Richard’s girlfriend Faith was less diplomatic. ‘Ugly people in ugly places,’ she said. ‘The whites I mean. You must be relieved you’ve escaped from all this.’
‘I’m sorry you’re not an estate agent,’ said Mrs Pinheiro, ‘because I need to get out of here. Never mind seeing the world, I’d just like to see the other side of town. If I could get a room at Nazareth House, I’d be the happiest woman alive.’
She was behind the desk squinting at the photograph of Mrs Ditton. I thought of telling her how much it was worth: not exactly a pension, but more than pocket money. Now that South Africa had rejoined the global community, Auerbach’s reputation was on the rise, he had become collectable. The experts were beginning to say that he was more than a photographer; that he was an artist.
‘I’m sorry you’re not a historian either. You could have written something about Dr Pinheiro. Such an interesting man.’
She tugged a photograph from the frame and held it out to me. It was a passport photo embossed with an arc of print like the inscription on a coin. A man with black hair swept back, a veined and bony forehead, and dark eyes gazing regretfully down a nose that was too long for his face. Not a bad likeness, I thought, less hair on the head, more flesh on the bones, a little less Bela Lugosi and a little more Marlon Brando, and he was the spitting image of the man I had imagined languishing in the room behind the door.
‘I am not Mrs Pinheiro.’ She left the words lying between us like the settlement of a debt. ‘I may be the love of his life, but we never married. Sometimes I wonder whether there isn’t a Mrs Pinheiro somewhere else, waiting for him in Mozambique or Portugal. People do not always tell the truth about who they are, as you know.’
Some people are born liars, I thought, and others acquire the skill through patient effort.
‘Dr Pinheiro was a gifted physician,’ she continued. ‘He had a thriving medical practice in Lourenço Marques. He came down here after the Revolution, as they call their crazy carnival, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He was not the only one, of course, there were thousands of refugees like him, but he lost more than most, even his stethoscope.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘My brother found him at Our Lady of Lourdes and sent him to me. He arrived with a suitcase, and in it, a suit. That’s all. I thought it was funny but he didn’t see the joke. He was suffering. I took him in as a boarder, I had the room, and I let him stay for nothing until he got back on his feet. I could see he was a gentleman.
‘He couldn’t work as a doctor. They said his medical degree was invalid. There was an exam he could take and he was willing to study for it, he said, his English was improving every day, but the problem was that he couldn’t speak Afrikaans. He got a job in the post office sorting letters. Can you imagine? A doctor, a man who should be giving injections and saving lives, standing all day throwing letters into pigeonholes. Sheltered employment for poor whites, for people with deaf ears and crooked feet. Yes, he used to say to me, it suits me, this job: I am a poor white.’
This must have been in the mid-70s, I thought, when I was still a schoolboy. Where would the depot have been? Perhaps at the Jeppe Street Post Office. I tried to imagine the doctor there, poring over the addresses on letters and postcards as if they were secret codes, while I sat at my desk with the plans for a Flying Fortress spread out under the reading light and the picture of the finished model on the lid of the box standing on end like a screen. No matter how carefully I dabbed glue on the tiny parts, they ended up stuck to my fingers.
‘Can you hear it?’
‘What’s that?’
‘I thought you were listening to the voices. It gets so loud sometimes I can’t hear myself think.’ We listened. ‘At first, it was just one or two, but lately it sounds like a crowd. Talk talk talk.’
The silence had a texture to it now, an undercurrent like a tap running in another room of the house.
‘The doctor seems like a clever man,’ I said. ‘Did this job really suit him?’
‘It was very hard for him. He didn’t know the names of the big towns, never mind little villages or farms or railway junctions. Even the suburbs were new to him: how was he to know whether Troyeville was in Johannesburg or Pretoria or Blikkiesdorp? He had to learn everything from the beginning. It’s a wonder he managed.
‘Every sorter had a pigeonhole for letters that were not properly addressed or illegible. A few times a day, the Chief Sorter would go around the depot and collect all these letters, and then he would try to decipher them. In the beginning, Dr Pinheiro’s pigeonhole for unsorted mail was fuller than everyone else’s, and he worried that the Chief Sorter would notice and give him the sack. So he started to bring these letters home with him. He would have lost his job anyway if he’d been caught, but it was worth the risk. Together we went through the letters and I helped him decipher the addresses. It was like solving a crime. That’s how we fell in love.’
Make-believe is easier to catch than truth-telling. I was beginning to hear things, a radio playing in a distant room or a dance party in the next block, a burst of laughter going up like a balloon slipping from a child’s hand, and then an angry voice trying to talk over the others, insisting on something, making demands. And rushing beneath it all, so quietly it was almost imperceptible, an undercurrent of my own thoughts like a subterranean river under the house.
In the dark room, many mouths were working away at English, crunching it between their teeth and pushing it around with their tongues, grinding the edges off the parts of speech and breathing out the dust. Even the oldest words, the hardest and heaviest ones, could not hold their shape; sharp tongues peeled the patina off them like pencil shavings and revealed a green new meaning.
A single voice became audible. It was my old history teacher Prof Sherman, Hegemony Cricket himself, the most remarkable lecturer of his day, renowned for his clipped accounts of the migrant labour system and the rise of the African working class on the Rand. He had published five books with ‘under apartheid’ in their titles. I tried to follow his argument now, but all I heard was an insistent chiming. He was naming names. They fell from his lips, glittering and precise as newly minted coins, and sank away in the wishing well of talk.
‘Where is your camera?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘When you came here, you said you wanted to take my picture.’
‘I said I wanted to take a picture of the house.’
‘Call me a liar. Even a bad photographer must have a camera.’
‘It’s in the car. I could fetch it, but I don’t really like using it. It keeps a roof over my head, that’s all. I suppose it’s like Dr Pinheiro sorting letters.’
‘You should find something else then. That’s what the Doctor did. He moved on to bigger things.’
‘Did he go back to medicine?’
‘No, that was impossible. He worked for contractors, for builders and demolishers. He did the books. But he never forgot his years at the post office. It became a point of pride with him and also a bit of a laugh. He turned it into a sweet-and-sour joke at his own expense.
‘One day, he came in with a letterbox shaped like a golf ball on a tee. I thought it was for my gate, but he set it up in the backyard. He’d salvaged it from some derelict semi they were tearing down in Bertrams, but he used to tell people it once belonged to Gary Player.