In the little red softcover book Maria finds only the yearning and clamation of the disciple, in a state of readiness and sharpened, purified receptiveness. Nowhere else in it does Sofie permit herself to be seen. If her sister is to be recovered in any other place, Maria decides, it is in the grave gaze of Justinian and Theodora, in the high hat of Persephone, in the Phrygian cap of Orpheus, in the sombre whisperings of the eel.
*
Maria and the man gaze into each other’s eyes. First she lets her tongue hover and linger at the entrance to his mouth, teasingly she caresses the corners of his mouth, only then does she thrust it deep into his mouth. He sucks her out like a marrowbone. Then he rams himself deeply and forcefully into her, without false modesty or reticence. They batten on each other’s bodies like snails on a carcass. (This she often witnessed in the subtropical regions.) She thinks: Good Lord, can it be, am I becoming besotted with this man?
While it rains outside, the mountains by day are swathed in trails of drifting mist; the wind by night drives on the rain in violent flurries. While her partner is lying on the other side of the world in the arms of a newfound lover — Eastern, Western? She hasn’t even asked. While her tenant, Joy Parks, is lying dismayed and defeated in a state hospital in the last colonial outpost, the only white among a host of suffering blacks. And Benjy, her child whom she raised on goat’s milk, lowers his head, forges ahead tenaciously in the face of adversity, intimidation and lost love. She groans and sighs. It’s not infatuation, it’s something that approximates more closely to notions of extinction and finitude.
She calls out his name! The rain pours down in sheets! The trees bend in the wind! Everything is possible! Inform me about extinctions, about the last days, about the folly of my people! she cries out in the urgency of love. Inform me about the five million metric tons of ash! The melting poles! The rising sea levels! The disrupted food chain! The massed armies of the hungry! The monstrous rich — inviolable citadels of greed! The terrible social inequalities in the country! The fallacies regarding race! Everything is possible! The graves of my parents! My dead mother! My dead father! The cryptic little book — bequeathed to me by my deceased, demented, bloody-minded sister.
Heavens, she thinks, but how the man charms her.
*
At night Maria is on the look-out for the moon. For three nights running the heavens are so impenetrable, there might as well never have been a moon. In the early mornings, by the first glimmerings of light, she walks through the cold, wet streets. She must see the mountains at first light. When it’s raining, they’re not visible. When the heavens relent somewhat, they are there: sometimes with trailing drifts of mist on the highest peaks. The nearest mountain first catches the light — when the weather’s clear, the first, warm light enfolds the mountain from behind, the detail becomes visible, while the other mountains, further away, are still solidly silhouetted against the lightening morning sky.
When it’s overcast during the day, the nearest mountain is soft, and its colours muted. No dramatic shapes or shadows: the mountain is then soft and solid at the same time, as if you could stroke it with your hand. A young mountain. Younger than the others, it would seem. When the weather’s cleared again, this mountain is firmer in its resolution, more assertive of colour and form. So she keeps her eyes constantly fixed on the mountains. She is aware of the changing play of cloud above them, of their hourly mutation of colour, solidity, texture. Aromas arise from the soil. Doves coo. The claim it all makes upon her! Her heart feels like a clam clinging to a rock, now being prised open as if with a small sharp knife.
Of a day an emptiness came upon her. It settled in every organ: stomach, heart, liver and kidneys. Eventually in her head. An emptiness akin to pain.
*
Margaretha Stoffels was sixty-one years old, all those years ago, and her husband, or companion, Willem, not a day older than twenty-four. He took off for Gordon’s Bay as early as a quarter past six every morning. Nevertheless they were happy together, so Margaretha told Maria. Other couples, of whom Maria has forgotten the names, who came knocking at her and Andreas’s front door — high on spirits, elevated of spirit, in spite of their often lamentable and reduced circumstances. Countless couples that she saw wandering about on the banks of the river, in the streets of the town, apparently insouciantly. But especially Joeta and her dark companion, dark of hide and intention, who went underground in winter, arose in the spring, staggered down the mountainside and assaulted, accosted or blackmailed at random any prospect or possible benefactor. Maria watched them. Determination! she thought, such as one did not encounter every day.
You could tell Sofie nothing. Obstinate. Headstrong. No more to be deflected from her course than an arrow from a bow. What determination it must have taken to make an end to her own life in such a way.
*
Look, Jakobus Coetzee writes to her in an email, before you visit us, I should give you a little background. This isn’t the kind of outfit that you want to approach unprepared. It’s advisable to know what to expect. I don’t know if I can report coherently on this place. My life has changed direction here in an unexpected way. For instance, I pick up pig shit, with bucket and spade, and for the first time in my life I feel that I’m holding my own in a social environment. As I’ve mentioned, says Jakobus, the light here falls at times as it fell once on a farm in my youth, a place to which I am always returning in memory. The young woman who would have worked in the kitchen on that farm is now my neighbour. Thus have things changed.
An old military storage depot
IN THIS PLACE I’M EVERYBODY’S UNCLE, Jakobus continues. My sojourn here, which initially I expected to be one of the most eccentric chapters in my life, I now see as something rather more ordinary. I see myself as a very ordinary participant in an extraordinary situation. Under the management and direction of Josias B, incidents and situations from common life are trampled underfoot here as guiding principle. Literally, by the clean and unclean creatures here, and figuratively, by Josias B’s management style.
The farm is situated in the city, at the foot of Signal Hill. Every day the noonday gun booms. Apart from pigs (from piglet to hamlet, as my father would say), there are geese here, chickens, a merino ewe, semi-feral cats, and a hundred-and-one dogs. There are also donkeys. Thus, all creatures great and small (though I doubt that the Lord God made them all). Hamsters and canaries come and go. The farm ascends in terraces up a steep incline.
Allow me to orientate you more or less with regards to the mise-en-scène here, and also the dramatis personae.