My dear brother, Iggy concludes, I have seen it all, and it has filled me with loathing. But also with an unquenchable resolve. My suffering has come to an end, I am eagerly awaiting my imminent transfiguration.
It might get loud
AFTER HER MEETING WITH BENJY Maria Volschenk drives back to Stellenbosch. The mountains are oh so lovely. Late autumn — the vineyards are turning colour, the trees have lost almost all their leaves. Under different circumstances enchanting — but today it nauseates her. You can stomach only so much of this saccharine prettiness. She’s not in the mood for it today. Then rather Durban’s unpretentious industrial areas — the section between Sydney Street and the harbour; Edwin Swales Road on the way to the Bluff, with one container depot after the other on the left.
In Stellenbosch she has tea in a coffee shop that she normally likes, but today she finds offensively pretentious. She sits at the long, well-scrubbed table and pages in a desultory fashion through a magazine. It’s so typical of Benjy’s way of functioning in the world to decide that someone would want to wipe him out. She hopes that as so often he’s misinterpreting the situation. If he really is in mortal danger — what on God’s earth then? She wishes she didn’t have to deal with the situation on her own.
She tries to reach Andreas once more. No reply on his cell phone. When he’s working towards an exhibition he’s often incommunicado. Nobody to whom she can turn. She doesn’t fancy trying to explain the situation to Vera or Susanna.
She sends a text message to Jakobus — he is at least geographically close to her at present:
Crisis with Benjy. He thinks his life’s in danger. Andreas as always unavailable.
Jakobus messages back:
Benjy can always come and lie low here on the farm. Refuge for dodgers and drop-outs. Josias B a doughty champion of men on the run.
It’s a possibility. She feels somewhat reassured. She’ll suggest it to Benjy. The farm does truly sound like a place where somebody could disappear off the radar temporarily amidst the inmates, pigs and whatever.
As she gets up, she suddenly feels an acute pain in her chest. She’s literally brought off balance by it, has to steady herself against the counter. Her first thought is: Something has happened to Benjy, I can feel it in my body!
*
Look, thinks Karl, individually each of these things could still be ignored, but taken as a whole they suggest a pretty grim state of affairs. The psychic’s warning that he should remove his brother from the place, what Josias had to say about Iggy, the frostbite guy’s crazy warnings, and last but not least — indeed the worst of the lot — Iggy’s own report on his situation. If Karl was still thinking there might be some hope of a way out — well, there isn’t.
However much he would like to blinker himself, bury his head in the sand, turn tail, deny everything — it’s no longer possible. He has a headache, the glands under his arms are swollen — must be the side-effects of the tetanus injection. But sore leg or not, headache, dizziness, whatever, tomorrow morning he must hit the road early.
All afternoon he lies on his bed in the hotel after reading the rest of Iggy’s letter-report. He half-dozes off; half-feverish, half-delirious he sees Iggy’s face clearly before him. Iggy with his shapely, round head, his regular features, his thick, light, sticking-up-straight hair, on the face of it a calm, balanced person. And that is after all what Iggy is — totally engaged with the world around him, with everything that interests him. Iggy who can listen so attentively. The image Karl has of his brother is so totally at odds with that of a violent, ranting, delusional person. Iggy is forbearing, gentle, he is not somebody who judges people. He is easily moved. He is the least aggressive person Karl knows. So what is all this about the wrath of God that will be poured out over them so that nothing remains of them? What is this war that Iggy has declared on them? It sounds fucking biblical — Old Testament gone wrong. What did the frostbite guy say? There are cunning and demonic powers fighting for possession of Iggy’s soul, it’s by no means certain that he’ll survive. He himself was lucky to escape with his life, the man said, and held out the two beetroot claws to Karl for inspection. Holy fuck. Injury to the body, the man said, that’s the least. (The least?! Karl thought it looked fucking horrific.) And once Iggy has gone arse-over-heels down the abyss (which abyss?), nobody will ever be able to reach him again. In his mind’s eye Karl sees Iggy disappearing down a deep crevasse while he looks on impotently. The thought gives him cold shivers.
What Iggy wrote in his letter-report is so contrary to the image he has of his brother that he starts wondering whether the Joachim-fellow might not be right after all — whether poor Iggy is not in the grip of evil powers greater than himself. How would Karl know what cunning and demonic powers are operating in the world? If a psychic can see things, there could well be a sphere beside the ordinary of which most people have no experience. Perhaps he should after all contact the Joachim-fellow. He claimed to be an initiate and that he had knowledge of worlds beyond the observable world, another material dimension or some such thing. He thought the guy was talking shit, but now he wonders. He could be the one who knows fuck-all. Give him his music and his programming and he knows his arse from his elbow, but with this kind of thing he’s totally out of his depth. He supposes he’s living blinkered in one dimension. (Juliana would agree.) Simple things matter to him, like metal. Like Accept’s new album. Nothing in the recent past has appealed to him as much as the cover of that album. Only a week ago they were having a great time, he and Hendrik, listening to it, and now here he is in this crummy joint, potted in the leg by some prick in a small-town cemetery (Hendrik will split his scrotum laughing about it), on a mission of which the outcome most probably will not be favourable.
If only Hendrik were here. Hendrik is solid, he’s grounded, he wouldn’t easily let some Sheddim or evil goings-on in another dimension get the better of him. And Karl can still not get over it, it puzzles him endlessly — if Iggy’s mind is really so fucked, how come his command of language is not affected, how come he manages to describe all these off-the-wall things so precisely?
*
That evening he goes down to the bar for a beer. To his joy, who should he find there? Who else but Stevie and the two silent men? It’s a good sign, perhaps all is not yet lost. The three of them were at the metal festival at the Gariep Dam first, then they had business on the way, in Colesberg and so on, and now they’re on their way back to Cape Town. They have a small printing company there. What do they print? Karl asks. Anything you want printed, says Stevie: poetry, any flyer, underground magazines, official notices. Like the previous time in Colesberg, Stevie does most of the talking. The other two guys are as taciturn as ever.
The man with the thin, cynical face, Ian Bronkhorst, is apparently a writer. What the other guy, Jakes Oosthuizen, does Karl can’t discover. High forehead, trendy crew-cut, hair brushed back, big nose, deep frown lines, small mouth, big chin — in profile his face looks even more concave tonight than the previous time. Also something to do with writing, he gathers. He looks somehow bruised, as if life has dealt him a couple of hard knocks. Karl prefers him to the Ian guy. He is friendlier, his face more open. He’s got a plucky glint in his eye. Like somebody who’s been knocked down many a time and got up again quite cheerfully. Not the grudge-bearing type, not like the Bronkhorst man — he looks very distrustful. Pale skin and hair; something overly pointy about his face. Like a jackal.