Читать книгу The book of happenstance - Ingrid Winterbach - Страница 7

I want to go to Ladybrand, I tell Sof, I want to pursue that link with my stolen shells. She asks if I would mind her coming along. I say: With pleasure! By all means! We decide to go over the weekend.

On Friday morning Theo and I listen to Cimarosa. Andrew Riddle is the conductor, Theo says. At first I suspect he is pulling my leg. Riddle, as in riddle? I ask. Yes, as in riddle. Riddle left the London Symphony Orchestra to join the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Theo says, and succeeded in getting it back on its feet again.

The music hardly speaks to me this morning. I bend over my cards. Where should I begin? I have urgent matters on my mind, urgent issues for which I cannot find suitable words.

For a while we work side by side in silence.

I am busy with the word dool (roam, rove or wander). Doolgang (labyrinth). The cavities in the inner ear, hollowed out of the substance of the bone, are called the osseous labyrinth. The figurative meaning of doolgang is an errant way: the labyrinths, warrens or networks of the criminal’s life. Error is from the Latin errare – to stray. Ronddool (rove, or roam about). Spiritually or morally on the wrong track; to deviate from the way of virtue.

“What do you understand by the virtuous way?” I ask Theo.

He raises his eyebrows enquiringly.

“Virtue is the tendency to what is good, and the virtuous way is a metaphor for a life in which the good is pursued,” he says. He has clear eyes. He is impeccably polite. His gaze rests on me evenly – without curiosity or demand. That does not prevent me from watching him closely, from pointedly focusing my attention on him. Do I wish to provoke him? Besides his interest in words, he has a great appreciation for music. I have no objection to listening to his music with him. Here, too, I can learn from him.

“Labyrinth, or maze, I find a beautiful word,” I say. “It speaks to my imagination. It is poetic, it has resonance, I can visualise it. But I have difficulty with the virtuous way – as a concept it means little to me.”

He nods politely. “As a concept and as an expression it has probably long since lost its validity,” he says. He gazes reflectively in front of him for a while, before returning to his work.

“How did virtue become deug?” I ask.

“Virtue comes via Latin to the Old French vertueux; deug is of Germanic origin,” he says (without looking up from his work), “from the Dutch deugen, from the Middle Dutch dogen.” He is also a discerning man, I have noticed. He likes beautiful things. I have seen him unobtrusively lift a cup to look at the name underneath, and turn a teaspoon to check the hallmark. I noticed that the day Sailor treated us to cake at teatime. Sailor had brought along his own tea service, teaspoons and cake forks. No half measures for Sailor – only the best for him, Sof remarked to me.

Doolhof, I read. Maze. Where one cannot find one’s way; place where one can easily get lost; bewildering network; labyrinth. The figurative meaning of the word is a complex situation or set of circumstances, in which it is difficult to follow the right way; a situation that makes no sense. Anatomically the word refers to the passages and spaces in the temporal bone of the skull, where the senses of balance and hearing are situated.

Deug and deugdelik. Virtue and virtuous. I see Theo Verwey as a virtuous man – a considerate husband and a loving father. He is reserved. He keeps things to himself. What he holds back, I do not know. I have my own assumptions about his inner life. I imagine it to be as ordered, as filed as his extended card system. I would be very surprised if I were to learn that he is given to excess. This is a man in whom the will – or the virtuous impulse – keeps the appetite, the pleasure-seeking instance, thoroughly under control. This is how I read him. I may be wrong.

*

On Friday afternoon Sof and I leave for Ladybrand. We travel through a landscape of uncommon beauty, but I am distracted and do not take in much. From the corner of my eye I see the wintry poplars, the muted, ochre fields and the misty dales flash by; I see the majestic cliffs of the mountains in shades of deep, pale and pink ochre, but the beauty leaves no lasting impression. I am nervous, for I have a plan and it may be a foolish one. I have the address of the only Steinmeiers in town, and I intend paying these people a visit tomorrow. I have no idea what I will encounter there.

We stay in a guesthouse in town – sumptuously fandangled, but fundamentally unattractive. That evening we eat in an Italian restaurant-pizzeria, décorated like a Roman villa – or the owner’s idea of such a villa. There are painted fountains, painted statues and a painted curtain, drawn to the side with a flourish to reveal the vista of an Italian garden with cypresses.

At the table next to us six Chinese men are devouring their food in complete silence. Sof clears her throat, leans forward and says softly: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they are the Chinese Mafia, said to be very active here in Lesotho. They may have something to do with the disappearance of your shells.” Thanks, I say, I will bear that in mind. I eye the men covertly with some displeasure. When they have finished eating, the staff appear with a cake topped with burning candles. Everyone congratulates Charlie, one of the men; the cake is cut and devoured as wordlessly as the main meal. Afterwards the remains are sent back to the kitchen.

What do I really know about Sofia Benadé, I wonder during the meal, except that she grew up in a pastorie, that she is married, has twin sons, and that she has an annual subscription to Die Kerkblad. We are still sounding each other out, looking for common ground. But tonight I am off balance. My attention is elsewhere. I am not trying particularly hard to establish an understanding. This does not seem to be a problem. Sof strikes me as someone who would not oppose the flow of events too much. She drinks her wine and smokes her cigarettes and observes the people.

After our meal Sof says that we are now going to explore the nightlife of Ladybrand. I think: If she has a clear idea of what we should do, I am more than willing to go along. It is cold outside. A biting cold, and the night sky is high and wide. There are more stars here than in the city. We walk up and down a few streets in the nearly deserted town, until we get to a place called the Red Lantern, across the street from the Spar. In front of the window hangs a brown bead curtain.

“This looks like a nice enough little place,” Sof remarks.

Inside there are a couple of tables and a fancy cane bar counter as well as cane bar stools. The place is still half full.

“By day the local branch of the Women’s Agricultural Association meets here,” Sof says.

It is pleasantly warm inside. A waitress with prodigiously rounded thighs in tightly fitting pants takes our order. I look around. At one of the tables a man and a woman are seated; at the rest of the tables there are mostly young people.

“They all work in the local bank,” Sof says.

A man and a woman enter. A respectable couple, sound of character and upbringing. The woman has short, dark hair which she touches self-consciously. With his hand against her back, the man guides her lightly to their table in the corner.

“The lawyer with the Latin teacher’s wife,” Sof says. “They met at the tennis club.”

“Where’s her husband tonight?” I ask.

“He’s marking essays,” Sof says. “They have two sons. The elder is quiet and serious and the younger has pale green eyes and too much energy.”

The waitress with the rounded thighs asks: “You girls still okay?”

“We’re waxed, sista,” says Sof, and gives a little cough.

“And the lawyer’s wife?” I ask.

“She has a headache tonight, but that’s only an excuse, because she hopes the magistrate will come by in her husband’s absence. They have two little daughters, two thin, pale little girls.”

The place fills up gradually. The music starts. Donna Summer sings “Hot Stuff”. Sof mouths the words silently: “I need some hot stuff baby tonight.” Her expression betrays nothing, only her mouth forms the words. She does this with the next song as well. “I will survive,” she sings wordlessly, making small, accompanying movements with her shoulders. A cool customer, Sof, even if she calls herself a deluded doos. We order more wine.

A slight young man with close-cropped, curly hair, particularly dark eyebrows, intense eyes and an evasive glance enters. He looks uneasy. He sits down at a table in the corner and orders a beer. He has a dark-blue sports bag with him. He seems to be waiting for someone, as he keeps checking his watch. He takes a small notebook out of the bag and writes something in it. He puts the notebook away and checks his watch again. He glances around him restlessly for a while. Then he takes out the notebook again and writes something in it for the second time.

“Hasn’t yet learnt to hold a pen properly,” Sof says.

I observe the young man surreptitiously. There is something compelling about his face, especially his eyes – ever so slightly squint. It is a face that can be read as either underhand or mischievous. His beard seems sparse, not yet firmly established: dark but downy. An attractive young man, if one could trust him; if his manner were not so agitated.

“He clearly suffers from attention deficit syndrome,” Sof, who has also been watching him, remarks. “A course of Ritalin will do no harm.”

“Or he suffers from a bad conscience,” I say.

“Es war spätabends,” Sof quotes, “als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefen Schnee. Vom Schlossberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste lichtschein deutete das grosse Schloss an.”

“Do you think Kafka had such a lightweight, skittish young man in mind?”

“Probably not,” Sof replies, “but this is the African version of K.”

“Wet behind the ears and of mixed descent?”

“Why not?”

“Actually the story should have ended there for poor K.,” I say.

“At fifteen I loved Kafka,” Sof says. “I read his biography and deeply mourned his death.”

“That I can well understand,” I say.

The Latin teacher’s wife gets up to go to the toilet, behind a second bead curtain. The lawyer makes a call on his cellphone.

“I remember friends of my parents’ when I was a child,” I say. “They lived in the same small town as my grandmother. The man was an Afrikaans teacher at the local school. He took remarkable photographs. We sometimes went on holiday with them to the South Coast. They were friends with the Dippenaars; the two couples played tennis together. On holiday I played with Engela and Moetsie, the two Dippenaar girls. Later it turned out that for years Mr Truter, the teacher, had been having an affair with Mrs Dippenaar. I don’t remember Mrs Dippenaar as a particularly attractive woman. Her legs were hairy and too wide apart. Mrs Truter, Santie, on the other hand, was lovely. Warm and easy-going. What drove her husband into the arms of plain Mrs Dippenaar? I still can’t make sense of it. Santie Truter later had a stroke and shot herself. I remember her in her bathing costume on the beach, looking over her shoulder at the photographer. Her husband. He had moles all over his body. What exactly made him sexually attractive to his wife as well as to Mrs Dippenaar is not clear to me.”

“The ways of people are unfathomable,” Sof says. “My father always abhorred the hypocritical piety of his congregation. They were constantly indulging in all kinds of bizarre infidelities. Then he would be expected to provide pastoral counselling to them as well as the aggrieved husbands and wives.”

“Whereupon the miscreants would have the best of resolutions until the next time around when once again they could not keep their hands off one another,” I say.

Not much later the young man with the furtive glance gets up, pays, and leaves his beer half finished.

“Now his adventure starts,” Sof says, as he exits through the door, like K., into the cold night.

*

I sleep restlessly. The bright passage light worries me all night. I have a dream about Felix du Randt. We are together in a garden. We have a row. There are tears, but the next morning I cannot recall the exact circumstances of the dream.

Sof and I eat breakfast in the dining room together with seven men who are attending a course for railway officials. The guesthouse décor is as kitsch inside as outside. There are artificial flowers on the tables. We are served scrambled eggs, bacon, and a sausage as pink as a dog’s pizzle. At the table next to ours there are four men, their skin colour varying from Van Dyck brown to a deep bluish brown. They speak Afrikaans with a South-Sotho accent. At another table one of the three men has earrings, a reddish moustache, and hair cut in a mullet. He wears off-white trousers, a white belt, white socks and white shoes. The smallest of the three has watery eyes. “He had ringworm as a child, and his brothers and sisters bullied him,” Sof remarks dryly. She takes two Panados, for she has a headache this morning. Smoked and drank a bit too much last night, she says, and laughs her small, exculpatory laugh.

Two women serve us. One is tall, with a small head and a broad behind. She is clad in shades of beige – from her tight-fitting stretch pants to the colour of her lipstick and powder base; the two spots on her cheekbones are a warm blush-pink beige. She has a small, resolute mouth and her hair, fringe flat on the forehead, is teased up behind her head in a seething, russet-red nest. The other woman is petite, a shy beauty, her skin of a yellowish hue, her features resembling the comely girl-women of hunter-gatherers.

I am nervous. Sof and I discuss our plan. It is a shot in the dark, but we are going to risk it.

“Maybe it’s crazy,” I say anxiously.

“Relax,” Sof says. “What could actually go wrong?’

“What if we end up in a den of thieves?”

“We first check out the scene before we move in,” Sof says, and gives a little cough.

The men are conversing with gusto. Every now and then they call out remarks to one another, from table to table – remarks like echoes that bounce lightly from cliff to cliff, with a densely forested valley between them. Against the wall hangs a copy of a Thomas Baines painting in a large, gilded frame. It is a depiction of Bloemfontein from Naval Hill. In the foreground a rocky hill offers a view of a sprawling plain and of a small town far in the background. Oh, says Sof, the charms of the metropolis. Sof, I say, I trust that you will support me today.

*

There is only one Steinmeier in Ladybrand. I looked up the address in the telephone directory. The house is on the boundary between the white and coloured neighbourhoods, a distinction that clearly still applies in this town. It is an old house, but well kept, with a wide red cement stoep and pillars supporting its roof. The house – like most of the houses in the more affluent white neighbourhood – is of an ochre-coloured sandstone. The front garden is small, but neat, the little lawn is withered, and to the side of the house are a number of bare fruit trees. On the stoep there are potted plants in tins.

I knock.

“Fu-uck,” Sof says softly behind me.

An elderly woman opens the door. I greet her with enthusiasm, but my heart is thumping fiercely. She regards me somewhat suspiciously. Would this be Patrick’s mother?

Behind her a young woman appears with a baby on her hip. She reminds me of Hazel, a young girl who worked for my parents more than twenty years ago.

Sof and I have decided to use false names. (That we have to deceive these people like this!) I introduce myself as Dolly Haze, and Sof introduces herself as Anna Livia. (Anna Livia Plurabelle. O / tell me all about / Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia.)

I ask the older woman if she is Mrs Steinmeier and she says yes, she is Rosie Steinmeier and this is her daughter Alverine, and she gestures at the girl behind her, who transfers the baby to her other hip with the same movement Hazel would have used twenty years ago. I say that we are from the Durban Bible Society, that we were in the vicinity and that we have come to deliver the parcel that Patrick Steinmeier ordered from us. (At Cum Books in the large shopping mall near us I bought a Bible and two spiritual booklets. I had a great deal of difficulty with the choice of titles, for what would be suitable titles for the dead?) The parcel I made up neatly and pasted a label on it with Patrick’s name.

The two women exchange a quick, furtive glance.

“Patrick Steinmeier doesn’t live here any more,” Rosie Steinmeier says.

“That’s strange, for this is the address that he gave us,” I say.

Again the two women exchange a quick glance.

“Patrick died not long ago,” Alverine says, and her intonation is so much like that of Hazel twenty years ago that I experience a moment of total confusion. (Could it be her, unchanged, after twenty years?)

I say that I am truly sorry to hear that and respectfully ask the older woman if she is the mother of the deceased. Rosie Steinmeier brings her apron to her eyes and nods. I hear other voices in the house, behind them.

“Then I must let you have the parcel,” I say hesitantly, “with the compliments of the Bible Society.”

Suddenly I do not know how to proceed (that we have to deceive these poor innocent people like this), but over my shoulder Sof asks if we may come in for a moment.

The two women look at each other. The older woman moves aside and we enter. We step into a cool, dusky passage. My heart is beating violently. I have no idea what I can expect to encounter here. Four of my shells on the display cabinet? I may be wide of the mark; Patrick Steinmeier had probably long since stopped having any contact with his family. That we have to enter the house under such false pretences!

The lounge leads off the passage. The room is furnished with heavy ball-and-claw furniture, a lounge suite with a subdued floral pattern and a plethora of ornaments and little crocheted coasters and armchair protectors. The curtains are drawn. On the sofa and one of the easy chairs there are two large stuffed toy tigers. In the darkened room I back away – taking one of them to be a dog or something. Fright of my life. Heart thumping in my chest. Against the walls are prints, some in ornate frames. In one corner of the room is a shiny dark-wood display cabinet. I do not want to look around too much, but I can hardly help myself. Trying not to stare too openly, I take in every detail of the room with a burning gaze.

I sit on the edge of the sofa, next to the large stuffed tiger that keeps a fixed and glassy eye on me. Sof sits opposite me, prim and erect, her legs crossed at the ankles, under a large print of a landscape in glowing synthetic colours, framed in a gilded, excessively elaborate frame.

Rosie Steinmeier offers us a cup of tea and tells Alverine to go and make it.

I am completely flustered and can think of nothing to say except to compliment Mrs Steinmeier on the appearance of the room, although my enthusiasm sounds most insincere to me. At this point, however, Sof’s pastorie persona comes to our rescue. She leans forward in her chair, clears her throat and asks firmly, though sympathetically, like one accustomed to doing the rounds daily, if Patrick died after a long illness.

“No, mevrou,” his mother says, “the circumstances of his death are very sad.”

“How come?” Sof wants to know.

“He took his life by his own hand, mevrou,” the woman says.

Sof says that she is bitterly sorry to hear that; it must surely be a great shock and a time of trial and tribulation for the whole family.

“Just so, mevrou,” says Rosie Steinmeier.

At this point Hazel-Alverine enters the room with a tray, and behind her, without a doubt, the young man that we saw in the Red Lantern last night. Herr K., on his way to the castle. The unsettled young man with the evasive glance.

Sof and I exchange a brief, though urgent glance. The mother introduces him as Jaykie, her youngest child. “And this is now Miss Dolly and Miss Anna from the Bible Society in Durban,” she says. “What is the surname again, Miss Anna?” she asks Sof.

“Livia,” Sof says, and clears her throat slightly.

“Unusual, mevrou,” Alverine says (with Hazel’s intonation exactly – the first syllable of “mevrou” considerably higher than the last).

Jaykie’s hand is cool and damp and his handshake not very firm. For a brief moment our eyes meet. Unusual eyes. Dark-brown, cunning. Darker, almost blackish-brown around the outer rim of the iris and a somewhat warmer brown towards the centre. A slight, very slight squint. Curly eyelashes; dark, lush eyebrows. And he smells of aftershave. At half past ten in the morning in Ladybrand this young man smells of aftershave. Could it be he? If he smells of aftershave this morning, and the shells were found at the feet of his brother’s corpse – could it be that he was involved in the theft too? Does he possess information about the burglary? Does he know about my stolen shells? Could it be this young man who either took my shells, or shat on my carpet? That was no innocent gesture. It was a deed of aggression and intimidation. Does he know who I am, does he see through our bluff?

“Yes, mevrou,” the mother, Aunty Rosie, says. “It’s a terrible thing that came over us.”

Alverine pours the tea. “Hold the tray for Miss Anna and Miss Dolly!” she tells Jaykie. With exaggerated politeness he first draws two small ball-and-claw coffee tables closer for Sof and me. Then he holds the tray with tea, his bearing submissive. Without sniffing too obviously, I lean forward slightly to catch his smell again. But the moment is too charged – I cannot identify it. When I take the cup from the tray, I spill tea in my saucer. This man may have been in my house. Worse still, this man may know who I am. He has long since seen through our false pretences.

“Do you have any idea, Mrs Steinmeier,” Sof asks in her pastorie voice, “what exactly happened?”

I bite into a Lemon Cream. Jaykie sits with his eyes cast down, his hands pressed together between his knees, his whole demeanour betraying barely suppressed restlessness. I take a sip of the weak, milky tea.

“He was in trouble, mevrou,” Hazel-Alverine says, “we think he got mixed up with gangs.”

“Did he work in the city?” Sof asks.

“Yes, mevrou,” says the Hazel-sister, “then he mostly came home weekends. But the past few months not so often any more.”

The landscape in the gilded frame behind Sof depicts a peaceful scene with a stream, lush banks and shady trees in synthetic sea-greens and lurid, autumnal oranges. My eyes roam to the display cabinet with photographs in the far corner.

Sof clicks sympathetically with her tongue. She takes a delicate sip of tea. I dare not catch her eye.

“Show Miss Anna and Miss Dolly Patrick’s photo,” his mother tells Jaykie.

Jaykie jumps up, fetches a framed photograph from the cabinet, and hands it to me. Again our eyes meet for a moment. His eyes are roguish and cunning in equal measure. Cunning priest’s eyes. I have seen eyes like those in religious portraits. The eyes of saints or confidence tricksters. Swindlers. Or epileptics.

I study the photograph.

“It’s a picture of Patrick on his wedding day,” she says.

Head-and-shoulder portrait of the bride and groom. The bride has a stiff, obstreperous head of hair, one lock artfully brushed over her left eye. Her short veil, blooming behind her, is covered in confetti. Patrick wears a pale, sand-coloured suit. His hair is short and curly, like Jaykie’s, but he has a long nose, much longer than that of his brother. His eyebrows run to his temples in a strong downward arch. I strain to see a resemblance between this man and the photographs of the corpse that Constable Modisane showed me. I think I see something, a vague similarity. The corpse was also that of a tall, lean man, but I can’t remember the nose. The photographs were not particularly flattering.

That I have to deceive these trusting people like this! The man in the wedding photograph (which I am still holding in my hand) has nothing to do with the man who took my shells! Or with the photographs of the hanging corpse that Constable Modisane showed me. The constable was mistaken! There is a huge misunderstanding somewhere. This will not be the first time that the police have been misguided. What are we doing here, on a Saturday morning in Ladybrand, in Mrs Rosie Steinmeier’s house? If anyone here has anything to do with the disappearance of the shells, it is probably Jaykie, with his aroma of aftershave and his seductive fraudster’s eyes.

These thoughts go through my head as I sit on the sofa alongside the stuffed tiger with the glassy stare. While Sof keeps the conversation afloat, Mrs Steinmeier – the bereaved mother – wipes her eyes with her apron every now and then, and Alverine rocks the baby on her hip in the exact way Hazel would have done twenty years ago, in my parents’ house.

“He was a good man, mevrou,” the mother says. “He would not have harmed anyone. He was a Christian too. But he was led into sin! He was led into sin by crooks and skelms!”

“Skollies!” his sister says. “They made him do it!”

“Do what?” I ask. I am distracted, I am flustered. I am not certain of my case any more. I am overwhelmed by the resemblance between Alverine and Hazel. I am flooded with strange associations and memories. I have a sense of unreality.

There is a long moment of silence.

“They made him commit crimes, Miss Dolly,” Alverine says softly. “We think he got mixed up with gangs in the city.”

“It’s in the city where he was led into sin,” his mother says. “That’s where he lost the way.”

“Did he have children?” Sof asks. (My support and succour in this bewildering hour. How grateful I am that she accompanied me here.)

“Yes, mevrou, he has children, but his wife left with them long ago,” his mother says.

“We saw the photos,” the sister says softly. “The police came and showed us the photos. As they found him there.”

“Do you know for sure that it was him?” I ask.

“It was him, Miss Dolly,” Alverine says, and the mother wipes her eyes again.

“Up to this day we don’t know what happened, mevrou,” the mother says. “The police just came and told us.”

“And showed us the photos,” the sister says. “We don’t understand it, Miss Dolly! One day he’s still here, the next day the police bring us the pictures!”

I clear my throat. “Did it happen here,” I ask, gesturing vaguely with my hand, “here in the vicinity?”

“Yes, mevrou,” the Hazel-sister says. “There just before the turnoff to the highway, there mevrou will see a little brick building, that’s where they found him.”

Jaykie sits with his hands between his knees, moving restlessly on his seat. It looks as if he might jump up at any moment. I ask if I may use the toilet. The bathroom is a large room with an old-fashioned bath and an old-fashioned medicine cabinet against the wall. I glance into it rapidly. No sign of Boss aftershave. Nor of any shell. I sit down on the rim of the bath for a brief while. The photographs that Constable Modisane showed me, the recovered shells returned to me, the rest of the shells, the crime, my complex feelings of loss – all those have nothing to do with these people this morning in this house in Ladybrand. I am entirely on the wrong track. And that I have to lie to these unsuspecting people like this in the process! Except Jaykie. Him I don’t trust. If there is a link, it has to be this young man. The chances are good that he has some knowledge of what happened to my shells.

When I return, I ask if I may look around the room. There are more framed photographs on the display cabinet, as well as a number of plates décorated with painted pink flowers, a clock hand-mounted on a sawn-off section of tree trunk, two glasses with artfully folded blue serviettes, copper coasters, and two identical glass fishes supported by glass waves. No sign of a shell.

As we get up to go, I ask Jaykie if he also works in the city. Before he can answer, his mother exclaims: “Jaykie is the artist in the family, mevrou! Jaykie, go fetch your artworks, show the mevrou!”

Jaykie returns with a small art folder. Dutifully he presents his works of art. They are mostly pencil drawings, mostly of women, both nude and clothed. Jaykie is regrettably not very skilful with the pencil, and why does it not amaze me? Does he not find it difficult to sit still for any length of time, and did Sof not remark on his ineptitude even at handling the pen the previous evening? The drawings are decidedly sugary in theme and touchingly clumsy in execution – like that of a much younger person. In one of them a girl turns her eyes dramatically towards the heavens – Saint Teresa of Avila with a Barbie hairstyle. Sof and I make appreciative noises, but dare not look at each other.

“Do you study art somewhere?” Sof asks.

“No, mevrou,” Alverine says proudly. “He taught himself. He’s saving his money to go and study at the tech in the city next year.”

After this we take our leave. We are seen off at the door with much flourish. We are thanked from the heart for our visit and for the parcel. We are thanked for our trouble and our sympathy.

In the car I ask Sof: “Where on earth do they get those stuffed tigers?”

“You get one free when you buy a Sealy Posturepedic,” she says.

*

I tell Sof that I do not want to stay in this town any longer. I want to go home immediately. This place makes my skin crawl, I say. I want to go home and reflect on everything that has happened. “So much for Herr K. on his way to the castle,” I say. “It’s not out of the question that that sanctimonious youth either took my shells or shat on my carpet. Although,” I say, “I have my serious doubts about the latter. There is something disarming about him after all, and he doesn’t seem quite the type to defecate on a stranger’s carpet. But he’s hiding something. Of that I’m sure. It would not surprise me at all if he knows something about the shells.”

I tell Sof that she will have to distract me. I will drive, it will do me good to keep my eye on the road, but she must talk. The whole fucking episode, I say, has unsettled me and made me even more on edge.

Before taking the turnoff to the national highway we come across the small brick building, resembling a small electrical substation, where Alverine said that Patrick Steinmeier had hanged himself. Presumably it is there that the bag of shells was found. (I had assumed all along that the bag was found at his feet.) I want to stop and look inside, but there are no windows, and the place is closed off from the road by a sturdy wire fence. I nevertheless insist on getting out and taking a couple of photographs.

Speak, I say to Sof, and don’t stop before we are in Durban.

*

“When the war breaks out in 1914,” Sof says, “James Joyce and his family move from Trieste to Zürich. Had he stayed on in Trieste, he would have been in danger of being interned. During the seven years he spends there writing Ulysses he has fits, ulcers and countless eye problems – there is a daily build-up of fluids in his eyes, his eyesight deteriorates by the day. In the evenings he writes in a room with a suitcase on his lap. He works ten hours a day. After each episode he breaks down and Nora nurses him back to health. He writes to everyone he knows to send him information about Dublin. His gargantuan imagination brings a thousand and one disparate things together. Songs, maps, sailors’ jokes, idioms and phrases. He asks his Aunt Josephine to write things down on scraps of paper. He is on the lookout for anything, for there is nothing that he cannot use. His head is like a factory. Imagine everything that is going on in there!”

But I interrupt her.

“Who would have done it?” I say. “Am I totally deluded here? Do the Steinmeiers perhaps have nothing to do with this? Neither of the two brothers – not the poor dead one nor Jaykie. Judging by his drawings he doesn’t have a particularly sensitive eye, and I’m not sure that he has it in him to produce a turd like that.”

“Human nature, like the human digestive system, is unfathomable.”

“Unfathomable?”

“Well. Unpredictable,” Sof says, and gives a little cough.

“Of one thing I’m sure,” I say. “The same person couldn’t have committed both deeds. I can’t see how anybody with such a fine eye for beauty could commit such a coarse and violent act.”

“It’s not impossible,” says Sof, and coughs dryly.

“It’s not impossible, but it’s highly improbable!” I exclaim. “No, actually it is impossible. It is out of the question. I cannot reconcile it with my conception of the world.”

“It won’t be the first brute with a refined eye,” says Sof. “Take the Marquis de Sade as an example.”

“Of what?”

“Of someone with a refined literary sensibility who wouldn’t have hesitated to shit on someone else’s carpet.”

“He did not shit on carpets as far as I know.”

“Whatever,” says Sof. She keeps her eye on the road. We are taking turns to drive.

“I speak under correction,” I say, “but no one in De Sade shits on carpets. They defecate on one another.”

“The male characters probably defecate on the female characters,” Sof says. “Although I cannot say with any certainty. I haven’t read De Sade in a long while. Probably not since high school.”

“In the pastorie?”

“Wherever. Maybe not in the pastorie, maybe at university.”

“But Jaykie knows something about the matter,” I say, “because he couldn’t look me in the eye, and the shells were found with his brother.”

“So?” Sof says.

“And he smelled of aftershave this morning. You must have noticed it too.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Sof says. “You can’t assume that it’s the same man who was in your house just because he smells of aftershave.”

“At ten o’clock in the morning in Ladybrand? Who uses aftershave at ten o’ clock on a Saturday morning in Ladybrand?”

“Jaykie Steinmeier,” Sof says, “because he’s an artist.”

“Sof,” I say, “don’t taunt me.”

But it is right here, I suddenly know, that our friendship is sealed.

*

Back home, I am deeply disturbed. My thoughts move restlessly from one thing to the next. I had better not entertain the thought that the youth with the seductive squint might have shat on my carpet (improbable), or even worse, that he wilfully deceived me, and that he is hiding the rest of the shells somewhere, or knows where they are being hidden (more probable). In my mind’s eye I see flashes of the beautiful landscape through which Sof and I travelled. The sister of the hanged man – the reappearance of Hazel after twenty years – has deeply touched me. And what has become of her, that lively young woman? I remember her with my child on her hip, how she would stand listening, silent, as if waiting for an answer. I remember Marthinus Maritz’s brutal sidelong glance. How do I remember my mother, and my father, and Joets? What residue of them remains in me? I ceded them to death with great sorrow: my mother even more than my father. On the way back Sof kept telling me about Joyce. She said that Joyce’s mother always returns in his fiction to persecute him. “Thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk,” Joyce said of her. I listened with divided attention and gazed with unseeing eyes at the lovely wintry valleys and dales that Sof pointed out to me.

I cannot sleep. I phone Frans de Waard, the man, my companion, with whom I have had a relationship for the past seven years (sexual in nature and intention). He keeps late hours.

“Do you have any idea,” I ask him, “if characters defecate on each other in De Sade?”

“Yes. It does occur at some or other stage.”

“What exactly happens – who defecates on whom?” I ask.

“I can’t remember. I read it too long ago.”

“You don’t want to take a guess?”

“No,” says Frans, “why would I want to take a guess? Let me rather not say anything of which I’m not sure. All right?”

“Yes,” I say, “all right.”

Do I hear someone coughing softly in the background, or am I imagining things? Have I caught him out – caught him out in flagrante delicto? No, this has more to do with my own fantasies than with reality. No man has ever suited me better. He is older than I am, ironic, erudite, and full of surprises in bed. This man is the best that I will ever encounter – I realised that soon enough. He is more deserving than anyone I have ever been in a relationship with. He is as much as I could ever expect from a lover and companion. That did not deter me, however, from applying for the assistantship when Theo Verwey advertised it. Even if it meant that we would be parted for a while and would not see each other regularly. He has already given me much pleasure, and I count on it that he will continue to do so in the future. And I believe that I, in turn, have pleased him well and shall continue to do so.

*

On my spool I have five photographs of the small building in which Patrick Steinmeier hanged himself. Although I did not particularly focus on the landscape, I took four photographs of the magnificent sandstone cliffs, as well as a picture of Sof next to the car, with the mountains in the background, and she in turn took one of me. (Sof, of whom I actually still know little, who accompanied me to Ladybrand on the spur of the moment, and whose pastorie persona made the visit to the dead man’s family home considerably easier.) Eleven photographs on a spool of twenty-four. Before I hand it in for development I should perhaps fill up the roll. I bought the film because I intended to document the exact arrangement of the shells next to my bed. But I never got round to that.

For many years I have had a preference for a heavier, larger kind of shell, especially for the conches – that wonderfully large variety of solid forms from tropical waters. But in the past four or five years I have been looking with more interest and appreciation at other, lighter shells, and have begun to augment my collection with tonnas, helmet shells and harpas. The twenty shells next to my bed were all medium-sized. (The heavier conches and dramatic murexes I displayed in the lounge.) Their colour varied from sandy whites, muted ochres and pink ochres to the darker brownish pinks of the harpas and the delicate blues of the Tonna perdix. I set them out next to my bed in three rows. Sometimes the light fell in such a way that they were lit from beneath, so that they glowed and appeared almost weightless – with an otherworldly beauty, like the host of angels, the ranks of the saints. These shells were the last objects that I would see at night before switching off the bedside lamp, and the first that I would rest my eyes on in the mornings when I awoke. By looking at them, I felt myself strengthened within. Their beauty restored my trust in all of creation. I felt myself at one with the immense variety of life forms on earth, a small link in the immeasurable chain of coincidence that binds us all together.

I hand in the film spool as it is. I can think of nothing else I want to photograph.

I do not tell Theo Verwey about my visit to Mrs Rosie Steinmeier in Ladybrand. I do not tell him about the hanged man and the photographs I took of the small building. I fear he will find it laughable. Maybe it is laughable – my efforts to follow the trail of the lost shells. After the burglary I mentioned briefly that my shells had been stolen and left it at that.

I sit with the cards in my hand. We are still busy with the letter D. Dorskuur – cure brought about by restriction of fluid intake. Dorsnood. Suffering from the throes of thirst? I ask. Similar to other less commonly used word combinations like dorsbrand (burning caused by thirst), dorsdood (death from thirst), dorspyn (pain caused by thirst), Theo explains. Shall we go and have a drink? I ask. (Theo smiles.) Dos (decked out). (How charming he looks this morning, decked out – uitgedos – in that fine, cream silk shirt.) “Gedos in die drag van die dodekleed,” Leipoldt says. Decked out in the apparel of the shroud. Doteer (donate). Douig (dewy) – not a word particularly suited to this province. Douboog (rainbow formed by dew), doubos (dew bush – word used in West Griqualand for the shrub Cadaba termitaria), doubraam (bramble bush of which the fruit is covered with a thin waxy layer). The many word combinations formed with draad (wire), with draag (variant of dra – carry) and with draai (turn). Who would have thought, I say to Theo, that simple words like these could be the basis for so many combinations? Draaihaar (regional word for hair crown). Has it been your experience as well that people with many crowns in their hair are unusually hot-tempered? Theo smiles and shakes his head. Draaihartigheid (disease caused by a bug found in cruciferous plants whereby their leaves turn inward). The word sounds like a character trait, I say, a twisting and turning state of the heart. Theo nods and smiles. Draais (the word used by children when playing marbles, yet sounding so much like a synonym for jags – horny). But it is especially droef (sad) that interests me. Woeful. Indicative of sorrow. Causing grief or accompanying it. Evoking a sombre or doleful mood. Bedroewend – saddening. Also in combination with colours, to indicate that a particular colour is murky or muted and can elicit sadness, sorrowfulness and dejection. Droefwit (mournful white). And droefheid is the condition of being sad, sorrowful or mournful; inclined to dejection, depression and despondency; something gloomy, cheerless and downcast, as opposed to joy. Is that all? I think. So few words for an emotion with so many shades? The complete colour spectrum – from droefwit (mournful white) to droefswart (mournful black), from droefpers (mournful purple) to droefrooi (mournful red). (Droeforanje, droefblanje, droefblou – mournful orange, mournful white, mournful blue.)