Nineveh Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  Shark’s Egg, 2000

  The Rock Alphabet, 2004

  Homing, 2010

  NINEVEH

  Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Published in 2011 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1966/003153/07

  80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2011 Henrietta Rose-Innes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0136-7 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0303-3 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0304-0 (PDF)

  Cover design by Michiel Botha

  Cover images from iStockphoto and VectorStock

  Text design by Chérie Collins

  For my mother,

  who introduced me to the Assyrian

  and the tsetse fly.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Swarm

  2. Release

  3. Cracks

  4. At the gates

  5. Bully beef

  6. Swamp

  7. Golf

  8. Scritch, scratch

  9. Underworld

  10. VIP

  11. Alma

  12. Sacrifice

  13. Rats in a rat trap

  14. Armed response

  15. Maze

  16. Leaving Nineveh

  Acknowledgements

  And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations: both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds; for he shall uncover the cedar work.

  This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!

  Zephaniah 2:14–15

  My possessions, like a flock of rooks rising up, have risen in flight – I shall cry “O my possessions”. He who came from the south has carried my possessions off to the south – I shall cry “O my possessions”. He who came from the highlands has carried my possessions off to the highlands – I shall cry “O my possessions”. My silver, gems and lapis lazuli have been scattered about – I shall cry “O my possessions”. The swamp has swallowed my treasures – I shall cry “O my possessions”. Men ignorant of silver have filled their hands with my silver. Men ignorant of gems have fastened my gems around their necks. My small birds and fowl have flown away – I shall say “Alas, my city”. My slave-girls and children have been carried off by boat – I shall say “Alas, my city”. Woe is me, my slave-girls bear strange emblems in a strange city. My young men mourn in a desert they do not know.

  Lament for Ur

  (The goddess Ningal weeps for her city)

  c. 2000 BC

  I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.

  Charles Darwin

  1854

  1. SWARM

  Caterpillars? Easy, thinks Katya. Even these, thick-clustered, obscuring a tree from bole to crown and shivering their orange hairs. Caterpillars she can deal with.

  Still, it’s a strange sight, this writhing tree: a tree in mortification. Particularly here, where the perfect lawn slopes down to the grand white house below, between clipped flowerbeds flecked with pink and blue. Off to the side, just in the corner of her vision, a gardener is trimming the edge of the lawn, his eyes on Katya and the boy and not on his scissoring blades. Rising behind the scene is the Constantiaberg. It’s an autumn day, cool but bright. The mountains look their age, wrinkled and worn and shouted down by the boisterous sky. It’s a lovely afternoon for a garden party.

  But at the centre of the picture is an abomination. This single tree sleeved with a rind of invertebrate matter, with plump, spiked bodies the colour of burnt sugar. It’s possible to imagine that the whole tree has been eaten away, replaced by a crude facsimile made of caterpillar flesh.

  “Toby. Gloves,” Katya says, snapping her fingers and holding them out stiffly.

  Her nephew rolls his eyes – particularly effective, with those large pale orbs, green with the whites visible clean around the irises – but leans down from his superior height to press a crumpled ball of latex into her palm.

  The gloves are important. Katya is not at all squeamish about cold-blooded, squishy things, but some caterpillars have irritant spines. Thick gardening gloves are too unwieldy for this fine work, and Katya also prefers the feel of the latex: it deadens, but in tamping down the background stimuli, it also seems to isolate specific sensations. The gravelly landscape of bark, the warmth of skin without its friction. The gloves are part of the uniform, along with the steel-toed boots and lurid overalls. Her signature colour: poison-toad green, boomslang green. While they are working, the uniform separates her and Toby from the pastel colours of lawn and flowers. They are all business.

  Katya shakes out the gloves and works them onto her hands. “We need to get some talc. Didn’t I ask you to get some talc?”

  Eye-roll. “Ja ja,” he says, fiddling with his silver-blond hair, which is scraped back into a scraggy bun with a rubber band. He’s been growing it ever since he left school a few months ago. He’s always ripping off the elastic, or jamming it closer to his scalp by yanking at the strands, a sight which makes Katya’s own hair prickle at the roots. Aunt and nephew both have their fringes pulled away from their faces in a practical way – although if you look closer this impression is diluted: the hairclips are sparkly, meant for little girls. Toby has supplied them and Katya wonders about their source. They are the kind of thing a teenage girl might wear, to be cute. One of several recent signs that her nephew might be in intimate contact with young ladies. What is he now, seventeen? Half her own age – a calculation that dismays her. What has she gained, in that doubled time?

  “Come, pull it together,” she says.

  He smiles at her appeasingly. Toby’s smile has a comic quality to it: his teeth are small and gappy, milk-toothy almost. Pink, clean gums like a puppy’s. With his mouth open, he seems much younger than his years. Katya often wants to tell him to relax. In repose, when he thinks no one is looking, his face falls into lovely sombre lines; like his mother, slight melancholy suits him.

  The uniform fits Toby better than it does her. They don’t make them in short, busty women’s sizes. Katya’s is rolled in the leg and tight in the chest. You can get Chinese ones, made for smaller people, although not for ones with bosoms. But Toby, slender and tall, fits his like a bricklayer, a ditch-digger. Like someone who’s meant to be wearing it.

  Toby’s job, largely, is to do the heavier lifting; there is surprising strength in those spidery limbs. Katya watches him as he positions the first plywood box and the tin chute, all made to her careful specifications. Once everything is in place, he steps back and holds one arm behind his back at the elbow as he stares up at the tree. The posture is hard to pull off with excess meat on your torso. Or breasts. It’s a pose Katya’s seen adopted by lean farm labourers out in the country. Like them, Toby knows how to conserve his energy.

  It is, in fact, the same stance as the lanky gardener’s, who stands downslope with his arms and his bent leg mirroring Toby’s, his overalls faded blue to Toby’s bright green, his skin dark to Toby’s paleness. It’s like they’re waiting to perform some kind of symmetrical d
ance.

  Time to move into action. First, Katya appraises the swarm, walking around the tree and glancing up and down, guessing at numbers. Then she leans in, nose centimetres from the dorsal hairs of the creatures on the bark. You have to find the chief caterpillar, the general. (A general and not a queen. To Katya, disregarding the facts of biology, all caterpillars are male: foot soldiers. Perhaps it is their small, helmeted heads.) With one hand Katya reaches in, breaches the flow and picks out a robust individual, one who looks fat and juicy and determined, and with a particularly fine ruff of orange fur.

  It is best if the client is there to witness this ritual, to see the skill involved, but in this case the client is so repelled that she’s observing from a distance of a hundred metres. Katya can see her down there in a blue dress, hands on broad hips, watching as waiters and servants scurry behind her. Music is striking up. A classy party: they have employed a string quartet. There is a line of white-sheeted trestle tables, caterers laying out plates and glasses. Soon the guests will be here.

  Katya places her prize wriggler on the rim of the tin spout, head downwards, urging him on with little prods. Then the trick is to get the next one in line latched on, and then the next, following on the numerous soft heels of his brother. Once they are in the narrowing chute, it’s hard for them to reverse direction, back into the stream. The system is designed that way. Once you get some movement going, it’s easier: caterpillars, like migrating wildebeest, have a strong herding impulse. They sense a stirring, they start to push. Perhaps they feel some dim invertebrate anxiety that the swarm has not yet been consummated, that this is not the right tree, that a better tree awaits, that they will be left behind. This is as far as her study of caterpillar psychology goes.

  Soon, there is a modest caravan of furry beasts marching down the spout. A conga line. Once it’s happening, it is beautiful, in a way: a river of caterpillar flesh flowing down the tree, peeling away, leaving the branches stripped and affronted. Once the leader drops off the end of the spout and into the box, there’s no going back, no turning tail.

  “Yeehaw,” says Toby. He jiggles side to side, excited by the slow stampede of the worms.

  Caterpillars are easy.

  The swarm is quite extensive: only the one tree, but it’s a thick and comprehensive infestation. It takes two boxes. They’re custom carriers, holes punched in the wooden lids to let the catch breathe. Katya closes the boxes up and latches them tight, then stacks them one on top of the other. Surprisingly heavy, and shifting slightly. Katya puts her ear to the lid and can hear them moving: a damp sound, not the dry scuttle you get with your hard-shelled customers. They’re strong, these small creatures, working together. Individually, easily crushed beneath the heel; but if they all pulled together … She pictures them carrying her off, and Toby too.

  “Alright, Tobes,” Katya says. “Mission accomplished. Let’s get these cuties out of here.”

  Toby loops his long arms around the boxes and lifts them from her. Then he balances them on top of his head, a hand on each side, and ambles down the lawn, singing happily to himself. It sounds like “I Shot the Sheriff”.

  It can’t be helped: Toby’s a sweet-natured kid. He has a radiance to him that communicates alertness, good spirits, a readiness to greet the world and give it the benefit. Katya is fleetingly ashamed of wishing him older, cooler; for imagining the years of his youth away.

  The gardener, who’s drifted closer, looks at her and she smiles. She’s easier with this man than she would be if she were out of uniform.

  “How will you kill them?” he asks.

  “We don’t.”

  “Then what?”

  “We release them into the wild,” she says. “It’s a strictly no-kill policy.”

  This is the point at which most people start to laugh, or wrinkle their faces in disgust. But the gardener just nods in a thoughtful way, snicking closed the jaws of his clippers.

  As they near the house, Katya can see that guests have started to arrive. Middle-aged men in pastel shirts and slacks, women in summer dresses. She and Toby are not dressed to blend in here, with their brightgreen Painless Pest Relocations overalls and their palpitating capture boxes.

  Now Katya sees again, down towards the swimming pool, the figure of their employer, Mrs Brand, gesturing tightly up at them. Shakes of the head, shooing motions. She’s ashamed of her caterpillar problem. The creatures have swarmed overnight, disgusting her; she cannot allow them to perform their congregation in sight of her fastidious guests.

  Well, Katya has no desire to mingle with the party-goers; but the woman’s rudeness wakes inside her an inner voice. Fuck you, lady, it says. Katya smiles and keeps on walking.

  Toby peers at her from around the boxes.

  “Just keep going,” Katya says.

  They pick their way down to the front entrance. A few guests stand next to the organically curved pool, drinks in hand; as the PPR work party comes through, they scatter instinctively. Katya and Toby are like people in hazmat suits, their catch pulsing radioactive in their hands. If Katya could rattle like a snake, she would.

  Their employer is a four-square, handsome lady, with short frosted hair. Her dress – waist cinched between broad hips and bosom – matches eyes so blue they look almost blind. Those eyes are fixed on Toby and Katya with open hostility, as if she suspects they really are going to rip open the boxes and strew worms around.

  “You were supposed to be done by three,” she hisses.

  Katya matches her stare with a blank one of her own. “Sorry. Coming through.”

  This job. It brings it out in her.

  Specifically, it’s the uniform. When Katya puts on her greens, something changes in her. She becomes cockier, more aggressive – if in the passive way of a servant. Also more stylised in her movements and her words: acting out the role of a working man. It’s heady. But peel off her boiler suit and she’s soft again, a lamb, a girl.

  The house has a large parking area, at the end of a shaded driveway, which has started to fill up with luxury cars. Katya opens the back of the minivan, her pride and joy. The van’s not exactly new, but she likes the fact that it’s knocked and dinged and gritty, carrying traces of its previous owner. You can tell it was ridden half to death by some mean old bugger with a bony arse – the driver’s seat is so hollowed out, Katya needs two cushions to see over the steering wheel. She’s fitted the vehicle with bars, turning the rear into a cage like a dog-catcher’s, and given it a bright-green paint job. It now bears the legend Painless Pest Relocations, with neat line drawings of her own design: rat, pigeon and spider.

  While Toby loads the carry-cases into the back of the van, Katya takes a wooden cigar box from the glove compartment and transfers four or five caterpillars into it.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  She snaps the box shut and spins around. The voice comes from the flowerbed – no, it’s a rock garden, with an ivy-covered arbour behind it on a small rise. Katya makes out a figure sitting in its shady depths. Drinking. He raises his glass in a cheery salute, then beckons her closer.

  “Just a sec,” she says to Toby.

  A paved path winds up to the grotto. Closer, Katya sees he’s a large man, sitting on a throne-like wrought-iron bench with armrests in the shape of dragons’ heads. His legs are thrust out in front of him and a tendril of ivy tickles his brow. Shirt loose at the collar, a whisky tumbler askew in his fist.

  She stands in front of him, waiting. This is another thing the uniform achieves. As it eased her interaction with the gardener, so too it helps her do business with what is, clearly, a boss. Usually, in front of someone like this – evidently a rich man, powerful, older – Katya would feel awkward. She’d wonder how to stand, what to do with her hands, what to say. But here, now, her posture and her role are clear. He can talk to her if he wants. Or she can walk away. All part of the job.

  It’s also his evident pissedness that puts her at her ease. He seems a benevolent d
runk, squinting up at her from behind the ivy.

  Katya doesn’t find drunken people difficult. Unless they are threatening or loud, they can be quite soothing company. She feels less observed around them, and there’s something touching in the way they allow themselves to be seen, in this foolish, almost infantile state. And although they are in one sense blurred by the liquor, there is also a film peeled back, an occlusion lifted.

  Right now, she feels free to pass her eyes over this man’s suit, his watch, his hair, his fittings and fixtures. The man is solid, meaty. His mouth and nose are strong, large enough to balance the broad face, but finely cut. The face of a Roman emperor, past his prime and in his cups. When he smiles he shows one greyed-out canine, the same colour as his hair. In his fifties, maybe.

  “Let’s have a look at the merchandise,” he says.

  Katya opens the lid of the cigar box, tilting it to show him the brownish caterpillars.

  Most people would recoil, exclaim at least. But in his face there is nothing: no revulsion, no interest either. He sips his drink, and then, with a casual flick of the wrist, dribbles a splash of the liquor into the box.

  Katya snatches it away. “What’s that for?”

  He shrugs. “They can’t feel much, surely? Stuff’s nutritious.”

  She scowls and closes the lid carefully on the squirming creatures.

  “So,” he says. “Caterpillar wrangling. Nice job for a girl. What else can you do?” He has a pleasant voice, lighter and more musical than his bulk would suggest.

  “Caterpillars, snakes, frogs, slugs, cockroaches, baboons, rats, mice, snails, pigeons, ticks, geckos, flies, fleas, cockroaches.” Katya observes his face for reaction. Men are generally more squeamish about these things. “Bats. And spiders.”

  He laughs – a laugh like the bark of a sizeable dog – and swirls his drink, as if her recitation has made him happy, has confirmed something for him. “I see. The whole gang. The unlovely. The unloved!”