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petit bourgeois, proletarian – the terms fell through a gap between two kinds of knowledge. Through one window I could see the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace and Lenin addressing the crowds in Sverdlov Square; through the other, schoolchildren battling the police in the streets of Soweto and Oliver Tambo addressing the General Assembly. Through one, Trotsky and Breton working on their manifesto in Mexico City; through the other, Breytenbach writing poems in his cell at Pretoria Central with a greasepaint moustache on his lip. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and the Top Star Drive-in. I wanted to bring these views together like the two images in a stereoscope, but I couldn’t see through both windows at the same time. I went up and down like a prisoner, until I was dizzy. Finally, I stood in the middle of the room, under the chandelier, with my head aching.
    It wasn’t a dream: I had never been more awake in my life.
    What exactly is the radical tradition? In one of the elections for SRC, a student politician, a long-haired boy from a suburban home like mine, had styled himself as Kropotkin. He went around in a cossack coat and riding boots like an extra from Doctor Zhivago on Ice. And I had nearly voted for him. What to make of Marx with his Boer War beard and his watch chain? He was treated like a patriarch in War and Peace , but he was more at home in David Copperfield . He might have been a chum of Mr Micawber, always expecting something to turn up.
    I am more flippant about this now than I was then. Had you seen me there, with the cold shell of the car against my bum and the morning sun on my face, you would have thought I was an overly earnest young man. You could not see Benjamin’s Angel – Klee’s Angel, strictly speaking, memorably captioned – leaning beside me with his wings folded across the bonnet. I was troubled. For all my uncertainty about the sacred texts, they had dumped me into history and I had a suspicion that I would never be out of it again. Looking back over the brief span of my life, I felt like some object left on the shoreline, toyed with by a rising tide. If you had a sense of historical destiny, if you were sufficiently drunk with it, you might expect to ride out any storm. But I did not imagine I would be carried in one piece to a classless shore. History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates.
    Gerald Brookes was a red stump of a man with a bald head curiously creased in the middle like an apricot. The lenses of his black-rimmed glasses were as thick as metaphors. He was wearing a black leather jacket belted at the waist and had a camera on a strap around his neck. He was my idea of an East German spy or an ageing bass guitarist. Gerry and the Pacemakers.
    As we pulled off, he leaned over the seat and shook my hand. ‘Gerry. Saul says you’re a journalist in training.’
    Auerbach’s eye flashed in the rear-view mirror.
    â€˜Well, I’m training for something, but I’m not sure what.’
    Then they forgot about me. Brookes wanted to know what Auerbach had been up to and he told him. They chatted about mutual friends, new jobs, divorces, property prices. They passed on good wishes and sent regards. Old mates, apparently.
    Soon enough they moved on to politics. Brookes was full of questions. Was Botha pushing ahead with the Tricameral Parliament? Would the right-wingers split from the Party? And the extra-parliamentary campaign against the so-called reforms? Was it gathering momentum? What was happening on the ground? Auerbach said he was not really the person to ask, as Brookes should know by now, he could only say what he read in the papers, Brookes was probably better informed than he was. But Brookes insisted: you get around, you speak to people, you’ve got your finger on the pulse. You must hear things. What