The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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in Joseph and His Brothers who, more than any of the other characters, united all the motifs in Thomas Mann’s large and complex novel.
Aaron listened. He didn’t think about their parents in the same terms as Stefaans. He thought about them in a more concrete way. He thought their mother was strong in spirit, but misguided. She was too concerned with her children. She never quite actualised herself, and that was a pity, a mistake; it worked to the disadvantage of her husband and her children.
Stefaans, back from the dead like Lazarus, on a visit to his brother Aaron, sits with him in his studio and interprets it thus: their mother realised she must let go of him. She must sacrifice him. This she did by buying Stefaans his first Weightlifting magazine.
Like Jacob, in Mann’s novel, she must have sensed a certain predestined course, a kind of election. And, like Joseph, he, Stefaans, descended into the darkness because there was no way he could evade his destiny.
Because remember, Stefaans explains to Aaron, in Mann’s eyes Yahweh was also a trickster god, a god with a penchant for irony, for Zen-strategy. Joseph’s story is about the recognition and acceptance of his eventual destiny. Jacob must have known that he would sacrifice Joseph to his brothers by privileging and indulging him. But he persisted in his folly, setting him up. So, in a sense, says Stefaans, Jacob unconsciously sent Joseph away from him, and Joseph ran away in order to fulfil his destiny, because he could have escaped if he’d wanted to. And Judah, who sold bonny prince Yusuf into slavery, helped Joseph get away, because he also knew, at a deep level, what it was that he was doing. Like Tamar, who, in the guise of a whore, ambushed her father-in-law on the side of the road.
CHAPTER 4
Twenty-five days after Eddie Knuvelder’s visit to his studio, and eight days after that disastrous Sunday when Aaron read the newspaper interview with Knuvelder, Wanda, one of Knuvelder’s two personal assistants, phones Aaron. (Wanda is slightly older than Zelda, but for the rest they’re the spitting image of each other. Both of them bottle blondes, perfectly made up and manicured.)
For a second, his heart almost stops. So great is his hope. His ears buzz and he feels slightly dizzy. He’s been saved – all is not lost! Knuvelder has decided to include him. All is forgiven. He should have known Knuvelder wouldn’t leave him out in the cold.
Mr Knuvelder has a request to make of you, says Wanda. A pair of young artists are due to arrive in Durban in two days’ time for a fourteen-day residency with master printer Duncan Cavendish, in Balgowan in the Midlands. Might Aaron see his way clear to driving the two of them there by car? Mr Knuvelder realises it’s a lot to ask, but he’s convinced the pair of them – two really exceptional young artists – would also like to pay Aaron’s studio a visit. Aaron will profit greatly from making their acquaintance. Mr Knuvelder will be sure to return the favour some time. And, naturally, he undertakes to cover all Aaron’s costs.
(Where did the woman learn to talk in such an affected manner? It hadn’t struck him quite so forcefully before.)
“Hello?” the woman says. “Hello, Mr Adendorff, hello! Are you still there?”
“Yes,” says Aaron, “I’m still here.”
“And it’s so much more personal than to let them travel in a hired car,” she adds.
As she talks, a series of thoughts flash through Aaron’s head. He considers saying to the woman that, as far as he’s concerned, Knuvelder can shove the two exceptional young artists up his backside.
“Why is Mr Knuvdelder not making this request himself?” he asks.
“Mr Knuvelder would most certainly have made the request himself if he were in a position to do so,” the woman says, “but unfortunately he’s on his way overseas.”
“Send me the flight details,” he says, putting the phone down.
He should have known it. And when he looked at the newspaper article again, just to make sure, there were the two names, larger than life: Jimmy Harris and Moeketsi Mosekedi.
It was at Jimmy Harris’s exhibition that the picture of Knuvelder was taken; Aaron is familiar with Mosekedi’s work.
What should he make of this? Is Knuvelder subjecting him to some sort of a test? Does he have something up his sleeve? Putting Aaron though a series of obstacles so as to teach him something – humility, patience? Or does he want to compel him – for his own good – to reassess his own work via exposure to these two young artists? What is Knuvelder thinking? Does he in fact want to do Aaron a favour with all this – now that he’s as good as blocked his way completely? Eddie might just as well have been wearing blinkers during his visit to Aaron’s studio. He was unwilling to see the work; he did not open himself up to it. He refused, obstinately, myopically, to take anything outside of his own agenda into consideration. Powerful, innovative work – as good as, or even better than, anything Aaron has made in the past. For this blindness, he blames Eddie Knuvelder; this he cannot forgive him.
*
The same day, he receives the following messages from Stefaans:
Just got word
of Josua Reinecke’s death!
Our lives, from the beginning,
an unholy alliance.
And remained so.
And:
Last saw Josua in ’95.
Then never again.
I didn’t want to see him again.
My uncharity!
On him, too, I turned my back.
And:
Reaching out to poor Josua
in a mythical space
might be redemptive.
*
When he spots the two men walking through Arrivals, Aaron’s spirit plummets. He’s prepared to give Moeketsi Mosekedi the time of day, but the moment Jimmy Harris crosses his path, his hackles begin to rise. Something about the young man’s attitude gets his goat. The way his feet splay slightly outwards when he walks. And the insolent look on his mug. For a moment, Aaron considers turning on his heel, right there and then, and getting the hell out. He would’ve done it, too, if it weren’t for the fact that he still carries a (ridiculous) sense of hope that this favour might make Eddie Knuvelder change his plans.
Moeketsi’s wearing a long, sleeveless shirt that emphasises the soft contours of his body. He moves with a slight awkwardness, but noiselessly, and slightly hunched. Jimmy’s T-shirt sports several food stains. Aaron greets them and loads their baggage into his car. In complete silence they drive past sugar factories, refineries, mosques, Indian temples, billboards on both sides of the highway. Sitting in the back seat, Moeketsi takes pictures with a digital camera. In front, Jimmy listens to music on his iPod. Aaron drops the pair off at a guest house and agrees to meet them for dinner. (He should have invited Bubbles to come along, just for the hell of it. She’d have sorted these two out in no time at all.)
In the restaurant, Aaron watches the two of them as if they were poisonous snakes. Moeketsi Mosekedi has just returned from an extended artist’s residence in Berlin. (Knuvelder’s assistant sent him CVs for the two, along with the flight details. He’d studied the documents very carefully.) Moeketsi Mosekedi is young and black. He arrived on the art scene a few years ago from almost nowhere (some small township or other on the platteland).Even then his work was inexplicably sophisticated for someone with little or no exposure to contemporary art. An exceptionally rich imagination. He worked with just about any waste material he could lay his hands on: cement and plastic bags, hide and rags, cheap house paint and grease, engine oil and blood, objects he found on rubbish dumps. All of it he transformed into something astonishingly ingenious. (The art magazine image that remained with Aaron was one of torn cement bags rubbed with fat and grease, flapping on a washing line in a township back yard. But he also likes the man’s later work.) Mosekedi