Extract Two

FRANK, who was staying behind, told us to prepare ourselves for a shock because part of the cemetery had been vandalised.

My grandfather looked thoughtful. “An anti-Semitic thing?” he asked. “No, just vagrants,” Frank said. I sat in the back seat because Bram was sitting up front. I took out my exercise book and a pencil. I wrote down that Bram had brought with him the rusk he’d been dunking in his coffee back at the office, and that on the seat next to me was an old copy of The New York Review of Books.

We passed the botanical gardens. Bram was explaining the predicament. The vandalised shrine at the Brixton Jewish Cemetery had been designed by the famous architect Herbert Baker, and since all Baker buildings had been declared national monuments, technically it was the city’s responsibility to fix it up. I thought that was interesting.

I stopped taking notes and looked out the window. We were driving through Melville with its bottle store, its pool bar, garage, pharmacy.

Then we were out of Melville and ascending the steep hill with the SABC offices on our left. At the top we passed the enormous base of the Brixton Tower, and then descended the hill on the other side, entering the suburb of Brixton itself.

“Why has this become a bad neighbourhood?” my grandfather asked.

“Like everywhere else in this country,” Bram replied. My grandfather said, “No. Not every neighbourhood in this country is bad.”

There followed a long pause, in which I could almost hear the cogs turning in Bram’s brain. At the end of the pause, he said, “I suppose what I mean is that you get bad neighbourhoods all over the country, and this is one of them.”

At a traffic circle, at the bottom of the long curving road, Bram told my grandfather to turn left. He took the turn, and we headed east now, towards town. Through a high fence on the right I started to see gravestones, many of them obscured by long grass.

On Bram’s instruction, my grandfather stopped the car on a short steep driveway, in front of a great, black, wrought-iron gate in which some long-ago ironmonger had fashioned two Magen Davids. I had been to Brixton hundreds of times and had never noticed this place.

The gate was not for opening. Bram led us some way along the pavement – back up the hill – until we came to a section in the fence that had clearly been trampled down. We took it in turns to step over the muddy threshold. Bram offered to help my grandfather, but he refused his hand. One by one we stepped over broken glass and beer bottles, mattress springs, chip packets, sections of trodden newspaper half submerged in the mud.

Ahead of us the shrine, the ohel, looked like a building after a bombing raid. There was no glass in any of the windows, and bricks around the edges of the square cavities were missing. The ceiling had been taken out.

The only thing left intact was the roof.

I took a photograph of my grandfather and Bram heading out of the structure into the bright sunlight on the other side. On my way through, I saw that in the side rooms were several sodden mattresses, and in the room on the right there was a washing line with a few items of clothing hanging on it. I didn’t want to think about this too much, so I caught up with the other two. My grandfather, shaking his head