Wolf, Wolf Read online

  WOLF, WOLF

  EBEN VENTER was raised on a sheep farm in Eastern Cape, South Africa and migrated to Australia in 1986. He has won numerous awards for his work, and currently holds an honorary appointment as professional associate in the Institute of English in Africa (ISEA) at Rhodes University.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published in South Africa only in Afrikaans and in English by NB/Tafelberg 2013

  First published in the Commonwealth (excluding South Africa) by Scribe 2015

  Copyright © Eben Venter 2013

  Translation copyright © Michiel Heyns 2013

  Acknowledgements

  Cavafy, C.P. The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translator: Dalven, Rae. New York/London: Mariner, 1976

  Doidge, Norman, MD. The Brain That Changes Itself, Melbourne: Scribe, 2008

  Thanks

  I would like to thank Riana Barnard, Francois Smith, Michiel Heyns, Lynda Gilfillan, Madaleine du Plessis, Michiel Botha and Jo-Anne Friedlander for their dedication and enthusiam.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Venter, Eben, author.

  Wolf, Wolf: a novel / Eben Venter; translated by Michiel Heyns.

  9781925106404 (Australian edition)

  9781922247865 (UK edition)

  9781925113594 (e-book)

  1. Gays–South Africa–Fiction. 2. Gay men–Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons–Fiction.

  4. Cape Town (South Africa)–Fiction.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Heyns, Michiel, translator.

  839.3636

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  At one o’clock on the dot, he walks into the room with a tray of food for his dying father. Privately, he uses the word dying in lower case – unlike the oncologist who rubs it in: I give your father another month or so. He’s also taking along a request that he may be ashamed of. And yet he will – he wants to – ask his father for the cheque so that he can start his own business. Every word has been sifted and weighed; and lunch is tomato and lamb stew, his father’s favourite.

  He’s surprised to find the old man propped up already, his back against two cushions – the willpower that must have taken. Without preamble, the voice issues from the decrepit body, forceful and peremptory, just as he remembers it. Pa wants to be moved from the bedroom to the study. Irrespective of Mattheüs’s opinion concerning his condition.

  ‘Now, this afternoon, Mattie.’ He says: Now. This. Afternoon. ‘No point in putting it off, my son. I’m here on borrowed time.’ He inclines his head towards the spot where he imagines Mattheüs is standing with the tray of food, pinning him to the striped kelim, the eyes behind their closed lids holding him captive.

  For weeks now, he’s been mulling over the request, considering its consequences: in truth, it’s a final favour to the dying man. His father would depart serene in the knowledge that his son is not a wastrel: Mattie will land on his feet again. He’d bought lamb and ripe tomatoes and baby carrots and left it all to simmer. He’s thought of everything.

  His saliva thickens in his mouth. The entirety of what he hasn’t planned for flashes before him: double bed, mattress, bedside cabinet with pills and medication and special sweets for dry mouth, and the Sorbolene, all Pa’s clothes and handkerchiefs and toiletries, slippers – the pictures on the walls can surely be left behind? – everything will have to be schlepped across. The bed remade, and pillows shaken down and puffed up and, finally: the frail body. And then the grumbling at the slightest mishandling. Now. It must all happen now. The cheque he wants to ask for, his carefully considered request, is fading into the background. He’s beginning to tread water.

  He’s facing a man who’s never been known for his tact, at least not in his own home. Who wants to be moved just as the week is drawing to a close, the day almost at an end. And his father knows perfectly well that Friday evening is his night on the town with Jack. Part of his plan was that they’d kick off with a double brandy, a shooter or two in between, then an ice-cold beer. (The cheque by now snug in his pocket.) At dusk he’d come to say his goodbye, his hand in his father’s, with its thin, worn papery feel. Take my car, Pa would say, as always. And even though Mattheüs knew that he and Jack would get wasted, he’d take it all the same.

  The study is on the south side of the house, while the en suite master bedroom is on the north; the mattress and base will have to be lugged all the way down the passage to the entrance hall and then left into the study, where they’ll need to clear a space for the double bed and all. And then, what about ablutions and going to the toilet, has he even considered that? Up to three times a night while he’s surfing the Net in the small hours, he hears Pa’s toilet flushing.

  ‘This afternoon, then, and it’ll all be over and done with. I’m not asking for much, my son.’ At the tail end of the instruction there’s just a shred of a scruple.

  It becomes, admittedly by mere degree, something between a request and an instruction. He places the tray with the tomato stew on his father’s lap. It has been prepared according to his mother’s recipe on page three of her dog-eared book. The only difference is the ground cumin that he adds.

  He tucks the linen serviette into his father’s pyjama top; he can smell the disease emanating from his body. Then he sits down on the wooden chair with its slatted sides and adjustable backrest and two fat cushions, the kind you come across in Afrikaner homes where old things are still cherished. The chair will go to his sister, which is okay; he’s getting the house.

  When he notices the frown about to form, he jumps up and adjusts the tray. The stew has sloshed around, leaving reddish-orange crescents on the rim of the plate. Pa’s hands flutter about, his fingers groping for the tray, fossicking to find out what’s what and where everything is.

  Mattheüs sits down again. Beyond the French doors, which are always open to the fresh air except in a storm, are the wrought-iron security gates opening on to a small garden with a fountain, and flowers, white and pale-pink and yellow and so on, and two plovers on the patch of lawn that realise they’re being watched and kick up a racket, a bird call with usually pleasant associations that now drills discordantly into Mattheüs’s ear: his father’s request throws him and reason goes overboard, so that it becomes a command pure and simple, raking up similar commands from his past with Pa, and smothering him under them.

  In the meantime, Pa has sensed what inner nourishment is on offer today, and instead of taking up his knife and fork and eating like a good boy, his little paws clutch at the handles of the tray, his stretched skin translucent over the bone. Thin, thin. Weight loss, and a ring finger long since ringless. Clutch, release, clutch and release yet again.

  Attuned as he is to his father’s every move, he understands the drill: the request has morphed into an order, delivered with the brute force or, to put it more mildly, the authority of a man who in his prime had everyone at his beck and call, with his staff, twenty-five at one time if memory serves, all taking note of who was speaking.And in this selfsame house, proclamations and instructions prevailed ‘because I love you’, to ensure that the two offspring of his loins should stick to t
he straight and narrow, and there was a final set of rules specially for his wife, matriarch in her own right, but ultimately totally demoralised. Fuck.

  ‘My son,’ Pa once again directs his gaze at the spot where he imagines his son’s head to be, where Mattheüs is still seated on the wooden chair that Sissy will definitely inherit, ‘come over here to your father, please.’

  The request that was growing into a command is tempered once again. This is Benjamin Duiker recalling that he is at the mercy of Mattie – he’s the only one who calls him that – and of Samantha. Samantha, who arrives on Fridays just after one o’clock, which is to say any moment now, to toil in the footsteps of her mother, Auntie Mary, who on account of her arthritic claws has had to abdicate the task of keeping this house spic and span.

  Pa wants him right beside him. Close enough to communicate, in the physical proximity of his son, the only true path open to him. While he’s waiting for Mattheüs, his eyelids remain closed over the glaucous, blind eyeballs.

  Now and again he slides the eyelids upwards, and the sight of what’s become of his father’s eyes, once deep-green and commanding, makes Mattheüs just about shrivel up, even though he’s witnessed it often enough.

  Tempered. The command has been diluted to a relatively mild request. Nothing more. The request, surely one of the very last, of an old man who wants to spend his remaining days in his study. But begging it’s not, and never could be. Mattheüs would be highly embarrassed if he were ever to hear his father beg.

  The books in the study – not that many really – are about trees, Pa’s great love, and cars, his first love, and then there’s the usual, familiar library: Langenhoven, the complete works, and Pakenham’s book on the Boer War and Roberts’s Birds of Southern Africa and Shell’s Succulents of the Karoo and Goldblatt’s Some Afrikaners Photographed, which his father regarded as a scandalous denigration of his people, and a concordance to the Bible in which you can look up the origin of a word like ‘shibboleth’. Some of the top shelves have no books.Pa was never a great reader – never really had the time. So he put a White Horse Whisky horse up there, and a row of model cars, each of them a Mercedes. As a child, the car that made Mattheüs’s heart beat fastest was the convertible, a red one with a suede top that you could unhook and push back to reveal the driver and his girlfriend and on the back seat another couple, and Pa’s hand on his finger all the time to guide him, helping him push back the top carefully without breaking it. He was allowed to play with it for a while, and then the convertible was put back in its place, out of reach.

  It’s not just for the books that Pa wants to move there, it’s for the atmosphere of the place. A cigar-smelling, masculine atmosphere, an inner sanctum, you’re really somewhere when you’re in there. The long velvet curtains are golden and his broad-backed desk chair is upholstered in gold brocade that scratches your bare thighs. In High Society, Pa once told him, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby sing that Cole Porter song in a study like this. A bit of a copycat. High Society – Pa chuckled.

  He wants to bring something home to Mattheüs, something about himself. No secret, just a clarification. Just a glimpse. But he holds back. The son withdraws. He doesn’t want to see inside, doesn’t want to get too close to his father. Now, Mattheüs understands it, yet also doesn’t.

  There’s a decorated Havana balsawood box with seven cigars inside it, seven for as long as he can remember, and between the two walls with their bookshelves, as in High Society, a fireplace, and to the left of that the liquor cabinet. His father’s, built into the wall, which you can unlock, the lid forming a surface for pouring drinks. Mainly hard tack, ten-year-old KWV and even some older brandies, which he and Jack sometimes help themselves to liberally.

  It’s the atmosphere in the room, that’s what he’s hankering after. There, you can think like a man thinks. Elsewhere too, but there you can do so unhindered and without opposition. So: back there. Made deals in there while he was a businessman, it was his life. Moved huge sums of money around. Typed out carefully considered letters on the Olivetti. Urges and desires, especially when the velvet curtains were drawn. It all happened in there, Mattheüs knows it for a fact. A woman could be conjured up in your mind’s eye, and every imaginable manoeuvre could be imagined there. One day, without knocking, he walked in through the half-open double doors and Pa and Uncle Diek Smuts, also a car salesman, were regaling each other with lecherous tidbits, their ties loosened, sleeves rolled up over hairy forearms (Pa’s), jackets hanging from the coat rack with its curved hooks as you enter by the double doors, just to the left, and to the right the head of a springbok ram mounted on the cream-coloured wall.

  Pa cut short what he was saying and looked at his son. He could have said anything to him then. His mouth was agape, words brimming. Contempt, anything scathing. But the words weren’t spoken, he’ll never know what it was. Only: he was not admitted to the circle. Come on, man, Bennie, he’s big enough, Uncle Diek said then. Uncle Diek missed the point, though. It wasn’t a question of being big enough. His father wanted to admit him, wanted him to experience his palpable charm, his passion and perseverance and principles, everything that made up his manly ego, but, as with an animal, instinct warned him off: you’re dealing with a different kind of creature here. It was all on his tongue, in his glance: his son, his own, his flesh and blood. How, dear Lord, had this come about?

  So Uncle Diek drained his glass and poured another drink at the cabinet. His male voice still lingers in the study. And Pa’s – from then and all previous times, everything in there bears Pa’s stamp. There’s nothing feminine in the room, or about it. Even long ago, when his mother used to arrange roses in a vase, the petals, of whatever colour or smell, in no time developed a bruised, sallow, almost oily complexion. It’s the room in the house that he most avoided when Pa was there, where he snooped most often when Pa was not there, where he went to hang out, brain-dead, curtains drawn, double doors closed, where in the pregnant twilight laden with scent he would listen to a wasp constructing its mud cocoon on top of a book marooned there, unread, forgotten. His, the study will be. He can’t wait for this trophy. The Battle of Blood River picture, that can be chucked out. Just a touch here and there: he knows exactly how he’ll rearrange things.

  ‘You can take it away please, Mattie.’

  ‘Pa, you only had a thin slice of toast this morning. How about a boiled egg? All the way from Sissy. A farm egg.’

  ‘I can’t even think of an egg. It makes me feel more sick.’

  ‘It’s the chemo, Pa.’

  He removes the tray from his father’s lap. Just the edge of the stew has been prodded at, and, shoving aside the stuff on the dressing table with the corner of the tray, he leaves it there and says: ‘And Pa, how do you think you’re going to manage at night when you have to get up?’ Then he sits down, next to the hand on the white bedspread.

  ‘You shouldn’t take things so to heart, Mattie. You’re so touchy. Pa can see this. I want you to be happy, my son.’

  Then he knows that he’s been right all along. He’s been thinking on his father’s behalf and he’s come to his conclusion. To be asked in his final days for a cheque for a business venture, a takeaway serving cheap, nutritious food, can only give pleasure to the old man.

  Both Pa’s nostrils dilate as he inhales. He can hear the breathing, different to his, distressed. ‘You get these modern commodes today. They’re made of plastic and have almost no smell. They come with chemicals. I’d like to be in my study when I go. You know what I mean, don’t you, my son? It was always Pa’s hide-out when storms were gathering. My son.’ His hand fumbles and lands on Mattheüs’s wrist.

  ‘Chemicals?’

  But Pa doesn’t reply. And the word bounces back with its merciless consonants, and he knows it was unnecessary to ask. If he really wants to, he can move his father.

  So there they sit, the two of them. Mattheüs
realises that he’s definitely going to carry out Pa’s request, Friday afternoon or not, and Samantha will have to skip the cleaning just this once.

  Ever since the start of that Friday – the question had in fact wrestled him awake – he’d been obsessed with his request. (It almost scorches him.) Either he must grab the opportunity and have done with it, by far the neatest option: a request from his father, a counter-request from him. Then waiting for a reply with a stomach-churning sensation, almost like when E kicks in. Or he must wait until he’s settled the old man; he can do this, he has a talent for creating cosiness. Whatever: the time is ripe. Go ahead and ask your little question right now, my boy.

  By now Mattheüs can smell the congealing stew, the fat forming small white islands on the orangey meniscus of the gravy in the plate. Untouched. Pa was always mad for Ma’s stew, but why not tell it like it is: his stew is every bit as good. Pa’s hand on his wrist is just this side of human warmth, the skin so fragile that if you pulled it apart with two thumbs, you’d tear it.

  So this is the moment. It’s on the tip of his tongue: Pa, I was just wondering if you could perhaps write me a cheque. The sentence. Now. I can do it. The words pre-formed inside a layer of spit. It took him exactly ten minutes this morning to formulate the sentence just as it is right now. Cheque. The whole sentence pivots on that word. But he, he. He’s always dithered in his father’s presence.

  He tries to synchronise his breathing with his father’s. Pa’s faltering, plucking at the available air in the bedroom. It’s impossible. All that’s required is Pa’s signature on the fine line in the bottom right-hand corner. That’s all there is to it. Yet he can’t. He wills himself to exercise his will. Can’t. He feels sweat trickling down from his armpits. Impossible.

  Ever since returning from overseas, actually even before that on the plane, one little bottle of shiraz, one Windhoek Lager, then another, until the trollies vanished, he’s worked it all out. Because to arrive in the country without some job in mind is beyond desperate. Therefore: a thousand times already. Thus. He’ll go and fetch Pakenham’s big coffee-table book on trees, the last one that Pa had paged through, saying at the time: ‘It’s all over now, Mattie. The pictures are blurry. Put it away for now, please. In its place. You know where, of course,’ and place the book on his lap as a writing surface and fetch the cheque book from the bedside cabinet on the right and open it on the book and guide Pa’s hand to the start of the line. The cheque by this time already made out by himself in block letters. Recipient: Mattheüs Duiker. The sum of so much and so much, only. And then the signature, that’s what he’s after. He suddenly jumps up and rushes to the French doors, flaps his arms at the plovers; he can’t stomach their damn squabbling any longer.