S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

Mrs Nyathi stares at her. ‘I sang for my patients sometimes, at night when they were dying.’

A tiny trail of sound, Sandrien thinks, illuminating the route.

Mrs Nyathi gets up and goes inside. She leaves her glass half-full on the table, perhaps annoyed that Sandrien has permeated the air with such sudden gloom. Sandrien stays until the fires of Vloedspruit burn out one by one. She is a revelation to herself in Mrs Nyathi’s company.

She rolls around in her bed, then dozes off restlessly. Not long afterwards, drunken girls’ voices wake her.

Mrs Nyathi stands in her bedroom door. ‘He is here for you,’ she says.

‘Who?’ asks Sandrien.

Mrs Nyathi winks.

It is Walter Mabunda. He has brought plums in a basket.

How squeaky clean the little rolls of fat in his neck are, she thinks when he bends over and delicately removes one of the fruit. He sits forward with a slight groan, holds it out to her between fingertips. She waves it away.

‘Mr Mabunda—’

‘Call me Walter.’

He bites into the plum with precision. It is the same colour as his lips.

‘Walter, I don’t want to make assumptions, but let me immediately clear up any possible misunderstandings. I am a married woman.’

He nods his head slowly. ‘Oh, but a married woman of exceptional beauty!’

He looks at her shoulders.

She attempts to resist his gaze. From the corrugated-iron houses voices are carried uphill by the wind. A few large flakes of ash drift onto the veranda.

‘I notice that the village market was almost completely washed away.’

‘Yes,’ Walter says, and shakes his head with a concerned frown. ‘Unfortunately they built it on a flood plain. But I’m going to make an investment,’ he says, and pushes out his chest. ‘I’m going to erect stalls. The government will help with funding. Shirley Kgope’s brother will build it for us. He was also the contractor for the college.’

His gaze rests in the vicinity of her chest.

A moth with false eyes on its wings descends on Walter’s cleanly shaven head. It flies up as he bends over to her.

‘Just be careful. People have their ways here.’

She does not know what he is trying to convey.

Then he talks loudly, his voice high, as if meant to be overheard. ‘But, yes, my enterprises and investments are nothing. Your Mrs Nyathi,’ he gestures with his head over his shoulder, ‘she has her contacts, oh yes she does! It is thanks to her that the college was built. And look what she got out of it.’ He gestures towards the house.

After Walter has left, when they are sitting on the veranda above the village lights and fires, Mrs Nyathi says, ‘Yes, your Mr Mabunda got himself a nice little egg with that college. He knows how to wangle things.’

Sandrien does not enquire further. She is thinking of the slap in the bathroom earlier.

As if in response to her thoughts, Mrs Nyathi says, ‘There are things here that you would not understand, that aren’t your business.’ Mrs Nyathi smiles sweetly, holds her tumbler of brandy aloft in a vague toast to someone’s health.

‘Who built the original market at the bottom of the hill?’ Sandrien asks, not to be deterred.

Mrs Nyathi thinks for a moment.

‘Dr Kgope’s brother,’ she says, her eyes slits. Her pupils dart back and forth. Then her head nods forward and her eyebrows rise. ‘She made a nice profit herself, our Shirley. Yes, that Shirley. Always so hush-hush.’

Sandrien is tired of Vloedspruit tonight. Apart from Dr Kgope’s useful lectures about antiretrovirals and the prevention of mother — child transmission, she is not sure she is gaining any wisdom. She is relieved the six weeks are almost over.

‘By the way, I’ll be glad if someone could inform Mr Mabunda that I am not susceptible to courtship.’

Through the veils of sleep she is waiting for the precipitation. She can hear it rumbling in the distance. She wakes up; it has arrived. Thundering against the corrugated-iron roof and windowpanes. She jumps up and jerks open the curtain. The ground is white. Hailstones are bouncing off the roofs. She is standing there, her body like a lamp, waiting for the glass to break. Moments after Mrs Nyathi pulls her away by the arm from behind, it happens: glass flying where she was just standing.

The moment the hailstorm has passed, Mrs Nyathi summons some of her maids. They appear out of the rain to nail wooden boards to the broken windows. They clean up and dry the floors, change wet linen.

Sandrien fails to fall asleep again.

When she walks through Vloedspruit one last time the next morning, she notices the extent of the damage. Glass and blades of corrugated iron slice into the ground. A woman stops her at the market premises. The parts of the market that were still standing before have now gone too. The woman waves her arms. She is arguing animatedly, as if Sandrien is the cause of the floods, and responsible for repairing the market. Sandrien gives her money. The woman will not let her go. She sinks down on her knees in the mud, holding Sandrien back by her sleeve.

A downy feather descends on the kneeling woman’s forehead. Sandrien looks up. Feathers are floating on the breeze. She shakes loose. She follows the feather trail. Like seeds at harvest time, down is hovering above the marshy area next to the river. Men are wringing the necks of herons and hacking off heads with pangas. Sometimes more than one blow is required. Dozens of water birds are dotted around, flapping with broken wings or trying to escape on snapped legs. The men do not even have to run to catch up with them.

‘Your van is ready.’ Sandrien clenches her fists after putting down the receiver: a minor triumph. The paperwork for her appointment at the municipal health department has been dragging on for more than two months. Since her return, she has been driving to the neighbouring farms with Kobus’s pickup truck. He had to postpone transporting his cattle feed, had to walk to his herd of Ngunis. First of all she went to Grace, of course. She looked slightly better than when Sandrien had left for Vloedspruit. Her raw coughing fits could still not move the dust gathering in her lungs, but she was out in the sunshine, washing laundry.

For the umpteenth time she calls the municipal health director, her new boss. The phone just keeps ringing. She has to speak to the director to formalise her duties; she plans to drive straight to Aliwal North once she has received the vehicle.

‘ That thing? That’s my van?’

The man from the divisional council shrugs. ‘Dordrecht got a new one and threw this one out. It’ll have to do.’

She walks around the vehicle. It looks almost like an ambulance, a pickup truck with a steel box on the back, yellow and red stripes down the sides underneath thick dust. When the doors at the back swing open, vapours of vinyl and iron emanate. The man helps her to hose off dust. The battery has to be jump-started.

Hardly a hundred metres away, the engine cuts out. She does not get out, stays sitting in the heat. Drops are evaporating from the windscreen. In the rear-view mirror, she sees the divisional council man approaching.

‘The immobiliser,’ he says, ‘always been broken. What a time to start working.’ He hands her a device, shows her which buttons to press, wiping sweat from his black cheeks with a white handkerchief.

In front of the municipal offices in Aliwal North there is a row of red geraniums. There is no one at Reception. She walks deeper into the building. The health director’s offices are locked.

‘We’re getting a new director,’ a secretary with a soggy chip between her fingers says. She puts it in her mouth. ‘Come again next week.’

Back at Dorrebult she scrubs out the van. She checks all the medicine, throws out things that have expired. She washes the little cabinets, the steel floors and roof, scrapes old spots of blood from the examination bench. Plastic syringes that have baked brown in the sun crumble when she touches them. Kobus welds the rickety shelves firmly against the sides. She takes curtains from her laundry and hangs them in front of the back windows.