Ivan Vladislavic - Double Negative

He’s playing a game — I thought this too — he’s having some fun. All this wandering around the city is nothing less than a guided tour of the places he’s captured on film. He’s letting us know we’re on his turf. There! That place with the palm tree! And what about that one covered in ivy? It was like counting caravans, Gypsy caravans like our own, when we drove down to the coast on holiday, a game my father dreamed up to keep me occupied when I got bored and restless. Who’ll be the first to see the sea?

When we pulled up outside the house in Fourth Avenue, I had a more cynical thought: is this really the place he picked from up on the koppie? Neither Brookes nor I can contradict him. He might have chosen it this minute, relying on those intuitions he makes so much of. All you can say for certain is that the roof is green. Racing green. Groendakkies .

While Auerbach went to see if anyone was home, and Brookes got out of the car to stretch and peel the fabric of his shirt off his belly like dead skin, I strolled a little way along the pavement to look at the house next door. My choice. It was as long and narrow as one side of a semi, a place that had lost its better half. The half left behind was yellow. A dozen steps led up to a stoep with a metal railing of diamonds and quoits. Beside the gate was a letterbox with a pitched roof and a chimney standing on an iron plinth like a maquette of the larger structure: they matched one another perfectly, down to the orange tiles and the red door. I could not wait to see what was behind that door. It might take another man’s charm to pass through it, but the choice was mine.

Then Auerbach came back to the car to fetch his bags and invite us in. This knack for getting people to open up surprised me less the second time round.

Mrs Ditton lumbered ahead of us down the passage, swaying at every step to sweep one thigh past another, almost brushing the walls. We followed her into the lounge. The room was lined with dressers and display cabinets, and for all its clutter peculiarly hushed and drained, like a little-visited annex in a museum. I remember stepping lightly from a patterned rug on to dark floorboards, aware that all around things were asleep on their shadows. Even Brookes took the boom out of his voice. Set out in cabinets of coffin wood and pillared glass were toby jugs and cruet sets, upturned port glasses, cut-glass dishes, fragile and flowery ornaments, iced frivolities for wedding cakes in lilac, rose and leaf green. Of course, you cannot see these shades in Auerbach’s photograph, although the black and white is perfect for lacquered wood and tarnished mirror. The ball-and-claw suite is ankle-deep in shadow, the curtains are so densely grained they could be carved from the same heavy wood as the furniture. There is a murderer behind every one.

An object stood out in the gloom: a low coffee table with a cracked top.

‘Is this from a lorry?’ Brookes asked incredulously, shifting aside a pewter urn on a tea cloth. Now I also saw the table for what it was: a windscreen welded at each of its four corners to a shell casing.

‘A hippo,’ she said. The flesh of her arms shook with laughter.

‘Military vehicle,’ Auerbach glossed it for him, ‘troop carrier.’ After a glance at the table, he went back to rifling out the legs of the tripod.

‘They drove over a landmine with Jimmy inside.’

‘Jimmy?’

‘My son.’

She watched Auerbach suspiciously. I saw that the pads of her bare feet were so thick and round that her toes did not touch the floor when she stood still. She seemed to be balancing on pontoons. Only her hair was stiff and angular, arriving swiftly at contradictory points below her ears. It looked like a hairstyle she had copied from Jackie Kennedy and forgotten to change.

‘Was he killed?’

‘No, thank God. I always say to him, Jimmy, God was watching your back. His mates had broken bones and stuff, but he walked away without a scratch. That’s why they gave it to him when he klaared out.’

So this piece of scrap was a good luck charm. Or a medal.

I had a look around with Mrs Ditton at my shoulder. Jimmy’s room was easy to spot: he had a Kawasaki poster on the door and Farrah Fawcett-Majors above the bed. The room smelt of fish. In the channel between the bed and the wall lay a clutter of flippers, tanks and masks crusted with sea sand, and a couple of wetsuits like bloated body parts. A speargun leaned against a wardrobe. Jimmy was a diver in Port Nolloth, his mother told me, but he’d been called up to the border again and so he’d brought his gear home. Couldn’t leave it in Port Jolly, it would all be swiped. He loved the sea, she said, even as a baby you couldn’t get him out of the water. Swimming before he could walk. It was a crying shame they wouldn’t take him in the navy because of his feet.

Auerbach called her for the shot.

The main bedroom was as gloomy as the lounge. A pair of brogues, side by side under the bed, polished for a funeral. The suit they went with was on a round-shouldered dumb valet. Through a window, I saw the window of the house next door, almost close enough to touch and so perfectly aligned it might have been a reflection. I shifted aside the edge of a net curtain and saw that the window opposite had venetian blinds tilted against the outside world. I could not imagine what was going on in that room. Anything was possible. Everything.

Brookes was like a visitor in a museum whose point he cannot fathom. He stooped to look at objects on the lower shelves of the cabinets and ran his fingers over the embossed spines of a set of encyclopedias. He paused in the doorways of the rooms as if they were spanned by chains, leaning in for a better view. There must be something interesting here, his attitude suggested, perhaps it’s hidden in the corner over there. In the kitchen, where the makings of a stew lay on a chopping board, he held a chunk of butternut up to the light as if looking for a flaw. Once he fanned himself with his notebook, but wrote nothing in it.

When I returned to the lounge, Auerbach had the focusing cloth over his head. For a moment, the darkness seemed to emanate from him, running out from under the stifling hood. Then the flow reversed and the cloth appeared to be soaking up the shadows that had lain there already. Mrs Ditton sat in the armchair beside the fireplace. The coffee table had been dragged away — there is no trace of it in the photograph — to expose the floorboards and a corner of the rug. Looming on the left is the largest of the cabinets, so imposing you would say it belongs in a department store. The chair has wooden arms with ledges for teacups and on each of these lies a pie-crust of crochet work and a coaster. The chair sprawls with its arms open wide and its fists clenched, and she wallows in its lap.

Auerbach shrugged off the cloth and stood beside the camera with the cable release in his hand. The shadows scuttled and settled again. He waited for something to happen. Or not happen. Something imperceptible to the rest of us had to become clear before he could release the shutter. Twice he stepped away from the camera and looked towards the door with a grimace, as if the situation pained him and he had made up his mind to leave. This caused her to look at the door enquiringly as if someone had just knocked.

I imagined the door opening, I imagined the room opening rather than the door, the door standing still while the house swung away on small hinges and closed into the eye of the camera with a bang. Patience, something is bound to happen. And if nothing does? That is unthinkable. We cannot be left here in this half-formed state.

While my thoughts were elsewhere, Auerbach took the picture. For only the second time that day, the shutter fell through the moment like a guillotine. You can see the relief on Mrs Ditton’s face as she drops from the fulness of life into a smaller, diminished immortality. She looks grateful to have the air knocked out of her. Anticipating a paper-thin future, she floats free of the fat-thighed cushions and the sticky shadows, she levitates. It is there in the photograph, you have only to look.