Silent Minaret

by Shukri, Ishtiyaq

  Where are we, he wonders? If we’ve crossed the equator, I’ve slept halfway down the world.

  A steward comes to replenish the drinks. “Where are we?” Kagiso asks.

  “Just above Kano, Sir,” the steward says, pointing at the monitor.

  Kagiso looks up dozily. “Thanks, I didn’t see that there.” He focuses, follows the red route of their flight path from London as it snakes its way, like a river of blood, through the African continent in the dead of night: France / across the Mediterranean / Algeria / Chad / Niger...

  “I always feel it should be announced.”

  Kagiso looks at him questioningly.

  “Kano, I mean. It’s exactly half-way. Only another six hours to go. But our passengers wouldn’t appreciate the interruption. You must be hungry, Sir? You slept through dinner. Would you like something to eat?”

  “No, thank you. Just another orange juice, please.”

  Back in his seat Jimmy Cliff makes him smile. “Any self-respecting traveller should have this track,” Katinka said emphatically as she downloaded it onto his music player. He glances at his watch – 2am, then turns to look out through the window again. At 34 000 feet, the past steps forward into his present.

  Muhsin.

  He has never actually said the name. He wonders what it will be like if he meets another Muhsin. Would he ever let a Muhsin into his life? He can’t imagine picking up the phone and saying, “Oh, hi Muhsin,” or, “I saw Muhsin for lunch today.” He can’t imagine saying the name with a neutral or loving tone.

  One day he was day-dreaming into the kitchen floor when Issa crossed his gaze. He looked up.

  “Stop!” he ordered.

  Issa stopped out of surprise rather than obedience, a scarred bare foot suspended hesitantly in mid-stride. What?

  He sat up in his seat and cleared his throat. “You were born on that very spot.”

  Issa looked back at him in disbelief.

  “Don’t you get it? You can stand on that spot and say, ‘I was born here.’ How many people can do that?”

  Issa looked down at the floor. For a while he just stood there, looking at his feet.

  Kagiso couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then Issa looked up at him – I haven’t looked at it like that – and smiled.

  In his window seat, tucked away under a blanket, both somewhere and nowhere, he remembers the first time he got stoned. It was a summer’s night in Cape Town – the best. They were lying on Issa’s mattress, listening to Rodriguez and Pink Floyd:

  ‘For long you live and high you fly

  And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry

  And all you’ll touch and all you’ll see

  Is all your life will ever be...’

  Clearly delighted at the impromptu visit, Issa laughed and joked, even let him in on a few secrets. They talked through the night, but in the morning returned to their separate lives.

  After showing him the new library building, Issa walked him to the main gates on Modderdam Road. They sat on the curb, strangers once more, and waited in silence for a taxi that would take him back to the lush southern suburbs – back to the idyll of Rondebosch with its book shops, wine bars and frozen yoghurt parlours – back to UCT with its occasional vogue demonstration, but otherwise mostly undisrupted academic routine.

  Please don’t resent me, Issa, he wanted to say. You had a choice and I’m glad you came here. You would have hated it up there. But I didn’t have that choice. You must know that. And I can’t afford to screw this up.

  Issa was scratching around with a stick in the sand that had gathered by the curb. Don’t go back, he wanted to say. We can have another skyf and go back to bed for the rest of the morning. This afternoon we can hang out at the pool. And then I’ll drive you back to Rondebosch. We can have fish and chips at Seaforth – best in town, you’re right – and maybe I can stay over. Tomorrow’s Friday, I only have one lecture.

  But neither said a thing. They just sat there on the curb with their heads lolling between their knees, seeking shelter from the already scorching 10 o’clock sun.

  When the taxi came, they got up reluctantly – Kagiso dusting his bottom, Issa sticking his hands deep into his pockets and hunching his shoulders around his ears.

  Sweet, he said.

  “Ja, sweet,” Kagiso echoed.

  When he had squeezed into the crammed taxi, the gaatjie, still dangling nonchalantly through the open door, pointed at the horizon in an exaggerated gesture and shouted the command for the driver to continue: “Kap aan, driver. Driver, kap aan!”

  Before the taxi disappeared over the brow of the bridge ahead, it occurred to Kagiso to turn around and wave, perhaps gesture a phone call, or, with tweezed thumb and forefinger to puckered lips, a joint. But he was too late; all he saw was Issa swing around on his heel and start walking lazily back towards the main gate.

  Kagiso readjusts his neck pillow. Despite all the years before, and all the iconic events that were to follow, that arbitrary, insignificant moment has endured to become his most vivid memory of Issa, perhaps because it is also his most lasting qualm. Issa must have stood there on the pavement while the taxi drove away, watching it recede, waiting for him to turn round. Kagiso still shies away from the memory. It is his trifling tragedy. It was the sudden unexpected recollection of this moment – his enduring petty regret – that had distressed him at Heathrow.

  The previous morning he had returned to Jan Smuts House following a sociology tutorial. ‘The lunatic is in the hall.’ The cleaning ladies had taken over the place: trolleys, stacked high with clean bedding, were parked in the corridors, wastepaper baskets were being emptied into huge black bags, everywhere the smell of disinfectant. He couldn’t decide whether the handsome old residence reminded him of a hotel or a hospital; in the lofty ceilings, the stone pillars, the ivy and courtyards – grandeur, in the fittings, functional simplicity in the furniture. When he got to his room, he locked out the cleaning ladies and skipped classes for the rest of the day. That evening he would jump into a taxi to UWC to see Issa.

  In the tutorial, Dr Johnson had presented them with an article from a prescribed text and asked him to read. For the first time, that morning – as he read out loud about the effects of the calculated, rational brutality of the homeland system, Kagiso contemplated the circumstances by which privilege had come to be a part of his life. Later, sitting in his window seat at Jan Smuts House overlooking the Cape Flats, the raw details of life in the Bantustans – his grandmother’s life – meticulously set out in his lap, he felt hollowed out, as though Dr Johnson had held his life up to the class and torn it into a thousand pieces before flinging it across the desk.

  The grainy black and white sequence and the noise of the antiquated projector fill his head as he considers his mother as a young rural woman, walking from house to house in search of work in an affluent ‘coloured’ suburb in Johannesburg.

  As the sequence progresses, it turns slowly into colour. She knocks at closed doors, like the insistent cleaning lady in the corridor outside. Eventually, she knocks at Ma Vasinthe’s door. He tries to reconstruct the sort of conversation they would have had.

  The noise of the projector fades and he can hear his mother’s voice speaking from the past, but only faintly, a bubbly underwater sort of voice, like the Highlander’s at the bottom of the lake when he realises that he is immortal. He can’t imagine his mother saying the word, but she must have, at least on that first day, said it:

  “Madam, I’m looking for work.”

  He tries to say the sentence, but it feels as though his tongue will explode. It sticks in his throat, this unutterable sentence, yet, it is certainly what his mother must have said upon first meeting Vasinthe.

  Knock knock. “Cleaning.” Knock knock.

  –

  Knock knock. “Kagiso?” Knock knock. “I need to clean your room.” Knock knock... The game would start with a knock at the door. Ma Vasinthe would look at Gloria who would rush the boys
into hiding, while Ma Vasinthe counted slowly and went to answer the door. With each game, their hiding places grew more and more elaborate: in Ma Vasinthe’s secret bathroom behind the built-in wardrobes in her bedroom, behind the geyser in the roof. Once Ma Gloria even took them to hide in the neighbour’s kitchen, where they ate cakes and biscuits, Issa refusing his place at the table, refusing the glass tumbler and plate that had been set out for him, joining Ma Gloria and Kagiso on the step outside the kitchen, drinking from the dented tin mug given to Ma Gloria, waiting for Ma Vasinthe to find them. Ma Gloria had thrown them over the back wall, before jumping over the wall herself and spraining her ankle. Once, when they didn’t have enough time to find a good hiding place, they scrambled under Ma Vasinthe’s bed and waited. That was an eerie round and they didn’t enjoy it very much. It frightened them and, even though Ma Vasinthe said that they were imagining things, they knew that from under the bed they had seen boots. “Lydia,” writes MM Gonsalves, “is tired of trying to make ends meet as well as running from the police. She hates 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 police.” After that they enjoyed the game less and less... Knock knock. “You won’t have clean bedding if you don’t open the door, Kagiso,” the cleaning lady shouts.

  “Kagiso?”

  “Please,” he begs in Setswana, “leave me alone. Please.”

  ‘You lock the door

  And throw away the key

  There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.’

  When he wakes, darkness is creeping up the foot of the mountain below him. For a while he doesn’t know who he is and, in this strange twilight, can’t figure out where he is. He is gripped by fear and sits up, looking around, like a hostage waking for the first time in his cell.

  Bit by bit, the details of his room emerge from the fading light. I’m Kagiso. I’m in my window seat.

  He yawns and lifts his arms above his head. But in mid-stretch he sees the article on the sill beside him. His yawn stops, leaving just a gaping mouth, the pleasure of the stretch drains from his muscles, leaving just a contorted body.

  He remembers who he is. I am Kagiso Mayoyo. I grew up in Johannesburg but I was born in Taung, a small village in Bophuthatswana, a small village in the Republic of Bophuthatswana, the homeland of Bophuthatswana, the Bantustan, Bophuthatswana. The reserve, Bophuthatswana.

  ‘The lunatic is in my head

  You rise the blade, you make the change

  You re-arrange me ‘till I’m sane.’

  And then, while the far-off muezzin calls the faithful to the last prayer of the day, the reconsidered snippets, the re-interpreted half-truths, the unfathomable whispers, the edited histories, the received ideas all start to fit neatly into orbit around the morning’s reading, piece by recast piece, like blocks in a well-played game of Tetris, until, a new picture emerges, boom, like a kick in the – Along with the hollow relief of the realisation that his mother never would have uttered that underwater sort of sentence.

  At least not to Ma Vasinthe.

  From his window at Jan Smuts House, it is not the Cape Flats lit up against the night sky he sees, but a spring morning in Johannesburg, 1970, now replaying itself in vivid cinematic colour with deafening sound.

  He sees Ma Gloria walking down the road. He is himself only two months old, the bundle strapped in a blanket to her back. He sees the houses on their road, and, for the first time, the neighbours who would have turned her away.

  He sees her eventually walking down Ma Vasinthe’s driveway. The new film now deviates from the minimalist black and white version of his childhood because Ma Gloria, he now knows, first entered Ma Vasinthe’s house by the back door. But the back door is not visible from the driveway and, on her first visit to the property, she would have had no way of knowing where it was. Not unless something happened that drew her attention there. A noise? A shout? A crash?

  He sits up, draws together, finally, the words of the eternal, never-formulated riddle, asks them of the approaching night: how does it happen that a woman like Ma Vasinthe, a doctor, obsessive about schedules, comes to give birth on a kitchen floor?

  In his revised film he sees Ma Gloria cautiously approaching the back door. But Ma Vasinthe doesn’t open the door. She isn’t even standing in the doorway. Where is she? Ma Gloria puts her face towards the kitchen window, her hands at her eyes like blinkers to shut out the light. He shuts his eyes against the sight.

  The woman falls to the floor. The man looks up and sees the witness in the kitchen window. He turns away and runs. The woman calls his name. Kagiso hears the name, not called out as a plea for help, but as Ma Gloria has always said it, with a hiss of contempt: Muhsin.

  Like a kick in the –

  Guts.

  He jumps from his seat and runs out of the building and into the car park. Once outside he doesn’t know where to go, except that it is easier to run down the mountain than further up it. So, like water, he follows the path of least resistance, leaping down the stairs at the war memorial, then tearing across the rugby field and through the underpass under the M3.

  When he trips on the landscaped lawns outside The Woolsack, he doesn’t try to stop his fall – just allows himself to tumble and roll down the mountainside all the way to Lover’s Walk, where, landing on his feet, like a cat, he continues his sprint. Hares across Main Road without stopping to look for traffic and, at the Mowbray taxi rank on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, he dives into a departing taxi, heading east down Klipfontein Road - white in the west, black in the east, Coloured and Indian in between – across the Cape Flats, bound for Bellville: Athlone / Gatesville / Vanguard Estate / Surrey Estate / Manenburg Police Station / Heideweld / over the bridge onto Modderdam Road - coloured in the west, white at the east / Valhala Park / Bishop Lavis / Elsies River / Little House on the Prairie / the graveyard / Belhar Station / UWC.

  “Kap aan, driver. Driver, kap aan!”

  In the taxi some factory girls natter ceaselessly in Afrikaans over a bag of shared chips, the smell of vinegar mixing noxiously with the heady scent of cheap perfume:

  “They say mos that she’s sleeping with the manager.”

  “Really?”

  “So I hear.”

  “I don’t believe it. Who told you?”

  “Rashieda, and if she say so then it must be true because she mos know everything that happen in the factory.”

  “Ja, you can say that again.”

  When his heart has stopped pounding and he has caught his breath, he starts to regret his impulsive decision to visit Issa. What if he isn’t there? It’s been weeks since they even spoke. What will he say? Why has he come to visit? What story will he tell?

  “But with him? What does she see in him?”

  “Money, baby. Money.”

  “Hoer.”

  “And white skin, don’t forget.”

  “Jagse slet.”

  “Ja. Just you wait, I’m gonna ask her tomorrow how do white piel taste.”

  “Why you want to know? You want some?”

  “Who? Me? Sies!”

  He decides that he can’t go through with it, that when he gets to UWC, he will cross the road and immediately get a taxi back to Mowbray.

  “Wait, let me tell you this before I get off. My ouma darem ma made us laugh last night, hey! We was watching that police raid of that hostel in Guguletu, so she shouted at the TV, ‘Ja, catch the trouble makers, but it’s that ringleader, Amandla Awethu, that take over our children’s heads so and make them act like kaffirs that I wish they will also catch and put in jail.”’

  The girls laugh raucously, but muffle their hilarity when one among them sneakily draws attention to Kagiso.

  At the main entrance to the university, he squeezes out of the taxi and crosses the road to wait for a taxi hea
ding back to Mowbray. But he immediately becomes aware of the casspirs lurking in the shadows under the tall trees and, not wanting to appear suspect, proceeds casually across Modderdam Road and into the campus.

  Inside, he asks for directions to Ruth First. As he approaches the hostel, he sees Issa standing outside the entrance hall with a group of friends. His gestures are loose and generous, frequently punctuated with hand-clapping, finger-snapping and air-punching. From time to time, agile bodies double over in laughter.

  Kagiso doesn’t approach them but waits on the low wall beside the pathway, mesmerised by the sight of an Issa he does not know.

  When Issa breaks away from the group, Kagiso gets up and, with a deep breath, follows him, at a distance, to his room. He watches the carefree, relaxed saunter. Everybody he passes, knows his name:

  “Ek sê, Issa, my bra!” they exclaim, knotting hands and arms in elaborate handshakes. “Hoesit, my broe?”

  Kagiso decides not to say anything. It is not his place. Besides, Ma Vasinthe may already have told him herself. That would explain Issa’s unending devotion to Ma Gloria, and hers to him. It will be up to Issa – if he knows, if he wants to – to raise it.

  Take a seat, Issa says, pointing at the mattress on the floor. Kagiso kicks off his shoes and sits down, knees raised, his back against the wall.

  Issa retrieves a small wooden box from the drawer in his desk and throws himself down on the mattress beside Kagiso. What’s up?

  “Not much,” Kagiso shrugs, awkwardly. “Just wanted to say hi.” He watches Issa empty some of the contents from the box onto a vinyl album cover, purple. He shakes the cover so that the tiny seeds go tumbling back into the box. He transfers the dry leaves carefully into his hand, drops the album cover between them on the bed and gathers the leaves, gently, into a neat line in his cupped palm. Then, in a deft movement, he transfers them from his hand to a blade of thin white paper, which he rolls and licks and lights.