PURGATORY

Dick sat alone in a furnished room overlooking the harbour. It was midnight. That meant he had spent two hours or more reading the same chapter. The ninth, longest, and most textually dense chapter, “Purgatory”, is set in Krugersdorp at a writers’ congress which Dick himself attends, to speak on “the text and the image” (old enemies in his view) and act as the novel’s interlocutor, both grizzled witness to horror and inveterate believer in poetry as a response, perhaps the only response, to barbarity. Dick’s wife got up and went to the window. Not a single other solitary soul alive was aware of that strange blueness at the window, of that undulating sea of spaciousness into which all opacities melt, lose themselves or flee away to the hour when all divided lovers send their spirits forth, each to each, across land and sea. Across from me is a well-dressed married couple, probably in their forties. Arranged at their feet are bags from significant shops and stores, their logos, chic, flagrant as modern times. They have been on a shopping spree, and this is somehow oddly touching to me. Dick lit two cigarettes and handed the pack to his wife, who took one out and lit it. She was in love. With Dick. Sighs and love words pass, making them laugh as they grow exhausted. Then Dick was falling. He landed on the roof, on his face, in snow, dazed. He heard men talking and their voices came to him from far away. “That’s Dick, all right. Get him down to the street!” He felt his body being dragged across the snow of the roof. Beyond the possible mirrorings of his personal drama, Dick must have seen that the real action and interest of “Purgatory” is in his wife’s states of mind and feeling; and then in how justice can be done when lawful authority has been usurped in Krugersdorp and is abused, when the people are cowed and apathetic and the gods are all smoking nyaope. Dick had just finished this last tale when sleep came suddenly upon him, relaxing all his limbs and banishing his cares. His story had broken my heart, and I sat down upon the sands and wept. I did not want to go on living or to see the sun. The opened window beyond was still enough but his wife turned her face from his so sharply toward it there might have been a light, some sound, some sudden movement from outside to leave his lips lodged at her ear so, filling its convolutions with his gasp of shock at how unseen beneath the spread her hand, unhesitating and without surprise, caress, or brush of exploration found and closed on him swelled to bursting and, silent, motionless, knees fallen wide, led him left thicketed there in dry abrasion as he swarmed over her and clinging headlong wrenched her shoulder in a plunge that left her open eyes fixed on a gap between the rafters where, even in this light, the points of shingle nails showed through in irregular rows, her only sound one that she might have made out of impatience jostled in a crowd, one foot out to the floor and the other... Romance novels are a hearty genre. They have grown increasingly more erotic in recent years. (Yes, wives like it hot.) Perhaps the only way to make people read “Purgatory” is to make them read the other Dick stories first. In Krugersdorp, I mean there are many people who write well, but most of them are trying their hand at realistic stories, no? So this kind of story, of course, falls outside the common expectation. But it’s one of Dick’s best stories, perhaps? Also, we are plunged into a network of associations, half-glimpsed beneath the surface of the text. Dick is lying on the ground, listening to his wife’s speech from the window, which he describes as a pharmakon. This word means “drug” or “medicine”, or even “poison”. It was impossible for me to imagine Dick and his wife being explicitly sexual together. Dick was a restless character who always lived on his nerves and was perpetually out of control. He was a brooder, endlessly philosophizing and endlessly accusing. He was also an incredibly well trained observer, and over the years he developed his gift for observation to a fine art. Nothing escaped his accusing tongue. Presently he went and got himself a whisky. His wife looked up. “What’s that?”

“About this radiation sickness people get. There’s one or two things that you ought to know.”

Now he became bolder.

“Shall we kiss each other on our mouths,” Dick said to his wife.

She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.

“Yes,” she said.

They caught hold of each other’s arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.

Dick’s wife looked out of the window again. She felt really happy. They passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from the inside, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set forever—burn out, pop, extinguish. Then there’d be no more music, no more loops. Dick’s wife was now spending entire days in bed, not saying anything, not doing anything. A colossal and welcome weariness overcame her. A surge of dazzled amazement consumed her, which her husband failed to understand.

Dick sits alone at a table, sipping his beer, he looks across the room. Then his foot knocks against something lying on the floor next to the wall; he reaches down, it’s a revolver. And just as he thought in despair, Not even a veteran hobo could find his way through all this confusion the scene vanished, and with a start he found himself sitting once again in the old antlered chair ... from which, now, his wife was sadly intoning, “That’s how it was...” And to which, sitting up in surprise, Dick heard himself adding, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be...” In my fatigue I have again felt the rush of excitement. Unless I control it, I shall never find a way to leave this place. I wrote down, slowly, the name of the hotel where I was staying, the room number. Imperceptibly the room is filled with the still dark light of the sun. Dick’s wife opens her eyes, shuts them again. She says: Two more paid nights and it will be over. She smiles and strokes Dick’s eyes. She smiles ironically in her sleep. Dick goes on talking, all alone in the world. She’s not listening, she’s asleep. They sleep side by side, the deep doze of the old.

The proofreading—5 pages a day are supposed to be completed—is not going as I want. At the beginning there was only a daily deficit that I hoped to make good, but then the “Purgatory” chapter alone held me up for two days. Now it is finished, not quite as I want it, and my nerves are on edge. Incoherence is the coherence.

by Aryan Kaganof

Aryan Kaganof is editor and curator of the South African cultural journal
herri (https://herri.org.za/10/).