by SJ Naudé
Sandrien puts the van in gear. She rattles over the dirt road. When she enters the road turning off to Helpmekaar, Lerato’s car is well ahead of her, speeding away towards Burgersdorp. Sandrien turns off. At the end of the straight road, Brenda and the sangoma are standing motionlessly. The sangoma then dashes off to the right; only Brenda remains, standing alone, in the middle of her windscreen. Sandrien pushes down on the accelerator. Thick dust spews out behind the van.
When she stops and gets out, the dust envelops them. Brenda is barefoot, her dress thin, fists against her sides.
‘Open your hands!’
Brenda puts her hands behind her back. Sandrien grabs her by the upper arms.
‘Show!’
She brings her hands forward and drops five crumpled R100 notes in the dust. Sandrien screws her eyes.
‘It’s her, isn’t it, it’s Lerato who had me sent to Twilight Lodge, who bribed the sangoma to play on your superstitions?’
She looks Brenda in the eye. A crafty little operator or a superstitious pawn?
With folded arms, Sandrien awaits Lerato on Thursday morning in the municipal parking area in Aliwal North. Lerato is late; Sandrien has been standing in Lerato’s parking spot for hours. On her way in, Sandrien filled up at the petrol station. Through the Wimpy’s window, she saw Lerato eating breakfast with Manie Maritz. She considered going in, but decided to come and await her here instead.
‘Have you been in PE?’ Lerato asks when she sees Sandrien.
‘Forget PE, Lerato, forget everything. Just tell me why?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re plotting with sangomas and paying people off. It was you who had me sent to Twilight Lodge.’
Lerato looks at her watch, shifting the designer handbag under her arm. She looks important and bored. Lazily she removes her sunglasses.
‘Sangomas also have their place in the public health system.’
‘You used me, Lerato. You wanted to threaten me with disciplinary proceedings so that I would help you to influence Walter regarding the corruption allegations, and help you fight your political battles. And on top of that, you wanted to undermine my credibility with the community.’
Lerato looks through Sandrien, at things way beyond her.
Sandrien continues. ‘Let me tell you now. If you don’t provide ARVs to my patients, then I’ll make a formal complaint.’
Lerato throws her head back. She crows with laughter until the tears start rolling.
‘Ag, meisietjie’ – she shakes her head, still overcome with hilarity – ‘and to whom will you be complaining? Whose interests do you think are at stake?’ She pinches Sandrien’s cheek playfully. ‘If only you had an idea of the scale of things, of how puny you are.’
Sandrien pushes Lerato’s hand slowly but firmly out of her face.
‘I have a better idea than you might think. I know of the big plans, about Twilight Lodge.’
Lerato stiffens, her face hard now. She tucks the handbag heatedly under her other arm.
‘Let me tell you how things work, meisie. Nobody likes death. And you,’ she comes closer still, her index finger against Sandrien’s chest, ‘shove it into people’s faces. Shortly we’ll have important guests. You have no idea who you’re irritating. Be careful, meisie, be careful.’
Lerato turns around, walks away.
From Aliwal, Sandrien drives to Mara. Upon entering the farm, she sees two men with their hands in the soil. They are digging small holes, like graves for birds. She stands outside the house, so that Manie has to come outside. He greets her stiffly.
‘Geologists,’ he answers when she asks about the men. ‘Where the graves are currently located, the ground is as hard as stone. A bugger to dig there. And bloody expensive. Soil structure determines profit. I’m looking for the most appropriate place for expansion.’
Sandrien does not answer, turns her back towards the graves and the diggers.
Manie starts relaxing, points out outbuildings on the other side of the house. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘a new crematorium. I converted the ovens where we used to smoke meat.’
She turns towards him. ‘What are you up to with Lerato, Manie?’
‘Sandrien, you are meddling now. But, if you must know, I’m having discussions with her about formal permissions for the expansion. This kind of business is strictly regulated. And so it should be.’
‘It’s not only permissions she’s wangling for you, is it, Manie? What else do you pay her for?’
He is quiet for a long time. Then he speaks softly. ‘Business is business, Sandrien. And survival, survival.’
She nods, speaks with a deep and slow fury. ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘Your business is death. And the condition for survival a steady supply of cadavers.’
He turns around and enters the house, closing the door behind him.
Sandrien misses Vloedspruit’s storms, the waters rushing down from the mountain and the violence overhead. She misses the way in which the electricity in the sky incites the skin. The storms have something to do with why she calls Mrs Nyathi that Friday, why she is looking for answers from her, for consolation or explanations.
In her mind’s eye, she can see Mrs Nyathi in a rocking chair in the lounge, throw over her knees, her legs too short to touch the floor.
‘Mrs Nyathi, I don’t want to involve you in all of these things, but let me tell you anyway—’
‘Oh, I’m hearing all the stories, you know. Yes, I have my sources – Walter, Shirley, the rest. I heard how Lerato and her hangers-on lured you. But her henchman couldn’t go through with his job and just warned you in the end.’
Sandrien can hear how she carefully takes a sip of her brandy.
‘Henchman? Job?’
‘Don’t err about motives. The forces are greater than you reckon. You’re nothing to them, just a thorn in the flesh to be got rid of.’
Sandrien can hear someone whispering something to Mrs Nyathi in the background. Mrs Nyathi suddenly strikes her as a puppet master. Her instinct is to put the receiver down, and that is what she does.
Ma Karlien’s funeral is arranged for the weekend. Saturday, after the service, refreshments are served in the homestead at Dorrebult. Sandrien asks the twins, home for the weekend, to look after the guests. She only stays for half an hour. When she pulls away in her van, her daughters look at her with the same expressions as when they arrived at Dorrebult for the first time in months, no longer as children, but as guests. The punctured exhaust drones. She has become the district’s batty woman, she realises. She does not give a fig. Her people are waiting elsewhere. Let one of her patients come here, let him fall over like a stick, a piece of driftwood amidst the scones and rattling saucers. Let them see. She does not look at Kobus where he remains standing, helplessly, on the veranda. The departing with the departing, Kobus. Thus we join the ranks.
On Monday they move Grace to the Helpmekaar homestead, she and Brenda. Who, other than Brenda, could help her? They carry her into the house between them on a sheet, slip her onto Ma Karlien’s iron bed. Over the weekend Grace has weakened suddenly. Sandrien bends over and turns her ear towards her, the breath barely noticeable against her temple.
‘You’ve become as light as a leaf, Grace,’ she whispers.
The blankets under which she is lying are the first two that they wove together. Sparks crackle and chase across the wool when she pulls one blanket over the other. For a second, Grace is surrounded by a pale glow.
Sandrien prepares a bed for herself in her old room. Her creaky childhood bed has long since been replaced. The throw that used to cover it has been cremated or buried with a woman from Ethiopia. The window frames, originally wooden, are now made of steel. But it is still her room.
She walks out to the van to pick up her medicine chest. The morphine, she realises, has been left behind at Dorrebult. The van’s headlights do not work. In the dark she drives back with the help of the moon and her memory. Not a single light is on in
the house. The door is open. Kobus is sitting at the dining table in the moonlight.
‘Sit, Sandrien. Grant me a moment.’
At first she remains standing stiffly in the door, then she sits down. There are four of them: she, Kobus and a blurry face underneath each of them reflected in the shiny wood.
‘So, you made your choice,’ he says hopefully, but without conviction. ‘You’ve selected one.’
For a long time she does not answer.
‘When Grace goes,’ she says, ‘I’ll be bringing the entire district’s orphans to Helpmekaar. Not one will be left behind.’
Kobus moves his hands, sits back. For a while he says nothing.
‘There is only one way for us to afford that. To make it possible for us to ultimately stay here at all. You know that.’
Back at Helpmekaar, Sandrien sends Brenda away and injects Grace with morphine. She flattens the blanket with her hand, feels the shape of the arid landscape underneath. She imagines a granite lid weighing down on Grace’s face, resting on the brittle tips of her cheekbones. She averts her face, leaves the room. She wanders through the interconnected rooms as if over a wide plain, ending up back at Grace’s bedroom door. She looks at the ampoules on the bedside table, feels the veins in her own arm.
She sits down on one of the benches on the veranda, back against the wall. Her parents built this house, this veranda with its ironstone pillars. A dry wind starts blowing. On the bench next to her there is a movement, a rustling. She cannot see her – there is only a dark hollow – but she knows it is Ma Karlien. A few swallows slip by.
‘I guess I should say sorry, Ma.’ It sounds as if she is speaking into ice. ‘I forsook you, let you waste away alone in this ramshackle place.’
The wind blows in dark gusts through the garden.
Sandrien holds out her hands, palms up. ‘What I can say is that I tried to be of service with these hands. Look: the skin is rubbing off my palms. I am becoming dust.’
Her mother is sitting too far away, in a vacuum over there.
‘Here come the swallows now,’ she hears her mother sigh. And so it happens. The black birds swerve between the pillars, skim along the veranda ceiling and back out. Swish-swish, they sweep, and their numbers increase, time after time they come, half-possessed, in and through and out and back.
Her voice is hoarse, the dust has settled in her throat. ‘I have to go, Ma. Perhaps the birds have come for Grace.’
But there is nothing. The birds have gone. And it is Ma Karlien who has gone with them.
Inside she bends over the bed, her ear against Grace’s lips. Her breathing is shallow but regular.
In the kitchen she stands in front of the sink. She smells the thinly worn bar of Sunlight soap and the evaporated staleness from the drain. Her skin crawls. She is occupying the same space as the ghosts of maids who have washed their hands raw here over the years – the maids from her childhood, those of Ma Karlien later. In vain she searches for faces in the windowpane above the sink – faces as worn as the bar of Sunlight soap. Grace’s is the only one that appears. She hopes they can forgive her, the ghost-maids and Ma Karlien.
Sandrien keeps a keen eye on the black windows as she wanders through the house, through the chain of rooms, around and around. Thanks to the game farms, so many predators live in the hills these days. Out there, beyond the circle of light, they are already lingering, their saliva like diamonds in the dark. Perhaps she should drag a bench in front of the veranda door and keep watch. One cannot be too careful. If they want to get in, they will have to eat through her first.
But when the weight of granite settles in her mind again, she knows: it is time. Yes, she will pre-empt the predators. She will lift the body from her mother’s bed, the body that no longer belongs to Grace. And when she walks out of here (inching her way along, not to scare away the beasts), it will lie lightly on her hands. She will stretch out her arms to the edge of the light, where the yellow eyes dart, and offer what remains.
‘Here,’ she will say, ‘I know you are waiting for us; here she is at last.’
It will be swift, the cleaning up. Just a little bag of snapping bones.
She walks out on the veranda, notices the distant lights of a convoy of vehicles – nocturnal hunters with infrared visors. She rubs her knuckles raw against the ironstone. With a flash of the hand she will summon them tonight: an army of ghosts, ready for battle.
A Master from Germany
Shortly before his mother’s death he sees her naked for the first time in his life.
He enters the bedroom. The bathroom door has been left open, in case she should fall or lose consciousness. It frames her: the body shapeless, the small towel she quickly presses against herself too small to cover her lower abdomen. Each pubic hair with a drop of clear water clinging to the tip. They both look away. Later they pretend it never happened.
Let’s first go back in time, a few months, to where he is standing, halfway down the cellar stairs, looking up at Joschka. Joschka is hesitant, calling him back, a large old-fashioned key in his hand. They are staying at Joschka’s brother-in-law’s castle, Burg Heimhof, in the Oberpfalz, not far from Nuremberg.
The castle sits on a rocky promontory, overlooking a quiet little Bavarian valley through which a Harley Davidson roars once or twice a day. The castle has a waterless moat on one side; on the other side it overlooks the edge of the cliff. The moat is overgrown and scattered with rubble. There is an eighteenth-century gate with metal-plated doors and ornamental carpentry. The part of the castle in which they are standing dates from the eleventh century. It is five storeys high. The oak floors have partially collapsed. The stairs, too, are broken off in places: as you ascend, they suddenly vanish. If you look down, you can see through three floors, all the way to the stairs descending to the cellar. If you look up, there are pigeons beneath heavy beams, light radiating through holes in the roof. The broken lines of the floors and stairs and beams form a three-dimensional diagram, an optical illusion. It is hard to get a grip on scale. Through openings in the wall you can see fragments of the valley and surrounding hills and forests, the hamlet at the foot. On the metre-wide sills there are birds’ nests.
Joschka’s brother-in-law, whose parents bought this castle from the German government for a song shortly after the war, has been restoring one room on the middle floor for decades. Painfully precise: wall paintings of knights and unicorns, floors and ceilings of reclaimed Southern German oak, torches on the walls. A knight’s armour stands in the corner with a lance clutched in the gauntlet. You could imagine that he is still in there.
A strange sensation: standing in a beautiful room, but when you open a door, you are in a ruin.
Or let’s go back a week further. Berlin. They are staying with Joschka’s friends Aarik and Wilfred in Kreuzberg. Joschka lived in Berlin for a few years before moving to London, where they met. It is Joschka’s opportunity to show him his Berlin, everything from the sublime to the abject. Mostly the abject.
On the first evening there, they go out on the town. They move from bar to restaurant to party to bar to party to underground event to nightclub. They meet friends of Joschka’s, and acquaintances. And friends and acquaintances of friends and acquaintances. Joschka snorts too much cocaine in toilets. He moves with purpose, as if heading somewhere, as if his feet are lifting off the street. There are taxis, long walks through wide streets, lifts in speeding cars. From Kreuzberg to Schöneberg to Mitte, to Prenzlauer Berg and back to Mitte. They join people and take their leave, meet and move on: a night of greeting and departure, of random trips and changes of direction. He drinks too much himself, swallows or snorts things he is offered without knowing what they are. There are times when they linger – sometimes it feels like an eternity, sometimes like seconds – in apartments all over town. The places of friends and acquaintances – or those of strangers. Fragmented conversations, shared cigarettes. Apartments overlooking courtyard gardens, one on the Landwehrkanal, a penthouse
by the Spree, a place in Mitte deep inside the Hackesche Höfe, another next to the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg. A place in a massive Communist-era block by Alexanderplatz. Here he stands on a little concrete balcony next to a blonde nymph dressed in metallic tights. The Fernsehturm’s sphere hovers above them like a disco ball.
Everywhere there are people; all of them know Joschka. They remember him or know of him, have something to say about him (‘ein wilder Junge, this guy of yours,’ or someone nodding in Joschka’s direction, a kind of hero worship in his eyes: ‘Der dunkle Prinz des Nachtlebens dieser Stadt, dein Freund’) . Joschka as the dark prince of Berlin nightlife: he is not all that surprised. He meets all of those milling around Joschka, immediately forgets their names again. In one place there are Ulrich, Aloysius, Ebermud, Detlef, Ida and Petra. Elsewhere there are Arno, Theodulf, Finn, Christian, Ava, Till, Lauri, Eriulf, Hilderic, Reiner and Ervig. In diverse places they encounter Sven, Nardo, Hugo and Wolfgang. And then there are also Ladewig, Kai, Adelfriede, Leander, Monika, Arno, Irnfried … Or similar names. There is no end to the list.
Later he will be unable to recall large parts of that night. In reality it was probably two or three nights, people and events having since merged. Like shadows observed through a smoke-blackened pane.
There are nevertheless chunks of time he remembers clearly, jutting out like shards of glass.
At some point in the early evening they are at a bar in Kreuzberg. They park on a bridge, descend the stairs and walk along the canal. Ahead of them, lanterns are hanging over the water. Wooden floats are anchored to the banks. On these, people are lying and sitting on cushions under sweet marijuana clouds. Next to the open-air bar counter, someone is spinning über-cool Berlin lounge music. The floats wobble as they walk across them. He gets the feeling, and not for the first time, that Joschka is leaving him behind, that he cannot catch up with him. He can only follow. He looks at Joschka’s proud shoulders from behind. It belongs to him, this city, to Joschka. He takes a puff on a stranger’s joint, thinking it might help.
