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A history of gold, feathers and water
TheLong Silence of Mario Salviati
Etienne van Heerden
2002
Sceptre, London
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
Johannes Kerkorrel, if he had featured in this novel from South Africa, would have had his name translated from the Afrikaans as John Churchorgan. Such a name would not be out of place in The Long Silence of Mario Salviati.
There are Devil Slap and Look Deep, two Italians. There’s a Redbeard, Karel Thin Air and a mayor called Goodwill. But John Churchorgan has nothing to do with this story. Johannes Kerkorrel is a revolutionary Afrikaans musician who committed suicide in October 2002. And the reason I’m mentioning him at all is something he said about a stage production he created back in 1987 when apartheid was still very much alive.
His cabaret, Piekniek by Dingaan, was produced entirely in Afrikaans, but it was radical, it was about poking holes in the fabric that had been used to construct Afrikaner nationalism. And I asked him, in an interview for a student newspaper at the time, why he used Afrikaans when it was the language of the oppressor and why did he not move away from it?
"Because Afrikaans is not the language of the Volk [Fatherland], it’s the language of the people."
Therein lies the dilemma of Etienne van Heerden’s book, yet it is not entirely a dilemma of his creating. This novel, a magical and even liberating journey through the heart of Afrikanerdom and its survival in the new South Africa, has been translated into English in such a way as to hide everything Afrikaans about it.
"A magical and even liberating journey through the heart of Afrikanerdom and its survival in the new South Africa"
It is as if the fact of this book having been originally written in Afrikaans is an embarrassment. Fifteen years ago this would have been understandable – by hiding its Afrikaans identity it might have made the book more palatable to an English reading public for whom Afrikaans, and everyone who spoke that language, was the embodiment of evil.
But this book would have not been possible then, because it is about Afrikaans-speaking people of all colours (and ancestries) defining their identity and reshaping a nationalism in a new South Africa where equality and justice have decapitated Apartheid.
Just as Kerkorrel was poking holes in the fabric of the old Afrikaner Nationalism, Van Heerden is piecing together the patchwork that makes up the new nationalism that has swept the Volk aside.
But any reader can only understand this if they realise, and understand, that the book is Afrikaans. This is not meant as patronising, it is meant as a critique of the book’s English editors who have hidden the original identity of this book. There is acknowledgement that the book has been translated, but it does not mention from what language and there is no mention of what the original title was. In the author’s biography on the inside cover there is no mention that Van Heerden writes in Afrikaans. On the back cover there is one almost co-incidental mention, where a critic has described Van Heerden as "an Afrikaans Marquez".
This comparison is wholly deserved, albeit only half true. Half because it is magical realism in an African setting, and a particularly South African setting at that, but where Marquez’s works deal with the identity of an entire country, Colombia, Van Heerden is not dealing with the South African nation, his concern, the focus of The Long Silence, is the identity of Afrikaners, not all South Africans. And here Afrikaner is meant as those whose home language is Afrikaans, not those whose home language is Afrikaner nationalism.
The central character in this book is Ingi Friedländer, a curator in Cape Town’s national gallery, who is sent on a mission to a small town in the Karoo, that semi-desert that stretches for thousands of kilometres between the western Cape and the Drakensberg in the east.
She arrives as a stranger, an outsider, an uitlander (as it would be in Afrikaans) in the town of Yearsonend to buy a fantastical wooden sculpture, the Staggering Merman, from an artist in the town.
The sculpture is not for sale, it is not even on display, but Miss Länder, as she becomes known, stays in town and begins to uncover the incestuous history and mumbled secrets of Yearsonend’s three riches: water, gold and feathers.
In a magical mixing of past and present, real and fantastical the reader is taken on a journey through the Karoo town with its white centre, black periphery, it resident angel, and the skeletons who refuse to die. What makes the story so special, what makes it more than a small town family saga, are the three riches and how these, with Ingi as catalyst, force the town’s residents to grapple, not so much with their past, as with their identity.
The range of characters Van Heerden populates Yearsonend with are in themselves magical because of their existence on the edge of implausibility. None is central, there’s no hero, no one person who brings the events to climax, it is about the whole community and how they gently uncover their past with sticks of dynamite. The magical characters include Mario Salviati of the title, a deaf mute who, when we meet him, is blind. He and his fellow Italians were sent to the town as prisoners of war during the Second World War.
Then there is Big Karel who wants to bring water to the town using the law of Bernoulli. He promptly becomes Karel Thin Air after disappearing when his scheme seemed to have failed. His father was a one-legged farmer who made his fame and fortune selling ostrich feather fashions in the capitals of Europe.
Other characters dot the historical trajectory of South Africa, from the legendary lost ship of Jan van Riebeeck (who established the Dutch colony in 1652), to the English naturalists and hunters and their Bushman guide, to Boer soldiers of the South African War, and the town’s first black mayor.
But this book is about collective identity, as well as individual. The keys to this identity lie in the three riches of the town: the three artefacts of gold, feathers and water; none of which the town nor its people actually possess.
These three things are laden with a symbolism, as identity beacons of Afrikanerdom, that makes them central to this novel, which is, after all, about remembrance of the past, a very particular past.
First, the gold. It is not just any gold that has been hidden nearby Yearsonend, it is the Kruger millions, part of urban legend in South Africa. It is gold with a history. The Second South African War of 1899 to 1902 was all about gold, the gold which President Paul Kruger controlled. The war was lost, the Boers had lost their countries, their pride and their gold, but not all of it.
Whether or not the gold exists, the Kruger millions do exist, but their value should be measured in the inspiration it gave to a young nation waging a guerrilla war against the British empire.
The Boer soldiers who brought the gold to the desert of Yearsonend, in Van Heerden’s recreation of the legend, also carry with them a more macabre icon of British ruthlessness – evidence of the brutal efficiency of the concentration camps. Too horrific to want to forget and too macabre to need to remember.
Then there is water. The Boer republics were both delimited by water, by rivers. The Orange and the Vaal, thus the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The struggle of Big Karel Bergh to carry water over Mount Improbable into Yearsonend in a stone channel is much more than a hydraulic engineering project. The coloured and the Italian, one non-white and the other a Catholic – both relative outsiders in the white, Protestant town, are bringing life to the Afrikanerdom of Yearsonend.
The edges of the nation are being reshaped, redrawn, carved in stone by the stonemason to whom language is irrelevant.
And the feathers. The fashion industry’s brief flirtation with ostrich feathers in the early part of the last century brought untold riches to Karoo farmers who farmed the birds. The character of Karel Bergh recognises that the riches of the feathers allow his position as second-class, non-white, citizen to be temporarily overlooked. The feathers give status, until the fashion changes, and then Karel loses everything, including his fashion-designer wife whose origins lie in the other extreme of the Dutch seaborne empire.
Ingi tries to turn water, feathers, gold into a painting, but fails as she grapples with more complex issues of the past and present. Ultimately she brings past and present to a climax, and breaks the silence and then casts it into oblivion.
Early on in her visit to Yearsonend, while trying to piece together the complex familial relationships of the town that go back to the time of Jan van Riebeeck she says to herself, in frustration: "The past, that’s your prison, all of you."
And therein lies the beauty of The Long Silence. Van Heerden turns the past into a liberating experience that belongs to those who have managed to escape. And it is a key. One that is worth embracing because of the joy it unleashes in the realisation that the people have replaced the volk.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.
