Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Online Free Page A
bearings.
The dogs eye us through lacklustre eyes.
There is the Burgundy restaurant on the west of the square. The Fisherman’s Cottage pub is behind him, so my stall (he figures out) is to be just in front of this low white wall. Under this kaffir plum, right here.
He folds the map away and Zippos a Camel in the lee of his hand.
I look at the space that is to become my world. The measure of a jail cell. In the shade of this kaffir plum I am to sell bead animals made by wizard-fingered Zimbabweans in Cape Town while fellow refugees hold their place in the never-ending line for asylum papers.
– The bead animals will sell like hotcakes. The good beadwork is done by the Zimbabweans, or the Zulus.
He flicks ash to the wind.
– If you want carvings, that is another thing.
He jabs his fag towards me to underscore his teaching.
Curiously, for one who is neither black nor white, Zero loves to pigeonhole folk. If you want masks you find a Gambian. If you want a sarong you find a Kenyan. If you want carvings you find a Tanzanian. If you want dope you find a Nigerian who will just happen to know a man who has carted his taboo cargo down from Lesotho’s skylands, Sherpa style.
Zimbabwean beadwork. (On wire. The Zulus do it on string.) That’s the trading goods in the Johnnie Walker boxes: tangled, vivid menageries of animals and birds and fish.
– It’ll be a breeze, Zero tunes. Tourists love this indigenous shit.
I would point out to him that the beadwork being Zimbabwean rather than South African renders it rather non-indigenous, but he’d just tune: Selling shit is all about selling an illusion . In Zero’s eyes there is no objective truth.
– I hope so. I hope they go down well.
– Like selling grass to a hippie. Whatever you make over cost, you pocket. Capito ? So haggle hard. Beat folk down.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Haggle hard.
He hands me money for a second-hand Vespa he bid for after seeing an advert in the paper. I just need to pick it up from an old, glass-eyed priest who has not ridden the thing since he lost an eye in the township riots of 1976.
As Zero rides away in his empty Benz, he winds down to call offhandedly:
– Hey, Jero. I love you, my laaitie .
Then he’s gone. I, his laaitie , his boy, feel stranded in the wake of his upbeat bravado. I’m cut off from all that’s defined my life so far, other than a few books. And the tourist trinkets: Zero’s jetsam.
A crow’s wry faawk mocks my loneliness.
The light fades. I go to find this pizza joint.
4
J UST SOUTH OF THE Limpopo River. After dusk.
The scattering of stars reminds Jabulani of fishing pontoons at night on Lake Kariba: the way they lure kapenta with a dazzling light.
He drops from the acacia to his feet and runs on in the loping stride of a distance runner.
He has always run. Run the long dusty miles to school as a boy. Run on the track at the university in Harare. Run at dusk for years to calm his mind after another day of teaching and marking papers.
He runs hour after hour in fear of a snake fanging him or a bullet felling him. And as he runs he recalls how he used to put his feet up for a pipe smoke after putting his son and daughter to bed. He’d let the cat doze on his lap and tune into Billie Holiday. It was at such times, as smoke floated up from his pipe through the overhanging fever tree to the Southern Cross, that he tallied up his good luck:
The magic of drifting into dreams as he lay in the dark against Thokozile’s spine.
Tendai coolly hula-hooping at dusk under the papaya, hardly a hint of lackadaisical lilt in her hips. The way she drew butterflies and angels in fluid lines without lifting her pencil from paper. The way she saw him as her hero for carrying her high on his shoulders through the flaring bazaar, for catching moths and spiders in his bare hands, for reading to her in a range of voices.
Panganai finger-picking Bob Marley on his guitar in the hope of dazzling the girls who drifted by.
The dogs eye us through lacklustre eyes.
There is the Burgundy restaurant on the west of the square. The Fisherman’s Cottage pub is behind him, so my stall (he figures out) is to be just in front of this low white wall. Under this kaffir plum, right here.
He folds the map away and Zippos a Camel in the lee of his hand.
I look at the space that is to become my world. The measure of a jail cell. In the shade of this kaffir plum I am to sell bead animals made by wizard-fingered Zimbabweans in Cape Town while fellow refugees hold their place in the never-ending line for asylum papers.
– The bead animals will sell like hotcakes. The good beadwork is done by the Zimbabweans, or the Zulus.
He flicks ash to the wind.
– If you want carvings, that is another thing.
He jabs his fag towards me to underscore his teaching.
Curiously, for one who is neither black nor white, Zero loves to pigeonhole folk. If you want masks you find a Gambian. If you want a sarong you find a Kenyan. If you want carvings you find a Tanzanian. If you want dope you find a Nigerian who will just happen to know a man who has carted his taboo cargo down from Lesotho’s skylands, Sherpa style.
Zimbabwean beadwork. (On wire. The Zulus do it on string.) That’s the trading goods in the Johnnie Walker boxes: tangled, vivid menageries of animals and birds and fish.
– It’ll be a breeze, Zero tunes. Tourists love this indigenous shit.
I would point out to him that the beadwork being Zimbabwean rather than South African renders it rather non-indigenous, but he’d just tune: Selling shit is all about selling an illusion . In Zero’s eyes there is no objective truth.
– I hope so. I hope they go down well.
– Like selling grass to a hippie. Whatever you make over cost, you pocket. Capito ? So haggle hard. Beat folk down.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Haggle hard.
He hands me money for a second-hand Vespa he bid for after seeing an advert in the paper. I just need to pick it up from an old, glass-eyed priest who has not ridden the thing since he lost an eye in the township riots of 1976.
As Zero rides away in his empty Benz, he winds down to call offhandedly:
– Hey, Jero. I love you, my laaitie .
Then he’s gone. I, his laaitie , his boy, feel stranded in the wake of his upbeat bravado. I’m cut off from all that’s defined my life so far, other than a few books. And the tourist trinkets: Zero’s jetsam.
A crow’s wry faawk mocks my loneliness.
The light fades. I go to find this pizza joint.
4
J UST SOUTH OF THE Limpopo River. After dusk.
The scattering of stars reminds Jabulani of fishing pontoons at night on Lake Kariba: the way they lure kapenta with a dazzling light.
He drops from the acacia to his feet and runs on in the loping stride of a distance runner.
He has always run. Run the long dusty miles to school as a boy. Run on the track at the university in Harare. Run at dusk for years to calm his mind after another day of teaching and marking papers.
He runs hour after hour in fear of a snake fanging him or a bullet felling him. And as he runs he recalls how he used to put his feet up for a pipe smoke after putting his son and daughter to bed. He’d let the cat doze on his lap and tune into Billie Holiday. It was at such times, as smoke floated up from his pipe through the overhanging fever tree to the Southern Cross, that he tallied up his good luck:
The magic of drifting into dreams as he lay in the dark against Thokozile’s spine.
Tendai coolly hula-hooping at dusk under the papaya, hardly a hint of lackadaisical lilt in her hips. The way she drew butterflies and angels in fluid lines without lifting her pencil from paper. The way she saw him as her hero for carrying her high on his shoulders through the flaring bazaar, for catching moths and spiders in his bare hands, for reading to her in a range of voices.
Panganai finger-picking Bob Marley on his guitar in the hope of dazzling the girls who drifted by.
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