The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Sam smiles, teeth as white as snow. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. Not over. Nowhere, everywhere. All the same. Everything is what it is, no? Or what it is becoming. Why must things have a fixed shape? You should prise the shapes open.’

  Sam’s wrist makes a shadow movement, as if he is practising a piece of choreography.

  He gets up. ‘That’s not enough.’ He wants to add: I need proper beginnings and endings, structure. ‘I’m going now.’

  He leaves two R100 notes on the table for the untouched food, gets up and walks out without looking at Sam or the waterfall. Only when he gets outside does he realise that there is no way for him to get back to the city. Had it not been for the mushroom juice in his blood, he might have stopped himself, but now he starts walking on the hard shoulder, along the busy road. He is ready for the long trek. In the distance, he can see the outlines of the Voortrekker monument. He is walking towards it. He takes off his shoes so as to feel the tar under his feet. The further he goes – cars speeding past, the engine heat against his skin – the looser he becomes.

  He takes his shirt off too. He is sweating. The silver helmet appears next to him, and the Vespa. Sam is driving along slowly, has to put his foot down every now and then to balance himself.

  ‘Your feet,’ Sam says, ‘they’re bleeding.’

  He looks at Sam and then down at his feet. ‘I find it beautiful,’ he says, ‘the blood.’

  He keeps walking. Sam stops on by the side of the road, kicks out the scooter’s stand. Sam walks after him, takes him by the shoulder, holding out the helmet.

  ‘Come on,’ Sam says, ‘don’t sulk.’

  Behind Sam cars are speeding like spaceships in orbit. He stops, but does not take the helmet from him. Sam takes off his own helmet. His hair is strewn out like a black sun.

  ‘We can talk about it if you want.’

  Sam embraces him tightly, silently, a helmet dangling in each hand. Just as swiftly, he disengages himself again. Sam puts the helmet on for him, tying the buckle under his chin in a fatherly manner. A few long strands of hair still cling to the inside of the helmet. Sam tests whether it fits snugly, then knocks on it three times with his knuckle.

  ‘It is not enough,’ he says to Sam and shakes his head, ‘to look at you when you’re dancing. Not enough to ride around with our bodies pressed against each other. We are on a false track. I need more. Substance, direction. I don’t want to hear some sort of cliché like “the only constant is movement”. Or nonsense about amorphous shapes—’

  Sam puts a finger to his lips, silencing him.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ says Sam. ‘Let’s not talk. You should learn to do without words. There are better things.’

  They walk back to the scooter. He gets on the back and they go: his arms around Sam, his helmet knocking against Sam’s. Like when they met for the first time. Would this, after all, have to do: endless journeys on the back of a silver rocket, wind and movement and looseness? Far-off sightings of Sam on a stage? Milling about in idyllic or overgrown gardens? He empties his mind. Sam’s hair is blowing against his cheeks. Neither says anything. It is just them and the cars and the warm wind. The smell of melting tar.

  Sam turns his head, says something that gets blown away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  They drive into the city centre. He tightens his arms around Sam. He has not been here for years. It looks pretty gloomy. They drive past a church. In his childhood, he recalls, he sang in a school-choir competition here. A Dutch Reformed church it was back then: a piece of architectural brutalism, the overwhelming weight of concrete miraculously suspended at precarious angles. Small shards of coloured glass in the concrete. Now it has a high fence. A sign above the entrance indicates that it is a haven for street children and refugees.

  They stop in one of the shoddiest streets in the city centre. A paper bag blows down the street. Weightless and pale, half-translucent. The street is empty, the cars’ windows blind in the afternoon sun. He wonders who is sitting in the cars, watching them. He hears a hyena laughing, or perhaps a wild dog. (He no longer knows the animals.)

  On the pavement someone is waiting for them. Sam must have contacted him earlier. The man is standing in front of a seventies office building, in shades of blue and grey, with lots of broken panes. Sam introduces him to the man. Somewhere behind them, the barking sounds again.

  He looks queryingly at Sam and the friend. The latter cocks his head too, listens for a moment.

  ‘The zoo,’ he says. ‘Just a block away. Hyenas.’

  There is nothing where the front door used to be. They enter. The lift shaft is empty. Just a piece of cardboard up to hip-height instead of a lift door. They walk up the stairs. People are living here. Dishwater (or perhaps sewage) is trickling down the stairs. When you peer through open doors, there are children’s faces in the dim light. Buckets and food smells. The smoke of a coal fire. Half-naked bodies, West-African French on radios. On the top floor they encounter the only door, made of steel. Sam’s friend unlocks it with difficulty.

  ‘Come and have a look at his exhibition,’ Sam says.

  A kind of improvised art gallery. The internal walls have been removed across the entire floor to form a long, low space interspersed with pillars. There is a small group of people in the opposite corner. The carpets have been ripped out. Carpet glue still clings to the concrete floor and sticks to your soles. There are photos hanging on the walls. Suburb is the title of the exhibition. The photos are big, two by three metres each. There are three series: ‘Ghost Pools’ is the first. A photo of a carpark in front of a suburban house which now houses a swimming-pool business. If you look carefully, you can see the outlines in the concrete of a former swimming pool. Another photo is of an empty municipal swimming pool in which concrete is growing through the cracks. Another one of a children’s pool in a small park. Leaves float on the surface. A woman is standing in the water, bent over, washing foaming laundry. Her dress is tucked into her underwear. ‘Burn, baby, burn’ is the title of the second series. Photos of burnt-out suburban homes. Then comes ‘Gardens of Eden’. Urban gardens: wintry gardens snapped through barbed wire, forgotten little rock gardens in public parks, lilies on a traffic island, a shattered greenhouse on a plot which is now a taxi rank – a single orchid surviving amidst shards of glass. Ever smaller, the gardens.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ says Sam’s friend the photographer when they walk past the photographs. ‘Night’s on its way, there’s no electricity here.’

  By the time they get to the ‘Gardens of Eden’, dusk has deepened; he can only vaguely make out the images.

  ‘How does one get people to attend an exhibition here?’ he asks the photographer.

  ‘Lure them with cheap wine. Stuff to smoke. Friends and vagrants. Half the wine at the opening was filched by local meth addicts and glue sniffers. I took some shots of it. Am still planning to hang it with the rest of the stuff. I think I’ll call it “Bums who OD on art”. Maybe I should add some photos of this bunch as well.’ He gestures towards the little group in the corner. White kids in their twenties, barefoot. Someone has switched on some music, wine is being swigged by candlelight. Everyone is speaking Afrikaans.

  It is warm here at the top, as if the heat of the coal fires on lower storeys is rising and gathering under the ceiling. The photographer takes off his shirt. BOER is tattooed on his muscular chest. His joint is shedding tiny flakes of ash. He absent-mindedly touches his nipple and pecs with a fingertip. The flakes smudge – two grey lines, flickering like phosphorus in the pale light, are drawn across his chest.

  The group in the corner offer him something to smoke and sniff. Strong stuff, he is told. He declines. He is no longer a youngster with the urge to experiment. He is in any event still enjoying the unnatural clarity of the mushrooms.

  ‘Show us your Butoh again,’ someone urges Sam.

  While Sam takes off his clothes and gets in position
on the floor, he takes a cigarette that is offered him. He retreats, opens a window. From the zoo: the sound of monkeys. Not a thing stirring in the street. Someone places a circle of candles around Sam.

  The performance is far slower than the one on the stage before. As it progresses, it slows down even further, to virtual non-movement. The air solidifies around Sam. He stretches his mouth open in an ancient grin. In the half-dark his teeth are whiter than ever. Sam holds the grin until it seems as if his mouth might never close again. The grin disturbs him; he has to look away. On either side of him the space disappears in the dark. Some of the ceiling tiles are missing; candlelight gleams against wires hanging from the holes. A screeching from the zoo. Peacocks? One starts, then others join in. It sounds like fear.

  He walks to Sam when the performance is over. Sam is standing in the candlelight. He is still naked.

  ‘Returning isn’t possible,’ he tells Sam.

  Sam’s eyes are glazed over. He is still in the process of returning from his body-world, from his pre-emotional state. ‘What are you talking about? Returning to where?’

  When he doesn’t say anything, Sam says, ‘Don’t, then. Whatever it is, just leave it. Just leave it behind.’

  He returns to the window. Sam keeps watching him, he notices from the corner of his eye. He wants Sam to follow, but he does not, just turns to the BOER, who has something to say about the Butoh. He turns towards the window, opens it wider. The silence of the city settles like an irreversible stiffness in his muscles.

  Sam is not with him, he thinks, and he is, similarly, not with any of the people in this fatherless little crowd, none of whom he will ever see again after this evening. He is no more with them than he is with any of the squatters beneath them (beneath them? Perhaps they have already crawled up through the air ducts, perhaps they are waiting at the edges of the light to pounce and tear every last shred of clothing from these kids’ bodies). Loose. They are all loose – loosened from each other. He turns around, observing the scene. He withdraws from the light, inching his way backwards. His hands search the wall behind him for the exit.

  Only a single street light is working. Pieces of cardboard move across the pavement. Plastic bags are blowing down the street like flowers. A vagrant is pulling his possessions on a trolley with a broken wheel. It is making an unearthly noise. The waste is piling up in this city, he thinks, the place is filled with relics. Simultaneously recognisable and unrecognisable. One big performance space. Something smells new, fresh. It starts raining. He takes off his shoes. He starts walking. It will take him a long time, but he does not care: he will not stop until he has left the city behind completely, until he can no longer see a single light.

  One of the first jacaranda blossoms falls on his face, slides down his cheek. He takes it in his hand, looks at it in the half-light. It contains an entire garden, he thinks, this flower.

  ‌Acknowledgements

  The Afrikaans versions of most of these stories were written as part of a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Stellenbosch.

  I’m grateful to Marlene van Niekerk and Willem Anker, my supervisors in the MA. Thanks to the following people who commented on (some of) the stories: Stevan Alcock, Pierre Brugman, Wynand Coetzer, Stephanus Muller, Sansia Naudé, Bibi Slippers, Richard Uschold and James Whyle. Thank you to my father, in whose home a few of these stories were written. Thanks also to Frederik de Jager and Fourie Botha, my original publisher and editor at Umuzi, and to Stefan Tobler, Sophie Lewis and Ana Fletcher at And Other Stories. I am also indebted to Rebecca Carter, my agent at Janklow & Nesbitt in London.

  And thank you to Damon Galgut for writing an introduction to the collection.

  Some sources that I found useful:

  Auster, Paul, 1975. ‘One-Man Language’, The New York Review of Books. Volume 22, number 1.

  De Quincey, Thomas, 1886. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. W Scott Publishing Company.

  Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 2005. Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language. Zone Books.

  Morrison, Robert, 2010. The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas de Quincey. Pegasus.

  Ross, Alex, 2007. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

  Vollmann, William T, 2010. Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. Ecco Press.

  Wolfson, Louis, 1975. Le Schizo et les langues. Gallimard.

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