Double Negative (4 page)

He was silent until we pulled up outside the King George in Joubert Park. ‘We've got company for the day, journalist by the name of Gerald Brookes, a Brit but a decent fellow. Afraid you'll have to move to the back.'

He crossed the pavement and vanished into the lobby of the hotel.

Listen to me, don't listen to me! Talk to me, don't talk to me!
Jesus. He'd left the radio on for my benefit. I turned off the ignition and got out of the car. One of my more imposing affectations was a pipe, a Dr Watson with a bowl the size of an espresso cup; the dropped bowl hung a perpetual question mark on my lip, made me appealingly wry, in my own estimation. I tamped down the crust of my early-morning smoke and sucked the flame of my lighter through it. Then I leaned on the bonnet as the bowl warmed in my palm. Company. I didn't know whether to feel relieved or disappointed.

On the opposite pavement, against the railings of the park, a couple of portrait artists were already waiting hopefully for customers. In midsummer, when the Art Gallery attracted more visitors, there would be half a dozen of them. They set up their easels and camping chairs under the trees every day. I sometimes went past there on my way into town and stopped to watch them working: it was more engaging than the amateur chess on the big outdoor board in the park itself. Chalky old men in berets with dandruff on their collars, and one wild-haired woman with an expressionist mask of a face. She was the only caricaturist among them, a lover of crayon; the others went for realism in pencil, pastel or charcoal. Most had samples of their work sticky-taped to a portfolio leaning against the fence as an advertisement. Usually they showed a photograph and a drawing so that you could judge whether the likeness was true. It was easier to capture someone from a photograph. A photograph was the presentiment of a portrait, stilling an expression, freezing the blood. When the living subject sat before you, breathing, sweating, with an expectant smile budding in the corners of her mouth, it was another matter altogether. Or so I imagined. Perhaps it was the other way round? Perhaps that was precisely what separated the artists from the copyists. The real artists worked from
life.

But what did I
know?

Auerbach came out of the hotel and went along the pavement with his head down and his fists bunched in the pockets of his shorts. For a moment I thought he was heading off into the city, having forgotten about me entirely. But on the next corner he stopped and looked through a plate-glass window. It was a men's hairdresser, not a barbershop, mind you, but a salon. Marco's or something like that. I had no use for it myself, but I had seen men sitting in there enveloped in linen, getting themselves shaved or coiffed, red linen, as if they expected the worst. Sometimes, the clients reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold. They actually washed your hair before they cut it. Auerbach stood at the window with his hands peaked over his eyes. He came back. In passing, he tilted his head in my direction, gave an open-handed shrug
–
And now?
–
and went back into the hotel.

What do I know?

This question ran like a hairline crack through my thoughts. I had read sociology and political philosophy, I had worked through a few of the key texts of the radical tradition, some of them written in the previous century. In order to read these books, I had sat in a booth in the Cullen Library, where the banned books were kept, as if I were suffering from a contagious disease. My head was like the stacks in the basement of the Cullen. New ideas fell out of old volumes and I tried to unriddle them in the gloom. The air was full of dust. I could scarcely breathe in the space between my
ears.

I was in a room with two windows, speaking to myself in Latin
–
or was it Greek?
–
about reification and alienation, surplus value and exchange value, base and superstructure. Class consciousness, false consciousness, petit bourgeois, proletarian
–
the terms fell through a gap between two kinds of knowledge. Through one window I could see the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace and Lenin addressing the crowds in Sverdlov Square; through the other, schoolchildren battling the police in the streets of Soweto and Oliver Tambo addressing the General Assembly. Through one, Trotsky and Breton working on their manifesto in Mexico City; through the other, Breytenbach writing poems in his cell at Pretoria Central with a greasepaint moustache on his lip. Tatlin's Monument to the Third International and the Top Star Drive-in. I wanted to bring these views together like the two images in a stereoscope, but I couldn't see through both windows at the same time. I went up and down like a prisoner, until I was dizzy. Finally, I stood in the middle of the room, under the chandelier, with my head aching.

It wasn't a dream: I had never been more awake in my
life.

What exactly is the radical tradition? In one of the elections for SRC, a student politician, a long-haired boy from a suburban home like mine, had styled himself as Kropotkin. He went around in a cossack coat and riding boots like an extra from Doctor Zhivago on Ice. And I had nearly voted for him. What to make of Marx with his Boer War beard and his watch chain? He was treated like a patriarch in
War and Peace
, but he was more at home in
David Copperfield
. He might have been a chum of Mr Micawber, always expecting something to turn
up.

I am more flippant about this now than I was then. Had you seen me there, with the cold shell of the car against my bum and the morning sun on my face, you would have thought I was an overly earnest young man. You could not see Benjamin's Angel
–
Klee's Angel, strictly speaking, memorably captioned
–
leaning beside me with his wings folded across the bonnet. I was troubled. For all my uncertainty about the sacred texts, they had dumped me into history and I had a suspicion that I would never be out of it again. Looking back over the brief span of my life, I felt like some object left on the shoreline, toyed with by a rising tide. If you had a sense of historical destiny, if you were sufficiently drunk with it, you might expect to ride out any storm. But I did not imagine I would be carried in one piece to a classless shore. History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates.

Gerald Brookes was a red stump of a man with a bald head curiously creased in the middle like an apricot. The lenses of his black-rimmed glasses were as thick as metaphors. He was wearing a black leather jacket belted at the waist and had a camera on a strap around his neck. He was my idea of an East German spy or an ageing bass guitarist. Gerry and the Pacemakers.

As we pulled off, he leaned over the seat and shook my hand. ‘Gerry. Saul says you're a journalist in training.'

Auerbach's eye flashed in the rear-view mirror.

‘Well, I'm training for something, but I'm not sure what.'

Then they forgot about me. Brookes wanted to know what Auerbach had been up to and he told him. They chatted about mutual friends, new jobs, divorces, property prices. They passed on good wishes and sent regards. Old mates, apparently.

Soon enough they moved on to politics. Brookes was full of questions. Was Botha pushing ahead with the Tricameral Parliament? Would the right-wingers split from the Party? And the extra-parliamentary campaign against the so-called reforms? Was it gathering momentum? What was happening on the ground? Auerbach said he was not really the person to ask, as Brookes should know by now, he could only say what he read in the papers, Brookes was probably better informed than he was. But Brookes insisted: you get around, you speak to people, you've got your finger on the pulse. You must hear things. What are people saying?

‘I really don't know.'

‘Show me something, baby, I want action,' Brookes said with a peculiar inflection.

‘You're a journalist,' Auerbach said. And then, after a pause, ‘The action is everywhere.' And he looked out of the window as if something very interesting was happening just
then.

We were in Twist Street, waiting for a robot to change. Everything was still. The little red soldier, standing to attention against the black gong of the light, had stopped the world in its tracks. The people on the pavements had their heads turned in different directions, each listening for a signal only they could hear. Across the intersection, a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd. A skinny man in a floral shirt and an alpine hat made of white raffia was sitting on a bus-stop bench with his hands clasped behind his neck. The second I gazed at him, at the pitted skin of his cheeks, he lurched forward, pulled something from his sock and threw it into a rubbish bin. The lights changed and we took off. Looking back, I saw the man walking swiftly in the other direction.

I wish I could remember clearly what was said that day. Between them, the photographs Auerbach took in the next few hours and my own disordered memories, which by comparison are mere snapshots with the heads cut off and the hands out of focus, have displaced everything else. They hang down like screens I cannot reach behind. I've read a dozen interviews with Auerbach since then, I can imagine what he might have said, but I've done enough ventriloquism as it
is.

Duty. That comes back now. They kept circling around it. Thou shalt and thou shalt not. Brookes was obsessed
–
so it seems in retrospect
–
with the responsibilities of good people in bad situations, people like Auerbach in places like South Africa, people who were opposed to apartheid. The pros and cons of the cultural boycott, the rights of the individual versus the collective good, the value of contemplation in a state of crisis. How could you go on writing poetry, was the gist of his argument, when you had the wherewithal to take down an affidavit?

Any minute now, I thought, he'll be quoting Adorno, misquoting Adorno, like everyone else. Sabine had written an intricate essay on the subject.

The notion of duty was very much on my mind, not least because I was about to be conscripted. What should I do? Brookes was asking some of the questions I had been trying to formulate for myself ever since it had dawned on me that I was living in a grossly unjust society. But the judgement in his tone riled me. He had all the answers too. He knew exactly how
he
would behave if the two of them traded places. Auerbach did not live up to his standards; he admired him, but he was disappointed in him. He should be doing more for the Movement. He had a duty. I thought of machinery again, an industrial loom for weaving everyone into a single fabric.

Auerbach was adept at answering questions. He must have heard them all before. He insisted on his independence and regretted his limitations as a photographer and a human being. This peculiar passivity also annoyed me. I wanted him to make a better defence of himself and therefore of me. If he was failing in his duty, he should at least be able to explain why. I couldn't speak up for myself. Brookes made it sound so easy to do the right thing, to make a stand, but it was difficult. Wasn't
it?

Of course, it didn't come out in one piece like this, I had to put it together afterwards. Through all of this, we were driving. We went to the end of Twist Street, so that Brookes could see the base of the Hillbrow Tower, driven like a stake through a city block. Then we headed for Yeoville. As we went, Auerbach pointed things out and Brookes leaned out of the window and took pictures
–
of
WHITES ONLY
benches, separate entrances, a uniformed servant eating her lunch on the kerb. Auerbach's subjects, you could say. In Berea, he got Auerbach to reverse so that he could peer down a service lane where a man and a woman were arguing among the rubbish
bins.

Brookes was overheated, he was pink and damp, and I almost felt sorry for him. But he must be a bit thick too, thick-skinned at least, firing away with his Instamatic in the company of a real photographer.

Then, or perhaps it was later in the day, Brookes asked, ‘How do you know that a subject is worth photographing?'

Auerbach answered, ‘I'm like you: I wait for something to catch my
eye.'

‘Everything catches my eye,' Brookes laughed. ‘You choose your subjects very carefully.'

‘Film is expensive.'

Brookes pulled a
face.

Then or later, Auerbach said warily, ‘The subject draws me, I don't have words for it really, something strikes a chord, rings a bell. Sometimes it's as if I've found a thing I've already seen and remembered, or imagined before, which may not be that different. Perhaps I recognize something in the world as a “picture” when it captures what I've already thought or felt.'

‘Evidence.'

‘You make it sound like a crime, but it's not that. And it's not proof either, I'm not trying to demonstrate a proposition or substantiate a claim. I'm just looking for what chimes. Let's say there's a disequilibrium in me, my scales are out of kilter, and something out there, along these streets, can right the balance. The photograph
–
or is it the photographing?
–
restores order.'

‘So it's therapeutic?'

‘No, I wouldn't go that
far.'

We were parked somewhere. Brookes was half-turned in his seat, looking at Auerbach with an ironic smile, and Auerbach was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. Although he'd been speaking slowly, searching for the right words, his expression was frank.

‘Look, if I could explain it to you, then you could take my photographs for me. But you evidently can't. Even if I show you what I do in the darkroom, the tricks of my particular trade, where I like to crop things, the lines that hit the spot, I can't tell you how I see. I can only show you the result. Essentially, the process is beyond explanation and what I say doesn't matter. That's the beauty of it. By the same token
–
and this is more important
–
the work is perfectly clear. It's self-explanatory. You should write this down, Ger. It explains itself.'