Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
them, Morgan – an Indian colleague in my part-time law class – lived in the neighbourhood with his parents. I found him walking to his car outside his house.
“I need a favour, Morgan,” I said. “First prize for me is a knuckleduster. Second prize, a flick knife.”
He pointed in the direction of a shop I had often walked past. “Tell Enver I sent you,” he said.
Enver was another Indian law student and, although we knew each other from campus, we weren’t as well acquainted. I’d had a cup of coffee with him once or twice and he’d invited me and others in our group once to the home of one of his relatives to enjoy some curry. He was always friendly, and a born trader. He was studying law to hone his talents and skills to benefit his family’s businesses. They owned retail shops in and around Vrededorp, Fordsburg and Mayfair and their shops stocked everything from clothing to bicycles and electronics. The only weapons openly displayed were innocuous-looking pocket knives. But for those in the know, there was a stash of medicine, self-defence and quasi-military equipment locked up under the counter.
He was happy to oblige with both of the weapons I was after.
The knuckleduster was made of steel and covered four fingers on my right hand. The flick knife opened with a touch of a button.
As I looked in the mirror of Enver’s shop, I became conscious of how I really appeared – a hybrid of long-haired hippie musician and severely malnourished scarecrow.
One day, I told myself, things will be different.
I handed over some cash and left with my purchases already pocketed.
Over the next few days, I saw the two Germans each morning. Their threats and abuse never abated, but did not become more imaginative either. I was always the “bloody Jew”, “the bastard”, “the Jewish motherless son of a bitch”. They became more voluble with their threats to hunt me down and maim or kill me. I kept waiting for them to make a move, almost hoping that they would – and that we could just get the whole thing over with, one way or the other.
But they just kept prodding, never actually pushing matters over the edge. I realised, though, that they were planning something, and could potentially put me in hospital, or worse. It became apparent I needed to make a stand – and take the fight to them or resign myself to being stepped on and squashed.
“I would like to meet all these friends of yours you keep boasting about,” I told them. “What time do you get to your precious German beer hall tonight?”
They simply laughed.
“We will be happy to kill you at 7pm tonight, you bloody Jew. If you are fool enough to show yourself.”
“Well, see you soon, then.”
* * *
The Johannesburg public library in my days as a student was an imposing 1889 Italianate building I used as a reference library and simply to browse books, read the news and study.
At a side-street entrance to the building was the library theatre at which I had competed in many eisteddfods as a young boy and won prizes for verse and public speaking. The library precinct was, for me, a wonderland of satellite libraries, museums, theatres and architectural influences. I used to hitchhike to town after school to get to the reference library, simply to enjoy the silence, solitude and books.
The lending section was on the southern side of the foyer, across a wide, open granite floor. A museum was on the first floor with an eclectic collection displaying the different phases and aspects of the city’s history. Every time I walked up the imposing stairs above the reference library my mind was transported into the historical settings in which the artefacts on display had once been a feature of everyday life. Different sections of the halls housed geological rocks, ox wagons, vintage cars, steam-driven devices, weapons and traditional clothing, including war memorabilia and archaeological implements – from the Sterkfontein Caves to the northwest of Johannesburg to Makapan’s Caves in Limpopo.
Over the years, I came to know the regulars, all of whom used to sit at the same desks and chairs they had become accustomed to. The reference library had its diehards, and nobody ever sat on anyone else’s chair if they knew the setup.
My Jewish friends in the public library included Eddie, who was studying to be a teacher, and Mervyn, a student fanatically involved with editing and distributing underground newspapers. There were also Jerry, Julian and Ronald, all of German-Jewish origin.
Eddie had relocated from Durban to Johannesburg to study law and, much like me, lived on scraps but always sported a pleasant demeanour. Julian was studying engineering. The son of a German-Jewish immigrant, his father had abandoned his studies as a fourth-year medical student after fleeing Berlin for South Africa to escape the gas chambers. He took a job as a ticket inspector on the railways. A tall young man, he exuded an inner strength that matched his confident, though introverted, disposition.
Mervyn was the friendly intellectual and the most interesting conversationalist of all the students who stood together regularly on the steps outside the building to share a sandwich and a few jokes and commentary on current affairs. He shared an apartment with a brilliant German student who suffered from intermittent catatonic seizures. Mervyn vigorously opposed the racist practices of the National Party and wrote a prolific and steady stream of articles on human rights, which he published in underground newspapers.
Ronald, another engineering student, lived at home with his German-Jewish parents in Greenside; he studied at the public library because it was quiet, and convenient for his father to collect him on his way home from work.
Our friendship was forged out of the simple, regular ritual of sharing our thoughts, ideas, philosophies and ideologies on the steps of that big library and, occasionally, while walking through the library gardens or wandering through the nearby museums.
I’d come to know them quite well. All had their own stories, and the scars – both physical and mental – to prove it, of how they had stood up to racists at some point in their young lives.
Ronald’s father had escaped from Germany shortly before the outbreak of war, in 1938. His uncles were less fortunate and, after being arrested for being Jewish, were taken to a concentration camp. Ronald knew they finished up somewhere on the eastern front, where, according to the Red Cross and records found in the hands of the Germans, they didn’t survive the camps.
Ronald himself had been a high achiever at school. One day on his way home from school, he found himself hemmed in between two kids on bicycles, perhaps jealous of his achievements, taunting him about being a lily-livered Jew. When he attempted to respond, they pushed him into an oncoming car. The driver swerved to avoid him but it wasn’t enough and the impact from the side of the car cracked his leg. When he woke up on the roadside, he had a broken leg and collarbone. When he later returned to school on crutches, the perpetrators mocked him openly, calling him the one-legged Jew and the Jewish cripple. He was left with a limp for the rest of his life.
Mervyn’s particularly distinctive Ashkenazi nose had been made even less attractive – with a permanent kink – thanks to a school bully who broke it with a cricket bat on the school field after announcing to his friends: “The Jews have a nose for money, so we will just level the playing field!” The event passed without so much as a whisper from the teachers, who felt that “boys will be boys”.
We had all attended schools where classmates drew swastikas on blackboards and taunted, baited and denigrated the one or two unfortunate Jews in class.
All the young men in my study group could tell their own stories and there was an unspoken understanding among us that, when the time came, each of us would be there to support any of the others.
I knew it would only be a matter of time before Hans and Klaus – or whatever their names were, I can’t remember now – came looking for me at Number 51 Honey Street. And, I felt fairly certain, when it did happen, it wouldn’t just be them. They would arrive as a small army, lost in the anonymity of their cowardly hate group. I could not contemplate Sam and Mrs K experiencing a mini Fourth Reich.