Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

Galp has disappeared from circulation; completely so. Nobody I know knows him. Sorry. Percy Vermoken, I see in the Mother City News , was recently promoted to an executive position in the firm he works for and is quite understandably no longer active as a trade unionist. C. Murphy, Eugene Marais’s guide in the bundu, is reported to be employed as an immigration official at one of our border posts. Brink is back teaching at his old university, finally cured of the attacks he suffered from.

Don Espejuelo? I knew you’d want to hear about him sooner or later. But honestly, I know next to nothing of him. And to be frank, I prefer it thus: I’m more than half sure he’s mixed up in some murky clandestinity, be it as snooper or spook or militant, perhaps even as an undercover agent for the Anoms. To which I must add that it won’t surprise me in the least were he to be unmasked as the biggest fake yet. What a devious fellow he is, planting little secrets in any sandy plot at hand. And irrigating it with a smirk or two. How did he get to frequent the others in the first place? Perhaps the best would be for you to get hold of his book, On the Noble Art of Walking in No Man’s Land (translated into Afrikaans, I’m assured, as Die Oupe Lyf ). Maybe the answers are there for all to see.

My mission is hereby completed. Now it is for you to take it further, to decide what you wish to do with the evidence, if anything.

True, over the several years I knew them I did develop a sympathy for some of them. They often reminded me of coolies, the word originating, as you know, from ku-li , literally meaning “eating-bitterness-people”.

Or maybe — let me leave you with this thought — an apt description of them in their futile movements hither (slither) and forth over the page would be, as Graham Greene wrote in The Power and the Glory :

Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullet in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex.

Again: don’t expect me to know what you are to do with this information, or with these writings. Perhaps the best would be to do whatever you think fit. And in any case to make no bones about it.

Veuillez agréer, cher Monsieur Valjean, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués.

Juan T. Bird

Mouroir , 1975-1982

Hoe sterven es met mi gheboren.

Maerlant

Shiki soku ze ku, ku soku ze shiki.

1

Flap — long-tailed widow-bird, sakabula; common name for Black prisoner.

2

Abajo la gusanera!

3

Note: In the Congo it is the custom among the Bakongo, the Badindo (or Babwende) the Basundi, Babembe and Bateke to make effigies of the ancestors which are kept in memory of the dead or sometimes buried with them; also rougher carved fetish figures intended as concentration points (lightning conductors as it were) for the spirit forces of evil and sickness. These fetishes often have cavities in the bellies — sometimes covered by mirrors — where magical things are deposited as “medicine”. One of the most common kinds of fetish is covered with nails hammered home by the priest.

4

“She has found a mare’s nest and is laughing over the eggs.” Gogol, Dead Souls.

5

“In the old days women did not smoke.” Ibid.

6

The real Dr Foroek (1919-?), also known as Galp Northangle, was the obscure but very unorthodox chess master of whom Alekhine said: “He was the most upsetting opponent it was ever my misfortune to be pitted against.”

7

“. . one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.” The Anglo-American Cyclopedia .