Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
this is a reason to hate us?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” he said. “But the hatred comes from resentment and envy and a total inability to understand what motivates Jews to work so hard.”
In my naivety, I told him: “So then I will explain I don’t want anything from these boys. I want to be left alone.”
“I wish it were so simple,” he warned me. “You can’t reason with anti-Semites. They are taught to hate. You will learn that, in the eyes of the anti-Semite, the only good Jew is a dead Jew. You will grow up and become a man. You may well be kind and loving to your fellow human beings. But none of those things will matter. The neo-Nazis will hate you anyway. To them you are simply the enemy.”
As a child, this was an almost impossible fact to understand and deal with. But I was being given the truth as directly and plainly as almost all Jewish children are.
“All the same,” he finished. “Continue to do your best to be a good man.”
“But for now … what should I do?”
“It’s not only what you will do, but how all Jews in South Africa must deal with these Nazis, sons of Nazis, anti-Semites, skinheads and racists.
“Take a stand. It will take courage to stand alone and defend yourself against older groups of boys. You will lose some fights; you will get hurt – but you must stand your ground.”
He paused for while before adding: “They must learn the Jew they despise has a strong heart and a tradition of survival against the odds, because it is in your blood. For you it will be better to come home with pellets in your skin and bruises – but with your pride and self-respect intact. Many of us have died for our principles, so we can never live a life without our principles, our self-respect and our traditions. Without these, we will become nothing.”
He peered at me over his small spectacles and I was afraid to blink.
“If you find you are afraid, Carnie, look at what Hitler did to the Jews. There are pictures in my books of the starving, emaciated, diseased, dying inmates of concentration camps. Those are our people. It can never happen again.”
I was trying hard to understand. But these were not words a child can deal with easily or even begin to comprehend.
“But what do I do if I am attacked at school?”
“Hit first; speak later. If you get expelled – know you left with your principles intact.”
I continued to pepper my father with questions, none of which he didn’t answer meticulously and comprehensively.
It was the kind of conversation he and I would become incapable of later.
My relationship with my mother, in turn, oscillated wildly between cordial and resentful, for reasons I was never quite capable of understanding. It struck me as odd that other children being collected from school were embraced by their parents, whereas I was unfailingly ordered into the rear seat with barely a look or hello.
I always felt like an irritant to Eva, from the time I had been a colicky infant stubbornly rejecting her notion of “the well-behaved baby”. Her disdain for my idiosyncrasies endured throughout my preschool years, during which she avoided almost all physical contact with me.
She occasionally made comments about what she thought of as my less than attractive physical appearance. So I chalked up her antipathy towards me to her thinking I was a somewhat disgusting creature she regretted bringing into the world.
But I got used to it and eventually learnt to brush it off. I came to realise her behaviour had everything to do with her own background and little to do with me. Ester, her own ultimately certifiably insane mother, had persecuted Eva in ways far worse than anything she ever inflicted on me.
I did my best to stay out of Eva’s way. Almost as soon as I made friends at primary school, I refused to return home until after dark, if only to reduce the opportunities for Eva to dish out her various punishments to me. They mostly took the form of beatings with wooden coat hangers, which she always seemed fixated on breaking over my head.
I would often walk on my own to the end of Albert and Herder Drives in Berario and cross Muldersdrift Road into the area that later came to be known as the Cresta Centre and Windsor. It was, back then, almost completely rural, densely populated with trees and shrubs.
The short gravel road, running from west to east, ended at a circle with equally heavy vegetation in the middle. The road seemed to have no discernible purpose to me and merely circumnavigated the circle and allowed vehicles to retreat back to Muldersdrift Road – which has since been renamed, as an important part of the expanded city, Malibongwe Drive.
It was late in the afternoon and I had endured yet another of my miserable encounters with my mother and her coat hangers. So, like a bear with a sore head, I set out towards Muldersdrift Road, merely looking for a spot to settle and lick my wounds. The trees, something like a small forest near the road, represented seclusion, tranquillity and a place where I might evaporate without trace.
As I walked towards the circle, I spotted a white rabbit jumping out of the underbrush into the road. It had beauty, grace and elegance as it pranced about across the deserted farm track. It was little more than a carefree, everyday rabbit, but as it disappeared into the foliage I imagined it to be an English Angora with fur covering its ears, face, nose and front feet. In my mind’s eye, I thought of its dense wool and teddy bear features – much like those I had seen in a pet shop not much earlier in the city with my mother.
Fluffy, lovable Angora rabbits were believed to have originated in Turkey and bred for their soft, silky wool – kept as pets due to their friendly dispositions. I had held one in my hands in the pet shop and remembered feeling its little heart racing as it lay motionless, trusting me completely.
As any child would, I’d wanted my mother to buy it for me, but she had merely pulled me out of the pet shop by my ear and frogmarched me away. She was not about to introduce another mouth to feed into our desperate little home.
Overcome by the need for a pet, I ran after the little creature – but by the time I reached the perimeter of the forest, it was nowhere to be seen. I was deeply disappointed. I wanted the wild rabbit to know it had a friend in me, that I would protect, feed and care for it. But it was not to be. I returned many times in search of it and, on a few occasions, saw it again. Each time, the story was re-enacted.
That was where the encounter should have ended, but that small creature found a way to hop straight into the deepest reaches of my unconscious.
I started having recurring dreams about the rabbit. As I slept, I would watch it jump from the edge of the circle into the road and pause, its little nose twitching, to make sure I was there. As soon as I tried to pursue it, the animal would disappear into the forest. This simple sequence of thwarted longing would reoccur night after night.
I would wake each time, taunted by the thought of the rabbit and its inexplicable fear of me. I deeply regretted that it seemed not to recognise me as a kind person.
That dream would continue to haunt me regularly for almost two decades.
Chapter 2
As a boy, I had great difficulty sleeping, so I frequently wandered into the kitchen. On most nights Natie would be sitting at the old wooden table, reading. The faded linoleum floor had large vacant sections through which the even older Canadian maple wood appeared. The steel cupboards were sparse and struggled to conceal rust. The ageing stove, oven, refrigerator and kettle made up the balance of the furniture. A single light bulb dangled from a cord in the centre of the room. The kitchen table had a smooth wooden top with traces of paint that had survived years of attrition from endless cups of coffee, magazines and plates. Natie would sit in a maroon dressing gown and barely acknowledge my presence. I would cast an occasional eye over the titles of whatever books he was reading. His interest in World War Two was all-pervasive, his appetite for nonfiction on the topic insatiable.
I