‘The point is,’ said Nick, ‘that someone had threatened her just before. Someone who’s been targeting her for a long time and that she doesn’t want anything to do with. By chance a car stopped next to me when I got home and someone wound down the window and swore at me most foully.’
‘That doesn’t sound like chance,’ said Marthinus. ‘You have to be on the lookout. Keep your eyes and ears open. I have contacts. People who know what’s happening in the neighbourhood. I can find out from them.’
‘Did you know Chris Kestell?’ asked Nick.
‘I did!’ said Marthinus. ‘Weren’t he and Victor hand in glove?’
‘They were friends, yes,’ said Nick. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘a man accosted me in Stellenbosch today – actually followed me at first. When I saw him for the first time, I thought he was Chris’s double. But from close up not that much like him after all. Still, it was creepy.’
Marthinus got up. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said. He returned with a small book. ‘See what I came across by chance in a second-hand bookshop yesterday. Look!’ he said, and lit a cigarette, ‘check what’s written in the front.’
Nick looked. The title was A Biblical-sociological Justification for Racial Segregation in South Africa, by Professor J.G. Kestell, Professor in Old Testament Exegesis, also Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. In the front was written, in Afrikaans: For Christiaan Gerhardus Kestell, from his grandfather, J.G. Kestell. Honour your God, your father, your leaders and your nation, and you will always walk in the light of righteousness. Below that, in a large rounded childish hand: This book belongs to Christiaan Kestell, and the date: 15 July 1966.
‘What does this tell you about the childhood of Chris?’ said Marthinus.
‘The childhood of Chris,’ said Nick in wonderment.
‘Can you imagine what such a patriarchal injunction would do to the spirit of an intelligent, sensitive child, somebody who off his own bat had started questioning the status quo? Then to be confronted with this lunacy? His grandfather was a minister, his father was a minister. Both of them foursquare behind apartheid.’
‘I did think that Chris had taken a bad knock somewhere,’ said Nick faintly.
‘But exactly!’ said Marthinus. ‘Here you have a possible key to Chris’s deep psychic wounding. Not to mention his great undefined anger.’
‘I suppose one could call it that,’ said Nick, not sure whether the whole Chris-business interested him that much at the moment. He looked at the table of contents, paged through the little book. One of the chapters was ‘Apartheid as vocation, the responsibility of the Stronger for the Weaker’. There were subsections such as ‘Intra- and Extramarital miscegenation’, and ‘The infiltration of non-European blood’. In the conclusion racial apartheid was seen as the task of the European race, failing which, racial interbreeding would result.
‘You must be right,’ he said to Marthinus, ‘that kind of thing could warp a sensitive child for life.’
*
When he turned into his street, Nick saw a black car slowly driving past his house. It seemed suspiciously like the car from which he’d been sworn at. Although he couldn’t say for sure. He hurried into the house. He found Charelle in the kitchen. She was making tea.
‘Was there somebody here?’ he asked.
No, she said, surprised. She’d come home a while ago and there was nobody here. Could she make him a cup of tea as well? He collapsed into a chair, relieved. He suddenly felt surprisingly moved by this gesture of hers.
He watched her while she made tea. He found her pretty. She had dark eyes and dark eyebrows, and a largish nose and a resolute mouth and her teeth were irregular. (Money for orthodontic work there had probably not been.) And then, the soft, abundant, dense head of curly hair. Delicately built. He generally preferred more robust women, but he found her attractive. Amazing that an adult (he assumed she was older than eighteen) could have such slender childish wrists. He was grateful, touched that they could sit together at the kitchen table like this.
He did not want to bombard her with questions, but there was a good deal that he didn’t know about her. He’d hardly had a proper conversation with her since she’d moved in. He didn’t want to be pushy, he didn’t want to spoil the new conviviality of their sitting there. She was shy, first of all he wanted to set her at ease.
How did she find her course?
She liked it. It was exciting.
Did she have any work to show him? (Immediately regretting that he’d asked it. Actually he wanted to be as little as possible involved with her life. With anybody’s life.)
She’d be happy to show him. (Her face changed colour slightly. A dark blush.) She’d get her portfolio together. He could see that she wasn’t entirely at her ease. He had just got up to make more tea, when the doorbell rang. At first he considered ignoring it. He didn’t want to disturb their companionable togetherness. But the bell rang again. Twice. Emphatically. But when he opened the front door, there was nobody outside at the gate. He switched on the stoep light. Closed the front door again. How had the person who’d rung the bell managed to make such a quick getaway? He did not like this.
He went back into the house. ‘Nobody,’ he said. She said nothing. Looked down at her hands.
‘This man who’s stalking you,’ he said, ‘is he capable … do you have reason to be afraid of him?’
She shrugged. She didn’t know. She thought his friends were a bad influence. And he was also thoroughly mixed-up in his head. But she didn’t know. It depended on who he was hanging out with.
In what way was he mixed-up in his head? he asked.
He’d had this thing about her ever since schooldays, but she’d never been interested in him. He’d come to Cape Town to look for a job. But she didn’t think he’d found one yet. She thought he was hanging out with tik-heads now.
Had she talked to him yet?
Not really since coming here. Just that once before she had the fit.
What had he said then?
He’d threatened her. (She looked down. Unwilling to talk.)
With what?
He’d said she wouldn’t get away. He’d come after her until she went with him. If she didn’t want to, he’d make her pay.
‘You can’t report him to the police?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘He’s done nothing yet,’ she said softly.
‘So do you have to wait until he does do something?!’ he asked.
She shrugged again.
The companionable atmosphere had been disrupted. Shortly afterwards she went to her room. He remained behind on his own at the kitchen table. Restless and disgruntled. That was how he’d sat at the table in their apartment in New York as well. Isabel had cried every morning. In the afternoon she hadn’t talked at all. Later he’d been afraid for her, she was so doggedly desperate in her blue dressing gown. They’d had moments of silent closeness on the subway, in streets on their way to museums, but the thrill of New York had largely passed them by. A sullenness had come over him. Nevertheless he’d still desired her at times. Desired her intensely. He’d wanted to blast open her blue dressing gown and stoke her like a furnace. Until she spontaneously burst into flame and they were consumed by it. In the museums only Oriental art had retained its appeal for him. The delicate hand of Jizō’s Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha from the twelfth or thirteenth century. The eleventh-century Bodhisattva from the Northern Song dynasty with its erect back and proud, enlightened-ecstatic facial expression. Western art, with very few exceptions, no longer did it for him. El Greco’s View of Toledo and the