Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes

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СКАЧАТЬ her father. Bald, maybe. Last time she saw him, his hair was thinning. His face seemed less balanced, the features fiercer and more pronounced; the eyes and nose had come to dominate his small, rounded head. Len’s expression remained largely the same, however: imperturbable, scornfully amused. She sees that expression often, although she hasn’t seen her father for years now. It’s in her mirror, most mornings.

      Toby comes to a halt in a small clearing under a twisted tree. Round the base of the trunk are some planks and smooth stones, arranged in a circle. Candle wax melted onto the stones.

      “How did you find this place, anyway?”

      Toby shrugs, an exaggerated movement with his newly broad shoulders. “I come here with friends sometimes,” he says.

      “Huh,” she says. “Really.”

      It is, clearly, a place one would come to smoke pot; she was a teenager too, once. Something else she had not known about Toby.

      Katya touches a hard, furred seedpod. It’s a wild almond, the same species Jan van Riebeeck used for his famous hedge, meant to keep Khoisan cattle-raiders out of the old Dutch settlement. Could this even be one of the original trees?

      Dad taught me all that, she thinks.

      The branches creak and shudder. Toby’s high above her head, his broad feet gripping the trunk.

      “Oy, get down here. No time for messing around.”

      He drops to the ground next to her in a scatter of twigs.

      Funny child. Cartoon boy. He’s always had these sudden energies and exhaustions, frisking one minute and dropping off the next, falling into a snooze on the spot. He lopes or lounges or mooches; he bops, he buzzes, he bounds. Katya pictures him getting out of bed on a good morning, leaping two-legged into his jeans. When he rests he is inert; awake he is effortlessly alert, bright and clear-eyed. There is no transitional state: Katya has never seen grit or sleep in his eyes.

      He crouches next to the collection boxes and looks up at her, waiting.

      “You do it, Tobes. You know how.”

      She watches him unlatch the lid, lift out a caterpillar in his long fingers and place it on the bark of the tree. He’s developed a confidence in his work: the way he bends to stroke or scoop up some little hapless wayfarer. Some mangy cat or cockroach down on its luck. The family touch.

      “How cool is this?” he whispers as the creatures resume their march.

      Kneeling side by side, Katya and Toby watch the sinuous threading of the caterpillars’ bodies. The tree is well chosen; the beasts approve.

      “All done,” he says, his voice softened and deepened by the dusk.

      A vision from memory fits itself imperfectly over the scene. Surely it was here, or near to here, years ago, and at dusk...She’d been walking...No. That’s not right. She was a child, she was not by herself. It was the two of them. Her and Dad. She could smell his roll-up tobacco. They’d come out onto a path in the near-darkness, with the trees closing a tunnel above them. They were working.

      Look. Dad was down on his haunches, intent, his whole body aimed at a spot on the ground. She crouched down next to him, carefully soundless. Proud of her soft feet, her silent approaches.

      A black shape, twitching on the sand. At first she thought it was an insect of some sort, a dull butterfly moving its wings. But, leaning in, she saw it was mammalian: a shrew, the size of the top joint of her thumb, engrossed in some fervid action. So absorbed that it paid them no mind, even when she put her face close. Its pelt was slightly darker than the leaf litter, its paws delicate and fierce. She understood for the first time why shrews were emblems of ferocity, for this tiny creature was engaged in an act of carnage: it was gripping an earthworm that was trying to escape into a hole. The shrew was hauling the slimy pink-gray body out of the ground, hand over hand like a seaman with a fat rope, and simultaneously stuffing it into its jaws, wide open to accommodate the writhing tube. It was ridiculous, obscene, impressive.

      They sat there for a long time, watching this miniature savagery, until all the light was gone. Her dad rose to his feet without using his hands. She admired his wiry strength, his woods-sense. She mimicked the movement, swaying a little to keep her balance. Another time, he might have brought the scene to a close with a shout or, worse, a foot-stomp, but that evening he stood quietly. It was not often that her father went so still.

      The silence of that long-ago evening, the tree-trunks black against a luminous evening sky...the scene has a religious feeling in her memory. Is it possible that Len took her hand to lead her down through the trees? Surely not.

      “Hey,” says Toby. “It’s not working.”

      It’s quite dim under the tree where he released the caterpillars. Some cling to the bark, some have fallen to the ground, some are wandering off into the undergrowth. The discipline of the corps has been shattered, the general has lost his command.

      “They’re not swarming like they were.”

      She shrugs. It’s true. She’s tired. “We tried, Tobes. We can’t win ’em all.” He looks so downcast, she doesn’t add that most of the catch will be devoured by birds, otters, snakes. The mountain is full of such tiny battles. It’s all contested territory, overlapping, three-dimensional, fiercely patrolled. Millions of miniature turfs, the size of her palm, of her footprint, her fingernail.

      Katya stands and brushes the leaf mulch from her knees. “Get us out of here, Tobes. I’m hopelessly lost.” Although it’s not really possible to lose yourself here in the forest, with the mountain on one side and the city on the other.

      Toby points and moves, stepping long-legged over logs and pushing through dry bracken; not the direction she would have chosen. Some small thing goes scuttling away from them, unseen at their feet in the undergrowth. There is a chatter, a rustle, a clap of wings. She imagines the caterpillars finding their spoor, inching slowly home behind them.

      Coming out from under the trees, Toby and Katya stand for a moment entranced by broader views. The switchbacking path pauses here on a bare shoulder, allowing them views up to the exposed face of the mountain, and down, out to the sweep of the city below.

      “Let’s go home, Tobes. Before it gets dark.”

      Driving home after dropping Toby off at his mother’s house in Claremont, she feels tired and virtuous. She’s not always so energetic. On occasion, she’s simply offloaded creatures at the side of the road, or decanted the cold-blooded types straight into the Liesbeeck Canal. She feels bad about that, though. Fish are tricky. When she was younger, she sometimes went swimming up on Tafelberg Road, where the mountain streams collect in deep concrete tanks before passing under the road. Someone once freed their goldfish into one of those pools, where they reproduced madly and filled the water with lurid flashes. The feral fish didn’t last: probably they ate the available tadpoles and then starved to death. The next time she checked, the tank was devoid of any life, piscine or amphibious. A relocation experiment gone horribly wrong.

      There used to be a play-park right opposite her house, a small one but quite lushly treed, where she’d release the beasts if she was feeling lazy. Over the six years since she started this business, the park absorbed an astounding number of creepy-crawlies and minor menaces without ill effect, soaking them up like a sponge. For a while it became an object of slightly queasy fascination: how much biomass could that small square hold? СКАЧАТЬ