"Elizabeth Costello" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coetzee J. M.)

2. The Novel in Africa

At a dinner party she meets X, whom she has not seen in years. Is he still teaching at the University of Queensland, she asks? No, he replies, he has retired and now works the cruise ships, travelling the world, screening old movies, talking about Bergman and Fellini to retired people. He has never regretted the move. 'The pay is good, you get to see the world, and – do you know what? – people that age actually listen to what you have to say.' He urges her to give it a try: 'You are a prominent figure, a well-known writer. The cruise line I work for will jump at the opportunity to take you on. You will be a feather in their cap. Say but the word and I'll bring it up with my friend the director.'

The proposal interests her. She was last on a ship in 1963, when she came home from England, from the mother country. Soon after that they began to retire the great ocean-going liners, one by one, and scrap them. The end of an era. She would not mind doing it again, going to sea. She would like to call at Easter Island and St Helena, where Napoleon languished. She would like to visit Antarctica – not just to see with her own eyes those vast horizons, that barren waste, but to set foot on the seventh and last continent, feel what it is like to be a living, breathing creature in spaces of inhuman cold.

X is as good as his word. From the headquarters of Scandia Lines in Stockholm comes a fax. In December the SS Northern Lights will be sailing from Christchurch on a fifteen-day cruise to the Ross Ice Shelf, and thence onward to Cape Town. Might she be interested in joining the education and entertainment staff? Passengers on Scandia 's cruise ships are, as the letter puts it,'discriminating persons who take their leisure seriously'. The emphasis of the on-board programme will be on ornithology and cold-water ecology, but Scandia would be delighted if the noted writer Elizabeth Costello could find the time to offer a short course on, say, the contemporary novel. In return for which, and for making herself accessible to passengers, she will be offered an A-class berth, all expenses paid, with air connections to Christchurch and from Cape Town, and a substantial honorarium to boot.

It is an offer she cannot refuse. On the morning of 10 December she joins the ship in Christchurch harbour. Her cabin, she finds, is small but otherwise quite satisfactory; the young man who coordinates the entertainment and self-development programme is respectful; the passengers at her table at lunchtime, in the main retired people, people of her own generation, are pleasant and unostentatious.

On the list of her co-lecturers there is only one name she recognizes: Emmanuel Egudu, a writer from Nigeria. Their acquaintance goes back more years than she cares to remember, to a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur. Egudu had been loud and fiery then, political; her first impression was that he was a poseur. Reading him later on, she had not changed her mind. But a poseur, she now wonders: what is that? Someone who seems to be what he is not? Which of us is what he seems to be, she seems to be? And anyway, in Africa things may be different. In Africa what one takes to be posing, what one takes to be boasting, may just be manliness. Who is she to say?

Towards men, including Egudu, she has, she notices, mellowed as she has grown older. Curious, because in other respects she has become more (she chooses the word carefully) acidulous.

She runs into Egudu at the captain's cocktail party (he has come aboard late). He is wearing a vivid green dashiki, suave Italian shoes; his beard is spotted with grey, but he is still a fine figure of a man. He gives her a huge smile, enfolds her in an embrace. ' Elizabeth!' he exclaims. 'How good to see you! I had no idea! We have so much catching up to do!'

In his lexicon, it appears, catching up means talking about his own activities. He no longer spends much time in his home country, he informs her. He has become, as he puts it, 'an habitual exile, like an habitual criminal'. He has acquired American papers; he makes his living on the lecture circuit, a circuit that would appear to have expanded to encompass the cruise ships. This will be his third trip on the Northern Lights. Very restful, he finds it; very relaxing. Who would have guessed, he says, that a country boy from Africa would end up like this, in the lap of luxury? And he treats her again to his big smile, the special one.

I'm a country girl myself, she would like to say, but does not, though it is true, in part. Nothing exceptional about being from the country.

Each of the entertainment staff is expected to give a short public talk. 'Just to say who you are, where you come from,' explains the young coordinator in carefully idiomatic English. His name is Mikael; he is handsome in his tall, blond, Swedish way, but dour, too dour for her taste.

Her talk is advertised as 'The Future of the Novel', Egudu's as 'The Novel in Africa '. She is scheduled to speak on the morning of their first day out to sea; he will speak the same afternoon. In the evening comes 'The Lives of Whales', with sound recordings.

Mikael himself does the introduction. 'The famous Australian writer,' he calls her, 'author of The House on Eccles Street and many other novels, whom we are truly privileged to have in our midst.' It vexes her to be billed once again as the author of a book from so far in the past, but there is nothing to be done about that.

'The Future of the Novel' is a talk she has given before, in fact many times before, expanded or contracted depending on the occasion. No doubt there are expanded and contracted versions of the novel in Africa and the lives of whales too. For the present occasion she has chosen the contracted version.

'The future of the novel is not a subject I am much interested in,' she begins, trying to give her auditors a jolt. 'In fact the future in general does not much interest me. What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.

'Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction. The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

'The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of the future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.'

The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences  and  and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so, the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present to produce the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel.

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

If she has trouble believing in her argument, she has even greater trouble in preventing that absence of conviction from emerging in her voice. Despite the fact that she is the noted author of, as Mikael says, The House on Eccles Street and other books, despite the fact that her audience is by and large of her generation and ought therefore to share with her a common past, the applause at the end lacks enthusiasm.

For Emmanuel's talk she sits inconspicuously in the back row. They have in the meantime had a good lunch; they are sailing south on what are still placid seas; there is every chance that some of the good folk in the audience – numbering, she would guess, about fifty – are going to nod off. In fact, who knows, she might nod off herself; in which case it would be best to do so unnoticed.

'You will be wondering why I have chosen as my topic the novel in Africa,' Emmanuel begins, in his effortlessly booming voice. 'What is so special about the novel in Africa? What makes it different, different enough to demand our attention today?

'Well, let us see. We all know, to begin with, that the alphabet, the idea of the alphabet, did not grow up in Africa. Many things grew up in Africa, more than you might think, but not the alphabet. The alphabet had to be brought in, first by Arabs, then again by Westerners. In Africa writing itself, to say nothing of novel-writing, is a recent affair.

'Is the novel possible without novel-writing, you may ask? Did we in Africa have a novel before our friends the colonizers appeared on our doorstep? For the time being, let me merely propose the question. Later I may return to it.

'A second remark: reading is not a typically African recreation. Music, yes; dancing, yes; eating, yes; talking, yes – lots of talking. But reading, no, and particularly not reading fat novels. Reading has always struck us Africans as a strangely solitary business. It makes us uneasy. When we Africans visit great European cities like Paris and London, we notice how people on trains take books out of their bags or their pockets and retreat into solitary worlds. Each time the book comes out it is like a sign held up. Leave me alone, I am reading, says the sign. What I am reading is more interesting than you could possibly be.

'Well, we are not like that in Africa. We do not like to cut ourselves off from other people and retreat into private worlds. Nor are we used to our neighbours retreating into private worlds. Africa is a continent where people share. Reading a book by yourself is not sharing. It is like eating alone or talking alone. It is not our way. We find it a bit crazy.'

We, we, we, she thinks. We Africans. It is not our way. She has never liked we in its exclusive form. Emmanuel may have grown older, he may have acquired the blessing of American papers, but he has not changed. Africanness: a special identity, a special fate.

She has visited Africa: the highlands of Kenya, Zimbabwe, the Okavango swamps. She has seen Africans reading, ordinary Africans, at bus stops, in trains. They were not reading novels, admittedly, they were reading newspapers. But is a newspaper not as much an avenue to a private world as a novel?

'In the third place,' continues Egudu, 'in the great, beneficent global system under which we live today, it has been allotted to Africa to be the home of poverty. Africans have no money for luxuries. In Africa, a book must offer you a return for the money you spend on it. What do I stand to learn by reading this story, the African will ask? How will it advance me? We may deplore the attitude of the African, ladies and gentlemen, but we cannot dismiss it. We must take it seriously and try to understand it.

'We do of course make books in Africa. But the books we make are for children, teaching-books in the simplest sense. If you want to make money publishing books in Africa, you must put out books that will be prescribed for schools, that will be bought in quantity by the education system to be read and studied in the classroom. It does not pay to publish writers with serious ambitions, writers who write about adults and matters that concern adults. Such writers must look elsewhere for their salvation.

'Of course, ladies and gentlemen of the Northern Lights, it is not the whole picture I am giving you here today. To give you the whole picture would take all afternoon. I am giving you only a crude, hasty sketch. Of course you will find publishers in Africa, one here, one there, who will support local writers even if they will never make money. But in the broad picture, storytelling provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers.

'So much for the generalities, depressing as they may be. Now let us turn our attention to ourselves, to you and to me. Here I am, you know who I am, it tells you in the programme: Emmanuel Egudu, from Nigeria, author of novels, poems, plays, winner, even, of a Commonwealth Literary Award (Africa Division). And here you are, wealthy folk, or at least comfortable, as you say (I am not wrong, am I?), from North America and Europe and of course let us not forget our Australasian representation, and perhaps I have even heard the odd word of Japanese whispered in the corridors, taking a cruise on this splendid ship, on your way to inspect one of the remoter corners of the globe, to check it out, perhaps to check it off your list. Here you are, after a good lunch, listening to this African fellow talk.

'Why, I imagine you asking yourselves, is this African fellow on board our ship? Why isn't he back at his desk in the land of his birth following his vocation, if he really is a writer, writing books? Why is he going on about the African novel, a subject that can be of only the most peripheral concern to us?

'The short answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that the African fellow is earning a living. In his own country, as I have tried to explain, he cannot earn a living. In his own country (I will not labour the point, I mention it only because it holds true for so many fellow African writers) he is in fact less than welcome. In his own country he is what is called a dissident intellectual, and dissident intellectuals must tread carefully, even in the new Nigeria.

'So here he is, abroad in the wide world, earning his living. Part of his living he earns by writing books that are published and read and reviewed and talked about and judged, for the most part, by foreigners. The rest of his living he earns from spin-offs of his writing. He reviews books by other writers, for example, in the press of Europe and America. He teaches in colleges in America, telling the youth of the New World about the exotic subject on which he is an expert in the same way that an elephant is an expert on elephants: the African novel. He addresses conferences; he sails on cruise ships. While so occupied, he lives in what are called temporary accommodations. All his addresses are temporary; he has no fixed abode.

'How easy do you think it is, ladies and gentlemen, for this fellow to be true to his essence as writer when there are all these strangers to please, month after month – publishers, readers, critics, students, all of them armed not only with their own ideas about what writing is or should be, what the novel is or should be, what Africa is or should be, but also about what being pleased is or should be? Do you think it is possible for this fellow to remain unaffected by all the pressure on him to please others, to be for them what they think he should be, to produce for them what they think he should produce?

'It may have escaped your attention, but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence. There is much I could say about essence and its ramifications; but this is not the right occasion. Nevertheless, you must be asking yourselves, how in these anti-essential days, these days of fleeting identities that we pick up and wear and discard like clothing, can I justify speaking of my essence as an African writer?

'Around essence and essentialism, I should remind you, there is a long history of turmoil in African thought. You may have heard of the négritude movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Négritude, according to the originators of the movement, is the essential substratum that binds all Africans together and makes them uniquely African – not only the Africans of Africa but Africans of the great African diaspora in the New World and now in Europe.

'I want to quote some words to you from the Senegalese writer and thinker Cheikh Hamidou Kane. Cheikh Hamidou was being questioned by an interviewer, a European. I am puzzled, said the interviewer, by your praise for certain writers for being truly African. In view of the fact that the writers in question write in a foreign language (specifically French) and are published and, for the most part, read in a foreign country (specifically France), can they truly be called African writers? Are they not more properly called French writers of African origin? Is language not a more important matrix than birth?

'The following is Cheikh Hamidou's reply: "The writers I speak of are truly African because they are born in Africa, they live in Africa, their sensibility is African… What distinguishes them lies in life experience, in sensitivities, in rhythm, in style." He goes on: "A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him… We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition."

'There is nothing mystical in Cheikh Hamidou's response, nothing metaphysical, nothing racist. He merely gives proper weight to those intangibles of culture which, because they are not easily pinned down in words, are often passed over. The way that people live in their bodies. The way they move their hands. The way they walk. The way they smile or frown. The lilt of their speech. The way they sing. The timbre of their voices. The way they dance. The way they touch each other; how the hand lingers; the feel of the fingers. The way they make love. The way they lie after they have made love. The way they think. The way they sleep.

'We African novelists can embody these qualities in our writings (and let me remind you at this point that the word novel, when it entered the languages of Europe, had the vaguest of meanings: it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along) – we African novelists can embody these qualities as no one else can because we have not lost touch with the body. The African novel, the true African novel, is an oral novel. On the page it is inert, only half alive; it wakes up when the voice, from deep in the body, breathes life into the words, speaks them aloud.

'The African novel is thus, I would claim, in its very being, and before the first word is written, a critique of the Western novel, which has gone so far down the road of disembodiment – think of Henry James, think of Marcel Proust – that the appropriate way and indeed the only way in which to absorb it is in silence and in solitude. And I will close these remarks, ladies and gentlemen – I see my time is running out – by quoting, in support of my position and Cheikh Hamidou's, not from an African, but from a man from the snowy wastes of Canada, the great scholar of orality Paul Zumthor.

'"Since the seventeenth century," writes Zumthor, "Europe has spread across the world like a cancer, at first stealthily, but for a while now at gathering pace, until today it ravages life forms, animals, plants, habitats, languages. With each day that passes several languages of the world disappear, repudiated, stifled… One of the symptoms of the disease has without doubt, from the beginning, been what we call literature; and literature has consolidated itself, prospered, and become what it is – one of the hugest dimensions of mankind – by denying the voice…The time has come to stop privileging writing… Perhaps great, unfortunate Africa, beggared by our political-industrial imperialism, will, because less gravely affected by writing, find itself closer to the goal than will the other continents." '

The applause when Egudu ends his talk is loud and spirited. He has spoken with force, perhaps even with passion; he has stood up for himself, for his calling, for his people; why should he not have his reward, even if what he says can have little relevance to the lives of his audience?

Nevertheless, there is something about the talk she does not like, something to do with orality and the mystique of orality. Always, she thinks, the body that is insisted on, pushed forward, and the voice, dark essence of the body, welling up from within it. Négritude: she had thought Emmanuel would grow out of that pseudo-philosophy. Evidently he has not. Evidently he has decided to keep it as part of his professional pitch. Well, good luck to him. There is still time, ten minutes at least, for questions. She hopes the questions will be searching, will search him out.

The first questioner is, if she is to judge by accent, from the Midwest of the United States. The first novel she ever read by an African, decades ago, says the woman, was by Amos Tutuola, she forgets the title. ('The Palm Wine Drinkard', suggests Egudu. 'Yes, that's it,' she replies.) She was captivated by it. She thought it was the harbinger of great things to come. So she was disappointed, terribly disappointed, to hear that Tutuola was not respected in his own country, that educated Nigerians disparaged him and considered his reputation in the West unmerited. Was this true? Was Tutuola the kind of oral novelist our lecturer had in mind? What has happened to Tutuola? Had more of his books been translated?

No, responds Egudu, Tutuola has not been translated any further, in fact he has not been translated at all, at least not into English. Why not? Because he did not need to be translated. Because he had written in English all along. 'Which is the root of the problem that the questioner raises. The language of Amos Tutuola is English, but not standard English, not the English that Nigerians of the 1950s went to school and college to learn. It is the language of a semi-educated clerk, a man with no more than elementary schooling, barely comprehensible to an outsider, fixed up for publication by British editors. Where Tutuola's writing was frankly illiterate they corrected it; what they refrained from correcting was what seemed authentically Nigerian to them, that is to say, what to their ears sounded picturesque, exotic, folkloric.

'From what I have just been saying,' Egudu continues, 'you may imagine that I too disapprove of Tutuola or the Tutuola phenomenon. Far from it. Tutuola was repudiated by so-called educated Nigerians because they were embarrassed by him – embarrassed that they might be lumped with him as natives who did not know how to write proper English. As for me, I am happy to be a native, a Nigerian native, a native Nigerian. In this battle I am on Tutuola's side. Tutuola is or was a gifted storyteller. I am glad you like him. Several more books penned by him were put out in England, though none, I would say, as good as The Palm Wine Drinkard. And, yes, he is the kind of writer I was referring to, an oral writer.

'I have responded to you at length because the case ofTutuola is so instructive. What makes Tutuola stand out is that he did not adjust his language to the expectations – or to what he might have thought, had he been less naive, would be the expectations – of the foreigners who would read and judge him. Not knowing better, he wrote as he spoke. He therefore had to yield in a particularly helpless way to being packaged, for the West, as an African exotic.

'But, ladies and gentlemen, who among African writers is not exotic? The truth is, to the West we Africans are all exotic, when we are not simply savage. That is our fate. Even here, on this ship sailing towards the continent that ought to be the most exotic of all, and the most savage, the continent with no human standards at all, I can sense I am exotic.'

There is a ripple of laughter. Egudu smiles his big smile, engaging, to all appearances spontaneous. But she cannot believe it is a true smile, cannot believe it comes from the heart, if that is where smiles come from. If being an exotic is the fate Egudu has embraced for himself, then it is a terrible fate. She cannot believe he does not know that, know it and in his heart revolt against it. The one black face in this sea of white.

'But let me return to your question,' Egudu continues. 'You have read Tutuola, now read my countryman Ben Okri. Amos Tutuola's is a very simple, very stark case. Okri's is not. Okri is an heir of Tutuola's, or they are the heirs of common ancestors. But Okri negotiates the contradictions of being himself for other people (excuse the jargon, it is just a native showing off) in a much more complex way. Read Okri. You will find the experience instructive.'

'The Novel in Africa ' was intended, like all the shipboard talks, to be a light affair. Nothing on the shipboard programme is intended to be a heavy affair. Egudu, unfortunately, is threatening to be heavy. With a discreet nod, the entertainment director, the tall Swedish boy in his light blue uniform, signals from the wings; and gracefully, easily, Egudu obeys, bringing his show to an end.

The crew of the Northern Lights is Russian, as are the stewards. In fact, everyone but the officers and the corps of guides and managers is Russian. Music on board is furnished by a balalaika orchestra – five men, five women. The accompaniment they provide at the dinner hour is too schmaltzy for her taste; after dinner, in the ballroom, the music they play becomes livelier.

The leader of the orchestra, and occasional singer, is a blonde in her early thirties. She has a smattering of English, enough to make the announcements. 'We play piece that is called in Russian My Little Dove. My Little Dove.' Her dove rhymes with stove rather than love. With its trills and swoops, the piece sounds Hungarian, sounds gypsy, sounds Jewish, sounds everything but Russian; but who is she, Elizabeth Costello, country girl, to say?

She is there with a couple from her table, having a drink. They are from Manchester, they inform her. They are looking forward to her course on the novel, in which they have both enrolled. The man is long-bodied, sleek, silvery: she thinks of him as a gannet. How he has made his money he does not say and she does not enquire. The woman is petite, sensual. Not at all her idea of Manchester. Steve and Shirley. She guesses they are not married.

To her relief, the conversation soon turns from her and the books she has written to the subject of ocean currents, about which Steve appears to know all there is to know, and to the tiny beings, tons of them to the square mile, whose life consists in being swept in serene fashion through these icy waters, eating and being eaten, multiplying and dying, ignored by history. Ecological tourists, that is what Steve and Shirley call themselves. Last year the Amazon, this year the Southern Ocean.

Egudu is standing at the entranceway looking around. She gives a wave and he comes over. 'Join us,' she says. 'Emmanuel. Shirley. Steve.'

They compliment Emmanuel on his lecture. 'Very interesting,' says Steve. 'A completely new perspective you gave me.'

'I was thinking, as you spoke,' says Shirley more reflectively, 'I don't know your books, I'm sorry to say, but for you as a writer, as the kind of oral writer you described, maybe the printed book is not the right medium. Have you ever thought about composing straight on to tape? Why make the detour through print? Why even make a detour through writing? Speak your story direct to your listener.'

'What a clever idea!' says Emmanuel. 'It won't solve all the problems of the African writer, but it's worth thinking about.'

'Why won't it solve your problems?'

'Because, I regret to say, Africans will want more than just to sit in silence listening to a disc spinning in a little machine. That would be too much like idolatry. Africans need the living presence, the living voice.'

The living voice. There is silence as the three of them contemplate the living voice.

'Are you sure about that?' she says, interposing for the first time. 'Africans don't object to listening to the radio. A radio is a voice but not a living voice, a living presence. What you are demanding, I think, Emmanuel, is not just a voice but a performance: a living actor performing the text for you. If that is so, if that is what the African demands, then I agree, a recording cannot take its place. But the novel was never intended to be the script of a performance. From the beginning the novel has made a virtue of not depending on being performed. You can't have both live performance and cheap, handy distribution. It's the one or the other. If that is indeed what you want the novel to be – a pocket-sized block of paper that is at the same time a living being – then I agree, the novel has no future in Africa.'

'No future,' says Egudu reflectively. 'That sounds very bleak, Elizabeth. Do you have a way out to offer us?'

'A way out? It's not for me to offer you a way out. What I do have to offer is a question. Why are there so many African novelists around and yet no African novel worth speaking of? That seems to me the real question. And you yourself gave a clue to the answer in your talk. Exoticism. Exoticism and its seductions.'

'Exoticism and its seductions? You intrigue us, Elizabeth. Tell us what you mean.'

If it were only a matter of Emmanuel and herself she would, at this point, walk out. She is tired of his jeering undertone, exasperated. But before strangers, before customers, they have a front to maintain, she and he both.

'The English novel,' she says, 'is written in the first place by English people for English people. That is what makes it the English novel. The Russian novel is written by Russians for Russians. But the African novel is not written by Africans for Africans. African novelists may write about Africa, about African experiences, but they seem to me to be glancing over their shoulder all the time they write, at the foreigners who will read them. Whether they like it or not, they have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers. Yet how can you explore a world in all its depth if at the same time you are having to explain it to outsiders? It is like a scientist trying to give full, creative attention to his investigations while at the same time explaining what he is doing to a class of ignorant students. It is too much for one person, it can't be done, not at the deepest level. That, it seems to me, is the root of your problem. Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write.'

'Very good, Elizabeth!' says Egudu. 'You really understand; you put it very well. The explorer as explainer.' He reaches out, pats her on the shoulder.

If we were alone, she thinks, I would slap him.

'If it is true that I really understand' – she is ignoring Egudu now, speaking to the couple from Manchester – 'then that is only because we in Australia have been through similar trials and have come out at the other end. We finally got out of the habit of writing for strangers when a proper Australian readership grew to maturity, something that happened in the 1960s. A readership, not a writership – that already existed. We got out of the habit of writing for strangers when our market, our Australian market, decided that it could afford to support a home-grown literature. That is the lesson we can offer. That is what Africa could learn from us.'

Emmanuel is silent, though he has not lost his ironic smile.

'It's interesting to hear the two of your talk,' says Steve. 'You treat writing as a business.You identify a market and then set about supplying it. I was expecting something different.'

'Really? What were you expecting?'

'You know: where writers find their inspiration, how they dream up characters, and so forth. Sorry, pay no attention to me, I'm just an amateur.'

Inspiration. Receiving the spirit into oneself. Now that he has brought out the word he is embarrassed. There is an awkward silence.

Emmanuel speaks. 'Elizabeth and I go way back. We have had lots of disagreements in our time. That doesn't alter things between us – does it, Elizabeth? We are colleagues, fellow writers. Part of the great, worldwide writing fraternity.'

Fraternity. He is challenging her, trying to get a rise out of her before these strangers. But she is suddenly too sick of it all to take up the challenge. Not fellow writers, she thinks: fellow entertainers. Why else are we on board this expensive ship, making ourselves available, as the invitation so candidly put it, to people who bore us and whom we are beginning to bore?

He is goading her because he is restless. She knows him well enough to see that. He has had enough of the African novel, enough of her and her friends, wants something or someone new.

Their chanteuse has come to the end of her set. There is a light ripple of applause. She bows, bows a second time, takes up her balalaika. The band strikes up a Cossack dance.

What irritates her about Emmanuel, what she has the good sense not to bring up in front of Steve and Shirley because it will lead only to unseemliness, is the way he turns every disagreement into a personal matter. As for his beloved oral novel, on which he has built his sideline as a lecturer, she finds the idea muddled at its very core. A novel about people who live in an oral culture, she would like to say, is not an oral novel. Just as a novel about women isn't a women's novel.

In her opinion, all of Emmanuel's talk of an oral novel, a novel that has kept in touch with the human voice and hence with the human body, a novel that is not disembodied like the Western novel but speaks the body and the body's truth, is just another way of propping up the mystique of the African as the last repository of primal human energies. Emmanuel blames his Western publishers and his Western readers for driving him to exoticize Africa; but Emmanuel has a stake in exoticizing himself. Emmanuel, she happens to know, has not written a book of substance in ten years. When she first got to know him he could still honourably call himself a writer. Now he makes his living by talking. His books are there as credentials, no more. A fellow entertainer he may be; a fellow writer he is not, not any longer. He is on the lecture circuit for the money, and for other rewards too. Sex, for instance. He is dark, he is exotic, he is in touch with life's energies; if he is no longer young, at least he carries himself well, wears his years with distinction. What Swedish girl would not be a pushover?

She finishes her drink. 'I'm retiring,' she says. 'Good night, Steve, Shirley. See you tomorrow. Good night, Emmanuel.'

She wakes up in utter stillness. The clock says four thirty. The ship's engines have stopped. She glances through the porthole. There is fog outside, but through the fog she can glimpse land no more than a kilometre away. It must be Macquarie Island: she had thought they would not arrive for hours yet.

She dresses and emerges into the corridor. At the same moment the door to cabin A-230 opens and the Russian comes out, the singer. She is wearing the same outfit as last night, the port-wine blouse and wide black trousers; she carries her boots in her hand. In the unkind overhead light she looks nearer to forty than to thirty. They avert their eyes as they pass each other.

A-230 is Egudu's cabin, she knows that.

She makes her way to the upper deck. Already there are a handful of passengers, snugly dressed against the cold, leaning against the railings, peering down.

The sea beneath them is alive with what seem to be fish, large, glossy-backed black fish that bob and tumble and leap in the swell. She has never seen anything like it.

'Penguins,' says the man next to her. 'King penguins. They have come to greet us. They don't know what we are.'

'Oh,' she says. And then: 'So innocent? Are they so innocent?'

The man regards her oddly, turns back to his companion.

The Southern Ocean. Poe never laid eyes on it, Edgar Allan, but criss-crossed it in his mind. Boatloads of dark islanders paddled out to meet him. They seemed ordinary folk just like us, but when they smiled and showed their teeth the teeth were not white but black. It sent a shiver down his spine, and rightly so. The seas full of things that seem like us but are not. Sea-flowers that gape and devour. Eels, each a barbed maw with a gut hanging from it. Teeth are for tearing, the tongue is for churning the swill around: that is the truth of the oral. Someone should tell Emmanuel. Only by an ingenious economy, an accident of evolution, does the organ of ingestion sometimes get to be used for song.

They will stand off Macquarie until noon, long enough for those passengers who so desire to visit the island. She has put her name down for the visiting party.

The first boat leaves after breakfast. The approach to the landing is difficult, through thick beds of kelp and across shelving rock. In the end one of the sailors has to half help her ashore, half carry her, as if she were an old old woman. The sailor has blue eyes, blond hair. Through his waterproofs she feels his youthful strength. In his arms she rides as safe as a baby. 'Thank you!' she says gratefully when he sets her down; but to him it is nothing, just a service he is paid dollars to do, no more personal than the service of a hospital nurse.

She has read about Macquarie Island. In the nineteenth century it was the hub of the penguin industry. Hundreds of thousands of penguins were clubbed to death here and flung into cast-iron steam boilers to be broken down into useful oil and useless residue. Or not clubbed to death, merely herded with sticks up a gangplank and over the edge into the seething cauldron.

Yet their twentieth-century descendants seem to have learned nothing. Still they innocently swim out to welcome visitors; still they call out greetings to them as they approach the rookeries (Ho! Ho! they call, for all the world like gruff little gnomes), and allow them to approach close enough to touch them, to stroke their sleek breasts.

At eleven the boats will take them back to the ship. Until then they are free to explore the island. There is an albatross colony on the hillside, they are advised; they are welcome to photograph the birds, but should not approach too closely, should not alarm them. It is breeding season.

She wanders away from the rest of the landing party, and after a while finds herself on a plateau above the coastline, crossing a vast bed of matted grass.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is something before her. At first she thinks it is a rock, smooth and white mottled with grey. Then she sees it is a bird, bigger than any bird she has seen before. She recognizes the long, dipping beak, the huge sternum. An albatross.

The albatross regards her steadily and, so it seems to her, with amusement. Sticking out from beneath it is a smaller version of the same long beak. The fledgling is more hostile. It opens its beak, gives a long, soundless cry of warning.

So she and the two birds remain, inspecting each other.

Before the fall, she thinks. This is how it must have been before the fall. I could miss the boat, stay here. Ask God to take care of me.

There is someone behind her. She turns. It is the Russian singer, dressed now in a dark green anorak with the hood down, her hair under a kerchief.

An albatross,' she remarks to the woman, speaking softly. 'That is the English word. I don't know what they call themselves.'

The woman nods. The great bird regards them calmly, no more afraid of two than of one.

'Is Emmanuel with you?' she says.

'No. On ship.'

The woman does not seem keen to talk, but she presses on anyway. 'You are a friend of his, I know. I am too, or have been, in the past. May I ask: what do you see in him?'

It is an odd question, presumptuous in its intimacy, even rude. But it seems to her that on this island, on a visit that will never be repeated, anything can be said.

'What I see?' says the woman.

'Yes. What do you see? What do you like about him? What is the source of his charm?'

The woman shrugs. Her hair is dyed, she can now see. Forty if a day, probably with a household to support back home, one of those Russian establishments with a crippled mother and a husband who drinks too much and beats her and a layabout son and a daughter with a shaven head and purple lipstick. A woman who can sing a little but will one of these days, sooner rather than later, be over the hill. Playing the balalaika to foreigners, singing Russian kitsch, picking up tips.

'He is free. You speak Russian? No?'

She shakes her head.

'Deutsch?'

'A little.'

'Er ist freigebig. Ein guter Mann!

Freigebig, generous, spoken with the heavy g of Russian. Is Emmanuel generous? She does not know, one way or the other. Not the first word that would occur to her, though. Large, maybe. Large in his gestures.

'Aber kaum zu vertrauen] she remarks to the woman. Years since she last used the language. Is that what the two of them spoke together in bed last night: German, imperial tongue of the new Europe? Kaum zu vertrauen, not to be trusted.

The woman shrugs again. 'Die Zeit ist immer kurz. Man kann nicht alles haben! There is a pause. The woman speaks again. 'Auch die Stimme. Sie macht daß man – she searches for the word – 'man schaudert]

Schaudern. Shudder. The voice makes one shudder. Probably does, when one is breast to breast with it. Between her and the Russian passes what is perhaps the beginning of a smile. As for the bird, they have been there long enough, the bird is losing interest. Only the fledgling, peering out from beneath its mother, is still wary of the intruders.

Is she jealous? How could she be? Still, hard to accept, being excluded from the game. Like being a child again, with a child's bedtime.

The voice. Her thoughts go back to Kuala Lumpur, when she was young, or nearly young, when she spent three nights in a row with Emmanuel Egudu, also young then. 'The oral poet,' she said to him teasingly. 'Show me what an oral poet can do.' And he laid her out, lay upon her, put his lips to her ears, opened them, breathed his breath into her, showed her.