The Snow Sleeper. Marlene van Niekerk

time. Let me summarise the story for you.

      After a month’s worth of skin treatments, the drifter’s hide had healed, his hair was cut, his scent pleasantly human. But this was not enough. Kasper was obsessed with getting the swan whisperer to talk. Because he was jealous of him, jealous of his art of communication with the “birds of the underworld”, as he put it. At night, he watched over the dozing vagabond, logbook in hand in case the man talked in his sleep, but all he heard was the ticking of the radiator, the rain pattering against the windows, the bell of Sint Nicolaas striking. Kasper could not handle the man’s silence. If he could just get him to open his mouth, even if just to say at dinner, and I quote: “Please pass the salt”, he would be able to start questioning him about how he charmed the swans.

      Pass the salt, ladies and gentlemen? I had to smile. The story did not operate at this level of realism. I was starting to feel that my student was building an argument, that he was making some sort of case. Because the things he did to try to get the man to speak sounded like a programme, a via dolorosa with stations of the cross, and this letter was addressed to me, to the student whisperer, if you will.

      But I never replied.

      This is the first time I have ever spoken about it.

      Let me stick to the story. How did Mr Philanthropist try to get his wayward guest talking? First, he sat him down in front of the television for hours on end, trying to provoke him with images of broken knees in Kenya, the terror of the long knives in Zimbabwe, the mourning polar bears of the North Pole, the smouldering trees of the Amazon; when this did not work, he made him climb through the roof hatch on clear evenings and showed him the swan and the harp in the stars, the tears of Orpheus in the west; and when this had no effect, he made him listen to every romantic swansong he could lay his hands on in the library – Grieg, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky. All for nothing. Not the terrors of our own time, not the eternal signature of the firmament, not the dated melodies of the Romantic era nor a glass of wine from Burgundy, nothing could untie this tramp’s tongue. Kasper writes that he considered taking him to a psychiatrist, or an ear, nose and throat specialist. One morning he examined the swan whisperer’s mouth himself, only to find there a healthy, light-red tongue, the clapper firmly strapped to the root, as he writes. He continues:

      I shone the light into the back of his throat. The tonsils hung on either side of the uvula like two smaller bells. I ran the tip of my index finger along the roof of his mouth. Its ridges reminded me of a harp.

      But the harps would not sound, at least not in Kasper’s writing. What he wrote were rows and columns, records and registrations, in shorthand throughout; an almost pathological writer’s block, this much at least was clear to me from the logbook. The entry for January 5th, 2003, was the following, in full sentences, the only semblance of self-reflection.

      Swannyboy is standing like a statue behind my chair while I am trying to write, been like that for hours, as if he is supervising me, I pretend not to know he is there but I am listening, what is it that I hear? Just the sounds of the city? The sibilance of his blood? Or my own? He does not know that I can see his reflection in the glass of the picture on the wall, I can see his lips moving, and I move my pen over the page as well as I can, in sync with what I imagine him to be saying. What does my pen remind me of? The graphite needle in a weather station, registering all moisture and wind and cloud movement and recording them on a roll of graph paper.

      And this, colleagues, is followed by rows and rows of sounds, the phonological patterns of Afrikaans. Some examples show the influence of the Khoi languages. Spak, grak, spal, malk, olk, skolk, and then mrie !krie krakadouw. Some of them were randomly strung together and arranged into what I can only call sound limericks. Transcriptions of what Kasper seemingly thought the swan whisperer was saying, or dreamt or invented. Swan whisperings, in other words. And what does the language of swans sound like?

      Rie mrie, rapuu,

      kriep, !tewiek, miruu,

      tohoe wa bohoe

      askla mor usa,

      pierok griemok sklahoe.

      Although I am a fan of nonsense verse, often finding in it more pleasure than in the pompous loftiness of, say, “Groot Ode” by Van Wyk Louw, I was in no mood to be made a fool of by a psychotic student looking for a mother. I smacked the book shut.

      Look, Professor, a deaf and dumb schizophrenic taught me more about the art of writing than you could! And then pages filled with mocking rhymes. I should have known it was not innocent. A year or so later, I found the phrase “tohoe wa bohoe” in a book about the Pentateuch. It is Hebrew for the formless void in Genesis.

      This I leave with you for now. I still do not know what to make of it. But something just occurred to me which I – well, someone in my line of work – would rather forget, but which might bring clarity.

      It relates to an incident from the time when Kasper was still a registered student, the only time he dared contradict me. I had summoned him for feedback on his latest piece of writing. I wished to conclude it briskly. He had barely taken his seat when I fired away. Drop the metaphysics, Kasper, I said, drop the ideas, write what the readers want, a juicy story about your hometown, a tale of unwelcome newcomers, gang violence, dog fights, highway robbery, shebeens, self-importance, adultery, braaivleis, family feuds, Maggie Laubser and piety. Call it The Sorrow of Rustling River.

      Kasper’s eyes glazed over; his voice was thin when he spoke:

      And a smug local author as narrator? The days of cosy local realism are over, in case you had not noticed, he said, even when it is dressed up in all sorts of metafictional drag. If I were to write prose one day, it would be plain street reports, pavement anthropology, recorded from a perspective of distant sympathy. Clean and dry.

      I saw small bubbles of spittle at the corners of his mouth. His hand was inside his blazer, but he did not take out his pen.

      Fiction, he continued, with his tongue dragging more than usual, fiction can no longer console us. The terrors of our fatherland rob the narrative imagination of its will, its willpower. We can no longer imagine anything. We must become brutalists, collectors of facts, no longer storytellers, but archivists of the unimaginable brutalities of our country. From this, readers will gather for themselves fear and empathy, perhaps even entertainment and knowledge.

      Well, this was the first time I had ever felt I was learning something from a student. I did not question him further about his views; I was not about to admit I was impressed. To be honest, I was jealous of what I recognised as an angle for a new literary movement in Afrikaans literature, which had become so woefully stuck in adventure and self-portrayal.

      Mr Olwagen, I said, I regret to say that I think you feign bravery. When I look at you, I see no brutalist, I see an aesthete. I do not see lists of necklace murders, raped children, murdered geriatrics, armed robberies. What I do see are lists of fauna and flora, Lehmann lovegrass, heart-seed lovegrass, stagger grass, fountain grass, quaking grass. Should you not stay true to your nature? You read Adorno’s aesthetics theories; I fail to see in you a taste for critical analysis, or for satirical commentary on your fatherland. I look at your twitching nostrils and your hand on your heart and I see someone who feels overwhelmed, weak, scared, alone, not someone willing to give himself a death sentence in sixteen lines, like your much admired Osip Mandelstam did with his poem about everybody’s beloved Onkel Stalin. Or like Breytenbach did in his poem for the butcher. Like no poet today would dare to write about Robert Mugabe. You have a lazy tongue, Olwagen. You are a symptom of the problem that besets progressive intellectuals in this country. Politically correct pose on the one hand and evasive behaviour on the other. Get a life, I would say.

      He kept staring at me with that inflamed gaze of his, but I did not return the look; I have no time for this kind of behaviour in students.

      Be honest, I said, how can you be a pavement anthropologist on any interesting pavement in this country today without an armed bodyguard by your side?

      And when I got no reaction: Your kind has been outlawed in this country, I said; there is always someone who needs a bow tie when a pig is being butchered.

      I