The Shallows

by Ingrid Winterbach

  ‘Which means what?’ Nick exclaimed. Impatient, irate.

  ‘Victor is a restless schemer,’ said Marthinus. ‘He thrives on intrigue. He’s paranoid. As blackguards often are. He’s manipulative, he’s a schemer. He’s inventive. He wouldn’t be such a good writer if he weren’t. But unfortunately he doesn’t confine himself to writing. He’s devious and unscrupulous. In short, he has an excess of imagination, but no form or medium can contain his destructive energy. And he’s his own greatest enemy. I don’t know. Does he have some issue or other with you?’

  ‘No,’ said Nick. ‘Apart from owing me money. Which I don’t expect he’ll pay back after all these years. So how do you know him?’

  ‘I had the dubious privilege of seeing him in action when we were on the same committee in the late eighties. We collaborated for a while with the trade unions. Just before I packed my bags for foreign shores.’

  ‘So what now,’ said Nick, ‘I’m not up to keeping the man here.’

  ‘I’ll take him to our place,’ said Marthinus. ‘No problem. There’s an extra room. Rosita can check out his injuries. Tomorrow we can find out where he’s from.’

  ‘Or whether perhaps he’s escaped from some high-security psychiatric institution,’ said Nick. Wryly.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Marthinus, ‘oh Lord.’

  The man let himself be led away by Marthinus without demur. Nick was profoundly grateful. He had neither the patience nor the empathy to concern himself any further with an injured nutcase. He shouldn’t have let him in in the first place. Whatever would have happened to the wretched guy in that case, it was none of his business. And of Victor he didn’t even want to think this evening.

  It was nine o’clock when Marthinus at last cleared out with the man. Nick remained behind dumbfounded and exhausted. He went and sat on the bed in Charelle’s room. The room was as empty as if she’d never lived there. If he had to accept that anything whatsoever that he’d done had contributed to what happened to Charelle, he’d go round the bend.

  He would sell this house. He’d put it on the market the very next day. He’d live in his studio for the time being. This space had lost any appeal it once had. It had been spoilt for him for ever. He wanted to put it behind him. And he didn’t want Victor to find him here. Calling card or not, he had no yen to see him again. He didn’t like him and he didn’t want to see him again.

  He had trouble falling asleep and his sleep was disturbed. Halfasleep, in the early hours, he turned to Isabel next to him in bed and called her name. He reached for her sleeping form, but woke up with a shock when he realised next to him the bed was empty; Isabel was gone from his life. In the months since they’d separated, she’d not once got in touch with him again.

  Thirteen

  The following morning Nick contacted the agent who’d sold him the house, and by the afternoon she phoned to say that she had a buyer. The person had made a cash offer and was interested in immediate occupation. Nick was alarmed. And who was this prospective (over-eager) buyer?

  His name was Buks Verhoef, said the agent, perhaps Nick knew about him, he was a Stellenbosch artist. He wanted to convert the house into a small private gallery.

  Buks Verhoef?! Enormously successful artist. He’d achieved fame through his heart-warming daubs: cheerful, gaudy street and country scenes. A few years earlier he’d moved on to three-dimensional work – bronze sculptures of wild animals – leopards, hyenas, lions, warthogs, and nowadays even elephants, which were bought at gigantic prices by foreign visitors. It was unlikely that he was personally responsible for these sculptures – he presumably had a team who executed his concepts in his enormous workshop behind his gallery. Buks was a big man, with a melancholy vibe. He looked like a pushover, but rumour had it that he was an astute businessman.

  Marthinus reported that afternoon that he’d contacted all psychiatric institutions in all of Cape Town and surrounds. Nowhere was there a patient missing. The three chaps who’d escaped from the high-security institution near Moorreesburg were safely back under lock and key after their little escapade. And none of them had been injured. Rosita had dressed the man’s wounds and Marthinus had taken him to the police station that morning, where he’d been reported as missing. He hadn’t reacted to Victor’s name, said Marthinus (ever so slightly disappointed?).

  Nick was relieved. The less Victor featured (loomed ominously on the horizon) in his life, the better it suited him.

  ‘I put my house on the market this morning,’ he said. ‘The agent’s already let me know that the Stellenbosch artist Buks Verhoef wants to buy it. Cash.’

  ‘Buks Verhoef!’ Marthinus exclaimed. ‘You can’t sell your house to Buks Verhoef!’

  ‘And why not?!’ asked Nick.

  ‘Bad energy!’ said Marthinus. ‘You don’t want to soil your hands with his money – he’s a crook and a swindler! And besides, his work’s an abomination; an insult even to the man in the street. Like me,’ he added, and laughed. ‘No, oh Lord. Just for that you must avoid him.’

  So that solved the matter for Nick. He phoned the agent and said he no longer wanted to sell. He was thinking of letting sometime in the future.

  *

  At the Metropolitan Museum in New York Nick had more than once gone to see the Astor Court. The design of this courtyard was based on the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets, from the Ming dynasty. This garden was in Suzhou, near Shanghai, and was celebrated as one of the most beautiful gardens in China. The courtyard consisted of three typical garden structures: a covered walkway, a small reception area, and a half-pavilion against the west wall. The small reception room also served as a terrace from which the moon could be viewed. Here the master of the house had gathered with friends to write poetry, taste a new tea, and to enjoy the full moon. The courtyard was designed in such a way that at full moon it was wholly illuminated. The plaque above the entrance to the courtyard as a whole read: ‘In Search of Quietude’, and the one above the entrance to the Ming Room: ‘Elegant Repose’. Gardeners chose poetic names for their structures to evoke a specific emotion or literary association. Every rock in the Astor Court was a piece of weathered limestone from Lake T’ai near Suzhou. The Chinese word for landscape (Shanshui) literally meant mountains and water. In Chinese gardens rocks represented high mountains, swathed in mist, or floating islands. In particular, rocks with freakish forms, top-heavy, with many perforations, were highly prized. These holes in the rocks represented caves and grottos – symbolic portals to other worlds; a refuge from times of unrest and confusion. In one corner was a small pond between a group of rocks, with koi fish and purling water, evoking a waterfall in a distant landscape between mountains.

  Nick recalled this moon-viewing terrace when Marthinus asked him the following day (Wednesday) whether he didn’t want to come round that evening for a drink. Nick accepted. Perhaps the evening with the full moon and unfamiliar friends might prove interesting.

  When he arrived, there were two men sitting on the stoep, a big man with an egg-shaped head and a small man with a peaked cap. The man with the egg-shaped head was called Anselmo Balla and the smaller man’s name was Selwyn Levitan. Anselmo growled something and Selwyn jumped up and shook Nick’s hand. They gazed out over the bay. They drank beer. The sun set. Anselmo from time to time broke wind. He glowered grimly straight ahead of him. He was restless, he fidgeted, he snorted, he produced strange sounds through his nose. A cool breeze came up from the sea. Nick thought: if only he could have a proper conversation with Charelle.

  Later the full moon rose over the mountain, diagonally behind them. They drank more beer. No tea tonight as on the Chinese pavilion from which the moon could be viewed. The moon climbed higher. No poetry either. Anselmo snorted and harrumphed and wriggled about while talking (passionately, emphatically). His foot tapped up and down and his hands were never still. Selwyn Levitan, on the other hand, sat virtually motionless all evening, marvelling at the moon.

  *

  When Nick g
ot home late on Thursday afternoon who should be waiting for him in front of his house in his motor car but Buks Verhoef. (A Jaguar, in case Nick needed further proof of Verhoef’s prosperity.) Not only was he corpulent (descending from his car with difficulty), but apparently also asthmatic. He wheezed his way up the stoep steps. Wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Wouldn’t Nick consider selling after all, he asked when they had sat down. He could offer more than the asking price. Cash. Why was he so keen on buying this particular house? Nick asked. He’d had his eye on a house in this area for a long time, but there weren’t all that many available. He wanted to convert the house into a small private art gallery. What did he mean by private? Well (Verhoef seemed uncomfortable), an exclusive gallery that was not accessible to the general public. Nick got a notion that Verhoef was not telling the whole truth. An exclusive gallery for exclusive buyers? That could mean anything. Buks plied his asthma pump, wiped his forehead once more, shifted about uncomfortably. Enormous thighs. Something disarming about him. Something of the shy, fat, awkward schoolboy. Nick found him engaging, in spite of not trusting him.

  For the time being no, said Nick, but he would give it some thought.

  Fourteen

  A month or so after Jacobus’ death I flee to the Eastern Cape. I know I’m leaving you in the lurch, but I can’t stay here any longer. If I stayed, I would perish, that I know. I stay with friends on the outskirts of an Eastern Cape town. A beautiful view of the quarry and the surrounding hills. A clump of bluegums in front of the house. They put a spacious outside room at my disposal. That suits me well. I can still do my freelance work here. It is bitterly cold. The end of winter, often the coldest time of year. Sometimes I accompany my friends to town when they go to work. Once I go to look at the coelacanth in the museum. The big fish is yellowish-pale, so different from what I had imagined. In its natural habitat, apparently, it glimmers like mother-of-pearl, in iridescent greens and blue-greens. At times I simply walk through the town, or have coffee somewhere. In the main street, once, I see goats eating from the refuse bags put out in the streets. I negotiate with Zimbabwean traders, at a stall in town, behind the cathedral, to make me a skull from wire and white beads. We agree on a price. When I’m not happy with the finished skull, they have to change it. I find that I don’t want the mouth to be open (in a manic grimace). They undo the wire securing the hinges of the jaw, close the mouth; the wire teeth no longer fit snugly over one another, but it looks better already. When completed, it’s too broad in the brow – it looks like a Neanderthal skull – but I like it nevertheless. I spend a considerable time in the university library. I like working there. This is where I come across a book on Nancy Spero. Her work speaks very directly to me. Also the work of Stanley Spencer – which I don’t know all that well, and which is a pleasant surprise. Especially the resurrection scene, and the scenes in the British camps of the First World War. I read eyewitness accounts of five survivors recounting their experiences the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I read in a book on Spero that Artaud’s writing is an underwater subliminal descent into a black, deadly world in which the feminine is simultaneously celebrated and stigmatised. I haven’t read Artaud extensively myself, because I can barely endure his brilliant grotesquery, or his life, or his suffering, or his notebooks on pain. There in the library I also read that Nietzsche maintained that torture is a woman: the pulling of a tooth, the plucking out of an eye. The violence of the Christian idea, the idea that becomes woman. The penetration of warm female corpses presenting (offering) their orifices. In Nancy Spero’s work men and dogs pollute the city, while women run, masturbate, copulate and perform acrobatics. It is bitterly cold. By now I believe that I’ll never in my entire life be warm again. It’s no longer just the organs in my body that are cold, the cold gradually seeps through to my bones. I imagine that I can see my frozen skeleton as if it’s projected onto a screen in front of me: my bones like ice crystals. My friends stoke up a great fire in the evenings, but of what use is it to me, my core remains frozen; I am still prey to my thoughts. On the bedside table stands the Neanderthal skull of wire and white beads. Instead of hollowing out the nose, the Zimbabwean traders have let it protrude slightly.

  When I don’t go to town, I study my friends’ medical handbooks. I examine, among others, the part on the surgical anatomy of the cleft palate in Gray’s Anatomy.

  At this time I start watching the videos of the Olivier brothers intensively. My good friend Willem Wepener put me on their track. Later he also encouraged me to write a monograph on them.

  At the beginning of spring I return to Stellenbosch. It’s a bracing season, the icy spring rains start to fall, millions of frail little snails hatch overnight, and the tender buds of the vineyards and the trees start to burgeon. You have in the meantime left on a long journey, to get your mind off things. You travel to far and unusual places, you peer down a crater and ascend a peak and row down a river full of green silt. You send postcards. Although you nevertheless persevere, you say, you know that all your wanderings are a futile attempt to displace your sorrow.

  At the end of the year I start – hesitantly and with great circumspection – writing the monograph on the Olivier brothers. At the beginning of the new year you are back in town again and I meet you in the coffee shop, the day it rained so incessantly.

  I do so like Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Reis is one of Pessoa’s heteronyms. Pessoa has died and his spirit is granted another nine months on earth to set his affairs in order. During this time he sometimes appears to Reis, who has just arrived in Lisbon. Reis’s life goes into a slow decline, starts subsiding more and more into passivity, and in the end he puts on his jacket and follows Pessoa to the cemetery. It is with an effort that I tear myself away from the space of the novel. Something of the sombre density of it lingers with me.

  Fifteen

  Once on their travels Isabel had said to him she felt like a pupa. Not something from which a moth or a butterfly was going to emerge, but as in a film being run backwards, in which the moth slips back into the pupa, the pupa changes into a worm, the worm into an egg, the egg becomes a speck, which grows smaller and smaller, until it vanishes. Until not even a molecule or an atom remains of it. She felt as if she was going to be annihilated, she said, into the most profound cosmic oblivion, into the smallest quantum unit of non-existence – and it was going to be BLISS.

  They were sitting opposite each other in the cafeteria of the Metropolitan Museum. Nick didn’t know what to say. He didn’t let on. Keep your gaze neutral, he told himself. Don’t show that you’re disconcerted. She doesn’t need it now.

  They drank their tea in silence. Isabel watched the people intently. From her unruffled expression there was little to be read of her internal turmoil, at any rate by an outsider. When they’d finished, he asked if she wanted to go and see the Astor Court with him. She only shook her head slightly, in refusal. When he saw her sitting there like that, he had an intense desire to take her in his arms and to nestle her poor, tortured head against his shoulder. His fingers in her hair (flaxen-white like wool), his fingertips healingly on her thin, fragile skull. But he was scared of her as well – she was so completely impenetrable in her misery. He’d gone alone, and sat there for a long time on his own. The rocks represented mountains, the pond a lake or a sea. A landscape of distant mountains and rivers.

  This was what Nick thought of on his way to work on Friday when he looked at the mountain range on the distant horizon. When he got home that evening he decided he would sell his house to Buks Verhoef after all. In spite of the fact that Marthinus had advised him not to do it. He no longer liked the house. It held bad associations for him. Tomorrow he would phone the agent.

  *

  On the day on which I can see the old father for a second time, I first have a cup of coffee in town.

  Opposite me, at a long table, is Buks Verhoef, the much-loved local artist. The place doesn’t really do it for me. It�
�s pretentious, like everything in this town. I sit at a smaller table, with my back to the shelves filled with exorbitantly priced exclusive vinegars, wines, muesli, packets of biscuits and rusks. My laptop is open in front of me. I read what I’ve written about the Olivier brothers in preparation for my interview with the father.

  A man comes into the coffee shop. I take note of him, because he’s wearing a winter jacket on this hot day. A strangely old-fashioned Harris Tweed. Very ugly, very unflatteringly cut. He’s wearing large black-framed glasses (also particularly unflattering), his hair is almost shoulder-length and oily, and he looks bewildered. I look at him musingly. What would he be doing here, he seems so out of place? It looks as if he wants to sit down at the little table in the centre of the shop, near the entrance, between me and Verhoef.

  The next moment he suddenly snaps into action, swiftly moves to the door, aims a pistol in Buks Verhoef’s direction, fires a few shots, and before I can register properly what’s happened, the man is out by the door. General consternation ensues: a yelling and screaming. Deafening.

  Buks Verhoef is lying head forward on the scrubbed table. Fatally wounded in the heart? No spattering of blood on the wall behind him – so the bullets didn’t go through the body. In one corner a clutch of screaming customers and waitresses huddle together, and in the other corner (behind the pillars) two women are yelling hysterically.

  Because I have been trained in first aid, I rush to Verhoef’s assistance. I try to lift him carefully from behind, my forearms under his armpits. I get him up straight, leaning back against my chest, his head lolls back against my shoulder. His face is turned towards me at an angle. My cheek just about against his. He is a big, heavy man. Too heavy for me to lay him down on the floor on my own. He’s been shot in the chest. The blood is literally spurting out in a bright red arc. I try to staunch the bleeding – press a handful of serviettes to the wound – but it’s difficult to keep him upright at the same time with just one arm. But it’s certainly too late already. Blood is burbling out of his mouth. He must have been hit in the lungs as well. He is dying. His face is half turned towards me. At first, for a few moments, there is shock and disbelief in his gaze, then bewilderment, then despair, and then he casts up his eyes to me in a last look of resignation as he surrenders himself to the inevitability of his own death. With my rapidly fading image as accompaniment, the soul of Buks Verhoef takes flight from his mouth. Poor Buks. His body goes limp in my arms. His head drops forward again, his arms droop limply by his sides when I remove my arms from his armpits. That’s how I leave him. I’ve never been scared of blood, but I’d forgotten how vividly it pumps. So as a result I am beset by an enormous sorrow.