Ingrid Winterbach - It Might Get Loud

‘You see,’ says Jakobus as they walk to her car, ‘many an earnest young Boer could manage this place quite competently. The problem is — it would never occur to them. There are also social activists and conceptual-art prodigies who would be able to imagine such a setup, but never bring it to fruition. The black sculptor I told you about was here in her black Jeep. She drank a few beers, waved graciously, and left. Six-foot-three with a six-foot-three-tall Greek-Cypriot girlfriend by her side — but she’s no conservationist, no carer for humanity and nature, despite her fascination with bull and bronze.

‘It is important for me,’ says Jakobus, ‘that I could turn up here to stay for an indefinite period. It is important for me to remember: it’s not all about me. It’s about us. We, the living.’

As she drives off, she sees him wave in the rear-view mirror, a gracious, stylised gesture.

We the living, she thinks, of whom Sofie is no longer one.

*

From Laingsburg Karl travels by the N1 to Touws River. Meagre little shacks on a barren plain next to the road. Low bushes. The valley of a thousand bushes, thinks Karl. Scrub with thorn bushes and here and there erosion gullies. Everything here is remote. Primeval and remote. White sheep with black heads (like termites) in the eroded landscape. The nearer hills are brown and barren; behind, on the horizon, the mountains are pinker.

Next to the road, cables are being laid at intervals. Women in overalls and neon jerkins wave red flags. Near Touws River he has the pee of the century on him, but he’s reluctant to stop in the village. Chances are his eye will fall on something and then he’ll be delayed all over again. He must keep going now, keep cool. Not look to the left or the right. Just not get befuddled by the wrong numbers again. He’s probably ever so slightly cursed, he and Iggy both. Perhaps the Sheddim or whatever has him by the throat as well. He does actually feel a bit in the grip of alien forces, and now on top of it also spooked by the barren landscape.

If only he could talk to Iggy himself. Against his better judgement he tries his cell phone again, but there’s nothing doing there. In Touws River there’s also nothing doing. There’s a hotel and a liquor store and a big township on a wide plain before you enter the town. If he had to live here, as in Laingsburg, and some man-made or natural disaster befell him (a hijacking or a housebreaking or a flood), he wouldn’t bother to put up a resistance. He would just say: Take me, no problem, can’t live here anyway. There’s probably not even something like the Club Take-a-Break outside the town. Here everything happens in isolation. Here people are born and die behind drawn lace curtains.

But he must pee and he stops at a place called The Wagon Wheel Bakehouse and Coffee Shoppe — the name displayed on a board on the pavement, and underneath it: Take-away Filter coffee, Fresh Bread, Homemade Pie’s, Cakes, Rolls, Koeksisters. (Each item handwritten in a different colour and font. Clearly lots of care went into this.) An ordinary house converted into a coffee-drinking place. In the garage (with a roll-up door) there’s an open counter where the takeaways are probably served. A few paces further the front door opens onto a room where you can sit and drink something. The setup looks clean enough.

The owner comes out of the kitchen to take Karl’s order. He has a perfect set of white teeth (marble). In the kitchen, visible through the open door, his wife is bustling about. She’s wearing a jacket with a tiger-skin motif. Karl asks to use the toilet. He has to walk through the kitchen and the rest of the house to get to the bathroom. What do people think when they plan their bathrooms?

Back in the front room he sits down at the only unoccupied table. On all the other tables there are cakes. Not for nothing is the place called the Bakehouse. It’s nothing less than a Bake Factory. There are so many cakes (in plastic containers, each provided with a label), packets of rusks, packets of cookies, that Karl imagines they supply the whole town as well as the surrounding area — from Laingsburg to De Doorns — with cake. If he’d lived in this town in this house among these cakes he’d have slit his wrists a long time ago in that very bathroom with its kitsch knick-knacks. The isolation of these little towns combined with their apparently frenetic entrepreneurial fervour does not inspire him today. He has to be on his guard against despair. In so far as one can be on one’s guard against something like that. The woman in the tigerskin jacket is bustling away in the kitchen. A television set has been installed high up against the wall. She’s listening to the Afrikaans radio service.

He has a quick cup of coffee. Apart from the tables full of cakes, the room also contains a wooden cabinet with fancy fretwork, two smaller side mirrors and one large mirror in the middle. The cabinet is full of a whole assortment of thingummies (just like the bathroom and the rest of the house). Handmade dolls, porcelain figurines, hand puppets, angels in a variety of sitting and recumbent postures, little mugs, little cups, pressed flowers in little containers. Everything for sale, like the cakes. What are these people thinking ? Who buys this stuff?

He looks at himself in the mirror, framed by the prancing porcelain figurines. He looks woefully forlorn to himself. Juliana used to say that with his beard he looked like a Boer general. His face looks particularly flat today. Like on a photo of some Boer before his execution. Jopie Fourie or somebody. Gideon Scheepers. A flat, pale face; all he’s short of is the hat and a bandolier across his shoulder.

After drinking his coffee, with two homemade rusks, he takes a short walk down the street to stretch his legs. Across the street from The Bakehouse is a house on a large plot. A real small-town plot, as he remembers it from childhood holidays. The yard has been swept clean, not a blade of grass in sight. Under a lean-to, up against the garage, there’s a make-shift shelf with an assortment of stuff on it: Ricoffy tins, other tins, plastic containers, rolls of wire, rolls of flex, garden implements, a wheelbarrow. At the back, against the fence, a windmill. Everything slightly ramshackle. Apart from the scurrying chickens energetically scrabbling in the yard, there’s no sign of life. The curtains are tightly drawn. He stands looking at the crazy scrabbling of the chickens for a long time. Not a care in the world, those birds.

In the street, next to the kerb of the pavement, half-covered under dead leaves, lies a dead bird. The wintriness that descends on him all of a sudden! A kind of constriction in his chest as if he can’t breathe. If only he could talk to Iggy. If only Iggy is okay.

He stands looking at the dead bird. He remembers. He and his father and Iggy. Long long ago. They were walking in the veld somewhere. Or in a town with wide sandy streets, like this one. Their father showed them a dead bird. Karl doesn’t remember much about his father. He remembers him as a laughter-loving, energetic man who often played with them. Young. Died on the border, four years after South Africa invaded Angola. Karl was nine, Iggy was eleven.

The day they got the news of his death was the most terrible day of Karl’s life. That their father was dead was terrible, but how Iggy lay on his bed crying, that was even more terrible. That Karl will never forget, how Iggy lay crying with his face to the wall.

Karl squats next to the bird. A shiver passes through his body, and he thinks he feels Iggy standing behind him. They are two little boys gazing into the dead eye of the bird. Their father behind them, hardly more than a phantom.

Back in the car, on the way to De Doorns, he listens to Iron Maiden. ‘Scan the horizon, the clouds take me higher / I shall return from out of the fire.’ It lifts his spirits somewhat to speed through the barren landscape at almost 140 kilometres per hour with the sounds of Iron Maiden resounding from dry ravine to dry ravine.