Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

He is a middle-aged Slovak, small of posture with black hair now streaked with grey. He arrived as refugee or displaced person in Nomansland. In his own country — and elsewhere? — he had already at times known the bitter cosmos of concrete and echo-corridors and grills, but then it would seem for more “noble” motives. Nowadays he’s just a cheater — a “fraud artist” he calls himself, and moreover one of the aristocracy specializing in the forging of credit cards. You must get to the top of the slippery pole in the best way you can. And he was an obsessive smoker — of private cigarettes if he could get hold of them, if not then hand-rolled pills in any old paper. Often the lighting of the cigarette, the sucking in of the first smoke, went accompanied by a slightly trembling nervousness.

His knowledge of any other tongue bar his own (from which he could quote the most beautiful pornographic verses, popular art, of old boop-bellied Turks in horse cars) was quite picturesquely inadequate. With his tortured words he tried to tell me his story. Not that there’s much chance to have a quiet talk in gaol, not when one of the partners is a terrorist, and thus it took several sessions before I could get the thread of it out of him. Perhaps that explains why I lost the track afterwards. I remember (I believe) that he had to repeat portions of it several times. Whether it was the truth that he held up to me I don’t know. I pass it on the way I heard it. For what it’s worth. In my language.

He has since disappeared. Was discharged and probably sucked up again in the nebulous world of a shadowed existence, perhaps under a new name? And now, often when I think of him — and struggle with the story which for such a long time couldn’t be completed — phrases jump to my mind, like: “before I was silver”; or: “and I bit God in the calf”. Further:

The Narrative

Sometimes when those birds, the ones you call plovers, fly with their sharpened sounds through the night and when the frogs in the marshes down here start clamouring like demonstrators behind barbed wire, in waves, as if they’re the shivering contractions of the moon’s skin, the gooseflesh — neither fish nor flesh, amphibian, hermaphroditic, squamous, no recoverable intelligence and yet not just a dull droning, and the moon a smoke, then I shudder to the marrow. Is it because the ancient sounds address themselves to the ancient mindstem, the nerve-tree? Because it takes me back again to the nights I passed in my own country. And seagulls at night also screech a different type of noise — something like a foot in its sock. If feet were to have vocal cords. Can you have the thorax resoled? Nights I’d prefer not to remember. Let them rather sink and disappear in the branches of the pre-intellect. And nights, strangely enough, that I have forgotten entirely. Because memory is a blanket. We also have birds there calling through the night and the sounds are just as inaccessible. Frogs too. And nightingales, these wistful birds you do not know here. I’m now talking of real nightingales, not the Cape kind. There is something wild and inhuman in the night. A nearly prehistoric defencelessness which cannot be covered by reason. Other corridors, other canyons. Moonlight — dead life — it’s a totally different dimension. Do you know the Arabs believe you will go mad if you walk under the moon without covering your head? And that they hang out their sheets at night to bleach? The light is silvery, cold but thick. Yet without any weight or substance. On such nights one should hunt the silver fox, when wind pushes tepidly, and you ought to be naked, with dogs to help you — only, the dogs should not have vocal cords. And the splashes under the trees are darker, like pits reflecting the trees. Pools in which the trees are floating. The schemer falls into the pit he digs for another. Not that I’m superstitious or that I’m interested in supernatural manifestations or transactions of the spirit. Although. . Now listen to this tale — I swear I’m not exaggerating at all. What the meaning behind the events may be, the sense in the being, the explanation to it all, the solution — that I do not know. But must everything happening always have a reason or an explanation? Take for instance something like a war — the co-operative frenzy and murder. Why? Aren’t we often just roaring away in the swamps?

The time of these events, which I try to depict at present, is also long ago already. I was young then and my hair was black. You know by now how I tried to keep body and soul together — I told you all about it the other day: namely by smuggling people across the border. Also gut , when I was caught at last they held me as a political prisoner, but actually it had nothing to do with politics. Money has no political or ideological etiquette. When someone contacted me for a border crossing I named my price and if he or she had enough money it was fine, if not, well then it was “hard lines, my friend”. Silver always speaks clearly. It wasn’t hard work — like black market trading it could be described as a “cottage industry”, and many of our people in that zone were involved in it. The border was two or three kilometres up the road from our little town, Osnabrück not far, and Vienna barely 80 kilos away.

An old acquaintance one day turned up at my place, Keuner was his name, and he asked me for money. I was a bit taken aback because K was in the same “trade” as I, just active in another sector, and I well knew that he also dabbled in all sorts of black deals. He should have been making good profits. But who knows — maybe there was a sudden crisis, or an accident. “Sure,” I said, “I can advance you something.”

“Look, Lamortč̌ek,” says he, “I don’t want to borrow anything from you. Give me 500 kroner and I’ll let you have this pistol.” And he showed me a 6.35 of Czech fabrication.

“Man, I don’t want your gun. You needn’t give me a pledge either. I’ll lend you 500 kroner and you can pay me back just whenever you feel like it.”

“No, No! I told you I don’t want a loan. Here, now take this thing. Look, it’s just about new, hardly ever been used, in excellent order, I swear. And you can give me whatever you want. Come on!”

So I took the firearm from him. I already had one of my own, a German 9 mill., but it was a big calibre, a Parabellum, and the smaller weapon I could carry more easily on me, even in my inside coat pocket. In a bar or on the street it wouldn’t attract any attention, I reckoned.

That’s when the strange things started happening to me. At the beginning it didn’t really bother me because I’ve told you, didn’t I, that I’m not a man for believing in ghosts or visions. And I’m not a weakling either. First I thought it must just be my nerves giving me a hard time. With my kind of illegal activities one must always be on the look-out and with all that stress you end up being too finely tuned. Like the cocking piece and the trigger of a gun too dangerously filed down. I thought I just needed to shake off the weird emotions. But I couldn’t.

Listen: I’m on the street and suddenly I’m absolutely convinced that I’m being tailed, that someone is right on my heels. I slip around a corner or stop innocently before a display window to look for my shadow, and there’s nobody! Or sometimes I return home late through the deserted streets and suddenly I hear crunching footsteps behind me. I jump around and hold my breath: there’s nothing, just fog-wraiths perhaps swirling around a lamppost, just old windtattered streamers. Sometimes I sense the presence of someone or something, so imposing that I quieten the word-ribbon in my eyes so as to spy about very carefully — useless. Even at home there was no security. A few times I imagined seeing very fleetingly a bearded face peering at me through a window (the way a book character may brusquely become aware of the author), but surely it was god-impossible, I then soothed myself, because my flat was on the second floor of the building without balconies. Once, in a bar, I very strongly felt the “presence” on a sofa next to me and when I looked there was still the imprint in the leather cushion cover where some person had just been sitting and before my very eyes the seat stuffing filled out again. I tell you the short hairs of my neck were on end!