Henrietta Rose-Innes looks at the layers and lives of a city in her novel Nineveh (Umuzi). This is an extract from At the Gates.
Nineveh is so very new that it doesn’t yet exist — not in the Cape Town street directory and not on the maps in Katya’s head. She stares at Zintle’s map, but it’s like a jigsaw piece for a picture she’s never seen. She can’t work out how these loops and forks correspond to any place real. When she tries to follow the route in her mind, she drifts into limbo: somewhere out past Noordhoek, between the new houses and the beach. Wetlands. Or so she thought.
She hasn’t got used to Toby at the wheel, and has to stop herself from clutching at the handbrake. But he drives prudently, she’ll give him that. Very upright in the seat, with his long legs cramped under the dash and his head poked forward off his shoulders, scowling into the headlights. Some young men gain grace with proximity to machines. Toby, clearly, is not one of these.
“Christ, relax,” she says. “Take your nose off the windscreen.”
She lets him do the navigating. This place obviously exists in a parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems. Some slightly future Cape Town, perhaps, one that Toby, being young, instinctively inhabits. Because he hasn’t been alive long enough to have the road map stamped into his brain, he drives without directional prejudice, following Zintle’s instructions to the letter, with no second-guessing. Thus they end up in the right place — which feels, to Katya, profoundly wrong.
On a dark stretch of road with bush on either side, Toby lurches the car off into a narrow avenue lined with palms. High white walls on either side, topped with electrified wire and set with evenly spaced floodlights, turn the road into a corridor of light and dark. The palm fronds glow emerald, backlit, and they drive for ages through criss-crossing shadows. The avenue seems implausibly long.
How could she have missed this place, if it’s been here more than a year? Katya thought she knew this city — she’s fished creatures out of its cracks and crevices for years — and yet right now she can scarcely tell which way she’s facing. Strange scenery has been cranked into place. The mountain is still there behind them, and somewhere up ahead is the ocean, where it should be, but everything else is turned around. This is somewhere else now. This is new.
Eventually they crunch to a halt in front of a set of tall iron gates where the avenue terminates. It’s dark. Two giant lanterns are supported on bulky gateposts, but their light does not extend far into the gloom. Beyond the gate, the walls and the road and the trail of lights disappear. It’s impossible to tell what lies on the other side.
Toby switches off the engine. Katya gets out and stands in the sudden country dark, and listens. The road is freshly tarred all the way up to the gate, but the ground beyond is raw, still to be landscaped. She draws her eyes away from the blackness between the bars and examines the gateposts. She sees now that they are ornate, elaborately shaped and tiled. A grinning lion paces either side, done in hard-wearing ceramic.
Some kind of Mesopotamian fantasy, it seems.
Although the lions are hokum, the padlock on this gate is real enough: bright bronze and as big as a pack of cigarettes. There is no obvious keypad. No buzzer or handle. She has no phone number to try, and anyway, there’s no cellphone reception.
Toby pops his head out of the car. “Let’s go,” he moans. “It’s dark, there’s no one here.”
Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps this is all a huge practical joke, a trick. Peering through the bars, she has a powerful sense that there really is nothing there, that the street map did not lie when it showed a blank. That they’ve reached the edge of the map and are about to drop off.
It’s odd, and touching, too, to see Toby so discomfited. Katya herself feels eager to push open the gate, dip her toe in the blackness. She’s just about to turn away and get back into the car when a silvery sound tickles the air: an irregular ting ting. A small light wavers towards them out of the dark on the other side of the gate. It casts a modest halo on the ground as it approaches, slows and stops. Of course: a bicycle bell. She sees the glinting wheel-spokes before she sees the uniformed rider. He straddles the bike, looking at them through the bars and breathing hard.
“You’re the lady?” he asks. “The worm lady?”
“That’s me,” she says, and suddenly she’s on familiar ground. He gets off the bike and fumbles with the big padlock. “Step back, please,” he says, and when she does the gates come creaking open after her. “No car, please,” he says. “It’s still very muddy in here. You can get stuck.” Toby passes her bags out of the car. She doesn’t have much with her: a small rucksack, the old suitcase. “Okay,” she says to him. “This is it, Âcompadre.”
He’s watching her with anxious bushbaby eyes.
“Are you sure? Is this the place?”
“Seems to be. Go on, Toby, it’s fine. This guy’s expecting me.”
She’s taking a bit of a risk, leaving him the van. But they have several small jobs scheduled over the next few days, easy money that she doesn’t want to give up. Some humane mousetraps to lay. Some mongooses that need transporting from the SPCA. Easy stuff. Toby can handle it, she reckons, while she’s living the life of ease and luxury in Nineveh. She’s made sure the first-aid kit is filled and ready to go, that he has enough gloves, enough of everything. He’ll be sleeping in her house, keeping an eye on things.
“You’ll be okay,” she says. “Two days?” “Three, maybe. I’ll call you.” He nods in the dark. “No problemo,” he says.
She should bend and kiss his cheek. The young are easy with their hugs, their kisses. But she doesn’t feel that young. Awkwardly, she grips his cold hand with her free one. “Don’t crash the van. That’s all I ask.”
She watches him crank the car through a five-point turn and rumble off down the corridor of palms and lights. The red tail lights blink out at the end of the avenue.
The bicycle guard trundles the tall gates closed behind her. He does not offer to take either of her bags.
“Follow me,” he says, and wheels his bike around. His tail light is a small echo of the van’s, a strawberry firefly pulling away. She picks up her suitcase and follows.
The sky is overcast, with no moon or stars, and no blue ghost of moonlight on the sea, which she knows must be ahead. Instead of waves, she hears a hidden chorus, multitudinous, massed in the night: the creaks and sighs and bellings of the creatures out there in the vlei. The frogs and toads, the worms and the nightbirds. The ones she’s come to parley with.
Henrietta Rose-Innes, Cynthia Jele and Jassy Mackenzie will be on the panel “New Writing from the City”, chaired by Sunday Independent literary editor Maureen Isaacson. (Session 9, Main Theatre, 11.45 am to 1 pm)
The Mail & Guardian Johannesburg Literary Festival hopes to be bigger and better this September. To mark the city’s 125th birthday the festival will focus on Jo’burg as both an African city and a world city. Visit our special report here.
Book your place at the festival here.