The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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– Naomi, their brother Benjamin and his wife, Stefaans’s daughter, and Aaron’s elder daughter – into silence. Every now and again someone would try, without success, to steer the conversation in a different direction. Once or twice Naomi demonstrated her disapproval of it all. But who, in the event, could restrain Stefaans once he really got going?
By the time the rest of them wanted to go sleep, Stefaans was in full flight. Unstoppable. Then he’d be sent back to his garden cottage.
Every morning Aaron would ask him if he’d slept well. Sometimes he’d sleep, yes, thanks, other times he’d only get to sleep in the early hours. He marvelled at the early-morning birdsong, and at other sounds (loeries, hadidas, monkeys). Sometimes he brought with him, from down below – from that menacing place down there in the garden – a dream.
One morning, Stefaans was standing at the kitchen sink. As he rinsed a cup, he told Aaron about a dream he’d just had. He was hitting and hitting at something, he said, but there was no power left in his blows. I cannot endure it any longer, he’d called out in his dream.
*
Aaron hadn’t realised Stefaans was having bad dreams down there in the lush lower garden; that he was regularly experiencing devastating anxiety. How ashamed Aaron felt, afterwards, for making Stefaans sleep there. (Driving him out of the house.) What had Stefaans done to him that he couldn’t offer his own brother the protection of his house, and the presence of human beings?
Apart from his daughter, there was one other character who arrived with Stefaans on the bus. Slipped in through the back door. A nasty piece of work.
When Stefaans came up from his room down below (where, at times, he suffered mortal terror – the dreams in the first few hours of the night, the faces he saw! – although, manfully, he refrained from telling Aaron about any of this), when he’d taken something and begun speeding, then this little wretch would show his face. A shitty little character, anally fixated; an obsessive, obscene little man-child. When Stefaans was high on something, and sly, this little person would slip past the ramparts of the unconscious and present himself at the dining-room table.
Initially, the rest of the seated company listened quietly, smiling politely, tolerant and almost encouraging, not sure how they should react, not able to look each other in the eye; until Aaron, in shock, couldn’t bear it any longer. He could not reconcile this little figure, this fabrication of Stefaans’s imagination, with the image he had of his brother.
They listened in silence – Aaron, his brother and wife, the girls, Naomi. Until one night when Naomi, on behalf of everyone (Aaron didn’t have the courage), declared: Stefaans, not at my table. Please.
That was six years ago. In the meantime, the big turnaround in Stefaans’s life had come about. He’d confessed his weakness and, with the help of the twelve steps, embarked on the straight and narrow. And, to this day, he still hasn’t strayed. After all those years snuffling in the muck with the pigs. After he’d descended into the underworld, and his friends had said of him: Stefaans is irretrievably lost.
Now, like their carpenter oupa, Stefaans works on a building site, attends meetings, exercises, and, at night, writes.
Now he communicates with Aaron via SMS. Aaron finds it impossible to keep up. Some nights Stefaans sends off as many as five, six, seven messages, one following rapidly on the heels of another. Stefaans’s mind, racing. Aaron reads the messages and laughs. He laughs and takes pleasure in his brother’s ingenuity, the breadth of his imagination. For his own part, he’s slow to answer. Especially these days.
Their carpenter oupa. Oupa Harry. A big man with a lively, roughly chiselled, peasant-like face. Actually their step-oupa, their ouma’s second husband. He’d spend the whole Sunday in his pyjamas, in one of the two outside rooms in front of the house, with endless cups of tea, cigarettes, and the Sunday papers. That’s where Aaron’s interest in comics began, he suspects; with his step-oupa in striped flannel pyjamas, his towelling dressing gown tied with a tasselled cord, in a room smelling of cigarettes, the beds and floor littered with newspaper pages. In a small town in the platteland, on holiday. The Katzenjammer Kids, Sad Sack. Their oupa as enthusiastic about the comics as they, the children, were. His hair standing on end, cigarette in hand, one leg across the other in his striped pyjamas; large features, expressive face. The cartoons a decisive influence on Aaron, an important motif in his work – that’s where it all began; that’s the source he returned to as an artist.
Oupa Harry was much like a child himself. He played games with them. Ludo and cricket. Mercilessly, he’d beat Aaron and Stefaans at Ludo. Then Stefaans would become morose and Aaron would start crying. Their pa and oupa would laugh. As opponents, they never gave an inch. They showed no mercy, neither for each other nor for the children.
That was their step-oupa Harry, the carpenter, the man of many occupations and just as many accidents. Larger than life. Their mother was a lot closer to him than she ever was to her own father, Oupa Jesse – that pompous, uncomfortable man, a heavy drinker, with his uncertain past, his esoteric interests, and his stylised gestures.
On their father’s side there was Oupa Stefaans, who, in contrast, was formal, certainly not in the habit of playing with the boys, or indulging in any kind of buffoonery. Aaron remembers him always wearing a suit. A farmer who, when his farming was later scaled down, cultivated a vegetable garden, and who watered his garden right up to the day he died. Their gardener oupa. Their carpenter oupa. Their oupa the self-made man and Freemason. Three grandfathers, and yes, indeed, as Stefaans pointed out, where did that leave him?
Stefaans pulled through. Thank God for that, because he almost didn’t make it. Came through by the skin of his teeth. He very nearly found himself going under. During that long and reeling journey, lasting twenty-five to thirty years, he lost everything – his house, his wife, his friends, his job – but he emerged again on the other side, unscathed, more or less.
Stefaans has come a long way since those merciless times. A long way, before he stepped into the light to face the extent of his loss. Or the extent of his denial, as he now insists.
By the time Stefaans began his penetrating moral inventory, both their parents had died. It’s possible they never realised the full truth, or they mercifully denied it right up to the end.
*
Aaron worked in his studio. Stefaans would sit with him. He’d smoke, drink tea and talk. He was appreciative of Aaron’s work. Always. He looked at it with more concentration than most people did (certainly with greater attention than Knuvelder could manage during his last visit). He would make cautious remarks. Pore over the paintings for a long time, close up, cigarette in hand, exclaiming in admiration. If Aaron was interested in selling, he said, he would want to buy the painting of the black wall. The black wall spoke to him.
Their mother was streetwise, Stefaans used to say, but she was too naive and passionate to be aware of Samuel Reinecke’s hidden agenda. Doctor Reinecke, Stefaans used to say, had an extraordinary ability to relativise things. And, Stefaans said, he suspected that Reinecke hated his father and that his intention with women was often – he hesitated to say it – satanic. Reinecke held their mother in his power, despite her dual feelings of attraction and revulsion for him.
Aaron would listen. He was surprised about the weight Stefaans gave Doctor Reinecke in their mother’s life. Their mother found Reinecke physically unattractive, Stefaans said. She even found him mean spirited. But she was attracted to him because he challenged her intellectually in a way their father never did. Their father wasn’t an intellectual, Aaron said. No, Stefaans said, he was also not a man who regarded himself as an instrument of God’s grace.
In the end, it was their father who helped their mother find herself, Stefaans said, because he wasn’t merely handsome, he also had an inner beauty. Something Reinecke didn’t have. Reinecke’s grotesque exterior was also the manifestation of an inner perversion, Stefaans said.
Stefaans lent their mother an almost heroic status. He talked about her intelligence, saying she was ahead of her time. Another reason why Reinecke’s intellect spoke so loudly to her. Stefaans talked about her new, strong ego after