Robert Kirby
THE BAYONET FIELD by Peter Wilhelm (Ad Donker)
This collection of the short stories of Peter Wilhelm again reveals his extraordinary gifts, both as writer and as intuitive diarist of the human condition. Of Wilhelm’s output of some 70 short stories and novellas, collected here are 20. Set in the past, the present and in fantastic and often terrifying futures, all of them trace the brawlings and survivals of the human spirit. They are full of the darkest humour, they are lonely, they are absurdist; with satirical delight they despise the banalities of commercial exchange.
The stories are not assembled chronologically, rather by theme. They are set anywhere: from Boer War times through the present, into the supernatural. It is in his inquisition of a reachable posterity that Wilhelm sounds strident alarm bells. The title, The Bayonet Field, derives from a dream of one of the characters: a shocking tomorrow landscape where fields grow rifles tipped with sharpened steel. It is a very apt name.
There are two central stories in the collection, intercessional reflections of the same event: the arrest and detention by South African security police of a black priest, Zeke Malatsi, whose sermons had been deemed seditious.
In the first of the two, At the Edge, the squall of circumstance, bitterness and confusion which pursues the event comes from widely different aspects. Friends, family, pastoral associates respond to the arrest, each against a backcloth of personal apology, as often at impotence against brute authority. The writing is remarkable in its economy, each vignette sedulously lean, utterly free of the repentant sentimentality which has become almost obligatory in South African “apartheid” writing. In the subtext of this story there is an agile satirical mockery.
In the next piece, All the Days of My Death, Zeke Malatsi himself tells of his arrest and torture. It is not to his interrogators that he makes his most shameful confessions, rather to himself – notably of an extramarital affair he had with a white liberal woman, of personal blame he feels for his young son, struck catatonic after seeing his fellows gunned down by police.
At the end of the collection Zeke returns, years later, on a visit to the Yugoslavia of the Nineties, as a member of an unnamed diplomatic mission. In his mind the older priest rages in emotional dissonance, mostly at the grey residues of Eastern European communism he sees. Particularly in its writing, this closing piece is a brilliant capping of the triptych.
The principal themes of the 20 stories are of the ageless search of the individual for sanctuary in political, military and social hell-lands. Wilhelm’s survivalists take many forms: some are inhabitants of bizarre future worlds; there is a soldier back from the border war, unable to reassimilate to the quotidian; a gifted artist resisting being sucked into the morass of commercial iconography; an otherworldly old man who arrives unannounced in a small coastal village to take up an anchorite’s life in a battered cottage out on the dunes.
The narrator in this story is the village doctor. His description of meeting the old man is a fragile construct of images, to include a sudden prosaic diagnostic thought overwhelmed by a more human response. It speaks as much of the doctor as of the other:
“He came to me because he could not sleep. Seated opposite me he entwined his thin, luminous fingers together, moving them constantly in a distracting fashion. I watched the fingers make strange nests of flesh. His voice was dry: it was, I considered, the voice of a man with an incipient respiratory ailment; the dryness registered in a sound like innumerable leaves moving together in a vagrant wind.”
Whether with such delicacy or, at the other end of the scale, with his ability to articulate, in sometimes shocking imagery, the vicious human configurations of this continent, at the essence of Wilhelm’s gift is his uncanny ability to detect the extraordinary in the mundane, to sense pity in the most profane violence. His precision of technique makes reading him an experience in itself. It is like hearing a truly competent musician in the knowledge that there will be no missed notes, fluffy phrasing or memory lapses.
As in his most recent novel, The Mask of Freedom, Wilhelm resolutely avoids the maudlin rewards of lament for an immutable past, the gaping snare of guilt without responsibility and which continues to distend so much contemporary South African writing. Most especially “post- transformationism” remains a festival attraction on local book pages. Wilhelm’s refusal to mourn – or indeed, celebrate past wrongs – is exceptional. His collection stands both apart from and in wider perspective to ritual literary contritions. If it did nothing else, this collection would be remarkable in that it does not conjoin.
The 20 stories are finely crafted miniatures, of the highest rank in the often undervalued genre of the short story. With this collection Peter Wilhelm’s significance as a South African writer is again verified. As the poet Patrick Cullinan was to say at the Cape Town launch of this collection, The Bayonet Field is a valuable addition to South African letters. It is also an essential one.