Читать книгу The book of happenstance - Ingrid Winterbach - Страница 5

In the last week of May, nearly three months after I started as Theo Verwey’s assistant in March, my garden flat gets broken into. When I arrive home late in the afternoon, the flat is in disarray. The cupboards and drawers are open, their contents ransacked, as if someone was hurriedly looking for something before shoving everything back. In the bedroom the bedding looks as if it has been bundled up after being stripped. I do not even take the trouble to see if anything has been stolen – what breaks my heart is my shells!

I brought thirty-seven of my loveliest shells with me. Even the robust conches I packed as carefully as porcelain for the journey. Twenty-one of them I set out in three rows on my bedside table, the other sixteen I displayed on a small table in the lounge. The bedside table is empty. In the lounge a few shells lie on the ground. I go down on my haunches. Only five have remained. The three Harpa majors are gone. The periglyptas! Most of the conches. (The irreplaceable conches!) The helmet shell, of which Frans said that its colour resembles his glans when he has lain in the water for too long. The two dramatic murexes. The rare terebras. I did not carelessly pick up these shells during a day or two at the seaside – over the years I have selected and bought them with great care. I hear my own voice moaning: I cannot believe this! The sound comes from deep in my throat, from a place where words are not usually formed. I can feel my throat constricting and the small bones in my larynx pressing painfully against one another. Am I supposed to learn a lesson from this? I wonder in passing.

All my things I view as earthly goods, all of them replaceable – but not the shells. The shells are heavenly messengers! The shells I have been collecting for a lifetime. They are my most prized possessions. Over the years I have taken (with a few notable exceptions) more pleasure in these shells than in people. (My ex-husband said that I was like the dowager empress Tz’u-hsi – more concerned with her silkworm cocoons than with her subjects.)

I move through the house from one room to another, distraught. Whores, I think. Whoever did this. Barbarians.

In the small back room there is a large wet stain on the carpet, as well as a large piece of human excrement. I instinctively draw back from the smell and the substance. Someone actually urinated and defecated on the carpet! The faeces look dangerous – black, solid, shiny, coiled like a snake. (What must be ingested to produce a thing like that! What relentless thoughts can direct a turd like that?) Menacingly it lies there, a warning: Be careful, or you will get to deal with me, and I do not show any mercy. The humiliation, the naked intimidation of this deed.

My own spiritual need is urgent. It takes a great deal of energy to sustain this high level of psychic need. Meditating on the shells is one way of centring myself and lowering my levels of anxiety. These shells are a source of infinite beauty and wonder to me. I can rely on their beauty to divert me from vexation and discontent.

I move into top gear; some kind of hysteria, surely. Carefully I lift the faeces with a wad of tissues and flush it down the toilet. I soak the carpet in Dettol. The water in the bath turns a murky black. (It is a carpet of which I am very fond; I bought it at a time when my ex-husband, the child and I were still together.) I cannot afford to be intimidated by a turd. Having done this, it occurs to me that there may be techniques these days for determining the identity of criminals from their excrement. Too late for that. I phone the police. I should probably leave everything as I found it, but I do not have the heart to leave the violated shells lying on the ground. I put them back on the table.

The doorbell rings. Two constables announce themselves: a Constable Modisane and a Constable Moonsamy. Constable Modisane makes a sympathetic clicking sound with the tongue whilst surveying the scene of the disaster. He is the younger of the two. He has smooth, youthful cheeks and a domed forehead.

“Do you like these things?” he asks, looking at the shells on the table.

“Yes,” I say.

Mr Modisane, Constable, how can I begin to say how I regard these shells? I have not led an admirable life, and there is not much I can change about that. I have been irresponsible and inconsiderate in most of my relationships. But concerning the shells, sir, I am and have been all reverent and devout attention. It is my way of acknowledging the wonders of creation. My meditation on the shells has been one of the very few things I do to tend my spiritual well-being.

“Why do you like them?” he asks.

“Because they are beautiful,” I say. “And because God made them.”

Constable Modisane casts a last sceptical look at the shells and exchanges a surreptitious glance with Moonsamy.

“Can you sell them?” he asks. “Are they worth any money?”

“I’m not interested in selling them,” I say. “And if necessary I will pay money to get the stolen ones back.”

“How much?” he asks.

“I’ve not had time to decide yet,” I say.

“O-kay,” he says amiably.

“What is that smell?” I ask. “Do you recognise it?” For the first time I pick up the sweetish smell of aftershave in the room. Constables Modisane and Moonsamy both sniff the air suspiciously. Constable Modisane a trifle more energetically than Moonsamy.

“It’s Boss,” Constable Modisane says. “Hugo Boss aftershave.”

*

The next day I encounter Sof Benadé at the Sand Dune. She works as a language advisor and translator at the museum. She translates from Afrikaans to English, and from German and French to Afrikaans. I think of her as the curator of languages. She is sitting with a copy of Die Kerkblad in front of her. “My father subscribes to this for me every year,” she says, “although my family knows that I have turned my back on salvation. They have long since accepted that I shall burn for all eternity in the fires of hell. The Reformed hell.” She gives a little laugh – half apologetic and half provocative.

“Is it that bad?” I ask.

“It’s much worse,” she says. “I thought that I could get away from the pastorie. I was wrong. Deluded. A deluded doos.”

(Deluded doos. I like that.)

Sof has a disarming awkwardness and narrow hands and feet. She is younger than I am. Dark hair, with the first signs of grey, and a small gap between her front teeth. She is shy, her eyes defenceless. Fine, soft grey-green eyes, withdrawn behind her glasses – but painfully observant.

“They broke into my place yesterday and stole most of my shells,” I say. I have a sudden need to tell this woman of the loss I have suffered, although I hardly know her.

“They urinated and defecated on one of my carpets. It’s a carpet of which I am really fond. I found it an intimidating gesture. But the real loss is the shells.”

“The one who did it should have his hand chopped off in public,” says Sof and gives a small cough.

“If only I could get the shells back unharmed,” I say, “I demand no drastic measures of retribution.”

“Who would want to steal someone else’s shells?” she asks.

“I would want to,” I say. “But I can hardly use myself as the norm.”

“What else was stolen?” she asks.

“Nothing that I’ve really noticed,” I say. “What matters to me is the missing shells. It breaks my heart.”

That afternoon I drive out along the South Coast to contemplate my loss. We used to come here during the July holidays, when it was cold in the Transvaal, and rent a house on the sea. My father started sunning himself weeks in advance. He sat on a chair in our back yard with a towel around his waist and a hat on his head. In this way he acquired a gradual tan and his skin never peeled. On holiday my brother and I made little trains from the stems of banana leaves. We ate some liana and it made us sick. A little friend came to play and we offered her some as well. I drew in a book I was given by my grandfather – my mother’s father, who had abandoned his family and had recently returned after an absence of twenty years. It was a Croxley Pen Carbon book, ten and three-quarters of an inch by eight and three-eighths of an inch in format. The pages were numbered, and every alternate page was lined. My father drew a train for me with a red ballpoint pen. (More pink than red.) I drew ballerinas, brides and bridegrooms with flower girls and bridesmaids. I traced my playing cards. I painted an ocean scene with a pirate ship in the background, which I copied from the lid of my box of watercolour paints. My sister Joets drew a mermaid on the back cover. It was beautiful. I was five or six, she was eleven or twelve. Our mother remained as white in her bathing costume as she had been before the holidays. She was afraid of the waves. The dunes in front of the house were unspoilt. They were covered with indigenous scrub and a creeper with small leaves and red berries.

I look in vain for that unspoilt coastline, for the whole coast has since been converted into a pleasure resort, densely built up with blocks of flats and time-share units. The coastline offers no consolation today. Which hardly improves my mood.

Since I arrived here, I have begun to write again. A young woman steps out onto a stoep; she is wearing a soft, flowered dress. For this woman it will never be possible to find happiness. She keeps her gaze fixed unremittingly on a man in white flannel trousers and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His fine arms are tanned and he is smoking a cigarette. Another man descends into the copper mines at Messina. He does not know where he comes from nor where he is going, and he seeks refuge in the pursuit of fleeting pleasure.

*

Very late that evening a man phones me. His name does not ring a bell.

“I’m thinking back tonight to an evening in 1978 in Braamfontein, in Felix du Randt’s flat. I would like to continue the conversation we had then.”

“Twenty-seven years later?” I say.

“You and I had a very enlightening conversation that evening,” he says.

“Is that so?” I say.

“You spoke with remarkable insight about Plato. How well you explained to me that we are lost in this world. That what we experience here is but a pale reflection of the real world, and that all the knowledge we possess is but the memory of an existence in a prior world.”

“You mistake me for someone else,” I say firmly. “I did not on that evening, nor any evening before or after, speak about Plato.”

“Oh, no,” the man says. “I could never confuse you with someone else. Never. I want to take the liberty of saying that I could not confuse you with someone else for all eternity.”

“For all eternity?” I say, with a scathing laugh (thinking of Sof’s Reformed hell).

The man also laughs, a jolly chuckle.

“What did you say your name was?” I ask.

“Freek,” he says. “Freek van As.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I still can’t place you. You are confusing me with someone else.”

Freek van As continues, unperturbed. “You arrived there late that night with Marthinus Maritz and Herman Holst.”

“That I remember,” I say. (I lost my head that night; I was drunk, my conduct was reprehensible.)

“Listen, Freek,” I say, “I can’t speak to you now. I had a burglary yesterday. I’m still recovering from the shock.”

The line suddenly crackles and his voice is almost inaudible. I consider replacing the receiver softly. Herman Holst, the editor, was there that evening; Marthinus Maritz, overzealous and misdirected, he was there. We were visiting Felix du Randt, a former lover of mine. Very vaguely I recall the presence of a fourth person, but I cannot be certain. A dark man? Pale.

“I have to go,” I say. “I can’t continue this conversation now. I have too many other things I have to attend to at the moment.”

“No problem,” Freek says. “I’ll be in touch again.”

“Rather not,” I say, and put the phone down. So much for the nebulous phantom of Freek van As, and also the intrusive memory of an evening in Braamfontein nearly thirty years ago. I can return to that when I am less unsettled by my loss.

I drink a whisky and go to bed. I still lack the courage to make a list of the missing shells. What made Freek van As decide to get in touch with me after twenty-seven years? Do I owe this man something?

*

Theo Verwey is smooth-shaven and rosy this morning. Schütz on the CD player. We discuss this specific recording.

“I used to be a member of a Schütz choral group,” Theo says.

“It must have been a singular experience,” I say, “to sing Schütz.”

“It was,” he says. “I attended a performance of the Symphoniae Sacrae in Berlin in 1996. It was excellent.”

“Seven years after the dismantling of the wall,” I say. “Schütz in Berlin. Do you like Berlin as a city?”

“A truly exceptional city,” Theo says. “It has a feel different from the rest of Europe.”

“An anarchic energy, I’ve heard. I’ve not yet been there myself.”

“You should really go,” he says.

I shrug.

“We’ve received an additional grant for the project,” he says.

“That’s good news,” I say. “Who from – a benefactor?”

Theo looks surprised. “How did you know?”

I say that I took a guess; I made a joke.

“A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Afrikaans. The Derde Afrikaanse Taalgenootskap. A high-profile individual. A substantial amount of money. This person is generously sponsoring your appointment for the first six months as it is, but with this grant we can extend your contract by another six months.”

Theo stands in profile, gazing out of the window. He is a good-looking man. I cannot fault any of his features. All in perfect harmony, the mouth perhaps a trifle too sensual. His complexion is rosy – a sign of good blood circulation and a healthy diet. His dark hair is lush, beginning to grey. A face suited to sensual abandon. Had the expression in his eyes been different, it could even have been called a passionate face. His eyebrows form a high arch, lending his face an expression of permanent surprise. For a moment he pauses reflectively with a card in his hand.

I have things weighing on my mind, pressing issues, and this man evokes a need in me to pour out my heart to him. Inexplicable. Is it perhaps because I know that this is not permissible? Does the prohibition sharpen the desire? What would the appropriate (décorous) words be for the feelings that rise up urgently in my throat from the region of the heart? For the time being I do not know how to clothe them fittingly.

“I read a very fine book recently,” I say.

He glances up from his work. Politely. “Oh, yes?” he says.

“It’s about a man who is very rich. Fabulously rich. It appealed to me,” I say, “that kind of wealth. Among other things, he wants to buy a chapel with Mark Rothko paintings. His agent advises against it. But he insists with a kind of perversion.”

Theo Verwey still looks at me politely; he is waiting for me to continue.

“The man’s agent and advisor – a former lover of his – one of a series of advisors, in fact, says that he owes it to the public not to acquire the chapel for his private use.”

Theo looks interested.

“But the man persists. He wants it for himself. Simply because he is able to have it.”

I pause for a moment, listening to the music. I find the instruments lovely; I associate the sound with complex colours today – tertiary, not primary colours.

“Although it’s more than his wealth that appeals to me in the book,” I say.

“Yes?” Theo says.

“This man moves from one point in the city to the next in a limousine, speaking to his various advisors along the way. He encounters a variety of delays and obstructions, among others a funeral procession – one of the loveliest parts of the book. Once or twice he gets out of the car and has a meal with his wife. They’ve been married for only two weeks. She’s enormously rich herself. At the end of the book he’s dead.”

“Is that so?” Theo Verwey says, raising his well-proportioned eyebrows a little higher.

“Yes,” I say. “Alas, yes.”

“Do you recommend it?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” I say. “With all my heart. The book, or death?”

He smiles.

*

That afternoon I phone Constable Modisane to enquire whether they have caught the villain who stole my shells.

“No-ho,” the Constable says, with a hesitation in his voice that makes me suspect that they have not yet made the slightest effort to do anything about the case.

“It’s causing me much, much grief,” I say to him, “the loss of those shells.”

“Ye-es,” the man says, not unsympathetically.

“I trust you will do your best,” I say.

I hear other voices in the background; the constable is talking to someone over his shoulder.

“Well, goodbye,” I say.

“Goodbye,” the constable says, distracted.

That evening I drink two whiskies before I make a list of the missing shells. The three Nautilus pompilius shells are gone – two small specimens and a large one. Both Murex nigritus shells are gone. The Terebra maculata and the Terebra aerolata are gone. The three Harpa major shells are gone. The Conus marmoreus, the Conus geographus, both Conus textile shells, the two Conus betulinus shells and the two Conus figulinus shells, all gone. The two Periglypta magnifica shells are gone. The top shell, Trochas maculata, is gone. The bride of the sea, Argonauta argo, is gone. The two white cowries (Ovula ovum) and the tiger’s-eye cowrie (Cypraea tigris) are gone. All the tonnas and the helmet shells are gone. The Marginella mosaica and the blushing Marginella rosea are gone.

I lie down on the couch in the lounge. I have contradictory thoughts. The three Harpa majors were among the most beautiful of my shells. Their form and colour are moving – the delicate vertical ribs like the strings of a harp; the delicate light-brown wavy patterns between the raised ribs resembling the thin lines drawn by a seismograph. These three shells I have recently been looking at with great attention. I would even call the attentiveness with which I looked at them a kind of meditation, for there are few other things that I give the same selfless and painstaking attention. (Reverent attention.) But although I meditated without ego on these objects, these shells, and even saw God in the detail (in a manner of speaking), I was still attaching myself excessively to them. Should I have had my heart less set on them? Should I have tried to bring about the salvation of my (eternal and immortal) soul in a different manner? Should I have allowed their beauty to nourish me, but renounced the pleasure of ownership? Should I have invested less in lifeless things over the years and more in relationships? I told Theo Verwey about the rich man today. Why? Fragments of memory of the evening in Braamfontein, nearly thirty years ago, come to me. Who is this Freek van As, who comes to me after nearly thirty years like a dog with a dead bird in its mouth?

Of that particular evening I recall first of all that I drank too much. I remember that the young editor Herman Holst was there – a neat, inhibited fellow, who has since vanished into the void to seek his happiness in America. He and the poet Marthinus Maritz often hung out together at the time. I went to Felix du Randt’s flat with the two of them. I regretted having ended my relationship with Felix some weeks previously and wanted, at least, to restore something of our relationship of trust. If I remember correctly, the poet and the editor were more than keen to accompany me. Starved for a little action. It was late when we arrived at Felix’s flat. I was in a worked-up and overemotional state. Sexy Felix du Randt, with his sharp, sly, foxy face, received us politely, but was icy cold towards me. From his side, reconciliation was not an option. Never could I have foreseen that foxy Felix, with his warm, freckled skin, who just a few months before had regarded me with such passion, such tenderness, such loving certainty, would turn his back on me so implacably. The more he distanced himself from me that evening, the more hysterical I became. What did I want from him? That he should take me back into his arms? That he should smile on me tenderly and intimately as he had done in bed some weeks before? That he should promise eternal fidelity, after I had made it clear that he was not the right man for me? Felix revealed a different side of himself that evening, the existence of which I had never suspected.

Marthinus Maritz is dead. Felix I never saw again; he had been head of some language institute or linguistics department somewhere up north before dying in a car accident in his early forties.

The poet Marthinus Maritz, filled with grim and misguided yearning, walked with a slight stoop. His torso was fleshy, his feet pointed slightly outwards; his heavy, dark, bearded head was too large for his body. His gaze was at once challenging and bewildered; in his eyes was the light of poetic possession. His first volume of poetry was a huge success. He was passionate about poetry, ambitious, intellectually energetic – even indefatigable – but an emotional cripple. A despairing, tormented man. His childhood had been difficult, his mother had neglected him shamefully, her lovers had mistreated him. He was married; we attempted something sexual once or twice, but we were verbally attracted to each other, not physically. His first volume of poetry was hailed as a gift of God to the language. Where else in Afrikaans is there another debut – a comparable volume, in fact – in which pain, uncertainty and emotional abandonment are expressed equally poignantly, where there are as many heart-rending poems about youthful illusion and despair as in that first collection of poems by Marthinus Maritz? He could not equal that again. Wallace Stevens was one of his favourite poets. The motto in that first volume was a quotation from a poem by Stevens. Marthinus was an incongruous figure, and he felt himself increasingly disregarded and isolated. He abandoned poetry, tried to make money. Succeeded. His business enterprise was a huge success; he became very wealthy, took up poetry again, but could never write anything to match his first volume. Perhaps he thought that if he became a fat cat like Wallace Stevens, he would be able to write like him.

Marthinus was a man with a penetrating intelligence and an uncontrolled aggressive streak that ran like a faultline through his personality. His aggression was mostly directed at women, though. I did not realise it then. That evening, when I ranted hysterically and deliberately spilled wine on Felix’s new white mohair carpet, Marthinus slapped me on both sides of my face with abandon. I recognise the intensity only now, thirty-odd years later. It gave that man great pleasure to slap me publicly, on both sides of my face, so that the fingermarks were visible, ostensibly to calm me down. Felix du Randt, my ex-lover, looked on expressionlessly and fetched a cloth to mop the red wine from his expensive new carpet. It was clear that everything he had previously emotionally invested in our relationship he had now reinvested in that costly white woven mohair carpet. He regarded the wine stains with abhorrence. I doubt if he would have intervened if Marthinus had treated (punished) me even more roughly.

But besides Marthinus Maritz, Felix du Randt and Herman Holst, there appears to have been a fourth person present, the indistinct Freek van As, who observed everything that evening and had a conversation with me about Plato, if I am to believe him. The editor has disappeared, the poet and the former lover are dead, only Freek van As remains. After twenty-seven years he strides forth from the nebulous regions of the past to remind me of an incident that occurred in my late twenties. Am I still interested? It is over and done with, that period of delusion and poor judgement.

*

“The most arresting part of the book I began telling you about yesterday,” I say to Theo Verwey the next day, “is perhaps the description of the funeral procession of the dead rap singer. A spectacularly extended procession. The rich man gets out of his car to watch it. The body of the deceased is exhibited in the hearse, somewhat tilted, if I remember correctly, so as not to lie flat, and his voice on cassette – immensely amplified – accompanies the procession. Just imagine. In this extended funeral cortege there are also dervishes. What would that be in Afrikaans again?”

“A derwisj, a Muslim mendicant monk,” Theo says. “From the Persian darvish, meaning poor.”

“The mendicants dance,” I say. “They whirl round and round. It’s one of the most exquisite moments in the book, the description of the whirling, turning dervishes.”

Theo Verwey nods politely.

“The rich man then fantasises about his own funeral,” I say. “He has about five chance sexual interactions with women during his journey through the city, and he fantasises about the role that each of these women will play at his funeral. Although it’s hardly a journey – rather a slow progression. He sees his wife a couple of times – from the moving car he sees her walking past on the pavement, he sees her passing him in a taxi. They eat together once or twice. He asks her during one of these casual meetings when they will have sex again.” I look down at the tip of my shoe. “At the end of the book they have a brief sexual encounter. In a standing position, somewhere.”

Theo Verwey looks surprised.

“She clasps her legs around his body,” I say. “It’s a passionate rendezvous.”

Theo’s eyebrows arch even higher.

I speak with averted eyes, my tone of voice slightly ironic.

“His wife is a poet,” I say. “Although the man doesn’t think much of her poetic abilities. They’ve been married for only two weeks. She’s also very rich. I’ve mentioned that already. Heiress to an astounding banking fortune. In the course of the day the man trades ever larger sums of money, against the counsel of his financial advisors. He loses everything. His wife’s money as well, which he steals in a deceptively simple – astonishingly simple – digital or cyber transaction. I’m not sure exactly how.”

Theo Verwey is now listening with undivided attention.

“He tells her that he’s lost her money, but she doesn’t really believe him. Before he left his apartment that morning, he first talked to his dogs.”

Theo Verwey gazes at me wordlessly for some seconds. “Do you recommend it,” he asks once again, “to wager everything you have knowing that you might lose it?” He smiles. Something ironic in his voice as well? “To steal your wife’s money only to lose it in some risky transaction?” He is still smiling.

I also smile. I get my breath back. This is further than I have ever gone with anybody in one morning. This is further than we have ever gone with each other.

*

That evening I lie on the couch in my garden flat as on the evening before. I am renting the smaller ground floor of the house, the owners occupy the large upper storey. I had my landlord replace the locks on the front door and install a sturdy security door immediately. They were out on the day that the burglary took place. According to him, they have never had a burglary before. Ever since the incident I have been feeling uneasy.

I contemplate the event. What kind of thief leaves behind clothes, jewellery, shoes, a CD player, CDs and a television to steal shells? A disturbed thief with perverted needs? A thief with a secret agenda? A thief whose left hand does not know what the right hand is doing? A Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde thief? Dr Jekyll carefully enters the house, Mr Hyde pulls the clothes out of the cupboards and sweeps the shells from the table with a single movement of the arm. Dr Jekyll, the aesthete, steals the shells, Mr Hyde, the thug, urinates and defecates on the carpet. Dr Jekyll bundles the clothes back and carefully packs the shells into a box. I do not like this – besides being bitterly upset about the loss, I do not like the idea that someone specifically targeted my shells. The event rests like a dead weight on my chest. My chances of getting them back are slim, judging by Constable Modisane’s tone of voice. The recovery of stolen shells is hardly a priority for the police anyway.

I need to talk to someone, but I do not know to whom. I can picture my ex-husband’s reaction if I told him about this. I can imagine his condemnatory silence at the other end of the line, his slightly laboured and admonishing breathing. In his view of the world the loss of shells would count as hardly anything. I do not wish to burden my child with this. (Do I expect some degree of censure from her as well? An impatience with my stubborn clinging to my loss? She travels light – casting off much as she moves along.) Neither do I wish to involve Frans de Waard, my lover and companion.

But my shells! The paper nautilus, Argonauta argo, related to the nautilus, fragile, papery thin, lustrous – one of my most exquisite shells. A shy bride! A prancing little caravel on the open sea! A thirteen-year-old girl! The Conus betulinus, smooth, spiral-grooved around the base, a heavy, ochre-coloured shell, whose cool weight I can still feel in my hand. As I can likewise feel the weight of the two heavy Conus figulinus shells, and clearly recall the day when I bought them in a town on the Cape coast. The Conus marmoreus, of which Rembrandt made a series of etchings. The two dramatic Murex nigritus shells, a rare bounty, all the way from the Gulf of California – white, ornate, capriciously imagined, with dark markings over the shoulder region and dark-brown protrusions. The light Tonna variegata – delicate as a Japanese paper lantern! The Mitra mitra, largest of the mitres – a heavy, spiral-shaped shell resembling a bishop’s hat (the Latin mitra from the Greek mitra, turban). The small marks on it are a deep orange, slightly paler in the smaller shell. The Marginella mosaica, with spiralling rows of dark-grey or brown markings like sand drifts on its pale, milky surface – as if time itself has woven its marks into the surface.

I do not even want to think about the loss of the three nautiluses – the two smaller ones and one larger one. Two proud knights and a queen, standard-bearers of the striped blazon, little cavorting horses of the deep seas! Perhaps the closest to my heart of them all (except for the two brown Figulinus conches). The last remaining genus of the primeval order Nautiloidea – an ancient shell, smooth on the outside, coiled on the inside, with thirty-six chambers, of which only the outer ones are inhabited.

How did the thief know, with what unfailing instinct did he take the loveliest, the most valuable ones, those dearest to my heart? How should I explain this? Or should I see in it only the fickle hand of Mrs Fortuna?

In my distress I appeal to my mother, my father, and especially to my deceased sister, Joets. It is not that I address them, but rather that I turn my imploring face in their direction. As if to say: See me. Here I am. What am I to do?

Now that I no longer have to take their corporeal existence into account – with the subtle intervening shifts and irritations that mark a relationship – I think I am able to see each one of them with greater clarity.

I have not thought of Marthinus Maritz for a long time. Freek van As caused me to remember him again. Although my acquaintance with Marthinus was short-lived, he made a deep impression on me. In the presence of my former lover – sexy, foxy-red and seductively freckled Felix du Randt – the editor Herman Holst and the nebulous Freek van As, he slapped me hard on both cheeks, but even with those two robust clouts he could not succeed in making me change my ways.

*

“The man you told me about yesterday,” Theo Verwey says the next day, “you mentioned that he talks to his dogs. What does he say to them?”

“It’s not clear,” I say. “I don’t recall that his exact words are given. His apartment has walls reaching two or three storeys high, and I picture the dogs in a black marble cage.”

“What breed of dogs are they?” Theo asks.

“I can’t remember. White borzois, perhaps. Russian wolfhounds. Dogs cared for by his staff, I suppose. With that kind of money people can probably be employed for the sole purpose of caring for the dogs and taking them for walks. Although they are still glad to hear the voice of their master. They are referred to again at a later stage in the book, which makes you think that the rich man values these animals highly.”

Theo Verwey gazes pensively into the distance. Does he want to say something? Something he finds hard to say? I wait, while he picks up a number of cards from the desk and arranges them in a neat pile. He does not look up. I wait, sensing his hesitancy.

“The ransom of a man’s life is his wealth, but the poor hears no rebuke,” he quotes reflectively. I wait. Is that a dismissal or a prompt to continue?

We continue our work in silence for a while. This morning we are listening to Monteverdi madrigals. Two male voices are singing “Mentre vaga Angioletta”, about the miracle of love. An ecstatic intertwining of voices. But I find the music somewhat depressing. “O miracolo, miracolo, miracolo,” the men sing. I wonder what Theo makes of this ecstatic celebration of love. I watch him covertly. He shows no sign of being transported.

“Do you remember the poet Marthinus Maritz?” I ask.

“Yes,” Theo says, surprised. “Why?”

“I was thinking of him the other day,” I say.

“He had a beautiful voice,” Theo says.

How could I have forgotten! His voice was one of his most distinctive features. Memory is selective. I remembered the high rump, the rather thickset torso and the dark, bearded head. His aura of danger and defiance I remembered, the vengeful glint in his eye, but not his voice. Why?

“I’ve begun to write a novel,” I say.

“Oh, yes?” Theo says.

“It’s set in the Forties,” I say.

“What is it about?” he asks. He looks interested, or is feigning interest.

“The outlines are still tenuous,” I say, “the storyline is still undefined.”

(A young woman emerges onto a red cement stoep. She is wearing a floral dress. She is in love. She is about to be married. She is filled with anticipation about the new life that she is about to embrace. She wants to leave the sorrow of the past behind her. She has set her heart on fulfilment. She believes that this fulfilment of the heart is possible. She wishes only to make good the tears, the despair and the uncertainty of the past.)

“I’m thinking of rereading C.M. van den Heever,” I say, “even though a vocabulary for emotional nuance hardly exists in the prose of his time.” His eyes are large behind his glasses. He reflects on what I have said, holding the stack of cards loosely in his hands.

“No,” he says. “You’re right. You won’t find what you’re looking for in the early prose.” We are interrupted by a light knock on the door.

His wife closes the door behind her. She is pretty. She is also a successful businesswoman, and self-satisfied. She has a madonnalike beauty – fine features, large, bright eyes, softly curling hair, and small, sharp teeth (a feral sharpness). But this morning I detect in her presence (her trail, her wake) a slightly unpleasant feminine odour, associated with menstruation. Could the woman be careless about personal hygiene? Someone in her prominent public position? I find myself blushing, not for her sake, but for that of Theo Verwey. I am nervous that his wife’s intimate odour will embarrass him in my presence. As soon as I have greeted her, I leave Theo’s office.

I hurry to the tearoom, where we regularly have tea with the museum staff. I enjoy their conversations; they interest me. I am a lexicographer by profession (though not by initial training) and have not had much exposure to science during my career, although it has always interested me.

The tearoom is small. Boxes are stacked against one of the walls, there is the pervasive smell of bone. There is a table with a kettle and cups. Old easy chairs are arranged in a wide circle around a low coffee table. Freddie Ferreira is here this morning, and Vera Garaszczuk and Mrs Dudu. A while later Sof Benadé, Sailor and Nathi Gule also show up. For years I have not given death much thought, and now I am suddenly obsessed with it again. Obsessed: behep, from the Dutch behept, derived from the Middle Dutch behachten, or beheept (of which the origin is uncertain), in the sense of being stuck with, or troubled by. This is how Theo Verwey explained it to me.