LITMIR.BIZ

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says Karl, but that still doesn’t get me anywhere. She did say I should take Iggy away from there immediately. But that’s what the Brandt fellow is also saying. Ye-es, says Hendrik, but for different reasons. What did Iggy say when he moved in? He said it was an amazing place, says Karl, he could see the mountain from his room. He thought he’d be able to get some work done there. What else did the woman say? asks Hendrik. Not very much, just the negative energy and the goings-on, and two men – one of them bites his hand while he’s sleeping, the other dreams of business, says Karl. What kind of business? asks Hendrik. She didn’t specify, says Karl. And a man biting his hand while he’s sleeping – how weird is that! says Hendrik. Yes, says Karl, but now I still don’t know what’s up with Iggy. And the man’s phoned again. What does he say? asks Hendrik. He wants to know when I’m coming. And when are you planning to go? asks Hendrik. As soon as I can get away, says Karl. There’s a metal festival at the Gariep Dam, says Hendrik. That’s on your way. Or at least it’s not too much of a detour. Where did you hear that? asks Karl. Saw it yesterday on the internet, says Hendrik. Who’s playing? asks Karl. No very high-profile bands, says Hendrik, except perhaps Rammstein. They were going to have Annihilator, but the guys cancelled. Oh well, says Karl, Rammstein’s not my favourite, but I wouldn’t have minded. See what you can do, says Hendrik.

      *

      Maria thinks: She can’t put it off any longer. She must phone the man, she has a few things to ask him, and she must pick up the parcel that Sofie left for her. Sofie has been dead for nine months. Maria is not looking forward to this visit, but she can combine it with a visit to her parents’ grave. She can go and see the house where she and the sculptor, her ex-husband, used to live, that charismatic, highly successful, recklessly egoistic marriage spoiler, Andreas Volschenk. (His name since then up in lights internationally.) She can see herself doing it – standing at the garden gate dispassionately gazing at the house and garden in which she experienced so much. Raised the child on goat’s milk and obliged the man where possible and for the most part, all in deference to his career. She can once again run her eyes over the mountains, which she always found so beautiful. She can look up a few old friends. She often wonders about all these figures from her past, what they’ve been up to. Perhaps she’ll bump into Joeta somewhere, miraculously spared the depredation of the years, or perhaps Donny. Or one of the many vagrant couples who wandered (sometimes staggered) their fixed routes through town winter and summer. Face down in the ditch in front of her and the ex-husband’s house. Pissed in their garden and filched their washing from the line. Donny, for one, would certainly have something to report, in the twenty years or so since he bumped off his child bride. (Maria has always imagined that the appalling deed was committed somewhere against the slope of a low hill.) Also not improbable that she’ll come upon Donny on some street corner or other, passionately fulminating against the wickedness of mankind.

      *

      Shortly before her death Donny’s late child bride in her dolled-up little Pep Stores frock stood under a tree on the pavement – a blood-red dress (prelude to coming events?) with embroidery and lace gussets and here and there a skittish little sequin. Maria stood watching her from the bedroom window; the woman was surely biding her time to come and ask for bread or money. (Where was Donny that day?) But she was evidently taking her time (waiting for Donny?), because for a while she leaned up against the tree. Maria was standing at the window, and the late-afternoon light lit up the woman’s figure from behind so that she was outlined in silhouette and she seemed to be surrounded by a fiery aureole. Literally radiant, Biblical, an Old Testament apparition – something out of Ezekiel. And as the glow of the setting sun intensified, it looked as if the woman’s body was itself starting to radiate a glow, starting to shine. This glow, this strange radiance became gradually more brilliant as the setting sun blazed ever more brightly, and the woman’s body was so enveloped in the fiery aureole that it looked like a body being consumed by flames on a pyre, or a saint in the process of transfiguration, as Maria had seen it depicted in certain paintings.

      It didn’t last long, this strange manifestation in the late-afternoon light, almost like a vision. Maria wondered whether there had for a brief moment been a short-circuit in her brain, or a disturbance in her vision, so singular was what she had just witnessed. The sun had set, the woman had left her station by the tree and come up to the house, she had knocked at the front door and asked for bread or money, her diminutive face devious and sly.

      A few days later she succumbed on the mountain to wounds inflicted by Donny – her lover, common-law spouse and beloved companion. Her skull cracked (bashed with a stone), her pelvic bone fractured (by well-placed kicks), three ribs broken (fist blows), her throat cut and her vagina penetrated with a bottle.

      ‘Poes,’ he’d called her on Maria’s stoep.

      Turned around and peed in a pot plant.

      When Maria opened the door, turned around and said, ‘Meddim.’

      Then he extended his two hands in a gesture of subservience, cupped, performed a deferential genuflection, eyes cast down humbly, and said: ‘Meddim, a bit of bread for me and the girl.’

      ‘Poes,’ he said, when Maria turned around to go back into the house.

      Not clear whether this was directed at her or the girl, the little child bride.

      First poes, and then hallelujah! For Danny was Reborn through the Rema (or similar) Church, a salvaged soul, inspired with tongues of fire, evangelically fired up when the occasion required.

      *

      Maria Volschenk grew up on the West Rand. Her father was a geography teacher with a great love of faraway places. Her mother was initially a housewife. She worked for a while at the local shop (she walked there in the morning), then at a chemist’s (she wore a white uniform). She made hats and attended courses in flower arrangement. She baked cakes for the Women’s Agricultural Union; she knitted and read. But one day, apparently deciding she’d had enough of all that, she enrolled for a diploma course with some college or other. She qualified herself in accounting, bookkeeping and economics, took a job with a small business in the village, and opened her own bank account. She learnt to drive a car and took up tennis twice a week: on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. It was at about this time, too, that she stopped going to church on Sundays.

      When her father retired, Maria’s parents came to live in the Western Cape. Her mother kept on working as part-time bookkeeper till shortly before her death. Now both of them are lying buried against a low hill, far from their place of origin.

      Maria followed in her mother’s footsteps, worked by day as a qualified accountant for an auditors’ firm; did auditing jobs for various businesses in the town, the city and surroundings, and in the evenings she read widely to extend her range of reference. As an accountant, somebody who had for all her adult life dedicated herself to accounts and balance sheets, she was all too inclined to feel inferior to Sofie, her sister, a poet, and also to her ex-husband, the sculptor. She thus earnestly educated herself in history, history of art, philosophy, psychology. All of this also for the sake of her sculptor ex-husband, in order to hold her own in the company of his friends, admirers and acolytes. She would not permit her numeracy to stymie her general cultural literacy. (Not that she expected any of them to conduct an informed conversation with her on the subject of markets or figures.)

      Until, one day, she’d had enough and told the sculptor: Go take a flying fuck. Enough of trying to second-guess your every need in every possible way. You bugger on in your own time now. Select a more suitable candidate for your requirements from your wide circle of groupies.

      A year later she embarked on a relationship with a steadfast man. This time she selected someone from the business world, who appreciated her aptitude for figures. She’d learnt her lesson – no more getting into bed with an artist.

      Martin du Bois’s job involved frequent relocation. They lived in Johannesburg, overseas for a while, and for the last seven years in the harbour town of Durban, the garden a true bower of delight, verdant and tranquil, secluded from the street. A refuge, she thought, a safe haven, paradisal. A balmy, sultry garden in summer, with snake, monkey and chittering locust. In winter, when the rest of the country was shivering, bloodwarm, and the days so perfectly

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