‘You’re busy,’ I said.
‘Popular,’ she corrected me. ‘I’m quite famous, you know. I’ve been on the cover of Lifestyle. I’m my own wallpaper.’ Holding up the phone for me to see.
I’d spoken to Hennie Nothnagel on the phone half a dozen times, and called the night before to confirm our appointment, but when we got to the address in Second Street, he was out. ‘Sometimes they get cold feet,’ I said. ‘Even though we’ve been introduced and there’s a connection, they suddenly decide it’s a scam. They worry they’re going to get burgled.’
‘You don’t look like a criminal,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
Hennie’s wall would not last: it was leaning out over the pavement as if it might fall the next time the wind blew. Panels between the pillars showed little golfers in silhouette cut from iron sheets. The round heads of the drivers at the top of the backswing created a decorative border like a rolling wave. Beside the gate was the classic golf ball letterbox that had first attracted my attention.
I wrote a note on the back of a business card and dropped it through the slot. ‘Please call me.’ Probably wouldn’t.
Talk talk talk. Making a duck’s bill of fingers and thumb. Kwar kwar kwar.
‘So, Auerbach,’ I said. ‘What do you make of him?’
‘He’s got a bit of a cult following.’
‘That bad, hey.’
‘I’m not a believer, but … but! …’ She wagged a sinuous exclamation mark out of her forefinger and did something Balinese with her head.
I was reminded of the sign language interpreter who appeared in a window on the TV screen during the news. Life in the digital age. I waited for her to continue, but evidently ‘but’ was the final word. I asked, ‘What photographers do you believe in then?’
‘It’s not a question of belief. I like to be baffled. Do you know S. Majara? I profiled him last year for the News — I’ll send you a link — he was so oblique he was facing the other way. Everything he said about his work sounded plausible and yet suspect, as if he’d found it in an article by a shrewdly hostile critic. That’s a line from my piece by the way. These days I can’t help quoting myself.’
That makes two of us, I thought. ‘It must be a technique, going off at a tangent, I mean. It’s the attitude I’d like to have, but I wouldn’t get away with it. I don’t have an interview manner.’
‘You have some strategies, you said so yourself.’
‘But I haven’t had a chance to practise them.’
‘You’ll just have to be yourself for the time being, Neville. We can’t all be S. Majara.’
Even S. Majara isn’t S. Majara. His name is Simeon but he had the foresight to give himself a nom de guerre. I can imagine how useful that would be. If only I’d thought of ‘N. Lister’ before I ever set foot in a gallery.
‘Never mind the man, what do you like about his work? I take it the two aren’t the same.’
‘Slight, light and liminal, quote unquote as if you don’t know. Blink and you’ll miss it. “Photograph” is such a heavy word, Majara and I agreed. Even “photo” is dull. You can hear the bell tolling. Phoh! — toh! We should find some other word. Have you noticed how Auerbach always says “photograph” as if he needs to give the thing its full, awful weight. It suits his work too. Those people of his standing around in their gloomy houses like pieces of furniture, holding up their faces like signboards, like beggars at robots. No job, three kids, please help. The whites are the worst, excuse me. I can hardly bear to look at his early stuff. It makes me feel claustrophobic, like I’ve been locked up in some museum no one visits any more.’
‘It was a different time, you know. You’re probably too young to remember.’
‘Ja, but I don’t believe it was all so gloomy.’
‘It was horrible! Every day of their lives ordinary people were subjected to appalling abuse. This was a police state, there were soldiers in the townships, activists were being tortured and killed, bombs were going off in burger joints. Business is booming, we used to joke, but it wasn’t funny.’
To tell the truth, this was something I’d heard from Leora.
‘You had to be there,’ Janie said with a laugh.
The phone sneezed again and she glanced at the message distractedly.
‘Do you know Majara’s Curious Restitution?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘He grinds curios into sawdust and reconstitutes the dust as wooden blocks. There’s a whole undercurrent about mincemeat and butcher’s blocks and what have you, but it isn’t heavy, you know. He makes these abstract assemblages of the blocks, almost like children’s toys, that fit together so beautifully you’d think they were made in a lab, like those 3D drawings in resin, and then he takes them apart again and carves them into new curios, which are so much like the originals even the people who made them wouldn’t know the difference.’
‘But we do.’
‘Only because he tells us. He paints them with special pigments derived from the boots of dead miners.’
Surely there was a provocation in this; she was challenging me to contradict her. The boots of dead miners? The boots?
‘And how is this photography?’
‘Oh, I forgot, he photographs the toys before he carves them up again and makes these tiny black and white prints that look like they came out of a woodworking manual, something a baby boomer got for Christmas, very beautiful in an inconsequential way.’
At the house in Malvern, we had better luck. Antoine K — he insisted on the initial — was waiting for us on the pavement in a sky-blue suit feathered with silver embroidery. The toes of his shoes were as long and pointed as powder horns and tipped with chrome. His presence was not assurance enough for the kids playing soccer in the street and when we pulled up at the kerb they retreated to a wary distance.
The wall behind Antoine was made of old garage doors, five or six of them patched together with sheets from bus shelters and billboards. Best prices, the wall said, fresh petrol. Two breeze-block pillars held a gate of rusty iron panels. Angles of board and corrugated iron stuck out like shark fins above the wall. You would have thought the place was a scrapyard wedged between two houses on a suburban street.
We got out of the car.
‘Think I’ll take a look around,’ Janie said brightly.
‘Be careful.’
The backpack clung to her shoulders like a gigantic beetle. Miming some sort of SWAT team procedure, she slipped through the gap in the gate with the digicam cocked. You’re not my father.
I greeted Antoine and before our hands unclasped he started talking. He’d given me the outline of his life story on the telephone and now he went on to the unabridged version, starting with the hardships he’d endured in the Congo before escaping to South Africa eight years ago. I let him talk while I set up the camera. It was an epic journey. Although he’d cadged the occasional ride, he seemed to have walked a lot of the way — in more sensible shoes than these, I assumed. The trip had cost him the few items of value he’d left home with, down to the watch off his wrist. When he finally arrived in Johannesburg, he was so poor, he said, he did not even have the time.
My laughter was excessively hearty, I thought. But then so was his. I thought.
On a wooden post beside the gate was a letterbox made of a Wall & All tin with a slot cut in the bottom. Pebble Beach, according to the label, ran in horizontal streaks along the tin, defying gravity. I shooed a few of the bolder children out of the background and asked Antoine to stand next to the letterbox. I wanted him to look at the camera, to look at me, but he kept looking away down the street. I looked too, with the feeling that someone was creeping up on us, although I could see no one there. All the while, he kept talking, showing me the length of his journey, the scale of his suffering, between his outstretched palms.