101 Detectives E-Book

Ivan Vladislavić

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 311

Beschreibung

What kind of Detective am I? Eardrum or tympanum? Gullet or oesophagus? Pussy or pudenda? A Detective needs a language almost as much as a language needs a Detective. In this new collection of stories, award-winning author Ivan Vladislavic invites readers to do some detective work of their own. Each story can be read as just that - a story - or you can dig a little deeper. Take a closer look, examine the artefact from all angles, and consider the clues and patterns concealed within. Whether skewering extreme marketing techniques or constructing dystopian parallel universes; whether mourning a mother's loss or tracing a translator's on-stage breakdown, Vladislavic's pitch-perfect inquisitions will make you question your own language - how it defines you, and how it undoes you.

Leseprobe

First published in southern Africa in 2015 by Umuzi, an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd.

First published in this edition in 2015 by And Other Stories Los Angeles – High Wycombewww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Ivan Vladislavić 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Ivan Vladislavić to be identified as Author of 101 Detectives: Stories has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781908276568 eBook ISBN: 9781908276575

Editor: Michael Titlestad; proofreader: Beth Lindop; typesetter: Nazli Jacobs; eBook version: Tetragon, London; cover design: Hannah Naughton.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

The Fugu-EatersHair Shirt101 DetectivesExit StrategyMountain LandscapeLullabyIndustrial TheatreDead LettersThe ReadingThe Trunks – A Complete HistoryReport on a ConventionSpecial FeaturesDead Letter GalleryDeleted Scenes

In memory of Chris van Wyk

‌The Fugu-Eaters

‘Hey, Klopper, what’s a gonad?’

Klopper did not answer.

Tetrodotoxin. Bate turned the word over in his wounded mouth. It was found in the gonads of the fugu fish and a grain of it was enough to kill you. It paralysed the nervous system, shutting down your organs one by one, until you died a horrible death.

‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘The fugu fish is twenty-seven times more deadly than the green mamba. Incredible.’

The back of Klopper’s head bristled. Bate could imagine the morose expression on his face.

Bate was sitting on the bed reading a copy of the Reader’s Digest, which he’d carried away from his dentist’s waiting room the day before. He’d been halfway through the article on fugu fish when the nurse summoned him to the chair and so he’d slipped the magazine into his jacket pocket. This morning, when he put the jacket on again, there it was. A label stuck to the dog-eared cover read: ‘Please do not remove from the waiting room.’

Klopper was at the window of the hotel room, looking out into the street. He was sitting the wrong way round on a chair, with his folded arms leaning on the backrest and his chin propped on one wrist. Glancing down through the gap between the frame of his glasses and his cheek he saw the digits on his watch flashing. Eleven hundred hours, eleven hundred hours.

Bate shifted on the mattress so that he could rest his shoulders against the headboard.

‘Don’t put your shoes on the bedspread,’ Klopper said, without looking round.

‘Get off my case.’ And Bate thought: He’s got eyes in the back of his head – but how do they see through that stuff? In the nape of Klopper’s neck was a sludge of bristly grey hair, like iron filings in grease. Maybe his glasses had little mirrors in the corners, like those spymaster specs they used to advertise in the comics.

‘Is he coming?’

‘I told you already, he won’t pitch until this afternoon.’

‘What’s the point of watching all day then?’

Klopper’s neck bulged. ‘Did you go to school or what?’

Bate stuck the tip of his tongue in the hole at the back of his mouth where his wisdom tooth had been. It was no longer bleeding, but it tasted of blood.

‘Mr Bate,’ Dr Borkholder had said, ‘it doesn’t look good. These wisdoms will have to go. But a clever chap like you won’t even miss them. Some of the others are also too far gone…’

‘It’s sergeant, if you don’t mind.’

‘You haven’t been flossing, sergeant. This molar is holding on by a thread.’

‘Do I need a filling?’

‘I’m afraid it’s too late for that. You should have come to me ten years ago. There’s not a lot I can do now. I might be able to save a couple at the side here and these two’ – tapping on them with a silver rod – ‘but most of them will have to go. To give you a better idea…’

He opened a drawer in a cabinet and took out a plastic model of the human jaw. It was a gory-looking thing, with gleaming white fangs jutting from inflamed gums.

‘Forget it!’ Bate said, trying to sit up in the chair. Bloody sadist. Any excuse to use the pliers. The whole profession was a racket. He jerked the armrest up and a tray of instruments clattered to the floor. The dentist gaped behind his plastic visor. Bate would have punched his lights out, but the nurse came running.

‘Sergeant Bate’ – bitch had been eavesdropping – ‘please, you must get a grip on yourself. Or we’ll…’

Or we’ll what? Call the police?

He calmed down. Even made an apology of sorts.

‘How would you feel if he told you your gums were shot?’

‘You’re putting words in my mouth,’ Dr Borkholder protested.

Then the nurse prepared the syringe and they gave him an injection and pulled out a wisdom tooth, bottom, left. He felt no pain. It should rather have hurt, he thought afterwards, then the sound might have been less sickening, the splintering in his head like a door being battered down as the dentist worked the pliers back and forth, twisting the roots out of the bone.

‘So what’s this crap about fish?’

‘Page 76.’

It was Bate’s turn at the window. He was sitting back to front in the same pose as Klopper, sitting that way to feel what it felt like to be Klopper. He heard Klopper leafing behind him. All ears, that was the secret.

A little yellow card, with the proposed date of Bate’s next extraction scribbled on the back of it, fell out of the magazine. Klopper put it in his pocket and began to read aloud:

‘The flesh of the fugu fish contains one of the deadliest toxins found in nature, and yet it is eaten everywhere in Japan. Some gourmets regard it as the ultimate gastronomic experience. Trust the bloody Japs. In 1986, two hundred and sixty people died from eating fugu, but many cases go unreported, and the actual number of fatalities is much higher. What is the appeal of this deadly delicacy?’

‘The appeal,’ said Bate, who had already read the next paragraph, ‘is (a) it tastes amazing, and (b) it makes you irresistible to chicks.’

The bedsprings creaked. Bate pricked up his ears and tried to picture what Klopper was up to. A soft thud. Klopper dropping the magazine on the floor. More creaking. Klopper making himself comfortable.

‘Take your shoes off the bed,’ Bate said, without looking round.

‘Piss off.’

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Klopper’s shoes at attention on the carpet, his toes squirming in his socks.

The fire had been the Captain’s idea. When Klopper thought about it afterwards, that was always the first thing that came into his mind. The two of them had brought the evidence to the farm on the back of the bakkie, wrapped in plastic and covered with a groundsheet and a load of firewood, just to be safe. The plan was to bury it in the veld behind the windbreak, but the wood gave the Captain the idea for the fire. ‘What’s buried can always be dug up again,’ he said. ‘But what goes up in smoke is gone for good.’

One of the constables was waiting for them at the house. It was Voetjie, the one with the limp. The Captain told him to offload half the wood at the end of the stoep, where they usually made the braai, and call them when he was finished. Then they took the cooler bag out of the cab and went to wait inside.

They were drinking beer at the kitchen table when Voetjie came to the door to say it was done. You’d think he was a bloody servant, Klopper thought, you’d never say he was one of us.

Voetjie climbed on the back of the bakkie and they drove out towards the bluegums. Then it occurred to the Captain that a fire might look suspicious out there and so they circled back to the dam. From down in the dip they could see the roof of the farmhouse on the ridge in the distance, glaring like a shard of mirror in the dusk.

When they untied the groundsheet Voetjie didn’t bat an eyelid, and Klopper guessed that he’d already sniffed out what was concealed underneath it. The two of them dragged the bundle off the tailgate, stretched it out on the ground next to an overgrown irrigation ditch, and piled logs over it. It was like building a campfire, Klopper thought.

The Captain himself sloshed diesel over the pyre. At the last minute, he bent down, jabbed a forefinger through the plastic and tore it open. He gazed through the gash as if he was trying to read something in the dark. Then he stepped back and struck a match.

Klopper kept watch while Bate ate his lunch at the dressing table on a sheet of newspaper. ‘When we leave,’ Klopper said, ‘I don’t want a crumb left behind to show that we were here.’ All Bate could manage was ice cream. The Sputnik Café downstairs was out of tubs, which would have been more convenient, so he had to settle for a Neapolitan slab. He ate it from left to right, which happened to be the order of his preference – chocolate, strawberry, vanilla. He spooned it into the right-hand side of his mouth, away from the tender hole, but it made his teeth ache.

The Reader’s Digest lay open beside him, pinned flat by an ashtray, and he read as he ate, glancing up at himself from time to time in the dressing-table mirror.

‘This fugu stuff is so dangerous you have to get a licence to cook it.’

‘Come off it.’

‘It says here: Only qualified chefs are allowed to prepare fugu dishes. The training is long and arduous, and at the end of it the candidates have to pass a stringent examination. Identifying and excising the poisonous parts of the fish is an exact science. But mistakes still happen, even in the best establishments.’

When the ice cream was finished they changed places and Klopper ate his Russians and chips. The sausages had burst open into gnarled shapes in the cooking oil. Deep-fried organ meat, he thought, something a Jap might like. He wiped them in the smear of tomato sauce congealing on the waxed paper. He looked at Bate in the mirror while he chewed.

‘I suppose you still hungry?’

‘I could do with a steak.’

‘I should of got you some of that fish.’

‘Fugu.’

‘And chips, no salt and vinegar.’

The burning had taken longer than they anticipated. Klopper and the Captain sat on a ruined wall, drinking beer and watching the light fade on the water, or squatted in the flickering shadows, tending the fire. Klopper had imagined it would be over in half an hour, that they would be back at the house in time to watch Due South on television. But at seven o’clock it was still burning fiercely. When they ran out of logs the blaze died down at last, and then a jumble of angular shapes became visible in the cinders. Folders and files. Dockets and statements. The covers of the duty books, with their leather-bound corners, the thick boards of the minute-books and logbooks, the tightly bound spindles of invoices and receipts. The knuckle-bones of rubber stamps. The Captain poked around with the end of a stick and layers of blackened leaves came away from the spines. Inexplicably, in the heart of the fire, new white pages unfolded. They should have torn the covers off the books first and shredded the paper. Stirred up by the stick, a black-edged sheet spiralled up on the smoke and fluttered down next to the Captain’s boot. The words were still legible, the handwriting recognisably his own.

The Captain tossed the keys to Voetjie. ‘Looks like we’re going to need the rest of that wood. And bring the cooler bag, and the grille from the stoep. We’ll eat here.’

As soon as they were alone, the Captain began to speak. He told Klopper that his wife had left him. He thought she was having an affair with some Sandton desk jockey, something to do with computers, software. What was he supposed to do now? He was lonely, he was living on takeaways, he had to get a girl in to wash his shirts. His voice thickened and Klopper thought he was going to cry, but he just went on speaking, and he didn’t shut up until they saw the headlights coming back down the track.

While Voetjie and Klopper built the bonfire up again, carefully laying the logs on the smouldering papers, the Captain made a smaller fire at the edge of the water. Then they braaied the chops and the wors. When the meat was done the Captain cut the wors into pieces with his pocket knife and speared some of it onto a polystyrene tray for Voetjie, who went to sit on the tailgate of the bakkie to eat. The other two ate their share straight from the grille.

All this time the bonfire went on burning, with the pages wavering in it like ashen palms, burning and burning.

Sixteen hundred hours, Klopper thought, and wiggled his toes.

‘Tell me something, Bate: if these fugu fishes are so poisonous, how come they don’t poison themselves? Hey?’

Bate looked at the street. It seemed cold and grey, but that was because the glass was tinted. A scrap of his training floated into his mind: Surveillance. In certain circumstances, you see better out of the corner of your eye. Something to do with the rods and cones. There was some story about listening too… you heard better… with your mouth open. The cavity of your mouth created a sort of echo chamber. The best attitude to adopt when you thought the enemy was near: turn your face away from him, look at him out of the corner of your eye and keep your mouth open. Bate opened his mouth tentatively. It hurt. He opened wider, and wider, driving the pain from the empty socket up into his ear, into his temple, into the top of his skull. He turned his head slowly until he could see Klopper on the bed from the corner of his eye.

‘What the hell are you doing now?’

Once during the meal the wind shifted and blew the smoke over them. It was bittersweet, compounded of leather and ink and sealing wax. For some reason it made Klopper aware of the meat in his mouth, of its texture, the fibres parting between his teeth, the taste of blood on his tongue, but he took a mouthful of beer and swallowed, and it went down. Soon the wind shifted again and carried the smoke out over the water.

‘This is the bit I really don’t understand. They call it the philosophy of the fugu-eaters…’

‘Hang on,’ said Klopper, ‘here he comes.’

‘Listen to this: He who eats fugu fish is stupid… but he who does not eat fugu fish is also stupid. What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Beats me.’

Bate went to stand behind the chair and they both looked at the man in the street, a man they knew from photographs, coming towards them in the flesh.

‌Hair Shirt

In the second autumn of my short life in San Diego, Mel and I flew to Oklahoma City to fetch the car her father had bought for her. The plan was to spend a few days with her parents, getting to know one another, and then drive the car back to the coast.

A road trip was long overdue. In two years of grinding away at pointless jobs, I had hardly been out of the city. When I looked at a map and saw that Route 66 was more or less obligatory, my romance with America, the old flame that had drawn me there, was rekindled. The American landscape was a songbook and its melodies had been playing in my head since I was a child… Amarillo, Albuquerque, Memphis Tennessee – they were more evocative than the names of the South African towns I grew up in. It irked me that they had ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and we were stuck with ‘Sixteen Rietfonteins’.

Mike and Hedda fetched us from the airport and did their best to make me feel at home. They wanted to like me, I could tell, but the obstacles were obvious. I was neither American nor Jewish; I had half a degree and no money. Being an outsider could often be turned to advantage, but it would not work on the Liebmans. For God’s sake, Mel said, how many Jews do you think there are in Oklahoma?

I liked them too. Mike was the plain, well-made kind of man the engineering profession attracts, still trim in middle age, and Hedda was an older version of Mel; she had the same quizzical gaze, the same pale, freckled skin. If anything, the resemblance between them was disconcerting to a young man: I saw exactly what my girlfriend would look like in thirty years’ time.

The Liebmans were not especially observant, but they were glad to have their daughter home for Shabbos. The Friday we arrived in Oklahoma City, we had supper together, just the four of us. Hedda said the friends and family could wait, we should have a chance to talk and break the ice. They turned out to be thoughtful, generous people, curious about me and my background but careful not to pry. I had met Americans who were surprised to discover that South Africa was a country, others who were moved to lecture me on the wickedness of apartheid as if the thought had never crossed my mind, and yet others who wanted to swap notes about keeping the blacks in their place, but none of them had been as interested in my point of view as the Liebmans. Although they found apartheid repugnant, they wanted to know more about South Africa, what it felt like, what made it tick. As Jews in a conservative, Christian world, I reasoned, they must understand the complications of belonging. Relieved and disarmed, I was able to express the contradictory feelings about my homeland I usually kept to myself, how I loved it and hated it because, like it or not, the threads of my life had been twisted into its fabric and could not be unravelled.

My situation was more precarious than I let on. I had arrived in California on a tourist visa and overstayed my welcome. You don’t have to lie about it, Mel said, they’re not going to turn you in to Immigration. But I couldn’t tell the truth. When Mike asked about my prospects over dinner, I said I had started out in San Diego only because some of my compatriots found it appealing – it was a lot like Durban, they said – but I had a job waiting for me in San Francisco. Once Mel finished college we might move up there. The two of us had discussed this fantasy, but the details were borrowed from a fellow South African, a university acquaintance with a degree and a career in computers.

The conversation soon strayed from my imaginary future, sparing me the discomfort of having to elaborate the lie. The evening passed pleasantly and I seemed to make a good impression. When the meal was over, Mike carried the coffee tray through to the living room and switched on the TV for the sports results. ‘Go and smoke a cigar with Dad,’ Mel said, giving me a quick kiss and taking the gravy boat out of my hands. ‘Do the stuff the men are supposed to do.’

As I was leaving the room, I noticed the candles in silver sticks on the dresser. I blew one of them out and was bending to blow out the second when Mel grabbed my arm. ‘What are you doing? They’re supposed to burn down on their own!’ She scrabbled in the drawer of the dresser for matches. We could hear her mother loading the dishwasher in the next room. I fumbled for my lighter and relit the candle, while Mel waved a napkin to shoo away the fumes of the wick. ‘Idiot!’ She was smiling but there was an edge of annoyance in her voice.

‘How was I to know?’

We laughed about it afterwards. Stop fretting, she said, it’s not as if you threw a brick through the window of the shul!

But the blunder unnerved me. It made me realise how anxious she was that I fit in. We had fun that weekend, visiting her old haunts and looking up old friends, and I got on with her parents, talking books with Hedda and suspension bridges with Mike. But in their home I kept thinking: are the curtains meant to be open in the middle of the night? Does that thimble of salt have some ritual purpose unknown to me? Am I allowed to use this cup?

On the Monday, Mel decided we should make a trip to see her Uncle Colley. Supposedly, we were giving the Honda a test run before we braved the long drive home, but there was more to it than that.

We stayed overnight in a motel off the I-40 just across the Arkansas state line and drove up into the mountains the next morning. We had missed the full blaze of the fall colours, but the muted reds and yellows of the trees had a smouldering beauty of their own. As soon as we left the interstate, we seemed to have gone off at a tangent from the modern world. We passed tumbledown shacks with screen doors closed on their dim interiors and smoke creeping from their chimneys. The further we went, the more primitive they looked. Don’t expect neon lights and running water at Colley’s, I’d been warned, it ain’t the Best Western. Still, I had no idea that people lived like this in Ronald Reagan’s America. It might have been some remote corner of the Transkei. The deer-hunting season had started and the woods were full of hunters. Flickers of gunmetal through the trees, a glimpse of a crouched figure in a bright jerkin stalking through a clearing, the occasional shot thumping down off the heights convinced me that we were driving back into another century.

Colley lived alone. He was – I hesitate to use the term – the black sheep of the family and they were embarrassed by him and proud of him at the same time. He was no close kin of the Liebmans: one of Hedda’s aunts had married some cousin or half-brother of his. The fact that he was not a blood relation, and did not have to be accounted for in their genes, made it possible to claim him for the family history as a living link to what was rough-hewn and untamed in the American spirit.

I was under strict instructions not to use the word ‘hillbilly’ in Arkansas. But that was only part of Colley’s ambiguous charm. The other part – the main part – was his hair. He had too much of it. I don’t mean he had more hair on his head than the average man: his entire body (so I’d been told) was covered with it. The condition was so severe that as a young man he’d joined a freak show and been displayed at state fairs as the wolfman – dogman – apeman – depending on the preferences of the day.

Mel had told me Colley’s story long ago. Everyone who found out we were going to see him had given it another twist. I wasn’t sure what to believe. When his name came up, people swapped glances or suppressed a laugh. Sometimes the whole thing felt like the kind of prank you play on foreigners to show how gullible they are. For all I knew, I was being initiated into the family through a test of my humour or forbearance.

The road had dwindled to a track and I was starting to wonder how much more we could expect of the car when we finally reached Colley’s ramshackle cabin. As we drew up on the bare patch of ground that passed for a front yard, he rose from a rocking chair and came to the edge of the porch.

At first glance he seemed disappointingly ordinary, not even bearded, a big man in washed-out dungarees and a checked shirt. His face had something raw about it, like a vegetable that has been blanched and hastily peeled, and his long, pale hands hung down at his sides, tapering towards the earth like taproots. A joke at my expense, I thought. Or has his condition – I didn’t know what to call it – abated over the years? But when he greeted me, and my fingertips pressed against the soft, greasy back of his hand, it occurred to me that the skin had been shaved.

He gave Mel a hug. Then he pulled his hat over his brow and helped me fetch the bags from the car. He wanted to carry them into the cabin, but she insisted we’d sleep in the RV as usual. After a tussle of wills, we all went round to the back where an old motorhome stood on blocks. It was damp and mushroomy inside. The bare mattress looked like a block of old cheddar.

Colley wanted to show us off. He led me out front, pointed to one of the rockers and took the other. There was coffee left over from breakfast on the stove, and Mel poured us each a cup and brought out a chair. We spent the rest of the morning on the porch, where the hunters passing in their pickups could note that he had company.

Everyone stopped to talk. They wanted to know about the deer, about who had got lucky yesterday and where, but mainly they were curious about the visitors. Once their memories had been jogged, a few of them recognised Mel, who’d been coming here since she was a little girl.

Colley’s neck of the woods was not on the tourist route and he was particularly proud of me. ‘This boy here’s from Africky,’ he said more than once. ‘He’s from plumb across the pond.’ It wasn’t long before I disappointed him.

A man called Mason and his son, who farmed together on the other side of the valley, came along in a pickup and Colley decided I should join their hunting party. He insisted; he even went to fetch a rifle. I would have gone too – being shown off like a curiosity was making me irritable – but while he was inside Mel leant over and said in my ear, ‘Don’t leave me alone with him.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s just not a good idea.’

‘What should I say? I don’t want to offend him.’

‘Make some excuse. Say you’ve got an eye problem or something.’

Colley came back with the rifle in the crook of his arm.

‘I know nothing about rifles,’ I said. ‘I’ve never fired one before.’

This was a lie. I’d been in the army and learnt to use everything from a popgun to a Browning, and I’d gone hunting too, although I hadn’t pulled the trigger myself.

The Masons looked aghast. Never used a gun? And he says he comes from Africky.

‘The boys’ll show you how,’ Uncle Colley said.

‘I don’t believe in hunting, actually. I mean, I don’t mind if other people do it, but I’d rather not join in.’

He exchanged a knowing glance with his neighbour. For a moment, I was annoyed with Mel for making me play the city-boy, but my thoughts quickly turned to her reasons. Was she scared of him? And, if so, why had we come?

The Masons went off along the track. We sat in the rockers. There was nothing else to do.

In the course of the morning, I had a good look at Colley. Not that there was much to be seen: he kept the shirt buttoned to his throat and wore boots under the dungarees. His hair was cropped into a blunt block on top of his head. It was strange, I thought, that a man who apparently had too much hair should look like he was wearing a wig.

Around noon, he sent me into the yard behind the cabin to stack firewood. Grateful for the distraction, I put my back into it, working the tension and tedium out of my muscles. When I came back, Mel was balanced on his knee, with his long fingers clasping her hips and the heel of his boot drumming. Playing horsey, you could say. She rolled her eyes at me as she squirmed off his lap. Over her shoulder, he was smirking as if I was the biggest fool he’d ever met.

It was lunchtime. We followed him along a path through the trees to a lot where a dozen pickups were parked, one model after another like a row of old journals, and we climbed into the newest one and drove back down the road we had come on. He doesn’t need to work, Mike had told me, he owns shares in an oilfield in Oklahoma and he’s got more money than he knows what to do with.

At a rest stop on the interstate, we had chicken baskets and fries and big glasses of iced tea. Halfway through the meal, I noticed the five o’clock shadow on the backs of his hands.

We returned to the cabin. Still there was nothing to do and we sat on the porch again. As the afternoon wore on, the hunters started coming down out of the hills with the deer they’d shot. Mason and his son had a doe draped over the hood. ‘This one’s yours,’ Mason said to me. ‘She’s got your name on her.’ The kill looked underweight to me – there were rules about the size of the animals you could take – but, as a man who knew nothing about hunting, I thought I should hold my tongue.

Uncle Colley had the boy carry it around to the smokehouse. There was some spring left in the lithe body, and when he slung it across his shoulders it twisted in his grip as if it were trying to get away.

Alone that night, clinging together on the crumbling sponge like survivors of some natural disaster, Mel and I whispered and giggled for an hour.

‘What an old goat,’ I said, ‘he can’t keep his paws off you. You should have warned me.’

‘He’s harmless.’

‘Really? You seem quite scared of him.’

‘I know how to deal with him. I just don’t want to make it harder than it should be.’

‘Isn’t it weird, though, the way he keeps touching you? I mean, you could make him stop.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to imagine that he’s been alone all his life. I’m sure he’s never had a normal relationship. He’s starved for affection. Doesn’t it make you sad?’

I woke the next morning to the sound of running water. For a drowsy moment I thought I was in my own bed and Mel was taking a shower. Just as I realised where I was, the splashing stopped and I heard a low moan, and then silence. Pulling the blanket around my shoulders against the early-morning chill, I knelt on the mattress and looked through the blinds.

In the clearing behind the cabin, Colley was sitting in a metal tub with his head between his knees, enveloped in a fuzzy cocoon of steam. Mel was bent over him, lathering his back with a block of soap. Her skin was pale in the morning light and soft as tissue paper, so clear and thin I could see the angles of her hipbones and shoulder blades. I cannot say I doubted for an instant that the creature in the tub was Colley. What else could it be? And yet two certainties condensed in my mind at the same time like images superimposed on one another: it was Uncle Colley and something else, an animal covered in thick brown fur that had followed the smell of fresh blood out of the woods and let itself be domesticated.

Mel put the soap down on an upturned bucket and reached for a long-handled brush. The shaggy hound moaned in anticipation. With the ease of a circus girl who did this every morning, she scrubbed at his back, working the foam into his fur, shoving it all one way and then raking it the other. He submitted to this painful pleasure, drawing his head down between his shoulders against the thrust of the bristles and then stretching out his neck again as the brush went down his spine.

He looked to me like the dog-headed men in a medieval bestiary or one of those monsters out of Africa with eyes in its chest or the head of a lion. Except that it was the other way round: the head of a man on the body of a beast. I have always been more susceptible to myth than psychology. Perhaps that’s why this vision did not repulse me.

She poked him with the handle of the brush and he stood up. In an instant, the book learning was sluiced away and he was simply a man, a big man with too much hair on his body, two naked hands and a naked prick, and a big round head with a patch of fur on its crown.

There was a hose attached to the rainwater tank and Mel opened the tap and held her thumb over the end. He yelled and capered in the jet, feeble though it was, splashing suds over the sides of the tub, and the water ran off him, driving channels through the hair down his thighs, while the cloak of steam blew away in tatters. As a young man I was prone to jealousy, yet I felt nothing but a shiver of recognition.

I lay down and pulled the stinking blanket over my head. If I went outside, I knew, everything would change, the story would have a different ending, but I had no idea whether it would be better or worse. What would I say?

In the event, I did not have to make a decision because the door opened and shut. I pretended to be sleeping. Mel slipped in beside me. When I turned over and clasped her shivering, soap-scented body, the small of her back felt strange to my touch, cold and damp and covered with goosebumps.

Later that morning, as we were preparing to leave, Colley brought a ladder into the cabin and sent me up it to fetch a cardboard box from the musty cave in the rafters. There was something he wanted to give me as a going-away present. It was a red flannel shirt. God knows how long it had been up there. The thing was filthy; it smelt of bacon grease and sweat, but he insisted that I try it on. Ants, or some other insect I could not imagine, had been nesting in one of the sleeves and when I pushed my arm through it a lump of hard red earth fell out of the cuff.

He wouldn’t let me take it off. He told me it fitted perfectly, although the cuffs hung down past my fingertips, and he winked at Mel so theatrically that I couldn’t fail to notice.

I was still wearing the hunting shirt when we drove away. As soon as we rounded the first bend in the road, I stopped the car, pulled the thing over my head and flung it into the undergrowth.

The day after we got back from Arkansas, the aunts and uncles and family friends came to celebrate Shabbos at the Liebmans. In the afternoon, I helped Mike put the leaf in the dining-room table and bring the extra chairs up from the basement.

Mike’s brother Morris was the last to arrive. He was a psychologist, although he looked like a businessman in his dove-grey suit and burnished wingtips. His bow tie, a rash of pink polka dots on creamy silk, was a whimsical flourish with an ambiguous message. ‘Relax,’ it said, ‘I don’t take myself as seriously as you do.’ But I heard, ‘Beware! Don’t think I’m harmless because I’m wearing this silly tie.’

He hunted me down in the living room, where the men were chatting while the women put the finishing touches to the dinner, and pulled a chair up so that we could talk.

‘I’ve never actually met someone from Darkest Africa,’ he said, ‘let alone a representative of the master race.’ And then he laid a puffy hand over my own to show that he was joking. When I spoke, he tilted his head to one side, profoundly attentive.

He started out by telling me that he despised apartheid. He imagined that no one could live in South Africa without going mad. It would make you sick, he expected. He imagined and expected many things. ‘I imagine it makes you feel awful,’ he said. ‘I expect it keeps you awake at night.’ Within a minute I felt like fleeing, but the arm of his chair was pressed into the padded side of the sofa like a bony elbow in my ribs. Only joking, he said, and gave me another jab. I was relieved when we were called to the table, disappointed to find him directly opposite, appraising me over the rim of his wine glass as if he could see through me.