Intimate Stranger

TOWARDS THE END

Towards the end of the semester a nightmare pushes me back in time. I have managed to wing my way through class so far, sounding suitably knowledgeable without getting bogged down in the matter at hand. The trick is to keep the pace, the pose and the pitch, and use your age advantage like dead weight.

Now we meet for the last time. The school is built on the mountain slope looking down to the gray winter sea. The cold in New York can freeze off your cojones. I have asked for the windows to be opened so that the fresh smell of damp fynbos may fill the classroom. (Fynbos is the collective name for a number of odiferous shrubs indigenous only to the Western Cape.) Clouds and fog roll up the flanks, closing our view of the city. Low cover, alive and boiling, obscures distance.

I have my black teacher’s jacket on. Class has been running for a while when my old friend M walks in with a companion. I have known M for years. He is an agile go-between when it comes to bringing the paw of writing to the ear of public presentation. He is, forever, Mr. Fixit. Even when nothing is broken. Especially then. The gentleman with him is thickset with short hair of faded straw. M sucks his big front teeth, looks at me over the dirty eye-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and announces with a gesture: “This is the inspector.” And he says, gesturing equally amiably in my direction: “Inspector, this is Mister D.”

The inspector, I understand, is to check and verify the groundedness of my teaching craft. I bow. He bows, rustling under his arm the sheaf of forms that must be completed. You’re welcome, you’re welcome. And so are you, sir. He then goes to the other end of the room where there’s a table covered with a black cloth reaching down to the floor. He will crouch under the table, out of sight except perhaps for a leg of hose sticking out. How will he see to do his work? Can darkness be penetrated? Does he have a pocket lamp? Or a secret lens? From there his voice is muffled when he asks the occasional question. “Life is a terrible business,” his choked voice says at a certain point. “It embraces the terror of territory.”

Oh, we manage to get to the end of class. It was no easy feat. I can tell you I was nervous as hell. The words in my mouth suddenly had another taste, awkward and of a faded chalkiness like that of pebbles, making the spittle flow copiously. I now took scant pleasure in the spiky gelled hair of the men and the youthful curves of the women. M watches the proceedings, grinning, the hands in front of his bulbous belly held fingertip to fingertip. This is his affable way of weighing words, particularly when they are slippery with saliva.

The final assignment was a story submitted by C, a good one as it turned out, culminating in a wedding ceremony with the couple of protagonists pronounced mistress and man.

But no, I’m lying again. C’s contribution was about the fable of the blackbird. It goes back all the way to the beginning of remembering when everything was still sung. Originally the future blackbird appeared in the Braytobook family coat of arms as a hand held out in some kind of protection. Later depictions showed it, black already but not yet gloved, plucking a harp. Times were unsettled and potentates thirsted for blood. The motif turned up as a clenched fist of war, smiting infidels. Then later still, in a country of full moon and fragrant nights, the hand, by now liberated from the shield, was recorded as writing songs of illicit love. It got itself arrested by the sultan’s goons, jealousy and intrigues were rife, and in due time it was sentenced to be amputated. His beloved in the alcove, peeping through the latticed window, fainted with a melodious moan when the blood started spurting. Ever since it has been this bird, balancing on the chimneypots and TV antennae of the city, and filling the air with its plaintive song. Since it took to roosting in the city of the dead it has also started looking after the corpses. In fact, it may now be seen as the incarnation of death, singing death’s songs to a dying sun.

And when it is over the inspector emerges from under the table with some fluff in his straw hair. We go outside on the balcony overlooking the city, but there’s not much to be seen: the clouds are even thicker at present and white, blinding the eyes.

“Ah,” says the inspector as he breathes in the wonderful smell of fresh mountain earth and plants. “We must love life more than the meaning of it. That’s from The Brothers Karamazov. Your arguments in there were compelling (he waves back to the classroom where M is now holding the floor, telling impenetrable jokes), but your underlying thinking is both bloated and flaccid. Your demagoguery is morbid. . That story about the singing hand. . What do we really want? We want for them (back there), man and mistress, to be des mordus de l’imaginaire, carrying with them on the road in the muttering and murmuring book in the pocket the mother and the moon.”