I had said that I was getting dressed, but the door swung open anyway, creaking on its hinges and then it closed. It was odd but I didn’t look behind me. I lay still on my back, my eyes closed, assuming that the person had opened and then shut the door, leaving me alone. But then I heard his voice: “I brought you a tie.”
I gave a start, came up on my elbows, and turned my head to see a beautiful man with a tapered beard and a bald head, wearing a black suit and a white shirt. He was leaning against the wall to the left of the door, holding up two ties—one in each hand—and attempting a pained smile.
I slumped back down and looked at the ceiling, the sadness and anger overwhelming me.
“You brought two ties.”
“You get to choose.”
“I have ties,” my voice was slow with grief.
Now he walked forward and opened the curtains. The light blew in with a force that only morning light possesses, making me shut my eyes to let them adjust. He came and sat to my right on the bed.
“You have one tie. And, it won’t go with a black suit,” he said, putting both ties across my belly.
I looked up at him more closely, searching his face for signs of something promising. He returned the look in that intent old way that I had become used to and I found this encouraging.
“Put the tie on,” he said, now looking away.
“Did you know my father was having a thing with Aus’ Tselane?” I spoke with a bit of feigned nonchalance. He said, without looking at me, turning his attention to the open window instead: “You still sleep with the window open.”
I snorted. “I guess you did know.”
“I wouldn’t call it a thing. I think it was much more than that.”
I covered my eyes with my arm and sighed again dramatically.
“I guess everyone has their secrets.”
“I wouldn’t call it a secret.”
“It would have been nice for you to tell me.”
He was still not turning to look at me, something I was beginning to find disconcerting.
“No,” he said examining his hands. “It was not my place. Strict orders from my parents. And it would have hurt you . . . so, no. I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Fucking township secrets.” I spat out my words.
He gave out a short, bitter chuckle and then straightened his tie.
In the silence that followed I sat up and came close to him. I put my nose on his shoulder, taking in the scent of lilac on his skin. Its familiarity jarred my senses, jolted me back to things buried in safe places that refused to remain safe. I put my hands at his sides, at his waist—more for balance than anything—and held on.
“Fuck,” I whispered, “ . . . I miss you.” He did not move.
When I slid my hands around to his stomach he said, softly, his voice sounding like he was very gently pulling himself away from something from which he had little control, “Put your clothes on. They’ll be waiting for you.”
I hesitated before standing up, my hands refusing to let go. I waited for him to shift his body, to nudge me away, but he stayed still. Slowly I moved, my feet touching the floor as if testing water temperature at the beginning of the season. Then the floor was warm and comforting from the sun’s heat. I walked over to the wardrobe where my suit was held up by a wooden hanger and started getting dressed. First I pulled on the pants and tied the belt and then I pulled off the t-shirt. When I was buttoning my shirt I looked up, and through the mirror I noticed Sediba with his hand on his chin, elbows pressed to his knee, watching me.
My hand stayed on my chest, fingers caressing a button. We had been here before, many times. One of us getting dressed, the other sitting or standing, witnessing the ritual with great fascination, watching the naked body and then the fit of the clothes on the body you loved. We had cherished this routine. And the one getting dressed would slow down as if giving the other a chance to take it in. This had all been in a different place and now was a different time. We were together but apart. I wanted him to stand up and bring me my shoes or fasten the last three buttons the way he would have done before and I sensed that he wanted the same but was not sure what to do, so ever so slowly, he looked away.
I threw the tie around my shoulders and took my shoes to the bed, where I sat down and started putting them on.
“I hate ties,” I told him as I pulled my shoelaces. “I was hoping not to wear one.”
Now he laughed with a bit more delight like he was hearing an old joke. He said, “You can’t. Not today.”
I was so pleased to hear his laughter that I sat up straight and looked him in the eye.
He reached up and fastened my tie, neither one of us speaking. When he was done we sat next to each other, watching the light dance across the floor as if this were any ordinary day.
“I want to stay in here,” I told him. “I can’t go and bury my father, Diba. Who buries both their parents in one year? Well actually, everyone these days.”
He shook his head. “No, everyone’s burying their children these days.”
I remembered Sizwe’s swollen nodes, the wheezing, his hands too heavy to swat a fly landed on his nose. I saw his mother and the handbag of flowing tissues; red lipstick bloodying the soft white paper.
“That’s true. Many more to come, I think.” The images now came tumbling like dominoes. They were of people I had seen just that week. Base. The children of neighbours. Older women, despondent. Young girls, pretty and smartly dressed, sitting cross-legged on the dusty ground because their bodies were too heavy to stand. The symptoms I recognized before even they did. There had been a wave of young people coming in that week, saying things like, “I didn’t come before because I thought it would go away.”
We were heading into the pit of death and I needed someone to hold my hand.
Sediba was looking curiously at the bags I had come home with. They were stacked against one another just below the window because I couldn’t be bothered to walk across the passage to the spare room and tuck them into the wardrobe. Now he turned his whole body to face me and asked, “Are you staying?”
“I . . . I have to. It was always my father’s plan, as you know. Even if my father isn’t here. Or especially now that he’s not here.” But then I wanted to be talking about something else, so I put my hand on his and told him, “But apart from that, I want to.”
He looked at me more closely, eyes filled with longing and grief, his hand not shifting away. He said, “Everyone will be there today. I will be there all day.”
I dropped the weight of my body back onto the bed. Slowly, hesitantly, Sediba came down to lie beside me. I didn’t move, only because I was afraid it might end too quickly.
“Thank you for calling me about my father,” I said. “I waited for you. I waited for you all week. I thought we could talk.”
He replied, “Just talk?”
I didn’t answer.
“Is there such a thing, with us?”
We lay side by side, his forehead on my right temple, his arm across my middle, his breath coming and going gently across my face.
He said, “After this, after today, I have to tell you something.”
I nodded, wishing we could both just fall asleep right there.
Aus’ Tselane came back as they were carrying the coffin out. She stood lurking in the background, head covered in black cloth and her face veiled in black lace. Anyone who saw her knew that she was hoping to go unnoticed. I kept trying at least to have our eyes meet, but she was dodging me, possibly having guessed that I was now in the know. I hadn’t had the courage to step into what used to be my parents’ bedroom; the door was shut the way she had left it and I hadn’t had the will to open it and go back to confront more of my father through his things.
It was possibly the largest funeral I
had been to in the township, even bigger than my mother’s with all the society women who had come. Because my father’s care had covered such a large area at a time when there was a great shortage of doctors, many had come from very far to pay their last respects to a man they had not only trusted but also quite loved.
My father’s coffin was carried into the church by his friends, mostly men who had worked in their own shops on the same street. Out of the church the pallbearers were my friends. Sediba was in the front with Lelo, and Trunka and Base were behind with two other childhood friends I had not been particularly close to but who had cared enough to stand when the priest asked for pallbearers to come forward. At the end of the church service I had moved forward to help but was gently told by Sediba’s mother—hand on my back—that it was against custom to carry your own father’s body after death.
I spent the day biting down tears, trying to appear stoic but not removed. Each person’s words blurred into another person’s song. Speeches turned into biblical parables growing into hymns spoken instead of sung. I think it rained but I couldn’t say with certainty. Old women introduced themselves as distant relatives, following the Setswana tradition—or is it only a regional habit?—of explaining what my father called them and what I was meant to call them: “When your father looked at me, he said: young aunt. When you look at me you say: great aunt,” and so on. I forced smiles and shook hands both damp and calloused, bodies coming and going around me, men patting my weary back and women with dry lips coming to kiss and caress my cheeks. I smelled alcohol on sympathetic breaths and snuff on noses coming close to kiss my cheeks. Through it all I bit my lip and coughed away the lump in my throat but when the coffin was lowered and I was asked to throw down my handful of dirt, I froze and looked up at Sediba, who stood next to his mother, their arms locking. I froze, wanting him to tell me what to do.
He took a step forward but his mother stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and signaled to his father, who came around instead and with a hand on my elbow, gently nudged me forward.
“Come son,” he said. “It’s time.”
With a trembling hand I threw my fistful of dirt on the coffin. I think when I closed my eyes he thought I was about to faint, so he gripped my elbow suddenly, giving me a start.
In a line my friends came forward, each pouring down their handful of dirt, afterwards brushing off their hands back and forth as if washing off a sordid act.
They all moved to give me hugs but Sediba, when his turn came, gave me a quick pat on the back—a gesture that almost made me laugh, it was so ridiculous.
Afterwards we all went back to the house, washed our hands out of the large bowls that had been arranged along the gate by women and men who had stayed behind to prepare the house and the food for the mourners.
Walking back into the house after the funeral I was struck again by the emptiness of it, the enormity of the loss of my parents. Why was it, I wondered, that the week before the funeral always gave the illusion of the person still being in the world? It is always after the burial that you really start to feel that they are never coming back.
After lunch, when the mourners had left, my friends and I gathered at Trunka’s house for the wie-sien-ons. I probably have never had that much to drink before or since, and that is saying something, considering my nights at Rodney’s parties.
The wie-sien-ons is meant to be a proper party. You’re meant to sit down and tell good, funny stories about the person who has just passed on. You’re meant to take off your jackets and ties, sit in a circle and drink, reminiscing on the good times. I thought about how it might look to people that their doctor was sloshed out of his mind one day and back feeling their pulses the next, but even I could see that this was practiced paranoia. No one cared a lick what I did with myself the day I had just buried my father.
I spoke of my father giving me a hiding when I was a little boy for stealing mangoes next door. Someone had a story about getting an injection from him for the first time. He had lollies for us when we were small that helped our throats feel better. It was soothing—and so were the drinks, donated by Trunka and his family. Then things took a turn. Lelo was telling a story which was funny and we laughed at first, but then it got uncomfortable. It was about the way my father deferred to my mother on everything, and Base was saying something about how he wouldn’t do that with his wife when he got married. But then Lelo was drunk and a drunk Lelo is always a ticking time bomb. He opens his mouth and people scatter because their secrets have just come out and are now lying scattered in the middle of the circle for all to watch and prod.
“But that’s old stuff,” he was saying after an incoherent sentence. “Aus’ Tselane might know a little more.”
“Jo, shut up!” Trunka yelled at him.
“Do you want to leave?” Sediba mouthed the words to me from where he was sitting, across the circle. I nodded and started to stand, but Lelo held me down.
“Eish . . . askies, Jo. Askies man. Eish. We all have our secrets . . . don’t go.”
I panicked. The bottle of beer in my hand was still half full so I brought it up to my mouth and gulped without stopping, emptying the contents before sitting down under the persistent force of Lelo’s hand.
All around me I felt their eyes bore through me. I saw them all seeing the things I’d hidden, not my father’s secrets. I saw my home—my flat in Durban—blown wide open and all eyes looking into my life. I stood up again and this time Sediba, throwing caution to the dogs, caught my arm and said, “I’ll take him home. I’m not drunk.”
I started to push him off, my mind saying, “No! They’ll see!” But my body gave in and I let him take me to his car.
Once settled in the passenger seat I said, “You know you might have just told on us.”
He said, “It’s not school. Adults don’t talk about telling on each other.”
I forced a bitter chuckle.
I slept in a t-shirt and my pants were nicely folded on the chair. When I woke up I couldn’t remember when Sediba had left. I remembered him pulling of my shoes and pants and vaguely remembered him stroking my forehead gently, but I must have faded really quickly because that was all I could recall.
At work I fumbled my way through the day, drinking water and feeling terribly ashamed of being at my father’s work like this—barely competent.
I had been at the surgery only about an hour, grateful that it appeared not to be the busiest day. My head was throbbing from a nasty hangover and I was counting the hours until I could go back to sleep. Then Thuli came in. I didn’t know Thuli very well because her family was one of the ones that had moved to our location after I had gone to varsity. She was studying engineering at the technikon and had been friends with Sediba for years, so I had heard about her from time to time. I had not been formally introduced to her though, but I knew her face very well. She is one of those people who are so ridiculously pretty that they’re hard to miss.
So when she walked into the surgery I recognized her instantly. She wore a navy blue dress with a white belt and her hair was held back in a small ponytail. She has big, beautiful round eyes, long black eyelashes, and round full lips that rarely stretch into a smile.
I stood up when she walked in and shook her hand to greet her. She looked me right in the eye, one hand on her belly and said, “Your father was my doctor.”
I nodded and showed her to the examining table.
I really didn’t have much of an exchange with her beyond the necessary: How was she feeling? When was she due? The doctor-patient standard back-and-forth.
So I didn’t think much of her saying, “So Sediba says you’re back to stay.”
I said, “Yes,” but that was all. I thought she and Sediba must have been closer than I had realized. Still, there was something knowing, about the way she had looked at me. It was as if she had been told something or h
ad simply worked out that I was gay. Her gaze was personal—familiar in a way that I couldn’t easily explain.
I decided to walk to Sediba’s house after work, remembering that he had said, before my father’s funeral, that we needed to talk. I had held on to that moment, that brief moment in my bedroom when we had sat next to each other and life had seemed peaceful for a short while. But I was unprepared for what he was about to tell me.
Arriving at his house I saw that he was not home yet. It was easy to remember why I had loved his backyard so much the first time I had been there: the flowers lined against the shrubs that made up the fence, the two large trees standing at each end of the yard, and the beautiful, nicely cut grass. It was peaceful—as calming as it had been on my first visit there.
My back against the wide trunk of the larger tree, I took off my shoes and closed my eyes.
Then I was back at the hospital, holding Sizwe’s hand listening to his wheezing. I knew he had very little time left and that I had to let go, but then he was sitting up and saying, “Every day, every day you say I love you.”
“To whom?”
“To me. Say I love you to me.”
“But I don’t—”
I was shaking my head and he reached out and put his hand on my shoulder and started shaking it.
“Kabz? Kabz?” I was wondering why he was now starting to call me by my first name when I woke up and it was Sediba crouching next to me, calling my name. I ran my hand over my face. It was getting darker now, the sun setting. My eyes adjusted and I was staring at him, not saying anything.
He looked concerned and picked my bag off the ground. “Bad dream?” He offered me his hand.
I stood up and followed him into the house. “Yah. Bad dream,” I mumbled. There was that wave of sadness. I rubbed my eyes and straightened up as if shaking it off.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 20