Читать книгу Degas' Dust - Carnie Matisonn - Страница 13

My rental included two used teabags, which Mrs K left for me after the other lodgers had finished their breakfasts.

Sam Kursman was seventy-six but still worked as a dispatch clerk for a trucking company. He would rise at 5am each morning and wake me half an hour later so that I could make my way to Vrededorp by 6.30am in the comfort of knowing that, on my return home, I would be able to at least enjoy Russian tea using my two used teabags.

My first job after school was as a shop assistant at Johannesburg Anti-Waste in its dilapidated depots in Vrededorp, a suburb northwest of the inner city. Like its more famous neighbour, Sophiatown, Vrededorp had taken the brunt of urban-area apartheid legislation.

In the late 19th century, poor people had been invited to squat and build homes there on the understanding that property rights would later be transferred to their heirs. That was where its name, “Town of Peace”, came from, but after the Anglo-Boer War the British did away with that promise. By then, the suburb was a bustling community of African, coloured, Cape Malay, Indian, Chinese and white people, known for the community of outfitters who lived above their shops on 14th Street. The area, along with neighbouring suburb Pageview, was known to locals as Fietas.

14th Street was a cross between a modern-day flea market and Indian bazaar where all the residents of Johannesburg went in search of bargains. Shopkeepers lived for their work and often developed close personal relationships with their customers. It was not unusual to shop for an item of clothing and be offered a samoosa while making up one’s mind about what to buy.

My father’s old friend Raymond Matuson owned both the Anti-­Waste depots. One was in 14th, the other in De La Rey Street, named after a famous Boer general. Twice a week, Raymond would move bales of offcuts from the warehouse behind his larger 14th Street store and lay them out on tables and in bins.

Raymond was an affable, larger-than-life extrovert. He was a trained actor, and watching him selling offcuts of cloth was a daily cabaret. He knew I enjoyed his show and would often comment about his customers’ reactions to his sales spiel.

He had relationships with most of the garment manufacturers. He did not charge for carting away their waste (a disparate variety of colours and sizes of materials: cotton, Dacron, polyester, nylon and more). In return, thanks to him, very little of this material was wasted, and most commonly found its way to the machinists working in the outlying, decentralised areas to the north of the inner city.

The doors of Joburg Anti-Waste opened at 7am, by which time there were queues of hopeful buyers extending along 14th Street and halfway around the block. They scratched among the bales and bins to find the largest offcuts to make blouses, dresses, shirts and trousers. Our material was priced by weight alone, which made it a bargain-hunter’s paradise. Imagine the joy on the face of a seamstress who found four pieces of feather-light, exquisite silk, all in different colours, but which cost less than synthetic materials. I often marvelled at the clothing the customers eventually made from our orphanage of offcuts. Colourful and innovative, the clothes reflected the multicultural environment in which these poor – but mostly happy – people lived.

In 1955, black residents had already started being forced at gun­point from their homes here, after the apartheid state’s resettlement board was formed to remove them from Joburg’s western areas. They were transported to the enormous cluster of townships now known as Soweto. Once shifted, their empty houses were made available to poor whites.

Much the same thing was still happening in Vrededorp in the early sixties. By the 1970s, the area was completely cleared of “non-whites”, with many homes bulldozed and the state providing houses for white people on some of the land. Horrific stories were emerging almost daily in newspapers of bulldozers flattening houses to make way for white developments while desperate black and coloured residents clung to their belongings.

But a lot of the land acquired in this way also simply stayed empty. To this day, many land claims have not been settled. More claims have been made than there are properties in the area, and it remains one of the irreparable wounds of apartheid history.

But back when I started my job with Raymond, most of this was still being played out.

My job description included carrying bags of material offcuts from the warehouse to the shop floor, cleaning the floors and serving the customers.

I toiled away from 6.30am until 7pm each day, then jogged the six or so kilometres into the city, where I worked at night clubs and hotels as a photographer for Sam the Bad Man, who had a monopoly on the central city turf.

The day I’d met Sam, he memorably told me: “Remember, boy, I develop the pictures, so don’t bring me the regular fee if I see breasts and nipples. If you don’t get it, you will. You never know what pictures people want. You want to work for me – it’s simple. Whatever they ask you to take, the answer is always yes. One more thing, boy. My cameras have my name on them and the venues will let you in. If you see anyone else in my territory, you kick the bastard out and phone me.”

The foul, uncouth Sam sneezed all the time, as if trying, futilely, to discharge all the filth that had built up in his body over decades as one of life’s human sewer rats. Each night, I learnt more about him. While I – and others like me – cruised the clubs, he was running a bucket shop. Between developing our pictures, he took bets. Exactly what people were betting on I still can’t say. The only bits of discussion I heard were conducted in Greek.

It seemed – from his relationships with the women who passed in and out of his office and some of the phone calls – that prostitution was also on his menu. Sam was into anything and every­thing that could turn a profit and he feared no one. I later discovered his real name was Elefterius, which in Greek, I’ve been told, means “liberty”. Sam was the personification of personal, if not also highly questionable, liberty.

Most of the time, I simply took pictures of couples enjoying a night out on the town. Many were celebrating milestones in their lives. But on one unforgettable occasion – which made Sam’s induction speech appear perfectly prescient – I found myself asked to do a great deal more. I was at the Langham Hotel in central Johannesburg, one of the more regal and respectable places at the time. I snapped the first group of people in the foyer and moved to the tables in the restaurant before being summoned by three jovial, intoxicated couples in the lounge. The leader of the pack, a platinum blonde in a figure-hugging red miniskirt, asked if I could make myself available for an hour of portrait photography in the executive suite on the second floor. She would pay whatever my rate was.

I was asked to bring a fresh spool of film and make sure I had at least another two lots of thirty-six exposures each. She told me to knock on their door in about half an hour. I tapped loudly using my knuckles, but to no avail. The sounds of alcohol-induced revelry I was hearing could have drowned out an overhead sonic boom. I turned the doorknob, to be greeted by the same long-haired buxom blonde wearing only her heels.

A glass of alcohol was thrust into my left hand while I was dragged into the room by my right arm, still clutching my camera bravely.

The sight of five nude, gyrating bodies on the couches and on the floor, with buxom blonde ordering me amid all the laughter where to point the lens, should have been a nerve-racking experience for a seventeen-year-old. But I focused on the commission I’d be paid for 108 photographs at Sam’s “premium” rate.

I also couldn’t help thinking of how the filthy Greek would no doubt be leering over all these photos later as he developed them, surely printing additional copies for himself. If the participants in that night’s orgy could have foreseen lascivious old Sam slavering over images of them, they would have thought twice about having me there.

Or perhaps not. I simply snapped my way through it all as professionally as I could.

* * *

I had every reason to regard Raymond as a friend, not just my employer – he was always open to questions and conversations. Once, he asked me to accompany him on a drive through the suburbs of Vrededorp, Mayfair, Westdene and Newlands, as he wanted to look at a few houses up for sale.

As we neared our first stop, I cleared my throat and asked him: “Raymond, do you remember a discussion you had with my father about my great-uncle Karnielsohn a few years ago, when I was around eleven?”

Raymond chuckled. “I love Natie,” he said, “and I would have loved to get more out of him to develop a script. But in his mind, Karnielsohn existed as a reclusive character all on his own. I couldn’t do much with that. Natie spoke about his uncle being a lawyer, his art collection and death at the hands of the Nazis, but he never followed up when I asked him to put it all in context.

“I wanted Natie to bring him to life as a person in a particular community, with relationships. What was I supposed to do with snippets of information that would hardly fill a page of dialogue?

“There seemed to be no storyline, no other characters, no entertainment value. A pity, really.”

Raymond pulled up to a small old house in a run-down part of Johannesburg.

He turned to me. “What do you think of it?” he asked, pointing at the structure.

“What an awful old chaluppah!”

“That’s why I love it,” he told me. “A house like this will always have a tenant, and certainly not one likely to emigrate. Write down the address; I’m taking this one.”

“Are you not going to look inside?” I asked incredulously.

“I know what it’s like inside. These ones are all the same: one bathroom, three small bedrooms, dirty walls, dirty children and a whining wife. I’m buying it. Let’s move on.”

As we drove, I continued my line of enquiry. “Do you think I would ever be able to find out more about Karnielsohn and the whereabouts of the art collection?”

“If you are prepared to spend the time, follow leads and do the research, I am sure you could,” Raymond said.

“Would you pursue it if you were me?”

Raymond’s chubby face broke into a broad grin.

“Hell, man,” he said, “when I want to do something, I just get on and do it. If you’re that interested, you’ll stop thinking about it and do the same.”

Raymond focused on his shopping spree. In all, we drove past seven houses and walked into only one. His standard comment after stopping for two minutes in front of almost every single house, almost as if simply to check that there was indeed something there that vaguely conformed to the rules of being a house-shaped object, was: “I’ll take this one. Write it down.”

* * *

I was working nightclubs and restaurants as many nights as I could. By day, aside from Joburg Anti-Waste and various sales jobs that came my way, I fitted anything and everything I could into every spare hour I had, as long as there was money or food at the end of it.

In some cases, I was fortunate and got both. I alternated occasionally as a film extra for Jamie Uys Film Studios, headquartered at the top of the hill in Northcliff, which the city and its suburbs were finally discovering as part of Johannesburg’s inevitable expansion. I worked for a while on the set of Kimberley Jim, still a well-­regarded film classic starring Jim Reeves, shot in the North­cliff hills I knew so well.

The studios paid R2 a night. We worked from 7pm until about 1am or 2am. We were also served pap and wors for supper along with our payment at the end of each shift.

But no matter how much I was doing, I needed to find a way to make a lot more money. My own tuition fees would not cost as much as Alan’s, but they were still more than I could afford.

Nevertheless, at the start of 1963, I enrolled for my bachelor’s degree.

My decision to study towards a bachelor of arts degree came more as a default position than because of any positive motivation. After leaving school, I had tried to work out what really interested me. The list stopped at music and a general, unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Clearly, any course of study I chose would have to be done part time. That ruled out medicine, engineering, the sciences, architecture, fine arts and every conceivable profession – with the exception of accounting and law.

In my ignorance, I judged these latter professions largely by the demeanour and conduct of their practitioners.

The accountants I’d met seemed dour, stable, pedantic, uni­direc­tional – boring. Although I had read books glamorising the brilliant minds of attorneys, advocates and legal beagles, the lawyers I had come across were pompous, verbose and self-opinionated. So I dismissed the law, too, as something not for me.

This left me with only two choices: either a bachelor of commerce or arts, both of which could be done part time. The subjects required for a bachelor of commerce seemed rather dry and – at face value – failed to stimulate my interest. But the vast choice of courses available to arts students, along with the many libraries available, seemed a good entry point to me into the world of academia. At the back of my mind was the thought that, if only in the absence of anything better to do, it might make sense to follow it all up later with a law degree.

So, fortunately, in my first year I also included a major in legal theory along with registering for courses in English, Afrikaans and politics. My plan was to spend the first three years as a full-time student on the Wits campus but appearing for only a few hours a day to attend about half the required number of lectures. Despite this, I was still able to enjoy a taste of university life.

Although I did not have the money to buy tickets to the debutantes’ ball to witness the crowning of the rag queen, I managed to take part in some of the float building. Building floats for the rag procession had a certain appeal, but I ended up with the challenge of trying to find more innovative ideas to raise money for charities that would benefit from the rag.

Ster-Kinekor was publicising the impending opening of the film spectacular Sodom and Gomorrah, which was trying to cash in on the success of earlier biblical epics like Ben-Hur. I marched into the Ster-Kinekor general manager’s office and offered to promote the movie on condition I could also use some of their money to advertise our forthcoming rag procession and raise funds for charities I believed in. After a short negotiation, the company agreed to give me a horse and chariot at peak hour on Saturday morning. I knew a good number of theatrical personalities and phoned Morrie Blake, a well-known compère and stage and radio personality, to ask if he would be willing to conduct a mock auction of my “slave girls”.

Morrie jumped at the opportunity to have his name in the newspapers and do his bit for a worthy cause.

With the support of my handful of friends, I convinced all ten rag-queen finalists to trail behind the chariot while dressed in white sheets torn into rags with their hands tied behind their backs, joined together with ropes in the style of persecuted slaves. At about 11am, I took my place as the charioteer in full Roman battledress, gave a nod to the pretty young women behind me and set off on a slow walk, dictated by the pace of the horse, in the direction of the Herman Wald statue in Joubert Street. To add to the lustre of the occasion, I had negotiated the loan of a seven-ton truck from OK Bazaars, which I parked in Joubert Street between President and Market streets. I sourced electricity from an apartment on the first floor of a nearby building and plugged in a sound system borrowed from the university music department to amplify the guitars and brass instruments for an all-girl band.

The plan was to ride the chariot through the city to the Oppen­heimer Fountain with all these attractive, sparsely clad slaves in tow. Hordes of people followed us in amazement, with no idea of what was going on, other than the Sodom and Gomorrah posters on the sides of the chariot and the messages about the rag procession. At our destination, my slaves and I climbed on to the back of the truck. The band launched into what many at the time referred to as the “music of the devil” and the slave girls started to gyrate in rhythm.

I had arranged for four heavyweight wrestlers to be in the crowd as security, because I had a vague idea things might get out of hand.

Before the bidding, we let Morrie the “auctioneer” introduce each objet d’art, highlighting her individual characteristics, while emphasising the enormous prestige a successful bidder could enjoy by claiming her. Foolishly, but in the spirit of fun, he said it would be “a fight” for whose bid would be accepted for the most beautiful damsel of all. Little did I know this would set the trend among the spectators – many of whom seriously seemed to believe they could whisk these girls away as genuine slaves for their private entertainment.

The auctioneer initially coaxed bids from members of the public who good-naturedly threw money on to the platform, most of them aware they were donating to charity.

But the festivity fast degenerated into a brawl when one of Johannesburg’s most well-known heavyweight wrestlers, apparently “planted by me”, according to the police and the Sunday Times, made a bid for the most beautiful maiden and was challenged by a notorious ex-convict, who claimed to have outbid him and promptly pulled the poor child off the truck in an attempt to abduct her.

As the bidding disintegrated into a fight between the wrestlers and the crowd, which was soon totally out of control, the police descended. But not before hundreds of coins had been thrown into the back of the truck.

Once everything had calmed down and order was restored, the police decided to track down the man behind all the madness.

“Does you got a permit?” asked the head honcho of the local constabulary, flanked by three subordinates.

“I’m sure I must have one,” I told him.

“You give me the permit or I lock you up,” came the response.

I could only shrug.

“Did you got it or don’t you?”

“Well I don’t exactly have it on me – and this is a charitable event,” I muttered.

“You call this charitable when you got a whole lot of naked women here that you are selling into prostitution and causing a riot in the streets of Johannesburg?”

“I wouldn’t call them prostitutes,” I objected. “Especially since–”

“You can see they prostitutes, man. They don’t got no clothes underneath them!” he spluttered. “I’m not going to waste my time with you. Lock him up!” he ordered.

And with that, the heavy hands of the law landed on each of my shoulders and marched me off to the nearest police van. Two cops sat in the front and one in the back with me, insisting on getting a “confession” from me about where I had found my collection of “strumpets for sale”.

I knew when I eventually arrived at the police station someone surely would have heard the words “rag”, “jool”, “charity” or even “student”.

I was released almost as soon as I arrived. The arresting officers were instructed to drive me back to the place where they had arrested me, but not without a stern warning that I had contravened the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 by holding a public meeting without the written permission of the commissioner of police or his deputy.

I soon found myself back on the street, where we had successfully raised a large amount of money. The Sunday papers featured our photographs as Morrius Blakius, Carnius Matisonius, Flavius Orulus, Suzanikus Orpheus and a few other parodies of Roman names.

I found university life wonderful. I had no money, precious little food and very few set-work books, but I considered myself lucky to be part of a large and inspiring group of intellectual and musical friends and acquaintances. Although there were masses of students in some of the classes I attended, most of the lecturers knew me by name, either by virtue of the fact that I achieved high marks or – the far more common reason – through having read articles in the papers about my riotous rag procession.

The story followed me around so doggedly that even on the first day of my third year I had the pleasure of Professor Scholtens, my lecturer in Roman Law, throwing me out of his class. He repeated this gesture on the first day of each subsequent term for various offences, such as asking me what my thoughts were on his ramblings in Latin, which nobody understood, and which I “translated” as humorously as I could.

Before one of our classes, I wrote on the blackboard that I had calculated that he was covering two lines of Latin per minute, meaning that if the class read the English translation at double that speed they could fall asleep for the remaining half of each of Scholtens’ lectures.

Needless to say, he threw me out for that too.