The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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The Book of Happenstance
Ingrid Gouws
Human & Rousseau
For Liesbeth-Helena Gouws
I wish to thank Margaret Lenta and Sally-Ann Murray for their invaluable comments on the manuscript;
Elsa Silke for her steady editorial hand and sound judgement;
And Alida Potgieter for her professionalism, commitment and care.
Chapter one
In March, at the end of summer, I start working as Theo Verwey’s assistant. In October, in spring, he is found dead in his office. I am the one who discovers him at six-thirty in the evening. I close the door behind me and move forward cautiously, but there is a threshold I cannot cross.
Everybody is upset about his death, Sailor more so than anybody else. For days on end his eyes are red with weeping and he tells me: He was like a father to me.
Sailor sits in my office. One of his long legs dangles over the armrest of the chair. Under his arms are large patches of sweat. His hair is tousled. His face is red with emotion. Even in his state of collapse he still looks pretty good. Freddie stands in the door. Behind him stands the cleaning woman. (She looks like a cleaning woman, but she is in fact an expert on fossils, more specifically fossils from the Cambrian.)
Sailor says: “It’s that Indian dog.”
“Which Indian dog?” I ask.
“The margarine magnate,” says Freddie from the door.
“It’s his father,” Sailor says.
“Whose father?” I ask.
“The dog’s father,” Sailor says.
“The margarine magnate?”
“Yes, he made his money from margarine and cooking oil,” Freddie says from the doorway.
“Which one is the dog?” I ask.
“The cunt is his son,” says Sailor.
“Sailor thinks he blackmailed Verwey,” Freddie says, and grinds out his cigarette beneath his heel.
“Blackmailed,” wails Sailor.
“Bad,” says the woman.
“He’s stinking rich,” says Freddie.
“They have a TV screen as big as a wall in their house,” Sailor says, “with seats like in a bioscope.”
“How does he know that?” I ask Freddie, for Sailor is overwhelmed by a fresh flood of tears.
“How do you know that?” Freddie asks Sailor.
“I was there,” Sailor wails.
“Christ Almighty,” the woman says, also lighting a cigarette.
“Did the father or the son blackmail him?” I ask.
“The father,” Freddie says, shaking his head.
“No, the cunt himself,” Sailor says.
“And the cunt is the son,” I say.
“Yes,” Sailor says, “the fucking cunt with his hot Indian arsehole!”
Theo Verwey and I used to listen to music as we worked. Mahler, Schubert, Cimarosa, Gluck, Strauss, Schütz, Mozart. I helped Theo Verwey with his project. He recorded words that have fallen into complete disuse, as well as words not often used in Afrikaans any more.
A couple of days after his death Mrs Verwey arrives to collect her deceased husband’s possessions from his office. I help her pack the books into boxes.
“Are you willing to complete this task on his behalf?” she asks me. “The project was his lifelong dream and Theo had the greatest respect for your expertise.” With my back to her, bending over a box with a small pile of books in my hand, I tell her: “I’ll have to think about it; I don’t know how much longer I plan to remain here.”
Chapter two
In the last week of May, nearly three months after I started as Theo Verwey’s assistant in March, my garden flat gets broken into. When I arrive home late in the afternoon, the flat is in disarray. The cupboards and drawers are open, their contents ransacked, as if someone was hurriedly looking for something before shoving everything back. In the bedroom the bedding looks as if it has been bundled up after being stripped. I do not even take the trouble to see if anything has been stolen – what breaks my heart is my shells!
I brought thirty-seven of my loveliest shells with me. Even the robust conches I packed as carefully as porcelain for the journey. Twenty-one of them I set out in three rows on my bedside table, the other sixteen I displayed on a small table in the lounge. The bedside table is empty. In the lounge a few shells lie on the ground. I go down on my haunches. Only five have remained. The three Harpa majors are gone. The periglyptas! Most of the conches. (The irreplaceable conches!) The helmet shell, of which Frans said that its colour resembles his glans when he has lain in the water for too long. The two dramatic murexes. The rare terebras. I did not carelessly pick up these shells during a day or two at the seaside – over the years I have selected and bought them with great care. I hear my own voice moaning: I cannot believe this! The sound comes from deep in my throat, from a place where words are not usually formed. I can feel my throat constricting and the small bones in my larynx pressing painfully against one another. Am I supposed to learn a lesson from this? I wonder in passing.
All my things I view as earthly goods, all of them replaceable – but not the shells. The shells are heavenly messengers! The shells I have been collecting for a lifetime. They are my most prized possessions. Over the years I have taken (with a few notable exceptions) more pleasure in these shells than in people. (My ex-husband said that I was like the dowager empress Tz’u-hsi – more concerned with her silkworm cocoons than with her subjects.)
I move through the house from one room to another, distraught. Whores, I think. Whoever did this. Barbarians.
In the small back room there is a large wet stain on the carpet, as well as a large piece of human excrement. I instinctively draw back from the smell and the substance. Someone actually urinated and defecated on the carpet! The faeces look dangerous – black, solid, shiny, coiled like a snake. (What must be ingested to produce a thing like that! What relentless thoughts can direct a turd like that?) Menacingly it lies there, a warning: Be careful, or you will get to deal with me, and I do not show any mercy. The humiliation, the naked intimidation of this deed.
My own spiritual need is urgent. It takes a great deal of energy to sustain this high level of psychic need. Meditating on the shells is one way of centring myself and lowering my levels of anxiety. These shells are a source of infinite beauty and wonder to me. I can rely on their beauty to divert me from vexation and discontent.
I move into top gear; some kind of hysteria, surely. Carefully I lift the faeces with a wad of tissues and flush it down the toilet. I soak the carpet in Dettol. The water in the bath turns a murky black. (It is a carpet of which I am very fond; I bought it at a time when my ex-husband, the child and I were still together.) I cannot afford to be intimidated by a turd. Having done this, it occurs to me that there may be techniques these days for determining the identity of criminals from their excrement. Too late for that. I phone the police. I should probably leave everything as I found it, but I do not have the heart to leave the violated shells lying on the ground. I put them back on the table.
The doorbell rings. Two constables announce themselves: a Constable Modisane and a Constable Moonsamy. Constable Modisane makes a sympathetic clicking sound with the tongue whilst surveying the scene of the disaster. He is the younger of the two. He has smooth, youthful cheeks and a domed forehead.
“Do you like these things?” he asks, looking at the shells on the table.
“Yes,” I say.
Mr Modisane, Constable, how can I begin to say how I regard these