iJusi #34

Anton Kannemeyer

Hope during great reckoning How do you put this year to words? I’m struggling.

It’s the end of experiences for the moment. Lenin said there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.

Coronavirus makes both happen at once.

I am hunkered down with my family in a horse estate in picturesque Hilton. I do branding from a garage office. Business has been brisk.

I have no right to complain.

Lockdown has felt like a plug being pulled. I’ve lost connection.

I’m too much in my own head. Working too hard. We’re homeschooling, we avoid public places, we sanitise the groceries.

The pandemic comes for the healthy. I feel disconnected from other people. I don’t feel the mourning around us. I’m concerned that I might bring the illness in from one of my meetings.

Coronavirus counts the days and blurs the months. It’s a numbers game. Daily infections are x. Do not be one of them.

I have friends whose lives are hanging by a string and others having the year of their life.

How do we measure what has been lost? How do we prepare for what’s to come? When does it end?

Blake Pickering

Cashandra Willemse

Cashandra Willemse

Ernest Van der Merwe

Shane de Lange

Richard Myburgh

Rikus Ferreira

Sibusiso Gcaba

Maaike Bakker

Simon Villet

Vumile Mavumengwana

Vumile Mavumengwana

My Last Stranger Memory 2020 Story and Photography by Suzy Bell

I love strangers. As kids we moved a lot so I grew up talking to strangers wherever we lived.

Instead of Stranger Danger, my mum always said: “You must learn how to speak to strangers, because you never know which stranger may show you kindness, or become your next friend.”

Like any writer working from home during the pandemic, at first, I was absolutely fine. Two months whizzed by, then seven. Today, as I write this, I deeply miss my meaningful interactions with beautiful strangers. Before reverse lockdown in Los Angeles, before the 1.5 million global deaths; the last stranger I deeply engaged with was a 78-year-old gentleman named Orlando, from Cuba. *

A handsome two-toned caramel and mint green 1958 Chevy - its rattling exhaust that had not been smogged since it arrived in Cuba - cruised down Calle Abierto blaring Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

I watched Orlando as he carefully removed a white sheet of paper, folded in four, from his hand-stitched royal blue leather wallet. With elegant piano fingers, he slowly unfolded the A4 paper. Orlando’s thick veins, like river snakes, swam down his golden forearms. Orlando smiled at me. He had dimples.

I watched him survey his beloved park. A schoolgirl carried a silent wild sparrow in a hand-made reed cage.

There was a furtive change of Cuban Pesos for dollars 1-for-1 under the cool shade of a Flamboyant.

This is my last stranger memory of 2020.

It was Friday lunch time in La Habana’s parque San Juan de Dios. I sat beside Orlando on his favorite park bench. School was out. Boys and girls tumbled out from under the high arched faded blue and cream doorway of Escuela Primaria Agustin Gómez-Lubian Urioste. They skipped into parque San Juan de Dios in burgundy and white uniforms, long Orlando Ruiz in his park white socks and neatly knotted burgundy scarves. They were on their way to afternoon salsa rehearsals at Casa de Africa. A huddle of screenagers held their phones, arms stretched, like selfie sticks, as if in revolutionary salute, up to the soft winter sunlight towards the antennae, in an attempt to catch a patchy glimpse of the newly legal government run ETESCA WIFI.

La Habana’s parque San Juan de Dios and the sculpture of Cervantes

A skinny, three-legged dog pissed at the feet of a marble statue in the center of the park. Orlando looked fondly at the statue of famed Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, who led an adventurous life, in and out of prison, shot twice in the chest and once in the left hand, earning him the nickname el manco de Lepanto, the onehanded man from Lepanto. But this Cervantes had two hands and he was holding a book. With their identical silver bushy brows, moustaches and neatly trimmed vintage Van Dyke goatees, Cervantes and Orlando could have shared the same barber.

Today, as I write this, I deeply miss my meaningful interactions with beautiful strangers A strange time in a strange new world without strangers is very strange indeed “I’ve survived Fidel, three wives, and twelve generations of American Presidents,” chuckled Orlando.

Salsa dancing rehearsals at Casa de Africa

“I live in a room in a condemned building. I live like an animal. It’s like a cage. But it’s mine. I have a small gas stove and two blackened pots. No electricity, no shower,

no toilet. It was smashed by vandals. Could I trust you and tell you the truth and say it was the police? I live on the second floor. Beautiful marble stairs, like this statue, but also smashed, and part of the hand railing long gone. I used to live on the first floor, my brother on the second, but he had a heart attack and died, so I moved into his room on the second floor, to feel closer to him.

I have a small balcony. But the view! My small room has the best views in Cuba. The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba and El Capitolio is in my back garden.

Have you seen a Manuel Mendive?

King of the World is about a boxer, Rey del Mundo” said Orlando. “I was not the boxer,” he smiled. “I had a very small role. But I jumped into that movie! Oh, the magic to be in a picture as an actor. It was very exciting and memorable for me...to escape... I would very much like to see it. When you get home, please find it for me. This is my sister’s phone number. Please call her. You can post it to her. DVD. We can only play DVD in La Habana.”

“I live in a cage...” and a view from Orlando’s lobby entrance into the street

Orlando’s treasured synopsis of King of the World

Orlando’s prime location with the best views in Cuba from the second floor balcony

I can walk two minutes to the Gran Teatro De La Habana to watch a Russian ballet. But a balcony seat is 25 Cuban Pesos. My pension is 260 Cuban Pesos ($10/R170) per month. A loaf of bread is 25 Cuban Pesos. A paella at my favorite restaurant, D’Lirios, opposite El Capitolio, will last me a week! But I don’t eat there anymore. The quality of food here is so poor.

Eating in Cuba is a lesson in humility. We get to eat so little. To be born on this island, this beautiful island, is a remarkable thing, but sadly, with no escape. The revolution has been very hard on our stomachs and our souls.”

Throughout, Orlando held his paper, firmly, as if guarding a passport. He finally shared. It was thin, like rice paper. On it typed in black ink, 14 Point Courier font, was a rambling synopsis of a 2006 Belgian production mini TV series, Koning van de Wereld which was only shown on Euro channel.

We sat quietly. We watched the park. We both noticed a lush Clark Gable doppelganger on a nearby park bench. He looked freshly 21, in tight America flag shorts. He had beautiful dark eyebrows, like two perfect crescent moons.

Orlando folded his precious paper neatly back in four and returned it to his hand-stitched royal blue leather wallet. He stood up from his favorite park bench.

Tall, his frame thin. He looked at Cervantes as if to say goodbye, then looked at me, smiled. He walked out parque San Juan de Dios slowly, with a sense of gravity, like every step lived, counted. With the heady fresh scent of dog’s piss and rotten egg exhaust fumes, Orlando ignored the street art in ox-blood red against a yellow painted wall that shouted, LIBRE! *Orlando is currently on a dusk-to dawn curfew in Cuba which has 8075 COVID-19 cases, 7494 recoveries, and 133 deaths as of 26 November 2020.

For the first time since the Cuban revolution in 1959, the capital is under a night-time curfew to keep the coronavirus at bay. Wearing a mask is mandatory. Cuba has been far less affected than many other countries in Latin America.

FOOTNOTE: Talking to a person, especially a stranger, in a communist country, in a public space, to a person who has lived through a revolution, is understandably met with superstition and unease... But Orlando and I developed a friendship, and the next day we went to his favorite restaurant, D’Lirios, opposite El Capitolio.

Toby Attwell

Wilhelm Krüger