Moxyland

Kendra

It’s almost dusk by the time I reach Mr. Muller’s apartment block in District Six. I feel a twinge of guilt – I should have called first. But the elevator recognises my SIM on the approved guest list straight away, slides open, and drops me to level minus-four, sending a notification to his home™ automatically, so that when the door swings open, he is already brewing the ultra-caffeine.

He’s got his wall2wall set on Karoo; pale light over scrub hills complete with a windpump, metal blades turning idly in a breeze you could almost convince yourself you felt. It’s an idealised version of the Rural, peaceful, as far removed from the real thing as you can get. At least Mr. Muller keeps the display reduced, so it only takes up half a wall, more painting than wraparound. He doesn’t like to forget that it’s not legit. He says it’s just another kind of sedation. A lulling, he calls it. ‘Watch out for the lulling,’ he says sometimes, like it’s something profound, especially if a commercial sets him off. Commercials really get to him. He says you used to be able to skip them, just prog them right out of your recording, but it’s hard to imagine that now. Then he’ll launch into a rant on how the world has evolved for the worst, although at least crime is down. But the truth of it is he likes to yell at the television, and I should just leave an old grouch and his foibles in peace.

He turns, two cups already in hand. ‘Hello. I wasn’t expecting you today. You’re looking well. Got something new for me?’

I swap him a cup of ultra for two spools of film. He puts them on the counter as if they are holy artefacts. The counter is already looking frayed, the plastic peeling, even though the subterr is only a couple of years old. The whole thing makes me depressed, but Mr. Muller likes to joke that he’s just in touch with his body. It’s dragging down with age, so he’s moved below ground to keep up with it. ‘This way, they won’t even have to bury me,’ he says. ‘Just lock the door and be done with it.’

Of course, he’s joking. The property in this neighbourhood is far too valuable, even the swivels and the subterrs. There are a lot of oldsters living below ground, but the wall2wall scenics make it more bearable.

The major advantage, he says, is that there is no natural light to interfere with his darkroom. It’s really his bathroom, the entrance hung with a tunnel of black recycling bags, because even the fake light from the projected vistas can mess with the process. The problem is getting the chemicals. He has to get them shipped in from a guy in Nairobi, which takes weeks with all the new security checks.

I had about thirty rolls already by the time I found Mr. Muller. Didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with them, because there was only one lab I could find up in Jozi, and it would have been impossible for me to be involved in the process, or to fly up every time I wanted to develop a new spool. I’d gone completely overboard with the film. Partly it was the find, picking up the thirty spools for next to nothing at the market, and what else was I going to do with them but shoot? But it was also the mystery, a grand experiment. When I told him this, when I found him, Mr. Muller knew exactly what I was talking about. ‘It’s an alchemy,’ he said. ‘As much in your head as the camera.’ Unfortunately, it’s also horribly expensive, especially now I have to buy my film from a specialist supplier via the Net, and Mr. Muller doesn’t cut me any slack.

His wife left him seven years ago. Although he doesn’t go into the details, I get the idea that there was an affair involved, maybe even on his side. That’s when he picked up on his old habit. There’s not much call for film development these days, but he’s taught me tons I didn’t know from digital.

If I catch him in the right mood, he’ll haul out his portfolio from back in the days when he was a photojournalist for the Cape Times, which, endearingly, he insists on keeping hardcopy. We’ll flip through thousands of portraits of politicians and public figures, jazz concerts and crime scenes and the Quarantine Riots.

My favourite is the mangled wreckage of a truck engine embedded in the sludge of a driedup irrigation pond, framed by grape vines shrivelled from the temperature rise none of the farmers wanted to believe in. It’s the result of a car bomb set off by a bunch of right-wing students in Stellenbosch, who thought they could do a better job than government inc. with the drought and the superdemic. The only thing they managed to accomplish was blowing themselves up.

Apparently, engines are the only things that can survive an explosion of that calibre. In Lebanon in the 1970s, the photojourns were so jaded by all the car bombs, they turned it into a game to find the engines. Not that Mr. Muller was around then, but he describes the photo as a kind of tribute. This is the way his spiel runs every time he shows me his portfolio, like it’s a recording and he just has to hit play. I think this is a side-effect of getting old.

The image is beautiful, almost black and white, although he shot in colour. It’s the time of day and the way he’s worked the light that washes it out. But it’s the evocative simplicity of the context, of the meaning he’s brought to a landscape that’s impressive. It’s easy to gutwrench with people: Tiananmen Square or Kevin Carter’s vulture baby or the Bangladesh Children’s War, but investing an inanimate object with the same quality is an accomplishment.

If I was still at Michaelis, I would make this the focus of my thesis, but I walked out of classes when dad died and didn’t go back to explain, and now my bursary is null and void. Jonathan keeps nagging at me to reapply, to plead extenuating family circumstances.

Actually, I wanted to use some of Mr. Muller’s images, from the quarantine series in particular, as a juxtaposition for an exhibition. But when I told him about it, planning a contrast between the photos of crams of people fighting through the smoke from the burning tyre-barricades and the hack gas versus the shots I took of the stadium crowds at the Extraordinaries concert last year (on assignment for a PR company), he told me it was pretentious art school crap, that it was totally insensitive to what people in this country had endured, and thank God I’d dropped out of that awful place.

‘So what’s it today?’ Mr. Muller asks. ‘No, wait, let me guess. Portraits of street kids holding their only possessions. Reflections in rear-view mirrors. Close-ups of people’s shoes on the underway.’ He’s always amused by my choice of subject matter, although the street kid idea is genius.

‘You’ll just have to wait and see, Mr. M. I think you’ll like them, though. I’ve been pushing the film.’

‘And how go your plans for the exhibition? All in order, I trust?’

‘We did the final selection yesterday. It’s looking good, although Jonathan’s a bit freaked out by the format, too archaic, the repro …’

‘Yes, yes, you told me. It won’t be perfect carbon copies.’

‘Unless I scan them, which goes against the whole concept of non-digital.’

‘You just stick with what you know. Ignore the whole bloody lot of them, especially that Jonathan. They’re blowing smoke out their asses. You ready?’

We always do the developing together. I wish I could say it’s a sacred rite of the alchemical process, a communion, but really it’s because he doesn’t quite trust me with his expensive chemicals. I’m also not allowed to address him as Dan or even Daniel. Just Mr. Muller, which is so retro.

I reach up to push aside the black plastic bags and he gently takes my arm, pushing up the sleeve. ‘My goodness. What’s this?’ And suddenly I’m embarrassed.

He regards the glow logo seriously. ‘When I was young, I wanted to get my grandfather’s number from the prison camp tattooed on my arm. A sort of homage to suffering.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Jewish. It’s not kosher. And it was in remarkably bad taste. I didn’t realise that at the time.’ He shrugs and takes another sip of ultra, gesturing to the darkroom. ‘Shall we?’