The Lion Seeker (9 page)

During his first month, he is casual about the address that appears on his clipboard one day, a place in Orange Grove. He asks Silas about going there and Silas only shrugs, it's just another place to him, a White place. But Isaac is trembling, he's never been that far north, beyond Yeoville, up into the suburbs. Above Orange Grove there sit even richer neighbourhoods, Observatory and Sydenham, and above them, along the overlooking ridge, are the dream places, the Mr. Jackman and Mr. Joel and Mr. Rhodes places, where the masters of gold and diamonds and industries can survey their city below: Westcliff, Parktown, Houghton. Coddled mansions of highest repute. Generators of dreams and magnets of achievement. In his mind a cloud swirl guards the upward pathways into their golden realm.

Isaac shakes himself back into the now, sitting low in the truck's passenger seat, this cab of the truck redolent with the tang of Silas's sweat. Silas has beads hanging from the rearview mirror and his leopard-skin totems and family photos are tucked above the sun visor, his fighting sticks (just in case) point out from under his seat and a tuneless whistling leaks steadily through his bottom teeth like a function of his driving. The rest of them sway and jounce on the open flatbed behind. Isaac watches the brown grasses and the low red-rock quartz-glinting koppies on Observatory Ridge to the south as they turn off Harrow Road and onto Raleigh Street which turns into Rockey Street, up past the place where the tram cars turn around, then up to Louis Botha Avenue and then east and north.

New territory.

 

Orange Grove is absence: no shops, no pedestrian life. A silence strung between garden walls and jacaranda trees that line the road like pillars, their flowers tiny trumpets in regal purple. Their target house has a roof of overlapping clay tiles instead of sheet metal and bars against burglary at every window shaped into leaves and stems. Wealth needs bars: he hadn't imagined this detail, nor that the bars could themselves be made into decorative symbols to signify the goods they protected. He stalks around with hands on his hips, a little hunched, ferocious in his feelings so that the want in him is almost like a kind of anger.
This
is the only cure for Mame's secret tears. Forget old man Kaplan and useless buried events, papers in a cashbox. Forward, only forward.

Such workdays bleed into months that themselves stretch out and Isaac learns his job well. Talk sweetly with the wives who are the hoverers as they pack, but make sure to take very thorough notes and have them signed; it is the husbands who will ring back later to complain of damage, to make their accusations of theft. This is what is called experience. Mame is much satisfied by his growth; Tutte only wants to know—baffling—if he's enjoying himself. Such irrelevancy slides beneath his understanding and he can only shrug. Rively has taken the school's maths prize, the first girl ever.

One day in Hillbrow there is no wife but a plump divorcée. It's a flat in one of the tall blocks with Englishy names, this one called Willow House. He keeps looking at this woman in a way that she has to pretend not to notice while the boys take the boxes out and down the service elevator. When the job is done he accepts her invitation for a cup of tea even though they are running late. He comes down some forty-five minutes later feeling glazed, knowing how oddly his face must loom, afloat on the cloud of astonishment that's replaced everything below the neck.

Silas is napping stretched over both seats with a newspaper over his face and Hosea, Morgan and Fisu are smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and sitting on the curb, Morgan looking down at the open bible across his lap.

—Oright, Isaac says, gruff. Lez go. Haven't got all day.

Silas sits up. —Baasie, he says. Little boss. —Baasie, was that
tea
very nice?

They are all looking at him, expectant.

—Was it
sweet
tea? Fisu asks, holding in a grin with twitching lips.

—Maybe, Silas says, maybe my baas, he spill some.

Isaac looks down. His fly unbuttoned, bright flecks of lipstick on the shirt, half of it still untucked. When he looks up he can't stop the spread of his own grin and they all thunder into eye-watering laughter, beautiful deep African laughter, wild as rain. They clap their hands, beat their feet and shake with the glee of it. Ten minutes later Silas is still repeating the word
tea
to himself and shaking his head, wiping a fingertip under each eye as he drives, till finally Isaac has to tell him behave yourself. But he's not truly in the mood to put much vim behind the words, his mind so full of the new revelations of the flesh. That touching and licking, the undoing of the clothing in that raw tumble to the bedroom. No speaking, only animal pleas. Teeth on skin and what a woman's mouth can be, so hot and wet and savage. The furnace of it around his thing, the marine tang of her taste, and then the final soft-wet engulfment as he kept expecting her to stop him, so utterly mysterious and complete. She hooked her nails into the meat of his buttocks like some carnivore. He hunted her salty sweat with the point of his tongue in the wrinkles of her armpit. Woman. The sound she made at the end. A heat forge of desire that almost scared him, dissolving into her, draining.

Yes Da, I am enjoying myself very much at work nowadays, thank you very much for asking. I surely am.

For some months after that infamous incident he feels the eyes of his boys on him every time he chats with the lady of the house. Even though now he can look at these women in a truly knowing way there is never a repeat performance and gradually he realizes how lucky he'd been. Once or twice he thinks he is getting similar signals but he can't believe, truly, that a married woman would do such things (or that his rough looks and short wiry body would be enough to tempt her into such sin), stopping him from trying. Each time on those occasions Silas in his uncanny way is ready with a fresh comment.

—No biscuit tea time today, my baasie.

—Shut up hey will you Silas.

That big smile so bright in his square face. —Sorry sorry my baas.

—Qhuba! Isaac will say in Zulu. Drive. Clicking his tongue on his palate at the first syllable, getting the pronunciation exactly right, for he's learning more of Silas's language all the time, fascinated by the sound of it and discovering an aptitude for languages in himself out here in the practical world where words are useful things, real as tools, as opposed to the drone noise in the constraints of a brick classroom. (Also he hates it when Silas speaks to other boys and he can't understand—he doesn't want to be some Stupid getting mocked to his face like any ignorant umlungu, any other Whitey.)

Mame asks him what he's learning and when he has nothing to say, Mame has suggestions.

Don't stand still. You been nearly a year already. Time goes like water. Remember always that you're working for more, to be on your own in business. To buy a big house one day. Don't sit on your tochus too comfortable. Open your eyes.

He opens his eyes and a scheme comes to him. He shares it with Mame and she bakes him an apple strudel in honour of its brilliance.

Next day on the way back to the warehouse with the truck unloaded he tells Silas to pull over at that Native bus stop: a sign on a pole near which Blacks have patiently massed with their goods and their infants. For a tickey a head—a penny less than bus fare—he lets them pile on and taxis them into town. He splits these takings half and half with his boys; overly generous, ja, but he's becoming quite fond of the buggers.

So this taxiing becomes a regular little earner for them, a secret that binds them all.

 

His father has technical questions about the work. It's real work, he tells Abel, snapping a little. But inside he knows he does not do the real part of the work and can sense the judgment in his father's questions. For Abel, work belongs to the worker, like a prayer to the worshipper (to do a
properly job
is his highest English compliment). What your work produces is what you are. But Isaac mostly stands around watching his boys do the lifting and the carrying, moving endless White goods from one spacious household to another, disassembling and reassembling White lives. He knows that his mother will say the bladerfools are the ones who break their backs like donkeys day in and out, sweating for a pittance with not a chance of advancement while the Clever is the one who makes the profit and sits on a nice clean office chair. But watching how hard his boys work—how they shake with the sweat-dark canvas straps looped around their wrists and under the edges of heavy awkward things (cabinets, beds, ovens, iceboxes), slowly up and down that steep ramp off the truck all day—he feels a secret pulse of jealousy; his blood is restless, his bones feel trapped. To them belongs the dignity of expressing their strength as men. Yet always in his heart is also a kind of contempt for their Black passivity, the same way he felt it years before when he was selling col'drinks on Harrow Road and the Black boys only had their newspapers and their rags and their grins.

Meanwhile Silas goes on teaching him new things. Ubusika is winter. Izolo is yesterday. To pay is khokha and to run umjaho. Bhebha is fuck and ikhekhe is both cake and cunt. One day he learns the word for sweat. Juluka.

 

Countless times they criss-cross Johannesburg (iGoli in the Black tongue, the place of gold), a city of mingled chaotic streets since it bloomed unplanned out of a gold rush town in the middle of nowhere, a rush that has never died because the lake of sunken gold under it has never dwindled. Isaac thinks about this as they drive, watching the blur outside. He sees the head gears on top of the mine shafts, sees the poison dunes of the mine dumps (lumpen pale hills of excavated rock crushed finely to sand once washed with cyanide to rinse out the gold). He can hear this rock dust whispering in the slipstreams, a hungry mocking sound. There are no other reasons the city is here, no big rivers, no port or coast, nothing but the buried mineral that waits beneath ever undying like some immense yellow demon, feeding on the massed life it lured with greed to squat above.

Yet they never get the call Isaac truly wants, for a job in the uppermost tier, in a place like Lower Houghton. Once they do Dunkeld and another time Saxonwold, but only for apartments, never a grand home, never one of the mansions, the pinnacle. Meanwhile he starts to grow a little blasé about the neighbourhoods like Observatory and Highlands North that at first so awed him; it's around then, as if the world is attending to him, that they get the job in Parktown, up on the high ridge.

USED TO BE
that access to this section of Parktown required a key to a private gate that only the residents held, now they can climb St. Sebastian Road unimpeded and at the top they branch onto Gilder Lane. Here the steep road curves between mansions of redyellow stone hewn from the ridge like carved natural extrusions. The high walls stretch between spiked gates flashing glimpses behind: he catches columns and turrets and treetall windows; a ring of gaping stone fishes watering a great bowl (the wind skims off spray to dapple urns of proteas bright as fired coals); glossy dogs spring at iron bars; once an open lawn stretches away lushly vivid as any bowling green, with a dark face slowly crossing holding out white gloves and a silver tray between. Silas keeps whistling through his bottom teeth. Uphill they reach a municipal park on their left, drab and dry and tiny by contrast, behind a simple log fence painted green, the repeating pattern of two stumps and a horizontal pole, with a small clump of willow trees in the last corner. Farther uphill on the other side is number eighteen. Silas turns in without breaking his whistle: a long steep driveway to wide garage doors of varnished wood. To the left, a wrapping stone wall rises twenty, twenty-five feet. He finds a small locked gate inset in an archway. He pulls a cord and a maid comes, leads him up a corkscrew of tiled stairs with oval hollows in the wall cradling vases of flowers like shrine offerings. At the top, a sudden airy plateau. A gardenboy in overalls is poking a pole as tall as three men through a watery skin; only sky backlights him for the land drops away in terraces, intricately gardened, down to a clay tennis court. Far beyond, the distant city unfolds in its shrunken grace, so green with clumping trees closer in, but running to khaki and grit under a smearing haze out towards the south where mine dumps glint pale as icebergs against the angled morning sun.

The soft tinkling of spoons on china makes him turn to the house. There's a couple at a patio table laden with silver tureens; the scent of coffee with butter-fried eggs and toast and sausages makes water jet under his tongue. The maid leads him again, pausing at the table to add fizz from a green bottle to tall glasses. He sees half a pineapple in crushed ice, a neatly cored pawpaw. The man and the woman both squint up. She's wearing a kind of turban, bizarre, almost like the doek that maids wear but fancier and with a bright gemstone in front and some green feathers. He gives his professional smile and she looks away, to the man. —This?

The man sighs. He is thin and fineboned, with long fingers fitting a cigarette to an ivory holder. He wears a puffy kind of scarf in place of a tie, white trousers on crossed skinny legs; a cream jacket with black stripes hangs off the back of his seat.

—We can presume the mover?

Isaac nods. —Mr. Linhurst?

The woman has been shaking her head metronomically. She covers her face with both hands. —Cecil. Come off it.

—Bupsie, says Cecil.

—This is assurance?

—Poppy, he says. Now don't.

—I'm sorry, but schoolboys.

Cecil unfolds his lanky self from the chair and stands lighting his cigarette. —You do have experience transporting glassware?

—Ja sure, says Isaac. All kinds a glass. Salad bowls, whichever.

—Oh my good God, says the woman.
Salad bowls
.

Cecil looks away. Isaac sniffs. He notices rigid streamers of reddish meat with streaks of white fat: a mystery. He says: —Summin wrong?