Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavic

Author:Ivan Vladislavic [Vladislavic, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393071511
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

78

The plane takes off. I am looking forward to seeing Joburg from the air. It is always surprising to discover how huge and scintillating the city is, that it is one place, beaded together with lights. As the aircraft lifts you out of it, above it, it becomes, for a moment, comfortingly explicable. Personal connections dissolve, and you read your home from a distance, like one of De Certeau’s imperious voyeur-gods. Lionel Abrahams, flying over Joburg by night, saw the ‘velvet obliteration’ of all his landmarks: ‘Everything familiar had been forgiven.’ But there is another, more intimate comfort in the vastness: it assures you that someone, inevitably, is looking back. At one of those millions of windows, on one of those thousands of stoeps and street corners, someone must be standing, looking up at the plane, at the small, rising light that is you, tracing your trajectory, following your flight path. But we have hardly lifted into air when the plane banks to the left and the lights dip below the horizon of the window ledge. It is sudden enough to be alarming, this lurch and slide, but I am merely annoyed. I look across the dim sloping interior, but the dull-witted economizer in the window seat opposite has pulled down the shade. Through the other windows I catch the briefest sparkles and flares. The plane continues to bank. We are going to spiral out of here, I can just see it, rising like a leaf in a whirlwind until the entire city has been lost in the darkness below. Disappointment wells up in me, disproportionate and childishly ominous. This failure to see Johannesburg whole, for the last time, will cast a pall over the future. Tears start to my eyes. And then just as suddenly the plane levels out and the city rises in the window, as I knew it would, a web of light on the veld, impossibly vast and unnaturally beautiful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.