Why had I taken on these other lives? Did I hope to ballast my own record with others that were weightier, more complete? Their proximity repulsed me.
‘We are stories.’ It’s a notion so simple even a child could understand it. Would that it ended there. But we are stories within stories. Stories within stories within stories. We recede endlessly, framed and reframed, until we are unreadable to ourselves.
When I returned from abroad in a new century, a time to take stock and start afresh, I found a room in a hotel. From there I was able to undo the ravages of my tenants’ stay and make some alterations to the outbuildings at my house. At last, after weeks of marshalling painters, cleaners and gardeners, I was ready to move back home. On a Friday morning, I went out to the self-storage depot with the removal men and found my life packed away tidily, a little dusty but otherwise in good repair.
Leaving the trunks in storage was my idea, but the movers seized on it with relief. It was no spur-of-the-moment decision: I had reasoned it through over many months. It would be a good thing, I decided, to keep some distance between myself and Claude’s effects, a professional distance. If I moved them back to my house, they would all too easily seem like mere possessions and the impetus to do something about them might be lost. My study was already crammed with redundant paperwork, things I knew it would be interesting to go through — letters, journals, notebooks — if I could only find the time. Better to keep Claude’s trunks in a separate place. As soon as I had settled back into my work routine, I would come out regularly to the storage unit and look at them properly and systematically. It might be necessary to draw up a schedule. It would be like going to the office or to the archives to do some research. If my researches revealed that the trunks did indeed contain a story worth telling, I could retrieve them and unpack the material in my study. Before then, I would have the opportunity to sift through it all, setting the important things aside and shedding the dross. Then again, if I came to the conclusion that the material was worthless, inaccessible or uninteresting, I could dispose of it directly, without cluttering up my home.
I did not need an entire storage unit for four trunks. Fortunately, in addition to the full-scale unit I had been leasing (the ‘Householder’), the depot also made available half units (the ‘Voyager’) and quarters (the ‘Weekender’). The last was perfect for my purposes.
When the removal men had finished loading my furniture and boxes onto the truck, they moved the trunks into a ‘Weekender’ unit in a separate block. They did not complain this time: there was a porter’s trolley at hand and the walkways between the blocks were flat and evenly paved. Like the full-scale unit, this one had a metal roller door and a fluorescent light, and was equipped with wooden pallets to raise things off the floor to avoid potential water damage. There was more than enough space. The four trunks did not even have to be stacked. Instead, they were set out beside one another, where each one was easy to open. There was room too for Louis Fehler’s trommel. It looked quite manageable and contained. I went back home with the sense of a job well done, although in truth the job had not yet started.
What I did carry with me was the half-dozen boxes containing Claude’s personal library, which I moved into my study.
The months passed. My plans for the trunks did not work out. In fact, keeping them at the self-storage depot had the opposite effect to the one I anticipated. I was able to forget about them for weeks at a time. Whenever I did think about them, and tried to schedule a ‘research trip’, Gosforth Park seemed a long way to go.
At the end of the year, when I sat down to look at my budget, I saw that it had cost me R2000 to keep the trunks in storage. I recalled the fact that these same trunks had lain in a warehouse in Cape Town for nearly fifty years and the derisive note I had once made about how Berti and Claude had squandered good money on such a foolish thing. Here I was, struggling to find work, with no money to take a holiday, and doing exactly the same thing. It was high time I cancelled the contract with the depot.
So it was that I spent one weekend of the Christmas break retrieving Claude’s stuff. The laden trunks were too heavy to move and the only solution, short of hiring a moving company again, was to unpack their contents into smaller boxes and then move these and the empty trunks separately. With an archivist’s precision, each trunk was numbered and each box labelled, so that its contents could be returned to the right trunk, and to the right quadrant and level in each trunk, after the move.
Before that could be done, a decision had to be made about where to store the trunks. They were large, obtrusive things and there simply wasn’t room to keep them in my house. Among the recently refurbished outbuildings was a room previously used as a storeroom and tool shed, which I had now provided with a shower and kitchenette and intended to use for guests. For the time being, I decided to pack the trunks into this guest suite. Soon I would decide what to do with the material and find moreconvenient places to store it. In the meantime, a guest staying over for a day or two could live with the trunks easily enough.
The empty trunks were carried out to the guest suite and positions found for them. The two metal trunks were stacked in a corner, while the large steamer chest was placed at the foot of the bed as a sort of divan. The wooden chest went under the kitchen sink.
When I repacked the contents of the boxes into the trunks, I did make a few changes. I extracted the more valuable items and put them in a separate carton. More accurately, I extracted the items that appeared to be valuable, the kinds of things a burglar might walk off with — the cut-throat razors, the old tobacco tins, lapel badges, a broken fountain pen, the tin of fifty-year-old tea leaves. Even though these items would have fetched little or nothing on the street, I did not want them stolen, and the guest suite was protected by the flimsiest burglar proofing and had no alarm. These things had only been placed in my care. The ‘valuables’ went into the linen cupboard inside (where Louis Fehler’s trommel had already been stashed). All the rest, the jumble of papers, packets, photographs and books, went back into the trunks.
In my experience, no burglar has ever walked off with a book.
In the following years, I thought often about the trunks and what would become of them. Occasionally, when I went out to the guest suite with an armful of bed linen because I was expecting a house visitor, I would open the trunk at the foot of the bed and stir the layers of papers around. Sometimes I sat down to page through the books and pocket diaries or look at the picture postcards and maps. Usually the dust caught in my throat after a while, and that was a sign to pack everything back in and close the lid.
I thought about the metal trunks too, but not as often. The first time a guest came to stay, these stacked-up trunks were covered with a cloth and crowned with a vase of flowers.
The boxes containing Claude’s library were harder to ignore. They were in front of the shelves in my study and they got under my feet nearly every day. To reach my files I had to move the boxes around. I cursed them often. Finally, it occurred to me to stack them in a tower in one corner, but then I had to move them to open the cupboard and the round of shifting and cursing continued.
After a year or two — I think this would have been towards the end of 2003 — I decided to catalogue the personal library. Here was a manageable task, something practical I could accomplish in a defined period of time. Once the books had been listed, there would be no reason to keep them, unless something remarkable turned up. I could take them all to a charity shop or a second-hand dealer and shed some of the burden.