A True Story
A new chapter ? Beryl emerges from the mist
I had worked at the steel factory for about 4 years under the constant weight of gloom, failure and grease. It was a place for some salutary lessons ? like the fact that not all people are sane. On my very first day there, I was introduced to a little old man who ran the upholstery department. He had my surname and it turned out that though I had never heard of him he was my grandfather?s brother.
He had been the secretary of the Communist Party in South Africa. This accounted for why I had not been told of him. He and I would play chess together amongst the chair frames and the leather when the lunch hooter sounded. He was a terrible cheat and would often get two moves to my one.
He had given his first name to his brother so that my grandfather might leave Lithuania to start a new life. And he went to the Russian Army. He had shrunk from being a lively athlete to being a feisty and rather crazy little old man.
But he had a most charming little old wife, a lovely woman who once made us a Friday night dinner started with Pea soup and what I thought was Mon but on closer inspection was revealed to be a colony of ants.
They had an even tinier son, a gay man who was so little that it made perfect sense that he should be a Professor of Paediatrics.
My Grandfather?s brother, like so many foolish idealists was a devout communist through the 40s and 50s. One summer afternoon at a cousin?s wedding, which I attended with him, he burst into uncontrollable tears. I asked what was wrong. It was what Stalin had done to the party he said. At which time everyone around our table moved a little further away.
Beryl became quite famous in Johannesburg. He would prowl the empty streets from 3am. I have a frightening memory of driving one very early morning through Cyrildene, in the mist, on my way to take photos of one of the slums out East, and seeing him emerge like a ghostly apparition.
He would walk with his head down intently seeking out the odd dropped coin. At the end of each year he would get his picture in the newspaper handing over his found loot for a charity.
His little wife died. And he became tragically lonely. When my grandfather?s maddeningly stupid wife died (she who had stayed in bed for 15 years because she had Meniers disease), I had the two old fellows reconcile and move in together. They drove each other crazy.
My grandfather died leaving his daughter in charge of his will and possessions. He had an old 1960s Jaguar which had 13000 miles on the clock and which I coveted but she sold it off instantly. And she disposed of the brother dumping him in an apartment block in Hillbrow that she had inherited at the same time.
One of the very first programmes on SATV when it started, apart from the Cosby family which I always found to be one of the really true ironies of living in South Africa was a police programme fondly known amongst the Coloured community as ?Check your mate?.
They showed a picture of a very little dead old man. He had been run over in the early hours of the morning and know one knew who he was. He was my grandfather?s brother and he had been a very proud Cossack once.