CHAPTER ONE

He realises with a start that he has been dreaming again. It’s a problem he has. Time disappears. Hours pass. Until her cry. And then he comes back. He checks the clock on the church tower. Lunch is on the stove and he has only the abstract to write.  There will be time for her then. But now there is the pounding of small feet on the stairs and everything comes to a halt because something has arrived, has landed in front of him, in front of the keyboard where she knows he can’t avoid seeing it. And now she is standing next to him, breathless, expectant. ‘It’s not her,’ he says.  He means it’s not from Louise, but why add to the disappointment? She knows who he means. Rather make something of it. A geography lesson. He rummages through the references piled up next to his desk looking for his atlas so he can show her where Canada is, that it’s not Australia, and picks up Specimens of Bushman Folklore. He has opened it to the chapter on the Moon when the phone rings. The voice is terse.

‘Where’s Keisha?’

He looks around.  
‘Outside I suppose,’ he says. ‘Playing by the sloot.’

‘You suppose?’

He goes to the window.

‘She’s talking to our neighbour’

‘Herta? That racist crackpot?’

‘She likes the woman, Jasmine. Who cares about her stupid theories?’

Ten minutes later, the phone again. Her voice is cold, businesslike.

‘I’m coming to fetch her.’

‘I thought I had her till Sunday.’

‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

‘Whatever you say, Jasmine.’

Don’t patronise me, Daniel. It doesn’t suit you.’

There is a tugging at his sleeve. Keisha has slipped back into the room, heard her mother’s name. He hands her the phone. She speaks in an urgent hiss.

‘Mama, what’s a folk soul? She says I have a different one to hers.’

Pause.

Her eyes widen. ‘You mean a real one with a broomstick?’

He smells something burning.

The lunch!

With Keisha gone, with the house silent, he applies himself to finishing his work, but he has lost his enthusiasm. And that stirring he felt, mixed in with his irritation at Jasmine’s voice?  What was that about? The phone interrupts his train of thought. His sister Becky. She’s arriving tomorrow. A short visit. She’ll see him on Tuesday after she’s recovered from the flight. The prospect irritates him. Time for a drink.

He slips through the miasma of cheap wine outside the hotel and descends a narrow stair. His neighbour is talking to the old teacher.  She jabs her finger at the floor as she speaks as if directing traffic.  The people on the pavement outside he guesses. He’s heard her often enough on this subject. The subject of crime. Further along some people wearing birding vests  are examining the faded photograph above the bar -  a panoramic view of the village taken after the river burst its banks and swept away the bridge. The cataclysm had given the village, known for its birdlife, a curious status. As if having received  God’s attention, it had entered into the sacred, yet was at the same time dammed.       Written by hand on the photograph is the statement, eleven adults and one child lost. RIP.       'Who were they?' one of the group asks.

      It’s the cue for the teacher.

    ‘They were trekarbeiders - itinerant workers. They go wherever they can find work and when the work runs out they move on. It’s in their blood. The fishermen too. They can’t escape it. Once they were everywhere. In the mountains. In the caves, painting on the rocks. But in 1652 ....

   The barman interrupts. ‘Onderwyser, these people don’t want a history lesson. They want to hear about the Storkwoman…’

    ‘Well she was one of them,‘ the old man says, ‘but for that they better ask the Professor.’  

     Time to make his escape.

When he gets home there is a car is parked opposite his house, alongside the marsh, facing the causeway. He can the glowing ends of cigarettes through the tinted windows. Keeping an eye on the movement of people, he supposes.  A new development. He enters the house and climbs the stairs to his study. Past the photographs of family members  who have passed away - his izinyanya.

The phone on his desk is flashing. The message is from Miles. About tomorrow’s meeting. What position to take? His eye falls on a passage in the book open on his desk.

Therefore the Moon spoke, he said: Ye who are people, ye shall, when ye die, altogether dying vanish away. For I said that ye should, when ye died, ye should again arise, ye should not altogether die. For I, when I am dead, I again living return.

He inserts a marker, and lifts the book exposing the envelope.

Mr Karonovich

Marsh Road

Stanford

Afrique du Sud

Who would be writing to his father now? Turns it over.

2760 Place Darlington 17, Montréal 26, Canada.

Slits the envelope and holds it up. Another letter flimsy and yellowed slides out onto his desk. 

He draws the lamp closer.
It is in a foreign language. Yet the longer he looks, the more he feels that he knows something…though not in words.

A voice floats up from the street. Someone headed for the marsh probably, shouting obscenities at imagined demons.

He draws the light onto the signature.

  Bela B.

  He is aware of his heart pounding.  

   The clock chimes the hour. 

He turns to  the widow. The tower is illuminated in the moon’s cold light. This, he reflects, is my life. A certain amount of time measured in fractions of a rotation of the planet, into which one fits a research paper or the duties of a parent. His thoughts turn to Keisha. Already her wild and free spirit is being shaped by the forces of conformity, her own dreamed up world giving way to stories written by adults - the sooner the better, according to Jasmine.

He opens the marsh window. Breathes in the dank earthy scent. There is the sound of scuffling, bushes rustle and a bird, wings extended, rises into the air. It hovers for a moment, an apparition in the moonlight, before dropping down again into the dark.

He returns to the signature, imagines long sensitive fingers, moving the pen from left to right, from the curled top of the first ‘B’ to the tailing off of the second ‘B.’

She enters, invisible, mute.

H

e is unable to sleep. A mosquito trapped under the net is drilling a thin hole into his brain and time has slipped back thirty years. In the next room, Becky has her ear pressed to the wall, listening to their parent’s voices. She was pretty …she ran into the forest…a Pole saved her…the Poles killed her. And in the room on the other side, the one facing the marsh, Dreamer is thinking about the fragments his sister has passed onto him. Poles save pretty girls. Poles kill pretty girls. Who are the Poles?

Every hour the clock chimes, until finally the night cracks, cocks crow, and the words come to him: In the world of the dead time has no meaning. At which point he falls asleep.

And dreams again of the German woman.

                                                                      

T

he morning sun has lit up the mountain face. From his study window he can see the thin line snaking into the kloof.  Loses it when it disappears into shadow. He sends a message: Need translation. You home Monday? Downstairs the kitchen is in a mess, the burned pot still on the stove. He phones Tjokki.

‘Yes, Mister Daniel?’ The cleaning woman speaks in a whisper, as if speaking itself is an intrusion into her employer’s world.

‘I’m going to the mountains, Tjokki. I’ll leave the key in the meter box and money in the tin.’

‘You be careful,’ Mister Daniel.’ She means careful scratching around with bones, a concern she had voiced before. There is something else she wants to ask. He helps her.

‘You need extra?’

‘For the doctor.’

‘How much?’

She starts to explain, but he cuts her short. Saves her the embarrassment. He will leave extra. He stuffs some notes in the tin, fills the thermos and grabs his gear: head-torch, sleeping bag, camera, measuring tapes, a book of poems, Kabys’s twak.

His neighbour is on her side of the fence, staring at the causeway. She raises a pair or pruning shears. 'There,' she says - she points at the place where the car was parked - 'there were the heroes protecting us, and here...' She points a quivering finger at the ground '... here was the man making scheisse.  Right under their noses.'

He passes the hotel and pulls up on the other side of the bridge, next to an opening in the cemetery wall. It’s a habit of his to stop here when he goes to the cave. A ritual of sorts. Allows expression to primitive parts of the mind, he tells himself. No reason to suppress these instincts, but also no reason to turn them into literal beliefs.

He skirts the burial grounds still divided into two sections, and follows a pathway toward a promontory with a single gravestone on it. The obelisk, hewn out of local sandstone, is distinguished by an engraving of a stork. Beneath the engraving, on a metal plaque, is an inscription.

Unknown Young Woman

Taken by the Marsh in 1960. Returned to Us in 2001

May Her Soul Find Peace

There had been bitter wrangling between the two communities over which religious iconography should accompany the reburial, and he’d been brought in to arbitrate. It was his neighbour who’d suggested the stork for its symbolism as a link to the next world. ‘Let her spirit fly,’ she’d said. ‘The more you write on the stone, the more you’ll chain her down.’ Her suggestion, surprisingly, had struck a responsive chord. Some dormant pagan element in the village had awakened at the sight of the young woman’s body seemingly unchanged by time. It was as if the worlds had been bridged and nature had spoken.

On reflection, he decides that her suggestion had very little to do with it. It had all stemmed from the carved amulet which was now reinterred with her. ‘There is nothing supernatural about her preservation,’ he had told the reporter from the local gazette. ‘What had prevented decay were the anaerobic conditions - the same as those prevailing in the peat bogs of Europe where two-thousand-year-old bodies have been found.’ Having lain in the marsh a mere forty years, the young woman’s skin had had a natural, if pallid, colour, ascribable presumably to the absence of tannins in the water.

In fact his first impression had been that she’d fallen in just a few days earlier. Despite a careful study of the floor of the drained section of marsh and intensive research in the local archives, they’d been unable to find out anything about the young woman. This had provoked speculation of the kind usually heard in the cellar bar after a few drinks which had led to the town clerk asking him to stick to archaeology lest people confuse him with the village policeman – a real possibility he had to agree, since his approach was also somewhat forensic. Nevertheless despite his agreement, the speculation continued, the latest report being that someone, said to be the houngan of a community of slave-descendants, was planning to bring her back to life, if only for long enough to tell her story!

Closer to reality, though almost certainly romanticised, were the accounts of the wildflowers that appeared periodically on her grave. They were, it was said, placed there at dusk by a man who’d been seen sitting on the stone on which he was now seated, but no one had seen him clearly enough to identify him. One version had him as the grieving lover of the young woman; a married man who had fallen in love with a trekarbeider’s daughter. Another, as their child plucked from her arms as the mud took her.

H

e opens his eyes to a black void and stars. Find the edge before you move. Feels the cave floor, finds the edge, rolls the other way. Hanging in the moonlight are painted images, luminous in their ochre and red hues; ferric oxide, manganese forged in fire, the blood of eland. He locates his torch. Reaches for the letter, his ward. Drifts off again.

She holds the tracing against the rock face, pushes her hair up from her face, wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm . ‘When the dead are poisoned they what? Join the living?’ he asks. She does not answer. His secretary is talking to him through his torch. ‘Deluded people Dr Karon, can see very well that they are not Napoleon, but they believe the reflected image is an hallucination of the mirror.’ He scrapes the bat droppings off the wall. Exposes the writing.

When he wakes, the church bell is tolling and he is unable to remember a single word.

H

e turns onto the tar road. Lets out a long slow breath. Nothing so serene as a country village on a Sunday morning, its central spire drawing roofs to heaven, ringing God’s time. Checks his messages. Monday fine. Come for dinner. Bring letter.

On the square, the honey-seller is stacking cartons passed to her by a woman offloading a van. When she sees him, she straightens up, pushes her hair back with both hands, displaying an ample bosom. ‘You’ve been to your cave again, Daniel. Are you not afraid of demons?’

‘The main thing is not to look back,’ he says. The other woman catches his eye, smiles. Church bells peal. They turn around. A cart drawn by two black horses is trundling down the street.

‘Tjokki’s daughter was raped,’ his neighbour tells him when he gets out of the Jeep. ‘It’s been going on for a year. By an uncle. Tjokki noticed she was walking strangely. She needed the money for anti-retrovirals.’ He doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t add anything. Just stares at him with her cold blue eyes. It occurs to him that although they have been neighbours for years, this is their first intimacy.

T

he cafeteria is desolate. Miles is sitting in a corner, poring ferret-like over some papers. ‘The rector has urged us to express sensitivity to the concerns of the community in what is a contested area.’ He closes the file. ‘So let’s keep things clear and simple,’ he says. ‘We tell them what information could be gained from the bones - sex, age, diet, health, origin, social class and so on - but we declare at the same time a political position.’

‘Which is?’

‘The bones belong to descendants. Descendants are those who believe themselves to be descendants. Archaeologists should work within the constraints imposed by descendants.’

A predictably post-modern position. Miles is not one to rock the boat. ‘But the dead,’ - the question issues from his lips as if of it’s own accord - ‘what do they want?’

The ferret splutters on his coffee. ‘The question is absolutely fucking meaningless Daniel. If you want to play with your Ouija board at night, fine, I don’t deny anyone their private delusions, but this is a faculty of science. Or are you suggesting that we conduct séances during our lectures?’

 ‘Right Miles, I keep forgetting. The rock art painters were deluded. There is no world of the dead.’

H

e has half an hour before the talk. What will they make of him? An archaeologist who is possessed of the notion that the records left by the rock art painters are science. That they belong among the classic investigations of science; journeys to rival those of the great explorers, and as risky, to judge by some of the grotesque figures on the cave walls. Monsters no less dangerous for being of the mind.

He is formulating a paper about the imagination. An antidote to the materialist bias in his faculty. Not that he is religious. Far from it. He has no problem with the idea of a spirit world, but his view is fundamentally scientific. As far as he is concerned, the only place where the departed can be detected in a scientific way is in our thoughts. But that does not mean they don’t exist. The difference between he and his colleagues is that he regards the imagination as real. Not physical of course, but real nevertheless. Not hallucinatory, not a delusion, not Maya. His paper will illustrate the point by reference to the way we reassure our children when they glimpse that scary figure in the dark, telling them it was just their imagination, or it was just a dream, while at the same time teaching them that dreams and fantasies are meaningless; without import. Lately, he has been rehearsing this theme in his lectures - its theoretical underpinnings. Today he plans to test it on his summer-school students to see how far they will go with him. He will ask them to look at a stone implement - a prehistoric hand axe - and then to close their eyes and picture it in their minds. To describe the physical rules that apply to each mode of perception. What do we mean by ‘real’ and by ‘imaginary?’ He will offer it to them as a question to think about rather than to answer. It’s the way he likes to think himself. Inconclusively. From there he will take them to William Blake’s description of the two modes of seeing.

For double the vision my Eyes do see,

And a double vision is always with me.

With my inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey;

With my outward a Thistle across my way.

He has been repeating the same line of argument to his students for years. They yawn, close their books and go on to the next lecture. He tells them: ‘The shaman artists used their rock paintings as portals through which in their trance they passed into the spirit world behind the rock face. Not the physical rock face of course, but the rock face in their imagination. On their return they recorded their experiences on stone, sharing them with their community. We tell our dreams and fantasies to psychologists in private behind closed doors or we write books.’ There is no response. What has the one to do with the other? They don’t know what he is talking about. They don’t know that this is an intellectual game he plays; that he himself is struggling not to dream because when he does dream, it’s about someone he is trying to forget.

Today he asks them to think about a modernist painting, Munch’s ‘The Scream’. The bridge is a potent metaphor in any culture but is the painting also a portal to another realm? He himself has not come to any conclusion about it. The students are not impressed. They want a lecturer who knows, not one who doesn’t.

S

he approaches him in the corridor afterwards. He has seen her somewhere before.  Of course. The village square. Does he think that the rock painters had Blake’s double vision? she asks. And did they perhaps lose themselves in the second vision? He invites her for coffee.

She is a beekeeper and a potter. That’s what attracted her to his talk - the portrayal of bees as symbols of trance. He will call her Amber, he says. He is joking, linking honey and archaeology, but the name sticks. She is interested in consciousness. As a realm, she says.

‘Oh, you won’t learn anything about that in this department,’ he says. ‘We don’t believe in it.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asks, surprised.

‘It’s a sensation or notion produced in the brain. Nothing more. Expecting scientific materialists like us to explain consciousness is like asking a bunch of Maoist engineers who have just taken down a Tibetan temple to explain the meaning of nirvana.’ He leans forward and lowers his voice in mock secrecy. ‘The real name of this department is the Faculty for the Study of the Stupidity of the Rock Art Painters.’

‘Really?’ she says, playing along with him.

‘They spent thousands of years believing they were visiting the world of the dead, but it was all a mistake. There’s no such world, you see. Not in our faculty. What they thought were spirits were simply ghosts in the machine - the noise of neurones chattering to each other. The funny thing is if the painters saw us at a movie they’d probably feel quite at home. The pictures on our screen are flat just like theirs were, and we experience ourselves as being among the images, just like they did. There’s a difference though. Can you think what it is?’

She can’t.

‘What the painters experienced were their own mental journeys. What we experience are the filmmakers’ journeys. We allow the filmmakers - total strangers to us - to enter our minds and replace our thoughts with theirs. This is a very intimate intrusion. Would you make love with a person you know nothing about?’ he asks.

‘I know nothing about you,’ she says.

H

e pauses at the University exit. On his left is Table Bay with its cold Atlantic waters. On his right, False Bay with its warm Indian Ocean. Behind him, Table Mountain and beyond it the Antarctic. Ahead of him, across the Flats are the Hottentots Holland mountains, his village and if one keeps going eventually one will reach Cairo.

 He turns right. As the Bay comes into view, the river that runs through the Flats - till that point little more than a concrete drain - turns into a series of lagoons, teeming with birdlife. On the far bank of the last lagoon is the retirement complex in which Lily now lives. Her unit has a garden in which Keisha, when she visits can play, twenty-four hour security, and an additional suite for Sanna.

He parks next to his mother’s blue car which she will never drive again - but just in case, he has removed the battery - and enters the foyer.

‘Bonjour Dr Karon.’ A face appears from behind the surveillance monitor. ‘Can you help me with some words, s’il vous plaît? What does it mean, “same-parent offspring of a legally constituted conjugal relation-ship?”’ The security man gestures despairingly to a form on the desk. ‘ I’m trying to get my sister out of Congo. I got letter from her. It is very dangerous. To find food, she must go at night in case soldiers see her. Even now I don’t know if she’s alive because that was two months ago.’ Behind his round glasses the man’s pupils are dilated, as if he himself were peering into the dark. ‘I don’t sleep at night, Monsieur Karon. All the time I feel she is calling me, calling me, but what can I do?’

He doubts the man can do anything. Not without money passing. But he will take the form with him. Will translate it into ordinary English. The security man can find someone to translate it into French if need be. That won’t be too hard. He will at least know what information is needed. That’s the first step. The rest he will find out soon enough.

Lily is having her afternoon sleep. Sanna will be lying on her bed, smoking and watching television. He looks around the room. He has created a diorama for his mother, a setting in which she can feel at home. As if she is in the Stanton house; before the money and the move to the city. The same Polish painting on the wall, the same carpet, the same framed photograph on the sideboard, the same porcelain figurines that used to fascinate  Dreamer.

The painting has been in his family as long as he can remember. A narrow street, half lit, half in shadow, flanked by tall houses leaning in toward each other, a single dark figure in the foreground, a similar figure in the distance. At the head of the street, a building with a clock tower, the time eternally at quarter to twelve.

His mother’s friend has done a good job. The vases are filled with roses. ‘It will ease the transition for her, poor dear,’ the friend had said, but Lily had thought her a Harpy sent by death to lure her away from life. ‘Or you from her,’ the friend had teased, which to his mother, he supposed, was probably the same thing. ‘It’s too late,’ he’d told her. ‘Dreamer has flown. To Lily I’m an impostor, a divorced philanderer pretending to be her twelve-year-old son who in her mind is getting younger all the time. Soon she will wonder who the man next to her in the photograph on her bedside table is, and why she looks so old in the mirror when the eyes she looks out from are those of a glamorous young woman.’

The man next to Lily had also been displaced. Not because Ezra had forgotten where he came from, but because the place he held in his mind - would be transported to whenever its name was uttered - no longer had a physical existence.

And so the name is said and Ezra smiles, his finger pointed at the painting as if to touch a place that he alone is seeing. And then somewhere a pause button is pressed and Ezra is turned to stone. But where that place is other than above the dining-room table, and why he is not there with his father, is a mystery that must have to do with the possibility that things might go terribly wrong, like for instance his father becoming charged with negative energy and trapped in attraction to Lily who was always very positive about everything. If she disappeared, so would Ezra and he, the one they used to call Dreamer, would be marooned in time with only his father’s smile and index finger to keep him company for the rest of his life

H

e had discovered the suitcase when they were moving Lily to the retirement unit. It was in the cupboard under the stairs, behind the box of things they kept for Jonas the driver. In it were the papers belonging to his father that Lily had been unable to throw away. Mostly because she was unable to understand what they were; a correspondence with a lawyer about some financial dispute with his brother Saul, an official-looking letter from the Polish embassy in Pretoria, a hand-written list, several pages long, of people to whom Ezra owed money and under it all, the framed assemblage.

He had dusted it off and taken it to the window where he could examine it more easily. It was an assemblage of twelve photographs arranged in rows - a memorial of some kind. But whose? He counted twenty-two people in all - adults and children - none of whom he recognised. A dark-complexioned man with sad eyes in the top row caught his eye. A religious man, to judge by his beard and hat, he stood out from the pallid, almost ghostly people below. To the left of him was a woman of similar age, presumably his wife, and to the right of him a girl, sixteen or seventeen, with dark skin and bright black eyes. They seemed to belong not to some fearful past like the others below, but to modernity. Except for the father with his sad eyes. The father, he imagined, was in the land of the distant dead,  the izinyanya. And from that place he asks: ‘Where is my daughter Bela?’