The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  I must make up my mind, I can’t sit here shilly-shallying for ever. In the late afternoon I am vouchsafed a sign. The silkworms start spinning themselves into cocoons. I’m relieved. This means that they’re no longer eating; I no longer have to provide them with fresh leaves every day. This gives me greater freedom of movement, if I should want to carry on up the coast. But actually this simply confronts me with an even greater dilemma: at what stage do I get rid of them? The seven worms spin themselves into cocoons, after a set number of days (I have yet to check this out on the internet) seven moths emerge. The seven moths lay their seven eggs. (Why does it all sound so biblical?) How many eggs do seven moths lay, because it certainly can’t be only seven. In fact, it can’t be a trifling number. I can hardly start farming silkworms.

  What am I to do? At what stage do I abandon the worms to their destiny? I can’t release the seven moths into nature. The moths, I read on the internet earlier, can’t fly. Silkworms are domesticated, as dogs are domesticated – they can’t fend for themselves in an unprotected environment.

  I reach a decision. I’ll go back to Stellenbosch. I’ll take the pupae to a pet shop, or to a school. I’ll let myself be guided by the circumstances.

  Thus I allow my movements to be dictated by seven domesticated worms. I pack my weekend bag. Pay my bill. Try to get away quickly. Hope the pervert doesn’t spy me from somewhere and descend on me. Or even worse – follow me again. At a hundred and forty kilometres an hour I race back to Stellenbosch – that place of limited potential – with the seven spinning worms on the back seat of my car. I listen to Jack White singing: ‘I want love to walk right up and bite me/ grab a hold of me and fight me, leave me dying on the ground/ … Yeah I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me any more.’

  That is what I want, I think, while the landscape flies past me at high speed, for love to grab me and fight me, leave me dying on the ground. Yes, (all the same) I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me.

  Twenty-two

  Back in town, back in my house. So much for my little trip to Oesterklip and Frederiksbaai – rudely disrupted by unforeseen events. I don’t have much time, it takes the worms about three days to spin themselves into cocoons. The cocoon, I read, provides a vital protective layer during the defenceless, near-immobile pupa phase. (The mystery of that motionless transformation process interests me.) I have to get rid of the cocoons before the moths emerge, couple and lay eggs. More than 350 eggs at a time, I see on the internet. I could take the box with the seven half-spun cocoons to the nearest primary school. I could try to make a case for the educational value of the silkworm cycle. But I can just imagine the reaction of the teachers – the distrust with which they will regard me. Therefore, on the second afternoon after my return to town, I stalk the nearest primary school like any paedophile. At the gate, on a pillar, half-hidden under the leaves of a creeper, I leave the box like Moses’ wicker basket in the bulrushes. I can only hope that some child will discover it and like Pharaoh’s daughter insist on taking the box home and caring for the cocoons. More than that I cannot do. Even though I feel dastardly at abandoning the worms – by now in an advanced pupal stage, entrusted to my care by a man bearing a strong resemblance to Frankenstein, and very possibly mentally disturbed – in this way to their fate. Fare you well, transforming cocoons, I whisper to them, may you be vouchsafed an eternal and uninterrupted cycle.

  *

  For the time being I focus on the Olivier brothers again. This is what I’m doing, and I engross myself in it. When I’m watching their films – which I do again and again – it is as if I see in every one of them, always and all the time, the presence of a character: most often a hand-carved Punch and Judy puppet, but sometimes also a real human being, who in the way in which he features in the specific film, in the music announcing and accompanying his appearance, in the themes associated with his character, in his movements, in the way in which he is lit, in the actions he performs – operating levers leading to trapdoors, climbing stairs, pursuing characters, bringing about their undoing, peering through a magnifying glass – brings to mind the person of the father, Marcus Olivier.

  *

  In one of the interviews with the Olivier brothers there is a photo of their mother at twenty-one, in tennis clothes, with a racquet. She was pregnant with them at the time. An exceptionally beautiful woman, as far as I can judge from the little photo – tall, blonde like the boys, and apparently equally sporting. In the interview they claim that she played tennis at national level. So that is the woman by whom Marcus Olivier, academic, had his sons. On the face of it a sporting star was an improbable choice of wife for him. He must also have been quite a bit older than she. After they separated, Olivier did not marry again. In none of their interviews do the brothers make mention of their father, and there is no further mention of their mother either. At some stage she must have disappeared off the scene, but I can’t discover anywhere in my research exactly what happened. This is one of the things that I want to try to find out from Marcus Olivier, and that is exactly where I botched my previous interview, by introducing the matter too soon and with too little circumspection – still under the impression of and stupefied by the shock of the dying Buks Verhoef in my arms, the smell of his blood still on my hands and in my clothes.

  *

  In the place of the stricken Karlien, Nick acquired another student to supervise. He had recently noticed the chap, a new student – tall, with abundant shoulder-length hair, a moustache and eye make-up. Jan Botha was his name. Clearly a very different proposition from the dilatory Karlien. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. On the desk in Nick’s office Jan spread out his preliminary sketches, he showed his multitude of notes, and even produced a small model of the installation he was planning. A dark installation, it would appear. It made the wretched Karlien’s plan for her satanism installation seem even more pathetic. Nick wondered how this guy had ended up here – he was so obviously in a different league from most of the other students. He was not inclined to indulge in personal chit-chat, he was focused and to the point. Let not the thick mascara and conspicuous eyeliner suggest otherwise, or the shiny – and probably fragrant – hair. (Nick had the urge to press his nose in it and take a deep sniff.)

  Jan Botha brought new drawings to show Nick every day. The man evidently drew reams of stuff, if that was his daily output. He was clearly a fount of creativity. There was apparently nothing that deterred or intimidated him. Had he known the student who was involved in the satanism incident? Nick enquired cautiously one morning. Not personally, said Jan Botha. In any case not his type, too passive, too little spunk. Nick could go along with that, the girl certainly had remarkably little drive. For a moment he was tempted to tell Jan Botha that he’d smelt her one day, much to his surprise, because he’d assumed that she was odourless – well, odourless in terms of female reproductive processes. He thought better of it.

  What did he think of the whole affair, of the fact that it was apparently connected with satanism? Nick asked him. He thought it was a ludicrous business, said Jan Botha. The students messed around with things they knew nothing about. They were too squeamish or too inexperienced. They could learn a thing or two from the gangsters and criminals of the Flats and Khayelitsha and places like that. The students here thought they were cool, but they knew zilch of the real world. They should pop into the Salt River mortuary for a look-around sometime. That would show them the real world. He did volunteer work there over weekends. He knew what bodies looked like when people really meant business. Even when they were ready to be identified, patched up after a fashion, they still didn’t look their best.

  After a fashion, asked Nick, meaning what? Cleaned up a bit after the postmortem – the worst of the blood mopped up, the more obvious gaping wounds discreetly closed up. The viewing was through a window in any case, which softened the impact for the viewers, said Jan Botha.

  And how did he find this volunteer work? asked Nick. He
wondered in passing whether Jan Botha wore his eye make-up there, at the mortuary, and whether he tied up his abundant hair there (he probably had to). It did not ever seem to bother him while he was drawing, or discussing his work. (His fragrant hair, in which Nick wanted to bury his nose because it filled him with longing.) Interesting, said Jan Botha. And what was the nature of his work? asked Nick. Very menial, said Jan, cleaning up, wheeling bodies on gurneys to where they had to be – to autopsy rooms, viewing rooms, back to the fridges. Sometimes going out to collect bodies, taking photos of the crime scene, that kind of thing. Things didn’t look too great there, he said. The times were very violent. The daily intake of dead people was huge. There were hellish backlogs on everything. People couldn’t keep up.

  *

  Since Charelle’s departure Nick spent much more time at Marthinus’ house than when she’d still been at home with him, and he’d regularly cooked for them. Also because his own house seemed more inhospitable by the day. Winter was approaching. They wouldn’t be able to sit on Marthinus’ stoep for very much longer. (Nick still associated this stoep with the pavilion in the Astor Court.) This evening Anselmo was present again, with his clever, egg-shaped head, and Menasse with the adamantine brow. The moon, which had been new quite recently, was starting to wax again.

  Anselmo said: To be subject to time, means to be subject to constant transformation. Time destroys everything it touches. Newton thought that the earth was six thousand years old. His friend the Reverend Thomas Burnet, an Anglican priest and fierce anti-papist, did not question the Biblical chronology, any more than Newton did, but he was searching for a law of nature. He tried to understand why so many events could have taken place in such a short while. He had a bizarre theory of the Flood: All the water on earth had gathered under the first crust of the earth and had exploded one day, hence all the water. Everything transforms, said Anselmo, except particles. They don’t evolve. But as soon as the particles form themselves into atoms, and the atoms into molecules, at that moment time takes its toll. Time applies only to forms, to systems, not to elementary materials. Everything coming into being in the universe is subject to the irreversibility of time. And ultimately to death and destruction, to dissolution, and to a rearrangement of the original elements from which it was formed.

  Menasse said: Time existed before the beginning of the universe. God’s time is not measurable.

  The moon rose, and waxed, and the night sky changed, and the breeze got progressively cooler. The bay lay stretched out and scintillating below them, and the mountain to the right of them. Nick felt his own thoughts coming and going, coming in and going out, like waves, sometimes closer, sometimes further, sometimes calmer, sometimes more turbulent. As if he were moving in and out of Anselmo’s monologue. But the basic undertone of his mind remained restless and troubled.

  What Menasse was making of Anselmo’s monological verbal deluge was not clear. He sat calmly gazing out before him, always with the cap on, the little smile, secure in the knowledge of the Kabbalistic truth, of God and the angels and the spheres and the shedim. Nick wasn’t sure of the exact reach of Menasse’s faith, what mystical knowledge he had at his disposal – apart from his sensitivity to the emanations of a place, which according to Marthinus made him such a reliable estate agent.

  Anselmo Balla, the lapsed Catholic, was unstoppable this evening, though the more he talked the less coherent he became. As the moon rose in the sky and the rest of the company fell silent, he conducted his monologue ever more assertively. He looked at nobody directly, he never sat still. He quoted St Augustine (Marthinus had claimed that he could never escape Catholicism), he spoke about an enormous molar to which the saint referred in The City of God. Nick pictured a gigantic molar washed up on the beach, as big as a whale. History was unpredictable, said Anselmo, not because it was illogical or depended on chance, but because it was not controlled by natural laws. Then again he was on about apocalyptic movements, which according to him were always revolutionary by nature.

  Menasse remarked that the apocalypse was rooted in a very vigorous Jewish tradition – just look at the writings of the prophet Isaiah in the Bible. Anselmo did not respond to Menasse’s comment – or to anybody else’s – but spoke once again about the end of time (to which he returned constantly). When you talk about civilisation, said Anselmo, you talk about loss, because only an infinitesimal part of what has ever existed on earth – whether natural objects, whether man-made, cultural artefacts – has survived. We are in any case ignorant of the greatest part of the whole of creation, he said.

  Nick thought of his brother, dead for so many years now. His brother who no longer existed. His father and sister had had to go and identify the body in Namibia after the accident. His mother had not been up to it. When they came back, Nick had wanted to ask how it had been, but he didn’t know how. His father was dumbfounded and his sister was her usual undistractably focused self. He wanted to know whether his brother had been disfigured beyond recognition, but he didn’t know how one asked such a thing, he was fifteen years old, and he lay awake night after night wondering what his brother’s dead body had looked like. If he’d lived, his brother would have been almost sixty by now, a middle-aged man. Nick sometimes felt as if his brother had aged along with him. As if he had an awareness of his brother, still older than he, right behind his left shoulder, an unpredictable, reckless, devil-may-care presence. A presence from which he still in a weird way took his bearings.

  Twenty-three

  In the third week of May, more or less three weeks after the incident in which Karlien had been involved, Albrecht Bester turned up in Nick’s office one morning. He was breathless with dismay. His cheeks were flushed, his perfect coiffure in disarray, his eyes bloodshot. For a moment Nick thought the man was going to confess to a night of reckless passion or an unrequited love.

  The police had just been here, he said. The three students who’d been involved in the incident had now also been charged with drug dealing. Can you believe it, groaned Albrecht, and that three of our most promising third-year students! (This was news to Nick, that apart from Jan Botha there were other promising students in the place.) What was our governing body going to say about this? How was it going to affect our numbers in future?

  Nick said it wasn’t Albrecht’s responsibility what students did in their free time. But Albrecht moaned that the charges against the students still reflected abysmally on the school.

  *

  Jan Botha intrigued him. Nick was grateful that at long last there was a student whose work interested him. Jan Botha was older than the other students, he took his work seriously. He was unusual of appearance, with the abundant hair and the eyeliner. Work-shy he was not (unlike most students). Sturdy of build, not the effete, over-refined designer look that so many of the male students cultivated. His work reminded Nick of that of Ed Kienholz, or Joseph Beuys, but with a stronger contemporary feel, and more confrontational. Much of his imagery clearly originated in the mortuary – figures on stretchers, on gurneys, in fridges. Some of his drawings were crude, almost pornographic. He confronted every taboo head-on: race, sex, death. One of his drawings, a dead figure on a steel slab, reminded Nick of Holbein’s panel painting of the dead Christ. Isabel had told him that when Dostoevsky saw it, it made such an impression on him, he was so gripped by it, that his wife had to drag him away to prevent it from inducing an epileptic fit in him.

  *

  Albrecht now regularly came to bewail his lot with Nick. Fortunately he did not expect any response. Nick simply carried on doing whatever he was busy with. Today he was looking at a book on Japanese battle art, while Albrecht was telling him hand-wringingly that the girl’s flatmate had also been taken in for questioning, that in all his years nothing like this had ever befallen him, that he’d been under the impression that what they offered there was more than a mere art education, that they were shaping their students into well-adjusted adults who could fill their proper places honourably in
society, and now it had transpired that they were dedicating themselves to satanism, the lowest, the most perverse activity conceivable. Not to mention drug trafficking. Nick was looking at the reproduction of the Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace from the Heiji era. It depicted the bloody war between two clans during the last half of the twelfth century. A host of fighting soldiers in heavy battle garb were engaged in a fierce battle in the foreground, while the whole scene was dominated by the massive flames of the burning palace. Stylised flames, billowing and curlicuing like waves or clouds. He felt his personal honour impugned, said Albrecht, he did not know where it would all end, but it did not bode well, because it could have far-reaching implications for the continued existence of the art school, and for everything he had dedicated his life to. The soldiers were engaged in brutal man-to-man combat, as was usual in these civil wars. Blood spurted from a decapitated neck, a soldier was held to the ground while another was cutting his throat – quite a few were headless. Decapitation was apparently de rigueur. Couldn’t have been difficult, Nick thought, he’d seen some of those Japanese swords. You impaled your opponent on it, right through the heavy battledress, like a caterpillar threaded onto a thorn. He didn’t know what he was to do, said Albrecht hand-wringingly, he didn’t know what they had to prepare themselves for, because perhaps everything was lost, everything that all these years he’d been able to pride himself on, everything that had made this school a leading, sought-after institution. (Nick had been under the impression that it was considered a very mediocre school.) He’d taken a photo of Isabel in the Metropolitan Museum standing next to a display case containing five of these sets of Japanese suits of armour. He didn’t know how he’d persuaded her to pose for the photo, because she’d not wanted photos of her taken anywhere. Her expression on the photo was reproachful. She was still prepared for love on one condition, she’d said, and that was that he did not look at her face-on. Don’t look into my eyes, she’d said, the intimacy hurts me, I can’t handle it. It had wounded him, it had made him feel unworthy, because he’d still desired her. He looked at the representation of a Japanese suit of armour from the Edo era. Lacquered iron and silk brocade. Used for equestrian battles between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. The woven, harness-like outfits were reminiscent of the ornate markings on some insects. A special metal flap over the heart. The soldiers wore similar harnesses in the night attack on the Sanjo Palace with the billowing flames like clouds. But in spite of the elaborate precautions for the safety of the wearer of the outfit, it was apparently possible to decapitate the enemy effortlessly. The razor-sharp blades sliced through the necks like butter. Still agonising, Albrecht left the room again.