The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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sympathy.
In the car I ask Sof: “Where on earth do they get those stuffed tigers?”
“You get one free when you buy a Sealy Posturepedic,” she says.
*
I tell Sof that I do not want to stay in this town any longer. I want to go home immediately. This place makes my skin crawl, I say. I want to go home and reflect on everything that has happened. “So much for Herr K. on his way to the castle,” I say. “It’s not out of the question that that sanctimonious youth either took my shells or shat on my carpet. Although,” I say, “I have my serious doubts about the latter. There is something disarming about him after all, and he doesn’t seem quite the type to defecate on a stranger’s carpet. But he’s hiding something. Of that I’m sure. It would not surprise me at all if he knows something about the shells.”
I tell Sof that she will have to distract me. I will drive, it will do me good to keep my eye on the road, but she must talk. The whole fucking episode, I say, has unsettled me and made me even more on edge.
Before taking the turnoff to the national highway we come across the small brick building, resembling a small electrical substation, where Alverine said that Patrick Steinmeier had hanged himself. Presumably it is there that the bag of shells was found. (I had assumed all along that the bag was found at his feet.) I want to stop and look inside, but there are no windows, and the place is closed off from the road by a sturdy wire fence. I nevertheless insist on getting out and taking a couple of photographs.
Speak, I say to Sof, and don’t stop before we are in Durban.
*
“When the war breaks out in 1914,” Sof says, “James Joyce and his family move from Trieste to Zürich. Had he stayed on in Trieste, he would have been in danger of being interned. During the seven years he spends there writing Ulysses he has fits, ulcers and countless eye problems – there is a daily build-up of fluids in his eyes, his eyesight deteriorates by the day. In the evenings he writes in a room with a suitcase on his lap. He works ten hours a day. After each episode he breaks down and Nora nurses him back to health. He writes to everyone he knows to send him information about Dublin. His gargantuan imagination brings a thousand and one disparate things together. Songs, maps, sailors’ jokes, idioms and phrases. He asks his Aunt Josephine to write things down on scraps of paper. He is on the lookout for anything, for there is nothing that he cannot use. His head is like a factory. Imagine everything that is going on in there!”
But I interrupt her.
“Who would have done it?” I say. “Am I totally deluded here? Do the Steinmeiers perhaps have nothing to do with this? Neither of the two brothers – not the poor dead one nor Jaykie. Judging by his drawings he doesn’t have a particularly sensitive eye, and I’m not sure that he has it in him to produce a turd like that.”
“Human nature, like the human digestive system, is unfathomable.”
“Unfathomable?”
“Well. Unpredictable,” Sof says, and gives a little cough.
“Of one thing I’m sure,” I say. “The same person couldn’t have committed both deeds. I can’t see how anybody with such a fine eye for beauty could commit such a coarse and violent act.”
“It’s not impossible,” says Sof, and coughs dryly.
“It’s not impossible, but it’s highly improbable!” I exclaim. “No, actually it is impossible. It is out of the question. I cannot reconcile it with my conception of the world.”
“It won’t be the first brute with a refined eye,” says Sof. “Take the Marquis de Sade as an example.”
“Of what?”
“Of someone with a refined literary sensibility who wouldn’t have hesitated to shit on someone else’s carpet.”
“He did not shit on carpets as far as I know.”
“Whatever,” says Sof. She keeps her eye on the road. We are taking turns to drive.
“I speak under correction,” I say, “but no one in De Sade shits on carpets. They defecate on one another.”
“The male characters probably defecate on the female characters,” Sof says. “Although I cannot say with any certainty. I haven’t read De Sade in a long while. Probably not since high school.”
“In the pastorie?”
“Wherever. Maybe not in the pastorie, maybe at university.”
“But Jaykie knows something about the matter,” I say, “because he couldn’t look me in the eye, and the shells were found with his brother.”
“So?” Sof says.
“And he smelled of aftershave this morning. You must have noticed it too.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Sof says. “You can’t assume that it’s the same man who was in your house just because he smells of aftershave.”
“At ten o’clock in the morning in Ladybrand? Who uses aftershave at ten o’ clock on a Saturday morning in Ladybrand?”
“Jaykie Steinmeier,” Sof says, “because he’s an artist.”
“Sof,” I say, “don’t taunt me.”
But it is right here, I suddenly know, that our friendship is sealed.
*
Back home, I am deeply disturbed. My thoughts move restlessly from one thing to the next. I had better not entertain the thought that the youth with the seductive squint might have shat on my carpet (improbable), or even worse, that he wilfully deceived me, and that he is hiding the rest of the shells somewhere, or knows where they are being hidden (more probable). In my mind’s eye I see flashes of the beautiful landscape through which Sof and I travelled. The sister of the hanged man – the reappearance of Hazel after twenty years – has deeply touched me. And what has become of her, that lively young woman? I remember her with my child on her hip, how she would stand listening, silent, as if waiting for an answer. I remember Marthinus Maritz’s brutal sidelong glance. How do I remember my mother, and my father, and Joets? What residue of them remains in me? I ceded them to death with great sorrow: my mother even more than my father. On the way back Sof kept telling me about Joyce. She said that Joyce’s mother always returns in his fiction to persecute him. “Thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk,” Joyce said of her. I listened with divided attention and gazed with unseeing eyes at the lovely wintry valleys and dales that Sof pointed out to me.
I cannot sleep. I phone Frans de Waard, the man, my companion, with whom I have had a relationship for the past seven years (sexual in nature and intention). He keeps late hours.
“Do you have any idea,” I ask him, “if characters defecate on each other in De Sade?”
“Yes. It does occur at some or other stage.”
“What exactly happens – who defecates on whom?” I ask.
“I can’t remember. I read it too long ago.”
“You don’t want to take a guess?”
“No,” says Frans, “why would I want to take a guess? Let me rather not say anything of which I’m not sure. All right?”
“Yes,” I say, “all right.”
Do I hear someone coughing softly in the background, or am I imagining things? Have I caught him out – caught him out in flagrante delicto? No, this has more to do with my own fantasies than with reality. No man has ever suited me better. He is older than I am, ironic, erudite, and full of surprises in bed. This man is the best that I will ever encounter – I realised that soon enough. He is more deserving than anyone I have ever been in a relationship with. He is as much as I could ever expect from a lover and companion. That did not deter me, however, from applying for the assistantship when Theo Verwey advertised it. Even if it meant