by Zakes Mda
It seemed he desperately wanted me to believe him. I had not heard any of those details nor of the rumours that he was being blamed for betraying his friend, who apparently was on the run and had come to him for assistance. I drove away feeling sad for everyone: those who died for some elusive cause and were buried underground, and those who died but continued to walk among the living as living corpses.
I later heard that Dugmore Hlalele died soon after that chance meeting.
It was a Wednesday morning towards the end of April 2001. Adele was at work and the kids were at school. I was in my back garden near the swimming pool being interviewed for television by a striking South African Indian woman. She was irritated that I was giving elaborate nuanced answers to her questions and she kept on interrupting me. ‘We need sound bites. Give us sound bites.’
In turn, I was getting increasingly irritated that she was irritated with me.
‘I am an intelligent person,’ I said. ‘I don’t speak in sound bites.’
I was about to unclip the microphone from my jacket and call the whole interview off, but the cameraman and the sound woman pleaded with me. They needed the footage for the news that evening. I had won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Africa Region for The Heart of Redness and would be going to Ghana to receive my award and perhaps, if I was lucky enough, to get the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize which would only be announced at the ceremony. The novel had also won the very first Sunday Times Fiction Award, so it had caused some sensation. The woman wanted to know what I would tell the Queen of England at the reception if I won the overall prize. I thought it was a silly question and I was in the process of giving her an equally silly answer – that I would ask Her Majesty to facilitate the return of King Hintsa’s head which was taken to England by her ancestors who were famous headhunters, and while she was at it she should return all the heads of my ancestors that had found their way into the museums of England – when she pleaded for sound bites again.
‘If she wants sound bites she must harvest them from my answers,’ I said, addressing the cameraman and the sound woman. ‘I am not going to speak in sound bites. I am not some stupid politician.’
I was saved by the arrival of a messenger who was led to my back garden by ’M’e ’Mathabang, my helper. A helper is a South African euphemism for a maid. The messenger had my three novels, Ways of Dying, She Plays with the Darkness and The Heart of Redness, and a message from Charlayne Hunter-Gault that I should sign them for President Bill Clinton. Ms Hunter-Gault was the CNN Bureau Chief in Johannesburg, but also a well-known figure in the history of the civil rights movement in the USA. I think she is great fan of my fiction because she has introduced it to many of her celebrity friends. I once received an email from David Shaw, Glenn Close’s husband, telling me that Glenn Close had fallen in love with Ways of Dying, to which she had been introduced by Ms Hunter-Gault, and she wondered if she could option the rights to adapt it as a movie. Unfortunately, at that time the novel had been optioned by a British film company, which never exercised the option. In this case also, Ms Hunter-Gault thought my novels would be an appropriate South African gift for Mr Clinton who was already in South Africa on a private visit after shedding the shackles of power earlier that year.
The messenger also delivered an invitation to meet Mr Clinton at a reception to be given by Nelson Mandela that Friday. Alas, I had to turn the invitation down. I had two trips that week that were already clashing. One was the trip to Ghana for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The other was a long-standing engagement in Nyon, Switzerland, where I was going to be on the jury of Vision du Reel, a highly esteemed international documentary film festival. It did not worry me that I was not going to meet Bill Clinton, though as far as American presidents went I thought he had been the very best. I had met him and Hillary Clinton before when they visited the Market Theatre. I liked them at once, especially the man who had an easy-going manner about him despite the flurry of Secret Service men and our own police who had cleared the place, including the vendors who sold arts and crafts in front of the theatre building.
The Market Theatre is a historical establishment. All the celebrities stop there whenever they visit Johannesburg. I have seen guys like Denzel Washington and Danny Glover going there to see plays or to dine at Gramadoelas, a restaurant known for its South African cuisine.
I decided I wasn’t going to Ghana for the prize ceremony. I was going to Nyon instead because I had made that commitment long before they announced that I had won the prize. I went looking for Sello Duiker, who had won the Commonwealth First Book Prize for his novel Thirteen Cents. He would be going to Ghana for his prize so I thought he could grab mine as well. I had never met the guy before so I went searching all over Yeoville and found him living in a garret in some old building. He agreed to represent me in Ghana. That was how our friendship started. I became part of his troubled life. But that is a story for another time.
I didn’t regret my choice of taking a rain check on Bill Clinton’s party and on the prize-giving ceremony in Ghana. I had a wonderful week in Nyon watching some of the greatest documentaries from all over the world. By the end of that week I was drained since I had sat in the cinema for hours on end watching one full-length documentary after another. I heard when I visited friends in Geneva that Peter Carey had won the overall Commonwealth prize for his True History of the Kelly Gang. I didn’t begrudge him; it was a damn good novel. He wrote to me to say he had been looking forward to meeting me in Ghana, which had been his very first trip to Africa.
With this Nyon trip I didn’t only miss partying with the high and mighty, I also missed an important visit that took place at my house during my absence. My mother had come to visit from Lesotho, and when author Elinor Sisulu heard that she was around she brought her parents-in-law, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, to see her. Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at my house and I was not there to welcome them. I could have kicked myself. I would have missed the Nyon Vision du Reel Festival for Walter and Albertina. Integrity is not part of the make-up of politicians, but these two had it in abundant doses. I don’t normally hero-worship human beings, not even the deified Mandela, but these two are my heroes. Of course, they had not come to see me; they had come to visit my mother.
My mother was still there when I returned from Europe and she had been rejuvenated by the visit.
Fortunately, Elinor was kind enough to take me to the Sisulu home in Linden, a suburb of Johannesburg, to see her in-laws. Walter had many stories to tell me about my father, how they used to be in awe of him as a thinker and a debater and how they learnt a great deal from him. He was disappointed that he wrote to him and to my mother a few times when he was on Robben Island but he never got any response. I don’t know why my parents did not respond to those letters, if indeed they received them at all. Walter told me that if my father had been in Johannesburg at the time instead of the Eastern Cape, the young militants who formed the PAC wouldn’t have left the ANC. He believed in a stronger ANC that could be reformed from within.
After talking to Walter Sisulu I missed my father very much and regretted the time I wasted avoiding his company. I could have learnt so much.
Adele told me that she wanted to do a PhD in the United States. Even though there was no love lost between us, to the extent that we were no longer intimate though we shared the same bed, she wanted me to help her get there. She wanted me to get a job at one of the universities, even if only on a short-term basis, so that she could have her foot in the door and then stay and continue with her PhD while I returned to my sinful life in South Africa.
I thought it was a good idea. I would have done her a good turn while at the same time separating myself from her – for good, this time. In any event, I reasoned, a PhD would make her even more marketable and she would be able to look after our kids very well since she was certainly going to have custody of them after our divorce. The divorce was now a certainty and we talked about it all the time. I certainl
y would not want to stay in America. I was not doing badly as a full-time writer, I had my pet rural development project with the Bee People, was a dramaturge at one of the most prestigious theatre houses in the world, and had my HIV-positive friends at the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust.
The poet Willy Keorapetsi Kgositsile was working in the United States at the time and I asked him to spread the word that I was looking for a short-term position anywhere in the country. He wrote back to say he would be returning to South Africa soon, but he would spread the word. In no time, I heard from Mbulelo Mzamane informing me that my alma mater, Ohio University, was looking for a Visiting Professor in Anglophone African Literature for one academic year. Mbulelo, ever so resourceful, had come to our rescue again just as he did when I had completed my contract at Yale University and had nowhere else to go. Remember, he had recruited me then for his old position at the University of Vermont. A one-year Visiting Professorship was an ideal job. I applied and was interviewed by the head of the English Department, Ken Daley, and the Director of African Studies, Steve Howard, on the phone. I got the job.
Adele was ecstatic. She was unemployed again after having lost the Department of Education job. We put things in motion to apply for visas. I wanted Thandi to join us as well so she could go to school.
I thought that finally Adele would be nice to me since I was sacrificing my good life in Johannesburg for her. But instead I was suffering a lot of verbal abuse from her. I stubbornly continued to assist my nieces and nephew financially on one hand, and my children on the other, and that of course exacerbated the situation. Sometimes when we were in bed she would wake up and start yelling at me. I yelled back at her and called her a fishwife when she did that. I would wake up, get dressed, and attempt to leave the room. She would stand at the door and say, ‘You are not going anywhere until I am done insulting. I’m going to insult you until you walk slowly.’ Here I am making a direct translation from Sesotho. In Sesotho that last statement has more impact. It is very ominous.
She knew I would not hit her. I was too scared of jail. In fact, she challenged me to hit her so that she could lay a charge of domestic abuse with the police. Nevertheless we would struggle until I managed to push her away from the door. I would walk out of the house to the garage, with the view of getting into the car and driving away, maybe to book in at a hotel. But she would follow me and force herself into the car. I should have driven away with her to the nearest police station but I didn’t. Instead, I went back to the house and listened to her verbal abuse until she finally fell asleep.
Things came to a head and I started looking for a townhouse for myself in the neighbourhood. My main worry was who would give my children their medicine if I left.
One day I was sitting in my study which was next to our bedroom. I was looking at old files. In a shoe box – yes, a shoe box – I found the letter that Gugu wrote me seven years before, in response to mine, encouraging me to stick it out in my marriage with Adele. I wondered where she was and what she was doing. I put the letter away and went to play with Zenzi on the lawn.
‘You know, Daddy, I wish I was a boy,’ Zenzi said.
‘Yeeech! A boy? Why would my pretty little girl wish to be a boy?’ I asked.
‘Because Mommy told me that when I am big I’m going to have a period.’
‘Of course you’re going to have a period. That’s no reason to wish to be a boy.’
‘She told me that it’s terrible and it’s not pretty and it stinks. I don’t want to bleed, Daddy.’
She was really scared. I didn’t understand why her mommy didn’t realize it would frighten a five-year-old girl like that, or if it was even the right age to tell the child about menstrual problems. I tried to calm her fears and told her how great it was to be a woman.
That evening I went back to the shoe box. I heard Adele yelling at the maid and just sat there staring at the shoe box. Then I went to sleep.
I dreamt about the shoe box. In my dream I opened the box and a misty face emerged like a genie. It turned out to be Gugu’s face as it was when we sat in my Toyota Cressida under the tree at our Jerusalema.
The next morning when it was just me and the maid at home I went to the shoe box. I took the letter out and resolved that I was going to write to Gugu. Something inside me told me: Don’t do it! This is dangerous! You’re playing with fire! My heart began to pump faster and faster. It was like I was standing on the railway line and I could see the train coming at full speed, but I could not move. I did not want to move. I was going to write to her and damn the consequences. They might be bitter, but I was too far gone to care. The train was almost here; there was no avoiding it.
I wrote a brief letter. I asked how she was and what she was doing. I wished her well. I drove to the post office and mailed the letter. I hoped the old address I had was still her address, or if it was not that whoever received the letter would forward it to her.
I carried on with my life and forgot about the letter. I was completing the final chapters of The Madonna of Excelsior and preparing to start on the first chapter of The Whale Caller.
A few weeks later I received a letter from Gugu. It was even briefer than mine. She asked: Ukuphi? Wenzani? Nabani? Where are you? What are you doing? With whom?
Then there was her phone number.
That was all I needed. I called her there and then. After all those years her voice was like balm to my scalded soul. She told me she still lived in Swaziland and taught at a high school in a town called Nhlangano. Her parents lived in Piet Retief, a South African town a few kilometres from the Swazi border. She would go visit them the following weekend and we could meet if I drove up there.
I drove to Piet Retief in the Mpumalanga Province, about four hours from Johannesburg, and booked in at the Waterside Lodge. The next morning I sat on the porch of Mr Fries, a fast food place just in front of the lodge, and waited for her. And she came along wearing orange slacks, a white blouse and a white cap. She had not aged one bit since the last time I saw her more than ten years before. I know that’s what we say to women to flatter them, but in this case it was true. If only she knew how often I had thought of her, that when I used to write my column for the Sunday Times or my articles in the Mail & Guardian I hoped she read them and could hear my voice in them, that when I was at a literary festival in Adelaide, Australia, I read to a multitude that had gathered outdoors as if it was a rock concert the poem I had written about our Jerusalema and actually sang Queen’s ‘Radio Gaga’.
As I suspected, her marriage had gone to the dogs too. I didn’t think she would have agreed to meet me there if it had not. I didn’t want to know the details but she intimated that for a long time she had felt like a soccer widow; her husband was a FIFA referee and spent his life on the soccer fields of the world. She told me about her three children: Nonkululeko, a girl a year younger than my son Zukile, Simphiwe, a boy a year younger than my daughter Zenzi, and a baby daughter called Gcinile.
‘Now that I’ve met you again I am inspired,’ she said. ‘I know I’ll go back to school; I’ll do a master’s degree.’
That evening we made love. I had broken my vow never to be unfaithful to Adele despite the terrible life I was living with her. I had kept my vow until then. Now I had broken it; there was no going back.
I gave Gugu the manuscript of The Madonna of Excelsior. Some days later I was to get her feedback.
I drove back to Johannesburg with my head buzzing with excitement.
Gugu applied to Wits University and was admitted for an honours degree and then for an MA in Forced Migration Studies. She lived in Braamfontein and I saw her quite often. Adele was bound to hear about it, ironically from the same gossip-monger who had told her about us when we were still at Roma, Lesotho. History repeats itself.
In the meantime we finally decided to do something about our divorce. Adele insisted that I should be the one who initiated it. Her logic was: ‘You have done it before and you’ll do it again. You are
experienced in divorce.’
She promised not to contest it because she wanted out of the marriage as much as I did. We therefore consulted the same lawyer.
‘I can only work for you both if it’s a consensual divorce and all we are doing is to draw up an agreement,’ he said.
We both agreed.
‘But you tell me you are going to America together,’ said the lawyer. ‘How are you going to live together there when you are going through a divorce?’
She wanted to go to school, so she said we certainly could live under the same roof even though we were not together conjugally.
But it turned out that she wanted half of my royalties from all my books as part of the settlement, even those I wrote long before I knew her. Obviously I was going to contest that. I was not going to share any of my royalties with her when she had discouraged and disparaged my work from the word go. It was no longer a consensual divorce. She consulted her old lawyer who had defended her in the theft and embezzlement case, Raymond Tucker Esq., and I consulted different lawyers from Rosebank, Alet Beyl and her husband, Mark Anthony Beyl.
My lawyer lodged the divorce case and summonses were issued. Her lawyer lodged a counter claim. The battle-lines were drawn, but it was going to be a protracted affair as contested divorces normally were in South Africa. Since the case could only be heard in the High Court our attorneys would have to brief advocates. We would leave for America while the matter was pending. At some stage we would have to come back for the hearings.
Under the circumstances my association with Gugu became quite open. I went with her to my reading events where we would, with Sello Duiker who was almost like my son, tease the woman we called Mama, novelist Miriam Tlali, about her new unpublished work titled Bleeding Shoulders. We laughed our lungs out at the jokes we made about the title. I took her to the Bee Place where I introduced The Heart of Redness to my grandfather at the graveside. I stood there while Gugu watched, next to the polished marble tombstone that I had erected, and spoke with him about the book, and gave it to him by leaving it on top of the grave, telling him I hoped he would enjoy it. I had done the same at my father’s grave in Mafeteng.