Ivan Vladislavic: 101 Detectives

He hunted me down in the living room, where the men were chatting while the women put the finishing touches to the dinner, and pulled a chair up so that we could talk.

‘I’ve never actually met someone from Darkest Africa,’ he said, ‘let alone a representative of the master race.’ And then he laid a puffy hand over my own to show that he was joking. When I spoke, he tilted his head to one side, profoundly attentive.

He started out by telling me that he despised apartheid. He imagined that no one could live in South Africa without going mad. It would make you sick, he expected. He imagined and expected many things. ‘I imagine it makes you feel awful,’ he said. ‘I expect it keeps you awake at night.’ Within a minute I felt like fleeing, but the arm of his chair was pressed into the padded side of the sofa like a bony elbow in my ribs. Only joking, he said, and gave me another jab. I was relieved when we were called to the table, disappointed to find him directly opposite, appraising me over the rim of his wine glass as if he could see through me.

‘Our visitor from Africa should say the blessing,’ he said when we were all gathered around the table.

I declined. He insisted, until I had to say: ‘I’m not Jewish.’ The yarmulke I had pinned to the back of my head suddenly felt like a ridiculous disguise.

‘Forgive me,’ Uncle Morris said, ‘I just assumed.’

Mike said the broche, and as soon as we were seated the awkwardness was submerged in talk and laughter. Mel gave my leg a reassuring squeeze under the table.

It was a country meal with Yiddish trimmings. There was no chicken soup, although one of the aunts had brought chopped liver, which was served with crackers rather than kichel. The main course was quail. Hedda warned us: ‘Watch your teeth.’

We spoke about Uncle Colley, of course. Morris imagined how surprised I must have been to find a man living in such a primitive state. The way he said ‘primitive’ was insinuating, as if he was quoting a word I had used myself, one which passed a judgement that rebounded on me. He had a way of looking at me that suggested he knew me better than anyone else at the table. ‘Living up there in the woods,’ he said, ‘you need a strong stomach to keep the man’s company.’

The picture of Colley and Mel came into my mind, and along with it a shameful sense of betrayal. Unsure what I had seen passing between them, half-convinced I had dreamt it all, I had not said a word, and neither had she.

There was no sign of birdshot in my quail, although everyone else was fishing bits of black lead from their mouths. Halfway through the meal though, I began to feel strange. My skin crawled. I should have said something at once, but I didn’t want to cause a fuss.

The conversation turned to medicine. Perhaps it started with the question of whether anything might have been done for Colley, or perhaps one of the old people was simply discussing their aches and pains. Uncle Morris bemoaned the wasteful excesses of modern healers, the cascades of pills and potions, the bloody surgeries. Doctors were always reaching for the scalpel. He mentioned Chris Barnard, who had put the heart of a black man — or was it a baboon? — in an ailing white body, in the body — pulling a face at me — of a Jew. Everyone laughed. He did a toothy impression of Barnard that seemed to me a parody of my own accent. He began to speak about eczema. When Mel and I discussed it afterwards, after I’d recovered, she insisted this part of the conversation came later, when Morris was trying to make a diagnosis, saving my life , I was disorientated, but in my memory it comes before, he is suggesting the diseases of the skin to which I might fall prey, predicting them if you like, urticaria, prurigo, suppurating boils. They were all possible, indeed likely, they were to be imagined and expected. While he was busy with the list, I opened a gap between two buttons of my shirt and saw that my belly was covered with red spots. My skin was burning. I put my hand under my shirt and scratched and peered again through the gap. It looked like chickenpox. The rash was already rising on my neck. I should have said something, but I carried on eating and listening to the talk around me, following a line here and a phrase there, catching hold of none of it, letting the meanings sink beneath their accents. Then Hedda’s sister was bringing in the strawberry fool and Hedda was waving at me from across the table as if we were on opposite sides of a river in spate. The welts had appeared on my cheeks apparently and my neck was puffing out like a bullfrog’s.

Morris took charge. He gave instructions for an ambulance to be called. Then he scratched through the medicine cabinet and crushed a couple of tablets into a glass of water and got the mixture down my throat before it closed up entirely. They put me on the sofa while they waited for help to come. I was gasping for breath. Mel held my hand and cried. Her mother’s drawn face came and went over her shoulder, echoing out of a distant future in which an old man on his deathbed, surrounded by a little circle of family and friends, turned out to be me.

A numb sense of calm seeped into my limbs — Morris had added a tranquilliser to the mix, reasoning astutely that what needed managing most was my anxiety — and I heard voices and spoons chiming on teacups. Morris especially: ‘You never know what will come to the surface,’ he said. ‘The skin never lies.’

We drove back to San Diego a few days later than planned. I recuperated in the guest room, laid out on the sleeper couch like a corpse, with the blinds drawn against the light. Hedda joked once too often about the judgement I had passed on her cooking.

The kicks I got on Route 66 were less intoxicating than I’d anticipated, more in keeping with a Honda hatchback than a Ford Thunderbird. My illness had made us late and we had jobs to get back to, so we stayed on the interstate most of the way, but once or twice we went off to follow the old highway. I drove and Mel read the maps. From time to time, she also read aloud from the novels by Steinbeck and Kafka which Hedda had packed for us like a picnic, the passages she had marked with playing cards about the great mother road that took the Joads west to California, the way we were going now, and the railway line that brought Karl Rossmann over mountain passes and bridges to work in the great Theatre of Oklahoma, where everyone was welcome.

On the way out of Oklahoma City, we passed a sign that said, ‘Caution! Hitch-hikers may be escaping convicts.’ Just a mile further on, as if to prove that the state authorities had a point, we came to a man hitch-hiking. Picturing the prison garb under his business suit, we laughed and laughed. It kept us laughing all the way to the coast.

Winter was settling over Oklahoma, turning it pale and brittle. The countryside reminded me of the Free State, the stubble fields and silvery grass, the vast empire of the sky that made your head float off your shoulders, the grain silos in farming towns where the railway lines still defined a right and a wrong side of the tracks, the little divided Western towns that were so much like platteland dorps and their townships. A complicated homesickness began to dismantle the makeshift version of myself I had constructed in California. I thought of sharing this feeling with Mel, but she had never seen the Free State, and I knew in the backwoods of my body that she never would.

He knew there were tricks — no — not tricks, techniques, there are techniques for getting to see what you’re not supposed to. Let’s say the register at reception in the hotel lobby. You drop the pen or you fake a cough and ask for a glass of water, and while the clerk is distracted you quickly turn the book your way and scan the page for what you’re after. Let’s say the room number of a particular person. Or let’s say the name of a particular person occupying a certain room the number of which is no mystery. He knew all that.