The Snow Sleeper. Marlene van Niekerk

had to get this clearly. I would leave no room for misunderstanding.

      Mister Olwagen, I said, do you want to know what I see when I look at you? I see someone who wants to banish himself to the sticks, yes, to the back of beyond, to become an architect of the intensified moment in the unblemished outdoors, a sculptor in the amber of words. You want to become an animal in your language, the way a genet is himself in the undergrowth. All very nice, mind you. I see your dictum, it is written all over your imposing forehead: The only subversive deed remaining in a superficial, brutalised society is the cultivation of the intimate discomfort of the lyric. True or false? Or would you formulate your escapist desires differently?

      I could see that he was having difficulty. But honestly, what teacher has never upset a student? Not that you mean to, but you cannot do much about it when a student feels crushed. Nonetheless, this is not how an educator should act. Later, I sought advice from a colleague about the matter and he reminded me that Kasper was a client of a corporate institution, and that going forward I should treat him as such, no more and no less. I was his knowledge partner. If he wished not to complete his course, I should leave him be, that is all, it is his own choice, as long as he pays for services rendered.

      *

      Where was I? I have lost my thread. Oh yes, I was at the nonsense, the nonsense poems Olwagen had written in the mock-up. Tohoe wa bohoe. The formless void.

      We were discussing the third package, the sand in the envelope. Dwarsrivier. I got out my atlas and, lo and behold, there it was, no allegories here, a real Dwarsrivier in the Cederberg Mountains, a farm belonging to the Nieuwoudt clan, closest post office Clanwilliam. I took the dustpan and brush, swept up the sand on the garden path and poured it back into the envelope. For the purposes of this lecture I have put it into this hourglass.

      You understand the situation. Kasper’s letter from the hospital was nothing less than an instruction manual. I had to return to this letter every time in order to make sense of the ensuing packages. Was I trapped in the revenge plan of a wronged man? Or had I been caught by a tall tale? You see, I still did not believe the whole story of the swan whisperer.

      You look at me? You ask, at what point might one start to think that such a tale could be true after all? That Kasper had not made any of it up? That the whole swan-whispering business actually happened that way, exactly, word for word?

      There I sat at my kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, going through Kasper’s densely written pages. There was a teeth-pulling scene on page fifty. Perhaps the man has dental difficulties, Kasper writes, maybe that is why he would not talk. So he took his lodger to the dentist, where three teeth were pulled that same day, and numerous fillings administered. And then follows the part of the letter that got me thinking that perhaps my student had actually experienced something preposterous. Unlikely events occur far more readily, as we all know, in the real world than they do in stories.

      On the night of 20 January, after the teeth had been pulled, I woke with a draught on my neck. The swan whisperer was at the open window in his pyjamas, arms raised. I slipped down the stairs behind his back. Outside on the canal in front of my apartment there were, believe it or not, not one or two but dozens of swans, the entire length of the Geldersekade, nodding and swishing – necks bowing, stretching, curving, a kind of writing in which the white cursive danced on the black ink of the canal. They came swimming from beneath the bridge, from the Oosterdok they swarmed, the air alive with the whirring of their wings. With their long necks set back they landed among one another, flapping and splashing. I was dumbfounded at the steadily growing congregation of stalklike necks, the feathers royally displayed in a massed nocturnal plume, the surface of the water astir under the blue light from the Liebherr cranes. This is how it must have looked when the gods herded all the swans together to pull the sled of Orpheus.

      Professor, he asks me here in brackets, what would you call a drift of swans in Afrikaans? A “drifsel”? Could one call them a swathe? A throng? A longing, a sin, a shame of swans?

      I did not return to the flat that evening, he writes. I wandered around the city, too perturbed by the spectacle of swans, all my doubts, all my reservations about this drifter summarily eliminated. He was a genius. Autistic, perhaps, as in Rain Man, but still a genius. Did you see it? The movie with Dustin Hoffman in the lead? I had to find a different approach. But how? He could not exactly take me on as his apprentice. Nor as the scribe of his whisperings. And no, I understood that I was not his saviour, nor his interpreter. Nor his lover, although that would have been a sweet ending for my story.

      By six the next morning, tired and cold and hungry, I finally knew what to do. Why had it taken me so long? I had to go back to the flat and switch on the kettle. At a quarter to seven I had to knock on his door, open the curtains and touch his shoulder to wake him, just as I had done every morning for the past two and a half months. I would have to sit on the chair by his bed and have coffee with him in the sleepy silence, while we listened to the city slowly waking, the train wheels scouring the tracks, the siren in the Oosterdok announcing another workday. Together we had to sit there while the morning glow filled the room and a lone sparrow started chirping in the gutter on the roof, waiting for the bells to strike seven, first the Oude Kerk on De Wallen and then, after two strokes, the Zuiderkerk, and then promptly the closer clangour of Sint Nicolaas, as its dorsal fins were slowly sketched in before our eyes by the morning light. And then I would touch my face to see if I had to shave, and from the corner of my eye I would see him doing the same, with a barely audible scratching sound. And all of this, I knew, I would be able to do that morning for the first time without anxiety, because I understood that, after everything, and despite his unusual abilities, I had simply become his friend, the friend of this singular man, Professor, was that too much to ask?

      Well, dear listeners, I cannot expect you to fully understand, after sharing with you only a few extracts from this letter, how moved I was by this passage. Sitting at my kitchen table, I knew without a doubt that all of it was true.

      True and poignant. Because when Kasper got back to the flat that morning with his newfound insight, it was too late: His friend was gone, missing, rope ladder and all. And yet there was more. Page sixty-three.

      He was disconsolate, Kasper writes, utterly inconsolable and distressed. Just when he had finally realised what was important about the swan whisperer – not his Orphean arts, but his ordinary bodily presence as a housemate – he disappeared. Gone, missing. For days on end, Kasper looked for him, up and down the swan route. He searched every night shelter, enquired at every welfare society. Asked every Daklozenkrant seller: “Heeft u een man gezien met wit haar en een touwladder?” He distributed flyers across the whole city: “Vriend vermist”.

      And so, in the course of searching for his friend, Kasper himself becomes a drifter. Day and night, in wind and rain, he walks the city in the threadbare coat, wearing the boots of the swan whisperer. And here we find beautiful descriptions of Amsterdam, the reflections, the gables, the elms, the trams, always with the notion: I am no longer seeking inspiration or authorial fulfilment, I am looking for my friend, and every street corner and every reflection and every bridge speaks of my longing. Kasper writes – and this is where the angels start dancing, where in my view Kasper becomes a writer – of how he lingered at every bridge where he used to find the swan whisperer, raising his hands in the air and murmuring: What did I do wrong to lose my mate? And that if the swans did appear then, it would be immaterial.

      Let me read you the final page.

      I believe I spotted him once, white hair ahead of me on the bustling pavement, and I was gripped by the conviction that I should not call out or run after him, that if he were to look around and see me, I would be lost. I sensed that I myself had been followed for some time, in fact by someone who thought that they, too, recognised me. I realised I was part of a procession through the city, a silent convoy of the urban lost and looking, all of us connected at the wrist by an endless black ribbon, all of us thinking that perhaps we have found a lost person, someone who had run away, but afraid to make this hope known, afraid of being disappointed, rather walking on in the solace of a community of like-minded individuals, the consolation of not being alone, of belonging to the most unbreakable brotherhood on earth: the ones who stayed on, who have survived, who have been left behind.

      And