A few days after the call from her ex-husband Maria and Susanna are having a drink at a little restaurant in Helen Joseph Street (formerly Davenport). At a table next to them are a large, dark-skinned man and a young woman. Susanna recognises him as Abel Ahewu, a participant in the writers’ festival in the city, an author whose work she knows. She engages him in conversation, says that she admires his work.
Abel Ahewu has a large, heavy body. His neck is thick, his head and neck form a continuous whole, so that his head seems to taper towards the top. His dense, curly hair is cut short; a scattering of grey in it. The deep flush under his skin suggests a white parent — a Ghanaian father, a white mother, it transpires. His lower lip is uncommonly plump — like a ripe fruit, or a caterpillar.
The girl with him has eyes the shape of green peaches before they start ripening and swelling out. They slant upwards. She lives in Cape Town, she has just published her first novel and she’s also participating in the festival. She smokes. She hardly talks. Her name is Ayesha. She certainly has Malay blood. Her skin is the colour of strong milky tea.
He has come to South Africa hoping to find a bride, says Abel Ahewu. He had a premonition that he’d meet an exceptional woman here.
While they’re talking, Maria Volschenk receives an SMS message from her ex-husband. He thinks Benjy is involved in some scaly scheme. Could she please come to Cape Town as soon as possible, preferably within the next two weeks. Her gut reaction is to let him know, no, you deal with it for a change, I raised Benjy on goat’s milk and with great trouble and much sorrow while year after year you pursued your career. She ignores his SMS.
Abel says a good friend of his committed suicide recently, just before he (Abel) came to South Africa. The friend had fallen in love with a transvestite, a dancer in a night club. He couldn’t deal with his hopeless love and so he jumped off a building. The loss of the friend was a heavy blow to Abel. He has travelled to the other end of the world, he says, and his dead friend is like an invisible travel companion.
Susanna says the love of her life died young. Their dreams were like a diptych at times — the dream of the one like a mirror image of the other. A love like that she will never know again. Her ex-husband was a racist swine. He has also died in the meantime. His end was tragic but no more than he deserved. He was a bully and shunted around his workers and her gardeners. She realises that it reflects unfavourably on her that she could marry such a man. But she was a fool and probably a bit traumatised by her childhood in the orphanage.
At home Maria has another whisky. For the rest of her life she’ll probably look backwards more often than forward, she thinks, whereas in fact in retrospect there is really not all that much that she wants to revisit. She stands outside on the wooden deck. It has cooled down slightly, but the night is still muggy. There is the sound of crickets, and a fruit bat skims past her head. Only then does she send her ex-husband an SMS saying that he should tell Benjy to phone her as soon as he has a new cell phone.
The following evening Maria and Susanna Croucamp go to listen to the performance of the writers in the university theatre. The hall is freezing. The girl reads an extract from her novel. She never looks up from the book while she’s reading. Her voice is timid, a young girl’s voice. She reads evenly, without any variation of intonation. Abel Ahewu reads an extract from a new book. He makes a few introductory remarks about the book. It is set in Los Angeles and in Accra. The main character is a young girl. She grows up in a slum in Accra and later becomes a striptease artist in Los Angeles, where she gets addicted to drugs and falls in love with a black graffiti artist, who kills himself by jumping off a building.
At the end of the evening the writers and members of the public congregate for drinks on the wooden deck outside. The night is sultry and brooding. Once again Susanna Croucamp engages Abel Ahewu in conversation, while Maria (out of her element) listens in silence. The young woman Ayesha is once more in attendance. Abel Ahewu says he likes Durban. The city gives him a feeling of benevolence and abundance. He feels the need here to surrender to something — the night, the sultriness, the lush vegetation, the profusion of trees — all these are enticing. He leans back on the bench he’s sitting on. He is both charming and aloof, in the massive body like a stronghold. A citadel. When somebody else is talking, he keeps his eyes downcast, when he is talking he looks up, then the whites of his eyes have a melancholy glint. His full lower lip swells sensually, but also forbiddingly (a samurai warrior guarding a gateway). Susanna, the orphan from Langlaagte, is unmistakably charmed by him, Maria notes, by this dark-blooded man, smouldering with secrets.
*
The next evening Maria is playing chess with Vera Schoonraad, her neighbour on the right. Vera is an art historian, she trained in Florence. She is fluent in Italian and Spanish. Vera is an expert in the field of Romanesque architecture. She wrote her dissertation on the frescoes in the cathedral of Santa Maria de Tahull in Spain. Sometimes they look at Vera’s slides of Romanesque architecture and painting — an extensive collection with examples of churches from down in the south of Spain to up in the north of Germany.
Then they sit in Vera’s sitting room looking at the slides in silence, with Vera passing a comment from time to time, or pointing out some feature, but for the most part Maria feels they’re sitting in silence, with now and again the sound of a chirruping bat, or a hadeda startling up somewhere, or in summer a mango plopping onto the roof of Vera’s garden shed. At times it feels as if she’s on a pilgrimage with Vera, peregrinating from cathedral to cathedral.
Like Maria, Vera has one son. He apparently has links with the Boeremag, or AWB, or Volksfront. She’s not even sure with which one of these organisations. It could even be the Suidlanders. He believes in the ‘night of the long knives’. She finds it appalling that a child of hers, exposed to art from an early age, who travelled all over Europe with her, can allow himself to be so misled, can be so conservative politically — an intelligent child, so misguided, and so obstinate to boot. He sent her some of the circulars of one of these organisations in which security strategies are explained in the event of countrywide bloody black uprisings, but ever since she’s informed him that these organisations are dangerous — naïve and paranoid — she has not had any contact with him. Doesn’t say much for a cultured background, she says.
Maria tells Vera that her house makes her think of the Baroque, with the dark walls, opulent surfaces, heavy, red velvet curtains, statuettes and icons that Vera collected on her manifold wanderings. Vera says no ways, she’s in essence a desiccated Protestant, the tendency to the Catholic, to baroque excess, is a vain attempt to compensate for the arid penury of her soul.
Her ex-husband, she says, is involved in illicit dog-fighting. How does she know? asks Maria. She’s put two and two together, she says. It does not surprise her one bit, she says, he’s a ruthless thug. Why did she marry him? asks Maria. Good question, says Vera.
*
Maria Volschenk phones her son, Benjy, in Cape Town, after he’s SMSed her his new cell phone number (just the number, no message). Are you okay? she asks, your father says you’re in some trouble. No, I’m okay, says Benjy. (The line is bad, as if Benjy is standing somewhere on a mountain in a high wind, or on a beach at high tide. Although Benjy is hardly an open-air enthusiast — the spaces he moves in, if she’s not mistaken, tend to be indoors, over-crowded, under-illuminated.)