Chapter 2: The Country

1972. I remember the first time we drove through Johannesburg: coming from Jan Smuts Airport, we soon passed into the suburbs, and from the back seat of the car, I saw high walls and sometimes higher trees reaching over them from unseen properties. We were driving through suburbs which, in those days, were entirely white, not just "predominantly" white (with financial resources acting as the barrier) – no: the “laws of the land” prohibited Blacks from living where whites lived, and laws passed in the same spirit saw to it that Blacks drifted in each morning in order to work, returning in the evening to "their" townships. The coming and going (coming in the mornings and going in the evenings) of gardeners, workers, and nannies from Monday to Friday gave a very specific feel to the ends and the beginning of each school day; weekends were very different. I remember frantically looking out of the car window, on day one in the country, to perhaps catch a first glimpse of a real palm tree – oh wonder of wonders. We soon arrived at my uncle’s place, the central marvel of which to me was his swimming pool, the water surface on that specific day clogged by fallen leaves, leaves that were then removed for us so we could swim in it. I even remember the metal mugs (in all probability still in his kitchen today owing to their indestructible nature) altering ""the taste of the orange juice we drank from them towards steel. And as a side note: orange juice itself was not an everyday thing to us – most people today around 50 or older probably only retain hazy memories of what they saw when opening fridges as children in 60s and 70s Western Europe; orange juice you would not see in them by default. We first moved to "Sandown Village", an architecturally uniform, spatially close-knit togetherness of individual houses and house clusters, essentially taking a broader view: a village in a village in a village. The design of this place made walking from roof to roof and from wall to wall something we, as children, liked a lot and so often did. We spent substantial amounts of time balancing, walking about, and lying around on the thin rims of walls, but also on roofs, allowing the sun to dry and warm us there after hours in the swimming pool. One of our neighbours in "Sandown Village", a few houses further on, had a constant and large supply of water ice popsicles in his freezer, and there were also bushes next to that family's front door (such is memory) with many a small red blossom you could pick from them and suck the sweetness out of, a regular harvest that rendered these bushes forever simply green and no longer decorative. We were attracted greatly by the swimming pool and the possibilities it afforded, such as jumping into the water from the red-brown wall enclosing this bathing area or, even better, using as a diving board the branches of a tree growing in a high arch across the water’s surface. People sometimes used the enclosed pool area for picnics. I remember – again: such is memory – an overly obese woman sitting on the stone floor rim of the pool surrounded by an array of watermelon pips, satellites she ejected from her mouth into a densely packed orbit around the gravitational central mass that was her body. In the evenings I sometimes stood on a sand sidewalk looking at a shadowy façade of trees shielding, adding mystique, the Balalaika Hotel from view; a hotel in which our uncle, Pit, sometimes performed, playing jazz music. He had, it was said, and this was true, a talent for music and a great passion he had been prevented from bringing to any fruition, nothing much beyond this occasional playing in the evenings with his band of like-minded enthusiasts, who were mostly non-professionals like himself. I mentioned the sandy sidewalk, so let me add some detail here. Paths, walkways, and sidewalks were rarely sealed by stone or with tar in the Johannesburg suburbs of the early 70s; neither were they particularly straight, and so the red earth seeped its colour into the lower parts of all that was architecture as a kind of fringe. The walls themselves mostly consisted of stacked concrete slab segments and large, longish tiles in colour ranging from off-white to light grey. Both going to school and going to the shops involved walking along sidewalks that, to me, had a distinctly three-dimensional appeal to them: thick roots, furrows trickling with moisture, and trenches quite as deep in places as in my imagination those in the Great War must have been, plus the occasional boulder as an unintended decorative element. Suburban topography, even in a detail this banal, made these communal spaces a wild place to my sentiment, bordered by gardens, often well-kept, holding their orderly private ground, against and past which flowed a tide of people, bikes, cars, and a greatly enlarged ant-road, partitioned by bus stops. From a bird’s-eye perspective, you would see the "veld", the blunted yellow of the high grass, creeping in wherever possible. From this imagined perspective high above the ground, you would also see, creeping around the outer perimeters of these ochre patches: bicycles, cars, pedestrians, and the many "Putco" buses, a public transportation service used by Black people. Taking a different step back, namely viewing things through time, as in a time-lapse video, fires would occasionally come and go, natural lawn mowers shearing away at the dry hair of the veld to leave a swath of charcoaled stubs. The fires looked threatening, especially at night, coming right up to the doors and fences of where we lived; there was a pungent smell in the morning after each fire. I know and remember this also because I sometimes got up much earlier than the others to see what the fire had done before then having breakfast and going to school. There were waterholes in the fields, often with large willows, the typical hanging branches of which you could bundle to create a kind of thick corded vine, a liana for swinging on; thick ropes were better, the higher up the tree they had been attached, the more dramatic the pendulum sweep. The waterholes were said to be bilharzia contaminated, and we were warned not to play in them. They were a separate universe of nesting and resting birds, many birds and other creatures wiped out, I suspect, by the fires that sometimes passed by, also exploding myriads of insects in their exoskeletons. I imagined fire events in the world of small things in this way. Many insects and animals obviously survived, though, contributing each to a cacophony of sounds that was forever with you even after it had long been erased from conscious awareness. At night we could hear the croaking of frogs when lying in bed in our flat on the fourth floor of "Majuba", flat number 408. Majuba was the name of the apartment building we moved to in 1973. Houses and properties were so diverse in nature and appearance that one had to assume either a lack of regulation or a variety of avenues for avoiding uniformity. Architecturally, people did what came to mind – in stark but pleasant contrast to hyper-regulated, huddled tin soldiers, we-all-look-the-same Germany. Sandton City, an office building, shopping centre and landmark, a behemoth, had not yet been built. And Sandton was still an agglomeration of very different partitioned solo universes, each usually with a swimming pool as its central star, visible from high above, but otherwise well hidden behind walls, trees and bush barriers acting, in a way, as folding screens behind which you could, much as in old Western movies, get changed in privacy. Even thick branches sometimes grew across property walls and, from there, across the sidewalks; nobody seemed to mind, and having to duck below such obstacles seemed acceptable. So going down on all fours, at least occasionally, is part of my memory of all this, too, as is the omnipresence of badly tarred roads, often split open by thick subterranean roots or damaged by time and the sun, roads ending in sand and gravel paths for pedestrians, merging into these walking zones without curbstones as barriers, like the ragged outer rims of fried eggs reaching the pan and there the end of their abilities to further expand. Mind you, you generally didn’t cover long distances walking anyway if you were white and, without a doubt, very, very long ones if you weren’t. I more than once saw cars suspended in mid-air, as if on display; bumps and hollows had lifted the vehicles in mid-motion onto a kind of pedestal, or even double pedestal, all their wheels suddenly in the air, and the two ends of the cars propped up on tar humps, hanging there hopelessly like stiff fish. Images of this sort I have many; they populate the inner landscape of my recollection of Sandown – surreal ones. On some days the sun was so hot it softened bad road patches to a sooty, tough paste that stuck, blacker than black, to our naked foot soles – we ran around barefoot for most of the day. Needless to say, speed restrictions made sense due to boulders on and holes in the road, holes so large in places, it looked as if some meteor shower had hit the ground. Children built hidden houses or treehouses in the fields; some children were more adept at and passionate about this than others. I was one of the less passionate, though searching for these well-camouflaged retreats was something I liked doing. And children weren’t the only ones there in the fields. I recall a dark, wooden hut across from where we lived, always visible and, in all probability, a tool shed of sorts, but we respected its horror movie appeal and rarely went near it. We’d often climb a tree overlooking the wall shielding the Majuba gardens from the road (Alice Lane) in front of the complex; there we counted cars or guessed what colour the next one bending into the street would have, games and distractions being very different in those days. I was scared of heights and therefore stayed in and on the lower branches, acting casual, to hide being embarrassed because of the vertigo it made me feel just watching other children go high up into the treetops, especially John von Wiese, who moved across the high canopies in complete fearlessness. And then there was this very different landscape scenario: When the long summer holidays began, which were always at the beginning of December, our father every year flew over from Germany to spend these four weeks with us, his children, down at the coast. On one of these occasions we came across Port Alfred, a small port town which, over the years, would come to be imprinted in my mind as paradigmatic for wildness and exposure to the elements. As I stood there, facing the ocean, especially on East Beach, there was not an ounce of mildness toning down the wild aspect of the place’s character. No bay, no generally soft wind. Instead, you might, on one morning, find massive, twisted segments torn from the wreckage of sunken ships and, on some other morning, the bleached remains of a whale, also a kind of hull. There were washed-up seals; I recall seeing some with huge chunks taken out of them, and all kinds of other animals – sharks, giant turtles, dolphins – all dead, spewed out by the ocean during some night storm; and this debris, metal or flesh or bone, always made me calculate back to imagine the force necessary that had first destroyed and then moved all this out of the sea's system as if in a digestive process. Wandering along these East Beach dunes, you never knew what you’d find. The region appealed to the hunter-gatherer type in many ways. These were the most impressive beaches and dunes I have ever seen. And I have since then been to many places. On days when the wind blew strongly, the sand (i.e. shells ground down to salt grain size) contained in and carried by this wind pelted you painfully. You were always in danger of getting whipped by particles when on the beach or in areas just above it. The sand either accelerated across unobstructed expanses, in which case you would see the mini-whirlwind shapes before, or it appeared suddenly, less predictable, more personal, in an isolated current. Opening your mouth, however slightly, always meant that a few grains would get in. And later, lying in bed, I always found it surprising how much sand was still in my ears or how much had stayed on my scalp even after taking a shower. To sum it up, and before I lose myself in too much detail: witnessing storms in Port Alfred impressed me, impressed me on a primitive level that is still part of who I am. We stayed mostly at the then newly built Kowie Beach Cabanas with their large window fronts facing the ocean. And, looking at monumental, monolithic waves forming and collapsing just a football-field length away, I just couldn’t imagine them not reaching me. But although some of these giants did drive their spittle across the road, threatening our living room, the distance between audience and natural theatre had been well calculated. And if this was nature’s performance for protected West Beach on our side of the Kowie River every time there was a storm – how, I tried to imagine, must the storm have hit East Beach? Waking up the next morning was like waking up to a new world, with an altered dune-scape, the sun shining, calm and quiet; an aftertaste always remained with me of what it had been like to be in bed the windy night before, cosy, just a few metres away from the storm's wrath, the softness of the linen felt so much more consciously because the all-encompassing turmoil was just a few metres away from where I was about to fall asleep. Storms revealed an inbuilt power and menace, lurking, concealed in the serenity of the next day. All the dirt and all the charcoal from beach fires; after a deluge mighty enough, debris, weeks old, that you had gotten used to as landmarks would have been erased. Logs and rubble: all gone, and so you had to relearn the miniature geography of your surroundings. Whether the general appearance was that of a clean slate or of seabed artefacts littered across the beach seemed arbitrary. Sometimes all looked smooth and foreign in an extraterrestrial way; at other times heaps of seaweed and jellyfish littered the coast, with bluebottles able to sting when you popped them, despite having been baked crisp by the sun. I mentioned the Kowie River. It flowed through a town that had seemingly arrested all processes having to do with ageing, thereby preserving a late British Colonial Empire atmosphere, or what I imagined that atmosphere to have been like; it had something about it that took you back to a time between the 1920s and, at the latest, the late 1930s interwar years, dotted by some ossified, dusty Victorian niches here and there. I know the Kowie still flows through Port Alfred today, and I am therefore only using the past tense because my remembered impressions are quite dated. Going upriver, either by car or by boat, the background din of surf, town, and wind would disappear to reveal, from one moment to the next, the ululating buzz of insects, the screeching of monkeys, and the warbled responses of birds to the monkeys, emanating from a forest thicker and higher than in other places, owing to the snaking presence of the river’s water. You could rent boats, and going upriver meant that jungle sounds would suddenly not so much introduce you to a different world but remove you from the one you had come to take for granted.

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