The loss of nine coins
A shortish story
One
He wakes up from a dream of fire and burning torches with a thick shitty taste in his mouth. The sheets are damp and feel dirty, though they were almost clean last night. They're old, thin and grey and he's been sweating into them as he turned in the reckless images of the night.
The starting day offers no new sound or light, no different breath: outside the window the only message spoken is loud birdsong, and the signal of footsteps, but there is no meaning in them. A rattle returns, settles, sound bounces. A car echoes and slowly moves away.
For a long time he just lies there, coming up from the dream, not even clear where he is. His eyes itch. His right arm is trapped in a twist of linen. The ceiling enters his field of vision: once white, there are now several dampnesses; pale brown, ochreish and faintest brick-red, creeping together, forming profiles or limbs. There perhaps the face of a centaur and here a helmeted man with his visor lifted and a great hook nose peering out; some bodies coiled in a Laocoon. He can remember that last night these smudges had seemed alive and meaningful but now they're empty. He tries to recreate the vision and can't, lies back tugging to release his arm.
Lines of light move over these patterns as cars pass, reflecting sunlight from the street outside, suggesting their own cinema. But the image passed in is only light, bars in the sloping shape of the gap between the curtains, the shape of the looped succession of curtain-hooks; even these are blurred and distorted, becoming merely bars of moving light. The whole room dims and then lightens again as a cloud passes over the sun.
Now the sound outside is of a car starting. Loud footsteps rattle. Echoes, daylight at the window. The same bird returns but offers no sign; settles slowly on fluting wings. There's still no different message, no sound moving a breath to form a signal.
His feet reach the floor, missing the carpet and coming down cool on the linoleum. He gropes for trousers and a cardigan in the heap of clothes spilling from his suitcase. The trousers are woollen, pale brown (camel) and the jersey is navy, fluffy, too big. With these as props, he starts the dance of a man half asleep, with an urgent full bladder, hung over and trying to get dressed quickly in the chilled morning air.
Back from the bathroom Harry Zeit stands looking at his image in the mirror above the sink. His hair is graying; always makes him look older on bad mornings. The beard line is clear and distinct, charcoal blue like a bad guy in a movie. He pulls an eyelid down to inspect the veining, and slowly, almost theatrically tells himself: "This is it. The end. The bottom. There's no-where further. Further down." The image ignores his words, purses its mouth, shows him the other eyeball, sticks a tongue out, retracts it, leans on the edge of the sink which feels a bit loose on its brackets. He puts a neat half-inch of Mentadent-P on the bristles, bares the big yellowish teeth and starts brushing.
Cars still hiss past. The knight and the centaur on the ceiling face each other around the light-bracket. The dream of fire subsides, fades, disappears entirely as the toothbrush grinds in little circles, darts up and down.
By the time he's shaved and dressed again, forty-five minutes have gone by and he could almost pass for sober or respectable or even both. Almost, because his shirt isn't a fresh one, is a bit crushed from a night crumpled in with the other things. Almost, because he has two shaving cuts, one still with a little wisp of cotton-wool. And his eyes still don't look right. But the clothes are neat, the tie perfectly knotted, the shoes have been rubbed with his handkerchief, trying to polish over the worst marks.
Two
The firm of Zeit and Son, Manufacturing Jewellers (Pty) Ltd had been okay. Sure. They'd had a company crest designed by the old man: nine gold coins laid out in neatly in three rows of three. The crest had said: "money", a rich man's symbol. By the time Harry had taken over, it had eroded to a mere logo: the three-by-three grid was still there, but now the circles above the word ZEIT were nine empty rings.
The crest was also their hallmark, and the old man'd had special dies made on a trip to Pforzheim in 1952. The master die maker Reinholdt had cut them in return for some ineffable favour. Three beautiful dark steel dies, two of them curved for the insides of rings. Those dies had lasted, right up to a month ago, pounding their matrix impression onto the soft metals, alongside the carat mark or the sterling silver grade. They must be somewhere still, lying in their rusty black and gold Dannemann Pierrot cigar tin; the one with a picture of the bearded cigar-maker surrounded by flowers and palms and a glimpse of an exotic South American port. The dies were made of that old blue steel, such incorruptible stuff. They must still be unmarked, unrusted, perfect.
Whenever the journeymen or apprentices finished something, they'd have to take it to Old Zeit for inspection. The gleaming jewel would be proffered, folded in a new piece of tissue-paper, for examination by his meticulously controlled anger. Like Faberge, he kept a small anvil on the desk, and anything flawed or imperfect was sent back to the workshop to have its gems removed, then returned for the ritual crushing with his hammer. The workers (all except for Cassim, the workshop foreman) were terrified of Old Zeit, and bringing a finished object for him to inspect through his loupe was a special kind of agony. But whatever passed, and that was almost everything, had to be hallmarked. And the dies had lived in their cigar tin in the bottom right drawer, with all the other stamps. They were issued almost in the way of a reward to the uneasy workers.
Harry had often seen the exchanged glances, the hesitation, sweating and shuffling, the last-minute buffing with a fine cloth that accompanied presentation to his father. As the boss's son and heir he had always felt somehow immune, an invisible child among the workbenches, the particular and unmistakable smell of jeweller's rouge, the transformations of metals. At a very early age he had gained an intense insight into the processes of production, watching over a workbench or from a sunny perch on the huge windowsill that overlooked Parliament Street. He'd watched the rough metals smelted, cast, rolled, hammered, forged, cut, filed, sanded, soldered, polished; seeing the careful measuring and fitting of a diamond or ruby, until the object was presented to his father for study under the eyeglass. And he'd often seen the final transformation too, when the jewel was exchanged for the customer's money. And at seven or eight he could have told an asker, if there'd ever been one, where his food came from, and had understood quite precisely how money could be "made", how gold or silver was changed into gain, and by whom. But no-one ever asked as he steered his big eyes among the men and women who worked for the family.
The workshop never became prosaic for little Harry. He never stopped being fascinated by the glow of smelted metal, by the dangerous hum of the big polishing motors. It took him years to lose the prurient thrill of hovering on the edges of the male workers' vertiginous conversations, the ones around and in and out of sex. The scariest and most ambiguously attractive of these men was a polisher called Whitey, a blonde "coloured" man who bore the inverse brunt of the rest of the workshop's racism, and whose sleaziness seemed unbounded. Lunch times (in the school holidays) Harry would sit on the windowsill with his tin lunch box and watch the men. They'd lean in their patch of sunlight, contemplatively chewing their foreign foods, samoosas, spiced Moslem things. Two storeys below them the people moved in their lunch time jostle, the poorer and busier end of the city. There were regulars: the old man who walked in half-inch steps, shuffling his pain along the paving flags until he reached the curb, then making one big looping foot-lunge over the guttery water before taking up his half-inch steps again. There was the millionaire who parked his Rolls diagonally opposite and always waited in the back behind his darkened windows with his business files on his lap. But mostly there were the women. The men's' eyes, guided by a stream of talk and boast would crawl all over them, down there below and so foreshortened in the street. Each would be analysed, hacked apart and weighed out as so much poes en bak en boude, tits and arse, so much cock hunger, so much revelation of flesh and hair; launching-pads for rockets of fantasy. And sometimes, scariest of all, the conversation would twist itself into a competition of pornography, with the men all coaxing each other, and Whitey's wicked angled eye watching for the effect of all this on the boss's ten-year-old son.
And then there was the day when Whitey, (whose real name was Frederik de Waal,) didn't come in to the workshop. A hot day in January, a day when the long holidays were ending and school would start again soon. Cassim, big and serious with his skull-cap and meaty face, having stood outside old Zeit's office for five minutes, went in and conferred and then Harry's dad had come out into the workshop. He'd knocked on the big anvil with a triplet till it rang and everyone stopped to listen and then he'd told them what he'd just heard, what they all knew already: how Freddie had drowned the previous day, playing with friends in the sea at Strandfontein. How he'd fallen off and, unable to swim, had died in the breakers. The workers had all stood or sat where they'd been when Abraham Zeit had emerged from his office, and said nothing, and looked down. Gradually, after the speech, the noise of the workshop had resumed: a clanking as a ring-shank was stretched, the squeaking grate of a file against an edge of metal plate. And the day had been filled with a lot of silence between these noises.
Harry had spent the rest of his holidays living uneasily, with the image of Whitey with his dagga-stained hands and his sneering look, reduced to a blank and vacant corpse among sea-foam and the thrashing fear of his friends.
* * * * * *
Now, at forty-two, he stands with his hands on the warm dark enamel paint of the railing, on the balcony of the Marron Boarding House, and thinks about the suddenness of that slip from the floating tractor tube. Was it red rubber or black?
Down in town, towards the harbour, he hears the sound of cannon being fired, perhaps a twenty-one gun salute for a visiting diplomat. The gunshots boom and echo in the bowl of the city.
Three
Now Harry goes down to the shop for milk and a paper, walking out into the sunlight, his eyes furrowed against the whiteness reflecting off a wall. This is the same morning light and it's still bright but not as cold, teasing with clouds.
He gives a grunt and says "Hello" to the two tight nervous faces in the corridor. One is a salesman with a pile of catalogues and invoice books held under his left arm. He's wearing his only suit, a pale-blue one, and his hair is gummed in place with something which makes it shine almost blue-black.
Down the front path past the old man, "What's his name again?" he thinks, "Oh, yes Eriksen, mister Eriksen that just sits in his deck-chair on the weedy lawn."
"Morning, 'ster Eriksen!"
"Morning."
* * * * * *
He comes back in at the gate, between the two concrete fin-de-siècle sphinxes which stare obliquely beyond all passers, with his paper tucked under his arm and the carton of milk in his hand. He stops, stands for a moment and looks up at the Marron Lodge. There are four symmetrical palms in the front garden, big and old, and the cast-iron ornamentation hanging down from the balcony front shows that the place must have been better once, classier. The whole building is a history of decay, a map of creeping damp and spider-web, of neglect and willful damage. And gradually, as it's slid from order towards randomness, chunks have fallen out of it. A drunk has broken a window, the uncontrolled lawn has cracked and undermined the steps.
Harry stands at the gate looking up and in. There's a golden shower creeper slung over an old trellis, all dead in the middle but still hanging down strong and green with new shoots tight; bud and tendril still grow, stretching in locks wet with last night's rain. There's the bird-bath in the middle, an old corn-grinding stone set on a pillar made of round river stones held in rough mortar. It's the first time that he's noticed it, and he wonders for a while how it got there. Such a South African thing, but not from here, not from the Western Cape. He walks up the pathway without seeing the snowdrops pushing up through cracked cement.
As he enters his room on the first floor he hears the shots again. The dark rumble of guns. He puts down his paper and his milk and goes over to stand with his elbows on the dusty windowsill, looking down towards the city. Nothing. A police or ambulance siren swoops. The silence settles around the noise so that he can hear the creaking of the bed under his knees as it adjusts to tiny shifts in weight. "The siren's a constant, must be a burglar alarm." Another joins it. "Why don't they do anything about them?" A wisp of smoke drifts up from the rail yard or the docks.
He fills his aluminium jug at the basin, finds the immersion heater among his clothes and starts boiling water for coffee. While it's getting hot, he straightens the room. Clothes are put back into the suitcase. He hasn't used the drawers or the wardrobe, though he doesn't know how long he'll be here. There isn't much else. Food is put into two orderly rows on the cream enamel cupboard between the sink and the hotplate.
Sitting on a straight-backed chair, out on the balcony, with his cup of instant coffee on the ground next to him, he starts reading the paper. What is Harry reading for? He glances at the front page, taking in the headlines, missing the content. Turns the pages, thumbs meeting at the top corners in an elaborate opening and closing rite. He skims over the business pages, reads only Peanuts and Dagwood on the comics page. Every now and then he'll close his eyes then open them, staring out over the little garden. Two pigeons sit on the electric wire that drapes in from the street pole, shuttling down to the bird-bath and Mr. Eriksen's bread crumbs. The leader page occupies him for a little time. He looks at the book review and the readers' letters, at the cartoon.
He's trying to find the guns and the sirens, reading in among the print for the turning of some great wheel. Everywhere around him he feels the signs of its movement, notched and ratcheted against the twisted thong, tense to spin. Each time he goes to a new page his eyes dart from headline to headline looking for its tracks through the rows of the words.
The paper's full of strikes again. He puts it down, sips the coffee. Mr. Eriksen is heading in for a pee, his hand in his pocket holding down against the groin. The sky is blue and white, the coffee hot, bitter. Now there are three witogies flitting and tumbling through the space of air enclosed by the U-shaped structure of the boarding house. The more distant burglar-alarm quietens and is taken up in echo by the noise of engines. He imagines monkeys in the palms, crocodiles slithering among the finger-slicing pampas grass.
Four
The strike had caught Old Zeit without much warning. Some of the other bosses had known, but he had always imagined that his workers were loyal and responsible, and had ignored the union. Harry had been in Johannesburg working for B. F. Parkov, the big findings wholesaler, and had known nothing until his father had called him.
"Harry, they're striking."
"Hello dad. Who? Who's striking who?"
"The men, the workmen. Cassim told me now, and they've all gone off into a, a sort of a huddle in the corner. Bastards."
"Slow down, run it past me again slowly. What's actually going on? So the men have come out on strike. Good. About time." He chuckled.
"Shut up, you. How can you say 'good' before you know more than nothing? Weren't you coming on holiday? With Sylvia and little Caroline? You know how your mother wants to see the child again. Good, good."
And then, after a rubbery pause, Harry had said: "Do I hear what I think I hear? Dad. Holiday is holiday, we're not coming there so that I can mooch about in your office while the workmen are staying home. How many is it? All of them, only the journeymen? Is it your workshop or more? Everyone in the Cape, hey that really is something."
* * * * *
So he'd spent a lot of his holiday in the office. Doing nothing, making tea and helping take stock: the careful weighing of every hundredth of a gram of gold, every carat point of each stone, writing them in big black books with red or blue bindings. And waiting for the phone to go, and waiting for the employers' meetings and the outcome of the employers' meetings, for news from the negotiations. That had been the Precious Metal Workers Union.
The year was nineteen seventy, Harry was twenty-four, recently married, in sympathy with the workers and the strike (vaguely), but was unable to talk to his father about it. Old Zeit was sixty-five, confused, felt threatened by everything that was going on. He spent a lot of his time with Harry being defensive, as though he were being personally attacked, affronted as a being. With the workers he was always cool and aloof, showing all the outward signs of being completely in control. His desk remained dark, polished and uncluttered, with the little anvil and the planishing hammer now unused.
"Harry, go and talk to Cassim, tell him, tell him that they're being stupid." He patted his temple in a gesture of stupidity. "What do they want, more money? They're the best paid workers anywhere. Not just ours here, all the jewellers. Better paid? Huh! They're labour aristocrats, I tell you, labour aristocrats. And now they going to lose jobs, a whole lot of them, boom. Go and tell Cassim that the whole lot of them are stupid." The patting gesture.
"They know what you think. Cassim knows what you think."
"But why, Harry, why. I spoke to Steen this morning. D'you know what he's doing? D'you know what Steen is doing? He's fired the lot, all sixty or seventy of them, and if they want their jobs they can bloody-well come and beg for them, cap in hand. Cap in hand. And he's taking people off the street. Women, too! Over thirty of them from the labour exchange this morning."
"Scabs."
"Scabs! Workers, more likely. What are you, some whining communist or something? They're keeping Steen open, feeding families, getting the work out. Do you know what this is costing? Have you got the least idea?"
"Dad," and he'd stopped there, sensing futility, no meeting. And though he knew clearly what his father's position was, he couldn't really put his finger on where he himself stood. His mother was there too, old and frail way beyond her years as the hidden cancer moved through her abdomen. He avoided her reproach- ful-sympathetic eyes.
The workshop was quiet, and though it was a Thursday it felt like a Saturday afternoon. The were tools inert, waiting. Sharp pointed instruments for cutting and gouging, files, hammers, pliers, needing hands and eyes, the acids and poisons standing cold, the blowtorches unlit. Tools waiting on the productions of other tools in an ordered succession of steel.
Harry had tried to see Steen and discuss the strike with him, but Steen had refused to see him or anyone, claiming to be too busy. He'd wandered morosely about the workshop, avoiding or ignoring his parents.
The whole event had lasted three days and then collapsed suddenly. There was confusion among the workers. The Union treasurer had decamped with the funds. The bosses had started hiring scabs. Wives of some workers had opposed the strike. Reasons and retributions flew. Workers lined up to get their jobs back at the old wages: the few had beaten the many again. There was morose silence in the workshop, centering on Cassim who was a big brooding void. The noise of metals being formed into jewels continued. The workshop radio played Radio Good Hope, with Ella, and Bing Crosby still singing White Christmas as the summer built to its oppressive height. And there was Frank Sinatra oompahing his way into Anything Goes.
* * * * * *
Harry puts down his newspaper and places his hands on his lap, looks out for a while. He folds and rolls the paper, slides it under his arm, takes the coffee-cup in one hand and the chair by its backrest in the other and goes inside. In the room he sits on the bedcover for a while. It is old, lined with a fading pattern of poinsettias. He takes a flat half jack of brandy from the bottom of the bigger suitcase. He unscrews the lid, wipes the top with his palm and drinks, his Adam's apple jiggling. Outside he hears the echoes rumbling again.
Five
On a long day in January when they were twenty and twenty-one, Harry and Sylvia sat watching the crows moving their crow shadows over the highveld grass.
The afternoon was hot and darkening, building stained thunderheads, still with the smell of yesterday's rain and the settled dust.
Near the old dark shed and the broken cars, surrounded by flowering cosmos and ripe blackjacks, by khakibos with its particular smell, they sat on a plank, leaning against the trunk of the thorn tree in George and Phyllida's yard: the Halfway House Farm, which grew half-buried bolts and rusty paraffin tins.
Away for a holiday, they had asked Sylvia to see to the place for just over a week, and she'd brought deli food and wine and textbooks and water colours and Harry; and they'd spent all the warm long days unfolding and shaking out an their adulthood with love and skin and groins and sweat and tongues; with eating kisses and warm nude nights. Fuckdreams merged into half-awake real fucking, falling back into breathless sleep: dreaming of hair and mucus and all the strange returns from childhood, and of water flow drumming deep in the cup of the tendoned thighs.
They lunched on little cheese sandwiches which she'd made in the big sloppy kitchen: cucumber and tomato thinly sliced on sogging triangles of new white bread, a frill of diced lettuce and a bottle and a half of wine. Lieberstein, propped against the tree where old fence wire squeezed deep and left black rust streaks on the papery bark.
The first big bird, raven-gleaming with a broad white deacon's collar, hove into view with a great shouting. It came up over the four dark wattle trees, briefly black against the skyline's cleft at the meeting of hills, cawing and flapping, glancing back over its shoulder.
He watched it steady itself, wings locked stable, seeking the road in the air, flowing down and sideways over the hillside. It circled twice and caught the good hot lift from the shed roof. The bird spun upwards and, guided by a subtle wingtip flick of feather fingers, slid out sideways and was off again in a swoop that took it clear out over the valley. Over the stand of trees. Gone.
He turned to see whether Sylvia'd seen it, and when she said "Uh-uh", he moved closer and kissed her ear with his tongue; pushing a long hair aside, wet and spitty until she giggled and shrieked. The next crow tipped over the dark trees, slid down the river of air and spun up into the roof's thermal, cawing at them twice. Then it pumped hand-feathered wings, slipping off in a swoop to the right as it tilted up and higher and slid away over the hill and out of sight.
Half the afternoon they watched the crows coming down their beaten path of air. The clouds of the storm jostled higher and darker. The sky the unending African highveld sky.
"They're like dogs, air-dogs," Sylvia said, "what kind are they?"
"Beady little eyes they've got. They're a bit like black foxes with white necks. Fox terriers maybe."
"Yes, listen to that noise. It must be a flying bark. What do they eat?"
"Oh, anything. You know; they're carnivores, like dogs. And scavengers, though I don't know where they find dead things around here," Harry told her. "And they take shiny things to their nests. It's a sort of a seduction of the females. The boy crow with the most gems in his nest gets the girl crow."
"Rubbish Harry. The ones with the shiny things are magpies. We don't have them here."
"Of course we do. They peck out lambs' eyes on the farms in Natal."
The first lightning hammered blinding from the deeps of the tallest cloud. They grabbed the debris of lunch: the plates, the glasses, blanket and breadboard, carried them indoors. Sylvia started making crow-noises, shrieking and flapping her arms.
Harry danced around her, his hands flopping on the ends of his arms. Happy at his own happiness, he was also a little uneasy with it, as though it were something he didn't deserve. He glided his hand around her ribcage, in under the open shirt and his fingers rippled over skin and bone, pausing at a mole. A part of him just watched, always aware that too much excitement might set the asthma off.
On Phyllida's bed Sylvia knelt at the red stoep-polished windowsill and watched the last crows hurrying down the slippery gusts of the valley. Star-white on the horizon's cloud the lightning flickered at the switch of the sky's flood lights.
"Look, there go another two."
"Ja, they're getting away from the rain. See, they've stopped in the trees." Pointing with his right hand around near her cheek, he used the left to guide her hand to his groin. Excitement flared again, rushing up from below his stomach.
He knelt behind her, his chin on her shoulder. While she watched the wind with her eyes the sense of her skin could feel his hands over and under the folds of her clothes, touching lightly, brushing secret hair, and the warmth ran in a shivering string from the depth of her belly to the base of her throat.
And Harry never stopped watching. Touching, feeling, being touched, he kept looking at himself, at her, at each sensation as it built up towards rhythm. He watched every still detail of the moments that the lightning froze in water and white against the window's frame.
Rain stampeded down into the valley, rattling the roof; ample rain curtaining from the eaves, and she pushed her back against him, swaying, the darkness of the water, falling.
White electric fire lit the room of their orgasm. Following thunder drove them deep into each other.
Six
Caroline was born when Sylvia was twenty-two and Harry was sixteen months younger. He wasn't actually present in the room of her birth, but sat outside in a husbands' waiting room smoking. The room was ugly and smelly and contained one forgettable poster, two chairs made from Philippine mahogany in a 'modern' style and upholstered in pale blue, several full glass ashtrays with TPA sandblasted into their bases, three tatty old Personality magazines and a Farmers Weekly and several unutterable Vrouevereeniging publications in Afrikaans. He could faintly hear his wife screaming. At least, he assumed it was her. She was somewhere in there, down the trolley-pushing corridor. It was mid-morning and he was the only husband in the room.
At one stage, an enormously fat woman in Hospital uniform pushed a stainless steel trolley into the room. Hospital tea. The nurses outside walked so that their heels clicked and echoed. Then the corridor bent, taking them out of sight.
The waters had broken long ago, while they'd been in the car, wetting the passenger seat of their big Ford, but still no child had flowed slippery down the amniotic river. Sylvia had been in labour for almost twelve hours, somewhere in the aseptic recesses of the wards, pushing and spewing out a stream of impossible swearing.
"Fuckfuckfuck Oh mommy mommy Jesus fuck fuckfuck owww owww," horrifying the matron,
"Shh, Shh" from the nurse at her right side, on and on, interspersing her sweating and neck twisting with the screams which Harry could sometimes make out, screams over the pain killers, fading into laughing-gas delirium until the next big push; against a breach birth, the infant presenting its back to the narrow channel of her pelvis.
Harry had waited for the messengers of birth. Through the night, past midnight and the first visit of Doctor Sachs, beyond another husband's jubilation and whooping at the birth of a son:
"James!, We'll call him James!"
Through the early hours and the change of shift, past the agony columns of the thumbed magazines and the Hitching Post of the Farmers Weekly, through a whole pack of Luckies and lighting butts from the ashtrays.
The room was his jail, Sylvia's pain was his jail. Every hour or so a sister would poke her head through the door and tell him that nothing was happening, that no child was being born in the imagined bed of pain. The mood of elation, the feeling of smug cleverness slowly faded over the first few hours, giving in to frustration, pushing the inhaler up to his mouth, hiss, hiss into his narrow breathing, spraying chemical relief against the constriction of vague waves of guilt. He lit another Lucky in the tar-stained shaking hand of three a.m. The air-conditioner would change gear and rattle for five minutes at a time, the neon tube flickering would show serial hands reaching for the lighter, making the shakes seem worse.
Doctor Sachs swept into the room at eleven-seventeen a.m., escorted by two nurses, his white coat floating on the air behind him like Batman's cape. In his hand there was a clip-board, around his neck a stethoscope, two pens in his pocket showed ball-point marks on white fabric. Harry felt pale, unshaven, humiliated.
"Mister Zeit?" he asked, having met Harry on six or seven occasions already.
"Mm" from Harry, looking a tired boy child to the obstetrician's adult confidence.
"I suppose you realise that your wife, um," glancing at his clipboard, "Sylvia, is having a difficult labour. We have found that the child is, you know, facing the wrong way, and we're going to do a caesarean. That means an operation to help, well, remove the child."
Harry couldn't be sure that it was Sylvia he could hear down the corridor. He felt the pain of a knife cutting into him, in his arsehole, inside his belly.
"Yes, sure, of course. Will you put her under... you know, an anaesthetic?"
"Naturally. The two of you did sign all the forms and waivers, but I thought I would let you know. It'll go much easier for her now. For the child too."
"Thanks Doc. That's a relief, really it is. Um... have you got a smoke on you? Ta, thanks." and the doctor had turned and left with his nurses on either side of him, a single step behind. He'd had graying temples and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and short, finely trimmed hair that moved back from his hairline in perfect waves. His face had expressed tolerance and severity in equal measures, and he was perfectly in control.
Forty-seven minutes later the left-hand nurse returned, smiling.
"Mister Zeit, you have a child, a girl." and Harry had looked at her as though she were a fever hallucination, his mouth open. "You're a father!" she beamed, and he crumpled forward with his head in his hands, stiffening his body to hide his sobs from her, tightening his throat and forcing his tongue backwards to throttle the sound.
"Are you all right? Can I get you some water or something?" and he just nodded his bent head and said "Fine, I'm fine, really."
* * * * * *
His first view of Caroline was that evening at seven. He'd driven home in the car feeling tired and numb, confused by his lack of feeling, by the blankness where he'd expected drunken elation. In their flat he'd taken off his trousers and climbed into the unmade bed, stared at the waiting cot, and fallen asleep trying to imagine that it contained a little human being. A girl.
Changed, spruced, hair combed and clutching a huge bunch of expensive roses, he'd arrived promptly at the start of the visiting hour. Sylvia's mother had pulled into in the hospital parking lot at the same time as he had. She parked next to him, glared and smiled at the same time, resentful of his intrusion into their lives, delighted by the succession of generations, a grandchild. He let her out of the car and kissed her dutifully on the cheek, smelling powder and scent: something French, with roses and a faint whiff of what, cloves?
Sylvia looked exhausted, smiled faintly and said "Hello," wincing. She held the roses against her face and there were tears which didn't leave her eyes, but Harry couldn't tell where they came from. She responded with a nod and a colourless "Yes" to his "Are you Okay?"
Sylvia's mom ignored Harry, said sensible things, made plans for "Helping Sylvia with it all." Sylvia said nothing, but her eyes found Harry, and a hand stole out from under the sheets, slipped over the bedside and down to his knee, where she gripped with the determination of someone biting a lip. He put his big dark hand over her small pale one, watched his broad thumb bumping over the raised tendons.
A grinning nurse brought the baby in, held it in her arms like a Madonna for the husband and grandmother to admire. Harry was dumbfounded by the littleness, the pink wrinkliness of his daughter.
"Ooh, Sylvie darling. She looks exactly like you did! Exactly. The same little mouth, she's too dear." She looked at Harry expectantly, raising her eyebrows. He held his arms out to take his child and the nurse gave it to him saying: "Hold her head up, like this." He took her carefully, afraid of breaking the tiny pinkness of her. A hand came out of the swaddling bands and he let it curl around his little finger, warm and alive. A thrill of pleasure mixed with unexpected guilt and sexuality took him by surprise. He smiled and moved his face nearer to feel the breathing against his cheek, looked up, handed the child to Sylvie and said "Feed her."
* * * * * *
Driving home he saw the evening star rising over Hillbrow, and wished aloud: "Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. I wish, I wish...." and found no words for his wish, but held the sensation of the tiny hand and the helpless flopping head, and called the starlight into her.
Seven
He stands on the balcony and watches for a while. Watches nothing, watches the blue of the sky marbled with far streaks of cloud and the twin jetstreams, watches but does not see the pigeons pecking on the lawn, a telegram delivery man with a pith helmet passing on a bicycle. A male resident comes out of the shared lavatory at the end of the balcony, holding up his trousers with one hand and rubbing an unshaven chin with the other, twisting a rubbery mouth, his hand gritting over the skin.
This is his the beginning of Harry's second week here. As the stubbly man passes him, walks down the row of numbered rooms, the texture of his life turns to sludge. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe, feeling pressure, resistance, opacity, sliminess, dirt, filth, cloying dampness, formlessness, closing in around him, over him.
He has lived clean and rich for forty-two years. Now he is poor, stripped of his possessions, of the named and the owned. He thinks: "Ja, ja .... In the mud, in the shit. Don't make waves," and struggles with the asthma attack. His hand goes to his shirt pocket where the inhaler lives. A pure reflex, he sprays; one two three, breathe, one two three. A door behind him slams. The roof above is dark and hot, clicking from expansion in the morning sunlight; the floor of the balcony is lino-covered wood and smells of old tar. A far radio chatters. The railing is a warm archeology of paint. He prods with a fingernail, revealing layers of colour: a blue, a greenish yellow. The surface of the black paint is uneven on the staggered layers beneath, over the splitting wood. Even the old paint seems scented as he picks at it. He sprays, one two three, wheezing the acute air into unwilling lungs.
He sees that his shoes are scuffed, especially the right one, and rubs it against the left trouser leg.
Back in the cool shadow of his room he takes a bag from under the bed. It is a portmanteau, a bit like a Gladstone bag. He unclips the strap over the top and opens it. Inside are papers and a big file marked `Manual' which he takes out and puts down on his lap, resting his hands on the blue plastic cover, dark hairs and rooty veins moving slightly as the fingers tap and drum, waiting for the stimulant to open his chest.
* * * * * *
The first time he'd been really impressed by a manual was more than a decade ago in '75, when he'd imported a Swiss casting machine. The big, complex and dangerous-looking mass of parts, all chrome and green machine-paint, had stood among Styrofoam debris and plastic wrapping on the workshop floor. Taped to the top of the box in which the rotor assembly had been packed was the manual; Cassim sliced it free with the scalpel which he used for cutting injection-moulding rubbers. Taking it in hands calloused by the peculiarities of the trade, he slowly sat down on a box. Lisa, one of the polishers, sidled in to peer over his shoulder at the colour pictures. His brows crunched into a frown: "Wat kyk jy so? Gaan doen jou job. Even better, loop haal vir my 'n koppie tee." and she scuttled out, not daring to question him. Since Old Zeit's death he'd been like that and even Harry approached him carefully.
"Let me see that when you're through will you Cassim?"
"Sure man Harry. Check here," indicating a page, "This is where that graphite crucibles goes in .... " and for the rest of the afternoon they paged through the infallible clockwork of the intended sequence: assembling, bolting, testing.
The solid assurance of the new machine grew during the afternoon and the idea of a perfect instruction set lodged in Harry's mind. A manual. He took the book home and read it in bed.
Over the next few years the idea had gradually come to him: A manual for being Harry Zeit. A book, a file containing concise instructions in manual language, unambivalent, for being himself. An executive course on motivation produced headings like Health with a top-down structure. He'd spent evenings attempting the high-level description. How does one describe a human? What are the headings? Should he go to Aristotle, the Hindus, the alchemists, to Groote Schuur or Freud or Spinoza?
* * * * * *
FITNESS:
· Harry needs regular exercise to maintain an acceptable level of fitness. If not, he tends to degenerate to a level of physical clumsiness where he does not notice that he is losing co-ordination. Things which he could do without thinking at twenty-one, like running wildly down a steep hill without falling or feeling a loss of control.
· Exercise should be taken to the point of pain, or at least severe discomfort. Anything less is not acceptable, as it seems to make little noticeable difference. The type of exercise selected should cover all the important muscle-complexes and should include enough stretching to keep him supple.
· The question of motivation arises: How to keep him doing something that is both boring and painful.
The entry stops there. In the coolness of the morning bedroom, he sits with it on his lap, forcing himself to read. He snaps the ring-clips of the file open and removes the page, crumples it in his hand and flicks the tight little ball of paper at the bin. The next page that's exposed is an entry on sleep.
By the time the entire file has been destroyed, the floor is littered with wadded balls of paper. They cluster around the scratched and rusted tin rubbish bin, on which he doesn't see the remains of an image of a coach and four. He stands up from the bed, coughing and wheezing, the breath coming a bit easier. Phosphene patterns swim over his visual field when he goes out into the light again. They fill the air and thicken it muddily. The spots of light jiggle to the sound of what must be loud bangs in the distance. Down the stairwell at the end of the corridor the phone rings and rings and rings.
Eight
The shout comes down the passageway: "Zeit! Mister Zeit! Phone call! Is there anyone called Harry Zeit?"
At first he doesn't recognise the voice, or even the fact that there is speech at all. He is already walking towards the phone before he knows that he's moving. He reaches it at the bottom of the stairs. The hallway smells slightly of Jeyes fluid.
"Hello. Harry Zeit."
"Hi. Have I been looking for you."
"Did your mother tell you?"
"No, I got your number from Jerry. I hope it wasn't a breach of legal etiquette. But how are you? I mean really?"
"Fine." His reflex answer. "Fine. Don't worry about me."
"Liar, you're not. I can tell." Her voice goes up half an octave.
There is a long pause.
"Okay, I'm not fine. I'm up to shit. There, does that make you happy?"
"Harry. Where are you? Where is that number?"
"You don't need to know. In fact, you probably don't want to know."
"Uh," she sighs. "What do you know? What the hell do you know about my needs?" The last bit is shouted. He holds the receiver away from his ear, where he can see it. The tiny voice shouts at him from the earpiece.
"I worry about you Harry. I bloody worry. Every day I think about you, about what you're up to, where you are, what you're doing." He hears the little voice crumpling towards tears, interrupts.
"I told your mother to leave you out of this until it's all sorted out. Told her. Lina baby, worry doesn't help either of us."
"Stop fathering me, I'm too old for that. Tell me where you are. I want to know where you are."
The force of the demand winds him. He holds the receiver so that his fist distorts his cheek. "At the Marron Lodge. It's in the Gardens. It's..."
I know the place and I'll be there in half an hour. Are you wearing a watch?"
"No. Not at the moment."
"Find out the time. Meet me outside. Twelve fifteen. Bye." He stands for a long time looking at the black plastic object in his hand. It is silent. A middle-aged woman in the hallway clears her throat and snaps and unsnaps the clasp of her handbag. He notices the cord, his eyes trace it to the red box on its shelf. A telephone. He hangs up, turns on his heel as the woman reaches for the warm plastic.
* * * * * *
Lina, Caroline. The memory of her telescopes back to babyhood, to shit and nappies and a small toothless mouth sucking on a little finger. It bursts out into images: birthday parties, sticky faces, the broken arm from the swing, with the bones sticking through, and her not crying, the big dark eyes just looking at the exceptional red and white that had sprouted in the young skin. The prize-givings and Eisteddfods, the pride as this serious little person created her own being.
His memory seems to cut off at about nine or ten. Nothing more recent. The room, the smell of her room was its own special air, not bad or good, just Lina's room. Crayons and plasticine, the whole bottle of scent spilled at some stage, on the blue carpet. Lina's satchel with the school books spilling out, brown paper covers tatty. Untidy heaps of clothes, but with the smell of child rather than a darker grown-up odour.
Sylvia and Lina conspiring together to do women's things in the kitchen, baking a cake or Lina coming through to offer a bowl of popcorn. All greasy with melted butter and smelling hot and fresh. And those hard black burnt bits at the bottom. She holds it out to him with both hands, her serious small face framed above the big wooden bowl.
* * * * * *
He re-enters the dark coolness of his room. Squatting near the bin, he picks the crumpled papers up and stuffs them into it. When it's filled he stands upright, compacts them with his foot, bends down to get the other bits. He puts the file back into his bag and goes to hunch over in front of the mirror and look at himself again.
He wonders whether he should grow a beard. It would be black with a salting of grey, giving him a piratical look. He runs water at the sink. The cold tap splutters and spits before pouring out its sure stream. With a dampened hand he pats his face, smiles, baring his teeth. Then he goes outside with the chair to resume his place on the balcony. Warmth from the day rolls up from the garden. The light is intense and he narrows his eyes, wishing for dark glasses.
He watches the street and the moving cars. A young woman in a bright floral dress tries to entice a languid cat from its perch on a whitewashed wall, but the cat has its own agenda and she has to stretch up on her toes to scratch it under its chin. The words "HANG ANC SCUM WITH PIANO WIRE" have been spray-painted on the wall. Neither Harry nor the young woman nor even the cat seem aware of this. The woman moves on, a skip in her step.
The gun on Signal Hill marks noon with its echoing report. A little old sky-blue Renault pulls in over the road near the wall, and the cat gets up and stretches. Caroline gets out, slams the door, locks it and puts her keys in a hand-woven bag, then she stands for a few seconds looking up at the boarding house. She is wearing light cotton trousers and a t-shirt with some message which he cannot read. She doesn't see Harry sitting in the deep shade, crosses the street purposefully, her thumb hooked around the strap of her bag. Her red hair flames in the sunlight as she walks. He gets up and moves towards the stairs.
* * * * * *
She's about to ring the bell at the vacant untidy reception desk when a noise makes her glance up to see Harry coming slowly down the stairs. For a second she's paralysed, thinking how old he looks for forty-two. Then she's up the first three steps, her arms around him, and they nearly fall as their opposed momentum meets.
"Harry!"
"Lina."
"How are you?" she steps back, pulling him down into the hall and out into the sunlight where she can compare him with the man who had always been her father. "You look tired."
"I am. I can't tell you."
"Don't."
"My princess, I've missed you." he says, and hugs her awkwardly again, bending his body from the waist.
Nine
He'd been staying late at work. At home he'd been restless, pacing, saying "Fuck" or "Amazing, that's amazing" or "Let's get out of here" to no-one, and seeming not to realise that he was talking out loud. He'd make little gestures aimed at nothing. A favourite was a tightly balled fist, twitched and shaken as if he were tugging at a fastened rope.
Sylvia drifted through the rooms of the house during the day, going to read on the balcony or moving aimlessly downstairs to the kitchen in response to a vague but excruciatingly felt craving for something. She became fat in this house which had belonged to Abraham Zeit and which had never become home to her. And after Caroline had moved out, the house seemed bigger and more alien.
Nomsa Nteyi, the domestic worker who was always bigger and fatter than her, resisted all her attempts to make friends, with a bland indifference which almost made her angry but which offered a surface far too smooth for her feelings to find a hold.
She called her Vickie after her white-name, which was Victoria. Nomsa called her Madam, and looked down, and withdrew to her small back room whenever she wasn't actually tidying up or cooking meals.
He'd come home late, unlock the door, move down the staircase to the kitchen where he'd lift the pot-lids to peer in at the soggy vegetables. She'd find him there. "Hello love. How was your day?" "Mm, okay, is this supper? Let's eat out." And she'd come to hug him and sometimes she thought she'd feel him tense and pull away or imagine that she smelt a scent which might have been another woman's perfume. And she'd say nothing, and put her head against his chest, trying to hear his breathing and his heart.
They didn't speak much, but sometimes he'd get into one of his wild moods, kick off his shoes, put on the old Jazz records, and they'd dance on the Persian rug and the wall-to-wall in the empty living room. And maybe then, he'd want to make love, and he'd half carry half drag her to the sofa. She'd feel foolish and awkward as he peeled her pantyhose off as though she were a rag doll, and put his big hand against her groin as he kissed her mouth. She's push against him and worry that the kids, or perhaps Victoria might come in and find them like that. But she never resisted completely, never spoke against him. He'd hit her once or twice.
* * * * * *
The firm's auditor was a man of Harry's age with the unlikely name of John Smith, of the firm Bewell, Jameson and Schock.
He and Harry had a good working relationship, and Smith and his wife Lila had been out to supper with Harry and Sylvia on several occasions. He was a sporty man with thick rugby-playing thighs and a round smiling face. Sylvia sat and looked at him over the restaurant cutlery, waiting for what he had to say. He dabbed his moustached and refilled his beer glass, looked around and leaned back in his chair.
"You understand that this is difficult for me."
"What is?"
"I mean, Harry and I have been friends for, what, eight years."
Sylvia just stared at him and shifted uncomfortably.
"Sylvia, well, let me get straight to it then. There are several things and I don't know which one to start with."
"Start with the worst, then." she said, and her voice was a masterpiece of control.
"Well, I don't know, you know. There have been, um, irregularities in the books. But I suppose you know that already. Look, do you have an ante-nuptial contract. I mean, you don't mind my asking?"
"Yes, we do, as a matter of fact." Harry had been transferring things into her name: the house, the car, everything. She felt acid panic rising in her throat.
"Well, um... everyone else knows and I don't want to be the one... I mean, you know that he's been, uh, seeing other women?"
She heard herself saying "Yes" even as she was framing the "No" in her mind.
"Oh, oh that's a relief. Yes, well I, ah"
She looked hard at his knotted fingers on the table. Expecting tears, she was slightly surprised to find only detached ice. "Who?" she asked, and watched him unblinkingly.
"It's hard to say, but I suppose you should really know, really you should. The money, you know, he kept making these unaccountable withdrawals. I got one of the chaps from the firm to watch him, just on a hunch. Sometimes these company directors get up to all sorts of monkey business, you know, the casinos, that sort of thing." Smith looked excruciated. He was clearly finding this much harder going than he'd expected.
"What was he doing with the money?"
"Um, women, well some of it. There was a receptionist from one of the diamond dealers. And, well, you know, escort agencies, that sort of thing. Not very nice."
"Who knew about this? The staff at the workshop?"
"I should think so. Yes."
"Mrs. Russo?"
"Yes, probably. She was the one who, uh, suggested I have him watched."
"I see. I really do see."
"What else was he doing? Rolling gold, taking stolen things?"
"I don't have evidence, but I should think so."
"The rest of the money? What was he doing with it? You said 'some of it.'"
"Who knows... mismanagement, trying to recoup by gambling... the races, I think. Loan sharks like Retzner. The total worth of the place, and that includes, uh, stock and equipment and everything, it must be less than a third of the debts. He's asked us to apply for provisional liquidation already."
"When?"
"Day before yesterday."
She paused to look at the food, tucked a forkful of mushroom omelette into her mouth. "You know, John, it's not only his business he's going to lose." and her face set, staring at its own reflection in the mirrored wall, through the indoor plants. "I've heard enough, now. I want you to write all this down for me, as well as all the things we've left out. I'm hiring your firm to do this for me."
"Frankly, Sylvia, I don't think I can. You know, uh, professional etiquette... God knows I've already breached Harry's confidence, but I felt... " He put his hand over hers and patted it, leaning forward. She held her hand still, looking straight into his eyes. "You'll do it for me, won't you?" she told him, and gave his wedding-ring a little squeeze. "You have omelette on your chin." They both laughed.
Ten
After an awkward goodbye, a non-intersection of lives, he watches Lina drive away. The sunlight paints the balcony. The afternoon is filled with the sound of a police helicopter hammering the air. His hands have no gold in them, lie like dead animals on his thighs. His dead thoughts scatter on the lawn, wash over the cat on the wall, now crouching to stalk a pigeon who flies off into the airy spaces among the trees, between the houses.
Harry opens his mouth to fill the silence, but there are no words of power to cover over the world.
