101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  I came back three times in the next week to look at the trunks, and never got past the surface layer in each one, the thick skin it turned to the world. When I tried to dip below that surface, just to see how deep it was, I couldn’t breathe. I had no idea what to do with the trunks, but before I could bite back the words, I found myself proposing to have them carried to my place.

  But you’re about to go away, Margery said.

  That’s not a problem. I’ll put them in storage, along with my own stuff, until we decide what to do.

  A few days later, I came back with the station wagon to fetch the trunks. We got the street guards to carry them out for us. It’s not the done thing, distracting them from their duties, but they were only too pleased to earn a bit of extra cash – until they felt how heavy the things were. They were strong young men but they sweated over it, and got their paramilitary uniforms so dirty I felt obliged to double the fee we’d offered.

  Besides the trunks, I took Claude’s personal library, packed into cardboard boxes. In the end, three trips were needed to carry everything to my house. Nana and the Bear stayed behind. At their age, we agreed, they would not survive the move.

  The trunks stood in the spare room. The house, already made uneasy by my impending departure, felt this shapeless new memory in a back room of its mind, a name that would not come to the tongue. A stranger’s past was seeping out into the troubled air, dragging the hands of the clock back just when they should have been hurrying forward.

  Now that it was done, I could not believe I had brought these things here. In six weeks, I would be leaving (the house had already been let), and I had a mountain of things to sort through and pack up before then. I had gathered the necessary stock of cardboard boxes, garbage bags, mothballs, plastic packaging tape, indelible markers. I had a past of my own to order, and that was what I should have been doing, instead of sitting in this hot, stuffy room – the sash window had been jammed for years: another repair I never got round to – going through Claude’s trunks.

  On a cursory examination, the contents fell into three categories: books, papers, things.

  The books. Most of those in the trunks had belonged to Berti, Margery said. Claude had sold off nearly all his own books when he moved to Somerset Road. Those he’d kept, which had been on the shelf in his flat, were now in five or six separate boxes. In any event, I could tell by the age of the books and the fact that most of them were in German and French that they had belonged to the father. Some of the books for children, the treasures of that unimaginable boy with the sweet mouth and the adorable curls, had his name in the covers. There were some beautiful storybooks, things that could have been collectors’ items, had they not been scribbled all over with crayons.

  The things. Berti’s cut-throat razors. Pillboxes, wallets, portfolios. Twelve pairs of glasses with nearly identical round black rims: every pair Berti ever owned. A broken compass. Cigarette tins with smaller objects rattling around in them (eye teeth, tiepins, a crumbling scarab). Claude’s baby shoes. A lock of blond hair in a wax-paper envelope.

  The papers. Bundles of letters. Generations of family correspondence (Claude to his mother from boarding school in Manchester, Berti to the family from his many trips abroad). Albums of postcards. Photographs from the turn of the century: hand-tinted, mounted on ivory boards joined by silken ribbons, with tracing paper spread over them like veils. Photographs from mid-century: glossy stacks like playing cards, with thick white borders or deckle edges, a profusion of prints. Forty years of pocket diaries. Schoolbooks, passports, maps, itineraries, stock sheets, calling cards, university notes, newspaper clippings. Death notices edged in black. Wedding invitations, certificates, receipts, bundles of sheet music. A recipe book in black-letter type.

  I examined and classified, opened tins and envelopes, and made lists and notes. There were papers in English, French and German. I had gathered from Margery that Claude was German-speaking, although he’d spent part of his childhood in France and his youth in England. That might be helpful for creating order and I made some notes to that effect. Afterwards, I returned everything as nearly as possible to the place I had found it, as if the disposition of things in the trunks might contain a revealing narrative of its own. But my cataloguing did not disperse the haze of irretrievable significance that hung between me and these things.

  It would be better, I knew, not to touch them at all. The custodians of archives and museums wear cotton gloves in the interests of preservation – not of the objects, but themselves. Allowing these memory-laden, use-soiled things to come into contact with living, breathing skin is dangerous. A prophylactic barrier is advised.

  In the following weeks, as I began to pack up my household in earnest, I realised that I had misread the message of Claude’s trunks. They were more than a warning about a debilitating fascination with the leavings of one life, assembled here in tin and leather and glass; they were a prophecy of the distasteful end that awaits all those who set too much store by the written word. The pointlessness of paper.

  Let me be frank: Claude’s trunks were not my only burden. I already had Louis Fehler’s trommel.

  A decade earlier, Louis Fehler (not his real name) had left me his papers to look after while he went abroad, travelling light, and then promptly died. I’d been carrying his blue trommel around with me ever since, packed with outlines of novels, biographical notes and other things, unsure what to make of them.

  It’s a problem, clearly, that people give me their papers. The reason is obvious: I hoard such enormous quantities of my own. My house looks like a public library or some archive of the ordinary; I cannot get rid of a book or throw away a receipt from Pick n Pay. What difference will another little stack of documents make? I am like an animal lover who gets a reputation for taking in strays. The book lover.

  Of course, there’s more to it than storage. These papers are entrusted to me, placed in my care and assigned as my responsibility. People put their papers, or the papers of their departed loved ones as the case may be, in my hands, because they want me to read them, think about them, edit them or otherwise reorder them, and write about them. They would like me to make something of their leavings.

  I tried to explain this to the movers, but they were irritated. The trommel bothered them less than the trunks, which I had failed to include on the inventory for the quotation (they had not yet come into my possession at that time). No matter, they wanted me to unpack the contents of the trunks into smaller boxes. They would injure themselves trying to move these coffins, they said, it was unreasonable of me to ask. Finally they relented and said they would move them as they were, but they made it clear they would not be held accountable for any damage done to my property in the process. They fetched a trolley with two wheels and upended the smallest trunk on its scoop. As if to demonstrate that their warnings had been in earnest, on the way out to the truck they dragged the trolley through flower beds, cracked two tiles on the path and knocked a chunk of plaster out of the gatepost.

  The trunks were conveyed to a self-storage depot next to the highway near the Gosforth Park toll plaza and stacked along with my own possessions. They looked like ancient sarcophagi among my flimsy boxes. The men were right, not coffers but coffins. Even Louis Fehler’s trommel felt insubstantial by comparison. In the stuffy interior of the sealed storage unit, they smelt like old, unwashed bodies.

  Why had I taken on these other lives? Did I hope to ballast my own record with others that were weightier, more complete? Their proximity repulsed me.

  ‘We are stories.’ It’s a notion so simple even a child could understand it. Would that it ended there. But we are stories within stories. Stories within stories within stories. We recede endlessly, framed and reframed, until we are unreadable to ourselves.

  When I returned from abroad in a new century, a time to take stock and start afresh, I found a room in a hotel. From there I was able to undo the ravages of my tenants’ stay and make some alterations to the out
buildings at my house. At last, after weeks of marshalling painters, cleaners and gardeners, I was ready to move back home. On a Friday morning, I went out to the self-storage depot with the removal men and found my life packed away tidily, a little dusty but otherwise in good repair.

  Leaving the trunks in storage was my idea, but the movers seized on it with relief. It was no spur-of-the-moment decision: I had reasoned it through over many months. It would be a good thing, I decided, to keep some distance between myself and Claude’s effects, a professional distance. If I moved them back to my house, they would all too easily seem like mere possessions and the impetus to do something about them might be lost. My study was already crammed with redundant paperwork, things I knew it would be interesting to go through – letters, journals, notebooks – if I could only find the time. Better to keep Claude’s trunks in a separate place. As soon as I had settled back into my work routine, I would come out regularly to the storage unit and look at them properly and systematically. It might be necessary to draw up a schedule. It would be like going to the office or to the archives to do some research. If my researches revealed that the trunks did indeed contain a story worth telling, I could retrieve them and unpack the material in my study. Before then, I would have the opportunity to sift through it all, setting the important things aside and shedding the dross. Then again, if I came to the conclusion that the material was worthless, inaccessible or uninteresting, I could dispose of it directly, without cluttering up my home.

  I did not need an entire storage unit for four trunks. Fortunately, in addition to the full-scale unit I had been leasing (the ‘Householder’), the depot also made available half units (the ‘Voyager’) and quarters (the ‘Weekender’). The last was perfect for my purposes.

  When the removal men had finished loading my furniture and boxes onto the truck, they moved the trunks into a ‘Weekender’ unit in a separate block. They did not complain this time: there was a porter’s trolley at hand and the walkways between the blocks were flat and evenly paved. Like the full-scale unit, this one had a metal roller door and a fluorescent light, and was equipped with wooden pallets to raise things off the floor to avoid potential water damage. There was more than enough space. The four trunks did not even have to be stacked. Instead, they were set out beside one another, where each one was easy to open. There was room too for Louis Fehler’s trommel. It looked quite manageable and contained. I went back home with the sense of a job well done, although in truth the job had not yet started.

  What I did carry with me was the half-dozen boxes containing Claude’s personal library, which I moved into my study.

  The months passed. My plans for the trunks did not work out. In fact, keeping them at the self-storage depot had the opposite effect to the one I anticipated. I was able to forget about them for weeks at a time. Whenever I did think about them, and tried to schedule a ‘research trip’, Gosforth Park seemed a long way to go.

  At the end of the year, when I sat down to look at my budget, I saw that it had cost me R2000 to keep the trunks in storage. I recalled the fact that these same trunks had lain in a warehouse in Cape Town for nearly fifty years and the derisive note I had once made about how Berti and Claude had squandered good money on such a foolish thing. Here I was, struggling to find work, with no money to take a holiday, and doing exactly the same thing. It was high time I cancelled the contract with the depot.

  So it was that I spent one weekend of the Christmas break retrieving Claude’s stuff. The laden trunks were too heavy to move and the only solution, short of hiring a moving company again, was to unpack their contents into smaller boxes and then move these and the empty trunks separately. With an archivist’s precision, each trunk was numbered and each box labelled, so that its contents could be returned to the right trunk, and to the right quadrant and level in each trunk, after the move.

  Before that could be done, a decision had to be made about where to store the trunks. They were large, obtrusive things and there simply wasn’t room to keep them in my house. Among the recently refurbished outbuildings was a room previously used as a storeroom and tool shed, which I had now provided with a shower and kitchenette and intended to use for guests. For the time being, I decided to pack the trunks into this guest suite. Soon I would decide what to do with the material and find moreconvenient places to store it. In the meantime, a guest staying over for a day or two could live with the trunks easily enough.

  The empty trunks were carried out to the guest suite and positions found for them. The two metal trunks were stacked in a corner, while the large steamer chest was placed at the foot of the bed as a sort of divan. The wooden chest went under the kitchen sink.

  When I repacked the contents of the boxes into the trunks, I did make a few changes. I extracted the more valuable items and put them in a separate carton. More accurately, I extracted the items that appeared to be valuable, the kinds of things a burglar might walk off with – the cut-throat razors, the old tobacco tins, lapel badges, a broken fountain pen, the tin of fifty-year-old tea leaves. Even though these items would have fetched little or nothing on the street, I did not want them stolen, and the guest suite was protected by the flimsiest burglar proofing and had no alarm. These things had only been placed in my care. The ‘valuables’ went into the linen cupboard inside (where Louis Fehler’s trommel had already been stashed). All the rest, the jumble of papers, packets, photographs and books, went back into the trunks.

  In my experience, no burglar has ever walked off with a book.

  In the following years, I thought often about the trunks and what would become of them. Occasionally, when I went out to the guest suite with an armful of bed linen because I was expecting a house visitor, I would open the trunk at the foot of the bed and stir the layers of papers around. Sometimes I sat down to page through the books and pocket diaries or look at the picture postcards and maps. Usually the dust caught in my throat after a while, and that was a sign to pack everything back in and close the lid.

  I thought about the metal trunks too, but not as often. The first time a guest came to stay, these stacked-up trunks were covered with a cloth and crowned with a vase of flowers.

  The boxes containing Claude’s library were harder to ignore. They were in front of the shelves in my study and they got under my feet nearly every day. To reach my files I had to move the boxes around. I cursed them often. Finally, it occurred to me to stack them in a tower in one corner, but then I had to move them to open the cupboard and the round of shifting and cursing continued.

  After a year or two – I think this would have been towards the end of 2003 – I decided to catalogue the personal library. Here was a manageable task, something practical I could accomplish in a defined period of time. Once the books had been listed, there would be no reason to keep them, unless something remarkable turned up. I could take them all to a charity shop or a second-hand dealer and shed some of the burden.

  It took me a week or so to type the catalogue into my computer. Each book was listed by author, title, publisher, place of publication and date, and then there was a column for notes on inscriptions, bookplates, illustrations and other distinguishing marks.

  As far as distinguishing marks are concerned, I was appalled by the state of Claude’s books. The habit of scribbling in books with crayons acquired as a child had clearly never been unlearnt. Practically every one was marked by cigarette burns and food stains, pencil scribbles, smears of ink and ash, gouges and tears. An astonishing range of bits and pieces were trapped between the pages, scraps of newspaper and pictures torn from magazines, moth wings, mandibles, antennae and other insect remains, shreds of dottle and leaves of grass. Some of the papers were stuck with grains of rice and unidentifiable lumps of food. One book contained an entire cigarette pressed flat like a flower. Two pages of another were glued together by a fruit pastille. A chicken bone fell out of Madame Chrysanthème. The corners of some pages were folded over and worn down, while others were pierced by hundreds of
tiny holes. The books had not only been used, they had been used up, spent, eaten off, walked over, doused, mortified. After ten minutes of leafing through them, I had to wash my hands.

  There were two hundred and fifteen books. While most were singletons and some were oddities, a few favoured categories were readily apparent. There were many books on murders and trials – Famous Trials by Harry and James Hodge, More Murders of the Black Museum by Gordon Honeycombe, Five Famous Trials by Maurice Moiseiwitsch; and many more on the mysterious and the occult, including Frank Edwards’s Strange World – ‘Sensational stories of fantastic events… astounding and absolutely true!’ – and the Reader’s Digest’s Mysteries of the Unexplained. There were outdated works of German scholarship dating back as far as the nineteenth century – Wilhelm Braune’s Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, Karl Weinhold’s Mittelhochdeutsches Lesebuch and Sigmund Feist’s Einführung in das Gotische.

  Among a dozen volumes by Angela Brazil, the two that had been read until their spines cracked were A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl and The Jolliest Term on Record.

  There was a single book by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey. According to the ornate green plate on the flyleaf of Pixie O’Shaughnessy it had been a Prize from the Sons of England Patriotic & Benevolent Society Imperial Lodge No 558 Awarded to Cecily Tomlinson for the Best Girl at the Brooklyn School, Dec. 1923. On the opposite page, in the handwriting I had by now discovered was Claude’s, stood the phrase: ‘galumptious, page 62, line 16’. I typed it into the Notes column in my catalogue.