LITMIR.BIZ

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She’s silent for a while. When she starts speaking, her voice sounds strange, as if it’s not her own. One of the dogs growls ferociously. She slaps him lightly on the head but is apparently not roused from her trance. (How does she know which one growled?)

      She sees two figures, she says. Or is it three? Two are very distinct … two men … both of them with strange (she gestures around her head, makes quick scurrying movements) … rays … it’s very hot … somebody is crawling on his knees …

      She’s silent for a long time. She presses her fingertips to her temples as if she’s in pain. Sweat beads on her forehead. He waits. She presses the fingertips. Then she suddenly comes out of her trance. She opens her eyes wide. No, jeez, she says, she can’t go any further. There are too many goings-on. She can’t help him any further.

      Where? What kind of goings-on? he demands.

      But she shakes her head emphatically. No, unholy goings-on. She can’t have dealings with that kind of thing. She’s too sensitive. There’s too much negative energy.

      Where? he asks.

      Jesus, no, she says, now that she can’t pronounce upon. It’s just her sense of a space. Somewhere. A dark place. And she knows a dark place when she sees one.

      Did she see it? asks Karl.

      She sensed it. She as good as saw it.

      Is it perhaps near a mountain, something like Table Mountain? he asks.

      No, now that she couldn’t say. It could be. It’s not important. All she knows for sure, is that she sensed a very dark place. Lots of pain and anger there.

      Is my brother there? Karl demands.

      No, that she can’t pronounce upon, but if he is there, in such a place, then Karl must get him away from there immediately. She saw the two men. The one is dreaming of business, the other looks as if he’s dreaming of dead people, and he’s biting his hand for sure while he’s sleeping. That she could see clearly. Lots of grief. Goings-on.

      The grief is not perhaps his brother’s grief? Karl asks.

      Could be, says the woman. She also sensed other presences. But she couldn’t make out exactly whose pain it was. But lots of pain, as she said.

      Pain of what kind? asks Karl.

      No, Jesus, now that she can’t pronounce upon, says the woman.

      But Karl persists. Since he’s here anyway. His brother has fair hair, he says. He wears glasses. He has a friendly face, gentle.

      She didn’t see anyone like that, says the woman. At the beginning there were three figures. One of them could maybe have been his brother. It’s possible that one of them had fair hair.

      And the person crawling on his knees?

      The woman shakes her head. No, she doesn’t think that was his brother.

      Can he just wash his hands quickly? asks Karl.

      Sure, she says, but she looks at him oddly anyway. Is there a problem?

      No, there’s no problem.

      He can’t find a towel that looks clean enough in the bathroom. Wipes his hands on his pants. Has to wash them again, because he’s been sitting on the chair on which the dogs probably sit at times. Blows his hands dry so that he needn’t use the towel.

      The woman looks at him mistrustfully when he returns.

      That will be R75, she says. A full session is R135, but his was just half a session. She’s sorry she can’t be of further assistance.

      Now he has to get out of here as quickly as possible. When the woman gets up, the dogs jump off the sofa and mill around his feet. He’s scared the one with the wound will rub up against his trouser leg.

      Shame, she says as she opens the front door for him, that your poor brother should be in such a terrible place.

      What place?

      The woman clasps her hands to her chest. Looks at him expressively. Okay, she may not have seen his brother, but the fact that such a dark place came up is a sure sign that his brother’s in a bad place. And if she can advise him, Karl must take him away from there as soon as possible.

      Where to? he asks, panic-stricken. (Dumb question, he knows, how would the woman know.)

      That is for Karl to decide, she says, unfortunately she can’t be of any assistance in that regard.

      He goes home and listens to Pantera’s album Cowboys from Hell at full volume. He thinks of Juliana. He hadn’t realised she was so depressed. Till one evening in the hotel room in Bilbao, during the trip they’d looked forward to for so long. She said later that she’d considered slitting her wrists that evening. (Where would she have done it – in the unsavoury bathroom?) That bathroom in the corner of the room stank of sulphur. It was enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. At the market the following day she stood still for a long time in front of the baby turtles in glass bowls. There were flowers in containers. Big crabs on ice. The stink! Slaughtered rabbits like López Garcia’s still-life with a dead rabbit, which they’d seen in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. (He’d liked it a lot.) Bull’s, pig’s and sheep’s testicles. Sheep’s and other brains. Fucking repulsive. He was terrified that he’d touch something by accident, or step on something: a scrap of meat, fish, crab, crayfish. The contamination takes over, it invades his body. Everything he has is taken away from him.

      She didn’t let on that anything was wrong. She wandered expressionlessly from stall to stall. He was totally unaware of her state of mind, he was too busy trying to keep body and soul together. Early every morning he’d go down the stairs to put a coin in a slot and return with two little mugs of coffee. She was writing in her diary. The sulphurous bathroom stinking as with the vapours of hell; he could hardly bring himself to use it; every single surface in it filled him with fear and loathing. The sticky plastic curtain, the bath’s gritty surface, the stained mirror; the encrustations and fungal matter that he thought he could see everywhere; but especially the toxic fumes. He practised shallow breathing; scared the poison would invade his body.

      One evening they ate paella in a pan, with black rice – on a little square with plane trees. I can no longer help you, she said, you have to help yourself now. I can no longer support you, from here on you’re on your own. A courtyard with cobblestones, so terribly forlorn the coloured lights in the wind. Even in the beautiful Guggenheim Museum her attention was elsewhere. What was she thinking of? What does a woman think of who’d considered slitting her wrists in a foreign land? What are the kinds of things Juliana thinks of – he doesn’t know. It panics him even more. She likes landscapes. She likes music. Is she thinking of famous landscapes? Is she thinking of the books she so dedicatedly reads? Does she listen to music in her head – requiems and Stabat Maters and all the other infinitely doleful songs and desolate piano notes to which she so loves listening? Is she thinking of former loves, perhaps? Is she thinking of her lonely youth – of the boy, perhaps, that she once told him about, with whom she played table tennis when they were both twelve years old, in a large double-storey house on a rocky coast, in a windy city, the upper rooms with wood panelling and round windows like the portholes of a ship?

      *

      That afternoon he gets another call from the Josias fellow.

      ‘Well,’ says the man (a touch impatiently), ‘when are you coming?’

      ‘I’m coming as soon as I can get away,’ he says.

      And with that the deal is clinched, the die is cast. He’s said he’s coming, now there’s no turning back.

      That evening he drops in on Hendrik again. So I went to the psychic, says Karl. What does she say? asks Hendrik. She sensed a place, a dark place with lots of negative energy, says Karl, at one stage she wouldn’t carry on, said it was too dreadful. Sounds bad, says Hendrik, so would that be Josias Brandt’s place? No, says Karl, that she couldn’t pronounce upon. She was very vague. It’s just a place that she sensed. No, man, says Hendrik,

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