Читать книгу Degas' Dust - Carnie Matisonn - Страница 10

For a time, Natie ran a used-car business in Johannesburg, buying old cars and turning a small profit on each of them. Eva would drive whatever jalopy he made available. On one occasion, she was allocated a Ford Zephyr to drive until the front axle broke and the two wheels moved off in opposite directions. A photo of her even made the newspaper – with her pointing without expression at the car lying nose-first in the middle of the main road.

My father’s search for work eventually saw him spending longer and longer away from home in pursuit of his ultimately unfulfilled dream of relocating to South Africa’s east coast. My mother had her hands full with what eventually became her brood of five children in a house with a leaking roof and a near-on completely absent father.

As a family, we were barely functional. We hardly spoke to each other – not about anything that mattered. Not one of us discussed our feelings, lasting problems, hopes or dreams. We all just seemed to exist together, from day to day, as if life were little more than a practical exercise of endurance.

Natie seemed to live on the periphery of the real world. Without basic business skills, qualifications or any profession, he was not equipped for anything other than menial work as a salesman. He often chose work in the most far-flung and unappealing locations – places other salesmen refused to include on their beat.

At one point, he lived almost permanently in Durban after being offered an agency to sell watches. He spent his days there in the Indian market hawking whatever goods he was able to get on consignment. That lasted a short while, until he was offered a job buying logs for a plywood company. I rather wondered what anyone thought he knew about timber. The company soon relocated him to French Equatorial Africa to spend most of his time in the jungle supervising the felling of trees in that endless green expanse. The trees had to be tied together in the sea and towed to a boat. A crane lifted the logs on to a ship and they were taken to Paris to be processed into veneers.

I don’t know how much money he made and how much of it made its way back to my mother. The daily pressures on her were telling – and I did my best to stay out of her way. She, often alone, had to contend with the never-ending battle to put food on the table and fend off the sheriff’s writs of execution against our paltry possessions.

She simply put her faith in God and her own hard work. She was an orthodox and relatively observant follower of the Jewish faith, steeped in many of the traditions of Jewish life. We were expected to observe holidays and festivals. Her English was peppered with Yiddish colloquialisms, and she was at her brightest when she found someone to converse with in fluent Hebrew.

Eva derived great comfort from being a member of a group with whom she enjoyed strong, cultural and religious ties and, as children, we were encouraged to attend services at the Orthodox Synagogue until at least our Bar Mitzvahs.

But any prospect of my continuing with any degree of observance was dispensed with after numerous encounters with our incompetent local rabbis.

Rabbi Reichenberg, for one, was imbued with little more than a sense of his own self-importance. He was devoid of interest in any of us and, if he harboured any true compassion for members of the community, he hid it well. His hapless beneficiaries were generally subjected to an awkward personality who never seemed to have any idea of what was going on. His services were dull, uninspiring, irrelevant and delivered in a monotonous drone. He single-handedly turned most children, including me, off religion. The other rabbis I encountered in our area were not much better.

My mother, though, accepted these odd religious leaders as part of the inescapable price of being part of her cherished Jewish community.

By the time I was twelve, I was spending many a school holiday and Saturdays working at a local clothing shop called Lentz­ner’s Outfitters, owned by Mr Lentzner. For the next four years, he paid me fifty cents for work on Saturday mornings as a counter hand, and one rand for a full day during school holidays. Although it was less than half of what an adult might have earned at the time, I was perfectly happy and more than grateful to be away from home. The money meant I could buy a pie and small bottle of Coke from the corner café and still have some change left.

For a while, I supplemented this bit of income with mowing lawns at two houses in my neighbourhood.

After a year or so, I cobbled together enough money to buy a big wooden box on wheels. It was 1.8 metres high and 2.5 wide, described in the advertisement, rather generously, as “a caravan”.

It became my home for the next few years. I knew I’d probably only need it until I could finish school. I parked my little mobile bedroom in the garden and ran an electric lead from the exterior wall of the house to my place of solitude, blissfully away from the sounds of double spacing or overlocking – and an important step removed from my mother’s wooden coat hangers.

I painted the interior walls a pale shade of lilac, the wooden support beams black enamel. My self-imposed mini-exile limited contact with my parents even more. From that point on, you could say I looked after myself – as I have done ever since.

From the age of thirteen, I existed in a cocoon on the fringes of society. I felt I belonged nowhere. As I drifted, I started looking for some of the answers to life in philosophy and became fascinated with the writings of Socrates, Virgil and Dante. I came to believe that religions were all essentially the same, despite their numerous practical differences. They all attempted to preach some sort of common morality, packaged with the manifold sets of superstitions and myths that defined each religion for what it was.

Eventually I came to believe that most people, regardless of their starting points, were not that different from each other.

I was and would remain proudly Jewish – but my developing philosophy of life could no longer allow me to succumb to dogma and mindless compliance. The only thing I would look for in others, Jewish or not, would be a common belief in principled behaviour and values, whatever shape those might take.

When I came across the stories of the American satirist Don Marquis, I fell in love with his quirky cast of characters. The most famous was Archy, a cockroach who happened to be the reincarnation of a free-verse poet. The cockroach wrote his poems by hopping about on the letters of a typewriter (there were never any capital letters in his poems because Archy could never reach the Shift key).

Archy’s best friend was an alley cat, Mehitabel. That was what I named my first full-sized violin. My soul mate Mehitabel cost me the princely sum (by the standards of the day) of R15, payable over thirty months at fifty cents a month. Even today, to me she remains the most beautiful instrument on earth. Whatever flaws she may have, her sensuous curves are – to me – the loveliest in all creation.

Mehitabel and I needed our space. Practising in the shoebox that was my little caravan was out of the question. It would have made me deaf and hastened my mother’s descent into insanity.

But what Mehitabel and I lacked in money was more than made up for in open space. I was familiar with all the caves in the hills overlooking our home. There was even an old gold mine shaft at the halfway mark when hiking up Aasvoëlkop.

Today there are huge and affluent homes nestled around the steep incline of Northcliff Ridge. The millionaires and billionaires who live there have been only too happy to pay for their views of the Johannesburg CBD on the one side and the city’s leafy northern suburbs on the other. At 1 800 metres high, this also happens to be the second-highest point in the city.

Human remains and evidence of earlier hominid habitation, particularly in the area’s caves, date as far back as 250 000 years ago, long before the emergence of modern humans.

Unlike when I was a boy, you won’t now find the great flocks of vultures that circled the skies. They alone owned the cliffs when I was young.

One fine afternoon I hiked up the hill with Mehitabel and made my way towards a sizeable cave perched high on the northern façade of Aasvoëlkop. There were numerous tunnels leading from the main chamber into the heart of the great hill, many of which conveyed water, like tributaries of a river fading into the dark. Like the long procession of human generations who had been there before me, I marvelled at this geological sanctum.

In this magical and slightly ominous environment, I discovered an acoustic effect that allowed my humble Mehitabel to be transformed. Her notes soared magically around me and I lost myself, and many, many hours, to those sounds.

When I emerged from that cave, from its complete blackness, into the milky depths of the evening, I experienced one of my life’s greatest and most lasting epiphanies.

I stood there, my violin case in hand, the other hand’s fingers throbbing from the long hours of punishment on the strings in the darkness. I looked out at the distant and fast-growing city and the main road far below. I felt fascinated by the lights of the completely soundless vehicles as they moved like little more than fireflies on their hidden trajectories along the city’s arteries.

I felt like Gulliver looking down on the Lilliputians. As I stood outside my cave, I felt imbued with a sense of personal power over my destiny. This, to me, was an entirely new perspective on not just my life, but also the world and the universe itself, which stretched away in a wash of intoxicating stars beyond the black horizon. Surrounded by the profound solitude of nature, I imagined how preoccupied the occupants in their vehicles far below were with their lives. For the first time, I had a sense of some kind of bigger perspective in the cosmos; with effort, I realised I might be able to keep that in mind and work towards something far greater than myself.

I imagined how so many of those troubled Lilliputians in their minuscule cars could be obliterated under the foot of a malevolent Gulliver.

Until then, I had always thought of myself as a vulnerable, small being in a large, hostile world. Many children must feel insignificant and diminutive, particularly if they don’t live in a protective environment.

My life up to that point had seemed little more than day after day of not enough food and long winter nights with subzero temperatures that made a mockery of the thin wooden walls of my caravan. My makeshift home was sometimes little more than a fridge. If my body so much as rolled against its sides, the cold alone could wake me like an electric shock. But I realised I was also becoming something more, something like a wandering minstrel. I felt my occasional sojourns with Mehitabel and the world’s long-deceased composers, whose thoughts and feelings she helped me bring back to life, made me part of something intangible and near-immortal: like being part of an undying chain of masters and patrons, whose faces had dulled in the fading light of time but who could linger in the best of human culture, of which I was a part.

Astride my little mountaintop, I felt I was Gulliver. I was the one on the outside looking in. And I felt I could see it all. It was a profoundly spiritual experience, independent of religion or faith.

It was a powerful moment, an illusion of some sort, or perhaps a vision, and one that is difficult to describe, but it was a turning point and I am grateful it came at such a young age. From that moment on, no insult, provocation, threat or warning, be it from my mother, father or a president, would be able to sway me from what I set my mind to. I knew my life would never be the same.

By the time I was finally back in my little caravan, to carefully clean the rosin off Mehitabel’s belly and lock her up for the night, it was almost midnight. And as I wrapped myself up in my little bed, I knew something in me had changed forever.