Stories of the Everyday

When I open the gate into the courtyard, I see Alan perched on a ladder. He is busy fixing the roof of the front veranda. Alan is my landlord. He is in his late 60s, retired and clearly bored. He is also tight when it comes to money, so he tends to fix things around the house himself instead of hiring a handy man. Alan, at least, believes he fixes things, but in reality, the stuff he ‘fixes’ usually ends up being in a worse state a couple of weeks after he is done. On the upside, this gives Alan a never-ending amount of work to do to fight the boredom of his retirement.

A couple of years ago, Alan and his wife, Thelma, moved to the basement of their three bedroom family home, which allowed them to rent out the much bigger top floor of the building – to myself and a friend. Retirement, and the end of Apartheid, weren’t particularly good to the lower middleclass couple. That’s how they gauge the situation. They struggle to make do in a world they can’t relate to any longer, desperately trying to hang on to the past whenever they can, for example by being members of the AWB local branch.

Once Alan and Thelma tried to leave South Africa on the search for greener (or whiter) pastures. They went to visit their son in Florida, perhaps hoping the state where the oranges grow would be closest to the Orange Free State. But three months later, they were back. “Too many Blacks,” Alan told me by way of explanation. What irritated him most was that they were empowered ones at that. People in their own right, not domestic servants. That’s certainly not how he imagined the American Dream. In South Africa, at least, society changes only slowly, despite a democratic Constitution. The previously disadvantaged, as they are called politically correctly, will not be educated overnight, and well off. That gives Alan & Co still another few years in which they can call their domestic workers ‘girls’ and their gardeners ‘boys’ and expect them to respond ‘Yes, Baas’ without being too offended.

Alan knows where he draws the line when it comes to race relations. He knows, for one, that in the New South Africa, he can’t forbid his tenants, like myself, to have black visitors, or friends, but he is adamant that no black person will ever move into his house. And he has no qualms voicing that. Over his dead body. He also won’t shake a black person’s hand. He will greet him or her, if he has too (he has manners after all, he tells me), but shake hands… never. After this conversation, I know it’s time to look for a new place to live as soon as my lease is up.

But right now, I have to make do with Alan as a landlord for a while longer. I walk towards the front door and try to squeeze past him with a quick hello before he can draw me into another one of his dreaded monologues about how hard he was done by. I feel entitled to be a little rude, not only because Alan is a racist, but also because he is not entitled to be unannounced in this section of the house. He is supposed to notify us, but he happily ignores our requests for privacy. This rule was made after my roommate, twice, stepped out of the shower to be confronted with Alan’s face on the other side of the window, fixing things.

Just as I am about to draw the door closed behind me, relieved that I escaped a chat, Alan says by the by: “Don’t worry, I won’t be long. I am just installing a new plate of asbestos here.” I am too dumbfounded to respond. Who in his right mind would add asbestos to their house, in the year 2004? I put down my bag, pour myself a glass of water and step onto the veranda. “I am not too happy with having put additional asbestos into the roof,” I venture. “It’s known to cause cancer. Could we perhaps use a different material instead?”

Alan seems to think I’m hilarious. He almost falls off the ladder, he laughs so hard. “I’ve worked with asbestos all my life, girlie,” he tells me. “And look at me. I don’t have cancer.” Seconds later, his gaiety changes into anger. He must have realized that I am serious about my request and that he won’t be able to quickly blow me off by belittling me. “I had the plate custom cut, and I paid R250 for it,” he vents. When I offer to order and pay for another roof plate made from a different, healthier, material, Alan still isn’t happy, but there is not much he can say. “Whatever,” he says in a huff, making me look like a stickler for useless detail. (Later, when I call the builders’ warehouse, I am told that they don’t sell asbestos any longer because it is a health hazard and that they supplied Alan with an alternative material anyway. Even that he interprets as a confimation that he was right in the first place.)

Almost a year has passed. I have moved out of the dreaded house a few months ago and my verbal battles with Alan are long forgotten, when I run into Thelma in a supermarket aisle. How are Alan and herself doing, I ask politely but without real interest, expecting the usual ‘fine, and you?’. But Thelma’s face falls. Not good at all, she tells me. Alan is seriously ill. Cancer. Terminal. When the surgeons opened him up, they realized that the tumor had already spread throughout his body. There was nothing they could do, so they closed him up again and sent him home.

Six weeks later, Alan is dead.