kagablog

Every now and again a novel rises out of the slew of new fiction titles and makes a claim on one’s attention that is extraordinary. Trencherman by Eben Venter is such a novel.

Published in Afrikaans in 2006 as Horrelpoot – to wide critical acclaim, and to some controversy, too – it is quite simply the most devastating fictional account of apocalyptic South African collapse yet written, and it has been superbly translated into SA English by Luke Stubbs.

Novels of apocalypse (or ‘dystopia’) in local fiction are a well-established tradition, many of them incorporating anti-pastoral variations of the farm novel. These novels include Karel Schoeman’s Na die Geliefde Land (translated into English as Promised Land), Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (specifically In the Heart of the Country, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace).

However, none of them travels quite as deeply, and quite as startlingly, into the very heart of livid, psychic fear, into the focal point of horror and the terror of dissolution – collapse of every known system and quantity – as does Trencherman.

Venter is a hard-hitting writer, and deeply contemptuous of political correctness. But he is also a lyrical, subtle writer with a developed literary sense.

Trencherman is a deliberate rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Its narrating character, Marlouw (Martin Louw), a SA émigré living in the over-refined, ‘sepulchral city’ of Melbourne, is convinced by his sister, Heleen, to go back to South Africa to find her lost son, Koert.

All of this is a replay of Conrad’s Marlow going on a riverboat journey into the Congo, into the ‘heart of darkness’, to find Kurtz. Each chapter in Venter’s novel is introduced by an epigraph from Conrad’s novel.

In Trencherman, however, the unspecified future South Africa is a scene of abysmal collapse and dark chaos not simply in realistic terms, but more so as the stark realisation of the deepest, most collective and ancient of white fears about belonging in Africa. More precisely, the novel plays out these fears in explicit, psychologically dramatised detail.

So, as Marlouw penetrates the country in shadowy images of a river journey (although the land is wrenched by lack of water), he encounters every white fear in the book: dysfunctional infrastructure; bribe-taking, corruption and desperate barter as the only valid currencies; devastated roads; hordes of shadowy masses converging on anything of value; collapse of electricity and water distribution systems; political anarchy; starvation; and near-universal HIV/Aids infection.

Taking off where Coetzee’s Disgrace left off, with the symbolic hand-over of the white farm to its actual black occupants, Trencherman sees a strange reversal. Heleen, Marlouw’s sister who, with him, handed the farm over to its black labourers and left the country for Australia, has a son called Koert.

Unlike the rest of his family, Koert returned to the abandoned South African farm, Ouplaas. Once there, he established a corrupt power-base in the guise of a meat-mogul, cornering the consumer meat market and growing obscenely corpulent himself.

Ramparted off from his minions in a section of the old farm house on Ouplaas, he gathers together an inner circle and runs an autocracy grounded in ‘Bells and meat’. He and his crazed confidantes obsessively play a Nintendo game called Mario Kart.

On a larger scale, Koert dispenses meat and Bells inconsistently and arbitrarily, keeping his growing province of subjects in a state of expectancy and dependence. Their regard for him is a mixture of awe, adoration, mystery and hatred.

Koert is possibly one of the most grotesque and fascinating fictional figures I have yet encountered in a South African work of imaginative writing. He is an abomination, a demi-god, the apogee of inward fear and horror. Physically, he is a malformed, obese and sweating Hulk who spits vengeance, largesse and crazy intelligence by turns. He is the ultimate white anti-whiteman. His repulsiveness knows no bounds.

Koert’s meat-stuffed body is collapsing on him, gangrene spreading from his legs upward. He is self-restricted to his bed in a room in the middle of the old garage cordoned off by ex-farm furniture. This throne-hovel stinks of stale sweat and the contents of the overflowing pottie under his bunk. Somewhere in the folds of his crumpled beddegoed lies a bottle of Bells and a Nintendo game console.

He is everything that every white man fears becoming: a gangrenous despot whose life and language has degenerated into a tinpot mélange of debased dialects, a SA pidgin creole that is as liberating as it is monumentally awful. (Stubbs deserves a few prizes for his rendition of this demotic under-language.)

‘Hast thou heard what Koert tunes you?’ he bellows at Marlow after Marlow eventually gains access to this über-whiteman-devil-king. ‘Not one snot makes sacrifices for me, mine brudder … Mammie’s stopped loading mine credit card. Right? Right! Love is reality, brudder … Do youz realise how many little sheep I graze on dis farm … how many little sheep I myself got for de town and de districts an de global province? Meat fo’ de people. Right? Right! Wij hebben gedansen an celebrated on thiz liddle Platz. Bells ran like syrup. I showed them Mario Kart and we gamed … Peware, I warned de mudfucker. Laughing ends in shit …’

Everything that has been consecrated in the name of whiteness and Afrikanerdom over the course of more than three centuries is finally brought into a kind of glorious, riotous, and lyrical abasement in the figure of Koert. He is the heart of darkness. ‘De horror. I am de horror’ (‘die horrel, die horrel’ in the Afrikaans original), he shouts in the climactic moments of the novel, when his wayward meat-acolytes turn the knife on him and carve him up during an orgiastic, ultimate, apocalyptic farm party, the party to end all parties, the ultimate outcome of the big SA jol, the one that self-destructs cataclysmically and decisively. Finally, a denouement. Finally, the SA story comes to its end. Nothingness. It’s what we always feared, isn’t it?

In Venter’s novelistic intelligence, this self-destruction, this realisation of the fear of internal and moral, as well as external and systemic, downfall, has been lodged in the white SA psyche since time immemorial, in the amygdala (the almond-shaped structure in the brain linked to emotional states) – and it is coupled in the novel to what Venter calls ‘erfvrees’, a kind of fear and loathing so deep that it is carried physically in the body, phylogenetically passed from one generation of white progenitors to the next. Eventually, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it eventuates in its own self-fulfilling prophecy, it becomes what it has always feared it will become.

The abomination and destruction in Trencherman is complete. Not only does Koert stack up the family furniture (‘erfgoed’) and sideline it, for good, in the passageways leading to his smoky and demented meat-lair, but the crazed people of his principality of corrupt flesh also succeed in desecrating the graves of his and Marlouw’s immediate family.

In a brilliantly realised scene in the novel, Marlouw (with the gangrenous Koert strapped on his bed to the back of a bakkie) travels to the family graveyard, intent on destroying the family graves himself so the hordes can no longer continue pissing and shitting on the forefathers’ tombstones, as they regularly do, and, once there, the party encounters gravediggers, coffin thieves, in the act of excavating their parents’ and grandparents’ earthly remains. The scene that follows is high drama, breathtaking reading.

This is the beginning of the end of Koert’s shady meat-kindgom. As it is, the sheep are ill, Koert’s bloated body is collapsing and his consorts are dying of Aids.

The party escapes from the massing grave-throngs and Koert announces a celebration, a boisterously self-destructive finale. The mad ‘witch’ who crawls around on all fours in the surrounding hills, crepitating and cursing, Ouma Zuka, comes down to the drunken bonfire celebration and pronounces: ‘He’s the mzungu. He’s not one of us … This mzungu is vermin that’s come to live on your werf, meant for humans only.’

Mzungu – the greatest and final curse upon the white person in Africa – a non-being. Koert’s henchmen take out a long knife and begin to stab him, ritualistically murdering the King of Meat, the apogee of white self-elevation. Koert himself, in his dying moments, exclaims: ‘I am the trencherman, Marlouw. I am he … I have devoured you and your language. I have cut you up into pieces.’

A ‘trencherman’ is one who cadges meals, an eater of meat, but a ‘trencher’ is also a cutting instrument, a person who carves meat.

Asked to comment on the doom-laden preoccupation with meat in his novels (one of them entitled Foxtrot vir die Vleiseters), Venter says: ‘I think in all cultures meat is seen as a privilege. In Foxtrot van die Vleiseters this privilege is specifically connected to the white farming community. A lot of meat becomes an indulgence.

‘Consuming even more becomes decadent and eventually repulsive, Venter continues. ‘Koert is the personification of the fallen Afrikaner that is so feared by Marlouw’s father (the ghost voice in the mountain, in Trencherman). Koert is a meat-devouring abomination, a full-on monster that has also managed to bastardise and destroy the language of Afrikaans. I think this is the guy readers should be worried about, not the black people who’ve screwed up their farm.’

Indeed he is. It is in whiteness, rather than blackness, that the horror, Kurtz’s horror, and Koert’s abomination of all things sacred to white flesh, becomes fully and finally real.

● This is the full version of a review that appeared as ‘Book of the Week’ in the Sunday Times on 24 August 2008, cut down to half its original length in the print version.

eben venter’s website is here

My beautiful death
Ek stamel ek sterwe

1. When did Tafelberg decide to bring out an English translation of Eben Venter’s Ek stamel ek sterwe?

Riana Barnard: In January 2006. Eben and I had often discussed the possibility of eventually translating the novel, but we needed to find the right translator. It was a real learning curve and quite an adventure. Things finally fell into place when I received the manuscript of Horrelpoot, Eben’s latest book. Eben had just then read Luke Stubbs’s proof translation of Ek stamel, ek sterwe and was very satisfied with the result. When Horrelpoot was accepted for publication we both realised that it would be ideal to publish Horrelpoot and the English translation of Ek stamel, ek sterwe simultaneously. Luckily Luke was available full-time to revise and perfect the translation and thus we were able to meet all the publishing deadlines.

2. Why was it published now, ten years after the Afrikaans novel was first released? Was it due to its relevance to the HIV/Aids pandemic? Because good literature should be available for all to read. Or is there another reason?

RB: Our main aim was and remains to publish literature of a high standard, but also to reach and appeal to a wider readership. All South Africans should have access to important or challenging texts originally written in Afrikaans, specifically those individuals who cannot read or write in Afrikaans.

3. How does Tafelberg go about selecting a suitable translator for a text? And how long did it take to create the “perfect” translation with the same literary value as the original?

RB: Finding skilled translators who deliver excellent translations of our publications is always on the agenda of a publishing house such as Tafelberg. There always is a need to find new translators. They need to have specific skills – it is not a case of finding the right words, but also of translating the style and rhetorical strategies of the original. In the case of My Beautiful Death, I suggested a few names to Eben. He requested proof translation from a few translators and finally chose Luke’s. Thereafter it was a simple formality to commission Luke to do the translation. He was well aware of the demands of the industry and wasn’t intimidated or put off by the punishing schedule. His passion and dedication to the project was critical to its success. After reading Luke’s exploratory translation, Eben was keen to work closely with Luke as translator.

Eben Venter: After two translations of Ek Stamel turned out to be stillborn I eventually followed up a suggestion by my publisher and started working with Luke Stubbs. From the start his trial translations of the text felt right. He exhibited an understanding of my sort of Afrikaans, and had a turn of phrase that suited my writing style.

Is there such a thing as a perfect translation? Marquez’s earthy, hot-blooded South American Spanish perfectly rendered by what sort of English? The question here is whether the heart and soul of the original story is retained, as it is now all dressed up in an English outfit. In the case of My Beautiful Death the heart of my story has been captured, and I can still hear my voice when I read the English text.

Luke Stubbs: There’s no perfect translation – and trying to achieve one can become quite a burden in the translating process, especially with a text like ESES, which came with an “untranslatable” tag. The best hope is for good balance and a measure of integrity – somehow negotiating the space between the original text and the target readership(s) in a way that remains true to the author’s intention and allows the new audience to enter into the “strangeness” of a translated world without its being totally inaccessible or contrived; and with the new text reading as good, fluent English, but not utterly betraying the nuances and flavours of the original. Perhaps one could see it as mediating between the various realities of the author’s language and world and the world of the new language. There’s a sense in which the translator’s task is a “priestly” or “shamanistic” mediatory role.

Lynda Gilfillan: This is an elusive beast. As George Steiner observes, literary translation involves more than the mere transfer of linguistic information, since it also engages the imaginative originality of the translator. In this sense, then, the only “good” translation is probably a “bad” translation.

Eben’s form of Afrikaans writing holds its secrets close to its bosom – and in doing so, it offers unique challenges to the translator (which Luke was certainly able to meet, most of the time). However, some words and phrases entirely elude the translator’s art: “tannie Dinges” (“Tannie Thingy” doesn’t quite cut it), and “baas van die plaas”, so rich with cultural and historical resonance, are phrases that stubbornly refuse to surrender their secrets to a foreign language; and then there’s the campness of a phrase such as “Sy’s so contrived, weet jy” (p 55), which is –inevitably – lost in the banality of “He is so contrived, you know.” (MBD p 56).

4. How much input did Eben have in the translating process?

EV: The hard work was done by Luke, but my input was substantial. His every word and phrase was measured against the original. Did he convey my intention? Would the character have said something in that way? What is the best way to render this utterly untranslatable Afrikaans song in English? I wanted the English not to grate the ears of its readers. I wanted it to be a proper English text.

Luke’s final draft arrived in Prince Albert together with him, the translator, and for an entire week, night and day, we revised, reworked, rephrased. With him in front of the computer screen and me with Ek Stamel, searching myself for the thoughts I had thought when creating the first text.

LS: Besides our working together on the text, Eben also provided a stimulating theoretical introduction to the process – Nabokov on his translation of Eugene Onegin and Cesare Pavese … Pavese says somewhere: “To translate well, one must fall in love with the verbal material of the work and feel it being reborn into the native tongue with the urgency of a second creation …” Reworking the final draft together in Prince Albert, weighing and measuring every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, was also an essential part of the process. On reflection, I’d say that this part of the process is key in trying to produce contemporary fiction in translation at the same time – it contributes significantly to finding that “balance” and giving the translation an “integrity” as a “second creation”.

5. Ek stamel ek sterwe has been declared one of the ten best novels in the Afrikaans literary canon and was reissued as part of Tafelberg’s Klassiek/Classic Series in July 2005. What are Tafelberg’s hopes for the English translation?

RB: A publisher has one basic desire with all the books that he/she publishes, namely that it find appreciative readers and subsequently become part of a larger debate about life and literature. Novels should entertain or enrich – perhaps both. In the case of an English translation from Afrikaans there is, of course, also one’s wish that it will help establish Afrikaans literature within a larger (world) context.
6. There seems to be an emerging trend of releasing new novels and their translations simultaneously. Why has this trend developed in publishing?

RB: Economic concerns are the consideration. It is far more cost-effective to release an original text and its translation simultaneously because the publishing process is so labour intensive. Any expenditure on the marketing of books (which includes the time the publicity department spends setting up publicity events) is actually an investment in a particular writer. To be truly successful a publisher must have a long-term plan for every writer because in the end it is the author who becomes the brand, not any single novel he or she writes. To return to the crux of the question, if money is spent, for example, on a nation-wide publicity tour, it becomes far cheaper to market a novel and its translation simultaneously. In most instances the original ends up selling far better than the translation, so a measure of cross-subsidisation occurs: sales of the book in the original language end up helping to finance the translation. It also gives the publisher the perfect opportunity to build the author in a new market. So I think this trend is based almost entirely on practical considerations.

7. Is there an effort being made to create a South African literary canon which is representative of all 11 official South African languages – Afrikaans and English, isiXhosa and SeSotho etc – or is South African literature still divided by language (eg an Afrikaans canon versus an English canon)?

RB: A publishing company cannot be held exclusively responsible for the development of a national reading culture, especially not in all 11 official languages. This ideal (of a South African literary canon) cannot and will not be achieved unless all the publishing houses and the government work closely together. This also implies the need to formulate a comprehensive language policy, to firmly protect copyright and to support and develop writers writing in all our country’s official languages. It is a mammoth task. Publishing a book is a futile exercise if the book does not find an appreciative readership. Booksellers also have to be prepared to keep a stock of all these books and this they can do only if there is a demand for those books. For this to happen we require eager readers reading in all 11 official languages. Publishing houses cannot single-handedly create these markets. This is part of a more complex process which involves many role-players, including educators. Of course this ideal does form a fundamental part of our strategic planning and we never lose sight of it, but unfortunately the results of our efforts are not always immediately apparent. There is still a long way to go.

8. Were any changes or updates made to the novel?

EB: The Jude character in Ek Stamel is an ambiguous one. In the Afrikaans Jude is mostly referred to as “she”. I’ve always wanted the book to be about, amongst other things, a terminal death, and not, in the first instance, about a gay relationship and HIV/AIDS. That was my reasoning when I wrote Ek Stamel. Even so, the “male” Jude did not ring true with a lot of readers.

In My Beautiful Death the gender of Jude is masculine throughout. I listened to my readers and I trusted the universality of the story. Jude can be either male or female, and he/she still is; the journey of Konstant up to the most beautiful moment of his life is clearly marked out.

LS: The most significant change was making Jude male, which seemed to come naturally as the translation developed. To start with, Jude was female in the first English drafts, but there was an inner necessity in the text that simply demanded that Jude become male.

LG: One change especially interested me: the switch in gender of the character Jude from female in Ek Stamel to male in My Beautiful Death. The initial sexual indeterminacy of the Jude character in Ek Stamel teases the reader’s interest, and the author’s fairly prolonged disguise of Jude’s gender constitutes an interesting subtext on the persistence of homophobia (incidentally, the novel was published in 1996, the year of the new Constitution, which forbids discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation).

In Ek Stamel, in the scene where Konstant first meets Jude, the latter is presented as sexually ambiguous. Konstant wonders: “En wat, as ek mag vra, is jy van geslag? Dis onmoontlik om vas te stel: dubbelslagter, hartesmelter, djy’s Djude, nè?” (p 47). Jude’s gender is eventually revealed a good many pages on (p 54): “Sy laat nooit toe dat ons gespreksmateriaal opdroog …” – the tension is broken as the reader is “reassured” that Konstant’s lover is a woman.

However, in the English translation the tension around the issue of Jude’s gender is broken earlier than in Ek Stamel. In My Beautiful Death, Stubbs’s creative translation of Konstant’s bewilderment: “It’s impossible to decide: doublegender, heartbender” (though something is inevitably lost in the translation, “so it’s Djude, then?” (p 48) is followed by the use of the pronoun “he” almost immediately afterwards. I couldn’t help feeling that Eben had confidently decided to “out” the gay relationship in a way that he seemed reluctant to do in the Afrikaans version published ten years earlier.

9. The English translation has been on the shelves for several months now. How has it been received by critics and the reading public?

RB: Selling local English titles to South African readers is really difficult. About 60 percent of all books sold in bookstores are imports from London or New York and the cream of all world literature is available in English on the shelves. In other words, My Beautiful Death has to compete with the very best literature in the world and an overwhelming choice of titles. Under the circumstances we haven’t done badly and the initial responses to the book from readers and reviewers have been very favourable. We have actually sold almost half of the print run. Afrikaans novels also have to compete with the best, but it remains essentially a niche market. It is therefore unreasonable to compare, for example, sales of Horrelpoot with those of My Beautiful Death.

EB: I have had excellent feedback from non-South African English-speaking readers. That kind of feedback counts, as it was intended as a proper English text, and one with universal appeal. Michiel Heyns (Sunday Independent) has given it a strong review, and the Fair Lady reviewer was complimentary too.

LS: A few readers have commented on how moving they found the final section – in particular the death scene with which the book ends.

LG: Towards the end of 2006 I sat in on a UCT creative writing seminar discussion of My Beautiful Death, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Students remarked on the authenticity of the writing, and noted that they were unaware during their reading that the work was in fact a translation. Sadly, however, I don’t think that the book has had the attention from English-speaking readers that it deserves. In my experience many of these readers still opt for British or American writing in preference to South African novels – and they are the poorer for it.

10. Why was the title My beautiful death chosen?

RB: No better title was brought to the table. We did consider a number of possibilities, but no other title struck a chord with our marketing personnel or the booksellers we approached.

EB: The alliterative sound of Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe was impossible to capture in English. Try all the variations and see for yourself! Eventually I stumbled on this title, which had overtones of My Beautiful Laundrette and all the other millions of “beautifuls” that have been used in titles. It captured the end goal of Konstant Wasserman’s journey, and when I see it on the shelf now, it sounds intriguing.

LS: Finding the right title isn’t just a translation exercise – there’re marketing and other factors to consider as well. The final choice of My beautiful death initially came as a surprise, and felt a bit awkward, but has since grown on me. I think it captures the ironies and paradoxes of the book pretty well – which for me are located in the way Konstant’s struggle “to get the hell out of here” (away from the family farm and all it represents) to make a life of his own becomes a struggle to let go of life, to “prepare for my death”.

LG: The title My beautiful death does not have the same resonance as Ek stamel ek sterwe. For what it’s worth, here is an email I wrote to Eben on the subject while I was editing the novel:

Even though you have made it clear that the title has been agreed upon by yourself and Tafelberg, I still have a niggling doubt. My Beautiful Death is, I feel, a bit too glib. It doesn’t capture the richness of the original. I hate to irritate you, but would you mind at least considering the following:

The word “stumble” occurs 3 times in the text. Sound-wise, it approximates “stamel” and “sterwe”, and it would be wonderful to echo the original title, which is so effective. I thought I’d play around a bit, and share these with you:
“I stutter, I stumble”
“Stricken, I stumble”.

this article first appeared on litnet.co.za

– in Forces’ Favourites, Johannesburg: Taurus, 1987.
(translator: the author)

I can only thank the people of Brakpan from the bottom of my heart. They haven’t pushed me out like a piece of rubbish. This past Sunday, Boetiefanie was sentenced on Tuesday, I confessed at Rhema Church. Last year you know, we swopped churches. We used to be Dutch Reformed people. In front of hundreds - you should come and see the size of this church - I opened up my whole heart. Kept nothing back, told them e-ve-ry single thing my Boetiefanie did.

From then on brothers and sisters have been pouring into my house. I can tell you, day and night there’ll be someone at my front door. Over there, that lovely milk tart there under the tea cloth, actually, that’s a leftover from trousseau. Sister Bertie Wagenaar brought it early this morning. Miles out of her way, because she’s actually from Alberton.

This is their way to stop the aching, here in my heart. Because the LordJesus hears me, I have cried myself dry about this thing. Excuse my language, but the bloody thunder got right into my Boetiefanie. Inside his head. The work of the devil. Make no mistake. Listen, Boetiefanie, he never, never showed any hatred for the blacks. I know my child. Take Margrit the black girl who works for us. She’s been here in our yard in Dalview since Boetiefanie was tiny. His father yes, oh, he couldn’t stand them. He used to tell Margrit, that’s when he still lived here, he used to say: I’ll kick you all the way to the back gate. That’s because she used to be late with his early morning coffee in bed on Sundays. Because you know Saturdays was her day off. But if Kobus kept a black girl she had to do her work one hundred percent. That’s the way he was. One morning he gave Margrit a back hand through the face.

That was the time I spoke up: for heaven’s sake, we are not heathens. I wonder if he knows about Boetiefanie, he never reads the paper.

I think it’s about time to wet our whistles - Kristientjie!

During the trial I kept her out. You know what school children are like. They’ll tease her non-stop. But her teacher, Miss Britz, she’s also here from Brakpan. Actually, before we changed to Rhema Church we were from the same Dutch Reformed congregation. Lovely person. She came to talk to me. Said such nice things. Said Kristientjie must come back to school. She’ll look after her, like a piece of gold, and then she took my hands in hers.

No really, this thing, it eats me, eats me. All the time. Since I confessed the aching sometimes stops. But you know what it’s like. Especially at night. Now with Kobus gone as well. Sometimes Kristientjie wakes me up. She’s such a fine child, like an egg shell. Boetiefanie was, ag, I don’t know, he was never one for violence. Shooting, yes. He was a top shot. Number one in the army. During his weekened passes I had to specially cut him pieces of soft flannel to clean his R1 rifle with. He was from the Infantry there from Kroonstad. Once Kristientjie and I visited him with some buttermilk rusks. That was just before Thunder Chariot . You know of course, the big operation the army had, there in North Western Cape. Always showed it on TV. More than eleven thousand soldiers. Can you imagine making food for all those boys. And then they still have to sleep as well. I was so proud that he could go and fight there. By the middle of September the whole thing was finished. Then they gave Boetiefanie a weekend pass and he hitch-hiked home with Marxie. That’s the son of Dirk and Hettie, live close by, I can call Hettie for tea from my stoep.

Kristientjie, put it down on the little table over here. Milk?

One could say that they were born together, Marxie and Boetiefanie. Here in the street they had competitions on those skateboards. Skin off their toes. I was so glad Boetiefanie could come home again… nice hey, I always use half Rooibos tea, half Ceylon … that the LordJesus had looked after him for us. Kiristientjie still sang to him that afternoon.

Kristientjien, why don’t you sing that: ‘ag man, it’s so nice to beee in the armieee’. Look at her now, shy. ‘From Tempe to Grootfontein …’ Listen to me, so false. Maybe she’ll sing something for us later.

Sometimes I wish Kobus was still here. He’s boilermaker-welder now, in Richard’s Bay. That’s when I heard from him last. But I never reply to his little postcards from Durban. I know what he gets up to there. My sister told me she was in their car there next to King’s Beach waiting for the children to finish swimming and who should walk past? Kobus. With his arm tightly ’round the waist of one of those escourt girls. That’s how he cheats me behind the back. Bettie, my sister, she’s with Rhema Church too now. That’s what keeps us going.

Krappie, come boy. Come to Ma. Come and sit on Ma’s lap. He was never obstreperous, Boetiefanie. Never. Never touched a bottle until he went to the army. It’s all those types there. They led him onto bad roads. And that Marxie, I don’t trust him one bit. But I pray for him as well.

Well, that Sunday evening Kristientjie and I were already dressed for church. So I went to say goodbye to Boetiefanie. He said he’ll drive his little Datsun back to the camp. That’s easiest. And when I came into his room, I smelled the liquor. His whole room. But not a bottle in sight. They hide the bottles under the matresses. That Marxie was lying around as well. But I didn’t say a word. Boetiefanie came home for such a short while. I didn’t want to upset him. I just stood there quietly and prayed. Boetiefanie, he saw my sorrow. You see, it’s not as if his feelings are in the deep freeze. So he said: don’t worry, Ma, why don’t you and Sis go to church now. If only he could open the door of his heart for the LordJesus. I shall never stop praying.

He said Marxie will be going along and he’ll also give two other army boys a lift to Hoedspruit Army Camp. Do you know where Hoedspruit is, Ma? he asked me. I didn’t have a clue. If only the LordJesus could have given me a sign that night. I could have looked for a map somewhere. Maybe Miss Britz knows where Hoedspruit is. Kristientjie’s got her telephone number.

So when we came back from Rhema Church Boetiefanie’s little Datsun was gone already. But later on in court he confessed that he and the other three left Brakpan only at eleven o’clock that night. I walked to his bedroom. It was a pigsty. I did not bring him up that way. His father yes, always very messy. Don’t throw your pants around like that, I used to tell Kobus. Maybe it’s better that he’s gone. But some weekends he pops back for a visit. Just as I return from the pharmacy on Friday nights, as I walk up the street from the bus stop, I spot his blue van. I usually stick him into the spareroom. I don’t hold it against Kobus. He’s got his own life.

I didn’t want Kristientjie to see Boetiefanie’s room like that. But these days you can’t hide a thing from children. And as young as you see her there, she belongs to the LordJesus. She found I don’t know how many of those little flat brandy bottles under his bed. Oh, this is a terrible thing.

My Pa used to say: never let the hardships knock you down. Eighty years old, and his mind was still bright. He was one to tell you about hardships, until your eyes were full of tears. But the shoulders of the LordJesus are broad enough for our cross. Praise his name. Only sometimes I wish it could have been otherwise. But it can happen to all of us, Sister Bertie said. Only this morning she still read to me from the Vaderland about those boys from Nelspruit High School staying in the boarding house there. And how one night they clubbed two old black men until they dropped down and died on their school’s rugby field. Believe me, that is the work of the devil.

When Siter Bertie brought the milk tart she said many kind things and she also went on her knees for me. She promised to go with me to Colonel Verster, he’s from the Department of Prisons, to ask permission so that someone could exorcise Boetiefanie’s devil. So we plan to go next week.

Then I don’t know at what unholy hour of that night the four of them left from here. No-one on the streets anymore. And not one of them knows the road to Hoedspruit Army Camp. So they stop next to this black man. Afterwards he witnessed in court as well. Where’s the road to Hoedspruit? they asked him. I don’t know that place, he said. Next thing that Marxie jumps out and hits the black man with the fist. Then he throws the black man’s bicycle onto the road. That’s how he told the story in court. The whole case lasted for three days. Oh, it was terrible. That Marxie, he’s a real bully type you know, he kicks the bicycle right in front of the tyre and he shouts at Boetiefanie: go for it. And then? Then they still didn’t know the way. Marxie said they drank all the time. Is that what the army does to our sons?

Does she want to get off, boy? Kristientjie, please open the door for Krappie, my girl.

Now the four of them are driving, driving, looking out for someone else to explain the road to them. It’s dark outside. Not a soul in sight. Drunk all of them, even if I have to say so about my own Boetiefanie. That morning I still asked him to join us to Rhema Church. We go to both services, you know. Ma, there’s never any time for me to sleep in, he replied. But when Kristientjie and I came back from the morning service, he was gone. And I specially let Margrit cook a roast for us that day. But after some time Boetiefanie did come back for the Sunday lunch. He’s not an animal, you know. I always tell him: you’ve got such nice hands, why don’t you play the piano. No, he wants to be an electrician. That will have to wait now. Once he made me a toaster. All by himself. You won’t find anything better anywhere. You could say it was his own patent.

And then they saw this young black girl below a street lamp. I mean, why do the blacks walk around that time of the night? That’s looking for problems. But I don’t want to upset myself. That’s the way the LordJesus planned it all. Here is her name, in this paper: Miss Ntlakwe Agnes Moepya. Seventeen years old. The judge said the whole thing was a gruesome act. That it had to be my own son - I’ll never understand that. Boetiefanie always treated Margrit with such respect. That’s why she stayed with us for such a long time.

Then they pulled up right next to this black gril to ask for directions. Her ma sat in the court room as well. Old woman already. The first day, then the second day … I did not even want to look in her direction. Margrit knows the whole story too. I cried with her, here in the kitchen. The little boss, Margrit said, he’s not bad child. Good girl, that one. Still the old type. She’s also a Christian, belong to that ZCC of theirs. Don’t ask me why she just left us one day. Any case, there was this black girl’s ma, sitting there in court. I didn’t know what to do, you see. So I prayed and prayed and the night before the last day when Judge Myburgh was going to pass the sentence, I phoned. I spoke to our pastor. He tells me: go, go and talk to the girl’s ma.

And on the last day, right in front of the court, I walked up to the old woman. She wears a black dress, black doek, you know how they like to dress. She immediately knew who I was. There the two of us stood on the steps of the court building. I didn’t know whether the sun was shining or whether it was dark. The LordJesus helps me. She’s got one of those black stoles on. I could tell that it was hand crocheted. I don’t know if it was her or I who first pulled the other one closer. But there the girl’s ma stood and the next thing I put my arms around her shoulders and her arms were already ’round mine. We cried. Tears on my white face and tears running down her black cheeks. That was how Rhema Church and our pastor and the LordJesus helped me.

No, the black girl also did not know the way to Hoedspruit Army Camp. She must have been so scared. And it’s Marxie who’s first to jump out. To hit her in the face. It was Marxie who confessed in court: he said he did it because he liked it. The very same Marxie I once taught the four x table. Here in this house. I remember it like yesterday. But I don’t want to judge. Judge Myburgh already said that he was guilty. Then Boetiefanie jumped out of the car as well and he picks up a stone and throws it at the girl. The other two army boys sit in the car. Still drinking. Then the girl falls down. Half of her body on the road, half on the pavement. Then Boetiefanie said he and Marxie got back into the car and let it run over her body. The front wheel of the Datsun went over her shoulder. The post-mortem showed it was brain damage. Just as well she didn’t live. The LordJesus helps me. They were so drunk. Because then Boetiefanie turned his car around and came back for her. And he runs over her again.

Tell everything, the pastor said. Spit it out. It’s poison, it has to come out.

Judge Myburgh said he did not want to break Boetiefanie. He did not want to let him sit in prison until his old age. So he gave him ten years. Fanie … my little boy. I got so sick during those last two months with you. And then you never cried at night. Kobus said why don’t we gave him his name. No, he had to get my Pa’s name. Stefanus. Boetiefanie … ten years. Then he’s got enough time to rehabilitate himself, Judge Myburgh said. That’s why I baked the Judge some cookies. Hertzog cookies, you know them, don’t you? I dropped them off at the court yesterday.

Wait, let me pour you more tea. It’s gone cold. I can go and show you where it happened … oh, just leave it. It’s all finished. All over. I’m so tired.

*

Originally published as Die donner in Boetiefanie se kop - Venter, E. Witblitz. Johannesburg: Taurus 1986

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After my brother’s death in Sydney I was devastated. I retreated to Donegal on the west coast of Ireland and wrote my first novel, Foxtrot van die Vleiseters/Foxtrot of the Carnivores (1993).

My Beautiful Death (1996)

My editor said: why don’t you go to Prince Albert in the Great Karoo. There’s a lovely tannie(auntie) who rents houses. I wrote Ek stamel ek sterwe in 3 months there. Later it was translated as My beautiful death.

My Simpatie Cerise (1999) and Twaalf (Twelve) (2000), a collection of short stories, followed. Now my stories were either set in South Africa or Australia or on both continents. Like all migrants I had a history in one country and a life in another. On old Italian woman in a $2 shop smelled a plastic rose with a fake dew drop on it. It’s not in vain, she said when I asked her why she was doing it. She wanted to prove to herself – she started crying - that the roses here will never smell like the ones in Calabria.
Prince Albert house where I wrote My beautiful Death
Prince Albert house where I wrote My beautiful Death

Begeerte (2003) My parents and I travelled to north western Cape, to a town called Hartswater. This was where my new novel, Begeerte(Desire), was to start. After WWii the South African government handed out plots of land to returning soldiers here. Conditions were harsh. Only the most essential tools and a house the size of a match-box were provided. Now the area seemed lush and rich with its citrus orchards and fields of peanut plants.

On our way back it poured and the dirt road was very slippery. At times you could hardly see anything through the sheet of brown rain. Every now and again a deserted farm house would appear this or that side of the road. I had the feeling of being utterly forlorn. As if we were the last of the living pushing ahead through a land that had been deserted long ago.

Trencherman (2006-2008) Gerard and I packed up and moved to Prince Albert. He thought he’d give South Africa a try. I had come home.

Discomfort – My father died and our beloved farm was sold. Sometimes it seemed that my father’s prophecy (South Africa will sink) which I fiercely opposed at the time, could just come true. In this town the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was still about colour. It made us uncomfortable. We’d stand in the supermarket queue with chocolates and red wine and behind us would be a mother and children with flour and sugar.

On summer afternoons the breeze from the mountains used to be cool. But at that time the evening breeze turned hot and when it stopped a fierce northerly blew sand into town from the plains of the Great Karoo.

Dystopia - I got the idea of writing a Heart of Darkness story set in a future South Africa where the infrastructure had collapsed and peoples’ chances of living a decent life were destroyed by AIDS, hunger and greed. I called the novel Horrelpoot (clubfoot). Two years later it was published in English as Trencherman.

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Two Polish friends, Paweł and Matylda, will escort me to Gdańsk and I regard myself lucky. You can get by with your Lonely Planet guide and there is an eagerness in cafés and bars to serve the traveller in English, but you’ll miss out on the nuances between say an authentic and an instant żurek soup. If you really want to hear English as spoken by a Pole, you need to talk to the staff of London restaurants or Belfast hotels these days - like the Afrikaners the Polish are experiencing their own diaspora during the last decade.

For its livelihood Gdańsk has always turned to the sea with all its trade routes and its wealth of amber reserves. So when Paweł and Matylda suggested we approach the city from the coast, or as far as we’re able to by beach, that sounds appropiate. The Baltic remains the cold seagreen way to the heart of Gdańsk.

There is a cluster of three Polish cities along the Baltic coast: Gdynia, Sopot and Gdańsk. We’ll be staying in the holiday apartment of Matylda’s wealthy aunt in Gdynia. Such an apartment bloc from the seventies takes getting used to. Outside the plasterwork is a miserable grey, especially in winter, and wherever it’s not crumbling or patched-up graffiti rules - like in all subways, on gas pipelines and on trains – yet inside the open space has all the white goods you can wish for, plus sprung wooden floors and puffed-up duvets with floral covers.

To line our stomachs we breakfast in one of the taverns on the Gdynia foreshore. We pick a backpacker’s hang-out where a kind of omelette is served with a puddle of mushrooms, tomatoes and melted cheese in its centre. As we chew away it becomes edible, but coffee seems essential afterwards. Now we’re ready for the beach trail to Gdańsk, the city named Gyddanyzc by a Benedictine monk as early as the year 999.

It’s almost May the first, workers’ day, and the spring sun shines gaily. The trail starts at a monument honouring one of the greatest writers of the English canon, Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad. A Wroclaw academic once said to me that Conrad ‘was lost’ by the Poles. They do treat their writers with reverence; in the royal castle of Wawel in Kraków many writers and poets lie tucked in under engraved slabs.

‘There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea’ – with Conrad’s words to ponder on we finally set off to Gdańsk on a pristine beach, keeping as close as possible to the fresh Baltic Sea.

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The wedding is to be in the town of Toome, county Antrim, Northern Ireland. Both the bride and groom, Eavan Totten and Paul Dunlop, are Catholic and both hail from old, established families, some so large that the children of a single family could not be counted on the fingers of two hands. The members of Eavan and Pauls’ families have outlived the troubles, as the war is being referred to euphemistically. The Totten-Dunlop wedding on a Saturday in February, 2007, will be a celebration of love ánd life.

Hiring a suit at Parsons & Parsons, Belfast

Outside Toome on a green hill stands the Sacred Heart Church. The guests are preparing to enter for the ceremony, cigarettes are stubbed-out, last banter goes flying. It ís English that you hear, yet the tongue shapes the words distinctly different from the way it would in England. There are other words as well. You need to listen.

From the porch of the church you have a clear view of the road running past, flanked by stone walls on either side. Beyond, neat paddocks fenced off since time immemorial with hawthorn hedge or more stone wall. Suddenly, from the grass green as glass a mob of crows lifts and scatters across the sky. They caw and swerve towards the cemetery on the right, an exceptionally shiny bird lands on a Celtic cross.

Slightly cloudy, but nice and dry: ‘it’s a quare day for a wedding, so it is,’ someone remarks as we enter the church. Each syllable is pronounced and at the end an affirmation is imported just to tidy up. And the use of quare comes spontaneously.

The greyish-blue sky, brighter than the sky above the continent; the green fields, the mossy stone walls and the pitch black crows, the disgrace of the Great Hunger followed by the massive migration to America and the sorrows caused by the troubles; and further back to when the brazen Vikings approached in their longships: all of this is folded into the Irish language. Not only did they store words which belonged to the fabulous invaders, as Seamus Heaney likes to call the Vikings; they also moulded and churned what they already had for the talking, they flexed their tongues and had fun - made fun - until their language became an appetizing, intelligent, stew. The comical, mostly ironical, disposition specific to this nation nestles in their language. ‘We’re a language-based society. You can get away with practically anything in this country if you give a good account of it, ‘ the Irish writer John Banville has said. And Heaney further urges in his own rich version of Hiberno-English:

‘Lie down
in the word-hord, burrow
The coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.’

The reception for the wedding takes place in an oxblood red and buttermilk yellow hotel on the main street of Toome. As we enter, Frank Dunlop, father of the groom, takes me by the arm. There you can see Lough Neagh, he points southwards with his Embassy cigarette, it’s Europe’s largest lake. From the North, from the Atlantic, thousands upon thousands of eels make their way along the River Bann during mating season to lay their eggs in the lake.

Creepy, I think to myself. A deep, watery kingdom filled with writhing sea snakes battling it out for a mate.

As if Frank Dunlop can guess where my thoughts are taking me, the Irish never shy away from anything creepy or gothic, he sweeps me along to the days of his great aunt’s kitchen on a small, mixed farm, to her fireplace alive with the smell of burning peat, to her favourite recipe for eel. Cut your eel in rounds and fry in a heavy pan with a halfin of butter and a halfin of whiskey. Serve up with floury potatoes, ripe cheese and Guinness.

The reception is an extended affair, some speeches are long, the bestman’s a one liner. And the food fails to appear. An aunt from County Cavan leans over: ‘have you a mouth on you?’ And everyone at our table, some in tails, some in taffeta, but all in their Sunday best, scream with laughter. Another tray loaded with pints of Guinness arrives. And a rush sweeps through the guests. The talk accelerates, you’re forever interrupted, the Irish brain, whetted, produces stories fast and always in the plural.

This is how James Joyce writes up a similar scene in Ulysses: ‘… and then he lifted in his rude great brawny strenghty hands the medhar of dark strong foamy ale, uttering his tribal slogan.’ Unrivalled is Joyce’s report of his tribe, and of the human condition, his language shot through with Irish.

When eventually the food arrives it turns out not to be great at all. You don’t come to Ireland for its food, definitely not for its weather. You come for the craic, the mood, the Gemütlichkeit as the Germans, who dote on the Irish, call it.

And never get impatient at receptions for the craic. Often guests wake up long after midnight, only then do they start remembering, then they’re able to hold the tune, a cappella, mostly. If you want to catch the craic, you must stay up, listen and join in, let Guiness after Guinness take you like a black sea. Only then will you experience the rising spirit, the enthusiasm for life, for one another, for the flash of wit, the jest and counter- jest, and the pure, uninhibited madness.

*

Story was originally written in Afrikaans for the travel magazine, Wegbreek, June 2007. The directive was to write an essay around a book of my choice. My choice was: Dolan, T.P. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Dublin: Gill & McMallin. 1998.

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Tuesday night is his night off. Eddy plans it carefully. By 4.30 he’s bathed the Alsatian, he dries it thoroughly then plays with the dog and the children on a patch of hard kikuyu. He never runs out of dog shampoo and has the fridge stocked with Black Label. On Tuesday nights everything has to be just so.

By 6.30 he sits down at the kitchen table while his wife makes the bolognaise. Usually they have a nice little chat. He compliments her, he would come up from behind and hug her. He tries his best. They don’t have much time on other days and nights. Eddy’s bar work saps his energy.

What’s up? You look stressed.

I can’t talk now, she says.

One of the children has waddled in. Eddy puts his beer down (even his glass is chilled on Tuesday nights) and re-buttons the child’s pyjama top.

When then?

You’re the man to say. You know what you’re like. And you know what Eddy, it actually stresses me when you’re like this. She tries to lift the heavy saucepan to turn the flame down.

Give it to me. He’s up in a flash. He’s got hard, wiry muscles. He seems to have an abundance of energy on these nights.

Eddy Prinsloo runs the local bar six days and six nights of the week. He opens at 11 am and closes around ten, it all depends. He keeps the glass shelves spotless, the upside down bottles with tot measures for whisky or brandy or gin shine, the antique White Horse whisky mirror behind the shelves is buffed, even the kudu and gemsbok horns mounted on the wall are dusted and polished with transparent Cobra wax. Most important of all is that the till never bounces.

Every month he introduces a new cocktail. It used to be every week but that’s too hard. He gets his ideas from the back of the Kahlua bottle or from the back of the Amarula bottle or from overseas magazines left behind by flashy hotel guests. His latest cocktail is dry champagne, strawberries, crushed ice, a dash of lemon and the glass, sparkling, is pre-rinsed with exactly three drops of Angostura Bitters. His employer, mr Jannie van Niekerk, has tried it and smacked his lips. So far no hotel guest has ordered the new cocktail yet. And the regulars from the town (very small) are wary of anything that’s slightly out of the ordinary.

Eddy keeps on trying, genuine. He can’t say he hates his job. He simply can’t. What bothers him most is the wide world out there and him trapped behind a stupid bar with a stupid floral shirt and a permanent grin on his mug.

Mr Jannie Van Niekerk adores Eddy. He would stay away for up to a week to see to the running of his tavern in Observatory, Cape Town. During his absence he hands some of the reins of the hotel as he likes to call it, to Eddy.

Eddy this and Eddy that, his wife says. That gold chain around his neck and the aftershave, Yardley or whatever. And the rings on the fingers and always so chummy. There’s something fishy about you and that mr Van Niekerk of yours.

What’s wrong with your head? I’ve worked in that bar for fifteen years. Look at all the things in this house, your food mixer, the flat screen, where would we have been without mr Van Niekerk?

She stirs the spaghetti so that it doesn’t stick. She doesn’t even glance at him. He knows she knows her worry and whatever’s spawned it will have to stay until they’re in bed. She’ll make no more attempts to tell him what’s the matter. Every now and again she wipes loose hair, oily, from her forehead. From this he can tell that she’s bothered.

It’s supper time now. Everybody sits down at the table, the children are restless and irritable. As soon as his plate’s clean he goes straight to the TV. From 8 pm onwards, 8.15 is the absolute cut-off point, he’s out of bounds to his family. From then on he listens to BBC world radio which he picks up via the television set. First he listens to BBC world news then to the night’s discussion of a topic, followed by phone-ins from all over the world. Literally the whole world: Addis Abeba, Athens, London of course, Nairobi, Santiago which is the capital of Chile. All the different voices trying to speak English as best they can, all delivering their opinions vigorously, feverishly sometimes.

House in a Karoo town at night
Eddy’s got the BBC’s number on his cell phone. It’s 00447786206080, a hell of a number. By Tuesday’s he’s topped up his credit with the cheaper Vodago top-up cards avalaible from Pep Stores. He’s ready to go. From tuning-in many times before he knows how quick you have to compose and send your SMS message or else your take on the topic is not heard and gets lost in the stratosphere. Forever.

Chocolates wrapped in shiny papers on the coffee table to his left and a fresh beer, he’s onto his fourth, on the coaster. On the arm rest immediately under the fingers of his right hand, the remote control. The quality of the phone-ins differs and he’s ready to adjust the volume at any time. It gives him the shivers to know that he, a barman, a nothing really, can chip in on an important topic all the way from Western Cape, South Africa.

Tonight’s topic is whether you think your country’s leader should stay away from the opening of the Beijing Olympics in protest against the oppression in Tibet. Eddy’s already made up his mind. He feels strongly that mr Thabo Mbeki, a weakling compared to Mandela, should stay at home. No two ways about that. His smart Boeing should remain in its hanger until further notice by the people of South Africa. Solidarity with the oppressed - isn’t that what African leaders should feel in their marrow.

Shouting and carrying-on. Eddy looks over his shoulder into the dimly-lit corridor – they only use low watt long-life globes - at arms in pyjamas that flail, one of the children is kicking about on the floor. He holds back, he tries not to be annoyed. It’s unusual for them to misbehave like this. They obviously sense their mother’s stress. He knows his family inside out. What’s the matter with her? He should have made time to hear her out.

A British caller, a woman, is given a turn. She speaks clearly and calmly. These callers often have most clout. Eddy admires Ross Atkins, the BBC’s man who handles the programme. He admires his quick rebuffs, his gentle but firm way of cutting off dumb callers. There is a Turkish Delight centre in the chocolate he’s selected next. He rewraps it neatly and swops it for another shape.

The British caller is so well-spoken and so fluent. It’s quite disgusting how everybody picks on China suddenly, she says. Look at our, she means the British Empire’s, record in India and in Africa. For heaven’s sake, she says.

His wife has no intention of controlling the children tonight, that’s become obvious. She is trying to get him back. The bolognaise too wasn’t up to scratch. He can taste food made without love.

For fuck’s sake (it’s too hard, his family is making it impossible for him), can you lot just give me one night. Just one. I’m never here. Fuck! (He says ‘fak’).

Lots of Chinese callers from all over the world are given a chance. The BBC’s man is good to them. Whether they’re from Toronto or from Düsseldorf in Germany, no matter where their lives have taken them, they’re all still pro-China.

Shop in Karoo town
Tibet. Poor, freedom-loving, non-violent Tibet. And the Dalai Lama, what a man. He’s not unfamiliar with the Dalai Lama’s thoughts from chats at the bar. It’s the Tibetans’ Mandela. He remembers a line by the Dalai Lama. It goes like this: in one type of compassion there is not only a sense of empathy toward the object of compassion, but also a sense of responsibility in that you want to relieve that suffering yourself. That’s a more powerful compassion than empathy. These are true words.

Eddy’s all fired-up now. His knee is bouncing up and down, he’s gulped the last of the beer in one go. Create message. His thumb is sweaty. Text message - this is what he wants to say, this is what he wants the world to know.

For fuck’s sake Shané, can’t you keep the children quiet. A few minutes is all I ask

He’s almost in tears, prickly as hell. The fucking arrogance of the Chinese. Text message. All caps, no, it should be caps and lowers. His thumb slips as if it’s too big for the buttons. OK. Calm now. He knows exactly what to write. Come on Eddy, if you don’t get it out now it’s going to be too late. Start with a cap: World leaders should not go.

No, that’s too long. It’s going to cost. Leaders shouldn’t go. China’s wrong-doing. No, that’s not the word. What’s the word again?

Those children are going to drive him mad. What’s the word? He knows the word. It’s 9 pm already, he’s message will be too far back in the queue to be broadcasted. Fuckit.

Shané! Now the bloody dog’s joined the kerfuffle.

Atrocities. He’s got the word. Delete wrong-doings. Write: China’s atrocities are inconveniently overlooked. If the country in question was South Africa pre-’94, there’d be no question. No, delete. If the country in question was South Africa before ’94, there will be no argument. Mbeki should stay. Eddy Prinsloo South Africa. He’s got it, he’s said it.

Eddy! Come and help me with your son. Do you think this child belongs to me only?

Fuckit.

Shané comes from behind so quickly that he can’t stop her even if he had wanted to. She whacks him across the head with a towel still wet from the children’s bath. He holds his head, his thumb searching for the SEND button.

This is my only night, my only chance of getting out of this miserable shithole of a town with its petty little people. I can be part of the world, fuck! Just one night, an hour, not even. And you won’t give it to me.You just don’t understand, do you Shané. You just don’t.

Well why don’t you get out there and become part of whatever? Why don’t you just get out?

This is Ross Atkins from the BBC. Thanks very much to all our callers, the three people here with me in the studio, everybody who took time to send text messages. If you want to log onto our site …

You don’t know, you don’t want to know. He gets up and sends the bowl of sweets and sweet wrappers flying. He sees Shané’s face in front of him, he can read it: loathing.

He walks out into the night, the chill of autumn against his bare arms. He closes the gate behind him and walks onto the dirt road in front of their house. He can cry, he can scream about his lost message. He looks up. The stars and milky way are all bright and distinct. There is no sound.

He is a barman. That’s all. There’s nothing else out there for him. In a while he’ll turn in, crawl into bed next to Shané, beer on his breath. He’ll force himself to ask for forgiveness. That’s it.

© Eben Venter in Diversity is Power. An anthology of Surinam and South African writing. Ed. EKM Dido. Writers in Exchange: 2008

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By Johann Rossouw**

But nothing remains of them today. Like the Jews, the Afrikaners have forsaken themselves to a mighty diaspora and left the blood river for good; though unlike the Jews, they even cast their language on the waters like stale bread, drifting downstream rapidly so that some of the words of the language, words that everyone remembered and used once upon a time, floated away, faster and faster, and disappeared under the water. Under, then above, like fingerlings, sometimes you could almost see their splashings, but like miniscule traces of water life they eventually disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again, faster and in greater numbers, so that their presence became ever less noticeable, ever vaguer, until no sign whatsoever remained of the existence of these words.

Burning Bus by Stephen Allwright. Mixed media 2009

Thus an inner reflection of Marlouw, the main character of Eben Venter’s apocalyptic novel on a possible South African/ Afrikaans future, Trencherman, p 213 (translated by Luke Stubbs).
Like another apocalyptic novel on the future, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, Trencherman is the novel about which I’ve heard the most Afrikaans readers say: “I couldn’t finish it, it’s too terrible.”
This reaction is all too comprehensible: like Atomised projects from a contemporary decaying (French) consumer society towards the end of the human species, Trencherman projects from within an even more decayed society – in which consumerism has become the great ideal – towards the horrible death of most of the people in South Africa. More precisely, as is suggested in the opening quotation above, Trencherman also projects from within the present towards the death of the Afrikaners. Those who succeed in the novel to survive in South Africa (and elsewhere in Africa), barely lead what may be described as a life worthy of a human being. They are rather doomed to an atomistic existence of scraping through, in which the next meal nearly represents a small victory.
The similarities between Atomised and Trencherman must however not be overemphasised at the cost of the more important differences between the two novels. Houellebecq’s novel harks back to 19th-century naturalism, according to which man acts mostly in accordance with his biological and material drives, and according to which his spiritual life, inasmuch as he has something like it, is merely the function of biology and matter. Atomised can be read as a novel that wants to show that consumer society with its overemphasis on the satisfaction of biological and sensory needs is the natural and unavoidable outcome of human evolution that must eventually lead to the death of the species. Viewed thus Atomised is a deeply cynical novel.
Trencherman may on the contrary be described as a tragic novel. Tragic since, in the best Greek tragic tradition, it portrays a situation that could have been avoided had the different protagonists recognised their part in the situation as well as the limitations of their access to the truth. Since this does not happen partial or complete mutual destruction occurs, with the tragic hero exposed to the biggest destruction.
In Trencherman the two parties of black and white mostly represent the tragic protagonists. As a novel from the pen of a historically conscious Afrikaner Trencherman can be read as a melancholic consideration of the part of South African whites in the tragic situation that eventually leads to decay and destruction. Precisely due to the willingness of the Afrikaner main character, Marlouw, to recognise his people’s part, he also attains the moral authority to voice criticism of the other party – blacks. This criticism is never heartless: it stands under the aegis of nearly discouraged compassion and melancholia, a criticism that unavowedly asks: but couldn’t you have acted different than us?
The character in Trencherman who comes the closest to the classic tragic hero of the Greeks, is Koert Spies. Koert is the son of Marlouw’s sister and brother-in-law, Heleen and JP, who emigrated decades ago with Marlouw to Melbourne, Australia. There a fatal confluence of circumstances led to it that Koert became the product of cultural and language loss, liberal paternalism and consumerism.
When Koert, against his mother’s wishes, goes to South Africa, to the family farm that Marlouw and Heleen after the death of their parents transferred to the black family who worked on the farm, he speaks in a gibberish of Afrikaans, English, German and Dutch, he’s a videogame addict, and he harbours the vague hope to “help” the blacks.
The decaying country sucks him in, and when Marlouw reaches Koert after a hellish journey, Koert is an overweight, videogame-playing meat eater suffering from gangrene: due to the lack of cultural transmission biological impulses have gained the upper hand, and Koert is literally a rotting bastard whose liberal naivety, as happens all too often, has inverted into utter violence and individualism that must lead to abominable death.
In a certain sense, as with Atomised, the role of production and consumption is central to the tragedy of Trencherman. According to a black South African friend and astute political analyst, blacks in South Africa were chased out of production a century or more ago and their cultural memory decayed with their languages. This would then help to explain why so many South African blacks today, from the richest to the poorest, contributes less to production and much more to consumption and live as if there is no tomorrow.
Contrary to this, my friend argues, Afrikaners have always been involved in production and our language commitment has ensured the transmission of our cultural memory, and therefore our productive ability. What he does not take into account is the extent to which the loss of basic Afrikaans and cultural memory amongst the younger generation of Afrikaners and their parents also gradually makes them more consumers than producers.
Thus Afrikaner and African ironically becomes similar, is their dialogue and diversity undermined, and is decay in South Africa sped up. The worst possible version of this is portrayed in Trencherman, and Eben Venter deserves praise for the courage with which he makes us stare into the mirror of this possible death.

***

*This article is a slightly adapted English version of Rossouw’s Saturday column, Glasoog, in the Afrikaans daily Beeld, that originally appeared on February 7 2009. It is published here in the English with the kind permission of Beeld.
**Afrikaans writer and philosopher, and a PHD candidate in the Department of Politics, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne.

this article appeared on eben venter’s website

During winter, 2008, many migrants were attacked, killed and burnt out of their homes in Cape Town and other cities in South Africa. Some of the migrants, most of them illegal, were taken in by churches and provided with food and bedrolls in church halls. Others were given refuge by private families.

Their mother has made up her mind: the Congolese man is not invited for coffee & cake and that’s final. Sunday afternoon and the family has gathered in the sunroom: Ma, Pa, Sissie and Stoney. It doesn’t happen very often.

It just doesn’t feel right. That’s all, she says.

Sissie goes rigid in her wheelchair. If her foot could tap up and down, it would’ve. That’s certainly not all there is to it as their mother tries to intimate.
Across the orchard of apricot trees the shed in the backyard has been fixed-up for Benjamin Bienfait. There is no toilet, at night and in the mornings he slips through the kitchen to do his ablutions in the second bathroom. Quiet as a mouse, you wouldn’t hear the backdoor open or close, at most the flush of the toilet. The other day Stoney discovered a wiry pubic hair on the toilet seat, figured that it doesn’t belong to any of the Steenkamps and wiped it up with a sheet of Baby Soft.

Stoney promised that he’ll make a special Eastern European apple cake with crème anglaise, which is, he added quickly, nothing more but old-fashioned custard. He has no intention being a show-off with his cooking even though he realises how skilled you need to be for a proper crème anglaise. Not too thick and not too runny and never over-sweet. The texture has to be silky. If you end up with a lump as big as a rice kernel, you have to start all over again.

Benjamin Bienfait in the shed – everybody senses the presence of the man across the apricot orchard.

I just gave hom granny Ansie’s old one, you know, the mother says about Benjamin who’d come to ask for a Bible. It’s not in French I know, she told him, I didn’t want him to think I’m stupid. He simply said, no, that’s all right.

This time of the year, she says, it makes her sad to watch the beautiful orange of the apricot tree leaves turn brown and then drop to the ground and remain there right through winter, cold and damp. She doesn’t venture into the backyard anymore.

I think he’s got a very musical name, Sissie says.

Stoney noticed Sissie had gulped down a pill and since then she’s recovered. She reckons she’s the only one who knows everything about Benjamin. That every single one of his belongings went up in fire in Langa. Everything, his runners the lot. That he rented a tiny shed in that township too. That he’s left with what his wearing, that’s it. And if he returns, they’ll kill him. He also sends all his savings to his sister in the refugee camp of Kakuma in Kenia, that’s something she knows for a fact. And his sister’s the last one left of his family. The rest has been wiped out in the war in the DRC.

I wonder if any of you remember the story of the man who comes to knock at the door late at night to ask for a fish, Sissie has abruptly swung her wheelchair around to face all of them. Will you send him away empty-handed? He’s only 21 you know, that’s all.

Well, we haven’t sent hom away at all. He’s staying with us, isn’t he, their mother replies. Sy picks at a nail on her left hand. She clearly finds the Congolese man in their backyard disturbing.

Stoney has read something about a woman in a story by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean writer who has since died. In the story Bolaño tells of how absent the woman always seemed. If she said halo, it was as if she spoke from another, distant place. And if she looked at her husband that too seemed to come from a faraway, distant direction.

Stoney used to think of his mother in this way. Yet since the Congolese man has moved in, she started talking. It’s as if she’s suddenly got the spirit.

And how long is he intending to stay, she wants to know from Sissie.

‘Till he has to, Ma, she says.

It has become apparent to Stoney how much power Sissie has acquired at home the last year or so. At the back next to the swimming-pool she let Benjamin plant chrysanthemums: yellow and brown ones. He’s got a green thumb, she said.
.
Their mother would stand on the back step looking out, the Dobermann at her side and say: I have to admit, it’s never looked as good.

All Sissie’s doing. She was alone at home the day the bell rang and she dared to open. She said she felt strong with the Dobermann there and all. That’s the new Sissie. She had Benjamin digging up the flower-beds in no time. At lunch she let him have a sandwich and a Coke. They chatted away, there’s no-one else for her, is there.

In the sunroom nobody has anything to say about the story of the man and the fish. She manipulates them, makes them feel guilty: they know they neglect her.

*

When Stoney gets up for the coffee and cake, his mother follows.

How many cake plates are you putting out?

I guess four only, Ma. She nods, her eyes sharp and clear.

Hy goes to set out the cake plates with cake forks and cups on the coffee table in the sunroom. Then he returns for the coffee and hot milk and his apple cake.

So he’s not coming, Sissie says when she notices there’re only four of everything.

I think his reading his Bible, their father says.

Ag don’t be stupid, Pa. You lot have decided Benjamin is not coming, all on the sly. Don’t bother about asking Sissie, she doesn’t count.

Listen Sis, you should ask yourself whether he’s going to feel at home here amongst us. We’ve got our way of doing things, you know. For a start: we won’t be able to speak Afrikaans.

Pa you speak English all day at the office.

Well, I just thought it would be nice to have the family all by itself for a change.

Across the backyard and through the open kitchen door Benjamin’s music drifts towards them. The Dobermann doesn’t even bother to bark, simply lifts his head and looks in the direction of the music, wet tongue lolling, then back towards Sissie in her wheelchair.

The dog, Stoney thinks, it too has become hers. Waits on her commands all the time. Her word has become law, the dog won’t even listen to Pa anymore.

You’re all so selfish. Benjamin could have been with us right now. We can learn something from him, you know.

You’re being silly now, Sis. You’re starting to annoy me. We do what we can, all of us here in Cape Town. What bothers me, is that he’s invaded our privacy. I don’t feel at home anymore in my own backyard. Can’t help it, I was born like that. You won’t get me any other way. What is that music he’s playing all the time?

It’s Soukous, Ma. Congolese music. That’s what I mean, see, we can learn something from him.

So why don’t you take your piece of cake and join him in the shed, why don’t you do that if that’s what you want. He’s not one of us Sissie, we don’t know the man at all, their father says.

I can’t believe all of you. Bunch of hypocrites! That’s what you are. She buries her face in her hands. Tears will flow, Stoney knows her well. The Dobermann doesn’t take his eyes off her.

Leave her alone now, Pa, Stoney says and cuts the moist, bronze cake into robust squares. He baked the apple cake in a square tin, it had sunken slightly in the middle to form its own rich syrup.

I got the recipe from a Jewish friend of mine. It’s from her aunt on her mother’s side, passed on through the years. Hy pours the pale yellow custard – like a dream – on each square, passes a cake fork and a napkin: here, Ma.

You and your old Jewish recipes, Sissie hisses through her fingers.

Everyone looks up at her. And looks. And nobody says a word.

*

Only him and his father are still up. They both sit reading. They’ve been watching the late edition of Aljazeera news. Bishop Tutu had been to Gaza. He says it’s a disgrace what’s happening there. It’s like a stain.

When his father senses that he’s staring at him, he looks up from under the reading lamp.

Pa, you’ve read Waiting for the barbarian, haven’t you?

Not bad. But too sombre for me. All his books are like that. I don’t need that in my life.

You know Pa, I only realise now that JM Coetzee got the title of his book from a Greek poet, from Cavafis, one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Cavafis had a perfect sense of rhythm and never used metaphors or similes. Listen to this. It’s from Waiting for the Barbarians:

Why this sudden unrest and confusion?
(How solemn their faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
And all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
Some people arrived from the frontiers,
And they said there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Stoney frowns: what do you think of that, Pa? Under the circumstances?

eben venter’s website is here