Cyrena Lohr fidgeted in her beautiful house that finally had lost the last trace of Ishmael. The signatures and stains of love and passion had evaporated or been polished away by the servants, along with the arguments and his surly presence. And it had all been so easy. The house was clear of him and she felt utterly alone. She went to her favourite balcony and sat trying to extract pleasure from the shifting view. None came. She watched the birds squawking and clattering in the nearest tree, sending leaves and snapped twigs into her garden below. She watched the butterflies avoid them and marvelled at their lightness and colour, their tiny wings pattering the warm and pungent air. She looked across her corner of the city to where it ended and the vivid land danced towards the great shadow of the distant Vorrh. He was still out there somewhere and she wondered if she had preferred the idea of him being dead. His cunning guile that had hurt so much when she discovered that she had been tricked again suddenly took on a note of nostalgia. An almost pleasant recollection of the cleverness of his perfidy. The birds rattled again, dislodging even more foliage, and she snapped off the taste of sweetness in that memory. She needed to do something positive, to aim herself at a task.
A far-off wind rattled very different trees and she was back in her childhood, when she was blind and happy, with her father and brother far away on the open plains. She sat and closed her eyes and let the memories rise up and flood in. They always started in the same place. On a journey towards the south. It was almost as if she had been born there, awakened on the visit to the cape, and the seven years previous had been dissolved or evaporated by its vivid potency.
When her father, who had spent most of his life in Holland, came to Africa, they had all gone on hunting trips to the Transvaal. She had greatly enjoyed the excitement of the bush camps. The violent purring odour of the wilderness and all that lived there. Twice they had taken her with them onto the spoors, the actual hunting fields. She had witnessed the stealth, the adrenaline of the chase and the kill through her other straining senses and loved every minute of it. She was special then and there, where a great magnitude existed in that place and in the endeavours of the men around her. The colours of sounds were more vivid than sight could ever be. The echoing barks of the hunters’ guns filled the great plains and drifted to the mountains and back, describing a vast and harmonious distance that seemed to throb in the percussion. The smell of the cordite chiselling the air. The far-off roars of the game. There was always a party after the shoot. The servants would erect tables under the shade of the trees. The men were loud and happy and a great business filled in all the spaces. The next day they would travel back to one of the smaller townships, tired but exhilarated by the wildness of it all.
The details were becoming brighter while her eyes were closed. Scenes constructed of scent and sound uncurled.
They were in the library of her father’s friends talking about the potshots that they had taken at a tree full of baboons. She could smell the books and hear other children in the garden.
“What are baboons?” she casually asked.
Her father seemed surprised by her question and explained that they were a kind of large and ferocious monkey. Towards the end of the description his voice became a little uncertain.
“Err, it’s best if we don’t talk about the shoot when Eugène arrives.”
She had been told that he was arriving in the afternoon and that he was very special, a poet and a scholar, and that she was to call him Oom. Because although he was not a real uncle, he was the closest thing to one: her father’s oldest friend.
“Doesn’t Oom Eugène like baboons, Father?”
There was an embarrassed silence for a short while; then her brother spoke.
“He doesn’t like us shooting them. Just don’t talk about it when he’s in the room.”
“How will I know when he’s in the room?” she asked.
“You will know,” was all they said.
And she did, they all did. Eugène Marais was not yet famous, but there was a presence about the quiet-spoken man that filled the room. She first thought that he had an extraordinary voice. Softer and more resounding than the rest, who yapped and growled like playful dogs. He had stillness and dark in his voice, like the sounds in an ebony piano when it is not played but just listens, upright, to other sounds in the room and murmurs them back—rich, dark, and sensuously hollow.
He was different from all the other grown-ups. When he spoke to Cyrena and the other children, he did not pretend to be interested, did not fake being a child in their company or an adult above them. She became aware years later that he had that rarest of gifts: engagement. Whatever he became interested in absorbed him totally during the time of his commitment to it. It was that strangeness that made him close to children. He could talk to them with ease and share the wonder of their understanding. When he asked them a question, he meant it. It was easier than the chitchat of adults, where she thought she could hear him becoming a little lost.
She remembered how he had asked her to search for sight. It had been on the veranda of another of her father’s friends after a long lunch, where much of the conversation was about the possibility of new war in Europe. Marais had sickened of it and walked outside to smoke. She understood many years later that a previous war between the Boers and the English had left him saddened and damaged inside. The heat of the sun was waning on her face. She followed him, followed his tobacco smoke to the side of the house where all was quiet, away from noise of talk and the servants washing pans.
“Oom Eugène,” she said into the pink whiteness that described the boundary of her blindness in the quiet light. She heard him turn, the surprise in the swivelled dust of his footsteps.
“Cyrena?”
“Yes, Oom.”
He walked over to her and cautiously offered his warm bony hand.
“Come sit with me, child, you should not be wandering about, away from the others, there might be snakes here.”
She held his hand tighter and he guided her to the trunk of a fallen tree nearby. They sat quietly for a while enjoying the light breezes of evening that guided in the difference of birds. Above them, she heard the swallows carve the brilliant air.
“Do you like it here, Cyrena?”
“I love the sounds of the bush, the way it touches and runs away and then comes back again from afar.”
“Little one, you are a poet.”
“That’s what they call you, Oom!”
It became quiet again while the man looked at his hands and ran one of them through his thin hair.
“What is a poet?” she asked.
The quiet became louder and the distant pots and pans being washed somewhere inside the house sounded important.
“It is somebody who sees our life in a different way,” he said.
“But I can’t see anything,” she answered.
“You see it in your soul, not in your eyes,” he said, “and through your other senses.”
“I don’t really understand see, but I know I don’t have it,” she said carefully.
“What do you think see is, Cyrena?”
Nobody had ever asked that question before, and it was hard to hold it in her head. But she trusted her father’s friend more and more.
“I think it must be like my head touching things, becoming happy and sad like my ears do when music and other sounds get inside them.”
“Well said, Cyrena, you understand much of this invisible world,” Oom Eugène said, with great happiness in his voice. “Many people with sight see only the surface of things, it’s all they want to see. I think you have the gift of imagination, which makes some of us question the interior of things.”
“What, like the interior of the baboons? I heard Joshua say he wanted to keep some of their innards—he meant interiors, I think.”
Then she remembered that she must not speak about these things with him.
“Did they take you on the shoot with them?”
Cyrena did not know what to say; she had broken the only rule she had been given. He saw her drastic change of expression.
“Did they tell you not to speak to me about it?”
She stared hard at the ground and felt a stone growing in her throat.
“It’s all right, my dear, I am not upset, you’ve done nothing wrong.”
She strained her senses to find out if this was true.
“I don’t hunt anymore. I spend my time living close to the animals. I think they have more to teach alive.”
“Do baboons have imaginations?” She started up again.
“I think not, my dear, only us humans are cursed with that splendid gift.”
She ignored his paradox, which sounded like a mistake to her, and pressed on.
“So that’s why animals can’t see with their souls, because they don’t have them, the pastor told us that.”
She heard the discomfort of his movement and the distance between his next words.
“The church is not always right in the wisdom of its proclamations.”
She did not understand “proclamations” and said so.
“Well then, in all the things it tells us are true,” he said a little breathlessly.
“So you think they might have souls but no imaginations?”
Again he shifted. “They are lower animals than us, is what I meant.”
“But that’s what the pastor says.”
Oom Eugène stood up and moved about. When he spoke again he was facing away from her.
“I think you can have a soul without an imagination.” These words were very slow, as if congealed in his mouth, without spit or water. “Shall we go and find out what the others are doing?”
He put his hand close to hers so that she could find it, and then she knew that their conversation was over, he had moved on to something else. She found his hand and also understood that he really knew where she was. Most people grabbed at her from out of the casual comfort of their own direction. Making her jump or flinch against the abrupt interaction. He had given his hand to be found and the difference was overwhelming. It was the same as his questions and answers. She held it with firm gratitude and began to weld a friendship.
The next day she was with him again in the shade of the backyard tree.
“Tell me, Cyrena, again what you think about seeing,” he said.
He smelt funny today, a strange lingering heavy rub about him.
“I don’t think about it, but sometimes I think that it thinks about me,” she said.
“Child, you are a wonder.”
“Why?”
“Because you see the world the right way around.”
“Which way around?” she said, perplexed. Her small brow furrowed.
“The way that you know about the interiors, the innards of understanding. Your way of seeing things is so clear, it’s a miraculous gift.”
“Like in the Bible?”
“No, not like that at all.” He sounded as if he had just nibbled a grumpy seed.
“But they say you are like that, like in the Bible.”
“Whatever do you mean, child?” Adultness had taken him over.
“They call you a miracle worker. The doctor of miracles.”
“Oh, that,” he said in a dismissive way, “that’s just a job I did once.”
“Making miracles?”
“A lady got sick, sick in the heart, and it made her head tell her legs that they did not work. So for fifteen years she never walked. Had to be pushed around in a wheelbarrow. Imagine that.”
“How did the miracle fix her?” asked Cyrena, moving forward.
“Well, I put her to sleep a little bit each day, and then one day while she was deeply asleep I told her that she could walk again. I then woke her up and she could.”
“So you are the miracle?”
Marais said nothing. After a while Cyrena said, “Can you put me to sleep and make my eyes work?”
He hadn’t seen this question coming and answered it with a speed that sounded like harshness. “No, it’s different.”
“Because it’s eyes, not legs? Jesus did miracles with all kinds of sick people. The blind and the lame, they were called. Some had caught the Travail.”
Marais’s face perked into attention. “The what?” he said.
“The Travail. It’s a kind of sickness that poor catch from the world, a bit like the TB. I think.”
“Out of the mouths of babes.” Marais chuckled with glee.
“I am not a baby,” snapped Cyrena.
Marais suppressed his mirth. “No, you are not. You are a wise woman. An old soul.”
She thought he was being cruel calling her a baby and now an old woman. She no longer wanted to talk, he was laughing at her. He was just like the others after all. She shrank away from him into her private dark.
“Cyrena?”
She ignored the miracle worker, pretending to be deaf.
“Cyrena, I was serious. It’s a way of saying that some people are born with more knowledge than others. That they come into this world already knowing important things.”
This made her open her ears.
“Some people think that they might have lived before, here or in some other place. That they see this time through the understanding of another.”
“Do you mean because I was adopted? I know all about that, Papa explained it.”
“No, child, I don’t mean that.”
“Did you know I was adopted, Oom Eugène?”
“Yes, Cyrena, I helped your father with it.”
“It’s a kind of secret to most people.”
“It’s easier that way,” he said, and then steered the conversation back to his previous questions. “Do you think that sometimes you might have memories from another place, see things from a different time?”
“But I don’t see anything,” she said flatly.
“We could try talking about that.”
“We are.”
“No, I mean can I ask you when you are asleep?”
“Like the lady with the forgotten legs?”
“Yes, I will put you to sleep like her. It’s a way I learned when I was studying medicine in London. It’s a way where you go to sleep but still talk to me.”
“When I am in bed in the dark?”
“No, child, here and now.”
“Will it hurt?” she said, shading her closed eyes with her hand so that she could hear his face more clearly.
Marais smiled. “No, not at all, why should it hurt? Sleeping doesn’t hurt. Not for you anyway.”
“You said medicine, and medicine always hurts.”
Marais laughed again, quieter this time, and moved closer to her. “I promise you that nothing will hurt, little one, and that you will enjoy the magic of this.”
“It sounds funny,” she said.
“Your poppa asked me to ask you to try the magic. So what do you think?”
While she thought about it, the birds in the trees became interested, and some of them watched and made small comments.
“Yes please, Oom, I want to try the magic.”
“Very well,” he said in a jaunty manner. “May I touch your head for a moment?”
She nodded and he put one of his hands across her forehead; it felt cool and gave her more shade to think in. His other hand held hers.
“I want you to imagine you are in your room lying down by the open window. It’s raining outside and you can hear the water dropping on the leaves and the roof of the house. Very gradually the sound will fade as you become more tired and soon the rain will sound a long way off. Soon. Soon.”
Cyrena’s breathing changed and she slumped slightly.
“It’s far, far off now, and you are in a warm, cosy sleep.”
Now all the birds were quiet.
“Tell what is inside you, what story lives there.”
Cyrena instantly began to talk. “It’s a tall sky in a closed room with everybody sleeping next door.”
“Is it light or dark there?” he carefully asked.
For a moment she looked like she did not understand the question.
“Do you know what light and dark are?”
The corners of her mouth twitched. “Of course, dark is the inside, the deepness. Light is the outside, shifting, the forever. Now it’s sort of in between, as if the shell of me lets them in and out.”
“Very well, Cyrena. This is what sighted people call transparent.”
“Glass is transparent,” she said eagerly.
“That’s true. How did you know about glass?”
“I broke one and Mother said not to move until she found all the pieces, and they were difficult to find because they were transparent. She explained that it was like invisible, which is like not being there.”
“Did any of this make any sense to you?”
“No, but I do know that glass is different because it’s colder and quicker than the other cups.”
Marais shifted and came closer to her. She was thinking hard where she was supposed to be dreaming and he was a little worried about her expression of concentration. He had never seen it before in a hypnotised subject.
“I think I can understand ‘sight’ now,” she announced.
“Tell me, child,” he said softly.
“Sight is like part of the me shell, it lives between light and dark and keeps them separate. In most people it must be cold and hard, but in me it’s transparent. Which means that it makes things invisible and lets them pass through. Isn’t that right, Oom Eugène?”
Marais was mesmerised and just stared at the child, who had opened her eyes on speaking his name. He stared through her with her wisdom ringing in his ears.
“Oom Eugène,” she said into a space that he had never conceived of. “Oom Eugène?” Fear had entered her voice and her remarkable eyes moved as if searching for him, but why? Why did those defunct beautiful orbs attempt to catch his trace?
“Yes, Cyrena, I am here.”
Her face softened, the eyes resting on him before the lids closed. In that moment he felt them touch him, as if an infinitesimal pressure had emanated from them in a physical ray onto the surface of his being, his position in the world being held and defined by the beam of her tangible sightless gaze. It jolted his concentration and he felt his control of the session slip.
“Cyrena, can you hear the rain? It’s getting closer again.”
“Yes.”
“It’s coming towards your window and pattering on the leaves outside.”
“Yes, I can hear it.”
“Soon it will wake you from your refreshing sleep, soon, soon…Now you are wide awake.”
Nothing happened, there was no change in her position and she said nothing.
“Cyrena, are you awake?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think I just saw something.”
This had never happened before. All of his “subjects” had responded instantly to his suggested commands. Unease had entered their session.
“Cyrena, it’s time for you to wake up, the rain is on the roof. Can you hear it?”
She did not answer but turned her head sharply to the right and opened her eyes again and strained them towards the tree full of silent birds. Marais was trying to hold down the anxiety that was welling up inside him.
“Cyrena, close your eyes and sit back as you were before.”
“I think I can see something,” she said with curious dispassion.
Was this possible, he asked himself. Had the hypnosis unlocked her vision? Undone some knotted causeway in her bright mind? Was it possible?
Cyrena had been born blind, and that was the least of her tragedies when her father found her. Her malnutrition and exposure were as easily soothed as her lack of social awareness. The Lohrs’ wealth, love, and commitment shaped her back into normality before her first words came. But the blindness remained, seeded deep in her infant soul and body. The nature of the malady had never been accurately diagnosed, even though all the family’s riches and influences had exposed it to some of the best specialists in Europe. There had been wildly disparate and disappointing opinions about the cause of the problem and very little solid evidence to form the basis of a cure. One of her father’s and Marais’s old friends from London had suggested surgery. But the proposed operation sounded vague and exploratory, and Lohr had no intention of letting his precious daughter undergo the hazards of anaesthetics and infection without the balance of cure and recovery being heavily weighted on their side.
“Cyrena, what can you see?”
“I think it’s sight, but I don’t know, Oom.”
“Describe it to me.”
He knew he should not be going in this direction; he should be fiercely trawling her back into full consciousness.
“I think it’s the invisible living in that tree, where the birds are quiet.”
“What?” Marais barely said.
“The invisible and it’s coming closer.”
She lifted her arm and moved her flat hand in a circle above her head, as if describing a halo. The obscure gesture galvanised the gently spoken man. A cold chill ran through the warmth of the day and hid itself in his blood.
“Close your eyes, Cyrena. Close your eyes.”
“But, Oom, it’s coming.”
“No buts, Cyrena, close your eyes now, it’s the rain that is coming closer.”
“But the sight.”
“No buts, close your eyes.”
The cold in his blood had strengthened into a furious ice, so that now his muscles copied it and his slender body knotted into the purpose of pulling her back.
“The rain is getting closer, you are in your tall room with all your people sleeping next door. You are home and the rain is getting closer, do you hear it?”
After a pause, which seemed to span an eternity, she turned her head back towards him and closed her eyes.
“Yes, Oom, I hear it.”
“It’s getting closer and you are waking up.”
“Yes, Oom.”
“Now you are awake.”
Her eyelids opened and her face set into a beaming smile. The weight and tension fell from his bones like a suit of rusted armour. She looked straight at him and her radiance told him all was well. Her sightless eyes gleamed in anticipation.
“When are we going to do the magic?” she asked.
The next morning Cyrena wanted to talk more to him about the “magic” of the day before, but there were so many people at the breakfast table it was difficult to attract his concentrated attention. Later, before he left, she spoke to him for a few minutes, but he seemed distracted, as if he were already travelling.
“You said I talked in my sleep.”
“Yes, Cyrena.”
“Tell me again what I said, the bit about the tree.”
She heard him fiddle with the catch of his suitcase, heard its weight scuffle the planks of the wooden veranda. He seemed to be taking too long to answer, as if he forgotten the question or was distracted by something else. She started to ask again and he began speaking.
“You talked about something in the tree, something that you thought you could see.” His mouth sounded dry.
“Did I say see?”
“In a way, yes, Cyrena.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes and then Marais spoke. “You said you saw the invisible.”
“Yes, I think I did, but not with my eyes, I saw it inside my head.”
“And you made a strange movement.”
“You said I touched my head.”
“Not exactly.” He sounded tired. “You held your hand out flat and moved it over your head.”
“Like this,” said Cyrena, lifting her arm and waving her hand in a boneless kind of way.
“Not exactly. May I take your hand and show you?”
She grinned and nodded approval. Marais stepped forward and took her hand, unfolding it gently, and rotated it in the circular motion that he had seen before. He then let go and stepped back while she continued.
“Feels funny,” she said, the grin vanishing from her confused face. “Like I am wearing a halo.”
He said nothing. They were interrupted by the car that was to take him away pulling into the dusty yard. Marais spoke a few words to the driver and put his suitcase on the backseat before returning to Cyrena, who had stopped making the movement.
“I have to go now.”
“Yes, I know.”
“If you dream the answer will you write it down and send it to me in Waterberg?”
“Yes, Oom.”
“Write to me about anything, stay in touch, especially about the invisible,” he prompted.
“It’s gone now, I used the lemon juice.”
“Lemon juice, what lemon juice?”
“It’s something I heard my brother and his friends say.”
Marais was looking at her the way he did yesterday and she could feel it.
“They said it about the invisible, so I did it. I put the lemon juice in my eyes and then looked at the sun to make them hot, and then the invisible was gone. But I won’t do it again, it hurt.”
“Yes, I think you’d better not,” said Marais as he walked to the car, opened the door, and joined his case on the backseat. He was laughing as he waved goodbye.
That had been so many years ago, when she was a child. Only Christmas cards and formal family notes had passed between them through the years of her growth into maturity.