Iggy made things. He was always busy. He made a volcano out of papier mâché. He fashioned things out of clay — ghosts in grottos with skulls and bats. Adroitly he folded the wings of thirty plasticine bats and suspended them upside-down in the clay cavern. Not one of the bats was bigger than one centimetre.
Iggy drew strong men, animals, birds, various breeds of dog, cars, whales, dolphins, dinosaurs.
Iggy did not like loud noises or sharp light, he was exceptionally sensitive to both.
Iggy was not into music, not like him, Karl.
*
From Colesberg Karl makes an early start for Beaufort West.
What was the last, the very last DVD he and Juliana saw together? Was it Werner Herzog’s documentary on Kuwait shortly after the Gulf War, Lessons of Darkness?
That evening he’d rather have watched It Might Get Loud once more. (That moment when Jimmy Page, with his long grey locks, takes the guitar and plays the first few bars of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and Jack White and The Edge both give a tiny grin of recognition and pleasure.)
But Juliana prefers classical music (something else on which they don’t see eye-to-eye).
A hellish landscape. Vast surfaces of oil kilometre upon kilometre like dams of water; in which the air is reflected as if in fact in dams of water. And then the burning oil wells — pillars of fire ascending into the sky, and massive, billowing clouds of smoke. Herzog’s quotation from Revelations — the opening of the fifth seal — made the hairs on Karl’s arms stand on end. At one point two female voices interweave as the camera moves high above the devastated landscape. From the corner of his eye he saw tears trickling down Juliana’s cheeks. Do you recognise the music? he asked her. Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater, she said. Perhaps she was crying for the music, perhaps for the relationship, which so evidently was drawing to a close.
*
Just this side of Hanover, after he’s been on the road for about an hour, Karl suddenly wonders whether he did after all pack Iggy’s letters. He draws up at the very first garage in Hanover. Oh good fuck, he’s left the letters on the table in the guest house. Oh Christ. He knows it for certain and with a sinking heart. To make doubly sure he rifles through all his stuff. But he can see it lying there, on the table. At a café he asks for a telephone directory. Fortunately he remembers the name of the place. No, says the woman, the maid has tidied up there already, she saw nothing. He gives the woman his cell phone number. Please phone me if the parcel turns up somewhere. Will do, promises the woman.
Iggy’s letters are gone. He’s gone and lost Iggy’s letters. Iggy took the trouble to write to him and he’s lost them before he’s even read them. That as fucking well. If he’d read the letters he might have had a better idea of what’s up with Iggy.
He’s sitting at a table in a café, his head in his hands.
His cell phone rings. It’s Josias Brandt. Damn him.
‘When are you coming? You have to get a move on.’
‘I’m close to Beaufort West,’ says Karl (not quite true), ‘I’m coming as quickly as I can.’ He feels like telling the man to just fuck off. Just fuck off and leave me in peace.
‘Shouldn’t Ignatius perhaps see someone in the meantime, a doctor or someone?’ he asks.
‘A doctor,’ says Josias, ‘if a doctor were to see him now, he’d have him locked up in an institution at once. His condition is in any case no longer my responsibility, as I have said repeatedly. He has to get out of here before he burns the place down, as he’s threatening to do. He attacked one of the geese with a stick.’
Excuse me, this is Iggy we’re talking about here. Iggy used to cry when he or anybody else stepped on an insect by accident.
‘Couldn’t I perhaps talk to him on your cell phone?’
‘Are you also out of your mind!?’ says the man. ‘Do you think I want my phone smashed to smithereens? Nobody dare go near him today.’
‘Is he eating?’ Karl asks.
‘I don’t know if he’s eating. I can’t take that on as well.’
When he wants to get going, there’s clearly something wrong. The car won’t start.
Holy fuck, that fucking-well as well.
Now the car has to be seen to, in this godforsaken town. Why do these small towns depress him so, what’s wrong with him? Why on earth did they chop off the tops of the cypresses, didn’t they have anything better to do here?
The dead they chill
ONE EVENING IN THE SECOND WEEK of January (after a miserable festive season on her own: Martin still in Taiwan and Benjy gone away with friends), Maria Volschenk is playing cards with one of her neighbours when her ex-husband phones. She’s instantly irritated at his call because she’s actually winning, something that doesn’t happen all that often. Susanna Croucamp plays a mean hand. And they play for money. The ex-husband says he thinks Maria should come to Cape Town as soon as possible because Benjy is in some sort of situation. What kind of situation? she asks. He doesn’t know, but he suspects it’s not good. Why can’t he help Benjy? she asks. Because he’s preparing for a big upcoming solo show in Johannesburg. Benjy’s cell phone and his computer have been stolen, he says. (That’s why she’s not been getting any response to her SMSes and emails to Benjy for a while now.)
Maria and Susanna Croucamp play cards every Wednesday evening. When they’re alone, they play Cribbage, Coon Can (Con Quien). Bezique, Pontoon. Contract bridge they play with a married couple of which the woman is freckled all over her body and the man has the most lugubrious aura conceivable. (Behind his back the woman refers to him as Old Tight-arse.) Draw Poker they play with a fifth player — a chemist’s wayward wife. Susanna learnt to play cards in the orphanage.
She has two small dogs that romp around on the sofa all the time while they’re playing cards. They’re of a miniature breed, with pointed ears and bulbous eyes. The smaller of the two, the female, can be snappish at times. Susanna has a man working in her garden, his name is Godfear. He is misshapen, with short, bandy legs and half a hump and he talks incessantly to himself. Especially in the afternoon when Maria sometimes has a lie-down, Godfear likes working next to the hedge near her bedroom window.
Susanna Croucamp is an author. Her first book was an experimental novel — inspired by the Alexandria Quartet, which she had tried to read at school. The book was not exactly well received. Then she spotted a niche for erotic science fiction. She writes that under a pseudonym. The books sell well, but she tells Maria that she hopes one day to write a real novel — something major, experimental and ambitious. Susanna has dark, mulberry-coloured hair and a gap between her front teeth.
She grew up in Langlaagte, in the shadow of the mine dump. She remembers the first, historical wooden mine-shaft etched in silhouette on the horizon at sunset and being told that General De la Rey was ambushed and shot at Langlaagte. For years she looked out for the spot where he was reputed to have been shot, in hopes of finding a dry bloodstain. She thinks that as a child she in time scoured all of Langlaagte centimetre by centimetre. Susanna and her brother and sister lived in the Abraham Kriel Children’s Home. The principal there was a Mister Welmann: upright, courteous. He invariably wore a three-piece suit, generally brown, with a fine stripe. He was impeccably neat of appearance. A handsome man with an attractive profile. Next to the school was the post office, a red-brown brick building.
Susanna got a teacher’s diploma and got married. (The actual love of her life had died in an accident before then.) Her husband was of a prominent, respected family, but he was a swine, she says. An arch-racist, among other things. They were divorced, she took the children and came to Durban. He died recently; good riddance, she says. She took a course in creative writing and started writing. Reclaimed her life. Now she takes shit from no-one.