The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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return to that when I am less unsettled by my loss.
I drink a whisky and go to bed. I still lack the courage to make a list of the missing shells. What made Freek van As decide to get in touch with me after twenty-seven years? Do I owe this man something?
*
Theo Verwey is smooth-shaven and rosy this morning. Schütz on the CD player. We discuss this specific recording.
“I used to be a member of a Schütz choral group,” Theo says.
“It must have been a singular experience,” I say, “to sing Schütz.”
“It was,” he says. “I attended a performance of the Symphoniae Sacrae in Berlin in 1996. It was excellent.”
“Seven years after the dismantling of the wall,” I say. “Schütz in Berlin. Do you like Berlin as a city?”
“A truly exceptional city,” Theo says. “It has a feel different from the rest of Europe.”
“An anarchic energy, I’ve heard. I’ve not yet been there myself.”
“You should really go,” he says.
I shrug.
“We’ve received an additional grant for the project,” he says.
“That’s good news,” I say. “Who from – a benefactor?”
Theo looks surprised. “How did you know?”
I say that I took a guess; I made a joke.
“A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Afrikaans. The Derde Afrikaanse Taalgenootskap. A high-profile individual. A substantial amount of money. This person is generously sponsoring your appointment for the first six months as it is, but with this grant we can extend your contract by another six months.”
Theo stands in profile, gazing out of the window. He is a good-looking man. I cannot fault any of his features. All in perfect harmony, the mouth perhaps a trifle too sensual. His complexion is rosy – a sign of good blood circulation and a healthy diet. His dark hair is lush, beginning to grey. A face suited to sensual abandon. Had the expression in his eyes been different, it could even have been called a passionate face. His eyebrows form a high arch, lending his face an expression of permanent surprise. For a moment he pauses reflectively with a card in his hand.
I have things weighing on my mind, pressing issues, and this man evokes a need in me to pour out my heart to him. Inexplicable. Is it perhaps because I know that this is not permissible? Does the prohibition sharpen the desire? What would the appropriate (décorous) words be for the feelings that rise up urgently in my throat from the region of the heart? For the time being I do not know how to clothe them fittingly.
“I read a very fine book recently,” I say.
He glances up from his work. Politely. “Oh, yes?” he says.
“It’s about a man who is very rich. Fabulously rich. It appealed to me,” I say, “that kind of wealth. Among other things, he wants to buy a chapel with Mark Rothko paintings. His agent advises against it. But he insists with a kind of perversion.”
Theo Verwey still looks at me politely; he is waiting for me to continue.
“The man’s agent and advisor – a former lover of his – one of a series of advisors, in fact, says that he owes it to the public not to acquire the chapel for his private use.”
Theo looks interested.
“But the man persists. He wants it for himself. Simply because he is able to have it.”
I pause for a moment, listening to the music. I find the instruments lovely; I associate the sound with complex colours today – tertiary, not primary colours.
“Although it’s more than his wealth that appeals to me in the book,” I say.
“Yes?” Theo says.
“This man moves from one point in the city to the next in a limousine, speaking to his various advisors along the way. He encounters a variety of delays and obstructions, among others a funeral procession – one of the loveliest parts of the book. Once or twice he gets out of the car and has a meal with his wife. They’ve been married for only two weeks. She’s enormously rich herself. At the end of the book he’s dead.”
“Is that so?” Theo Verwey says, raising his well-proportioned eyebrows a little higher.
“Yes,” I say. “Alas, yes.”
“Do you recommend it?” he asks.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “With all my heart. The book, or death?”
He smiles.
*
That afternoon I phone Constable Modisane to enquire whether they have caught the villain who stole my shells.
“No-ho,” the Constable says, with a hesitation in his voice that makes me suspect that they have not yet made the slightest effort to do anything about the case.
“It’s causing me much, much grief,” I say to him, “the loss of those shells.”
“Ye-es,” the man says, not unsympathetically.
“I trust you will do your best,” I say.
I hear other voices in the background; the constable is talking to someone over his shoulder.
“Well, goodbye,” I say.
“Goodbye,” the constable says, distracted.
That evening I drink two whiskies before I make a list of the missing shells. The three Nautilus pompilius shells are gone – two small specimens and a large one. Both Murex nigritus shells are gone. The Terebra maculata and the Terebra aerolata are gone. The three Harpa major shells are gone. The Conus marmoreus, the Conus geographus, both Conus textile shells, the two Conus betulinus shells and the two Conus figulinus shells, all gone. The two Periglypta magnifica shells are gone. The top shell, Trochas maculata, is gone. The bride of the sea, Argonauta argo, is gone. The two white cowries (Ovula ovum) and the tiger’s-eye cowrie (Cypraea tigris) are gone. All the tonnas and the helmet shells are gone. The Marginella mosaica and the blushing Marginella rosea are gone.
I lie down on the couch in the lounge. I have contradictory thoughts. The three Harpa majors were among the most beautiful of my shells. Their form and colour are moving – the delicate vertical ribs like the strings of a harp; the delicate light-brown wavy patterns between the raised ribs resembling the thin lines drawn by a seismograph. These three shells I have recently been looking at with great attention. I would even call the attentiveness with which I looked at them a kind of meditation, for there are few other things that I give the same selfless and painstaking attention. (Reverent attention.) But although I meditated without ego on these objects, these shells, and even saw God in the detail (in a manner of speaking), I was still attaching myself excessively to them. Should I have had my heart less set on them? Should I have tried to bring about the salvation of my (eternal and immortal) soul in a different manner? Should I have allowed their beauty to nourish me, but renounced the pleasure of ownership? Should I have invested less in lifeless things over the years and more in relationships? I told Theo Verwey about the rich man today. Why? Fragments of memory of the evening in Braamfontein, nearly thirty years ago, come to me. Who is this Freek van As, who comes to me after nearly thirty years like a dog with a dead bird in its mouth?
Of that particular evening I recall first of all that I drank too much. I remember that the young editor Herman Holst was there – a neat, inhibited fellow, who has since vanished into the void to seek his happiness in America. He and the poet Marthinus Maritz often hung out together at the time. I went to Felix du Randt’s flat with the two of them. I regretted having ended my relationship with Felix some weeks previously and wanted, at least, to restore something of our relationship of trust. If I remember correctly, the poet and the editor were more than keen to accompany me. Starved for a little action. It was late when we arrived at Felix’s flat.