Sixteen years since I shared a bed with man or boy. Sixteen years alone. Does that surprise you?
I wrote. I write. I follow the pen, going where it takes me. What else have I now?
I woke up haggard. It was night again. Where had the day gone? The light in the toilet was on. Sitting on the seat, his trousers around his knees, his hat on his head, fast asleep, was Vercueil. I stared in astonishment.
He did not wake; on the contrary, though his head lolled and his jaw hung open, he slept as sweetly as a babe. His long lean thigh was quite hairless.
The kitchen door stood open and garbage from the overturned bucket was strewn over the floor. Worrying at an old wrapping-paper was the dog. When it saw me it hung its ears guiltily and thumped its tail. 'Too much!' I murmured: 'Too much!' The dog slunk out.
I sat down at the table and gave myself up to tears. I cried not for the confusion in my head, not for the mess in the house, but for the boy, for Bheki. Wherever I turned he was before me, his eyes open in the look of childish puzzlement with which he had met his death. Head on arms I sobbed, grieving for him, for what had been taken from him, for what had been taken from me. Such a good thing, life! Such a wonderful idea for God to have had! The best idea there had ever been. A gift, the most generous of all gifts, renewing itself endlessly through the generations. And now Bheki, robbed of it, gone, torn away!
'I want to go home!' So 1 had whinged, to my shame, to Mr Thabane the shoe salesman. From an old person's throat a child's voice. Home to my safe house, to my bed of childhood slumber. Have I ever been fully awake? I might as well ask: Do the dead know they are dead? No: to the dead it is not given to know anything. But in our dead sleep we may at least be visited by intimations. I have intimations older than any memory, unshakeable, that once upon a time I was alive. Was alive and then was stolen from life. From the cradle a theft took place: a child was taken and a doll left in its place to be nursed, and reared, and that doll is what I call I.
A doll? A doll's life? Is that what I have lived? Is It given to a doll to conceive such a thought? Or does the thought come and so as another intimation, a, flash of lightning, a piercing of the fog by the lance of an angel's intelligence? Can a doll recognize a doll? Can a doll know death? No: dolls grow, they acquire speech and gait, they perambulate the world; they age, they wither, they perish; they are wheeled into the fire or buried in the earth; but they do not 'die. They exist forever in that moment of petrified surprise prior to all recollection when a life was taken away, a life not theirs but in whose place they are left behind as a token. Their knowing a knowledge without substance, without worldly weight, like a doll's head, itself, empty, airy. As they themselves are not babies but the ideas of babies; more round, more pink, more blank, and blue-eyed than a baby could, ever be, living not life but an idea of life, immortal, undying, like all ideas.
Hades, Helclass="underline" the domain of ideas. Why has it ever been necessary that hell be a place on its own in the ice of Antarctica or down the pit of a volcano? Why can hell not be at the foot of Africa, and why can the creatures of hell not walk among the living?
'Father, can't you see I'm burning?' implored the child, standing at his father's bedside. But his father, sleeping on, dreaming, did not see.
That is the reason – I bring it forward now for you to see – why I cling so tightly to the memory of my mother. For if she did not give me life, no one did. I cling not just to the memory of her but to her herself, to her body, to my birth from her body into the world. In blood and milk I drank her body and came to life. And then was stolen, and have been lost ever since.
There is a photograph of me you have seen but will probably not remember. It was taken in 1918, when I was not yet two. I am on my feet; I appear to be reaching towards the camera; my mother, kneeling behind me, restrains me by some kind of rein that passes over my shoulders. Standing to one side, ignoring me, is my brother Paul, his cap at a jaunty angle.
My brow is furrowed, my eyes are fixed intensely on the camera. Am I merely squinting into the sun or, like the savages of Borneo, do I have a shadowy sense that the camera will rob me of my soul? Worse: does my mother hold me back from striking the camera to the ground because I, in my doll's way, know that it will see what the eye cannot: that I am not there? And does my mother know this because she too is not there?
Paul, dead, to whom the pen has led me. I held his hand when he was going. I whispered to him, 'You will see Mama, you will both be so happy.' He was pale, even his eyes had the blanched hue of far-off sky. He gave me a tired, empty look as if to say: How little you understand! Did Paul ever really live? My sister life, he called me once in a letter, in borrowed words. Did it come to him at the end that he had made a mistake? Did those translucent eyes see through me?
We were photographed, that day, in a garden. There are flowers behind us that look like hollyhocks; to our left is a bed of melons. I recognize the place. It is Uniondale, the house in Church Street bought by my grandfather when ostrich-feathers were booming. Year after year fruit and flowers and vegetables burgeoned in that garden, pouring forth their seed, dying, resurrecting themselves, blessing us with their profuse presence. But by whose love tended? Who clipped the hollyhocks? Who laid the melon-seeds in their warm, moist bed? Was it my grandfather who got up at four in the icy morning to open the sluice and lead water into the garden? If not he, then whose was the garden rightfully? Who are the ghosts and who the presences? Who, outside the' picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bending it, bursting it in?
Dies irae, dies illa when the absent shall be present and the present absent. No longer does the picture show who were in the garden frame that day, but: who were not there. Lying all these years in places of safekeeping across the country, in albums, in desk drawers, this picture and thousands like it have subtly matured, metamorphosed. The fixing did not hold or the developing went further than one would ever have dreamed – who can know how it happened? – but they have become negatives again, a new kind of negative in which we begin to see what used to Me outside the frame, occulted. Is that why my brow is furrowed, Is that why I struggle to reach the camera: do I obscurely know that the camera is the enemy, that the camera will not lie about us but uncover what we truly are: doll-folk? Am I struggling against the reins in order to strike the camera out of the hands of whoever holds it before it is too late? And who holds the camera? Whose formless shadow leans toward my mother 'and her two offspring across the tilled bed?
Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside. Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips, dazed by the flood of light.
Was it the crab I saw so presciently when I was two, peeping out of the black box? Was I trying to save us all from the crab? But they held me back, they pressed the button, and the crab sprang out and entered me.