Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

five metres behind the horses. Each befriended a particular horse and rider. They were liable to snarl when they were displeased, strong enough to rise on their back legs and pin Victor against the wall, powerful enough in the shoulders to hold him there as he turned his head away from the pouring out of salty dog’s breath until some expression on his face satisfied them. But they almost never bit.

      Three years ago a certain individual sought to take his father’s job. That man told tales to the European staff sergeant, accusing his father of mistreating the dogs and trading their feed items to an Indian market-gardener. The accusation hung in the atmosphere despite the lack of evidence. His father’s cough had worsened while he worried about being put in jail on suspicion of theft or having the right to have his son with him in the barracks taken away. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and had lost the desire to talk to his many friends among the European riders. The pressure soon proved too much to bear. His father resigned from his position, bought the permit for his son to stay in the province so that they didn’t lose the foothold, left him in Pietermaritzburg, and returned to their native area, near Lesotho, in sight of the mountains. He promised Victor to return when rumours about the supposed theft cooled down. Since then, no message had come.

      For three years, asleep or awake, Victor had never been out of reach of his reference book. The fever rose in his head while he searched again in the coat and turned it inside out. He moved the paint tins one by one and set them down in the other corner, pulled the drying rack from the wall, and, finally, opened the door to the outside. There was no lock on it. Light from the corridor came into the room and gave no clue to the whereabouts of the piece of missing property. His head spun.

      The building was silent. The naked bulb above the staircase shone pale and yellow into the morning without producing any light. Victor looked past the staircase into the yard. At this hour the inhabitants were invisible, a hundred and eighty grown and grizzled, restless and fearless men, who argued from their beds and the rows of open toilets, who borrowed rapaciously and tried never to return what had been loaned except to Mr Shabangu.

      The men were exhausted. The day before, in place of church, they had practised dancing on the cement. They drank jars of illegal fizzing orange beer before sharpening their knives for the fights that developed on the way back from the beer hall. They treated Victor as an extension of Mr Shabangu, sending him with messages, warnings, requests, notifications of disputes, and other announcements that were meant to go first to the caretaker and, through him, to the council of supervisors, five Europeans drawn from the church hierarchy and the police. Their lordly messages, however, were received and then ignored by Mr Shabangu.

      Victor looked for his friend. He should be around. The custodian didn’t seem to sleep. At any hour he might be prowling the hallway, inspecting the burglar bars for spots of rust, taking the council members on a tour, leading a policeman to an interview with one of the men about a theft or an assault, standing and thumbing the passages in a Gideons Bible, which shone in an oiled black leather cover.

      Mr Shabangu, after all, was the person to ask if you had lost something or were looking for someone. There were no obvious limits to his knowledge. Sometimes he even seemed to know the future, who might find a position with the machinist shops, a fitter and turner and a large tool and die maker on Rissik Square, which of the residents might wind up in the district hospital, and which one might be arrested in connection with the burglary of a certain premises. Mr Shabangu stood for a system, fixed in place, in which you knew how to measure who and what was important.

      Down the corridor, the door to Shabangu’s room was closed. Victor considered knocking. The caretaker hated any disappearances in the building, whether it concerned a man or a woman or an item of property, because it reflected poorly on him. He had seen the worst that a man could do, many times over, and liked to remind you of the lessons he had learned while drinking straight from a carton of very sour Juba in which the alcohol was as piercing as a European woman’s perfume.

      Many identified Victor as something of a son to Mr Shabangu. They were wrong. Sometimes there was no connection with the older man. The caretaker had to struggle, on certain occasions, to recall Victor’s name. His large face would go blank while he was trying to fix on the letters, as if someone had relaxed the string holding his eyes and mouth in harness. He was unable to set his jaws. It was frightening. You feared that the man had been overcome by a fit and that he might choke. After a minute or two, Mr Shabangu recovered his self-possession, completed his sentence, retreated his tongue, and again seemed to recognise the other person. Afterwards he didn’t refer back to these incidents.

      The people Mr Shabangu truly remembered, for whom his face tightened on the string, were the ones to whom he had loaned money. On Fridays he set up at the desk in the entrance, behind the frosted-glass door, and doled out new two-rand notes in exchange for their signatures. Over Christmas he made longer-term loans, which the residents took to the rural areas to pay for a new roof, or a coffin, or a daughter’s or sister’s dowry, or the celebrations to mark a boy’s circumcision. He took down their pass numbers as part of his security. Looking over the top of plastic glasses, he copied the details into the end pages of the Gideons Bible. When you repaid your loan, a line went through your name with the help of a Parker pen and a ruler.

      The outstanding accounts belonged to men who vanished. Some chose not to return to the urban area because of the pressure. Others died after a short illness and were buried in a potter’s field. Several had left the country to join Umkhonto, in which case the disappearance was not mentioned. Their names were nevertheless kept in the book and transcribed into a new Gideons when more space was required. They might come back into the country someday. Mr Shabangu repeated the numbers under his breath, updating the principal to allow for each month of interest, when he went through his records column by column. He was the only man who could do such calculations in his head. He was as good as an Indian.

      Victor knocked on the door and listened. There was no movement. He waited and put his ear to the door. Sometimes in the passage he heard the caretaker talk to himself on his long trestle bed after he had stored his mops and buckets. His stern lips recalled the names of the debtors and the amounts outstanding in a voice so low you had to stand beside the door to make out the words and numbers. You almost believed you had caught Mr Shabangu casting a spell.

      Victor went back down the hall and into his room, remembering the feeling of bad magic about the custodian. It was common knowledge, when somebody fell behind on his loan, that misfortune was sure to follow. Shabangu sent Victor to remind the person when a payment was due. Victor brought back promises, excuses, and other stories, and the knowledge that the payment would be made. Nobody defied Shabangu for fear of what he could do at a distance.

      When he wanted to celebrate a sizeable repayment, the custodian came into the store room with a dish of sugared and startlingly orange baked beans, or a bowl of saltless bone-white pap from which rose the merest scent of water. On a long holiday, when certain longstanding accounts had been closed, he might bring an unlabelled tin of golden syrup. He ate slowly and delightedly without, however, offering Victor so much as a spoonful. Nobody knew Shabangu’s people. Victor was clearly his favourite at the hostel and perhaps in his life. Yet he didn’t get a spoon.

      Towards others in the hostel the caretaker was obscure and even unfriendly. If Mr Shabangu wasn’t much liked, he was respected on account of his longevity. He was understood to be the oldest man in the building, snow having settled thick on his eyebrows and in the stiff hair around his black mouth. He walked up and down the staircase while hitching one of his legs. He sat down on a chair with a noticeable degree of discomfort and could only find peace in certain positions. Nevertheless, Mr Shabangu was not yet out of his forties.

      Victor went to look again in the store room. He couldn’t rely on his friend to save him.

      Mr Shabangu didn’t knock. He simply arrived by right, putting his broad hands around the door and hauling himself inside the store room, where everything had been turned upside down and moved away from the wall.

      —And how are you this morning, Victor? Is everything going to your satisfaction?

      —I have no complaints, Mr Shabangu.

      The pass book was nowhere. Victor could cry out loud. The past