Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
Alan’s desperate benefactor, I abandoned my caravan and responded to an advert for lodgers at Number 51 Honey Street, Berea, an old double-storey house owned by two quiet survivors of the Treblinka concentration camp, Sam and Mrs Kursman.
I told Mrs Kursman – whose first name I never found out – that I could not afford her minimum rate of R25 a month, including breakfast, to stay in one of the bedrooms. I asked if she might consider a rate for me to sleep on a stretcher in her garage.
She politely declined, as her seven cats already tenanted that space. But Mrs K was a kindly soul, intent on doing her best to accommodate as many people as she could.
She suggested I buy a stretcher and place it in the pantry adjoining the kitchen, as long as it would still be possible to open the door and slide through the gap. I assured her I would find a stretcher small enough to allow someone to squeeze between the wall and the door. It would be more than enough for me.
I found a stretcher for R10 and kept my meagre belongings in a cardboard box below it. We agreed on a rate of R14 a month, excluding electricity. To start with, there was neither a light nor electric plug in the room anyway.
Mrs K, however, later agreed to let me connect a wire to a defunct electrical connection in the ceiling and attach a globe to the end of it. All I needed was a screwdriver and a bit of insulation tape. Thanks to that single bulb, my rental went up by fifty cents a month, but the improvement was priceless. I placed pictures of my favourite paintings on the walls and enjoyed being welcomed home each evening by this sliver of a room and its colourful array of Impressionist images. Unable to afford any original art, the pictures, of course, were all cut out of magazines and second-hand books I had come across at junk sales.
When I looked at that art, bathed in the orange light from my bulb, I didn’t feel like a vulnerable teenager living in a pantry. I felt like a man in touch with greatness. I could lose myself in the colourful expanses captured by those poor reproductions. But through the eyes of those artists, my world felt limitless.
To me, of all the French Impressionists, the one whose work I found most fascinating – much like my granduncle Karnielsohn once had – was Claude Monet, who had produced a vast series of paintings called Mornings on the Seine. To create them, he had painted Paris’s river in its many guises throughout his life and used that inimitable setting to explore the transformative effects of light and atmosphere. Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise led to the word ‘Impressionism’ in the first place. One can only guess how many hundreds of perspectives of the Seine he produced before he died in 1926. Many other Impressionist painters were inspired by the light, beauty and mystery of Paris’s lovely river and took to setting up their easels along its banks, the very place my great-uncle probably met and befriended some of them.
I derived great comfort from those photographs of the old masterpieces. I could imagine myself one day taking long walks along the riverbank, gazing over the shoulders of aspiring artists – and perhaps identifying the next Monet myself.
Standing in that spartan pantry with the idea of doing anything like that must have seemed like a remote and impossible dream, and anyone seeing me there could not have had the faintest idea of the grand thoughts swirling through my young mind. How big and sweeping my ambitions were … transcending anything that humble space might have suggested.
Chapter 7
My rental included two used teabags, which Mrs K left for me after the other lodgers had finished their breakfasts.
Sam Kursman was seventy-six but still worked as a dispatch clerk for a trucking company. He would rise at 5am each morning and wake me half an hour later so that I could make my way to Vrededorp by 6.30am in the comfort of knowing that, on my return home, I would be able to at least enjoy Russian tea using my two used teabags.
My first job after school was as a shop assistant at Johannesburg Anti-Waste in its dilapidated depots in Vrededorp, a suburb northwest of the inner city. Like its more famous neighbour, Sophiatown, Vrededorp had taken the brunt of urban-area apartheid legislation.
In the late 19th century, poor people had been invited to squat and build homes there on the understanding that property rights would later be transferred to their heirs. That was where its name, “Town of Peace”, came from, but after the Anglo-Boer War the British did away with that promise. By then, the suburb was a bustling community of African, coloured, Cape Malay, Indian, Chinese and white people, known for the community of outfitters who lived above their shops on 14th Street. The area, along with neighbouring suburb Pageview, was known to locals as Fietas.
14th Street was a cross between a modern-day flea market and Indian bazaar where all the residents of Johannesburg went in search of bargains. Shopkeepers lived for their work and often developed close personal relationships with their customers. It was not unusual to shop for an item of clothing and be offered a samoosa while making up one’s mind about what to buy.
My father’s old friend Raymond Matuson owned both the Anti-Waste depots. One was in 14th, the other in De La Rey Street, named after a famous Boer general. Twice a week, Raymond would move bales of offcuts from the warehouse behind his larger 14th Street store and lay them out on tables and in bins.
Raymond was an affable, larger-than-life extrovert. He was a trained actor, and watching him selling offcuts of cloth was a daily cabaret. He knew I enjoyed his show and would often comment about his customers’ reactions to his sales spiel.
He had relationships with most of the garment manufacturers. He did not charge for carting away their waste (a disparate variety of colours and sizes of materials: cotton, Dacron, polyester, nylon and more). In return, thanks to him, very little of this material was wasted, and most commonly found its way to the machinists working in the outlying, decentralised areas to the north of the inner city.
The doors of Joburg Anti-Waste opened at 7am, by which time there were queues of hopeful buyers extending along 14th Street and halfway around the block. They scratched among the bales and bins to find the largest offcuts to make blouses, dresses, shirts and trousers. Our material was priced by weight alone, which made it a bargain-hunter’s paradise. Imagine the joy on the face of a seamstress who found four pieces of feather-light, exquisite silk, all in different colours, but which cost less than synthetic materials. I often marvelled at the clothing the customers eventually made from our orphanage of offcuts. Colourful and innovative, the clothes reflected the multicultural environment in which these poor – but mostly happy – people lived.
In 1955, black residents had already started being forced at gunpoint from their homes here, after the apartheid state’s resettlement board was formed to remove them from Joburg’s western areas. They were transported to the enormous cluster of townships now known as Soweto. Once shifted, their empty houses were made available to poor whites.
Much the same thing was still happening in Vrededorp in the early sixties. By the 1970s, the area was completely cleared of “non-whites”, with many homes bulldozed and the state providing houses for white people on some of the land. Horrific stories were emerging almost daily in newspapers of bulldozers flattening houses to make way for white developments while desperate black and coloured residents clung to their belongings.
But a lot of the land acquired in this way also simply stayed empty. To this day, many land claims have not been settled. More claims have been made than there are properties in the area, and it remains one of the irreparable wounds of apartheid history.
But back when I started my job with Raymond, most of this was still being played out.
My job description included carrying bags of material offcuts from the warehouse to the shop floor, cleaning the floors and serving the customers.
I toiled away from 6.30am until 7pm each day, then jogged the six or so kilometres into the city, where I worked at night clubs and hotels as a photographer for Sam the Bad Man, who had a monopoly on the central city turf.
The day I’d met Sam, he memorably told me: “Remember, boy, I develop the pictures, so don’t bring me the regular fee if I see breasts and nipples. If you don’t get it, you will. You