Hans Günther paused again and paged forward to the last of the yellow flags. Now for the Valley of Death, he thought. And then the words she had inscribed on the manuscript. He could almost feel them through the printed page: handmade things in a world of flawless signs. His throat was tight. He pursed his lips and squeezed breath into his head as if he was trying to make his ears pop. The more practised listeners could tell by his attitude that the reading was not over, but some of the others shifted experimentally in their chairs or glanced at their companions. He ran a knuckle along the stitching to press the pages flat and looked over the edge.
The path falls into the valley. Some of the men want to stop here on the edge of the abyss, others want to press on. Amito and Kidega add their voices to the chorus. They are tired, their feet are sore, they need to rest.
It is a mistake. We have been told not to speak, neither among ourselves nor to them. The bearded one is suddenly angry. He knocks Amito to the ground. The boy with the panga is there but it is the one with the sunglasses, the one they call Shaggy, who rushes forward to beat her. He has a switch and he lashes her with it, across her back, on her shoulders, on her shins, and she cries out and tries to ward off the blows with her hands.
After half a dozen blows, I start counting, and then I stop again and look away. My face is turned to Amito, because they want us to watch, that is the point, but my eyes are not. Something is flickering down there to one side, but I cannot tell if it is something small right here on the ground beside the path or something big far away in the bottom of the valley. It twists like a flame.
There is nothing we can do, of course. Even Kidega is silent all through the beating. I wish she would get up. She is weaker than I am and more complaining. If he kills her, it will be worse for me. And who will carry the sorghum?
At last, it stops. The bearded one orders us to walk again and we get to our feet and start lifting everything. Usually one or two of the men have gone ahead on the path, leading the way, but now some of them are arguing about where to stop and others are dragging Amito to her feet, and so Anya is in front. The rest of us are still heaving up sacks and untangling ropes when she starts down the steep track with the box on her head. She has hardly taken a step before she slips on the shale and falls, pulling all of us with her, scrambling to keep our footing and set down our things. She tries to hold onto the box and so it is in her hands when it comes down on the rock, and it looks as if she has dashed it there rather than dropped it. The box breaks open at the hinges and the small cardboard boxes inside spill out, and some of them burst open too and the bullets flash and tumble down like a splash of coppery water over the rocks.
The boy raises his panga, but the Commander snaps it from his hand like a twig. Then he tramples me down in the grass as he barges past. The blade goes up into the blue and comes down from high on the scalloped neck of Anya’s dress and she does not even see it fall. She calls out once, and the blade rises again and falls. Again and again.
With the final blow he cuts the rope. He wipes the blade in the grass.
They gather the boxes of bullets and stuff them into their canvas bags and their buttoned pockets. They clean the loose ones in their mouths and roll them on their thighs. Everything makes them angry. They say we are weighing them down, they should kill us all, and they hit us and drag us around on the rocks, but they do not use the panga again.
When everything has been divided, they tell us to go on, over the bridge. We have to step on this thing that was Anya, each of us, as if it were a branch fallen across a stream. This is part of the lesson.
He should stop now, Hans Günther thought, this was far enough. But it would be cowardly. She had finished it, she had pushed on to the end and kept her word, and so must he.
That was the last time I touched my sister. There was hard earth beneath my feet, and then yielding flesh, once, twice, and then rock. It was the way forward. I stepped lightly and looked ahead. As I crossed over into the future, I made a promise. I said that if I lived, I would tell this story, so that she would not be forgotten. Your breath is in these words, Anya. I have translated you from the dead.
We stopped in the hollow of the valley. The men were spent and we were too tired to be afraid or to run away. They need not have bothered to tie us up. As I lay down, with the others gasping for breath all around me, I put my hand in my pocket. And I—
Hans Günther dropped his head. His glasses, which had been sliding to the end of his nose, fell to his chest and dangled on the chain. Just a few more lines and then he was done. He did not need to see them written down. They had been sounding in his head for months. He opened his mouth and what came out was a sob.
The auditorium shook as if a wind had blown down the doors and consternation churned through the rows.
Horst Grundmann leant over towards his wife Sylvia and said that Hans Günther had not been himself lately, and although in truth such a thought had not crossed his mind before this evening, now that he had said it, it seemed true.
Andrij Leonenko took out his notebook and clasped it between his knees like a missal. He should make a note of something, he knew.
Annemieke Vogel, who had been covering the readings at the Literaturhaus for three years without noting anything even slightly out of the ordinary, felt an exhilarating jolt in her chest as she realised that something strange and remarkable was happening, followed by a tremor of dread that came with the certainty it was going to be embarrassing.
I—
Hans Günther Basch gulped. A tear eased from the corner of his right eye, ran swiftly down the slope of his nose and swerved into the corner of his mouth.
There arose, like a squall on the surface of a lake, a murmur made of many parts – surprise, curiosity, sympathy, dismay, glee – emotions that encircled one another or clashed like waves, causing flurries of turbulent conversation, muttered exclamations and undertones, chasing into every corner. Underneath it all, the chairs shrieked like a chorus of demons, but only Karolina Fischer heard them.
Maryam Akello stirred. She glanced questioningly at Hans Günther Basch, but she was the one person in the room who could not see his face clearly. Then she looked towards the front row and raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Ich—
Hans Günther gulped again. Then his face began to crumble, from the top down, like an expertly imploded building. The skin around his eyes creased and the lids sagged, allowing his tears to flow freely. These tears washed away the last vestiges of order in his features and left behind a look of utter misery. His nose broadened, opening two mazy courses of wrinkles in his cheeks, which carried the tears by roundabout routes down towards his mouth and chin. His lips drew back, becoming flat and thick, as the corners of his mouth travelled back towards his ears, and then his yellow teeth appeared, threaded with saliva. The round base of his chin dimpled and elongated into an oval cushion. The skin of his neck was spanned tight across his jawbone and the tears, passing over that cliff, coursed down into the collar of his shirt.
Bloody crybaby, Prof. Ziegler said out loud. She thought of Edward Sheldon, lying on his catafalque under a brocade coverlet, naked but for a dinner jacket, complete with bow tie and buttonhole, which was actually no more than a bib covering his chest and secured at the back with laces.
Mortified, unable to watch for a moment longer, Karolina Fischer turned to the woman beside her and asked whether her safari suit came from Uganda, and the woman said no, her sister-in-law had bought it in Cape Town, and Karolina said she didn’t mean to pry and the woman said not at all, the leopard skin was synthetic, and she was welcome to look at the label in the collar if she wanted to know the name of the designer.
Andrij Leonenko slipped out of his seat and headed for the free wine in the foyer.
At that moment, the girl who had come in late had the same idea.
Rolf Backer wondered what the papers would have to say about this and whether it would be good or bad for sales, and his friend Theo van Roo
sbroeck, who was biting his lip so as not to burst out laughing, noticed that the woman next to him had begun to record the spectacle on her cellphone.
The young man who had never been to a reading before felt the stirring of an erection beneath the copy of Zucker he was holding on his lap and his new girlfriend, noticing the way he shifted in his chair and gripped the book, thought that perhaps she had misjudged him and he was quite a sensitive man after all.
Hans Günther’s percussive sobs rang through the loudspeakers.
The puzzlement on Maryam Akello’s face had drained away, leaving a residue of cold indifference.
Hans Günther fumbled a handkerchief from his pocket, but it may as well have been a flag of surrender. He wept as if he would never stop.
Horst Grundmann rose and turned to the audience. He crossed his arms and flung them wide and crossed them again. The gesture was meant for the cameraman. Enough, it said, switch off. Look away. When this made no impression, Horst drew the flat of his hand across his throat. Cut! For God’s sake. Kill it! But the camera was unmoved.
Behind Grundmann, Maryam Akello sat quietly on the podium. In the surf of bobbing heads strangers turned to one another, all speaking at once, trying to decipher what they were witnessing, testing out what might be an adequate response or, finding that none was possible, opening their programmes and sinking into the forgiving surface of the printed page. In all this to-do, Maryam Akello sought out Florence Lawino. The look they exchanged was worth preserving for the record, but the cameraman was focused on Hans Günther Basch, stooped over the lectern with the broken pieces of his face in his hands.
The Trunks – A Complete History
Claude and his trunks. Where do I start?
Margery first told me about Claude thirty years ago. Then he was living in a flat in Braamfontein, and she would visit him there or join him for dinner from time to time. He’d been a teacher at the university once but he was no longer working. From what I could gather – and there was never much to go on, the story was full of silences – he was an antisocial and even paranoid person, but also erudite and crankily entertaining when he chose to be. In the mid-1990s, Claude, by then sickly and reclusive, came to live with Margery in Somerset Road. And it was then that she told me about the trunks. I learnt that when Claude and his father Bertrand, whom everyone knew as Berti, had arrived in Cape Town from Europe after the war, the trunks containing their possessions had been put in storage. And there they had stayed for nearly half a century. There was always some reason why it was better to leave them where they were. When Margery took Claude under her wing in Kensington, the baggage was finally retrieved. Berti was long dead by then and Claude, as it turned out, had only a few years to live.
She showed me the trunks, recently arrived by rail from the Cape and stored in the basement of her house. There were four of them: an enormous travelling chest of weathered, canvas-covered board, with hardwood slats and metal catches, so corroded they could hardly be opened; two smaller metal trunks, also rusted and dented; and an even smaller wooden chest with leather trim. Besides these, a few carpet bags, hatboxes, cardboard cartons. I looked at these things from the doorway. They were intriguing, like objects lifted from the bottom of the ocean; and they were also ominous, as if their long quarantine had failed to detoxify them or, like treasure pilfered from a grave, they might exhale some curse. They looked pale, unused to the light. The largest one was the size of a coffin and smelt of damp soil.
Occasionally, in the early years, I had been eager to meet Claude, not merely to satisfy my curiosity, but to fill in a gap in my friendship with Margery. Her mysterious friend was alive only in her accounts of him. In fact, he was so vividly present there, and so insubstantial otherwise, that I sometimes doubted whether he existed at all. But oddly enough, after he came to live in her house, my interest in meeting him waned. In any event, a meeting was discouraged. He had a flat of his own in the downstairs part of the house, adjoining the basement storeroom, which he never left. He did not enjoy visitors, Margery always said, he was impatient and cantankerous. He dribbled and complained. Later, when he was bedridden and increasingly frail, he saw no one at all.
After he died, I was annoyed that I hadn’t insisted on meeting him. Now I would never be able to establish a separate sense of him, and Margery’s stories would go unchallenged. But this feeling faded.
Although I don’t recall the exact circumstances, it was not long after Claude’s passing that Margery suggested I take a look through the trunks. Why? Because I am a writer, of course, and it was obvious that the trunks contained a story. I agreed immediately and we made an appointment for a few days’ time: she would have to unlock them for me and guide me into their contents. But when I thought the thing through at my leisure, something about it oppressed me and I called to put the arrangement off.
Weeks passed before my conscience pricked me. Margery wanted to get rid of these things one way or another, so that she could find a lodger for the downstairs flat, where the trunks were now being kept, the storeroom having proved too dusty or damp, according to the weather. She wanted to air the rooms and sweep away the shadows of the last months. I phoned and said I would come over to look through the trunks as soon as I had a bit of time, this weekend or the one after. But again, when the day arrived, the same gloomy reluctance beset me and I broke the arrangement. There was a touch of pique in my response, I think: she’d never seen fit to introduce me to the old bugger. Why should I take an interest in his dusty papers? But sometimes, as the weeks turned into months, the very opposite impulse would seize me, as I considered an equally fascinating potential, one that a biographer would appreciate. How much more intriguing it would be to meet the man this way, to gain access to his most personal papers and possessions, without the slightest direct impression of a living, breathing creature to spoil things. Then I would begin to worry that she might have got rid of the trunks in the meantime. I would give her a ring – surely she was getting sick of this by now? – and be relieved to discover they were still there. I’ll come past next week, I would say, to open the vault.
At this time, I was making plans to go abroad for an extended period. My departure date drew closer. Finally, Claude’s trunks could not be avoided: I would have to look into them or tell Margery once and for all that I wasn’t interested. In January 1999, I think it was, I made an arrangement to see the trunks, and stuck to it.
Margery led me downstairs to the flat. It was the only part of the house I had never been in. There was the bed in which Claude had died, covered by a candlewick bedspread through which the quilted lozenges of the bare mattress showed, an empty wardrobe breathing out naphthalene, a shelf containing the eccentric assortment of books he could still tolerate at the end. The four trunks had been pushed against the walls on either side of the bed, the three smaller ones on one side and the largest on the other, beneath the window. Some papers and objects lay on the broad windowsill.
On the bed, resting comfortably against the pillows, lay two stuffed animals, mangy relics of a distant European childhood. He wept when he saw those again, after all the years, Margery said, and told me their names. Nana and the Bear. They were animals of indeterminate species, neither bears nor dogs but something in between.
Together we shuffled through the things on the sill. A tin of China tea, still fragrant after decades in storage, like a flask out of the pyramids. A little calibrated gauge for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. Photographs, immense enlargements of snapshots, five, ten, twenty copies of the same image.
Meet Claude, she said, picking two or three photos from the pile and handing them to me.
A delicate boy with brown curls, a sweet mouth. This child dressed as a Red Indian, with a nursery-blanket tepee in the background. This child on a rocking horse, with a Roman helmet and a wooden sword.
And Claude again, somewhat older, she said drily, handing me a Technicolor snapshot with a thick white border.
An elderly gentleman,
sitting stiffly in a deckchair on some ocean liner, trying without success to recline. The mouth crooked and bitter, the face sharp, a few wisps of hair standing on end in the wind. No trace of the child left, neither the beautiful one with the curls nor any other you could imagine.
After a while, Margery went off to do some chores. Left alone with Claude’s personal effects, I felt like an intruder. I retreated to the most public part of the room – the book shelf – where I picked through the titles and made a few notes in a spiral-bound pad about the areas of interest: the occult, boarding-school stories for girls, great naval battles, the American West, unsolved mysteries, infamous crimes.
The trunks unnerved me. I had the feeling that I was on the brink of an obsession, that once I looked inside one of them, I would never be able to turn back. They lay there like an enormous, obvious drug, which it would be wise not to sample. I should refuse them, I should tell her I wanted nothing to do with them.
Nevertheless, I raised the lid of the smallest container, the wooden chest with leather trim. A musty exhalation escaped, as if the chest had just breathed its last. It was packed with papers, letters in coffee-coloured envelopes, photographs in boxes, calendars. Were these Claude’s papers or his father’s? I had no way of knowing.
The first folder I reached for was full of mementos from sea voyages: itineraries, menus, weather reports, news from the bridge about passages and docking times, certificates issued at the crossing of the equator, featuring a cartoon Neptune with trident raised, sea charts. Here was the plan of a Union-Castle liner in blues and greens, postwar colours that smacked of cocktail lounges and Formica kitchenettes, so crisp you would have thought it had just been printed, with a line of blue ink extending from Cabin 52 on the second-class level out into the sea-blue border, where, on a little raft of blue lines, the following handwritten words floated: Miss van den Broucke.
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