‘Where did the police take the man?’ Maria asks.
‘I couldn’t say. He was still shouting abuse at Josias from the back of the police van.’
‘What did he shout?’
‘He called down fire and damnation upon Josias.’
‘What did Josias do?’
‘He turned round, washed his hands of the matter, and carried on doing what he’d been doing.’
After this guided tour they have tea in Jakobus’s living quarters. They eat the biscuits Maria brought. She looks at Jakobus’s sculptures. He also makes masks, some of them painted white, like Japanese Noh masks. He makes guns of bent wire, which he then paints in neon colours. The masks and the weapons are all displayed on a table; the bigger sculptures against the wall. Appealing, Maria finds his work, and impressive, and unusual. It’s cold inside the chamber.
‘Lucinda Hlobo made a beeline for you as if she’d been waiting for you all her life. As if you were her long-lost sister,’ says Jakobus.
Maria is surprised to hear it. Surprised that Jakobus should see it like that, but also surprised if that really were the case.
Jakobus tells her about Japanese Noh masks and Butoh. He tells Maria about a black artist who turned up here one day, she’d once done an installation with Josias and a sidekick. Rocked up here in a black Jeep with a six-pack of beer and a six-foot-three tall Greek-Cypriot companion. Josias built a gigantic fire. The woman was a sculptor, just back from a tour de force in Germany. Everyone standing around, beer in hand. Jakobus found the woman interesting, kept an eye on her: Semitic aquiline nose, princess of Swaziland and Sheba. She worked in bull’s hide and bronze. Her self-assurance reminded him of his grandfather on his father’s side: insouciant, uninhibited, outgoing. The embodiment of success. And beautifully subversive. She bubbled and sparkled. She wanted her own helicopter. She wanted to marry a Stuttafords millionaire. Under the old dispensation she would probably have been the head servant on the estate. Thus the tables are turned. She told him that the sculpture he was working on reminded her of a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. He was charmed, flattered. He wondered where she found a resemblance: in a similarly grotesque passion? She had influential connections. She brought so much hope and joy that evening. He would so have liked to take a trip with her in the black Jeep. With this woman at your side nothing could go wrong. Royalty! The deportment of a queen! The sense of entitlement! The regal nose! The clean lines of her head, the well-shaped body, the supple, shiny, warm-brown skin — warm in the light of the flames.
In the meantime, Jakobus says, Lucinda had come home earlier that evening, but had cleared out quickly and kept her distance all evening. Slunk back to her lair. She must have read the signs at a distance: the black Jeep, the imposing companion, the melodious voice, the self-assurance. Lucinda must have sensed the blinding glamour of success. His heart bled for her. There but for fortune — that could have been her. She’s not the kind of woman who should beat a retreat, tail between the legs. She reminds him of his mother: streetwise, but too proud to admit defeat.
Maria tells him about Benjy, about the situation in which he finds himself, about the death threat. They talk about Sofie for a while. ‘She wasn’t your common poet,’ says Jakobus, ‘she had something you can only compare with Duende — a kind of spirit in her poems that no longer takes account of things like your normal, predictable aesthetic.’
Maria says nothing, a lump in her throat.
‘A catastrophe,’ says Jakobus, ‘a powerful voice that has been silenced.’
Outside, when they go out, the sun is bright, she blinks her eyes, unhabituated to the light after the gloom inside. Here they encounter Lizeka, just back from church. A shy young woman, profoundly embarrassed when she’s introduced to Maria. She averts her face and giggles uncontrollably behind her hand.
Maria remembers that in the first days after Sofie’s death she used to think, in the street, in shops — everywhere: All these people are alive, every one of them doing the daily grind and leading his or her unremarkable life, and she is dead. She saw beggars and drunkards in the street and thought: Even the unworthy are alive, and she is dead.
Just as they turn back, they encounter Josias Brandt at last. So this is the man. The fabulous director of operations, as Jakobus has on occasion referred to him. The operations being the gardens, the animals, the sheltering and caring for foster children, the appointing of the chambers. The man at the helm here, with whom everything started. Josias is bulky, strongly built, extremely vital and youthful of appearance, in spite of his white patriarchal beard (and probably not yet sixty either), with the bluest of blue eyes. He’s wearing a straw hat and sandals. A direct gaze, a no-nonsense man, thinks Maria. Not a man to pick a quarrel with. Brusque, but not unfriendly. Vigorous, that’s clear, and energetic. He’s on his way to fix the rabbit hutches.
‘You see,’ says Jakobus as they walk to her car, ‘many an earnest young Boer could manage this place quite competently. The problem is — it would never occur to them. There are also social activists and conceptual-art prodigies who would be able to imagine such a setup, but never bring it to fruition. The black sculptor I told you about was here in her black Jeep. She drank a few beers, waved graciously, and left. Six-foot-three with a six-foot-three-tall Greek-Cypriot girlfriend by her side — but she’s no conservationist, no carer for humanity and nature, despite her fascination with bull and bronze.
‘It is important for me,’ says Jakobus, ‘that I could turn up here to stay for an indefinite period. It is important for me to remember: it’s not all about me. It’s about us. We, the living.’
As she drives off, she sees him wave in the rear-view mirror, a gracious, stylised gesture.
We the living, she thinks, of whom Sofie is no longer one.
*
From Laingsburg Karl travels by the N1 to Touws River. Meagre little shacks on a barren plain next to the road. Low bushes. The valley of a thousand bushes, thinks Karl. Scrub with thorn bushes and here and there erosion gullies. Everything here is remote. Primeval and remote. White sheep with black heads (like termites) in the eroded landscape. The nearer hills are brown and barren; behind, on the horizon, the mountains are pinker.
Next to the road, cables are being laid at intervals. Women in overalls and neon jerkins wave red flags. Near Touws River he has the pee of the century on him, but he’s reluctant to stop in the village. Chances are his eye will fall on something and then he’ll be delayed all over again. He must keep going now, keep cool. Not look to the left or the right. Just not get befuddled by the wrong numbers again. He’s probably ever so slightly cursed, he and Iggy both. Perhaps the Sheddim or whatever has him by the throat as well. He does actually feel a bit in the grip of alien forces, and now on top of it also spooked by the barren landscape.
If only he could talk to Iggy himself. Against his better judgement he tries his cell phone again, but there’s nothing doing there. In Touws River there’s also nothing doing. There’s a hotel and a liquor store and a big township on a wide plain before you enter the town. If he had to live here, as in Laingsburg, and some man-made or natural disaster befell him (a hijacking or a housebreaking or a flood), he wouldn’t bother to put up a resistance. He would just say: Take me, no problem, can’t live here anyway. There’s probably not even something like the Club Take-a-Break outside the town. Here everything happens in isolation. Here people are born and die behind drawn lace curtains.