S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

‘They date from the 1940s. All running again now. And see this?’ He walks past the tanks, pointing to a rusty Volkswagen Beetle with a split back window. ‘One of the very first ones. A few were built in the 1930s for top brass in the German army. Who knows who might have driven this one—’

‘I must go now—’

‘Wait, the tour isn’t finished.’

He walks out the back. She hesitates, then follows.

There is no grass here. On this side of the house/workshop, a large hole has been excavated into the slope. A stone quarry. From where she and the other two spent the night, it is invisible. Half-cut blocks of stone are dotted around. It is quiet; nothing is moving. The place is pale and dim.

‘Come for dinner tonight. Bring the two black girls.’

‘Their names are Beauty and Nungi,’ she says.

‘Bring them with you,’ he says. ‘I live here with these people, it’s not a problem.’

Ondien digs out her cellphone from underneath the clothes in her bag. She has missed eleven calls since they left the previous day. She holds the phone above her head. No signal. Somewhere along the road, the missed calls must have registered last night. She switches off the phone. The gig in the Eastern Cape is only a few days away. Nothing’s rushing them. The cold here has started entering her core, convincing her to stay a while.

‘Beauty and Nungi didn’t want to come.’ The two Zulu women silently shook their heads, remaining seated on the beds, when Ondien left for Hendrik’s place.

‘Then they’ll have to go without food.’

She looks at him.

He smiles. ‘A joke. I’ll give you something to take back for them.’

On the way here, small falcons circled above her in the dusk, sweeping down from time to time to snatch prey off rocks.

‘Snow rats,’ Hendrik says when she asks. ‘The herdboys roast them on spits.’

He turns a lump of meat in the hearth. (Is it goat?)

‘So, tell me more about your music. It was like a carnival.’

‘Yes,’ she says coolly, ‘like a church fête, I guess, or a circus.’

‘How does one come up with such music?’

‘You mean music with such disruptions and abrupt transitions, such dissonances and syncopations?’

He says nothing, just keeps looking into the fire.

‘I think,’ she continues, ‘it’s like building a machine. The different elements first appear as shreds moving around in my mind. Then they start to find a centre of gravity. Gradually, the shreds revolve more closely to the centre. I wait for them to gain mass. I weigh the cloud, waiting for the right moment to write it down. But then, when I walk on to the stage, I rip it all apart again.’ She smiles. ‘Do you ever dismantle your machines?’

He says nothing, turns the meat again, looks into a pot. In the glow of the fire, she is warming up for the first time since their arrival. But, as usual, she has not taken proper account of her audience. He has closed up, become sullen.

There is too much meat on her plate and it is tough. Hendrik dishes up floury potatoes from the pot. They eat in silence.

‘That is not how one builds a machine,’ he says after a while. ‘I will have to show you.’

‘Why are you here?’ he wants to know after a further silence.

She is darting too swiftly and too cleverly over his questions. She can feel it. Something is building up. But she continues: ‘Perhaps I’m grasping towards a core,’ she says, ‘an origin.’ She breaks open a potato with her fingers. ‘Perhaps I want to escape the centrifugal forces, the éléments exotiques . I’m but a simple Free State girl, you know.’ He looks at her, seeing whether she’s mocking. And whether it is self-mockery or aimed at him.

She walks up the slope, towards where Beauty and Nungi are waiting behind thick walls. She looks around in the dark. He is standing in the doorway. There seems to be anger in his shoulders. He keeps standing there. She walks back to him, even though she knows she should not.

In Hendrik’s bed everything is silent and urgent, his body against her like stone. She becomes aware of the membranes between her fingers. She thinks of fish ejecting strings of phosphorous eggs in the mountain streams.

Early afternoon, the following day. Deep grass stretches in all directions, as far as the eye can see. Ondien is on her own. The blond grass is pulling her in, trapping her. She sits down. Down here one is aware of nothing but scurrying rats and the blue sky above. Inside her skull it is quiet; the music is waiting, she hopes, behind floodgates. She decides she will ask Hendrik to sing a few songs from the FAK , the book of Afrikaans folk songs. She will record him in the stone quarry, where there is a little acoustic texture, at least an echo. Yes, she will make him do it and then use samples of it.

When she was a PhD student, she had an idea for a piece of music that would incorporate such fragments. The structure of the first movement came to her when she was at a London conference, listening to a paper by an exiled South African ethnomusicologist. ‘Numbing the Ear: The Afrikaans Folk Music Project (1948–1994) and the Construction of an Aural Past’ was the title. The only other Afrikaans person in her field of study that she had ever met while she was outside the country. Jakkie, if she remembers correctly, Jakkie de Wet. From some Canadian university or other. Afterwards, during the lunch break, and for the rest of the conference, she took care to avoid him.

‘We want to leave,’ Beauty says. She is on her knees, pushing a bowl of water towards Mixie. ‘I think she’s missing her little sister.’ She gets up with difficulty.

‘Where the fuck are we anyway?’ Nungi wants to know. ‘Are we hostages?’

‘I promise you,’ Ondien says. ‘Tomorrow we’ll leave.’ She looks at Nungi and Beauty. In three days’ time they have to be at Twilight Lodge for their performance. She regrets bringing them here, and making them stay a second night.

They haven’t touched the cold goat’s meat and potatoes that Ondien brought back the previous evening. They are listening to the silence.

The third morning. They wake up in strange light. There is deep, soft snow outside, their first snow since Paris. The cold in the hut is bitter, the little paraffin heater’s flame glowing blue like glacier ice. They venture outside. They sink into the snow, their socks getting soaked. Mixie is wrapped in a pullover. She is clambering higher up against Beauty’s chest, escaping the whiteness. There are scratchmarks on Beauty’s neck.

They sit in a circle with their feet against the heater. Hendrik brings more blankets and three new pairs of boots, as if bought specially for them.

‘Tell me if you want to move to my place. There’s a fire there.’

‘We’re fine here,’ Ondien says through clenched jaws.

‘The phone’s dead,’ he says. ‘We’re cut off.’

The blankets smell of iron, of rust. Late morning it starts again: small snowflakes on the corrugated-iron roof.

When the sun emerges, Ondien goes for a walk in the snow. She gives Hendrik’s house a wide berth, looping round and down to the stone quarry. She pricks her ears, waiting for the music, for fragments. It has been a while since she has heard anything. Against the white page of this landscape it has to come. She looks around at her tracks. How present one becomes in snow.

Where she reaches a narrow valley at the bottom, the snow has been driven in so deep, and piled so high, that telephone wires are virtually touching the fresh powder. Her legs disappear up to the knees. She bends over, her ear against the wire. Voices. She smiles. She wants to intercept them, use them to make something. She waits. A few notes, nothing more. It is the American minimalists of her student days that are unexpectedly back in her cold ears. Riley or Reich, she cannot be sure, and the droning of more obscure composers — Morton Feldman, La Monte Young.