The Snow Sleeper. Marlene van Niekerk

at that. Not all of your students feel about you the way I do, I can assure you. But let me get to the point.

      Point, what point, I thought as I flicked through the pages. Three deleted pages, each line carefully struck through so that one could still read it all. So I read it, obviously. A minutely detailed description of the accommodation in Amsterdam that I had helped him obtain. Instruction manual, I thought. Here is the gist of what he had deleted.

      It was a writer’s paradise. Even lying here in the intensive-care unit, in the care of the Dutch nursing staff, I can recall it vividly. Will I still find it as I left it, with all my belongings, what now seems an eternity ago? An apartment on the fourth floor, close to Amsterdam harbour at the top of the Geldersekade. Three double windows with small panes in the living room. Thick, old glass, slightly discoloured, full of little bubbles and flaws. To the north, a view of the seventeenth-century gabling on the quay. To the east, the former docks, where two bright yellow cranes were constantly lifting and lowering building materials. With my binoculars (always bring your binoculars, you had said) I could make out the name Liebherr on their masts. There were two writing tables, just as you had told me to specify on the application form, one for prose against the wall, where the computer sat, and one for poetry by the window. There were two bedrooms: a small cabin on the ground floor with a view onto the back of the Sint Nicolaas church, and a larger one on the top floor. But I could not write a single word.

      The usual Olwagen refrain. I impaled the letter on the levers in the file and clicked the clamp into place. After all the rattling of drums in the opening lines, nothing extraordinary; a description of a space. And dumbfounded? About what could he possibly be dumbfounded? Probably about the enormous, undeserved privilege of spending three months in such quarters for free. And then he goes and gets himself admitted to the intensive care unit, surely not as a result of tremendum et fascinans, but rather through utter laziness. I was livid. All the forms and testimonials and special words whispered to colleagues in Amsterdam to give this student a chance, and he messes it up. I ripped Kasper Olwagen’s freshly filed letter from my file and shoved it into a drawer full of speed fines, bills and final notices.

      Eight months later, as I was reviewing the translation of my novel, I received notice of a package from the post office. Local, according to the slip. Could not be urgent. Kasper, I knew, had come back in the meantime; the university administration had let me know that he had deregistered in person. I wondered what had become of him, but why would I concern myself further with Mr Xenos? He had not had the decency to come and see me, to explain himself. I only fetched the package a week after the third and final notice was delivered. I remember the day I fetched it at the post office in Die Boord. My parcels, mostly from publishers, are always professionally packaged, with printed address labels. Not this one. This was wrapped up in brown paper, bound and quartered with white sisal twine, with a knob of red wax on the knot at the back. I recognised the fountain-pen script at once. I cursed. When I opened the package in the kitchen, a number of audio cassettes clattered down at my feet. Sixteen TDK cassettes, sixty minutes each. And something else – yes, nothing less than the dummy of my novel, already published by that time. I had given it to Kasper as a lucky charm on the day of his departure for Amsterdam. A handy white blank book, sturdily bound, two hundred and fifty pages, the maximum number for a novel. I had written in the front: “To Kasper, for your ideas, for the missives the gods let fall upon the streets.” He looked at me strangely after reading that inscription, hand on his heart, his nostrils twitching, as though I had handed him something that smelt slightly bad.

      There was a note in the parcel:

      Dear Professor Van Niekerk. The heart guards its sorrow, here as in Amsterdam. I have included a few samples for you. You might find it entertaining to see what has become of your phantom book; quite fitting, I think. I call it The Logbook of a Swan Whisperer (see my letter earlier this year from the university hospital). The contents of the tapes should amuse you even more. It means even less. All details have been deleted, all ideas have been removed. Farewell to the world of will and representation. Kind regards. Kasper.

      I kicked at the cassettes on the kitchen floor, rereading the note. Swan whisperer? What in god’s name was a swan whisperer? I had heard of a horse whisperer, but a swan whisperer? Clearly, I had not read enough of Kasper’s godforsaken letter.

      I ripped off the rest of the brown paper, opened my model book. At least half of it was filled with writing. I had to fetch my glasses – it was written in Olwagen’s characteristic fountain-pen script. Long tables, columns with headings: location, time, and action; a strict chronology of dates in the rows, 11 December 2001 to 15 January 2002. Under “Location”, the entries were mostly the names of various bridges along the canal belt, and under “Action” a few cryptic notes; they looked like descriptions of some occult scheme. I have brought the book along, let me read you a few typical inscriptions: 11 December; “Prinsengracht bridge, Utrechtsestraat. Swan whisperer: posture particularly stiff today, supplication with murmuring, hands lifted, rope ladder down to the water, three swans from under the bridge”. Or: “Lauriergracht bridge. Swan whisperer raises his eyes to the firmament, shakes coat out over the water, murmurs constantly, one swan from under the bridge.” Invariably: bridge, gestures and swans; gestures, murmurings, swans and bridge; the same phrases over and over again.

      The tapes were different, clearly from a more recent period. They were labelled from 1 to 16, with dates ranging from 5 March to 17 May 2002. I picked them up from the floor and put them into a plastic bag from Woolworths. My cassette player was broken, but I could imagine what was on them. Names of grasses, rocks, insects. Read out in alphabetical order from reference books. That is how I knew Mister Stranger.

      So, this was the contents of package number two. And there I sat with my cross-dressed book and the Woolworths bag and the cut white string with the red wax in my hands. The Olwagen mock-up of my book alone was enough for me to go and open the drawer where I had shoved his letter. Drawer whisperer, I moaned, because it was so full of rubbish that it would not open. The letter was completely scrunched up and I had to smooth it out, page by page, before I could read it.

      Dear listeners, it is time now for Kasper’s story. Let me orientate you once more, for clarity’s sake. Imagine, if you will, a young man from the swanless south, an alien in a world city, a struggling writer, alone, anguished, neurotic. He breaks down, as is to be expected. There he lies, in a foreign hospital, his tongue feels swollen, his hands shake from the medicine they are giving him, and he writes his teacher a letter about what has supposedly happened to him. Pure fantasy? The true situation disguised? A hidden confession? An embellishment of his own failure? An attempt to mask his fears and longings? Whichever of these it may be, he hands in a logbook, a piece of evidence to support the validity of his story. Come, we shall let him set his stage:

      It was, Professor, as they say over here, in the time of the dark days before Christmas. I had been eating nothing but baked beans from tins for weeks. At night I did not go to bed, but fell asleep on the red sofa in front of the television. I did not go out any more. I spent entire mornings standing at the window, rocking my head back and forth so that the quay, the docks, the traffic in the street all appeared to me in turn, variously distorted. Then I would breathe on the glass and write words on it. Guilt, penance, loss, shame. The great black bells in my tower. The reasons I could never write anything. Just once, I wrote: beauty, breath, song – and started crying.

      Then I woke one morning, like a prince in the mist. A great night mist, frozen to the elms as in a fairy tale. Pure lacework in the trees alongside the quay. I blew on the windowpane and on it I wrote a line of poetry I remembered from somewhere: “Perhaps my whisper was born before my lips.”

      Professor, we are there to invoke, you always said, to evoke, to call forth. Why, once the lesson is manifested, is the master absent from the student’s side?

      Because when I erased the line with my fingertip, there he stood, framed in the trace of my breath, across the canal in a portico, a man with snow-white hair and a bag in his hand, and he stepped forward and leaned over the railing. Had he dropped something in the water? He gestured over the railing, towards the bridge arching between the canal and the harbour, his bundle beside him on the ground. I adjusted my binoculars. He was in his late forties, maybe fifty, scruffy, homeless. Tufts of down were leaking from