Mouroir

No, Baba

Time, he then says, must move ahead although it has no destination. (There is no time. Only we ourselves who run smash into dismantling, and try to force the regulating correlative “time” in an attempt to measure, comprehend, excuse.) But still we need it as a catalyst of life; it is only in the searchlight of time that there is life. Life is in the present, in the now. (Commonplace!) That which lies behind is death and ahead is death. Like the view from an aeroplane — when that would be time — flying over an immeasurable landscape, thus is life. That which sharp-immediately sweeps by under the wings and that which the eye up here may frame, are alive. Unpredictable, involuntary, unprejudiced it crawls forth from under the wings, is unrolled. (Cover, flyleaves, title-page, text, endpaper.) Once you have moved over it, it is swallowed by distance; the further back it is the quicker it disappears, becomes that and then imagination. It is like a page of written words falling in the changeable water (when trees lose their manuscripts) — the letters run and change their language, the paper will be part of the water and the water in the end will be clear. Theoretically such a craft should be able to return and to quiver over the already stroked surface, but it can never be the same terrain because in the dark, in the past sense, certain shafts and funnels and towers and neutral zones decay and crumble faster than others, are changed, become stains or even nothing, so that a hypothetical second passage would reveal a modified landscape. (Behind your back everything grows to hell.) Quicker, always quicker they sink; the further you are the faster they go. The future, that which may not yet be illuminated by time and thus by life, is similarly subject to change, tearing and careening, birth and decline, mutation and syncretism and bastardization, destruction and slaughter (frost over the yard), which we will never be aware of because it takes place in the penumbra. It is only the clear light of time-at-work, that fleeting moment and tangent point of relationships, people, objects, dreams, which generates the illusion that we may grasp and hold something existing and immutable. The environment is perpetually changeable changing death. The difference between life and death is that there is actually no difference; it is the play between illusion and reality. . Life is that which in the twinkling of an eye is lit up in a never-ending, pulsating and crackling darkness. (Isolated in the temporary.)

Naturally one also realizes it from within, he thereupon says. Or you think that you experience it from inside. There is the internal cohesion of the momentary which is not sudden, at least, that is not the way you live it. You experience it as something growing inside — let’s project it as the inner form of a bird solidifying in you. But which then rises in flight and disappears or which is plucked from you or is flushed and frightened off before you could even observe its description. It flies away and vanishes in the dark because you could neither recognize nor follow it with the senses, and totality is never completed. If it were to be completed you wouldn’t know it since you were part thereof. You never knew the outlines etched clearly. Thus the witnessing is for you like the inwardness of a bird departing from you or put up before it could decently take on shape, and in the nature of things you don’t realize that it was the “self” of the moment which has been displaced. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness. And emptiness is loneliness. Without emotional connotations. You add on two letters when you wish to transform the moment into a monument: NU — that’s naked. Monakedment.

The memory too, storeroom of experience, is subject to the same process: time/life is a lighting up of death, the spotlight picking out a grain of sand — and everything occurs in that grainy look — if the universe were a beach. Try to imagine what lies beyond the universe: you on the thrumming, eroding edge; to one side the sea with what it contains, its watery secrets, its sunken civilizations, its shells carrying the echo of absence on the dry land; on the other side the interior which had to come from the sea via the beach, with its wounds, its journeys and its trips, its spotted animals, its mountain roads, cities and deserts. In the convolutions of that storeroom the experienced, the shapeless birds, the full birds — since we cannot take in the concept “emptiness” — are stocked, to such an extent that they become entangled with the roots of the mind because we must assume that the mind, primordial shape, houses the memory, primeval void. And like the unspeakable black land of death — of which it is a component, which it has part of — it mates and twitches and dies and changes without tracing the consciousness. Back of your mind everything laughs to hell. No wonder then that the mind is so fertile. And it is clear why it should have such a bad smell when opened. Here and there, selectively, we cling to something in that memory, small mirrors mostly, thinking (as if thinking isn’t dissolution!) that these are immutable, more or less on the principle that that which momentarily we close our eyes to will stop playing tricks on us; that which I do not let live in my seeing is fixed for ever, is dead and thus immortalized in life. But everywhere behind us the mirrors are growing deaf. Or pulling their own faces. When the image is gone, the mirror reigns. And that lying furthest wastes away the soonest, in the same way as that waiting ahead the most distantly will approach the fastest; they depart and mutate the most and we notice no change. We live — what we envisage as living — based on the images in departing mirrors without being able to observe the measure of deformation, even without any consciousness thereof. Yes, sometimes only on the afterglow of an image as reflected in another polished surface. But it is of little importance. I, he says, am us. We are the aviaries of birds without amplitude which have smashed into mirrors because they/we wanted to be aeroplanes. Thus we live in death. The black traces in the glass. And in this way life is a growing death. There is only one tense. The dead season. Isolated in the temporal.

What happened the furthest back was that he had something to do with boats. Perhaps he had been, in his tender youth, a cabin boy on board a three-master sailing with bulging cloth the trade routes between continents, perhaps particularly towards the Orient and there from one island to the following, mornings when the sun in an aureola broke through the fogbanks above the oil-grey sea or else came to dip the tips of slender palm trees in bloody luminosity; evenings when a baked wind from the land propelled the hint of spices, particularly cloves, over the waves, and also the rancid stench of villages which as yet knew nothing of modern drainage systems. Hamlets on mouldy stilts, their roots in the rotting. Perhaps he had been a galley slave on one of the Phoenician longboats in the Mare Anticum, and perhaps they travelled all along the vague coast of North Africa where the sea, in places, is light green and very shallow with sandbanks, and under these ridges some skeletons and cuirass pieces remain preserved, with the drum beats in his ear like the heart’s nibbling in his chest and the lashes of a whip over shoulders and back. Perhaps he jumped without outer garment from a dhow to dive for coral in the Red Sea and slapped his hands on the water to scare off the sharks. Or perhaps he trawled for sardines with his mates while the sea was very stormy and blue-black like the fear of an ink-fish, and ice, several centimetres thick, blossomed on the boat deck and the handrails; but once the catch flip-flopped over the planks like handfuls of living coins, then they could return to Björnholm or one of the other Baltic islands where grey winds eddy in the shrieking of mews to drown a fortnight’s cares and joys in drink.

However and wherever it might have been, a feeling of betrayal clings to the memory. Something like a blue line. A blue line over salt-encrusted planks. But also over the people. Or in him too? Shipwreck? He doesn’t think so. He had a rank taste in the mouth. The faces of fellow travellers by the lantern’s light, bobbing shadows over nose-bridges and cheekbones, and shards or sparks in the suspicious and furious eyes? He sat leaning his back against the wooden ribs and could sense the sea lapping at that creaking partition against his spine. And a blue beam. The other men talked about it.

Later he was on a beach at low tide. At ebb the sea withdraws a long way, like a huge thirst, and exposes an area of black sand. The force of the currents and spring tide along these parts washes benches and ridges in the sand so that fingers of water shine in all directions over the laid-bare territory. In places there are naked rocks which, with different tides, would be covered by water and foam. There is a stench — the damp sand, the gullies, the rocks — as strings of seaweed and bamboo, half-digested crabs, putrid prawns, debris and floatage of every kind and origin are strewn all over. Also many empty plastic bags, containers, condoms. The cloacae of a nearby town probably run into the water here. Although a wind is gathering speed it in no way upsets the gnats and the sandflies hovering over the waste and the oozing rubbish. They are vibrating questions in the air, questions which will strip everything bare if only they were given time and tide to do so.

He is here with the prince. Off to one side of the beach, just about where it runs into a steep rock cliff, he finds three hats which, miraculously, are brand new and still dry. The wind is slightly cut off here but when it capriciously grabs hold of one of the headgear to send it spinning like a wheel over the sand, the booty is very nearly lost. But then he succeeds in retrieving and keeping all three. From far away the prince espies the loot and comes running with pale ankles to claim his share, the part of a prince, this, the best hat which with smooth fur is practically a mirror in the sun.

He is enraged but obliged to satisfy his lordship. He has to content himself with the smallest hat, a brownish porker with a very narrow brim, limp and with not even a feather. He pulls the little hat right down to his ears so that the crown may fit deep and tight over his hair. Then he sees how the prince, Albert, drops his watch in the dark sand and vengefully he puts his foot over it to push it even deeper into the stickiness so that just the glass over the dial protrudes like the one eye of a pair of glasses squinting into the sun. Albert stands at the foot of the rock barrier, crying with one hand fisted before his eyes and with the other holding down his new hat, crying because of the watch he lost. Through his tears Albert sobs that he wishes to return home.

Now he pities Albert; and besides, he is afraid of what might happen if the prince were to start sulking angrily. Thus he runs back to the hidden watch and digs it up with long finger and index. He holds it up in one hand, swinging by the strap, nearly a tacked-on wrist, and jumps up and down. Shouts against the wind at Albert standing diminutive by the rocks: “Look what I found! I have it! I have it!” In the immediate vicinity he discovers four more timepieces which he stuffs in his pocket although not one of them ticks as swanky as the prince’s; in fact, two are pumping rather irregularly with little spastic leaps. He also finds, partially silted up under a stone, something which at first he doesn’t recognize. Upon closer inspection it turns out to be a long string of jewels, little ones with in-between sapphires as big as beetles with light bulbs in the bowels. Then he realizes that it must be a rosary since a small image dangles at one end, carved most likely from ivory, of the Christ with pulled-up legs on the cross. The nails gave him cramps. No bigger than a locust and just as leggy. The legs so twisted that they might be artificial, and the cross a wee crutch. He thinks that the carving will fit well in his slightly cupped palm, like a dead locust. The string too he surreptitiously pockets with the intention of cleaning it later and then giving it to his wife as a present. Findings keepings. Spoliatus ante omnia restituenda est. Then he jogs to where the prince waits. Long trails of a blubbery substance of dubious origin lie in all shapes on the banks of the furrows washed in the sand. A stickiness clings to his feet. When running he rouses swarms of seabirds — gulls and sandplovers and cormorants — like tatters and tears they wail and call names above his head.

With the prince he climbs up the perpendicular rockface. There are steps and twisting tracks hacked from the façade. Where no other way could be found tunnels and chimneys were cut in the rock itself, higher, ever higher. This road-making — brilliantly conceived and executed — still continues endlessly. From all over there are the sounds and the reverberations of rock drills, small explosions, pickaxes, crowbars, spades and trowels, the squeaking of ropes over pulleys hoisting buckets of gravel and letting down buckets of mortar. The slope with its ledges, niches, rocky outcrops, crannies and holes, is alive with labourers. Simultaneously however it serves as the favourite nesting and breeding place of several kinds of seabird. These birds are incessantly chased off but they remain hanging from the sky above their nests, or where their nests were supposed to be, with gaping beaks and poisonous beady eyes and the gullets full of horrible scissor-cries. It has happened that some workers were attacked. Usually the birds only peck out the eyes of the people. Several day labourers have bandages over their eyes, or dark glasses. Some of them, tougher than most, aren’t at all concerned about their appearance; their eye sockets are yawning raw wounds like overripe figs left on the branch for the go-away birds. The workers who can still see lead their blind comrades by the hand to their work stations. Many have been posted here since such a long time and now know the inclines so thoroughly that they can find their way on their own despite their want of sight. The whole scene is flooded by a tremendous din: that of the workers and their tools, the yodelling of the eyeless ones, the gnashing and croaking and hissing of gulls, and above all the lowing of the wind through crags and hollows and alleys and around corners. The workers have a supplementary task too, namely to whitewash the smooth pebbles at the foot of the wall. And this duty must be fulfilled once every twenty-four hours (the small stones of Sisyphus!) as the incoming tide rubs off the paint just as the outgoing ebb will suck in most of the pebbles or bury them under a filthy goo. . Day and night the labour continues. At night lamps and torches and lanterns are made to stand in every available hollow or hung from nails and wedges driven into the rock. Then it has the air of a festively decorated pleasure boat struggling to rise above the waves.

For lunch the labourers partake of tomatoes from brown paper bags. When the prince moves up or down the labyrinth all must get out of his way. Like monkeys they scatter up the steepest slopes or go to squat on the ledges; they hate these interruptions and with bared gums they snarl the most awful curses and imprecations at the prince and his retinue. Luckily the contents of their words are entirely blown away by the thundering elements. Some of them moan like birds of the sea.

With difficulty he climbs upwards all behind Albert. In front of them the men clamber out of their path. One worker has large shoulders and jade-black eyes. His name is Angelo Giovanni and he is of Polish descent. Angelo Giovanni glowers at them with eyes like torn-open ant-heaps before climbing nimbly up the rockface along an uncharted route running parallel to the path whilst holding on fast to his bag of tomatoes. When, several metres higher, they emerge from a pot-hole, Angelo is already sitting on his heels on a traverse off to one side and slightly higher, staring at time. The black-eyed labourer takes aim and then throws an overripe tomato very precisely. The missile whistles over Albert’s shoulder and explodes in his face where he follows in Albert’s steps with bent knees. The red meat and the gluey pips spread over his eye and cheek. Thirty metres along to the right a blind slave with neither headcloth nor blinkers gets up from where he was haunched on an outcrop, thrusts his two clenched fists in the air and crows triumphantly: “Holy! Holy! Thus he got his eye back!” Then, with a graceful plunge, he dives into space, and is smashed to pieces in the dizzy distance on the slimy beach down below. Light, which was a skein over the sand, is now blotched. Immediately the seabirds descend in screeching flocks. From up here they seem to be scarcely bigger than gnats around a scarecrow. White wings flapping over the ragged cadaver. Expression.

Above, on the plateau, it is altogether silent. The wind still strains but since there is nothing opposing it or holding it up there is also no sound. You see nothing except this table-landscape which is flat and limitless and yellow. No mountain chain or cloud-castle, neither smoke-column nor leaf-tree nor any other irregularity: just nothing.

With Albert he sits at a chess table while the wind keeps plucking inaudibly at their clothes and their hair. The chess table is made of clear glass but it has no legs. It is only a transparent block placed on the plateau. They execute their moves with intense concentration, without exchanging a single word. He can feel the watches ticking in his trouser pocket. He imagines that he can sense the little hands moving like a caress over the tender flesh of his inner thighs. A streaming silence. Albert has pinned his watch to the crown of his silver hat where it now shows off like a spare eye to indicate the flow of time. There is no one — neither angel nor bird nor fly nor labyrinth-maker — to look at the time on the face of the watch. Nothing. You would have been able to see the fly-wheels shuddering with movement but not to hear their throbbing. A reduced wrist suspended there, which has not yet deciphered the message that it is dead. A scare-time. When a piece — pawn, bishop, knight or rook — is eliminated, it sinks through the board into the glassy depths of the table. Then it shrinks, slowly at first and gradually ever faster, but it remains part of a game with the other pieces. The two players also are moves in the ritual. Invisible threads of correlation entangle everything. All go down in the game. There are different layers of volatilization amplifying and tied into each other, and all dimensionless. The two contestants are manoeuvred. Arrive at a position of tension or aggression or defence in the relation to the pieces on the board and those again to the pieces moving in the glass depths. From the result of each move hang life and death. A game endlessly renewed. Mate, opening, Polish defence, Berlin counter-attack, check. Smaller and smaller. In this way and at this distance there is no difference between life and death.

Then there was the court case. There they all sit, man and mouse, in the sanctified courtroom. The largish room is paneled in a dark, varnished wood. High up one wall are the stained-glass windows (with vulgar motives, he reflects: vine-leaves, grape-bunches, owls with dead feathers, sheep’s heads with glass eyes — the multiple adornments of death; even as those against the walls of the place of ashes outside P — where Wella was cremated long ago, he remembers) which permit coloured light-staves to grope through the musty interior. The judge, an old man with little grey feathers of hair over a shiny skull — the Old One he is called — sits fretfully wrapped in a red gown, cushioned on a kind of enclosed dais built into one wall of the hall. This hierarchical construction resembles a roomy pulpit. It is shadowed by a baldachin similarly decorated with patterns carved in the wood, of the same vulgarity as those of the windows. There the Old One perches, lofty, malicious, as if he could be an auctioneer. The rest of the hall is just the dock. No public, no legal representatives. The accused pack the space from door to doom.

He knows not why he is there. He doesn’t know yet of what he will be accused. It may turn out to be of the theft of a string of jewels, of underhandedness in chess-playing, of terrorism or some such nefarious act. Or perhaps because of what he attempted to describe in the first couple of paragraphs. Or because of a blue streak of which he no longer knows the lapsed meaning. For the time being it doesn’t really matter either since the group of people amongst whom he finds himself (his izintanga?) are seated right at the back of the hall. The benches on which they sit are sunk at various levels into the floor. Some, therefore, can truly be said to be in the well.

Right in front directly underneath the throne of the Old One prisoners are lined up. They are all Unwhite. Among them also an immigrant. He is easily as aged as the Old One, but he wears a big, awkward pair of glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose. His bony face — the head is a bone-riddle — has vaguely the same appearance as that of a pelican. He has only a few very long grey hairs left, combed flat over this domed head. His name is Mister Murphy. Mister Albert Murphy.

Apparently it was his case which was just now disposed of. Two hundred rands is the fine imposed. Upon hearing this Mister Murphy pulls himself up straight with umbrage and starts objecting with violent gestures. His face has taken on the purplish glow of a beet. “Two hundred rands!” he screeches. “Is an insult! At the very least it should have been twenty-one thousand. Who, who do you (seamheads) take me for? My name is Mister Murphy. Albert! I am the immigrant, a businessman, and I was in the war, dammit man!” At this he bends down and starts unscrewing his right leg. It is evident that the artificial limb was attached to a stump hardly twenty centimetres long. The stump, enclosed in a blue leather cap, now grotesquely jerks up and down like the severed tip of a tail of a farm hound. Mister Murphy waves the loose limb with the neatly polished shoe about him. Two court orderlies fray their way through the shackled Unwhites and Mister Murphy hands them the leg with the shoe. The defence’s exhibit A. The leg with its calf and knee of imitation flesh shines like a largish pink fish in the dusk-light of the court.

Next to him on the last bench right at the back of the hall someone was busy filling a sheet of paper with words and his attention is drawn to it now. The paper is nearly entirely covered with letters and squiggles. It looks like a poem. He can make out the first line: “No, Baba — don’t trust the chains on your ankles. . ” The rest is illegibly entwined in flowery letters and letter-like flowers. All of a dark blue colour. This drawing or description in fact becomes hazy lower down the page. It is only like a written page gradually inserted in water and the ink is dissolved. The lines and arabesques which have remained the longest in the liquid, fade the fastest. The water will become whole again.

Now at last the Old One has found his legs. The hubbub roused him from the swoon or the sleep in which, as is customary, he sank after pronouncing sentence. He lifts his two balled, vengeful firsts to heaven — flabby with age and the momentous weighing of pros and cons, being proposed to and disposing — and cries: “Holy! Holy! Did I not also fight in the war then?” He climbs down from the referee’s chair and plods with difficulty to the back of the hall.

Then he notices for the first time the hallstand behind them. And draped over the stand is something. . something like a birdrobe. It is another gown belonging to the Old One. Under the robe, this he can observe now that the Old One starts manipulating it, there is a hanger. The Old One brings the hanger to light. It is filled from end to end by a row of medals pinned to it. The badges are like ancient watches grown blind and useless. When picking them up and straightening them out, the row of medals on their faded ribbons jingle and quake. Look, the Old One demonstrates, these are for all the skirmishes and battles in which I took part. . The Great War with Delville Wood, Passchendaele, Papawerkop, Verdun, Festubert, Vimy, Somme, Etaples, Fort Douaumont, Bapaume, Thermopylae, Tin Hats. . and the line of words drooling from his mouth becomes ever longer, like jewels strung on a cord with clotsapphires in between. These names, these words, convey an old odour of musty blood and clods mixed with quicklime. . “And these here were for the Other War. This is for the relief of Berlin, and that one for the liberation of Paris afterwards.” It strikes him as strange that Paris should come after Berlin. He had always thought it the other way around.

“And this here,” and the Old One bends down to lift with both hands something which had been lying under the hat rack in the shadow-pool of the gown, “this I picked up more than twenty years ago on the beach of Paris.” In his hands he holds a roundish, pale object emitting a horrible rattling noise. It is, so the Old One explains, a bag or a ball made of skin and devoid of any colour — very likely the featherless skin of the older birds themselves — in which the gulls kept their chickens for security and protection when they went out looking for carrion. Indeed, he notices then the smooth, miniature skulls, bone-riddles without clues, and the wide-open beaks of the chickens protruding from the mouth of the purse, and among the other sounds he distinguishes again the cheeping and the hissing. At the bottom of the bag there are some more eggs or maybe even whitewashed pebbles — nobody has ever been in the position to verify — and with the trampling of the chickens (“look, thus”) these eggs or these things click against one another, the ball oscillates as anything with a rounded bottom will be wont to do, and this movement causes a noise fit to frighten off any predator or enemy. Suddenly it reeks of rotten eggs, of old-old iodine-saturated sea. And the hall is entirely filled with the ghastly chainlike clack-clack clack-clack.

“In this way there is no distinction between life and death,” he then also says.