Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  So you were right. All good stories end happily.

  As for justice, well, that’s another story. That young woman I once brought home, Kay, accused me of raping her and wanted to take me to court, which would have meant I wouldn’t be standing here on the big water. It took a fellow female to make her see that virtue isn’t determined by gender but by action, just as it took another woman, the deputy editor, to fire her. As for your killers, they are still as free as the living dead or vice versa. No fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime.

  But what is that shape in the fog? It cannot possibly be a coast guard; we’re much too far out at sea. Is this what the good captain and his sailors saw after too many months on the water? Apparitions? I don’t know, but if it is a ghost ship it has Japanese writing on its side, another bit of news out here on the quiet colossus, the shroud starting to tap the mast softly. The lost ship slowly drifts by like a life, a race, a language, driven by the tides Maori could read like San did the Kgalagadi. The former call this great ocean, this extroverted desert, a marae, a community, a place of healing. That is why I’m here. I need this terrifying immensity to remind myself of your wife’s love for you and yours for her.

  And I can hear more than just the shroud now, getting a little louder. For quite a while I’ve been hearing your and Ma’s laughter in those of the living. How could she laugh with such deep pleasure? How could you laugh with such intense mischief? But I also hear a school choir singing ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ in its second language. And I can imagine-hear a man telling his comrades that, though they are far from home, fighting a war in which they are not even allowed arms, that they are still men, Africans, and must therefore do what is required of men when all is irretrievably lost. So I’m finally starting to understand the A minor, too, the fifteenth. Music that is out of this world, as Ma used to say. I can hear Beethoven paying his last respects to his old teacher, the constrictions of Vienna and then, rising out of this angelic singing, this drowning turmoil – this cold, wet violence – the vital declamation from the shtetl fiddler, the sound reclaiming life after a day of back-breaking labour. The music is saying, “Look at your son, standing there on the bow with his back to us. What is he doing there in the dissipating fog? Why is he putting his hand in his jacket pocket? What is he taking out of there? Is it a pistol? It doesn’t seem that heavy. Then what can it be? Let’s go and look. Let’s see how he chooses to farewell you. Let’s see what it is. Mind you don’t slip, stumble and scrape your shin now. Your son has an envelope in his hand. Why?”

  Well, as one storyteller to another, I was given this paper glove at your funeral. Songless and flowerless, as you wished. It was given to me by the undertaker.

  The mist is clearing and it is time to go. I would have preferred to have a hundred warriors perform a haka to farewell you. If anyone deserves it, it is you and the millions of other nonentities whose lives are determined by those of ambition. But I am too new to this country of your wife, Yvonne’s beloved ferns. So I will perform this act, make this gesture, born from a deskbound idea. For even there I tried to emulate you. If you were a fingerprints clerk and I a writer, were we not working with what makes each and every one of us different, but human?

  So what is inside the envelope? Something even lighter and softer than that tiny bird’s finest feather, something as heavy as this very planet in the glittering sky. I must let you go and you must do the same. I have to go and live my own small life, die my own small death. I must tend to the insistent sail, wake the others, for the wind is building, the ocean stirring. I am making this gesture in the hope that you have made peace with your God and your father and that you have forgiven yourself for forgetting your mother’s birthday one year. I do so in the hope that you are with the woman who gave up her life for you, who did her best to protect your infinitely sensitive soul from the rest of the grinding, grimacing world. I do so in the hope and commemoration that your death finally liberated you from the barbed wire of 1942 to 1945. I do so in the hope that you didn’t see or do worse things than the only small, dark event you ever told me about. I do so in the hope that you’ll forgive me for being so angry with you over so little for so long, that I used that sad weapon of silence to deprive you of a life you could have lived by proxy. I do so out of gratitude for your giving me that one thing we fear more than anything else: freedom. I do so in the hope that the great soul of that kudu you saved rests and abides with you, now and forever more.

  I am sorry that I never matched your generosity, which is greater than all hatred and charity combined. I am sorry that I wanted you to be something neither of us ever could, that I expected so much that I didn’t see in how much pain you were. I am sorry about all the jagged things I said, wrote and thought. I am sorry you didn’t tell me all your stories, possibly because they might get published. I am sorry you never told me about another shadow that haunted you. I am sorry I didn’t visit you that Sunday before you were killed. I am sorry I played a part in your dying violently and alone, thinking what I thought, writing what I wrote, doing what I didn’t.

  I truly think you were more sinned against than the old king himself, you old patron and piper of the canine kingdom. You old breaker of hearts and horses. You old maker of potjiekos, ginger beer and wooden steeds. You old judderer of the foot and clicker of the nail. You old soother of nightmares. You old charmer, you. You old young man. You gentle barbarian. You raver, you rager, you raconteur. You fearless warrior, you helpless babe. You sage, you frail old fool. You free man.

  The fates of the final movement have started, Father, steady and sure and beyond any contradiction, the shroud slapping more urgently. I must go now, not because I want to but to honour you, your wife, your daughter-in-law and your grandson. I have a story to tell and it’s thanks to you, once again. I will try to do justice to the mystery you were. I will try to tell your story as truthfully as possible, even if I lie wholesale about my own. I will sing your praises, for that is what we Africans do in the presence of great souls. And so I open this envelope and hold its contents for the longest moment I have ever known. Then, with the help of Master Beethoven and the four winds, I commit a tuft of your fine, silver hair to the mighty Pacific.