CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The yard of Kühler Brunnen seemed desolate and empty. It was unswept and seemed to lack its previous size and authority. The gate was unlocked and on her way across the yard Cyrena quickly looked in at the stables without knowing why. It too was different, had become less. It was Mutter’s large and taciturn presence that was so startlingly absent, as if the flask of the place was now three-quarters empty. She shuddered slightly and made for the door, ringing it until it opened. Not by its new mechanical contrivance but by the strange hand of Thaddeus.
“Good morning, Mistress Lohr,” he said politely and stepped aside so that she might enter.
“Thank you, is your mistress at home?” She had assumed his status of servant without a second thought.
“Yes, mistress, I will fetch her.” Thaddeus showed none of the swirling new sensations that were now welling up inside him.
Cyrena went into the reception room and waited, peeling off her chamois gloves and lightly testing the gentle dishevelment for dust. She knew something had changed the moment she heard her friend’s footsteps descending. There was a new quick lightness there. The previous sullen weight had dispersed. The speed, the patter of happiness’s footfall. Her instinct, perceptions, and sensibilities were all still intact, no matter how much they had been trampled by Ishmael.
“Dearest Cyrena, I did so hope that you would call.”
Ghertrude was beaming with a quiet joy that seemed to have removed all the stress lines and knotted muscles from her much slimmer face and body.
“Have you found Rowena?”
It was the only thing that Cyrena could think of that would have produced such a distinctive change in her friend. Suddenly some of the lines and angles returned and the banished years connived in her face.
“No. No, we still wait and pray.”
Cyrena crossed the room to Ghertrude, putting her arms about her in a warm and sincere embrace. As she did this she saw that they were not alone, which stifled her affection by making her aware of it mid-hug. Looming just inside the doorway was the long, drab presence of Mutter’s son. Cyrena stepped back from her friend and said, “Yes?” The tone of the word spoke volumes.
Thaddeus said nothing in return, his eyes flickering between the two women and the floor. Now Cyrena became more emphatic, the honed edge of Lohr authority qualifying her voice. “Thank you, you may go.”
Thaddeus received its full weight and started to turn away.
“No,” said Ghertrude in a very different voice that seemed totally out of place. Her single negative word resounded in a warmth that filled the room and stroked Cyrena’s command into total submission. Ghertrude held out her hand sideways and said, “Thaddeus.”
After a moment of total incomprehension between him and Cyrena, he crossed the room to Ghertrude’s side where she lovingly grasped his hand and pulled him a little closer. The look of absolute disbelief and astonishment on her friend’s face was so extreme that it provoked an instinctive single laugh from Ghertrude, who quickly turned it into speech before it offended.
“My dearest Cyrena, don’t look so shocked, you can be no more surprised than we.” She gave a darting glance to Thaddeus that was more than a kiss. “We had no idea that so much joy could grow out of so much horror, and this quickly.” She gave him her other hand and looked from his glowing eyes into the beautiful cool and mystified pools of Cyrena’s.
The women sat while Thaddeus went to fetch drinks, not as a servant and certainly not yet as the master of the house, but as something awkwardly displaced in between. The moment that he left Cyrena said, “Are you mad? Mutter’s son, a peasant boy?”
Ghertrude did not even flinch, but was firm and clear in her answer. “Saner than I’ve ever been. He is genuine and kind, and who is there left to care where he comes from?”
“But, Ghertrude—”
“Do you believe that Ishmael came from nobler stock?” inflicted Ghertrude.
The comment hit Cyrena like a slap. Hammering her countenance out of gawping disbelief into hurt shock, but only for a moment because her defences were up and the agile adrenaline that so liked the elegant corridors of her sharp mind was now coursing and speeding there.
“There is no comparison.”
“Why not?”
“Because…because Ishmael came from another world and fooled us all.”
“Thaddeus isn’t fooling me, he is genuine.”
“I know you want to think that, but what can he really offer you?”
“Love.”
And there the conversation stopped because Ghertrude had won the first round flat out and Thaddeus had appeared at the door with a tray of drinks. Ghertrude insisted that he stay and held his bent hand throughout the strangled silences around their loud sippings and Cyrena’s announcement that she was going south for two weeks or so.
After she eventually left, Thaddeus did not know what to say, so Ghertrude took command.
“It’s all right, my dear, she will get used to us. She’s a funny old stick, a bit set in the formal ways of the Fatherland. But she has a heart of gold. It will take time, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to come between you and your best friend,” he said.
“Much worse has come between us before, don’t worry. When she gets to know you, we will all be friends.”
Thaddeus severely doubted that but said nothing as Ghertrude put her arm around him and took him back towards the unfinished drinks.
* * *
Outside, Cyrena was fuming.
“How dare she, how dare she!” she said out loud while storming towards the cathedral, where she had told the chauffeur to bring the car to collect her. How dare she compare what had been between her and Ishmael and this inane infatuation with Mutter’s idiot son. What kind of life did she expect to live now? And what about Rowena, had she forgotten the poor stolen child while she billed and cooed with this dolt?
“I give up,” she said loud enough to make passersby turn their heads.
The car was not there when she reached the great door, so she waited and paced up and down. She had never really noticed how out of place the cathedral was baking in the meaninglessness of the constant sun. How silly its European proportions in this vast primitive land. The folly and monstrous arrogance of the city fathers, including her own, whom she had loved so dearly. Again she thought of Marais and wished he were here now. She must see him, talk to somebody who had intelligence enough to share and dissect her growing turmoil and disappointment in all things. The car arrived, and after lambasting the driver she returned home, knotted silently in her anger and ludicrous envy.
After the painful visit to Ghertrude, she was even more convinced to visit Marais and the glorious south. She should have invited him to her house there years ago. Especially after she had heard of the death of his young wife. If she met him now, they could talk about pain on equal terms. She wanted to look again into the face of that genuine man and explain the growing misery between her heart and her eyes.
She wanted to spend some time in Marais’s strange warmth and charismatic wisdom. He might be the only person alive who could restore or galvanise her faith in humanity. She knew he was still in South Africa and working because the business about his book being stolen was all over the press. It had even been reported on the radio. There was nothing to keep her here. She would tidy up her family affairs, appointing Talbot to supervise them in her short absence. There was little chance that he would decline, his hesitant flutterings had told her that. Her quick and easy insight suddenly appalled her. “My God, I am thinking like Ishmael,” she almost said out loud. But perhaps that was also part of his reluctant gift to her, though earned rather than given.
She would take a plane or a train down to the cape. It would take the same time as a letter. She need to know more about the tree and let this extraordinary man
enter her heart and mind again.
* * *
—
The three-engine plane was waiting for her after her first enquiry. Talbot had made it possible, as she had so wilfully predicted. The white-and-red Fokker F.12 sat high and proud on the landing strip. It rested at a fifteen-degree angle because of its large fixed front wheels that made its polished rectangular body point alertly at the sky as if impatient to leave the binding earth and embrace the upper breezes. Cyrena left Talbot at the steps and thanked him with a kiss on his happy cheek. Inside the plane were three metal reclining seats that were capable of being turned into beds. They had an alarmingly surgical quality about their design. Thoughtfully, one had been made up for her, cushions and a plaid blanket added in an attempt to give it a homely feeling. One of Talbot’s personal touches, she thought, and smiled. She looked around the walnut-veneered interior with its little kitchen and bar at the back. She was to be the only passenger. The two pilots were busying themselves with preparation for takeoff while the flight attendant was carrying supplies into the tiny galley. Cyrena made herself comfortable just before the engines choked and spluttered into action.
Everything in the thin metal box quivered and shook violently. Now she understood why the seats were so stoically functional. Her doubts about the journey surfaced as her immaculate teeth rattled in her beautiful head and the freshly picked flowers that lolled in a tiny wall-mounted vase leapt up and down and tried to escape their elegant confinement. Another of Talbot’s little touches. The plane sprang forward and galloped down the runway, jumping into the singing blue sky. When it nudged between the low puffs of cloud, the rattles ceased and the flowers sighed back into their ornamentation as the plane glided the gentle buffers of rising air. The land below rolled over to expose its magnificence as they banked and circled the vast and forever canopy of the Vorrh. Seeing it from above and at such an acute angle displayed the complexity and depth of its ancient volume.
Cyrena strained at the window, wanting to see more. The gleaming Fokker turned again, with the sunlight polishing its wings, and the forest curved away, the dark shadow of the Vorrh sliding to the horizon behind them as they veered south. The landscape that now opened and flowed forward was breathtaking—great broken rills of colour and vast expanses of mountain with a far shimmer of desert to the east, all focussed and held by the purest light that she had ever seen. She found it hard to keep all this in her head, so much space and distance. A land that went on for days. The only other thing that she had to compare it to were the echoes of gunfire rattling back and forth from the mountains to the plain in those early years on safari. But this was greater. The sun cut apertures and highlights across the broken land. Herds of wildebeest and gazelles ran between the shadows; rivers and lakes shone and winked out of the dry ochre ground; and the flooding gallons of light washed in through the cabin and danced under the stiff upper wings. A huge joy seized her heart and cleansed the last remaining shades that were folded there. Tears came to her eyes and she started to gently sob as a flock of great birds flapped windward far beneath the silhouetted aircraft’s black static wings.
* * *
—
Eventually she slept as twilight drained the last colour from the settling sky. The shuttle between vision, sleep, landings, and further hours of magnificent landscape lolled her into a deep, sumptuous visual world in which she felt submerged and expanded. The flight attendant brought her coffee and brandy and opened the thick embroidered curtains. A bluer light slanted in.
“Two hours, madam,” she said.
“Yes,” said Cyrena gleefully.
She smelt the difference in the air the moment she walked down the plane’s metal steps towards the waiting car. Thirty minutes later it pulled up next to a low, slightly soiled wooden colonial building. A red-faced man in an antiquated safari suit stood outside it, grinning at her arrival. “Welcome to the Transvaal and Jackari’s Lodge. I am Wolfgang Steiple, a friend of Herr Marais,” he said.
She suddenly knew where she was, and her old blind memory of this place slid beneath the visual structure of the lodge, giving it solidity, meaning, and association. She had stayed here before when she was a child. The smell of the place crashed in and pushed aside the insignificance of the peeling paint and the uncleaned windows.
* * *
—
The next day Steiple would drive her forty miles to the smaller community where Marais had chosen to live for a short time.
“I think you have known our celebrity friend for many years,” he said in an accent that she greatly enjoyed.
“Yes, Herr Steiple, since I was a child.”
They chatted about the Transvaal and the cape, about mutual friends and the journey tomorrow, which would be in the late afternoon when the ferocity of the sun was spent. Just before they arrived in Waterberg, he asked a question in a different tone of voice.“How long has it been since you last met the good advocate?”
“Too long, not since my father’s funeral,” she said wistfully. The canvas-sided car bumped relentlessly across the rough track.
“You may find him much changed,” said Steiple carefully for such an openly spoken man.
“Oh, we have all been changed by time,” she said, staring across the jagged land towards the great plateau that was absorbing the setting sun.
Steiple left her on the steps of the white wooden house that had turned pink in the twilight. A grinning young man whose black skin was also weirdly glazed pink held her bags as Steiple drove away. Marais had been told that she was coming. Now all she had to do was wait. The guesthouse was one of those used for arriving safari members—it was at the top of the range and almost empty. The season had not yet started. The weather was still unsure, the breeding season almost over. She sat just inside the veranda behind the fly screen to avoid the mosquitoes that were rising from the marshlands, and the moths and beetles that wanted to taste the artificial lights. She sat and waited with her eyes closed.
His footsteps came hurriedly in from the right. She was not sure it was he until he walked onto the broad white wooden steps. He saw her there, slightly hazed by the fly screen.
“Cyrena,” he said as he pushed open the door and she opened her eyes.
He was indeed “much changed”; changed from the man she had wanted to give her heart to. The firmness of his confidence had gone, the brightness of his charisma had changed colour and dimmed. He seemed to have lost the buoyant aloofness and sharp elsewhereness that gave him a sense of mystery.
This man had been rewritten in doubt and unease and something else that she could not place in the fraction of a second before they embraced.
She felt his bones through his once elegant light suit.
“My dear, how wonderful that you have come.” He offered his arm in exactly the same way as he had before, when she was blind. She took it and looked deeply into his eyes. Had he forgotten their last meeting at her father’s funeral and all they had said about her gaining of sight?
Suddenly the questioning force in her eyes stopped him dead in his tracks, and he looked at her in shock, trying to find an answer rather than a question in her gaze, looking for the mind to engage with its splendour and warmth. Now it was seeking him, directly beaming out and illuminating some of the darkness that sat behind his cringing irises. In a second she saw the scars of entangled damage and the brilliance like cave paintings scratched on a wall that only a given neophyte had ever glimpsed, crawling through the tunnel of ritual, burning torch in hand. But there had never been a neophyte. And those flickering signs had only ever been read continually by him. Something in him took a sharp intake of breath and she did not know if it was actual or psychic. They were both paralysed, their eyes locked, holding each other on the edge of the parlour as the house servants moved discreetly past.
She broke the spell, or rather the interrogation of shadows.
; “Oom Eugène, shall we go in?”
He had no words as the pressure of his weight answered her and they glided towards the high-backed cane chairs adorned with the pelts of fine beasts. She let her eyes retract and looked at the surface of the man. He smiled and said, “Tell me about your life, Cyrena, tell me about what you have been doing in the great dark heart.”
For the next two hours they exchanged tales of wonder and pain. She could finally talk to him about Ishmael. To admit to her failings under his spell. Something she had never done with another person, not even Ghertrude. She had “seen” only what she wanted to and it had made her more blind than before. She allowed herself to verbally balance and gush the ironies of perception on a stage of revelation and betrayal. But the tide of sadness that had recently so filled Cyrena’s life seemed but a trickle in relationship to her friend. She had no idea how much life had chewed at him, gnawing away the foundation of hope. She had wanted to talk about his articles on the baboon and about the fragments that her brother had translated for her from Die Huisgenoot. The journal came in a great bundle every month, following her father’s lifetime subscription. She of course did not read Afrikaans, but understood a little of its speech. Marais’s ingenious and breathtakingly original thesis The Soul of the White Ant was electrifying to her. After the second reading she found a schoolteacher in Essenwald who could translate and read it to her, her brother’s infrequent visits being far too lax for her appetite. The way Oom Eugène told the tale and shivered the questions of consciousness was an absolute delight. The resounding meanings stirred deep and significant thoughts in her. After the third session the well-paid teacher insisted on also reading each article in its original Afrikaans, saying that the translation lacked some of the rhythms and sounds of the unique language. She did not object because in those moments of meaningless words she heard the veldt rise up and the guns thunder from the mountains to the plain. She heard her childhood. But mostly she heard him.
The Cloven Page 13
