Michelle Sacks

Michelle Sacks was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She currently lives in Germany where she works as a copywriter. Her interests include loved ones near and far, travel, highbrow literature, art with angst, film and film festivals, acts of kindness, food made with love and butter, tortured poets, second-hand book stores, roses that smell like roses, other people’s family photographs, melancholy music, things with a history, good grammar, conversations with strangers, onomatopoeia, head massages, classical pianists, bold changes and clean teeth.

Man Dies Alone

The man, in his shop filled with treasures, is a relic from the past, a character out of a dusty book with pages yellow and weary. He is so far from home and yet this small corner of the world is the only home he has known these past sixty or so years. It is strange to him, that all this time in a place can do so little to dull an accent or a memory. Time can blur but not erase, and this is where he was misled. He calls himself Michael, although it is not the name his mother called him when she first clutched his red and squirming body to her breast. But that was another time and another life. He is no longer that boy and wishes often that he never had been.

Here in his dusty store, filled to the brim with books old as himself and the best ones older still, he has vanished himself into the world and its history, drowned himself book by book until there is nothing left to hide. Tucked away in a side alley of a seaside town on the very tip of the African continent, he has found his refuge from the world, from his former self and all that was entangled in that pitiable incarnation. Perhaps initially he thought this life would be temporary, a way to bide his time until enough years passed and the threat of discovery abated. But the years snake up on one another, gathering in volume until they are too great in number to be outwitted. It was suddenly too late to consider another option; the years spent too numerous and the years remaining too few.

But in truth, he likes the bookstore anyway. The quiet, the solitude. It is an environment that suits him and he feels that he belongs here in a way he has never belonged anywhere else. There is a handful of customers who come into the shop to browse his collection or request a particular title. They are thankfully not loud or chatty; the more serious collectors are not after small talk and the assortment of tourists and passersby who come through his door are mostly respectfully silent and decorous. Few people buy anything, most being happy enough to page through the tomes of forgotten words and breathe in the smell of dust and aged leather bindings. He is fortunate that he does not rely on an income from the sale of books. The shop’s purpose is only to give him a purpose, and of course a guise of middle-class respectability.

He is not what one would describe as a people’s person. In fact, he abhors mindless chatter, and barely manages to conceal his disdain for most people. Over the years he has managed to create a reputation for himself as somewhat of a recluse; the locals have long since stopped trying to engage him in awkward conversations that leave them perplexed and him flustered. Keeps himself to himself, they usually warn newcomers to the town, lest they embarrass themselves with attempts at friendly banter. A solitary life is not an easy one to cultivate. People are by nature suspicious of those who prefer their own company to that of friends and colleagues. They are uncomfortable with loners, perhaps fearful that it might be contagious, the dreaded condition of being alone. Here though, in the middle of nowhere and the end of the world, it has not been overly difficult to keep to himself. Those who encounter him by chance in the supermarket or at the little café where he likes to drink his morning coffee are by now fully aware of his preference for silence, and oblige him with little more than a polite nod. It is difficult in a town so small to avoid one’s neighbours, and yet he has managed somehow to master it, only rarely finding himself confronted with a face he must greet.

There is one curious exception to his silence, in the form of the woman who cleans his house a few days a week. She is a coloured woman in her late thirties called Minnie, the niece of his previous cleaner who had become too old to work. Minnie’s aunt Miriam was a short, stout woman who had kept his house spotless for over forty years. She had been content with his silence, used to getting on with the job and stopping to chat only when she needed to ask for a day off or a raise. She became a familiar presence in his life and he had been somewhat melancholy the day she came to him and informed him that she could no longer work. It had struck him then that theirs had been the most enduring relationship of his life.

Minnie had been sent as her aunt’s replacement. She was as different from Miriam in temperament as she was in efficiency, perhaps because she was of a generation for whom servitude was no longer the sole option. She never called him master the way Miriam had done, and he found that he preferred this. Minnie always arrives at his door glamorous and heavily made up before changing into her work clothes. She tells him of her boyfriends, who are numerous, and of her little daughter who lives in the care of a cousin in Wellington. She never asks him questions about himself, only talks about her own life while he listens and absorbs the details. It was a shock at first, this intrusion into his world of silence, but slowly, over the years, he has grown accustomed to hearing her voice fill his home. In fact, on the days when she does not come, he finds himself strangely disappointed. It is a relationship entirely devoid of sexual attraction – from his side, without a doubt, and from hers, well, he simply couldn’t imagine. No, what he desires from Minnie, without quite knowing why, is simple human exchange, uncomplicated and undemanding.

Old men have an air of loneliness about them whether or not they are in fact alone. They cannot help but look lost in the world, marooned in a foreign space of youth and haste. For Michael, the loneliness has been with him long since he was of an age to be considered old. It has been with him since he left his other life behind and maybe even before, in that strange and empty childhood that lingers ever so slightly in his mind. He has lived here many, many years, shrouded in the safety of anonymity and detachment. No one here knows his story, no one is curious. He has made himself invisible, wonderfully invisible, and it is surely what has saved him from discovery over the course of his lifetime. Because of course there is no danger of spilling a secret if there is no one to spill it to, and he has always been careful to avoid any situations that might invite intimacy. In truth, perhaps he never wished it anyway, for there is a part of him that has always preferred silence, stillness, the calm of solitude.

Even before, as a young man, he found himself happiest when alone. His father used to scold him for his solitary ways, yelling at him to play with the other children, to chase after girls the way his brothers did. At school, he dreaded the classes in which he was required to work in groups; he always felt let down by other people, as though they diminished him in some way.

He imagines from time to time that the past was never his past at all, but a story once heard in a bar, a story of another man entirely. It is so far away but never far enough, and still, each time the bell rings and someone walks into his store, his immediate reaction is terror. They have found me, he thinks. They have traced me from there to here, I am revealed. His mind races and he imagines his capture, public and undignified. It is only when he sees that it is simply one of the locals, or a couple of browsers wishing to spend an hour away from the howling afternoon wind that his breath returns to him and his heart resumes its fervent beating.

You look like you have just seen a ghost, they often say. Sometimes they apologise as though they were the ones at fault, intruding upon an old man’s peace. They may try to chat, to ease his nerves or make up for their intrusion, but invariably he is his usual silent self and they leave, wondering whether an old man with so slim a grasp of reality ought to be left alone minding a shop.

It is a Thursday and sunny and he is contemplating leaving early, putting the closed sign on the door and taking a walk along the endless stretch of beach before the afternoon wind comes up and sends everyone home. He seldom leaves before closing time, mostly out of sheer habit, but his mood has been unusually bleak the past week and he feels in need of some sea air. He puts his hat on his head and wraps a light scarf around his neck to keep off the chill. On the beach, he scours the sand for shells still intact, bending with great effort to retrieve the ones he does find. He used to be an avid collector when he first arrived on these shores. He had never before seen the beach, had never felt sand between his toes or the bite of the indifferent sea on his bare skin. It was all new and wonderful and he timidly allowed himself to enjoy the newness of the experience, though the pleasure of it seemed to him to be entirely and almost sinfully undeserved.

The shells he collected then were beautiful, exotic specimens, treasures of the deep. On some days the shoreline was awash with colour, with delicate corals and giant queen conchs and urchins cracking underfoot because there were too many to avoid. He remembered a children’s book that was read to him once, perhaps by his school teacher, in which a young boy puts his ear to a shell and hears all the secrets of all the world. He tried it too, many times, straining for the sounds of a long-lost life, and always there was only the sound of the sea on this patch of paradise, monotonous but faithful. It was not so bad as exiles go, he knew that much. He knew many who had it worse, and many for whom any exile at all would have been better than none.

He watched the shells change slowly over the decades. The tides never did but their bounty became less and less abundant as the years passed and one era gave way to the next. He has visited the beach every day for the last sixty years, religiously and devoutly walking the stretch of coast in silent contemplation. His reward in the early years was finding a shell, secreting it into a pocket and taking it home to his bare shelves, filled only with books and the emptiness of his existence. These days there are not so many to choose from, only mussels, recently vacated, and the odd abandoned periwinkle. He seldom takes anything home to his shelves, only stoops to remove litter when it is tangled amongst clumps of seaweed.

The town too has changed over the years and he has stood by and watched, an impartial observer, as older houses have been replaced with new ones of glass and marble. The small corner shops became chain stores; the butcher went out of business because he could not compete with the prices of the newly opened supermarket. He thought it was unfortunate, this transformation. The place was now not so different from anywhere else. In summer, the crowds descended, and the beach was covered with people staking their claim to a patch of sand like early pioneers. Michael despised this time of year, felt continually harassed and cornered and avoided the beach until late at night when he could walk in peace.

He thinks, from time to time, about ending his life, this dull and unbeloved existence. He would not be missed; it might even go entirely unnoticed. In his lower moments he has even contemplated how he might achieve his end, preferring something bloodless and clean. He supposes Minnie would be the one to discover his body, and he would not wish to terrify her, or give her vast amounts of mopping to do. In the end, it is not this that stops him, it is fear. Not so much of death but of not living out his sentence; this self-imposed but necessary exile from the world. Of course it is ridiculous, a contradiction in terms, but he will feel that he is cheating if he does not continue to live on, barely and begrudgingly. And he truly believes that there must be something to it, a higher power seeing to it that his years are long and his pleasures few. He is ninety-one years old. Alive longer than anyone ought to be, really, and especially someone like him. But there are no signs of an end being near, no signs of illness or a lurking murky death. He has aches and pains in his joints, and a mild cough from smoking his pipe. But apart from that, nothing. He checks himself frequently in the macabre but always thwarted hope that something may reveal itself. But the moles do not grow, the lumps fail to appear. His organs conspire against him, and keep him well.

He wonders sometimes what age his parents might have been when they died. His brothers too, for they must surely by now be long in the ground. Along with most of the family, aunts and uncles, cousins. All of them so virile in memory, full of self-satisfaction and wellbeing, vigorously alive and anticipating the glorious future they believed in. He believed in it too, back then, because how could he not? It was a promise, there was no doubt that it could be so. He remembers family dinners, held in his mother’s ostentatious dining room with the silver and crystal shining and the table groaning with food; roasted pork and elaborate cakes and wine aplenty. His relatives would be crowded around the table, eating and drinking and discussing the transformation of their city, eyes shining and bright with anticipation, fingers greasy from chewing the crackling. They could not have known how it would end. He stops himself from dwelling on this too long and too often. It does him no good.

The ghosts come to him mostly at night, in the darkness of his bedroom. They demand nothing of him, just an acknowledgment that they are there, that they once existed. Men and women and children, all of them pale and ghastly, ravaged by cruelty and the persistent inhumanity of the world. Sometimes the ghosts are on the television, in the newspapers, though less so as time passes. The stories never end.

Tales of unspeakable horrors; of heroes and villains. An inexhaustible supply of facts, even now when there are so few witnesses remaining. When he first arrived on this faraway patch of land, he imagined foolishly that Cape Town was far away enough, that he might somehow escape it all. But there were too many people who knew too many things, who had family or knew people who had family. A global network of sorrow and loss. He needed to remove himself further still, and that, of course, is how he ended up here, alone and undisturbed.

It is strange to think that it was human kindness that allowed him safe passage away from the chaos of Europe. A kindness he never felt he deserved. He never knew why it was that the man chose him of all people to save, when there were so many others more desperate for the chance of escape. His name was Commandant Mank, a tall, wiry man with grey hair and eyes the colour of a cloudless June sky. He was not like the others, the ones who took pleasure in the humiliation and the torture. The ones who were enthusiastic members of the Party and vigorous enforcers of its laws. The ones who did not hesitate to treat a man like a dog and kick a pregnant woman in the belly. The ones who were unaffected by dead babies or elderly men begging to have their lives taken in exchange for that of their frail wives. In the aftermath, these men said they were forced to do such things. They had families to protect, children to stay alive for. There was no choice, they pleaded. No choice but to do as ordered. For some it was true, maybe. For others, it was more than a job. It was sport. His stomach always turns at the memories, sometimes he cannot even breathe. Oh God, the things he had seen. And done, do not forget done.

Michael dusts the sand off his feet and puts his worn shoes back on. His toes are gnarled with arthritis and he notices that his nails need to be clipped again. It is work he dreads, since these days the undignified struggle to bend over far enough quite winds him. He thinks of his great-grandfather, who at ninety-five was still alive and well. He went to the therme every day of his life, swore always that it was the powers of the waters that kept him young. He once carved Michael a train set out of a tree that had stood in his back garden. Michael played listlessly with the trains, and thought of the lost pine.

He walks slowly back to the bookshop to pick up his car and drive home. His house is small, cramped even for one and without the usual charms of a country cottage. He has no paintings on the walls, no photographs or mirrors. When Minnie first started working for him she asked if he had just moved in. But he has lived in this same house for the greater part of his life. Like him, it reveals nothing and is only a shell of what once was or might have been.

He puts the kettle on to make a pot of tea and gets to work preparing his dinner, a sandwich of supermarket ham and a slice of cheese. The bread is two days old and hard but he chews slowly and washes the food down with sips of tea. He has long since ceased caring about food. He requires little and has never truly been able to enjoy a meal since arriving here. Always he is overwhelmed with guilt that manifests itself as a physical sensation; a mild revulsion even. How can one eat after witnessing so much hunger? He finishes his meal and moves to the living room where a single armchair dominates the sparse room. There would not be a spare seat even if he wanted to entertain a guest. He contemplates his book, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he re-reads every year. He is a fan of grim repentance after all. But tonight he is too tired, and simply sits awhile, staring at the walls around him that have done so fine a job of keeping the world out.

He owns the house, paid a pittance for it in cash from the money given to him by Mank. Now he is struggling to find someone to leave it to when he dies, for there is no one. Maybe Minnie. Maybe she could come and live here, bring her daughter and her aunt too. It would be cramped, but surely not more so than their current living conditions. Yes, he thinks this is likely what he will do. It is curious, but he never once in all his life imagined that he might have a family, a wife and children. Even before, when it might have been possible, he never quite took to the idea the way young men are supposed to. There was the worry, lurking always in the back of his mind, that there might be something wrong with him, that he might be bent in an altogether different direction which would account for the absence of desire he felt towards women. The idea terrified him, and of course he never dared entertain it, let alone act upon it. His father would surely have disinherited him, perhaps even killed him. And even in this new life, free of the claustrophobic judgments of family and countrymen, he refrained from any sort of exploration into his proclivities. Over time, it became less and less troublesome to him as he began to see himself as an ascetic of sorts. There would be no pleasure in his life, permissible or forbidden. It suited his new life well; made it easy to resist human contact of any kind. Made it easy to feel appropriately punished.

Mank knew he would be hunted down but he knew also that Michael would have a chance to avoid a similar fate, being lower down on the chain of command. Less recognisable when it came to trials, witness testimonies. The aftermath of an atrocity. He wanted to save Michael because he could. Because he could give the young man who had been forced into a war and into a position he despised a chance at a different life. Because he wanted to do something good for once, though the nobleness of the gesture was surely questionable; and questioned by Michael himself. Still, he took the money, the forged documents, the stolen jewellery and all the gold watches that would fit into his pockets and pay his way across the numerous channels he would have to cross. Everyone he met on the way knew; of course they knew. His face said it all. His posture, not yet that of a fugitive but of one still in command, like one of those deposed dictators who wear the uniform of their former regime till the day they die.

Everyone knew, but no one stopped him. War tests one’s morals, but it also destroys them. When people are hungry, it is easy to forget the things that were once important. Justice, retribution, the righting of wrongs. They did not judge him because someone else would be judging them, and they all had their reasons. The network was efficient, benefiting many people who emerged on the other side like butterflies newly hatched from the darkness. For shame, Michael thought. For shame. Still, he too paid his way out. They told him where to go, sent him to this fishing boat to speak to that man; to that train at this stop in God-knows-where at all hours of the night. He paid them in gold, diamonds, whatever he reached for first, dispensing these twice-stolen goods engraved to people long dead or soon to be. How many lives paid for that escape, how many were cheated out of not only life but also heirlooms, symbols of love and toil that had been handed down generation after generation.

He arrived in this place with nothing but his somewhat emptier pockets and a desire to disappear. He was lucky to have learnt some English at school, and he had a natural aptitude for language. His accent was more of a problem, but he invented a Swiss heritage for himself and was fortunate enough not to raise the suspicions of anyone over the years. For his first few months he rented a room in the home of an elderly widow who was as eager to talk as he was to be silent. The arrangement worked well, he gave nothing away, paid her a small amount each month to cover his board and lodging. When he was asked why he was there, of all places, he would say politely but curtly that his father had been South African and that he wanted a quiet life at the sea. Of course in a town so small, the gossipmongers were in a fit of curiosity about the handsome stranger in their midst. Some of the young ladies imagined him as the suave European suitor of their dreams, a worldly aristocrat who might save them from the dull and unrefined men the town offered up. The older women tried to arrange meetings with their daughters, prettying them up with flowers in their hair and rouge on their cheeks. He always declined, polite but firm, and eventually it was accepted that he would not be making a bride of any of their own. They saw in him only the mystery and allure of a foreigner, never suspecting him of being anything more malignant than an introvert who had dashed their hopes of bringing drama, culture and exoticism to their part of the world. No one knew, no one could ever have known.

Once, some twenty years after he had arrived, there had been a man in his shop who Michael was convinced he knew from before. The man walked in one afternoon with his wife in tow. His accent was a mix of America and the distant past; the old country of his birth and despair. Michael always recognised accents that were half-hidden; he knew the effort it took and could pick up the words that so unkindly betrayed their speaker’s true heritage. He looked into the man’s eyes and a flicker of recognition hit him in the gut like a bullet. It had to be him. The mouth, the colour of his eyes. The way he carried himself on unsteady feet, not yet accustomed to freedom and possibly never to be. Michael was frozen, could not open his mouth to speak even when the man asked him a question. Do you have this or that, he was enquiring, but all Michael heard was his heart pounding furiously in his chest and his history coming flooding back.

The man had been a boy of 12, maybe more, maybe less. It was so hard to tell when they were that emaciated and well shorn. You could hardly even tell the men from the women. Michael was responsible for clearing bodies from the showers. He enlisted several prisoners for the job, each one instructed to load a wheelbarrow and then transport the newly dead to a large pit. Their reward was an extra piece of bread, sometimes a potato, half rotten but better than nothing. Solemn and gaunt, the men worked, barely alive themselves but still with enough fight in them to do whatever it took for food. The boy was one of them. He approached Michael one morning when one of the regular prisoners keeled over dead in the snow. I will do it, he said. Pick me. I am young and strong and faster than the rest of them. Pick me, he insisted.

Michael looked at his frail form and old-man eyes; not a hint of child left in him. He agreed to let him work. He stood near the boy and watched him, making sure he did things properly. At one point the boy pointed to a body and said, this is my mother. Later he pointed again, this time showing his father. He was calm, matter-of-fact. Had he cried all of his tears or was he simply too young to recall any sense of humanity?

Michael stared at him in his shop and wondered if it could be possible. The man showed no signs of recognition. Had he really forgotten or was his own desire to be invisible greater than his willingness to remember? He left the shop empty-handed but smiling and Michael began to doubt if such a man could truly have lived through the nightmare of that place. He convinced himself, if only just, that it had not been the same person – who knows if that boy even survived – but still, every now and then he thought of that moment, that piercing recognition, the possibility that it might well have been so.

He climbs slowly into his bed, with the sheets newly washed and smelling of spring, and breathes a heavy sigh. He is weary, the walk earlier has tired him out and he has a dull pain in his side. I am ready, he thinks, and wills himself to die. It would be a sweet release, a welcomed end to the sorry life he has led. He knows he will die alone, unloved, unmissed. Not a single soul in the world to mourn him or place a flower on his grave. It is what he deserves, he is certain of this, and he wants it to be no different.

He closes his eyes and hopes, as he does each night, not to open them in the morning.