Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  The house is next to the Ohio State University campus off High Street. We meet the landlord who is sitting on the porch supervising some workmen sawing wooden boards. He tells us that Sonwabo has left and he has no forwarding address. Our spirits are dampened. We drive back to Athens. I later learn from an African American woman who writes to me about visiting her school to talk about South Africa that she knows Sonwabo and that he works for a soccer team called the Crew as a custodian. Through this connection I trace him to a conservative think-tank organisation where he works as a political consultant. The Crew job is a part-time one. We finally get in touch and he comes to Athens to visit and to meet Adele and the kids. He mentions something about his plans to return to South Africa soon, but I know it’s just empty talk. Why should his desire to return to South Africa happen only when he sees me? He has been here for years without writing even to his children, let alone to his wife and his mother.

  The divorce is moving very slowly. The lawyers from the opposing sides are involved in protracted negotiations. Raymond Tucker, Adele’s lawyer, makes it clear in his letter that they do intend to drag the matter out because the divorce may have some effect on the visas of Adele and the children which are dependent on my visa. His fear is that the divorce may affect their right to remain in the United States. Adele, who has been admitted for a PhD in media studies, has been granted a tuition waiver by the university on the grounds of being my wife, and therefore the divorce may affect that as well. They also want me to continue to pay the mortgage on the house in Weltevredenpark, but the property must be transferred to Adele. I should continue to pay the mortgage on Adele’s property even after our divorce until it is fully paid up. I, on the other hand, will take possession of some property in the Eastern Cape – ‘the Herschel property’, as Tucker’s correspondence refers to it. She is demanding half of all my royalties from my books. She also wants custody of the children and maintenance for herself and the children of a ridiculous amount that exceeds my entire salary at Ohio University before taxes.

  This is obviously not going to be an amicable divorce. I instruct my attorneys to respond that indeed she must have custody of the children. It is my belief that children of this age should be with their mother, as long as I get reasonable visitation rights. But of course the maintenance will have to be reasonable, an amount that I can afford rather than her current demand which is beyond my means. The ‘Herschel property’ is a myth she has concocted so that she can have our property in Weltevredenpark, and I must not get a single cent from it. The ‘Herschel property’ does not belong to me but to the Lower Telle Beekeeping Collective Trust, the Bee People, and it cannot be part of the dispute. She knows that as well, but she brings it into the mix to muddy the waters and give the impression that I have more assets than I really do. The only solution I am prepared to accept is that we sell the property in Weltevredenpark and divide the proceeds equally, after paying off the mortgage.

  As for the royalties, here I am prepared to fight to the last man. She will not get a single cent of my royalties because she has never supported my writing. Instead, she disparaged it quite early on in our marriage and later lost all interest in it. The only time she paid attention was when I got a bad review, and these were few and far apart. Most of the reviews were glowing with praise. But once in a while there would be a scathing one. And then she would become animated, make copies of it and send it to her friends and to those people in South Africa who she thought were interested in my work. For instance, when a writer called Norman Rush savaged me in the New York Review of Books, accusing me of the literary crimes of not featuring AIDS in my novels and of not being previously known by him, she was so gleeful that she distributed the article to all and sundry in South Africa.

  The last time I was in South Africa Dorothy Steele, my biographer, told me that she had received Norman Rush’s review from Adele and added, ‘Thank her for me and please ask her to send me the good reviews too, such as those from the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.’

  I wish I could get more bad reviews so that there is more sunshine in her life.

  That notwithstanding, I am determined not to share my royalties with her. It’s a matter of principle.

  When Raymond Tucker insists that she must have sole possession of our Weltevredenpark house because I have the ‘Herschel property’ I state my position thus:

  The property was never part of any dispute because it belongs to the community of Herschel. It is a Trust and I am only one of the Trustees. Raymond Tucker and I are both Trustees of the Market Theatre. Why doesn’t he mention the Market Theatre in this dispute? Why doesn’t he include it in the spoils that must be given to Adele?

  Since we both stand our ground on these issues it is clear that our divorce will not be resolved in the near future. Yet I am desperate to be free. I ask my attorneys to explore the precedent set in the case of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – which had been successfully followed in the case of Barry Davidson versus Sally Davidson – where the court granted a divorce without having settled the financial issues between the parties.

  While my lawyers are exploring this line of action and her lawyers are opposing it, life in the family is living hell. The children are affected because there is perpetual tension between us. I think she is angry that she is not getting her way and she wants to take it out on everyone. In the morning she wakes up and struts around in her undergarments yelling at the children. It is her way of teaching them how to take their bath and clean their teeth and prepare for school. I lie in my bed frozen with fear lest she turns her wrath on me. But she never does, until one morning when I cannot take it any more and I ask her to cool it a bit.

  ‘You are a teacher by profession,’ I say. ‘And a very good one by all accounts. I am sure you don’t teach your students by yelling at them. Zuki and Zenzi will learn better if you go gently on them.’

  ‘You shut up,’ she says. ‘These are my children. What do you know about bringing up children when yours are failures who have achieved nothing in life? You left them with your useless mother to bring them up for you; now look how they have turned out.’

  I know already that every time we disagree about something she brings up my older kids – Neo, Thandi and Dini – and drives her point home that I have no right to say anything because Mpho and I did a botched job of raising our children. Her running mantra is: ‘I don’t want my children to grow up to be like your children.’

  But I think she does see my point because when the kids come back from school she apologises for her morning behaviour. She blames it on the stress of living with me. But the next morning she does it again.

  I can understand her point about the stress of living with me. I have my own stress of living with her. I would be having a similar breakdown too if I didn’t have an outlet, namely my creative writing classes and The Whale Caller, which I have resumed writing. But I don’t write it at home. I wake up early in the morning and go to my office at the university where I work furiously for the whole day, until late in the evening. Colleagues see me and praise me for my dedication. They don’t know that I am an exile from a poisonous home environment.

  I don’t want to medicalise Adele’s anger, turning it into something pathological, but I feel very strongly that she needs help. I suggest that we both go for counselling as I need help too. She opposes it because she says counselling will not do her any good; I will lie about her to the counsellors as I have always lied about her all my life. But I suspect that she does go for medical advice privately. I am hopeful that things will be better, not between us as such, but between her and the children.

  They never are. They worsen instead. Zenzi is a relentless painter and a very talented one. She is certainly going to be a great artist one day. Some of her paintings have inspired mine. She uses every free moment she has to paint a picture. Her mother starts a new campaign of destroying Zenzi’s paintings. I do manage to save some and hide them in my office.
They are still there to this day. But I am not always there for the rescue. Sometimes I find her crying because her mother has destroyed a prized work. All I can say to comfort her is: ‘Don’t worry, my child, you’ll paint another one.’

  ‘But it won’t be the same again,’ she says sniffling.

  She is right. You can only create a work of art once. Even a performance of a play in the theatre cannot be repeated. It can run for every night for months on end, but no performance will be the same as any other performance. I can tell you proleptically at this point that in the next novel I write after The Whale Caller I create a character who destroys her daughter’s works of art. Adele has indeed inadvertently given me many ideas for characterisation in a number of my novels, beginning with She Plays with the Darkness, as I have already told you. Her habits are coming in quite handy in my creation of some aspects of my main female character in The Whale Caller, which I am currently writing.

  Maybe I do owe her royalties after all!

  For me, relief comes from my travels. And from my varied literary activities in America and abroad. As you may have noticed, literature has taken over completely and I don’t do much painting these days.

  I feel giddy when I am away from the rancour that pervades the homefront. The Heart of Redness wins the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. I ask Robert Edgar, the Howard University professor who writes about my father, to represent me at the awards ceremony because I am at Philips Academy in Massachusetts where the students are performing my play, The Bells of Amersfoort. I composed the music for this play so their director wants me to teach them how to sing the isiXhosa songs properly.

  When The Heart of Redness is published in Dutch and in Swedish I go to those countries to read and sign books. When Salman Rushdie writes to me inviting me to do more readings in New York I gladly attend the PEN World Voices Festival where I am on the panel with Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Tsitsi Dangarembga. I read for the full-house public about a man who is mating with a whale in The Whale Caller, which is still a work-in-progress. Ngugi tells me he is mesmerised both by the reading and the content.

  ‘Even though there is no revolution or class analysis in it, Mzee?’ I tease him.

  I call him Mzee, which is a title they use for elders in his country. I find these older writers inspiring and I like to hang out with them. That is why a month or so later I fly to Basel, Switzerland, to visit writer Lewis Nkosi and his partner Astrid Starck. There I debate with the Yiddish writers who gather in his small living room about fiction and politics. It is a pity, though, that I can’t join them in guzzling the vast amounts of hard liquor that seem to oil good conversation. Lewis is still a heavy drinker as I have always known him to be. He has no sympathy for the likes of me who have chosen to walk the lonely path of temperance. The thought of going back to Athens could easily have driven me back to drink. But, thankfully, I no longer have the stomach or the head for it. The problem when you become a teetotaller is that you can’t postpone your problems by postponing sobriety.

  Good company that makes you forget your problems is found not only in Basel, but in Barcelona where I pop in occasionally to be with Teresa, Albio, Sara and Adrian. And in Toronto, Canada, where I read poetry at the International Festival of Authors at the Harbourfront Center. It is not so much the reading but the meeting of old friends that I relish. There is the couple Patrick Nkunda and Palesa with whom I enjoy reminiscing about the old wild days in Maseru. Just to remind you, Nkunda is a top-notch immigration lawyer and Palesa is a nurse in the city. There is also the attractive film director Debe Morris, with whom I reminisce about her South African visit. She is the lady I took to Lesotho to see Her Majesty Queen ’Mamohato.

  I remember that on that trip, after Debe was done with her royal visit she decided to take a minibus taxi to the Basotho Pony Trekking Centre up the very steep mountains where she hoped to hire one of the famous Basotho ponies and ride to the Maletsunyane Falls. It was already afternoon and I worried that she would not be able to get a taxi back, in which case she would be stranded in the mountains. I went to Lesotho High School to get my friend Mxolisi Ngoza, the mathematics teacher, to accompany me. I drove up the winding road that ascends steeply for more than forty kilometres past Molimo-Nthuse Lodge to the horse breeding place. We waited there for only a few minutes before Debe arrived on horseback. We drove back with her, stopped briefly at the Lodge for a few drinks, drove on and then stopped again at the most dangerous part of the road, the Bushman’s Pass.

  ‘This is where two former cabinet ministers of Chief Leabua Jonathan’s government and their wives were murdered,’ I told Debe.

  I was talking about Desmond Sixishe, the Minister of Information who helped me get to America that first time in 1981, and Vincent Makhele, Minister of Foreign Affairs. They were abducted from their homes with their wives. Their bodies were found at this mountain pass riddled with bullets. This happened soon after the 1986 coup when General Metsing Lekhanya overthrew Chief Leabua Jonathan in what seemed at first to be a bloodless coup. It was not until 1990, after Lekhanya had been overthrown by fellow officers, that two senior members of the Lesotho Paramilitary Force, who were also relatives of the King, were convicted for these point-blank executions of two men who were political rivals and two women whose only crime was that they were married to the men.

  Debe took photographs of the horrid place.

  In Toronto, we recall the blood-soaked mountain and the rest of the journey. Debe says her strongest impression of the trip is being in awe of me and my generosity and kindness. I am rather flattered by it all. It is not every day that women tell me they are in ‘awe’ of me. I know of one in Athens, Ohio, who thinks I am the worst scumbag ever to walk this earth. But I do not tell Debe about my miserable situation back home. One doesn’t burden friends with one’s afflictions, especially when they are self-inflicted – yes, I was not forced by anyone to be in this situation, I walked into it with my eyes open. A sane person would ask: then why don’t you just walk out of it? Good question. And when people say that, you know immediately that they don’t have a good answer. I don’t know if you’ll buy it if I tell you the children have something to do with it. You will buy it even less when I tell you I feel I have an obligation towards her. But take it or leave it, that’s how I feel.

  The greatest relief comes when I return to South Africa during the summer months. South Africa means the bees and the Bee People. It also means the comforting presence of Gugu in Johannesburg and of my mother in Lesotho.

  I rent a townhouse in Sandton and Gugu and my daughter Thandi join me there. We travel to the Bee Place and find that the Bee People are still as determined as ever to make their project a success. Only women remain in the project now, the men having given up long since. One of those who left is Morrison Xinindlu, the elder we once upbraided for wrecking the car in his drunkenness. But others have been forced out of the project by death. One of these is my Uncle Owen. I heard of his death while I was in the United States, but I couldn’t come for the funeral. My children Thandi and Neo and their mother Mpho represented me.

  The only retrogressive step that I find among the Bee People is that they still haven’t learnt how to drive. They tell me that they did enrol two women at a driving school in Sterkspruit but neither of them made any headway because they were so fearful of driving. Now they have to employ one of Uncle Press’s sons, Sandile, to drive their truck whenever they have to deliver their honey in Sterkspruit or Lady Grey and he charges them exorbitant amounts as if they were hiring his own vehicle filled with his own petrol. I try to give them more pep-talk.

  ‘This is now a women’s only project because you are more persistent and have more patience than men,’ I say. ‘You have proved that you can be successful without men. In fact, in your case it is likely that you are successful because you do not have any men running things here. That is all the more reason why you must learn to drive your own truck. This guy you employ as a driver is robbing you blind. You
should be doing your own driving.’

  They promise that they will try to banish their fears and return to the driving school. But their eyes tell me that none of them have any intention of doing so.

  From the Bee Place we drive to Lesotho to visit my mother. Her health has deteriorated and she is beginning to lose her memory. She is grateful to the Lord that I finally found Sonwabo and she hopes that she will see him before she dies. I admonish her for talking as if she is at the mouth of the grave and promise that I will persuade Sonwabo to come back home, even if just to visit and see his mother, his siblings, his wife and his children who are now three grown women and one giant of a man.

  Back in Johannesburg we launch The Madonna of Excelsior at Exclusive Books in Hyde Park. Kader Asmal, the Minister of Education, is present. I am glad that he came when he heard I was launching a book even though he was not specifically invited. He is a true lover of literature and a supporter of my novels in particular, though he has told me that he does not agree with my political position in The Heart of Redness. I tell him that I am particularly proud of The Madonna of Excelsior because I own all the rights, thanks to my beautiful agent Isobel Dixon.

  An eavesdropper whose book I have just signed asks, ‘What has her beauty got to do with it?’

  I laugh and say, ‘I know, I know I am being sexist and all that jazz. But I am a man of art, I love beauty.’

  Gugu and I pay a long overdue visit to Nadine Gordimer in Parktown. Today she is all alone in her huge house. We relax in her tastefully furnished but subdued living room and she offers us brandy. Alas, we are wet blankets because we are teetotallers. She treats herself to a shot nonetheless. She is a very disappointed woman. One of the icons of the struggle, Mac Maharaj, has just been accused by the Mail & Guardian as having been involved in some financial scandal. I never really get to know what it is all about because I am really corruption-fatigued; there are too many such stories in the papers.