Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Online Free PDF Page B

herringbone tweed. He hovers at the door to the pub till they give him a take-away cup of something. Maybe yesterday’s coffee.
    He slides his hooked spine down the bark of a fig tree just across the square from my stand. He squats on his heels in the sketchy shade and blows into the cup.
    I nod his way and he stares through me, as if he’s never seen me before.
    His dog lies at his feet and idly surveys the chaos of the market moments before the theatre begins.
    I sense the dog loves his hobo, has no sense his master is on so low a rung in the eyes of the world. But then a hawker’s hardly higher than a hobo in any hierarchy.
    – Never skips a day, the stoneseller chirps. He’ll be under that fig till noon tying bits of flotsam string together. He was a professor of something or other at Rhodes University. Philosophy, I think. He and his wife came to Hermanus to watch the whales one September, years ago. The whales were basking just off the rocks down by the old harbour. A fluke wave snatched his wife off the rocks. She died ... and ever since then he’s not gone further than a stone’s throw from the sea.
    – Did he tell you?
    – It was in all the papers. And I saw it happen from up by the railing. I’d heard the yells and ran over from my stall. He’d gone in after her and folk yelled: Swim out! Swim out! But she was just too scared of the whales. It’s against all human instinct to swim out towards them. And so the sea pounded her against the rocks till her head bled and she went down.
    – That’s hard.
    – Yes. Another fella dived in and hauled the professor out. The professor fought tooth and nail. He wanted to go down with his wife. The fella had to hit him in the face.
    I study the old professor’s wind-lined face. He puts his coffee cup on his head and fiddles a few strands of string out of his pocket.
    Then I put my hand out to the stone seller.
    – Hey, I’m Jerusalem.
    Her forehead furrows as she figures whether I’m dark white (maybe Italian?) or light coloured.
    – Jerusalem Cupido.
    Cupido . An incurably Cape Coloured name.
    She bares sepia teeth through papery lips. Her dry skin scratches my palm.
    – Hunter, she says.
    – Hunter?
    – Lily Hunter. But Lily sounds too sweet for a hardy old bird, hey?
    – Hunter’s cool.
    – Jerusalem’s exotic, she says. I never thought of it as a name for a boy.
    I see in her bloodshot eyes a hint of fumbled coyness, as if recalling dusty lines from a school poem learned by rote.
    – Well, I was born Jude, but no one ever calls me that. Jerusalem’s my father’s joke. You see, I’m half Muslim, half Jew. And the Muslim half of me is half Malay, half Cuban. My blood’s a novel of journeys south from Malacca, Havana and Vienna.
    – Sounds romantic. A taboo love between Muslim and Jew.
    – Their love faded out long ago. If not for me, there’d be no proof of it.
    – Tricky for your folks, I imagine ... under apartheid.
    – I was born in Amsterdam. If they’d stayed in South Africa they’d have been jailed. After Mandela got out it was no longer taboo.
    – He’s a god, hey?
    – Mandela? Ja . A god.
    – So, who do you bow to? Allah or Jehovah?
    – Neither. I never found God in temple or synagogue.
    Maybe God hides in the static between radio stations, in gaps between frames in film, in gullies between panels in comics, in silences between lines of a play. Or maybe God’s found in the metamorphosis of things: the forming of a pearl around a speck of sand, the sea-honing of a sharp shard of beer glass into something smooth-rimmed and beautiful, in the journey of pressed grapes to wine, the paring down of a squid to the cuttlebone.
    Zero Cupido never went to the temple again after he ran away from his folks at fourteen. To him the call of the muezzin is now just a distant mosquito whine in the soundtrack of a Cape dusk, along with the cries of newspaper boys and the crooning of pigeons.
    I dimly recall an outing with my mother to a synagogue