Kafka's Curse Hardcover - 1999

Excerpt

In the end, Anna left her husband Oscar because he breathed down her neck. At Wrst his breathing had been his most endearing quality. Through many years of unconscious practice, Oscar had developed the perfect breathing technique: breath in through the nose, breath out through the mouth. He did this with such serenity that he seemed to Anna the most sensitive and reWned man she had known. Even more so than her father. She loved Oscar for his gentleness, his ability to smile when aVronted, his understanding of her need to rage at life's many and inevitable little agonies. Even when he was the cause and object of Anna's anger. Oscar's strength lay in his reticence: the hesitancy that in others seemed like a vice or a weakness became in Oscar a thoughtful virtue. All of this Anna attributed to Oscar's capacity to fill his lungs with invigorating oxygen, his finely structured, somewhat hooked nose quivering like that of a thoroughbred horse.

Then Oscar was struck by an illness that reversed the whole natural order of his being. It began with a headache which the doctor put down to an infection in his sinus cavity. At first his breathing acquired a hoarseness associated with chest colds or the flu and did not unduly disturb their bedtime tranquillity. But gradually Oscar's condition worsened, his breathing became irregular and his struggling lungs began to make harsh, anguished noises. Suddenly he was overcome, each night, by coughing spasms that shook his body, his eyes bulging as if he were near to madness. Because of their devotion to each other, Anna endured without complaint the long sleepless nights, observing her husband's pain with a helplessness that brought tears to her eyes. Despite many consultations with a number of doctors, and a desperate prescription of different drugs, Oscar's health continued to deteriorate until Anna saw in his face a gauntness which told her that he had reconciled himself to death.

One measure of their unquestionable devotion to each other was the fact that they had not had sex before they married, that they had both come to the wedding bed as virgins, to the best of their totally trusting knowledge of each other. Anna recalled this bond of celibacy with quiet pride when some of her women friends boasted about the surreptitious premarital fumbling sessions they had had with their future husbands. And even with other men. Anna was not in any way prudish though and enjoyed making love to Oscar. He, always aware of the nuances of meaning that words created, corrected her: We make love with each other, not to each other. And Oscar never demanded anything more than the caresses that Anna permitted. He stopped kissing her and pressing up against her body as soon as she felt his passion was becoming too fierce and asked him to stop.

There arose in her an inexplicable discomfort when Oscar's sexual desires became too intense. In the midst of their normally courteous lovemaking, a sudden wave of pure lust would surge through him. He would close his eyes as if to contain some unbearable pain within himself, his penis swelled, became huge and vividly veined like volcanic rock. But he always subsided the moment Anna whispered, Oscar, no please.

In the beginning of their marriage this distressed Anna, who feared that she could not satisfy Oscar's sexual needs. She remembered someone telling her that the key to a good marriage was sexual compatibility, that her father had taken a mistress because her mother was unresponsive and saw sex as no more than a duty to which all women coldly submitted. But Oscar showed great understanding and patience, sensing her struggle with the image of a placid Oscar transformed into someone fierce by his sexual desires. She loved him with great tenderness in those moments, as he kneeled on the bed before her, his head bowed, ashamed of the extraordinary appetite for sex he had displayed. He would only lie down beside her when his erection had drooped and his penis had shrunk to an appropriate, contrite size. They would caress each other to sleep, she in the crook of his arm, sheltered by his cool and gentle breathing.

Now Anna could not sleep at all. Oscar shuddered and groaned, and though the air seemed strangely sweeter and less polluted in the morning, they both rose from their bed hollow-eyed and exhausted. Anna developed an itchy skin which their latest doctor ascribed to a lack of proper sleep. The doctor, whose flabby chest reminded Anna of her mother's sad and sagging breasts in the last months of her life, was ominously named Dr Mayat, which in Arabic means "Dr Funeral". He gave Anna a limited supply of powerful sleeping pills, cautioning her against abusing them.

It could be dangerous, even fatal.

Anna sat on her side of the bed, facing away from Oscar, and swallowed, with the aid of a large glass of water, the fat and translucent capsule. She remembered Dr Mayat's immaculate fingers handling the drugs as if they were precious pearls he was counting. And how Aunt Hilda, who had left her husband and children in their home by the sea to come and assist Anna, had uttered a restrained admonishment when the doctor left.

He is Indian?

Anna only turned to join Oscar in bed when she was certain he had completed his own nightly ritual, slowly drinking the many potions, capsules and tablets prescribed by specialists of all sorts.

The sleeping pills worked at first and Anna quickly sank into a state of unconsciousness the moment she shut her eyes. Her repose, however, lacked the regenerating qualities of a true and gentle slumber. Soon, even that drug-induced sleep became impossible.

Anna was compassionate and loving even though despair gnawed at the resolve she had formed in her mind to stand by my husband. It was discovered that the "condition", as the doctors called the illness they could not diagnose, forced Oscar to reverse his perfect breathing rhythm. He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose. Try as he might, he could not curb this shocking deviation. He tried to compensate by breathing in and out through his mouth, which is what many men are forced to do, although not at so young an age. The snores that result from this peculiarly male malady are in themselves unpleasant. But nothing as thin and knifelike as the sounds Oscar made the moment he lay down. It was as if the very tendons of life around them were being severed. The plants which someone had advised them to bring into the room in order to increase the "natural oxygen level" seemed to stir and struggle against some unnatural presence.

Even the shafts of moonlight on the richly coloured wooden Xoors acquired a jaggedness that terrified Anna. She lay in bed, rigidly still, her horror impervious to the eVects of the all-powerful sleeping pills, besieged by the sharp light and the grotesque rustling of innocent nasturtiums and shy ferns. Her heart Wnally betrayed the loving resolve of her thoughts.

In Anna's mind somewhere a voice was saying, Listen, they're humping--a voice that sounded like her own but had a vulgar timbre, hard and echoing, a childhood expression of disgust as parents moved about on a creaky bed in the room next door, a voice that came back to her like a recording. Other hands slid up her thighs and hot breath came close to her cheeks, not Oscar's, but someone she knew and loved, someone whose weight upon her she had forgotten. Or banished from her memory. All these years. Now she sat up and screamed. Martin, her brother, hovered above her, his face pleading and vicious at the same time. But Oscar could not help her now. He lay like a thin and decadent monarch upon a mound of pillows, struggling with the perversity of his breath. Carbon dioxide in, oxygen out.

It was Aunt Hilda who responded to Anna's scream and came bursting into her room. Aunt Hilda, with her brown hair flying behind her like that of a wild but matronly angel, who hugged the sobbing Anna and led her from the room, glancing hatefully at Oscar. He who had betrayed Anna by falling ill, by allowing this ugly and mysterious sickness to creep into his body like an evil spirit.

Anna's brother Martin, now the Director of the School of Psychology at the University, came in the morning and drove them away, his car taking off smoothly, almost without noise. The neighbours would appreciate this civilised decorum. It was a thought that Anna had, but one that she expected would be spoken by Aunt Hilda. They said things like that, Aunt Hilda and Martin and Martin's wife Helena, graceful Helena who awaited them, welcoming Anna with the warm grasp of her elegant hands. A cup of tea and then breakfast. Over the silence of clinking cups, knives scratching on good white china, Anna pondered her future. Martin tried to break the scraping silence by telling Anna, gently, that there was perhaps some psychological basis for Oscar's illness. Kafka's curse, he said, in between swallows of toast and honey and gulps of coffee. At least we may be able to Wnd an approach. He turned his full attention to his sister, dear little Anna whom he dimly remembered protecting from bullies and lascivious men and other childhood evils, and saw in her face the mirrored recognition of some terrible memory. Something that he too would not want to recall, but which he knew sat behind her eyes like the negatives of a photograph waiting to be developed.

Tears ran down Anna's cheeks and Helena was swiftly at her side, offering the musty comfort of her just-out-of-bed warmth. Oh Martin! You say the most awful things, all at the wrong moment, Helena said, before looking up and seeing Diana, her youngest daughter, standing at the foot of the stairs. Helena's embracing attention was transferred to the sleepy eleven-year-old, who rubbed her eyes and pouted her pale ruby lips. Soon another daughter came thumping down the carpeted stairs. Greetings were hastily exchanged, with shy pauses when it came to Anna's turn, but the interruption was momentary and the voices soon resumed their heady flow, coffee was slurped, cheeks kissed, doors opened and shut with friendly, familial haste. Both Martin and Helena were gone from the table, miraculously clothed and briefcased, two cars left the leafy driveway with the now acceptable noise of screeching tyres. In the silence, Aunt Hilda and Anna contemplated the chaos of a leftover breakfast, the half-eaten bowls of cereal and bits of toast marooned in cups of coffee allowed to go cold because of the endless chatter. These abandoned repasts seemed to Anna to have an inherent affection, reminiscent of her own childhood. She remembered how her father had allowed his puritan attitude towards wastefulness to lapse, but only at breakfast. As if it was a ritual, the daily bending of his rigid soul. Anna remembered, as well, her mother's stern intrusion, the alien sound of her little, hasty footsteps, the glass door to the dining-room opening abruptly, and her father wiping away the crumbs of his merriment. The napkin, neatly folded into a square, would be left on the place-mat as he pushed his chair away.


Aunt Hilda wiped her mouth with the same swift gesture, rose and excused herself, a dark, brooding-hen look in her eyes that Anna remembered her aunt having had many years before she had children to brood over. Anna listened to Aunt Hilda's fingers punch the long-distance number of her home into the cordless telephone, a subtle electronic language that echoed through an extension somewhere in the house. How different all of this was. Here her brother lived, someone she vaguely loved, despite some terrifying secret slowly Wnding its shape in her mind's eye. Lived like a stranger with his blonde-haired wife and two children who seemed to move, when awake, with the bounding energy of aliens. Whose home was a splendour of modern angles, austere in their tall shapes, yet somehow concealing all the ostentation that her brother Martin was drawn to, not Helena, whose only flamboyance was the fluffy tiger-head slippers she wore around the house. Helena was a professor in her own right, this "own right" being more precious because it had been doubly earned.

Anna's own house seemed darker. More Oscar's house than hers, she thought, bought a long time ago with the one windfall that Oscar's freelance work as an architect had brought them. For most of his life Oscar had worked in an office and earned a comfortable enough living. The independence of his talent, which he refused to subject to the trials of a go-it-alone business, despite his brother-in-law's urging, brought huge commissions to his employer. Oscar and Anna were wealthy enough to give modestly to charity. There was nothing, really, wanting in their lives.

But Oscar, a man who refused to be stirred by the passionate debates about the political situation, the violence and the crime, the homeless people who were squatting in the suburbs and were said to be bringing the property values down, developed a stubborn protectiveness towards the house. He repaired and restored, obsessively battling the effects of the house's ninety-year-long decline, but refused to touch the structure, marvelling out loud at the clean and simple lines. Even the strange fountain that stood in the centre of the path leading to the front door, forcing people to confront the sorrowful sight of a castrated David, his drooping stone penis broken at the tip like a child's pee-pee. It was an integral part of the house's nature, Oscar said.

Anna hated the fountain's pretentiousness, but was convinced by Oscar not to have it removed, even though the jargon he used in his arguments seemed false and out of character. For the first time since she had known Oscar, she saw a desperation in his eyes. The kind of desperation, she now suspected, that he had suppressed behind his shut eyelids when overcome by his occasional, ferocious passion.

The furnishings matched the house, dignified, classic, solid. No gimmicky twists of steel or surrealistic plastic. They both had chosen that furniture, Anna because she preferred the cosy atmosphere created by the often jarring "collectedness" of the pieces bought at random, Oscar because he liked the feeling that the hands of their human creators were touching you when you sat down in them or ran the palm of your hand over a grainy wooden surface. Affectionately, without any sexual meaning or anything like that, he had hastily added.

But Anna saw the disdain on Martin's face on the rare occasions when her brother visited. It's Oscar's choice, this mishmash of colours and dull shapes. Anna read this in Martin's mind, concealed behind the unwizened brow that shaped his smile and hooded his eyes. Even Helena, magnanimous Helena could not help a wry grimace, quickly absorbed into her flashing smile. This was Oscar's house. It bore Oscar's personality, the tedious evenness of his nature. Not Anna. She's one of us.
What they really meant was: Oscar's not one of us. He was a mixture, Javanese and Dutch and Indian and God knows what else, they would later discover. He was the lovely hybrid whom Anna had fallen in love with, perhaps because of his hybridity. Only Caroline, Anna's elder sister, seemed to understand. Until Anna confided her intention to marry Oscar.

Gorgeous, all brown bread and honey! Good enough for bed . . . but to marry? That's another story, Caroline said in her wink-wink manner. Remember Jean-Pierre? French Canadian, my eye. Good local coloured stock. A damn good fuck, though.

In later years Caroline would marry a dentist and move to Australia.

No, she didn't really understand this love. Nor would Aunt Hilda or Martin and Helena or their children Allison and Diana. They too would marry like their parents, in search of comfort and compatibility. Somehow, in between it all, they'd try and find some passion. There would always be careers and children and concerns about the levels of violent crime to distract them from their loneliness.

Anna's father Patrick did not seem offended by Oscar's "Jewishness". Of course, we're mixed too. Some Jewish blood in our distant pasts, but that's okay, everyone has Jewish blood in them, Patrick said laconically. His wife Grace, the distracted mother of Caroline and Martin and Anna, frowned and fumed and finally forgave. But never approved.

A woman came into the kitchen and began to clear away the breakfast. She was dressed in a smart domestic's uniform, black with a white collar. Deft hands sorted vegetables and leaves the elder daughter had half eaten, separated their limp virtue from the more grisly remains of egg-yolks and bacon rinds. Martin's household was "green"; organic discards for their garden, washable cloth napkins instead of forest-consuming paper towels. There was a benevolent design to their extravagance, this waste of food recycled to produce more wasted food. Whereas Oscar and Anna had murdered ants and exterminated termites all their lives with ozone-depleting poisons in order to preserve a house full of gloomy artifice. Leftover food that could not be resurrected for lazy TV dinners was given to beggars in the park.

Anna remembered that Martin had named his first child "Allison-Anne" against the wishes of his wife. It is so primitive, children should have names of their own, not some heirloom they can't discard! She remembered too Helena's astonishing anger, the vehemence in her tired voice. Helena was right. They would hire a woman whose name was Anne, had an aunt named Anna who would come in sadness to live in their house.

The morning slid into a brass-sunned afternoon. The misery of the sleepless night, the early departure past the park and its sketch-book lake, were already forgotten. And Oscar hung like a grey shadow of grief over Anna, like someone already dead, transformed from loved to beloved. There arose in her consciousness the image of a gravestone, tall marble that gleamed in the sun. The shape of Oscar's face was slowly absorbed into its hard, detached surface.

Evening arrived quietly, doors opened with sighs of welcoming relief, and Martin and Helena sank back into the cool shadows of their home. Domestic-Anne served drinks beneath the canopy of yellowing, unharvested grapes--Oh no, we don't pick them, just keep them for the birds. Their children too joined in this ceremonial draining away of the day's pressures, sipping soft drinks while Martin and Helena drank chilled white wine. That was how their relationship began, with glasses of white wine in Helena's student room, before they crept into her bed and muffled their cries. Before Allison was conceived and imposed upon them a quiet marriage in court, followed by a luncheon for friends and drunken sex in the afternoon.

Christ, is that what we've got now? A mere relationship? Martin's gung-ho humour unsettled Anna, who held her gin-and-tonic too tightly and drank it too quickly. Aunt Hilda was doing the same, Anna suspected. Above them the rapacious rejoicing of feasting birds, and all around, the banter of sharp voices as the Martin-Helena-Allison-Diana unit used up the vestiges of their daytime adrenaline. Their decline thereafter was fast.

Not before a slightly drunken Martin resolved the problem of their names. We'll call Anne Annie, and Anna Anna. No one calls Allison anything but Allison these days!

Annie cleared away the dinner table, Helena prowled about for a while in tiger-patterned slippers, then went to the study, where she sat with her notes before her, absorbing the dull steep of words into her sleepy mind. Martin and young Diana fell asleep before the TV. Allison had retired long ago and and lay formally asleep in her bed, legs stretched out and arms crossed as if to ward off unwelcome dreams.

Only Aunt Hilda dutifully sat until the end with her grieving niece, observing from time to time Anna's features, drawn tight around her skull like a mask. Aunt Hilda would convey this martyrdom to her cluck-clucking husband. She sat there like a ghost, not saying anything, so sad. Not at all like my brother who could laugh at things. Must be Grace's blood. To do all those queer things. Well, marry that crazy God-knows-what-not for starters!

Then Aunt Hilda was gone, back to her home by the sea, and Martin went away on conventions, and Helena with great kindness told Anna to make herself at home. This is your home now!

Media reviews

"Dangor's prose is that rare achievement: an equivalent in lyrical energy and freshness to its subject.  This is a South Africa you haven't encountered in fiction before.  Immensely enjoyable."
--Nadine Gordimer

"Extraordinary.  A dense surrealist fable. . . . This is the essence of the emerging South African version of 'magic realism,' which could be described as 'realistic fantasy.'"
--Mike Nicol, author of The Ibis Tapestry

"A mesmerizing, mythical work that proves that South Africa is a much deeper and more imaginative place than the headlines would have us believe."
--Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden