‘What was Sofie’s wish?’ Maria asks.
‘It was always her wish that no unpublished work should be published after her death.’
‘And you’re going to permit it?’ Maria asks. ‘Surely you have some say in the matter?’
‘I have a say, but I’m going to respect her wish,’ he says.
‘You’re going to do it?’ she asks, incredulous.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’m going to.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ she exclaims. (The other customers glance round at them with interest.) ‘I can understand that unfinished poems can be placed under embargo, but a volume that was ready for publication!’
He shrugs. Her face is glowing like a coal of fire with indignation.
‘It was Sofie’s wish,’ he says, ‘whether you want to believe it or not.’
‘I believe that it could have been Sofie’s wish, but that you can do it, that I can’t believe.’
He shrugs.
‘Tobie,’ she says (even his name she dislikes), ‘Sofie is dead. She will never know whether her wish is respected or not. She will never write again. Apart from the poems she left behind, there will never again in all eternity appear anything by her. You know that as well as I do. How can you get it past your damn conscience to deprive the world of her last poems?’
‘It was her wish,’ he persists.
‘Oh, crap, man,’ she says. Her hand trembles so, she can hardly hold her cup.
That it could have been Sofie’s wish, that she can believe. Extreme Sofie always was. Impulsive, reckless, insane even, at times. But that he can do such a thing, that passes her understanding. Tobie Fouché is a poet. Complacent hardly begins to describe him. Sensitive nature verse, tender urban poems, he is a panegyrist of elusive mountain paths and bashful waterfalls. Deeply felt poetic utterances, interminable odes to autumn, to winter; delicately nuanced emotions upon beholding shifting qualities of light. (Not exactly her taste in poetry, she always thought; how could Sofie attach herself to such a man?) He takes pride in his sensitive poetic regard; has always sported a certain poetic election like a halo round his head, as if the mantle of some great poet had descended upon his shoulders — whereas Sofie is a hundred, a thousand times the greater, the more forceful poet. Was. Sofie is dead. She will not write any more poems. She was a hundred times more fearless. More profound. Rawer, less precious.
Tobie’s cultivated, gentle radiance, the eternally ingratiating little fake-humble smile. The corduroy trousers and Viyella shirts, those Maria finds as pretentious as always — always in earth tones: green and brown, in organic cloth, hand-woven in some workers’ cooperative in the Langeberg or in India. She can hardly bring herself to look at his self-satisfied face. She’d forgotten how insubstantial he is. Sofie commented to her only once that Tobie was disembodied. After that she clammed shut and never again said anything about him.
‘May I read the poems?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says, ‘as I said, the poems are under embargo.’
‘And you may not make an exception for me?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I may not.’
‘Tobie,’ says Maria, ‘I am Sofie’s only sister. I’m her nearest relation. Don’t you think you could make an exception for me and allow me to see the poems?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘If I make an exception for one, I must make it for others as well. You may, though, with special permission, read the poems under supervision.’
‘Permission from whom?’
‘Permission from me.’
‘That’s exceedingly big-hearted of you,’ she says. (She can’t believe what she’s hearing. The mean-spirited fool!)
‘And besides,’ he adds, ‘I’m actually making a concession for you, because I think under the circumstances Sofie would in any case not have approved of your having access to the poems.’
‘You are henceforth Sofie’s official mouthpiece on earth?’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘as the executor of her estate that is more or less what I am.’
‘She would never have allowed you to speak on her behalf while she was alive,’ says Maria. ‘For that her own voice was too powerful.’ He colours slightly.
‘In actual fact,’ he says, ‘Sofie’s wish was that her work should be burnt. If she should die. I moderated it by placing it under embargo.’
‘The embargo was your idea?’
‘Yes. As I’ve said, she actually wanted all her work to be burnt.’
‘She officially had it stipulated like that in her will? Black on white? Signed by a commissioner of oaths, an attorney, whatever?’
He hesitates just a moment too long.
‘It’s not stipulated like that in her will?’
‘It was always her wish,’ he says.
‘You’re not answering my question,’ says Maria.
He suddenly bridles, takes a deep breath, and says: ‘I do not have to discuss Sofie’s will or her wishes with you, Maria.’
She must adopt a different tactic. She is furious and vindictive in equal measure.
‘What do you know about Sofie’s interest in the Ten Gates?’ she asks.
She notes with satisfaction that for a moment he has absolutely no idea what she’s referring to. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘Sofie was interested in many things.’
‘Yes, she was,’ says Maria, ‘and this interest is difficult to reconcile with the others, as far as I can judge.’
‘Yes?’ he asks. He is curious, but he doesn’t want to show it. He is of course aghast at the intimation that there was some aspect of Sofie’s life of which he was not aware, and over which he has no control after her death. He wants to fish for information, but he is too proud.
‘Yes,’ she says. She would relish rubbing his snout in the mud.
‘Are you referring to’ — he makes a half-dismissive hand gesture — ‘what she wrote in the little book that she … that I gave you last time?’
‘Yes, the book she left me. You know of course that she interested herself in annotating and explicating the so-called Ten Gates,’ she says. ‘She wrote about it extensively, it must have been very important to her.’
‘Right,’ he says. His gaze wanders. He’s also getting older, she sees. His hair is thinning, he no longer has the same boyish effulgence. He looks, to her great satisfaction, deflated. The wind knocked out of his sails for the time being.
‘It would seem, in fact, as if she underwent a complete change of heart.’ Rub it in.
‘Right,’ he says, his glance lowered, directed at the scrubbed table surface in front of him.
She tries a different tack. ‘How were things with Sofie before her death, Tobie?’ she asks: suddenly, outright. ‘You know for yourself that we no longer had contact.’ (Of course he knows it; he may even have been partly responsible for it.)
He looks up. He looks four-square into her eyes. Actually for a few moments something pleading in his regard. But she sees how quickly this pleading gaze veils over, rebarbative. He is still looking squarely at her, but now with greater depth of feeling. ‘She was ready to go,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?!’ Maria asks, staggered.
‘She had made peace with the knowledge that she would never experience happiness in this world,’ he says. Of all the banal and clichéd bullshit! That she could have thought for a moment that this man — hypocrite — would ever inform her of her sister’s emotional state before her death.
‘How do you know that?’ she asks.
‘That’s what she said,’ he says, and drops his gaze chastely.
‘Tobie,’ says Maria, ‘did you know that Sofie was going to kill herself?’ (As if he would answer the question honestly.)