Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  I surprised myself. I was not usually this cool when she made false accusations. I usually yelled back.

  The following weeks she hired a construction company and built a high brick wall around our house. I objected to this because our house distinguished itself by being the only one in our street that was not surrounded by a high wall, and that spoke of our confidence and fearlessness. But she wanted a wall, so she got a wall. Then she converted one of the three garages into an office. She furnished it and bought some office equipment. She told me that she was using funds that had been approved by the board of L-MAP to do all this construction work.

  As soon as all the work was completed, but before she could start working in her new office, the board of L-MAP summoned her to a meeting in East London. I was at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown when she called me to say she had been summarily fired. I asked her to come to Grahamstown and I spent the rest of the festival with her, trying to comfort her and to assure her that she was a highly qualified woman and would surely get another job soon. But in the meantime I would help her sue L-MAP for unlawful dismissal. She would have none of that, she said, the L-MAP people could take their job and stuff it where the sun didn’t shine. Though I didn’t know the details of her dismissal, I suspected that it was not unlawful. Otherwise why didn’t she want to contest it?

  She got another job with the Technical College of South Africa in Roodepoort. She didn’t last long there either before moving to a job with the Department of Education in Pretoria dealing with adult education.

  In the meantime, auditors came to our house when she was at work and asked me about the wall and the other improvements that had been made on our property. I told them what Adele had told me: it was funded by L-MAP as part of the costs of her moving to Johannesburg. Since she would be using her property as an L-MAP office, these costs would go towards the rent the organisation would be paying for the office space. After the auditors came the police, with the same questions.

  I later learnt that Adele had been charged with the embezzlement of L-MAP funds and the theft of the company laptop. She was not taken into custody, but was asked to appear before the magistrate at the Roodepoort Magistrate’s Court. She engaged the services of a brilliant attorney, Raymond Tucker, who had made his name defending anti-apartheid activists during the bad days. For two days I attended the trial in her support. That’s how I got familiar with the Roodepoort Magistrate’s Court which later featured in Black Diamond.

  In their evidence the members of the L-MAP board denied that they had authorised the expenditure. She, on the other hand, insisted that it had been authorised, and denied any knowledge of the laptop. The magistrate was the final judge and she acquitted her on all the charges.

  This trial soured our relationship further. But it is possible we could still have survived it if other events had not intervened, mostly connected with what I felt were my responsibilities. Limpho, my brother Sonwabo’s first born, came to live with us while she did part-time jobs waitressing with the view of saving money for her education. Adele resented her presence in our house. She told me that she was already tolerating the presence of my two children Neo and Thandi – Dini had gone to live with his mother somewhere on the East Rand. Now I was burdening our lives with yet another child. All these kids were already adults, so I sympathised with her position. She had a point, but I am an African father; I had to help my children until they were on their feet. It didn’t matter that they were in their twenties; they were my children still. Limpho didn’t make things any easier for me because she was very helpful in the house and pampered me in a way that I was not used to. For instance, immediately I walked into the house from work she would ask, ‘Uncle Zakes, may I make you some tea?’

  And, of course, I wanted the tea. No one had ever asked me that kind of question before. If I wanted tea I either made it for myself or asked the maid. So, Limpho made me tea and this riled Adele no end. She finally put a stop to it when she told Limpho: ‘This is not your husband; you have no business making him tea. You are spoiling this man and soon he’ll expect me to make him tea.’

  But things came to a head when she discovered that I had been helping to pay the school fees of Limpho’s younger siblings. You will remember that their father deserted them when they were babies and toddlers. Their mother Johanna was struggling to educate them. In most cases she was able to cope, but once in a while she would be behind in the payment of fees and the principal of the high school they attended in Wepener in the Free State would threaten to expel them. I would then drive to Wepener to save the situation. I never told Adele about this because I knew she would give me hell for it. But she discovered the receipts and drove to Lesotho to confront Johanna. I am told that she accused her of sleeping with me.

  ‘Otherwise why would he be paying for your children?’ she asked.

  It got worse when these children visited me, which was always for very brief periods. She grumbled about them and claimed that they were displacing her in her own house.

  Limpho finally had to move out of the house. As did Neo at some later stage. They were followed by Thandi and her son. I didn’t tell you I was already a grandfather at this time. Thandi had gotten pregnant by some boy she met at Allenby College where I had sent her to study film-making. Instead of coming home with a diploma, she returned with a baby. I joked with her that we should name the child Diploma. But she named him Wandile instead. So Thandi and Wandile went to live with her mother Mpho at Etwatwa, which I discovered when I visited them was a sprawling shantytown in Benoni on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It looked like the pictures of the favelas I had seen in Brazil. They lived in a corrugated iron shack.

  I certainly could not have my ex-wife, my daughter and my grandson living in a shack. I gave Mpho money to pay a deposit on a three-bedroom house with servants’ quarters in the previously Afrikaner suburb of Welgedacht in one of the satellite towns of Johannesburg called Springs. I also signed as surety on the mortgage bond. They all moved into the new house and I had peace of mind.

  But I didn’t have peace at home when I told Adele about it. This was too big to be hidden. In any event, she had a way of discovering things because I was such a lousy liar.

  I remember one day I was having coffee with a friend of mine, Keke Semoko, at some restaurant in either Sandton or Rosebank. She is the actress I had directed in the Market Theatre Laboratory production of the TB/AIDS/child sexual abuse play, Broken Dreams. I was telling her about my problems at home because I had helped my ex-wife buy a house. She told me straightaway that Adele was right. She herself would kick her husband out if she discovered he had bought a house for his ex-wife.

  ‘No woman can allow that,’ Keke told me.

  She was right, of course. But I had already done it, and was not sorry for it. In any event, my marriage was already irretrievably broken even before I saved my ex-wife from the favelas.

  Another thing I recall about my coffee with Keke, who had by that time become a household name in South Africa thanks to her recurring role in a television drama series called Isidingo, is that we discussed the child sexual abuse about which we created Broken Dreams and how it was still playing to thousands of school kids throughout the province. We ended up talking about my own sexual abuse by Nontonje which, unbeknown to me, had left me shattered for a great part of my life.

  ‘You must write about this,’ Keke told me. ‘Men don’t normally talk about such things. They like to pretend they are all strong and macho and unbreakable. You’re a different kind of man who openly talks about how he was abused by an older woman, which resulted in his sexual dysfunction, and how he was healed by another woman. If you wrote about this it would be a lesson to many other men.’

  So, there, I am writing about it, Keke. Thanks to you.

  African Theatre Ensemble produced my play And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses in Toronto and I flew to Canada for the opening night. I enjoyed Rhoma Spencer’s direction of the play. I also had a
wonderful time with Debe Morris and my friends from the old days in Lesotho, Patrick Nkunda Kabeteraine and his wife, Palesa Thoahlane. Patrick was one of the Ugandan refugees I used to party with in Maseru. I was the one who introduced him to Palesa during those wild days. He was now a very successful immigration lawyer in Toronto.

  From Toronto I went to England on a tour of the literary festivals there. I think I was gone for about three weeks. When I came back earlier than expected I found that Adele had accommodated a couple from Swaziland in our house. They had been there for a week when I arrived home. The wife was sick and the man had brought her to specialists at the Sandton Clinic. This was not just Adele’s kindness to strangers, which would have been a breath of fresh air. The woman was a stranger to her but the man was not. He had been her boyfriend when she was a student at Roma and she had assured me before we married that they had broken up. I had not been aware that they were in contact again.

  I said nothing to her about it. Instead, I went to greet the man as he sat in my living room and to wish his wife a speedy recovery. I told him they were welcome to stay at my house for as long as they wished. I had my suspicions about him, but I wanted to give him and Adele the benefit of the doubt. I was already good at giving her the benefit of the doubt. One night, at about midnight, a barman at Maseru Cabanas phoned me all the way in Johannesburg to tell me that she was at the bar cavorting with some man. I told the barman it was not his business and he should never again call me about such things. The next time I met Adele – she was still staying in Bloemfontein then – I asked her about it and she told me she was not with a man but with three men who were her cousins. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, especially because throughout our marriage, stormy as it was, she had never given me the slightest reason to doubt her fidelity.

  I was surprised when I came back from the Market Theatre the next day and the couple told me that they were leaving because they had found accommodation closer to the hospital. They thanked me for my kindness and drove away. I never raised the matter of the ex-boyfriend again.

  Even after all my kids and niece had vacated the house our relationship didn’t become any better. But in public we were seen together and pretended that nothing was wrong. When my friends Nakedi Ribane or Motshabi Tyelele or Keke Semoko visited they never forgot to say what a happy family we were and how lucky I was to have such a nice wife. When journalists came and interviewed us for magazine articles she told them what a great husband and father I was and how I cooked everyone great vegetarian dishes. She was telling the truth. Because I did all my writing at home, and only went to the Market Theatre to hold workshops with the writers on Saturdays, I was more of the househusband. She worked in Pretoria and left very early in the morning and came back late in the evening. I took Zukile and Zenzi to school and for their piano lessons and swimming lessons and everything else.

  When I made a feast in Qoboshane for the unveiling of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s tombstones she was with me. My father’s people saw nothing but a happy couple. She was beside me when I made a speech to the villagers to tell them that I had bought the tombstones and erected them because I dreamt of my grandfather. He was lying down and his rotting flesh was peeling off his thighs and falling on the ground. The elders had said that the ancestors were talking to me, telling me that my grandparents needed tombstones. They had never had any since they were buried decades ago. Obviously, my father and Uncle Owen didn’t bother about such things. I didn’t tell the villagers that I went along with appeasing the ancestors not because I believed in life after death, but because such ceremonies and rituals brought relatives together and contributed to social cohesion.

  When President Thabo Mbeki invited me to a gathering of black intellectuals and opinion leaders at Mahlamba Ndlopfu, the presidential residence in Pretoria, I went with Adele. Under the huge marquee we shared a table with Sudanese poet Taban Lo Liyong, his wife and some senior civil servants and their spouses. Taban and his wife told us what a charming couple we were. We listened to the speeches about the African Renaissance and danced together to the music of the Soweto String Quartet. No one was any the wiser of the hostilities brewing within us.

  The only two things worth mentioning about that event was that as I was greeting some folks who were excited to see me and were congratulating me on the Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture that I had given to a standing ovation at the University of Cape Town, I spotted Keneiloe Mohafa. Yes, Keneiloe, my childhood sweetheart. There she was, sitting with her friends who were pointing at me, obviously gossiping about me. The last time I saw her was when she left me in Ohio for her father’s funeral and never came back. I went to greet her. I was glad to see that she was doing well and seemed to be very happy. She was my first love.

  The second thing was meeting Tony Yengeni, the former ANC chief whip who served time in jail for corruption. I must admit that I have always had a soft spot for Tony Yengeni, not only for the suffering he went through during the struggle but because he was Chris Hani’s friend. I always thought he’d had a bum rap going to jail for getting a big discount from Daimler Benz on a Mercedes Benz when a lot of his comrades were getting away with corruption worth millions every day. Tony told me that Limpho Hani would have liked me to write Chris Hani’s biography because I knew him more than most people.

  ‘It is true I knew Bhut’ Thembi very well,’ I said, ‘but only at a personal human level, rather than at a political level.’

  ‘You can always research the political level,’ said Tony. ‘We are here, we’ll tell you.’

  I felt it would be a daunting project that would take me away from my fiction for more time than I could spare. But I knew that Limpho Hani’s instincts were correct. My book would have been more credible than the life stories of politicians that I have read in South Africa which pretend that the subject lived a purely political life and had no father or mother or friends or family who contributed, for better or for worse, in shaping the subject into what she or he became.

  On our way back from Pretoria we reverted to our ugly selves. This time it was about some woman I smiled and waved at. I remember before we married my mother once called Adele for a private meeting where she tried to talk to her like mother and daughter. She had warned her against jealousy which she said could destroy our marriage. It had happened already and was the bane of my life.

  The following week I went to Lesotho to see my mother. I made a point of visiting her at least once a month and taking her some money. Her health was deteriorating to the extent that she had not been able to read the manuscript of The Heart of Redness. The neighbours who always gathered in her bedroom had read it to her. My mother was as beautiful as ever, sitting in her wheelchair in her bedroom. She cried immediately she saw me. I held her in my arms. She told me, in the midst of sniffles, that the ANC government had forgotten my father’s contribution to the struggle. There was no mention of him anywhere, as if they were the only ones who fought for freedom, as if he never existed at all. It was like that with her those days, something would trigger the memory of her husband and she would get all emotional.

  ‘Don’t worry, mama,’ I said, ‘history will remember your husband. They cannot rub him off its pages, however hard they may try.’

  She seemed a bit comforted.

  I gave her the perfume that I had bought for her in Paris and spent the whole afternoon with her. I could see that she was becoming forgetful of many significant events in her life. But I didn’t take her sporadic loss of memory seriously.

  On my way back I stopped in Maseru to see Deborah Mpepuoa, Kittyman’s daughter who worked for me when I still had the Screenwriters Institute at Mothamo House. She was very distraught because her husband was in hospital in Leribe.

  I decided to take the Leribe route on my way to Johannesburg to see the guy, though I had never met him before. After all, Kittyman looked after me when we were students at Peka High School and saved me from savage hazing. I was walking between the building
s at the government hospital in Leribe when an excited man came running towards me, calling my name. When he got close I saw that it was Dugmore Hlalele in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck. But he looked strange. He was thin, almost skeletal, and his rubbery muscles clung desperately to his bones. I suspected AIDS. Many of my friends in Lesotho were dying of AIDS. One of Dugmore’s friends, Nthethe, who was a lawyer in Mafeteng had also died in the pandemic. Dugmore was certainly a dying man, yet he still worked as a doctor, healing others.

  He brought his hand forward reluctantly, as if he feared I would rebuff it. I didn’t take his hand. I reached for him and embraced him. His face cracked into a dry smile. We talked briefly of the old times as he walked with me to the ward I was looking for. He knew Deborah’s husband because he was his patient but he had not known the guy was Kittyman’s son-in-law.

  ‘I’ll take special care of him because Kittyman was a good man,’ he said.

  I thought he himself needed someone to take special care of him. I didn’t ask him if he was still with Ray, nor did I tell him how much I used to love Ray, and how jealous I was of him when I heard he had married her when they were students in Russia.

  He walked me back to my car and just before we parted he said, ‘I am glad to see that you’re not like the other MaPeka who are trying to isolate me.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Why would anyone isolate the popular Dugs?’

  ‘They are accusing me of killing Jama.’

  He was not smiling; he meant it. I didn’t know that anybody had accused him of killing Jama Mbeki, and I told him so. He told me that the Peka High School old boys who were Jama Mbeki’s comrades in the BCP were spreading lies that he sold Jama out to Leabua Jonathan’s Police Mobile Unit who then kidnapped and murdered him.

  ‘He did come to my house that night, disguised in a Basotho blanket,’ he said. ‘But he left. I don’t know what happened to him after that.’