The Exploded View Page 7

  Vinegar surged in his throat, peanuts, garlic, that stinkbug herb thing. Jesus. He flung himself down on the bed with the questionnaire in his hand. He couldn’t bear to go on. Fucking Van der Haas. He thumbed the volume button on the remote but nothing happened. Probably also on the Dutchman’s list. A skinnier Robert De Niro was having the crap beaten out of him now, sweat sprayed off his battered head, cursive exclamations of blood and saliva trailed from his broken mouth. Egan drew his knees up protectively and cupped his hands between his legs. Even without the sound, he could hear fists thudding on flesh and bone.

  CURIOUSER

  In the studio attached to his house, where he usually engaged in the serious business of making art, ‘S. Majara’, indulging a whim, began to construct a lantern out of wooden masks. The four he had chosen for this purpose lay in sequence on the floor beneath the windows. Many others were scattered around the tall white room, leaning against walls and lying on trestle tables, pinning down the clutter like oversized paperweights. Besides masks, there were wooden animals arranged in groups on the windowsills and the seats of chairs, carvings of buck and zebra and elephant of the kind displayed for sale to tourists by hawkers all over the city. Curios. The meat of Curiouser.

  ‘S. Majara’ was having a closing. It was the new thing, more fun than an opening, they said. His show at the Pollak had just come down, he had spent the whole day taking the works apart and packing them up, and the last thing he felt like was a party. But it had to be done.

  He put two masks together with their temples touching and aligned the holes he had drilled in their ears. Then he pushed the end of a length of wire through a pierced lobe, bent it sharply and pushed it back through the ear of its neighbour, and twisted the ends together with a pair of pliers. He had an enormous supply of these things. He had begun to think he would never see the end of them.

  The third of the lucky foursome had peculiar ears, little lugs tucked into the angles of its jaw – a real lantern jaw, he thought – and the holes he had drilled were useless. He made a new mark with a pencil and carried the mask to the workbench. As he pressed the bit against its forehead, he studied its expression. You could imagine that it was gritting its teeth – but that was just the effect of the drill. If you took the bit out of the picture, the grimace turned to a grin.

  The face of Africa, he thought, the one made familiar by ethnographic museums and galleries of modern art, B-grade movies and souvenir shops. Everywhere you went in Johannesburg, wooden faces looked up at you from the pavements at the hawkers’ stalls, a running catalogue of expressions that ranged between hollowed-out hunger and plump self-satisfaction, each flipping over into its opposite as soon as the weather changed.

  Curiouser had been a great success, a new beginning for him, everyone said so. The Genocide series had led them to expect another video installation. Instead he had given them sculpture, witty pieces quite unlike his stock-in-trade. Even people who were habitually sarcastic about his work thought he had achieved something remarkable, liberating the curio from its stifling form, cutting down to the core of its meaning, that sort of thing.

  The lantern was finished: a head with four faces. He carried it out of the studio, across a courtyard cluttered with lumber, bolts of wire mesh, paint tins and other oddments, and into the house.

  ‘Let’s take a look.’ Ruth was painting her nails at the dining-room table. ‘The candles are in the dresser, under the dishcloths.’

  He fetched one, set it up inside the lantern and lit it. Then he shut the blinds to get the effect. Perfect.

  ‘Think I’ll make a few more to spook the guests.’

  ‘Go for it, Sim. Make ten.’

  Simeon was an artist. Everything else followed. He had made his name – ‘S. Majara’ – with three shows on the theme of genocide.

  The first of these, the Holocaust work, had been a little obvious perhaps, overladen with ashes and soot; but the second, the Ahmici series, made everyone sit up and take notice. Its element was bone, ground and splintered and scored, and no one who saw it was unmoved. It made you painfully aware that you were corporeal and mortal. Of course, people were intrigued that a black artist should be dealing with Bosnia, although one critic suggested that he mind his own business. Hadn’t he heard of Idi Amin?

  In fact, his attention had turned already to a more recent African atrocity. The next show, Genocide III – the ‘Nyanza Shrouds’ as it came to be known – was about Rwanda. Its element was dust. The gallery was saturated with it, quite unintentionally. There was a pale shimmer in the air, on the tiles, sifting imperceptibly from the fabric of his winding sheets. People became aware of it sometimes in the soft lisp of their soles on the gallery floor, or, hours later, when they were back in the full-colour world, in a white smudge on the sleeve of a jacket, as if a soul expiring there had left behind this soap-bubble residue.

  He had gone to Nyanza with the idea for Genocide III half-formed in his mind, to see the site of the massacre, now preserved as an open-air museum. There were ten or twelve people on the trip, a handful of journalists, a researcher from the European Cultural Foundation, a woman representing a Danish church organization that took in orphans (‘Hutus and Tutsis’), a couple of tourists. On the drive from Kigali, he sat next to Henk from Groningen. This cross-cultural adventurer, as he called himself, had a special interest in genocide. He had done the major concentration camps in his own backyard (Auschwitz, he said, was still the must-see), the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, and a five-day drive along the Trail of Tears. This was his first African visit, but South Africa was next on the list.

  When Henk finally asked him what he did, Simeon could not bring himself to say he was an artist. The idea made him queasy. It suggested an intolerable common purpose with his fellow traveller, whose bony knee was rubbing against his own. He said he was a journalist and patted his camera bag.

  The economies of repetition. Any task got faster and easier as you went along. One of the pleasures of working with your hands lay in finding rhythms and refining sequences, discovering how a given process could best be done. By the time he was busy with the eighth lantern, he’d halved the time it took. Eight? Perhaps he’d got a little carried away. But then the raw material was so plentiful.

  The masks had come into his hands by chance a year before. It was startling how one lucky find had changed his artistic course – although the gap between corpses and curios was narrower than people thought. An acquaintance, a woman who framed his prints from time to time, had been commissioned to design the décor at Bra Zama’s African Eatery. Deciding that he knew more about authentic African style than she did – he was black, after all, never mind the private-school accent – she had asked for his help. The implications intrigued him, the possibility of erasing another line between his art and his livelihood. And the restaurant itself was perfect, a touristy place on the edge of Germiston where people could pretend they were in a shebeen. It appealed precisely because it was so corny. He had explored this ambiguous charm in his sketches for the interior, seizing on the obvious trappings of the tourist experience and trusting that in the end he would be able to turn them inside out, double them back on themselves, so that they meant something else. That was one of his things. ‘Recharging the drained object with meaning,’ as Jackie Wetzler once put it in Business Day.

  He hit on the answer soon enough: Bra Zama’s African Eatery would have masks. The budget stretched to no more than a handful at shop prices, but he wanted dozens. So he had driven out to the curio-sellers on Ontdekkers Road and William Nicol Drive, diffuse marketplaces straggling along the verges of suburban roads. His plan was to beat one of them down by ‘buying in bulk’, but they were surprisingly resistant. They wouldn’t even name their suppliers.

  He was already toying with the idea of making what he needed from scratch when he met Roger, a Malawian who kept a stall on the pavement outside Flea Market World in Bruma. Yes, he had masks, he said, he had six crates of them.
/>   ‘Six crates!’

  ‘One thousand rand a box, take it or leave it.’

  Excess was always interesting. In a flash, ‘S. Majara’ was calculating whether the grant money he had left over from the Genocide III show was enough to buy the whole lot for himself. He could use them in his own work, the real work, after the Eatery potboiler.

  Only when he began to unpack the Malawian’s masks in his studio did he realize how many there were. His eye had told him fifty or sixty in the whole consignment, but there were that many in a single crate. Every time he threw out a handful of shredded newsprint, expecting to see the blond pine bottom of the box, he found another layer gazing up as astonished as stowaways. There was something charmed about it, like the bottomless granary in a fable. He had used a few dozen of them at Bra Zama’s without making a dent in the supply, and still he had a roomful left at home and an unopened crate in the garage. Ruth was sick of it. She’d be glad to see another handful go.

  He picked up a lantern in each hand and went into the house again.

  She was sawing through a lettuce now at the kitchen counter.

  ‘I’m just going to put these out.’

  ‘Sandy’s arrived. She brought that with her.’ Pointing with the knife to a portfolio leaning against the wall.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The prints that Tanya hasn’t got rid of and a couple of posters.’

  ‘Keepsakes.’

  ‘Also the visitors’ book. She says you should take a look. Some hilarious stuff.’

  ‘Is Tanya coming?’

  ‘Says so. Here, take the candles with you.’ She looped the handles of a plastic bag over his crooked forefinger.

  The pool was vividly blue in the twilight (Ruth had already switched on the underwater lights). A liquid lozenge of California in the crust of Gauteng. There was something about it that thrilled him, something glamorous and electric that produced a current of longing with no definite object. The luminous blue water shifted heavily against the sides of the pool, moving for no apparent reason, unless it was the rotation of the earth itself. Although you didn’t see the contents of glasses and cups rocking. And why not? He turned the question over in his mind as he went along the terracotta surround of the pool. He should send it to that Q & A column in the Mail. Was it all gravity? The moon? You moved a cup through the air and it sloshed over, with many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, blah blah. But the cup was hurtling through space along with the planet and not so much as a ripple. Those palms should be bent double. His hair should be flying, his cheeks filled to bursting. Dizzy Gillespie. Or a freefaller, a skydiver. Skydiver I. A man, me, a man walking down a city street with his hair on end, stiff as quills, his cheeks puffed out, his clothes rattling, while everyone else is strolling along as unruffled as you please. A poppy little piece, very MTV, very Drumroll. Earthdiver. Arms outstretched, legs rigid. Another little Guronsan C man like the hero of Bullet-in, my photographic series. Drydiver!

  Their guide in Nyanza was a gaunt, middle-aged man with John Lennon glasses, who had survived the massacre by lying for a day among familiar corpses, pretending to be dead. Death had rubbed off on him, it was there on his skin. He showed them the church, the mass grave and the shed where the bones of victims were piled. Then they were free to wander over the red earth, which seemed to express too obviously the idea that it was drenched in blood, through the shells of buildings, across unmown lawns. Bone. Simeon had used bone before. He needed something else. This red clay was garish.

  After a while, he found himself alone outside a building with gaping doors. When he went inside, he saw that it had been a clinic. There were hospital beds, tin cabinets, rails for curtains. The place was eerily quiet and complete, as if the massacre had just taken place. It was easy to imagine patients lying in the beds, and doctors and nurses shouldering through the doors, while the fans revolved overhead.

  He went outside again into the glare and then retraced his passage into the clinic, looking through the viewfinder this time. He moved slowly, trying to capture the taking-in of detail, discovering the beds cranked up into fractured angles, the ragged mosquito nets, the dusty medicine measures on bedside cabinets. There was a door in one corner of the ward. Hesitantly, an eye afraid of what it might see next, he pushed through into another room. The dispensary. He swung open the door of a cupboard with his foot, still filming, and locked in surprise on shelves dotted with tubes and jars. The cupboard was full. What had preserved it so completely? The certainty that this place was tainted and these remedies had lost their power.

  The plaster bandages were on the bottom shelf. So this was what he had come for. He lingered on them, transfixed.

  Finally he put the camera down. He emptied the contents of his bag – sweater, lunch pack from the hotel, mineral water, paperback for the bus ride – into the bottom of the cupboard, packed up as many of the rolled bandages as he could (twenty, it turned out) and covered them with his kikoi.

  He was busy with the Polaroid when he heard the driver blowing his hooter, signalling that it was time to go. As he made his way to the bus, he noticed that despite being wrapped in plastic the bandages had left traces of white plaster on his fingertips. Dust. That was it. He stopped and wiped his hands on the grass. He felt no guilt about the theft. He did not even think of it in those terms.

  On the journey back to the hotel, he found a seat by himself, avoiding Henk from Groningen, and thought about the work. The road jolted into his head the old wisecrack about applying a Band-aid to a cancer. Yet he clutched the bag as if it held the answer to everything.

  He made twenty shrouds, weaving into each of them a single roll of plaster bandage. The catalogue explained that there was one winding sheet for every two hundred people who had been killed in Nyanza; it said nothing about the bandages or their provenance. The film footage was also silent on this subject. The moment when he discovered the bandages in the cupboard – the crux of the whole experience, a genuine revelation, captured without artifice – he excised from the video.

  Each shroud bore the impression of a human body, a crying mouth, a twisted arm, a hand raised to ward off a blow. The long white sheets were hung in a dimly lit room like photographs of ghosts.

  ‘Hey, Simeon,’ Sandy called to him from across the pool. She had arranged the garden furniture around the braai and was running a cloth over the table-top. ‘I brought your prints back.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘Tanya’s coming.’

  ‘I heard. What’s the plan for tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ve got to be there by ten.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘James is coming half past eleven, twelve with the bakkie to take the stuff to the office. But we’d better be there early, we’ve still got to dismantle the vitrines. And a couple of pieces will have to be packed properly.’

  ‘Did you get the bubble wrap?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘James is going to drop the “Skinny Rhinoceros” at Norman Fischhoff’s this evening. You know he bought the “Rhinoceros”?’

  ‘We should bank the cheque first.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Joking, Sands.’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Lanterns.’ As he padded across the lawn, he raised the two lanterns shoulder-high to show her. They felt like heads, all of a sudden, swinging from his fists. ‘I hear we’re making a braai. You should get the fire going.’

  ‘That’ll be the day. That’s boys’ work.’

  ‘What do I know about building fires?’

  ‘It’s too early anyway.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Bheki will do it. Or Leon. He’s one of those men who can’t resist taking over at a braai. One whiff of a charcoal briquette and he’ll come running.’

  He prowled along a path made of railway sleepers to the street door. Ever since Artslink had called ‘S. Majara’ a ‘Young Lion of the Art Scene’ – sarcastically, it’s true �
� Simeon had discovered a feline streak in himself that was hard to suppress. The goatee only made it worse. So did the rubber-soled trainers, which looked more like a superior form of foot than a shoe, as if his body had magically projected its striated musculature onto the surface of his skin. Lately he’d taken to inserting something catlike into his gait, a version of padding, a leonine grace.

  Every last image on the Nyanza Shrouds had been modelled on Simeon’s own body. It irritated some people. They saw it as vanity that he used himself as the measure of all suffering. Whereas he saw it as the opposite. It was a mark of humility, he said, to take yourself as the template, to immerse yourself in the image of the other like an armature in a sculpture.

  He had a knack for publicity, no argument there, but that was a different matter. It was nothing but good business sense, even if it offended people who preferred their artists quiet and self-effacing. Whenever he was accused of superficiality, he took comfort in a private conviction that the work was always received more superficially than it had been created. There was always more to it than met the eye. No one even suspected that the sepulchral dust which was such an integral part of the show – the white patina that clung to everything ‘like mortality itself’, according to Jackie Wetzler – came from Nyanza. No one would ever know.

  Some details of Genocide III no longer pleased him, but he was satisfied with the big picture.