The Lion Seeker (4 page)

Mame clicks her tongue, almost angry, to get Isaac to look away from the window. She settles down behind her plate and they all start eating; only Tutte murmurs the blessings first, only Rively hesitates, watching him. —Geshmuck number vun, Tutte says, after swallowing. Delicious number one: a line from an old joke about a fat woman on Muizenberg beach that Isaac's never understood. Mame seems not to have heard and keeps on looking at Isaac. She starts to talk about the Clevers and the Stupids. The Stupids who live like pack mules, poor and hopeless, the Clevers who rise in the world like Mr. Jackman who started with one cart here on Beit Street and now owns the biggest department shop in all Africa, a whole block there in town, anyone can walk and see it. The Clevers like the men who own the gold mines. Mr. Barney Barnato was a poor Jew who came to Africa with nothing but dust in his pockets, and then there was Sammy Marks and the Joels and the Beits, Mr. Hersov and the giant Mr. Oppenheimer. Now they are the richest men in the world. Every diamond on earth is under their thumbs, and most of the gold.

Yes, says Tutte, smiling, but tell me, do they eat as well as we do? Not like this. And how many pairs of shoes can they wear at once? How many beds do they sleep in? How happy are their children?

Mame clicks her tongue, irritated. For a Clever, she says, anything is possible but for a Stupid life is misery.

When she talks this way Isaac knows she'll start to talk about a house again soon, that they need a house, up in the northern suburbs, a private house of their own, of the family's; but she surprises him. She is smiling her clawed-down halfsmile and tapping the serving spoon on the dish of mashed potatoes. Now Isaac, she says in that warm deep loving voice, you tell us, if one person gets rid of a dirty animal that makes diseases and costs to feed, that makes a stinking mess that must be cleaned all day, that can
bite children
God forbid, then is that person not a Clever? And if someone else must take in the animal and get sick from the diseases and have to clean up the messes and pay for the food for the animal, then is that person not a Stupid?

—Nu, zog mir, she says. Zog mir der richtike emes.

So tell me. Tell me the real truth.

—Ja hey Isaac, says Rively. You tell us.

Isaac twists a face at his sister but after a while he knows that Mame is right. He stops looking to the window. He wants to be like Mr. Jackman who is a Clever and if Mr. Jackman wouldn't keep a dog, as his Mame keeps saying, then he won't want one either. Her logic, too, is as watertight as the lavender hull of a Union Castle liner: the dog brings expenses and trouble and you can't do anything with it, like get milk from a cow (like the beautiful cow called Baideluh that Tutte always talks about that they had backhome). You have to be a Clever. Today he's done like a Stupid.

The dog starts crying outside, a rising woowoo that breaks at its peak then settles back to mounting whimpers.

Do you see? says Mame. Do you see what problems he is making already?

 

When supper is over he and his mother go out to the dog. It is clear she has a plan for it, her movements brisk. Isaac watches her untie the leash from the wall but when she pulls it the dog and its tail droop and it looks at him and yaps and Isaac runs across and falls over it, squeezes its huddled warmth tight against him. I didn't even give a name yet.

Listen Isaac, don't stir me now. Don't make me boil. Be good.

I'm not, Mame, I'm not.

He looks up and she's moving to the sewing room. She's moving fast and all of a sudden it hits him that it's just like it was with the couchers: it's going to be the couchers all over again! He starts to shout as loud as he can, he leaves the dog and he chases after her with his arms spread. No Mame, no! Don't do it, no, Mame!

Mame puts on the light in the cramped hut, turns to face him with a screwed-up face. What are you hammering in my head for? Calm down.

You mustn't, Mame!

Mustn't what? What are you crying about?

As she talks she reaches into a hiding place behind a half-splintery folded table and brings out a bottle of brandy, then another. Isaac stops shouting, leans against the wall.

What is it? says Mame. What's the matter?

He doesn't answer but watches her wrapping the bottles briskly in newspaper so they won't clink inside her handbag. She puts the handbag strap in the crook of her plump arm, her chin points. Your friend, she says.

He turns and the little dog is standing there watching his face. Mame comes out and picks up the dog's string, hands it to him. She walks off and he doesn't move. She stops and looks back. Isaac.

He follows her and the dog follows him. Drooping both. Okay, oright, ja: the dog will not stay. He's resigned. Seeing her go for the sewing room like that—it lit up the fearful memory of that other day, harsh and real enough to burn away all the protest in him. More than.

 

Old carpets draped on a sagging frame that reeked of smoke and sweat, that's all it was, pressed against one wall of the workshop opposite Tutte's bench. And the warm feeling from the slumped men there on it, their grizzled faces and hairy hands. He loved to watch them, how they tipped bottles of Chateau brandy and used their penknives on plates of pickled fish or to cut up fatty chunks of Goldenberg's kosher polony or salty crackling logs of biltong. The way they argued over the scattered news pages. How they taught him to play klaberjass with a dog-eared pack showing ladies in bathing costumes (slapping the cards down hard, shouting
Shtoch! Yus! Menel!
), and how they smoked their oval Turkish Blend cigarettes pinched in a circlet of thumb and forefinger.

His father would look up and sometimes add a murmur to their lurching debates from the workbench where he was bent over the watches; never more.

Simple Fivel had the gap in his teeth and the tongue curling through to the tip of his nose. Kaplan used to bend over the side hacking up black jelly into a saucer always positioned by his left foot. Mandelbaum had no teeth at all, his gums alone crunching peanuts and even Mame's taygluch—syruped doughnuts baked candy hard—while he winked at Isaac, making him giggle. They were the men of old and their hoarse voices breathed to him the wisdom of narrow streets and distant times and fading places, they wore their hats on the backs of their heads and went at life with a sideways elbow, a knowing whistle from the corner of the mouth. Scrapers, survivors. Full of jolly battering. They told no stories that were not jokes. There is a way to laugh at anything and they had it, a glaze of double meaning he could never quite penetrate but always sense. And when they laughed, their heads rocked back and the couch squeaked and shifted. Farting Ellenbogen the crook. Yishi Strudz doing tricks with hanky and spoon. Swarthy Leitener the strongman buckling horseshoes, a drop of shvitz quivering on the tip of his arced nose.

While they laughed he saw that their sad drooping eyes did not change, their faces grizzled and pouchy. And the laughing always turned into a sigh at the end, a shaking of the head. Then they would start to talk about der haym again, olden times backhome. The forests and the families.

He watched them shlupping hot tea from glasses or saucers, tea drizzled from the tap of a beaten brass samovar with its smoking coals. The steaming glasses with a fuzzy dollop of apricot jam at the bottom, a wedge of lemon floating. The way they lifted the hot steam to their mouths, the careful shlupping noises through the pouted lips—the longer the sound the better the satisfaction—then the great sigh, appreciating the heat of the tea into the belly. Vestige of a land where snow chilled the fingers and the blood. Where do any of these huddled attitudes come from? It's the fading place on the far side of Isaac's furthest memories. Some essence a part of him still yearns toward.

The couchers. Theirs was a poignant human warmth, and Isaac could have sat before them as before a fireplace in winter the whole day long if not for Mame. He knew his father felt the same warmth. So much better than working alone, all alone, with only the cold tickticking of irrevocable time for company.

 

Down the alley they are moving. A mother, a boy, and a dog. Night has dropped like a sudden curtain: African night. A wind brings mine dust on it, to coat the laundry on the bobbing lines, to make them blink and wipe at their faces, to scratch and hiss on the iron roofs of Doornfontein. The white dog drags on the string behind him so that he has to yank it every now and then. It's easier for him not to look back. They plod all the way down to the railway bridge. The bruise on his back aches.

His mother doesn't say anything. She's looking toward the other side while they wait and he watches the side of her scarred face in equal silence.

 

It didn't just happen out of nothing; there were dark rays before.

If he was in the kitchen when she came back from the couchers with an armload of dirty plates and cups, to fetch more food for them, he would hear acid curses in her breath that puzzled him with their ferocity. Calling them parasites and lazy scum. And if she caught his eye she would stop to lecture in a hiss: what it was exactly that she meant by the word parasites, how these couchers would one day gnaw the very walls down from around them and they, the family, would have to live on the street like half-starved squatting animals, was that right? Would even one of the couchers lift a finger to help them then? Tell me, would they? Isaac would nod but really couldn't picture anyone gnawing at any walls, and when he thought of the couchers he only wanted to smile, and felt a little sad for them, for their pouchy watery eyes. Even to think of the couch just as an object made him feel good, to lie on its piled threadbare carpets, its rich smoky manly smell, the only soft thing in the workshop.

Mame would tell him how the couchers were abusing Tutte's great gifts, his talented hard work, for his father was a craftsman and a gentleman with a heart of solid gold, only he was too good, too good for this world, he couldn't see what they were doing to the family, because the golden shine of his own heart blinded him so.

When she spoke this way her eyes would narrow almost shut; the scar tissue would turn shiny, livid. This was the dangerous thing in her that was stirring. Isaac knows it's there always, like a lioness bound up in a sack. Knows it because he was in the kitchen on the day she finally had enough of the couchers,
enough
. No more polony and pickled fish and booze for the leeches, the freeloading termites! When she barged through the kitchen door that day, Isaac held it for her and watched her drop the plates and go on outside into the backyard.

—Mame?

Watched her through the open doorway moving into the sewing room so calmly and fetching out for herself the secondhand wood axe that she'd bought only that last week.

—Mame?

But her eyes were slits, as if she were dreamwalking, with the scar so brightly livid on her face. Back through the kitchen past him as if he wasn't there. From the doorway he watched her stand before the couchers. Holding the thing behind her skirt with both hands, a strangely coy gesture but her voice was so flat and dead that, even though it was very soft, Isaac's father looked up at once from the bench. He knew what he knew. Pity on them who did not. It's finished, she told them. The party is closed for good. Get out.

It didn't seem to dent their bleary joking. Shmulkin was there that day and he leaned forward to address her with a nodding forefinger, with one eye shut. Kaplan wondered where his ashtray had got to. Taysh tried to prod an empty bottle at her, meaning bring them another. Someone grepsed; someone else—Ellenbogen no doubt—broke soft wind. Their voices were all hoarse and thick with liquor and fatty food, their laughs gruff unshaven rumblings.

Don't Mame, Isaac thought. Leave them, the poor sad couchers. Don't hurt them Mame.

Even within the glowing clarity of these kindled memories there are parts of what happened next that Isaac can't remember, though at the time he stared so hard his eyes ached. He remembers his father lurching up and calling out his mother's name, plus the sense of sliding and clattering, and how loud their shouts were and how savage and quick she was with that flashing axehead with everything happening, tumbling, at once.

Hacking into that hated couch with all her power, feathers and splinters and back-flung slats of shredded carpet. The men snatching their limbs away and rolling off, breaking plates, shattering bottles.

His mother's thick arms lifting and falling and the breath grunting in her clenched face: the flash of that axe.

The men tumbling before her into the street and then she was pitching chunks of the couch out after them. Simple Fivel sitting on the dirt wailing in incomprehension like a hurt child. Neighbours came to the cries. Isaac watched her, outlined by the light in the doorway with the axe lifted and shaking in one hand, the mass of her upper arm quivering in the sleeve, her voice raw in a scream he'd never heard before. All those insults she'd long nursed in her acid muttering ripping out into the daylight then, calling them nochshleppers, kleps, kuylikers, mumzayrim and shmootsikuh shnorrers.

Clingers-on, leeches, cripples, bastards and dirty beggars.

Scum,
scum
, she said. Nothing but parasite scum. And when Isaac's father had limped up behind her with his bad foot scuffing and gently put his hands on the backs of her stout strong shoulders, she wriggled him off without looking around. Said: Not one word, Abel. Not even so much as one.

His father had hesitated for a long time, his hands still up. Then he'd slowly turned and limped back to his bench, his bad foot scuffing. As he sat again he'd seen Isaac in the kitchen door and become frozen for six beats of Isaac's smashing heart; he lifted one hand slowly and dusted the air, two quick shooing motions. Out, out. Don't look at this.

Isaac had turned and run. The men never came back and Isaac's father has worked alone at his bench ever since.