Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist | Sven Axelrad on the genesis of ‘Buried Treasure’

FICTION

Criteria:

The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style, evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

Buried Treasure by Sven Axelrad (Umuzi)

Aging cemetery groundskeeper Mateus, his dog named God, and a homeless girl called Novo — Axelrad’s debut novel intrigues from the get-go. Introducing the reader to the fictional town of Vivo, where pigeons deliver messages, a phonebooth is used for trysts, and residents include a prophetic flower-seller. 

Judges said: This adventurous coming-of-age story weaves together diverse characters and worlds that stand in stark contrast with one another. Clever, witty and playful, yet with dark and foreboding shadows, Buried Treasure is a highly imaginative and entertaining piece of writing. This is a debut that punches above its weight. 

Sven Axelrad on the genesis of Buried Treasure 

I had secretly been writing for years when the idea for Buried Treasure came to me. The novel was born from a deep need to make sense of my life as an accountant. Many had failed attempting such an impossible task. Failure didn’t bother me much — I drank it first thing in the morning, strong and black.

At the office I wore smart shoes, trousers and a white collared shirt (no tie, this is Durban after all). I processed papers, passed journals, read famous novels while I ate my lunch. In the afternoons I would flirt, just a little, with depression. I rode a scooter back then and would wear headphones beneath my helmet, travelling the streets of Durban awash in music. Sometimes at night I would ride my scooter simply for the pleasure of being alive as one is only alive inside the alchemy of music and movement.

It was on one of these nights that Bob Dylan spoke to me. The lyrics of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was offered as a scaffold on which to hang my story. With this structure in place my characters started to arrive — Novo first, followed by Mateus and God. The pigeons came next along with Augustin the flower vendor and the Rat-Catcher. I remembered Cormac McCarthy writing that things without their names are only shapes and have no meaning, so I added in a mysterious existential shadow.

In a caffeinated frenzy, I wrote my own story about names and identity. I wrote to understand my life. My hopes. My failures. I wrote to understand the people around me, who were presumably all hoping and failing too. In Vivo, I discovered a series of characters as lost as I was. To my great pleasure and relief, I noticed that everyone was doing their best. What I discovered both in Vivo and in vivo was kindness beneath it all.     

EXTRACT

Six — Alto/The People vs the Pigeons Collective

Novo wasn’t born in the gutter outside Vivo’s prestigious university. She was born in a small flat to a mother she met but never knew and was raised by a father named Alto. An interesting fact unbeknown to all parties involved is that Novo is, numerically, a very important baby. If a census had been undertaken it would have indicated that at that moment in time there was an equal number of men and women in Vivo. That is, until Novo arrived: Novo is the baby that tipped the scales towards the feminine.

Alto was the town’s pigeoneer, which is to say he trained pigeons just as a falconer trains falcons, except with less dignity. He had originally learned this trade in the Navy but now made a modest living by providing a local pigeon-based messenger service, though this was not all he trained his pigeons to do. In the rooftop studio Novo grew up in, pigeons had been trained to water the plants, crack eggs, fetch towels and attack intruders, which is scarier than you might think. Just imagine slipping into a window only to be assaulted by a human-shaped formation of beating wings and sharp beaks.

“Pigeons are the unloveliest of birds, Frankenstein’s monsters with wings,” Alto said to his daughter. As if to prove the point, a one-legged pigeon roosted on Alto’s shoulder and eyed Novo with its one remaining eye.

Pigeons almost always look like survivors of an avian war. Most of Alto’s were amputees of some sort, many sightless or beakless, some balding, having lost feathers to mite infestations, poor nutrition or to the teeth of Vivano alley cats. It was a rare thing to find a pigeon whole. The bird on Alto’s shoulder had rostrum problems. The top half of the creature’s beak had been torn off, leaving a keratinous underbite that jutted out like an open dresser drawer. As he spoke, Alto was absently sprinkling crushed granola into this protuberance.

“A pigeon is considered a lowly bird, but they are intelligent and nearly impossible to kill. I once saw a pigeon with no wings or legs rolling down the street, very much alive and well.”

Exaggerated as this may well be, it’s by no means impossible.

“Pigeons are as abundant as rats, but unlike the rodent, they are trustworthy. Rats are nothing but fallen pigeons who have renounced the Lord.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Good girl, good girl. You will take over the business one day. When that day comes, just remember: if you are good to the birds they will never fail you. The pigeon will do anything for food and affection.”

Father and daughter, Alto and Novo, lived this way for some time, just the two of them alone with hundreds of pigeons in a studio apartment. Novo slept with pigeons on her pillow, pigeons curled behind her knees, pigeons roosting in her shoes. The young girl’s dreams were layered with gentle cooing and the rustle of feathers. There was a grading system for the pigeons, after which they graduated and were welcomed into the workforce. New birds were always arriving. Initially their training was simply to be held and touched until they became comfortable to be carried around in pockets and on shoulders. When the birds trusted the pigeoneer and his daughter enough to be rolled onto their backs and inspected, they graduated from novice to trainee.

Alto would call his daughter over with a gesture, all the while talking calmly to the supine pigeon, saying things like, yes, that’s good, let me see your tummy now, yes, very good. This kind of hitherto unexperienced affection was an opiate to these street-birds, and their tiny bird eyes (if they miraculously had retained both) often rolled back as their tongues lolled in stupefied abandon. When this happened, it was Novo’s job to secure a small, coloured bracelet around the pigeon’s ankle to indicate its level of education. Yellow for trainees, leading through eight more levels before a bird finally attained its red bracelet, truly an accomplishment. Each time Alto would raise his index finger and say, “You see, V.U. isn’t the only prestigious university in town.”

Traditionally, the people of Vivo were proud of their pigeon messenger service. The arrival of a pigeon at your window was an archaic delight, and the act of receiving a message attached to a bird’s foot carried an undeniable old-world charm. Be this as it may, more and more children were growing up in the age of technology and, to them, charming meant something else.

The pigeon business was declining, but Alto firmly believed that all people were imbued with an inherent sense of history and tradition, which meant that although things were slow he needn’t worry too much. Father and daughter continued to train the new arrivals, but now only a fraction of the workforce was commissioned to deliver messages, which left the rest of the birds idle. This caused problems for the pigeoneer because, as we all know, idle wings are the Devil’s playthings. Before long, these indolent birds got up to an incredible amount of mischief in Vivo, patrolling the skies in colour-coordinated gangs based on their ankle bracelets. These gangs would search Vivo’s alleys for stray cats and dive-bomb them mercilessly, then regroup and do the same to any human who dared to stand in the open with a sandwich in their hand. Things got particularly bad when an infamous newspaper article in Viva el Vivo circulated about a mother who claimed to have taken her eyes off her child for a minute only to find her daughter levitating off the ground, in the process of being kidnapped by a squadron of pigeons wearing light blue bracelets and all flapping their wings in unison, managing to lift the girl a metre into the air before dropping her.