The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Beauty is sprinkling breadcrumbs in the snow.

  ‘For the birds,’ she says. ‘The snow is hiding the food. And their throats are frozen, they can’t sing. They won’t find each other to mate. They’ll all become extinct.’

  When she enters Hendrik’s place at dusk, he is sitting motionlessly in front of the hearth with dark glasses. High flames reflect in the black lenses.

  ‘Hendrik?’

  He takes a long time to answer. She can feel the cold emanating from the rooms beyond this one. It looks as if he has become blind.

  ‘The phone,’ she says behind his back. ‘I thought you said it’s out of order.’

  ‘It is.’

  He takes off the glasses – old-fashioned ones, with leather patches on the sides. He opens a door, switches on a light. It is a room in which she has not been before. There are no windows. He is clearly building something big here. On a workbench there is a large structure with oil-smeared parts around it. Chains are hanging over pulleys from a rafter. She approaches the bench, as if recognising something, as if the smell of grease and rubber is jogging her memory. He waits, but she fails to ask any questions.

  ‘I’m not building Frankenstein’s monster, you know.’

  His teeth are showing in the electric light. He moves behind her, comes right up to her.

  ‘What is it?’

  He lowers his voice. ‘Perhaps a machine for chopping up women.’

  She laughs, a little too loudly. He is now standing next to her. He tests one of the chains, pulling it taut.

  ‘Would be perfect, hey? Everything just right: the isolation, the forces of nature, the silence. The three of you not having a bloody clue where you are.’ He turns, looks her in the eye. ‘One flees slowly in deep snow, you know.’

  He lets go of the chain. It swings. Like snow rats in falcons’ shadows, she thinks.

  Then he smiles, his teeth shiny. ‘Jokes,’ he says. ‘You like to mock me, don’t you? All that clever talk.’ He nods at the thing on the bench. ‘It’s a stone crusher. For the quarry.’

  He lifts his head, comes even closer. ‘A question for you. What’s the story with your two girls?’

  ‘Nungi and Beauty. What do you mean?’

  ‘Why can one only get to them through you? Can’t they speak for themselves?’

  She lifts her chin, says nothing. An oily thing is dangling from the ceiling, a piece of one of his machines. It looks like a bat.

  He wants her to stay. ‘Please,’ he says, his eyes cast down again.

  The thing comes loose. It is a bat; it flits over her head, outwards. She looks at Hendrik, at his forearms and thick hands. She walks quickly through the rooms to the front door.

  ‘You have to know where she is, Nungi, you’re responsible too!’

  ‘She’s not a child. I’m not her keeper.’

  Mixie is lying on Beauty’s sleeping bag. Beauty has disappeared at some point during Ondien’s afternoon nap, which she took after a sleepless night. Ondien stands outside the front door, calling Beauty’s name. The snow has almost melted; only patches are left between tufts of grass. She starts running down the hill. There Beauty is now, walking up the hill, with a wide curve around Hendrik’s place.

  ‘What’s wrong, Beauty?’

  Her eyes are glassy. Her cheek has been grazed. She is not saying anything.

  ‘You ask her, she won’t say a word to me,’ Ondien says to Nungi inside. Nungi asks something in Zulu. A short conversation follows. Ondien only picks up a word here and there.

  ‘Nkontshane,’ Nungi says, ‘a wild dog.’

  ‘What? It makes no sense.’

  ‘A wild dog attacked her,’ Nungi says and sits down on the bed furthest away from them.

  Ondien catches Beauty’s eye. Beauty takes off her headscarf. There is dust in her hair, sandstone dust.

  ‘Please, Beauty. Tell me. Tell me what happened in the quarry?’

  Beauty gets up, clearly aware of each bone, each screw of surgical steel. She sits down next to Nungi, right up against her.

  Ondien considers things for a moment. Then she gets up. With long strides, she starts walking down the hill towards Hendrik’s place. Nungi and Beauty rush after her.

  ‘I know it’s him,’ Ondien says, ‘Hendrik, he’s the nkontshane.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Nungi calls after her. ‘You’re just going to make it worse. Nothing can help us here.’

  Beauty is a few steps behind Nungi, struggling to keep up. Hendrik is waiting in his front door, leaning against the frame with folded arms.

  Then: the drone of an engine. A white double-cab pickup truck appears. It is floating like a ship through the long grass, over the invisible road, stopping by Hendrik’s front door. The women arrive at the moment that two policemen get out of the vehicle. One is wiry, the other has sad shoulders.

  She points at Hendrik. ‘It’s him,’ she says. She points at Beauty. ‘She’s the victim.’ She gets her breath back, then starts wondering how the police managed to get here so quickly, and who had called them. Something is amiss. The two policemen are frowning. Hendrik is looking bemused.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, madam. We’re here to investigate the theft of a dog.’

  She frowns. ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘We take the theft of animals seriously, madam. We have major problems with cattle theft.’

  ‘We’re not talking about cattle.’

  ‘Big or small, crime is crime. What would become of the world if we started measuring stolen goods?’

  The policeman looks up the hill. Here and there, where the grass has been flattened by snow, Mixie pops into sight. She is running down to them.

  ‘We’ve had a complaint from beyond the border. And a hint that the suspects had fled to a remote place.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  Ondien looks from one policeman to the other in disbelief, to Hendrik and back again. Hendrik is not saying a word.

  ‘A crime has been committed here, yes, but it has nothing to do with a dog.’

  ‘No?’ The wiry man lifts an eyebrow. ‘Why, then, do we seem to have the evidence right here?’

  He steps forward, intercepts Mixie when she enters the clearing between them. A trickle of urine runs down his forearm, dripping off his elbow. The policeman with the sad shoulders makes a note in a dirty pad.

  Ondien shakes her head. ‘A misunderstanding, an absurd misunderstanding. One phone call will clear it all up.’

  ‘No phone,’ says Hendrik.

  ‘No need to take statements,’ the wiry policeman says, as if someone had offered. He nods his head slowly, authoritatively. ‘We can see what’s going on here.’ He turns to Ondien. ‘You’re the responsible one?’

  She is too dumbfounded to respond. She is waiting for something to happen, for Hendrik to come and chase them off with one of his tanks, or with his Nazi Beetle. He is, after all, one of her own. The only one here of her kind. Between him and the Zulu women, only Ondien and the police vehicle stand. Neither Nungi nor Beauty says a word.

  Ondien is rocking back and forth in the back seat. She should probably be grateful that they have not handcuffed her. Occasionally she turns around. Mixie is standing up against the back window and whining soundlessly. The policemen did not want her to keep the dog with her. As they reach the foothills, her phone finds a signal. She makes a call.

  ‘Mrs Nyathi! I’m so relieved to hear your voice. There’s a big misunderstanding. I’ve been arrested. About your dog! You have to clear it all up, right now—’

  ‘Ooh, it’s all out of my hands now, dear, I can’t meddle in police affairs—’

  ‘You don’t understand. You brought the charge, after all. We’re bringing the dog back, Mrs Nyathi! I have to go and fetch the girls, Beauty and Nungi. They’re not safe. Tomorrow we have to be at Twilight Lodge—’

  ‘Listen, that place has burnt down. The party’s been cancelled. Rumour is that my former lodger set the place alight
. Shortly before she died—’

  ‘Enough,’ says the one policeman, ‘stop talking.’

  ‘We’ll take your phone,’ says the other. The signal is lost.

  The road is rough. Ondien rubs the scar on her upper arm. They drive over passes, they become trapped behind lowing cattle. It is further than Ondien remembers. She looks at the dull rocks outside, hears Mixie’s nails as she tries to gain a grip against the steel. She suddenly thinks of her sister Vera who now probably lives in a Middle Eastern desert, finally and mercifully stripped of all context. She thinks of her brother Cornelius, sitting in a conference room at a glass table – it could be any city, any time zone – hands calmly folded, eyes focused, but always on two points: here and in the distance. She thinks of her younger sister Zelda, not of her exhaustion or her Satan’s child, but of a time when they were children. The two of them on their bicycles, side by side on a two-track road, hair streaming backwards. The landscape is empty, as if there is no one else on earth. The sun is shining brightly, their feet hanging free beside the pedals. To one side of the road, neatly dug, is her mother’s bed of nasturtiums.

  She sits forward. She looks at the wiry policeman, then at the one with the sad shoulders.

  ‘Could you sing something for me?’ she asks. ‘Something from here.’

  They don’t answer.

  ‘Could I sing something for you, then?’

  Mrs Nyathi lifts Mixie in front of her, inspecting her from different angles, as if confirming that she got back exactly what she lost. Once she is sure, she loses interest. She bends down, lets Mixie go, as if setting a wild animal free. Mixie disappears around the corner of the house.

  The two Lesotho policemen looked disappointed when they arrived at the police station and it became clear that Mrs Nyathi had withdrawn the charge. They were reluctant to let go of their prize catch. Ondien’s urgent pleas to go and pick up the other two women in the mountains fell on deaf ears. She was deported without ceremony.

  Ondien calls the Lesotho police’s Maseru headquarters from Bella Gardens. She reports Beauty and Nungi as missing.

  ‘How do you know they want to be found? Who are you? What is your relationship to the missing women?’

  She hesitates before answering the last question. ‘They are like sisters to me,’ she says.

  She wants to explain how they are the fuel for her metamorphoses, that they enable her to slip through boundaries. And through herself.

  ‘Without them, I am stuck in my own skull, like in a cage.’

  ‘Huh?’

  She tells of her own arrest, but just manages to confuse the man further. She describes Hendrik, as well as the two policemen. They would know where Beauty and Nungi are.

  ‘What are the policemen’s names?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘The one is wiry, the other has sad shoulders.’

  ‘Who are you? Who put you in a cage? Are you a relative of the abducted women?’ He is at the end of his tether.

  ‘They’ve not been abducted—’

  ‘So, why are you wasting our time? Talk to the South African police. You’re not even a citizen of Lesotho.’

  The boat leaves shore. This a party without guests. Or without the desired guests. After Twilight Lodge had been destroyed in the fire, the soccer teams’ visit was cancelled. So too was the visit of the VIPs, the political and industrial elite, who are now seeking out the centre of events elsewhere. This party is the only one still going ahead, a remnant of thwarted big plans. A boat ride on the Gariep dam, a subdued affair. The guests consist of a small circle of local important types. Municipal officials: a mayor, a heavy woman who is apparently a director of health. A provincial MEC or two. A few white farmers who just about manage to remain in favour with the local black hierarchies are tolerated on the margins. Tables are loaded with food for absent guests. Flies are circling the buffet.

  The boat is luxurious and heavy, as if carved from ebony. In the cabin, the carpets are dark, with a medieval heraldic design. The furniture is shiny and varnished. Chandeliers are swaying slowly from the ceiling. Ondien escapes the stuffy cabin, walking out onto the deck. Dead heat hangs above the grey water. The smell of minerals rises from the surface. At the top end of the lake, a concrete wall reaches up like a cliff. The landscape around the lake is barren, as if nothing could live there.

  Ondien has to face the heat inside to sing. The listlessness penetrates to the core of her sweaty, uncertain performance. Her voice is thin.

  Like an insect drunk with light and sun, she fluctuates, hovering just below or just above the note. The excessive courage, the sense that anything is possible, that she could appropriate anything – that has gone.

  The last note is still in the air when her phone starts ringing. It is Mrs Nyathi.

  ‘I have news of your girls,’ she says. ‘The police have notified me. Both gone back to KwaZulu. Days ago already. To their families.’

  ‘To their families,’ Ondien repeats.

  ‘Yes, to their own people. Now they’ll be able to sing properly, I tell you!’

  There is silence for a while.

  ‘Any message for me?’

  ‘No, but a package arrived for you from Lesotho. I’ve opened it. A Zulu outfit it is. Not all too clean, either. I’m having it dry-cleaned for you, ok?’

  ‘Hope I’ll be seeing you some time,’ Mrs Nyathi continues when Ondien does not answer. ‘It’s pretty lonely for a widow all on her own in the mountains, you know. And without any music too.’

  ‌Mother’s Quartet

  For more than a year Ondien has neither sung, nor written, any music. She does not, in fact, ever listen to a single note. That is, if she can help it. In Johannesburg’s shopping malls, as in shopping malls everywhere, silence is hidden behind a curtain of muzak. And it is the shopping malls she is seeking out. She finds delight, now, in everything that is new and smooth. She has had enough of the old world’s gently weathered façades, of the artful curves of cobbled lanes. It is better here, the continental elements reimagined and embedded in fantastical monuments: shops transforming into courtyards and carparks, concrete additions accreting like flotsam. In here, in the bright light, it is possible to be emptied out, like in a monastery or a Buddhist retreat.

  It is in one of these places, while she is having a cup of coffee, without a book or music, that she receives a call from her older brother, Cornelius, who lives in London.

  ‘Last I heard you had moved from London to Paris to make music,’ he says.

  ‘Where did you get my number, Cornelius?’

  ‘Zelda.’

  Zelda is her younger sister who lives in Phoenix. They speak almost as infrequently as she and Cornelius.

  ‘Last month I was in South Africa for meetings. If I had known you were in Johannesburg, we could have met up.’

  Before, when Ondien was a postgraduate student in London, she managed to see Cornelius once. A few times afterwards she tried to establish contact again, but his banker’s life was too busy, his travel schedule too full.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to meet. I’m not seeing anyone, I’m waiting.’

  ‘Waiting?’

  ‘For the music to return.’

  ‘Music? In Johannesburg?’ He snorts. ‘A suggestion,’ he says. ‘Come and visit me in London. For as long as you want. Perhaps here you’ll find your music again.’

  As if, she thinks, Cornelius’s ear would comprehend anything other than the droning of things electrical in the shafts of office buildings.

  ‘Why now, suddenly, Cornelius? What about all the other things that are so demanding of your time?’

  ‘Something has changed,’ he says, ‘or everything.’

  For a while she is silent. She looks at the people around her, Sandton’s pedestrian traffic. None of the delicate play of the European street here – no swift glances stretching erotic vectors back and forth like silk thread. People look at her bluntly, people who carry their bodies differently than in th
e North, lacking all concept of the relativity between their own and other flesh. They occupy space contemptuously, as if infinite distance were possible between bodies. A dour and spoilt lot, the people of Johannesburg. Defensive and full of bravado.

  ‘I can’t just pack up and leave in order to satisfy your whim, Cornelius. I’m settled here.’

  She does not work. She lives on what remains of her inheritance in a garden flat that has been burgled four times in the past three months. Most of the small inheritance has been absorbed by living expenses in Paris or on loss-making tours in South Africa with her band, the Victorian Native Ladies’ Society, or VNLS. Until recently she was doing volunteer work in Johannesburg, in a rehabilitation centre for children with brain injuries, but was asked to leave. She now spends her days squatting in these muffled coffee shops, as if it were the Rive Gauche sixty years earlier. She is emptying herself of all that remains: this is how she thinks of her days in the shopping malls.

  She does not have a single friend left in this country. The sum of her human interactions, since returning to Johannesburg, has been with Mrs Zuckermann (her landlady, a frail widow who has now been taken into a geriatric home), the director and children in the child rehabilitation centre and the editor of a fading local musicology journal. The latter entailed a few phone conversations about a proposed (now abandoned) article. She has seen a few old acquaintances: a former (now married) lover, a university friend who is a disillusioned academic at Wits university (‘It’s all so racialised now, one cannot function any longer.’ ‘What do you mean “now”?’ Ondien wanted to know.) She did not seek out their company again. Her old friends have either left the country, or she has lost touch with them. Perhaps, she considers, she has outgrown friendship. And family ties. Or perhaps such relationships – any relationships – in unpolluted form are impossible in this country. She does have a cat. Flame is his name. A lean blue Burmese.

  ‘I thought you said you were just waiting. For music, for some kind of intervention.’

  She frowns. How many years since Cornelius left the country? Nine, ten? Apart from briefly at her father’s funeral, they have not spoken since their single meeting in London.