In the flannel petticoat in which I’d slept I sit as though carved in stone, my legs dangling down the side of the bed. Behind me, Dwadwa’s breathing is steady and soft . . . calm as a new-born babe’s. Some people’s cool! I am not one of those people. All night long I fretted, tossed and turned in my half-sleep, half-worried-out-of-my-mind state. Not my husband. His capacity for sleep is truly amazing. He says all that loading and off-loading of cargo onto and from the ships saps every ounce of his strength. As soon as he flops into bed, closes his eyes, he is immediately snatched into the sea of unknowing. I work as hard. But does that give me this huge appetite for sleep?
A sound hits my ears. Not loud, but still noise where, but a short moment before, deathlike silence reigned. The sound is muffled, but there. Suddenly, I knew.
That sound! That is what woke me up. The same sound. Yes, yes, that’s it. I could swear it is the sound of a car door being shut. Carefully. Very, very carefully. Stealthily?
Now I’m all ears. Waiting for another surreptitious, ever so slight clash . . . muffled . . . a car door closing. Will there be another, I wonder.
Mxolisi? By car? Thoughts of car-hijacking flood my mind. Heaven forbid! And those can turn nasty. But Mxolisi is not a bad boy. Not at all a bad boy. Just a young person taken up with this business of politics. As all the students have been these past twenty years or so.
Why, only two weeks ago, did he not risk his life saving a girl from a group of men who wanted to rape her?
I strain my ears, hoping to catch the slightest sound. Silence. In my mind’s eye, however, I see people approach the house. There, they climb over the low fence, avoiding the gate lest it creaks. I wait for the inevitable footfall. Who are they and what do they want? Could it be Mxolisi? Did he ever come home last night?
The only answer to my frantic questions is an eerie silence that blankets the pre-dawn air, pushing the walls of the house inward . . . inward . . . and ever inward. This is no longer the silence of before whatever noise hit my ear. This silence is fraught with all manner of possibility — bubbling with dark, shadowy happenings that force our eyes to scream and tear our ears. Happenings that will loosen some tongues, set them wagging for years to come, while others it will still . . . still as effectively as the tongues of izithunzela.
My heart is a witchdoctor’s drum. The silence is suffocating. Scary. The lull between the thunder-clap and the onslaught of hail.
GQWAA! GQWAA-GQWAA! BANG! CLANG-BANG! On door. On window. On wall. At once, the whole yard is alive and clamorous. Back and front. Torches shine through the bedroom window, accompanied by loud, unruly wraps — knuckles and sticks wielded with enthusiasm from the sound of it. I hear the same noise coming from the direction of the other rooms. The house is completely surrounded. More than the noise, however, it is the simultaneous nature of its occurrence, the intensity of the onslaught, that freezes the marrow in my bones.
Dwadwa leaps out of bed. He is naked as the day he was born. My husband does not believe in pyjamas. He detests underwear, calling the short pair of pants he is forced to wear beneath his long pants ‘women’s drawers’. If truth be known, the whole concept of clothing is anathema to his nature. ‘If God had wanted human beings clothed, he’d have given them fur or some other kind of cover as He did with animals,’ is his constant rider whenever the subject comes up. If it were not for the fact that in his job he often has to strip to the waist, I’m sure he would not bother wearing underpants.
Even as Dwadwa grabs his pants, which he’d thrown over a chair the previous night, and kicks his legs into them, Siziwe suddenly comes charging into the room. Next thing I know, there she is clambering right into the bed, into the space vacated by her father but a moment before. She is whimpering and shaking like a leaf blown about by a fierce south-easter gale.
I put my hand over her mouth, shake my head at her while, with my other hand, I pat her on the back. Pat her as though I were putting a little baby to sleep.
There is a fresh barrage from outside. Loud, gruff voices demand, ‘Open up! Open up!’ There is angry thudding and banging against the back door, as though someone were butting his shoulder against it with all his might. Pushing against it. Forcing the door open. Breaking in by force.
Years ago, there would have been no question in my mind that this was a police raid. However, with things what they are these days, what they have become, who can be sure? It is not unheard of that skollies, hooligans, common criminals or comrades come disguised as police. And, at times, it is hard to know which is worse. To be fried alive is a terrible thing and little solace can come from the knowledge that one dies at the hands of one’s own group, fighting for everybody’s freedom?
‘Who’s that?’ Dwadwa, who by now has his pants and a shirt on, calls out in the dark. At the sound of his voice, the commotion stops.
‘Police! Open up!
Is it the police? . . . At this time? A new fear stabs my heart. Mxolisi! Did he return last night? Has something happened to my child? In the back of my mind I know that the police wouldn’t come like this, in the middle of the night, to tell us about something happening to Mxolisi.
“Coming!’ my husband shouts back, in answer to the resumption of the clangorous raps, which are, if anything, more ferocious this time.
I reach for the box of matches under my pillow, strike a match, and light the candle. That is when I realize that I should put on a dress . . . that I am not dressed to have strange men’s eyes rake over my body.
In the frail and reluctant light of the candle, no one speaks. No one has words to say. However, there are questions galore. Questions. Frightful, frightening questions chase each other. In our eyes. Wide with fear and apprehension. But there are no answers there. Not in any of the eloquent eyes. Only questions.
Dwadwa turns on his heel and leaves the room. A second later, I hear him unbolt the kitchen door. Suddenly, there is a loud crash.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’ I hear Dwadwa’s angry shout. ‘Don’t you see that I’m opening the door? Why do you break my door?’ he bellows.
C-R-R-AA-A-CK! The sound of wood connecting with bone.
‘Uhh-huh!’
Footsteps. A horde of feet, marching, trampling over the wooden floor of the kitchen. Bold and angry footsteps enter the dining-room.
‘They’re going to kill us! Mama, they’re going to kill us!’ The nearer the footsteps come, the louder Siziwe screams. Her eyes are wild with fear.
‘Sshh!’ I say, bending over the bed and scooping her into my arms. ‘Sshhh!’ I wag a stern finger at her then put it on my pouted lips.
Clutching the blanket tightly around her, she nods. Several times rapidly, her head goes up and down. Her eyes are wider than the Sahara.
‘We said open up an hour ago!’ The voice booms as though coming through a loudspeaker; my heart stops; the walls of the house shiver. There is no answer from Dwadwa.
‘Why did you take such a long time? What’ah you trying to hide?’ Thunk! The sound of a boot connecting to but is quickly followed by the scraping of the floor as a chair or some other heavy object overturns.
Through the slightly open door, agitated beams dart back and forth, illumining the pitch black of the dining-room; flashes of lightning spearing an inky night. I want to scream, but there is a frog at the back of my throat.
I snatch the candlestick. The movement is abrupt and unplanned; it frightens the candle, upsets its tummy and it erupts, spewing molten lava which scalds the back of my hand. Fighting back the stinging tears, I bite my lower lip. Siziwe’s sharp intake of breath sounds like a sniff. I peer at her. Make my eyes hard, a sign that tells her Don’t Move! Then, holding the candlestick high, I make my way to the front room.
An army of policemen has taken the dining-room over. I say policemen, for even in the erratic and unevenly flashing light the glimmer and glitter of brass epaulettes is unmistakable. Enough of the men are in police uniform, although just as many are in plain clothes. What
a relief to see that our visitors are, indeed, the law.
However, swift on the steps of that relief came apprehension. Yes, these were police, but . . . what did that mean? The police are no security to us in Guguletu — swift comes the correction as I remember people killed by the police . . . including children. Mzamo. Zazi. The police even killed important people like Biko. Even important white people, sometimes. That’s what people say. Although we do not know the names of those white people, but we know that they too were killed.
Alarm tasted bitter in my mouth. What did the police want? And why so many of them? What did they want? And why this pre-dawn raid on our house?
The police were everywhere; but where was Dwadwa? In the forest of blue-clad legs, bumbling bodies and flashing torches, he seemed to have disappeared.
Meanwhile, my entrance seemed to have signalled an open invitation to the bedroom, the room I had just left. Unceremoniously shoving me to the side, three or four of the men rushed in, brandishing their torches.
I turned to follow them.
Another pushed past me, sending the candlestick skittering on the floor, plunging the room in darkness — complete darkness save for the flashing light of the torches.
Without thinking, I fell down on all fours, meaning to retrieve the candlestick. A hopeless task since the fall had snuffed the candle out. The sudden dark, thicker than before I’d lit the candle.
Just then, two sounds hit my ears: a loud crash from the backyard. Instantly, I knew that someone had broken the hokkie door down. And Siziwe’s scream.
I forgot why I was on the floor, hands blindly groping around in the shimmer-filled, splintered dark, hands dodging angry raps of torches . . . searching. In one second flat, I reach the bed.
Siziwe is no longer here. Even with the faint and flickering light of the restless beams, I see that the bed is bare. Nevertheless, I grope all over the bed.
All the while, an unholy din dyes the air. Boots hammer the floor, boots kick at what furniture there is in the house, sending things crashing against walls, colliding with each other and clattering onto floor. Planks creak and groan. Walls reverberate while the very air grows thick and warm.
A large, unfriendly hand grabs my neck, stapling flesh and garment. As a pin lifted by a magnet, I am snatched from the bed. Only to be dumped on the floor. The same hand (or its brother or cousin) clasps itself to my shoulder and hauls me up . . . drags me bumpity-bump along the floor. Out of the bedroom, through the dining-room and into the kitchen. Mercifully, this room is now all lit up. Enough torches in steady hands beam here. A whole klomp of policemen line the room, doing nothing except hold their torches high.
My eyes dart about, searching for the girl. However, the search is disrupted as one of the men asks:
‘Where is he?’ The voice is raised and angry. It is a hideous voice, quite startling. There is something not human about it. And one look at his face and you know he robbed some poor bull frog of his . . . and an ox for his neck and eyes.
‘Where is he?’ bullfrog-face snarls at me. Only, the snarl is not at all successful — it is a cross between a growl and a bray. The voice comes straight from a donkey.
‘Where is who?’ I ask, putting my arm across my face to shield my eyes from the light of the torch trained hard on them.
‘This boy of yours?’
‘Which one?’
‘Wat is die jong se naam, jy?’ He addresses himself to one of the African policemen there.
‘UMxolisi, Mama,’ the African policeman, gives the answer directly to me.
‘Where is he?’ Donkey Voice glares at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply, truthfully.
Quick as a wink, I feel the sting of his beefy hand. My face is on fire. Even so, lying on the floor, I wonder — Where did that come from? What amazing swiftness from someone of such girth! Crazy, the thoughts that assail one . . . crazy and incongruous at a moment like this.
On the walls and ceiling of the unlit room, the unsteady, flickering torch beams paint thin, elongated, ghost-pale figures. The figures feint and dance and gaily frolic.
Had the police been searching for a needle, they could not have been more meticulous. They practically pulled the house apart; tore mattress, pillows, the doors off wardrobes and the lining off coats hanging in those wardrobes. They looked in beds, they looked under beds, and they took the ceiling down and peered between the rafters. They pulled the floor boards up. They knocked a wall down. Outside in the backyard, they simply dismantled the boys’ hokkie. They tore the planks off, breaking each and every one of them. Breaking them so that we would never be able to put them together again. That hokkie would have to be built up from scratch. Starting with getting new planks, new cardboard, and a lot of nails besides.
When they were quite satisfied Mxolisi was not in the house, not in the hokkie, not in the garden, they beat up Lunga although we told them over and over again that he was not Mxolisi . . . not the boy they were looking for. They beat up Lunga even though we told them his name was Lunga and not Mxolisi. They beat him up because, as they said, he should have known his brother’s whereabouts.
‘You must be your brother’s keeper, ma’an!’ said one, laughing uproariously. ‘Otherwise, what kind’ affer brother you are, hey?’
‘We are tired of this andaz’, andaz’ of you people,’ another threw in, as they left. At last.
Now they were gone. The police were gone. Gone to wherever they had come from. We could not. No, not us. We could never go back to who we were before they had come. We could never go back to that time or place. Nothing would ever be the same for us. We had been hurtled headlong into the eye of a raging storm.
7
From the beginning, this child has been nothing but trouble. But you have to understand my son. Understand the people among whom he has lived all his life. Nothing my son does surprises me any more. Not after that first unbelievable shock, his implanting himself inside me; unreasonably and totally destroying the me I was. The me I would have become.
Troubles come thick as the hairs of a well-fed dog, my people say. In 1973, they certainly did for me. Fifteen. I was only fifteen. But that is the year my son was born. January 4th. And all I had feared at the beginning of the previous year was the monster of a teacher I was getting, strict Mr Vazi.
I was thirteen, almost fourteen, January 1972. About to start the final class of Primary School. I was going into Standard Six and, come year’s end, would sit for external examinations. A not insignificant step, as Mama reminded me daily: Gone is the time for playing.
Mama had high hopes for me . . . for both of us, my brother and me. Our parents believed that education would free us from the slavery that was their lot as uneducated labourers.
Yes, we had our plans. But the year had its plans too; unbeknown to us, of course.
Looking back, I don’t even know where to start. Where to lay a finger and say, this is where things began to unravel for me.
But, of one thing I am certain: 1972 definitely delivered more than I had bargained for. However, things began going all awry from the previous February 1971, when my moon time first appeared. That was bad luck number one. As that upside-down year limped to an end, even the long summer holidays promised little reprieve from the ennui brought by Mama’s constant worry that I would get pregnant. Not that I’d given her any reason to think like that. But everything about me seemed to upset her these days.
Then, my best friend and I had a fall out. On the first day of the year, too. New Year’s Day, 1972. Bad luck number two.
We had gone to the beach, as was customary then. Teenagers converged at the beach during what we called the ‘B
ig Days’, the public holidays over the Christmas season. That day I discovered that Nono had a huge secret from me. She was my brother’s girlfriend. I felt such a fool. The two had been seeing each other for months. Nono coming over to my home, pretending she was coming to see me. Khaya, my stupid brother, just happening to be there. Oh, for weeks thereafter I would not speak to her. As far as I was concerned, she had betrayed me in the worst possible way . . . with my brother. So, for a while, I was a loner because, of my school friends, Nono was the only one who lived close by.
One day, Mama sent me to Claremont, the white suburb where we did grocery shopping. Imagine my surprise and delight when I ran into a former class mate from the halcyon Blouvlei days. This was a rather rare experience, one often accompanied by promises of staying in touch forever thereafter, ‘Now that we’ve found each other again’. However, with no phones or money with which to take the occasional bus trip and visit one another, maintaining ties could not and did not happen. In what was a fond fancy, a feeble attempt to hide our embarrassment at yearning for the impossible, we’d say to each other on such occasions, ‘Come and visit me!’ We’d say that, not really expecting what we were asking for to happen . . . Not believing it would. And the answer, equally simple and easy and impossible, ‘Soon,’ never failed to come. ‘Soon!’ or ‘Sure!’
Stella and I had shared a desk since Sub-Standard A, the first year of school, until, with the forced removals, we were separated. I was half-way through my errands, walking along the Main Road, when I heard a voice hail me from behind. Time simply fell away. I was flung back into then and there . . . to that warm and familiar place . . . to that other time, that had been so much sweeter. That voice — at once chesty and robust — as though the owner suffered from a perpetual cold but had lungs the size of an elephant’s — that voice that reminded one of an organ . . . never a pure note to it but far from frail.