Читать книгу The book of happenstance - Ingrid Winterbach - Страница 6

We continue with the letter D. It is the beginning of June. The obsessive, almost perverse proliferation of summer is abating. Like someone coming to the end of a manic episode. A paradisiacal peace begins to descend. The days are cooler, with the occasional leaf fluttering down. The poinsettias are beginning to flower, as well as other plants in my landlord’s autumnal garden. In the early morning and at evening the colours are turning richer and deeper. The earth is becoming more fragrant. The threatening lushness of summer is cast off like a psychological affliction; there is a new commitment to décorum in the air. There is the promise of maturation. Even in this province, where the approaching autumn and winter are so different from where I come from.

Theo Verwey rocks back and balances on the rear legs of his chair this morning. Don’t, I want to say, you will fall over backwards. I have never seen him sit like that. He is deep in thought. The palms of his hands are pressed together tightly and his index fingers rest against his mouth. Keeping guard of his mouth this morning? Does something want to slip out? He is not that kind of man. I do not read him like that. Although I admit that I do not read him well.

I am sitting with the bulky stack of cards in my hand, the dictionaries open before me. The first card in the stack is da. The last card is dyvelaar.

“Da,” I say, “where does that come from?”

Da or dè is probably an abbreviation of daar (there) and was noted for the first time in Afrikaans by Pannevis as deh and in the Patriotwoordeboek as dé, he explains.

“Dyvelaar,” I rhyme teasingly, “as in twyfelaar?”

“Dy-vel-aar,” he spells out, “or dy-huid-aar.” A vein in the lower leg, the vena saphena, he explains. “Not to be confused with the femoral artery, the arteria femoralis.”

“What would the dermbeen be? And the dermbeendoring?” I ask.

“The dermbeen is the topmost, flat part of the hipbone, the ilium, and the dermbeendoring is any of its peaked protrusions.”

“Dermbeendoring,” I say. I repeat it a couple of times to feel the uncommon sequence of sounds in my mouth.

We are still listening to Monteverdi madrigals. Madrigali guerrieri e amorosi, performed by the Taverner Consort and Players on historical instruments, conducted by Andrew Parrott. This is not my favourite music by Monteverdi, but I do not object. The next track is exquisite, though, and we listen to it in silence. “Su pastorelli vezzosi. Su, su, su, fonticelli loquaci.” (Arise, comely shepherds. Arise, babbling springs.)

Theo leans back in his chair, his hands behind his head, and it must be the effect of the music, for I am unexpectedly overcome – overpowered – by a sexual receptivity to him in a way that I have not experienced before. The sensation is so intense that I feel slightly nauseous and have to bend forward. God forbid, I think, I could slide my hands under his shirt, over the chest, and let them nestle in his armpits.

It takes a while to regain my concentration. I continue to page through the dictionary. I read the definitions of “death” and “life”. This morning I rose with a heightened sense of mortality. The soft armpits, the powerful male stomach, the tender groin and instep of the foot. What would it be like, carnal love with this man? A day or two ago I told Theo Verwey about the passionate meeting between the man and his wife at the end of the book. I mentioned that they have sexual relations standing up. I told Theo that she clasped her legs around her husband’s body, but did not mention how ardently she kissed him. In the small hours I dreamt of a seducer – someone focusing obsessively on me. Something threatening in the man’s attentions. In the soft, compressed space of the dream he forced himself on me with an offensive licentiousness. I woke up and too soon lost the mood and content of the dream.

This morning I am inclined to think that it was death who had fawned upon me and flattered me like that last night. Why not? Would I not be able to clothe death in this way in my subconscious?

Their dictionary definitions hardly shed an adequate light on the mystery of either life or death. As a child I would often sit and watch dead insects. Or I would kill an ant to observe the difference between the living ant and the dead. I see now that I tried to probe the secret of life with my child’s mind.

“Do you have a clear conception of what life is, and how it originated?” I ask of Theo.

“That you will have to ask Hugo Hattingh,” Theo says.

“Will he know?”

“He will know, I presume. He should know how life first originated.”

“What kind of man is he?” I ask.

Theo Verwey makes an odd little gesture with his head and shoulders. Disparaging, dismissive? I cannot say.

“I don’t know him,” he says. “Have you started to alphabetise the cards?”

No, I have not. I glance through the cards in my hand. On the greater majority of these cards are words formed with or containing dood (both death and dead). Often descriptive, often to indicate the intensive form “unto death” – to the utmost. Doodaf (tired unto death), doodbabbel (babble to death), doodjakker (gambol or frolic to death).

“Doodlukas?”

“Regional. Dead innocent.”

“Nice,” I say.

Doodluters as a variant of doodluiters (blandly innocent or unconcerned), I read, doodmoor (murder, torture or strain to death), doodsjordaan (crossing the river Jordan as a metaphor for death), doodsmare (tidings of death), doodswind (wind bearing death), doodswym (total unconsciousness), doodboek (register of deaths), doodbaar (death bier), doodbus (death urn), dooddag (day of death), doodeens (agreeing completely), doodellendig (miserable to death), doodgaan-en-weer-opstaan (die-and-get-up-again, aromatic shrub Myrothamnus flabellifolia – so called because it appears dead in dry times but revives after rain), doodgaanskaap (sheep dying from causes other than slaughtering), doodgaanvleis (flesh of animal that has not been slaughtered), doodgeboorte (stillbirth), doodgegooi (very much in love; literally thrown dead), doodgeld (money paid out at death), doodgetroos (resigned unto death), doodgewaan (mistakenly assumed dead), doodgooier (heavy dumpling, or irrefutable argument), doodgrawer (gravedigger, or beetle of the genus Necrophorus), doodhouergoggatjie (descriptive name for any of various dark beetles of family Elateridae that keeps deathly still as self-protection), doodhoumetode (method by which an animal mimics death).

“They are endless,” I remark, “the words formed with death.”

“There are many interesting words,” Theo says, “but a large number of them have been lost.”

“The world is changing,” I say. “We don’t relate to death as intimately any more. I have never seen a winding sheet. Or felt the wind of death blow. Actually the mere thought of it makes me shiver a little.”

Theo smiles. “The wind of death, yes. An unpleasant thought.”

“An indecent thought,” I say. He smiles.

I continue looking through the cards. Doodkiskleed (black cloth covering a coffin), doodkisvoete (feet as large as coffins), doodknies (to waste away by continual moping), doodlallie.

“Doodlallie!” I say. “Where does that come from?”

“Very prosperous. A regional word.”

Some of these unusual combinations I have not encountered before. “Doodop?”

“Totally exhausted.”

Doodsbekerswam (also duiwelsbrood – devil’s bread, poisonous mushroom Amanita phalloides), I read. Doodsbenouenis (distress unto death), doodsdal (valley of death), doodseën (blessing for the deceased), doodsgekla (moaning associated with death), doodsgraad (degree of death).

“Degree of death. As if death has degrees.”

“The degree of heat or cold above or below which protoplasmic life can’t exist.”

“Protoplasmic life,” I say. “Would that be the first, most basic form of life?”

“Ask Hattingh that as well,” Theo says.

“Would that be the primal slime?”

“It could be that, yes.”

Doodshemp (shroud), doodshuis (house of death), doodsjaar (year of death), doodskamer (room of dying or death), doodsklok (death knell), doodskloppertjie (little knocker of death – deathwatch beetle, family Anobiidae), doodskopaap (death’s-head monkey), doodsvlek (any one of the coloured spots found on a body twelve or more hours after death), doodsvuur (ignis fatuus: foolish fire, because of its erratic movement).

“I clothe myself in my shroud, my shirt of death, lie down in the room of death at the appointed hour and hark the death knell tolling,” I say.

Theo Verwey smiles.

Doodsrilling (shudder as if caused by death; fear of death), doodsteken (sign of approaching death; in memoriam sign), doodvis (to fish to death). Doodtuur or doodstaar (gaze to death).

“Doodtuur,” I say. “A strange word.”

“To gaze yourself to death at what is inevitable, for example.”

“Like the hour of death,” I say.

“Like the hour of death,” he says.

“To fish to death I also find interesting. To think a stretch of water can be fished to death.”

“Yes,” he says. “A particularly effective combination.”

I ask about the origin of the word dood.

“Probably from the Middle High German Tod, the Old High German Tot, from the Gothic daupus, of which the letter p is pronounced like the English th—probably based on the Germanic dau,” he says. “Compare the Old Norse form deyja, to die.”

I would like to ask him how he feels about death, now that we are covering the terrain of death so intensively. But it is too intimate a question. Dead intimate. As intimate as death. Intimate to death. Highly improbable that we will ever know each other that well.

I continue looking through the cards. Dader and daderes (male and female doer, perpetrator). (Theo Verwey and I? And in what context would that be?) Dadedrang (the urge to do deeds). Daarstraks (obsolete for a moment ago), dampig (vaporous; steamy – after the joys of love?). Dries (archaic for audacious), dageraad (archaic for daybreak; Chrysoblephus cristiceps, daggerhead fish).

“Dactylomancy,” I say, “you probably know . . .”

“Divination from the fingers,” he says, “from daktilo, meaning finger or toe, as in dactyloscopy.”

“Looking at fingerprints,” I say.

“For purposes of identification,” he says. “Based on the fact that no two persons have the same skin patterning on their fingers – and that this pattern remains unchanged for life.”

*

I weep for my shells as Rachel weeps for her children. I am alternately murderously angry and depressed. I phone Constable Modisane regularly to enquire if anything has been found. What do I care if he thinks there is something amiss with me? A woman going on about shells as if she has nothing better to mourn. I have much to mourn, but at the moment I am mourning for the shells.

I have a child, a daughter, and I have a companion, someone with whom I have had a relationship for the past seven years. Although my daughter is already a young woman, with a life of her own, she is constantly in my thoughts. I often recall with painful intensity her form in all the phases of her life – as an infant, as a young girl, and now as a grown-up woman. The smell of her hair close to the scalp, the silky skin and barely noticeable transition from neck to jaw, the delicate meandering of veins in the area just below the collarbone, her particular tone of voice – when she is pleased, or anxious. The heat of her breath when she is feverish, or when she says something close to my ear. All this I recall clearly. I have great affection for Frans de Waard, the man with whom I have a relationship. He gives me much pleasure – edifying as well as erotic. He is a many-faceted man, solid as well as sexy, attractive, intelligent and virile. Prompt – receptive to the giving and taking of pleasure. But I have been less open to him over the past months. I have been more focused on my immediate circumstances – the project with which I am assisting Theo Verwey, the book that I have begun writing, and the recent loss of my thirty-two shells.

And now, out of the blue, when I am least expecting it, Marthinus Maritz insinuates himself into my thoughts – although I have little reason to believe that the impetus is coming from him. Freek van As (whom I still cannot remember clearly) reminded me of him. My most vivid and immediate recollections of Marthinus Maritz are of his sidelong glance, the powerful, somewhat fleshy torso, his emanation of both aggression and neediness, and a restless impatience that determined the pace of his physical movements as well as his mental activity.

I keep thinking about the dead – those who were close to me that I have lost, and a few others, like Marthinus Maritz. I keep communing with them in my thoughts. I think I see them with greater clarity – my mother, my father, my sister, Joets. I recognise more clearly the ways in which each of their lives was thwarted. All this I could have mourned, but I choose to focus my grief on the missing shells instead.

Her name is Judit, but I call her Joets. During the December holidays our family visit my aunt on their smallholding in the Orange Free State. I am nine, Joets is fifteen. By day we take long walks in the veld; sometimes we catch crabs in the dry banks of the spruit. In the afternoons I play by myself in the front garden. Everyone is sleeping and in the enclosed stoep behind me there is a constant low humming noise, like a whirligig moving very slowly. (At night this noise scares me.) I play in the shade on the grass, close to a small round rock garden. I play an imaginary game with a little celluloid doll. I am totally immersed in the game. At night Joets and I sleep in a room full of unpacked boxes – my aunt and her husband have only just moved in. These boxes are stacked all the way to the ceiling. There is no electricity yet. Joets wakes me up with a candle one night and threatens to burn my toes if I do not tell her what presents she will be getting for Christmas. The rooms have low hessian ceilings, there are always flies, the kitchen smells of milk, and during the long summer afternoons it is hot and dead quiet in the house.

*

Nine days after the burglary I get a call from Constable Modisane.

“Your stolen goods have been retrieved,” he says.

“Where?” I ask.

“In Ladybrand,” he says.

“Ladybrand in the Free State?” I ask.

“Yebo,” he says. “Ladybrand in the Free State.”

“Who took them?” I ask.

“A Mr Patrick Steinmeier,” he says. (He pronounces it Pah-trick.)

I hesitate for a moment before I ask if Mr Steinmeier is white.

Constable Modisane enquires over his shoulder. In the background a hubbub is audible.

“They don’t know,” he says.

“Where is Mr Steinmeier now?” I ask.

“Mr Steinmeier is dead,” he says.

“How did he die?” I ask.

“Mr Steinmeier hanged himself,” Constable Modisane says.

“I see,” I reply. “Where did he hang himself?”

“In Ladybrand. When can you come in to identify and claim your stolen goods?” he asks.

“I can come immediately,” I say.

“When you come, I will show you the photographs,” says the constable.

I am confused. Photographs of the shells? “What photographs?” I ask.

“The photographs that were taken of Mr Steinmeier when they found him,” he says.

“I don’t want to see them,” I say.

“Okay,” the constable says jovially. “I will show them.”

I report at the counter twenty minutes later with a thumping heart.

Constable Modisane is a genial fellow. He obviously does not hold my obsessive telephone calls over the past few days against me. I notice only now that his hair is cut in a kind of crew cut, a style similar to those I have seen depicted outside barber shops downtown. As he turns around, I notice the exuberant swelling of his rounded buttocks and thighs.

He places a small cardboard box before me on the counter. It feels as if I am receiving the ashes of a deceased person. I pick up the box and shake it lightly. It feels about the right weight. I am so nervous that I struggle to open it.

The shells are in a small hessian bag inside the box. The bag has a strong, unplaceable odour. It is slightly moist. With shaking hands I unpack the shells one by one on the counter. Thirty-two shells were stolen, nine have been recovered.

One of the periglyptas is back, the smallest Harpa major is back, as well as the Trochus maculata, the smallest Conus figulinus and the Conus geographus. Two tonnas and a helmet shell. And one of the two small nautiluses.

Constable Modisane makes soft, sympathetic noises: “. . . eh heh, eh heh,” he says, when not engaged in conversation over his shoulder with one of the other constables.

The shells are dirty. They are covered with soil, and something greasy. I do not want to sniff them in front of the constable. What has happened to them? Have they been used for a ritual? A divination? Have they been gambled with, did they land in a fire? I gently stroke the surface of the small nautilus. It looks damaged. My eyes are tearful and I feel a lump forming in my throat.

“Are these your goods?” he asks.

I nod. “There are still twenty-three missing,” I say.

“Sorry,” says the constable, and clicks sympathetically with his tongue. He turns around and lifts a large brown envelope from a shelf behind him.

“These are the photographs,” he says.

“I don’t want to see them,” I say.

He nimbly slides the photographs from the envelope anyway. In spite of my firm resolve, I cannot help but look. The photos are folio-sized and printed in black and white on glossy paper. There are a number of shots from different angles of Mr Steinmeier hanging by his neck from a beam. Luckily the images are somewhat out of focus. It is nevertheless no pleasant sight. It is in fact a most shocking sight – it is horrible, I look at it with horror. There are a couple of close-ups of the dead man’s face, probably taken in the morgue, for he is lying on his back. His eyes are swollen, his mouth half open. Mr Steinmeier appears to be of mixed descent, but what does that have to do with anything these days anyway?

“Is this the man who came into my house?” I ask.

“We cannot say that with certainty,” the constable says. “But we found the stolen goods with him.”

“How long had he been dead when they found him?” I ask. It probably will not help to ask if the deceased was smelling of Boss aftershave.

The constable is becoming impatient. He replaces the photographs. I receive a form to fill in and sign.

At home I wash the shells carefully in soapy water. The sand and ash come off more easily than the greasiness. None of the shells is broken, but the surface of most of them is scratched, and one or two have small cracks in them. At first glance they appear unharmed, but for me they have been irreparably damaged. Violated.

*

I inform Sof about the recovered shells. The next day I phone Constable Modisane to find out where the deceased (the dead thief) is from; perhaps even to obtain his home address. But if the constable had been accommodating a day of two before, happy to supply information, he is now unwilling to do so. He must have been reprimanded; he was probably not supposed to have given any information in the first place.

“What am I to do?” I ask Sof.

“Bribe him,” she says and gives a small cough.

(I remember Aunty Jossie, a friend of my mother’s, asking a traffic policeman who had stopped her if he liked chocolate cake. As a child I appreciated her unconventional manner. She was less predictable than the other women I knew. My introduction to an irreverent female character? Gertjie would be sitting in the back of the car with a maid when she came to visit. Gertjie was her younger son; he was retarded. He was so pale his skin seemed to have a greenish hue.)

“What with?” I ask. “With chocolate cake?”

“Why not?”

“The days are gone when one could bribe servants of the law with home-made cakes,” I say.

“Try biltong,” Sof says.

“Which I will find where?”

“At Checkers. What is this information worth to you? How about two crisp hundred-rand notes?”

“And if he exposes my attempted bribery in front of everyone?”

“Then you say you want small change for parking.”

“Small change for two hundred rand?”

“Why not? What do you want to do with the information?”

“I just want to know.”

I decide to go and see Constable Modisane at the charge office. The first time he is out on patrol duty, the second time I find him behind the counter.

Where did the man who hanged himself come from, I enquire of him.

“I cannot disclose his identity,” the constable says. He is wearing his cap today and he keeps his eyes averted, busying himself with paperwork.

“But you’ve already given me his name! You told me that his body was found in Ladybrand,” I say. “You showed me the photographs! I didn’t even want to see them!”

“I cannot give you more information,” he says.

“Just tell me where the man came from,” I say softly. “Was he from Ladybrand as well?”

“Why do you want to know?” he asks suspiciously. He is copying information from one book into another. The upper joints of his fingers are plump, as exuberantly rounded as his thighs.

“Because it will give me peace of mind,” I say.

Constable Modisane glances fleetingly over his shoulder (anybody keeping an eye on us?) and without looking up says softly: “He came from Ladybrand. Same place where his body was found.”

“Thank you,” I say, and turn around.

The man comes from Ladybrand, I say to Sof the next day and I want to go and see where he lived. Sof is more than willing to go there with me.

*

I enjoy having tea with the museum staff. Their conversations interest me. I see it as an unexpected perk that Theo Verwey’s office is located here (on account of his involvement with the Department of Regional Languages, also housed in this building). An added benefit is that I would otherwise not have met Sof Benadé.

Freddie Ferreira is the curator of mammals. He is small and wiry, with straight, oily hair and small, lively dark-brown eyes. I take him to be no older than forty-five. He is an impatient and at times unpredictable man. It is hard to determine the content of his inner life, but about mammals he knows everything.

This morning he is in conversation with Hugo Hattingh, a palaeontologist. At first glance Hugo is an attractive man, but surly, not inclined to make contact of any kind. He appears to be in his mid-fifties, about the same age as Theo Verwey, possibly younger. Brilliant at his subject, Sof maintains, with a taste for child pornography. Boys. How does she know that? I ask. She shrugs: Whatever – heard it from Sailor or Vera, she says. What does she mean by whatever? I ask. Whether it’s child pornography or paedophiliac tendencies, she says, his knowledge is extensive and always at hand, and, unlike most other people, he is mostly worth listening to.

This is the man who, according to Theo Verwey, can explain what life is, explain the phenomenon of life more comprehensively than any dictionary definition could. (A man who can account for life down to the matrix, the Ursludge, the primal slime.)

He and Freddie Ferreira are disagreeing this morning about the geological time frame in which bone evolved. Sof Benadé wants to know why bone originated and what its function is. Hugo Hattingh puts forward some hypotheses for the early functions of bone. Amongst other things it had to serve as protection against aquatic predators: water scorpions and nautiluslike cephalopods. (Simply hearing the word nautilus upsets me.)

Sailor enters the room. His name is Johannes Taljaard, but everyone calls him Sailor. Why that is so I do not know. He looks like Flash Gordon – like Sam Jones in the leading role of the film version. A comic-strip hero, with high cheekbones, a powerful jawline, blue eyes with blond, curly eyelashes, a broad chest, long legs and slim hips. He is responsible for the exhibits of the museum. He is the curator of exhibits.

Freddie greets him with a stylised gesture of the hand; they seem to be good friends. Hugo glances fleetingly at him before continuing his exposition. He refers to the occurrence of endochondral bone in extinct stickleback sharks. Freddie explains that they are not real sharks, but resemble sharks only superficially. “Howzit?” he asks Sailor, without looking at him. He grinds out his cigarette butt under his heel.

“Is there no cake this morning?” Sailor asks.

“Why should there be any?” Freddie asks.

“What is bone?” Sof asks.

“Bone is a compound of inorganic calcium phosphate crystals, hydroxyapatite, and organic collagen fibre. A bone like the femur of a mammal has a minimal content of approximately sixty-seven per cent. This provides rigidity and the collagen offers resistance to pressure,” Hugo says.

Of this I take note. This too is valuable information.

“Isn’t it someone’s birthday today?” Sailor asks. “Isn’t there something we can celebrate?”

“Why do you always want cake?” Mrs Dudu wants to know.

Sailor has a wide smile and his teeth are surprisingly small, I note, for a man of his height, of his heroic proportions. Small, strikingly square and polished, like freshwater pearls.

“Mrs Dudu also likes cake,” he says, and stretches his arms contentedly above his head. He is wearing a water-blue silk shirt and Diesel jeans.

Mrs Dudu laughs roguishly. Her hair is braided artfully. It reminds me of the braids of wool I made for myself as a child.

“Did the vertebrates originate in sea water or in fresh water?” Sof asks Hugo Hattingh.

If Freddie Ferreira seldom looks at the person he is talking to, Hugo does so even less. He has a heavy head – a stalwart lion’s brow – with sharply chiselled diagonal planes. He is not tall, but he makes a solid impression: powerful in the shoulders. There is something stiff, something rigid to his movements. His greying beard is neatly trimmed, his hair darker, boyishly short.

Only one of my father’s four brothers had black hair. I remember its texture – thick, hard hair, like a brush. His voice had a strange, raspy sound. He liked young boys. That my mother told me much later. He stayed in a rondavel in the Lowveld and he collected things: aloes, stones, maybe even shells. As a child this fascinated me, as did his manner of speaking (slightly scratchy) and his sense of humour (dry, cynical, somewhat whimsical). He and my mother got on well, but when he visited with a friend, she would strip off the sheets and wash them as soon as they had left. I am suddenly reminded of him this morning.

Hugo Hattingh starts explaining that the chief proponents of the freshwater theory are Alfred Romer, a palaeontologist, and Homer Smith, a renal physiologist, but Freddie interrupts him by saying that these arguments are so dated that they are hardly relevant any more. Hugo Hattingh nonetheless continues, unperturbed, to expound Romer and Smith’s arguments, whereupon Freddie, who is still sitting with his elbows on his knees and looking at his feet, cigarette in hand, remarks that it seems as if Hugo Hattingh is convinced by Romer and Smith’s arguments. Hugo Hattingh still takes no notice of Freddie’s objections and concludes that the evidence favouring a marine origin is more convincing than Romer and Smith’s freshwater theories (the theory that Freddie had been insisting on all the while). As conclusive evidence, Hugo cites the fossil record, which is now much more complete, and which indicates that all known fossils from the Cambrian and the Ordovician have a marine origin.

“Now you understand, don’t you?” Freddie says half mockingly to Sof.

“Yes, thank you,” Sof says. “I see now that we crawled with great effort from the sea onto dry land.”

“By the sweat of our brows,” Sailor remarks. I am surprised; I did not expect biblical references from him. I had mistakenly assumed that for him everything centred around the exterior – the body beautiful and cheap thrills.

“What makes you think it was so hard?” Freddie asks.

“The Bible,” says Sof, and gives a little cough.

Hugo is not listening any more. It is difficult for me to imagine the nature of his thoughts and preoccupations. I would have liked to be able to place myself in his position through some manoeuvre of the imagination. I cannot. I envy him his knowledge. To see the drama of evolution played out before you like a film – to see it unfold like a flower before your eyes – that I find enviable. To know how bone developed over millions of years. To be intimately acquainted with the origin and inception of life. Valuable knowledge! That is not enough for him. He longs for more, for something else. The psyche has different needs. Knowledge is not enough. This man has a taste for child pornography, he has paedophiliac longings, his desire is after young boys, if it is true what Sof alleges.

It is not the first time that this knowledge interests me, but for the first time it interests me so emphatically. I sit up straight, in a manner of speaking, and prick up my ears. Loose facts, shreds of knowledge (unsystematically acquired), and an old interest come to life again. I have an urgent desire to learn about the circumstances that were needed for life to originate on earth. Hopefully I will also gain a better understanding of the nature of man – a mammal that developed how many millions of years ago. Seeing humans in this context must shed light on how consciousness developed and functions, and thus on the existential dilemma of an animal with a developed intelligence and an awareness of its own mortality. A consciousness which, if I understand correctly, developed around an anus at one end, a mouth at the other, and a spine connecting the two.

*

The nine retrieved shells I have packed away for the time being. I still cannot look at them without being reminded of the loss of the others. What happened to the missing twenty-three? Why were they separated from the others? Are they still lying somewhere in the room where the dead man was found? Of what value could they be to anyone? Have they been sold somewhere for a pittance, traded for tobacco, for bread, for liquor, for a gun, or do they perhaps grace someone’s display cabinet? Did the person who took them want them for himself or as a gift for his wife, for his mistress, for his mother, perhaps? How did the thief – or thieves – know about the shells? Did they break in with the purpose of stealing the shells, or did they come upon them by chance and decide that they were more useful loot than the other apparently more valuable possessions in the house? All equally improbable. Why did he – did they – select the shells with a discerning eye and then defecate on the carpet? Shit on the carpet, to be precise. What conclusion must I draw from this, what hidden warning lurks here? What message? Why did the man, poor Patrick Steinmeier, hang himself? Is he the culprit, who took his own life out of bitter remorse, or are those who left with the rest of the shells the guilty ones?

Over lunch I ask Sof what she thinks. Maybe the thief or thieves were looking for something specific, she says. Maybe they confused your place with someone else’s.

“And then the shells caught the eye of one, while the other was shitting on the carpet,” I say. “For good measure.”

I am uneasy. The man with whose corpse the nine shells were found (Dr Jekyll?) may be safely laid out in the morgue. (Hard to judge on the basis of a few black-and-white photographs, but the poor deceased hardly had the appearance of a thug.) But what if Mr Hyde is still roaming free? Or Mr Hyde and his henchmen – his unscrupulous gang of house defilers. As soon as I get home, I phone Constable Modisane again to find out if there could possibly have been more than one burglar.

“Because you did not report anything else missing and your stolen goods have already been retrieved, we have closed the docket,” he says.

“They have not all been retrieved,” I say. “There are still twenty-three missing.”

“Eh heh,” Constable Modisane says, the last syllable ending low and melodiously. In the background I hear a terrific noise.

But I do not want to say goodbye! I do not want to let him go! I want to talk about the hanged man, I want to know exactly where they found the shells, I want to know all there is to know.

“Constable Modisane,” I say hesitantly, “I’m worried . . .”

The constable speaks in Zulu to someone over his shoulder.

“What is it that you’re worried about?” he asks patiently.

“I’m worried,” I say, “because I don’t know what happened precisely. Who came into my house. Who took the shells. What he was looking for. If there were more than one person. I would like to know all these things.”

“Yee-hes,” says the constable, not unsympathetically.

“I would like to know everything that happened,” I say.

“O-kay,” the constable concedes in his soothing bass.

“Are you sure you have no more information? Were there no other burglaries in the neighbourhood at the same time?”

“No,” the constable says. “Nothing else.” Again he calls out to someone in Zulu, and laughs heartily.

“Well, then,” I say. “Thank you.”

“O-kay,” he says jovially.

*

My heart remains heavy and it is not only about the loss and defilement of the shells. Ever since the burglary I have been finding it hard to fall asleep at night. I sleep with the bedside light on, for the moment I switch off the light the darkness comes to rest on my chest like a dead weight.

When I was five years old, the devil appeared to me in a dream one night. We had just moved into our new house, and the room I was sleeping in was painted blue. My bed stood against the wall, facing the window. The devil in his full demonic glory materialised full-length at the foot of my bed. I was panic-stricken and screamed so loudly that my father stubbed his toe badly against some obstacle in his haste to come to my aid. As a child I never doubted that I had indeed been visited by the devil.

The last time I gave credibility to the devil was when I was nine years old. One day I earnestly remarked to my father that from that day on I would never listen to the devil again. We were in the dining room, standing next to the tea trolley that my mother had inherited from her mother. This remark caused my father genuine mirth. He laughed silently. He laughed as he laughed only at someone else’s expense. In this case it was at my expense. I remember his face in profile as he laughed. When I laugh the corners of my mouth draw up in the same way. I was devastated. From that day on I banned the devil from my frame of reference and wrote off my father as a confidant.

After forty-odd years, one evening I suddenly have a strong awareness of the devil again. I find it surprising. He is neither evil nor threatening, but a melancholy character, who has come to the end of his road. Together this devil and I stand on the brink of an abyss. We have equally little say over our allotted fate. Moreover, in my current state I find his presence strangely reassuring.