In the evenings he goes to see Jakobus on the farm, or meets him for a beer at his hotel in the city. They talk. Or Jakobus talks, and Karl listens. Jakobus tells him about his life, about his friendship with Josias, about the other people on the farm — the Hlobo family, Lucinda and her mother and her children — he talks about his work, about books, about his family, about rugby, about politics. Sometimes Jakobus’s hands are bleeding, Karl sees, from the day’s labours: the bending of wire and the lugging of logs and the handling of heavy tools.
They sit in Jakobus’s part of the large room, by the feeble light, Karl on the garden chair, Jakobus on the log, they drink beer and strong tea. Jakobus rolls cigarettes for himself. Karl decided, from the very first time he set foot on this farm, for his own safety and survival not to look round too much. Especially after seeing the pig’s head, he decided rather not to zoom in on anything around him, he is thoroughly aware of the crazy plethora of things here, in room after room, but at most he glances at it in passing from the corner of his eye — afraid of being sucked into a fucking tunnel from which he can’t escape again. Like Iggy.
This place is insane, it’s loaded. This place is seething with all the energies. It bounces off the walls, off the objects. Perhaps Jakobus was right when he said that there’s as much good as negative energy here, and it doesn’t take much to tip the scale. For Iggy it obviously tipped to the wrong side.
Karl asks Jakobus if he thinks Iggy will recover, if he’ll ever be himself again. Jakobus says: ‘Who knows. Let’s hope so.’
Karl doesn’t show him Iggy’s letters — he only gives him an indication of the contents: Iggy thinking God is turning him into a woman, and so on. Jakobus says he’s learnt not to find anything strange — not what happens to others, not what happens to himself. Reality would seem to have many dimensions — like folds. One day you’re stuck in one context and the next day in a totally different one and you have no idea how you ended up there. A different time zone (he laughs). Or a different dimension (he laughs again). Almost as if you’d tumbled into an alternative universe. Trust, he says, trust and patience, that’s all you can have. He realises anew how weird it is that he ended up here. Well, perhaps not ended, because he has no idea what lies ahead for him.
‘But why should it have had to happen to Iggy?’ Karl asks.
‘Look,’ says Jakobus, ‘things happen to people. Sometimes somebody is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or (and he utters his abrupt little chuckle again), at the right time in the wrong place, and then you have your cataclysmic collision, or confrontation, as in the case of Ignatius and Josias.
‘Look,’ says Jakobus, ‘you must understand. Josias is like Charles Dickens, of anything you can say about him, the converse is also true. He’s a carer, but he wouldn’t scruple to cast anybody who opposed him into the outer darkness. He’s a champion of the outcast, but he’s sometimes also on a deadly narcissistic mission. He’s a conserver of man and beast, but oh my lord! Destructive! I saw him in action, way back.’
Karl leaves it there for the time being. He doesn’t know, and probably never will know, what to make of Josias and his part in Iggy’s condition. Jakobus has said in so many words that with Josias things can go one way or the other. With Iggy it apparently went the wrong way — to Josias’s destructive side, it would seem. Perhaps Iggy, despite his delusions, had hold of some truth somewhere in thinking that Josias showed him no mercy. Soul murder — that’s maybe taking it a bit far, but helping to engineer his downfall, yes.
He’s learnt, says Jakobus, dig in firmly, but if you’re bowled over, don’t resist. Go with the flow or sit it out.
‘Too late to tell Iggy that now,’ says Karl.
Jakobus nods slowly, and rolls another cigarette.
He asks Jakobus whether he thinks Josias could be related to Johanna Brandt, the visionary. Jakobus just about explodes with laughter. Apparently he finds the idea hilarious.
‘Who knows,’ he says. ‘Perhaps there is a shared gene for clairvoyance and prophecy through all the branches of the Brandt family tree.’
*
After three days Doctor Lonesome says he wouldn’t advise Karl to stay on much longer. He could rather return within a week or three. He hopes that by that time they’ll be able to pronounce with more certainty on Iggy’s condition.
Before leaving, Karl visits his brother for a last time. ‘Iggy,’ he says, ‘I’m leaving now, but I’m coming back. I’m coming back as soon as you’ve woken up good and proper, then we can talk. But any time, any time you want me to come, I’ll come immediately.’
Iggy’s hands are resting on the bedspread. There were times when he chewed his nails to the quick. Now his nails are short, but not chewed. Perhaps the nurses here clip them. Behind his eyelids the eyes don’t even move, that’s how fast asleep he is.
Karl stands next to the bed and looks at his brother for one last time.
‘Iggy,’ he says, ‘I do so hope …’ (what does he hope?) ‘I hope you get out safe and sound on the other side. Perhaps it’s like a kind of tunnel that you have to crawl through, like the culverts underneath the road through which we crawled as kids.’
Then Karl takes his brother’s cool, dry hand in his and presses it against his cheek.
He asks one of the nurses (the one who seems most sympathetic) please to place a saucer with a bean under damp cotton wool next to Iggy’s bed as soon as he comes to. She knows, doesn’t she, he says, the bean will start germinating eventually. The nurse doesn’t know if it will be possible. She’ll find out from the doctor. It’s not really the hospital’s policy to allow patients to keep plants in their rooms.
A germinating bean under cotton wool isn’t exactly a plant, says Karl. Ye-es, says the woman, but the saucer is the actual problem. Nothing is allowed with which patients could injure themselves.
When he says good bye to him, Jakobus says he’ll drop in on Iggy from time to time to see how he’s doing. He’ll keep Karl informed.
‘Your brother is a good man,’ says Jakobus, ‘but he came up against greater forces than most people can cope with — Josias and the Sheddim combined make a formidable pair. And Josias apparently just triggered a spark in Ignatius. Something that may have lain dormant for a long time.’
*
On the trip back Karl keeps his eyes glued to the road. He stops as little as possible. Only to pee and to eat. He thinks he must be very tired, perhaps even a bit ill or delirious, because the landscape speeding past is sometimes black-and-white and then again it erupts in colour: streaks of vicious red, the yellow and green of toxic fungi. Even this barren Karoo landscape. The landscape at times seems tilted, as if everything is lying on a hellishly steep slope, against which rock, shrub and stunted tree cast smouldering fire-blackened shadows. Karl thinks his vision may have been disturbed by everything that happened.
It’s perfectly possible that Josias is a thug, he thinks, and as Jakobus said, triggered something dormant in Iggy. But if he thinks how Iggy lay there, and especially what he wrote, then he wonders if Iggy didn’t after all muck down some abyss or other, and lose his soul, as the Joachim-chap warned. The further he travels, the more irreversible Iggy’s condition seems to him. Perhaps he’s just tired, he thinks. Perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps it just feels that way to him. But how is it possible, he wonders, that even the deepest sleep — induced by Doctor Lonesome — could cure Iggy of his delusions? Surely no sleeping cure could be radical enough to enable Iggy to experience the world as he did before his torments. To see the world like that even once must have radical consequences.