Etienne van Heerden’s acclaimed novel, 30 Nagte in Amsterdam, is now published in English as 30 Nights in Amsterdam, translated by Michiel Heyns and published by Penguin Books South Africa.
The book follows Henk Andreas de Melker, a museum assistant from a small Eastern Cape town who becomes the sole beneficiary of his late, long-lost Aunt Zan’s estate in Amsterdam.
This is an extract:
For his monographs Henk selects figures long dead, but then more particularly unremarkable people, people from small communities who will never end up under the magnifying glass of the important historians at the universities.
Between the date of birth and date of death of each unremarkable person Henk patiently constructs a suspension bridge, so that the reader can cross to the other side on the firm footing of facts, look back over a life, and feel safe.
He’s already elected his next victim. It was Aunt Zan who first introduced him to Vincent van Gogh’s paintings: a book of colour plates as a conciliatory gift after that day in the school hall. But it’s not Vincent, around whom a whole industry has sprung up, in whom Henk is interested.
Two months ago he chanced upon documentation making mention of an unknown brother of Vincent van Gogh’s. The brother lived in South Africa and is buried here.
Vincent’s more famous brother is, of course, Theo, in his day one of the foremost dealers in the work of younger artists. But this one, the unremarkable one, was named Cornelius — apparently called Cor by the Van Gogh family — and he came to South Africa at an early age during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. He was quite unremarkable enough, indeed obscure enough, to fit under the pointed nib of Henk’s fountain pen. Monograph Number Fourteen, by Henk de Melker — The unremarkable brother: The life of Cornelius van Gogh.
In a sense he owes his decision to tackle this project to Aunt Zan and to her long-ago gift of that book of reproductions. And, as chance would have it, now, just as he has started gleaning the meagre data available about Cornelius van Gogh, the letter from Grotius arrives. Just now, in these days when in the dim reaches at the back of his head (so far back that up to now he hasn’t dared admit it to himself) he’s been toying with the idea that he might have to travel to Europe to find out more about Cor van Gogh.
Coincidence is one of the great driving forces of history — that he’s learned as a historian. And that is something he doesn’t like. Things should happen calmly, with restraint. He turns to his desk. The 13 monographs are ranged there, slender but upright. The first one, his debut, dealt with a transport rider who hauled elephant tusks between Mozambique and Cape Town in the 18th century and died here in Somerset East at a ripe old age.
The second, his most acclaimed study, was the chronicle of the life of one of Olive Schreiner’s pall-bearers — her coffin had to be dragged up the mountain to her grave on top of Buffelskop in the neighbouring district.
Eleven more meticulous chronicles of obscure lives followed. Cautious studies. Henk isn’t given to the grand gesture. History as a narrative, as a story, does not engage him; he’s a man for the simple bridge between life and death, for the firm footing of facts and the assured tread of documented evidence.
And all of a sudden Aunt Zan is vividly before him, with her melancholy eyes, her tensed hand clutching the smoking cigarette, and the defeated stoop of her shoulders, just as she used to look just before the onset of the First Phase. She is standing next to Cornelius van Gogh, the man with the red hair, the man with a mauser in his hand, the Boer War warrior.