cabin fever and other stories
Diane Awerbuck
(Umuzi)
Cabin Fever is a remarkable collection of short stories. Awerbuck has an uncanny ability to get under the skin and inhabit the consciousness of a wide range of characters – from an 80-year-old British ex-army officer (haunted by memories of the Holocaust), to a matric schoolboy, a rather lonely librarian, a caring schoolteacher, a pregnant wife, a vicious juvenile killer, and a young graffiti artist.
Atrocity and trauma shadow the pages of many of these stories (Columbine, the Black Death, Bergen-Belsen), as do events closer to home: shark attacks, suicide, gang violence on a Metro train, domestic violence on the Cape Flats.
Whatever the subject matter, the vigour and inventiveness of the telling make for compelling reading. The stories take an unflinching look at aspects of contemporary reality – but their imaginative probing takes one beyond the surface truth of the journalistic report. Events and people are not seen through the familiar South African lenses of class and colour and gender. Instead, these stories probe our common human substratum and explore the dilemmas of everyday (and not-so-everyday) life in ways that are original and disconcerting.
There are some standout stories. Cabin Fever captures the helplessness and alienation of the wife/onlooker who watches the decline of her husband/partner into drug addiction. It records the sad erosion of a marriage over time. All the Kings’ Horses – set in the familiar context of Observatory – deals with a real event, filtered through the consciousness of an unmarried, unnamed librarian. The event is the apparently casual murder of the owner of a local restaurant, this is juxtaposed with the banality of everyday life (which, of course, just goes on). “On the far corner of Trill a few other people have stopped. They are peering in at the windows of Carte Blanche.” How much do we matter to each other? How deeply do we care? These questions resonate through the collection.
One of the most remarkable stories, There’s a Light that Never Goes Out, explores the thoughts and feelings of Thomas the Twin, an ex-British army officer, now aged 80, who journeys back to Europe, burdened with his memories of the Holocaust death camps. He visits the ossuary at Kotna Hora (in the Czech Republic), a macabre relic constructed from the bones of those who died in the Black Death.
The presence of death runs like an undertow through many of these stories.
Thomas brings to a sharp focus a recurring dilemma: what are the limits of our human responsibility? Where does this begin and end? Are we our brother’s keeper?
The protagonists in these stories are often reduced to the status of onlookers. In The Extra Lesson a teacher watches, horrified, as a boy (an intruder from a neighbouring school) stabs one of her pupils, who dies in front of her. The references to Othello suggest an Iago-like inscrutability with regard to motive.
The same applies to the young killer in Murder Ballads, accused of the random killing of four strangers from Darktown. The suggestion is that the killer himself does not know what he has done. The narrator/reporter in this story is a kind of author-surrogate: unlike the other spectators in the courtroom, she doesn’t want a story with a clear-cut happy ending: “I wanted something else… I wanted to know how they (the killer’s parents) felt.”
Many of the stories in this collection do not have happy endings. They are driven by the impulse to understand, to get under the skin and interrogate even the most alien experience.
Cabin Fever is a fine addition to our literature. It’s difficult to believe the author regards her writing as “a luxury, an aside”. On this evidence, her writing is a necessity – and the short story her natural medium. - Cape Argus