Nineveh. Henrietta Rose-Innes
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? It was a magician’s handkerchief, enfolding and disappearing a thousand rabbits. Were all the animals eating each other? No doubt there was some run-off, some trickle of mice and midges out into the surrounding streets and drains, but she can’t say she ever noticed, and the park’s human inhabitants – the five or six vagrants living behind the toilet block, Derek and his friends – never complained.
Now, the park is off-limits. In fact, it hardly exists: it’s been bulldozed. The demolition finished a week ago, but she’s still not used to the change. Even now, steering the PPR-mobile round the corner to her house, her heart gives a lurch to see the road so altered. It looks unbalanced, as if the whole street tilts away from her house and down towards the disturbing gap on the other side. There’s more sky than there was before. She can even see a piece of the mountain over the far rooftops, deep slate blue today and wearing a cap of cloud.
Katya stops the car in the driveway and walks across the road to look at the excavation. The fence is as chill as it looks, pulling the heat out of her hand and into its metal grid. As she moves, her fingers bump-bump in and out of the gaps in the wire, catching and losing grip. The sections of fence make silky looping patterns against each other, shimmering and aligning.
Fat tire tracks curve out onto the road, under the padlocked gate and over the edge of the pavement. A trench has been dug; old foundations lie exposed, strata of concrete and twisted metal pipes. Cloudy water pools at the bottom of the excavation. The ditchwater smells like long-buried coins. Leaning on the wire, she stares down into the pewter water and sees the wavering outlines of buildings and streetlamps, a sunken city that might still be raised, intact. But the surface of the water is opaque. Herself a blurred reflection in dirty milk.
Of course the destroyed park is no surprise. She’s watched the deterioration from her upstairs window, stage by stage. First the jungle gym, the slides and the roundabout, the swings and the seesaw: each one uprooted and tossed aside, jumbled like the toys of a big, bad baby. Now the climbing frame is upside-down in the corner of the lot, paint chipped, concrete club feet in the air. The demolition made a surprising amount of ruckus and dust, considering that there wasn’t much to start with: some trees, a few park benches of mundane municipal design, a yellow-brick toilet block. Brick shithouse, she used to say to herself in the mornings when she glimpsed it through her upstairs window, liking the sound of the words in her mind. Now that little joke is gone. One tall blue gum, pale-skinned and statuesque, an old-fashioned leaning beauty in whose branches multitudes had sung and nested: now that’s a loss. A squad of men with chainsaws took the tree apart, hauling the pieces away like joints of meat; and then they came for the park’s human dwellers. Derek and his gang came out stumbling, blinking, old soldiers led at gunpoint from caves. Their shopping trolleys dumped on the pavement, their mattresses like misshapen fungi pulled from the soil. And then the digging machines moved in, chipping their muzzles into the earth. Each stage brought its own wails of suffering and indignation. Now the excavating beasts have clamped their jaws and rested their topsoil-bearded chins on the ground. Something new will be rising up here soon.
This is what happens when you don’t pay attention, Katya thinks. Things change; the pieces move around. She doesn’t like it. She’s troubled by change. Toby’s presence, for example. It’s not like she could turn her own nephew down when he came asking for the job. No, she’s glad to have him. But she’s lived and worked alone for a long time now, and to have someone tagging along is distracting. It’s his vigor that she finds troubling, the speed of his growth. He’s a new plant butting up from the soil, pushing her aside: her own roots are so shallow.
She plucks herself with a twang from the wire, and turns back to her house. Behind