The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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be surprised if they are the Chinese Mafia, said to be very active here in Lesotho. They may have something to do with the disappearance of your shells.” Thanks, I say, I will bear that in mind. I eye the men covertly with some displeasure. When they have finished eating, the staff appear with a cake topped with burning candles. Everyone congratulates Charlie, one of the men; the cake is cut and devoured as wordlessly as the main meal. Afterwards the remains are sent back to the kitchen.
What do I really know about Sofia Benadé, I wonder during the meal, except that she grew up in a pastorie, that she is married, has twin sons, and that she has an annual subscription to Die Kerkblad. We are still sounding each other out, looking for common ground. But tonight I am off balance. My attention is elsewhere. I am not trying particularly hard to establish an understanding. This does not seem to be a problem. Sof strikes me as someone who would not oppose the flow of events too much. She drinks her wine and smokes her cigarettes and observes the people.
After our meal Sof says that we are now going to explore the nightlife of Ladybrand. I think: If she has a clear idea of what we should do, I am more than willing to go along. It is cold outside. A biting cold, and the night sky is high and wide. There are more stars here than in the city. We walk up and down a few streets in the nearly deserted town, until we get to a place called the Red Lantern, across the street from the Spar. In front of the window hangs a brown bead curtain.
“This looks like a nice enough little place,” Sof remarks.
Inside there are a couple of tables and a fancy cane bar counter as well as cane bar stools. The place is still half full.
“By day the local branch of the Women’s Agricultural Association meets here,” Sof says.
It is pleasantly warm inside. A waitress with prodigiously rounded thighs in tightly fitting pants takes our order. I look around. At one of the tables a man and a woman are seated; at the rest of the tables there are mostly young people.
“They all work in the local bank,” Sof says.
A man and a woman enter. A respectable couple, sound of character and upbringing. The woman has short, dark hair which she touches self-consciously. With his hand against her back, the man guides her lightly to their table in the corner.
“The lawyer with the Latin teacher’s wife,” Sof says. “They met at the tennis club.”
“Where’s her husband tonight?” I ask.
“He’s marking essays,” Sof says. “They have two sons. The elder is quiet and serious and the younger has pale green eyes and too much energy.”
The waitress with the rounded thighs asks: “You girls still okay?”
“We’re waxed, sista,” says Sof, and gives a little cough.
“And the lawyer’s wife?” I ask.
“She has a headache tonight, but that’s only an excuse, because she hopes the magistrate will come by in her husband’s absence. They have two little daughters, two thin, pale little girls.”
The place fills up gradually. The music starts. Donna Summer sings “Hot Stuff”. Sof mouths the words silently: “I need some hot stuff baby tonight.” Her expression betrays nothing, only her mouth forms the words. She does this with the next song as well. “I will survive,” she sings wordlessly, making small, accompanying movements with her shoulders. A cool customer, Sof, even if she calls herself a deluded doos. We order more wine.
A slight young man with close-cropped, curly hair, particularly dark eyebrows, intense eyes and an evasive glance enters. He looks uneasy. He sits down at a table in the corner and orders a beer. He has a dark-blue sports bag with him. He seems to be waiting for someone, as he keeps checking his watch. He takes a small notebook out of the bag and writes something in it. He puts the notebook away and checks his watch again. He glances around him restlessly for a while. Then he takes out the notebook again and writes something in it for the second time.
“Hasn’t yet learnt to hold a pen properly,” Sof says.
I observe the young man surreptitiously. There is something compelling about his face, especially his eyes – ever so slightly squint. It is a face that can be read as either underhand or mischievous. His beard seems sparse, not yet firmly established: dark but downy. An attractive young man, if one could trust him; if his manner were not so agitated.
“He clearly suffers from attention deficit syndrome,” Sof, who has also been watching him, remarks. “A course of Ritalin will do no harm.”
“Or he suffers from a bad conscience,” I say.
“Es war spätabends,” Sof quotes, “als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefen Schnee. Vom Schlossberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste lichtschein deutete das grosse Schloss an.”
“Do you think Kafka had such a lightweight, skittish young man in mind?”
“Probably not,” Sof replies, “but this is the African version of K.”
“Wet behind the ears and of mixed descent?”
“Why not?”
“Actually the story should have ended there for poor K.,” I say.
“At fifteen I loved Kafka,” Sof says. “I read his biography and deeply mourned his death.”
“That I can well understand,” I say.
The Latin teacher’s wife gets up to go to the toilet, behind a second bead curtain. The lawyer makes a call on his cellphone.
“I remember friends of my parents’ when I was a child,” I say. “They lived in the same small town as my grandmother. The man was an Afrikaans teacher at the local school. He took remarkable photographs. We sometimes went on holiday with them to the South Coast. They were friends with the Dippenaars; the two couples played tennis together. On holiday I played with Engela and Moetsie, the two Dippenaar girls. Later it turned out that for years Mr Truter, the teacher, had been having an affair with Mrs Dippenaar. I don’t remember Mrs Dippenaar as a particularly attractive woman. Her legs were hairy and too wide apart. Mrs Truter, Santie, on the other hand, was lovely. Warm and easy-going. What drove her husband into the arms of plain Mrs Dippenaar? I still can’t make sense of it. Santie Truter later had a stroke and shot herself. I remember her in her bathing costume on the beach, looking over her shoulder at the photographer. Her husband. He had moles all over his body. What exactly made him sexually attractive to his wife as well as to Mrs Dippenaar is not clear to me.”
“The ways of people are unfathomable,” Sof says. “My father always abhorred the hypocritical piety of his congregation. They were constantly indulging in all kinds of bizarre infidelities. Then he would be expected to provide pastoral counselling to them as well as the aggrieved husbands and wives.”
“Whereupon the miscreants would have the best of resolutions until the next time around when once again they could not keep their hands off one another,” I say.
Not much later the young man with the furtive glance gets up, pays, and leaves his beer half finished.
“Now his adventure starts,” Sof says, as he exits through the door, like K., into the cold night.
*
I sleep restlessly. The bright passage light worries me all night. I have a dream about Felix du Randt. We are together in a garden. We have a row. There are tears, but the next morning I cannot recall the exact circumstances of the dream.
Sof and I eat breakfast in the dining room together with seven men who are attending a course for railway officials. The guesthouse décor is as kitsch inside as outside. There are artificial flowers on the tables. We are served scrambled eggs, bacon, and a sausage as pink as a dog’s pizzle. At the table next to ours there are four men, their skin colour varying from Van Dyck brown to a deep bluish brown. They speak Afrikaans with a South-Sotho accent. At another table one of the three men has earrings, a reddish moustache, and hair cut in a mullet. He wears off-white trousers,