Double Negative (6 page)

I was embarrassed. On my own behalf, for being there; on hers, for being unable to prevent me. I remembered my father speaking to Paulina in the yard, how she always came out of her room and pulled the door closed behind her, drawing the only line she could.

For a moment, we hummed like a delicately balanced mechanism with an experimental purpose, keeping the sun in the sky overhead, let's say, or measuring the whiteness of the linen hanging down like sheets of paper: Auerbach with his hands on his hips, gazing into the doorway of the shack, Brookes concealed behind the washing as if he were a prompt in the wings, scribbling in his notebook, Veronica swaying gently, testing the blade of the air against her skin. And me, looking on, standing by. Much as I wanted to, I couldn't stop staring. Below her left breast were three wooden clothes pegs with their teeth in the fabric of her dress and they moved with her like a shoal of
fish.

A baby began to cry in the shack. Auerbach motioned her to go to it. Then he spoke to her from the doorway again, so softly I could not hear. When the baby had been hushed, he half-closed the door and went to fetch his camera.

As soon as he was gone, Brookes stooped under the washing line, thrashing through the sheets like a pantomime ghost, and peered around the door. ‘May I come in?' His voice was a spill of white enamel on red brick. He ducked his head and went inside.

I hung back, flustered by my own discomfort, repelled by Brookes and the haze of deodorized sweat and proper English that had begun to emanate from
him.

The room felt even smaller inside than the view from outside suggested. Daylight, poking holes through the walls everywhere, drawing dotted lines along their seams, made the place seem temporary, like something you could tear up and scatter to the wind. Most of the space was taken up by an iron bed on which the woman sat, nursing two infants; what remained was occupied by two tea chests lined with blankets, which evidently served as cradles, and a third chest standing on end and holding a Primus stove, a candlestick, plates and mugs, a medicine bottle.

I know this because I have seen Auerbach's photograph. Probably you have seen it too and my description is redundant, or worse, inadequate.

Alone in the yard, I suddenly felt anxious. If the owner of the house were to come home now … a student might understand
–
perhaps it would be someone I knew. But even so, trespassing is trespassing. What would my father think if he could see me? He was such a stickler about the law and doing the right thing. A parking ticket threw him into a moral panic. He might still regret this little exercise.

When Auerbach came back with his camera bags, Brookes was wetting his handkerchief under the tap. He wiped the top of his head and watched Auerbach setting up the tripod, telescoping rods and tightening thumb nuts with the practice of a movie-screen assassin.

Going closer, Brookes said, ‘That's one nil to me. You've found a subject. Not just Mother and Child but Mother and Children. Twins.'

‘I'm afraid it's more interesting than that,' Auerbach said coldly. ‘Or perhaps I should say complicated. There were triplets, but one of them died.'

‘My God! That's terrible, Saul. You should have said something.'

‘They were burning a brazier in the room to keep warm this past winter. It's a miracle the others didn't suffocate
too.'

‘Is that them?' Brookes asked. He was back in the doorway.

‘It's the only picture of all three.'

‘May
I?'

It was unclear whose permission he was asking. He brought a snapshot out into the sunlight and studied it. ‘Also a boy? This one who died?' Auerbach nodded. Brookes wrote in his notebook. Then he thrust the photograph at me, with an impatient grunt, as if to say, ‘Here, see what you've done. Happy
now?'

Veronica came out of the shack. She had taken off the doek and fluffed her hair into an astonished halo. She unpegged two woollen caps from the line
–
the pompomed caps you can see in Auerbach's photograph
–
took the snapshot from me and went back inside.

In a moment, Auerbach gathered the legs of the tripod into a sheaf and followed
her.

A car door slammed in the street. Brookes did not seem to notice. He found a kitchen chair in the corner of the yard, sat down with the notebook resting on his knee, and went on writing. His head looked like an egg extruded from the glistening shell of his jacket. Once again, I had the sense that he was directing us. Not that he was writing down what we were doing, but that we were moving or standing still, turning left or right according to his design. Dialogue was no longer possible: all we could do was act. Respond to stage directions.

The photograph is one of Auerbach's best. Of course, it has a special significance for me because I was there when he took it, but it is singled out by the experts too. You can look it up on the internet. They say it embodies those apparently contradictory qualities you read about on the dust jackets of his books. The tender way the woman holds the babies, presenting them in their innocent perfection: her head is turned aside, as if to make it clear that the children are the subject of the photograph, but also showing the lovely line of her cheek and the hoop in her ear. The twins are identical, you really cannot tell them apart. The mere handfuls of their heads in the soft caps, lolling against her breast, make you fear for the slender stems of their necks. Their eyes are open, their fingers are curled, and for all their delicacy, they look vital and ready to grow. Behind the mother, over her turned shoulder, is the snapshot of the triplets, propped on a wooden crossbeam against the iron wall. It is possible to miss that picture-within-a-picture entirely, but once seen it looms larger, or you wish it would. It makes you bend your head to the paper, trying to get closer, although you know this distance cannot be altered. The depth of field is fixed, once and for all. The third child, the dead one, irreplaceably absent in Auerbach's photograph, persists in that smaller frame like an echo. But who can tell which child it is? The mother could say, perhaps, but she is absent too. In the circle of your eye, they all go on, living and dying, then and
now.

Yes, the embarrassment I felt on her behalf was entirely misplaced.

Auerbach packed away his equipment and wrote their names in a notebook. He said he would bring her a copy of the photograph when it was printed. Again, he refused my offer of help with the bags. Brookes was waiting for us on the stoep, still writing, pausing between lines with his hand going up and down like a sewing-machine needle, as if he was covering the page with
dots.

We had lunch at Raul's in Troye Street. The place was packed but Raul
–
the man who put the king back in kingklip
–
found a table for us in a corner near the bar. The atmosphere was oily and submarine. Aquarium light seeped from a tank where a little deep-sea diver, lead-soled boots sunk in drifts of gravel, opened and shut a treasure chest, over and over, spilling pieces of eight and an SOS in air bubbles. The fringes of seaweed waving in the depths were the colour of the kale in the caldo verde.

Brookes ordered the seafood platter for two and the waiter thought he was joking. But he was deadly serious, he said in a menacing way. ‘I am
deadly
serious.' And he laughed like a mad scientist. He was always famished after a long flight. Who can eat that crap? A hijacker? And now a tough assignment on top of it all. While we were waiting for the food he moulted the jacket, at last, and tucked a serviette into his shirt collar. One after the other, he took four bread rolls from the wicker basket in the middle of the table, broke them in half and ate them. The waiter cleared away everything except the piripiri sauce to make space for the plates.

Then Brookes ate and talked and ate. He had filled up with questions again, and after a glass of wine they streamed out of him. He kept working the food into the pouches of his cheeks so that he could ask another one: Do the prawns still come from Lourenço Marques? Not Marx, mind you, Markesh. Is Frelimo maintaining the fisheries? How large are the regime's stockpiles of foodstuffs, fuel, ammunition? Is it true that the N1 was designed for troop carriers and armoured cars like Hitler's autobahns? Is Sasol running at full steam? Will there be another bombing? Are the Boors still in bed with the Israelis? Do they have an atom bomb? Are sanctions biting?

Auerbach said he only knew what he read in the papers, but he would do his best to answer. While he was speaking, Brookes peeled his prawns and licked his fingers, and scratched in his notebook, which lay open on the seat of the fourth chair, pinned by an ashtray.

Between mouthfuls, Brookes suddenly said, ‘I can't get that woman out of my mind. What did you say to her? When we arrived, I mean.'

Auerbach was eating prawns too. He sucked the juice out of a head while he considered this question. ‘I said I wanted to take her picture.'

‘Oh, come on, don't be coy. I'm just interested to know why she let you
in.'

‘She wanted her picture taken.'

Brookes rubbed his fingertips with his thumb and drew a figure of eight on the table top. Formica with a pattern in it, almost a texture, like brawn.

‘They always want their pictures taken,' Auerbach went on. ‘Nine times out of ten. Believe me, it's the easy part.'

I was halfway through a sole, picking at its pale flesh, every mouthful bristling with bones. Another stupid choice. I should have had prawns too, it would have given me reason to splash butter and lemon juice, to suck at my teeth and burn the hell out of my mouth and leave a manly amount of wreckage on the plate. Instead I was sorting through this skinny fish, something a girlfriend would order. Usually prawns were too much like insects for my stomach: the piles of translucent shells and crumpled feelers reminded me of the beetle sediment that collected in the light shades in my parents' lounge. But I would have ordered them
–
especially had I known Brookes would insist on paying. Expenses, expenses, shovelling the proffered cash aside with the back of his credit
card.

‘What are the odds of giving birth to identical triplets, I wonder,' Brookes
said.

‘Must be pretty rare,' Auerbach
said.

‘You'd think the doctors would follow up on something like that.'

‘That's the system for you, Gerry. The government spends the bulk of the health budget on whites. Meanwhile black babies are dying of gastro and pneumonia, Third World diseases, the kind caused by malnutrition, overcrowding
–'

‘Yes, I know all that, but I'm talking about the interest, the human interest. They've done something special. You'd think they'd have been in the papers, that they'd attract some attention, some sponsorship or other. A pharmaceutical company, a nappy supplier, Nestlé, something in that line. How is it possible that these poor people have just been left to get on with it? In a one-room shack.'

I pulled another bone from the corner of my mouth. On the ocean floor, the diver went on opening and shutting the treasure chest, while a dazed and sated guppy drifted out from behind some seagrass.

‘Why didn't the people in the house help them? They could have run out an extension or given them a heater. That's what would happen in a normal society.'

‘They're just students,' I
said.

Brookes turned his magnified gaze on me. ‘Then they should know better. They should be asking questions. It's the least you'd expect to develop at a bloody university
–
an enquiring mind.'

‘It's complicated.'

‘Complicated! You've infected him, Saul. What's so complicated about a bit of human decency?'

A slurry of sociology surfaced in me, more feeling than thought, a thickening of the blood. I felt myself redden, as if I'd taken a swig of the piripiri.

‘Is there a more complacent creature than a white South African? You've mastered the art of self-deception. In a normal society, you wouldn't have a bunch of overfed students living like lords in a rambling house while a family of five squat in a shanty out the back. It's like Russia under the tsars. Students are supposed to go hungry, like artists, it helps them see things more clearly. It's a shed, for God's sake, it's no bigger than a fucking play house. The right sort of mortuary for a child.'

Brookes had hold of the table as if he meant to turn it over. Any moment now. Now. I saw the wicker basket in a swarm of breadcrumbs, the dirty roses of the serviettes, a wine glass and the fat speech bubble of grand cru spilling from it, fishbone thatch, a fried egg moored to the bloodshot eye of a plate by a crimson thread of chilli, all of it afloat between heaven and earth, every single thing thrown irrevocably out of order, beyond retrieval but not quite ruined, yet. Suspended. Surprising though it was, the scene seemed familiar to me, as if we had rehearsed the conversation before and could only push on now to a foregone conclusion. ‘What sort of people are they?' Brookes would say with his leaded boots in the debris. ‘Are they empty inside, are they dead?' The dead white interior resounded. But the plates were still on the table top, the food was still on the plates. Brookes was still on the other side of the table, which was still unturned, with a maggot of rice on his chin, waiting for my reply.

Repetition. Things had begun to double. There must be a term for it. Is it a natural process or an historical one? Should it be encouraged or suppressed? Or simply endured? Perhaps every gesture will beget its twin, every action find an echo, every insight become a catechism, like some chain reaction that can never be halted. The concatenated universe.

I found my ordinary voice. ‘I've come across many student houses where there are people living in the servants' quarters, and not just neat little nuclear families either, uncles and aunts and cousins from the countryside. At least they have a roof over their heads. It's not ideal, but you can't expect a bunch of students who aren't even earning a living to look after ten people.'