LITMIR.BIZ

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used are of the earliest examples of systematised Chinese writing. The oracle was posed such questions as: ‘On the first day of Chia-chien of the first month we want to do battle against the Land of the Horses. Will Ti be on our side?’

      The oracle bones vary from deep ochre to ivory, they are about fifteen centimetres high, and the simple inscriptions are delicately carved on them in vertical rows. On some of the bones the inscriptions have not been deciphered. The many varied household articles, with green patina on the bronze, are attractive, but it is primarily the delicate, impenetrable words of the oracle that appeal to Maria.

      *

      Maria and her neighbour Vera Schoonraad, with whom she plays chess once a week, watch a DVD series in which a number of Dutch psychiatrists talk about their subjects and themselves. In the various instalments they discuss, among other topics, the therapeutic process, emotions, childhood, the use of pills as against the talking cure, and depression. Maria hopes in this way to gain some insight into her own emotional condition. In one of the instalments the psychiatrists are asked what each of them regards as the most basic emotion. Shame, says one. Fear, says another.

      The professor of biological psychiatry dons blue rubber gloves, produces a bucket in his laboratory, takes half a human brain from the formalin in it, and with a cotton bud points out the part of the brain responsible for emotion. The shape reminds Maria of a bisected coral that she once saw in an illustration. The colour reminds her of the pale white thorax of the large, bulbous spider that every evening for one whole winter lowered her body and spun her web before the bedroom window of Maria and her sculptor husband. The web and the body of the spider were covered in minuscule drops of water, and in the morning there was no trace left of either her or the web.

      *

      Karl Hofmeyr packs his bag, gets into his car and hits the road to his brother in Cape Town, who has been more or less of a headache to him for as long as he can remember.

      At the garage opposite the Pavilion he buys a road map and plans his route. At the Wimpy in Estcourt the woman serving him touches her nostril. Without any ado Karl gets up from the table, pays, and leaves. His meal untouched. He washes his hands thoroughly, and when he gets to his car, he turns round, walks back to the bathroom, washes his hands thoroughly for a second time.

      In Ladysmith he pulls up at a small shopping mall in the centre of town. He first washes his hands and then orders a sandwich in a small coffee shop that seems clean enough.

      The Josias fellow phones him again. He doesn’t sound very friendly. He sounds impatient, distracted, as if he’s talking to someone else at the same time; voices can be heard in the background, and animal noises – the honking of a goose or something. (Godaloneknows where Ignatius is hanging out this time. Though the presence of a goose on a farm, albeit a farm against the slopes of Table Mountain, is probably not all that odd. )

      ‘Are you on your way?’ he asks.

      ‘I’m on my way,’ says Karl.

      ‘Good,’ says the man. ‘Before Ignatius can cause any further havoc.’

      They’re cut off before Karl can enquire into the nature of the havoc. (Does he want to know? No, he does not want to know.)

      He washes his hands. At the CNA he sees a book that interests him, but he gives it a miss. The shelf on which the magazines are displayed looks gungy.

      There are a few things that Karl doesn’t do: he doesn’t do oil, he doesn’t do contact with anything that’s been handled by people who touch or pick their noses, he doesn’t do rats, excreta or open wounds; certain numbers spell disaster. But for the rest he’s really quite okay.

      *

      While filling up in Harrismith, Karl phones the Josias fellow. A young child answers. Where’s your father, where’s Josias? Karl asks. But only the child’s breathing is audible at the other end.

      In Ladybrand he phones again. Josias Brandt does not answer his phone. (Here he and Juliana overnighted once on their way to Cape Town. They stayed in an A-frame house among pine trees. It was cold. The duvets in the place were made of a thin, synthetic material.)

      In the café where they had supper that evening, Juliana told him about the autopsy she attended at school with some of her classmates. It was the first time that she’d seen a dead person, and the first time that she’d seen a naked man. They went there that day for a biology lesson, a small group of children, five boys and five girls. The body was kept in a room behind the police station. On going into the room, the first thing that struck her was the smell. It was not a smell that one could get rid of. It seeped into everything. (She made vigorous rubbing motions with her arms, as if trying to get rid of something sticky.) You couldn’t wash off the smell, she said. Not for days. It was concealed inside other smells. In the smell of cooked food. There was first the smell, then the body. The body was lying on a table in the centre of the room. It was covered. Not one of them said anything. When the cover was taken off (she made a plucking motion in the air), the naked body of a black man was exposed. Everybody’s eyes immediately focused on the sexual organ. Crinkly pubic hair and all, she said, with a slight laugh (half-embarrassed, half-apologetic).

      The body had already been opened up. A long incision (Juliana demonstrated on her own body) from the top of the sternum to above the pubic bone. The skin and muscles of the chest cavity had been pulled apart to reveal the internal organs. The sound of blood and body fluids, Juliana said, was like when an animal is slaughtered. She had seen it as a child on the farm. A wet, squishy sound. It’s the same as raw liver, she said, raw liver is never dead; it always keeps quivering slightly. The internal organs were like that. The doctor removed the heart and showed it to them. (She opened up the palm of her hand to demonstrate how the man had held up the heart to their scrutiny.) He pointed out the arteries, the veins, the ventricles. They all nodded to show their interest, observed politely. He replaced the heart. Then the lungs were pointed out to them. They lay splayed open, like a butterfly. (She demonstrated the position of the lungs with her hands, bent at the wrists, the open palms angled towards her chest.) This was a good man, the doctor said, he didn’t smoke. The lungs were pink. But when the doctor removed a thin slice from one of the lungs, there were little black dots visible on it, like small, black roses. When you heat the point of a pin over a flame, Juliana said, and you prick a piece of paper with it, it leaves a small, round scorch mark. (She stabbed the table with her finger.) That’s what the spots on the lungs looked like. The doctor said it had been caused by pollution in the location. That was what you were exposed to when you lived in the location, he said. The intestines were pale. A blue-green colour. The doctor explained that it hadn’t been necessary to open up the man’s head. The injury was confined to his body. He had been run over by a tractor. His spleen and liver had been ruptured.

      After that the dead man was sewn up, Juliana said. The skin and muscles of the breast cavity were drawn together again and he was stitched up. With a big needle, she said. (With two fingers she demonstrated how big.) The needle had a big eye, a rounded tip. (She pressed her finger on the table so hard that the tip flexed.) The doctor used thick thread and big stitches. The man was stitched up roughly with blanket stitch because (she hunched her shoulders apologetically) he was dead. The body was ready to be buried. There was no need for fancy stitching. Then it was over. She remembers that her mouth was very dry, Juliana said. We said goodbye to one another: See you at school tomorrow. Sheepishly. We couldn’t look each other in the eye. Three taboos violated in one go: we had seen a dead person, we had seen a naked, black man, we had seen it as girls and boys together.

      What was the exact colour of the organs? Karl asked her. Pink, she replied. Pink, and looked around for a matching pink. By chance the colour of the chairs on which they were sitting. The organs were light against the man’s dark skin, she said.

      *

      In Smithfield he once again phones Josias Brandt. Again a child at the other end, with the gabbling of birds in the background. Geese or something. Once again the child doesn’t react, just breathes.

      Karl has a pub lunch in the bar. The bar counter, when he places his order, seems reasonably clean. At the table next to him are four men. He can hear

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