The boy raises his panga, but the Commander snaps it from his hand like a twig. Then he tramples me down in the grass as he barges past. The blade goes up into the blue and comes down from high on the scalloped neck of Anya’s dress and she does not even see it fall. She calls out once, and the blade rises again and falls. Again and again.
With the final blow he cuts the rope. He wipes the blade in the grass.
They gather the boxes of bullets and stuff them into their canvas bags and their buttoned pockets. They clean the loose ones in their mouths and roll them on their thighs. Everything makes them angry. They say we are weighing them down, they should kill us all, and they hit us and drag us around on the rocks, but they do not use the panga again.
When everything has been divided, they tell us to go on, over the bridge. We have to step on this thing that was Anya, each of us, as if it were a branch fallen across a stream. This is part of the lesson.
He should stop now, Hans Günther thought, this was far enough. But it would be cowardly. She had finished it, she had pushed on to the end and kept her word, and so must he.
That was the last time I touched my sister. There was hard earth beneath my feet, and then yielding flesh, once, twice, and then rock. It was the way forward. I stepped lightly and looked ahead. As I crossed over into the future, I made a promise. I said that if I lived, I would tell this story, so that she would not be forgotten. Your breath is in these words, Anya. I have translated you from the dead.
We stopped in the hollow of the valley. The men were spent and we were too tired to be afraid or to run away. They need not have bothered to tie us up. As I lay down, with the others gasping for breath all around me, I put my hand in my pocket. And I—
Hans Günther dropped his head. His glasses, which had been sliding to the end of his nose, fell to his chest and dangled on the chain. Just a few more lines and then he was done. He did not need to see them written down. They had been sounding in his head for months. He opened his mouth and what came out was a sob.
The auditorium shook as if a wind had blown down the doors and consternation churned through the rows.
Horst Grundmann leant over towards his wife Sylvia and said that Hans Günther had not been himself lately, and although in truth such a thought had not crossed his mind before this evening, now that he had said it, it seemed true.
Andrij Leonenko took out his notebook and clasped it between his knees like a missal. He should make a note of something, he knew.
Annemieke Vogel, who had been covering the readings at the Literaturhaus for three years without noting anything even slightly out of the ordinary, felt an exhilarating jolt in her chest as she realised that something strange and remarkable was happening, followed by a tremor of dread that came with the certainty it was going to be embarrassing.
I—
Hans Günther Basch gulped. A tear eased from the corner of his right eye, ran swiftly down the slope of his nose and swerved into the corner of his mouth.
There arose, like a squall on the surface of a lake, a murmur made of many parts — surprise, curiosity, sympathy, dismay, glee — emotions that encircled one another or clashed like waves, causing flurries of turbulent conversation, muttered exclamations and undertones, chasing into every corner. Underneath it all, the chairs shrieked like a chorus of demons, but only Karolina Fischer heard them.
Maryam Akello stirred. She glanced questioningly at Hans Günther Basch, but she was the one person in the room who could not see his face clearly. Then she looked towards the front row and raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Ich—
Hans Günther gulped again. Then his face began to crumble, from the top down, like an expertly imploded building. The skin around his eyes creased and the lids sagged, allowing his tears to flow freely. These tears washed away the last vestiges of order in his features and left behind a look of utter misery. His nose broadened, opening two mazy courses of wrinkles in his cheeks, which carried the tears by roundabout routes down towards his mouth and chin. His lips drew back, becoming flat and thick, as the corners of his mouth travelled back towards his ears, and then his yellow teeth appeared, threaded with saliva. The round base of his chin dimpled and elongated into an oval cushion. The skin of his neck was spanned tight across his jawbone and the tears, passing over that cliff, coursed down into the collar of his shirt.
Bloody crybaby, Prof. Ziegler said out loud. She thought of Edward Sheldon, lying on his catafalque under a brocade coverlet, naked but for a dinner jacket, complete with bow tie and buttonhole, which was actually no more than a bib covering his chest and secured at the back with laces.
Mortified, unable to watch for a moment longer, Karolina Fischer turned to the woman beside her and asked whether her safari suit came from Uganda, and the woman said no, her sister-in-law had bought it in Cape Town, and Karolina said she didn’t mean to pry and the woman said not at all, the leopard skin was synthetic, and she was welcome to look at the label in the collar if she wanted to know the name of the designer.
Andrij Leonenko slipped out of his seat and headed for the free wine in the foyer.
At that moment, the girl who had come in late had the same idea.
Rolf Backer wondered what the papers would have to say about this and whether it would be good or bad for sales, and his friend Theo van Roosbroeck, who was biting his lip so as not to burst out laughing, noticed that the woman next to him had begun to record the spectacle on her cellphone.
The young man who had never been to a reading before felt the stirring of an erection beneath the copy of Zucker he was holding on his lap and his new girlfriend, noticing the way he shifted in his chair and gripped the book, thought that perhaps she had misjudged him and he was quite a sensitive man after all.
Hans Günther’s percussive sobs rang through the loudspeakers.
The puzzlement on Maryam Akello’s face had drained away, leaving a residue of cold indifference.
Hans Günther fumbled a handkerchief from his pocket, but it may as well have been a flag of surrender. He wept as if he would never stop.
Horst Grundmann rose and turned to the audience. He crossed his arms and flung them wide and crossed them again. The gesture was meant for the cameraman. Enough, it said, switch off. Look away. When this made no impression, Horst drew the flat of his hand across his throat. Cut! For God’s sake. Kill it! But the camera was unmoved.
Behind Grundmann, Maryam Akello sat quietly on the podium. In the surf of bobbing heads strangers turned to one another, all speaking at once, trying to decipher what they were witnessing, testing out what might be an adequate response or, finding that none was possible, opening their programmes and sinking into the forgiving surface of the printed page. In all this to-do, Maryam Akello sought out Florence Lawino. The look they exchanged was worth preserving for the record, but the cameraman was focused on Hans Günther Basch, stooped over the lectern with the broken pieces of his face in his hands.
The Trunks — A Complete History
Claude and his trunks. Where do I start?
Margery first told me about Claude thirty years ago. Then he was living in a flat in Braamfontein, and she would visit him there or join him for dinner from time to time. He’d been a teacher at the university once but he was no longer working. From what I could gather — and there was never much to go on, the story was full of silences — he was an antisocial and even paranoid person, but also erudite and crankily entertaining when he chose to be. In the mid-1990s, Claude, by then sickly and reclusive, came to live with Margery in Somerset Road. And it was then that she told me about the trunks. I learnt that when Claude and his father Bertrand, whom everyone knew as Berti, had arrived in Cape Town from Europe after the war, the trunks containing their possessions had been put in storage. And there they had stayed for nearly half a century. There was always some reason why it was better to leave them where they were. When Margery took Claude under her wing in Kensington, the baggage was finally retrieved. Berti was long dead by then and Claude, as it turned out, had only a few years to live.