Ingrid Winterbach - It Might Get Loud

‘What is he in conflict with?’ asks Karl. His voice sounds appallingly wishy-washy.

‘Look,’ says the man ( his voice sounds weird, as if he’s talking through a pipe or a garden hose, or sitting under the road in a big culvert), ‘as I said last time, Ignatius has entered a perilous sphere. There are powers fighting to possess his soul. These powers are cunning and demonic … and they …’

The line starts crackling, an unearthly whooshing sound, and Karl struggles to hear.

‘… evil — iniquity,’ says Joachim, ‘you must understand …’

‘I can’t hear you!’ Karl shouts. An almighty whooshing. Is the man in some underground bunker or something?

‘Evil is like a …’

Karl doesn’t hear very well.

‘What,’ he shouts, ‘evil is like what ?’

‘Like a parasite,’ says the man, ‘battening on the divine power within every human being … sometimes the evil is incarnated in a specific person, or people who exert …’

There is a great rushing sound like that of the sea. The man’s words come and go like waves breaking on the beach. Karl presses the phone really hard against his ear. Scrambled brains or not, he has to hear what the man is saying.

‘… their demonic power …’

‘I still can’t hear you!’ he shouts desperately.

‘… wearing down the person’s resistance through time and relentless onslaught, exhausting his spiritual resources, which is the case …’

The owner, Karl realises suddenly, has been eyeing him for a while now from behind the counter with a slightly worried expression on her face. He signals with his hand it’s okay, everything’s okay.

‘… with Ignatius. And this exile of the divine presence, the Galut ha’Shekhinah, who provides the life force to the natural world … she is at times forced to cooperate with evil, with people or …’

Who is the man talking about now? Who is this she?

‘… who speak or act against the divine will … sometimes even hostile to Shekhinah herself, you must understand …’

The line becomes ever less clear. Karl gets frantic. He hears nothing, he understands nothing. Who and what is this Shekhinah?

‘As I say, the evil gets incarnated in specific people … settles in the body and the soul … containers, carriers, delegates, instruments of unholiness who …’

‘Who what ?’ Karl shouts.

‘… the person with whom … the persons, the individual with whom Ignatius at the moment … precisely such an instrument of darkness …’

‘Do you mean Josias Brandt?’ Karl shouts.

‘I can’t mention names,’ says Joachim, ‘the person should preferably not be named … but yes, he is … it is him …’

‘Is it him?’ Karl asks. ‘Are you sure it’s him ?’.

‘… the death of Nefesh, the incarnation of Yetzer Ha’re … in his best interest …’

Oh Jesus, Karl thinks.

‘… Ignatius, your brother …’

More than that Karl doesn’t hear, because the line suddenly conks out, and when he phones, there is only an unholy hissing.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have talked to the crazy bugger. From the frying pan into the goddam fire. So what did he actually say: that Josias Brandt is evil incarnate? That his name is not to be mentioned — like Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter or some such spaced-out book? Either the Joachim-guy’s story is bullshit, or he, Karl, is an ignorant twat, yomping around in one dimension knowing buggerall about cunning and demonic forces flying around his head in some or other other dimension or stratosphere, or other material dimensions and that kind of thing. Protoplasmic blobs that can only be perceived by psychics. Lord, how would he know? Whose story is he to believe? Iggy’s own report? The off-the-wall allegations of the psychic and the Joachim-guy? Jakes Oosthuizen, who maintained that Josias took him in when he had no other refuge (together with the widows and orphans, who apparently he also takes under his wing)? Josias Brandt sounds like an impatient bastard, but he for sure doesn’t sound like evil incarnate. He must be careful now. Steady now, Karl cautions himself. When he’s so stressed out and off-balance, things can start going wrong. Numbers can come up. Then he’s fucked. Then he’ll sure as hell never get to Cape Town. Then he and Iggy are fucked. Good and solid and permanently fucked. If they aren’t already.

And so it turns out, because when he’s washing his hands in the bathroom, his eye falls on the calendar behind the door, and the first number that leaps out at him is the wrong number, and he starts counting, he counts desperately to ward off catastrophe, he half-prays in-between, he washes his hands fit to work up a lather, he washes and he counts, but he doesn’t get it warded off. He’s fucked, he thinks, he’s fucking fucked, he and Iggy.

SUDDENLY IT IS COLD, and the rain pelts down in furious flurries. The first rains of winter. The mountains are shrouded in mist. Maria Volschenk must talk to Tobie Fouché once more. The first conversation succeeded only in getting her back up good and proper. She wants to know about Sofie’s last days. The man will have to meet her halfway, whether he wants to or not. She will have to think up a way of getting round his evasions. Flattery, she’ll have to flatter him; she’ll have to play up to his narcissism and his writerly ego; with cunning and compliments she’ll have to win him over. She was too confrontational at their first conversation.

*

Maria thinks, one morning, that she spots one of Sofie’s two great loves in a supermarket. (Her husband and Tobie Fouché, at any rate, were not it — that Maria is prepared to vouch for.) The relationship was clandestine, because Sofie had not yet divorced her husband. She wrote to Maria at this time that when for the second time in two days she’d found a praying mantis regarding her with its triangular face, she’d taken it as a sign: she wouldn’t accept the man, even if he were to come to her. But when one evening in a tremendous gale two windows and a door slammed shut simultaneously, she took it as a further sign: she would take the man if he were to come to her. He had come to her, she had taken him, she wrote. He was a man after her own heart, with his Oscar Wilde mouth and his soft girlish hair. She asked Maria rather not to tell their mother about her indiscretion and adulterousness, because as it was she found Sofie’s values morally dubious. (Not so, Maria thought: in their mother’s eyes Sofie could do no wrong.)

Maria tries to follow the man down the aisles as inconspicuously as possible, but realises after a while that it’s not him. Had she thought that after twenty years he would still have the same ephemeral appearance?

*

Maria lets Jakobus Coetzee know that she would like to visit him. Come! he replies, you’ll find it interesting. Jakobus used to be a good friend of her ex-husband’s, but their friendship had soured with the years, whereas he and Maria had remained good friends. (Of her ex-husband Jakobus commented only once: Andreas’s hubris gets his goat.)

*

She moves to a little self-catering apartment in the town centre. She lets her business partner know that she’s done the audits, but she’s staying on for a while longer — the unfinished personal business is taking longer than she’d counted on. Should she send Joy Park a message: I wish you luck; ask one of the neighbours to collect the post while you’re in hospital? (May God have mercy on you in those dark demonic wards.)

She wakes up abruptly one night (a week or three after she arrived in town for the second time). Her heart is beating so frantically that she can hear it in her pillow. Was she dreaming? Where are Sofie’s ashes?! Does Tobie still have them somewhere at home, or has he scattered them somewhere by now? Sofie’s sparse remains surely are more weighty than that featherweight of a man. And remains is a hideous word.