The Architecture of Loss

by Z. P. Dala

  At one point, he looked outside to the place next to the entrance steps, where the women selling food and flowers stood. He looked with squinted eyes but could not make out his tall wife, who was hard to miss for her height and very bright clothes. He couldn’t see her and felt annoyed that perhaps these women had left the child with him and gone off to sit in the rare sunshine in Greenmarket Square. It was unlike Reyhana to be so irresponsible. Something must have happened for them to leave, for Moomi to leave her child there without even a word to him. He would find out later. For now, he did his job with extra care.

  At precisely ten o’ clock, a gentleman with warm, brown eyes that peered over a pair of silver bifocals stood before him. He had a glorious head of silver hair, worn longer than most men, and he wore a charming tweed coat and brown corduroy trousers. He carried a brown satchel that seemed to have been molded to him along with dark green cardboard tubes filled with plans and designs. Dawud was peeping over his shoulders at the cleaning closet as the man approached and rapped lightly with his knuckles on the desk.

  Dawud jumped upward, startled as if he had been caught doing a terrible thing.

  “Good morning, my good man,” the gentleman said in a pleasantly gruff voice. “I am sorry, have I startled you?”

  “No. No. I was . . . looking for a . . . naughty child here,” Dawud recovered himself.

  “Oh, there is no such thing as a naughty child. There are only curious children. And all children are such treasures, naughty or not, wouldn’t you say?”

  Dawud blinked at the man, wondering in his most paranoid way if he had perhaps been set up. He thought it best to be silent. An answer might just damn him.

  “Ah, well. I see you are a man of serious business,” the man continued. Well, let’s get to it. I am Heinrich Opperman, architect. I believe Mr. Arnsworth is expecting me.”

  “Yes, oh yes, Mr. Professor Architect, sir,” Dawud jumped up and saluted the architect as if he were an army general.

  “No need for all that Professor Sir business. It’s Heinrich. Simple name, but it certainly sticks on the tongue. Blame my old gran; she loved the Germans.”

  Again, Dawud was lost for words. He was certainly not accustomed to being drawn into pleasant conversation with anybody who visited the museum. Mostly they barked orders at him, ignored him, or, like Mr. Arnsworth, talked down to him and expected supreme adulation.

  “Heinrich . . .” Dawud tested the sound on his own tongue and found nothing sticking there.

  “Yes, that’s me. Now . . . where shall I find this curator of yours?”

  “Agh, he’s not mine . . .” Dawud blurted out and a loud laugh echoed from the belly of the professor. It was infectious, and soon Dawud was also chuckling.

  The loud laugh brought Mr. Arnsworth scuttling into the entrance hall. Clearly he had been lurking in wait for the esteemed professor. He cast a disapproving glance at Dawud, and quickly began ushering the professor upstairs to his office, using his best flowery speech and gesticulating wildly.

  As they disappeared into the office, Dawud saw Sweetie peer at him from the entrance to the service quarters corridor.

  “So, Sweetie, what you say? Handsome, neh?” Dawud teased.

  Sweetie made a face, and wagged a finger at Dawud. “Oomie, jy is sommer naughty, neh. Old man like that! Agh, he’ll have a heart attacking him if he see Sweetie dressed up beautiful.”

  She giggled and disappeared down the passage. Now Dawud had some silence. He toyed with the thought of sitting in his chair and spending his time daydreaming, which he loved to do. But his conscience gnawed at him, and he chose to peep in at Rosie. The little girl was fast asleep amid the tall mop handles, wrapped in her gray shawl.

  He felt a stab of guilt. She had probably been starving. He shut the door and went to his desk, taking his large coat from his chairback. He went to the closet again and draped the coat over the sleeping child. She stirred and looked up at him with trusting eyes. He patted her shoulder, and as he did, she closed her tiny fist around his wrist and fell into a sleep again. Slowly, Dawud pried the little fist from his thick wrist and lay her hand softly down on the coat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dawud was not happy. He was not settled. What began as a day of hiding little Afroze in the cleaning closet was fast becoming a daily ritual. He couldn’t even remember how Reyhana had nagged him into agreement. He had put up a good fight, but a futile one. His wife had made up her mind. She riled and regaled him with every parable from the Holy Book she could think of, mentioning names of the Prophet’s dearest advisors and how they had sheltered and protected the weak and the vulnerable.

  Reyhana was clever like that. She knew that if she appealed to the one thing that was dearest to her man—the love he had for his religion and its principles—then he would have no fight in him. She mentioned how the Beloved Prophet would save the lives of discarded baby girls; she dug deep into folklore and came up with heart-wrenching stories of saints and saviors. She challenged his morality, she harangued at his sense of duty, and finally she had gotten her way. Dawud agreed to keep hiding Afroze in the museum until Moomi was able to sort out a school that she could go to.

  Of schools, there were very few. The good-enough schools in the Bo-Kaap were filled to bursting. The schools that had reputations—for being filled with rowdy children of Cape Flats’ gangsters, drug addicts and babies possibly born out of the wombs of women of ill-repute—were far away, and not a place to send a girl who had lived a life sheltered in a tiny town. Moomi had the added difficulty of Ismail, who had adamantly refused to acknowledge that the child even existed in his home. He spent most of his time ignoring her, barely looking at her, and gritting his teeth if she walked by him.

  Moomi spent her nights waiting for Ismail to come home, because despite his many roamings (she barely wanted to know the details of where he went), Ismail always found his way back to Moomi’s kitchen. She never asked him why he had such rage toward the child, yet she ached to ask him more about the woman who had borne her.

  In Moomi’s imagination, she pictured a woman with the body and stature of a warrior and the face of Afroze, and this was a disturbing vision. She knew very little. She had heard snippets of Ismail’s life before he came to Cape Town. She knew he had been involved somehow in the anti-apartheid struggle, although knowing her husband well, she knew that his involvement could not have lasted long.

  Ismail was too selfish to give away his freedom and his life to anything that was larger than his own needs. She knew that Afroze’s mother was a doctor, and on some nights, Ismail would torture her by speaking of the nameless woman and how tall, slim, and beautiful she was. Moomi could not help but feel twinges of envy for a woman she had never met, a woman who had looks and intelligence but clearly did not have a heart.

  Moomi, who had been rendered childless by a cruel God, could never understand how any woman would throw away her own beautiful child. Ismail, in a rare moment of calm, had told her one once that the telephone call he had received that late night, the call that came to the neighbor’s home three houses away because Moomi did not have a telephone, had been the child’s mother. She had begged him to take the girl away, and she had told him to come quickly, the child was being left at the home of a family friend in their small town. When Ismail told the tale, he curled his lips in anger, telling Moomi that the doctor had cracked, that she couldn’t handle the pressure of looking after a child. That she had made a choice and this little girl was not part of the choice she had made. After hearing this, Moomi did not like the doctor at all.

  But none of this mattered to Moomi. She swooped down on Afroze and rapidly morphed into an ideal mother. All her frustrated childless yearnings came pouring out onto Afroze. Moomi began to believe that this girl had come from her womb. She treated Afroze like a precious but fragile gift, one that could be snatched away from her at any moment. And Moomi was not selfless, after all. She selfishly chipped away at Afroze’s memories, her chisel of smoth
ering love lacerating off pieces and pieces of Afroze’s life before. She would only admit to herself in the late hours of certain nights that all she wanted was for this child to forget everything of where she had arrived from.

  She would rapidly change the topic when Afroze asked about people back in Brighton. She would coddle Afroze in a blanket of ignorance, driving out memories and questions with a constant stream of immersion into this new life. She tried to make it such that in every moment she shared with Afroze, she ensured that her mind could not drift toward the ghost mother with whom Moomi competed. It was only those times when Afroze was secreted away inside the museum that Moomi regarded with deep anxiety. Those hours, long and painful, were the only times Afroze was away from her bosom. Moomi began to imagine that, alone, inside a small room, glaring at a naked lightbulb, Afroze communed with her past. And Moomi’s answer to those alone times, those necessary separations, was to ply Afroze with as many delicious treats from her basket as she could afford. Moomi believed that when Afroze was away from her, it was her food that would keep the thread between them, and it was her food that would act as holy water—the type that exorcises demons.

  Afroze forgot very easily. It was not the hardest task in the world. Here, she found things that made her happy and comfortable. She found happy women who cooked and talked and took her into their embraces. They plaited her hair, they dressed her, they fed her, and they listened to her voice. It was something that was entirely alien to her; her life in Brighton had been so different.

  There, she had nothing feminine to anchor her. Her daily needs were always seen to, and she had been fed and clothed and sometimes played with by Beatrice. But for the most part, life in Brighton for a six-year-old girl in a home filled with politics and anxiety was not pleasant. She dug at the secrets she knew hid inside crumbling buildings. She spent countless nights staring at her mother skulking in and out of that horrible, forbidden building at the back of the house. And finding no reasonable answer, Afroze—being a child, after all—began to believe that dark, witchy magic went on in that place. She began to believe that her mother was indeed a witch who killed people inside that building; Afroze had heard men scream.

  Here, in the tiny rooms of Moomi, Afroze felt that she had been rescued from certain death. Perhaps the witch had planned to kill her next. That was the only logical explanation. So she accepted Moomi’s overwhelming, suffocating love, and bathed in the light of the basket-bearing women that were Moomi’s sisters, and finally decided that life had begun the day she had been given, Moseslike, to this mother, the one who bore the basket home. Yet she could only call her Moomi, and in terrifying nightmares, she called out the name Ma.

  It is surprisingly easy for a child to transfer. A child will embrace the one that embraces her. And Afroze was quick. She loved her Moomi. She sat alone in the cleaning closet of the museum for many days that soon became many months, and her life was happy. It was almost perfect. Dawud grew accustomed to her being hidden there, and he even grew brave once or twice and let her out of the closet during quiet moments, letting her stand and stare at the magnificent rooms, the wide arches and the spiral staircase. He let her wander among the ceramics, and look at the murals and paintings. And in those rarest of times, Afroze felt most at peace.

  When Reyhana complained that perhaps the child was too bored in there, Dawud stole a writing pad and pencil from one of the offices and gave it to Afroze. When he went to sneak her out of the room that afternoon, he was shocked to see that she had used up every single inch of the writing pad. Her large, curved drawings arched all over the pages in thick, hard scrawl.

  She had been pressing down on the pencil with all her might, forcing snippets of her mind onto the pages. She had drawn the things that she saw. Interpretations of sash windows, arches, doorjambs, and pillars. Sweeping rooms with strangely skewed ceilings, rooms that led into other rooms, hidden passageways, crevices of imagination, and recesses in the walls.

  The one thing Afroze had not drawn, and would in fact never draw, was people. The pages and pages were filled until there was no space to even place a series of dots. But not a single person could be found anywhere. Dawud looked strangely at the writing pad. He knew that children always drew little line drawings of stick people.

  He had seen his children scrawl Mama, Dada, Brother, Friend stick montages over walls and on tar driveways and cul-de-sac roads. But this child had drawn only things. Things, spaces, and places.

  The following day, he gave her another writing pad and another pencil. And she did the same. He supplied Afroze with a constant pile of pages, used-up paper that he found in dustbins, the backs of pamphlets and old calenders. The pile of drawings grew larger and larger.

  One day he found her clutching a dirty, old book to her chest while he hushed her down the steps, out to the waiting Moomi.

  “Ey, kindtjie, what you have there? No stealing from the museum, you hear?”

  “Oom, I’m not stealing. The old man gave it to me.”

  “What, eh? What old man? Let me see.”

  She reluctantly handed him her dirty, torn-up treasure. It was an old architecture magazine.

  Dawud paged through the faded and crumpled-up pages. He saw nothing there that would interest a child. It looked like trash.

  “Oom, the old, nice man. He came into the closet looking for a cloth; he said he spilled his tea. He saw my drawing. Then he went away, and came back with this.”

  Afroze handed Dawud the magazine.

  “What? You spoke to Professor? Oh hoh hooo . . . we in trouble now, meisie.”

  “No, Oom, he was nice. He said he won’t tell nobody. He said he is a . . . a archi-test.”

  Dawud stared at Afroze. He wondered whether his job at the museum was finally over. He decided that it was time to stop taking chances. He would tell Reyhana tonight. The child had to go.

  “Agh, what archi-test? What you know about archi-test, archi-test. Go, throw this dirty thing away,” he scolded, and crumpled up the magazine.

  Afroze screamed and launched herself at him, trying to pull the magazine away from his grip. He was glad they were outdoors, no one had heard her.

  “Yoh, wildcat. Relax, neh. Keep your magazine. I’m just saying it must have sommer germs.”

  Afroze grabbed the magazine from him and clutched it to her chest, staring at him with molten fire in her eyes. “It don’t have no germs. And he gave it to me. It is mine. You can’t take it away from me.”

  Afroze’s shrill child voice rang out into the emptying square in front of the museum. People stopped to stare. Afroze ignored everyone and stomped off and away from Dawud. He, who had hidden her, cared for her, risked his job for her, mattered nothing at all. All that mattered to Afroze was the beauty she saw inside the magazine. It was surprisingly easy for Afroze to turn her back and forget Oom Dawud. He meant nothing to her in the larger world.

  She turned and walked off toward Moomi, who dared not try and take it away. Dawud shook his head and walked off. He felt a slight stab of hurt that little Afroze could so easily cast him off, replace him because of a silly magazine that probably made no sense to her.

  “Strange child,” he muttered, but then had to remind himself that she did not lead a normal child’s life, and perhaps this magazine was all she could call her own.

  Their time together had come to its end. Dawud finally was released from the overbearing task of hiding Afroze in the closet. He convinced Reyhana that hiding a child in a cleaning closet was in no way healthy for the child or safe for their livelihood. Moomi, who came under intense pressure from Reyhana, finally let Afroze go to school. Moomi knew that there would be a time for her to let her treasured child out into the world; she just tried selfishly to delay it for as long as she could. But Moomi was not a selfish woman. When Reyhana had found a decent enough school near their home, and had arranged everything, Moomi felt pride on the morning that Afroze donned a new school uniform and walked slowly away. Afroze would begin in the ne
w school year, and would spend her afternoons walking back from the school to her home, where Moomi waited anxiously for her return.

  There was dread in Moomi, she knew that she was slowly going to lose Afroze to an educated life, one that she would never be able to match. This was inevitable, because she could not avoid the gleam in the child’s eyes when she began to learn that there was a whole world out there. With each new day, when Afroze would come home with books that grew fatter and fatter, Moomi began to fade. Moomi could not read, nor had she ever really looked at a book in her entire life.

  It was strange to her that Afroze would spend hours and hours with her face inside these books. Moomi feigned interest, asking Afroze silly questions about the pictures and what the books were about. At first, Afroze tried. She tried to show Moomi what the words were saying; she tried to explain to Moomi all the wonderful things she found within the pages.

  “Look, Moomi . . . it’s a poem about an owl and a pussycat that get married.”

  “Agh, sies girl. You use bad words. I’ll wash your mouth with soap, neh. What-what pus—er, I mean kitty cat—want to marry one owl? Silly things inside your books. Better you don’t read so much, you get cow eyes, and the boys they don’t like girl with glasses, jy wiet.”

  But as time went on, Moomi’s questions seemed too silly, and Afroze lost patience. She would roll her eyes if Moomi looked at a picture and made a silly comment, or if she started competing with the book with folk stories of her own, the things she had learned sitting in kitchens for her entire life.