swot hard. Your last test was disgraceful.

Her face looks cross but when he takes the bag his hand passes over the top of hers and, without thought, he turns it and dips his head and breathes in the fragrance of her inner wrist and kisses her there, the pale softness, the cool blue veins. She makes a sound: too breathy for a squawk, not quite a yelp. She takes her hand back—not yanking it—and holds it to her chest and stares at him. He watches, astonished, as pink and red patches colour the ivory column of her neck. She seems to try to speak; her lips tremble.

—Sorry miss, he hears himself say, hoarse. Can't help.

She stands up and the chair falls behind her. He wants to say, I found out you're only twenty-two miss. That's only six years. His mouth is so dry. He wants to say, I love you miss, love you love you.

She says,—Don't, don't do that again.

— . . . Why?

She scoops her papers and picks up her bag and walks out without looking back.

 

A framed portrait of a seaside scene. Pressed flowers between the pages of a fancy book. A pair of cut glass earrings. All of these items go into her desk over the next couple weeks. He watches her look into the drawer and give no sign. The way her pretty eyes flick away from him he knows that tasting her skin has made a secret pact between them, a translucent cord. She understands.

He knows her dresses, the long black skirt with the red flowers and the blue top with the long sleeves. The green one-piece, the white blouse with puffy shoulders. She always hurries out at the end of class. During her classes he asks to go to the bog and wanks in the stalls, full of her in his mind, ripe with her. When he spurts he screams the words
Miss Winterbourne
in his mind.

There is a storage closet in the space behind the blackboard. One day he writes a note for her to join him there after class and leaves it covered on the desk. He gets into the closet before the bell and waits in the dark, listening to the class come in. Her voice gives the roll call and there is the silence of his absence. Sooner or later she will read the note. He shivers in the dark. He can hear the ich-ich scratching of the chalk on the board through the wall. The blind trembling, the hidden lust; being both here and not. He can hear his breaths against the unseeable walls.

After a time he thinks if she was going to unveil him, drag him out, she would have done it when she read the note which she surely has by now, hasn't she? The class carries on. A span of time unending that feels like her silent consent. Then the bell rings and now he hears the elephantine sounds of desks grating and sliding and school shoes tramping and the voices of the class as they leave.

There's a silence after. He feels like an electric thing, his very blood must glitter.

Maybe she has left. The slow sweet torture of the unspooling moments in the dark while he trembles as if fever-struck. Then: a click that is not a school shoe but must be her long elegant heel. In his mind he sees the calf, the thigh, the stocking. Another click then another and now he knows she is standing on the other side of the door. He closes his eyes even in the dark and feels out with his ears and his nostrils and finds her breathing, her perfume. The handle of the door creaks, minutely. Stops.

The blood clots painfully between his legs; he unzips himself and prongs free. Grips it in his fist like a gift.

Now the door slowly whines and he sees brightness through his eyelids. He exhales and opens them. A bald man stands before him, shaking his head with a look of sadness and pity. It's Mr. Larkin. Principal Larkin.

 

He sees himself in a tram window, a schoolboy without a school. The way his big ears stand out like bat wings and the tough rumples of orange hair that won't consent to being combed, the freckles that patter his white face like mud from a passing wheel. Mame lied to him when he was little, said they would wash off. It's the first time he connects the word
ugly
to himself. The wide lump of a nose, the small bitter mouth. Long arms on his short frame like an ape, an orangutan. Of course she ran away from you shmock, you idyat, clickety-click on those high heels as fast as she could. Straight to the principal's office. Who exactly do you think you are?

 

There is no way of course that he can tell anyone at home, or anywhere, why he was kicked out of school this time so he positions it as a request, he wants to stop school, to start earning. (All the school gave him was the expulsion letter; they don't telephone the immigrant parents who can't speak English, and even if they wanted to, number fifty-two Buxton Street has no telephone.) It causes a meeting in the bedroom with his parents with the door locked and Rively creaking softly in the passage outside. Mame says school has never been for him. Business is better for everyone now. Let him start to earn full-time, proper, why not.

His father is long-faced, his gloomy limping crippled father, who stands there with his long hands tucked into the pockets of his leather apron, a lanky man with socketed eyes and an Adam's apple that points like a finger when he rocks back on his good heel, disappears when the head stoops low again, the spine curled permanently from so many years bent over watches. He wants to know why now, why doesn't Isaac finish the term? He must finish the year.

—Da, he says. I hate bladey school. I don't wanna go.

His father's eyes are not the eyes of a Stupid. They narrow. What's happened? Tell us.

—Ach nothing man. He looks to his mother, gets only: Answer your tutte.

— . . . Got in some trouble.

What now?

—This one teacher, just duzzen like me hey. Wants me kicked out, like. I dunno. She's a bit nuts or summin.

His father nodding, slit-eyed now. Tomorrow we'll go see that Mr. . . . what's his name, London? You will translate what I talk.

—No man, Daddy, please. What for hey? I don't want school.

School wants you.

—But it doesn't!

I say yes.

They stand close, staring. A blue vein brightens in the wrinkles of his father's left temple. Gently Gitelle takes her husband's forearm. Why not let him try in business? Can anytime go back to school later.

What kind of business? he says to Isaac, not looking at her.

Isaac shrugs.

Be with me, Isaac. Without a trade, man is lost. Work comes from God.

—Oh jeez, says Isaac.

I'm your father, look here at me. You need to learn so you can choose your work. The right work for your own soul.

Gitelle says, A soul doesn't pay any rent, Abel. Let him go in business, this is what he wants.

Abel angles at her. Him or you?

She flips her hands up, stubby fingers spangling. What is you want from him? A scholar he's not.

It's not what I want. It's what
he
wants. He pivots back to Isaac. You like cars, so let me talk to Ginzburg. Maybe you can apprentice for a mechanic. But after you finish this year.

Or a salesman, says Gitelle. Selling the cars.

Abel glotzes at her: a sullen mean-eyed stare.

What? she says.

His hands come out of the apron to sit on the hips. Gitelle—

—A mechanic is azay vi a shvartzer, she says. Dos is nit a zuch. A mechanic is like a Black. It's not on. Let me find for him. With cars, all right. But a business he can learn.

His father points, to her, to Isaac. A long Jewish forefinger, full of warning. He finishes school, the whole year.

All right, all right, says Gitelle. She moves across between them and her look at Isaac as she nods is a sly one, with the eye over the scar crinkled down. Never mind that part, the look says, I'll organize it.

His father is limping to the door, right shoe dragging. Isaac's seen it bare, the horror stumps of the blunt mutilations in place of toes. He did it to himself, to get out of the army of the Czar backhome, when he was almost as young as Isaac is now. He knows it from the street, heard it told with glee by a son of one of the men who used to be on the couch, but he didn't believe it, except when he asked Tutte he got back only silence and a grimace—a confirmation more brutal than any weeping confession. Now a flare of bitter feeling burns in him: it's this voluntary crippleness of his father, in order not to be a soldier. But soldiers are brave and his father is—well what else is it? what else can it be called?—a coward. Look at him, taking another loss, hoodwinked again, another backing down, shuffling away with his neck curled over. There goes a man who will never get his family out of Doornfontein, too soft and kind in this world of takes. Greenburg comes and collects the rent from him like milk from that passive cow of his in backhome. He loved that cow, Baideluh, because he is one! How powerful is this feeling in Isaac then, this contempt that burns in his throat like acid, like a gargle of venom.