Ivan Vladislavic - Double Negative

‘Find the people and talk to them,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine the stories!’

‘I’m not a storyteller. I wish I was interested in stories, other people’s especially, but I’m not.’

‘You never know the lives people have lived until you ask, and asking is an obligation.’ Lecturing me now. ‘Every time someone dies, a whole history dies with them. It’s like each one of us is an archive.’

‘I’m surprised you’re so interested in the past.’

‘Oh, I’m all for it, so long as there aren’t too many grumpy people involved. I’m not exactly a born-free, but I’m not a child of apartheid either. I don’t need all that misery.’

‘People suffered terribly under apartheid, you know.’

‘Ja, but it’s time to move on.’

When I was a child, it puzzled me that there were so many films about the War, that the model planes were Spitfires and Stukas, and the comics were full of Germans shouting, ‘Achtung!’ Why was this ancient conflict so alive? My grandpa had been up north, but he was ancient too and belonged in another era. As I got older it became obvious. Scarcely twenty years had passed since the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. The earth was still trembling. I can feel it trembling now.

We had our own brief lifespans to consider. Janie asked for a copy of my CV and I went inside to print one in Leora’s study. ‘You can email it,’ she called after me, but I wanted to get it done.

When I came back, she was watching her footage on the digicam.

‘Check this out!’

I went with her into the maze of Antoine’s village, twisting and turning between the shacks, on and on as if the place were endless. Once she came to a dead end, quickly doubled back, and found another path. The shacks were so close together, you could reach out and touch the walls on either side. A tangible community. You would not need to go next door for a cup of sugar, you could simply lean out of your window. She swung around a corner, jaunty and unafraid. A woman stooping over a plastic basin of laundry started when she saw her, and then stood up with her foamy hands on her hips, laughing. She focused on the laughing woman and then on a king-size bottle of Sta-soft. ‘Hello ma. Who are you? Tell me your name and what you’re doing.’ But the camera made the woman shy and she turned away, hiding her face. The camera bobbed and reeled again along the ironclad streets, as if it had been set adrift on a raft. Bits of sky flickered into the lens, dented walls fell like shutters, layers of trampled earth flew up. She turned to look back. A gang of kids were following her, excited and alarmed. She focused on a girl with braids standing out stiffly like a crown of exclamation marks all around her head.

I offered to drive her home, but she had called a cab already and it was waiting when I let her out.

On the threshold, she paused and said, ‘One last thing: I need you with your letterbox, obviously.’

‘It’s just a slot in the wall.’

She held the camera out and looked at the screen. The way I study packages in the supermarket when I forget my reading glasses, trying to see how much salt they contain. She said, ‘I see what you mean. Two peas in a pod. Okay, say something cheesy.’

‘And in the alcoves?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You sure?’ Leora inspected the print as if there might be some small object in the shadows. ‘They must be displaying something.’

‘No, nothing.’

‘Weird. What is this style, African Imperial? Sol Kerzner must be behind it, he was the great prophet of the African Renaissance.’

‘I think it’s what Aurelia calls Afrocentric chic.’

I put the prints on the dresser and began to set the table while Leora went back to chopping fennel on the butcher’s block. It was Friday evening. The aromatic essence of her famous salmon soufflé — in individual ramekins, if you don’t mind — came from the eye-level oven; a salad cut down cruelly in its youth, baby carrots, bean sprouts, young spinach leaves, lay in a bamboo bowl. While she mixed the dressing, I opened some wine (it was a compensatory Springfield Life from Stone, nursed to maturity in the rocky soils of the Robertson valley) and told her more about the day with Janie.

‘Tell me, Mr Lister, was it a good interview?’

Leora’s sense of humour: Mr Lister of Leicester Road. ‘It was more like a natter with a friend. She didn’t shut up for a second. Talk talk talk.’

‘What about?’

‘Let’s see. Saul Auerbach, the godfather of documentary photography. Metaphysical acupuncture, the new thing. How to get chewing gum out of a budgie. Her dreams and ambitions.’

‘I thought she was interviewing you.’

‘I made the mistake of asking.’

‘Never show an interest. That’s the first law of self-promotion.’

‘I wish I’d known.’

‘What are her ambitions then?’

‘She wants to be a brand ambassador.’

‘For what?’

‘Herself, I think. She wants her own talk show and to grow and grow and be the best Janie she can be. She could give inspirational talks to young people on overcoming adversity, it’s just that nothing really shit has happened to her yet.’

I was being unfair, but I couldn’t stop.

Leora is a nicer person than I am, but she secretly admires and sometimes encourages this side of me. ‘She might have to settle for something in the performing arts,’ she said, pumping the juice out of a lemon as if she were doing reps at the gym, ‘poetry, say, or weather forecasting …’

‘The trick is to diversify. She’s writing a cookery book and a children’s book and a children’s cookery book. There’s a CD in the pipeline: some minor mogul overheard her scatting in the fitting rooms at the Zone and signed her to his label. Meanwhile, she’s working on a screenplay set in the future when we’ve run out of gas and everyone’s living in ruined Tuscan villages and puttering around in solar-powered golf carts.’

‘She sounds like a live wire.’

‘She’ll be an oober-something-or-other.’

‘You’re quite taken with her.’

‘It was like talking to a time traveller, a mime artist from a distant galaxy come to assure us that all will be well.’

Enough. Leora peeped into the oven, liberating a soothing waft of nutmeg.

‘And how did your side of the conversation go?’

‘Not well. I cast around for a story, some credible version of myself to impart, but I couldn’t find one. This pop stuff is infectious. I started coughing up factoids like a column in the newspaper. Not a columnist, note, a column, one of those last-ditch efforts to look like a website.’

‘You couldn’t find a story?’

‘No, I’ve dropped the thread and I can’t be bothered to pick it up again. I’m all thumbs anyway. What holds my attention now is design. Show me a pattern in the information and I’m satisfied.’

Leora tasted the salad dressing on the tip of her finger.

‘She was being ironic, obviously,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And so are you.’

‘I guess.’

‘The whole thing is ironic.’

‘Including the ironies.’

‘Maybe they cancel one another out then,’ Leora said, ‘like a double negative.’

She put on the oven gloves that look like sharks and brought the bowls to the table in their soft jaws, the individual ramekins , each with a little chef’s hat of gilded egg. ‘Poor baby,’ carving out a spoonful of soufflé and raising it to my mouth, ‘here.’

Channel-hopping with the sound down is my kind of extreme sport: there is always a story to be gaffed from the sea of televised images. The tide is rising there too, it’s another case of global warming. Every day, an immense shelf of information drifts out into the channels, data, useless entertainment, dogma, edifying documentaries, reality shows, weather reports, travel advice, sport, opinions, views, news, views, news. Mainly, because I have been in a gloomy mood, news of the dead and dying. Two hundred feared drowned as ferry capsizes. Suicide bomber kills thirty in Baghdad market. Twelve die as bus plunges off bridge. Teenager slays mother, brother, self. Nearly 140 cases of horse sickness reported in KwaZulu-Natal. The fatalities keep ticking while the news hounds find another tree to bark up. All the correspondents appear to be embedded somewhere. Even the girl reporting on the interprovincial netball in Potch is tinged with the war-zone green. We are so used to human bombs scattering fragments of their own flesh like leaflets in the rubble that we hardly notice the numbers killed.