Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
the interview, it was made clear there would be no salary of any sort or any other allowances. My employer, Mr Wootan, said I would earn 20% as commission on what I would soon repeatedly be describing as “fairly priced cartography”.
Mr Wootan was an affable Englishman with a pleasant disposition. He assured me the map business had never been better and was, in fact, the “next big thing”. There was a whole world of people out there still to buy their first map, he said. And I would be the man to sell them that map.
So I set out to find a car. On foot, I walked the steep incline towards Hillbrow, casting increasingly weary eyes over the prices of every used – and mostly totally abused – car on each of the many dilapidated second-hand car lots. Whenever I saw something I even vaguely thought could work for me, it became more obvious how hopeless my prospects were. Not only did I have no credit record, I didn’t even have a bank account. I couldn’t prove a cent of income and, even if I could, my expenses would have terrified the city’s most reckless lender.
Cars in the 1960s were a far cry from the high-performance machines of today. Steering wheels tended to be pretty large and road holding, on poorly maintained roads and in bad weather, was often a wrestling match between man and machine – more like navigating a ship through choppy waters. Safety standards (and seat belts) weren’t even an idea yet. But I would have happily agreed to drive even one of the older jalopies that had been built without indicators.
But I found nothing. On the brink of defeat, almost accepting that owning a car was a ridiculous pipe dream, I trudged past a scrapyard and noticed a battered and bruised Volkswagen Beetle rusting in the last light of day in the middle of a large pile of even more unfortunate cars in various stages of cannibalisation.
The man in charge of this colossal heap of junk was called Henry; I recalled once seeing an advert with his face staring out of it beatifically.
I took a deep breath and asked Honest Henry if it would be possible to rent his little Herbie, providing it could move.
“Seven rand a week, payable in advance,” Henry told me. “And I don’t sign papers or guarantee anything. The lights and wipers are kaput. She has a few dents in the front, but the brakes are fine and the engine goes.”
I didn’t have R7, but Henry agreed to hold my watch and violin.
I handed him the watch and kept to my promise to deliver the violin the next day. As soon as he opened the yard again, I was there to hand him my precious Mehitabel. Seeing her pass into his weathered, grease-stained hands put a lump in my throat.
“You have two pints of petrol in the tank, kid. Should be enough to get you to a filling station,” he said, as reassuringly as he could.
But my heart sank as I tried to start it. It was as dry as bones in the Karoo. Henry shrugged. “Sorry, kid. Really thought she had some juice left.”
I offered to sell Henry a map, but he declined. He was many things, but a man on his way to anywhere else was not one of them. I had no remaining earthly belongings to offer as collateral for petrol money. But Henry agreed to hold the deal for another day.
So I set off to make a bit of fuel money.
My employer had marked out an area for me to work on the East Rand, at least fifteen kilometres away. He had other salesmen working the city and its suburbs. As a junior, I would have to start not only at the bottom, but also on the other side of the city.
I clocked in at work, collected my quota of maps and assured my new boss I was on my way to the neighbouring town of Germiston.
As I strolled back in the direction of Henry’s scrapyard, I knocked on the doors of every business that looked as though it could use a map. It occurred to me I was pitching to places not far from Map Centre’s head office and was doubtless not the first salesman they’d seen, but I felt I had little other option. I’d already promised Alan I would pay his second-year book account and he urgently needed to hire a microscope and skeleton. I thought, with a rueful smile, that if another salesman found me trespassing and killed me it would at least solve my brother’s skeleton problem.
By the time I reached Henry, my legs and arms were caving in but I had enough for petrol and a down payment on my brother’s book account.
Heading to Germiston with a pile of maps in the back of the Volkswagen, I was relieved that, although the little car had its limitations, it worked. When I got to Germiston, a place full of warehouses and businesses, I sold as much as I was able to that afternoon. And I could at least honestly claim to have been to Germiston when I saw my boss the next day.
That morning, I walked into Map Centre to find Mr Wootan, who expressed a surprised satisfaction at my productivity for day one. I left him and greeted the other sales staff cheerfully on my way to the kitchen for a glass of tap water.
The sun was shining and I was fired up at the prospect of tackling the remainder of Germiston’s sprawling industrial townships. I had discovered the day before that every driver working for a factory needed a map if they didn’t already have one – and many didn’t. Mr Wootan was right. Things were looking up.
But I had no sooner signed for my next consignment of maps than two salesmen, both in their late thirties and with heavy German accents, showed up, glaring, one of them pointing a ramrod finger straight at my face.
“Kill this bloody Jew!” shouted one, asphyxiated with rage.
“Hitler should have murdered the whole bloody lot of them,” roared the other.
It was utterly out of keeping with my mood, not to mention unexpected, to encounter such hatred in a public space. Astonished, I spread my hands and half shrugged.
“What do you want?”
“You deserve to die – you bloody Jew – trespassing in my area,” the first one declared.
Oh, I thought.
By now we had the attention of the whole office.
“Mr Wootan,” I said, turning to my boss as he approached, “I can explain. I needed petrol money and meant no harm.”
But Mr Wootan simply shrugged and made it clear he didn’t want to be involved. He retreated to his office.
“I will get my guys from the Deutsche Keller to put a knife in this Jew. He will never live to see the end of this week,” threatened the more aggressive of the two.
“Johannesburg is a city with three million people. Surely it can handle a third salesman selling a few maps for a morning to make up a tank of petrol?”
“This bastard is so poor, he can’t even afford to run his car.”
“You can count his ribs. They should have gassed him in the camps.”
This had fast reached the point of no return. While I would have been happy to concede I’d been in the wrong by encroaching on their territory, there could not have been a worse thing to say to me. If I’d had a gun in a holster, I’d probably have taken it out right then and shot them both where they stood.
Obviously, neither of these men had been at the death camps, at Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Auschwitz or the nearly 900 others – but the look they had in their eyes had been there from the start. The same look of disaffected murderousness stared coldly, pitilessly, at me: the same look of inhuman hatred that had been the last thing so many millions of Jews before me had seen before being shot, gassed or buried alive.
A terrible mix of despair and rage came over me. I was more than 1.8m tall, but weighed only 71kg. They were right that I may have resembled a refugee from Belsen. But I had neither the time nor money to eat three meals a day.
I can’t recall exactly how, but I left that office, the hurt and rage pounding in my ears. I walked straight to my decrepit car, clutching my maps. But I had no intention of selling anything to anyone that day. Not any more.
I drove straight to Vrededorp, the bottled fury within me ready to explode.
On