Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

tobacco inside the wrapper as if coaxing a screw, and watched the scenario through the brown smoke.

      As Victor heard how he dealt with his actors and explained the correct gestures and expressions and the way to occupy a certain volume of space, how to react to the other person, how to pause on or speed over the phrases in each sentence, he felt that the director had a wisdom that was, after all, as certain as any farmer’s.

      When the rehearsal was over Polk came up to him.

      —We should probably find Roland now. Are you coming?

      —Of course I am coming. I will do anything, Sir.

      —Anything is not required. You only need to catch sight of him.

      —I’ll find him, Sir.

      —You have to be like a bloodhound. I gather he and Janet had something of a showdown. It’s not the first time. In my opinion, the responsibility is on both of them. He keeps after her. For her part, Janet can act like a bitch on heat. So this is our drama. He’s in love with her. She’s in love with me. I am in love with myself. We have a merry triangle going.

      —I didn’t notice, Mr Polk.

      —You notice everything, Victor. Let’s see if we can find the van before the metre maid has her way with it.

      —The metre maids don’t come over here.

      —So we have the metres and not the maids. The best of possible worlds.

      They were in luck. Polk continued to talk as he drove through town. It was busy. From Friday noon, lasting until Sunday evening, the factory workers had money to spend on alcohol, brown bread, tinned vegetables. The farmers came from the interior of the province, the bachelor in his bakkie and the married man in the family Mercedes, to buy supplies, meet their friends at the new hamburger restaurants, pick up magazine subscriptions at the Christian bookshop, check the catalogues of agricultural machinery, and, perhaps, attend performances of the Natal Philharmonic, which courted controversy by programming Russian symphonies.

      At the next intersection a cement mixer was stuck. Polk put the car in neutral.

      —What is it, Victor? Is it a woman? Is it Janet also?

      —Sorry, Sir?

      —Something’s wrong with you today. You’re usually as cheerful as a starfish. I will work it out eventually if you don’t confess.

      —It’s okay, Mr Polk.

      —It’s okay. It’s not okay. Sometimes you are as difficult to piece together as your friend Shabangu. You can tell me your troubles if you want, but I won’t force anything out of you. Now do you suppose they will ever move this truck?

      The robot went from red to green while the mixer continued to sit in the middle of the road, its massive green cylinder sputtering and the exhaust pipe breathing clouds of unhealthy white smoke, while the driver studied the engine hopelessly. Other men got out of their cars to advise him.

      A Black Maria clambered onto the pavement, two men in the compartment whose arms were handcuffed to the railing above their heads. They looked out at Victor as if to remind him about his permit book. But he was luckier than them.

      Polk continued.

      —In any event, you can’t be worse off than Roland. His father was white. His mother, on the other hand, was a certain coloured lady, Yolanda Adams, and so he was brought up in a coloured area and went to coloured schools and so on. Roland has suffered from a broken heart since he met Janet. The three of us met at the same time, donkey’s years now, when I was putting on my first production. Since then Roland has good days and some bad days when nothing can get his chin off the floor.

      —I can see that, Mr Polk.

      —Ah, but what you don’t know is that all this time, Roland has been quietly married to a very nice lady who is a secondary-school teacher. I have met her and she has nothing to do with any sort of drama. He has a son in class two, plus a daughter in standard three. He is as happy as a clam in the heart of his family, but none of it can protect him from the negative influence of Janet’s existence. That’s love for you. Roland resents me because he sees Janet is in love with me. In my opinion Janet is in love with the idea of love. She has never been committed to the physical side of it.

      —I think it’s too complicated, Sir.

      —We get most of our energy from complications. If you were to ask me, right now, where I get half my ideas from, it is from the two of them, Roland and Janet. But there is also a cost to it. Sometimes I feel that I have to carry around Master Roland on my back, and all his moods and his grievances. I never get the opportunity to put him down.

      When he was drunk, Polk was as sad as the night was long. When he was back to sober, there was a good feeling that came off him, as if you were sitting around a fire and having your hands and face warmed by his confidence. The same was true for the others in the production. If the sun was up, then Polk would continue to pull at your unhappiness until it unravelled.

      The mixer was pushed to the side of the road and they could be on their way again. Victor wanted to tell Polk about his situation with the reference book. Yet there was nothing obvious the director could accomplish. You had to be a good judge of what people could and couldn’t do for you. Many of the Caledonian residents had the idea that they could take their problems to a European and they would be sorted out. Victor thought it was wishful thinking. If Polk made a noise about the disappearance of the permit, then the people in the hostel would know about his plight. One of them would report him to the other, and the magistrate would be forced to apply the rules that were his professional existence. Victor would be arrested by the end of the day.

      They went through the old section of town, where there was a line of fruit-and-vegetable shops shuttered for Friday prayers, and then an international hotel, the library, and post office. Victor read the signs in the shops and the sandwich boards announcing the rugby results.

      Polk had based the play, which focused on the idea of a false accusation, on a story that Neil Hunter had passed on to him. He had tried to explain the connection between the story and the play but Victor couldn’t see it for himself.

      —I invited Neil again although he says one visit to the set is enough. I don’t think he will come.

      —Why not, Sir? As you said, you put some of his ideas in your play. You wrote about him and his life. I would love to see a version of myself in a play.

      —That way you would live forever. But Neil doesn’t really like plays and novels. He prefers abstract concepts instead of life itself. Neil sees the world in a straight line. Maybe you saw that when he came to see the rehearsals. Neil does not understand why we tell stories instead of conveying the facts as they happened. For example, he wants me to say what I think out loud and take the consequences for it. What do you think the police would have to say? Out of the two of us, he is the naïve one. What he is doing, with the Free University, is too much in the open. Because they can see it, they will find a way to stop it. What we are doing is hardly even visible.

      —You think it’s better to be invisible?

      —Making plays to be invisible? You can’t insist on scientific logic if you want to live in this world. As you see, Victor, I can’t rely on the actors to turn up, for the electricity to stay on. I make do with whatever arrives. So I have to learn the trick of making something appear out of nothing. But sometimes, I can promise you, it’s better to make nothing out of something.

      Polk sent him inside to find Roland. The out-of-town actors, soloists, and studio musicians who came for shows or to record parts in a radio drama went to the bar at the end of a shopping arcade, past the women toting their bags on the escalator, convenient to the hotel and the main station. There were three ladies with coloured curlers in their hair sitting underneath the hood dryers in the salon, their handbags laid on the leather chairs behind them.

      Victor realised he was hungry. The sharp smells interested him, burning coffee and sausage rolls in tin foil in the tea room where the court reporters and