Читать книгу Degas' Dust - Carnie Matisonn - Страница 14

Aged eighteen, well into my first year of university and while still enjoying the homely atmosphere of Mrs K’s pantry, I took a part-time job as a salesman at Map Centre. I figured it might allow me a bit more time to focus on studying and other jobs, and there was the promise it might be better paid than anything I had tried before.

Untruthfully, I claimed in the application form that I owned a car, something of a prerequisite for a travelling salesman. But I didn’t even own a bicycle.

At the interview, it was made clear there would be no salary of any sort or any other allowances. My employer, Mr Wootan, said I would earn 20% as commission on what I would soon repeatedly be describing as “fairly priced cartography”.

Mr Wootan was an affable Englishman with a pleasant disposition. He assured me the map business had never been better and was, in fact, the “next big thing”. There was a whole world of people out there still to buy their first map, he said. And I would be the man to sell them that map.

So I set out to find a car. On foot, I walked the steep incline towards Hillbrow, casting increasingly weary eyes over the prices of every used – and mostly totally abused – car on each of the many dilapidated second-hand car lots. Whenever I saw something I even vaguely thought could work for me, it became more obvious how hopeless my prospects were. Not only did I have no credit record, I didn’t even have a bank account. I couldn’t prove a cent of income and, even if I could, my expenses would have terrified the city’s most reckless lender.

Cars in the 1960s were a far cry from the high-performance machines of today. Steering wheels tended to be pretty large and road holding, on poorly maintained roads and in bad weather, was often a wrestling match between man and machine – more like navigating a ship through choppy waters. Safety standards (and seat belts) weren’t even an idea yet. But I would have happily agreed to drive even one of the older jalopies that had been built without indicators.

But I found nothing. On the brink of defeat, almost accepting that owning a car was a ridiculous pipe dream, I trudged past a scrapyard and noticed a battered and bruised Volkswagen Beetle rusting in the last light of day in the middle of a large pile of even more unfortunate cars in various stages of cannibalisation.

The man in charge of this colossal heap of junk was called Henry; I recalled once seeing an advert with his face staring out of it beatifically.

I took a deep breath and asked Honest Henry if it would be possible to rent his little Herbie, providing it could move.

“Seven rand a week, payable in advance,” Henry told me. “And I don’t sign papers or guarantee anything. The lights and wipers are kaput. She has a few dents in the front, but the brakes are fine and the engine goes.”

I didn’t have R7, but Henry agreed to hold my watch and violin.

I handed him the watch and kept to my promise to deliver the violin the next day. As soon as he opened the yard again, I was there to hand him my precious Mehitabel. Seeing her pass into his weathered, grease-stained hands put a lump in my throat.

“You have two pints of petrol in the tank, kid. Should be enough to get you to a filling station,” he said, as reassuringly as he could.

But my heart sank as I tried to start it. It was as dry as bones in the Karoo. Henry shrugged. “Sorry, kid. Really thought she had some juice left.”

I offered to sell Henry a map, but he declined. He was many things, but a man on his way to anywhere else was not one of them. I had no remaining earthly belongings to offer as collateral for petrol money. But Henry agreed to hold the deal for another day.

So I set off to make a bit of fuel money.

My employer had marked out an area for me to work on the East Rand, at least fifteen kilometres away. He had other salesmen working the city and its suburbs. As a junior, I would have to start not only at the bottom, but also on the other side of the city.

I clocked in at work, collected my quota of maps and assured my new boss I was on my way to the neighbouring town of Germiston.

As I strolled back in the direction of Henry’s scrapyard, I knocked on the doors of every business that looked as though it could use a map. It occurred to me I was pitching to places not far from Map Centre’s head office and was doubtless not the first salesman they’d seen, but I felt I had little other option. I’d already promised Alan I would pay his second-year book account and he urgently needed to hire a microscope and skeleton. I thought, with a rueful smile, that if another salesman found me trespassing and killed me it would at least solve my brother’s skeleton problem.

By the time I reached Henry, my legs and arms were caving in but I had enough for petrol and a down payment on my brother’s book account.

Heading to Germiston with a pile of maps in the back of the Volkswagen, I was relieved that, although the little car had its limitations, it worked. When I got to Germiston, a place full of warehouses and businesses, I sold as much as I was able to that afternoon. And I could at least honestly claim to have been to Germiston when I saw my boss the next day.

That morning, I walked into Map Centre to find Mr Wootan, who expressed a surprised satisfaction at my productivity for day one. I left him and greeted the other sales staff cheerfully on my way to the kitchen for a glass of tap water.

The sun was shining and I was fired up at the prospect of tackling the remainder of Germiston’s sprawling industrial townships. I had discovered the day before that every driver working for a factory needed a map if they didn’t already have one – and many didn’t. Mr Wootan was right. Things were looking up.

But I had no sooner signed for my next consignment of maps than two salesmen, both in their late thirties and with heavy German accents, showed up, glaring, one of them pointing a ramrod finger straight at my face.

“Kill this bloody Jew!” shouted one, asphyxiated with rage.

“Hitler should have murdered the whole bloody lot of them,” roared the other.

It was utterly out of keeping with my mood, not to mention unexpected, to encounter such hatred in a public space. Astonished, I spread my hands and half shrugged.

“What do you want?”

“You deserve to die – you bloody Jew – trespassing in my area,” the first one declared.

Oh, I thought.

By now we had the attention of the whole office.

“Mr Wootan,” I said, turning to my boss as he approached, “I can explain. I needed petrol money and meant no harm.”

But Mr Wootan simply shrugged and made it clear he didn’t want to be involved. He retreated to his office.

“I will get my guys from the Deutsche Keller to put a knife in this Jew. He will never live to see the end of this week,” threatened the more aggressive of the two.

“Johannesburg is a city with three million people. Surely it can handle a third salesman selling a few maps for a morning to make up a tank of petrol?”

“This bastard is so poor, he can’t even afford to run his car.”

“You can count his ribs. They should have gassed him in the camps.”

This had fast reached the point of no return. While I would have been happy to concede I’d been in the wrong by encroaching on their territory, there could not have been a worse thing to say to me. If I’d had a gun in a holster, I’d probably have taken it out right then and shot them both where they stood.

Obviously, neither of these men had been at the death camps, at Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Auschwitz or the nearly 900 others – but the look they had in their eyes had been there from the start. The same look of disaffected murderousness stared coldly, pitilessly, at me: the same look of inhuman hatred that had been the last thing so many millions of Jews before me had seen before being shot, gassed or buried alive.

A terrible mix of despair and rage came over me. I was more than 1.8m tall, but weighed only 71kg. They were right that I may have resembled a refugee from Belsen. But I had neither the time nor money to eat three meals a day.

I can’t recall exactly how, but I left that office, the hurt and rage pounding in my ears. I walked straight to my decrepit car, clutching my maps. But I had no intention of selling anything to anyone that day. Not any more.

I drove straight to Vrededorp, the bottled fury within me ready to explode.

On Wits campus I had become friendly with a number of law students I’d met in the law library. One of them, Morgan – an Indian colleague in my part-time law class – lived in the neighbourhood with his parents. I found him walking to his car outside his house.

“I need a favour, Morgan,” I said. “First prize for me is a knuckle­duster. Second prize, a flick knife.”

He pointed in the direction of a shop I had often walked past. “Tell Enver I sent you,” he said.

Enver was another Indian law student and, although we knew each other from campus, we weren’t as well acquainted. I’d had a cup of coffee with him once or twice and he’d invited me and others in our group once to the home of one of his relatives to enjoy some curry. He was always friendly, and a born trader. He was studying law to hone his talents and skills to benefit his family’s businesses. They owned retail shops in and around Vrededorp, Fordsburg and Mayfair and their shops stocked everything from clothing to bicycles and electronics. The only weapons openly displayed were innocuous-looking pocket knives. But for those in the know, there was a stash of medicine, self-defence and quasi-­military equipment locked up under the counter.

He was happy to oblige with both of the weapons I was after.

The knuckleduster was made of steel and covered four fingers on my right hand. The flick knife opened with a touch of a button.

As I looked in the mirror of Enver’s shop, I became conscious of how I really appeared – a hybrid of long-haired hippie musician and severely malnourished scarecrow.

One day, I told myself, things will be different.

I handed over some cash and left with my purchases already pocketed.

Over the next few days, I saw the two Germans each morning. Their threats and abuse never abated, but did not become more imaginative either. I was always the “bloody Jew”, “the bastard”, “the Jewish motherless son of a bitch”. They became more voluble with their threats to hunt me down and maim or kill me. I kept waiting for them to make a move, almost hoping that they would – and that we could just get the whole thing over with, one way or the other.

But they just kept prodding, never actually pushing matters over the edge. I realised, though, that they were planning something, and could potentially put me in hospital, or worse. It became apparent I needed to make a stand – and take the fight to them or resign myself to being stepped on and squashed.

“I would like to meet all these friends of yours you keep boasting about,” I told them. “What time do you get to your precious German beer hall tonight?”

They simply laughed.

“We will be happy to kill you at 7pm tonight, you bloody Jew. If you are fool enough to show yourself.”

“Well, see you soon, then.”

* * *

The Johannesburg public library in my days as a student was an imposing 1889 Italianate building I used as a reference library and simply to browse books, read the news and study.

At a side-street entrance to the building was the library theatre at which I had competed in many eisteddfods as a young boy and won prizes for verse and public speaking. The library precinct was, for me, a wonderland of satellite libraries, museums, theatres and architectural influences. I used to hitchhike to town after school to get to the reference library, simply to enjoy the silence, solitude and books.

The lending section was on the southern side of the foyer, across a wide, open granite floor. A museum was on the first floor with an eclectic collection displaying the different phases and aspects of the city’s history. Every time I walked up the imposing stairs above the reference library my mind was transported into the historical settings in which the artefacts on display had once been a feature of everyday life. Different sections of the halls housed geological rocks, ox wagons, vintage cars, steam-driven devices, weapons and traditional clothing, including war memorabilia and archaeological implements – from the Sterkfontein Caves to the northwest of Johannesburg to Makapan’s Caves in Limpopo.

Over the years, I came to know the regulars, all of whom used to sit at the same desks and chairs they had become accustomed to. The reference library had its diehards, and nobody ever sat on anyone else’s chair if they knew the setup.

My Jewish friends in the public library included Eddie, who was studying to be a teacher, and Mervyn, a student fanatically involved with editing and distributing underground newspapers. There were also Jerry, Julian and Ronald, all of German-Jewish origin.

Eddie had relocated from Durban to Johannesburg to study law and, much like me, lived on scraps but always sported a pleasant demeanour. Julian was studying engineering. The son of a German-­Jewish immigrant, his father had abandoned his studies as a fourth-year medical student after fleeing Berlin for South Africa to escape the gas chambers. He took a job as a ticket inspector on the railways. A tall young man, he exuded an inner strength that matched his confident, though introverted, disposition.

Mervyn was the friendly intellectual and the most interesting conversationalist of all the students who stood together regularly on the steps outside the building to share a sandwich and a few jokes and commentary on current affairs. He shared an apartment with a brilliant German student who suffered from intermittent catatonic seizures. Mervyn vigorously opposed the racist practices of the National Party and wrote a prolific and steady stream of articles on human rights, which he published in underground newspapers.

Ronald, another engineering student, lived at home with his German-Jewish parents in Greenside; he studied at the public library because it was quiet, and convenient for his father to collect him on his way home from work.

Our friendship was forged out of the simple, regular ritual of sharing our thoughts, ideas, philosophies and ideologies on the steps of that big library and, occasionally, while walking through the library gardens or wandering through the nearby museums.

I’d come to know them quite well. All had their own stories, and the scars – both physical and mental – to prove it, of how they had stood up to racists at some point in their young lives.

Ronald’s father had escaped from Germany shortly before the outbreak of war, in 1938. His uncles were less fortunate and, after being arrested for being Jewish, were taken to a concentration camp. Ronald knew they finished up somewhere on the eastern front, where, according to the Red Cross and records found in the hands of the Germans, they didn’t survive the camps.

Ronald himself had been a high achiever at school. One day on his way home from school, he found himself hemmed in between two kids on bicycles, perhaps jealous of his achievements, taunting him about being a lily-livered Jew. When he attempted to respond, they pushed him into an oncoming car. The driver swerved to avoid him but it wasn’t enough and the impact from the side of the car cracked his leg. When he woke up on the roadside, he had a broken leg and collarbone. When he later returned to school on crutches, the perpetrators mocked him openly, calling him the one-legged Jew and the Jewish cripple. He was left with a limp for the rest of his life.

Mervyn’s particularly distinctive Ashkenazi nose had been made even less attractive – with a permanent kink – thanks to a school bully who broke it with a cricket bat on the school field after announcing to his friends: “The Jews have a nose for money, so we will just level the playing field!” The event passed without so much as a whisper from the teachers, who felt that “boys will be boys”.

We had all attended schools where classmates drew swastikas on blackboards and taunted, baited and denigrated the one or two unfortunate Jews in class.

All the young men in my study group could tell their own stories and there was an unspoken understanding among us that, when the time came, each of us would be there to support any of the others.

I knew it would only be a matter of time before Hans and Klaus – or whatever their names were, I can’t remember now – came looking for me at Number 51 Honey Street. And, I felt fairly certain, when it did happen, it wouldn’t just be them. They would arrive as a small army, lost in the anonymity of their cowardly hate group. I could not contemplate Sam and Mrs K experiencing a mini Fourth Reich.

That evening, I walked into the library and asked the young men from our study group to speak to me outside.

I explained my predicament. Julian was the first to answer.

“What do you want us to do – protect you from a few Germans?”

“No,” I said. “I want you to help me break up the German beer hall. I want to use the barstools to destroy every square inch of the bar. If the Germans attack us, we use the barstools on them. We send a message.”

“What sort of message?”

“That we can’t simply be silent in the face of evil.”

Enver had, in the meantime, supplied me with six additional knuckledusters and flick knives.

“The knives are our parachutes,” I said, “not to be used unless we are attacked and taking a clobbering. The steel gloves should be enough to keep us standing.”

Within an hour, we had assembled eleven Jewish boys and, by early evening, headed in the direction of the Deutsche Keller.

The German beer hall in Hillbrow was infamous for its patrons wearing swastikas. Hitler’s birthday was still celebrated in some Johannesburg beer halls around that time.

The Deutsche Keller was in an unspectacular semi-basement building in Pretoria Street in Hillbrow. There was so much going on in the surrounding buildings and streets – actors, musicians, habitués of coffee bars, music from troubadours and hundreds of people looking for a pleasurable night out – that in the normal course of events you would not have taken any notice of the beer hall other than to see people heading in and out of a basement.

In Hillbrow back then, you could frequent any number of coffee lounges, theatres, bars or restaurants and walk the streets freely and without fear at 2am. If you had a taste for burlesque, there’d be a pick of shows for you. While prostitution and drug dealing were always present below the surface, it was no different to any­thing you’d find in any European city today. Everyone knew which coffee bar attracted the best chess players and where the best artists and musicians could be found with the finest live entertainment.

The beer hall, however, was frequented by groups of robust, aggressive, often potbellied Germans known to wander around wearing bits of Nazi apparel. Mostly, though, they entered the beer hall and only then donned an armband with a swastika to give the Nazi salute. Not every German who went to the beer hall was like that, but there were certainly enough of the swastika types to give the place its foul reputation. And anyone who could remain in a bar a minute after seeing a display like that was guilty by association.

Such open provocation had enlisted protests from Jews in the past and the lack of decisive action by the local community and authorities simply contributed to the growing arrogance of the regulars, who flaunted their anti-Semitism with a sense of impunity.

Shortly after 8pm, arriving on the street corner next to the Harley-Davidsons of the biker gangs inside, we were met by the sounds of drunken, raucous laughter coming from below. I took one last look around and headed down the concrete steps, the first of my group to enter.

There were perhaps thirty to forty men inside. A large, lurid swastika was emblazoned on the far wall. I saw a group of leather-­clad skinheads with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads and arms talking to my two work colleagues.

It was like stepping into my greatest nightmare.

For a frozen moment, Klaus, Karl and I looked at each other. They no doubt could not believe I was standing there – as promised – apparently a lamb in the lair of the lion.

“This is the same bloody Jew I was telling you about!” sneered Karl, jumping up and pointing at me.

I picked up a barstool, which had legs of angle iron, and hurled it over the bar counter. The mirrors, alcohol and optics splattered over the barman.

The skinheads launched themselves in my direction as I lifted a second barstool. I saw two Germans pulling out knives as I swung another stool. It connected with the larger of the two across his back and shoulder.

My right hand slid into my pocket and found the knuckleduster. I had briefed my friends to take up a position against the wall, preferably in a corner so that the enemy could attack us only from the front. I ran to one corner, with one skinhead bearing down on me. He smirked: “The Jew has a yellow streak down his back.”

Most of the men here were bigger and stronger than we were, but I had a reasonably long reach. The skinhead came straight at me. Purely by luck, my fist hit him on the bridge of his nose. He fell to the ground clutching his knife, not quite knowing what had happened. Skinhead number two looked on in disbelief, while I stayed in my corner, hiding my knuckleduster with my right hand behind my back.

He lunged at me, shouting: “The Jew is scared!” Again, with luck on my side, I took careful aim and scored another direct hit. I could hear his jaw breaking as his knife went spinning through the air.

It turned out few of the Germans felt strongly enough about protecting their drinking hole. Most of them, including Klaus and Karl, scattered, leaving the Deutsche Keller to its fate. In the chaos and noise they probably thought there were hundreds of us. It didn’t take long before my crew were in various stages of breaking windows, ripping down curtains and dominating the proud base of the herrenvolk. We broke every bottle, mirror, window, item of furniture and piece of décor we could lay our hands on.

It was over almost as soon as it began. As we heard the sounds of police sirens approaching, I gave the order to run.

The next morning, all the newspapers reported on the incident.

“The German beer hall was totally destroyed by unruly Jews offended by open displays of swastikas and anti-Semitic neo-­Nazi emblems,” declared one paper.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

As for my German colleagues – well, I suddenly had a name and it was no longer “bloody Jew”.

Although Klaus and Karl knew only too well who had been behind the sacking of their beloved beer hall, I had no worries about hearing from the police or being charged with damage to property. The complaints of one group of vigilantes about another group of hooligans would be unlikely to find much favour with the men in blue.

The Germans grudgingly told me they respected me, but could never like me.

I had marked out my turf and made my point. I realised I’d been lucky though. They could just as easily have killed us and tossed our bodies in the skip outside. So I decided to join a health club, study martial arts and pack on some muscle – as soon as I could find a permanent solution to my daily hunger pains.