The Snow Sleeper
Translated by Marius Swart
Marlene van Niekerk
Human & Rousseau
A writer is someone who spends years patiently
trying to discover the second being inside him.
– Orhan Pamuk, from My Father’s Suitcase
The Swan Whisperer
An Inaugurali Lecture
Honourable Rector, Dean, dear colleagues, friends and family,
What does one teach, when one is a teacher of Creative Writing? Is one concerned with the true, the good, the beautiful? With criticism or fantasy or faith? What is the use of literature, its place on the greater canvas of human endeavour? And maybe I should ask: Can a story offer consolation?
I do not pretend to have answers. What I want to share with you tonight is an experience which made this kind of question irrelevant to me. It concerns a correspondence I had with a student – I shall call him Kasper Olwagen – or rather one he had with me, as I never engaged.
Perhaps, I thought, this whole episode would become clearer to me if I reconstructed the sequence of my student’s unusual letters and my reactions to them; even more so if I did this before a critical audience.
The sand is running through the hourglass; judge for yourselves. I present the evidence.
The first piece to arrive in my postbox from Kasper was a letter, if you can call it that. Sixty-seven pages. Let me read you the first paragraphs, to give you an idea of what I was dealing with.
Bed B
Ward 1002
Intensive Care Unit
Academisch Medisch Centrum
Amsterdam
24 February 2002
Dear Professor Van Niekerk
As you can deduce from the address, I am writing to you in a state of personal crisis. Ruled paper, leaking ballpoint, IV in the back of my hand, catheter in my anther. I know that a letter like this is the last thing you would expect from me, after all those years of reading my bone-dry manuscripts. I also know you prefer to keep your students at a distance, given that you are constantly having to read their boring and barely veiled confessions. Not that you ever had reason to fear anything like that from me, in all my years of study. But the time of reckoning (tempus fugit!) has come. I know you well enough to know that what I have to say will not bore you. But as you always say, no desire without technique, every truth needs an orator. And so I shall keep in mind – as much as this genre of spontaneous communication called a “letter” allows – the admonishments inked onto my manuscripts in your barbed hand. Cut to the chase, Kasper! Shorter sentences, Olwagen! Suggestion, not interpretation! Stick to the knitting, orientate your reader in space and time! Lie, but do not deceive!
Against this last, an accusation of fraud, I wish to defend myself in advance. Despite having woken only three days ago from what the nursing staff here refer to as a “babbling delirium”, and while still being held in the intensive care unit for observation, I have concrete evidence that I have not dreamt up what had occurred. I am in possession of the coat, the shoes, perhaps the tongue of someone else, but let me not mislead you. I assure you I have no energy to fabricate tall tales right now. Frankly, if my tribulations in Amsterdam have had any impact, it has been to cure me finally of my ambition to write fiction. So herewith I give notice: I am dropping out of the course. Sorry for wasting your precious time. But may I suggest you regard this letter as a form of compensation? I would not be surprised if you exploit what I relate here for one of your dark designs.
*
Kasper Olwagen – as I am calling him – was thirty years old at the time of writing this letter, already a philosophy graduate. A slight, pale fellow with intense eyes, a high forehead, a delicate mouth. Well groomed, especially his hands, a skin sensitive to sun and cold. His movements seemed somewhat tentative, and his nostrils twitched constantly, as though inspecting the air for the faintest of hints. He gave an impression of fragility. His classmates nicknamed him Mr Xenos. He was intelligent, obsessive, withdrawn, a bookworm who lisped slightly when he was nervous or excited. There was something old-fashioned about his manner. For appointments he wore a waistcoat, a ruby-red bow tie, a fountain pen in the inner pocket of his jacket. I remember how he would take it out to make notes in his small black notebook, hesitantly, as though he wanted first to touch his heart.
On my recommendation, Mr Xenos was spending three months overseas during the local summer recess of 2001/2002. By chance, I had heard of a bursary available to a young, unpublished writer from South Africa – funding and accommodation at the Stichting Literaire Activiteiten Moederstad, the “mother city” being Amsterdam. I thought it would be ideal for this candidate. Exposure to a stimulating environment, as well as pressure from his Dutch hosts to produce something. Pressure from me, at any rate, had turned out to be completely counterproductive. He was one of those students, you see, who simply could not finish his writing project for the MA course, hindered as he was by extended writer’s block. I guessed it was a matter of oversensitivity to criticism, alienation from his peers, confusion about the South African reality, perfectionism, hypochondria. He suffered from what he called a “murmuring heart” – suppressed libido, I suspected at the time. But after what happened to him, my projections seem misplaced. Something quite beyond my comprehension was troubling him.
On the day I received the letter, I read only the first two paragraphs and then put it aside. I was writing fiction myself at that point, in the home stretch of a novel, final revisions, surrounded by the usual chaos of that part of the process – frozen meals from Nice ’n Easy, dirty dishes, a mouse in the kitchen, squirrels in the attic, garden overgrown, wrist inflamed from using the other kind of mouse; I simply saw no sense in spending more time on a difficult student who wanted to drop out. Why didn’t I try to convince him to reconsider? Well, I was tired of struggling with Kasper Olwagen. In the five years since enrolling, he had handed work in late every time, pieces riddled with too much detail, full of information and illustration, in which absolutely nothing ever happened. “Instruction manual!” I always commented. “Delete unnecessary details.” His other problem was profundity. He often discussed the central question of ethics: What is a good person, how should a good person live? But always in the form of wholly indigestible allegories. Beside each and every one of his moralistic figures I wrote in the margin, “Delete the ideas.” He simply could not arrive at a narrative reconciliation of meaning and minutiae. Kasper Olwagen is a philosopher, not a writer, that is what I thought.
But here was this letter from Amsterdam, quivering with appetisers from the very first paragraph. Why did I not read further? Well, I was busy. I dropped a card in the post: “Speedy recovery, thanks for your entertaining letter, I shall notify University Administration. Best.”
Two weeks later, the letter resurfaced from beneath a stack of papers and I thought to myself, let’s keep this on file, just in case. As I was punching holes in it, the following paragraph caught my eye. I was irritated; I find such impertinence unacceptable in a student. Just listen to this:
Professor, I still do not understand everything that has happened to me in this city; in fact, it is still happening. I am dumbfounded as I lie here in my hospital bed, and I believe that you will be similarly dumbfounded once you reach the end of this letter, even though you are employed at an institution of higher learning where space no longer exists for being dumbfounded, for fear and fascination, for grace and awe as human potentialities. I am returning to South Africa in a month’s time. To whom else could I possibly confess this premonition of my fate? As you know, I am a loner. Loner! How dubious, this concept. Nobody is truly alone; an invisible string connects us all, and it is only a matter of time before we stand face to face, asking: Have we not met somewhere before? Granted, my relationship with you is by no means an example of this, Professor. But may I say that, despite all your prescriptiveness and indifference, I have always experienced you as a kind of mother, although you are not exactly brimming with