‘Yes, I picked a house too, the house next door to Mrs Ditton’s. You were supposed to take a third photo, but we never got round to it.’
‘Let me guess: we lost the light.’
‘The light waned, yes, and also the interest, I think. Years later, I went back to satisfy my curiosity. I knocked on the door, if you don’t mind, and the lady of the house let me in.’
‘And?’
‘You would have liked it. It was a prime example of apartheid gothic and it proved Gerald’s point three times over. You never know what’s going on behind closed doors.’
I kept Dr Pinheiro and the letterbox museum to myself. At that time, I had spoken about them with no one but my mother and the secret had darkened into a superstition. At the heart of my memory something was in quarantine, for reasons I no longer remembered.
‘The light failed, and you never took the photo; the light held, and you did. It seems so arbitrary.’
‘I’m not too sure about that,’ he answered. ‘In a way it felt inevitable, as if I hardly had a choice. I was always drawn to the same things. I could pass by a corner twenty times and have the same thought: I’ve got to photograph this. Until I acted on that urge, it wouldn’t let me go.’
‘But can you square how the work is made and what it comes to stand for? There’s such an air of necessity about your photos, as if it had to be these images and no others. It might look inevitable, read backwards, but it could all have been different. Every portrait could have been of someone else; every house could have been the house next door. If you’d turned down a different street, or passed by ten minutes later, or been less fond of driving.’
‘I agree, a photograph is an odd little memorial that owes a lot to chance and intuition.’ The espresso cup was like an eggshell in his fingers. ‘But I was dogged, even if I say so myself. I used the available light. In the morning, I packed my camera bags and went out to take photographs, while more sensible men were building houses or balancing the books.’
Auerbach had an exhibition coming up. These days, he always had an exhibition coming up somewhere. ‘I’m an artist, you know,’ he joked, ‘I can’t help it. I’ve stopped arguing with the experts.’ He spread some working prints out on the table like a deck of cards and we played rummy with them for a while.
I told him about the pictures I’d been taking. Even when he said, ‘You should have brought them with you,’ I did not mention the orange Agfa box in the boot of my car.
We spoke about my father and my uncle Doug, but what gripped me was the story about his friend Matti. They had known one another for years. The Finn had started coming to South Africa in the ’70s, he said, covering the political situation for the European papers, and was glad of a place to stay when he passed through Johannesburg.
‘We got on famously,’ Auerbach said, ‘although our approaches to photography could not have been more different. He should have been banging around in the war zones, but he didn’t have the nerve. More gung than ho. South Africa was a good compromise. Once, just before he was due to fly back to Helsinki, he asked me if he could leave some clothing behind for safe keeping. His suitcase was open on the bed in the guest room — and it was full of film! Full to the brim with hundreds of spools. It looked like a conceptual artwork. It wouldn’t be so strange today, now that every camera has a trunkful of film in it. Bytes weigh nothing and you don’t pay for the excess. But I was shocked.’
The story reassured me enough to admit that I’d brought a few of my own photos with me. I fetched them and he gave them his attention. He was kind. He asked me questions and gave me pointers. It was more than the photos warranted.
Then, as I was getting ready to go, he said, ‘You’ll be interested in this.’ He took a print from a folder and pushed it across the table. ‘It’s Joel Setshedi.’
A serious young man in a collar and tie, perched on the end of a desk in a panelled office. He is holding a framed photograph of himself, and in this one he is smiling broadly.
‘The smaller photograph is Amos,’ Auerbach went on, ‘the twin brother. It’s the portrait that stood on his coffin at his funeral. He died a couple of years ago, of Aids I suspect, although no one will say so. Joel keeps the picture on his desk. He works for a bank, the same one that employed his father, except he’s in foreign exchange whereas the old man drove a delivery bike. He’s done bloody well for himself, if you think where he started out, and he has his mother to thank. Veronica’s still alive, by the way, retired to the family home in Limpopo. I’m going to photograph her too one of these days.’
Later, I went over this conversation in my mind and tried to name the aftertaste of envy in my admiration for Auerbach. He had a body of work and it held him steady in the world. More precisely: he was a body of work. A solid line. I had wasted my energies on trifles. Layered on one another, they created the illusion of depth, but it was never more than an effect. Most of all, I envied him his continuity. He had soldiered on, one photograph at a time, leaving behind an account of himself and his place in which one thing followed another, print after print. My own story was full of holes.
Janie wrote again re dead letters: ‘It’s a double whammy, isn’t it? You want people to think you’re making up the letters, because the story that they were left to you is so unlikely, but actually it’s true. Fact is stranger than fiction, especially in novels. Your secret is safe with me.’
‘Never should have told her,’ Leora said.
‘I know.’
‘How did you respond?’
‘I haven’t written back, I don’t want to encourage her. Next thing she’ll ask me to be her friend on Facebook.’
‘So?’
‘It makes me think of lonely children with imaginary friends.’
‘You should talk.’
There was a postscript to the email. ‘You’ve got some dodgy role models. Koestler was a real bastard in his relationships with women. And that Eich character you’re fond of quoting was a bit of a Nazi — if one can do such a thing by halves.’
And then a pps, fyi: ‘Still working on your profile. Should be done in a week or two. Let me know what you think.’
It was Wellness Week at the mall. All along the high street, shops had set out tables laden with products for a healthier lifestyle. At the sportswear outlets, lithe young people in bodysuits were spinning, orbiting and rowing. The pharmacies displayed their ranges of vitamins and food supplements, alongside shower attachments, health sandals and bathrobes.
My eyes began to itch.
In the empty space at the bottom of the escalators, Miranda’s Day Spa and Fitness World was offering free back rubs and foot massages to weary shoppers. People reclined in chairs with their pants rolled to their knees and their bare feet on footstools draped with plush white towels. Every single one of the acolytes kneeling before the stools to apply the aromatic oils was young, slim and beautiful, I noticed, while all the shoppers were old, fat and ugly. They must have followed their bliss into the nearest Wimpy once too often. One of the shoppers was talking into a cellphone pinned to her ear by a hunched shoulder, but most lay back with their eyes closed, their faces rapt, ready for whatever was on offer, oral sex or a sacrament. I remembered the photograph of Adriaan Vlok, the former Minister of Law and Order, kneeling to wash the feet of Reverend Frank Chikane, the former activist whom he had tried to poison, seeking a biblical absolution for the crimes of apartheid. I noticed the shoes abandoned beside the chairs, high heels that were bashfully pigeon-toed, trainers with their tongues hanging out. I remembered that there was no photograph of Adriaan Vlok and Frank Chikane: the story had simply been reported in the press. The laying on of hands. It should be the other way round! The shoppers should be massaging the feet of the acolytes, doing penance for their gluttony, vanity and sloth.