The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  Willem and I are having a drink in one of the town’s more luxurious guest houses. (I don’t anticipate meeting my stalker there.) It’s conveniently situated in the centre of town, and the lounge is convivial, and more private than most other places where one can have a drink in town in the evening. After we’ve drunk a considerable amount of whisky, and Willem has left, late in the evening, I remain sitting in the lounge for a while. Diagonally opposite me a woman has been sitting on her own all evening, of whom I was only vaguely aware, because the conversation with Willem totally absorbed my attention. Now that he’s left, she comes into sharper focus, also because I become aware of the fact that she’s watching me.

  She is older, I would put her deep in the fifties, with a finely chiselled face and a supercilious expression. Short grey hair, stylishly dressed, slender build.

  After a while she gets up, and just before she ascends the staircase to the bedrooms (so she’s a guest here), she stops, and turns to face me for a few moments. I pay for my drink, get up and follow her.

  Her bedroom door is ajar. She invites me in, makes me sit down in one of the deep armchairs, and introduces herself. She’s British, involved here in the country with a project on poverty. She pours us each a whisky. She tells me about her project. Her glance is sardonic, reserved. She’s not over-friendly, actually quite offhand. Unusual eyes. Attractive.

  After a while she gets up and puts out her hand to me. Wordlessly I follow her to the bed. Wordlessly I let myself be undressed by her. We crawl into the heated sheets. Lightly intoxicated by the whisky and the intense earlier conversation with Willem, I submit to her expert manipulation of my body. She handles my body with the ease and confidence with which I imagine her to drive a car. When at last a trembling passes through my body – an almost ecstatic thrill – it is Buks Verhoef’s dying face that I see before me momentarily.

  *

  We must have slept for an hour or two. When I wake up, I get up, get dressed. I take my leave of her softly and thank her; she murmurs something in her sleep. Then I slip out by the door. Outside the streets are quiet. A fine drizzle is falling after some heavy rain earlier in the evening. Still pleasantly befuddled, my body relaxed into well-being after the sexual surrender and the sleep, I am less alert, less inclined to fear that the man may be lying in wait for me at home.

  *

  I can’t bring myself to visit the grave of my benefactor. I don’t want to think that he’s lying there, the once potent male body reduced to bones. At times I still feel as if he’s extending a sexual invitation to me – from beyond the Styx, from the domain of the dead – to which my body spontaneously never fails to respond.

  *

  All the time I have an urge to go back to the coffee shop where Buks Verhoef was shot. While I know without a shred of doubt that that is the one place I must avoid, because that is the place most likely for my stalker to hang out. There is undoubtedly something about the place that exerts an irresistible attraction upon both of us. For me because Buks Verhoef died there in my arms, for him because he could have had something to do with the murder (a criminal returning to the scene of the crime?).

  I also have a desire to visit once again the little room behind the undertaker’s. I don’t know under what pretence. I don’t know how I would announce myself and how I would describe the purpose of my visit. Perhaps that I wanted just once more to be in the space where for the very last time I could lay eyes on my beloved dead friend. Perhaps the room is now being used for another purpose, presumably it’s becoming ever less common to view bodies before the funeral.

  I also consider returning to the guest house, to see whether I can recover the woman who surprised me so, and provided me with such bodily pleasure. But I suspect that in broad daylight I will be less reckless. And the intensity of that encounter is probably irrecoverable. So I decide against it.

  *

  With the passing of the days, I start hoping that the stalker may have beaten a retreat. Perhaps he is already on his way to the family farm in Mpumalanga, via a visit to the disturbed cousin in the high-security psychiatric institution in Moorreesburg. Who knows, perhaps the cousin is the guy who shot Buks Verhoef, the suspect who was sent for psychiatric observation. His severely disturbed cousin, according to the man. Perhaps that’s why the stalker so chronically wants to know about Buks Verhoef from me. Anything’s possible, that much I’ve learnt.

  Thirty

  At the time of the solstice it rains in the early part of the night, but it ceases during the latter part, and by a quarter past seven in the morning it starts clearing. An enormous, solid bank of cloud hovers over Simonsberg. From one end of the horizon it extends, as far as I can move my head. Gradually this cloud bank becomes lighter and smaller, as if dissolving, starting to fray downwards into wisps of cloud. I drink my tea in bed and behold it all. Gradually it starts to grow light, the outline of the mountain becomes more visible, the solid bank of cloud becomes less solid, and another, lighter cloud slowly starts shifting in behind the mountain. By degrees the cloud bank grows ever lighter, the mountain more solid, but still hazy, until by half past seven the massive cloud bank is long, extended and elliptical, smokily soft. Very gradually the light becomes radiant, the cloud shrinks ever smaller, the mountain assumes more presence. In the distance I hear the scolding of geese, and hadedahs, very far away, almost out of earshot, and the sound of small garden birds intensifies. Further to the right the next mountain range is much more emphatic of shape (not easily visible from my bed) and the greens in it are already distinguishable. And then, all of a sudden, at a quarter to eight, a cloud appears behind the mountain, rosily illuminated by the rising sun – still invisible. How glorious it is, the single, rosily glowing cloud behind the mountain.

  I feel the breath of time blowing down my neck. I feel time hunting me down. My friend Willem Wepener commented that only at times does he succeed in standing still and looking at things, without being constantly driven, conscious of the susurration of passing time in his ears.

  *

  He had three options, argued Nick. (Four, if he took seriously the notion of taking up the study of Japanese gardens, which he naturally had no intention of doing.) The most radical, most extreme option – by far the least probable – was to adopt Menasse’s suggestion: telling the agent he no longer wanted to sell; acquiring the art of meditation; sitting for hours (days, weeks) in the polluted rooms, and focusing on the Good and the Godly. A second option was to sell straightaway, regardless of whose criminal clutches would take possession of the house and to what purpose it would be put, looking for another habitation, carrying on with his life and never looking back. A third option was to adopt Marthinus’ suggestion: telling the agent he needed a few days to make up his mind; going away for a while; seeing if distance would bring clarity.

  He decided on the last option. The art school was closed for the winter break. He had time. He would lock up his house, ask Marthinus to keep an eye from time to time. Or get Jan Botha to stay in the house. He thought Jan would be proof against the powerful emanations Menasse had picked up there. If he could last that long in the Salt River mortuary, where the emanations would most certainly be less than positive (much more powerful than regret and melancholy), he would probably also be resistant to whatever negative energy he was likely to encounter in Nick’s house. And it was important, thought Nick, that somebody should live in his house in his absence, because he had the hideous fantasy that when he returned, Victor Schoeman and associates would have occupied the place. And then he would have burnt his arse good and proper.

  He fixed on Oesterklip. The sea air would do him good. Perhaps he could even get fit again, jog on the beach. He had no idea what the place would look like now. He’d been there years ago. Then everything had been pristine. He’d rented a fisherman’s cottage and spent a fortnight there painting. In the evenings he’d gone drinking at the hotel bar. He remembered the flatness of the sea. The beach as well. Narrow and flat, an und
ramatic beach. Pebbly, with washed-up kelp. Stinking. He’d experienced Oesterklip at that time as a strange, unemphatic half-disconsolate place. For him it had been a place of grey – a place in shades of grey. From lighter, warmer grey to darker, cool greys. Grey, Marlena had said, the only anonymous, the least personal colour. Grey did not stimulate, it was perceptually static. The same perceptual stasis was what Nick had recovered on the beach at Oesterklip.

  *

  Nick informed the agent that he needed more time to consider the offer. Jan Botha with the fragrant hair was perfectly prepared to stay in Nick’s house. Even when Nick apprised him of the negative emanations. Jan Botha just laughed. Bring it on, he said. If he could cope with the emanations of the Salt River mortuary, he said, he could cope with any emanations. (As Nick had foreseen.) But scarcely had Nick asked him, than he regretted it. He didn’t know if he wanted the guy in his house. He didn’t know if he still wanted to go away. But it was too late now. He’d reached a decision. It was important for him to go away for a while for clarity, and it was important that his house not be left unoccupied – an open invitation to robber and scoundrel. The whole idea of so-called clarity sounded flaky to him, but a change might just help to unscramble the tangled rigging of his mind.

  *

  Again and again I study the work of the Olivier brothers while writing the monograph. I’m still charmed and intrigued by each of their little videos – even though I’ve seen some of them any number of times.

  For each video they create a special set with a box-like format. Small – sometimes no larger than 90 x 65 x 75 cm. Within this created space the puppets, hand-carved from wood, are then filmed by means of the stop-action technique. Unlike on a film set, the spaces are not reproductions of existing spaces – there is no attempt at spatial coherence or logic. The materials used are mainly wood, glass, metal and cloth. Murky street scenes (like the one in Kafka in Long Street), dark interiors, cabinets, cupboards, empty shelves and unexpected detail are characteristic. Often a mysterious, nineteenth-century Dickensian atmosphere prevails (as in the video The Cabinet of Jan de Grevenbroek). In Kafka in Long Street, one of my favourites among the brothers’ videos, a Kafkaesque hand-carved puppet emerges from a door, and slinks down the street. He is in a night scene, of which the background is made up out of dark, apparently soot-stained panels reminiscent of industrial scrap-metal surfaces, illogically arranged in a shallow space. Small ladders, such as those used in big cylindrical storage tanks, a street light. A length of white cloth draped over one of the panels. Two flying, or suspended, objects, that look like the arms of little porcelain dolls. Ominous, inhospitable, desolate. High up, to the left, in a small opaque window, perches something that looks like a Punch and Judy puppet. The Kafka character is remarkably lifelike – the same intense facial expression, sternly staring eyes and angular face as Franz Kafka. Like all their puppets, he has an immovable face, but moving hands and limbs.

  The spectator feels herself trapped within these bizarre spatial configurations. The puppets are often stalkers, voyeurs. The spaces provide spyholes into other spaces – ambivalent, fractionally exceeding the boundaries of a recognisable reality. The spectator is placed in the role of stalker herself, of voyeur.

  A recurring motif is that of the cabinet – cabinets of curiosities, cabinets of memorabilia, cabinets with pseudo-scientific contents. The dominant ambience of the videos is mysterious, dream-like, ambiguous. Obscure, half-known characters and anecdotes, often relating to history, and sometimes also South African history, are embodied. (The Cabinet of Jan de Grevenbroek, for instance, and The Tempestuous Dream of Doctor H, in which Doctor H, the protagonist, in a small, almost claustrophobic chamber on the upper level of the set, behind half-drawn curtains, is examining the genitalia of a naked, tawny woman with a magnifying glass. While he’s doing this, he is spied upon through a keyhole by another character. Accompanying this are the moving string quartets of Leoš Janáček.)

  In one of their interviews the brothers quote Bruno Schulz: ‘Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant? … Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events.’

  I cannot but see the Punch and Judy puppet – grinning, cynical, grim, with an immovably fixed wooden eye – regarding the whole street scene from his vantage point in the little window, as a portrait of the old father, Marcus Olivier.

  *

  In the morning I sit in bed watching the shifting spectacle of the sunrise. One morning there is a single pink swirl of cloud, with a darker centre. A cloud as wispy as an afterthought, a blithe spilling-over from an excess of possibilities. A playful recollection of godknowswhat. And just for the hell of it, higher up in the sky, an exuberant bright-pink cloud – rosy, radiantly lit up by the rising sun. A cloud glowing in the as yet uninscribed, blanched, pellucid sky.

  Thirty-one

  Nick handed over the house keys to Jan Botha. He got into his car and drove to Oesterklip. The surroundings were attractive. Since his previous visit Oesterklip had grown considerably. He checked in to the hotel. The place did not look at all as he remembered it from his previous visit. If he got fed-up here, he’d move further up the coast the next day.

  His room was small, dark and musty. It was dominated by a dark wooden wardrobe, dark headboard and a too-gaudy, too-floral bedspread. He doubted whether it was going to be conducive to any clarity of mind or vision. The repetitive fish motif on the shower curtain could induce hallucinations.

  One night, and tomorrow he’d move on.

  In the late afternoon he took a walk on the beach. A haze hovered over the sea. Much higher up in the sky there were delicate fleece clouds. The rocks were less grey than he remembered them. They were brilliant orange in patches, interspersed with a rust-green. The beach between the sea and the plant-covered dunes was wide and almost level. Towards the edge bordering the sea it was littered with mussel shells, which crushed under his feet when he walked on them. Three times he saw a seagull flying high up into the sky, dropping a mussel onto the beach, then swooping down to gobble up the cracked-open mussel.

  Some distance along he came across a dead seal. It must have been fresh, because it had no smell as yet. Close to the tail-end the skin was lacerated. The insides bulged out here like raw boerewors. There were many seagulls in the vicinity, but only two were feeding on the seal. He found this dead seal upsetting. If it was a sign, it was not a good omen. (Where was Marthinus to put him at his ease, and Menasse to interpret the premonitions for him?)

  As the sun started setting, the fine fleece clouds were suddenly gone. Nick stood still to watch the setting sun. The sea was a warm yellow-green, much lighter than the sky. As the sun moved closer to the horizon, it gradually turned a darker shade of red, and changed into an irregular, flattened oval.

  With a sinking heart he walked back to the hotel. Near the hotel a man carrying a plastic bag came up to him. Crayfish, Pa, he said, freshly dived out of the sea. He held open the bag for Nick to see. There was little or no movement in the bag, and an unpleasant smell. He took out one of the crayfish, flung it down at Nick’s feet. There was still some feeble movement in the claws. The man had a scar running across his right cheek, from the top of his ear to under his chin. His front teeth were broken. Pa can trust me, he said, my name is Fatey. Nick said sorry, he didn’t want crayfish, and hurried back to the hotel, before the man could utter another word. (Fatey – did he hear correctly?) A figure from a Bergman movie, a harbinger of death, with his bag of stinking, dead crayfish. Something medieval about him, something from one of the DVDs he and Marthinus had watched recently, The Seventh Seal, by Ingmar Bergman. Fatey – little destiny – with his bag of stinking crayfish.

  In the parking lot next to the hotel he noticed an ex
pensive sports car. It hadn’t been there when he arrived that afternoon. He could hardly imagine that the owner of such a car would want to stay in such a crummy hotel.

  That evening he ate at a pizza joint near the hotel. (The hotel dining room had not seemed promising.) Against the wall were posters from the fifties. The light was too yellow. It reflected off the jaundiced walls and the yellow-green melamine table top. A man who introduced himself as Penelope – signwriter and snake catcher – sat down next to him. (Did all the men here have women’s names?! Once again, was he hearing correctly?)

  Were there enough snakes here to catch? asked Nick. Oh yes, said the man, the snakes always managed somehow to slip into the visitors’ cars and then he was just the guy to catch them.

  Penelope had small ears and short, curly hair, cropped close to his scalp.

  At nine o’clock that evening Nick went to the hotel bar. If there was any hope of clarity, and insight into his current psychic state, he’d be more likely to find it here than in his room with the dark wardrobe, the synthetic floral duvet, and the cavorting fish on the shower curtain.

  His heart sank as he walked into the bar. Atmospheric it was not. The kind of space into which, if you were already tottering on the edge of a crater, you could very easily pitch headlong. Here you had to keep your eye fixed on the ball very firmly not to be overwhelmed by despair and feelings of futility.

  He sat down at the bar. He’d just ordered a whisky, when a person – a woman – entered the bar. This was Mignon, the mother of his student – his ex-student – Karlien Meyer. The woman who on the occasion of his and Albrecht’s visit to her injured child had given him a look of unmistakable sexual invitation. Nick groaned inwardly. For a moment he considered clearing out quickly. But unless he dived headlong through one of the windows, the only other exit from the bar was the one through which the woman had just entered.