S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

She recalls Hendrik’s announcement that the phone is dead. She holds her ear against the wire again. Unmistakeable, the voices. Her breath melts away a small hollow. She lies back. Flakes settle on her cheeks. If the snow were to bury her, the search parties would come and walk back and forth over her face, calling and calling. She would not be able to respond, but would change their voices to music in her head … Her heart is knocking against her chest; something wants to break through. She sharpens all her senses: it is something new, but it is not music. She has never written a poem, but she knows: it is a line of poetry.

She hears her name. Nungi. The line disappears instantly. When she sits up, both Nungi and Beauty are standing there, knee-deep: Beauty with a frowning Mixie, Nungi with a black stick in her hand. Beauty is humming to the dog in her arms.

‘We want to go,’ Nungi says. ‘We want to leave now.’

‘How can we, Nungi? Look around you—’

‘Why did you bring us to this place? Did we ask to come here?’ Nungi clicks with her tongue, looking across the plateau. ‘We always do everything for you, everything you want to do.’

‘We’re trapped, Nungi, surely that’s obvious …’

Nungi is not listening. She is drawing a line in the snow with her stick. She and Beauty are on one side of the line, Ondien on the other.

‘You’re there, we’re here. So it’s always been,’ Nungi says.

The wind dies down. For a while they stand in silence. Then Beauty drags one leg out of the snow. It clumps down on Ondien’s side of the line. Nungi walks away. Beauty follows, then Ondien. They walk with exaggerated movements, their shadows stretching and shrinking absurdly. Beauty’s shadow wobbles most. Ondien tries to feel Beauty’s pain in her own body, the chill of steel against bone.

The rest of the day takes shape around the cavity of the lost line of poetry, Ondien’s thoughts arranged around the edges. Perhaps, she thinks, it is time, once she has returned to civilisation, to disband VNLS and take up her research again. She can see the title of her last — incomplete — chapter, as if written in snow: Where does music end and speech begin? There were so many questions. In which ancient mouths did music and speech part? How does one synchronise them again? Fieldwork was required. She would search for her answers in the singing-speaking throats of the world, in enclaves where something has survived from the time of the bone flute. She had wanted to invoke proto-noises, to use them to create something new. Not poetry, but something in the region of poetry …

She smiles. The centrifugal forces are taking hold again. Could such detours perhaps lead one back to the shard of poetry?

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.