Sizwe

He was named after Umkhonto we Sizwe like many other young men of his generation. Sizwe was 20 when I met him. He arrived at my gate with a group of five or six other young men, new in the city from one or other rural location. Petrus was the leader of the team in the beginning.

They presented a piece of paper with the words 'Action Security' written on it and Petrus's cell number. A few of us in 8th Avenue decided to take a chance on them although it was evident they were not trained for security work.
When news spread that households that reneged on their agreement with Action Security were promptly robbed, it dawned on me that I was nurturing a group of vigilantes, but by this time I knew them all and it was too late for me to extricate myself.

Over the years the team changed and so did the name of the security company. Some of the gang returned home to Limpopo or Mpumalanga or Northwest Province, generally because somebody was dead or dying. As a poet said, these were the days of ‘love in a time of AIDS’.

Others ended up in jail. The team of six became five and then three - Sizwe, Lucas and the Mozambican Caluti - and then just Sizwe and Action Security became 'Sizwe's Security'.

The Portuguese builder from 7^th Avenue gave him a bicycle and I bought a chain for it. Once a day, then once a week, then once every now and then, Sizwe would cycle past and wave.

As more and more cars were stolen, Sizwe's clients dwindled. I was one of the few who endured. He continued to arrive at my gate on the first of every month with a tattered blue receipt book, still bearing the name, 'Action Security' and I continued to pay him.

One starless night in April, he shouted for me from the gate. He was dressed in a leather jacket and a cap and there was a taxi revving in the road behind him. He said he had a problem with rent and was about to be evicted. There was an aura of hysteria around him. I didn't have any money to lend him so I told him to come back the next day.

Weeks passed and still no sign of Sizwe. When I saw Norman, a gardener from Kensington, pushing his lawnmower down Cumberland Avenue, I stopped the car. ‘Any news of Sizwe?’ He shook his head and bending down, demonstrated with his hands Sizwe's swollen legs and feet. ‘I think it's this disease of these days,’ he said, a local euphemism for AIDS.

I sent an SMS to Sizwe's cell number after many futile attempts to call the number: ‘I have known you for more than 12 years, why didn’t you speak to me about your problems?’

Almost a year later, he arrived at my gate. He said he had been treated for TB in a clinic in Mpumalanga for eight months and then went home. His cell phone had been stolen and he had lost all his possessions.

I gave him my bike - a woman’s bike with a white shopping basket in front.

He hasn't managed to re-establish himself as a security company. He says it is because the people who can afford to pay have moved away.  He has a piece job a couple of days a week as a gardener in Observatory and has rented another back room in 8th Avenue.

Mama Fluffy

The children from 196  - Mohammed and Abdullah and Nabeela - call me ‘Auntie Melody’ (pronounced ‘Uhnnteee Melody’) but the children from 194 – Angel and Grace and also Ntombi’s children and their cousins and friends - call me ‘Mama Fluffy’.  I prefer ‘Uhnnteee Melody’.

The name came about when Angel bonded with my little dog, Daisy. She was messmerised by Daisy’s fluffy white hair and gave her the name 'fluffy'. 

Even the girls’ father who generally calls me ‘Mel’, refers to me as ‘Mama Fluffy’ when speaking to them about me. “Ask Mama Fluffy…” he says.

Old Lorentzville synagogue

“I am an Afrikaans kugel living in a Jewish synagogue in a predominantly Muslim area, with a buddha.” This is how Jungian therapist Marianna Nielsen describes herself. Marianna is the third private owner of the old synagogue in Lorentzville/Bertrams, which was consecrated in 1926 and deconsecrated in 1983.  She spent two years renovating the building, which was in a dilapidated condition when she bought it, before moving in in 2001. 

In the gallery where the women would be seated, Marianna has her lounge, study, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Downstairs is a vast space containing minimal furniture and a statue of the Buddha in the the area that would be where the 'Ark' is found.

The part of Lorentzville/Bertrams border where the synagogue is located is adjacent to New Doornfontein and Judith's Paarl and also adjoins Troyeville. Many Jewish families used to live in this area. They were part of the Jewish community which spread to Doornfontein and beyond.

The building, which was bought by the community in 1918, had been the 'Valley Bioscope'. It was first used by the Congregation in the state in which they found it but in 1923 a decision was taken to alter the building after negotiations with the Johannesburg "Parks and Estates" fell through.

The Lorentzville/Bertrams Hebrew Congregation, established before 1917, was the religious centre for Jews living in this area for many years.  Provision was made for teaching children Hebrew and Jewish studies, and in 1925, the Bertrams Hebrew Society was formed.

In later years, as the community moved out of the area, the Congregation started to dwindle. In May 1982 a closing ceremony was held. Moveable furniture was donated to the Edenvale Hebrew Congregation.

Marianna is at home in the area. She says: “I love areas where there is a flowing of different cultures, different lifestyles, industrial, residential. I find affluent areas very sterile. Here the children play in the street, you can hear the drunk people walking past on a Saturday night, I have a Chinese neighbour on the one side and Muslim neighbour on the other side. I love the idea that there is a coming together of different cultures and religions. There are quite a few churches and missionaries in the area. There is poverty... It is real, it is just real.  It is not trying to create a kind of a false Tuscany in Sandton.” 

“I think for me it is always about trying to find home. I am on a never ending quest of trying to find home in myself and this is reflected in my outside world. This is a sacred place, a place of prayer. It is a containment.  We live in a chaotic world and I continually come back to a safe, sacred space. This allows me continuity between my inner and outer worlds.” 

There are drug dealers in the area who apparently service quite a number of prominent people from the business, media and academic worlds. “I live in the shadow of Johannesburg ….” Marianna says.  “It is about not being able to keep the shadow out and at the same time trying to find a place of groundedness.”

*Thanks to Rose Norwitch for sharing her Masters dissertation (University of the Witwatersrand, 1988): Synagogues on the Witwatersrand and in Pretoria before 1932 - their origin, form and function.  

Silence

At the traffic lights outside the Bruma flea market, a street vendor selling Chinese goods holds a small wooden cage at my car window. Inside an artificial bird with a bright orange beak, protruding black beads for eyes, and a shocking pink, feathered tail swings back and forth. “Support, Mama! Support”, the man whines. 

Four garish gold chimes and a diamond-shaped wooden disc with the word ‘luck’ or ‘fuck’ carved into it hang down from the base of the cage. The whole contraption makes a high-pitched mechanical shrieking sound that bears no resemblance to birdsong.

“Support, Mama, support, support.” I give the man the twenty rand he is asking for.

There is apparently no means to turn the high-pitched sound off. At home I take the still shrieking contrivance into the outside room, hang it up on a cupboard door and throw a rug over it to soften the sound. My little dog Daisy runs around in circles , emitting demented yelps and trying to get at the bird.

The high-pitched shrieking persists in the background. Close to breaking point I pour out my troubles to the first person who calls. “There must be some way,” my brother consoles, “to remove the thing that makes the noise. Get a screwdriver!”

Abandoning my commitment to non-violence, I approach the cage armed with a variety of screwdrivers, hammers and other weapons of mass destruction. All the while Daisy runs around my feet yelping and doing a mad dance. 

With trembling hands, I find a screwdriver that fits, remove the cover of the cage and wrench out the bird’s mechanical heart.

Now soundless, the creature dangles from the kitchen light.

Daisy collapses on the bed.

Silence has become an imperative.

Neighbours

Properties here are small and close together. There is a mingling of sounds and smells and emotional  states. It is inevitable. I know when one of my neighbours is ill before I get told. I know when things are going well and not so well.

Rikkia, my neighbour to the right, shares her scrumptious meals generously. I don’t have to wait for Eid to receive gifts of curry and roti and homemade cookies and other delights through the gap in the blade wire fence dividing her property from mine.  Even during Ramadan she calls me to the fence: "Here are some feta pies I know you like so much..." I share too, though not as generously. In my wildest dreams I wouldn't be able to cook the way Rikkia does.   

Rikkia likes flowers – pink flowers of any variety. I buy her a bunch of pink flowers from time to time.

At Easter I give the children Easter eggs and at Christmas, sweets and cake.  When my neighbours celebrate Eid, such a stream of treats is passed through the fence it is almost overwhelming.

Through this sharing we understand one another’s traditions and habits and preferences and also our struggles and the sadnesses of our lives. According to Rikkia, God has a minute by minute interest in what is happening to us too. “The Almighty knows everything about you and me, Melody…” she says with confidence.

Learning to love failure

I love the poem 'Learning to Love Failure' by Gabeba Baderoon:

"Two swallows tumble
like crumpled paper
after each other.
The camera fails again
and again to find the place
where life will fly through its aperture.
In the meanwhile, the swallows fall
like two crescent moons from the sky.
Fleeting tails in a corner of emptiness
just leaving the frame,
the photographer filming the swallows
has to learn to love failure,
how the almost having of the thing
is true in itself."

The notion of "almost having the thing" being "true in itself"  makes me think of South Africa - our hopes of the new democracy and our daily disappointments. Of course the "almost having of the thing" is blatant at a global level too. And it is true of living in Bez Valley. There is a truth in the valley, though it is not the mountain top. The biblical character Moses was shown the "promised land' but he never actually got there. We want completion and finality but how often do we get it?  It is hard to accept that what we have right now, right here, has a truth of its own. 

Plumbing in Bez Valley

Before sunrise I am awoken by dripping water on the bathroom ceiling. At seven, I call Mr Khoza, a self-employed plumber who lives in a backroom in 8^th Avenue. 

He rings the bell at the gate persistently. When I arrive at the front door, he is holding a copy of the 'Joburg East Express' in front of his face. He keeps it there for a few minutes. I wait.  Finally, with intense irritation and impatience, he enters the house.

In the bathroom we perform our usual song and dance routine which involves placing my small ladder on top of my small kitchen table so that once he reaches the highest rung, Mr Khoza can take one foot off the ladder and place it precariously on top of the door in order to hoist himself up into the bathroom ceiling and inspect my archaic geyeser’s latest affliction.

He disappears into the black hole. I wait nervously for his response. His diagnosis is always aggressive, incoherent, and turbulent. This is partly because he was apprenticed to a temperamental Portuguese plumber with a very limited English vocabulary for many years and partly because Mr Khoza - with good reason - is cautious not to commit himself.

The expletives stream out of his mouth, like an overflowing pot of food on the boil. He shakes his head. "It's fucked," he says. I have to establish whether the problem is redeemable or terminal so I try and get him to elaborate. "Fucked ! Fucked!" he says forcefully several times, spluttering with intensity, apparently believing that the weight of emotion behind the words should be sufficient to make a simple-minded person like me comprehend. "Little fucked or big fucked?" I probe. "Fucked! Fucked! Fucked!" He shouts, beads of sweat breaking out on his frustrated face.

After several phone calls to Mr Karam who owns the plumbing supply shop down the road, I give Mr Khoza the money to buy the parts.

I am still handing him lit candles hours later (I can't find my torch and Mr Khoza doesn’t have conventional plumbing tools to see in the dark).

Finally, the dripping sound gurgles and gasps and dies. Mr Khoza descends from the heavens, wreathed with an aura of satisfaction and achievement.

I am dizzy and so exhausted that I feel that my limbs have been dislocated from their sockets by the time I see him off the property. We stand at the gate like an old married couple, depleted by a domestic row that has been raging like a mountain fire for many years, leaving miles upon miles of scorched earth in its wake.

I observe that Mr. Khoza looks even older and more shriveled than he did when he arrived, his hair standing on end like a sucked mango, his shoulders stooped from the stress of his trade and the tyranny of his emotions.

With relief I wave him on his way, marveling that despite the fact that I feel like a victim of post-traumatic stress, the roots of our association go so deep into our individual and national pasts that our future is inevitably intertwined, like a creeper that has been growing along the walls of an ancient building for so long that it has become embedded in the structure.

Poverty in Bez Valley

On an average Friday, the day that the Pikitup truck collects, the sound of hawkers and vendors pushing their carts or stolen supermarket trolleys full of bits and pieces to the local dump for whatever few cents they can get for waste starts in the early hours of the  morning.

There are different sounds depending on the vehicles used; which supermarket the trolleys originate from perhaps; or the nature of the goods: The clunk-clunk-clunk of metal waste; the high-pitched clinking sound of glass bottles; and the thud of a mixed bag of goods. The visuals of the trolleys, and their owners, demand their own, separate exploration.

I am not attuned to the nuances of these sounds. I am trying to listen to them in a new way. I am inclined to lump them together under the umbrella of poverty and desolation.

The noises made by the trolleys or carts or makeshift conveyors of goods are usually - almost always - accompanied by the sound of coughing and spitting. I don’t actually hear the phlegm splattering onto the pavement but I imagine it. I have become over-sensitive to spitting after I saw some bloodstained phlegm on the pavement.

It lay in a strange shape like the Tarot card for sorrow in some packs, or a child's sticker of a broken heart, or the shattered skull of a misguided bird that has flown into glass thinking it is sky.