The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  Is this what had attracted them? Made them leave their comfortable beds in the retirement home? Because this is where they had been seen.

  Capek went to the exact spot that the nurse had so clearly described. They were not there. Only a bustle of soldiers and the continual clanking movements of goods and cattle trucks. He had never seen so many. Probably another ridiculous and extravagant military exercise, he thought to himself. He looked at the closest wagon, one in a tethered line of twenty or more rolling stock, and noted that it and all the others had been fitted with strengthened locking levers and new shiny padlocks. Such a waste of money, he mumbled to himself. All the heavy wooden sliding doors were open and expectant except one. He walked up to it and peered inside: In the far empty corner crouched tight in the apex they sat. Somewhere they had found two identical trench coats that disguised their strangeness.

  “What in God’s name are you doing in there?” he barked. Hinz or Kunz—he could never really distinguish which was which—raised an arm and beckoned him inside. He tutted while finding a foothold to climb into the wooden wagon.

  Once inside he also noted that the slit-like windows that allowed the cattle to breathe had also been modified with steel bars. Kunz was still flapping his arm, so Capek approached.

  “What are you doing in this stinking boxcar? You must come back home with me.”

  They both started shaking their heads, which also made their bodies and overcoats shudder.

  “You will freeze or starve to death in here.”

  He took another step closer and was about to more forcibly persuade them when Hinz pointed a bony finger at him and then turned it towards his own crusty heart. Capek froze in his tracks. Something about the gesture terrified him, more than if it were made with a loaded gun. All his words, care, and responsibility faded to nothing. Kunz then held up three fingers and nodded.

  “Three what?” asked Capek.

  The fingers were shaken.

  “Three hours, three days, weeks, months?”

  Hinz nodded in agreement and Kunz shook his head too.

  They both then waved at the confused administrator as if saying goodbye. They did it until he left the wagon, looking back for no apparent reason. There was something very touching about the gesture, like children leaving home. He walked away feeling lost and foolishly sad. As he left the yards he saw a small group of workers and a soldier loitering by the gate.

  “There seems to be a lot of activity, considering the appalling weather.”

  The men looked at him from under rims of their caps, eyes nervous and distrustful of such questions.

  “Where is all this transport going at this time of the year?” Capek boldly asked.

  “East,” said the soldier.

  Capek was just about to tell them about Hinz and Kunz waiting in the cattle truck when he saw something in the workers’ eyes that changed his mind. With more caution he asked, “When will they be leaving?”

  What looked like the oldest worker flicked the stub of his cigarette away and lifted his filthy hand up to Capek’s face and shook three gnarled fingers at him. The other men smirked.

  “East,” he said and spat into the trampled grey snow.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Cyrena Lohr fidgeted in her beautiful house that finally had lost the last trace of Ishmael. The signatures and stains of love and passion had evaporated or been polished away by the servants, along with the arguments and his surly presence. And it had all been so easy. The house was clear of him and she felt utterly alone. She went to her favourite balcony and sat trying to extract pleasure from the shifting view. None came. She watched the birds squawking and clattering in the nearest tree, sending leaves and snapped twigs into her garden below. She watched the butterflies avoid them and marvelled at their lightness and colour, their tiny wings pattering the warm and pungent air. She looked across her corner of the city to where it ended and the vivid land danced towards the great shadow of the distant Vorrh. He was still out there somewhere and she wondered if she had preferred the idea of him being dead. His cunning guile that had hurt so much when she discovered that she had been tricked again suddenly took on a note of nostalgia. An almost pleasant recollection of the cleverness of his perfidy. The birds rattled again, dislodging even more foliage, and she snapped off the taste of sweetness in that memory. She needed to do something positive, to aim herself at a task.

  A far-off wind rattled very different trees and she was back in her childhood, when she was blind and happy, with her father and brother far away on the open plains. She sat and closed her eyes and let the memories rise up and flood in. They always started in the same place. On a journey towards the south. It was almost as if she had been born there, awakened on the visit to the cape, and the seven years previous had been dissolved or evaporated by its vivid potency.

  When her father, who had spent most of his life in Holland, came to Africa, they had all gone on hunting trips to the Transvaal. She had greatly enjoyed the excitement of the bush camps. The violent purring odour of the wilderness and all that lived there. Twice they had taken her with them onto the spoors, the actual hunting fields. She had witnessed the stealth, the adrenaline of the chase and the kill through her other straining senses and loved every minute of it. She was special then and there, where a great magnitude existed in that place and in the endeavours of the men around her. The colours of sounds were more vivid than sight could ever be. The echoing barks of the hunters’ guns filled the great plains and drifted to the mountains and back, describing a vast and harmonious distance that seemed to throb in the percussion. The smell of the cordite chiselling the air. The far-off roars of the game. There was always a party after the shoot. The servants would erect tables under the shade of the trees. The men were loud and happy and a great business filled in all the spaces. The next day they would travel back to one of the smaller townships, tired but exhilarated by the wildness of it all.

  The details were becoming brighter while her eyes were closed. Scenes constructed of scent and sound uncurled.

  They were in the library of her father’s friends talking about the potshots that they had taken at a tree full of baboons. She could smell the books and hear other children in the garden.

  “What are baboons?” she casually asked.

  Her father seemed surprised by her question and explained that they were a kind of large and ferocious monkey. Towards the end of the description his voice became a little uncertain.

  “Err, it’s best if we don’t talk about the shoot when Eugène arrives.”

  She had been told that he was arriving in the afternoon and that he was very special, a poet and a scholar, and that she was to call him Oom. Because although he was not a real uncle, he was the closest thing to one: her father’s oldest friend.

  “Doesn’t Oom Eugène like baboons, Father?”

  There was an embarrassed silence for a short while; then her brother spoke.

  “He doesn’t like us shooting them. Just don’t talk about it when he’s in the room.”

  “How will I know when he’s in the room?” she asked.

  “You will know,” was all they said.

  And she did, they all did. Eugène Marais was not yet famous, but there was a presence about the quiet-spoken man that filled the room. She first thought that he had an extraordinary voice. Softer and more resounding than the rest, who yapped and growled like playful dogs. He had stillness and dark in his voice, like the sounds in an ebony piano when it is not played but just listens, upright, to other sounds in the room and murmurs them back—rich, dark, and sensuously hollow.

  He was different from all the other grown-ups. When he spoke to Cyrena and the other children, he did not pretend to be interested, did not fake being a child in their company or an adult above them. She became aware years later that he had that rarest of gifts: engagement. Whatever he became inte
rested in absorbed him totally during the time of his commitment to it. It was that strangeness that made him close to children. He could talk to them with ease and share the wonder of their understanding. When he asked them a question, he meant it. It was easier than the chitchat of adults, where she thought she could hear him becoming a little lost.

  She remembered how he had asked her to search for sight. It had been on the veranda of another of her father’s friends after a long lunch, where much of the conversation was about the possibility of new war in Europe. Marais had sickened of it and walked outside to smoke. She understood many years later that a previous war between the Boers and the English had left him saddened and damaged inside. The heat of the sun was waning on her face. She followed him, followed his tobacco smoke to the side of the house where all was quiet, away from noise of talk and the servants washing pans.

  “Oom Eugène,” she said into the pink whiteness that described the boundary of her blindness in the quiet light. She heard him turn, the surprise in the swivelled dust of his footsteps.

  “Cyrena?”

  “Yes, Oom.”

  He walked over to her and cautiously offered his warm bony hand.

  “Come sit with me, child, you should not be wandering about, away from the others, there might be snakes here.”

  She held his hand tighter and he guided her to the trunk of a fallen tree nearby. They sat quietly for a while enjoying the light breezes of evening that guided in the difference of birds. Above them, she heard the swallows carve the brilliant air.

  “Do you like it here, Cyrena?”

  “I love the sounds of the bush, the way it touches and runs away and then comes back again from afar.”

  “Little one, you are a poet.”

  “That’s what they call you, Oom!”

  It became quiet again while the man looked at his hands and ran one of them through his thin hair.

  “What is a poet?” she asked.

  The quiet became louder and the distant pots and pans being washed somewhere inside the house sounded important.

  “It is somebody who sees our life in a different way,” he said.

  “But I can’t see anything,” she answered.

  “You see it in your soul, not in your eyes,” he said, “and through your other senses.”

  “I don’t really understand see, but I know I don’t have it,” she said carefully.

  “What do you think see is, Cyrena?”

  Nobody had ever asked that question before, and it was hard to hold it in her head. But she trusted her father’s friend more and more.

  “I think it must be like my head touching things, becoming happy and sad like my ears do when music and other sounds get inside them.”

  “Well said, Cyrena, you understand much of this invisible world,” Oom Eugène said, with great happiness in his voice. “Many people with sight see only the surface of things, it’s all they want to see. I think you have the gift of imagination, which makes some of us question the interior of things.”

  “What, like the interior of the baboons? I heard Joshua say he wanted to keep some of their innards—he meant interiors, I think.”

  Then she remembered that she must not speak about these things with him.

  “Did they take you on the shoot with them?”

  Cyrena did not know what to say; she had broken the only rule she had been given. He saw her drastic change of expression.

  “Did they tell you not to speak to me about it?”

  She stared hard at the ground and felt a stone growing in her throat.

  “It’s all right, my dear, I am not upset, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

  She strained her senses to find out if this was true.

  “I don’t hunt anymore. I spend my time living close to the animals. I think they have more to teach alive.”

  “Do baboons have imaginations?” She started up again.

  “I think not, my dear, only us humans are cursed with that splendid gift.”

  She ignored his paradox, which sounded like a mistake to her, and pressed on.

  “So that’s why animals can’t see with their souls, because they don’t have them, the pastor told us that.”

  She heard the discomfort of his movement and the distance between his next words.

  “The church is not always right in the wisdom of its proclamations.”

  She did not understand “proclamations” and said so.

  “Well then, in all the things it tells us are true,” he said a little breathlessly.

  “So you think they might have souls but no imaginations?”

  Again he shifted. “They are lower animals than us, is what I meant.”

  “But that’s what the pastor says.”

  Oom Eugène stood up and moved about. When he spoke again he was facing away from her.

  “I think you can have a soul without an imagination.” These words were very slow, as if congealed in his mouth, without spit or water. “Shall we go and find out what the others are doing?”

  He put his hand close to hers so that she could find it, and then she knew that their conversation was over, he had moved on to something else. She found his hand and also understood that he really knew where she was. Most people grabbed at her from out of the casual comfort of their own direction. Making her jump or flinch against the abrupt interaction. He had given his hand to be found and the difference was overwhelming. It was the same as his questions and answers. She held it with firm gratitude and began to weld a friendship.

  The next day she was with him again in the shade of the backyard tree.

  “Tell me, Cyrena, again what you think about seeing,” he said.

  He smelt funny today, a strange lingering heavy rub about him.

  “I don’t think about it, but sometimes I think that it thinks about me,” she said.

  “Child, you are a wonder.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you see the world the right way around.”

  “Which way around?” she said, perplexed. Her small brow furrowed.

  “The way that you know about the interiors, the innards of understanding. Your way of seeing things is so clear, it’s a miraculous gift.”

  “Like in the Bible?”

  “No, not like that at all.” He sounded as if he had just nibbled a grumpy seed.

  “But they say you are like that, like in the Bible.”

  “Whatever do you mean, child?” Adultness had taken him over.

  “They call you a miracle worker. The doctor of miracles.”

  “Oh, that,” he said in a dismissive way, “that’s just a job I did once.”

  “Making miracles?”

  “A lady got sick, sick in the heart, and it made her head tell her legs that they did not work. So for fifteen years she never walked. Had to be pushed around in a wheelbarrow. Imagine that.”

  “How did the miracle fix her?” asked Cyrena, moving forward.

  “Well, I put her to sleep a little bit each day, and then one day while she was deeply asleep I told her that she could walk again. I then woke her up and she could.”

  “So you are the miracle?”

  Marais said nothing. After a while Cyrena said, “Can you put me to sleep and make my eyes work?”

  He hadn’t seen this question coming and answered it with a speed that sounded like harshness. “No, it’s different.”

  “Because it’s eyes, not legs? Jesus did miracles with all kinds of sick people. The blind and the lame, they were called. Some had caught the Travail.”

  Marais’s face perked into attention. “The what?” he said.

  “The Travail. It’s a kind of sickness that poor catch from the world, a bit like the TB. I think.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes.” Marais
chuckled with glee.

  “I am not a baby,” snapped Cyrena.

  Marais suppressed his mirth. “No, you are not. You are a wise woman. An old soul.”

  She thought he was being cruel calling her a baby and now an old woman. She no longer wanted to talk, he was laughing at her. He was just like the others after all. She shrank away from him into her private dark.

  “Cyrena?”

  She ignored the miracle worker, pretending to be deaf.

  “Cyrena, I was serious. It’s a way of saying that some people are born with more knowledge than others. That they come into this world already knowing important things.”

  This made her open her ears.

  “Some people think that they might have lived before, here or in some other place. That they see this time through the understanding of another.”

  “Do you mean because I was adopted? I know all about that, Papa explained it.”

  “No, child, I don’t mean that.”

  “Did you know I was adopted, Oom Eugène?”

  “Yes, Cyrena, I helped your father with it.”

  “It’s a kind of secret to most people.”

  “It’s easier that way,” he said, and then steered the conversation back to his previous questions. “Do you think that sometimes you might have memories from another place, see things from a different time?”

  “But I don’t see anything,” she said flatly.

  “We could try talking about that.”

  “We are.”

  “No, I mean can I ask you when you are asleep?”

  “Like the lady with the forgotten legs?”

  “Yes, I will put you to sleep like her. It’s a way I learned when I was studying medicine in London. It’s a way where you go to sleep but still talk to me.”