In the last instalment of the series, the alternative convention, the body is pale, unprepossessing and defenceless, reminiscent of a tuber or a root. The bodies of the damned in the depictions of the Last Judgement, in Gothic paintings and miniatures, the Adam and Eve of Van Eyck, Van der Goes, Memlinc. Dürer’s women in a bath house, his four witches, Urs Graf’s woman stabbing herself in the chest with a dagger, Cranach’s sly Venuses.
It comes as no surprise to Maria that these tuber- and root-shaped damned and cunning nudes should interest her. She now feels no rapport with harmony and wholeness — the ecstatic and the deviant, that she can identify with much more closely at the moment.
*
The second lecture series that Maria Volschenk attends at the university deals with the art of the Bronze Age during the Shang dynasty in China (from the eighteenth to the eleventh century B.C.). (Maria reasons that the wider she casts her net, the better her chances of outwitting her vigilant self.) The first lecture provides a general introductory background. The origin of Chinese bronze casting remains obscure, but it’s generally accepted that pottery and bronze castings from the Shang dynasty are the oldest forms of Chinese art. The Shang empire was situated on the plains of Huang He — the Yellow River.
Her father told them — her and Sofie, her sister — about the Huang He and the Yangtze Kiang. He was a geography teacher but he should really have been a world traveller, visiting and discovering places. From as far back as she can remember, the names of places fascinated him, he recited them like mantras: the Yangtze Kiang and the Huang He in China, the Popocatépetl and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico, the Sverdrup Islands at the North Pole, Mont Forel in Greenland. He was enchanted by the places as well as by their resonant names. In that respect Sofie was his child — she was also seduced by the melodious names. Maria wanted to know where the places were on the map, their degrees of longitude and latitude, Sofie wanted their father to repeat the names again and again.
Maria casts the net as wide as possible, and meets up with her father again. Hello Dad. We meet again, on the plains of Huang He, the Yellow River, at the time of the Shang dynasty in China.
The subsequent lectures examine examples of the bronze artefacts. A gu drinking vessel, a three-legged jue container with dagger-shaped feet, decorated with a motif of stylised songbirds. A three-legged jia with pointed feet, a handle in the shape of a ram’s head. A you container with three-dimensional ram’s heads as support for the handle, decorated with dragon’s heads with serpent bodies. A zun container with rams on all four corners, serpents and inscriptions — technically so complex that it took twenty-one separate steps from the casting stage to completion. Another you container, wonderfully ingenious and highly ornate, in a combination of high as well as low relief, with a tiger-eats-man motif; the lid in the shape of a deer. A three-legged jia container with prominent, upright handles.
The last lecture surveys the use of ritual, and in particular its use of the so-called oracle bones. Tortoise shells and the scapulae of oxen were heated with branding irons so that the shell or bone cracked, and the resulting patterns used to predict the future. These divinations were the main activity in the household of the king, who had divine status. Before any important enterprise of which the outcome was uncertain — like a hunting expedition or a battle — the ancestral spirits were invoked and the interpreted prediction was then engraved on the shell or bone. The pictographic symbols used are of the earliest examples of systematised Chinese writing. The oracle was posed such questions as: ‘On the first day of Chia-chien of the first month we want to do battle against the Land of the Horses. Will Ti be on our side?’
The oracle bones vary from deep ochre to ivory, they are about fifteen centimetres high, and the simple inscriptions are delicately carved on them in vertical rows. On some of the bones the inscriptions have not been deciphered. The many varied household articles, with green patina on the bronze, are attractive, but it is primarily the delicate, impenetrable words of the oracle that appeal to Maria.
*
Maria and her neighbour Vera Schoonraad, with whom she plays chess once a week, watch a DVD series in which a number of Dutch psychiatrists talk about their subjects and themselves. In the various instalments they discuss, among other topics, the therapeutic process, emotions, childhood, the use of pills as against the talking cure, and depression. Maria hopes in this way to gain some insight into her own emotional condition. In one of the instalments the psychiatrists are asked what each of them regards as the most basic emotion. Shame, says one. Fear, says another.
The professor of biological psychiatry dons blue rubber gloves, produces a bucket in his laboratory, takes half a human brain from the formalin in it, and with a cotton bud points out the part of the brain responsible for emotion. The shape reminds Maria of a bisected coral that she once saw in an illustration. The colour reminds her of the pale white thorax of the large, bulbous spider that every evening for one whole winter lowered her body and spun her web before the bedroom window of Maria and her sculptor husband. The web and the body of the spider were covered in minuscule drops of water, and in the morning there was no trace left of either her or the web.
*
Karl Hofmeyr packs his bag, gets into his car and hits the road to his brother in Cape Town, who has been more or less of a headache to him for as long as he can remember.
At the garage opposite the Pavilion he buys a road map and plans his route. At the Wimpy in Estcourt the woman serving him touches her nostril. Without any ado Karl gets up from the table, pays, and leaves. His meal untouched. He washes his hands thoroughly, and when he gets to his car, he turns round, walks back to the bathroom, washes his hands thoroughly for a second time.
In Ladysmith he pulls up at a small shopping mall in the centre of town. He first washes his hands and then orders a sandwich in a small coffee shop that seems clean enough.
The Josias fellow phones him again. He doesn’t sound very friendly. He sounds impatient, distracted, as if he’s talking to someone else at the same time; voices can be heard in the background, and animal noises — the honking of a goose or something. (Godaloneknows where Ignatius is hanging out this time. Though the presence of a goose on a farm, albeit a farm against the slopes of Table Mountain, is probably not all that odd.)
‘Are you on your way?’ he asks.
‘I’m on my way,’ says Karl.
‘Good,’ says the man. ‘Before Ignatius can cause any further havoc.’
They’re cut off before Karl can enquire into the nature of the havoc. (Does he want to know? No, he does not want to know.)
He washes his hands. At the CNA he sees a book that interests him, but he gives it a miss. The shelf on which the magazines are displayed looks gungy.
There are a few things that Karl doesn’t do: he doesn’t do oil, he doesn’t do contact with anything that’s been handled by people who touch or pick their noses, he doesn’t do rats, excreta or open wounds; certain numbers spell disaster. But for the rest he’s really quite okay.