The book of happenstance. Ingrid Winterbach
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for the early functions of bone. Amongst other things it had to serve as protection against aquatic predators: water scorpions and nautiluslike cephalopods. (Simply hearing the word nautilus upsets me.)
Sailor enters the room. His name is Johannes Taljaard, but everyone calls him Sailor. Why that is so I do not know. He looks like Flash Gordon – like Sam Jones in the leading role of the film version. A comic-strip hero, with high cheekbones, a powerful jawline, blue eyes with blond, curly eyelashes, a broad chest, long legs and slim hips. He is responsible for the exhibits of the museum. He is the curator of exhibits.
Freddie greets him with a stylised gesture of the hand; they seem to be good friends. Hugo glances fleetingly at him before continuing his exposition. He refers to the occurrence of endochondral bone in extinct stickleback sharks. Freddie explains that they are not real sharks, but resemble sharks only superficially. “Howzit?” he asks Sailor, without looking at him. He grinds out his cigarette butt under his heel.
“Is there no cake this morning?” Sailor asks.
“Why should there be any?” Freddie asks.
“What is bone?” Sof asks.
“Bone is a compound of inorganic calcium phosphate crystals, hydroxyapatite, and organic collagen fibre. A bone like the femur of a mammal has a minimal content of approximately sixty-seven per cent. This provides rigidity and the collagen offers resistance to pressure,” Hugo says.
Of this I take note. This too is valuable information.
“Isn’t it someone’s birthday today?” Sailor asks. “Isn’t there something we can celebrate?”
“Why do you always want cake?” Mrs Dudu wants to know.
Sailor has a wide smile and his teeth are surprisingly small, I note, for a man of his height, of his heroic proportions. Small, strikingly square and polished, like freshwater pearls.
“Mrs Dudu also likes cake,” he says, and stretches his arms contentedly above his head. He is wearing a water-blue silk shirt and Diesel jeans.
Mrs Dudu laughs roguishly. Her hair is braided artfully. It reminds me of the braids of wool I made for myself as a child.
“Did the vertebrates originate in sea water or in fresh water?” Sof asks Hugo Hattingh.
If Freddie Ferreira seldom looks at the person he is talking to, Hugo does so even less. He has a heavy head – a stalwart lion’s brow – with sharply chiselled diagonal planes. He is not tall, but he makes a solid impression: powerful in the shoulders. There is something stiff, something rigid to his movements. His greying beard is neatly trimmed, his hair darker, boyishly short.
Only one of my father’s four brothers had black hair. I remember its texture – thick, hard hair, like a brush. His voice had a strange, raspy sound. He liked young boys. That my mother told me much later. He stayed in a rondavel in the Lowveld and he collected things: aloes, stones, maybe even shells. As a child this fascinated me, as did his manner of speaking (slightly scratchy) and his sense of humour (dry, cynical, somewhat whimsical). He and my mother got on well, but when he visited with a friend, she would strip off the sheets and wash them as soon as they had left. I am suddenly reminded of him this morning.
Hugo Hattingh starts explaining that the chief proponents of the freshwater theory are Alfred Romer, a palaeontologist, and Homer Smith, a renal physiologist, but Freddie interrupts him by saying that these arguments are so dated that they are hardly relevant any more. Hugo Hattingh nonetheless continues, unperturbed, to expound Romer and Smith’s arguments, whereupon Freddie, who is still sitting with his elbows on his knees and looking at his feet, cigarette in hand, remarks that it seems as if Hugo Hattingh is convinced by Romer and Smith’s arguments. Hugo Hattingh still takes no notice of Freddie’s objections and concludes that the evidence favouring a marine origin is more convincing than Romer and Smith’s freshwater theories (the theory that Freddie had been insisting on all the while). As conclusive evidence, Hugo cites the fossil record, which is now much more complete, and which indicates that all known fossils from the Cambrian and the Ordovician have a marine origin.
“Now you understand, don’t you?” Freddie says half mockingly to Sof.
“Yes, thank you,” Sof says. “I see now that we crawled with great effort from the sea onto dry land.”
“By the sweat of our brows,” Sailor remarks. I am surprised; I did not expect biblical references from him. I had mistakenly assumed that for him everything centred around the exterior – the body beautiful and cheap thrills.
“What makes you think it was so hard?” Freddie asks.
“The Bible,” says Sof, and gives a little cough.
Hugo is not listening any more. It is difficult for me to imagine the nature of his thoughts and preoccupations. I would have liked to be able to place myself in his position through some manoeuvre of the imagination. I cannot. I envy him his knowledge. To see the drama of evolution played out before you like a film – to see it unfold like a flower before your eyes – that I find enviable. To know how bone developed over millions of years. To be intimately acquainted with the origin and inception of life. Valuable knowledge! That is not enough for him. He longs for more, for something else. The psyche has different needs. Knowledge is not enough. This man has a taste for child pornography, he has paedophiliac longings, his desire is after young boys, if it is true what Sof alleges.
It is not the first time that this knowledge interests me, but for the first time it interests me so emphatically. I sit up straight, in a manner of speaking, and prick up my ears. Loose facts, shreds of knowledge (unsystematically acquired), and an old interest come to life again. I have an urgent desire to learn about the circumstances that were needed for life to originate on earth. Hopefully I will also gain a better understanding of the nature of man – a mammal that developed how many millions of years ago. Seeing humans in this context must shed light on how consciousness developed and functions, and thus on the existential dilemma of an animal with a developed intelligence and an awareness of its own mortality. A consciousness which, if I understand correctly, developed around an anus at one end, a mouth at the other, and a spine connecting the two.
*
The nine retrieved shells I have packed away for the time being. I still cannot look at them without being reminded of the loss of the others. What happened to the missing twenty-three? Why were they separated from the others? Are they still lying somewhere in the room where the dead man was found? Of what value could they be to anyone? Have they been sold somewhere for a pittance, traded for tobacco, for bread, for liquor, for a gun, or do they perhaps grace someone’s display cabinet? Did the person who took them want them for himself or as a gift for his wife, for his mistress, for his mother, perhaps? How did the thief – or thieves – know about the shells? Did they break in with the purpose of stealing the shells, or did they come upon them by chance and decide that they were more useful loot than the other apparently more valuable possessions in the house? All equally improbable. Why did he – did they – select the shells with a discerning eye and then defecate on the carpet? Shit on the carpet, to be precise. What conclusion must I draw from this, what hidden warning lurks here? What message? Why did the man, poor Patrick Steinmeier, hang himself? Is he the culprit, who took his own life out of bitter remorse, or are those who left with the rest of the shells the guilty ones?
Over lunch I ask Sof what she thinks. Maybe the thief or thieves were looking for something specific, she says. Maybe they confused your place with someone else’s.
“And then the shells caught the eye of one, while the other was shitting on the carpet,” I say. “For good measure.”
I am uneasy. The man with whose corpse the nine shells were found (Dr Jekyll?) may be safely laid out in the morgue. (Hard to judge on the basis of a few black-and-white photographs, but the poor deceased hardly had the appearance of a thug.) But what if Mr Hyde is still roaming free? Or Mr Hyde and his henchmen – his unscrupulous gang of house defilers. As soon as I get home, I phone Constable Modisane again to find out if there could possibly have been more than one burglar.
“Because