by Nick Wood
I am grateful that the drive through the peaceful white suburbs of Howick is quiet.
The journey grows ever quieter as I head up the valley past sweeping imported eucalyptus trees; no drifting teargas smoke to worry about, no burning tires or police blocks strewn across the road.
The mid-summer sun still hangs low with some warmth as it drops towards the hilly horizon. Christmas 2014 is nearing fast. Elections next year, but everyone knows the AWB will win hands down; De Klerk is still in prison for trying to dismantle apartheid from the inside and Terreblanche carefully ensures the safety of all ballot boxes.
It’s too quiet here – I look in the rear-view mirror, but there is no car following.
I start to tap the steering wheel of my old Ford as my CDs run through their loop, especially when Aretha asks for respect, but keep glancing in my rear view mirror at the empty road behind me. (I must look up Gil Scott-Heron on Wikipedia; see if it’s accessible through the State Firewalls.)
There are only a few cars left in the car parks at the entrance to the Umgeni River Valley Nature Park and I pay my way in, eyeing the ‘Slegs blankes/Whites only’ sign on the wooden kiosk.
My camera bounces against my chest as I wind through wooded thornveld; a few large birds shriek in the canopy. (We still wait for cam-phones, but they remain banned as a potentially easy source of troubling video.) The path drops down towards the valley and I take the detour left to where the old rope bridge used to be. It’s a balmy evening and there’s no one else around at this late hour. The path levels out in front of me and the bridge comes into view, but it’s different from how I remember; built of strutted wood and more solid looking.
The river rumbles with summer rains below me and I smell the dung of a large mammal in the bushes near the bridge. I smell my own sweat too, as I pant to catch my breath.
Well, here it is; the swaying bridge I have never crossed.
I stand at the spot where I took those pictures almost a decade ago: one devoid of any person, fit to adorn the wall of my then new job, freshly qualified as I was. The other picture still sits as I left it beside my bed, with Suzette looking out at me; the bridge small, the valley obscured behind her long blowing brown hair.
Strange, but Suzette’s face dims even more in my memory as I stand here.
The valley sweeps down towards the racing river in a torrent of brownish grass and green woodland. I take a hold of the wooden railing and step onto the struts of the bridge. They creak with my weight. I wait for a few moments and then step deliberately across, one slat at a time, focusing on the next slat, not looking over the railing.
The other side arrives almost too suddenly, my feet squelching onto damp tussocks. I hold the bridge post and swing around to check the view.
It’s very similar to the other side, thicker riverine trees and bushes dropping to the edge of the rock-strewn white spraying river. But on this side there’s a scarred and stripped patch I hadn’t noticed down near the riverside. It’s a blackened, burnt area, flat and empty, but glinting with one or two long and shiny corrugated aluminium boards lying derelict. The vegetation has not re-grown; it’s fairly recent. Probably the detritus left by illegal black squatters who sneaked through the fence and set up camp before being forcibly evicted, their homes crushed, the place emptied and burnt.
Pain thumps in my head, a sjambok-blow pain and there’s an acrid burning smell in my nose, stinging my eyes – smoke; or tear gas? Then, just as suddenly, it’s gone.
I take a picture of the scorched, desolate earth. There’s only one cause of fire at this time of year.
I step back onto the bridge and make my way across to the swaying middle; bracing myself as I stop to look down. I’m giddy with the deep drop to white-green water below and the pungent vegetation scented warm wind that buffets the bridge.
I cannot take a picture here; I am too afraid that I – or my camera – will topple over. Instead, I hold onto the rope railing with one hand and feel in my right pocket with the other. Bracing my feet and ignoring the burn in my strapped right ankle, I swing my right arm around and launch the grasped bullet downwind.
It spins and drops, glinting once, and I don’t even see where it splashes.
I am tired of threats and ghosts.
The river rolls on and I watch, caught in its hissing motion.
I will clear my weekend of patients and go to those meetings of radical psychologists and social workers who fight for political change, saying there’s no normality in an abnormal society… Ah, and I’m not a complete altruist, true – there’s a good few woman psychologists and social workers who go there too, I believe.
A gust of wind rocks the bridge, pumping my heart as I stand over the Umgeni River. I hold on tighter to the railing with both hands. I need to have a word with that Dr. James too… A firm word, a vuurwarm word.
The bridge swings again in a gust of strong wind and I inch my way across to the car park side of the river. No point in false heroics; in any case, no one’s here to see them.
On firm ground once more, I look back across the view that is captured within the pictures in my office and bedroom. No, this is definitely a different bridge, a newer bridge. It doesn’t look nearly as far across to the other side anymore either. Perhaps it’s my new perspective – but I also have a sense that maybe most of the vastness of the chasm has been inside my head.
Brand has called me both a brother and a traitor to my people. But I don’t know who ‘my people’ are anymore.
There is no one else standing by the bridge. Suzette is gone.
I walk back up the sloping path, glancing ahead. On the distant hill summit above me, I see the long rocking neck of a giraffe. It’s blackly silhouetted in solitude, near a bent thorn tree against the fading sky. Giraffes are social animals; I know there must be other members of the herd on the far side of the hill, but still I feel a pang of empathic loneliness.
I have heard rumours the South African Defence Force have been here too, poaching ivory to fund our local War on Terror. Would they target a bit of family giraffe meat?
I am too afraid to climb the hill, for fear there is nothing on the other side.
Stay focused, stay here: It’ll be good to see Sibusiso tomorrow. And I mustn’t neglect to help him sort out his relationship with his father before discharge, as the ward closes briefly for the year’s end.
Perhaps it’s time I speak to my own father again…
Something howls in the bush to my left and I break into a wincing jog uphill.
No silence here, but the wild languages remain alien to me.
Still, it’s good to hear voices.
I pant up the path as I head back to the car-park and realise I am rebuilding the EE machine in my head, piece by bloody piece... and not for the State either. Why?
What can I say?
I build bridges.
Chapter 5
Sibusiso’s Beast
Today, the white doctor turns up with his black box.
My stomach grows heavier as he places the box carefully on the desk between us.
“Look, Sibusiso.” He shows me two sets of leads coming out of the box from either side, “These are the leads which connect our brains together so that we can communicate – you know, talk – without words.”
I know what ‘communicate’ is – I study to teach history and geography in English at Fundimiso College. Or I did once, before...
He continues to talk slowly, as if to match my brain.
“Of course it’s a new invention and so I need you to sign you’re happy with trying it out.” I want to laugh, because Dumisani told me they asked for his ‘X’ when it came to shocking his brain to make him better. He refused, but still they did it, in his best interests.
I do not laugh though; I can see the doctor is serious.
And excited: “See here, this switch changes the directional flow of the brain-waves between us so we can change who reads whose mind at any one time.”
&n
bsp; Ah, it is a good toy, but one that makes me even more ill.
He notices my face. “Sibusiso, what’s wrong?”
Give him his due, he does not call me Edward, my European label from them – and his pronunciation is passable. I look around the small yellow-green room with no windows. I see no cameras or listening devices, but they may still be there, tiny, hidden and waiting to bite.
“You’re not going to connect that to my genitalia are you, Doctor van Deventer?” I ask.
His hands freeze across the dials and switches littering his box. “Liewe God, of course not, what do you think this is?”
He does not ask me how I know a word such as ‘genitalia’; so I wait for the cents to drop.
“Ag no man, Sibusiso, we’re here to help you, this is not some sort of torture thing – can you tell me where you are?”
I sigh, it’s a question I have been asked many times and to the point I have grown to doubt my answer: “Fort Napier Psychiatric Hospital.”
“Good,” he smiles with encouragement. “And what’s the date today?”
I am not an old man with a fading brain. I stand, with a fist of hot feeling thrusting up my spine.
He steps back, glancing at the closed door behind him. “Uh... Sibusiso?”
“Friday, December 8th.”
“Oh, uh, ja right, um well, are you ready to be hooked up to the machine?”
I continue to stand as I see it unsettles him - and he has no taser-prod in his hand. “No.”
He looks disappointed: “We went through this yesterday and I thought you’d agreed, why not now?”
“There are things in my mind that are precious to me. Why...” It is hard to ask a question of a white man.
But I have to, for the sake of Bongani from my college, now three days in a boere cell, for the sake of dead Mandla. “Why are my words alone not enough? And...” This is a harder question still, so I clench my fists and swallow, to force it through: “Why should I trust you, Doctor?”
“Ahh…” he relaxes then, as if it had only just occurred to him: “Listen Sibusiso, I am not connected to the Security Police at all. In fact…” This time he looks around the room and I can see some small doubt and fear on his face: “I’m on the run from the Military Police, as I have refused to serve in the army. Thankfully they haven’t chased me hard, as they’re too busy dealing with unrest in the townships.”
Thankfully! My throat chokes on that word. So many of my brothers and sisters are dying out there in the ‘unrest’?
He sees my face. “I’m sorry Sibusiso, I didn’t mean to offend you and it was a stupid, selfish thing to say.” He nods his head in apology. Why does he need his box? It looks like he is not such a bad reader of my expressions, after all.
He gestures towards the machine. Ah, it is a toy that smells both of his sweat and his ambition.
I sit, but I will not be meek. “Two conditions, Doctor.”
He grinds into his chair, wobbling a little with excitement. “What are they, Sibusiso?”
I stop as the wave of feelings that brought me here sweep over me again. They squeeze my words dry with hollow emptiness, freezing my brain with thoughts of death. In the end, that’s all there is. Nothing else survives.
A man waves his hands in my face, but those hands will wither and fade; the fat man will become a skeleton and the wind on my cheeks will go.
He is pulling me up from my chair, holding my hands, massaging my arms, getting me to move, to step around that small room. “Come on, man!” he barks.
He is not afraid to touch me. Other lighter feelings swing into my arms and head. He is not afraid to touch me. That’s kakhulu good for a white man. My head and throat thaws, just like an early spring stream high up on the Ukhahlamba Mountains, where I often long to go.
“Enough, Doctor.”
He smiles at me: “Feeling a bit better, Sibusiso?”
“Surely,” I say.
“Would you rather leave it then? Shall we end our session now?”
I look down at him; he is a short man, but his face is near mine, there is no longer a desk between us. I can see and smell his sweat; bursting through a sickly sweet smell he must layer over himself daily like concrete.
“Two conditions,” I say, “One, this is never shared with the SB.” He knows of whom I speak, there are no worse devils than those from the Special Branch. “Two, I get to read you first.”
He steps back in surprise. “Ja man, of course to the first one, but your second condition is a little less – uh – orthodox.”
He notices my look: “Unusual.”
There is nothing wrong with unusual. Unusual is good.
He seems less sure. “Okay…” he says with reluctance, seemingly only agreeing due to the lure of his machine.
I sit and wait while he clips a pad of funny stuff on my head, struggling a bit with only short tufts to anchor the clips, it’s still less than a week after my admissions shave. His hair is much easier; he must go to a nice barber, he gets the netting clips to dangle against his scalp.
He looks at me over the box and I see he is sweating even more. “Ready, Sibusiso?”
I nod with a warning glare that lets him know he must do this right. If I have any sense he is reading me, I will tear this tissue from my head and stay mute with him.
He flicks a switch and I wait.
Nothing.
Or, as the boere say, fok all!
Then I hear it, like my father’s fuzzy radio high up in the mountains, where we used to slow twist the dials to edge a faint voice from the roar of static, searching for Radio Freedom. This machine hisses too, a ‘shhhhh’ of sound like a distant waterfall, but there are no dials I can twist. The doctor watches me with a blank look and fiddles with his machine.
Is that a faint voice I hear, a deeper rumble amongst the hiss? I strain my ears but the sounds are inside me. Is that a name – Parton; Martin? The rumble and hiss warm me but there’s an ice-prick of loneliness and desire, hidden by thoughts of… standing up on an ironing board, riding sea-waves?
I look up at him in puzzlement and he switches the machine off. “Well,” he says, “Does it work, Sibusiso?”
“Perhaps.”
“What do you mean? What was I thinking then?”
“That your first name is Martin and you need a woman.”
“Yes!” he shouts and clenches his fists in front of his face: “My name is indeed Martin and I’ve been divorced for a few years now!”
I wish I could join his joy, but perhaps someone on the ward mentioned his first name and he just looks lonely to me? I want to ask about the board but stop; I’ve seen pictures of mad white men riding waves on boards in the magazines we cut up for art therapy.
I do not wish to cast doubt on his joy. For although I am young, I know real happiness is rare, perhaps even for an umlungu.
“You can have a turn tomorrow,” he smiles at me.
There is a knock at the door and he scrambles to hide his machine away, shoving it under the desk.
But the door is already open and an old pale man looks in. I have seen the old man walk into our ward a few times, swinging his arms freely, as if he has great power.
“Is that what I think it is, Martin?”
My doctor looks frightened. The old man shakes his head: “I’m sorry, Martin, this time you’ve gone too far.”
So a man scolds a boy. Does the old man wish to protect what is inside my head?
“I’m busy in a therapeutic session, Doctor!” There is more steel in the younger doctor’s voice.
The old man is not impressed and shakes his head: “I will report you for this. You will stop this session right now!”
Dr. van Deventer looks at me with a peculiar expression that is hard to read. He stands abruptly: “Did you not read my ‘do not disturb’ sign, Dr. James? Or does it not matter to you, because my patient is black?”
“How dare you!” The old man barks with teeth in his voice: “On your own head
be it, then.”
The door slams, the sound shaking me.
“Trouble, Doctor?” I ask.
“I think I can talk him round,” he says, “The box, the Empathy Enhancer does work doesn’t it, Sibusiso?”
“Yes, Doctor,” I say, knowing they are the words he wants to hear. I keep my face calm, but it is a strange thought that even the umlungu fight amongst themselves.
“See you tomorrow then, Sibusiso?”
I smile, but am not so sure.
Tonight, I ask for curry.
The coloured woman behind the counter pauses and looks me up and down as if I smell bad. “You’re only allowed Bantu food.”
I look at the samp and beans. They have been so over-cooked and mixed; it’s as if they have passed through someone’s irritable bowels.
The dark feelings drop on me again, threatening to smother me. I think of dead Mandla and hold my plate out: “I want curry.”
She lifts the large metal spoon as if she wants to strike me. I see a security man move forwards from a corner of the dining hall, brown uniform bursting with eagerness. I put my plate down extravagantly with one hand, before leaving the piss-yellow hall, now starting to throng and seethe with hungry people.
It is but a few paces to the ward, along the darkened path. I am not so mad; my ward, at least, is ‘open’. Jabula Ward they call it, although I feel no joy here.
Jabu, Chief Nurse Nhlapo, looks at me in surprise. He is sorting out piles of brightly coloured pills.
“You’re back early, Sibusiso. You ate quickly.”
I do not disabuse him of the idea. He holds out a pink pill. “You might as well have yours now, then.”
I fist the pill and he gives me a glass of water, watching as I swallow water and air.
“Good,” he turns back to his piles, but with a buck-shy curious look at me, as if he wonders what I am thinking. His quick, precise movements remind me of my dead mother. He is a big man, neatly dressed in his uniform, sleeves buttoned primly down around his wrists.
I don’t know if he is safe to talk to. I don’t know who masters his politics.
I walk down the corridor, between galleys of dishevelled bunks and find my own bed. It’s nestled in the far corner, the furthest I could find; although I pay at night with a farter in the bunk above me.