But he must pee and he stops at a place called The Wagon Wheel Bakehouse and Coffee Shoppe — the name displayed on a board on the pavement, and underneath it: Take-away Filter coffee, Fresh Bread, Homemade Pie’s, Cakes, Rolls, Koeksisters. (Each item handwritten in a different colour and font. Clearly lots of care went into this.) An ordinary house converted into a coffee-drinking place. In the garage (with a roll-up door) there’s an open counter where the takeaways are probably served. A few paces further the front door opens onto a room where you can sit and drink something. The setup looks clean enough.
The owner comes out of the kitchen to take Karl’s order. He has a perfect set of white teeth (marble). In the kitchen, visible through the open door, his wife is bustling about. She’s wearing a jacket with a tiger-skin motif. Karl asks to use the toilet. He has to walk through the kitchen and the rest of the house to get to the bathroom. What do people think when they plan their bathrooms?
Back in the front room he sits down at the only unoccupied table. On all the other tables there are cakes. Not for nothing is the place called the Bakehouse. It’s nothing less than a Bake Factory. There are so many cakes (in plastic containers, each provided with a label), packets of rusks, packets of cookies, that Karl imagines they supply the whole town as well as the surrounding area — from Laingsburg to De Doorns — with cake. If he’d lived in this town in this house among these cakes he’d have slit his wrists a long time ago in that very bathroom with its kitsch knick-knacks. The isolation of these little towns combined with their apparently frenetic entrepreneurial fervour does not inspire him today. He has to be on his guard against despair. In so far as one can be on one’s guard against something like that. The woman in the tigerskin jacket is bustling away in the kitchen. A television set has been installed high up against the wall. She’s listening to the Afrikaans radio service.
He has a quick cup of coffee. Apart from the tables full of cakes, the room also contains a wooden cabinet with fancy fretwork, two smaller side mirrors and one large mirror in the middle. The cabinet is full of a whole assortment of thingummies (just like the bathroom and the rest of the house). Handmade dolls, porcelain figurines, hand puppets, angels in a variety of sitting and recumbent postures, little mugs, little cups, pressed flowers in little containers. Everything for sale, like the cakes. What are these people thinking? Who buys this stuff?
He looks at himself in the mirror, framed by the prancing porcelain figurines. He looks woefully forlorn to himself. Juliana used to say that with his beard he looked like a Boer general. His face looks particularly flat today. Like on a photo of some Boer before his execution. Jopie Fourie or somebody. Gideon Scheepers. A flat, pale face; all he’s short of is the hat and a bandolier across his shoulder.
After drinking his coffee, with two homemade rusks, he takes a short walk down the street to stretch his legs. Across the street from The Bakehouse is a house on a large plot. A real small-town plot, as he remembers it from childhood holidays. The yard has been swept clean, not a blade of grass in sight. Under a lean-to, up against the garage, there’s a make-shift shelf with an assortment of stuff on it: Ricoffy tins, other tins, plastic containers, rolls of wire, rolls of flex, garden implements, a wheelbarrow. At the back, against the fence, a windmill. Everything slightly ramshackle. Apart from the scurrying chickens energetically scrabbling in the yard, there’s no sign of life. The curtains are tightly drawn. He stands looking at the crazy scrabbling of the chickens for a long time. Not a care in the world, those birds.
In the street, next to the kerb of the pavement, half-covered under dead leaves, lies a dead bird. The wintriness that descends on him all of a sudden! A kind of constriction in his chest as if he can’t breathe. If only he could talk to Iggy. If only Iggy is okay.
He stands looking at the dead bird. He remembers. He and his father and Iggy. Long long ago. They were walking in the veld somewhere. Or in a town with wide sandy streets, like this one. Their father showed them a dead bird. Karl doesn’t remember much about his father. He remembers him as a laughter-loving, energetic man who often played with them. Young. Died on the border, four years after South Africa invaded Angola. Karl was nine, Iggy was eleven.
The day they got the news of his death was the most terrible day of Karl’s life. That their father was dead was terrible, but how Iggy lay on his bed crying, that was even more terrible. That Karl will never forget, how Iggy lay crying with his face to the wall.
Karl squats next to the bird. A shiver passes through his body, and he thinks he feels Iggy standing behind him. They are two little boys gazing into the dead eye of the bird. Their father behind them, hardly more than a phantom.
Back in the car, on the way to De Doorns, he listens to Iron Maiden. ‘Scan the horizon, the clouds take me higher / I shall return from out of the fire.’ It lifts his spirits somewhat to speed through the barren landscape at almost 140 kilometres per hour with the sounds of Iron Maiden resounding from dry ravine to dry ravine.
Gradually the landscape starts changing. He drives through a valley with farmlands, vineyards, ringed by high mountains with shadowy, rocky crevices.
Just before De Doorns, on the left of the road, is an extensive township. Carpets are hung out on the fence, laundry. Dogs, children, little groups of young people loitering. In the white town in the vicinity of some college there is an oasis of green, in stark contrast to the cheerless township. The constriction in his chest intensifies as he approaches his destination. Long time no hear from Josias. He hopes it means that things are more or less okay with Iggy.
In Worcester the houses lining the main road have tree-filled gardens. Palm trees. A bit further there is even a mall. One of these days they’ll plonk down a casino or an even bigger mall here on this vast plain between the mountains — pleated, looks as if they were scattered by a heedless hand. Lots of trees. He can hardly distinguish between indigenous and exotic. Juliana knows everything: the name of every little bush, shrub and tree. The name of every bird in the sky and fish in the sea. Don’t you feel anything for nature? she asked. Didn’t your father walk in the veld with you? Ye-es, he said. (Visiting their grandmother and grandfather in a town, wide sandy streets. A field with a windsock. Their father pointing out things to them. Iggy so excited about everything. With his high, elated voice and his stand-up-straight hair. Pig’s bristle, their mother said, rubbing over his head.)
Them Crooked Vultures sing: ‘Can’t afford to lose my head, can’t afford to lose my cool.’ If only Iggy is okay. If only he hasn’t lost the plot totally, as would appear from his letters. (That he thinks God is turning him into a woman is fuck knows the cherry on the cake.)
If Karl could talk to Iggy himself just once, he’d be able to judge for himself. Perhaps Iggy’s come to his senses since writing the letter. Okay, he must take Iggy away from there — the Josias-guy made that clear in no uncertain terms. But where to? The Lord only knows. He’s waited too long. He should have realised something was amiss when Iggy gave up his job and his digs in the city. Iggy was initially so enthused about the new place! And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Josias phoned him. And in next to no time it was pretty obvious that Iggy had lost the plot.
Brünhilde
SHORTLY BEFORE HER DEPARTURE, Maria Volschenk pays Tobie Fouché another visit. She decides not to let him know in advance. Perhaps if she just turned up, she could catch him unawares and leave him less time to come up with some cock-and-bull story. Catch him with his guard down, before he’s had a chance to muster his defences.