And so it turns out, because when he’s washing his hands in the bathroom, his eye falls on the calendar behind the door, and the first number that leaps out at him is the wrong number, and he starts counting, he counts desperately to ward off catastrophe, he half-prays in-between, he washes his hands fit to work up a lather, he washes and he counts, but he doesn’t get it warded off. He’s fucked, he thinks, he’s fucking fucked, he and Iggy.
Sombre whisperer and Phrygian cap
SUDDENLY IT IS COLD, and the rain pelts down in furious flurries. The first rains of winter. The mountains are shrouded in mist. Maria Volschenk must talk to Tobie Fouché once more. The first conversation succeeded only in getting her back up good and proper. She wants to know about Sofie’s last days. The man will have to meet her halfway, whether he wants to or not. She will have to think up a way of getting round his evasions. Flattery, she’ll have to flatter him; she’ll have to play up to his narcissism and his writerly ego; with cunning and compliments she’ll have to win him over. She was too confrontational at their first conversation.
*
Maria thinks, one morning, that she spots one of Sofie’s two great loves in a supermarket. (Her husband and Tobie Fouché, at any rate, were not it — that Maria is prepared to vouch for.) The relationship was clandestine, because Sofie had not yet divorced her husband. She wrote to Maria at this time that when for the second time in two days she’d found a praying mantis regarding her with its triangular face, she’d taken it as a sign: she wouldn’t accept the man, even if he were to come to her. But when one evening in a tremendous gale two windows and a door slammed shut simultaneously, she took it as a further sign: she would take the man if he were to come to her. He had come to her, she had taken him, she wrote. He was a man after her own heart, with his Oscar Wilde mouth and his soft girlish hair. She asked Maria rather not to tell their mother about her indiscretion and adulterousness, because as it was she found Sofie’s values morally dubious. (Not so, Maria thought: in their mother’s eyes Sofie could do no wrong.)
Maria tries to follow the man down the aisles as inconspicuously as possible, but realises after a while that it’s not him. Had she thought that after twenty years he would still have the same ephemeral appearance?
*
Maria lets Jakobus Coetzee know that she would like to visit him. Come! he replies, you’ll find it interesting. Jakobus used to be a good friend of her ex-husband’s, but their friendship had soured with the years, whereas he and Maria had remained good friends. (Of her ex-husband Jakobus commented only once: Andreas’s hubris gets his goat.)
*
She moves to a little self-catering apartment in the town centre. She lets her business partner know that she’s done the audits, but she’s staying on for a while longer — the unfinished personal business is taking longer than she’d counted on. Should she send Joy Park a message: I wish you luck; ask one of the neighbours to collect the post while you’re in hospital? (May God have mercy on you in those dark demonic wards.)
She wakes up abruptly one night (a week or three after she arrived in town for the second time). Her heart is beating so frantically that she can hear it in her pillow. Was she dreaming? Where are Sofie’s ashes?! Does Tobie still have them somewhere at home, or has he scattered them somewhere by now? Sofie’s sparse remains surely are more weighty than that featherweight of a man. And remains is a hideous word.
In the botanical garden the presence of plants exerts a beneficent and soothing effect on her state of mind. In the newspaper she reads only the death notices. One in particular makes a deep impression on her. A woman mourns her deceased sister. You were my mother, my friend, my dearest sister. Until we meet again. Maria cuts out the item and pastes it in her diary.
She is living in an anonymous space here, and that is how she prefers it. Nothing to remind her of anything, except of her conjunction with the man, the lover. She has no need here of a familiar space. She doesn’t want to be reminded of anything. She’s brought nothing personal with her — apart from Sofie’s little red book and the big natural history book.
When her lover with the Daisy Duck upper lip is out of town (often) and she can’t sleep at night (more and more frequently), she looks at the red book and the nature book. Difficult to recognise Sofie in the disciple clamouring to God for forgiveness.
Her and Sofie’s last meeting was in the park. Maria was visiting and Sofie had suggested it as a rendezvous. Sofie lay on the grass on her stomach, supported on her elbows, her hands clasped together. Delicate wrists. She looked down as she talked. Her eyes only now and again met Maria’s — large eyes, guarded gaze. Large features, attractive, robust, expressive face. Her abundant hair cut short. A little distance away two big tortoises were mating with a noisy clashing of carapaces. This was before the publication of Sofie’s last volume. After its publication Maria congratulated her by email — that was nine months or so before Sofie’s death. Maria couldn’t really get into the volume. As hard as stone, she thought, as cold as ice. What the hell is the matter with Sofie, she thought, what’s happened to the Sofie of old — her playful, boisterously obstreperous sister?
Maria reads in the natural history book about the Moray eel. It has a large mouth and sharp, strong little teeth. It lies in wait in a rock crevice underwater peeking up, only its head outside its hiding place. There is one of them in the aquarium in Durban. She must go and have another look at it. A close look. Who knows what she could learn. This eel does not look edible to Maria — Sofie must have had the European eel in mind in her recipe — it would give her the heebie-jeebies to slaughter such a beautifully patterned creature. (It would give her the heebie-jeebies to slaughter anything.) Maria once read somewhere that sailors long ago wore their hair in two styles — either in little rats’ tails, or in a single plait. A pickled eel skin was then taken from a brine barrel, carefully peeled back (like a condom) and slid up to cover this plait. For decorative effect it was tied with a red ribbon. An eel skin peeled like a condom — what would Sofie have made of it?! She would have bust a gut laughing, and come up with something even more outrageous. A month or two before Sofie’s death Maria wanted to send her the Timbuktu limerick, the one in which one Tim and a friend go hunting and meet up with three whores in a pop-up tent. Just up Sofie’s street. Also in the light of the dream that Sofie had way back about the three old whores in the ghost town of Durban. She didn’t send it. She no longer had the inclination or the nerve. No, damn you, Sofie, she thought, it’s time you got in touch with me for a change.
Now Maria wonders what sorrow and tribulation compelled Sofie, garbed in a coat of locust skin or in sackcloth or hair shirt, to toil arduously with a pilgrim’s stick and staff, through the inhospitable terrain of humility and renunciation?
*
It’s raining. It’s cold. Winter has arrived. So here she is now, Maria thinks, and it suits her very well. At night the wind blows in gusts, or it rains, she’s not sure which. Nobody can reach her here, that’s what it feels like. (Of course Joy Park could, and Benjy, and the lover, and her ex-husband, should he want to enquire after the welfare of their child.) It’s raining, it’s bitterly cold, she digs in. She sits by the heater. She pages through Sofie’s book (still looking for something in it), she bends over the visual guide to all living creatures on earth: locust, cricket and eel, bat (with its vampiric countenance, its pricked-up little jackal’s ears, its great hemeralopic eyes), polecat and civet-cat, otter with its webbed paws, killer whale, beetle, skylark and water mongoose. There’s nothing systematic about her desultory survey, and at times she’s distracted by recurring thoughts (where Sofie’s ashes could possibly be stored or strewn; the allure of the man’s infranasal groove). At times she can almost imagine that Sofie is standing behind her: an absent-minded presence. An evanescent, restless shade from the land of the dead, the region of the river Acheron.