Cabin Fever (16 page)

But that must come later. For the moment we are suspended in the resinous heat of February, with the mountain on fire and everywhere the sound of jackhammers and helicopters, endlessly competing to destroy and remake. There is a fine layer of ash drifting down, turning and turning in the permanent twilight before it comes to rest.

When the men came yesterday their trucks rolled like tanks through that ash, carrying hundreds of rolls of instant lawn. A million tubers trailed as they unloaded the kweek they had severed from somewhere else, square by square, marked for transplantation. It is the only variety that will grow in the summer gale, grow this close to the sea, grow in time over anything.

From the museum window I watch the builders crawl down the girders, dumb insects in their bright overalls. Each man has a red number on his back, like football kit, like road signs, and for each man that number is the same. 10: the yellow-backed army of next year, of hasn’t-happened-yet, of whatmight-be.

From the same window I first saw the earth-crawlers begin the digging; I witnessed the casual horror of excavation, the raw indignity of exposure. If the drivers had looked up they would have seen the white flag of my features through the glass, the lone pale face left there among the staff after 1994. After seeing them turn over the distressed soil, the decision was simple. I took the package.

As it was, I stayed as long as I did in the dry days that came after to watch the men at their work. How certain they are of their destruction. They have bulldozed every structure on the surface of the grounds except for the McDonald’s and a segment of the old stands. The seats wait on one side, stubborn and forlorn, teeth in a hominid jawbone. The men’s machines shake the foundations of neighbouring skyscrapers, the sewage works, the lighthouse. It is not that things fall apart, but that they have always housed their own collapse. I am afraid I will see the insides of the earth: I am afraid that inside there will be nothing to see.

When the construction workers leave this evening it will be just me again, in my pallid shirt, orbiting pointlessly as I wait for the traffic to thin, unmarked by anyone else in the Breakwater Museum or beyond it. I will pace, as I do, the artefact lying hidden against my stomach like a colostomy bag.

It will be easy enough to get onto the grounds: the men on night shift have no one to watch them but me. The bald boss of Hyena Security told his guards – I saw him say so – to stay on the ground level, to use their eyes and not their legs. Work smarter, he said. Work smarter, boys, not harder. When he left the guards laughed. They taunt him cheerfully behind his back. Langneus, one always calls out, as Mister Hyena’s double-cab door slams. Takhaar. They settle on the ziggurat of the old stands and mock him in their own languages, or they doze in the warmth of the booth – a few lazy men, each with the roll of his gut lying patient as a snake around his middle. One studies for his Learner’s licence, teaching himself the K53, frowning down at the random rules of the road. He is preparing himself for some other future.

And it seemed to me that I, instead, had spent my life looking backwards, poring alone over fragments, allocating their exile to lighted cabinets. In times of change there is less distinction between the living and the dead: we are smudged with the rough thumbs of the new dispensation, confused with the old shards of evidence. What right had I to set a single piece apart from its fellows? I began to wonder if I could return just one to its rightful place: a lone, definitive, secret act before I left the museum forever.

The guards are right to relax. Who would break into the half-built stadium? In the months I have been monitoring its progress, the only interested people have been bosses in hard hats,
FIFA
officials, and street kids wanting a place to play. They think the space is empty. The World Cup is about the visitors who will land, swarming like mosquitoes around a breathing sleeper, migrating by morning. They come to our continent craving the fever of many people with one purpose: the memory of the communal fire, laid down in the marrow and lost in the present. We South Africans wait for their arrival, fingering the past, expecting the panacea. Every place is three places.

And Green Point has been many more than three places in its time: Van Riebeeck’s Eden; the Dutch foreshore; the first permanent lighthouse; a seasonal vlei where boats proudly raced; a racetrack when dry land remained.

And a prisoner-of-war camp.

It was in that camp of white tents that Boer families found their memories. My people remembered their trades with their fingers: there were men who sewed clothes and sculpted toys, men who printed newspapers and currency, educated men who taught the others mathematics and calligraphy in defiance of the British.

And there were the men who one morning rolled a pitch in the bare patch between the tents, smoothing the original racetrack until it was hard-packed, half-waiting for the rain that would turn it back to mud. They kept a captive’s eye on the firmament and named the place Skyview, a sweet-sour joke flavoured with the expectation of disappointment. They knew what it was to be looking out over a homeland where they were not welcome.

Within a year the Boer undesirables and irreconcilables would be dispersed in their thousands – to India and Portugal; St Helena, Bermuda and Ceylon – and when they went into exile they would take voetbal with them, or the memory of it, where it would be translated by the feet of foreign men into the separate and idiosyncratic games it became, into other centuries, into the World Cup itself. When the visitors start pouring in next year, time will reverse with the return of the lost souls. Every place is three places.

But we are not there yet. Before the exile that was and the return that will be, there was just voetbal. My ouma used to speak of my oupa before he was my grandfather, how shiny his hair was even in the camp, slicked back with grease, so shiny it matched his boots when he ran onto the field. The prisoners in their tight clothes came to watch him and his loose five-a-side teams. They had played ball games all through their dusty Free State boyhoods – before they were thrown together, before Association Football, before they knew they would go to war. In that camp the spectators learned the rules of the game despite themselves, leaning into the southeaster when it blew their thin sternums against the white tents, the canvas flapping at them like the hands of women attending the sick. They watched the games on days even when the wind died and the heat brought with it mosquitoes and starvation and disease. Some of them gave in to blackwater fever or influenza or broken hearts: civilian curses fell indiscriminately on people who so far had survived British shelling, survived burned farms and smashed pianos, survived the loss of everything they knew.

A few men defied the curse. They waited until late afternoon, when the sun was low but the light was good, waited until my shining grandfather gave the sign.

And the games began – scruffy, scuffling matches that drew shouts from the spectators who surprised themselves with the store of joy still lodged in them, the joy like a fever that enervated the players in their mismatched clothing, their heels without boots hard as hooves. The air was so hot that they did not scrum or tackle: they could not bear the human contact. The men were content to use only their feet, moving quickly, reclaiming their bodies for pleasure instead of the terror of the last year, running towards something instead of away.

One day, said my ouma – I saw it, I was there – the ball just exploded from the friction and the heat. The bladder burst, and the string and leather unravelled in the air against the black mountain. It fell back to earth with a sigh. While the players waited, one of the Jew tailors replaced the bladder and stitched it quickly back together like the skin it was. It lasted until the end of the game, and was abandoned.

She gathered it up, my grandmother the keeper, when the crowds were dispersing to their own low pots to chew over what they had seen. She hid it in her skirts, the evidence that anything can be repaired.

After the war the deflated ball rested quietly in her cabinet, year after year, marking time for the men in the tropics who first prospered and then died far from home, or came back to find that they could not start over. The bladder was the lone survivor of the camp, flat as a collapsed lung, unrecognisable behind its glass.

When I came to live with her I imagined another organ, a second liver, a spare and crippled heart. I would wait for her to take to her sighing bed in the afternoons and then I crept to the clawed cabinet, familiar with every squeak of the hinges, every mark on the glass. When the door swung towards me the smell rose up from its confines – not rot but trespass and preservation. Daily I opened the tomb of the pharaoh.

The ball itself felt dry and papery and irritable, like nostrils after a nosebleed; it required breath to be what it was. Through the long, blonde years of adolescence I kept watch, ticking. It belonged to me – it was my inheritance – but I made myself wait before I took it away. I fetched it from the cabinet on the day that she died.

But after that it confounded me, this flaking undead thing the colour of rust. It waited all the numb months I sat at my curator’s desk. In the conferences with the new board of directors I shouted above the noise of the machines next door: their growls interrupted negotiations; their reverberations jarred the ear. Through it all the ball pulsed beneath my shirt; it was permanent, snug, bound by my belt like a talisman.

During those meetings, the idea came to me intact. My people would not end up another atrophied artefact. For better or worse, they have made me what I am: a deflated bladder after the end of apartheid, a thin man with permanent windburn, a spectator squinting from the sidelines as the world moves on. I cannot disappoint them, the stiff-necked ones who lost the war and were scattered over the earth like weeds, the ones who found themselves transformed into poor whites, the ones who survived to return and take their revenge. There was the chance at last for restitution: I myself would hold them in the cradle of my skull – and I would take the ball back where it belonged. I would return it to the earth.

Now that it is time I thought it would be different, but today has been just as hot as the ones before it. The workers leave with their familiar taunts, stripped to the waist in the lavender evening. They file out through the makeshift fence. The ball throbs; where it presses against me I am sticky and warm. I will wait for the mist to creep in over the breakwater in the dark. When it comes I will hook the neck of my clammy shirt open so that for the last time I can breathe the musty leather.

The sun sets long and low. In Sea Point families will be ambling along the promenade, children straying to the municipal swings; groups of young people will be playing volleyball on the beach. Someone will have a guitar. I have seen them all: how they lean on each other and laugh; how they belong here.

But even they get into cars, pile back into taxis, cross the road. There is that moment of brief pacific balance – then day clicks into night, blowing the leaves up in the gutters.

The mist falls quickly, stinking of displacement and the sea. It magnifies sound. The guards in the stadium are oblivious: they murmur and snort among themselves. I watch for the one who will do a slow perambulation of the perimeter, his Learner’s book in his hand, but there is nothing. I am hidden from them.

I walk along the fence, counting my steps, wishing for pepper spray or a baton, something to even the odds. I pause to listen for the guards, but they are somewhere else – in the booth, playing some inexplicable game of cards, or dreaming of the return to their own countries while they fart softly in their sleep. In the sudden silence the iron skeleton creaks, hunching like a fossil in the dark. I know how its metal will feel beneath my fingers; I know every inch of its cage.

I come to the old stands leaning into the low evening. I step through the fence into the world of tin.

But there is a new sound: the memory of the jackhammers and the sirens, that weird persistent thrum that sets the small ear bones tingling. Something rhythmic, something long. It makes the soil of the excavation vibrate; when I look down at my shirt I see my heartbeat; my ribs rub together with the buzz. I strain to see further, but the mist is closing in and my torch is back in the office.

I have imagined this often. It will be no surprise to see them. I have something that belongs to them, something that also belongs to me. Whatever is coming, I am ready.

I wipe my hand on my shirt, and then I pull up the material from my waist. I retrieve the ball from where it has lain for so long. It pulls away from my skin like surgery.

When I look up there are rows and rows of white tents, sheets drying over fences, shanties made from the memory of houses. And the crowds are there again, called up together for one final game, standing so close that their arms touch. The men’s beards are blown suddenly back like flags against their chests; the women and children stand beside them, fluttering. Their mouths are open, their heads held high. They smile into the wind like dogs: their ghost voices roar with the southeaster.

And there in the middle of the pitch is my grandfather before he was my grandfather, hand raised to hold back the team behind him, his teeth glinting in the moonlight. He nods at me.

He is waiting for the ball.

T
OURISTS
,
SHE THOUGHT BITTERLY
. We come here in our sturdy shoes and our new clothes, and we expect not to be molested.

Sophie sighed and shifted the backpack that had seemed like such a good idea in Cape Union Mart. The vertebrae of her spine were pressed against each other like the leaves of books; she thought she could hear them squeak.

It was only the first day, and already Sophie was sick of the triangulation of Eastern Europe: sick of everything contained within its grey lines. Maybe her mother was right and art
was
best left in the library, where you could look at the pictures safely and then close them between their hard woven covers when you had had enough. That way they didn’t acquire coffee stains like tree rings, didn’t have their ears bent, didn’t bloat in the bath. Maybe it was just better to look
at
than
be
looked at, most of all. Sophie was sick of the curious glances she garnered everywhere she went, as if she herself were an exhibit. Was there not a single other coloured girl in the whole of Eastern Europe? She had expected more from a place where the eyes on all the billboards were ringed with thick black liner. Down below was less exotic. The only gypsies she had seen were being hustled away by policemen.