The Distance Read online

  Copyright © Ivan Vladislavić, 2020

  First published by Penguin Random House South Africa, 2019

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vladislavić, Ivan, 1957- author.

  Title: The distance / Ivan Vladislavić.

  Description: First Archipelago Books edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2020014546 | ISBN 9781939810762 (paperback) | ISBN 9781939810779 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9369.3.V57 D57 2020 | DDC 823/.914–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014546

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810779

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover art source: 1974 Zaire Ali vs Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” Fight Poster

  Design: Zoe Guttenplan

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Dave Edwards

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Fight of the Century

  2. Lessons

  3. Doubles

  4. Americans

  5. Silence

  6. Collectors

  7. Poems

  8. Tactics

  9. Pictures

  10. Questions

  11. The Rumble in the Jungle

  12. Inheritance

  13. Limits

  14. The Thriller in Manila

  15. Death

  Sources of chapter-title illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  1

  The Fight of the Century

  The commander of South Vietnamese forces in Laos said today that his troop had seized three main junctions on the Ho Chi Minh trail and were achieving the two objectives of their drive – destroying North Vietnamese bases and cutting the supply network.

  – Pretoria News, March 1971

  Joe

  In the spring of 1970, I fell in love with Muhammad Ali. This love, the intense, unconditional kind of love we call hero worship, was tested in the new year when Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. I was at high school in Verwoerdburg, which felt as far from the ringside as you could get, but I read every scrap of news about the big event and never for a moment doubted that Ali would win. As it happened, he was beaten for the first time in his professional career.

  It must have been the unprecedented fuss around the Ali vs Frazier fight that turned me, like so many others who’d taken no interest in boxing before then, into a fan. ‘The Fight of the Century’ was one of the first global sporting spectacles, a Hollywood-style bout that captured the public imagination like no sports event before it. In the words of reporter Solly Jasven, it was as significant to the Wall Street Journal as it was to Ring magazine, and it generated what he called the big money excitement.

  I don’t know what I thought of Ali before the Fight of the Century, but I came from a newspaper-reading family and had started reading a daily when I was still at primary school, so I must have come across him in the press, and not just on the sports pages. In March 1967, after he’d refused to serve in the US army, the World Boxing Association and the New York State Athletic Commission had stripped him of his world heavyweight title. This was big news in South Africa, but I cannot say what impression it made on my nine-year-old self.

  Although Ali was absent from the ring for more than three years, he was not idle: he was on the lecture and talk-show circuit, he appeared in commercials, he even had a stint in a short-lived Broadway musical called Buck White. In short, he was doing the things celebrities of all kinds now do as a matter of course to keep their names and faces in the spotlight and build their ‘brands’. He went from the boxing ring to the three-ring circus of endorsements and appearances. He was also speaking in mosques and supporting the black Muslim cause. But very little of this activity, whether meant in jest or in earnest, was visible from South Africa.

  In 1970, when I was twelve, a Federal court restored Ali’s boxing licence. His first comeback fight was against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta and he won on a TKO in the third round. Six weeks later he beat Oscar Bonavena and that set up the title fight against Frazier in March the following year. It was a match Frazier had promised him if his boxing licence was ever returned.

  We had no television in South Africa then and our news came from the radio and the newspapers. The Fight of the Century produced an avalanche of coverage in the press. My Dad read the daily Pretoria News and two weeklies, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express, and so these were my main sources of information. In the buildup to the fight I started to collect cuttings and for the next five years I kept everything about Ali that I could lay my hands on, trimming hundreds of articles out of the broadsheets and pasting them into scrapbooks. Forty years later, these books are spread out on a trestle table beside my desk as I’m writing this. Let me also confess: I’m writing this because the scrapbooks exist.

  The heart of my archive is three Eclipse drawing books with tracing-paper sheets between the leaves. These books have buff cardboard covers printed with the Eclipse trademarks and the obligatory bilingual ‘drawing book’ and ‘tekenboek’. In the middle of each cover is a hand-drawn title: ALI I, ALI II and ALi III. The newsprint is tobacco-leaf brown and crackly. When I rub it between my fingers, I fancy that the boy who first read these reports and I are one and the same person.

  Branko

  I am the sportsman in the family. My brother Joe doesn’t mind kicking a soccer ball around in the yard, but when I need him to keep goal while I practise my penalties he’s got his nose in a book. Now all of a sudden he’s a boxing fan. Not that I’ve seen a lot of boxing myself. I’ve been to a couple of Golden Gloves tournaments at Berea Park with my cousin Kelvin, where they put up a ring on the cricket pitch in front of the grandstand. But we prefer the rofstoei in the Pretoria City Hall.

  The thing about wrestling is the rules are easy to understand. If Jan Wilkens is on the bill, you know he’s going to win. He’s a huge Afrikaner and he’s the South African champion. Kelvin always shouts for Wilkens. My guy is Rio Rivers. He doesn’t often win but he puts up a good fight. The last time my cousin and I went to the wrestling, Dad insisted we take along Joe and Rollie – that’s Kelvin’s little brother. It was a fiasco. Joe started rooting for Sammy Cohen. Sammy’s a pile of blubber in a black leotard. He looks like he hasn’t slept for three days and he always loses. That’s his part to play. Joe doesn’t get the principle: you’re not supposed to support the bums.

  And now this thing with Ali. It comes over him like the measles. The boxing bug is going around because of the upcoming fight between Ali and Frazier. Naturally I support Smokin’ Joe. I would support him in any case, but the fact that my little brother has picked the other corner is a bonus. Another chance to get under his skin.

  Joe Frazier’s going to give Cassius Cla
y a boxing lesson, Dad says. He’s going to knock seven kinds of crap out of that loudmouth.

  Eight kinds, I say.

  And Mom says, Watch your mouth. Even though eight is just a number.

  Dad won’t say Muhammad Ali. Over my dead body. It’s always Cassius Clay. It drives my brother to tears of frustration. Sometimes he goes out in the yard behind the servants’ quarters and smashes tomato boxes with a lead pipe.

  Sport is my thing and I wish he’d leave it alone. My plan is to win the Tour de France one day. I prefer road racing but I join the track season to keep fit. Cycling is not a popular sport. If we’re lucky fifty or sixty riders turn up at the Pilditch track in Pretoria West on a Friday evening, most of them seniors, and a handful of us in the schoolboy ranks. Juveniles, they call us, a stupid term you would never apply to yourself. The stands are nearly empty: the wives and girlfriends and mothers cluster together in a few rows with crocheted blankets over their knees. Ten rows back Joe is sitting alone under the icy corrugated-iron roof, wearing a knitted cap with an enormous pompom. He’d rather be at home but Dad says: You boys have got to stick up for one another. When the starter’s pistol goes or the timekeeper rings the bell for the last lap, he pretends to watch. He’s half interested in the Devil-Take-the-Hindmost because of the name, but mainly he’s reading a book in his lap, struggling in his black leather gloves to turn the pages of The Canterbury Tales or David Copperfield. The explosive pompom, the biggest one Mom ever made, hovers over his head like an unhappy fate.

  When I go to bed, I find him shadow-boxing. He’s supposed to be sleeping, but he’s got the desk lamp swivelled to cast a shadow on the wall next to the window. Bobbing and weaving, he says.

  Ja, I say, float like a bumblebee.

  Joe

  On the cover of the first scrapbook – a book of scraps, about scraps – I spelt out the word ALI in upright capitals using red double-sided tape from my father’s garage. When this tape dried out and fell off like an old scab, leaving a tender trace of the name on the board, I outlined each letter in black Koki pen to restore its definition. The numeral after the name must have been added when the growing volume of cuttings demanded a second scrapbook.

  The first cutting in ALI I is headlined in red ‘The Fight of the Century’. It was published the day before the fight. Like most of the cuttings this one is unattributed, but judging by the typeface and layout it was taken from the Sunday Times.

  It’s a busy page. There are drawings of Frazier and Ali side by side and between them, under the headline ‘How the Fighters Compare’, the stats on weight, height and reach, the dimensions of waist, thigh, chest (normal and expanded), fist and biceps, and finally age. Boxing writers call this the Tale of the Tape. Unfurled below are ‘Fight Histories’ with the highlights of each boxer’s career accompanied by a photograph. The picture of Joe Frazier knocking out Bob Foster, his most recent challenger, is not familiar. But the other is one of the most recognizable images in sporting history: Cassius Clay standing over a prone Sonny Liston after knocking him out in the first round of their return match in May 1965. Clay’s right forearm is angled across his chest, as if he’s still following through, and he’s looking down at Liston with a snarl on his lips. It’s a stance that makes perfectly clear what a boxing match is about. Ali later told a reporter he was saying: Get up and fight, you bum!

  The rest of the page is devoted to Frazier, and his comments reveal why the interest in the fight was so intense. Clay lost his licence because he refused to be drafted into the United States Army. That’s something I can’t have sympathy about. Frazier goes on to tell David Wright how he himself tried to join the Marines when he was just fifteen and was turned down because he couldn’t cope with the IQ tests.

  Further on he describes his childhood as the son of a one-armed sharecropper in South Carolina, his working life on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse in Philadelphia, where he began boxing to keep his weight down, and the importance of the Bible in his life. Recently I’ve been kinda stuck on the seventh chapter of Judges – where Gideon is fighting those tribes and everybody. Gideon only had a few men against thousands, but he won the war because he had the Lord on his side. That’s just how I feel about this fight with Cassius Clay.

  Judges 7 is one of those cheerfully brutal Biblical episodes in which the righteous smite their enemies. In this case, the Lord delivers the Midianites into the hands of Israel. He instructs Gideon to choose a conspicuously small army of men, no more than three hundred from among the thousands. So Gideon leads a crowd of men to the water, dismisses those who kneel down to drink and recruits only those who lap the water up with their tongues ‘as a dog lappeth’. These men are sent out against the enemy camp armed with trumpets and lamps inside pitchers, and in due course the Midianites are well and truly smitten. Their princes Oreb and Zeeb are slain and their heads cut off and brought to Gideon on the banks of the Jordan.

  The Book of Judges is a cloudy lens, but if you squint through it what comes into focus is Frazier’s aversion to a man who had renounced Christianity for a ‘foreign religion’ and refused to fight in the Vietnam War.

  The week before the fight, Frazier and Ali were on the cover of Time magazine under the headline ‘The $5,000,000 Fighters’. The story, based on hours of interviews with both boxers, summed up the simple symbolism of the fight: Shrewd prefight publicity has turned the billing into Frazier the good citizen v. Ali the draft dodger, Frazier the white man’s champ v. Ali the great black hope, Frazier the quiet loner v. Ali the irrepressible loudmouth, Frazier the simple Bible-reading Baptist v. Ali the slogan-spouting Black Muslim.

  On 8 March 1971, 20 000 people packed into Madison Square Garden to watch what turned out to be one of the most memorable heavyweight boxing matches in history. The fight went the distance and all three judges scored it in favour of Frazier.

  It’s the happiest day of my life, my father said. Except for the day I married your mother, the day she gave birth to your sister, and the day I bought my first car, a ’38 Chevy with a dickey seat. Jissie that was a beautiful car.

  Branko

  I’m a glorified taxi driver, Dad says. I should put a sign on the roof.

  It’s Saturday night and we’re fetching Sylvie from a session in the Skilpadsaal. Usually the hall is used for roller skating, but tonight there’s a band. When we dropped her earlier a boy in a pink shirt was leaning against a pillar smoking a cigarette and she said, He’s the bass guitarist. And Dad said, Ag any mampara can play the bass guitar.

  The streets around the showgrounds are full of cars but Dad finds a parking close to the hall. It’s just the two of us in the car. Mom’s at home with Joe.

  Dad’s idea of being on time is to be half an hour early, so he’s always waiting, ready to be impatient when the time comes. Sylvie is always late, especially at the sessions. She’ll push her luck by fifteen or twenty minutes. So help me, Dad says, if you keep me waiting again I’ll come in there and drag you off the dance floor. She would die of embarrassment. But he’ll never do it. For one thing he’s wearing his pyjamas under the old houndstooth overcoat he bought with his first pay cheque. That was round about the time Moses fell off the bus. For another, Sylvie always gets her way.

  Dad opens his window an inch so the glass won’t mist over and the music from the hall drifts in on the cold air. ‘Whiter Shade of Pale.’ They’ve started with the slow dances and that’s a bad sign in Dad’s book. He’s left the ignition key turned so his parking lights will show and some joker won’t ride into us. There’s a dim green light coming off the dash. We’re parked under a plane tree and the streetlight throws a lace of leaf-shadow over the bonnet. When cars come up behind us, long slow shadows creep over the cab. I shouldn’t fall asleep like a kid, but after a while my head gets heavy, and I breathe in the animal scent of the leather seat, which creaks every time Dad jogs his foot.

  I must have dozed off because Sylvie i
s at the window. She’s ten minutes early and she’s got her friend Glenda in tow. Never mind the weather, they’re both wearing bolero tops. It’s an old trick: she wants to stay a bit longer and the friend is there to make it harder for Dad to say no. Dad man, she says, everybody’s still dancing. Who is this everybody? he says. I’d like to meet him. But he always says yes in the end. She’s his princess.

  There are goosebumps on Glenda’s arms. Perhaps we’ll drop her at her house in Valhalla afterwards.

  Dad complains about driving, but there’s nothing he’d rather do. On a Sunday, when we get back from church, he’ll say: I think it’s time to see if the fish are biting. This means we’re going to drive out to Hartebeespoort Dam or Bon Accord or maybe even all the way to Pienaars River or Loskop. Dad was a fisherman in his young days and the dams are his landmarks. The rest of us are bored with these places, we want to go to Bapsfontein or the Fountains, but Dad never tires of them. He likes to be near water, but not in it, watching people potter around in motorboats or cast a line. Mom doesn’t mind the drive because it gives her time to knit. On a round trip to Pienaars she can finish the whole front of a cardigan.

  Bon Accord sounds grand but it’s just a sump of muddy water in a tangle of rutted roads and scrub. There’s no caravan park but campers carve out sites under the thorn trees to rig their tents. The whole place smells of mud and unhappy fish. We bump around on the tracks from one fishing spot to another. We’re looking for the bank where Dad and Uncle Arthur used to pitch a tent for the weekend before either of them was married.

  Mom and Sylvie wait in the car while we go exploring. Dad walks off in one direction with his hands behind his back. There’s an angler sitting on a camping chair down there and he’ll strike up a conversation with him about rods and reels. Joe and I go the other way. We pick up old bait, stinking lumps of carp and mieliepap packed around rusty hooks, and we get our feet caught in tangles of blue-green line that look like the balls of hair Sylvie combs out of her brush and leaves on the edge of the bath.