Red Dog. Willem Anker

      It is still autumn, but see, I’m hibernating. I sleep till afternoon, then walk up and down in the house wrapped in hides, go and lie down again. If I go far enough, all the way to the end of sleep’s labyrinth, I find silence. The house is bigger than any I’ve ever stayed in before, but the longer this winter sleep lasts, the more the house shrinks around me. As if the reeds on the roof and the clay on the walls are compacted around me like a nest and then, weeks later, as if the walls turn sticky and soft and enfold me like the membrane of a chrysalis.

      My people soon learn to leave me alone. For the most part I don’t hear them and if they do make me aware of them, I roar at them before spinning myself into my chrysalis again. I curl myself up in my karosses and bedspread that I’ve thrown down in the corner of the room. Maria sleeps on the bed. She says my groaning keeps her awake. She says I am welcome to go and lie with my Caffre girl. I remain lying in the corner.

      I concentrate on keeping as still as possible, every movement is considered before it’s executed. I know the soul of every muscle. Late in the afternoon of a day of which I do not know the name I lie staring at a snail trailing across the floor. I look at the fury with which the snail crawls out of its shell. Just see the horns slowly unfurling.

      The children are buzzing around Maria like blowflies and ask after their father.

      He’s lying in wait, I hear her say.

      For what? they ask.

      She sends them out. She is a mother, she knows about withdrawing into shells, the preparation of a passage out. Her mouth twists when the child kicks inside her. Do you think that when she’s standing like that looking at her Coenraad lying on the ground under his hides, do you think she sees me and thinks of snakes in their holes? Or do you think she remembers how her father in their hut at the Senekals paced up and down every night?

      In the late afternoons I disappear. Then I go to the sea. On the plain the wind blows without cease. You can’t hear the sea from the house, but it’s not far. I hold the shell and turn it over and touch it, careful not to break it. I lick at it. While I’m looking at it and holding it, the shell’s shape makes absolute sense to me, and as soon as I think of it again under the heap of hides, it becomes wholly incomprehensible.

      How could I have known that twilit afternoon that the shellfish excretes its own house? Who could possibly have told me that the building material seeps through the creature, how it distils its miraculous covering according to its need? I press the shell to my eye and see darkness; I press the shell to my ear and hear the sea. I could not then put it into words, can still not do so, but what I saw was something of an eternal shaping and reshaping without cease.

      Back at the farm I do put two things into words to two people. The first is Windvogel, to whom I say: Count your blessings, friend. You live alone. The second is Nombini to whom, when I am sure she’s asleep, I whisper: In a shell you don’t need a door or a gate, everybody is too scared to enter.