Not that these thoughts are new to me. A few weeks ago, on opening an encyclopaedia about ancient cities, it struck me how pointless was the hunger for knowledge for a man who was dying. I had been told the previous day that the medication was not working and that I should not exclude the idea of a hole in the wall of my stomach and a colostomy bag. Without closing the encyclopaedia on the entry on the mundus, and without saying goodbye to the library staff, I came home and lay down on my bed with my hand on my liver. If it had been my eye I would have plucked it out. For three days I lay like that, too heavy to get up, too light to sleep.
Early in the evening of the third day the phone rang, Buytendagh, in high spirits. I put on a voice and pretended I was occupied with a normal evening routine. Sorry he was phoning at supper-time, but didn’t I want to come to the library quickly before he locked up, he wanted to know. He had traced something that would interest me, and he had got raisins from Upington that I had to sample.
I did not want to disappoint him, all the trouble he had taken for me, never a sceptical word about the randomness of my enquiries, perhaps some teasing, yes, but never a presumptuous trawling after my agenda. What could he really think of me? Yet another old geezer who’d lost his marbles? Like the old fellow he told me about, more or less my age, who, although very learned in “literary science” (the gods help us, says Buytendagh, if they’re calling it a science nowadays), started imagining a few years before his death that he was in communication with angels, to such an extent that he undertook to exploit this gift commercially from a little room in his mother’s back yard. As “angelic mediator” he advertised himself, R250 per “intercession”. In order to impress his clients he apparently came to the library regularly to do research in angelology (the study of angels) according to Thomas Aquinas.
What was to make me any better than him? In the end we all have to go before.
As the reader could have predicted, it was unwise to go and pick at a bunch of raisins with these thoughts still fresh in my mind. So sweet and so crackling were they that I felt quite undone emotionally. The librarian offered me his handkerchief, which I naturally declined; the thing looked as if it had figured in a survival trail. I had to go and collect my faculties in the toilet on an excuse of hay fever. He never breathed a word about it again.
For the rest he wanted to show me some French and Russian poems that, with the help of one of his colleagues, he had traced for me in a university library and, with his professedly unreliable knowledge of French, translated for me. The Russian, he winked at me, he had wholly sucked out of his thumb.
The poems all dealt with what, according to Mr X, had been his mother’s sanctum: a dark, glossy, gleamingly polished walnut dresser in which she kept piles of snow-white, fragrant linen locked up. My question to Buytendagh the previous day, namely if there could be symbolic value attached to an old-fashioned linen cupboard, was, as usual, without any mention of background or reason. But with a sly giggle the librarian said that evening of the raisins: Mr Wiid, I think I’m on your trail. Beds, nests, cities, cupboards, forests, trees, gardens, footpaths, temples, monuments, schools, hospitals, shells, streets, cathedrals, I do believe you’re an augur of spaces. What an admirable pastime for a beautifier of cities! Upon which I kept a straight face, because I felt that with this he was placing me in the same category as an angel-keeper.