The Shallows. Ingrid Winterbach
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‘that probably means that he’s back in the country. So here he turns up again. That does not surprise me one bit. Putting out his feelers. Spadework. Count on it, he’s got something up his sleeve. It wouldn’t be Victor if he didn’t have something up his sleeve.’
This was not what Nick wanted to hear at that moment. He did not want to hear that Victor was back in the country with something up his sleeve. When Victor left, he’d hoped never to see him again. And in the years of Victor’s absence, Nick’s judgement of him had not become more charitable. On the contrary.
Shortly afterwards he got up to leave. ‘Keep me informed of Victor’s moves, and come and watch DVDs some evening,’ Marthinus called after Nick as he saw him off at the garden gate.
*
Victor Schoeman’s first novel was published in the early eighties by Dogshit, a small underground publisher. (Nick was still at art school at the time.) The book was banned. In the late eighties his much more ambitious novel, The Depths, was published. Highly experimental, with black pages, pages with only dialogue, interspersed with pastiches of several canonical Afrikaans texts.
In the mid-nineties Victor wrote his last great novel – The Shallows. According to him, the second of a projected trilogy, of which The Depths was the first. A dystopian, futuristic novel. An apocalyptic crossbreed of the historical South African past, a massively exaggerated present, and a science-fictional future. A piling-up of depravities, anxieties, political anarchism, corruption, maladministration, opportunism, interwoven with elements of the Great Trek, Border Wars, miners’ strikes, nuclear power disasters, religious fundamentalism, folk music, rappers, diamond diggings, imbongis, white and black tycoons, witchdoctors, muti murders. Satanism and satanic rituals. Large sections of the arbitrary action took place in a gigantic cemetery. A kind of heroes’ acre, amidst the graves of heroes of the Anglo-Boer War and the Struggle. There was desecration of these graves. There were (as in The Depths) cannibalism and necrophilia. Eruptions of communal violence, overcrowded mortuaries, widespread mother-and-child mortality as a result of famine and poverty in the former homelands, pages with inventories of ministerial transgressions and abuses – among others the illicit appropriation of land, of tenders. Synodic sodomites. All of this jumbled together with astonishing technological advances: flying motor cars, robots as servants. Factions in the countryside perpetually at war, groups doggedly clinging to tradition; ancestor worship; prophets and prophecies. Communication with the dead.
No publisher would touch it. Victor was obliged to have it printed and distributed at his own expense. Nick invested a hefty sum in the project. And could he, while he was about it, store the boxes of books with Nick, please, from where he, Victor, would then dispatch them to people on order.
When, after a year and a half, sales were still not up to expectations (few people could stomach that inventory of debaucheries) and the feedback was less rapturous than Victor had anticipated, he cleared out. From one day to the next Victor had vanished.
*
Nick’s friend Blinky Booysen was short, chunky, permanently perspiring, slit eyes, slit mouth, flared nostrils. A rat-face – sly, pointed and smirking at the same time. Outrageous work – shocking, scandalous. Fantastic. Blinky’s studio was also a large loft in an industrial building, near a railway track, in one of the grimy Dickensian buildings near Nick’s in the vicinity of Cape Town station. In his studio everything was filthy – years of accumulated soot and dust. There he painted his large canvases and they were, Lord knows, miracles. Blinky was a neo-expressionist and a disciple of Trotsky’s.
When Nick returned to the Cape after his army training Blinky was dead, or had disappeared. Nobody could inform Nick definitely on this point, and he was no longer in touch with Marlena Mendelsohn, Blinky’s constant companion.
*
Blinky had organised Nick’s working space for him. Like Blinky’s studio, it was cold and soot-bemired, full of birdshit (pigeons in the open rafters), but it was big. Blinky’s companion, Marlena Mendelsohn (platonic companion, as far as Nick could make out), was embarked on a master’s degree in psychology, or history of art, or both at the same time, he never knew exactly. Because Blinky’s studio was close to Nick’s, she sometimes came to sit with him in his studio. She was a source of abstruse information. In the twentieth century, she said, monochromatic work was originally associated with the dawning of the radically reductive painting of the Russian avant-garde. (Nick at that stage had a preference for tonalities of grey.) She sat on the only chair (plastic) in his studio and drank her tea. In summer she wore short dresses and in winter a jersey full of holes, of which the sleeves were too long. She had high insteps, narrow feet, and bony, boyish knees. The delicate bones of her ankle (the lower parts of the tibia and fibula, where they join the little bones of the foot) were perfectly proportioned.
She said: Don’t look only at contemporary art. Look at the older stuff. Look at Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. See if there’s anything in contemporary art to equal the intensity of it. The demon in The Temptation of St Anthony. St Anthony himself, with his suppurating sores and hideous abscesses. The afflicted demon suffering from St Anthony’s fire in the lower left-hand corner of the Temptation. Nick’s use of grey interested her. She pointed out the greys in the work of Goya and Manet. She was blonde. Her apparent dissipation was just a defence. Her eyes were an indeterminate grey-green, dreamy, and eternally fixed on something just behind him. She pointed out to him how he held himself back in his work. She showed him how grey was the colour of denial and resistance.
Grey, Marlena said, is inert, it’s neutral. Black and white have too much baggage. Black has too many mystical associations. White has too many modernist associations of purity and transcendence. Grey is the only anonymous, the least personal colour. Juan Gris, she said, changed his name to John Gray, to be as anonymous as possible. Grey didn’t stimulate, it was perceptually motionless. Giacometti almost went mad, she said, with a mug of tea in her hand, her legs crossed (in itself something to drive you mad), and grey was an escape. Already so tormented by anxiety, Giacometti nearly went off his head while painting the portrait of Isaku Yanaihara. He had not succeeded in capturing the image of his sitter, compulsively reworked the areas, until larger and larger undefined areas of grey appeared in the work. Sartre said about the six variations of these Yanahaira portraits that they represented the existential conflict between being and nothingness. The colours had fallen away one after the other, Giacometti said, and all that had remained was grey, grey, grey. Nothing envelops the figure, said Sartre, nothing contains him, he is isolated in the immense boundlessness of the void.
When Nick returned after his army training, Blinky was gone – he’d either committed suicide or simply vanished. Nobody could inform Nick definitely on this point, and he was no longer in touch with Marlena Mendelsohn. There was some talk that she’d begun a relationship with Victor Schoeman.
*
The girl renting the room from him was a hard worker. She was mysterious about what she was working on. He didn’t want to enquire too closely. They did not see each other often. She was the ideal lodger. Quiet, tidy in the kitchen, she had her own bathroom. They sometimes bumped into each other in the kitchen in the late afternoon, when she made herself a cup of coffee. All that he knew about her was that she’d come to Cape Town to do a photography course at the Peninsula Academy of Art. He hadn’t asked to see her portfolio. Kept his distance. Other things on his mind at the moment.
Is her room large enough for her to work in? he asked.
Oh yes, she said. She’d never had so much space to herself.
Five
Late one afternoon, a few days after receiving the postcard, Nick was returning from his studio, where he’d been working all day. As he pulled up at his gate, a car with tinted windows drove by slowly, stopped next to him, a window was wound down, and a string of obscenities was hurled at him. Then the car accelerated and drove off.
Nick hurried into his house. It was unpleasant. He had no idea why he should have been targeted in just this fashion. The house was eerily silent. He had a sudden feeling of foreboding. His lodger had said she was going away for the