The Skin Collector

By Chris Karsten

Abel still lives on the smallholding outside Johannesburg, where he spent most of his life with his disturbed mother. Here he harvests and treats the skins of small animals which he trades for the authentic African and South American masks and tsantsas sold in his gallery in the city. For his fiftieth birthday he has special plans. He wants a new face for himself, one for special occasions. And he is on the lookout for specific tattoos for the covers of his Cosmic Journals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau
• Release date: Sep 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780798158541

Chris Karsten

Karsten is ’n bekroonde skrywer en voormalige joernalis wat in Kanada woon. ​Koms van die motman​ is die derde in die nuwe Ella Neser-reeks. Die voriges sluit in Die dood van ’n goeie vrou en Die verdwyning van Billy Katz. Albei romans is benoem vir die ATKV-prys vir die beste spanningsroman, en Billy Katz ook vir die ATKV-prys vir die beste roman.

Book preview

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1

Shaved, his skin tingling, Abel studied his face in the mirror: the despised features, the unfinished bungling of a clumsy sculptor who had abandoned his creation.

Now, the image in the mirror revealed the hand that had guided the razor, and sometimes plied a scalpel, the fingers stroking the forehead, the cheeks, the chin, and the bridge of the flat nose. Like the bow of a violin producing sounds from the strings, the touch of the fingers unleashed tones of mockery and scorn and rejection.

He leaned closer to the mirror.

Was that a drop of moisture escaping from the inner corner of the lazy eye?

In the reflection, the pad of a forefinger mopped it up and delivered it to the tip of the tongue.

It tasted salty. A tear, he thought wearily. He had grown up suspicious of the world; surely, a tear was fitting.

His mother, the only one to be trusted, had encouraged him since childhood to find comfort in solitude, and in her. In her presence he could be himself. With her there was no need to retreat into corners and shadows, no need to hide from the gaze of people; with her he did not have to wear a mask of geniality.

A twitch appeared at a corner of the mouth. Not a smile, but a grimace; Abel rarely smiled. Still, in a month’s time it would be his birthday, and he was going to spoil himself with a very special treat: a new face.

It was no impulsive decision; he had been considering it for a long time.

In front of the mirror, he felt excitement stirring deep inside him, as if he were about to float away in a weightless atmosphere.

Of course, he thought with a whimsical blink of his lazy eye, he would have to consult with his mother first. As was customary in all big decisions, her blessing was required. But he was convinced that she would approve, even be pleased by his intentions. She would understand his need for an exciting interlude with a new face.

Not necessarily the face of a man – preferably not, in fact. For a special occasion, a special mood, he would like to wear a pretty face.

Yes, Abel thought, slightly light-headed. For his new look he craved the perfect face of a young woman, delicate and unspoiled, the skin tender as softly tanned virgin parchment as he slipped her face over his own.

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2

As usual, Mia took great care of her appearance, even for a casual Saturday morning stroll in a shopping mall. She knew she was sexy, in a graceful and seductive manner, and liked to be admired, especially by men. Sauntering in the general direction of the boutique selling Gucci blouses and Zanotti sandals, she enjoyed the appreciative glances. Slowly making her way, she stopped for a cup of tea, paged through a décor magazine, listened to a CD track, tried on an elegant pair of sunglasses, caressed the texture of a handwoven rug from Turkmenistan.

She walked past the display window of a gallery, then stopped and retreated a couple of steps and stared at the motley collection of macabre faces inside.

She was familiar with the ethnic African masks sold by roadside hawkers, along with soapstone figurines, wooden animal statuettes, miniature tin windmills, brightly coloured bead trinkets, leather, and pottery goods. But this was not just another curio shop with shelves crowded with useless souvenirs. It was, rather, a gallery of antiques. And that was what had caught her eye, what interested her. She entered.

The room was sparsely furnished, the atmosphere almost hallowed, with the soft sounds of a violin concerto, and a hint of musk in the air. In the centre of the room four or five square pedestals were arranged, each displaying a bizarre artefact, and from the walls the hollow eyes of dozens of masks stared at her, as if she had suddenly become the focus of a pagan tribe looking down on her, weighing her, mutely judging her.

In a corner, as if hiding from all the eyes, the owner lurked behind the screen of a laptop on a table – yellowwood top and stinkwood legs, she noticed.

If you need help, let me know. His voice was just a whisper, barely audible above the music.

She caught his gaze furtively following her, as if he had selected her from among his other patrons for special consideration. She was used to the gawking of men and had cultivated a detached, almost aristocratic bearing. The hair in a low chignon accentuated her long, slim neck and gave the impression of a slender swan drifting on water past the masks, pausing, unruffled, to read a brief description, when one caught her attention:

African masks, traced back to the early Stone Age, are of great ceremonial, cultural and religious significance. A mask is the wearer’s link to ancestral spirits and the instrument by which he perpetuates the chronicles of his ancestors. This Yohure, of Tweneboa wood, polished and with metal inlay, is worn in the Côte d’Ivoire during a dance for the dead, to console members of the tribe on the death of one of them. Dimensions: length 41,91cm, width 20,32cm; weight 0,9kg.

Peering at her watch, she realised she was spending too much time in the gallery. But the Guccis and Zanottis were going nowhere. She was an expert on antique furniture, silverware, ceramics, and glassware. These relics were not exactly to her taste, but still, she was mesmerised by the faces on the wall and the weird artefacts on the pedestals: mummified scalps, blackened but complete with hair and facial features, the grotesque trophies of headhunters in Papua New Guinea, the Congo and the forests of the Amazon.

The arch of her neck was accentuated as she leaned forward:

Tsantsa; Jívaro-Shuar, circa 1900.

The Jívaro-Shuar, who lived in the Andes between Ecuador and Peru, harvested the tsantsa (shrunken head) of an enemy in a religious rite to demonstrate to family spirits that an injustice in the close family culture of the Jívaro-Shuar had been rectified by means of bloody revenge.

Boys were coached from a young age in the rites related to family feuds with other tribal clans, sometimes lasting many decades. From the age of eight, the boys accompanied the headhunters of their household in order to gain practical experience in punitive expeditions. These teachings were maintained until the boys reached adulthood and the tribal leaders were satisfied that the young men had a proper understanding of their responsibilities towards their family.

The guardian of these alien faces got up from behind his table. Short of stature, he managed to look even smaller, his steps hesitant, as if he felt ill at ease among people. He stopped on the perimeter of an inquisitive group surrounding the shrunken heads. His Adam’s apple bouncing, he began to speak in a soft monotone, without cadence or inflection, his voice matter-of-fact, almost mundane.

To harvest a scalp as a trophy the kakáram severs the head from the body while holding it by the hair. The decapitation takes the experienced leader of a tribal family no more than a few minutes.

Standing slightly apart, she studied the Jívaro face and listened to the voice addressing the cluster of engrossed on-lookers around the pedestal.

"The process of separating the entire scalp, face intact, from the skull, lasts fifteen minutes. It is done by making incisions on either side just below the ears, cutting backward towards the base of the neck. The loose flap of skin at the back is then pulled up by the hair to the crown of the head, enabling the blade to separate the cartilaginous tissue of the nose and ears from the skull, while the skin is peeled from the face. The eyes are removed and the skull is discarded.

"Still held by the hair, the scalp is then immersed in boiling water to the accompaniment of ritual chanting by all the family members. Twenty minutes later, the saturated skin is attached to the point of a spear and allowed to dry.

At daybreak the following morning the lips and eyelids are sewn shut using tailors’ darts, and the skin is further dried by heating sand under a fire and pouring it through the neck opening, as if into a pouch. The sand is tamped down with the fists to restore the shape of the skull. Then a smooth flat stone is heated in the fire and the outer layer of the skin is ironed flat over large banana leaves until it has a dry, blackened appearance. Finally the hair is combed out.

He turned away, allowing them to absorb the explanation.

Captivated by the face of an unlucky victim of a tribal feud in the Andes, she was startled when he spoke behind her, See how noticeable the darts still are. Such fine craftsmanship. Do you sew?

He was so close that she could feel his warm, moist breath on her bare shoulder. She turned, was forced to look down at his face, at the tongue that seemed too big for his small mouth when he spoke.

No, I don’t sew, she said. Her mother was fond of embroidery, but she did not mention that.

Mia Vermooten had also cultivated a habit, not entirely as a result of her height, of looking down on people. It was an acquired mannerism, since she wasn’t born into a position of privilege; she was delivered under the tin roof of a railway house in the humble village of Touws River.

Short and bulky, the gallery owner had to raise his moonface to her. She couldn’t fathom the expression of the clay-like features. Actually, no, not clay; the texture and colour reminded her of dough – a lump for a nose, a blob for a cheek, ridges for eyebrows, too little left for the chin; everything tacked on in a slapdash manner, stuck on as if the moulding still had to be done.

These relics are museum quality. Unique, said the man on whom she was looking down.

Very weird, she said.

What about a shrunken head for your lounge? A tsantsa as an investment and conversation piece?

It gives me the creeps.

The tsantsa has remarkable symbolism.

I like beautiful things, you know, flowing lines and good proportions, said Mia.

The only good thing about Touws River, she would volunteer if asked about her roots, was that it was situated next to the N1 freeway, between Cape Town and Johannesburg. She had bade farewell to her family before she left, and had not looked in the rear-view mirror again as she’d headed north.

She stepped away from the man, who had a rosy spot high on each cheek, as if he carefully applied blusher every morning to a complexion seldom exposed to the sun. She was an expert at estimating the age of an object, even of people, had undergone intensive training and had refined the skill, but his age was difficult to appraise. Fifty perhaps, if she took into account the wrinkles and wear and tear on his face, the scrubby hair, the spots on the back of his broad hands, the bulging belly straining against the shirt and braces. The gallery owner looked like a rotund dwarf.

What about a mask, then? he asked.

Perhaps, she said.

Historically, masks have played an important role in many cultures, he said. Europeans wore masks at their eighteenth-century balls, and ancient Greek actors wore them in their plays. The Chinese still don them in traditional celebrations, as do African tribes at cultural occasions and feasts, like thanksgiving for good rain and harvests, and as homage to the dead …

She drifted toward a whitish mask with a shock of hair like dreadlocks. Perhaps one like this after all, displayed on a wall in her lounge as conversation piece for party guests?

He followed her. The shape and decoration of each mask has a specific purpose. This Punu from Gabon represents feminine beauty, though only men are allowed to wear it.

He was, she thought, like an old dog begging for a pat on the head. She tended to have that effect on men, so she allowed him to continue.

The ridge on either side of the nose, reaching towards the ears, the diamond-shaped incisions on the forehead, all serve as adornment. Do you like jewellery? Yes, I see you like to decorate your body.

The white face …

Of rare white ochre, a symbol of purity. Do you like the Punu?

But the dreadlocks …

The hair is a sign of wealth and status.

I’ll think about the Punu.

The Punu is not for sale. Perhaps a Ngil? Also white-faced, but of kaolin, not ochre.

She liked the symbolism of status and purity. But then she glanced past him and his masks to the cabinet in the corner, next to the yellowwood table.

That cabinet, the tallboy?

He was visibly disappointed at her apparent lack of enthusiasm for his artefacts.

My mother’s.

Not masks and scalps, but furniture – that’s what I’m actually interested in, she said, running her fingers over the top of the table, the flavescent wood smooth and glossy as creamy butter.

He watched her fingers intently, then looked up at her face. Our house is full of old pieces.

Would your mother consider selling some of them?

She’s very attached to her things.

We’re antique dealers. We pay top prices for quality.

These masks and tsantsas are top quality antiques.

Our range is more … well, gentler on the eye.

But dead, he said. Furniture doesn’t speak to you like the masks and tsantsas do; it doesn’t tell a story. In the corners of his mouth white flecks of saliva had collected.

Will you ask your mother?

He stuck out his hand. I’m Mr Lotz.

The fingers, like short, cold sausages, were well groomed, the nails clean and trimmed.

Would you mind, Mr Lotz, if I took a closer look at the tallboy? It’s an exceptional piece.

He pulled open the drawers, three at the top, with a door below. Inside, she noticed literature on masks – Rituals, Masks and Sacrifices, Idia, Queen Mother, The Jívaro Head Shrinkers; on astronomy – The Big Bang, Galaxies and Constellations, Ptolemy’s Almagest; and brochures on telescopes – Guide to Telescopes for Amateur Astronomers, Your Own Observatory in Ten Easy Steps.

I like this tallboy. A 1920s Belweb, I’d guess, she said. If you’d like to sell it.

I’ll have to discuss it with my mother first. She has other, better pieces.

Could I see them?

Don’t sound too anxious, she knew, or the prices would escalate. But if the tallboy was an indication, a taste of what was waiting …

I’ll ask her, Mr Lotz said again, studying her, one eye blinking out of sync with the other.

We pay cash.

What about a mask?

The tallboy, Mr Lotz, I want it for myself. For my lounge. I have just the right spot for it. Here’s my card.

Mia Vermooten. Appraiser. Antiques, he read out loud. I’ll phone you when I’ve spoken to my mother. He raised his eyes to two framed photographs on top of the tallboy. Actually the tallboy was my late grandmother’s.

She pointed at the one with the face of a grimlooking woman with a lipless mouth and stony stare, her greyish hair in an old-fashioned bun.

Is that her, your granny?

No, that’s my mother.

She studied the second photograph of two women and a boy of about fourteen or fifteen.

Yes, I see. There’s your mother again?

But younger. And me, with my mother and grandma.

Mommy’s boy, thought Mia. And no smiles, as if the stoic trio shared a deep, miserable secret.

You have good skin, he said from behind her shoulder.

She turned to face him. Excuse me?

The texture, he said. Smooth as satin. You protect it from the sun, and you moisturise regularly. That’s good.

Skincare is important, she said, somewhat surprised by the turn the conversation had taken. He was appraising her now, she thought.

I have to go.

She took a last disapproving look at the faces on the pedestals as she left.

I’ll phone you, he called after her. At the door, she heard him mumble something behind her, like paw or pavo, something unintelligible.

She was in a hurry now, but satisfied. Mia suspected she might have incidentally stumbled on a treasure trove of old furniture. Tom Spottiswoode would be pleased – if only Mr Lotz could persuade his mother to part with some her antiques. Old people could become so attached to their stuff. Her own mother too. Mia found that kind of sentimentality something of an enigma, that people could allow old articles to gather dust without realising their monetary value. She hoped Mr Lotz and his frumpy old mother wouldn’t let her down. And she had been truthful about the tallboy; it was a beauty. She wanted it for herself.

She headed up the escalator, straight for the Gucci boutique. She’d wasted time on the masks and the parchment faces, but it had been worth it in the end. She hoped he would phone.

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3

The old house and shed were situated on a large plot of land. Behind the buildings were abandoned vegetable patches, the irrigation ditches clogged up after years of disuse, weeds rampant where lush vegetables once grew. Beyond the fence the veld began, and in the distance was the audible noise of traffic on the R82, heading for Johannesburg. The spacious shed had no doors and was built of cement blocks, unplastered and unpainted. Through corroded gaps in the corrugated-iron roof, dusty rays of sunlight speckled the roofs of two old vehicles and the rust-encrusted implements and tools that were once used in the vegetable gardens. In a corner of the shed was a connecting door to a storeroom.

The yard and the buildings, like the surrounding neighbourhood, had an aura of neglect, decay, and despair.

From the storeroom, Abel was carrying out garden tools – a spade, a fork, a rake, an axe, a saw – dumping them onto a pile of rubbish in the shed. He was removing any object from the storeroom that could be used as a weapon or cause injury.

Inside the storeroom, flimsy wooden shelves against a wall held tins, bottles and plastic containers filled with weed killers and pesticides long past their expiry dates. Next to the antifreeze for his bakkie and car, were empty brandy bottles, the labels faded and illegible. He remembered the brand from long ago, though; the almost-forgotten odour of the brandy now offending his nostrils again as he carried the dusty bottles out of the storeroom, his fingers round the necks as if they were contaminated. Then he dragged a heavy wooden toolbox across the floor. In it were claw hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, trowels, a meat cleaver. Dust rose up from the floor and swirled in the mottled light as he pulled it outside.

He breathed heavily with the effort and surveyed the storeroom, his gaze lingering on the rat and mouse droppings, and the mildew on the old mattress. He left the mattress. He also left the cardboard boxes, softened by rain leaking through the roof and filled with magazines, books and newspapers, all motheaten and covered with grime. He was aware of the content of the boxes: old newspapers with articles about the tragic death of a father and son, magazines for amateur astronomers, books about ethnic masks and the cultivation of vegetables and herbs, even a girlie magazine, the pages now soggy and mouldy and yellowed.

From the rafters hung dried-out strings of onions, garlic, and corn on the cob with brown beards and leaves and white and yellow kernels hard as stone.

He breathed in the musty, dust-filled air as if gathering strength for one last task, looking at the object on the topmost shelf. Balancing precariously on a box, he reached up, took it down carefully, and placed it on another box. He unfolded the plastic cover and unclasped the lid of the oblong black case. Despite the plastic, the contents were covered with a layer of dust. As he wiped the surface, the beautiful burgundy of the varnish emerged under his fingers.

His face expressionless, he studied the rare 1942 Van de Geest, the back made of flaming maple, the top of finely grained Canadian spruce, the F-holes reminiscent of a Guarneri, the immaculate scrolls of a master craftsman.

His head dropped slightly to one side, and now he could hear the singing sound as the violinist coaxed the beautiful melody from the strings with his bow. He stood there with the instrument in his hands and he listened to the pure tones flowing like liquid out through the door of the storeroom, over the quiet yard, over lush vegetable patches, and over the veld beyond, where the moles and the dassies, hares, and field rats stopped their burrowing and ferreting and scrabbling as the sounds reached them in the twilight.

The sounds faded away, and he closed the violin case, wrapped it in the plastic sheet again, and replaced it on the top shelf.

He shuffled to the small window with the shattered panes, shards of glass still embedded in the old, chipped putty in the steel frame. He picked up a square of cheap plywood and hammered the wooden board into the masonry with steel nails, sealing up the storeroom’s only window.

He took the hammer with him, flung it in the toolbox in the shed and locked the storeroom door with a padlock on the outside. He walked back to the kitchen of his house, about fifty metres from the shed – the only sound in the quiet yard, after the bustling and hammering, that of two pit bull terriers crushing the bones of small animals with their powerful jaws at their feeding spot in the shed.

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On a Saturday morning a week later Mia received the call, his masks and mummified heads and tallboy already relegated to that dark corner at the back of the mind where the debris of unattainable, and sometimes unpleasant, dreams was hoarded.

His voice was slightly hesitant, It’s me, Mr Lotz, of the …

The masks. I know, she said.

You can have it. My mother says if the price is right, you can have the tallboy.

What about the rest of the old furniture?

Come to the house and have a look. See if there’s something you like. She’s fed up with all the cleaning and dusting and polishing. Come and pick up the tallboy.

Now?

Yes. Today

And the rest? When can I –

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow? It’s Sunday.

Tomorrow afternoon, not too early. We always rest on a Sunday afternoon. Come at five, it’s the only time we have.

What about on a weekday, maybe Monday?

I work during the week. She wants me to be present. She depends on me.

In case she tried to con the old lady, Mia suspected.

Fine, give me directions.

She already had an appointment for lunchtime on Sunday. The day was wasted anyway, she might as well do the appraisal afterwards. Her appointment was in the Rainbow Tavern at the Southgate Mall. It would be a brief meeting, shouldn’t take more than about fifteen minutes. Afterwards she would get something to eat, drink a glass of wine, kill some time before driving to meet Mr Lotz and his mother.

Dorado Park, he said. The roads are bad, gravel roads, full of potholes. Do you know Dorado Park?

No, but I have an SUV and a GPS. I’m used to gravel roads; I’ve viewed period furniture in strange places, even on remote farms.

Don’t forget the money for the tallboy. Cash.

She found Speedy Mini Movers in the telephone directory. She could have phoned Tom Spottiswoode at the showroom. He would have sent a driver with a truck. But he’d want to know why the tallboy was being taken to her home; he’d want to know whether she was starting a private collection. He wouldn’t mind being disturbed on a Saturday morning, but he’d ask awkward questions when he came over tonight and saw the tallboy in her townhouse.

Her parties were well known, and her guests were never disappointed. An invitation to a soirée at her Rosebank townhouse was, as a rule, not declined. She would inform him tonight – while he was enjoying her party and admiring her curves and her taste in décor – about the find in the house of Mr Lotz’s old mother. Tom would be pleased, and he did not need to know the provenance of her new walnut tallboy, nearly a century old and worth a fortune.

On Saturday afternoon the tallboy was delivered, and she moved it around until she was satisfied with its position. On top, where Mr Lotz’s two family pictures had taken pride of place, she put a box made of gleaming rosewood, about the size of the shoebox containing her Zanotti sandals.

Her house, friends and lifestyle were light years removed from Touws River. That was how she preferred it. She liked the good life and the money and the freedom – in no particular order.

And when the sounds of merriment and the scraps of empty conversation reached her ears that evening, she considered herself lucky and happy.

Nice party, Tom Spottiswoode said, sneaking up to her beside the tallboy. But you’re not mingling.

Too close, as always, crowding her space.

I have a busy week ahead. Starting tomorrow.

He touched the tallboy with a manicured finger and said, A new acquisition, I see. Is this a Belweb?

She felt his body heat, anticipated the palm on her bum. I have appointments all week. Won’t be back before Friday.

He didn’t ask for, and she didn’t offer, any additional information. Driven by a fast buck, Tom Spottiswoode’s mantra was profit, but he preferred not to dirty his hands in the process. When he became a tad unsteady at a party, his focus shifted from profit to fornication.

The sweet herbal aroma of incense, potpourri, and cannabis indica permeated the air in the townhouse and she glanced at a woman with long nails and a short dress using a red Joker to divide white powder into lines on her glass tabletop. Tom Spottiswoode, with his gelled hair, was not unattractive, but Mia had boundaries: she refused to swap body fluids with colleagues, and firmly removed his hand from her backside.

She went to bed alone after the last guests had departed; a photograph of her mother on her nightstand the only reminder of Touws River.

On Sunday, she woke at ten, feeling particularly upbeat. She took care with her hair and make-up, put on earrings and a chain with a little gold cross around her neck, and a ring with small diamonds in the shape of a daisy on her middle finger. She was dressed comfortably but stylishly, her outfit suitable for a corrugated dirt road to appraise dusty old furniture, as well as for lunch in a restaurant. Designer jeans and her new Gucci silk blouse, worn without a bra. She was still young, not yet thirty, but she suspected it was one of the less than perfect genes of the twenty-three she had inherited from her mother that had caused her boobs to droop prematurely. However, thanks to a mastopexy, she seldom wore a bra nowadays, and at the age of forty-five she planned to have them lifted again. That was the upside of having lots of money and she was happy to spoil herself. Also, she had already decided that no infant would ever have the privilege of tugging at her breast.

She packed a bag with clothes for five days and then phoned her mother in Touws River. She called her mother every Sunday morning, giving her enough time for chitchat after the church service and the short walk home.

At the second ring, her mother answered promptly, Is that you, Mia my love?

That was how her mother answered the phone every Sunday morning.

Yes, Ma, it’s me. How is the chest? What did the doctor say?

The lamentations were routine too: croup in the chest, arthritis in the hip, a corn on the cushion of the big toe. Then the conversation would, predictably, turn to Bertie, promoted to assistant manager (stock feed) at the co-op, married to Magda, a primary school teacher, with three offspring, the apples of Granny Trudy’s eye. Mia seldom phoned her brother. Only on birthdays. She had little to say to Bertie, and he to her. There was no discord, or anything unpleasant like that. They had merely grown apart since she hit the N1 North and settled on another planet, galaxies away from small-town Touws River, burial place of old steam locomotives and her father.

The noise of the shunting trains still visited her in nightmares: the jangling of the couplings, the hoarse whistling and puffing of steam released from boilers like the death rattles of alien creatures.

In the evenings, passing trains shaking and rattling their little railway house, her father would reminisce, unperturbed – ad nauseam, at least to her – about a long-forgotten war, about joiners and cowards who had surrendered to the British Tommies, about the way the Cape Colony had betrayed the Boers fighting against overwhelming odds. That was the thing about old people, she thought: they lived in the past; they clung to old furniture and old stories.

The conversation with her mother ended after half an hour. She activated the alarm and took her travel bag out to her new Toyota RAV for the first of her Sundayafternoon appointments.

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5

The skins had been stretched on square wooden frames, the flayed hides of dassies and moles, rats and cats. Abel had followed a tried and tested procedure to flesh, depilate, and tan his pelts. He’d been given the recipe long ago by his e-mail friend in Belgium, a maker and preparer of vellum, obtained from the tender skins of unborn calves and lambs, known as virgin parchment. But his Belgian friend called it by its German name: Jungfernpergament. Jungfern, he explained, not without a touch of facetiousness, referred to a virgin, and Jungfernhäutschen to the hymen of a virgin. But that was purely incidental, his friend from Bruges had said in an e-mail.

Abel had bolted a workbench – made of simple wooden slats, like those used for a garden deck – to the floor and a wall of his workroom next to the kitchen. The bench, covered with plastic sheeting, resembled a single bed on legs, not too high. A strong light bulb in an open shade was suspended over the bench to provide sufficient light for the delicate procedures with his scalpel.

At the foot of the bench, he had installed a washbasin with cold running water, simply rerouted from the kitchen using a length of black plastic pipe. At the head was a chest of drawers containing his instruments: pincettes, surgical needles, awls, scalpels with blades of various sizes and grades, a butcher’s knife of solid steel, used for cutting through cartilage, manufactured by J. Russell & Co., Green River Works in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts. The surgical forceps, one pair curved and one straight, could sever the legs and neck of a tortoise, the dealer in taxidermy instruments had boasted. The scissors, of different shapes and sizes, were used to cut thinner bone, muscle, and sinew. The serrated tanning knife was perfect for scraping tissue from dried skins, and the smooth one suitable for green skins, still wet and fresh.

In a corner was a wardrobe, the doorpanels removed and replaced with wire mesh. Inside were drying racks for his hides and pelts after they’d been removed from the frames. On the floor stood a variety of urns, flasks, pots, and buckets, made of glass, ceramic, and plastic, in which he mixed his tanning liquors and pickled his hides. A wall-mounted shelf contained bottles of cleaning agents and preservatives.

On this Sunday morning, Abel was working on the pelt of a hare he had shot three nights before. The hares and dassies came out of the veld to forage in the abandoned vegetable patches and were easy prey.