I stood, gathered my things and started to leave. I reckoned that since Sediba had always been a deep sleeper he wouldn’t notice me walking out, but I was wrong.
As I slowly pulled the door open he said, “Are you leaving?”
Startled, I turned back went to sit on the bed beside him.
“I didn’t want to wake you. I have to go home so I can have fresh clothes tomorrow.”
Sediba sat up and pressed his fingers against his eyelids.
“You should stay. You can borrow my clothes tomorrow.”
“Someone will see me walking out . . . ”
He kissed my bare shoulder and then leaned his cheek against it.
“If we’re to do this, you can’t walk out in the middle of the night like we’re teenagers sneaking in and out of each other’s houses. If we’re to do this, you’ll have to stay.”
“And Thuli?”
He let out a faint and tired laugh. “Look at me. Look at me begging you to stay like . . . well, like a young man in love, really. You think I’m going to be able to wake up next to anyone else in the future?”
I kissed his clean-shaven head.
He moved over and made room for me.
I slipped back in, excited and afraid. Morning would come and I would have to walk out with him, with all his neighbours there.
It’s hard to say that I slept at all with the usual township night sounds keeping me up. Sediba, for his part, held on to me through his sleep, pulling me closer every time I started to move. All night long I thought about how we could do it and by the time the cock crowed I had decided one thing: I would work here but I would not live here.
We went about with our familiar routine the next morning, me borrowing his clothes, Sediba making me tea and being his old attentive self, sliding his hand up and down my back, kissing my neck.
In the midst of getting ready he stopped and looked at me, his eyes dancing with relief:
“I really missed you,” he said.
I kissed him: “I love you.”
The knock on the door jolted us back to reality. I nearly dropped my cup of tea and I started to move, getting ready to leave the room, to go and hide in the bedroom, but Sediba shook his head and motioned for me to stay. My throat was dry, my shirt felt too tight. I adjusted my belt. He put his hands in mine and squeezed before going to open the door. I fiddled with my keys and waited.
When he opened the door, and Thuli stood there, her eyes moving from Sediba to me. It took all the courage in me not to look away. Sediba seemed so unsure of himself that I didn’t know if I was imagining it, but I thought I was losing him all over again.
Epilogue
A New Kind of Home
IN A FEW MINUTES I will have to go and lock the doors and put up the Re Tswaletse / Closed sign. This afternoon it’s my turn to go and fetch her from school. The biggest challenge is getting through the last patient’s visit. People always come with more than they admit at first. You think you’re seeing someone for a headache and you find out the headache is because of trauma suffered a few weeks ago, so you have to sit, talk, make time. There’s always more. I’ve come to understand now why my father’s work took so long, why he left at sunrise and didn’t close until long after supper time. I understand, also, my mother’s resentment of the job and I’m lucky that I am with someone whose job sometimes requires late working hours, who also thinks people are there for one thing but they always bring in so much more of their lives.
So I’ve learnt, on the days that I have to drive into town to fetch her, that I must put someone whom I know well as the last patient on the schedule. It has to be a patient whose health concerns are more familiar to me—preferably someone I’ve seen very recently.
The road to town is not as long as it used to seem when I was growing up and being driven to school. Things—places—always seem much larger in the eyes of a child. I feel more and more tightly wound, and as is my way, I am fidgeting, patting my pockets looking for keys when I should know that I’ve put them in my bag. I feel giddy with anticipation because this is the best part of my week.
I pick up my jersey now and put it on. It is a rather stylish v-neck pullover, with leather trims around the openings of the sleeves. Of course I didn’t buy it myself. I place my father’s stethoscope in my father’s old leather bag and sling it over my shoulder, wondering what he would say if he saw me now, taking over big parts of his life but not at all being the man he thought I was.
Outside my window I see there might be a storm on its way, clouds are gathering in the distance, white, grey, red. My thoughts turn to where I am going: there is a girl waiting for me and I must hurry before the storm lands.
Days after we bought the house, I stood at my gate and watched a scene from my childhood and one of my earliest memories repeat itself:
A large lorry, white as a sunny day’s cloud, came to a standstill in front of my house. Sediba’s father jumped out from the driver’s seat as cheerfully as he had done when I was eleven years old. Again he rubbed his hands with the excitement of a child, his overalls as large and paint-stained as they had been on that day long ago. I wondered if they were the same pair.
Sediba’s mother, as impeccably dressed as ever, stepped out and smoothed down her blue polka dot dress, her handbag slung over the crook of her arm. The boy who once wore a blue and white scarf around his neck was, this time, the man standing at my side, nervously fiddling with the keys in his pocket.
“Hallo boys!” His mother called out cheerfully, her easy chuckle reassuring us both. I stepped aside as she came towards us, one arm flying out and landing around her son’s neck, lips landing on his cheek, her other arm stretched out beckoning me to her. Working to clear the lump in my throat, I moved in for the hug, felt lips moist with dark brown lipstick brush against my cheek.
The man called out: “A re eng banna!”
We quickly moved to help, unloading the truck. Bits of our old lives—chairs, tables, came out of the lorry, and we carried them into our new home.
Now I know what Sediba meant when he said his mother didn’t ask questions, but she knew. Once a month or so his parents come in, groceries in hand, to join us for a meal. His father walks around tinkering with screws and handles, whistling all the time. He then sits with his son on our porch and they share beers while I walk around the garden with his mother, talking about plants, gardening, and nothing else. I have a bit of my own mother in me, it seems, because I’m quite happy to spend time in the garden. We eat together and they seem almost to not have noticed that there is one large bed and we both sleep in it.
After the meal they go next door through the adjoining back yard, because they are in love with the little girl.
Her name is Reitumetse and we call her Itu, Nana, Setsana, Ma-Itus, and Tutu. She has big round eyes with long eyelashes. Her skin is a smooth dark brown, darker than either one of us. Sometimes when I stand at the gate to the school see her come running up to me, school bag heavy on her back, her jersey in one hand and a flask in the other, I marvel at her beauty and at the sight of someone who looks at me like she loves me more than anything—like she just wants to fall into my arms.
I scoop her off her feet—school bag and all. She giggles on the good days or her head flops onto my shoulder on the hard days. No matter what kind of day she’s had, she throws her arms around me and cries, “Papa Kabelo, can we get ice cream?”
Thuli always tells me, “Stop, don’t feed her ice-cream every time. Not every time. Sometimes, once a week, is fine but not every time.” Sometimes I smile and shrug away her concerns, other times I say: “OK, I’ll try,” but I never promise because if there is a way to refuse the child anything I swear I haven’t found it yet.
From school we drive to the ice-cream place in Sunnyside, the one that claims to have “the best Danish ice cream.�
� She says, “Can we go to Denmark someday, since they seem to have the best ice cream?”
I tell her, “Of course,” and then I spend hours after she has gone to sleep in her room or next door to her mother’s house, thinking and looking for ways the three of us can go overseas together, until Sediba comes up and puts his arm around me and says, “Leave it to her mother, don’t offer it.”
I am very good about respecting her mother’s wishes. I try never to do or say anything to suggest that she is mine—but at home, in private, I don’t know how to fully let her be someone else’s. I don’t think of her as her mother’s until Sediba reminds me. Until he says, “We agreed, remember?” and I shut my eyes and make myself remember that I have a child who is not mine.
I know he feels the same way because we talk about it when we’re alone. Just the other day he had to phone me in the middle of the day from the salon. There he was making his customers wait because Itu had begged him to relax her hair and he faced a dilemma. He was short of breath when I picked up the phone, so that I had to ask, “Were you running?”
He explained the problem and said, “What’s the harm, really?”
It was only after I had explained what the harm was, the thing about it not being our decision, though it would be cute, that he said, I could just blow dry it very straight. It would be the same thing to her but not to Thuli, right?”
“Still . . . ” I started.
“Yah, still . . . ”
She is ours but she is not ours. She lives mainly next door and moves freely between the houses with no fence in the backyard. She calls me Papa and she calls Sediba Papa but only softly, quietly, because she knows that it’s not allowed—because one day she had spoken referred to me as her Papa to her grandmother and to this day she can still remember the tongue-lashing she received for it.
So, this is the way it is: when there are other people around, she speaks to us as if we’re people with no names. No “uncle” or “papa” or even our first names. In public she only has a mother, in private we are a family.
People talk and stare but we have never said anything, not officially anyway. We are in the same house, in the same bed every night and Thuli and Itu live next door. Sometimes she sleeps at our house. When Thuli works late or has a guest she doesn’t want her to see, we take her out to the movies or out for supper and she comes to sleep here, in her own room with her own things.
We are not a family but we are. To us this is a family: separate houses; some lies or refusal to correct that misunderstanding that we’re her uncles and to each other we are friends. We live with stories woven out of fear and the details tangling, tangling more with each passing year.
We have chosen to live in the suburbs, surrounded by people we don’t know, even while we are still very committed to our jobs in Kasi. My parents’ old house is Aus’ Tselane’s. I never go a whole week without visiting. I suppose at this point she is the only one left from my family of origin and as Sediba pointed out, if she lived there with my father and changed the house then the house is rightfully hers.
Sometimes when Sediba and I are planning something, when we are about to have a guest or to go and see people, we look at each other and ask, “Do they know?” and proceed, based on the answer.
You let go of people and places because of where you are. You choose to forget people you once wanted in your life because they don’t know and you need them not to know. You have fewer family members because you’re afraid of what might happen if they found out. Your loving happens when shadows fall and behind closed doors because that is the only way for it to survive. But here we are in spite of everything. Here we are, a family.
Our friends are the toughest part. There’s a silence around us, around our being together. They’re too close and too smart not to have noticed, of course. They no longer ask us about finding wives and they adore Itu, but no one ever says anything to suggest that they think we’re a family—but I also think that it’s kind they never suggest that we’re not. We still have beers with them, still have parties with them, but always in the township and never at our home.
A lot has happened there. Base died before Itu was born. I know who is probably next, but I won’t let myself think it. Who Sediba and I are to each other is hard for our township friends, but what is going on with them, the fact of losing each other, looking at houses going empty when everyone in them is still young: that is much harder.
Sometimes I do catch a scornful look or a disgusted comment from someone on the street. A patient comes in and says something believing that it’s cryptic, but I recognize it as thinly veiled curiosity about me and Sediba, about why neither of us ever got married, or why Thuli’s child sometimes comes and plays at the surgery and other times at the hair salon. I say nothing and reveal nothing. In the end I think people may be angry and disapproving—they may feel that we’ve betrayed them in some way because they trusted us to be the men they raised us to be, but as Sediba often tells me, people need good doctors and great hairdressers and that is all we have to be to them.
Glossary of Setswana, Afrikaans and Township Slang Words
A re eng banna! – (Setswana) “Let’s go, men!”
Ao – (Setswana) pleasant surprise
Askies – (Afrikaans) “I’m sorry”
Aus’ – (Setswana) Sister
Braai – (Afrikaans) barbecue
Eish! – Urgh!
Eng – (Setswana) a very polite Yes
Haai – (Slang) No!
Hao! – (Setswana) similar to “Oh, no!” showing surprise
Heita – (slang) for Hi
Howzit – How’s it going?
Jo – a friendly nickname used between friends
Ke – (Setswana) It is
Lenyalo – (Setswana) wedding
Lobola – (isiZulu) Dowry
Mara – (Slang, derived from Afrikaans word maar) but/however.
Mfana – (isiZulu) young boy
Molweni – (formal, polite isiXhosa) hallo.
Monna – (Setswana/Sesotho) for Man
Na? – (Setswana) Is it?
Neh? – (Afrikaans) Right?
O right? – Are you alright?
O sa wara – (Slang) Don’t worry
Ou’ – (Afrikaans) old
Sies! – (Afrikaans) Gross!
Tjo! – (slang) shows surprise, usually for something unwelcome
Wie-Sien-Ons – (Afrikaans) A funeral after-party, to celebrate the life of the deceased
Zol – South African slang for marijuana
Acknowledgements
Jude Dibia, who breathed new love and life into this book. Martin Reesink and Anyes Babillon for loving the book and loving me more. David Austin for the 5 a.m. phone calls and ever-present love. Adrian Harewood for the many phone messages reminding me you were there. Amma Asante, for refusing to let me give up. Chris Abani for your love and time when I most needed it. Zukiswa Wanner and Thando Mgqolozana for reading and insisting it really was that good. My sister Lopang, for making me laugh when I thought I no longer had it in me. My sister Tumelo, for the 2 a.m. phone calls, the words of wisdom, the trips to come and be by my side, the relentless love.
Motsumi and Siamela for beautiful, overwhelming, glorious, frightening, endless love.
KAGISO LESEGO MOLOPE was born and educated in South Africa. Her first novel, Dancing in the Dust (Mawenzi House) was on the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Honour List for 2006. Her second novel, The Mending Season, was chosen to be on the school curriculum in South Africa. Her third novel, This Book Betrays My Brother, was awarded the Percy Fitzpatrick Prize by the English Academy of Southern Africa, where it was first published. She lives in Ottawa.
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