KEN BARRIS
Life Underwater
KWELA BOOKS
Dedication
To Anri, for thirty-nine wonderful years
“There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.”
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Port Elizabeth in the 1960s
Simon
The light is too hard in Port Elizabeth on certain days. It has a single-minded ferocity, reflecting off the sea and glaring through the clouds. On the beach, lion-coloured sand throws it back so harshly that Simon’s eyes ache. He doesn’t like the beach that much. It is too hot most of the time. He knows most other boys like the beach. They have self-assurance, or pretend to have self-assurance – it shines out of their bodies so clearly, whichever it is. They claim the sea as their own, as he never can: he loves the ocean, but often fears it.
Once he saw a sand shark cruising on the bottom directly below him, swinging its head from left to right as it undulated forward. He had it in the sights of his spear gun. He could get it right between the eyes. But he didn’t squeeze the trigger. The fish could attack him, or tow him out to sea. He knew it was really harmless, all five feet of it, but his heart leaped into his mouth and he angled off as fast as he could, fearing that he was a coward even more than he feared the shark, his big spear gun dragging foolishly sideways.
There are oysters on the rocks, sea urchins, hermit crabs. Slender brick-red worms tunnel through the foundations of the oyster shells, the part that anchors them to the rocks. They emerge when he cleans oysters for his father, scraping them together to get brown moss off the top. They stink – perhaps it is the shell itself or the moss that stinks – of ammonia or urine. By the time the oysters are served on a tray, nestled in ice and crescents of lemon, the muck has been cleaned off.
Now he is maybe six feet down, not needing to breathe, not yet, flying underwater like a seal or otter. The trick is to recognise the crack between the upper and lower shell, about a millimetre wide. It is difficult because of the mossy overgrowth. He finds one and taps it. If the oyster is healthy it snaps shut, the first part of the movement rapid, the closure more deliberate. If it doesn’t respond, it is dead or bad. This one is fine. He raises the crowbar and slams it in, which is difficult hanging head down, body anchored to nothing but the movement of the swells. He has to slam in the crowbar several times, the sound brittle but clear in the density of water. He eventually wrenches the oyster free. It drifts and tumbles in a cloud of shell fragments and disturbed slime.
His need to breathe is pressing. He lunges down and grabs the mucky creature, then tunnels hard upwards to the surface. Looking up, it is a flexing, shifting silver shield. The light is too hard. Even seen from below, it hurts his eyes.
There is the metallic ring of a propeller in the background. Mechanical sound travels for miles underwater. There is the slow hiss of his breathing through the snorkel as he drifts on the surface, which he always finds so peaceful. There is the slap and release of the surface chop. The water isn’t deep here, a fathom at most. Beside him floats the inner tube that is his dock for the molluscs. It has a galvanised steel ring tied to its underside, from which dangles a gunny sack. The ring is tied to a small anchor, and so cannot drift off.
This morning he nearly drowns. He dives, fins gently above the bottom in search of a promising bed. Puzzlement overcomes him. So many colours! Shades of olive and silver, suggestions of blood embedded in the moss. There are lichens purple and orange, and chalk-green seaweed. He glides over a brick-red starfish, its skin leathery, one of its pentagrammic arms bent at the tip, as if it has an arthritic digit. It reminds him of his grandfather’s index finger, which bends sideways. My rival, he thinks of the starfish, which also hunts oysters. There are little black spots floating inside his field of vision, as if they have always been there. A school of tiny silver fish feeds around him, nibbling at the sea grasses. They make crackling noises which sound like the minute explosions of ice dropped into warm brandy.
He should be needing to breathe. Why, he ponders, is there no urgency? He turns upwards as the sea grows darker and cold fingers touch the back of his neck. Like my own private eclipse, he thinks idly, and then in panic, waking at last to the fact that he is in danger of blacking out. He breaches, kicking frantically, blasts the water out of his snorkel and spits out the mouthpiece. The tube is in reach and he tries to launch himself over it, half successfully. It is still empty enough to take his weight. His heart beats with slow, heavy force. Sun enters the world again.
Eli
I am back from South Africa now, poorer than I was before. My father is dead and buried in the old country, my mother emptied out. I should never have given up smoking at this point: mourning and nicotine withdrawal make for an agonising combination. I won’t bore the world by writing down how I feel, but I need to collect myself again, to find the shards of selfhood I’ve left scattered behind me. I cannot say how this will turn out for health and sanity – it might prove to be a very bad idea – but here goes.
Perhaps this is my earliest memory: In my grandfather’s house are two empty tortoiseshells. They were once giant mountain tortoises, big enough for a child to ride on. Now they are cleaned out and polished, odourless, speckled with dust. No pink meat or ropy entrails, no blood or marrow. This is exactly what turns them into memory, this purification, this purging of everything complex or prone to rot. There are no tortoise gonads, no beady eyes. I sit on them and rock to their empty music. Only I can hear it, no one else. The tortoises sing to me of the old bushland they inhabited, the wild animals that couldn’t kill them, the prickly pear thickets and steep kloofs lined with aloe. They sing to me of the Eastern Cape through which my grandfather drove on his donkey cart once upon a time, selling goods to farmers.
But now Wolf Machabeus is a giant mountain tortoise himself. He moves very slowly, holding on to a walking stick. His hands are swollen, the skin is shiny, stretched too thin. It looks like reddened wax or plastic. Every day he is given a squash ball, which he has to squeeze repeatedly to exercise his hands, to keep them alive. His eyes are milky. They are magnified by thick spectacles that do not help him much. His cataracts are too advanced, his retinas are detached, his optic nerve has died. He is well looked after by my aunts, his married daughters. They take turns to dress him in the thick serge suits he favours. They clean him and lay him down to sleep. Before they dress him, they rub him down with surgical spirits. The smell is wonderful.
He likes to eat borscht, soup more colourful than blood. He eats it ice-cold, with sour cream swirled into it and one hot potato resting under its glossy surface. My grandfather calls it sour soup.
“Try it,” he said to me one day. “Maybe you’ll like it.”
It set my teeth on edge, and the beetroot flavour was hard to endure as violin music. I refused to taste it ever again.
“This soup is too sour,” my grandfather complained that day. Then he added more tactfully, “But for sour soup, it is not too sour.”
He likes to listen to Sophie Tucker. The song he likes best is “My Yiddishe Momme”. When that old Columbia record is put on, he begins to weep. When Sophie Tucker stops singing and breaks into the spoken eulogy in Yiddish, he bawls. My aunts always argue about allowing him to listen to her.
“If he listens to the damn thing, he will cry,” Aunt Hannah insists.
“It gives him pleasure, let him listen,” Auntie Molly proclaims.
And so it goes on. He listens, and her voice brings on floods of tears. Nothing makes him happier. Nothing makes him more sad. When I hear the song, I try to understand his sad Yiddishe momme. What did she look like? Why does he miss her so much? After all, he is well over eighty years old, and she must have died a very long time ago. I know the house they lived in was in a country called Lithuania. I think the house was filled with brown colours and herring smells. It had small windows and a steep roof,