The suspicion that torments him all the way back is that he has lost his brother. Once again he speeds all but unseeingly through the landscape (there’s no curing him of that); overwhelmed by a kind of edgy desolation. An immense sadness that drains everything of colour.
He drives back by the same route as he came. Past Touws River where he saw the dead bird, Laingsburg where he almost had himself hypnotised by Doctor Bruno. Through Beaufort West where he met Elzette at the Club Take-a-Break outside the town, and where he was potted in the leg in the cemetery the next day. Maybe he should go and look up Elzette and ask her to marry him. They can live in a big old house in the town, with Iggy in a spacious room in the back garden — safely out of reach of Josias the Godknows genius maker of plans, and Joachim the initiate. He and Iggy can take a walk every day in the mountain; the open air can only do them both good. Iggy can paint and garden — a vegetable garden full of beans, tomatoes and sweet peas; whatever one plants in a garden.
Idle fantasies, thinks Karl, idle amusement to keep the misery at bay. If only it were so simple — both in his and in Iggy’s case. Elzette is already engaged to one of her colleagues teaching with her, with whom she cycles around in the mountain in the late afternoon, and she’s certainly not a woman who is in the long run going to take to Karl’s music, to his tattoos. And even though she seems like a friendly, open person who doesn’t judge other people too readily, his afflictions would probably in the long run get on even her nerves. Besides, his deepest desire is that he and Juliana will get together again.
He drives past Hanover, where his car packed up, past Colesberg where he met Stevie and his two friends that evening, and also, alas, was accosted by the Joachim-chap with the beetroot claw. Only at the Orange River does he pull up and get out. He stands on the bridge by the parapet. Here he thought he’d like to stand with Iggy — as if it would ever be possible again — so that together they could watch the broad, still flow of the river. Past Bethulie where he picked up the parcel with Iggy’s letters (he has still not given any thought to the question of how on God’s earth it ended up there, too many other, more urgent inexplicables have claimed his attention). Past Smithfield where Ollie of Steynsrus mistook him for someone else.
He drives without stopping for long at any of the places where he eats. He drives till he reaches Durban. Tonight he’ll listen to Accept’s new album with Hendrik again, the one with the bloody fist on the cover, and God knows, he can only hope and pray that Accept and Hendrik will help him to overcome his feelings of desolation, because he thinks what happened to his brother has permanently affected him too. If Iggy can never be the same after what happened to him, then Karl can also not be the same after what happened to Iggy.
He never did get round to googling the Sheddim, nor Johanna Brandt, and he doesn’t think he ever will. Enough grief already, the Sheddim and thoughts about the Sheddim have caused him. Of that kind of thing he never wants to hear anything again. For him it’s too much part of a demonic underworld in which poor Iggy — possibly for ever — lost his way.
When he unlocks his flat, he realises that on the whole trip back he didn’t count once.
*
A few months later Jakobus lets him know that by order of Public Works they have to vacate the farm on the slopes. He sometimes wonders, says Jakobus, if it’s not a consequence of the curses that Ignatius called down upon Josias and the whole outfit that day.
The locust
MARIA HEARS NOTHING FROM BENJY, which means that for the time being he’s not embroiled in any crisis. Two days after her visit to Tobie Fouché she’s phoned by Laura, Sofie’s daughter. She wants to come and say hello to Maria. Maria is pleasantly surprised. Laura was at Sofie’s memorial service and disappeared again immediately afterwards; where to, nobody knew exactly.
Maria is glad to see her. Laura is tall, with her mother’s dark eyes and hair. Her gaze is also like Sofie’s: half-withdrawn, a bit mistrustful, but intense. She is still somewhat awkward, with her lanky limbs, still something of an adolescent, although she is a woman deep in her twenties. Like Sofie, clearly not someone for small talk.
What does she do? She lives somewhere in the Eastern Cape, near Grahamstown, on a smallholding with her seven big dogs. She is writing a PhD in anthropology. Apart from the dogs, and her books, her only worldly possession is a big, clapped-out pick-up truck. Self-evidently not someone who sets much store by material goods. That would certainly meet with Sofie’s approval.
She’s not here for chit-chat. The child wants to talk about her mother. That Maria fully understands. Isn’t that why she herself is here, why she visited Tobie? Has she seen Tobie yet? asks Maria. No, the two of them never really saw eye-to-eye. Maria says nothing about her own visit to him and about the dog breeder — the only person, according to Tobie, that Sofie had been close to in her last few months.
How often did she see her mother in the months before her death? Maria asks. Not that often, says Laura. She got the impression that her mother preferred it that way. That she had started turning away from them — from her and her brother, that was how he also experienced it. What gave her that impression? asks Maria. She remembers that when she was small, says Laura, her mother’s eyes sometimes seemed to be saying goodbye. Now her mother had that look in her eyes again. Did she show anything, say anything from which Laura could deduce the nature of her intentions — no last letter, no phone conversation? Nothing, says Laura. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Nor did she leave anything behind, no last letter or note. Maria says nothing about the red book. Nor about the Ten Gates.
‘Do you miss your mother?’ asks Maria.
‘Sometimes,’ says Laura. ‘But I missed her even as a child. Sometimes she’d be sitting at the table, and then I’d get very scared. I must have sensed something. She looked as if she was counting down the days and the minutes.’
She is silent.
‘But I have forgiven her,’ says Laura.
‘For what?’ asks Maria.
Laura shrugs. ‘For bringing us the tidings that the world is not a habitable place. That I will never feel as if I belong anywhere.’ She says it without rancour or reproach.
‘A difficult inheritance,’ says Maria.
‘Yep,’ says the young woman. ‘It makes my own battle that much more difficult.’
Maria nods.
‘What was she like?’ Laura asks. ‘My mother. When she was young?’
Maria has to reflect for a moment. Where should she start? That Sofie saw herself as a failure from an early age? Look into my eyes, she told Maria, it’s written in black-and-white on the whites of my eyes. That she asked for a knight’s panoply when Maria went overseas? That she visited the city mortuary on her own? That shortly thereafter she went into her first deep depression, lay with her face to the wall, didn’t speak, didn’t eat, only drank water? That she wrote to Maria from three harbour towns, when Laura and Michiel were small, that she said that she sometimes considered suicide. That she read Thucydides at night to escape the daily grind of housekeeping and raising children? That she coveted a greyhound, once when she was pregnant again, on the verge of having the pregnancy terminated? That she thought it was immoral to bring children into the world? That she thought she was destined to go to the dogs, like Jezebel in the Bible? That she said more than once that she was bequeathing her hands to Maria when she died, so that Maria could play Ezekiel with the bones — whatever she meant by that?