The Dao of Daniel

By Lodewyk G. du Plessis

Daan van der Walt, a Latin-quoting, God-fearing former Kalahari farmer, visits his estranged son in China. He soon finds himself on a difficult path (the Dao of the title) to come to terms with his feelings of remorse and guilt. He sets out to write his Historia, or confessions, in the form of letters to his deceased wife and imaginary observations to his beloved dog.

An astounding debut by an octogenarian author; the award winning Afrikaans novel was translated by Michiel Heyns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9780624092544

Lodewyk G. du Plessis

Lodewyk G. du Plessis is 'n skuilnaam. Hierdie fenomenale debuut én gissings oor die skrywer se identiteit gaan boekliefhebbers vanjaar aan die praat hê.

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Lodewyk

G. du Plessis

THE

DAO

OF

DANIEL

A NOVEL

Translated by Michiel Heyns

Tafelberg

For him who brings me books to read

Humanity is the mould to break away from,

the crust to break through,

the coal to break into fire …

– Robinson Jeffers: ‘Roan Stallion’

Glossaries of Afrikaans words and terms as well as Latin quotations are provided at the end of the novel.

Jīn Jī Dú Lì

The golden cock stands on one leg

28 February

For months I have thirsted after the delight of a young body in my lap. On chilly autumn nights, the first frost crusting on the cut lucerne, I craved, like King David, a virginal Abishag, the Shunammite, to cosset my loins.

‘Carnal intercourse is like koeksisters and milk tart at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon on the front stoep of Ystervarkfontein,’ I told you, that evening as I was lighting the opsitkers, the candle that in my youth attended my courting activities. You had a hay fever attack. ‘But,’ I added when your sneezing fit had subsided, ‘you must never fret about the fiddling and groping between the sheets, nor try to understand it. There’s nothing unsavoury about the huffing and puffing and panting. Naturalia non sunt turpia. Ovid’s words: What is natural is not shameful. A cock under the hens, that man. An exile …’ I fondled your pliable ears between my fingers. ‘Brood on everything that you were still hoping to get up to in bed, and a cockroach will crawl from the seam. A deed for doing, the sex deed, while you can still do it. Before the moon has smiled twice at its own reflection in your water bowl, Kaspaas, the fleeting years have knocked your hipbone from its socket and you’re lying at the bottom of the well, a shattered urn.’ You licked my hand and wagged your tail.

You, my faithful dog, were still alive when we had that conversation. We were living at Ystervarkfontein, the Fount of Porcupines. Now you are lying under the ground at the foot of my pre-plastered grave on the farm and I’m sitting in a monk’s cell on a crippled stool by a ramshackle table in a heathen land penning my history.

I lift my head from the writing pad. In front of me, in the Temple of Eternal Peace, three Buddha effigies glitter in the flickering light of pink lotus candles. Yes, Kaspaas, Daan van der Walt, your lord and master, has been tarrying for a week in the land of the phoenix and the dragon. The lusts of my flesh have been quenched. All that keeps me standing is the thought of good old-fashioned farm fare and approaching death. The bedding on my cot is no longer tumbled and no longer reeks of erotic night sweats. Here I sleep on a pallet without sheets. A hard, bare plank. In the morning I eat a bowl of rice and spinach and dream of a plate of mealiemeal porridge with crackling and buttermilk on the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen in front of the old coal stove. With body and soul I long, here in China, for a lashing of lard and Lyle’s golden syrup on a slice of fresh crusty bread from the outdoor oven next to the abandoned antheap. With a little bowl of spinach in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other, I crave a glass of red wine from the Swartland, the land of black scrub. But let me rather record what happened this morning.

Two bronze lions are glaring at me. Incense is stinging my eyes. I am standing amidst a loose assemblage of men in long dresses, trying to balance, like them, on one leg.

‘Ai ya! Nī bù …’ I hear his voice. With his outlines soft as a souskluitjie I see him through a haze of incense: my tai ji quan master. Yang Ying Sheng is his name, this man who is trying to induct me in the secrets of Chinese martial arts, who is trying to teach me in front of the Temple of Eternal Peace to balance on one leg. Yang Ying Sheng, whom I address reverently as Yang, lao shi, Master Yang.

‘Ai ya! Nī bù zhuān xīn. You’re not concentrating, Da Ni Eu. What are you thinking?’

How, my dear departed dog, could I tell my master that after my Fall I dreamt of sex for months? The act, not the filthy four-letter word. How could I tell him that at night in my incense-fume-filled monk’s cell I fancy I smell braaivleis when I’m agonising over my sin-besmirched past and the hereafter? The hereafter, yes, Kaspaas. Man is on a journey, death but an interval, an interjection on the voyage to eternity. A man must have direction, and a destination, otherwise he’ll lose his way.

My destination is heaven. In what incarnation I shall arise from the grave, that gives me pause. I don’t want to wander the streets of the New Jerusalem tripping over my own shadow. I’m not vain, but after passing through the heavenly portals heralded by the sound of trumpets I don’t want to be plagued with rheumatism, heartburn or constipation. Nor do I want wings on my back and a harp in my hand; a Boer doesn’t flutter around a cloud of lightning bolts and thundercracks like a moth around a rotten apple. Mindful of the mistake made by Eos – known to the Romans as Aurora – about Tithonus, the beautiful youth who had stolen her heart, in beseeching Jupiter to bestow eternal life upon him but forgetting to ask also for eternal youth, I desire, when in heaven, the lithe body of a young man. Sturdy legs. Feet firm of tread. Muscles in the right place. Fully functional parts.

Master Yang looks at me, shaking his head, grey like mine. He is a Daoist, my son tells me. A Daoist, a retired medical doctor and an expert in the martial arts. He is full of strange sayings, this Chinese man, and as opaque as the eyes in a roasted sheep’s head. He lives in a cave at the summit of this holy mountain, at the foot of which I and ten or so monks are now practising tai ji. In the West this business is also known as tai chi.

A week ago, a day after my arrival in China, my son told me what he’d got up to this time. His news upset me so much that I suffered an attack of vertigo. My balance gone for a loop, I collapsed like an ox hamstrung by the Mau Mau. It was he, Jan-Willem, my firstborn, who came and dumped me at this cloistered Buddha business. Master Yang stuck a lot of needles into my body and scorched my naked flesh with a cigar. When I resisted, he and my son decreed that tai ji would calm me down and restore my equilibrium.

The Apostle Paul cautioned that we may be in the world, but not of the world. Where, Kaspaas, was I this morning before sitting down to write at this ramshackle table? Where? I ask you. Amidst idolators, practising devilry.

Around me these baldpates are balancing on one leg, arms extended like the wet wings of cormorants on a floating log. They are dressed in saffron robes, these monks, one shoulder bared. Little black hairs peep out at me from their armpits: not curly crinklies like ours. Theirs are only slightly frizzed, almost straight. A flea-track down the centre parts the fine tendrils in their oxters like Dominee’s Brylcreemed hair when we were first-years at university.

Master Yang recalls my errant thoughts to the present: ‘Concentrate your qì on your dāntián, Da Ni Eu.’

The present, Kaspaas, is the place to which Ounooi Magrieta recalled me whenever I got so entangled in my thoughts that I didn’t know whether it was Aandblom’s plop-plapping dung in the drainage ditch that I was smelling or the foaming milk in the pail between my knees. You never knew the Ounooi. She died before Jan-Willem turned up with you on the farm.

Now just lie still on your rug at my feet and listen to what I have to tell you.

The present, that’s what I want to escape from: the here and now, before the idolatrous temple. We oldsters escape the present when we retreat into the past. I don’t want to slander the Ounooi, but let me tell you, when she was still alive, on many a day I found the present well-nigh intolerable. Not only did she torment me in the past; now she niggles me from beyond the grave with her timeline. Stick to the timeline, like a burr to the tail of a sheep, was one of my letter-learned spouse’s golden rules for writers, guidelines that she and her literary Sadducean friends could conjure up like evils from a Pandora’s box to spoil a good story. The shadow of the Ounooi’s timeline weighs heavily on me here, where I’m sitting and writing. After every digression, she maintained, the writer must return to the timeline, the place where he was before he got lost. And that was not all. She also wanted to know where and on what the writer was sitting while practising his craft, whether the legs of the chair were straight, or bandy, whether there was a creaking sound when he leant over to refill his pen. Is there a hairline crack in the wall behind his head, a scratch mark on his table?

Conscious adherence to the timeline gives a writer hair on his chest and a bristly beard on his upper lip, I hear her calling from the grave. When that line forges through a piece of writing like the road to perdition you can rest assured the writer knows his oats.

The Ounooi died before she could feel in her bones how an oldster’s whirlwind thoughts snatch at stories from the past to try to understand the present. The past, when I was still in the land of my birth, where the slaughter of your loved ones and the loss of your native soil dim even the moon and the stars, and Aurora, appearing when the scorpion men roll away the boulder at the mouth of the cave of night, shyly hides her visage behind her rosy fingers. Before you think that I am manacled in Tartarus’s pits of darkness and despair along with the falsifiers of the Word, false prophets and fallen angels, as we read in the Bible, let me mend a few shards of my broken pitcher and tell you a thing or two about life.

‘I’m just myself,’ I’d say to my late wife when she got too learned for my understanding. ‘Just myself.’

‘To weep for,’ she’d reply with a sweet smile. ‘You’re a cactus flower bruised in the bloom, my little Daan.’ With these words she’d then place a sliver of milk tart on the plate next to my cup.

‘The mysterious female … the gateway of the mysterious female we call the source of creation, the creation of heaven and earth.’ Master Yang’s voice summons my thoughts back to the timeline.

‘Who said that?’

‘Laozi.’ And then, without telling me who this fellow is and what these obscure words mean, my master asks me the question that’s been occupying me for a week: ‘Why are you learning to do tài jí, Da Ni Eu?’

Tai ji, I’ve been taught here, is the inner form of the Chinese martial arts. The men who deliver ostrich kicks and assail each other by fist, the gong fu heroes, practise the external form of the art. Ostrich-kick violence I understand. I was an ostrich farmer in my day. The creatures keel over if you so much as look at them. An ostrich farmer who knows what he’s doing can load up to six dead ostriches on a wheelbarrow, I always say. I also know that this bird can, like love, rip open your breast with its claw and stop your heart. It’s the tai ji part of the martial arts, the inner one I have to perform in slow motion like a tortoise to calm myself in the face of life’s onslaughts, which I don’t understand.

‘I’m teaching you tài jí, Da Ni Eu,’ says Master Yang, ‘to regain your balance: to float like a feather, fly like a leaf, hover like a dragonfly, soar like an eagle.’ He breathes twice. ‘I want you suspended between heaven and earth. I want you to defy the pull of gravity.’ His snow-white eyebrows twitch up and down. The little tendrils curl down over his eyes, which fix mine in their gaze. ‘I am introducing you to the Dao. The Way.’

The Dao? The Way? The way whereto, Kaspaas? Soar like an eagle? Hover like a dragonfly? I don’t want to fly. I’m scared of heights. And my name is not Da Ni Eu. My name is Da-ni-el. Daniel Jacobus van der Walt, erstwhile dreamer-poet, ostrich breeder, sheep and goat farmer on the farm Ystervarkfontein. Swathed in the ancestral christening robe, I was christened Daniel Jacobus in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost with water from the silver font, right in front of the pulpit, askance from GOD IS LOVE embroidered in letters of gold on the pulpit cloth.

I was the only baby who didn’t cry that Sunday morning.

‘You can see for yourselves his little eyes are dry. It’s just his forehead and bottom that’s wet,’ my mother said to the wide-eyed sisters when she changed my nappy among the Bibles on the yellowwood table in the consistory.

I, apple-bummed-bare cherub, there and then sprayed a proud arc of pee over the Psalms of David and the Songs of Korah.

Daan van der Walt, an apple-bummed cherub! My first literary tour de force in this document, Kaspaas, a thirty-kilogram seed potato in a peat bog, in a manner of speaking.

While my proud mother is blotting up my water from the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort and reverently drying the Word of God, my father is boasting in the winter sun before the house of the Lord surrounded by the elder brethren:

‘Van der Walts are not crybabies. We are forceful men. Strong and silent.’

Daniel Jacobus van der Walt. So that’s me. I mean, that’s who I would have wanted to be instead of the man to whom many a name has been attributed. In primary school I was Little Daan. In high school Danie. At university Daan. In the city for a few years Advocate van der Walt. Later in our town Oom Daan. Even later, on the farm, the labourers and kids called me Oupa or Klei’baas – Grandpa or Little Boss. Oupa, Grandpa, because I was old. Klei’baas, Little Boss, because my father was Oubaas, the Old Boss, already. After his death I was still Klei’baas, and would remain that till the day of my own death, I reckoned. Farm folk never varied their customs: After winter the spring was there, after the day of prayer the rain, if not that year then the year to come. Things remained the same. Everything had its time and place, we believed.

If only we had realised then that we were seeing through a glass darkly and that one day we would know only echoes of our dreams.

But in those days, in the evenings on my way home from the milking shed with a little pail of cream in the hand to enjoy with bottled peaches from my neighbour Elsie Steyn, the smoke was drifting up from the kitchen chimney and I could smell the rib-roast’s garlic and thyme through the open windows and doors, and hear the murmuring voices of Magrieta and her right hand, Ragel, in the kitchen.

In the cool of the day the Lord walked Ystervarkfontein’s orchard, along the fig trees, the quinces and pomegranates on the verge of the irrigation furrow, between the peach and plum trees all the way to the fountain. The leaves of the apple trees rustled and the chickens settled for the night on their perches. On my farm, I believed, the invisible was made visible, the silence audible. Always the same, from my earliest youth. As in Paradise, before man, according to the teachings of the Bible, was made aware through the serpent and the woman of the passions of his flesh and of his own mortality. No searching for God on my farm. Just keep quiet, prick up your ears, listen, open your eyes and look, and like a shiny-smooth nectarine, with a blush on your cheek, you stood naked before your Creator.

On my farm I tried, sinner though I was, to walk in the ways of the Lord until I would walk past the angel with the flaming sword, into the hereafter. After our deaths the Ounooi and I would enjoy a glass of red wine in the dusk and the Lord would sit down with us, if not for a sip of wine then surely to nibble at a few dates from the Garden of Eden. We would discuss Paul of Tarsus, the man without a woman, and Zeus of Olympus, the god with an insatiable libido, a jealous wife and an eye for a comely lad.

Yes, I was a fortunate man, blessed and rejoicing, I thought. But I was filled with hubris, Kaspaas; I should have read Herodotus more closely and taken to heart Solon’s warning to Croesus: Not until the day of his death does a man know whether he’s led a happy life. I don’t know whether Solon the Wise said anything about the gift of words, but even if the Ounooi does turn in her grave to hear me say this, I can assure you, that is a gift I do have. Let me tell you a secret, my dog: I’m not much of a writer, but deep down inside I know I have the heart and tongue of a closeted poet.

Rough storms raged around me. The venerable Oom Daan of yore turned into just plain old Daan in the New South Africa: old Daan for Zadoc the priest, Nathan the prophet, the Cherethites and Pelethites, hoi polloi and barbaroi, Pharisees and Philistines. For all of them just old Daan.

And then … then I acquired a very specific name. A slander. A name that besmirched, defamed and defiled me in my town and my country. And then, yet another: a name that dare not speak its name, Kaspaas.

And here in China I am Da Ni Eu.

‘Da Ni Eu! Are you listening to me?’

It is cold here in front of the temple on the mountainside. My nose is running. I blow it and stuff my handkerchief back into my pocket. The tai ji monks pretend not to see, but watch me covertly, Da Ni Eu, the gwei lo, the palefaced ghost, who carries his excretions in his pocket.

‘Are you listening to me, Da Ni Eu?’

Master Yang niggles at me like my craving for a dish of lip-smacking lamb testicles.

With my patched-up heart and enlarged prostate I try, here among the monks, to ascend from this morass one-legged like a heron, but before I can spread my wings, I fall over.

‘You need imagination to balance,’ says my master.

Imagination? My cup runneth over with imagination. My problem is the meaning I have to grub from the dregs.

‘Tài jí is not about technique. It is a state of mind. Now place your weight on your right foot.’

I do as I’m told.

‘Imagine that your foot grows roots anchoring you solidly to the earth.’

My little toe itches. My big toe groans. The skin ruptures. Roots sprout white from under my toenails seeking anchorage in the temple soil. A scurvy little Daan I become, searching for mercurial ointment and grease, for the Balm of Gilead.

‘Feel how light your left leg becomes.’

My calf incinerates, my thigh shrivels. Unbearable, the weightlessness of my leg.

‘Lift up your right leg.’

Now I am Kaspaas at the kraal gate.

‘Fàng sōng.’ Relax.

Master Yang taps me lightly on my shoulders. The muscles relent.

‘Màn màn de.’ Slowly, slowly.

He waits.

Silence.

Silence …

‘See!’ he shouts. ‘You are standing on one leg.’

Light floods the darkling deluge and everything explodes in my head: strings, woodwind and brass, drums and cymbals, the tutti. As in the beginning I am a man again, a young man …

And then …

Then I plunge from light back into the chaos where two sturdy legs and feet firm of tread with perked-up toes are required for balance. As in childhood I wait shut-eyed for my mother’s healing hands to anoint my chapped chilblains with paraffin and candlewax …

I open my eyes. A monk with a pail of water passes us on wet slip-slops, chirp-chirp. He pretends in vain not to see me meekly enduring my agony. He’s not even wearing underpants. These men fold their robes chastely around their loins when they squat on their haunches, but I have eyes.

‘Are you listening to me, Da Ni Eu?’

‘Speak, Master, for thy student heareth.’

Master Yang, the Daoist, next to the temple of the Buddha high up against the Longshan mountain, has no ears for my King James English; he is instructing me in the age-old martial arts of the Chinese: ‘The tài jí stance you are now practising is called Jīn jī dú lì.’

‘And what, Master Yang, does that mean?’

‘That, Da Ni Eu, means golden cock stands on one leg.’

It is dark outside. I look up from my writing and in by the door of the Temple of Eternal Peace. The golden Buddha in the centre glows in the subdued light.

You know, Kaspaas, Master Yang sees deep into my hidden self. He is a visionary, this man, but he is wrong, I am not on the way of the Dao. I step cautiously over thorns and daisies between the rocks in my way.

I had the privilege of scraping together a little learning, but I had to abandon my profession to go and farm on Ystervarkfontein.

I tried hard to be a good husband to my wife. Honestly, Kaspaas. I mean it. I had to. That’s how I was brought up. Then death took her, and a study full of English books and Afrikaans poetry anthologies from earlier days remained. And her scent among the dresses in her wardrobe. And memories at night in the dark farmhouse. And the great longing on Sunday mornings under the willows at the farm dam. And Sunday afternoons on the front stoep with a cup of coffee and an empty cake plate.

Perhaps the time has come for me to write her a letter telling her that I loved her.

My son, your actual lord and master, stopped talking to me. For five long years I had no idea what had happened to him. That much you know.

What you don’t know is that I had another son, about whom I stopped talking. His death was the end of what I thought of as my saeculum aureum, my golden age.

But now Daniel is in the fiery furnace, dragon shadows on the wall. Even though the fig tree shall blossom and sheep and goat skip in the saltbush, he no longer rejoices. Daan van der Walt has done with rejoicing.

I refill my pen and write the closing sentences of this chapter: My mouth waters for a slice of milk tart before bedtime. Home-made milk tart. Here I can only dream of milk tart. In the old-age home I had to eat shop-bought tart. Shop tart! A shop tart stinks of bottle flavouring like a man with perfume under his arms.

And now for that letter to my wife, Kaspaas.

The Temple of Eternal Peace,

Longshan,

China.

28 February

My dear Magrieta,

I’m writing you a letter because you pester me at night. For thirteen years you’ve been lying underground and now you’re stirring the cauldron again. Last night it was ‘Tea and Sympathy’ that I had to sing to you.

You always gave me that look of yours when you thought I was being difficult. Then you would sit there stirring your coffee even though there was no sugar in the cup. If I said nothing, you’d place a slice of milk tart on my plate, or pass me a koeksister, and ask, ‘Why don’t you speak if there is something on your mind, Daan?’

Tonight I have plenty on my mind, Magrieta. Tonight I’m speaking to you.

I don’t know how much you can see from up there, but judging by the fuss you’re making of late, what’s happening down here may be yesterday’s news for you. For the avoidance of misunderstanding between us I’ll tell you in any case about all the evils that have befallen me since your demise.

Everybody dear to me, everybody except Jan-Willem and Ragel, is dead: Koos and Elsie, Liefie, Judge Ferdinand du Plessis and Kaspaas. All dead. Your Poplap and Fielies as well. Kaspaas killed them. That dog never liked cats.

There you go again! His name is Kaspaas, not Cerberus.

Jan-Willem turned up on the farm with him.

I’m no longer living on Ystervarkfontein. My abode is in an old-age home surrounded by a lot of English people, the Spes Bona Retirement Village. In Cape Town. But at present I find myself among monks at an idolatrous temple in China. For this past week.

I knew your wings would quiver when you read idolatrous temple, but you can relax: the sacrificial smoke wafting heavenward all over the place does not delight me. Jan-Willem came and dumped me among the heretics when I fell ill. I don’t want to elaborate on the subject. I could geld that young stallion. He’s living in China. Not to spread the gospel as you and I promised the Lord. Oh no! He started feeling his oats among the communists. Traded his chastity for a mess of noodle soup. And that’s not all, after seven years at university he’s now working in a café.

The discord with Jan-Willem and your nocturnal nagging have persuaded me to commune with what you call my shadow side. I’m going to retrace my history, do a critical survey, write my Historia.

Stop laughing, Magrieta, it’s no joke.

Let me tell you something, up there in your cloud tower among the angels of God. You’ve probably long forgotten that from the dawn of time men have tried their hand at histories. There is the Historia of Herodotus, a book about the investigation he did into the Greeks and the barbaroi, and the stories, true and untrue, that he was told to better understand the history of these peoples; there is Augustine who penned his Confessiones, a history so rampant with his guilt feelings about his sex life that he went and burdened all of Christendom with original sin; there is even an ass beaten with a stick and talking back and commemorated to this day for his words. Why should Daan van der Walt of Ystervarkfontein hold his peace?

You can make yourself useful in heaven, Magrieta. You can help me with the writing business.

My Historia commenced today in medias res, just like that, in the middle. Surely that cannot be. A historical survey should start at the beginning, otherwise you’ll misunderstand things later on. The question is, how far back should the writer go? Gaia in the orgiastic embrace of Uranus before the division of heaven and earth surely goes back too far, even though there are people who think I have the same problem as Uranus and a few other gods.

Don’t go trumpeting it up there, Magrieta, but I’m sorely tempted to start my Historia with Genesis, in the vicinity of Chapter One, with the Fall, and the punishment of Adam and Eve and that of the serpent; and then to recount it story by story, because my stories are spread far and wide, and like those of Herodotus they have been honed and whetted by many other stories, stories about humanity, and about the gods whom the humans served, and the inhuman penalties inflicted upon humans for their disobedience. What is your take on the matter? Will you assist me, Magrieta? In a dream, perhaps? But please, just not another nightmare.

That’s all for tonight.

Your surviving spouse,

Daan van der Walt

Postscript: Just in case you’re really going to be reading over my shoulder, I can tell you one more thing: I decided at the beginning of last year to go visiting. It’s not that like Uranus I had a mating urge, it’s just that the loneliness on the farm got to me.

THE HISTORIA OF

DJ VAN DER WALT

A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY THROUGH HIS HISTORY

Dedicated to his wife and his beloved dog

An Upbraiding

Now I am dead you sing to me

The songs we used to know,

But while I lived you had no wish

Or care for doing so.

Now I am dead you come to me

In the moonlight, comfortless;

Ah, what would I have given alive

To win such tenderness!

When you are dead, and stand to me

Not differenced, as now,

But like again, will you be cold

As when we lived, or how?

– Thomas Hardy

PART 1

THE WAY OF A MAN

ONE

Just in case the Ounooi is wafting about here somewhere, Kaspaas, we don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.

I’m sitting here writing in a monk’s cell barely three metres by three metres; a mite smaller than the police cell in which I was locked up after the murder. At least this cell is clean. The only other furniture is a steel frame on which I hang my clothes, and my bed, a contraption the Chinese call a kang, a platform with a chimney. Like Ouma Annie’s footwarmer the kang has a space for coals. The thing is as hard as the rocky ledge on the koppie in front of the farmhouse on which the Ounooi and I lay canoodling one Sunday afternoon before our marriage. I don’t close an eye on the hard surface. It’s too cold here. Coals for the kang’s belly to keep me warm are not to be had.

This morning I ate my rice porridge and spinach and did tai ji with the monks. My writing pad is open in front of me. Perhaps this time the Ounooi will sing to me like the muse to Homer.

Yes, I know, so I didn’t get round to telling her I loved her. Hang on, I’m getting there.

In the meantime you can be glad you’re dead, Kaspaas. In this place people catch you, skin you and barbecue you over coals for supper. Dogmeat keeps the blood warm in winter, they say. In the spirit you are with me, my friend. You are my dog muse. How other than with your help – and perhaps that of the Ounooi if she isn’t annoyed about the postscript in last night’s letter – can I pen my history? I need only recall your trusting eyes to feel up to the task.

Last night I lay wondering which language you understand in the realm of the dead. When you were alive, I treated your feelings with respect and spoke English to you, you who don’t even know what cave canem means, but knew how I felt about the English. In this document I may well speak mainly Afrikaans to you.

After Jan-Willem told me in Longshan how he’d misbehaved this time, I was so upset, my stomach was all in a turmoil. In his privy – if you can call an oversized, brown-stained keyhole in a concrete floor a privy – I was overtaken by a dizzy spell. Everything started tumbling about. Behind my closed eyelids I experienced something that I can best describe with that ugly word phantasmagory, a nauseous fever dream. Distorted images somersaulted about in my head. Trousers around the ankles, arms about my head, I fell down on the floor and lay vomiting into the ditch. There was no up and no down. When I opened my eyes, the earth tilted and I had to hang on not to slide off. Like Ham upon Noah, Jan-Willem looked upon my nakedness. But he had no time to laugh, he had to empty buckets of water over me to clean me. In a borrowed car he brought me trouserless to the Temple of Eternal Peace. Novice monks helped him to get me out of the car. While he was looking for Master Yang, I curled up like a foetus where they’d lain me down. When the man eventually arrived, he made me lie flat on my back and swivelled my head slowly from left to right, pushed needles under my toenails and into the lobes of my ears and burnt alcohol on my chest. He rolled me over and lit a herbal cigar on my back. When at last I opened my eyes, I saw I was lying on the shiny scrubbed surface of one of the kitchen tables, the little dishcloth covering my shame far too small for the purpose for which it had been placed there. So there I was lying on my back like that day in the consistory under the wide-eyed regard of the sisters of the congregation, a spectacle for the delectation of a bunch of monks, hand covering the mouth, giggling in embarrassment.

One word more about the events of that night, and I’ll commit a mortal sin.

I am, as it is, guilty of one of those sins. I am in China, like the Psalmist crying out of the depths. Calvin admonishes and obliges man to enquire why he should be discontented with himself. Introspection is currently trending, as the Ounooi and her fellow literati would say. My instruction to myself here at my table is, in the spirit of the Puritan exhortation from the sixteenth century: a narrow examination of thy selfe and the course of thy life.

Is there a better way of finding peace than through a confession of sin?

In your brown eyes, Kaspaas, I read the reply, I hear your voice: Confess, Oubaas, confess.

I shall confess.

After confession comes insight, I hope. After insight, understanding. Like a Roman Catholic in a confessional I am going to relieve my conscience of my burden of sin word by word. When I understand all, I want to be free, as free as a Crusader after a solid plenary indulgence.

Jan-Willem was a first-year student when the Ounooi died. Six years later, with a degree in theology, he cast me into the corner of the shed like an oil-soaked rag. For four years I licked my wounds in silence. Then, wifeless and childless, with only your company, my dog, I dusted off Hesiod and Homer, Virgil and Ovid, and placed them with Seneca on my bedside table next to the Vulgate, unlocked the Ounooi’s study and started reading again. With conviction I read. Day and night. Everywhere. In the easy chair by the dining room window, on a bale of lucerne in the store, on an up-ended paraffin tin in the calf pen, at the kitchen table, under the blankets in my bed. What stuck in my head was Yourcenar’s The Abyss and Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Those two books were like a voyage with St Brendan through the church’s reign of terror in those days. The condition of the bride of Christ reduced me to melancholy as the water turned lukewarm in my bath. Memoirs of Hadrian I read as well, and then again and yet again. On rereading Seneca’s writings and Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown, I realised that the stone denied a place by the builders could become the cornerstone for me.

I started developing an urge to wander from the narrow way and pick a flower by the footpath.

At night I would go and look at the picture of the Broad and the Narrow Way on the wall of my parents’ bedroom and pray: Show me thy ways, O Lord, teach me thy paths. But I knew: Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, as Ovid phrased it so strikingly: I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

At the calling of the owl when the moon hung suspended over the family graveyard, the Narrow Way was indicated.

At the crowing of the cock, by the glimmer of the morning star on the front stoep, mug of coffee in the hand, a chunk of aniseed rusk in the cheek, the Broad Way beckoned.

To and fro, like the clapper of a bell, I vacillated. Broad Way, Narrow Way. Broad Way, Narrow Way. The fervent hope and the firm conviction of faith was to keep me on the Narrow Way, the doctrine of predestination my consolation when I stumbled. Heaven was after all my destination. That is where the Ounooi is with whom I had to rectify a matter or two. But the Narrow Way to heaven was not to be my modest portion.

I have a suspicion: Man proposes, but God … God and Satan lay wagers on your fate.

Instead of ascending to the Ounooi, glass of Cape sparkling wine in hand, in a chariot with horses of fire, I found myself one night a year or so ago between the sheep pen and the cowshed on the ridged back of the He Goat from the West. The creature between my thighs bucked and capered, I