The drink, the heat of the fire, the restful conversation between Menasse and Marthinus about the eternal things, about God’s unity with everything and about the complexity of the idea of a beginning, all these acted soothingly on Nick’s turbulent state of mind, so that he gradually started to relax and unwind, and the idea of Victor Schoeman no longer felt quite so unpleasant. So what, he thought, if he’d seen the fucker.
After Menasse had left, Nick told Marthinus about Victor. Nick half expected Marthinus to reply that he’d known intuitively that Victor was in the vicinity, he’d known (intuited) that Victor was going to turn up sometime soon. But Marthinus said nothing of the kind.
All that he asked was whether Nick was one hundred per cent certain that it had indeed been Victor.
He was ninety-five per cent certain, said Nick.
That was good enough, said Marthinus. But what was it, he asked, that Nick had against Victor Schoeman? Look, said Marthinus, Victor was an offensive fellow, and he’d often enough indicated to Nick that he suspected that Victor was the instigator of a whole lot of things that had recently happened – criminal activities and so on – but did Nick have any reason to feel that Victor could harm him personally?
No, said Nick. (He didn’t want to tell Marthinus that it had in fact been he, with all his talk about Victor, who had made him even more wary of the man.) Victor owed him a lot of money, which Nick had in any case written off long ago, but that wasn’t the worst. Victor had admittedly fucked him over properly with the Shallows thing, but in the end that was nothing. The money was nothing. Much worse was that in a way – perhaps unjustly – he held Victor responsible for what had happened to Blinky. Perhaps he was making a mistake. Nobody would ever know what exactly happened there. And that on top of it Victor had taken Marlena with him when he’d left for overseas. More than that? No. But he’d never liked Victor. The man had pissed him off from the outset. And his dislike of him had over the years only grown stronger. The very thought of having to look into Victor’s scheming mug gave him the creeps. That was more or less his position as far as Victor was concerned.
‘Okay,’ said Marthinus. ‘I understand. Oh Lord.’
*
The following morning the agent phoned him. Was he still interested in selling, she had a buyer with a very good offer.
Twenty-seven
I avoid the town even more assiduously than before. I do only the most essential shopping early in the morning at the small Spar supermarket around the corner. During the day and even at night I avoid public places. I watch the Olivier brothers’ videos. I watch series on my laptop. Anything, I’m no longer particularly choosy – series about vampires (God hates fangs), about detectives, about drugs. I become a recluse. No, I become a prisoner in my own home, because I’m scared of coming across the stalker somewhere. If I can keep myself out of sight long enough and well enough, he may lose interest in me and clear out. Did he not have on his agenda a visit to his cousin in the high-security psychiatric institution near Moorreesburg, and a visit to his birth farm in Mpumalanga? All of it lies and fabrications of course, but nevertheless. He must have other matters on his agenda, it can’t be for nothing that he’s come back to South Africa, unless that was also a pack of lies.
When I do venture out onto the streets, I am hypervigilant. I look around me constantly, and behind me, to see if I can’t perhaps spot him out of the corner of my eye. I wonder if he’s instructed people to spy on me. How else could he have followed me into town and accosted me in the coffee shop, and that by chance in the place where Buks Verhoef was shot? He wants to know something from me about Verhoef’s death, something that he thinks I know, and I’m afraid he’s not going to leave me in peace until he’s had an answer.
But I’m on the lookout not only for the hollow-cheeked man, but also for friends and acquaintances. In these days I lack the patience or the appetite for making small talk. With the exception of you (who are in any case not in town at the moment) and one or two others, there are very few people that I wish to have contact with nowadays.
I slip out one evening to see a documentary about a South African artist. The film is showing at a small private theatre in the student centre of the university. I’ve never been here before. I have no particular interest in this specific artist, but I do have a very strong need to get out of my house. It’s a bitterly cold evening. This morning there was snow on the highest peaks of two mountains. Winter solstice is in ten days’ time. It’s evidently going to be a cold winter. The artist is a showman. He has well-developed calves and a lot of money. Some Chinese person arranged a retrospective for him in China. Angels and flying figures are an important motif in his work. Take away the cross, he argues, and it looks as if Jesus is dancing. (I’m not so sure of this.) He executes an exuberant Jesus dance to exuberant music, dressed in a loincloth and wig, his body painted brown. As far as I’m concerned, the whole documentary could have consisted of this dance, because it’s very amusing. Very imaginative, very joyful. He does it on one of the verandas of his home (an extensive mansion), with two statues, one on either side of him. But the scene doesn’t last long enough to make out whether they are two effigies of Christ, or if the statues are supposed to represent the two thieves on the cross. His paintings don’t say much to me, and his artistic process and his ideas even less, but towards the end he dances again for a gathering of guests, presumably once again at his home (pine trees and mountain in the background), dressed in pointed-toe green leather shoes, and an enormous blow-up suit with two stylised women’s breasts drawn on it, and with a kind of Malay skullcap or Christmas hat on his head. This dance I also enjoy greatly. The director is present tonight, and at the end there is a question-and-answer session with him, which seems to me to last for ever, because people ask all sorts of irrelevant questions. All of a sudden I become very restless, because I can just picture the stalker in the meantime sneaking into the theatre, and lying in wait for me next to the curtains, or, even worse, grabbing hold of my arm in the foyer.
The man, my benefactor, the man whom I had cared for full-time in his last months, died at this time of year, at the beginning of winter. While I was reading him Moby Dick, we both of us identified so closely with that novel that it was as if we were on that ship, with Captain Ahab and Ishmael. I started reading to him in the afternoon, just after his afternoon nap, and sometimes carried on until dusk fell, and I had to switch on his bedside lamps for more light. It must have rained at times, but I don’t recall that. It always grew dark very gradually, almost imperceptibly. Towards the end of the novel I carried on reading until the night nurse reported for duty. Then he and I – each in our own manner – had to detach ourselves from the world of the novel, and refocus on our immediate surroundings: the room in which he was lying, the sick chamber, the room to which he had been confined for weeks by his illness. He must certainly have refocused on his bodily discomfort, on his pain, presumably; I on trifles, probably. The atmosphere of the novel remained with me for a long time every day, and I think the same was true for him, even though he was progressively slipping away into a twilight world on account of the heavy sedation for pain.
*
It is now about a year ago that Mr Mandela fell ill and was admitted to hospital. Although everybody was awaiting it, he took a long time to die. Even when they had already started digging his grave at Qunu, he still did not die. One afternoon, I remember, I had a vision. I was standing at one of the windows of my sitting room at about a quarter to seven. I was looking at the wide western skies. On the horizon there was a glimmering and a few dark, drifting clouds. Bare branches were etched against the darkling sky. There were still dark leaf clusters here and there on those trees that had not yet lost their leaves. Then I saw the heavens open and our tata ascending unto them. Straight up he floated, smiling, wearing one of his pretty shirts. He was waving. Slowly he ascended, as in all of history only the Virgin Mary had managed before him. (Think: Titian’s Assunta.) Below him the se
a at False Bay was opening slowly, as in my Children’s Bible the Dead Sea had opened at the behest of Moses for the Israelites to pass through. A multitude of things, I saw in the vision, was revealed on that exposed sea bottom. Weapons, cartridges of bullets, banned writings. Documents, reels of film, tapes with interviews – all the incriminating exhibits the apartheid regime wanted to get rid of – everything full of slick and slime and seaweed and some of the objects covered in barnacles. Some things had already almost turned into coral. Recent bones – the bones of black and white people (indistinguishable, naturally), but also a multitude of fossils from the Cambrian era, from the Permian and Cretaceous eras, and many larger bones from the time of the dinosaurs – even these were exposed. Also the skeletons of fish – large and small. In a room I saw Graça, Mandela’s wife, seated very still on a chair. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was wearing a black veil and she was inconsolably sad. Winnie climbed into a black Mercedes and stepped on the accelerator. I could not read the expression on her face, but she was also clad in black, totally; the ornate gold embellishment on the temples of her dark glasses reflected the light momentarily. Then all of a sudden the old tata was no longer visible. The heavens had swallowed him. Then I blinked my eyes, and the vision was gone. I remember thinking we – my people and I – had done him an injustice but he had prevailed. A few months later they showed on television how his grave was being dug at Qunu among the aloes and the koppies.
You are out of town for a while and sometimes, in this time of isolation, I yearn for the black dog, the noble animal that I had the privilege of housing for a day and a night. It is almost as if it never happened, as if she never slept tight up against my back for a night and regarded me with her compassionate gaze.
In the meantime I keep a close watch on the newspaper for any mention of the man, any revelation of his true identity.
*
The house left to me by my benefactor is not big, but it is in an old, established area, with a view of Stellenbosch Mountain from the sitting room, the stoep and the main bedroom. (There is nothing more lovely than the full moon rising behind that mountain.) I could never have imagined myself as a homeowner. Drinking my early-morning tea, I have a view of the mountain from my bed, and in these days specifically the sunrises are often achingly beautiful. It gets light late, first light becomes visible only at half past six. There are still a few days to go before the shortest day. At times the sky is completely clear (like the past few days) – after days of cold, wet weather. At times there are clouds just above the horizon, just above the outline of the mountain, and half an hour before sunrise the radiance gradually turns to gold. At times the sky is as clear as on the first day of creation. The mountains in silhouette etched in velvet against this lambent light. At times there are great cloud masses, mainly in shades of muted blue, with their upper edges in warmer pinks, on account of the glow of the rising but as yet invisible sun. Some mornings, when the weather is worse, there is a mighty spectacle of dark clouds, with only fragments of clear sky in between. High clouds, often, gravid with rain. As it gets lighter, the clouds assume a less threatening aspect. But every day the spectacle is thrilling, the beauty of it seizing me by the throat and forming a – frequently sublime – transition from night to day, from the oppressive intensity of night-time dreams to the anxiety of daytime reality.
For a considerable time now I have found the company of people wearying. Actually ever since the death of Jacobus. Even as a child I was uncommonly reserved and for all of my adult life never particularly sociable (this was undoubtedly largely due to my blemished mouth), but my tendency to withdraw from the world has probably in the last few months assumed unnatural proportions. It may be why, I now think, I regard my last, intense community with people, in the time around Jacobus’ death, as a thing apart – as sacred! (And so help me God, sacred is not a word commonly occurring in my vocabulary. It is, truth to tell, a word I find deeply suspect. So much the more meaningful that I can so easily invoke it in the context of the death of Jacobus.)
My tendency to self-withdrawal must surely also be one of the reasons why I handled the interviews with Marcus Olivier so poorly – irregular interaction with other people has rendered me less nimble in precise timing in a social context. And also why, indubitably, I experienced the few minutes with the dying Buks Verhoef in my arms – I have no idea how long it lasted – as searingly intimate.
For the last few months, since returning to the town, I have sought refuge in writing the monograph on the Olivier brothers. I believe, tell myself, that I don’t need anything other than that. In this state of mind it’s easy to feel threatened, to feel somebody is following me, intent upon invading my privacy. But that the man, my stalker, is an unsavoury character, and probably a thug as well, embroiled in all sorts of criminal activities, of that I become ever more convinced.
It must surely signify something that the man is following me so relentlessly – from Oesterklip to Frederiksbaai and from there to Stellenbosch. It would not surprise me if he found my cleft palate condition exciting (sexually stimulating) – I’ve encountered that often enough. And then because he thinks I know something about the murder of Buks Verhoef – probably because he himself had something to do with it.
*
Because my benefactor died at this time of year, at the beginning of winter the year before last, I frequently need to think of him again.
When – at the beginning, when he was still mobile – I took him for his special exercise sessions at the local gym, I used to sit on a bench next to the swimming pool while he was doing his exercises. He waded at the shallow end, he moved slowly in the water, which reached only up to his waist. I never encouraged him, that was the job of his special personal trainer (a young man with freckles). He was still robust of build, his chest broad; covered in grey hair (the way I like it). He must have been a heartbreaker, because he was still handsome, with the broad face, dark eyes and solid masculine torso. His penetrating gaze was fixed on me throughout, and when our eyes then met, there was something like a shudder, a sexual shudder palpable between us. I remember it, the heavy smell of chlorine, the vapour against the windowpanes, the patient, freckled young man, his trainer, with him in the water, and my benefactor slowly wading towards me in the water, holding me captive in his fierce gaze. As if he wanted to compensate with the penetration of his gaze for his physical debilitation. By then he was already weakened by his disease, there was a big age difference between us. Because he was attractive, and influential, I believe there must always have been more than one woman in his life. Later, when he was completely bedridden, disarmed by his illness, and he had few physical secrets from me – by this time I was familiar with every phase of the disintegration of his body – I still loved him, and he me, like a man and a woman. It was, I like to believe, the chastest, most selfless love either of us had ever experienced.
*
Last year, in late winter, after the death of Jacobus, when I was staying in the outside room with my friends in the Eastern Cape, when I got so interested in the work of Nancy Spero, in the time when my bones felt as if they were constituted of ice crystals, and I thought I would never again be warm, I was sitting on my own one afternoon in my friends’ large living room. I can’t recall why I sat there all afternoon. In the fireplace were the ashes of the previous night’s fire. Above the fireplace there was a rose in a slender vase. Through the window, if I turned my head slightly to the left, one could see the bluegums in front of the house, and, across the valley, the long, flat hill with the quarry. On top of the hill there was a deserted house. I associated it with the house of the hanged man, as in the painting by Cézanne. I was surprised at how robustly my heart was still beating in my chest, robustly and rhythmically, reliably. There was a chill in the room, although it was not particularly cold that day, and the room was cosy. Outside the air was thin, but clear. Inside the light was cold, the walls had an unusual blue tinge. It was dead quiet. Three o’clock,
half past three, four o’clock, half past four, five o’clock. I thought I was never going to get away from this place, time was passing too torpidly. Time is the obstacle. It’s time that handicaps me; time has taken hold of me. Time is going to restrain me first, then extinguish me. Outside there was a slight stirring in the bluegum leaves. Later the late-afternoon sun shone warmly on these leaves and the hill opposite was bathed in sunlight. A long, low, warm hill. Then suddenly the sun was gone, the sky on the horizon turned a pale pink and the earth cooled down as if at the sudden cracking of a whip. In the room was a dustiness, as if the most rarefied layer of dust was covering all objects. Just at half past five I got up and went to my room.
One evening I saw three figures in the flames of the fire that my friends had made in the fireplace. It reminded me of Daniel and his friends in the Bible – in the furnace, unscathed by the flames. One of these three figures, I could fancy, was Jacobus. Jacobus who had transmogrified and could now manifest himself in various embodiments. Jacobus who had been liberated and was no longer shackled by time. Jacobus for whom time had ceased, and who could now move freely – no longer confined to one single medium, and who could now make himself visible in flames. That evening I stayed by the fire until all the others had gone to bed, and the fire had burnt to ashes. Then I was overwhelmed anew by Jacobus’ searing absence. Then I felt anew the icy cold in my bones.
At this time I engrossed myself in a book on the work of Nancy Spero, and in medical handbooks, especially Gray’s Anatomy. I was often furious, a helpless fury, of which I did not know the origin. Sometimes the fury seeped into my body, then I was cold as ice on the outside, my limbs like ice, but so dark and burning on the inside that I felt I was standing on the rim of a crater, into which I could plunge and by which I would be instantly swallowed up.
The Shallows Page 18
