The Lion Seeker (24 page)

 

He's nervous as hell the next week, waiting for Yvonne Linhurst in the park on Gilder Lane. She half ignores him, folding her arms. He walks with her in unconnected silence, uphill from the bus stop. It is good that he has his speech prepared, not the words exactly but the ideas: that it's not his fault, he didn't get her education but he's trying, he's looking at the Blacks at work differently now (true, but not in the way she imagines). The more he says these easy lies salted with a few granules of the truth, the more all of them start to taste in his mouth exactly like the salt of truth so that by the time they reach the driveway he feels he is making a blood confession. He could almost cry.

She does let him in.

In her room they talk about the Native Question and there's a feeling of breaking through, the current becomes different between them, and for the first time he kisses her. She holds him, her fingers in his coarse orange hair. His mouth talks more flat lies about how much he is changing while his hand plots a course to her left breast. What brought him this far is the Native Question. More of this Native Question is needed. The Native Question is pure magic.

They are talking for a while when a fresh idea moves through him like a wave of physical pleasure, so brilliant and natural it is: to combine the parents with the Native Question. He shivers a little, and murmurs at first so softly he has to say it again for her to hear. Wasn't it sad how the mother changed that day.
What do you mean?
How her mother spoke so big about the Natives and that but then would not let him, let his—he almost says boys here, but catches himself—workers go through the garage. And Jesus did they have to battle to get all that bladey stuff, that fancy glassware, down down those narrow killing stairs, how they suffered. Didn't she remember that? She doesn't at first, then,
Yes, yes I do, yes
. This is what I mean about some people, he says. See, I know I'm rough, but I call a spade a spade. I don't say one thing when I think another thing. (Hu hu, his inner self laughs, what a little lying bastard you are; but don't you dare stop, so soft and warm she is, don't you dare stop, the smell of her, those swelling ripe firm tits so close to your face, don't you dare stop you brilliant lying bastard you.)
Oh God, I know, I know. That's what really gets to me about them also
. I have to be honest, he tells her, have to be honest. The hypocrisy. Ja, that is the word I wanted to say. I am sorry, but ja. Hypocrites. His throat all fat with trembling blood and need so that the murmur is squeezed almost to hoarseness. Hypocrites. One thing what I hate, I'm sorry hey, but it's a hypocrite.

 

Now they have this new thing between them, whenever she lets him in and up to her room. Close together, kissing and touching. They use this criticism of her parents like a stimulant. Because what she is doing with him is a rebellion against them, he knows, the rebellion exciting her and in turn bringing him in closer. The bad words she uses aloud against her own parents to her are like physical acts. Whispering to him as he touches her through her school dress. All slows down for him, existence pivoting round the slow movements of a heart enlarged, words like a salivary glimmer between them, a strand chaining their mouths, so corrupt and sweet. He spasms against her. In the toilets at work afterwards he finds his cock stuck to his underpants with dried seed.

He has this little trick he does where he'll walk behind you when you're sitting down and gives you a tap with his hand, like this, on the back of the neck. It's supposed to be friendly or funny or something. You have to laugh. But it's really kind of nasty, it's a crack. I've seen him crack her like that hard enough to make her head go back. It shuts her up. Yes, when we're all alone it shuts her up beautifully. But then when there are guests there she uses her mouth to get him back. Oh she uses that mouth so viciously. She cuts and she cuts with those words. People try to laugh but she only goes on. They start looking down at their drinks or in their plates. And he's only sitting there, looking sick with this mousy idiot smile pasted on. As if he's bilious. The pasted-on smile about to vomit. He turns grey. I swear, actual grey. But then when we are alone he gets her back. With the crack on the neck and other little things. God, you know I hate him sometimes. I actually hate the man's guts. He can't deal with her and anything straight on. Everything has to be from the edges with him. He has to come in sideways, sly, like
a crook, like a crooking crab, scuttling. Has to pretend he's not doing what he is. And she's the same. She waits for other people to be there to treat him like a dog . . . but when we're alone she pretends like it's all fine. Darling and darling. I'm darling and he's darling. Everybody's darling
 . . . 

He feels intense claustrophobia sometimes, holding her, listening so hard. She might live in a Castle but she has less open space in her family than he does, even with his mother posed so watchfully, fiercely, over him, because she's the only child of mad parents. And she is mixed in with them in a way he's not with his. With her and her parents, they're a threesome. He is separated from his because they belong to backhome, another language and place. But her—he can see her role even if she can't. When she says how close they were when she was small, he understands when she elaborates that she really means she had no brothers or sisters to take the parental attention off her, nowhere to hide, and that her father and mother used her as a thing to distract themselves from each other, as if she was and is a living excuse for their marriage.

It's strange for Isaac to understand another person this well. Because he has never listened to anyone like this before. Neither would he ever have but for the hunger he has for her, Yvonne, her exquisite dollish blond beauty, honey for his tasting eyes, and her firm strong goyish body, spike of fire for the blood and dagger for the loins, but also for her world, the world of high castles in the dreamish air. Fantasies pump richly through him now, really for the first time in his life, visions so dense they seem alive. He sees their wedding, the creamy white veil and the tuxedo, the flung rice on the silver Rolls-Royce. And long afterwards, with their Anglo-Saxon fortune secured in a private vault, he sits in a deck chair by the tennis courts, Yvonne's cool hand under his, the both of them taking lime cordials through straws and wearing white hats and tennis togs, dark gold-rimmed glasses against the sun and the rose bushes gently fragrant nearby.

Everything that they say is a lying. They call each other love and that is a lie. She is always saying darling but she doesn't mean darling what she means is something so bad there's no other word bad enough to contain it. It's like she is onstage all the time, but she is such a grotesquely bad actress. I think maybe she knows what she is but instead of stopping the pretending it makes her pretend even more, to run away from it. She should be ordinary. She should stop the pretending. But she wants to be grand so she acts all the time and I think she's been doing it for so long there's nothing else left, she can't go back. She'll never be able to admit that she's only ordinary. That she's not special. Not really clever or beautiful or glamorous, just a plain-Jane average middle-aged woman whose face has dropped long ago. And he. He's too much of a coward to try and make her see this, he'll just go along with her theatrics but then do tiny nasty things to sabotage her, to snipe at her, vicious tiny things, because he's such a small coward inside. I almost hate him more, I swear, than her for his cowardice. I truly do
.

—You have such an honest life, she says to him another time.

He doesn't feel guilty. He feels satisfied she doesn't suspect. —Why? he asks.

—I don't know. Everything is clear. You have to work hard. Your parents, they can't even speak much English or write it. So your family, it's so straightforward. You don't have time for anything else.

—Maybe, he says, considering. Then: —Well, if you rich you can do whatever you want, ja. So then whatever you decide to do is all, like, your fault hey. If you know what I'm saying.

— . . . Responsible, she says. Yes I know exactly. My parents could do so much. But all they do is talk instead, they use words to make us feel better. The
Native Question
. But we have all these servants, you're right. She won't do without her servants for a morning, never mind a whole day. But all she yaks about is the Native Question. And him. Jesus. They don't
do
anything.

Listening hard to her like this is tiring, it physically saps him. It's as if he knows her one way as a young woman in the world but now he is building her again, taking bits of her and implanting them within, the way a painter's brush darts from the colours on the palette to the canvas, gradually vivifying her truer self inside his being. And becoming another.

IN THE BIOSCOPES
the newsreels flicker-flicker and Isaac smokes his Max cigarettes and takes in more news of strutting Hitler. All this year Germany's been gobbling and puffing itself bigger. In March they swallowed Austria, a new act of war that nobody did a thing about, not Britain, not France, not Russia, and definitely not Mr. Roosevelt in Washington who just gets more and more vociferous about keeping America neutral. Nice word that,
neutral
, Isaac reckons, thinking of a gearbox, a coasting car. The trouble is if you don't put it in gear you can't move if you have to.

He watches now, late in the year, as Hitler starts demanding a fat strip of Czechoslovakia and all the British Prime Minister can do in response is talk about talking some more. When Isaac looks at that Neville Chamberlain's sad and leathery face up on the screen, with his white temples and his high Victorian collar, he can't help but think of him as a butler in a farce, bowing and scraping. He's scared. That's all it is. Scared of the shrieking maniac who is kicking in the front door, here to steal the silverware. So Isaac's not surprised when nobody does anything as German forces guzzle up the swath of Czechoslovakian territory that they want, with all of its mountains and fortifications, leaving the rest of the country helpless. On the newsreels Chamberlain holds up a sheet of paper. Peace in our time, is what he says at the airport after flying back from a meeting with the Nazis in Munich. Everyone cheers him, because Hitler will be satisfied now, with what they've let him have (and Isaac can't help but think of all those new Jews under Nazi control). The glutton has been stuffed to satisfaction. Right. People are such bladerfools, even Prime Ministers. They see what they want to see.

In November the African Mirror newsreels go on flickerflickering and show a night when all over Germany and Austria the Nazis burn shuls and smash Jewish shops and break Jewish bones. What is odd is how detached he feels from it, where it used to set his blood bubbling and his legs twitching, making him want to go out and fight. Now the images of the British soldiers loading Bren guns, the sailors drenched in salt spray, the pilots firing up the engines of the Hurricanes and the new Spitfires, hardly stir him. Nor do the rows of French tanks (France has the strongest army in the world plus the impregnable Maginot Line and therefore there is nothing for them to fear from even ten Hitlers). No, Isaac's body is calm and unjittering, full of the good calming work he does, and his mind and feelings are aglow with Yvonne Linhurst and the beauty of his own unfolding fate. Sometimes these things do happen to a person, they truly do, and it's his turn, it's his luck coming round, Isaac Helger. Truly he does kiss her in her bedroom in The Castle. Plainly he is going to marry her. Him. Isaac Helger from number fifty-two Buxton Street in Doornfontein, apprentice panel beater class A. With big ears and wadded orange hair and spattered freckles and crimped cynical mouth, not even a high school education. Ja but look at me, look at me now, all you bustuds. Stuff you all. It's happening. Like when God in the Torah says something and lo, or whatever, there it is: kaboom. What they call a miracle. Saying the words
it is happening
to himself gives a spark to his guts. I'm the one that kisses her and holds her in her bedroom, I'm the one who has felt her crying hot tears on my cheek, I'm the one who is closest to her in the whole wide world and nobody else. I've
got
her.

And how fine his work is now, how talented he is. Everyone in the shop has started to notice. Everything is clear and inevitable. And all this soldier play, this war stuff, seems like a child's fantasy. He runs into Stu Finkel and Big Benny Dulut, part of the gang that went out to City Hall that time, and all they want to talk about is Greyshirt this and Greyshirt that and war this and war that, worried about what will happen if Britain and Germany go to war, because South Africa is supposed to join in for Britain but there is no way Prime Minister Hertzog will do that. It could be a civil war here, between Afrikaans and English again. Maybe Dr. Malan and the Nats and the Greyshirts will get control and want to fight with Hitler's help, like that Franco in Spain—who the hell knows? So the okes are even talking about saving up for tickets to go to Britain and volunteer if needed. But then what about Palestine? If we fight for Britain we'll be fighting against our own who are suffocating under the British in the Holy Land. Isaac doesn't offer anything to these febrile street discussions. They can't believe that Rabies Helger isn't more jazzed. That he's not first in line in whatever line is getting ready to kill some scumsucking fascists dead. What can he tell them? Rabid no longer, he shrugs off their admonitions with a sly blank smile. An old saying of his mother's floats up: Zollen zey brechen zeyere kep. Let
them
go break their heads.

But when he tells her this, she doesn't smile. There's a wan faded quality to her being lately, her posture is more bent, her skin more ashen and with mushroom grooves of purple under each eye, maybe she's been losing weight even. Mame, he says. What is it, Mame? And when she shakes her head and moves away he finds the newspaper, the real estate section, and goes to sit with her. —Look here Mame, give a look at this beauty. On a quarter of an acre lot, in Observatory. Seeing her try to smile hurts him more than any tears. She touches his hair. —Mame, don't worry so much, when I'm qualified I can have my own shop one day. You know—