Nat Gutman’s Wife, Warsaw 1938

Nat Gutman’s wife
was twenty-six when this one was taken.
She stares out at the stale crusts of bread
and bits of herring that are supper tonight,
and seems unable to resign herself.
Her forehead is already deeply wrinkled,
and there are brooding shadows beneath
her eyes. She worries. Her beautiful, full lips
are closed, settling into some expression
she won’t like if she gets old.

Nat Gutman’s wife looks at the stale bread,
the bits of herring, and thinks of
how to make it stretch.
Today her child played in the street
with a bandage wrapped from jaw to skull.
Awakening at four with a toothache,
she tied a bandage around the child’s head. The child
cried with pain. There is no money for dentists,
when your husband loses his job because he’s a Jew.
The child is quiet now, waiting to eat its evening meal
when darkness has fallen.
Such are the markers of meal times
when hunger is day long.

Nat Gutman’s wife is worried,
her world narrows down to a day,
and perhaps the next, and the struggle
to feed a family.
Nat Gutman’s wife’s has lost her name
in the photographer’s memory.
A woman who lives while the photograph lives.

She has a name, Nat Gutman’s wife,
it’s hiding there, just beneath the heavy
lidded eyes and the high cheekbones.
Just beyond the frame.

(Inspired by a photograph in Roman Vishniac’s A Vanished World)

Published in Fidelities XII, October 2005

Wear red, play dead

The invite said: Wear red, play dead,
Put your head in a gilded cage.
Come as your favourite rock star.
Wear black, change your name,
buy a dress made of safety pins.
Come as your favourite Disney character.
Come, even, as yourself.

She stared into the mirror, smoothing her face,
Angling her cheekbones in shades of naked dusk
Her hair curled out of its chignon, along her neck.
Would he be there?
Now, this time, after so long?
Would he recognise her?
Her lace-gloved hands fondled the glass stem of the wineglass.
Gently, she lifted it to her mouth.

The combination of lace, leather, thigh and bottle.
On six-inch heels she grew tall and bold.
As she stepped out of the car, her dress rode up her thighs.
Transformation was complete.
Ahead the lights ribboned across the garden
like snakes of desire,
Twinkling a path to the front garden.
You came! They air-kissed, she and host.

There was the taste of salt and sugar, crisps and wine.
Corks popped, gold foil curled among the trays of party food.
How have you been?
Where have you been?
Had it really been so long?
She drank, she danced, she answered questions and flirted.
The night ticked on. The new year was approaching,
And now she was spinning, flying ....

He found her there – on the soft white carpet, shoes kicked off,
Head under the table. A Mickey Mouse mask grinned next to a shoe.
Streamers draped across the table,
balloons lay plump and purple.
Where have you been?
Where, and not why.
It’s been such a long time.
I’ve missed you.
You’re so beautiful.
What was Nepal like?
Did you find yourself?

He’d found her instead in a suburban house
with an A-frame pitch.
His hand curled around her thigh,
the leather dress crinkled.
They leaned into each other,
she arched her neck against his face, the beard prickling through.
He wrapped his hand against her smooth, flat abdomen.
Again he said: I’ve missed you
They heard the countdown in the distance
a faint sparkle of hope entered the room they stood in.
She leaned into him, whispering now as cheers filled the night.

Published in Cape etc magazine, December 2007/January 2008

Pet shop in Málaga

It’s the kittens in the window
that draw us together, a grandmother with
grandchildren, and me, passing through.
We bend close, she shows the children
the fluffy animals, and we all smile together,
indulgently.
“Bonita,” I say, and the woman’s face falls,
just a fraction, it’s barely perceptible,
but now she knows. I’ve opened up my mouth,
revealed I’m an extranjera, a stranger, and she
moves away. I fooled her, perhaps, with my looks,
but the spell is broken,
I have betrayed her trust with my accent and faulty grammar.
She moves away, eyes wary now, and I’m guessing
she doesn’t even know why.

I’m one of them.

She scurries away into the night,
and I, too, move on.

Published in Green Dragon 5, 2007

Foreign ice

Frost covers the grass, the trees, the shed,
the benches in the garden.
It looks like snow.
The pavements are icy.
I crunch along, leaving footprints.
The ice melts slowly, but appears again by morning.
The sky is almost cloudless,
aeroplanes take off, trailing two
white streams as they ascend;
these curve across the sky and fade.

My boots are ten years old.
A decade ago they also walked London’s streets.
But it was different then,
it didn’t seem so blue and sunny.
I was warmer then,
was twenty, a student
in love with being a foreigner.
I was seeing it for the first time,
and nightmares came only at night.
This time the exile seems so cold
and uncomfortable.
London is strange and foreign.

This time I choke on English bread,
and can’t find the foods I am used to.
This time I tread resentfully on
foreign ice, wanting to make my flat vowels
stand out among clipped ones.
This time the weather is cold,
a bright, brittle cold.
This time I have to live here.

Exile’s icy. You will never be English.
You will never be a Londoner
rushing along the pavements at
breakneck speed to catch a train.
You will never share memories of frozen childhoods
with people who spent winters wrapped in parkas,
hands wrapped around mugs of sweet tea.
You don’t know about making snowmen,
or days when school was cancelled
because of raging snowstorms.
Instead you listen incredulously to a woman on TV
complaining that there aren’t enough types of contraceptives available.
But you come from a place where contraception is not always a given,
where bread and butter is exactly that: a meal,
something to avoid starving,
not a debate on TV among sophisticates
who have never been hungry,
and want, instead, a supermarket of contraceptives.

The ironies lie there, in the crunch
of boots, the jarring clash of
haves and have-nots,
slam up against
my amazement at the complaints when
trains are late
(aren’t they grateful they come at all?),
or that the national health system is in tatters
(aren’t they glad to have one?).

In Harrow the shopping district
has been closed off to traffic
and cinnamon pancake smells fill the air.
Familiar shops cluster along paved walkways:
Marks and Spencers, Next,
New Look, Barclays Bank.
We huddle in our jackets
at one with the crowd of shoppers,
people on leave, buying Christmas presents.
At one and yet so separate from these shoppers
with their jobs and accents,
and shared memories of English winters.
We stare from the outside,
spending pounds, handling the Queen’s face.

Harrow becomes a part of us.
I’ll remember it months later,
recreate it in dreams.
So quickly that transition from winter
to summer, only a flight away.
I’ll never be a Londoner,
I realise this as a bus takes us down
an unfamiliar street
on a cold English day.

Published in Isis X, Botsotso Publishing 2003, edited by Alan Kolski Horwitz

Carnival City, Brakpan, South Africa

Waiters in plaid shirts and cowboy hats
take our orders for hamburgers, ketchup, French fries.
At the fish restaurant there’s a queue
twenty minutes deep.
Lights flash, girls dance on the counter of the bar,
faces bared in lascivious grins. Midriffs bare.
A man gyrates on the counter,
a Stetson on his head.
Machines roll through the possibility of numbers,
apples and oranges flash among the digits.
In the smoking zone I watch, glass protected as
gamblers suck urgently on their cigarettes,
desperately clinging to something.
Tapping ash with one hand, eyes mesmerised,
focused on the flashing racing numbers.
A man in sneakers and combed-over hair stands,
bigger than the machines,
dominator of his destiny.
In two weeks time a group I’ve never heard of will
sing Afrikaans songs in the theatre.
And after that, a famous American comedian
will hold the stage.
In the sweet shop I look for liquorice All-sorts
and buy a can of Coke.
Eleven at night, there are more people coming in
than going out.
Electric heaters line the walls outside,
heating up nothing in the chill night.
I remark on this as we turn to look back,
candy-coloured turrets brighten up the black sky,
a candy floss wonderland,
we could be Anywhere, USA.

Published in New Coin 44, number 2, December 2008

Wits in Winter

The sky is as high and blue
as it was all those years ago.
The air is crispy, crunchy clean,
sharp. Campus is quiet,
students sit on the benches I sat on. Read books.
carry the heavy bags as I did. They stroll in groups.
The air is still: stopped. Life here
exists outside of the rush of work
and traffic, it’s an oasis, calmed on the
edges of the city.

Climbing the spiral, outdoor stairs,
I cling to the railing, don’t look down,
slightly full of vertigo,
as before. Memories come back suddenly,
alarmingly. Twists of the past, intertwined with now.
I could be eighteen, nineteen, twenty again, slightly too
plump in black leggings and oversized top.
But, I’m not. A lecturer passes and I’m closer in age
to him that the students surrounding us .

But it’s there, making me catch my breath,
as though there isn’t enough oxygen here.
Caught between then and now, I’m finally time-travelling,
poised on an edge, here, but somehow there too.
aching, pained, unhappy, lonely,
her face young and bare of make-up, too pale for the day that awaits.

Published in New Coin 44, number 2, December 2008

That Night

There were sixteen years between us,
three children, your wife, a whole life.
There were thirty kilos between us, a couple
of hundred thousand rand, not to mention the house.

All day we drove, through Pretoria, and then on
to Sun City to watch a blue movie. The Chinese porn
star had stretch marks on her hips.
And, then, on and on. We ate dinner at a
Mexican restaurant, and you said you’d drop me off
but there was just something you needed to get
from your rented cottage.

The night was like black dye, soaking us up.
You had car magazines in your lounge, and
copies of Getaway magazines by your bed.
You didn’t believe that I could be a virgin,
or that you could be my first.

The next morning stars exploded, the world had
changed, even though you still weren’t my first,
never would be.
I wondered if everyone knew about this secret, this thing.
I felt initiated, finally, even though, as I said,
you weren’t the first.

That night I drove. Three in the morning,
and in fifteen minutes, running stop streets,
I had brought us home.
The journey should have taken half an hour.
Exhilarated, gunning the engine,
flashing through the night.

Yet, years later,
when I’m almost the age you were, then,
all I feel is that sick thing,
that nausea, that slightly ill
bilious feeling, when I think of you,
that night.

Published in New Coin 44, number 2, December 2008

Harsh truths about love

Performed at Old Mutual Theatre on the Square, Sandton, Johannesburg

Hard Love is a play inspired by a real incident in the life of Israeli playwright Motti Lerner.

“I met a lovely girl,” he writes, “who later became deeply religious. Our lives were virtually impossible from the outset. One day I saw her quite by chance at the theatre. She was married with many children and had shaved her hair.”

Still wondering what she felt, the seed of an idea was planted and a hard-hitting poignant examination of a relationship, is the result.

Zvi (Ashley Dowds) has come to the religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem to see Hannah (Keren Tahor), the woman he divorced 20 years before. They are worlds apart: Zvi has chosen not to become religious, moved away from the neighbourhood after his divorce and has spent the past two decades writing books.

Meanwhile, Hannah has become ultra-orthodox and is devoting herself to motherhood and home, raising a child with a man nearly 30 years older than herself.

Going back and forth over their lives and what each has become, they soon start to reach the real the heart of their conversation. They must discuss the blossoming relationship between Eran and Rivka, ironically their two children from their respective second marriages. How the two teenagers become involved is less important than the fact that they are smitten with each other, much to their parents’ consternation.

This attitude shifts in the play. At first Zvi is amused, and not at all concerned by the relationship which so disturbs Hannah, but as the scene changes, it is Zvi who cannot accept it, while Hannah welcomes it.

The couple were divorced because of the death of their first-born child, and the religious doubts that crept into Zvi’s life after that early trauma.

Hannah has blamed him, saying God punished him for not believing, an idea that has festered throughout the years of her marriage to the only man that would take her, a man twice her age.

“I was divorced, my son had died no one else would have had me,” Hannah explains to Zvi, as he tries to make sense of her life.

In a dance of admissions, guilt and evasion, Hannah and Zvi’s conversation twines through the years, each believing that the other has not been happy in their chosen life. After his second divorce Zvi has flitted from woman to woman, a practice which the religious Hannah cannot condone, or understand.

Early on we learn that Zvi’s mother committed suicide, a martyr to her religion which she saw as imprisoning her. Clearly this early influence has influenced Zvi’s own desire to escape.

There can be no common ground between them, no reaching through that which divides them, despite the love they once felt for each other, and still do.

“To this day all my dreams take place in your street,” says Zvi.

Scenery and viewpoints shift in the second half of the play as we leave the religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. We move away from a traditional setting where a lace tablecloth covers the table, the chandelier is dim and old, and the sideboard is probably a piece of furniture passed down through the generations.

We are in secular Tel Aviv, the light is bright, the furniture modern and minimal, all stark lines and white leather. The action plays itself out within this room, as we see that the balance of power has shifted. Zvi is no longer so sure footed and Hannah has meanwhile gained in confidence and brightened.

But will they be able to breach religious differences and the dark seam of mistrust that has characterised their relationship? You keep hoping.

Tahor brings luminosity to her portrayal of Hannah, beautiful through her passionate beliefs and certainty of faith. Dowds inhabits the complex Zvi.

Both actors take on mild Israeli accents, but Dowds’s voice is sometimes lost within the accent and is indistinct at times. Both successfully draw you into their worlds and their dilemmas. I couldn’t help feeling that the interval was superfluous. The second half is distinctly shorter and I’m sure that we could have held out as an audience. The lack of a break would in this case serve to keep you engrossed.

A jarring element in the production is the use of lights, which suddenly brighten to indicate moments passing. I thought that this device was unnecessary. Darkening the stage for these moments passing would have felt more natural.

This is a story that stays with you long after the rather abrupt, yet open-ended final scene. You will draw your own conclusions as Hannah exits the stage – perhaps that religious differences cannot conquer all, or that two people cannot cross the divide of their own personalities, or something else entirely.

That’s the beauty and strength of Hard Love, which is a play that makes you question your own assumptions about the nature of love.


(Published in The Sunday Independent July 20 2008)

Desert and desire become one

Review of The Imposter, Damon Galgut, Penguin

This is a quiet, powerful story, a novel trimmed of excess, where every word means what it should. A handful of characters dominate the terrain of The Impostor, set in a small, sleepy Karoo town. This is a pared down novel, running at just over 200 pages and yet huge in impact. It draws you in from the moment you begin, and keeps you mesmerised. Quietly. There is no gore; there are, seemingly, no cliffhangers.

And yet, peer beneath the surface and Galgut exposes the gore inherent in all our lives. This is a novel steeped in the realities of life in South Africa today, with its edge of corruption, its contradictions and its searing beauty against complex realities. “The guards and the thieves were the same people – there’s South Africa in a nutshell,” says a character halfway through the story.

It opens on the day that Adam Napier drives into a sleepy Karoo town. He’s going to take up residence in the abandoned home that his wealthier brother Gavin bought some years ago. On the way there he is stopped by a traffic cop for running a stop street and is outraged when he’s asked to pay a bribe to ensure the fine goes away. But Adam won’t pay, he’s just lost his job and his home, one of the reasons he’s moving into this abandoned house. The scene sets the tone, revealing Adam as an upright and somewhat indignant man. It’s only one of the traits that will set him apart in a country and a place where it’s sometimes just so much easier to pay a bribe.

Adam, who once published a book of poems as a young man, is determined to begin writing poetry again after 20 years of silence and working in a faceless corporation. Forced out by affirmative action, injury is added because he didn’t see it coming, that the young black junior was being groomed to replace him. Choosing to spend the first night in the house, even before the electricity and water have been turned on, Adam experiences the first of many strange nights, with only his thoughts for company and a yearning to again write the poetry that just won’t come.

His neighbour is a silent man in blue overalls and with steely grey hair, a man nearing old age. The first sighting is accompanied by a look that does not lead to an introduction, but the quiet shutting of doors. Adam’s life carries on, quiet days followed by quiet nights, with only his own thoughts and regrets for company. Then one day he bumps into Canning at a local shop. Canning, left money by the father he hated, inherited a game farm, Gondwana, just outside town.

Adam will spend the first of many weekends there, drinking toxic blue cocktails and admiring Canning’s black wife, Baby. Canning reveres Adam from their boarding school days, although Adam can barely remember him. But Adam returns again and again, drawn by desire for Baby.

Events move slowly, inevitably to a climax. Things are not what they seem at Gondwana, and changes are afoot. Canning will benefit from this new South Africa … and not just by acquiring a desirable black wife. Part of the beauty and power of this novel lies in Galgut’s finely-tuned use of language. The Karoo comes alive under his pen, a stark harsh Karoo baking in the sun, full of spiky plants and hard, tough earth. Dialogue is carefully pared down and measured. There are no superfluous pages of conversation, and Galgut has an ear for South African idiom and expression.

As Adam tries to makes sense of the changes that will befall the game farm and all their lives, he is taken on a helicopter ride with Canning. “It comes to him that time is the great distorting lens. Up close, human life is a catalogue of pain and power, but when enough time has gone past, everything ceases to matter. Nothing that people do to each other will carry any moral charge eventually. History is just like the ground down there: something neutral and observable, a pattern, a shape.”

With The Impostor Damon Galgut once more firmly establishes himself as a writer of immense and strange power. A writer who can carry the mettle of greatness without a wobble.

(Published in The Star Tonight, May 2008)