The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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buttocks and thighs.
He places a small cardboard box before me on the counter. It feels as if I am receiving the ashes of a deceased person. I pick up the box and shake it lightly. It feels about the right weight. I am so nervous that I struggle to open it.
The shells are in a small hessian bag inside the box. The bag has a strong, unplaceable odour. It is slightly moist. With shaking hands I unpack the shells one by one on the counter. Thirty-two shells were stolen, nine have been recovered.
One of the periglyptas is back, the smallest Harpa major is back, as well as the Trochus maculata, the smallest Conus figulinus and the Conus geographus. Two tonnas and a helmet shell. And one of the two small nautiluses.
Constable Modisane makes soft, sympathetic noises: “. . . eh heh, eh heh,” he says, when not engaged in conversation over his shoulder with one of the other constables.
The shells are dirty. They are covered with soil, and something greasy. I do not want to sniff them in front of the constable. What has happened to them? Have they been used for a ritual? A divination? Have they been gambled with, did they land in a fire? I gently stroke the surface of the small nautilus. It looks damaged. My eyes are tearful and I feel a lump forming in my throat.
“Are these your goods?” he asks.
I nod. “There are still twenty-three missing,” I say.
“Sorry,” says the constable, and clicks sympathetically with his tongue. He turns around and lifts a large brown envelope from a shelf behind him.
“These are the photographs,” he says.
“I don’t want to see them,” I say.
He nimbly slides the photographs from the envelope anyway. In spite of my firm resolve, I cannot help but look. The photos are folio-sized and printed in black and white on glossy paper. There are a number of shots from different angles of Mr Steinmeier hanging by his neck from a beam. Luckily the images are somewhat out of focus. It is nevertheless no pleasant sight. It is in fact a most shocking sight – it is horrible, I look at it with horror. There are a couple of close-ups of the dead man’s face, probably taken in the morgue, for he is lying on his back. His eyes are swollen, his mouth half open. Mr Steinmeier appears to be of mixed descent, but what does that have to do with anything these days anyway?
“Is this the man who came into my house?” I ask.
“We cannot say that with certainty,” the constable says. “But we found the stolen goods with him.”
“How long had he been dead when they found him?” I ask. It probably will not help to ask if the deceased was smelling of Boss aftershave.
The constable is becoming impatient. He replaces the photographs. I receive a form to fill in and sign.
At home I wash the shells carefully in soapy water. The sand and ash come off more easily than the greasiness. None of the shells is broken, but the surface of most of them is scratched, and one or two have small cracks in them. At first glance they appear unharmed, but for me they have been irreparably damaged. Violated.
*
I inform Sof about the recovered shells. The next day I phone Constable Modisane to find out where the deceased (the dead thief) is from; perhaps even to obtain his home address. But if the constable had been accommodating a day of two before, happy to supply information, he is now unwilling to do so. He must have been reprimanded; he was probably not supposed to have given any information in the first place.
“What am I to do?” I ask Sof.
“Bribe him,” she says and gives a small cough.
(I remember Aunty Jossie, a friend of my mother’s, asking a traffic policeman who had stopped her if he liked chocolate cake. As a child I appreciated her unconventional manner. She was less predictable than the other women I knew. My introduction to an irreverent female character? Gertjie would be sitting in the back of the car with a maid when she came to visit. Gertjie was her younger son; he was retarded. He was so pale his skin seemed to have a greenish hue.)
“What with?” I ask. “With chocolate cake?”
“Why not?”
“The days are gone when one could bribe servants of the law with home-made cakes,” I say.
“Try biltong,” Sof says.
“Which I will find where?”
“At Checkers. What is this information worth to you? How about two crisp hundred-rand notes?”
“And if he exposes my attempted bribery in front of everyone?”
“Then you say you want small change for parking.”
“Small change for two hundred rand?”
“Why not? What do you want to do with the information?”
“I just want to know.”
I decide to go and see Constable Modisane at the charge office. The first time he is out on patrol duty, the second time I find him behind the counter.
Where did the man who hanged himself come from, I enquire of him.
“I cannot disclose his identity,” the constable says. He is wearing his cap today and he keeps his eyes averted, busying himself with paperwork.
“But you’ve already given me his name! You told me that his body was found in Ladybrand,” I say. “You showed me the photographs! I didn’t even want to see them!”
“I cannot give you more information,” he says.
“Just tell me where the man came from,” I say softly. “Was he from Ladybrand as well?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asks suspiciously. He is copying information from one book into another. The upper joints of his fingers are plump, as exuberantly rounded as his thighs.
“Because it will give me peace of mind,” I say.
Constable Modisane glances fleetingly over his shoulder (anybody keeping an eye on us?) and without looking up says softly: “He came from Ladybrand. Same place where his body was found.”
“Thank you,” I say, and turn around.
The man comes from Ladybrand, I say to Sof the next day and I want to go and see where he lived. Sof is more than willing to go there with me.
*
I enjoy having tea with the museum staff. Their conversations interest me. I see it as an unexpected perk that Theo Verwey’s office is located here (on account of his involvement with the Department of Regional Languages, also housed in this building). An added benefit is that I would otherwise not have met Sof Benadé.
Freddie Ferreira is the curator of mammals. He is small and wiry, with straight, oily hair and small, lively dark-brown eyes. I take him to be no older than forty-five. He is an impatient and at times unpredictable man. It is hard to determine the content of his inner life, but about mammals he knows everything.
This morning he is in conversation with Hugo Hattingh, a palaeontologist. At first glance Hugo is an attractive man, but surly, not inclined to make contact of any kind. He appears to be in his mid-fifties, about the same age as Theo Verwey, possibly younger. Brilliant at his subject, Sof maintains, with a taste for child pornography. Boys. How does she know that? I ask. She shrugs: Whatever – heard it from Sailor or Vera, she says. What does she mean by whatever? I ask. Whether it’s child pornography or paedophiliac tendencies, she says, his knowledge is extensive and always at hand, and, unlike most other people, he is mostly worth listening to.
This is the man who, according to Theo Verwey, can explain what life is, explain the phenomenon of life more comprehensively than any dictionary definition could. (A man who can account for life down to the matrix, the Ursludge, the primal slime.)
He and Freddie Ferreira are disagreeing this morning about the geological time frame in which