The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  Nick told Marthinus that he hoped Jan Botha would grow his hair again and wear eye make-up when he felt he’d done enough penance. He hoped it would happen soon, because Jan Botha’s work was losing its cutting edge.

  *

  Early one morning I once again have a vision. It comes to me with great clarity while I’m still lying in my bed between sleeping and waking, the horizon gradually changing colour, but without my being aware of it.

  I see three spheres. The top one is the biggest by far and it contains the other two. It is the sphere of the whole universe, the extensive Nothing, with all galaxies and dark matter whirling, churning, exploding and expanding within it.

  Then there is the middle sphere. Compared with the first sphere it is minuscule. In the great cosmic array it registers as less than a mote of dust, but I can see it clearly. It is positioned immediately above the third sphere – a thin disc, fragile as ice, thin as one of the rings of Saturn. In this sphere, or disc, is contained everything that has ever happened on earth – all history, and everything that has ever been produced and imagined and contrived – all cultural artefacts.

  The third sphere is the terrestrial sphere. It is like a well, a morass of primeval slime and mud. In this all living forms are present – everything that ever came into being and everything that ever died out, all evolutionary phases, but in no chronological order. In this sphere I find myself. I cannot see myself, I have no inkling of the nature of my incarnation. I am not necessarily human – I could also be fish, or amphibian, or early terrestrial animal. I am only one of the trillions of forms that plod around uncomprehendingly in this primeval mass. I don’t know from what kind of eye I’m seeing – it could be a simple light-sensitive surface, it could be a composite or a single eye. I don’t know if I’ve died out yet, or am still evolving. I am merely something registering at a very basic level, without comprehension of self – a primitive, unstructured neural process, a light-sensitive something, a minuscule splintering off from the cosmos.

  When the vision has passed, I get up out of bed, put on my dressing gown, make myself some tea, and watch the sunrise.

  Thirty-four

  Sometimes in the late afternoon I walk in the vineyard with my good friend Willem Wepener. The vines are leafless, only the bare shoots in neat rows, and the posts supporting them. In the pathways between the vines there are pools of water. Everywhere along the way there are hollowed-out tunnels. I don’t know what lives in these, but I like the tunnels. They evoke another life, a subterranean life. I ask Willem how he would describe the colour of the landscape. (He is attuned to colour like a dog to smell.) Van Dyck brown, he says, and ultramarine, mixed with white. The colour of the mountains on the horizon he describes as a milky blue. In one spot, in the vicinity of a few pine trees, there are often signs of human habitation. A man’s trousers, a mud-stained fleece top. Even a hair curler one day, pink. Signs of fires. I wonder who lives here. There was a report in the newspaper that part of a vineyard had been chopped out for firewood.

  As we walk back, the landscape has already darkened considerably. Table Mountain is visible, only the uppermost edge of it is still distinguishable, near-translucent against the blanching evening sky, partly swathed in mist. The vineyard is suddenly much darker, almost not visible in the fading light, sharply delineated against the tender, rosily glowing evening sky. But I smell the piquant aroma of khaki weed growing among the vines, and the damp smell of soil. Somewhere in the distance a plover calls, and a hadedah flies past, high up, skirling, on its way to its nest.

  *

  Nick became aware of resenting Jan Botha for cutting his hair. Jan seemed diminished to him. Nick had liked Jan’s sturdy bodily presence, there’d been something reassuring about it. And then of course the fragrant hair. He’d liked the smell of Jan’s hair. He’d even liked the faint undertone of some other smell, something that he’d associated with the Salt River mortuary. He was also seeing quite a bit less of Jan Botha these days, and more of the three students assigned to him. Another reason why he couldn’t wait to get away from the art school. Once his contract expired, they’d never see him again.

  *

  Nick told Marthinus that it might be groundless, but he felt responsible for what had happened to Charelle. He still had a notion that somebody had avenged himself on her for staying with him. Somebody could have got to know in some way that they often had supper together. He was worried that the guy who’d stalked her thought that they had a relationship, or something. He couldn’t think that she’d been targeted just because she happened to be in the vicinity of the perpetrators. It was terrible enough that it had happened to her, he said, but if he had to know that his presence had in any way – in any way – been conducive to it … well, then he didn’t know. He didn’t know how to deal with these feelings.

  These were difficult things, said Marthinus. He himself wouldn’t know how to cope with feelings of guilt, of accountability. With tricky moral questions like these, said Marthinus, he was inclined to look to the sages – he didn’t set much store by philosophy and psychology. He was more inclined to turn to someone like Mr K. Or Prince Gautama Buddha. Or to throw the I Ching yarrow stalks. The Bible he had always found engrossing, even inspiring. Especially the prophets. As he’d said, he was now reading Ezekiel again. It gripped him exceedingly. God telling the prophet: Eat the scroll. Then there were the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism – something that Menasse could help Nick with; and then there was the Koran. Anselmo would know about the Christian mystics. Even though he denied it, he was steeped in Catholicism. He was himself, said Marthinus, very much attracted to people like St John of the Cross. Definitely something there. There was something in each of these options that appealed to him.

  ‘And loss,’ said Nick, ‘how does one deal with feelings of loss?’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Marthinus, ‘that I really don’t know. But I find it helpful to look after my pigs, and to read Ezekiel.’

  *

  A day later the agent phoned and said the offer on Nick’s house had been withdrawn. The prospective buyers were no longer interested.

  In fact, said the agent, the buyers had suddenly disappeared without a trace. She couldn’t reach them anywhere. She was sorry about that.

  Nick was relieved. He thought, well, so that left him without any other option.

  Thirty-five

  One morning at the end of July I read a small news item in the paper. By chance I had once again gone to have coffee in town. Ever alert and on my guard. I wouldn’t have read the report if my eye hadn’t fallen on the phrase ‘high-security psychiatric institution’. That, after all, was one of the destinations on the agenda of the stalker – didn’t he want to go and visit his poor disturbed cousin there? A head-on collision, all four passengers killed instantaneously. The identity of the driver is not known, but the three passengers were all inmates of the high-security psychiatric institution just outside Moorreesburg. The car was en route from Moorreesburg to Stellenbosch. The superintendent of the institution declined to comment. The names of the deceased will be released once their next of kin have been informed.

  Without needing any further confirmation, I just know that the driver is the man, the hollow-cheeked disturber of the peace. I know it for a fact and without a doubt.

  What could it mean? Had he abducted his cousin and two other patients, or simply taken them on an outing? (As if that man could do something as dead ordinary as taking three severely disturbed people on an outing.) If the superintendent doesn’t want to comment, it suggests that the people had left without her permission. He must definitely have been hatching some plot. Now nobody will ever know. En route to Stellenbosch. Well did you ever. The hollow-cheeked stalker and the old father both suddenly out of circulation.

  *

  Nick read the same report in the paper. Sock me with a soggy fish, he thought. Victor Schoeman? Hadn’t Marthinus earlier that year thought that Victor had had something to do with inmates of the sa
me place? Which eventually turned out not to be the case. And Jan Botha had reported that Victor – who else would pose as Vincenzo Anastagi? – would drop in as soon as he was back in town from Moorreesburg. For the time being he would say nothing about this to Marthinus. He wanted to suss things out for himself first.

  For a week or two after reading the report Nick bought the paper every morning. He found no report on the identity of the people who’d died in the accident. When after a fortnight he’d still not found anything, he phoned the high-security psychiatric institution to enquire whether the identity of the three patients had been made known yet, but the superintendent said that no information was being provided to members of the public. When would it be made known, he asked her. The family of the deceased had been informed, she said. And the identity of the driver? She could unfortunately not be of assistance to him on that matter. (Fascist whore.) She couldn’t perhaps divulge what his connection with the patients had been? No, she was sorry, she thought she’d made it quite clear that she could not provide any information.

  In an older paper he did though by chance come across a small item to the effect that Tarquin Molteno had been shot and killed on the Cape Flats in a gang-related shooting incident. Molteno had been a notorious figure on the Cape Flats, the report said, involved over the years in any number of skirmishes with police as well as with gangs. (Marthinus had been right, Tarquin, with the diminutive mouth and gold neck chain, had known no loyalty other than to himself, because he’d collaborated with whatever faction had been most advantageous to him.) Nick wondered if the body of Tarquin had ended up with all the other fatalities in the Salt River mortuary. He’d have to ask Jan Botha, perhaps it had even happened on his shift. (He’d told Nick that he’d started working there again.) Perhaps he’d even been responsible for fetching the body, loading it on the stretcher, and transporting it to the mortuary.

  When Victor Schoeman did not turn up on his front stoep after all – as he’d feared – other matters obtruded themselves upon Nick’s attention. (Charelle was evidently not prepared to talk to him again.) But he’d like to know whether it had really been Victor, and if he’d started imagining things (spurred on by Marthinus), but since there was apparently no way of finding out, he gradually let it go. He let the whole Victor business go. Although, he had to admit to himself, it would have given him a great deal of pleasure to know for sure that it had indeed been Victor who had so spectacularly expired in a head-on collision.

  *

  The four fellow students who’d been involved in the satanism event and had been arraigned on charges of drug dealing and assault, had had their case postponed to early in the next year. Albrecht Bester said he couldn’t forgive them for what they’d done to the image of the school. But he was working on it, he told Nick, because he knew himself as the forgiving type. He was seriously working on himself.

  The braying redhead was painting her own variations on tits and pubic shrubbery. She certainly did lavishly implement emotional soil as fertiliser for her creations. Nick let her be. After Karlien he was grateful to have a student who could muck on with abandon and without a qualm. The joke was, he had to admit, that he found her work quite strong – confident, and with a brutal energy. It was the anaemic little blonde who worried him – he didn’t like the way she vacillated and couldn’t reach a decision on what she wanted to do. It reminded him too much of Karlien.

  Jan Botha’s hair was growing, Nick noted, and one day he was sporting eye make-up again. A gladdening sign. (His work also immediately seemed more edgy, more gutsy to Nick.) That meant that his period of penance was elapsing. Nick would dearly have loved to know what he was doing penance for (perhaps get a tip or two from him), but he’d learnt that if Jan didn’t volunteer information, it was no use interrogating him.

  *

  At the beginning of August Marthinus let Nick know that a friend of his had died. He was making a bonfire for him. Did Nick want to come by? In the late afternoon Nick found Marthinus in his back garden, stoking an enormous fire. Together they sat watching the flames. Marthinus told Nick about his friend. He’d been a fast runner but a slow swimmer, said Marthinus. He’d suffered from a deep-seated melancholy. He’d never been able to process disappointments in love, and he’d had quite a few of those, because he wasn’t an easy person to live with. Set exceptionally high standards for himself and his lovers. Nobody could keep up. Not somebody for the banal daily grind, that too had exhausted people. People wanted distraction, they didn’t want to be perpetually confronted with the eternal and the weighty verities, especially not at the outset of a love affair.

  The fire was burning well. Marthinus was satisfied. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘how merrily old Arnie’s memorial pyre is blazing. A good sign. It portends an unhindered voyage to the underworld. That, in any case, is what Menasse would say.’

  The memorial fire was indeed burning vigorously.

  Only now did Nick tell Marthinus about the newspaper report. Marthinus reacted surprisingly laconically. It wouldn’t surprise him at all, he said. It would be gloriously characteristic of Victor to meet his end in a car with three insane passengers. It was one hundred per cent down his alley. In tune with his modus operandi. Victor was the kind of person who’d decide that if he had to go, he’d take three or more people with him. That it had been three mentally disturbed people perhaps counted in his favour as an act of humanity. They should watch an appropriate video that evening to commemorate also his passing.

  Nick laughed incredulously. ‘But I have no idea or confirmation that it was in fact Victor!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘If it wasn’t him,’ said Marthinus, ‘it’s close enough to him. It’s actually not even important whether it was really him or not.’

  Nick glanced at him quickly to see whether he was joking, but Marthinus was gazing in front of him quite solemnly.

  ‘And if Victor really is dead,’ said Marthinus, ‘then the smoke twirling so vigorously can be a favourable portent for him as well. I suppose we can, in spite of all his nonsense, not begrudge him an unhindered voyage to the underworld.’

  At first Nick hesitated, then he said: ‘Yes, I suppose not. If in fact he is dead, of course.’

  ‘And if he’s not dead,’ said Marthinus, heaving another enormous log onto the fire, his large, lively face glowing in the light of the flames, ‘then we wish him an unhindered voyage through life. Whether he turns up one day on your front stoep or not.’

  ‘With his sneering mug,’ said Nick, wryly.

  ‘With his sneering mug and destructive energy,’ said Marthinus. Nick laughed. Marthinus added another log. His face elated in the light of the fire.

  ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘just watch this fire burning now. That skein of smoke is drifting straight up to heaven.’

  That evening they watched Faust by Alexander Sokurov. Marthinus had decided it was an appropriate video to recall Victor – whether dead or not – in spirit, to commemorate him, whatever. Nick found it a highly disturbing film. He found the image of Margaretha distressing. He found in her embodiment of total undefilement the potential for degradation. As if this potential for degradation were worse than the degradation and depravity itself. Like the invisible worm in an apparently healthy apple. He found it a disconcerting valedictory gesture for Victor Schoeman. How strange, if they didn’t even know whether he was one of the dead. The colours of the film also perturbed him – the tonalities of grey, so characteristic of the precise, cold tonalities of Flemish and Dutch painting. He found the image of Faust rooting in the innards of corpses for the origin of the soul disconcerting. But at the same time he found the film a good choice. It accorded with a sombreness in himself, which he could of late not escape. Its colours, mouldy greys – clay-grey, ochre-grey, brown-grey, in combination with black and greenish-black – were the colours of his own state of mind. Grey, he thought, it brought him up against grey once more. Grey that did not stimulate, but was perceptually inert. In this film it signified the iner
tia of death. He found it a cold, cruel, upsetting film, and he was grateful that he and Marthinus could sit in front of the fire afterwards.

  Marthinus said: ‘That’s why I like Russian novels and Russian filmmakers. The Western art world is directed at the body, at sexuality. The issues implicit in it are social issues. Eastern art, and I include Russia in that, concerns itself with spirit and transcendence. All subjects that are taboo in Western art. That’s what I like. I like an engagement with spirit and transcendence. That’s why I like so much what Menasse says. That’s why I find reading Ezekiel so disconcerting. Even in spite of Mr K, a man for whom I have the greatest admiration, saying: Pay unconditional attention, there is only the now. With everything else we merely delude ourselves.’

  *

  On a Saturday morning in mid-August Nick and Marthinus were sitting in Marthinus’ back garden. It was a beautiful, clear day. They were drinking tea. (Marthinus was a great tea-drinker, Nick had discovered.) Everything here was as carefully tended as in the front garden. Lawn, shrubs, vegetable beds. In the garden the five pigs were foraging.

  Marthinus told Nick about Ezekiel, in whom he was immersing himself at the moment. Nick listened and he watched the pigs.

  Marthinus said: ‘I’m reading various versions of Ezekiel. I even bought myself the new translation of the Bible. Ezekiel had his vision on the 31st of July 593 BC! So there Ezekiel was standing on the banks of the River Chebar in Babylonia when a gigantic cloud bore down on him. On the banks of the River Chebar, on the 31st of July, just think! Couldn’t be clearer than that! Nothing shabby about that vision. And no mean feat to describe that chariot so precisely. Remember, said God to Ezekiel, the children of Israel are a rebellious bunch. A hand is extended and God gives Ezekiel a roll of a book with lamentations and songs of mourning written on it. He must eat it. He must eat it and fill his bowels with it. What an image! Magnificent! Who could think up something like that nowadays? Nobody. Forget it. Not with the aid of any substance you can name. The modern imagination falls short of it.’