One way or another, every few months Katya would hear her sister’s dry whisper on the other end of a phone line, or sometimes a few moments of the kind of silence that was unmistakeably Alma’s: a silver crackling static. Katya started to lose the memory of what her sister looked like. She saw only a delicate figure, floating in a cloud, somewhere very high and very cold. An ice princess, barely real, weightlessly revolving around the still point of the phone receiver which connected them. Where are you, Katya would ask, where have you gone?
Oh Kat, Alma would sigh, her breath filtering though the rosette of holes in the receiver, ice crystals forming in her little sister’s ear. Each time Alma hung up, Katya was sure she had vanished entirely, like frost in the morning.
The next time she saw Alma, it was three years later and Toby had just arrived, a pale infant of mysterious provenance. By this stage, Alma had started to peroxide her hair. Was it to match her child’s? With her pale skin, it was indeed as if all that time Alma had indeed been out in some blanchingly cold world.
“Hey Al, it’s so strange,” Katya now finds herself saying. “I’m crossing Dad’s path. He’s working again.”
“How do you know?”
“Somebody’s hired me for a job. Apparently they used Dad before and thought I was the same company. He was there last year some time.”
“God. So the old boy’s still alive. When did you last see him?”
“Seven years ago. How about you?”
“Less than that. Three, maybe. I went to see him in that group home – you know that awful place he was in for a while, with the drunks? He borrowed some money.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised. I’ve done my bit for him over the years, you know.”
“Oh, I know.”
“More than my bit.” Alma’s voice is starting to rise.
Alma’s everyday voice is distant, always threatening to flicker out and disappear from tiredness or lack of interest. An unimpressed voice. She’s sounded that way since she was little. When she gets worked up, though, her voice slides up the register and she sounds like a child about to burst into tears: indignant, amazed to feel so much. Katya has never seen her sister weep – has only once seen her close to crying out from pain – and can’t bear to imagine it.
“Anyway, it’s creepy,” Katya says. “Being in his footsteps, as it were.”
“Huh. Serves you right, working in the same filthy business.”
“It’s not the same business.”
“Ja, ja, relocation not extermination, I heard about it. Just do me a favor, okay? Think about what happened to Mom. What this business did to her.”
Katya is silent. She cannot bring herself to ask the crude question: What did happen to Mom? Sylvie’s vanishing has always been too grotesque, too central to discuss as if it were just another episode in their lives. One day, when Katya was three, Sylvie went to the hospital and never came back. Katya knows this means she died, although that has never been spoken. It must have been an accident: something so maiming, so traumatizing, that their mother was plucked instantly from the presence of her children and could never be returned. There is no shortage of possibilities. Any given day with Len, especially a younger Len at the height of his chaotic powers, could have brought a hideous demise.
But it was impossible to ask her father about Sylvie, and some kind of pride prevents her from asking Alma now. Anyway, she’s always understood that Sylvie’s loss belongs primarily to Alma. When it comes to their mother, Katya has no authority. Alma has three years on her, three years more of Mom; always has had and always will. Katya possesses only shadows: memories of a figure moving through a kitchen, in yellowing light; a taste in the mouth. These spectres are not proof of anything, nor are they weapons to be used in argument.
And so Katya simply says, “I’ll tell Tobes to call.”
Alma clicks her tongue and puts the phone down. Katya is not sure what that means: if Alma has cut her short, or if it’s the other way around.
Above her, the tin squeals as Toby stomps across the roof, and she feels the noise in her teeth. She bites down on the scar tissue on her thumb, the place where she keeps slicing it open on the garage door. This is why she and Alma don’t talk much. Their conversations tend to twist back on themselves and bite, like snakes.
Her messed-up hands. Len’s. When they used to eat together in the old days, Katya would stare at his short fingers, attached to square, functional palms. When she looked down at the table, there they were again: those same hands, if smaller, less shopworn versions, clenched around her own knife and fork. She was always scared of developing Len’s bulbous knuckles, which he’d crack in their ears of his children to wake them in the mornings. Alma had the same hands – although Alma ate neatly, manipulating cutlery with neurotic precision. The tips of her index fingers pressed white against the steel as she dissected the food into smaller and smaller morsels. Katya ate loudly in response, chewing with her mouth open like her dad, showing Alma her teeth and her scorn.
In front of her on the kitchen table is Zintle’s “dossier”. She pulls it towards her, opens up the cardboard envelope. Inside is a sheaf of stapled paper – a brochure, phone numbers, maps, directions. Also a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. Katya spreads the papers out on the kitchen table. The newspaper article, dated June last year, is about a freak swarm of insects making their way through the southern peninsula. There’s not much information in the piece: some people’s gardens suffered, and a couple of motorists were disgusted by having to crunch their way through a tide of the things crossing a road. A small child suffered a bite on the cheek. A zoologist from UCT was interviewed, and he stressed that this was a natural occurrence, no cause for alarm: this particular beetle, “a species of metallic longhorn,” swarms every few years, at unpredictable intervals – in recent times perhaps more flagrantly than before. There was no danger, but laypersons should not attempt to collect the creatures, “although they are attractive specimens”.
A murky black-and-white photo shows a single nondescript beetle in the bottom of a laboratory beaker.
The brochure is much more appealing. The cover is an artist’s depiction of a gleaming ivory building, tiered, lapped at its base by an impressionistic greensward. The sky in the picture is rapturous blue, the clouds artistic dabs. Nineveh welcomes you, it says in embellished cursive. The address is not one she recognizes, a suburb name she doesn’t know. She’ll have to look it up.
She props the picture up against the kettle: a fragment of color in the corner of her stuffy kitchen. It breathes of some foreign place, not quite of the here or the now. She wants to shrink herself down to that size, lodge on one of those miniature balconies, bask in the beams of that small but potent sun; or, better still, duck down into one of those tiny, immaculate rooms and close the door behind her.
Time for a new notebook. She selects a fresh one from the pile in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It’s a fine, old-school piece of stationery, A5, hard black covers with a red fabric spine. The top and middle drawers of the cabinet are where she keeps the old ones, filled with her working notes. They get used up surprisingly quickly: she starts a new one every three or four months. She’s not really sure what she’s keeping them for. Perhaps one day she’ll write her memoirs: Life Among the Vermin.
Len never made a note in his life; his stories were all in his head. But Katya likes to do it. Making records is one way to keep things squared away.
She slides out the small pencil she uses for such things – so much more practical than pens for working in the field – and makes a neat heading:
NINEVEH
Katya negotiates a