Читать книгу The Road of Excess - Ingrid Winterbach - Страница 7

Six years ago, Aaron’s older brother, Stefaans, paid them a visit. It was his first visit since Aaron and Naomi moved to Durban twelve years earlier. Stefaans came by bus, accompanied by his youngest daughter. (If she hadn’t insisted, they would never have made the visit. If it depended on him, she knew, her father wouldn’t budge from the town where they lived.) When he got off the bus (so thin and worn-out, so wasted, Aaron was shocked), his first words were that he almost got engaged to the hostess on the bus – such a beautiful woman, how could he not fall for her! On the way down to Durban, he’d made drawings on a lined Croxley writing pad with a red ballpoint pen, and these he gave to her. For him, the trip was an overwhelming experience. The mountains! The hills and valleys! It’d been years since he’d crossed the Hex River Valley. The landscape such a revelation!

It was not an easy visit. This was before Stefaans’s radical change of heart. He was still using all manner of substances. Stefaans had stopped talking for a few years, but now that he’d started again there was no stopping him – his visit testified to that. He talked from the moment he got off the bus until the moment he left again. Stefaans, his large frame bony, reminded Aaron of Oupa Harry, step-grandfather on their mother’s side of the family. That peasant raconteur, as Stefaans once called him.

On this visit, his theme was family. Stefaans talked. Aaron listened.

They put Stefaans in the cottage at the bottom of the garden. There, he could go to bed as early or as late as he liked. (Stefaans never kept conventional hours.) Before his arrival, Aaron gave Mrs Sekete careful instructions to clean the cottage thoroughly. Initially, she was afraid of going down there (she feared snakes), but later she reluctantly agreed, killing off the scorpion-spiders with great relish, sending the geckos scooting, and stomping the ground with a broom to chase all snakes in the area away. Aaron placed a table in front of the window, a place for Stefaans to write, if he liked. A good view of the lush environment. He hoped Stefaans would be pleased with the place.

Stefaans was overwhelmed by the city; by the density and excessive growth in the lower garden; by the birdsong and intensity of colour. Everything was larger than life here, he said repeatedly.

Every morning, Stefaans would come up from the lower reaches of the garden. And then he’d talk. He talked to Aaron about literature, films, art, family. Their mother’s life. Their father’s life. He talked about denial. Denial, he said, was the theme that occupied him most right then.

Sometimes he’d take speed. Stefaans would come up from there, from the garden cottage below. He’d be all hunched over, perhaps after an afternoon nap during which he dreamt things, or thought about things, or after a mood had descended upon him – and then he’d take something. Aaron would watch as his tempo visibly accelerated, his mood lifting as he gathered his reduced powers and picked up momentum. He would sing lines from songs at the dinner table, making sly comments and laughing behind his hand. With that quick, sideways, crafty look of his. Who could hold him back? He dominated the company during mealtimes. He would sit leaning forward in his chair. He ate slowly, ate very little, sometimes almost nothing, in fact. Too busy with his little tricks, songs, phrases, his play on words, ongoing commentaries, his oblique remarks. And yet he always praised the food. (Left to his own devices, Stefaans would probably live on a diet of bananas and Weet-Bix, Aaron suspected.) Stefaans’s presence virtually forced the rest of the people at the table – Naomi, their brother Benjamin and his wife, Stefaans’s daughter, and Aaron’s elder daughter – into silence. Every now and again someone would try, without success, to steer the conversation in a different direction. Once or twice Naomi demonstrated her disapproval of it all. But who, in the event, could restrain Stefaans once he really got going?

By the time the rest of them wanted to go sleep, Stefaans was in full flight. Unstoppable. Then he’d be sent back to his garden cottage.

Every morning Aaron would ask him if he’d slept well. Sometimes he’d sleep, yes, thanks, other times he’d only get to sleep in the early hours. He marvelled at the early-morning birdsong, and at other sounds (loeries, hadidas, monkeys). Sometimes he brought with him, from down below – from that menacing place down there in the garden – a dream.

One morning, Stefaans was standing at the kitchen sink. As he rinsed a cup, he told Aaron about a dream he’d just had. He was hitting and hitting at something, he said, but there was no power left in his blows. I cannot endure it any longer, he’d called out in his dream.

*

Aaron hadn’t realised Stefaans was having bad dreams down there in the lush lower garden; that he was regularly experiencing devastating anxiety. How ashamed Aaron felt, afterwards, for making Stefaans sleep there. (Driving him out of the house.) What had Stefaans done to him that he couldn’t offer his own brother the protection of his house, and the presence of human beings?

Apart from his daughter, there was one other character who arrived with Stefaans on the bus. Slipped in through the back door. A nasty piece of work.

When Stefaans came up from his room down below (where, at times, he suffered mortal terror – the dreams in the first few hours of the night, the faces he saw! – although, manfully, he refrained from telling Aaron about any of this), when he’d taken something and begun speeding, then this little wretch would show his face. A shitty little character, anally fixated; an obsessive, obscene little man-child. When Stefaans was high on something, and sly, this little person would slip past the ramparts of the unconscious and present himself at the dining-room table.

Initially, the rest of the seated company listened quietly, smiling politely, tolerant and almost encouraging, not sure how they should react, not able to look each other in the eye; until Aaron, in shock, couldn’t bear it any longer. He could not reconcile this little figure, this fabrication of Stefaans’s imagination, with the image he had of his brother.

They listened in silence – Aaron, his brother and wife, the girls, Naomi. Until one night when Naomi, on behalf of everyone (Aaron didn’t have the courage), declared: Stefaans, not at my table. Please.

That was six years ago. In the meantime, the big turnaround in Stefaans’s life had come about. He’d confessed his weakness and, with the help of the twelve steps, embarked on the straight and narrow. And, to this day, he still hasn’t strayed. After all those years snuffling in the muck with the pigs. After he’d descended into the underworld, and his friends had said of him: Stefaans is irretrievably lost.

Now, like their carpenter oupa, Stefaans works on a building site, attends meetings, exercises, and, at night, writes.

Now he communicates with Aaron via SMS. Aaron finds it impossible to keep up. Some nights Stefaans sends off as many as five, six, seven messages, one following rapidly on the heels of another. Stefaans’s mind, racing. Aaron reads the messages and laughs. He laughs and takes pleasure in his brother’s ingenuity, the breadth of his imagination. For his own part, he’s slow to answer. Especially these days.

Their carpenter oupa. Oupa Harry. A big man with a lively, roughly chiselled, peasant-like face. Actually their step-oupa, their ouma’s second husband. He’d spend the whole Sunday in his pyjamas, in one of the two outside rooms in front of the house, with endless cups of tea, cigarettes, and the Sunday papers. That’s where Aaron’s interest in comics began, he suspects; with his step-oupa in striped flannel pyjamas, his towelling dressing gown tied with a tasselled cord, in a room smelling of cigarettes, the beds and floor littered with newspaper pages. In a small town in the platteland, on holiday. The Katzenjammer Kids, Sad Sack. Their oupa as enthusiastic about the comics as they, the children, were. His hair standing on end, cigarette in hand, one leg across the other in his striped pyjamas; large features, expressive face. The cartoons a decisive influence on Aaron, an important motif in his work – that’s where it all began; that’s the source he returned to as an artist.

Oupa Harry was much like a child himself. He played games with them. Ludo and cricket. Mercilessly, he’d beat Aaron and Stefaans at Ludo. Then Stefaans would become morose and Aaron would start crying. Their pa and oupa would laugh. As opponents, they never gave an inch. They showed no mercy, neither for each other nor for the children.

That was their step-oupa Harry, the carpenter, the man of many occupations and just as many accidents. Larger than life. Their mother was a lot closer to him than she ever was to her own father, Oupa Jesse – that pompous, uncomfortable man, a heavy drinker, with his uncertain past, his esoteric interests, and his stylised gestures.

On their father’s side there was Oupa Stefaans, who, in contrast, was formal, certainly not in the habit of playing with the boys, or indulging in any kind of buffoonery. Aaron remembers him always wearing a suit. A farmer who, when his farming was later scaled down, cultivated a vegetable garden, and who watered his garden right up to the day he died. Their gardener oupa. Their carpenter oupa. Their oupa the self-made man and Freemason. Three grandfathers, and yes, indeed, as Stefaans pointed out, where did that leave him?

Stefaans pulled through. Thank God for that, because he almost didn’t make it. Came through by the skin of his teeth. He very nearly found himself going under. During that long and reeling journey, lasting twenty-five to thirty years, he lost everything – his house, his wife, his friends, his job – but he emerged again on the other side, unscathed, more or less.

Stefaans has come a long way since those merciless times. A long way, before he stepped into the light to face the extent of his loss. Or the extent of his denial, as he now insists.

By the time Stefaans began his penetrating moral inventory, both their parents had died. It’s possible they never realised the full truth, or they mercifully denied it right up to the end.

*

Aaron worked in his studio. Stefaans would sit with him. He’d smoke, drink tea and talk. He was appreciative of Aaron’s work. Always. He looked at it with more concentration than most people did (certainly with greater attention than Knuvelder could manage during his last visit). He would make cautious remarks. Pore over the paintings for a long time, close up, cigarette in hand, exclaiming in admiration. If Aaron was interested in selling, he said, he would want to buy the painting of the black wall. The black wall spoke to him.

Their mother was streetwise, Stefaans used to say, but she was too naive and passionate to be aware of Samuel Reinecke’s hidden agenda. Doctor Reinecke, Stefaans used to say, had an extraordinary ability to relativise things. And, Stefaans said, he suspected that Reinecke hated his father and that his intention with women was often – he hesitated to say it – satanic. Reinecke held their mother in his power, despite her dual feelings of attraction and revulsion for him.

Aaron would listen. He was surprised about the weight Stefaans gave Doctor Reinecke in their mother’s life. Their mother found Reinecke physically unattractive, Stefaans said. She even found him mean spirited. But she was attracted to him because he challenged her intellectually in a way their father never did. Their father wasn’t an intellectual, Aaron said. No, Stefaans said, he was also not a man who regarded himself as an instrument of God’s grace.

In the end, it was their father who helped their mother find herself, Stefaans said, because he wasn’t merely handsome, he also had an inner beauty. Something Reinecke didn’t have. Reinecke’s grotesque exterior was also the manifestation of an inner perversion, Stefaans said.

Stefaans lent their mother an almost heroic status. He talked about her intelligence, saying she was ahead of her time. Another reason why Reinecke’s intellect spoke so loudly to her. Stefaans talked about her new, strong ego after the birth of their youngest brother. He saw their mother in Biblical terms. In literary terms. She was like Tamar, he said, the character in Joseph and His Brothers who, more than any of the other characters, united all the motifs in Thomas Mann’s large and complex novel.

Aaron listened. He didn’t think about their parents in the same terms as Stefaans. He thought about them in a more concrete way. He thought their mother was strong in spirit, but misguided. She was too concerned with her children. She never quite actualised herself, and that was a pity, a mistake; it worked to the disadvantage of her husband and her children.

Stefaans, back from the dead like Lazarus, on a visit to his brother Aaron, sits with him in his studio and interprets it thus: their mother realised she must let go of him. She must sacrifice him. This she did by buying Stefaans his first Weightlifting magazine.

Like Jacob, in Mann’s novel, she must have sensed a certain predestined course, a kind of election. And, like Joseph, he, Stefaans, descended into the darkness because there was no way he could evade his destiny.

Because remember, Stefaans explains to Aaron, in Mann’s eyes Yahweh was also a trickster god, a god with a penchant for irony, for Zen-strategy. Joseph’s story is about the recognition and acceptance of his eventual destiny. Jacob must have known that he would sacrifice Joseph to his brothers by privileging and indulging him. But he persisted in his folly, setting him up. So, in a sense, says Stefaans, Jacob unconsciously sent Joseph away from him, and Joseph ran away in order to fulfil his destiny, because he could have escaped if he’d wanted to. And Judah, who sold bonny prince Yusuf into slavery, helped Joseph get away, because he also knew, at a deep level, what it was that he was doing. Like Tamar, who, in the guise of a whore, ambushed her father-in-law on the side of the road.