‘Why would you lose your mind?’ Maria asked.
‘Just promise. You’ll see to it that Mom and Dad don’t commit me.’
Maria promised.
A week or two after this visit to the city mortuary Sofie lay down on her bed and turned her face to the wall. She slept all day. She refused to eat. She drank only water; next to her bed there was a Consol jar with water and a glass. She turned her back on them good and proper, as if to say: To hell with you all. Maria stood in the doorway surveying her sleeping sister. She was irritated with Sofie; why did she always have to be so extreme? she thought.
*
Maria decides that later, when she’s at home again, she’ll examine the contents of the book more carefully. She may find something in it after all. To deal with her immediate disappointment, she has a drink at one of the multitude of cafés in the town. A man asks whether he may join her. He is a visiting academic, an agricultural economist, he occupies himself with questions such as the food shortages in the third world.
It is full moon. They sit outside. If only, like a chameleon, she could keep one eye on the moon and the other on the man. He is amusing, engaging and informed. An attractive man. What does his upper lip remind her of? How should she describe it — a Daisy Duck lip? Although he is of imposing stature, the skin of his neck looks invitingly soft. For an alpha male, as she places him, he does not have a particularly firmly defined jawline. Later he invites her to his guest house and pours them both a whisky. Their entwinement is by no means unwholesome — there is something salutary in their energetic erotic skirmish.
*
The following morning Maria visits the cemetery for the third consecutive day. She still has no very clear idea of what it is that brings her here. An inexplicable urge. If only Sofie’s ashes had been walled in with the bones of her parents! Tobie never did inform Maria what he had done with them. Yesterday she couldn’t bring herself to ask him. For all she knows, they’re still somewhere on a shelf in his house, or he found a deserted — picturesque — beach somewhere where he scattered them in the sea with a self-conscious — histrionic — flourish. Stupid sod. Self-satisfied opportunist.
When in the last months she didn’t reply to her emails, Maria assumed it would blow over in time — Sofie had had periods of withdrawal before. But whenever Sofie was this morose and uncommunicative, Maria had to think of the heart-wrenching openness of her letters years ago! Written from three harbour towns! The endless conversations they had whenever they visited each other!
It’s a pleasant morning. A light breeze is blowing. Everything is radiance and sparkle; all surfaces reflect the light. Everything is touched with silver. The mountains are just starting to assume solid shape. Once again, as on the previous day, not a soul in sight. Perhaps there have been incidents here, perhaps she is blissfully ignorant of the dangers inherent in paying solitary visits to a cemetery. She is half-curious as to whether she is going to encounter Denzil Hartzenberg and his nameless associate once again. This time she is prepared, on her guard.
She sits down on the edge of her father’s grave. Fortunately a smallish tree nearby sheds a light shade on the grave, because although it is late summer, it is still boiling hot. She wipes her hand across the cold granite slab. In the tree a dove is cooing. She has just started to attune herself to the moment, the place, the grave, her nearness to the remains of her deceased parents, when she receives an SMS message:
They’re all buggering each other around, an endless saga of backstabbing & infidelity. I can’t do without it. Abel A is in town again.
The SMS is from Susanna Croucamp, the orphan from Langlaagte. She’s addicted to the soap Isidingo. She says she can’t distance herself emotionally from the joys and woes of the characters.
Maria is sitting on the grave in the sparse shade of the tree, cell phone in hand. Half-musing she sits, considering how she should reply to Susanna, when she becomes aware of a presence a short distance from her. She’s not heard anyone approaching, and that in spite of her intention to be on her guard. Her eyes first of all come to rest on the sandalled feet of the person, a woman — neglected feet and down-at-heel sandals. A tall, thin woman, in an old-fashioned floral dress, her large straw hat tied under the chin with a little ribbon.
The woman is talking to her, and at first Maria can’t make out what she is saying, until she realises that the woman is speaking not only incoherently, but totally unintelligibly. Gibberish. Speech impediment — cleft palate? The woman talks haltingly, stuttering in fits and starts, low gutturals, gesturing at the cell phone in Maria’s hand all the time.
Could the woman have escaped from somewhere, from a home or institution — absconded from House Horizon or Autumn Leaves or some such — because sound of mind she’s not. She carries on excitedly pointing at the cell phone. Her face is flushed with heat, or with the effort of making herself understood.
Maria gets up, and immediately the woman starts retreating. ‘What’s your name?’ she asks, approaching her. ‘Where do you live?’ Not that she expects an intelligible reply.
The next moment the woman stoops and picks up a large clod, which she clutches in her hand menacingly.
‘Okay,’ says Maria appeasingly, ‘okay,’ and starts backing off slowly. Good lord, is the woman going to start pelting her with clods now?
Then she turns around and starts walking away briskly. She starts running when the first clod glances off her arm, a second thudding shortly afterwards just to the left of her. Speech impediment or not, the woman has a lethal aim, and an impressive range. One by one the clods, and later also stones, thud behind her, and Maria takes to her heels, she runs as fast as she can, thankful to reach her car safely.
She sits with beating heart. Silence. The woman nowhere to be seen. If you’re looking for adventure or diversion, the cemetery is clearly the place to come. Suddenly she regrets having run without at least getting in a clod, or stone or two, herself. Wouldn’t it have been gratifying to pot the woman one bang in the middle of the forehead so that, like Goliath, straw hat and all, she toppled over stone dead. As she feels right now, Maria thinks it might have given her a considerable kick.
The next day she flies back to Durban. Back to the shade of her lush subtropical garden, where the monkey rollicks recklessly in the tree, the night adder slowly ingests the frog, and the bat chirrups through the night — fretful as a peevish woman.
The Ten Gates
HOME AGAIN, MARIA ONCE MORE examines, and this time more thoroughly, the red exercise book that Sofie bequeathed her (as a kind of bequest she should probably see it). First she riffles through it to check whether she missed something — a note or an accompanying letter perhaps. Lord, anything, a little line, a clue, direction or hint. Anything that Sofie could have addressed specifically to her. (Otherwise why leave her the book? Except if her only motive was to keep it out of the hands of Tobie Fouché.) Nothing. Not a single dried seed or pressed flower or miserable blade of grass. Not a bookmark or scribbled scrap of paper or chance annotation in the margin.
Then she examines the contents more closely. On some pages only one or two lines are written, more on some of the others. The eel is a sombre whisperer, is written on one page. And: Persephone wears a high hat and a veil, on a following page. Something that looks like a recipe on another page (Sofie’s idea of a joke?): Suspend the eel from a sturdy hook. Make a circular incision through the skin just underneath the head. Collect the blood.
A few pages on there is a detailed map that Sofie drew of the River of Acheron and the Acherusian Lake. Every river, every site, every topographical detail — plateau, plain or mountain — meticulously recorded. Underneath the map is an explication of the striking resemblance between Homer’s description of the so-called land of the dead and the region of the Acheron River, Thesprotia, which, according to Thucydides, was the Ancient Cimmerion — ‘proof that the region of the Acheron was without doubt the land of the dead.’