Two things, then, in the space of an hour: the news, long dreaded, and this reconnaissance, this other annunciation. The first of the carrion birds, prompt, unerring. How long can I fend them off? The scavengers of Cape Town, whose number never dwindles. Who go bare and feel no cold. Who sleep outdoors and do not sicken. Who starve and do not waste. Warmed from within by alcohol. The contagions and infections in their blood consumed in liquid flame. Cleaners-up after the feast. Flies, dry-winged, glazen-eyed, pitiless. My heirs.
Curren relates the news of her death to the discovery of Vercueil sleeping in a cardboard shanty in her yard. This occurs in the first scene of the novel and immediately filters Curren's fear of death and contemplation of her mortality through her class perspective. She immediately resorts to metaphor to describe Vercueil, a nomad, a person without shelter, so distant from her experience that she must view him as something other than human—a vulture, a fly. But she also positions herself among them, naming them, ironically, as her "heirs."
Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted.
Curren refers to the white, middle- and upper-class youth of South Africa. This is the first instance of the larva-grub metaphor for white ignorance and historical innocence in the book, which is repeated and evolved throughout the book as Curren develops her own understanding of how her whiteness and class makes her complicit in upholding apartheid.
I think of prisoners standing on the brink of the trench into which their bodies will tumble. They plead with the firing squad, they weep, they joke, they offer bribes, they offer everything they possess: the rings off their fingers, the clothes off their backs. The soldiers laugh. For they will take it all anyway, and the gold from their teeth too.
Here Curren considers the ironic tragedy of death and her powerlessness in the face of it. Like the soldiers awaiting execution, Curren has nothing with which to bargain for her life, so she sees bargaining is futile.
I cannot tell the children what to do. ... It is all changed today. There are no more mothers and fathers.
This is a quote to which Curren often returns when she grapples with her understanding of the rising generation in South Africa, particularly young Black South Africans like Bheki and John, fighting and dying to end apartheid. Curren cannot conceive of a generation with no use for parents, a generation which must fight for their young lives, because she hasn't been oppressed by apartheid—in fact, she has benefitted from it.
He is not a rubbish person. ... There are no rubbish people. We are all people together.
This is Curren's response to Florence when Florence refers to Vercueil as "rubbish." Interestingly, Florence never refers to Vercueil as a "rubbish person," but simply as "rubbish," emphasizing the irony of Curren seizing and stretching this opportunity to lecture Florence with maxims about equality. Curren puts on airs of being offended on behalf of Vercueil for Florence's comments when Curren, herself, contributes to Florence's subjugation.
Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?
Here, during Curren's exchange with Florence on the supposed parentless state of the rising generation of Black South Africans, Curren considers Florence's prideful description of children as being "like iron." Curren lifts elements of her explication from Hesiod, being a classicist. She doesn't yet see how she is of the age of iron, too.
Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside. Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips, dazed by the flood of light.
Here, Curren introduces the metaphor of the crab, and her cancer as a bone-eating crab that has entered her. She links this metaphor to the idea that her childhood, her whole life, as it is depicted in the picture of her and her family in their meticulously landscaped garden, is a superficial simulation that willfully ignores the oppression to which it contributes, upon which it thrives.
Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?
Curren makes this remark in reference to a woman on the street, straining to hear her from her car, while Curren struggles through a coughing fit while carrying her groceries home. Curren considers the ugliness of the woman briefly stopping to ask her if she is okay with no real concern. Curren then considers how she has grown uglier as the disease progresses. This also comes right after the introduction of the hammering cough, which signifies the point at which her disease begins "showing through" the container of her body.
I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence's room, too, with its one window and one door and no other way out.
Curren describes to her daughter the ways in which Bheki and John stay with her, these children she has seen die before her eyes, and how even John, whom she never liked or trusted, haunts her constantly.
A recreation area, you call it on the back of the photograph. The lake tamed, the forest tamed, renamed.
Here, Curren refers to a photograph her daughter sent her of her two grandchildren swimming in a lake in the U.S. The children wear orange floatation "wings," and Curren remarks on how their sheltered lives are so artificial, they can hardly be called lives at all. They are enactments of life—the lake, tamed, is only a symbol of a lake. It contains none of a real lake's threat of drowning. Here, Curren criticizes her daughter for sheltering her children and by extension, for leaving South Africa behind.
