LITMIR.BIZ

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rising in her throat (from the regions of the heart). A landscape of plenty, she thought at such times. And that was what it was, the last few years. Her life, by and large, perfectly satisfactory.

      Their relationship, hers and Martin’s, always courteous and considerate, but suddenly, a while ago, Maria started craving silence and solitude. Enough of having to adapt to someone else’s rhythms and requirements – however unexacting the person’s requirements, or predictable his rhythms. It suited her well when he decided, a month or two previously, to open a branch of his business in Taiwan. So now she needn’t send him packing. Now she needn’t say to him: Goodbye, see you in a year or two.

      She stayed behind on her own in the house. She’d earned well all her life, dealt sensibly with money and invested cleverly. If she wanted to, she needn’t work full-time ever again. She had time.

      Fortunately the child from her marriage with Andreas Volschenk has left home, because in his twenty-seven years he has complicated her life considerably. He gave her trouble from early infancy. He’s asthmatic. His nature is terrifyingly contradictory. He can be affectionate and engaging, and then whip around and bite you on the ankle, as it were. On the one hand ridiculously accommodating and on the other obdurately rebellious. Mistrustful and gullible at the same time. A large, clumsy child. His psyche a veritable battle ground of conflicting impulses: of good and evil intentions. At times, during adolescence, he was downright impossible to manage.

      As a baby he was a projectile vomiter. Allergic to mother’s milk, and then to cow’s milk. On goat’s milk and soya milk she had to raise the child. He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t sleep. Always picky and particular about food. Allergic to everything. Passionately fond of animals, but dog and cat hairs brought him out in an inflamed scabby rash. Waxen, etiolated, his mouth perpetually half-open because of enlarged adenoids, he looked a bit like a retard.

      But he had an extraordinary gift for figures (like Maria and her mother), and in addition, perfect pitch. Against his will he endured violin lessons up to the age of eleven. The teacher was full of praise for his exceptional abilities; the child would go far, he opined. Before every lesson Benjy was pale with tension. And she was tired to death of the effort of persuading (or blackmailing) him to go just once more. Until one day he vomited on the carpet by the teacher’s feet. And from that day on he refused ever to touch a violin or any other musical instrument. So that was a round she lost.

      He has attention deficit syndrome. He has trouble completing things. He doesn’t want to study. He wants to invent things, he wants to undertake things. It was hell getting him through school.

      He is both gullible and cunning. He frequently gets bamboozled by swindlers and sharpers. He is vengeful and tender-hearted. He often comes up with the most surprising things. She has a vivid image of him on the hot pathway in front of their house. He’s lying under a blanket. He’s breathing through his mouth. He is totally engrossed in his game. His skin is raw with scratching. He is building an elaborate castle of clay for two snails.

      He has poor muscle tone, but attractive eyes: light-grey with speckles, like a guinea-fowl feather, and long, lush lashes like a girl’s.

      To make things worse, he got mixed signals from his father ever since infancy. Andreas encouraged Benjy, but quickly got impatient with him – if he didn’t get going soon enough, if he didn’t complete a task.

      With his aptitude for figures it was clear that Benjy should study mathematics, or physics. In this direction he persevered for two years, with high marks, but dropped out at the beginning of his third year. He refused to study any further. Neither heaven nor earth nor mother nor father could budge him. He wanted to be an artist. Like his father. Maria blamed her ex-husband; she saw Benjy’s choice as an unresolved father-son issue – if the child had had a sounder relationship with his father, he wouldn’t have had this foolish compulsion.

      Now Benjy is living in Cape Town, where, as far as Maria can make out, he’s enrolled himself as a kind of apprentice to some or other established artist. A magus, Benjy calls him. If it’s a question of magic, it’s probably black magic, thinks Maria, as she knows Benjy.

      The Plains of Huang-He

      SOMETHING, ONE DAY, starts closing in on Maria Volschenk. It manifests itself first of all in her body as a sensation of emptiness, exactly at the juncture of her last two floating ribs, approximately at the lowest point of the sternum, just to the right of the lowest point of the heart, more or less where the gullet enters the stomach between the tenth and eleventh dorsal vertebrae. Right there is what feels like an ice-cold, hollow spot – something closely akin to pain – gradually permeating the rest of her organs. The heart, the liver, the stomach, the gall bladder, the kidneys, the bladder, the intestine. Eventually the sensation of a percolating void, a vacuum, settles in her head as well.

      All of a sudden everything seems pointless to her. Music she can no longer listen to. Nothing that used to give her pleasure does so any more. Neither lieder nor rock. Neither Charles Ives nor Stravinsky nor Mahler. Neither El Niño de Almaden, the Spanish flamenco singer (with his raw, discordant voice, his searing voice like acrid, fragrant moss). Nor the blind sheik Barrayn, making Sufi music from Upper Egypt, singing love songs and Koran psalms, deeply rooted in the ancient Bedouin tradition, accompanying himself on a little tambourine, held up close to his face, his fingers slapping, slipping, stroking its surface. Nor the family Lela de Permet from Albania, with the two toothless old men singing a duet in which one of them seems on the point of rending his shirt to expose the fragile, love-impaled heart. Nor Tallis, nor Monteverdi, nor Bach. Nor Berlioz’s settings of Baudelaire’s poems. Nor Schoenberg nor Alban Berg nor Britten nor Buxtehude.

      She listens to her entire music collection, hoping that something in it can still appeal to her, but she feels an aversion to everything she listens to. An aversion such as she felt to certain odours when she was pregnant with Benjy.

      Diminished, too, is her delight in the balminess and profusion of her tree-filled garden. She no longer inhales its fragrances with such sensual relish. The voluptuous excess of it rather disgusts her, truth to tell.

      She thinks: How can everything have changed like that overnight? (It is at this time that she has the dream of her sister.)

      Meticulously – because she’s a systematic woman, with a precise mind – she sifts through all the facets of her present and her past. Somewhere must lie hidden the key to this sudden beleaguered sensation in her body and her mind. She thinks of places where she’s lived, places she’s travelled to, people she’s known. She goes back as far as her memory allows. She compresses her memory, in an attempt to squeeze every last drop of information from it.

      If she could, she would go back all the way to the womb, even to herself as an unfertilised egg in the body of her mother, but that is not possible. How far back must she go? To her parents, her grandparents?

      Her father is seated on a big, loose boulder somewhere on a mountain with a woman, his first love. (Far beneath them a hazy landscape extends into infinity.) He’s wearing a tie and a white long-sleeved shirt. (Has he climbed the mountain in his shirt, tie and neat flannel trousers?)

      Maria’s mother, not much older than four, is sitting on a tiny cane chair in front of her seated grandfather and grandmother. They were prosperous middle-class people. Maria’s grandmother (whose name she’s inherited) stands behind them. She is young, dressed in white like a girl. The expression on her face is unfathomable – the same expression she often has in photographs: aloof, reticent, wary of the camera. Is that where it started – in the undivulged, unrecorded disappointments and losses of her grandparents, her great-grandparents?

      The same grandmother is standing, many years later, next to an elephant (with Indian trainer in knee boots and pith helmet: it must have been somewhere in Durban on holiday). She is no longer the same young woman, she’s dressed in something that looks like a dark, lightweight gabardine coat. Behind her is Maria’s smiling grandfather (an extrovert), his hand on his wife’s arm. Her grandmother’s arms dangle by her side, almost without volition; she is smiling faintly at the camera, but her gaze remains guarded and reserved, as if wanting to say: Don’t even

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