‘Benjy …’ Something in his voice. She doesn’t want to let him go.
‘What, Ma?
‘I don’t feel at ease.’
‘Ma, relax. I’m like fine.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ she says. (Something in his voice. The boy is hiding something from her.) ‘I know somebody who said you can come and hide out with them if need be.’
‘That’s cool, Ma, but I don’t need to hide out.’
‘Promise me,’ she says.
‘What, Ma? I must go.’
‘You won’t do anything foolish. You know your track record is not of the best.’
‘Foolish as in what, Ma?’
‘Benjy, only you will know. What are you going to do now, with your plans on ice?’
‘I’m working on my installation and I’m doing research for another big project,’ he says. ‘It’s sort of a new take on the working class.’
‘Is that going to be vast as well?’ she asks. (Why is she so snide with him this morning? Probably because she’s worried.)
‘Cool it Ma,’ says Benjy, ‘no need to be bitchy.’
‘Benjy,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry. As long as I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I’m going to be worried, sorry.’
‘That’s okay, Ma,’ he says, ‘relax. It was actually like nice to see you the other day.’
Well, well, she thinks, for that she should probably be grateful — it took him like a long time to say something like that. She hopes that his assessment of his situation is reliable.
Slightly more reassured, she can now focus on the other reason for her visit to the town. She must get in touch with the man, Sofia’s partner, as soon as possible, however much she dreads the prospect.
Farewell the locust
THIS IS HOW MARIA VOLSCHENK remembers the morning sky — exactly like this. The glory of tumbling clouds. Every morning a different cloud formation; a swiftly changing spectacle. The colours predominantly rose-pink, ink-blue, old-gold. The clouds on the horizon are lit up from below by the rising sun. The mountains are in silhouette, fire-gold on the horizon, more rosily pink higher up. The upper parts of the clouds are blue — indigo, cuttlefish-blue. The visible bits of sky are shades of grey-blue. Some mornings the clouds are more dispersed; higher up in the sky. The outlines of the mountains still darkly delineated; the light on the horizon bright, the clouds glowing gold, dark at the core, higher up the clouds are lit up more rosily from below; wispy at times — dispersed over the whole expanse of the heavens. Everything, in whatever configuration, equally lovely, equally dramatic. She does not know the names of the various clouds. She never learnt them. She was always too busy. Busy making figures tally. Busy raising the child on goat’s milk. Busy not getting out of touch with the man. The light falls from a more acute angle. And a different aroma that starts ascending from the soil.
Something makes itself felt very tentatively, very hesitantly, when she walks in the garden of the guest house where she’s staying, in the botanical garden, on her rambles on the mountainside. Something manifested in her body as a sensation of emptiness. It felt like an ice-cold, hollow spot, it was a sensation akin to pain. It spread to all her organs. It settled in her head. She stood by the grave of her parents and she rattled like a hollow pod. She thought, she is now so hollow on the inside, the wind could surely whistle through her as if through a reed. Her emotional state she still finds unfathomable, but at least, she thinks, she knows what she needs to do.
It is suddenly much colder. End of May, and the first rains of winter start falling. She does not think it a good idea to visit her parents’ grave in the rain. The economist has left for a conference somewhere in Africa. She should have asked him to bring her back a memento. A stone or something. She misses his heft, she misses his heat. She misses the hard-to-describe mouth. It’s last days that she associates him with. Everything that is fated to extinction lends an urgency, an acrid edge to their togetherness.
His smell she finds different. Not unpleasantly different, just different from the boys, the young men, the uncles who formed part of her childhood and youth; different from the men with whom up to now she has had sexual congress. Also, this different smell claims her sexually. She associates it with snow, with rabbit fur. He also tastes different. Constantly she explores with her tongue the contours of his enigmatic upper lip. Under her tongue this lip feels resilient. Perhaps her tongue comprehends what her eyes cannot. The prominent upper lip, the deep lip furrow — how is she to describe them?
If she had to draw his mouth, she would stylise it, as they drew birds in flight as children — a single, stylised, curved line. The shoulder section of the wing she would draw closer than usual to the body, the wings would slope down steeply. That is how as a child she would have pictured the man’s Daisy Duck upper lip.
In the mornings she lies on her bed in the impersonal space of the guest house. At the moment she is grateful for this. She welcomes such a space in which nothing clings to her. She finds it a disburdened space.
*
She — at long last — makes an appointment to see Tobie Fouché, Sofie’s partner. Maria proposes that they should meet somewhere for coffee, she doesn’t want to meet him in his own space (it would place him at an advantage), and just at present she doesn’t feel up to the house where every single object reminds her of Sofie’s absence.
When she’s sitting across from him, she suddenly knows that this man is not going to bring her any closer to Sofie. If anything, he’s more likely to alienate her from the memory of her sister.
‘What was Sofie engaged in before her death?’ she asks.
‘Oh,’ he says, evasively, ‘the usual. She wrote quite a bit.’
‘Poems?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any completed volumes?’
He hesitates for a moment. ‘One,’ he says. ‘It was ready for publication when she died.’
‘So why wasn’t it published after her death?’ Maria asks.
‘Well,’ he says hesitantly, ‘there’s a reason for that.’
‘May I see these poems?’ she asks.
‘That is unfortunately impossible,’ he says. ‘The volume and all unfinished poems have been placed under a twenty-five-year embargo.’
‘What,’ she asks, shocked, ‘do you mean, by embargo?! Whose decision was that?’
‘It was Sofie’s wish,’ he says, and lowers his eyes coyly.