She’d made him listen to Alban Berg, until he overcame his innate resistance – until something in him yielded – and he developed a taste for it, as for Schoenberg, Terry Riley, Luciano Berio. (Cathy Berberian singing Berio.) She’d made him read books. She explained the modernist project to him. She explained the minimalist backlash of Gerhard Richter to him. She made him look at Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer. That was just before Jeff Koons appeared on the scene, photographed on a rock, naked, with Cicciolina under him in stockings and suspender belt. That was before the manifestation of Ilona’s clean-shaven butthole (for Nick inexplicably uncontaminated – without any baggage, during his and Isabel’s dismal visit to New York). Marlena had been one of the three most important women in his life (by contrast with the multitude of one-night stands and brief encounters); she, after her the woman he’d married, and then Isabel (her hair as white as flax).
Did she still listen to Alban Berg? he asked.
Yes, she said, sometimes. But in fact for a long time now she hadn’t really listened to music.
It had been good to see him again, she said, as they said goodbye.
*
He’d slept with the mother of his ex-student. He’d encountered the woman with whom he’d been obsessed thirty years ago (he’d always thought that he’d never before or since desired anybody as much as that). Now he just had to decide whether he wanted to sell his house, then he’d have seen it all.
*
Jeff Koons was a contemporary of his, three years younger than Nick. So when he was at art school Jeff Koons was not yet known. Koons had not yet produced the photo series Made in Heaven, in which he and Ilona Staller were photographed in all kinds of explicit sexual positions, among others exuberantly engaging in cunnilingus on a rock. When Nick was at art school in the eighties, when Marlena had taken him in hand and introduced him to a multitude of things, Ilona’s clean-shaven pudenda and anus were not yet available for general consumption.
*
That evening, when Nick was lying on his left side, his heart beat so fast that he was scared he was going to have a heart attack.
The next morning in the dining room there were a man with a pointed face, two semi-oriental women and a little boy with a dense mop of black hair. Two mail-order brides, thought Nick. One bride was a trifle more attractive than the other. Which one of the two would be the mother of the child? Nick, the man, the child and the two brides, and a large man with a coarse, Frankenstein-ish face, were the only people in the dining room, and probably in the hotel. Marlena had mercifully departed already. She’d said the previous day that she was planning to leave in the late afternoon. He still had to process the shock of their reunion.
In the course of a late-morning walk on the beach, no illuminating thought or blinding insight came to him. When he thought of the possibility of selling his house, a haze descended on his brain. Thoughts that did obtrude themselves were the aroma of the woman’s neck and her enticing body, so ready to receive him. His sexual interest had been properly stimulated. He was still surprised at the total surrender of both of them. With indecent vigour they’d set sail into the night on the double bed of satin and ribbons as if on a ship. He had to smirk when he thought of that room – the bridal suite – with plumes and ribbons and baubles and bows, which they’d utilised with such unholy abandon. He could never have surmised that such a – to look at her – rich, demure trophy wife could be capable of such inventive sexual high jinks. But it wasn’t an ideal situation. Were the inebriated husband to get to know about it – and they hadn’t been exactly discreet, and he probably posted spies everywhere his wife went without him – he wasn’t the kind of man blithely to accept that his wife was cheating on him. And that, on top of it, with the man who’d encouraged – or at least not discouraged – his daughter to do a project on satanism, which in the end had just about cost her her life. Or that was how he could reconstruct it.
Marthinus sent him an SMS: I’m reading Ezekiel. Powerful stuff.
Ezekiel, thought Nick. Lord knows, further than Ezekiel was at that moment from his thoughts, no prophet could ever be. But perhaps he should also read it, to guide him in these confusing times. The moon, nearly full, shone on the sea that evening. Li Po, according to legend, drowned when he grabbed at it from his boat. Li Po, the poet who sang of drunkenness. Drunk, and drunk with the image of the moon on the water.
*
The first week of July. The night before full moon, at six o’clock, the moon appears above one mountaintop. At ten past seven it is already radiant in the open heavens. It is cold. There is a light stirring in the air, but no wind. At a distance the barking of dogs, and the voices of children.
Full moon. Eleven o’clock in the evening. I go outside. All solid forms are virtually dissolved in light. Even the mountains. Especially the mountains. All is light, no shadows, no detail. The light is cool. The world is bathed in the coolness of the light of the moon. You can say what you like, but the light of the moon is cool. It’s like no other light. It’s like light from another time – a time before the beginning of time.
Thirty-two
A day or two later Nick had had enough of the hotel, of the beach, of the moon on the water, of the man with the two mail-order brides, of the Frankenstein figure, brooding, in a corner of the dining room. The few of them still the only guests at the hotel. Off-season. He got into his car and drove back to town.
Jan Botha had shorn his hair. Nick was gobsmacked. How could he do it? That fragrant head of hair!
‘I see you’ve cut your hair,’ he said cautiously to Jan.
‘Yes,’ said Jan Botha.
‘Any specific reason?’ Nick asked.
‘Penance,’ said Jan Botha. Evidently as much as he was prepared to say. Nick noted that he was no longer wearing eye make-up either.
There’d been somebody to see Nick, said Jan. His message to Nick was: Vincenzo Anastagi had been to visit him. He was on his way somewhere – Jan thought he’d said Malmesbury, or Moorreesburg – but as soon as he was back in Cape Town, he’d definitely drop by again.
‘Oh, God,’ said Nick.
*
Nick was glad to see Marthinus again. Victor Schoeman had visited him in his absence, he said. The person had referred to himself as Vincenzo Anastagi. It could only be Victor – typical of him. He had, after all, sent that postcard earlier in the year with the picture of Vincenzo Anastagi. He’d told Jan Botha that he would come by again on the way back from Moorreesburg. Why on earth would Victor want to see him, Nick asked, they hadn’t had anything to say to each other for years. And he still wondered whether Victor hadn’t after all had some hand in the house-buying business. Marthinus said he’d never been altogether sure of that. Of the other things, yes – the robber bands and the escaped prisoners and the convict lookalike in Nick’s kitchen, yes, that he still thought Victor could have had a hand in. But common everyday criminality, he didn’t think that would interest him. That was too predictable, too ordinary. Just look at The Shallows, Victor liked unusual angles, he liked complicating things, he liked unexpected twists, he liked ambiguity, he liked to shock and intrigue. Although it was possible, said Marthinus, that in reaching certain conclusions he’d allowed himself to be led too much by The Shallows. That was perhaps mistake number one that he’d made.
‘But why is he in the country all of a sudden?’ asked Nick.
‘There could be a thousand-and-one reasons,’ said Marthinus.
‘Like what? What’s suddenly bringing him here now?’
‘For all you know, he’s been here on a visit any number of times before. He could have business interests here. Perhaps a relative died. Perhaps he inherited money. Perhaps he’s come to do research for a new book. How long ago was The Shallows published? As far as I know nothing’s been published since. Unless he did it under a pseudonym overseas.’
‘He has no relatives, as far as I know,’ said Nick. ‘I don’t think anybody would ever consider him as
an heir, he was too much of a general pain in the arse. He fell foul of everybody. If he didn’t borrow money from them without paying it back, he insulted or stabbed them in the back in some way or other. Although he wasn’t as bad as Chris Kestell. There wasn’t a soul who wasn’t rubbed up the wrong way by Chris Kestell. He was the most confrontational person I’d ever met. Confrontational and destructive. Self-destructive.’
‘Maybe Chris never committed suicide,’ said Marthinus. ‘Maybe he just let the rumour be spread. Maybe he went off somewhere, somewhere up the coast of Africa, to smuggle elephant tusks somewhere, or to start up a cellphone empire or to smuggle counterfeit funerary art. Or to swindle and corrupt the pygmies of the Congo in some way. Oh Lord.’
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘Chris is definitely dead. A friend of mine was present the day when they winched his body from the dam. Stone tied to the ankle. His packet of cigarettes still on the dam wall. He had a horror of water, and then he went and drowned himself. A final deed of self-spite. Chris Fungus. His equal I’ve never come across since.’
‘That’s what you get,’ said Marthinus, ‘if your great-grandfather was a minister of the church, and your grandfather a member of the Synod, who wrote a vindication of racial segregation. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’
*
Initially Nick hesitated to tell Marthinus, but a day or two after arriving in Cape Town, one day when they were having a beer on Marthinus’ stoep, the mountain diagonally behind them, clearly delineated in every detail, he could no longer keep it to himself and said: ‘In Oesterklip I slept with the mother of my ex-student.’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Marthinus, ‘how did that happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nick, ‘it just happened.’
‘What now – are you going to follow up?’
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘Not because I don’t want to, but because it would be an exceedingly bad idea. In the first place because she’s married. I’m wary of the husband. He’s the relentless kind. I checked him out. The kind who wouldn’t hesitate to exact revenge. He wouldn’t think twice about hiring somebody to shatter my kneecaps, or worse. In the second place she’s the mother of a student of mine, and I still feel a bit uneasy about my share in the whole ridiculous satanism palaver. I sort of feel I should have given the kid better guidance.’
‘Nick,’ said Marthinus, ‘what’s this all about now?’
‘Besides,’ said Nick, ‘somewhere, with our randy cavortings, we were trying to drive out the thought of the child, and it’s not going to work. It’s going to catch up with us and then sooner or later the roof’s going to cave in on our heads. If the spouse hasn’t already taken his revenge by then. No, however exciting our delights were, and I can assure you they were, I don’t dare follow up. For my own sake and that of the woman.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Marthinus. ‘The wise man knows when to contain himself. And did you achieve clarity on the sale of your house?’
‘No,’ said Nick.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Marthinus.
‘For the time being nothing,’ said Nick. ‘Especially now that I’ve got the message from Victor. I first have to make sure that he’s got no part in the affair.’
‘And how are you going to find that out?’
‘Buggered if I know. More than ever I just want to cut and run. Up the coast wasn’t far enough. Run, as in to a place where there’s no chance of meeting anybody from my past or my present.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Marthinus. But Nick got the impression that Marthinus wasn’t really saying what he thought.
That evening they watched A Serious Man by the Coen brothers. The film resonated powerfully with Nick. Especially the strange, cryptic opening. The curse of the dybbuk. He thought that perhaps he’d taken Menasse’s stories too much to heart. But if there really were things like the emanations Menasse mentioned, then Nick wondered if it had been wise of Jan Botha to cut his hair. His strength – and his protection – could perhaps also reside in his hair, like Samson’s. But perhaps, he said to Marthinus when they were discussing the film afterwards, he was confusing different things with one another: the dybbuk and the Kabbalah and the Bible, Samson and Job, and whatever else. And once he started seeing things in terms of emanations and so on, it was late in the day for him.
He couldn’t see, said Marthinus, how the one contradicted the other. Weren’t all these things interconnected? And he could see why Nick was concerned that his student Jan Botha had cut his hair. It made sense to him. He would have been concerned too. Marthinus was particularly intrigued when Nick told him that Jan Botha had said that he’d done it as an act of penance. And that he’d not wanted to say more than that.
‘Penance, you say,’ said Marthinus. ‘Fancy that, eh?’
*
My dear friend Willem Wepener and I meet again one evening for a drink. We meet in the same guest house again – private and cosy, exactly as Willem prefers it.
I become aware of the fact that I’m constantly on the lookout for the woman, although I know perfectly well that she left the country a week ago. Tonight I’m distracted. Willem tells me about Paris, where he did an artist’s residency. He tells me how he followed in the footsteps of Arikha. How he’d visited Beckett’s grave. How poignant he finds the friendship between Arikha and Beckett. How is his own work coming along? I ask. He’s struggling, but he finds it a challenge. He thinks he’s making a breakthrough, although he’s wary of saying such a thing. I tell him about the woman. He’s intrigued. Here, in the guest house, after he left?! Yes, I say. She’d been sitting diagonally across from us all the time (I point out where), but I hadn’t really been taking note, he and I were too engrossed in conversation. Only once he’d left, had I really focused on her, also because I realised that she’d been watching me all evening. Willem laughs. He finds it an engaging story. I tell him about my encounters with the hollow-cheeked disturber of the peace. Hardly encounters, I say, really more like stalkings, so much so that for some time now I’ve been afraid to go to town, in case he’s lying in wait for me somewhere. The man wants to go travelling with you, says Willem, without your even knowing each other’s names? I tell Willem about my three bungled meetings with Marcus Olivier. I recount how he’d not looked at me once, or given any sign of recognition, although we met each other long ago in very particular circumstances. (I don’t elaborate on these circumstances.) It remains a mystery to me, I say, that such a mean-spirited, surly man could be the father of such magnanimous artists. Willem is at one with me on this, the Olivier brothers are exceptional.
The rest of the evening we talk about Arikha again (Willem is clearly a bit obsessed with him). We talk about Willem’s work, about his relationship, about the monograph I’m writing.
*
Two days later I read in the paper that Marcus Olivier, historian, professor emeritus, has died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
I’m caught on the wrong foot. I had still hoped to talk to him once or twice. Unfinished business. What had I wanted from him? Did I want him to confess in my presence, look into my eyes and say: I know who you are? I remember every moment of that evening as if it happened yesterday. I have to laugh at the sheer improbability of this. I bungled every single one of my three recent meetings with him. Perhaps I should have had a more clearly defined agenda. Such a churlish man, so unobliging. In all probability a misogynist to boot. Perhaps it was enough to have beheld him and wondered at the fact that such a man could have fathered two such sons, such innovative, imaginative artists, whose work has provided me with so much pleasure. Perhaps it’s enough to have savoured the irony of it.
He is being privately cremated, but a small memorial service will be held for him in the retirement resort where he lived. A pity that there’s not going to be a proper funeral. I would have liked to stand next to his open grave with the other mourners.
Am I supposed to sympathise with Mis
s De Jongh? On the phone she sounds cool and businesslike. It’s quite in order, I may attend the memorial service. Will his sons also be there? No, unfortunately they won’t be able to make it, they’re involved with some project in Alaska at the moment. What a pity, I say. Yes, she says. Did he have any other near relatives? No, only the sons. How sad, I say. Yes, she says. When did he last see them? Very long ago, she says, several years ago.
I have no desire to attend the memorial service. I can just picture it: a small gathering in the dining hall of a retirement village. Mainly ex-colleagues of Marcus Olivier. An arrangement of pink gladioli, white carnations and grey foliage in one corner. Tea, coffee and snacks – savoury and sweet. One or two of his ex-colleagues say a few words. They mention what an outstanding historian Olivier had been, how painstaking, how valuable his contribution. (Nobody refers to him as beloved. No criticism is levelled at his modus operandi, his intransigence, his obstinacy, his contracted vision, his meanness.) I picture a staid, sedate occasion. No tear is shed, nobody tears their hair in an indecorous display of public grief. Everything decently decorous. Unless Miss De Jongh were to decide she’d had enough of hypocrisy, duplicity and false decorum – she will turn this into a memorable occasion. She revs up proceedings with décolletage and a well-stocked drinks trolley. She’ll see to it that her employer (slash benefactor?) is dispatched with fanfare. (One of the ex-colleagues ventures later on, behind the arrangement, to paddle a hand gently – appreciatively – over her impressive bosom.)
The Shallows Page 22