They drank tea. Marthinus talked. The pigs foraged tranquilly in the garden. The mountain was there, all rocky face and steep ravine. Awe-inspiring. No wonder Charelle hadn’t wanted to look at it when she first arrived in Cape Town. Behind them was the sea. Although it was winter, the day was pleasantly warm.
Nick asked Marthinus how it had come about that he bought this house. Had he always known that he wanted to keep pigs?
Marthinus laughed. ‘In the eighties I worked for the trade unions. That I’ve told you. That’s where I met Victor Schoeman. Though he didn’t last long there. He’s not someone who can be subservient to another person. After that I was overseas for a while, and when I came back, I started working. I made money. I became a fat cat. I became alienated from my principles. I say that and am ashamed of it. I was heading straight for self-destruction. One day I was sitting in the Gardens. I was on the edge of despair. A man was sitting next to me. He turned to me and said “If you’ll excuse me, I think you’re a soul desperately in need.” The man was Menasse. He gave me his card. Real estate. He showed me the house. He approved the emanations, as he called them. I bought it. We became friends. I started reading piles of stuff. I read everything that I’d never got round to before. Or that hadn’t appealed to me. I simplified my life drastically. I acquired the pigs. I laid out the garden and now I maintain it on a daily basis. I try to do good where I can. I have enough to live on.’
Nick was taken by surprise by the story. A fat cat – he would never have suspected that of Marthinus.
Marthinus elaborated on the pigs. He said that each had a clearly distinguishable personality of its own. The black potbelly, Aunty, was the matriarch. She was named after the figure of death in one of Marthinus’ most beloved novels. She was trouble-free and undeniably dominant. The oldest boar, President Burgers (he who had ended up in Nick’s garden one morning some months ago), was a noble animal, said Marthinus. A ponderous personality. If he’d believed in reincarnation, which was not the case, then he’d have believed that this animal had been a noble ruler, somebody like Kubla Khan. The black-and-white sow, Bathsheba (for Nick the most interesting of the pigs), was headstrong – very contrary, a strong will. She did not let herself be dictated to or hemmed in. Very assertive. The young boar was Joseph, he was very eager to please, still very impressionable. And the youngest sow, Dolly, was a bit uncertain, but she was still young, she had yet to find her feet among this self-assured crowd.
Marthinus said he found it a valuable spiritual exercise to watch the pigs. A form of meditation. He’d often calmed down in their presence.
‘The River Chebar is in Syria,’ said Marthinus. ‘Seven days on end Ezekiel sat dismayed and astonished among the Jewish exiles. Then he had to lie on his left side for 390 days. A day for each year that Israel had sinned. God would tie him down with ropes so that he couldn’t turn on his other side. Now God gave him the recipe for the bread he had to eat every day. But Ezekiel put his foot down when God said: Bake the bread on human excrement. God made a concession – something he doesn’t often do, believe me – right, Ezekiel can bake the bread on cow dung. On his side Ezekiel had to lie and prophesy. He had to warn Israel what they could expect when the Lord lost his temper and turned against a people. Parents would eat their children, and children their parents, among other treats. Tell Israel, said God, I’m speaking to them in my jealous zeal. Jealous zeal. Trust the God of Israel to come up with such a turn of phrase.
‘Then by way of a change I read Mr K,’ said Marthinus. ‘In his own way as little inclined to countenance a compromise as the wrathful God of Israel. Pay attention! he said. See how thought chases its own tail!
‘Now I wonder,’ said Marthinus, ‘did Ezekiel there on the banks of the River Chebar await God in his glorious manifestation in the same way as the young Jiddu awaited the emissaries of Annie Besant on a rock next to a different river?’
Nick did not know. He envied Marthinus his openness of mind.
Thirty-six
Liesa Appelgryn, in town, visited Nick in his studio. She looked at his work and said they were birds of a feather – bottom feeders – and she could see he also thoroughly implemented that toxic soil for his work. Bottom feeders, no less. His association was with the mud-coloured barbels with spiky stubble-beard that somebody once caught in the muddy water of some dam. He and Liesa drank a lot of whisky and had sex on the sofa where he had last spent the night in drunkenness, after Charelle’s visit. Tits and pubic bush quite as rampant as in her paintings. She was enthusiastic, she was loud, she was appreciative of every kink and loop of the sexual act. He thought poor woman, who is contented with so little, or then at least pretends to be, because enthusiastic and appreciative of her sexual charms he most certainly was not. At half past two that morning she took a taxi back to her hotel. He slept on restlessly and dreamt of intricately stacked squares.
Marthinus asked him the following evening if he felt like watching Sokurov’s Faust again. Initially Nick hesitated, but then consented anyway, and found the film even more upsetting than the previous time. He found the innocence of Margaretha as depicted bordering on the perverse. He struggled to find words for it when he was discussing it with Marthinus. Marthinus thought it was to do with the context in which Margaretha was represented – with the unearthly light falling on her face, with the dark leafy backgrounds against which she was delineated, and with the whole atmosphere of corruption and moral decay in the film.
A few days later Nick was sitting in the coffee shop where Buks Verhoef had been shot and where he’d seen Victor Schoeman a while ago. Something compelled him back to the place. Perhaps to convince himself that Victor was indeed permanently off the scene. Perished in the presence of three mentally disturbed people. He’d hardly sat down when his ex-student, Karlien, and her mother, the woman with whom he’d frolicked so joyously at Oesterklip, came into the coffee shop. By the time they saw each other, turning back was not an option. Mignon brought the child on her arm to his table. He leapt up clumsily and enquired after Karlien’s physical welfare. Was she in better health? (She was wearing a scarf that was probably supposed to camouflage the scar artfully.) She looked pale and listless. The mother, by contrast, had a fetching (sexual) flush to her cheek. Over the child’s head they caught and held each other’s gaze for a few moments. Karlien was taking the rest of the year off, explained the mother (slightly breathlessly), and she was planning to do a course at a beauty academy in town the following year. Nick met Karlien’s eyes briefly after this announcement from her mother. Cynical, with something provocative in it – an expression he’d never seen in her eyes in all the months that she’d sat passively and indecisively in his office. It caught him on the wrong foot. When they said goodbye, his and the mother’s eyes met again for a few moments. Shortly afterwards he left, his coffee barely drunk.
At the end of August he said to Marthinus, look, as far as the sale of the house was concerned, he was going to hang on now and see who would come up next with an offer to convert his house into an art brothel. Sometime soon some crook was sure to present himself. A shortage of crooks there had never been. In the meantime he could probably start emptying out the polluted rooms – the rooms in which, according to Menasse, the energy had been disrupted – and chuck out everything that he didn’t need. He had a lot of rubbish in there, clutter that he’d schlepped around for years. Look, he said, he knew it would be a good idea to get Menasse to show him the ropes. Instead of moping around in his house thinking all sorts of unproductive thoughts, as was his wont, he might as well sit in those rooms and think of the Good. But he’d thought about it long and hard, he said, he couldn’t do it. As he’d said before, it wasn’t his scene. He’d be violating himself – and his own integrity – if he were to force himself to do something like that. If there were such a thing as negative energy in his house, if Menasse were right – if there was a cloud of regret and melancholy hanging over his house, as Menasse had clearly sensed – then he’d have to
find some other way of living with it, or of driving it out. He felt like a prick having to admit it, but he was saying it now in any case. Furthermore he could probably also ask Jan Botha whether it would be possible to do volunteer work at the Salt River mortuary on Saturday mornings, but he didn’t feel up to that either.
Marthinus said: Oh Lord, he understood completely. If it wasn’t Nick’s scene, it wasn’t his scene. But if he were ever to change his mind, he was perfectly prepared to tackle room by room with Nick. He wasn’t all that sure himself what the Good was, but he didn’t think it really mattered much. Just sitting still and focusing on melancholy and regret was probably good enough.
Nick thanked him. In all these months, he said to Marthinus, he’d been in all respects a reliable and supportive friend.
Marthinus said don’t even mention it. Done with pleasure. Meanwhile he’d organised them a whole series of Pasolini DVDs: Oedipus Rex, Medea and The Gospel According to St Matthew.
Nick said he was glad, he liked Pasolini’s work.
‘Oh Lord,’ exclaimed Marthinus, ‘just think – Oedipus! Medea! The St Matthew gospel! The little cluster of women and the apostles in fluttering robes advancing towards the cross through the rippling grass, looking as if they’re standing still in one spot! Mary Magdalene stumbling and falling, stumbling and falling, supported by the women in black robes. Everything in black and white. The little cluster that seems not to be making any progress, but that carries on moving, stumbling, against the wind, with the fluttering robes, and the waving grass! Brilliant!’
*
Towards the end of their trip, Isabel had one day, sitting across from him in the museum cafeteria, suddenly interrupted her bitter diatribe and said: Console me. It was so unexpected that he didn’t know whether he’d heard her aright. Console me, she said again. He was caught unawares. They looked at each other. He didn’t know what to say. She looked down. She’d seen his incapacity. There were tears in her eyes. She got up. He hurried to the Oriental rooms, to the depictions of bucolic bliss – where the locust moves its leg in the fifth month, and shakes its wing in the sixth month, on a paper scroll from the eleventh century.
In the afternoons she usually read, but she didn’t discuss with him what she’d read. Only once she told him about something she’d read that had made a deep impression on her. It was in a novel based on the true story of the experiences of a young boy who’d been separated from his parents during the Second Sudanese Civil War. She told him that the boy told about another boy who along the way had found a deep hole and had climbed into it. The hole had been formed by a bomb. His friends had said goodbye to him because they were used to boys leaving the group in various ways or dying. The boy remained in the hole for three days. He didn’t move; he enjoyed the silence inside the hole. He dug himself a small cave on the one side of the bomb crater and with straw from a half-burnt hut fashioned a small door to cover the entrance. In this way he could also hide from animals. Nobody visited him or sniffed him out, neither man nor beast. Nobody knew he was there. When he got hungry the first day he crawled out of the hole to the deserted village, to a hut where he scrabbled a bone out of the ash. On the blackened bone there were only about three mouthfuls of goat’s meat, but it kept him satisfied for a whole day. He drank from puddles of water and crawled back to his hole, where he stayed day and night. On the third day he decided to die, because it was warm in the hole and there were no sounds inside. And he did die on that day, because he was ready. Not one of the boys who’d walked with him saw him die in that hole, but they all knew that the story was true. This tale, Isabel said, had moved her deeply, because she also had a need to climb into a deep hole like that and to stay there day and night. For an indeterminate time. She also had the desire to die, she said, but she was probably not ready yet, because she was still alive.
Thirty-seven
It’s icy cold. It’s the end of August. In a short while the first freezing spring showers will start falling. By day the mountains are swathed in swirling clouds of mist. Sometimes they are completely veiled by these. The rain falls in soaking flurries. Five pied crows are starkly etched against the misty landscape. I watch them. At night the wind keens around the corners of the house. My Neanderthal skull of wire and white beads stands on my bedside table. Its eye sockets are enormous.
I am alone. That I have always been. I have my friend Willem Wepener, for whom colour is a guiding principle. I have you. We share the memory of Jacobus, in life, in death. Willem and I saw him in the small back room with the green Mr Price curtain. In death his once mobile face was calm, monumental. I have the pleasure of the Olivier brothers’ lovely, tantalising, at times obscene videos. Willem has Arikha. I have the memory of the salty, stinking sea, of the transformation of silkworms, of the narrow head of the noble black greyhound bitch. I have the image of Ricardo Reis, the alter ego of Fernando Pessoa, keeping vigil in Ricardo’s room at the foot of his bed. I have a prospect of the mountains, of the horizon, where mountain and sky meet, where the sun rises every morning, with more splendour than I can ever find words or tears to express.
*
In the early hours, the hour before it gets light, I hear somebody say my name. A man’s voice – deep, imperative, but quite tinny, with a slight echo.
I wait to hear what else will be said. Nothing. Nothing else. I lie and wait. The voice was distinct. With an echo. But it leaves no after-echo. I lie and wait to hear if the voice repeats my name. But it doesn’t happen. I lie and wait and listen until I hear the birds singing outside.
*
The café where we met at the beginning of the year, after we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, the day when it rained so hard, no longer exists. It either burnt down or was converted into an art gallery. Anything is possible. I hear from you sometimes, a short email, or a postcard, even. You are restless, you stay on the move. I must ask you, someday, what purpose it serves.
Like you, I experience the town as a treacherous place, where one could perish in obscurity, even though the moon here is more glorious than anywhere else. At night when the moon is full I open my mouth. The wind blows through it as if through a grotto. It feels as if I am eating the wind, and am fulfilled by it.
Summary
Painter Nick Steyn moves to the City Bowl in Cape Town after separating from his partner, Isabel. A young boarder moves in with Nick and they soon become friends. But one night she does not come home, and his attempts to trace her come to nothing. A few weeks later the prosperous artist Buks Verhoef makes an offer on Nick’s house. Is there a connection between these events, and if so, could Nick’s former friend, Victor Schoeman, the author of the outrageous novel The Shallows, have a hand in them?
A parallel narrative concerns a nameless Stellenbosch woman who is writing a monograph on the famous Olivier brothers. One day she witnesses the murder of Buks Verhoef in a coffee shop; soon thereafter a sinister man starts stalking her. Could this also be Victor Schoeman?
A fantastical, absurd yet haunting novel by the award-winning novelist Ingrid Winterbach. Translated by Michiel Heyns.
About the Author
Ingrid Winterbach’s novels have won numerous awards, including the M-Net Prize, the Hertzog Prize and the University of Johannesburg Prize. Her work has also been published in the Netherlands, France and the USA. Winterbach is also a visual artist. She lives in Stellenbosch.
Praise for It Might Get Loud
What you get is a cacophony of realities. It Might Get Loud is a vast and clamorous story that mixes the unmitigated presence of the dead, of demons and spirits and mysteries, into the prosaic lives of the two main characters … Intelligent, boundary shifting and unafraid of itself – Karin Schimke, Business Day
Fierce truth-telling … continuously exhilarating – Patrick Lenahan
Praise for The Road of Excess
A fascinating and meditative read, and Winterbach’s narrative is exquisite, the prose as rich and textured as a 1980s velvet paint
ing – Business Day
A profoundly engaging and exhilarating read – Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian
Winterbach’s writing is delight without respite – Michael Titlestad, The Sunday Times
Praise for The Book of Happenstance
Witty, allusive and beautifully crafted, this is one of the gems of recent South African fiction – Ivan Vladislavić
An intelligent literary mystery … Winterbach’s characters are rich, her story foreboding and tense, and her prose remarkably lean – Publishers Weekly, UK
Praise for To Hell with Cronjé
I doubt that this book could have been written in the cosy Netherlands. You would have to go to Australia for Patrick White’s Voss, or to the Arizona of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. And to South Africa for Niggie (To Hell with Cronjé) – Brabants Dagblad, The Netherlands
Winterbach’s writing sets the mood brilliantly, and she pitches her blend of characters perfectly to create an uneasy, occasionally frightening feel to her narrative – Belletrista, USA
Praise for The Elusive Moth
The language of the novel is simple, but rich and suggestive – Margaret Lenta, The Sunday Independent
The Shallows Page 25
