The Lion Seeker Read Online Free PDF Page B

not change, their faces grizzled and pouchy. And the laughing always turned into a sigh at the end, a shaking of the head. Then they would start to talk about der haym again, olden times backhome. The forests and the families.
    He watched them shlupping hot tea from glasses or saucers, tea drizzled from the tap of a beaten brass samovar with its smoking coals. The steaming glasses with a fuzzy dollop of apricot jam at the bottom, a wedge of lemon floating. The way they lifted the hot steam to their mouths, the careful shlupping noises through the pouted lips—the longer the sound the better the satisfaction—then the great sigh, appreciating the heat of the tea into the belly. Vestige of a land where snow chilled the fingers and the blood. Where do any of these huddled attitudes come from? It’s the fading place on the far side of Isaac’s furthest memories. Some essence a part of him still yearns toward.
    The couchers. Theirs was a poignant human warmth, and Isaac could have sat before them as before a fireplace in winter the whole day long if not for Mame. He knew his father felt the same warmth. So much better than working alone, all alone, with only the cold tickticking of irrevocable time for company.
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    Down the alley they are moving. A mother, a boy, and a dog. Night has dropped like a sudden curtain: African night. A wind brings mine dust on it, to coat the laundry on the bobbing lines, to make them blink and wipe at their faces, to scratch and hiss on the iron roofs of Doornfontein. The white dog drags on the string behind him so that he has to yank it every now and then. It’s easier for him not to look back. They plod all the way down to the railway bridge. The bruise on his back aches.
    His mother doesn’t say anything. She’s looking toward the other side while they wait and he watches the side of her scarred face in equal silence.
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    It didn’t just happen out of nothing; there were dark rays before.
    If he was in the kitchen when she came back from the couchers with an armload of dirty plates and cups, to fetch more food for them, he would hear acid curses in her breath that puzzled him with their ferocity. Calling them parasites and lazy scum. And if she caught his eye she would stop to lecture in a hiss: what it was exactly that she meant by the word parasites, how these couchers would one day gnaw the very walls down from around them and they, the family, would have to live on the street like half-starved squatting animals, was that right? Would even one of the couchers lift a finger to help them then? Tell me, would they? Isaac would nod but really couldn’t picture anyone gnawing at any walls, and when he thought of the couchers he only wanted to smile, and felt a little sad for them, for their pouchy watery eyes. Even to think of the couch just as an object made him feel good, to lie on its piled threadbare carpets, its rich smoky manly smell, the only soft thing in the workshop.
    Mame would tell him how the couchers were abusing Tutte’s great gifts, his talented hard work, for his father was a craftsman and a gentleman with a heart of solid gold, only he was too good, too good for this world, he couldn’t see what they were doing to the family, because the golden shine of his own heart blinded him so.
    When she spoke this way her eyes would narrow almost shut; the scar tissue would turn shiny, livid. This was the dangerous thing in her that was stirring. Isaac knows it’s there always, like a lioness bound up in a sack. Knows it because he was in the kitchen on the day she finally had enough of the couchers,
enough
. No more polony and pickled fish and booze for the leeches, the freeloading termites! When she barged through the kitchen door that day, Isaac held it for her and watched her drop the plates and go on outside into the backyard.
    â€”Mame?
    Watched her through the open doorway moving into the sewing room so calmly and fetching out for