EXTRACT | ‘The Near North’ by Ivan Vladislavić

About the book

‘Ivan Vladislavić’s hand, not unlike Marlene Dumas, is unshaking as it paints silent, slow and highly vivid, almost cinematic, lines on the canvas of our shared Johannesburg.’
- Bongani Madondo

‘An elegant, gentle, bittersweet ramble through the streets of Johannesburg with the incomparable Vladislavić.’
- Jonny Steinberg

The Near North is a vivid account of life in Johannesburg in times of crisis. From the stony ridges of Langermann Kop in Kensington to the tree-lined avenues of Houghton, we follow the writer through the city's streets, meeting its ghosts and journeying through time and (often circumscribed) space finding meaning in the everyday and incidental.

At once an echo of Ivan Vladislavić’s award-winning Portrait with Keys and an original work of intense acuity and quiet power, The Near North is intimate and expansive, ranging from small domestic dramas to great public spectacles. Wryly playful at times, fiercely serious at others, it is certain to move and delight all who accompany the writer through its pages.

Extract

When Minky and I moved from a house to a flat, we brought with us a large library of books and a small depository of seeds. Amateur gardeners usually plant nursery seedlings, which have a good chance of survival, but Minky prefers seeds, she likes to grow things from the ground up. The seeds from our Blenheim Street garden were in packets from Kirchhoffs, Mayford and Garden Master, the leftovers of earlier seasons, as you could tell by the torn-off corners sealed with masking tape: tomatoes, Italian parsley, lemon thyme, sorrel, rocket, and then lobelia, dianthus, impatiens, verbena, cornflowers and wild flower mixes. In our new home, we were entitled to claim space in the communal garden, but we wanted plants close by, where they could be tended and enjoyed more easily. Some established pot plants had moved with us and so we put those on the balcony, along with a few planters filled for the moment with quick-growing nursery seedlings. The seed packets stood in rows on a shelf in the hardware cupboard, flowers, vegetables and herbs together. The seasons came and went.

In one of those summers, my mother died. Afterwards my sister and I had to go through her possessions, sorting her clothes, handbags and shoes, her collection of clip-on earrings kept in a drawer of the dressing table, the matching strings of beads clustered on the uprights of the mirror, setting a few things aside as mementos and bagging the rest for the charity shops. On the windowsill I found a yellowed envelope with Seeds written on it in her hand. Before I sawed the envelope open with a key, I knew what it contained. Hollyhock seeds. Tipped into my palm they made a drift of flakes like rolled oats. My mother was not much of a gardener but all her life she liked to grow hollyhocks. They towered over us along the garden fence in Rider Haggard Street, in Pretoria, where I was born. I think she may have brought seeds with her from her mother’s house in Clara Street when she got married, because she always said the flowers reminded her of her mother. Later in Clubview, where we moved in the mid-sixties, they grew beside the front gate or at the back of the house where she could see them from the kitchen window. I wish I had asked what she loved about them: perhaps their exuberant growth, the extravagance of their leaves and flowers. In English towns hollyhocks look after themselves, shooting up like weeds along the hedgerows and kerbs. On the highveld they need care, but they will survive on the bare minimum.

After it has flowered, a hollyhock produces a seedpod like a tiny pumpkin, which should be left to dry on the plant as it withers if you wish to harvest the seeds. When the pods become papery you can break them open — if they have not already burst on the stem — and find the seeds arranged like slides in a rotary carousel, ready to bloom into full colour when spring throws the switch. In my childhood, the gathering of the seeds was a ceremony that marked the end of summer. They were kept in a glass jar, some still encased in crackly pods, others scattered loose, and the jar stood on a kitchen shelf along with the peach preserves and chutneys that had been laid down for the winter. The handful of seeds in the envelope from my mother’s room seemed meagre by comparison. I brought them home and shelved them with the other packets in the hardware cupboard.

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The pandemic makes our metaphors literal.
The virus goes viral.
The public space is toxic.
We are sick to death of one another.

Can’t sit still. So I’m sorting, dusting, labelling, straightening the shelves in my study. Packing away spare copies of publications in numbered boxes, then adding the details of these publications, their location in the numbered boxes, and the location of the boxes in my cupboards to the index book that also has a place on an archive shelf. Ordering papers makes even less sense than usual, but it keeps my mind off the cracks of disorder running through every solid thing.

Minky goes to the mall for essential supplies and comes back alarmed. ‘Woolworths and Pick n Pay are packed,’ she says. ‘It’s like Christmas, trolleys piled this high. The shelves are half-empty. I couldn’t get milk or potatoes. The cashier told me they were restocked this morning, but people are buying huge quantities of everything. The strange thing is they seem to be enjoying themselves. No-one’s especially worried about keeping their distance or anything. It’s like they’ve seen this panic-buying phenomenon on TV and now they’re just glad to join in, to be part of the catastrophe and banish the FOMO.’

What will become of the people who cannot panic-buy and stockpile?

The Near North is published by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan