Gerry Adams at least had a face.
When she looks down from the ceiling, she finds him looking at her. He does not look away. She walks over to him.
“Wat dink jy?” she asks, crouching on the floor next to him.
Not much.
“Good.”
The response surprises him. Why good?
“Well, if you’re not thinking much,” she explains “then you won’t need to use too much of your daily fifty-word ration to share your thoughts.”
He tries to stifle a shy smile.
She raises her head encouragingly.
I’m thinking of those who can’t be here. My friends. Coline. Robert.
“Ag, forget about them,” she says with a dismissive wave. “If they can’t be bothered to be here, today of all days, they don’t deserve your thoughts. Absconders. Forget about them.” She grabs him by the hand and stands up. “Come. Dance.”
But he breaks free. And if they’re dead?
Her face falls. “Oh my God!” She slides down the wall, back into her crouching position on the floor. She buries her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
Katinka?
Comrade?
Hey! He takes her gently by the hand. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Come on.
She crawls out cautiously from behind her hands, wiping tears from her cheeks.
Hey!
“I thought – I thought you were talking about... People like...”
Like?
She sits up with a sniff. “I want to tell you a story,” she says, resolutely wiping away the tears. “It doesn’t matter that I hardly know you. I want to tell it to somebody tonight, now, and then never have to talk about it again. It must die with the old. It’s only a short story. Will you listen?”
Yes.
“One day, there was a brother and a sister who grew up on a farm outside Ventersdorp. When they were naughty or when their parents wanted to force them into things like homework or going to church, which the little girl hated, they would threaten them with a monster, saying that, unless they did as they were told, the monster would come for them in the night, drag them from their beds and devour them.
It was a horrible monster, ugly and cruel, and even after years had passed and the brother and sister had grown up, the mention of the monster’s name still struck fear in some part of them.” She looks at him nervously. “Can you guess the monster’s name?”
He thinks.
What? Not – ? He gestures to the images on the ceiling.
She nods.
Nooit!
Then looks away. “When I told my father I was coming here today, he said, ‘Kies! If you go, you are not welcome in my house any more. You are not my daughter any more. What do you think the people will say? How do you expect me to face them with a daughter who runs after a communist terrorist kaffir?’ And my brother, he said he’d shoot me himself if he ever saw me again.”
She looks up at him with overcast eyes. “Fluit, fluit,” she says with a sad smile. “My storie is uit.”
The Sanctuary
KAGISO HAS FORGOTTEN HIS JOURNAL, so he unlocks the door again to fetch it from the desk. It is open at an insert, an extract he was once asked to read in an undergraduate tutorial. It seems almost innocuous now so that he snatches the journal without fully noticing the open page, but at the time the extract brought his world crashing down around him. It was what first prompted a revision of his black and white mind film:
... Fifteen years later, in Cape Town, comes this brief glimpse of young mother, Lydia. Divorced with one child, she went back to look after her 86-year-old mother who lived with her husband in a house tied to a lime-stone processing plant whose owner forbade anyone else to stay with them. Thus, since Lydia was not allowed to stay there she has been running from the police. She and her one-year-old baby were amongst those arrested in a police raid. They spent the weekend in jail and were only allowed out because of the baby. She had to reappear in court and, at the time of the interview, did not know what the outcome would be because she did not have money to pay the R20 fine. She did not have anyone to support her. She had divorced her husband about six years previously, but although he was required to support her and the child financially she had not received a cent. “She has been in court many times for a maintenance grant but is tired of this because nothing ever materialises” (15:4). Lydia, writes MM Gonsalves, is tired of trying to make ends meet as well as running from the police. She states that no matter where one goes, if one does not work and ‘live-in’, and does not have a pass, one has to run, because of the danger of trespassing. She begs for a live-in job as she cannot stand the thought of being caught again and of being constantly on the look-out for the police (15:5).
When the tutorial was over, he returned to his room at Jan Smuts House and locked the door. He skipped classes for the rest of the day and in the evening, went to see Issa at UWC.
Kagiso roams the city – sometimes with Katinka, mostly by himself. No matter how late he goes to bed, he always wanders through the early morning streets, when security shutters on shop fronts in the neighbourhood are being lifted slowly, like sleepy lids, before the streets become crowded. While the destitute are still visible – bundles huddled in doorways, before being swept away into obscurity. Where faces are obscured, he looks to other features: ears, hands, fingernails especially – large, even and with unusually prominent half-moons – shoulders, hair, scrutinising them, not in order to classify and exclude, but to identify and embrace.
One morning, he plucks up the courage to talk to the fruit vendor, still setting up his stall. “Good morning,” he says, nervously.
“Alrigh’ mate? No’ quite ready yet.”
“That’s okay. I was only wondering if...”
The vendor straightens himself.
“If...” Kagiso starts from scratch. “I believe you know my brother.”
The vendor looks at him, confused. “Bruva?”
“Yes. He used to barter with you, fruit in exchange for the sports section of the paper.”
The vendor throws his head back in recognition. “Oh, yes, sure I do. Yeah, ‘e used to come by ’ere regular. I was only wondering abou’ ‘im the other day, like. ‘aven’t seen him for a while. He alrigh’? ”
“Actually...”
The vendor leans forward.
“Actually, he’s disappeared.”
“Your ’aving me on! Disappeared?”
Kagiso nods.
“When? How?”
“Four months ago. In April. That’s all we know.”
“And you’ve ’eard nuffing since?”
Kagiso shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“You mean to say somebody can disappear,” he snaps fingers, “just like that?”
“Seems so.”
“Well, I am sorry to ‘ear that, mate. I really am. Nice bloke ’e was, too. Mind you, he never said very much. Came ‘ere one morning, bough’ a banana and gave me the sports paper. Always a banana. Same thing ‘appened again the next morning, and the next, till I wouldn’ take ‘is money no more. ’ad to be fair, like, you know what I’m saying?”
“So he didn’t say anything to you before he left?”
“Nah, he didn’t say nuffing, mate. As I say, he never said much anyway.” The vendor scrutinises Kagiso a little more closely. “You say you two was bruvas?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. But he was more kinda Arab looking, weren’t he? ”
Kagiso nods.
“Don’t mean to pry, like, it’s jus’ that, for a moment I weren’t sure, you know, if, we was talking abou’ the same person, you know wha’ I mean? ”
“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Listen, if you hear or see anything,” he hands the vendor his card, “would you get in touch?”
The vendor studies the card. “Johannesburg, ’ay?”
“Yeah.”
“That where ’e was from, too?”
“Yes.”
“See, I didn’t even know tha’ much. Aint life funny sometimes?” he asks, searching the sky. “You can see somebone every day of yer life and know nuffing abou’ them, until they disappear. Tha’s London for yer, mate.”
Kagiso rocks back on his feet awkwardly.
“Sorry, mate, I didn’t mean to upse’ you, like.”
“You didn’t.”
The vendor is not convinced. He places Kagiso’s card down on a box and opens another. “‘ere, take a banana.”
“No, that’s not -”
“Go on,” the vendor insists, stuffing the banana into his pocket. “‘av it.”
Kagiso relents. “Thank you.” He looks at the card. “You won’t forget, will you?”
“Forge’?” the vendor asks.
Kagiso points at the card. “To be in touch. If you hear anything?”
“Sure, mate,” the vendor assures. He slips the card into his back pocket. “Anyfing I can do, mate. Anyfing I can do.”
Later in the day, the heat, inescapable, follows him like a stalker, from Issa’s tiny flat, onto the tube, through the busy streets.
“I’d have thought you’d be used to it,” Frances commented when he complained.
Kagiso muttered a vague, concealing response; at home he rarely has to confront the weather, his contact with it always mediated by his air-conditioned car, his modern office in a shady northern enclave of the city, his spacious, well-ventilated flat with its balcony overlooking the pool. London is a different world; he has twice had to rush off a baking stopping starting swerving turning sitting bus for fear of retching. On the tube, he tries, whenever possible, to stand by the door at the front of the carriage where he can let the window down as he has seen experienced commuters do.
With him, he carries his journal, a water bottle, a camcorder and Issa’s A-Z and notebook, which he found at the bottom of the bookcase and some of the ‘Missing’ leaflets of Issa to distribute when the desperate compulsion to do something takes hold. He visits the places Issa mentions in the notebook, to see for himself the new British Library, impressive inside but which from the street looked to him like a prison (he much preferred the building next door, was amazed to discover that it is, in fact, a station); Trafalgar Square, destination of protest, prestigious location of South Africa House and, to his surprise, just there, in the middle of the city, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, not at all the setting he’d imagined when their evocative soundtracks carried him on sentimental cinematic journeys to magical places, now, he doesn’t even step inside; the parking lot in front of Westminster Abbey, called ‘The Sanctuary’, the location of a black and white photograph in Issa’s notebook: a young Mandela before his eventual imprisonment and total censure.
From here, Kagiso winds his way through the narrow sunless back streets behind the abbey, past the offices of the Liberal Democrats on Cowley Street, then pausing further along to read a sign outside a house, the home of Lord Reith, first director of the BBC, before finally turning the corner into Barton Street. He is looking for number 14, so he starts to count the numbers on the front doors of the neat deserted terraced row – 10, 11, 12, 13 – odd and even next to each other on the same side of the road. Even though he knows it is next, still, in the end, after all the years, number 14 comes upon him rather suddenly, so that he has to step back a pace to study it.
Little distinguishes the house from the other near-identical houses on the quiet street, only a round blue plaque, like the one outside Lord Reith’s, from the Greater London Council, reveals why Kagiso felt compelled to investigate Issa’s mention of this address, also referenced in the brooding quotation above his desk, in his notebook:
TE Lawrence
“Lawrence of Arabia”
1888-1935 lived here
He finds a slight recess across the road and slips into it, looking up at the attic, willing the curtain there to twitch, expectant, remembering the soldier in blind Alfredo’s story who waits 100 nights in the street beneath his true love’s window. Kagiso looks left then right, up then down the quiet little street, barely registering the ding-dong ding-dong that comes rolling over the rooftops. When he moves away from the little house, he looks, one last time, over his shoulder at the attic before turning the corner. He glances at his watch just as, having struck its final stroke at four, Big Ben falls into silence.
Kagiso spends a lot of time at his destinations around the city. He is attentive to them, watches them, their other visitors, finds a good vantage point from which to sketch them, photograph them. Where possible, he always visits the restrooms before leaving, never fully aware that he is searching, always waits for the occupants of locked cubicles to emerge, before leaving.
On Grosvenor Square, he stops to film the sealed-off building on the west side of the square – the barricades, the closed road, the enormous spread-winged eagle that adorns the top of the otherwise unremarkable building. He has been recording the country’s embassies whenever he visits a capital city, storing the images in a folder entitled: ‘The fortressed look of freedom and democracy.’ He does not linger here but retrieves Issa’s notebook from his backpack before continuing down South Audley Street in search of the secluded garden with a secluded bench on which is inscribed the following dedication:
In Memory of Derek Lane
From a select number of friends who spent many hours in his company and together enjoyed the splendour of this city and the tranquillity of these gardens.
Issa had copied the dedication into his notebook alongside a little map of the area showing the location of the park and the bench where he wrote:
Mayfair
24th December 2000
I am sitting on Derek Lane’s bench tucked away in the affluent heart of this splendid city, but, with my own accursed ‘Sixth Sense’, I only see the ogres – the hideous ones, the invisible ones. They roam the city, the unwanted ones, with vacant, distant stares. Absent and preoccupied, here only in unwanted, despised, brutalised, foreign body; Europe’s untouchables.
From the top decks of busses, they scan the bustling pavements of the begrudging sanctuary, searching, desperately, for familiar scenes from home – the smiling face of an old school friend waving enthusiastically from the crowd; the old men at the café on the square, drinking coffee in threadbare jackets, sporting medals from wars only they can recall; the hands of the orthodox priest being kissed fervently by suppliant devotees in the market place; the teenagers with lean, healthy bodies, diving from the old pedestrian bridge – no longer there – into the warm glow of the setting sun.
Sometimes they stare at memories of torture chambers, at missing relatives, at dead friends, right there in the piece of floor between their feet on packed underground carriages, or in the unbelievably pretty shop windows at Christmas time, filled with price tags that could bring whole families to the sanctuary.
At the carwash on the corner, they catch sight of what they fear most in the polished chrome of shiny cars and buckets of dirty water; others see it in mirrors in hotel bathrooms or in the shiny cutlery they lay out before breakfast – reflections of self. Embarrassed, they look away. How could I have imagined that here, this, would be better? When they are still there? Did I leave to live with mocking reflections? Waiting on tables with an apron cut from a graduate’s hood; mending shoes – my grandfather’s trade – with the skilful hands of a surgeon.
Those who believed
And those who suffered exile
And fought (and strove and Struggled)
In the path of God, –
They have the hope
Of the Mercy of God:
And God is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful
(Qur’an S ii, 218)
For work, they do the jobs these people no longer want to do for themselves. They washed the limousines for Saturday’s wedding in the big church on the hill, tended the garden in the hotel ahead of the lavish reception, which was celebrated into the night. In the morning, they served them b
reakfast, and then, after everybody had set off on the journey back home, bleary-eyed and hung-over, they stripped their beds and washed their sheets stained with vomit and cum. And at the airport, they cleaned the toilets on the very plane that months earlier had brought them to the sanctuary and which would that night whisk the newly-weds off to their sun-drenched honeymoon, there.
At night they return to their lairs, where the corridors echo with anguished sobs and moans; where memories – of a carefree childhood with siblings, now dead; of frail grandparents, shell-shocked that their many years of toil and sacrifice had not made it all better; of lonely, fretful, wives, unable to escape from under the captive gaze of vigilant government gangs; of anxious parents filled with self-loathing and reproach for not having done more to prevent it all from going so horribly, horribly wrong – all come alive in vivid multicolour home cinema with surround sound on grubby walls and ceilings in the middle of the night, making sleep impossible.
Kagiso inspects the evidence around the bench – the scuffed pebbles at his feet, the recently smoked cigarette butt, the fresh match beside that may have lit it. Somebody has just left. He has arrived too late, will leave too soon, to ever know who. Whenever he leaves a place, he looks, instinctively, over his shoulder, sometimes stepping back a few paces to check.
No longer uses the expression, ‘No looking back’.
He’s heard that destitute people sometimes seek shelter on the Circle Line, so he spends several hours walking the length of the trains on this line, moving, like a beggar, from one carriage to the next at stations around the never-ending line, first clockwise: Notting Hill Gate / Bayswater / Paddington / Edgware Road / Baker Street / Great Portland Street / Euston Square / King’s Cross St. Pancras / Farringdon / Barbican / Moorgate / Liverpool Street / Aldgate / Tower Hill / Monument / Cannon Street / Mansion House / Blackfriars / Temple / Embankment / Westminster / St. James’s Park / Victoria / Sloane Square / South Kensington / Gloucester Road / High Street Kensington / Notting Hill Gate, then anti-clockwise: Notting Hill Gate / High Street Kensington / Gloucester Road...
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