Wolf, Wolf

by Eben Venter

  When he sees that it’s a bedraggled sparrow hiding in the corner, he immediately switches the torch to ordinary beam and focuses the light away from the bird to avoid terrifying it any further. He stoops to pick up the sparrow so that he can let it out by the window, lightly holding the small pulsating body. The bird comes to sudden life and breaks free of the funnel of his hands, flutters up to the high ceiling where it circles once, twice, three times, and perches for a moment on the crystal chandelier where, in the beam of light, Mattheüs sees the grip of its tiny claws around a glass arm of the chandelier. Then it flies off and begins to circle again. Mattheüs strides to the windows, struggles with the catches and pushes both up all the way. It’s dark out there, with none of the outside lights on. The sparrow isn’t in the least interested in going outside. Mattheüs goes to take a sip of brandy, switches off the torch and flops onto the mattress with his arm under his head.

  For an hour or so, he lies like that until the triangle of his arm under his head starts throbbing. The whole time, he chain-smokes, eventually forgets the sparrow, its minimal bird stirrings mostly inaudible, and tries, as with his father during those final nights, not to fall asleep and to remain fully conscious. He doesn’t succeed in thinking any thoughts other than those that have already churned through his mind over and over again; he doesn’t succeed in reaching any liberating conclusions that might redeem himself from the one thing he keeps coming up against and which he clings to obsessively, the oppressive thought that his father sold him out for the sake of his religious beliefs.

  A coolish breeze through the open windows makes him get up and close both of them, and for a moment the action clears his head. The sparrow swoops next to him once more as if wanting to acknowledge this other life in the room, then he no longer hears it. It’s a consolation, after all, this tiny life that’ll see the night through with him.

  He lies down again with his arms folded under his head and concentrates on his breathing, shallow against the top of his nostrils. He chokes on a gulp of brandy and enjoys it, the burning alcohol has penetrated his nose and tickles his nose hairs. When the choking won’t stop, he jumps up, again switches on the torch of his iPhone and starts systematically fine-combing the room. He makes out marks where the kelims used to lie, squares or rectangles against the walls where his father’s things hung. (The Battle of Blood River picture went to Sissy in the end: ‘Yes, you may as well give it to me, I’ll make space for it somewhere. Terrible, even then, the violence, don’t you think? Do you think it really happened like that?’) He examines the wooden shelves where his father’s books had stood, walks to and fro, starting at the left corner then the middle, to the right-hand corner. Shelf by shelf. Eventually he comes across something that remained behind, a small brown Betadine bottle on the fourth shelf. When he unscrews it, the hard plastic cap disintegrates in his hand. He sniffs at the mouth of the bottle. Stale antiseptic vapour hits him. It must have been his father’s private bottle, because he remembers that his mother’s bathroom cabinet also contained Betadine, along with all the other standard medications of those years. Would his father first have dripped the coffee-coloured liquid onto a handkerchief before rubbing it onto his wound, or would he have dabbed directly from the bottle? His father was extremely set on hygiene. It’s more probable that he’d have dripped it onto a handkerchief rather than risking the mouth of the bottle touching the wound, transferring some of the infection to the container. Mattheüs rubs the last of the crumbly plastic from the ribbed neck and pockets the little bottle. Again he lies down on the mattress.

  During the night – he must have dropped off – he smells boiled cauliflower with cheese sauce from the kitchen. He blows his nose and swallows and even flares his nostrils, but the smell remains unmistakably there. He considers getting up and going to find the source of the smell in the kitchen, but as soon as he sits up, the smell vanishes and he immediately lies flat again. The creamy, pale-yellow blanket of sauce over the soft-boiled billows of cauliflower, arranged in a Pyrex dish, and on top of the cauliflower, it goes without saying, the sprinkling of freshly ground nutmeg. More even than the other small life of the sparrow, the image consoles him, and he sees it as a gift sent to him by God’s angels of mercy during the dark night of his soul.

  At daybreak, when the sun from the east casts grey light around the house and into the high, uncurtained windows, Mattheüs reaches a terrible decision: he’s not going to let go of the house just like that. It’s the only stupid way, he knows it, to transform his father’s treason into something else, though exactly what he doesn’t know quite yet. His decision is terrible, he knows this only too well, because he’s going to allow himself to commune obsessively with yet another thing, will tie himself to it to the very end, whatever that may mean.

  He arrives at Charnie’s flat at breakfast time; he detests the place. Her double sponge mattress with its brightly coloured floral cover is stained with body fluids, ‘Matt, she’s specially washed and dried her sheets,’ and Jack said, ‘I know she’s only got this one set,’ he hates the toaster furred with bread mould, he hates the forlorn pine tree the flat looks onto.

  @ 9 Poinsettia Road, minutes before the auction. Matt is so emotional. Trembling all over. Feel for the man.

  Charnie: The pits for him. Give him all your support. How are you settling into my flat?

  Jack: Matt’s the problem.

  Charnie: What?

  Jack: He can’t adapt.

  Charnie: Think I know what his problem is: Your Matt = snob.

  Jack: You don’t understand what he’s going through at the moment.

  Charnie: My flat’s too trashy for him. Look at the house he grew up in. He probably thinks I’m white trash.

  Jack: Don’t be hard on him, Charn.

  Charnie: Okay, forget it, love you both.

  Jack: Auctioneer’s about to start, cheers.

  He and Jack stand some distance behind the thirty or so bidders and neighbours and nosy parkers, all more or less middle class or richer, close by the gate the two of them stand, and when the auctioneer gets going, Jack lights one of his expertly rolled joints, and amid the staccato barking of the auctioneer’s voice and the exaggerated gestures as he and his assistant, a little squirt of a guy, acknowledge signals or nods from the bidders, he’s dying in a way that no living being dies. Through the gate that is today wide open, and which as far as Mattheüs can remember has never been left open – and this upsets him anew – comes Aunt Sannie with her set of tiger’s eye beads and tiger’s eye earrings, in she walks and through the green haze around him and Jack without saying anything more than simply, ‘Afternoon, Mattie,’ a familiar sort of greeting with that intonation and all, so that he can no longer be pissed off with her, he isn’t any longer; the will was, after all, the work of a man of invincible conviction, who would not allow himself to be swayed in any direction whatsoever, ‘Ag, Aunt Sannie,’ he says – and he dies a bit more on ‘I have two and a half million’ – when Aunt Sannie comes closer, closest she’s ever been to weed, and presses him to her Estée Lauder bosom, making him shed a few feeble, pathetic tears.

  ‘I shudder to think who might move in here, next to me,’ says Aunt Sannie, and wanders off among the people to see who’s here and who’s serious, and looks sternly at those she believes to be strong contenders and shamelessly stands just a little way off to look them up and down, trying to fathom what kind of people she can expect next door.

  He hasn’t had a decent meal all day, has been off his food since the funeral, losing sleep, everything, and he can feel the weed messing with his empty stomach, slowly churning his guts like a winding road brings on carsickness, and then taking him further, and carrying on with him like you’d play with a child on a lawn until eventually the child got hurt and had long since lost all control over the game. His arms and legs come out in gooseflesh, which manifests higher up, in his head, as an intense sen
sation that overwhelms him and takes him away from the auctioneer to the pebble path on the right, the path with the lemon tree, where a child with a stick in his hand is now poking away at something, maybe a dead frog, then scurries away to the braai area that his father sketched and then had built – his mother was furious about the modern face-brick contraption so at odds with the style of their Cape Dutch house, one of the most unsightly things she’d ever seen in her life – used so often and with such pleasure by his father, so much sensual pleasure, and often just him on his own there with the ridiculously long braai tongs, so perfectly present in a den he’d created for himself, with the ever-present glass of dark-red shiraz, the blood of it still on his smacking lips, his shirt off, draped over a garden chair, his chest hairs silvery-curly in the light breeze, his gaze sharply focused on the four T-bone steaks that he’d been given by his farming friend from Swellendam, tender beef fattened and slaughtered on their farm, which he watches closely through the fragrant smoke so that the flames don’t suddenly catch them, so that they can be seared quickly and just enough to retain the succulence of the meat; and he and Sissy and their mother all get one of the enormous chunks of meat on their plate, just like that, the meat first, before the salad and the toasted tomato-and-onion sandwiches are added, with the red threads of blood seeping from the meat onto the white plate, meat that he, Mattheüs, found appetising and even tried to enjoy just for his father’s sake – in those days he was far less emancipated in his relations with his father – while his mother and Sissy shuddered at the obscene blood, asked him please to put it back on the grid, whereupon he would collapse, plate in hand, onto the wire-mesh chair in the shade of the oak tree, his torso strong and sweaty, and laugh them to scorn, saliva gleaming on his lower lip, take a sip of wine and lustily, unashamedly animal-like, raise his T-bone and start tearing at the meat with his strong white teeth.

  While he takes another drag at Jack’s joint – the people in front of them have in the meantime started getting restless as the auction seems to be winding down and the auctioneer is hitting the high notes at the thought of the triumphant selling price he’s going to achieve – with the stub of the joint between his thumb and index finger, he points out the barbecue to Jack and starts explaining a bit about his father’s barbecue ritual, something at least, because in his befuddled state it’s impossible to describe the magnitude of that ritual that belonged so utterly and completely to Benjamin Duiker, and to which the rest of the family was so averse, and in which he, Mattheüs, he tries to explain, may just barely have been included.

  Then Jack says to him from somewhere on the other side of the place where he finds himself – Jack, a pin-sized presence seen through barely open lashes, as you experience people when you’re getting high on weed – that he’d better start accepting that Uncle Bennie was a fuckup of a person, otherwise he’s never going to get over the thing. Not that he wants to prescribe to Mattheüs what he should feel, that’s the last thing he wants to do to Mattheüs. In any case, he’s far too much of a Duiker for that. It’s just that he’s going to have to change his perception of his father; okay, he won’t go so far as to call it idolatry. Uncle Bennie wanted a whole lot of little Bennies, finish and klaar. And he’s going to have to get angry with his father, as in mad, as in completely beside himself with rage, otherwise he’s going to remain stuck in his crippling disappointment. Limp. A victim. ‘Matt, think about it. It’s not the end of the world, man.’

  The joint is finished. He puts it out on the driveway paving and with tearful eyes looks at Jack, whose pursed lips are shaping the word ‘fuckup’. Even if his only remaining option were to die, he could never mention his father and say ‘fuckup’ in the same breath; at most he could include it in his arsenal of anger as a memento, as one of the descriptions encompassing the whole man. But as a primary adjective qualifying his father, never. And even the anger that Jack’s talking about, which he’ll have to rake up from nightmares and wounding incidents he’s already dealt with, on his own, and how, how, do you reactivate an emotion or attitude that you know in your heart of hearts no longer sits well with your constitution.

  And then he realises on the shoulder of Aunt Sannie (of all people) – she’s come across to sympathise, Aunt Sannie with her fleshy shoulder and heavy-scented perfume, the woman he could never abide – that she is the one person who stands out as the embodiment of the old-worldliness of his father, a value system he was handfed with, and which he later, on becoming fully human, began to despise so passionately. And yet it’s the constancy of that world that in an odd, almost repulsive way provided him with security, which he now misses so much, now that his father has ensured it’s been taken from him, wanted to ensure that after his death it would no longer be left standing as his son’s foundation; Mattheüs no longer qualifies for it, he would say, he could have, but he’s made the choice himself, and now he’s left on his own. He weeps for it, not openly with visible tears, but deep inside, an oozing internal wound. All that remains is the matter between him and his father. A one-sided story, because his father, after all, is dead. Isn’t that the way it’s always been?

  The auctioneer’s mallet bangs down on the lectern in front of his buttoned-down paunch, and Jack makes sure he’s got a lit cigarette to pass to Mattheüs. Number nine Poinsettia Road has been sold. The auctioneer makes his way through the crowd to shake the hand of the successful buyer, an elegantly dressed Mr Anthony Bongani Mkhonza, beside him his wife, also all dressed up and now in tears, and with them their progeny, three children jumping up and down and tugging at their father’s pinstripe trousers – ‘swimming pool’ comes fluttering from their babble.

  Behind them, the two ADT guards come cycling through the gate, stop next to him and Jack, ask for two cigarettes, and want to know who bought the place. When Jack points at the Mkhonza family, they smile and shake their heads without really betraying how they feel about the new owners.

  These are the two ADT guards that his father, and he, had known for years. Meat and cake were occasionally given to them, and a mutual trust developed that transcended the difference in class and wealth, or that at least is how Mattheüs thought of it.

  ‘You’ve got bad luck here, man,’ says Christopher with his ascetic face. ‘You will not live here at your beautiful house any more, man.’

  ‘It’s all over, Sissy.’

  ‘Ag, Mattie. Man, it was destined to be like this. You know, I went for a walk in the veld the other morning, it’s just desert here now, and then I realised something about that house. We’ve done with it. I know Pa had his quirks, but that house is history now.’

  ‘Pa trampled me one last time from his grave.’

  ‘Let it go, Mattie. Let go of that stuff. He was damned good to both of us. He looked after us well his whole life. So how much did the house go for in the end?’

  ‘Two point five.’

  ‘Million?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Good heavens.’

  ‘You’re getting a third. Is it enough to fatten your sheep?’

  ‘Ag, Boetie. It doesn’t suit you to be like that. You’re surely not going to hold it against me. For the rest of my life. It just gives me a pain here, in my side. Please, Mattie.’

  ‘Jack says Pa was a fuckup.’

  ‘Tell Jack I say he must keep his trap shut about our father.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s all over. All of it. I’ll never again walk in that house just to feel what it feels like. In summer, barefoot on those cool clay tiles. I’ll never get it out of my system. Never. Sissy, do you think that deep inside Pa despised me?’

  ‘Matt, don’t torment yourself, man. Pa is dead, he’s had his life. I don’t know what he thought. Do you think it matters any more? You know he had a big, big problem with you and Jack. It was never possible for him to square the two of you with his faith. That’s the heart of the matter. He couldn’t.
It was much too much to ask of a man of his generation. But despise? You? Don’t be silly, Mattie. You were his golden boy. Whenever you wanted to ask him for anything, he already had his hand open. Pa loved you, man. You have to believe it.’