The Snow Sleeper. Marlene van Niekerk

him to the hospital, as he puts it: Without name, without papers, with only my story and the need to tell it to the one person on earth who would understand.

      After two months and no further unusual parcels, I bought a new cassette player, packed up Kasper’s tapes and travelled to the Cederberg. The deeper I went into the mountains, from the Gydo Pass all the way through towards Clanwilliam, the more I felt I was on the right track. I found the farm Dwarsrivier easily and unpacked at a campground called Sanddrif. The sand in Kasper’s envelope was exactly the same as the sand I found at the river there. At night I listened to the tapes in my tent, fifty-three distinguishable recitations. I came to the conclusion that they were poems, recorded close to running water, or in the mouth of waving grass, as though Kasper wanted to provide his voice with a kind of pedal point, not the bold bass pedal he heard in the work of Bach, but rustling, murmuring, as though time was an instrument played by the transparent fingers of grass and water. I walked up and down the river for days, carrying my cassette player, until I found what I was looking for, a specific minor murmuring of water over flat rock at a small whirlpool, and also a patch of reeds with white plumes that rustled silkily like Chinese cymbals. These were the background sounds that Kasper had chosen to mask his voice.

      Pale, oversensitive Kasper, how cold he must have been in those bare gorges in winter, beside that dark stream! There where he bowed to the wind, to the water, with his song. Would he have hung his bow tie on a reed? His waistcoat on an aloe, emptied his fountain pen onto the sand?

      However hard I listened – and, ladies and gentlemen, I am still listening, I will never stop listening – I could not make out the words of the poems. If they were even words. What I could hear clearly was the strong commencement of the theme, and then its countermovement, varied somewhat in vowels and consonants, reinforced and built up by repetition and refrain, magnificent edifices of sound. I could catch rhythms, rhythmic variations, the length and cadence of the lines, their inversions and elongations and enrichments, the climaxes, the accelerations and decelerations. Also the tone and feeling of each recitation, sometimes elegiac and legato, sometimes exuberant, often painfully ecstatic, always with a songlike quality. I could understand the argument of the sounds, or rather the research done via sound, the search for possible developments or variations of the central theme, but never the meaning.

      My work, I know, is measured out for the rest of my life. I am the real dummy, you see, the mock-up professor, and god only knows who is writing in me. Someone has fitted me with a tongue. My just deserts, I would say, if that person is my missing student or his missing friend. But I will not give up; it is bad enough that two people have vanished without trace. I sit in my yard and the seasons pass above me. I no longer write novels; I have come to see myself as a translator. I study the lists of compound sounds that Kasper recorded in my book, my empty parting gift to him. Using them, I make one translation after another of his sound poems. As soon as I finish one, I read it in unison with the sound patterns in the corresponding recording, and I keep working on it until it matches his voice as closely as possible. Much is lost in this process; perhaps something is gained. I drop the adjectives, I scrap the ideas, I barely link words to meaning, because meaning is irrelevant. What is important is the materiality of the words. They must become like grains of sand, inconsequential in weight; sweet, white, dry sand that does not care if you let it slip through your fingers. Twice a year I go to the Cederberg Mountains, to that whirlpool, that patch of marsh reeds, and I read my latest translations aloud there, in the hope that the water and the rushes will keep whispering it, perhaps whisper it through to him, if he is still somewhere out there.

      Shall I share my latest attempt with you? I dedicate it to my lost student, the one who taught me everything a writer should be – which is, mind you, something quite different to what a writer should write.

      Morning of the Southern Boubou

      Holy crack! slipped from the knuckles

      of this side’s foodfiddler and domesticator,

      the shrike flits through daybreak’s crevice,

      ama-a-a-a-zed at the spice of his cinnamon chest,

      under his clove claws the rock ’n’ roll rippin’

      spick ’n spark spillin’ crossriversands,

      tincture of peck flecked on his coat-tails and flanks,

      fixed in his frock, top hat trimmed

      he frolicks over acres to the water’s edge, look!

      triiiiiiiillllions of big and small shrikes in the looking glass,

      cut it out, you cohorts of chancers in the ripples

      that he counters with a cocky akimbo,

      quicktailin’ the kidlight in the riverine herb,

      and sidesteps, see here, this swi-sh-sh-shy oldcart waistcoat,

      he is the one and only goddodger

      here in the tendertipped noonteasing sun

      !toweak in his throttle sits his petname !toweak

      like a bell in the mount cunt, a-rou-ou-ou-sed

      by the mouthsoft morn.ii

      The Percussionist

      A Eulogy