Rose-Innes Nineveh

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-465-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

An elegant and evocative novel about people, place - and pests - by one of South Africa's most exciting writers.Katya Grubbs, like her father before her, deals in 'the unlovely and unloved'. Yet in contrast to her father, she is not in the business of pest extermination, but pest relocation.Katya's unconventional approach brings her to the attention of a property developer whose luxury estate on the fringes of Cape Town, Nineveh, remains uninhabited thanks to an infestation of mysterious insects. As Katya is drawn ever deeper into the chaotic urban wilderness of Nineveh, she must confront unwelcome intrusions from her own past.

Henrietta Rose-Innes is from Cape Town but is currently completing a PhD at UEA. She won the Caine Prize for African Writing 2008 and the HSBC / PEN Short Story Prize 2007 and was runner-up in the BBC Short Story Award 2012. Her work is included in the Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011) and is published in several languages.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rose-Innes, Henrietta

Leseproben

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 this 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.”

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, 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 dance.

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 thin 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 – very slow, small ones – 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.”

“What do you do with them?”

“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 bright green 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 gestures. She’s ashamed of her...