Zirk van den Berg, I Wish, I Wish

Wish, I Wish by Zirk van den Berg
Wellington: The Cuba Press (2020)
RRP: $25. Pb, 178pp.
ISBN:978-1-98-859528-3
Reviewed by Jessie Neilson

White Lily Funerals is on the main road of a typical city in an unnamed country, jammed between Supercheap Auto and Discount Wheels. For nearly a quarter century it has been the workplace of Seb, an embalmer, who sets the features of the newly dead to a pleasing blankness, in the sanctuary of the preparation room. Black-suited with little variation, slender and stooped, Seb has seen as much sadness as he can bear, and yet he is only in his forties.

We first meet Seb standing alone under a tree, fiddling with a Rubik’s cube as the drizzle slips down his neck. It’s a little Beckettian, all this waiting. Perhaps he can line up those colours in a more satisfactory way, like rearranging the hand given by chance in life. Sometimes he dreams of magical intervention, an event to stir up his dreary, repetitive days, and to challenge the excessive patience that has become his permanent mask.

Seb keeps his work and private lives separate: a room for each, and an additional just for himself. He and his wife of nearly two decades, Helen, have a loveless, banal marriage. Their two teenage children are either permanently out (Josh) or attached at all times to their computer in a dark bedroom, channelling goth vibes (Katrina). He has no visitors, few friends and few colleagues, apart from the dead.

It is only when a woman and her terminally ill child, Gabe, stop by for information about the procedures of death, and to try out coffins for size, that Seb’s life takes a turn. It seems that Gabe, like the archangel, may have bestowed on him the gift of several wishes. From this moment, Seb’s life opens up.

This novella, by Zirk van den Berg, was first published in 2019 in Afrikaans and has subsequently been published in English through the Whitireia writing programme. It won the W A Hofmeyr Prize for its contribution to literature in Afrikaans, and this is wholly deserved. Published in the Cuba Press Novella Series, it is a compact size to hold. Within, the surprising liveliness of its seemingly rather depressed protagonist carries the reader through his adventures in an entirely compelling way.

The few characters, equally set on lonesome and repetitive paths, are trying to stave off desperation, searching for the other-worldly, or at least something to pique their curiosity. Drudgery has worn them down and erased much in the way of imagination. For, as Seb realises, while he is used to working with meat and its ‘murky, slimy’, he has never come across anything that resembles a soul. He would like more from his existence than being reprimanded for once again forgetting the milk. He wishes to shake free from his earthbound roots.

I Wish, I Wish is short, snappy and entirely worth consuming. Seb peeks out of the room with half-embalmed bodies, moving towards the world of living figures. Spurred on by the possibility of wishes, he is determined that his life become more than a blurred, hazy grey film, and, as he flourishes, we wholeheartedly cheer him on.