The Shallows Read online

  The house had been maintained as meticulously as the garden. In its day it must have been a stately home – large, dignified, with the wide front stoep.

  On the stoep a woman sat reading. A Malay beauty, dark eyes, slightly sallow complexion. In the corner of the stoep a little boy was playing. Marthinus is at the back, the woman indicated with her head. He must be working in the garden. Nick could just walk straight through the house.

  The passage was wide. The ceiling was high. The house smelt of floor polish and wood. A large house; four or more rooms, two on each side of the long passage. He had to cross the sitting room to get to the kitchen. The room was tastefully furnished. Cosy. Large sofas, easy chairs, fine old fireplace. Nguni hides on the floor. On the shelf above the fireplace were a beadwork buck, a bowl of lemons, two small figurines. Earthenware pots with plants on one windowsill. A bundle of dry laundry on one of the sofas, a few glasses and mugs standing around on the coffee table. Books and newspapers. The kitchen was tidy. A woman’s hand clearly in evidence here. Table scrubbed clean. No dirty dishes standing around.

  From the narrow back stoep steps led down to the garden. It extended far back, it seemed to be a large plot. The garden here was equally lush and well maintained, with plants in pots, beds with herbs, a small lawn, a pergola, and half-concealed behind tall shrubs, the pigsties in the furthest back corner. Five pigs were grazing in the garden. Marthinus had in the meantime spotted Nick, and came walking up, rake and secateurs in his hands. He welcomed Nick cordially. Come, he said, he’d make them some tea.

  Two little mugs were neatly set out on the tray, with doily. Sugar bowl, milk jug, rusks in a bowl. (Everything very domestic, quite different from his own set-up, Nick could see, which was empty and chaotic at the same time.) He wondered why he was surprised – what had he expected – a pigsty because Marthinus dealt with pigs?

  A strong wind had come up suddenly, the little boy who’d been playing on the stoep was now watching a children’s programme on the large flatscreen television set in the other corner of the sitting room, and Marthinus suggested that they might as well have their tea in his bedroom. His room was spacious and crepuscular. Wooden floors, high ceiling. Bed in one corner, wooden table under the big window facing the mountain. On the table an Apple laptop. Here, too, a Nguni hide on the floor. Two handsome Art Deco easy chairs and a leather armchair. Against one of the walls was a large built-in bookshelf, chock-a-block to the ceiling. Marthinus placed the tray on the large wooden table, pulled up the two easy chairs. Nothing scanty about this room.

  ‘Who’s living here with you?’ Nick asked. (The tea was exceptionally good.)

  ‘It’s my house, but my friend Alfons rents part of it from me, he and his wife, Rosita, and his child, the little boy you saw in the sitting room.’

  ‘Who is the gardener?’ he asked.

  ‘I am,’ said Marthinus. ‘I’m the chief gardener here, pig-herd, general janitor and houseboy – you could say.’

  Which still did not give Nick a clear picture of Marthinus’ position, or the nature of his work (there was clearly no shortage here). But, as if attracted by a magnet, his eye suddenly fell, in the over-stuffed bookshelf diagonally across from him, on a copy of The Shallows. Well, did you ever, so Marthinus actually had a copy of the book. The second time in a few days that he’d been reminded of Victor.

  ‘I see you have a copy of The Shallows,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthinus, ‘oh Lord. That massive compendium of dissolution. Brilliant.’

  ‘Did you ever know Victor Schoeman?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthinus. ‘I knew him. Not well, but I knew him.’ He rolled himself a cigarette. ‘A tormented fellow, oh Lord. A man whose left hand did not know what his right hand was up to. Not a man to whom to entrust one’s secrets. A destructive fellow if ever I met one.’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Nick, laconically.

  ‘And conflicted!’ said Marthinus. ‘Now there you have a psyche set up like two enemy factions against each other. Also not someone that you could – and that’s an understatement – count on.’

  ‘Did you ever know Blinky Booysen?’ Nick asked.

  ‘I did!’ said Marthinus. ‘What became of him?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said Nick. ‘There are all sorts of stories.’

  ‘Perhaps he and Victor went into exile together and started a business somewhere in Equatorial Africa.’ He uttered his short, cheerful chuckle. ‘Where they bamboozle the locals in every possible way. Mistahs Kurtz, they revived.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Nick. ‘They couldn’t stand each other.’

  ‘Blinky,’ Marthinus said meditatively. ‘Made beautiful stuff. An exceptional guy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nick said. ‘Almost everything I know about painting I learned from him.’

  ‘My goodness, really?!’ said Marthinus, and regarded him for a moment with intensified interest.

  ‘Coincidentally,’ said Nick, ‘I received a postcard from Victor Schoeman a few days ago in which he asks if I still have any extra copies of The Shallows. I stored the books for years in boxes in my garage. Schlepped them with me everywhere, truth to tell.’

  ‘Do you still have these copies?’ Marthinus asked.

  ‘I got rid of the lot a few years ago, after hearing nothing from Victor for a very long time.’

  ‘How long has Victor been out of the country?’

  ‘For a long time, as far as I know,’ said Nick. ‘Late nineties. A while after the publication of The Shallows.’

  ‘Where was the card posted?’

  ‘It’s not clear, but it’s got a South African stamp.’

  ‘Well, what do you know,’ said Marthinus, ‘that probably means that he’s back in the country. So here he turns up again. That does not surprise me one bit. Putting out his feelers. Spadework. Count on it, he’s got something up his sleeve. It wouldn’t be Victor if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.’

  This was not what Nick wanted to hear at that moment. He did not want to hear that Victor was back in the country with something up his sleeve. When Victor left, he’d hoped never to see him again. And in the years of Victor’s absence, Nick’s judgement of him had not become more charitable. On the contrary.

  Shortly afterwards he got up to leave. ‘Keep me informed of Victor’s moves, and come and watch DVDs some evening,’ Marthinus called after Nick as he saw him off at the garden gate.

  *

  Victor Schoeman’s first novel was published in the early eighties by Dogshit, a small underground publisher. (Nick was still at art school at the time.) The book was banned. In the late eighties his much more ambitious novel, The Depths, was published. Highly experimental, with black pages, pages with only dialogue, interspersed with pastiches of several canonical Afrikaans texts.

  In the mid-nineties Victor wrote his last great novel – The Shallows. According to him, the second of a projected trilogy, of which The Depths was the first. A dystopian, futuristic novel. An apocalyptic crossbreed of the historical South African past, a massively exaggerated present, and a science-fictional future. A piling-up of depravities, anxieties, political anarchism, corruption, maladministration, opportunism, interwoven with elements of the Great Trek, Border Wars, miners’ strikes, nuclear power disasters, religious fundamentalism, folk music, rappers, diamond diggings, imbongis, white and black tycoons, witchdoctors, muti murders. Satanism and satanic rituals. Large sections of the arbitrary action took place in a gigantic cemetery. A kind of heroes’ acre, amidst the graves of heroes of the Anglo-Boer War and the Struggle. There was desecration of these graves. There were (as in The Depths) cannibalism and necrophilia. Eruptions of communal violence, overcrowded mortuaries, widespread mother-and-child mortality as a result of famine and poverty in the former homelands, pages with inventories of ministerial transgressions and abuses – among others the illicit appropriation of land, of tenders. Synodic sodomites. All of this jumbled together with astoni
shing technological advances: flying motor cars, robots as servants. Factions in the countryside perpetually at war, groups doggedly clinging to tradition; ancestor worship; prophets and prophecies. Communication with the dead.

  No publisher would touch it. Victor was obliged to have it printed and distributed at his own expense. Nick invested a hefty sum in the project. And could he, while he was about it, store the boxes of books with Nick, please, from where he, Victor, would then dispatch them to people on order.

  When, after a year and a half, sales were still not up to expectations (few people could stomach that inventory of debaucheries) and the feedback was less rapturous than Victor had anticipated, he cleared out. From one day to the next Victor had vanished.

  *

  Nick’s friend Blinky Booysen was short, chunky, permanently perspiring, slit eyes, slit mouth, flared nostrils. A rat-face – sly, pointed and smirking at the same time. Outrageous work – shocking, scandalous. Fantastic. Blinky’s studio was also a large loft in an industrial building, near a railway track, in one of the grimy Dickensian buildings near Nick’s in the vicinity of Cape Town station. In his studio everything was filthy – years of accumulated soot and dust. There he painted his large canvases and they were, Lord knows, miracles. Blinky was a neo-expressionist and a disciple of Trotsky’s.

  When Nick returned to the Cape after his army training Blinky was dead, or had disappeared. Nobody could inform Nick definitely on this point, and he was no longer in touch with Marlena Mendelsohn, Blinky’s constant companion.

  *

  Blinky had organised Nick’s working space for him. Like Blinky’s studio, it was cold and soot-bemired, full of birdshit (pigeons in the open rafters), but it was big. Blinky’s companion, Marlena Mendelsohn (platonic companion, as far as Nick could make out), was embarked on a master’s degree in psychology, or history of art, or both at the same time, he never knew exactly. Because Blinky’s studio was close to Nick’s, she sometimes came to sit with him in his studio. She was a source of abstruse information. In the twentieth century, she said, monochromatic work was originally associated with the dawning of the radically reductive painting of the Russian avant-garde. (Nick at that stage had a preference for tonalities of grey.) She sat on the only chair (plastic) in his studio and drank her tea. In summer she wore short dresses and in winter a jersey full of holes, of which the sleeves were too long. She had high insteps, narrow feet, and bony, boyish knees. The delicate bones of her ankle (the lower parts of the tibia and fibula, where they join the little bones of the foot) were perfectly proportioned.

  She said: Don’t look only at contemporary art. Look at the older stuff. Look at Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. See if there’s anything in contemporary art to equal the intensity of it. The demon in The Temptation of St Anthony. St Anthony himself, with his suppurating sores and hideous abscesses. The afflicted demon suffering from St Anthony’s fire in the lower left-hand corner of the Temptation. Nick’s use of grey interested her. She pointed out the greys in the work of Goya and Manet. She was blonde. Her apparent dissipation was just a defence. Her eyes were an indeterminate grey-green, dreamy, and eternally fixed on something just behind him. She pointed out to him how he held himself back in his work. She showed him how grey was the colour of denial and resistance.

  Grey, Marlena said, is inert, it’s neutral. Black and white have too much baggage. Black has too many mystical associations. White has too many modernist associations of purity and transcendence. Grey is the only anonymous, the least personal colour. Juan Gris, she said, changed his name to John Gray, to be as anonymous as possible. Grey didn’t stimulate, it was perceptually motionless. Giacometti almost went mad, she said, with a mug of tea in her hand, her legs crossed (in itself something to drive you mad), and grey was an escape. Already so tormented by anxiety, Giacometti nearly went off his head while painting the portrait of Isaku Yanaihara. He had not succeeded in capturing the image of his sitter, compulsively reworked the areas, until larger and larger undefined areas of grey appeared in the work. Sartre said about the six variations of these Yanahaira portraits that they represented the existential conflict between being and nothingness. The colours had fallen away one after the other, Giacometti said, and all that had remained was grey, grey, grey. Nothing envelops the figure, said Sartre, nothing contains him, he is isolated in the immense boundlessness of the void.

  When Nick returned after his army training, Blinky was gone – he’d either committed suicide or simply vanished. Nobody could inform Nick definitely on this point, and he was no longer in touch with Marlena Mendelsohn. There was some talk that she’d begun a relationship with Victor Schoeman.

  *

  The girl renting the room from him was a hard worker. She was mysterious about what she was working on. He didn’t want to enquire too closely. They did not see each other often. She was the ideal lodger. Quiet, tidy in the kitchen, she had her own bathroom. They sometimes bumped into each other in the kitchen in the late afternoon, when she made herself a cup of coffee. All that he knew about her was that she’d come to Cape Town to do a photography course at the Peninsula Academy of Art. He hadn’t asked to see her portfolio. Kept his distance. Other things on his mind at the moment.

  Is her room large enough for her to work in? he asked.

  Oh yes, she said. She’d never had so much space to herself.

  Five

  Late one afternoon, a few days after receiving the postcard, Nick was returning from his studio, where he’d been working all day. As he pulled up at his gate, a car with tinted windows drove by slowly, stopped next to him, a window was wound down, and a string of obscenities was hurled at him. Then the car accelerated and drove off.

  Nick hurried into his house. It was unpleasant. He had no idea why he should have been targeted in just this fashion. The house was eerily silent. He had a sudden feeling of foreboding. His lodger had said she was going away for the weekend, perhaps she’d returned by now. She’d said she was going to take photos somewhere. She’d left here with a woman, a Desirée somebody, a tall, thin woman with a turban round her head. Not very friendly. In the kitchen there were a cup and a side plate in the drying rack (always considerate – she never left a crumb anywhere, washed up everything the moment she’d used it). That meant she was back.

  He lingered indecisively in the passage leading to her room. Her weekend bag was standing in the passage and her door was ajar. He wouldn’t do it normally, but he went up to the half-open door. He knocked gently, called her name. No reply. He knocked again, more loudly. No reply. He pushed the door open further and peered into the room.

  The curtains were drawn. Charelle was lying on the floor, on her stomach, her head turned awry, her cheek to the floor. ‘My God, Charelle,’ he exclaimed, and went on his haunches next to her, ‘what happened?!’ She opened her eyes slightly. A smear of bloody spittle dribbled from her mouth. She groaned. No blood on the floor or on her clothes, as far as he could see. She was wearing pyjamas, one leg had shifted up to her knee (delicate ankle and calf). No sign of any external injury. He didn’t know what to do. He cautiously touched her upper arm. ‘Charelle,’ he said. She opened her eyes a bit wider this time. She didn’t seem to recognise him. Should he phone an ambulance? She seemed to be breathing normally.

  Very cautiously he tried at least to turn her on her back. He placed a pillow under her head. Apart from the blood-flecked foam in the corners of her mouth she seemed unharmed. She tried to sit up. He helped her up carefully, so that she could sit on the chair. Her hair frizzed up wild and dusty around her head. The wooden floor had left an imprint on her cheek. She still seemed not to recognise him.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Did somebody hurt you?’ She licked her dry lips. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘I’ll fetch you some water.’ His hands trembled as he held the glass to her mouth. Her gaze was slow, as if she could not register him. She frowned slightly, her eyes oddly sleepy and unfocused, and then apparently all at once she recognise
d him.

  ‘What happened, Charelle?’ he asked, once she’d taken a sip of water. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘A fit,’ she said. ‘I suffer from epilepsy.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘And you were at home alone.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. She spoke slowly, as if her tongue were an encumbrance in her mouth.

  ‘Should I take you to the doctor?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I’ll make us some tea,’ he said, ‘for the shock.’

  She nodded.

  His hands were still trembling as he made the tea. Tea with lots of sugar for both of them. He’d had a fright. He knew nothing about epilepsy. Should she sleep, should he try to keep her awake? What if she went into a coma?

  He sat by her. They drank their tea. When she’d finished, she said she was tired, she was going to bed. She always slept after a seizure. He wanted to help her to lie down on the bed, but she said it was okay, she was used to it, she’d manage.

  He went and lay on his bed. Uncertain what to do. Perhaps she shouldn’t be left on her own after a fit.

  That evening he heard her in the kitchen. She was wearing a dressing gown, she was moving slowly, a bit unsteadily, as if not quite trusting the ground under her feet. He forestalled her; I’m making us some tea, he said, sit down. She obeyed. They sat together at the kitchen table having their tea. For the second time today, he thought. At first they’d hardly seen each other, now they were taking tea together for the second time in a day. Her face was sleepy, her eyes still slightly unfocused, she looked as if she hadn’t entirely recovered her wits. There was a bruise on her right cheekbone and her lower lip was swollen. Her hair was still curling wildly around her head.