‘Your mother was not scared,’ says Maria.
Laura looks down.
‘She was much more open with me when she was young. When the two of you were small. She wrote me letters from the three harbour towns in which you lived.’
‘Do you still have the letters?’ Laura asks.
‘Yes,’ says Maria, ‘I do still have some of them.’
‘May I see them at some stage?’ she asks.
‘You may,’ says Maria. ‘Towards the end we didn’t have that much contact. I should have insisted. I shouldn’t have let it go. I should have got onto a plane and come to see her. I should have known that her silence did not bode well.’
Laura says nothing. She looks down. She’s sitting with her elbow resting on the table, her thumb supporting her chin, the other fingers pressed to her mouth. Tears well up slowly in her eyes. When she looks up, it’s with Sofie’s eyes — Sofie’s large, sombre eyes, tear-filled.
When Maria takes leave of her niece, she presses her against her for a long time.
My poor, poor Laura, my poor child, Sofie once said while looking at Laura as a young child. My poor child, what have I done to you?
*
Maria must say goodbye to the man. The lover. He’s on his way back to home sweet home, far from here, on another continent.
She doesn’t want to bid him farewell. She wants to cling to him. She wants to say: Don’t go! Stay! As God is my witness, I’ll make it worth your while! She thinks this parting will destroy her. There’ll be nothing left of her. She feels pain, as if her entrails were being torn out. As if her heart is being pressed under a heavy weight. There’s nothing left of me, she thinks.
She went into this with her eyes wide open. She should have known there could be no happy ending to it. She has only herself to blame. When the emptiness came upon her, she could never have suspected that she still had such reserves of emotion.
Every organ in her body feels bruised with grief. Loss is inscribed on her forehead. She cannot survive it.
He says they will see each other again. He visits Africa and southern Africa regularly. He will visit her. He will search her out, wherever she is. But she is inconsolable. No, she says, she knows it’s the end. They’ll never see each other again. It’s over. It’s over for ever. She feels it. It will never happen again. From the start she felt that their union was marked by extinction and finitude.
*
As Maria Volschenk walks along the corridor between the airport building and the runway of Cape Town airport, on her way to the waiting aircraft, and she bends down to shift her grip on her bag, she meets — next to a minuscule courtyard with a few struggling plants — the eye of a locust, motionless on a lean leaf. She almost jumps out of her skin. A gigantic bloody locust. Motionless. Doing what here, caged in by glass and tarmac and cement, in this miserable little bit of garden, on this dusty leaf? Deep into its locust eye she gazes, which doesn’t blink, flinch or quail. Regards her piercingly, as if wanting to say: Get a grip on yourself, there’s work to be done, things to discover — ways of seeing of which you don’t have the vaguest notion as yet!
For just a few moments they look each other in the eye like that, before she picks up her case and carries on walking.
Sofie
ONE DAY I BOARDED A BUS and visited the place. I announced myself and asked for somebody to accompany me. A lean, chatty man offered his services. Virgil to my Dante. A chain-smoker (Lexington), missing a tooth or two, with a weathered face. Perhaps at interval we can have a brandy-and-Coke together.
One by one he slid open the drawers for me, all of them died of natural causes, he said, while constantly telling me about his financial hardship. Also tales of unpaid rent, parents-in-law sponging on him, wife in hospital, nature of the woman’s ailments (female parts prolapsing), obstreperous children. And lit one cigarette after the other.
A man with a large, broad, freckly forehead and a moustache. An old man with his head tilted to one side, his hair unkempt, day-old stubble and bushy eyebrows. A young woman with a sharp nose. Basic bone structure delineated in death more sharply than usual. Her right hand visible on her breast, the fingers resting lightly on the collarbone. An older woman, her eyebrows plucked to a thin line, dark under the eyes, her lips dryish, just slightly parted, her eyelids wrinkled. An older man, his mouth firmly closed, as if he’d taken an inexorable vow of silence. A middle-aged woman, plump neck, shadow of a dark moustache, facial wrinkles ironed out (like everybody’s), but with an expression of having been brought up short with a little sigh. A youngish man, smallish wound on the forehead (natural causes?), dark under the eyes, full lower lip, a hint of stubble, lashes that look as if they’re damp with tears (a difficult parting?). A young girl. Eyebrows plucked in an unnatural, high arch. Her eyes open just very very slightly, and because of that the deadest of them all in appearance. Front teeth visible, protruding slightly over the lower lip. Piercing in the ear with no earring. A child, a girl, not much older than six or seven. Little mouth slightly open. Lashes long, dark. The eyebrows in a soft, as yet unspoilt line. A middle-aged woman, weathered face, her mouth shut in a line as if refusing to betray a secret. A middle-aged man, thin mouth, the only one who looks as if he’s sleeping and dreaming something not totally unpleasant.
I had no desire to touch the dead. Each one was surrounded by a field of force that repelled me. An invisible barrier that I could not penetrate. I was also scared of the taboo of contamination. Except for the child. I rested the back of my hand against her cheek for a moment. Its flesh was cold, it didn’t yield.
Then suddenly I’d had enough of them. Of my guide’s uninterrupted stream of chatter, and of the intransigent silences of the dead. But when I asked the man, he firmly stamped out his cigarette under his heel, and refused point-blank to show me the black dead — in a separate section.
Thank you, I said, and goodbye. Then I boarded the bus again, and went home. Now I know, I thought, what it feels like.
*
Is that how it happened, Sofie, Sister? Answer me!
Praise for The Road of Excess
A fascinating and meditative read, and Winterbach’s narrative is exquisite, the prose as rich and textured as a 1980s velvet painting — Business Day
A profoundly engaging and exhilarating read — Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian
Winterbach’s writing is delight without respite — Michael Titlestad, The Sunday Times
Praise for The Book of Happenstance
Witty, allusive and beautifully crafted, this is one of the gems of recent South African fiction — Ivan Vladislavic
Winterbach is the kind of writer any literature could be envious of — Marlene van Niekerk
An intelligent literary mystery … Winterbach’s characters are rich, her story foreboding and tense, and her prose remarkably lean — Publishers Weekly, UK
Praise for To Hell with Cronjé
An exquisite book … an essential voice — Antjie Krog
I doubt that this book could have been written in the cosy Netherlands. You would have to go to Australia for Patrick White’s Voss, or to the Arizona of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. And to South Africa for Niggie (To Hell with Cronje). — Brabants Dagblad, The Netherlands