A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, by Harry Kalmer

A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, by Harry Kalmer. Penguin Random House South Africa, Penguin Books. ISBN 9781485903475 / ISBN 978-1-48-590347-5

A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg by Harry Kalmer, who had always been interested in hidden histories, the stories of so called little people, those who aren’t mentioned in the official histories.

Harry Kalmer  

Part One: The Storybook

Lonely and small lies on the Rand
their little house in trekker's land;
a speck just in the grazing veld
the thatched roof and thin walls of clay

Totius, Trekkerswee

The first time she saw a camera she still had both her eyes. It was a large wooden box on four legs. The man who was operating it stuck his head underneath a piece of black cloth. He reached his hand around the box, removed a copper lid from the lens and pointed at it with his finger. She and her four children had to keep still for a long time. They were standing outside the tent where they were living. The photographer said they could move again. She had worn her Sunday dress for the occasion, scrubbed the children and borrowed shoes for them to wear. The children's Sunday clothes still fitted, as if they hadn't grown during the fifteen months they'd been in the camp. She got a fright when the photographer handed her the portrait. All four of the children's heads had been shaved to get rid of lice. To see them like that made her realise how poor and neglected they looked. Her own face was a skull. She sent the portrait to her husband in the prisoner-of-war camp in Ceylon. The picture never reached Abraham. The next-door neighbour's daughter, the hussy, struggles to take the photograph. Sara's son, Josef, walks over to show her how the camera works. The hussy flirts with him even though he is a dominee. Sara smoothes down the hair of the blond twins standing in front of her. The boy looks back at her with his mother's blue German eyes. As always, his twin sister does not react to her grandmother's touch. Josef comes walking back and rearranges his black dominee's robe. Her husband tells a joke that makes everybody except her granddaughter laugh. She knows why she has forgiven him so many things. Because he always made her laugh. The neighbour's daughter, the hussy, calls out that they should all keep still. Sara puts her hands on the twins' shoulders. She knows that it is going to be a happy photograph. The storybook that Sara reads to the twins every night is almost done. Then she will have to start at the beginning again. But she doesn't mind. Even though she knows the book off by heart, she still enjoys it; Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves', 'Sinbad the Sailor', Aladdin and his Magic Lamp', and all the other stories Scheherazade had to tell the grand vizier every night to save her life. Her daughter-in-law had been gone for two weeks when her son asked if she would take care of the twins. Without his wife it was too difficult to care for them at the pastorie. Some of her children blame their sister-in-law for going to Germany, but Sara does not. If she could have, she would have gone to Egypt to find her youngest son who didn't return from the war. The letters her daughter-in-law sends and her son reads out loud break her heart. He translates from the German as he goes. The house where her daughter-in-law was born, the schools she attended and the hospital where the twins were born are all gone. There is no sign of her parents or her brothers. [...]

This is an ecerpt from A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, by Harry Kalmer.

Title: A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg
Author: Harry Kalmer
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Penguin Books
ISBN 9781485903475 / ISBN 978-1-48-590347-5
Cape Town, South Africa 2017
Softcover, 24 x 15 cm, 284 pages, 1 b/w image