Such a Lonely, Lovely Road

by Kagiso Lesego Molope

  “Because?” he snapped, madly throwing his arms up in the air.

  “Come on, Jo. You know where we’re from. We sort of knew we’d get caught—”

  I think it was me calling him Jo in the middle of it, like we were back to being pals—like I had already moved on, that enraged him.

  “Caught? Caught? Because we’re two children at a forbidden game?” I opened my mouth to speak but it took a while before the words formed and finally came out. By then the door was open.

  My voice was clearer now the second time I said it: “I do love you too—”

  “Fuck you, Jo,” and the door slammed behind him.

  Home

  MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL was as hideous an affair as these things are meant to be. I couldn’t tell you who attended. People kept trying to feed me and I kept going to my old bedroom to look at the clock and then out the window to see if I could spot Sediba in the crowd. Every few minutes, there I was: clock, then window. Clock, window. I hated the priest, who prattled on about all kinds of things—none of them having anything to do with my mother. I thought he was suggesting that God had taken her to do better things in the afterlife or something like that. It was distressing to find out that I was capable of so much rage.

  My father and I exchanged the usual empty pleasantries. I was unsettled to find that if he felt sadness, it lay very deep inside him. So deep, he obviously had trouble accessing it because I couldn’t find it in his eyes.

  When everyone was gone I stood in the backyard looking at my mother’s garden, wondering about her thoughts before she died, still puzzled by why she wanted me to stay in Durban. Why had she wanted me to be away from my father after so many years of us planning to work side by side? I couldn’t get an answer out of Aus’ Tselane, who was the least comfortable person at the funeral. She was so nervous that I couldn’t get her to sit down and talk calmly—and I certainly was not about to ask my father, a man with whom conversations were limited to about three subjects in his life.

  At last I saw Sediba outside, with all my friends, all huddled in a corner, talking. In the backyard I had to make my way through crying mourners before I reached them and when they all hugged me he reached out his hand without looking me in the eye. “Sorry Jo,” he said.

  Lelo, behind me, asked me something about the wie-sien-ons, the party you have after a funeral to celebrate someone’s life. When I turned around I found that Sediba had slipped away and was gone.

  I boarded a plane the very night after we buried my mother and went back to my flat. To my surprise my father had been quite encouraging about me going back, saying, “We all need to carry on. It’s what she would have wanted,” the way people confidently make pronouncements about the wishes of the dead. I was quite anxious to leave, and headed for the airport.

  I think that I stayed in Durban not so much because I wanted to or she had wanted me to. I stayed because I just couldn’t make myself move.

  Durban

  ONE OF THE MOST PAINFUL MOMENTS in my life—during that period after my mother’s death—was discovering the different types of loneliness. There is the kind that eats away at your insides and pushes you to go out and find something to fill the void even when you don’t know what that something is. Then there’s the kind that keeps you walking around in your dreams finding the thing you lost but with the faint knowledge that you will wake up and the thing will be gone. That kind of loneliness is worse. It had me waking up all sweaty and thirsty and cold so that I was forced to listen to nothing but the sound of restless dogs howling at the full moon. I would recall what the superstitious say, that dogs only howl like hyenas when they’ve just seen a ghost.

  I lived in dreams where he was still with me and cursed the howling dogs many nights. I woke up feeling empty and yearning for him, but also guilty because the dreams were never about the loss of my mother.

  I started feeling lucky to have Andrew, who brought me food at lunchtime and chatted on about his family and his problems, and for once I was happy to hear him because I didn’t want to think or talk about myself. Until, out of the blue one day, he said, “I’m really sorry about you and Sediba. I mean . . . I see . . . I can see that you’ve been really sad. I haven’t seen him around, I figure it’s more than . . . well, more than your mom. The thing you’re sad about.”

  His eyes were so kind and so gentle that I didn’t have the strength to deny it, correct him or be the way I had been before. I nodded and bit my lip to stop myself from letting out the familiar sadness that smothered and cursed me every day.

  I poured myself into my work, trying very hard to enjoy it, learning as much as I could and spending as little time in my flat as possible, and when I did, I overslept. I picked up the phone a hundred times, sometimes even letting him answer so that I could hear his voice and then dropping it. I was like a fourteen-year-old with a crush. This was no way for a grown man to behave.

  Finally one day he said into the phone, “Talk to me or don’t call.”

  I went into a routine that I couldn’t break. Every evening was the same: I would come home from work and, being unable to stomach the stench of loneliness tucked in every corner of my flat, I took a long, slow walk around the two rectangular buildings where I lived and contemplated the life I once had.

  The blocks were both painted an impossible blue—a colour someone might liken to the sky but only out of a need to place it: the African sky is never that faded, chalky shade. Standing on the pavement near the parked cars, my feet touching the bold yellow line separating the parking area from the pedestrian path, I looked up and counted the windows until I got to mine. There were only four floors and my flat was at the corner, its windows always open to let in the scent of that lemon tree tucked away somewhere in the neighbourhood. I imagined that the place held a life of laughter and smells so enticing you would never want to leave.

  And why not? It had all been true not so long ago and I liked to think it could happen again. I liked to separate the memory from the dreams, which were teasing and spiteful. The memory—because I picked and chose—could be a sweet, gentle caress, but the dreams I had no control over. They were a medley of objects and faces carrying scorn and the burden of guilt.

  I resisted sleep, putting it off for as long as the senses would allow, all the while bargaining with the body: one more sip of wine, a bit more water, one last memory. In my right hand there was always a cigarette glowing; I enjoyed the smell but didn’t want to taste it, fearing it would remind me of tastes and feelings that would very surely break my heart. In this and other ways I played games with memory, allowing it to take me here but ducking from there, shutting my eyes to places too painful to visit.

  He stayed with every part of me. This could not be helped. I thought of him at every turn, with every slow step and every pained breath—the cigarette burning away and sometimes burning my fingers because I was not paying attention.

  Every night I willed him back into my life and at times even convinced myself that after I climbed the eight flights of stairs—forty-eight steps exactly—I would arrive at my flat to find him standing, waiting for me. How many times had I opened my door almost expecting him there only to be greeted by the emptiness of my life. When I finally drifted into sleep I dreaded the moment when I would wake up and try to sort through the sounds and pictures in my mind: was it real? Had there been someone sleeping beside me? Why was the other side of the bed cold when he had just been there? That loud car hoot on the street had gone on throughout the dream but was it still a dream if I could still hear it?

  I had to convince myself that I was fine, that in reality people’s faces did not change back and forth, back and forth like in a magic trick.

  It was at this time that I met Sizwe.

  The initial diagnosis for Sizwe was acute pneumonia. Andrew had been on his last hour of call when Sizwe arrived. When I came in, Andr
ew briefed me on his condition, telling me he suspected it was AIDS-related, adding, “And also, he’s a she.”

  I liked Sizwe from the moment we spoke. He asked in Sesotho, “Dr Mosala. Are you Mosotho or Motswana? I lived in Jo’burg for three years, that’s how I learned Sesotho. My girlfriend is Mosotho. Was Mosotho.”

  He had a dark scar running the length of his right forearm and his head was swollen from what he said was “a fair fight.”

  “Why do you say ‘was’? You broke up?” I asked him as I examined him, my stethoscope landing on a thick bandage, covering tightly bound breasts.

  He looked me in the eye and his face changed from friendly to a warning glare. With his wheezing and exhaustion he shouldn’t have been speaking but he insisted, “I’m a man. I don’t want questions about my chest.”

  I nodded and continued. Then he coughed up some more phlegm and shook his head. His words came out in a lower whisper this time. “We didn’t break up.”

  I didn’t ask him to explain, only told him what was wrong and what we needed to do. He was drowsy from the medication at this point so I wasn’t sure he heard me. I remembered the young man who had died suddenly a few months before, when I had gone home and told Sediba about it and he had held me and given me a glass of wine. It was raining when I left the hospital that night and I jumped onto the first taxi I saw, managing to catch it just as it was about to close. The hospital was buzzing as it always was at every hour, patients restless and out for a smoke, taxi drivers standing in groups, chatting and waiting for passengers. A steady stream of visitors going in and out of the buildings.

  As the taxi drove on, I was thinking about Sizwe. I had had many young patients before, many who had died the same way, but there was something about this one—maybe it was the determined way he looked at me, I don’t know. I felt he had looked right into me. There was something knowing about his eyes. Like he recognized me. He was wheezing and in pain but was determined to appear brave.

  At home I sat at my table with a glass of wine in one hand and the phone receiver in the other. I briefly considered dialing Sediba’s number, as I did every evening after work and every morning when I woke up. I took a sip and sat still, watching the city’s glowing lights below, my heart aching for times I could neither hold on to nor go back to.

  My father would still be at his office, I knew, so I dialed.

  “He’s so determined,” I told him about Sizwe.

  “People often are in the last stage of their lives,” he replied. I could see him settled into his chair, picking up a pen and writing notes on my case and making a point to ask specific questions—a quiz disguised as regular conversation. I enjoyed this part. It brought out the scholar in me.

  “So I haven’t tested him but I’m sure that it’s PCP and I think he knows too.”

  “You have to—”

  “I know, Papa. I know. I just, you know . . . I want him to have just three more weeks.”

  “Ha-a. You know we don’t get to decide that. That’s not for us to decide.”

  “It breaks your heart . . . ” I started, but stopped when I heard the faint sound of a pen or pencil scratching the crisp, dry surface of paper. Here I was going where my father had taught me never to go, so I sensed a teacher’s frustration in a student going rogue.

  Yet I could not help but continue. “I know we don’t, but Pa, you should see him. He’s so young. Sixteen or seventeen. Strong, in spite of it, and determined. He occasionally asks me about myself.”

  My father cleared his throat and made an excuse about work. It was the classic Mosala strategy: if you delved too much into feelings, we got on with work. So we said our goodbyes and he dropped the phone first. I held on, dialed Sediba’s number fully and dropped it before I heard the first ring.

  How do I describe what happened with Sizwe? It was brief, my encounter with him, as I was not the only doctor seeing him. Yet every time we were in the same room, interacting, I felt a pull towards things I couldn’t always clearly name. Perhaps it was when he said, “You don’t look at me like something’s wrong with me.” When I told him that well, something was wrong with him, that he was very ill, he said, “You know what I mean,” his finger pointing to his chest. There was something about him that reminded me of myself, but whenever I saw him I kept thinking, I’ve never been that hopeful and open, why would he remind me of myself? Perhaps he was more someone I might have been, under different circumstances. A bolder, more liberated young person.

  He wanted to sit up when it would have been better to lie down, he wanted to speak when it took every bit out of him to speak one word audibly. His lungs were sacks of fluid ready to give up. Yet every time I walked into the room he perked up and we chatted briefly before he dozed off from exhaustion or the medications. He told me, “I watched this show once where there was a man wounded and his girlfriend believed that if she kept talking to him he would stay conscious. So when my girlfriend was sick, I kept talking to her, telling her I loved her—every day—thinking it would keep her alive.” He gave a chuckle and coughed up phlegm.

  Andrew and I disagreed about him. He kept saying: “He. She. I have no idea.”

  “He wants to be addressed as a guy.”

  “But she’s clearly not.”

  I was tired and irritated by him and his suggestion we take the bandage off. “It’s up to him,” was all I could manage to say. “It’s his choice.”

  It was the night before I got the phone call about my father that I saw Sizwe for the last time and I really could see then that he didn’t have much time. I had checked his DC4 cell count and it was well below fifty. He had moments of lucidity but they were fleeting. His mother sat beside him, clutching a rosary, and whenever she opened her bag, white tissues flowed out like flowers unfolding. She spoke about how determined her son had been. “Always, always he insisted we take him as he is. Never apologizing . . . I was only happy he found someone who loved him.”

  I sat with them, checked his vitals but mainly just kept them company, before going home. I had told the hospital to phone me if anything happened, so when the phone call came, I thought at first that it was about Sizwe. It was about my father.

  Home

  AUS’ TSELANE WENT BACK TO HER FAMILY for a few days, and said she would return the day before the funeral. This seemed rather strange, given how devastated she was by my father’s death. She refused to give me a plausible reason. “My sister’s child is very sick,” she said, but something about this didn’t sound right. I stood at the door of the spare room, the guest room when I was growing up, and watched her pack her clothes into a small black bag.

  After all these years, I observed, she had not accumulated much beyond a few dresses and two pairs of shoes. I leaned against the doorframe as the thought brought down the weight of sadness on my back.

  She looked up at my puzzled face and said, strangely, “Your father insisted I move out of the backroom, so that’s why my things are here.” I was lost in a fog of confusion and weariness, so I only shrugged and said nothing. I saw from the tightness in her jaw and her brisk moves from the wardrobe to the bag that she meant to leave and leave she would. So I put my arms around her and walked her to the taxi, half resenting her for leaving me alone. We stopped at the side of the road and I pointed my finger up—the sign for town, where she would go to catch a taxi to Phalaborwa—and when it stopped I picked up her bag, waited until she was seated by the driver’s side and handed it to her.

  “I’ll be back,” she said and forced a smile. “You’ll see, I’ll be back.”

  I shut the door and waved her away. All I could do was go back home and try to tell myself that with the help of neighbours I would be fine and that I had to be fine: it was all upon me now.

  My father had sold my mother’s shop only two months after she died, because he couldn’t manage both the surgery and the
shop. I had protested, asked him if we could at least rent it to someone else instead of having it completely leave the family, but he had said, “No. It’s too much for me. I have to let it go.”

  In fact a lot of things had changed around the house.. My father seemed to have worked at erasing my mother’s touch: the rosebushes in her neat and pretty garden had been replaced by wildflowers that I couldn’t identify; the front iron gate, which had been white, had now been painted black; all the interior walls were in pretty, playful colours like yellow and pink. Even the kitchen cabinets had been redone, with pine in place of white finishes.

  And the changes didn’t stop at the house. My friend Base was now thinner, slower, showing definite signs of being quite ill. I knew what was wrong and it was too painful to think about. At first I had looked at him with more shock than I had intended, and then had to look away, regretful. Maimela hardly felt like the same place.

  Then of course, I was now to be the doctor and the surgery and all everything that came with it was awaiting me.

  The day after I arrived, Sediba came in the morning with Base and Trunka, wearing overalls and a cap pulled down to almost cover his eyes. I was walking out of the house, on my way to buy food for the mourners as they walked in. My heart leapt at the sight of him, his arms lifting the pot and his face turned away from me, obviously in an effort to not meet my eyes. I said: “Heita!” and all three of them said it back, and then I had to move around them to get to the car, my arm briefly brushing against Sediba’s back. He stopped for a moment and said, “O Sharp, Jo?”

  In front of our friends I couldn’t put my arms around him and rest my head on his shoulder. I turned around and looked at him, my hands in my pockets but said nothing, before getting into the car. It seemed to reverse almost without me, and once out through the gate I put it in gear and sped down the hill.