Читать книгу The Snow Sleeper - Marlene van Niekerk - Страница 6

Bed B

Ward 1002

Intensive Care Unit

Academisch Medisch Centrum

Amsterdam

24 February 2002

Dear Professor Van Niekerk

As you can deduce from the address, I am writing to you in a state of personal crisis. Ruled paper, leaking ballpoint, IV in the back of my hand, catheter in my anther. I know that a letter like this is the last thing you would expect from me, after all those years of reading my bone-dry manuscripts. I also know you prefer to keep your students at a distance, given that you are constantly having to read their boring and barely veiled confessions. Not that you ever had reason to fear anything like that from me, in all my years of study. But the time of reckoning (tempus fugit!) has come. I know you well enough to know that what I have to say will not bore you. But as you always say, no desire without technique, every truth needs an orator. And so I shall keep in mind – as much as this genre of spontaneous communication called a “letter” allows – the admonishments inked onto my manuscripts in your barbed hand. Cut to the chase, Kasper! Shorter sentences, Olwagen! Suggestion, not interpretation! Stick to the knitting, orientate your reader in space and time! Lie, but do not deceive!

Against this last, an accusation of fraud, I wish to defend myself in advance. Despite having woken only three days ago from what the nursing staff here refer to as a “babbling delirium”, and while still being held in the intensive care unit for observation, I have concrete evidence that I have not dreamt up what had occurred. I am in possession of the coat, the shoes, perhaps the tongue of someone else, but let me not mislead you. I assure you I have no energy to fabricate tall tales right now. Frankly, if my tribulations in Amsterdam have had any impact, it has been to cure me finally of my ambition to write fiction. So herewith I give notice: I am dropping out of the course. Sorry for wasting your precious time. But may I suggest you regard this letter as a form of compensation? I would not be surprised if you exploit what I relate here for one of your dark designs.

*

Kasper Olwagen – as I am calling him – was thirty years old at the time of writing this letter, already a philosophy graduate. A slight, pale fellow with intense eyes, a high forehead, a delicate mouth. Well groomed, especially his hands, a skin sensitive to sun and cold. His movements seemed somewhat tentative, and his nostrils twitched constantly, as though inspecting the air for the faintest of hints. He gave an impression of fragility. His classmates nicknamed him Mr Xenos. He was intelligent, obsessive, withdrawn, a bookworm who lisped slightly when he was nervous or excited. There was something old-fashioned about his manner. For appointments he wore a waistcoat, a ruby-red bow tie, a fountain pen in the inner pocket of his jacket. I remember how he would take it out to make notes in his small black notebook, hesitantly, as though he wanted first to touch his heart.

On my recommendation, Mr Xenos was spending three months overseas during the local summer recess of 2001/2002. By chance, I had heard of a bursary available to a young, unpublished writer from South Africa – funding and accommodation at the Stichting Literaire Activiteiten Moederstad, the “mother city” being Amsterdam. I thought it would be ideal for this candidate. Exposure to a stimulating environment, as well as pressure from his Dutch hosts to produce something. Pressure from me, at any rate, had turned out to be completely counterproductive. He was one of those students, you see, who simply could not finish his writing project for the MA course, hindered as he was by extended writer’s block. I guessed it was a matter of oversensitivity to criticism, alienation from his peers, confusion about the South African reality, perfectionism, hypochondria. He suffered from what he called a “murmuring heart” – suppressed libido, I suspected at the time. But after what happened to him, my projections seem misplaced. Something quite beyond my comprehension was troubling him.

On the day I received the letter, I read only the first two paragraphs and then put it aside. I was writing fiction myself at that point, in the home stretch of a novel, final revisions, surrounded by the usual chaos of that part of the process – frozen meals from Nice ’n Easy, dirty dishes, a mouse in the kitchen, squirrels in the attic, garden overgrown, wrist inflamed from using the other kind of mouse; I simply saw no sense in spending more time on a difficult student who wanted to drop out. Why didn’t I try to convince him to reconsider? Well, I was tired of struggling with Kasper Olwagen. In the five years since enrolling, he had handed work in late every time, pieces riddled with too much detail, full of information and illustration, in which absolutely nothing ever happened. “Instruction manual!” I always commented. “Delete unnecessary details.” His other problem was profundity. He often discussed the central question of ethics: What is a good person, how should a good person live? But always in the form of wholly indigestible allegories. Beside each and every one of his moralistic figures I wrote in the margin, “Delete the ideas.” He simply could not arrive at a narrative reconciliation of meaning and minutiae. Kasper Olwagen is a philosopher, not a writer, that is what I thought.

But here was this letter from Amsterdam, quivering with appetisers from the very first paragraph. Why did I not read further? Well, I was busy. I dropped a card in the post: “Speedy recovery, thanks for your entertaining letter, I shall notify University Administration. Best.”

Two weeks later, the letter resurfaced from beneath a stack of papers and I thought to myself, let’s keep this on file, just in case. As I was punching holes in it, the following paragraph caught my eye. I was irritated; I find such impertinence unacceptable in a student. Just listen to this:

Professor, I still do not understand everything that has happened to me in this city; in fact, it is still happening. I am dumbfounded as I lie here in my hospital bed, and I believe that you will be similarly dumbfounded once you reach the end of this letter, even though you are employed at an institution of higher learning where space no longer exists for being dumbfounded, for fear and fascination, for grace and awe as human potentialities. I am returning to South Africa in a month’s time. To whom else could I possibly confess this premonition of my fate? As you know, I am a loner. Loner! How dubious, this concept. Nobody is truly alone; an invisible string connects us all, and it is only a matter of time before we stand face to face, asking: Have we not met somewhere before? Granted, my relationship with you is by no means an example of this, Professor. But may I say that, despite all your prescriptiveness and indifference, I have always experienced you as a kind of mother, although you are not exactly brimming with the milk of human kindness? I shall leave it at that. Not all of your students feel about you the way I do, I can assure you. But let me get to the point.

Point, what point, I thought as I flicked through the pages. Three deleted pages, each line carefully struck through so that one could still read it all. So I read it, obviously. A minutely detailed description of the accommodation in Amsterdam that I had helped him obtain. Instruction manual, I thought. Here is the gist of what he had deleted.

It was a writer’s paradise. Even lying here in the intensive-care unit, in the care of the Dutch nursing staff, I can recall it vividly. Will I still find it as I left it, with all my belongings, what now seems an eternity ago? An apartment on the fourth floor, close to Amsterdam harbour at the top of the Geldersekade. Three double windows with small panes in the living room. Thick, old glass, slightly discoloured, full of little bubbles and flaws. To the north, a view of the seventeenth-century gabling on the quay. To the east, the former docks, where two bright yellow cranes were constantly lifting and lowering building materials. With my binoculars (always bring your binoculars, you had said) I could make out the name Liebherr on their masts. There were two writing tables, just as you had told me to specify on the application form, one for prose against the wall, where the computer sat, and one for poetry by the window. There were two bedrooms: a small cabin on the ground floor with a view onto the back of the Sint Nicolaas church, and a larger one on the top floor. But I could not write a single word.

The usual Olwagen refrain. I impaled the letter on the levers in the file and clicked the clamp into place. After all the rattling of drums in the opening lines, nothing extraordinary; a description of a space. And dumbfounded? About what could he possibly be dumbfounded? Probably about the enormous, undeserved privilege of spending three months in such quarters for free. And then he goes and gets himself admitted to the intensive care unit, surely not as a result of tremendum et fascinans, but rather through utter laziness. I was livid. All the forms and testimonials and special words whispered to colleagues in Amsterdam to give this student a chance, and he messes it up. I ripped Kasper Olwagen’s freshly filed letter from my file and shoved it into a drawer full of speed fines, bills and final notices.

Eight months later, as I was reviewing the translation of my novel, I received notice of a package from the post office. Local, according to the slip. Could not be urgent. Kasper, I knew, had come back in the meantime; the university administration had let me know that he had deregistered in person. I wondered what had become of him, but why would I concern myself further with Mr Xenos? He had not had the decency to come and see me, to explain himself. I only fetched the package a week after the third and final notice was delivered. I remember the day I fetched it at the post office in Die Boord. My parcels, mostly from publishers, are always professionally packaged, with printed address labels. Not this one. This was wrapped up in brown paper, bound and quartered with white sisal twine, with a knob of red wax on the knot at the back. I recognised the fountain-pen script at once. I cursed. When I opened the package in the kitchen, a number of audio cassettes clattered down at my feet. Sixteen TDK cassettes, sixty minutes each. And something else – yes, nothing less than the dummy of my novel, already published by that time. I had given it to Kasper as a lucky charm on the day of his departure for Amsterdam. A handy white blank book, sturdily bound, two hundred and fifty pages, the maximum number for a novel. I had written in the front: “To Kasper, for your ideas, for the missives the gods let fall upon the streets.” He looked at me strangely after reading that inscription, hand on his heart, his nostrils twitching, as though I had handed him something that smelt slightly bad.

There was a note in the parcel:

Dear Professor Van Niekerk. The heart guards its sorrow, here as in Amsterdam. I have included a few samples for you. You might find it entertaining to see what has become of your phantom book; quite fitting, I think. I call it The Logbook of a Swan Whisperer (see my letter earlier this year from the university hospital). The contents of the tapes should amuse you even more. It means even less. All details have been deleted, all ideas have been removed. Farewell to the world of will and representation. Kind regards. Kasper.

I kicked at the cassettes on the kitchen floor, rereading the note. Swan whisperer? What in god’s name was a swan whisperer? I had heard of a horse whisperer, but a swan whisperer? Clearly, I had not read enough of Kasper’s godforsaken letter.

I ripped off the rest of the brown paper, opened my model book. At least half of it was filled with writing. I had to fetch my glasses – it was written in Olwagen’s characteristic fountain-pen script. Long tables, columns with headings: location, time, and action; a strict chronology of dates in the rows, 11 December 2001 to 15 January 2002. Under “Location”, the entries were mostly the names of various bridges along the canal belt, and under “Action” a few cryptic notes; they looked like descriptions of some occult scheme. I have brought the book along, let me read you a few typical inscriptions: 11 December; “Prinsengracht bridge, Utrechtsestraat. Swan whisperer: posture particularly stiff today, supplication with murmuring, hands lifted, rope ladder down to the water, three swans from under the bridge”. Or: “Lauriergracht bridge. Swan whisperer raises his eyes to the firmament, shakes coat out over the water, murmurs constantly, one swan from under the bridge.” Invariably: bridge, gestures and swans; gestures, murmurings, swans and bridge; the same phrases over and over again.

The tapes were different, clearly from a more recent period. They were labelled from 1 to 16, with dates ranging from 5 March to 17 May 2002. I picked them up from the floor and put them into a plastic bag from Woolworths. My cassette player was broken, but I could imagine what was on them. Names of grasses, rocks, insects. Read out in alphabetical order from reference books. That is how I knew Mister Stranger.

So, this was the contents of package number two. And there I sat with my cross-dressed book and the Woolworths bag and the cut white string with the red wax in my hands. The Olwagen mock-up of my book alone was enough for me to go and open the drawer where I had shoved his letter. Drawer whisperer, I moaned, because it was so full of rubbish that it would not open. The letter was completely scrunched up and I had to smooth it out, page by page, before I could read it.

Dear listeners, it is time now for Kasper’s story. Let me orientate you once more, for clarity’s sake. Imagine, if you will, a young man from the swanless south, an alien in a world city, a struggling writer, alone, anguished, neurotic. He breaks down, as is to be expected. There he lies, in a foreign hospital, his tongue feels swollen, his hands shake from the medicine they are giving him, and he writes his teacher a letter about what has supposedly happened to him. Pure fantasy? The true situation disguised? A hidden confession? An embellishment of his own failure? An attempt to mask his fears and longings? Whichever of these it may be, he hands in a logbook, a piece of evidence to support the validity of his story. Come, we shall let him set his stage:

It was, Professor, as they say over here, in the time of the dark days before Christmas. I had been eating nothing but baked beans from tins for weeks. At night I did not go to bed, but fell asleep on the red sofa in front of the television. I did not go out any more. I spent entire mornings standing at the window, rocking my head back and forth so that the quay, the docks, the traffic in the street all appeared to me in turn, variously distorted. Then I would breathe on the glass and write words on it. Guilt, penance, loss, shame. The great black bells in my tower. The reasons I could never write anything. Just once, I wrote: beauty, breath, song – and started crying.

Then I woke one morning, like a prince in the mist. A great night mist, frozen to the elms as in a fairy tale. Pure lacework in the trees alongside the quay. I blew on the windowpane and on it I wrote a line of poetry I remembered from somewhere: “Perhaps my whisper was born before my lips.”

Professor, we are there to invoke, you always said, to evoke, to call forth. Why, once the lesson is manifested, is the master absent from the student’s side?

Because when I erased the line with my fingertip, there he stood, framed in the trace of my breath, across the canal in a portico, a man with snow-white hair and a bag in his hand, and he stepped forward and leaned over the railing. Had he dropped something in the water? He gestured over the railing, towards the bridge arching between the canal and the harbour, his bundle beside him on the ground. I adjusted my binoculars. He was in his late forties, maybe fifty, scruffy, homeless. Tufts of down were leaking from his jacket. His lips were moving. I followed his gaze to the still water beneath the arch of the bridge. What did he see there?

He straightened, still murmuring, his hands in the air like a conductor before the orchestra strikes up. And then he gave the first beat. And from under the bridge came two swans, swimming towards him, majestic, bowing their necks, as if they belonged to him.

It was as if I saw for the first time what a swan is: feathery raiment of milk-white glass, a neck blown in a dream of fire, a vase under sail, coupled to its reflection, masked twins, breast to breast in a dance, a dark music in the webs.

The swan caller untied his bundle, and – yes, read on, it says what it says, Professor – took out a rope ladder, with which he lowered himself to the deck of a small sailboat docked at the quay.

A god in the crib of the rime-white dawn.

On his stomach, with his hands stretched out over the water, he called the birds, their tails wagging, their heads close to his. Orpheus on the bank. That I could write with my finger, in my meagre breath, one line by a forgotten poet, and have it leap from pane to quay and change into a swan whisperer ... Such serendipity enchants the heart.

*

I did not buy it. Do you? I could guess what was going to happen next. And I was right.

Kasper falls under the spell of the so-called swan whisperer – which translates as: He falls for his own fantasy about the swan whisperer, and unto us a story is born. Every day he follows him through the city, and at every bridge he bears witness to this homeless man’s so-called swan ritual. The man lifts his hands like a priest, he murmurs something, a magic word or formula, the swans come from under the bridge as though summoned, and the swan master descends his rope ladder and bewhispers them.

And then follows a passage which I simply cannot neglect to read to you. My correspondent writes:

At this point I can hear your thoughts, Professor. You are thinking: This is not going to get interesting, Kasper. Your story contains: 1. A writer with writer’s block. 2. A pair of binoculars. 3. A maladjusted vagrant with a swan fixation. This is not enough material, I smell a parable, you will have to get your characters involved with each other, because there is nothing like relationships between people for getting rid of symbols. I know, dear Prof, that given your limitations you will not be able to read this letter as a cry for help. You will appraise it as a piece of writing and nothing more. Well, luckily writing and living coincide entirely in this letter, because involvement is precisely what happened to me, the very next day, when I spotted the man across the way again. I went outside and followed him down the rope ladder onto the boat. What was it he smelt of? The aroma of compost? I lay down beside him on my stomach on the deck. The eager pupil. Would you not have done the same? Would you not have tried to discover what he was whispering to the swans? Could it be scripture, written on the plumb line of their flanks, runes from the cygnic depths?

With or without scripture, dear listeners, from here on the story picks up pace. Kasper takes the vagrant home, yes, Kasper feeds the vagrant. Young, unsociable South African man, an overbred neurotic afraid of germs, offers accommodation to a grimy, maladjusted stranger. And in this tale it does not stop at lodgings, it turns into nursing. Because this swan whisperer was not well. And moreover – Kasper the philosopher takes pains to impress this upon his reader – this patient of his was a blank page. For what hero would want to take care of an eloquent invalid? Kasper’s was a tight-lipped stray. The man could not or would not talk. His gaze was dull and vacant. He was purposeless and passive. He did not even know how to use the bathroom. This is how it played out:

I removed his grimy coat and the worn-out trousers and shirt. He did not have any underwear, and wore his boots without socks. I was shocked. He was very thin. There was brown gunge around his ankles and wrists and neck. His frayed clothes stuck to a crust that covered his entire body. Together with his body hair, it formed a kind of flaky silver fleece. Was this the reason for his odd odour? A layer of rotting hide? In his crotch, the hair formed a thick, caked mat. His sex was shrunken. The hair under his arms was long and white. His toenails and fingernails were overgrown and badly torn.

I put on the dishwashing gloves from the kitchen drawer and made him sit on a stool in the shower. I sponged his body down, soaped him up with disinfectant and started washing him carefully with a soft cloth.

Why did trying to clean him feel so much like trespassing? Can you explain that to me, Professor? You who understand these things so well? Why did such sorrow engulf me as I stood washing this damaged person? I was grateful for the steam, the water my tears could run into without being noticed. Who was I actually washing here? And how was I to complete what I had started? I helped him stand up, pressing my forehead against his chest to keep him upright, while using my body to prop him up as I turned him around in the shower stall.

I was scared to death, there under the shower, to strip him of his shell. But as far as I could tell, it would be more deadly not to try, deadlier for him, and even more deadly for me, do you see?

My clothes were soaked and the bathroom was completely steamed up. I caught a glimpse of our ghostly figures in the mirror, him with his hand on my shoulder, where I had put it to scrub his upper arm. Did I long for him to extend a limb or shift his weight, to give a sign of wanting to cooperate, of being willing to help me help him?

I was startled by the effect of my ablutions. Where the crust came off, his skin was tender, with inflamed red patches on the flanks and around his waist, something that looked like scabies. Or was it shingles? A proliferating eczema? Psoriasis? There were rough areas on his arms and legs, and in some places his skin seemed bruised, suffused with purple-red blotches; there were burst blood vessels and ridges that oozed pus, a few open sores on his buttocks and shoulder blades.

Het ziet er niet so best uit, I said, maar maakt u zich geen zorgen, wij komen er wel uit.

*

And what does Kasper do next in this fairy tale, colleagues? He purchases salves and oils and balms at the pharmacy. He goes to the Hema and buys new white clothes, a new coat and shoes and the most nutritious ingredients for an invalid’s meals. And here I must mention a remarkable writerly invention: Kasper describes pushing his two tables together, the one of musings and the other of science, the poetry table and the prose table, covering them in white towels, setting up his reading lamp like the light in an operating theatre. He helped the naked swan whisperer onto the tables, and set about tending to him from head to toe, three times a day, fourteen days in a row.

I could not read any further.

This, then, was the third time I put away the letter. This time I stashed it with my teaching materials, along with the white dummy book, because I thought I might use it to explain the problems of magical realism to my junior students. Not that I ever did; I was busy with other things. My novel had been translated, the translation checked and approved. There was a short respite in my own writing obligations and I decided to give my house a spring-clean, to have the place painted and pruned, have the squirrels removed from the attic, set a trap for the mouse, and let my wrist heal.

But then, about a month later, the clean-up in full swing, the letter all but forgotten – the mimic book unread, the cassettes unplayed – I received a third shipment, an oddly thick envelope in my postbox.

I tore open the envelope, standing there surrounded by painters from Wonder Wall in their white overalls. It was filled with sand – a good handful of pure white sand fell onto my feet. I remember stepping back and staring for quite some time at my two dark footprints on the paving. I sent the workmen home for the day. Who could have sent me an envelope full of sand, who but Kasper Olwagen? I checked the back of the envelope: no sender, just a scribble made with something like a stick of charcoal, the name Dwarsrivier.

Why Dwarsrivier – “cross river”? Some allegorical joke? Maybe his letter, which I still had not finished reading after all that time, would hold some clue? Maybe I should have a closer look at the logbook? And then there were also the tapes I had not listened to, in the Woolworths bag in my broom cupboard. I gathered all Kasper’s missives together on the kitchen table.

First, I picked up the letter and read on from page twenty, where I stopped the last time. Let me summarise the story for you.

After a month’s worth of skin treatments, the drifter’s hide had healed, his hair was cut, his scent pleasantly human. But this was not enough. Kasper was obsessed with getting the swan whisperer to talk. Because he was jealous of him, jealous of his art of communication with the “birds of the underworld”, as he put it. At night, he watched over the dozing vagabond, logbook in hand in case the man talked in his sleep, but all he heard was the ticking of the radiator, the rain pattering against the windows, the bell of Sint Nicolaas striking. Kasper could not handle the man’s silence. If he could just get him to open his mouth, even if just to say at dinner, and I quote: “Please pass the salt”, he would be able to start questioning him about how he charmed the swans.

Pass the salt, ladies and gentlemen? I had to smile. The story did not operate at this level of realism. I was starting to feel that my student was building an argument, that he was making some sort of case. Because the things he did to try to get the man to speak sounded like a programme, a via dolorosa with stations of the cross, and this letter was addressed to me, to the student whisperer, if you will.

But I never replied.

This is the first time I have ever spoken about it.

Let me stick to the story. How did Mr Philanthropist try to get his wayward guest talking? First, he sat him down in front of the television for hours on end, trying to provoke him with images of broken knees in Kenya, the terror of the long knives in Zimbabwe, the mourning polar bears of the North Pole, the smouldering trees of the Amazon; when this did not work, he made him climb through the roof hatch on clear evenings and showed him the swan and the harp in the stars, the tears of Orpheus in the west; and when this had no effect, he made him listen to every romantic swansong he could lay his hands on in the library – Grieg, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky. All for nothing. Not the terrors of our own time, not the eternal signature of the firmament, not the dated melodies of the Romantic era nor a glass of wine from Burgundy, nothing could untie this tramp’s tongue. Kasper writes that he considered taking him to a psychiatrist, or an ear, nose and throat specialist. One morning he examined the swan whisperer’s mouth himself, only to find there a healthy, light-red tongue, the clapper firmly strapped to the root, as he writes. He continues:

I shone the light into the back of his throat. The tonsils hung on either side of the uvula like two smaller bells. I ran the tip of my index finger along the roof of his mouth. Its ridges reminded me of a harp.

But the harps would not sound, at least not in Kasper’s writing. What he wrote were rows and columns, records and registrations, in shorthand throughout; an almost pathological writer’s block, this much at least was clear to me from the logbook. The entry for January 5th, 2003, was the following, in full sentences, the only semblance of self-reflection.

Swannyboy is standing like a statue behind my chair while I am trying to write, been like that for hours, as if he is supervising me, I pretend not to know he is there but I am listening, what is it that I hear? Just the sounds of the city? The sibilance of his blood? Or my own? He does not know that I can see his reflection in the glass of the picture on the wall, I can see his lips moving, and I move my pen over the page as well as I can, in sync with what I imagine him to be saying. What does my pen remind me of? The graphite needle in a weather station, registering all moisture and wind and cloud movement and recording them on a roll of graph paper.

And this, colleagues, is followed by rows and rows of sounds, the phonological patterns of Afrikaans. Some examples show the influence of the Khoi languages. Spak, grak, spal, malk, olk, skolk, and then mrie !krie krakadouw. Some of them were randomly strung together and arranged into what I can only call sound limericks. Transcriptions of what Kasper seemingly thought the swan whisperer was saying, or dreamt or invented. Swan whisperings, in other words. And what does the language of swans sound like?

Rie mrie, rapuu,

kriep, !tewiek, miruu,

tohoe wa bohoe

askla mor usa,

pierok griemok sklahoe.

Although I am a fan of nonsense verse, often finding in it more pleasure than in the pompous loftiness of, say, “Groot Ode” by Van Wyk Louw, I was in no mood to be made a fool of by a psychotic student looking for a mother. I smacked the book shut.

Look, Professor, a deaf and dumb schizophrenic taught me more about the art of writing than you could! And then pages filled with mocking rhymes. I should have known it was not innocent. A year or so later, I found the phrase “tohoe wa bohoe” in a book about the Pentateuch. It is Hebrew for the formless void in Genesis.

This I leave with you for now. I still do not know what to make of it. But something just occurred to me which I – well, someone in my line of work – would rather forget, but which might bring clarity.

It relates to an incident from the time when Kasper was still a registered student, the only time he dared contradict me. I had summoned him for feedback on his latest piece of writing. I wished to conclude it briskly. He had barely taken his seat when I fired away. Drop the metaphysics, Kasper, I said, drop the ideas, write what the readers want, a juicy story about your hometown, a tale of unwelcome newcomers, gang violence, dog fights, highway robbery, shebeens, self-importance, adultery, braaivleis, family feuds, Maggie Laubser and piety. Call it The Sorrow of Rustling River.

Kasper’s eyes glazed over; his voice was thin when he spoke:

And a smug local author as narrator? The days of cosy local realism are over, in case you had not noticed, he said, even when it is dressed up in all sorts of metafictional drag. If I were to write prose one day, it would be plain street reports, pavement anthropology, recorded from a perspective of distant sympathy. Clean and dry.

I saw small bubbles of spittle at the corners of his mouth. His hand was inside his blazer, but he did not take out his pen.

Fiction, he continued, with his tongue dragging more than usual, fiction can no longer console us. The terrors of our fatherland rob the narrative imagination of its will, its willpower. We can no longer imagine anything. We must become brutalists, collectors of facts, no longer storytellers, but archivists of the unimaginable brutalities of our country. From this, readers will gather for themselves fear and empathy, perhaps even entertainment and knowledge.

Well, this was the first time I had ever felt I was learning something from a student. I did not question him further about his views; I was not about to admit I was impressed. To be honest, I was jealous of what I recognised as an angle for a new literary movement in Afrikaans literature, which had become so woefully stuck in adventure and self-portrayal.

Mr Olwagen, I said, I regret to say that I think you feign bravery. When I look at you, I see no brutalist, I see an aesthete. I do not see lists of necklace murders, raped children, murdered geriatrics, armed robberies. What I do see are lists of fauna and flora, Lehmann lovegrass, heart-seed lovegrass, stagger grass, fountain grass, quaking grass. Should you not stay true to your nature? You read Adorno’s aesthetics theories; I fail to see in you a taste for critical analysis, or for satirical commentary on your fatherland. I look at your twitching nostrils and your hand on your heart and I see someone who feels overwhelmed, weak, scared, alone, not someone willing to give himself a death sentence in sixteen lines, like your much admired Osip Mandelstam did with his poem about everybody’s beloved Onkel Stalin. Or like Breytenbach did in his poem for the butcher. Like no poet today would dare to write about Robert Mugabe. You have a lazy tongue, Olwagen. You are a symptom of the problem that besets progressive intellectuals in this country. Politically correct pose on the one hand and evasive behaviour on the other. Get a life, I would say.

He kept staring at me with that inflamed gaze of his, but I did not return the look; I have no time for this kind of behaviour in students.

Be honest, I said, how can you be a pavement anthropologist on any interesting pavement in this country today without an armed bodyguard by your side?

And when I got no reaction: Your kind has been outlawed in this country, I said; there is always someone who needs a bow tie when a pig is being butchered.

I stood up behind my desk. He had to get this clearly. I would leave no room for misunderstanding.

Mister Olwagen, I said, do you want to know what I see when I look at you? I see someone who wants to banish himself to the sticks, yes, to the back of beyond, to become an architect of the intensified moment in the unblemished outdoors, a sculptor in the amber of words. You want to become an animal in your language, the way a genet is himself in the undergrowth. All very nice, mind you. I see your dictum, it is written all over your imposing forehead: The only subversive deed remaining in a superficial, brutalised society is the cultivation of the intimate discomfort of the lyric. True or false? Or would you formulate your escapist desires differently?

I could see that he was having difficulty. But honestly, what teacher has never upset a student? Not that you mean to, but you cannot do much about it when a student feels crushed. Nonetheless, this is not how an educator should act. Later, I sought advice from a colleague about the matter and he reminded me that Kasper was a client of a corporate institution, and that going forward I should treat him as such, no more and no less. I was his knowledge partner. If he wished not to complete his course, I should leave him be, that is all, it is his own choice, as long as he pays for services rendered.

*

Where was I? I have lost my thread. Oh yes, I was at the nonsense, the nonsense poems Olwagen had written in the mock-up. Tohoe wa bohoe. The formless void.

We were discussing the third package, the sand in the envelope. Dwarsrivier. I got out my atlas and, lo and behold, there it was, no allegories here, a real Dwarsrivier in the Cederberg Mountains, a farm belonging to the Nieuwoudt clan, closest post office Clanwilliam. I took the dustpan and brush, swept up the sand on the garden path and poured it back into the envelope. For the purposes of this lecture I have put it into this hourglass.

You understand the situation. Kasper’s letter from the hospital was nothing less than an instruction manual. I had to return to this letter every time in order to make sense of the ensuing packages. Was I trapped in the revenge plan of a wronged man? Or had I been caught by a tall tale? You see, I still did not believe the whole story of the swan whisperer.

You look at me? You ask, at what point might one start to think that such a tale could be true after all? That Kasper had not made any of it up? That the whole swan-whispering business actually happened that way, exactly, word for word?

There I sat at my kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, going through Kasper’s densely written pages. There was a teeth-pulling scene on page fifty. Perhaps the man has dental difficulties, Kasper writes, maybe that is why he would not talk. So he took his lodger to the dentist, where three teeth were pulled that same day, and numerous fillings administered. And then follows the part of the letter that got me thinking that perhaps my student had actually experienced something preposterous. Unlikely events occur far more readily, as we all know, in the real world than they do in stories.

On the night of 20 January, after the teeth had been pulled, I woke with a draught on my neck. The swan whisperer was at the open window in his pyjamas, arms raised. I slipped down the stairs behind his back. Outside on the canal in front of my apartment there were, believe it or not, not one or two but dozens of swans, the entire length of the Geldersekade, nodding and swishing – necks bowing, stretching, curving, a kind of writing in which the white cursive danced on the black ink of the canal. They came swimming from beneath the bridge, from the Oosterdok they swarmed, the air alive with the whirring of their wings. With their long necks set back they landed among one another, flapping and splashing. I was dumbfounded at the steadily growing congregation of stalklike necks, the feathers royally displayed in a massed nocturnal plume, the surface of the water astir under the blue light from the Liebherr cranes. This is how it must have looked when the gods herded all the swans together to pull the sled of Orpheus.

Professor, he asks me here in brackets, what would you call a drift of swans in Afrikaans? A “drifsel”? Could one call them a swathe? A throng? A longing, a sin, a shame of swans?

I did not return to the flat that evening, he writes. I wandered around the city, too perturbed by the spectacle of swans, all my doubts, all my reservations about this drifter summarily eliminated. He was a genius. Autistic, perhaps, as in Rain Man, but still a genius. Did you see it? The movie with Dustin Hoffman in the lead? I had to find a different approach. But how? He could not exactly take me on as his apprentice. Nor as the scribe of his whisperings. And no, I understood that I was not his saviour, nor his interpreter. Nor his lover, although that would have been a sweet ending for my story.

By six the next morning, tired and cold and hungry, I finally knew what to do. Why had it taken me so long? I had to go back to the flat and switch on the kettle. At a quarter to seven I had to knock on his door, open the curtains and touch his shoulder to wake him, just as I had done every morning for the past two and a half months. I would have to sit on the chair by his bed and have coffee with him in the sleepy silence, while we listened to the city slowly waking, the train wheels scouring the tracks, the siren in the Oosterdok announcing another workday. Together we had to sit there while the morning glow filled the room and a lone sparrow started chirping in the gutter on the roof, waiting for the bells to strike seven, first the Oude Kerk on De Wallen and then, after two strokes, the Zuiderkerk, and then promptly the closer clangour of Sint Nicolaas, as its dorsal fins were slowly sketched in before our eyes by the morning light. And then I would touch my face to see if I had to shave, and from the corner of my eye I would see him doing the same, with a barely audible scratching sound. And all of this, I knew, I would be able to do that morning for the first time without anxiety, because I understood that, after everything, and despite his unusual abilities, I had simply become his friend, the friend of this singular man, Professor, was that too much to ask?

Well, dear listeners, I cannot expect you to fully understand, after sharing with you only a few extracts from this letter, how moved I was by this passage. Sitting at my kitchen table, I knew without a doubt that all of it was true.

True and poignant. Because when Kasper got back to the flat that morning with his newfound insight, it was too late: His friend was gone, missing, rope ladder and all. And yet there was more. Page sixty-three.

He was disconsolate, Kasper writes, utterly inconsolable and distressed. Just when he had finally realised what was important about the swan whisperer – not his Orphean arts, but his ordinary bodily presence as a housemate – he disappeared. Gone, missing. For days on end, Kasper looked for him, up and down the swan route. He searched every night shelter, enquired at every welfare society. Asked every Daklozenkrant seller: “Heeft u een man gezien met wit haar en een touwladder?” He distributed flyers across the whole city: “Vriend vermist”.

And so, in the course of searching for his friend, Kasper himself becomes a drifter. Day and night, in wind and rain, he walks the city in the threadbare coat, wearing the boots of the swan whisperer. And here we find beautiful descriptions of Amsterdam, the reflections, the gables, the elms, the trams, always with the notion: I am no longer seeking inspiration or authorial fulfilment, I am looking for my friend, and every street corner and every reflection and every bridge speaks of my longing. Kasper writes – and this is where the angels start dancing, where in my view Kasper becomes a writer – of how he lingered at every bridge where he used to find the swan whisperer, raising his hands in the air and murmuring: What did I do wrong to lose my mate? And that if the swans did appear then, it would be immaterial.

Let me read you the final page.

I believe I spotted him once, white hair ahead of me on the bustling pavement, and I was gripped by the conviction that I should not call out or run after him, that if he were to look around and see me, I would be lost. I sensed that I myself had been followed for some time, in fact by someone who thought that they, too, recognised me. I realised I was part of a procession through the city, a silent convoy of the urban lost and looking, all of us connected at the wrist by an endless black ribbon, all of us thinking that perhaps we have found a lost person, someone who had run away, but afraid to make this hope known, afraid of being disappointed, rather walking on in the solace of a community of like-minded individuals, the consolation of not being alone, of belonging to the most unbreakable brotherhood on earth: the ones who stayed on, who have survived, who have been left behind.

And so, dear listeners, Kasper ends at the beginning, in the portico across from his own home where he saw his whisperer for the very first time. He falls asleep there, hungry and exhausted, at a degree or two below freezing. He slips into a coma. The city police pick him up and deliver him to the hospital, as he puts it: Without name, without papers, with only my story and the need to tell it to the one person on earth who would understand.

After two months and no further unusual parcels, I bought a new cassette player, packed up Kasper’s tapes and travelled to the Cederberg. The deeper I went into the mountains, from the Gydo Pass all the way through towards Clanwilliam, the more I felt I was on the right track. I found the farm Dwarsrivier easily and unpacked at a campground called Sanddrif. The sand in Kasper’s envelope was exactly the same as the sand I found at the river there. At night I listened to the tapes in my tent, fifty-three distinguishable recitations. I came to the conclusion that they were poems, recorded close to running water, or in the mouth of waving grass, as though Kasper wanted to provide his voice with a kind of pedal point, not the bold bass pedal he heard in the work of Bach, but rustling, murmuring, as though time was an instrument played by the transparent fingers of grass and water. I walked up and down the river for days, carrying my cassette player, until I found what I was looking for, a specific minor murmuring of water over flat rock at a small whirlpool, and also a patch of reeds with white plumes that rustled silkily like Chinese cymbals. These were the background sounds that Kasper had chosen to mask his voice.

Pale, oversensitive Kasper, how cold he must have been in those bare gorges in winter, beside that dark stream! There where he bowed to the wind, to the water, with his song. Would he have hung his bow tie on a reed? His waistcoat on an aloe, emptied his fountain pen onto the sand?

However hard I listened – and, ladies and gentlemen, I am still listening, I will never stop listening – I could not make out the words of the poems. If they were even words. What I could hear clearly was the strong commencement of the theme, and then its countermovement, varied somewhat in vowels and consonants, reinforced and built up by repetition and refrain, magnificent edifices of sound. I could catch rhythms, rhythmic variations, the length and cadence of the lines, their inversions and elongations and enrichments, the climaxes, the accelerations and decelerations. Also the tone and feeling of each recitation, sometimes elegiac and legato, sometimes exuberant, often painfully ecstatic, always with a songlike quality. I could understand the argument of the sounds, or rather the research done via sound, the search for possible developments or variations of the central theme, but never the meaning.

My work, I know, is measured out for the rest of my life. I am the real dummy, you see, the mock-up professor, and god only knows who is writing in me. Someone has fitted me with a tongue. My just deserts, I would say, if that person is my missing student or his missing friend. But I will not give up; it is bad enough that two people have vanished without trace. I sit in my yard and the seasons pass above me. I no longer write novels; I have come to see myself as a translator. I study the lists of compound sounds that Kasper recorded in my book, my empty parting gift to him. Using them, I make one translation after another of his sound poems. As soon as I finish one, I read it in unison with the sound patterns in the corresponding recording, and I keep working on it until it matches his voice as closely as possible. Much is lost in this process; perhaps something is gained. I drop the adjectives, I scrap the ideas, I barely link words to meaning, because meaning is irrelevant. What is important is the materiality of the words. They must become like grains of sand, inconsequential in weight; sweet, white, dry sand that does not care if you let it slip through your fingers. Twice a year I go to the Cederberg Mountains, to that whirlpool, that patch of marsh reeds, and I read my latest translations aloud there, in the hope that the water and the rushes will keep whispering it, perhaps whisper it through to him, if he is still somewhere out there.

Shall I share my latest attempt with you? I dedicate it to my lost student, the one who taught me everything a writer should be – which is, mind you, something quite different to what a writer should write.

Morning of the Southern Boubou

Holy crack! slipped from the knuckles

of this side’s foodfiddler and domesticator,

the shrike flits through daybreak’s crevice,

ama-a-a-a-zed at the spice of his cinnamon chest,

under his clove claws the rock ’n’ roll rippin’

spick ’n spark spillin’ crossriversands,

tincture of peck flecked on his coat-tails and flanks,

fixed in his frock, top hat trimmed

he frolicks over acres to the water’s edge, look!

triiiiiiiillllions of big and small shrikes in the looking glass,

cut it out, you cohorts of chancers in the ripples

that he counters with a cocky akimbo,

quicktailin’ the kidlight in the riverine herb,

and sidesteps, see here, this swi-sh-sh-shy oldcart waistcoat,

he is the one and only goddodger

here in the tendertipped noonteasing sun

!toweak in his throttle sits his petname !toweak

like a bell in the mount cunt, a-rou-ou-ou-sed

by the mouthsoft morn.ii