Ivan Vladislavic: 101 Detectives

The Reader’s Digest lay open beside him, pinned flat by an ashtray, and he read as he ate, glancing up at himself from time to time in the dressing-table mirror.

‘This fugu stuff is so dangerous you have to get a licence to cook it.’

‘Come off it.’

‘It says here: Only qualified chefs are allowed to prepare fugu dishes. The training is long and arduous, and at the end of it the candidates have to pass a stringent examination. Identifying and excising the poisonous parts of the fish is an exact science. But mistakes still happen, even in the best establishments .’

When the ice cream was finished they changed places and Klopper ate his Russians and chips. The sausages had burst open into gnarled shapes in the cooking oil. Deep-fried organ meat, he thought, something a Jap might like. He wiped them in the smear of tomato sauce congealing on the waxed paper. He looked at Bate in the mirror while he chewed.

‘I suppose you still hungry?’

‘I could do with a steak.’

‘I should of got you some of that fish.’

‘Fugu.’

‘And chips, no salt and vinegar.’

The burning had taken longer than they anticipated. Klopper and the Captain sat on a ruined wall, drinking beer and watching the light fade on the water, or squatted in the flickering shadows, tending the fire. Klopper had imagined it would be over in half an hour, that they would be back at the house in time to watch Due South on television. But at seven o’clock it was still burning fiercely. When they ran out of logs the blaze died down at last, and then a jumble of angular shapes became visible in the cinders. Folders and files. Dockets and statements. The covers of the duty books, with their leather-bound corners, the thick boards of the minute-books and logbooks, the tightly bound spindles of invoices and receipts. The knuckle-bones of rubber stamps. The Captain poked around with the end of a stick and layers of blackened leaves came away from the spines. Inexplicably, in the heart of the fire, new white pages unfolded. They should have torn the covers off the books first and shredded the paper. Stirred up by the stick, a black-edged sheet spiralled up on the smoke and fluttered down next to the Captain’s boot. The words were still legible, the handwriting recognisably his own.

The Captain tossed the keys to Voetjie. ‘Looks like we’re going to need the rest of that wood. And bring the cooler bag, and the grille from the stoep. We’ll eat here.’

As soon as they were alone, the Captain began to speak. He told Klopper that his wife had left him. He thought she was having an affair with some Sandton desk jockey, something to do with computers, software. What was he supposed to do now? He was lonely, he was living on takeaways, he had to get a girl in to wash his shirts. His voice thickened and Klopper thought he was going to cry, but he just went on speaking, and he didn’t shut up until they saw the headlights coming back down the track.

While Voetjie and Klopper built the bonfire up again, carefully laying the logs on the smouldering papers, the Captain made a smaller fire at the edge of the water. Then they braaied the chops and the wors. When the meat was done the Captain cut the wors into pieces with his pocket knife and speared some of it onto a polystyrene tray for Voetjie, who went to sit on the tailgate of the bakkie to eat. The other two ate their share straight from the grille.

All this time the bonfire went on burning, with the pages wavering in it like ashen palms, burning and burning.

Sixteen hundred hours, Klopper thought, and wiggled his toes.

‘Tell me something, Bate: if these fugu fishes are so poisonous, how come they don’t poison themselves? Hey?’

Bate looked at the street. It seemed cold and grey, but that was because the glass was tinted. A scrap of his training floated into his mind: Surveillance. In certain circumstances, you see better out of the corner of your eye. Something to do with the rods and cones. There was some story about listening too… you heard better… with your mouth open. The cavity of your mouth created a sort of echo chamber. The best attitude to adopt when you thought the enemy was near: turn your face away from him, look at him out of the corner of your eye and keep your mouth open. Bate opened his mouth tentatively. It hurt. He opened wider, and wider, driving the pain from the empty socket up into his ear, into his temple, into the top of his skull. He turned his head slowly until he could see Klopper on the bed from the corner of his eye.

‘What the hell are you doing now?’

Once during the meal the wind shifted and blew the smoke over them. It was bittersweet, compounded of leather and ink and sealing wax. For some reason it made Klopper aware of the meat in his mouth, of its texture, the fibres parting between his teeth, the taste of blood on his tongue, but he took a mouthful of beer and swallowed, and it went down. Soon the wind shifted again and carried the smoke out over the water.

‘This is the bit I really don’t understand. They call it the philosophy of the fugu-eaters…’

‘Hang on,’ said Klopper, ‘here he comes.’

‘Listen to this: He who eats fugu fish is stupid… but he who does not eat fugu fish is also stupid . What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Beats me.’

Bate went to stand behind the chair and they both looked at the man in the street, a man they knew from photographs, coming towards them in the flesh.

In the second autumn of my short life in San Diego, Mel and I flew to Oklahoma City to fetch the car her father had bought for her. The plan was to spend a few days with her parents, getting to know one another, and then drive the car back to the coast.

A road trip was long overdue. In two years of grinding away at pointless jobs, I had hardly been out of the city. When I looked at a map and saw that Route 66 was more or less obligatory, my romance with America, the old flame that had drawn me there, was rekindled. The American landscape was a songbook and its melodies had been playing in my head since I was a child… Amarillo, Albuquerque, Memphis Tennessee — they were more evocative than the names of the South African towns I grew up in. It irked me that they had ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and we were stuck with ‘Sixteen Rietfonteins’.

Mike and Hedda fetched us from the airport and did their best to make me feel at home. They wanted to like me, I could tell, but the obstacles were obvious. I was neither American nor Jewish; I had half a degree and no money. Being an outsider could often be turned to advantage, but it would not work on the Liebmans. For God’s sake, Mel said, how many Jews do you think there are in Oklahoma?

I liked them too. Mike was the plain, well-made kind of man the engineering profession attracts, still trim in middle age, and Hedda was an older version of Mel; she had the same quizzical gaze, the same pale, freckled skin. If anything, the resemblance between them was disconcerting to a young man: I saw exactly what my girlfriend would look like in thirty years’ time.

The Liebmans were not especially observant, but they were glad to have their daughter home for Shabbos. The Friday we arrived in Oklahoma City, we had supper together, just the four of us. Hedda said the friends and family could wait, we should have a chance to talk and break the ice. They turned out to be thoughtful, generous people, curious about me and my background but careful not to pry. I had met Americans who were surprised to discover that South Africa was a country, others who were moved to lecture me on the wickedness of apartheid as if the thought had never crossed my mind, and yet others who wanted to swap notes about keeping the blacks in their place, but none of them had been as interested in my point of view as the Liebmans. Although they found apartheid repugnant, they wanted to know more about South Africa, what it felt like, what made it tick. As Jews in a conservative, Christian world, I reasoned, they must understand the complications of belonging. Relieved and disarmed, I was able to express the contradictory feelings about my homeland I usually kept to myself, how I loved it and hated it because, like it or not, the threads of my life had been twisted into its fabric and could not be unravelled.