Life on the Vaya - Circus down the line

CIRCUS DOWN THE LINE

 “The circus is of the good old-fashioned kind, and those who enjoy a prolonged and hearty laugh can confidently be recommended to attend. There is frolic and mirth galore, and the memory of such capital fun will not soon fade away…” 

(Diamond Fields Advertiser – 9/10 April 1914).

The first thing that strikes me in Gary Boswell’s Orange Grove home is a framed picture of Tickey the Clown, who played a formative role in his Johannesburg childhood.  Tickey used to babysit the Boswell boys when they were growing up.  

“How has growing up in a circus family influenced your worldview?” I ask.

“If you think about what I have done: hairdressing to flight steward to religious life to I Ching readings to Hospice work; and now the work that I do with people in bereavement and counseling and corporate training. I think what it has allowed me to do is to reinvent myself at every turn. Every time I said I want to do this or try that, my parents were behind me 100%! When I converted to Catholicism they were all there in the church – all my brothers and their wives and my parents – and my brother and his wife are Jewish!

Gary spent a couple of years training to be a monk.  “I saw the film “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” and that did it for me.   I think I thought the life of a monk would be so romantic and serene and sublime and all of that and it’s not at all actually.  I converted here at Maryvale.  I was already quite knowledgeable about religious things. I started when I was 13. I used to go to Hatha Yoga when I was 11 and 12 at Fairmount in the evening. And the teacher mentioned something to do with Rajah Yoga and that it was to do with breath and so when I was 13 I found Rajah Yoga people and that got me in touch with Gita Obel. So I started investigating eastern religion at an early age”.

His family was close-knit and supportive.  “When I said to my father, I want to be a flight steward, computers had just come out, and he kept a list of everywhere I went.  He was so proud. He used to take me to the airport and wait for me to come home on an internal flight.  He used to make an arrangement with one of the cleaners to wake him up. He was fabulous; my father was marvelous! And also it gave me confidence.  I can stand up in an auditorium and talk for an hour and a half without a note or a power point and I can weave in stories about my life or about other people’s lives to make a point. It has given me imagination”. 

Trancelike I pore over family photographs of cousins who were the first to do the triple somersault at the Barnum and Bailey Circus in America; Brian Boswell with his tigers, Mr Ironjaws, David Marais on his bungee trapeze Brian Boswell in his cowboy outfit, Tickey as a Koringa, Timmy Turnbull with Nico Mienie (the smallest clown ever to appear in South Africa); the Boswell brothers beside a ‘House Full’ sign in front of the big tent in 1959; Jim Boswell and his liberty horses; the circus lighting plant in 1934, and an early animal cage circus wagon from 1914. 

I would have given my eye teeth to see what went on behind the scenes as a child and these photographs evoke the huge excitement of childhood memories of feet dangling off a wooden bench, popcorn, coke and candyfloss, belly laughs at Tickey’s antics and eyes fixed with terror and awe on the trapeze artists leaping through the air.

The family lived in Glenhazel first, and Gary attended Fairmount Primary School.

“The circus is so magical in my memory,” Gary tells me.  “Certainly we spent a lot of time with circus people when they were in town…  It was called the Boswell Brothers Circus originally…they used to parade in the neighbourhood as an advert and my grandfather used to try and make sure that the parade passed my school at break time so that he could wave at me and I could feel very important.  That would have been in the early to mid-sixties.  So he used to come down there at break time and wave to me, and it got me into a lot of trouble because I was not a very popular boy at school but when it was circus time I was everybody’s best friend, and they all wanted tickets to the circus and I used to say: “Yes, I’ll get you tickets…” and I couldn’t get tickets to the circus.  It was not in my power to do that. And then I had to disappoint them and say it was full or I couldn’t get them. Or try and write them an apology note in adult handwriting… So that is what would happen at Fairmount”.

Childhood birthdays were circus affairs.  Gary’s grandfather’s brother, Bill Boswell used to bring Shetland ponies to the house in Glenhazel as a treat for his birthday when he was a child and take all the children around the block on a Shetland. “I used to be petrified because they were cheeky, nasty little buggers… They would bite you.”

The MD of the Civic Theatre, Bob Adams was a friend of the family.  On Sundays he used to invite visiting artists and performers to a braai at his house. Here Gary met people like Eartha Kitt, Demis Roussos, Engelbert Humperdinck and Magna Carta. “I had one of the members of Magna Carta begging my father to let him take me out on a date but I was 16 or 17 and he was 40 so my father wouldn’t let him”.

The Boswell brothers (Gary’s grandfather and his brother, Jim) sold the circus to African Theatres in about1970.  African Theatres bought the name and then entered into a partnership with Wilkie, but the agreement was they had to use the Boswell name and the name had to come before Wilkie.

A family friend, Cartie, originally owned the Orange Grove house.  Cartie played a significant role in introducing Gary to literature, music, foreign languages, and the arts when he was a teenager and he used to visit him on his way home from school.  When Cartie died in around 1984, Gary’s father bought the house in 10^th Street Orange Grove for Gary.

The Boswell family has made its mark in Orange Grove in many ways.  Gary’s aunt, the celebrated singer Eve Boswell was hugely popular at the old Orange Grove Hotel (The Coconut Grove) when he was a child.  “She was Eva Colletti…Hungarian... She used to sing and dance with her parents, who were musicians. They were known as the ‘Three Hugos’ and they used to dance and play instruments.  Her father was a huge, tall man, and the mother… I don’t think she made 4'03 and her husband, Hugo must have been 6'8'!  And they used to do the tango together and the mother used to run up and sit on his shoulder like a little elf.  Eve was educated in Switzerland and she spoke a number of languages.  She used to play the piano. She was really a talented musician. As a girl of 11 she would tap dance on the xylophone apparently. And she married my father’s brother – my uncle. They met on the circus.  The Three Hugos came here when Eve was about 11 or 12…

“She called me her favourite nephew. I don’t know if she said that to my brothers, I never heard that.  I used to spend weekends at her house in Emmarentia sometimes. She had a rocking bed which I rather liked.  And then when she got married again at Sunnyside Park Hotel, I did her hair for the wedding…”

Gary Boswell can be contacted for counseling and for I Ching readings at gtboswell@gmail.com.

LIFE ON THE VAYA: HEARTBREAK (PART 3) - FICTION

Excavations began the next day.  Massive earth-moving machines, tree cutters and other weapons of mass destruction took over the property with military precision, obliterating forty years of the Body Cobra’s labour of love.

One hundred-year-old oak trees; fir trees and acacias were brought to their knees.  Asters; zinnias; Michaelmas daisies, their yellow centres lifted to the sun; palest pink roses; agapanthus; purple, yellow and orange pansies; violet and maroon irises; magnolias; red, pink, coral and violet azaleas; jasmine; hollyhocks; wisteria; fuchsia; oleander and lavender - ripped out, torn off, bodies crushed, defaced and shattered, necks grotesquely twisted to one side, broken limbs extending towards the sky as if in prayer.  As their last breath left their bodies a heavenly fragrance wafted towards me like holy incense. 

The army departed, at last, leaving behind a multi-coloured holocaust of plant life. I wept for the loss of the gardens; I wept out of fear and uncertainty for the future, and mostly I wept for the mindless destruction of the Body Cobra’s life’s work.

The Body Cobra never returned.  A Seeff for sale sign was erected on the verge outside the gate. 

His children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren came to dismantle his home and remove his belongings. Within weeks the Muslim Brothers bought his flat.

I went to visit Mr Ermann.  A new wife, Rokaya, opened the door and invited me in.  “My husband has just had his bath",she informed me, “but please wait, I know he wants to see you very much.”

I was surprised to walk into an atmosphere of domestic contentment with exotic aromas of cumin, coriander, nutmeg, cardamom aniseed and turmeric drifting from the kitchen, and classical music playing softly in the background. I heard Mr Ermann and the other wives laughing and chatting animatedly in the next room.

I wandered around the sitting room, still rich with antique Judaica, touching objects reverently, breathing them in:   An 18^th century Polish silver Torah shield; a silver Passover goblet, an embroidered, velvet challah cover and a Damascene Seder tray made of copper and silver, with a menorah in the centre and engraved on the outer rim the Hebrew words: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget [its skill]. May my tongue cling to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not bring up Jerusalem at the beginning of my joy…”

I was lost in contemplation of a painting of a rabbi painted in 1900 by the Austrian artist Josef Johan Suss when Rokaya tapped me on the shoulder. “My husband is ready to see you now,” she said.

Mr. Ermann was lying on this bed, propped up against a pile of pillows.  Two of his wives were busy settling him in.  I greeted them. Again, I had a distinct feeling that I had seen them on their way in or out of the Diamond Polisher’s flat.

“My dear…” he said warmly.  I am so happy to see you, so very happy. I was going to ring you because there is so much to talk about, so much going on.”  I noticed a copy of the Koran lying open on his bedside table.

 Mr Ermann watched me silently.  “Yes, my beloved Rokaya has been reading to me,” he said. “She has such a soothing voice.”

Rokya, who was hovering at the end of the bed, blushed with pleasure at his acknowledgement of her.  She and Fatima excused themselves. 

Mr Ermann gestured for me to sit on the chair beside the bed.  Zubeidah, meanwhile, drew up a chair at the bottom of the bed and began to massage Mr Ermann’s yellow toe-nailed, gnarled purple feet. I looked away, feeling that I was witnessing something as intimate as sexual intercourse.

Replacing the book, I asked after the Body Cobra. Mr Ermann shook his head sadly.  “He’s not dead,” he said. 

I sank back in the chair with relief.

“They thought it was a heart attack at first. We all thought that,” he said.  But it’s something else, a condition called Takotsubo Syndrome, broken heart syndrome".

“Broken heart syndrome…?

“Yes.  I’d never heard of it before but I’ve been reading up on it.  It looks like a heart attack at first apparently, but what happens is the left ventricle of the heart blows up like a balloon.  The Japanese discovered the condition. They named it after the little fishing pots they catch octopuses in. Takotsubo".

“Takotsubo? How do you spell it?”

“T-A-K-O, and then T-S-U-B-O. Fascinating isn’t it? 

“So he’ll get better?”

“Yes. People do recover from it….Poor dear Hymie…,” Mr Ermann shook his head, looking towards the window.  “… A broken heart…Oh my…oh dear….”

We sat silently in mutual mourning for a few moments.

“I have a gift for you,” Mr Ermann said suddenly, his voice lifting.  “Zubeidah, darling, go and fetch the parcel please…”  Zubeidah let go of Mr Ermann’s feet and left the room. She returned with what appeared to be a large package of books wrapped in brown paper. It was heavy. 

“Goodness… for me?” 

“Yes,” Mr Ermann nodded enthusiastically. Don’t open it now.  Take it home with you.”

It was late afternoon when I left Mr Ermann’s flat.  Down below, in the concrete quad that was once the garden, the Muslim Brothers were teaching the new converts how to pray.  I stood in the shadows watching them.

A group of Africanists, including Makabung, was also watching from the second-floor passage of the opposite building. They were dressed in black T-shirts, intensifying their solidarity and giving the impression of latent violence.

The hum of the forbidden voices of Hasidic women keening rose in a tense spiral from behind the door of the rabbi’s flat next door to Mr Ermann’s.

“Allah created body and soul together, so as Muslims we pray with our bodies and our souls, facing the Kaaba, God’s holy temple in Mecca, with Muslims all over the world, like one body, with Allah at the centre of our thoughts. Allahu Akbar ,” Aslam roared.  “Allahu Akbar”, the converts repeated after him.

I left them prostrating themselves, foreheads to the ground, and observed with satisfaction that beyond their prone bodies and the walls surrounding Oak View Mansions, the trees on the pavement were sturdy and rooted; their leaves iridescent in the fading light. 
They seemed to be waving at me. I almost waved back. 

The parcel from Mr Ermann was an early English translation of the ‘Masnavi’ in six volumes. The Persian Sufi, Rumi’s poetry and teachings on mystical Islam have profoundly influenced my own spiritual path.  I opened one of the volumes to a bookmarked page and read:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there….”

LIFE ON THE VAYA: HEARTBREAK (PART 2) - FICTION

One late afternoon I was confronted by the improbable spectacle of old Mr Ermann, who had recently celebrated his 86^th birthday, with two women, fully clad in the black ankle length hijab worn by Muslim women. One of the women, dressed in a burka, was pushing Mr Ermann’s wheelchair; the other, who had her face fully covered by a niqab, was carrying his oxygen machine.

“Mr Ermann!” I exclaimed.

“Oh my dear,” he said with his usual warmth, “let me introduce you.  These are my new wives… Fatima,” he held out his hand towards the woman in full niqab. “She’s 19”, he said… “And this is Zubeidah.”  They’ve saved me a lot of money on a cook and cleaner and day and night nurses,” he winked. After a pause, responding to my stunned silence, he chuckled, “They said they can find me more wives if I need them.”

There was something about Fatima and Zubeidah that I recognised.  I was almost certain I had given them an escape card when I met them in the passage on their way to the Diamond Polisher’s flat.

“Who, Mr Ermann?” I blurted out, anxious and enraged. “Who found you wives…?”   

Distracted for a moment, Mr Ermann waved at somebody behind me passing along the first floor passage. I turned to see Assad and the Diamond Polisher talking animatedly. 

“They’re matchmaking,” Mr Ermann smiled.  “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

“How could you?” I demanded.  “You’re an old man, a religious Jew, how could you? How could you…?”

“At my stage of life, human kindness and peaceful co-existence are what matters most, my dear,” he said with a look of almost tender concern at my distress, “It was much easier than I thought,” he continued.  Abdullah took us to the Turkish baths and it was all rather lovely really.  We soaked in warm water for a very long time until we were purified and then the Trustees towelled us down and dressed us in white robes, and we repeated the words after Abdullah: Ašhadu an lã ilãha illã lahu, wa ashãdu anna muhammadan rasûluhu: I testify that there is no God but God, and Muhammed is the messenger of God. And then we were Muslims”.  He looks upwards, as though communing with the heavenly realms.

“Then we came back in Abdullah’s combi. I have to say I felt euphoric and hopeful more than anything else.  Everything has changed.  I rather like it…I never thought I would get married again in my dotage. Of course I am not likely to get up to any tricks,” he chortled. “But so many woman to care for…what an honour…what an honour…” He shook his head in wonderment.

The next notice from the Muslim Brothers, as the Board of Trustees came to be known, announced a general meeting to be held in the foyer of the building.

Again I sat next to Vishanti Pillay. This time she was wearing hijab although I noticed a pendant with 

an image of Kali around her neck. Kali is the multi-limbed Hindu goddess of power, change and destruction.  I presumed Vishanti still had a lot to learn about the ethics and protocol of being a Muslim woman.  “You’ve converted…?”

“No use fighting fate, “she said.  “The Creator has many forms. Everything flows to and from one source in the end. “

I noted the Body Cobra sitting in the back row. He appeared to have shed half his body weight since the AGM.

Assad announced that the Board of Trustees planned to uproot the garden to make space for communal prayer. “It will also save on the water bill,” he rationalised.  “And we will be able to retrench Albie, who hasn’t been pulling his weight for a long time.”  Albie Tshabalala had worked as the Oak View Mansions gardener for more than forty years. 

Assad was about to call for a vote when Neo Makabung, the advocate from flat 204 interrupted him. A strikingly good looking, well-built man, reminiscent of Malcolm X, with astuteness in his demeanour that I found almost intimidating, Makabung spoke eloquently and forcefully on behalf of the Africanists, a new faction in the block.  “Subordination to one or other colonial religion is not the outcome for Oak View Gardens that the Africanists want,” he said.  A small group sitting on either side of him muttered their approval.

After a pervasive silence lasting several minutes, Assad again called for the vote.  The Africanists abstained; I and four or five others voted against; the overwhelming majority voted in favour.  It was blatantly clear to everyone present that Assad had promoted his position before the meeting. 

“Done!” he shouted triumphantly. The word had barely left his lips when there was a loud thud from the back of the foyer.  Everyone turned to see the Body Cobra lying flat out on the floor.

In the commotion of cell phones, pillows, wet cloths, brandy and blankets that followed, the Jewish ambulance service, Hatzolah, arrived. Two strapping young men pushed through the crowd bearing a stretcher and in a flash the Body Cobra was being transported to an ambulance with a drip attached to his arm and an oxygen mask on his face. 

LIFE ON THE VAYA - HEARTBREAK (PART 1) - FICTION

For sixty years Oak View Mansions was occupied a close-knit community of orthodox Jewish people. The community was so symbiotic and supportive that during the festival of Sukkot to commemorate the Israelites wandering through the Sinai desert, a sukkah, large enough to accommodate the residents of 39 flats was constructed in the Oak View Mansions gardens.

When a non-Jewish private developer bought the building, he gave flat dwellers the option of buying their flats or renting them until they were sold. A mass exodus followed, reminiscent for some of the tragic evacuations of ancestors throughout history. Those who were beneficiaries of the Jewish charity, Chevra Kadisha, made a sorry spectacle loading their meager belongings and numerous children into cars and bakkies for a journey to another flat rented on their behalf by the Chev. 

Oak View Mansions morphed into a United Nations of multicultural living as I and others from assorted cultural and faith backgrounds bought flats in the building. Although most flats were still owned by Jewish people, and they remained the most influential community in the block, the character of the block – and of the neighbourhood - changed when the massive Masjid Ul Furqaan - was built in Houghton, a few kilometres away.

When owners congregated at the Norwood Chabad for the AGM, those who were sensitive enough, detected an unsettling emotional undercurrent: “The winds of change…,” Vishanti Pillay, sitting beside me, whispered dolefully.

The meeting jumped from introductions to matters arising to nominations and voting at such an accelerated pace that it came as a shock when the Chairperson of the Body Corporate (the Body Cobra), was voted out of office.

He slumped in his chair, his huge frame folded over, like Humpty Dumpty after the ‘great fall’. It’s a terrible thing, I thought, to see the collapse of a man who has thrown his weight around for so many years. Even though there was no love lost between us, my heart ached for him. His Lubavitch brethren fussed around him like “all the kings men” in their black hats and tails, grey beards trailing down to their navels and Tzitziyot flapping, but there was nothing to be done. The Body Cobra was a broken man. For the first time in 65 years a non-Jew had been voted into power at Oak View Mansions.

The new Chairperson, Abdullah Assad (whose name means ‘Lion’), called for a recess so that he and other Muslims, could perform their ritual prayers before sunset. He disappeared upstairs into the women’s section of the Shul followed by his systematically canvased and caucused new team. They returned after a short interval with Assad leading and the others in a straight line behind him like soldiers marching into battle, all chanting: “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is the greatest).

A notice under the door the next day explained in almost poetic language that Oak View Mansions was destined for Muslim domination. The Western world had been poisoned against the Muslim world, Assad argued, and the teachings and ideas of Islam had been consistently misrepresented. Whilst no pressure would be exerted on residents, the chairperson encouraged conversion to Islam in the interests of the harmonious running of the block. Those who converted would receive certain ‘concessions’ which would be negotiated on a one-on-one basis.

A combi-load of male residents left the property the following day with Abdullah Assad driving. At first I barely recognised him. Instead of the striped designer shirt he usually wore, he was dressed in a white kurta with gold braiding around the neck, and had a taqiyah on his head. His black beard glistened in stark contrast to the white cotton fabric and just for a second, I was reminded of a reviled dictator. 

As the vehicle sped through the gate, I noticed Elijah, the rabbi’s simple-minded son, and waved. He waved back enthusiastically and then abruptly dropped his hand as if reprimanded.

A blank, rectangular space appeared on the door frame of Fanny Joffee’s flat. Fanny’s claim to fame was her courageous pursuit of a noisy, drunken security guard in her pajamas, at 3.00 a.m. one morning. Within days there were blank spaces on other door frames where a mezuzah had been secured for decades.

My next-door neighbour, the Diamond Polisher Adam Koan, who was Abdullah Assad’s tenant, continued his normal daily ritual however: Israeli News at top blast before sunrise and an early exit, possibly to inspect his diamonds. I met him in the passage when I took my dogs out clutching a poop scoop in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and as usual he reached out to touch his mezuzah and placed his fingers to his lips in prayer: "Hear, O Israel, the LORD (is) our God, the LORD is One." My dogs barked as always.

The ‘diamonds’ came and left at all hours of day and night. These days, whenever I could, I slipped them a card with the number of the 24-hour helpline for sex workers. 

I came to recognise some of the women; to get a sense of them and feel I understood them in a non-verbal sort of way.