Johannesburg’s night
A Johannesburger through and through, Mark Varder has realised, after a hijacking, that his city is the near-death experience
I am sitting on a green vinyl chair on the second floor of the Bramley Police Station. It is 7.30am. The man across the room is about to speak on the phone.
“Hell-o-o-o-oh,” he says. The word floats in the air so roundly that I look up to see whether I’m in Johannesburg or colonial India. Then, in a swirling sludge of syllables, he says: “Thusussarjanrabuyesofbrampollis.”
I’m in Johannesburg.
This green vinyl chair, I think to myself, is one of thousands handed over by the old, apartheid regime on April 27 1994 to the new, democratically elected government. The seat of authority has changed, but the chairs are the same.
Where I work, it’s quiet at 7.30 on a Wednesday morning. But I don’t work at the Bramley Police Station. Here it is mid- morning, the place has been cooking for hours.
“Thusussarjanrabuyesofbrampollis.” Pollis. Police. Concentrate.
“I am looking, thank you … Yes, ma’am … How are you? … I’m looking for Mr Skalenko … Skalenko … S-k-a-l-e-n-k-o.”
Three men share this second-floor office. The man on the phone. The man helping me, who has gone off down the corridor. And an old man who sits with his back to me, copying a column of numbers from one exercise book to another. Slowly. He has grey, frizzy hair and thick glasses. For some reason he has a blue-and-white checked tablecloth spread over his desk. I assume all three are policemen, but not one of them is in uniform.
The only thing pinned to a small notice board is a list of emergency numbers. Emergency numbers, I think, the police need emergency numbers. I’m too far away to read the list.
“Oh, he’s not living there. I-I-I-I … see. Thank you, Ma’am.”
His first language is not English; nor is his second. When he’s anxious he stutters. He puts down the phone, looks at a brown file, locates another number, immediately picks up the phone again. The file is one from a pile about 15cm high. It is going to be quite a day.
I’m here to pick up release papers for my car. Release papers: that is terminology I haven’t used before. Nor have I used the phrase “13 Number” before. But I am learning. To get anywhere I need my 13 Number.
The police have my car at their Vehicle Recovery Unit about 50km from here. I was at the unit yesterday, which was when I confirmed that this was not going to be a simple matter of producing my ID and driving off.
I had to identify my car. I could, which was a good start — the car next to mine was completely burnt out. I found my 13 Number too — written on a brown label and tied to the steering wheel with a piece of brown string. There’s lots of brown in the SAPS.
I am particularly keen to get my car back, and not simply because I value having my possessions. An officer has warned me that if it stands overnight at the Vehicle Recovery Unit there’s a good chance it will be stripped. I have already had one night’s grace.
Four days previously, on a Saturday, this being Johannesburg and me owning a car, I was hijacked. I had a near-death experience.
Trouble is, I don’t think the doors opened. If the choirs sang, I missed them.
It was 8.30am. If they had shot me then, as they jumped from their car, I would not have known. There would have been a five- second burst of confusion at the end of my life.
Then nothing. A pool of blood gathering thickly on a piece of warm South African tar. The taken-for-granted now taken. The chance to say goodbye now snatched away. The numb knowing that all that could still be now would never be.
I was in a movie with incredible detail and focus: my keys in the road where I had dropped them, the obscene heaviness of the gun pointing at me, every word exchanged. I have never been more aware of being alive. I was icy I was so afraid.
“Hell-o-o-o-oh.” The policeman across from me has got through for the second time. The same wonderfully rounded English. Followed by the same swirling sludge of syllables. “Thusussarjanrabuyesofbrampollis. I-I-I-I am looking for Mr Skalenko. S-k-a-l-e-n-k- o.”
This one sounds like a business. He waits to be put through.
The old man with the thick glasses and the blue-and-white checked tablecloth has ventured out, slowly and roundly, across the uncharted territories of yet another multi-digit number. I think he’s copying case numbers from one exercise book to another. A secretary with a word processor would do the job 200, 300, 500 times faster. But there are no secretaries, no computers.
“I-I-I-I-I am looking for Mr Skalenko … no, Skalenko … S-k-a-l-e-n-k-o.”
There is a pause. Long enough to know this is another dead end.
There are two roles, I discover, that you can play after you have been hijacked.
You can play the victim. “Oh, isn’t it terrible? It’s happened to me. I’m in such pain. Oh God, I’m a martyr.”
Or you can play the hero. “Hey, look at me, you lesser mortals. I’ve been to a place that you dread. And I’m back. I am a conqueror.” Neither is the truth.
That afternoon in Rosebank I felt I was walking among The Living. I had come within a hair’s breadth, a whim, of being killed. And now I was back. That’s how it felt: I was back. I was walking around. I looked the same as everyone. But I was walking among The Living.
My body felt too tight for itself. Later, I went for a jog, hoping that the day’s sunshine and my own sweat would reinforce the fact that I was alive. But my legs were too stiff to run.
That night, the next, and the next, my body twisted and turned in bed, trying to rid myself of the wrong that has been done. In the dark my brain projected images, replaying not what had happened, but the dozen scenarios that had not.
A week later: I sat in Fournos Coffee Shop in Rosebank. I watched the golden brown of the coffee oscillating in the stainless steel of the spoon. For the first time a thought came to me — I am lucky to be alive.
Two weeks later: I drove to the sea. I drove down on a Friday afternoon. I went because I wanted the waves to massage my brittle body. I wanted the sea to help heal the soft damage inside. I took off my shoes and socks and, as I walked across the sand, towards the waves, tears came to my eyes. I’m lucky to be doing this, I thought to myself.
Six weeks later: I was drowning in darkness. I found myself submerged and struggling, in the senselessness, the horror, that human beings are capable of. I was radiating darkness. So black that I could taste it in my mouth.
Six months later: I still have no idea what actually happens deep inside when you find yourself standing a metre from your own death.
“He’s not there anymore …Oh, I see … two years ago … yes, ma’am … you don’t know how I-I-I-I-I can contact him … oh, you have a number … yes, ma’am … eight, eight, oh … seven, oh, two. Thank you, ma’am. Bye.”
He has a lead. He has yet to make eye contact with me, even though I sit directly across from him. He dials the new number instantly. While he waits for a response he picks up a cold-drink can that has been cut in half and glances into it: his ashtray. He takes out a cigarette.
I was hoping to do all this — release papers, 13 Numbers, whatever else — on my way to work and still be on time. But my man is still out of the office.
By day, it’s the trees that make Johannesburg beautiful. I’ve heard that there are more species of tree here than any other city in the world. It’s a tree zoo.
At night, it’s the lights that make the city beautiful. Arcing forever in every direction under the highveld sky. From Munro Drive. From Northcliff Ridge. From Bellevue. From Kensington. From the Carlton Centre.
At night, Johannesburg transforms into energy. The lattices of light in the buildings. The computers controlling the traffic. The cars glittering like beads on a thousand necklaces. The escalators gliding up and down. The rows and rows of glasses hanging upside down in the bars. The movies starting. The knives and forks laid out in restaurants. The reflections in the glass of the buildings, in the windows of the restaurants, in the car windscreens.
No wonder I have lived here all my life. The night is man-made, but it sparks a thousand primal places in my soul.
A woman shrieks, blood pumping wildly from her stomach, her life flowing into a municipal drain. A young man walks away with her handbag, rummaging: R20 spending money for the rest of the evening.
Johannesburg 1997. A motor car, a television set, a microwave, a bracelet, a pair of sunglasses … these things have more value than a human being.
There, he has just proved it to me.
It is easy to believe that society is inextricably woven into the fabric of things. I lull myself into the warm comfort of it.
But it’s an illusion.
The cold metal of a crowbar plunges through my bedroom window, smashed in from another world, to remind me that society is a delicate, fragile thing.
The rules of society. Our morals. Our wonderful ethics. Our profound and immutable laws: they are man-made. They are abstract. Arbitrary. A whim.
Johannesburg is an illusion. Of power, grace, civilisation, order.
It was.
Now, every day, the glass explodes, the illusion shatters. Petty crimes. Burglaries. Armed robberies. Assaults. Muggings. Attacks. Hijackings. Rapes. Murders.
These things wear away at us daily. They happen to our friends and colleagues. Our brothers and sisters. Our mothers and fathers. Our wives and husbands. Our children. Ordinary people. Ordinary life.
It takes months for the penny to drop. But it does. My hijacking is not the near-death experience.
Johannesburg. You just have to have friends here. You just have to work here. You just have to read the paper here. You just have to get in your car here.
Johannesburg is the near-death experience.
Johannesburg is not, of course, the only city in the history of mankind to have gone to the edge and looked over. So to speak.
Right now other cities get short, sharp glimpses of the same view In a recent survey, for instance, it’s revealed that Parisians are depressed about the future of their city. They have the “Paris Blues”. Londoners are slightly better off. They are only “worried”.
It is easy to dismiss these sophisticated anxieties as silly, as nothing. Especially when you live in the poverty of a city like New Delhi or the horror of one like Sarajevo.
It’s just that in Johannesburg we don’t get short, sharp glimpses. We are rubbed raw, face-to-face with something most humans would prefer to avoid.
We are not safe, certainly. Not from violence. Not from the perpetrators. This we know.
But the wound goes deeper. Something troubles our sleep. It makes us lonely. It whispers to us when everyone else seems to be revelling in the moment. It wakes us on a Saturday afternoon with the blues. It drags us into quiet, unspoken despair, the undertow.
This pain. The pain of Johannesburg.
There is no sea in Johannesburg. There are no tides. No rise and fall, no ebb and flow. There is no reminder that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. That everything comes and everything goes.
Even hope and despair. Even meaning and meaninglessness.
Saturday mornings. A weekly celebration. A little landmark. A cappuccino and an apple danish. A glass of water on the side. Either with a friend or with the Mail & Guardian.
Fifteen minutes after I had been hijacked two policemen arrived to take my statement.
I looked at the one with a pistol shoved into his pants and I wondered, is he a policeman, a criminal, or both? He asked my date of birth.
“The 28th of April.”
“You’re a Taurus, sir.”
No amount of First World post-trauma training could have produced such a ridiculously warm, wonderful remark.
I started laughing. “And you?”
“I’m also a Taurus. All the best people are Taurus.”
“Hell-o-o-o-oh.
Thusussarjanrabuyesofbrampollis. I-I-I-I … yes, Bramley Pollis. I am looking, please, for Mr Skalenko. Skalenko. S-k-a-l- e-n-k-o. Yes, thank you.”
Things are looking up. Someone is being quite helpful.
“… And how long ago? … I-I-I-I … you don’t know how I can contact him? …Oh, I see … no, he reported his vehicle stolen … October 1995 … no, not 96, 95 … a Toyota Venture … yes, it is a long time ago … but we have recovered it … in Harrismith … we would like him to fetch it … Oh, I see … he’s left the country? … Oh, I see … he’s gone to Poland.”
Poland, I think to myself. Poland. Now what?
It’s nearly 8 o’clock on a Wednesday morning. I’ve been here almost half-an- hour. It’s a place I don’t want to be, right on the border of Alex, four days after I was hijacked.
He puts down the phone, stubs out his cigarette in the cold-drink can and, for the first time, he pauses.
There is no Meaning of Life, but there are lots of little meanings. There is no One Thing, but there are lots of little things. There is the pain of Johannesburg and its unexpected pleasures.
He crosses his arms, leans forward on his desk, and looks at me.
“Poland,” he says and breaks into a grin.
— Mark Varder is a director and copywriter at Sonnenberg Murphy Leo Burnett