The Architecture of Loss

by Z. P. Dala

  We could not stay in Durban. Ismail could not settle anywhere. He fought and screamed at the wind. Gangsters, police, and angry employers walked the streets looking for him. He had to run. People he hustled, swindled, they sniff everywhere for clues. They learned that he lived in a run-down outbuilding with a baby and a woman. They came to our door with threats and guns.

  “You, Doctor. You are rich. You pay us what he owes.”

  “We have nothing,” I whispered and it was true. Ismail raged and stole us into poverty; all my earnings are gone.

  We escaped like fugitives in the middle of the night to the town where he was born. The baby screamed throughout our midnight drive. And we arrived in Brighton long before dawn.

  This cottage. An old woman opened the door and sucked in her breath almost in terror when she saw Ismail.

  “Nahi . . . nahi . . . Jaaa. Tu Jaayaha thi . . .” Not you. Go. Go away from here.

  “Bibi Foi. Thamaro Ismail aawi gyoh.” Aunt, your Ismail has come back.

  “Nahi. Nahi.” Not you. Not you.

  She pushed the door shut. He stopped it with a foot. Foot in the door.

  “Open it,” he said through angry, clenched teeth.

  Her myopic, cloudy eyes saw me. She saw the baby stirring and wriggling in my arms. She opened the door.

  Ismail the troublemaker. Not even welcome in his birth home. Very quickly, he became unhappy, restless. That place was stifling him. That devastating rakishness, that scoundrel so handsome, he knew all he could do was run away again. He ranted at everything.

  That place was suffocating him. I was suffocating him, asking him to find a job somewhere. We couldn’t keep relying on his old aunt for money. I couldn’t work at the clinic. Too many questions would have been asked, and people he hid from, even here in this tiny town, must never know we were there.

  We both were angry, seething at what our life had come down to. He was allowed to give vent to his rage. I had to be silent, calm, and soothing. For the child’s sake.

  He could not touch me. He could not touch the baby. He hated from everywhere inside his cells. The old aunt simply nodded her head. She knew this rascal from the early days. She remembered the time when, as a toddler, Ismail had simply stood up. Never crawling, Ismail the baby went from lying flat on his back to standing up like a lightning rod. And then all he did was run. There was no stumbling block in the path of that relentless child. The old woman could only pity the girl with a baby, the girl who hid many secrets behind her large, almond eyes. All Ismail knew was running. The girl would soon be bereft. It was inevitable, and the old woman knew that all that would ever come to pass had been written in books on the day that you are born.

  The day he decided to run away became the day when I tasted sourness. I had cast in my lot with a loser, a scoundrel man. It was, of course, too damn late. He came to me as I was watching Afroze roll onto her back and suck her little toes. He caught me in a smile.

  “I am leaving. I can’t stay in this coffin here. I am done.”

  The old woman saw him saunter away, tossing a cigarette onto the parched Earth. Her eyes told me stories. See, I knew this would happen. She died soon after. He didn’t even come for her funeral.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Up until the day Ismail left, I was a lightweight. Just a caricature of what it meant to flirt with fighting. A woman of insipid behavior, a wastrel of talents. A loser of the voice. Words left me. All those years of sitting in dark rooms, hearing the spoken word about oppression and suffering, lying on floors lined with the songs of men who were great and men who had struggled and all the voices of the men who had taken me firmly in hand and told me who I was and what I could say and when. But they could never tell me why.

  Rage can bubble insidiously in the witch’s cauldron; notice the way a crone is the female and the wise wizard is the male.

  I was in that frustrating, suffocating house, the absent snore of that man echoed through walls that refused to be beaten down with a broomstick. He got to just get up and walk away.

  I had ideas. I had dreams and I had words that were purely my own. I did not need the baritone voices of men who had gone before me instructing me why I had freedom in my blood and a talent for words inside my flesh. I had lost myself, but I knew why I had been given this art, like the air that I breathed. Healing bodies, and weaving words—I was bestowed the Graces. The Graces became angry when I threw them away for something as insignificant as love.

  And suddenly, alone in a town that slept through every important event in world history, I knew my purpose. It was a shot-up drug. It was a desire to be seen and heard, it was the need to finally make a stain on the pure, white fabric and perhaps use fingernails to rip it to shreds.

  I had been a willing automaton, sitting in a librarian skirt, taking notes at the most important meeting in my own life. But I changed. I threw off the shackles of quiet domesticity and shocked even my own self in how swiftly I began to take strength. Time to roar. But it came at a price. And the price for passion is loss of softness. When you are so hungry for your voice to be heard, you cut throats. You sever ties that bind you to this lonely nothingness. Sometimes, a little child cannot realize why you are too frantic in your quest, that you might forget their birthdays.

  It didn’t matter now. My time had come, and my youth was at its peak, my brain was at its sharpest. I apologized to the child, but I apologized in silence. There was no time for soft words. It was time to mobilize, Comrade. You have been given birth. And the second coming is so much sweeter than the first. The velleity with which I had once worked for our struggle against white domination would now end. Now I would throw myself headfirst into it, and I would bear the losses inside my heart. I grabbed that baby, this girl-child who had been thrust into this lap, and I looked the baby in her soft eyes and howled. The baby howled. She howled because her mother was being born. She howled because babies, like feral animals, can smell danger, they can smell hunger.

  I suckled that child. She suddenly felt ferocious at my breast.

  “That’s it girl,” I said and pulled her from the hard, cracked nipple when she had filled herself so much she looked like she would soon vomit it all up.

  “No more. I hope you enjoyed that one,” I held her up and her head lolled with the satiety of a mother’s sweet milk.

  “Stay awake, stay awake,” I shouted, but babies can sleep through storms. “Your mother is going to work, my girl.”

  And in a silvery cord connection, this satellite-born sent an imaginary message to the base, the mothership. My beloved Congress. Comrades, I am back. I want in. I have returned. Take me, because this angry struggle is all I have in this world. And I am good at it.

  When the howl is howled, the pack will come.

  “Come, Comrade. Join us,” Gladys said.

  She took my soft hand and showed me that I had somewhere I belonged.

  “That baby is hungry,” she remarked, standing in my country kitchen, arriving at the exact moment when she was supposed to have arrived. That moment when I grabbed my destiny with both hands.

  Yes, it is true. My comrades in the Congress had been keeping close tabs on everyone that had ever worked with them, and although I had disappeared into barren Brighton, they had been watching me. Anyone who had ever been privy to their secrets never escaped into obscurity. They had eyes in every corner of this blue Earth.

  “Comrade, I knew you would see your place in our fight eventually. We have a special place for you and the medical work that you do. I gave up practicing medicine; my fight is now a physical armed struggle, but you will play a role behind this thick veil of secrecy in this town. Once the struggle takes your cells, you are never the same again. Feed your child,” Gladys said. She had tracked me down in Brighton, and brought with her the call to come back.

  “She’ll be fine.” I pushed a cold bottle to the fussy baby. She fussed even more. But hunger makes the believer out of the philistine, and soon enough hunger wins the day. Sh
e held the bottle with her feet, and sucked noisily at a teat that I had not even bothered to clean.

  “Strange thing that baby does. Uses her feet but keeps her hands locked tightly into fists.”

  I ignored the endearing anomaly. Afroze: the baby was like that and like that she would remain. A girl who would always do the most difficult things to prevent herself from doing the most obvious things. I did not know this growing child. But I knew that did not matter anymore. I knew her with my flesh and, for now, that was enough.

  “So, after my work in Brighton, when do I return to Durban?” I asked Gladys, almost tasting the tang of the salt air, and the drug of the Revolution.

  “You don’t. You stay here in this hole in the ground, Comrade,” Gladys said and peeped out the window to see the arid winter stare her in the face.

  No No No. I want out. I want in. I cannot remain in this ghost town one second longer. Brighton. The place where dreams come to die.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  This Brighton, so cold and ugly, forgotten by God, not even rain or sleet made her innermost core wet; she remained dry. She was an old hag. Every branch of every tree crackled with an angry, unforgiving static. No one in that town knew anyone else. Everyone had their holes, and business was business as usual.

  Such a pained past, this Brighton. Nobody had cared about the Englishman who built this town, the fraudulent Lord Pomeroy. Most people concerned themselves with his wife, Lady Charlotte. There still stands in Brighton a little plaque that is well hidden by an umbrella of dark green ivy. On it her name thrived, while his name had seen the effects of the burning sun and faded away.

  He was forgotten. She never would be. Lady Charlotte Bruce, a Scottish bride, tossed about on the Cape of Storms, following a man she was given to. Like the commodities he was accustomed to, she was packed onto a ship and never told her where he was taking her.

  Once she was docile, but when they arrived at a salty, fetid port called Durban and he had piled her into an ox wagon and lumbered her body to this godforsaken place, her fire began to rage. Her hot blood, her fury at this waste of a life in a craggy world, where all she saw every day and every night were rocks and burned black backs digging trenches, she raged and lost her mind.

  She paced the length of the road that was being dug, the one and only road the town would ever boast, and remained in her thick, starchy crinoline petticoats despite the terrible heat. Her mind roamed the recesses of a beloved that she had left behind, a young soldier she had met on the beaches of Brighton, England, during a vacation when she was but 15. It had not been a romance—a fleeting glance and perhaps the soldier had touched her gloved hand. But stranded here in the worst of hells, chained to an unloving lord, the affair began to swell and grow in her mind until she was convinced that the greatest of romances had taken place. And like all great romances, the heartache was what she endured.

  In a frenzy, one night, when her husband tried to take her, his rough hands so inept, the caresses driving her wild not with desire but with gall, Lady Charlotte threatened the lord with a knife to his throat. She threatened to slit it clean should he not name this ugly, barren town Brighton where he had imprisoned her.

  She sent a pitiful letter to authorities in England and explained in painful words how she suffered in this hot African world, and all she ever yearned for to ease her mania was a simple piece of cloth. A piece of cloth would cool her heart, and she begged and pleaded to be given this prize. One colonial lord of the East India Company, whose ships came with regularity around Cape Horn, bearing trunks filled to the brim with brown sauce, fish paste, and lavender soap to service the intrepid travelers who had come to conquer Africa, felt a flutter in his otherwise cool heart. He acquired the piece of canvas fabric that the desperate lady craved, wrapped it with his own soft hands, and with pity in his soul had it brought onto his ship, so that one December day when the sun in Africa’s Brighton was at its most vicious, a package arrived for Lady Charlotte.

  The town gathered as the parcel changed hands and as the package found its way to the lady’s bedroom, her husband kept a wide berth, knowing full well the sting of his fiery wife’s hands on his skin.

  Lady Charlotte had dressed in her finest that day. She sat in the one cool place in her home—under the brown eaves of her attic—and ripped the package open. She emerged from her inner sanctum bearing in her hands a piece of blue and white striped canvas, a piece of fabric that had once been part of an awning of a wooden vacation hut on a beach in Brighton. Lady Charlotte gave a loud sob, and yelled out equally loud orders that this piece of fabric would stand as the flag of this town. And a merry group of Norwegian missionaries, who had come to bring the word of the one true God to the infidels of this African wasteland, accepted Lady Charlotte’s treasure, and strung it up with dignity on a flag pole made of wood outside their mission hall. They rang the mission bell fifteen times, in honor of the fifteen horrible months that the unfortunate lady had endured in the town as the lord’s wife.

  And the following morning there came a throng of local people, who marched in their dark brown masses to stand under Lady Charlotte’s window, and sing the only hymn that the Norwegians had taught them. Their white teeth glittered in the warm shine of their dark brown faces, and their chief, who had been the first to convert to Christianity, demanded that the lord name the one main street after his real lady.

  The fake lord was flabbergasted, offended, stung. But the chief and his masses remained standing outside his wife’s bedroom window, repeatedly singing the hymn. Lady Charlotte slept that night with a large knife tucked under her pillow and glared at him, showing with bared teeth her intent to use it should he fail to comply. And finally Lord Pomeroy relented, giving up his grand dream of naming the street after himself. He had lost the war for the name of the town. The battle for the naming of the street was futile.

  Almost immediately at the Norwegian mission, a place the raving lady had taken to spending most of her days, listening to the civilization of children, wandering the dry grounds and muttering to herself, two plaques were forged out of thick alloys, with deep etchings: LADY CHARLOTTE ROAD. These two tiny plaques were set into large pieces of concrete where the road entered and exited Brighton. Two plaques—honoring the suffering of a lady that the people just seemed to love, because they noticed the suffering in her wild eyes—stood a kilometer apart, guarding the one street like bookends.

  And at the far end the Norwegian mission, where the first plaque remained under the wooden flagpole, grew large its congregation of converts. The nuns and one priest were devoted to their singing masses, which picked up psalms and hymns with rapidity, and also picked up a Norwegian accent as they sang songs to the civilized God.

  The striped flag of fair England’s blue and white, the canvas awning from the beach of Brighton, waved lethargically in the rare, heated wind, because thick canvas is not meant to float like a flag. It just hung there, looking flaccid and convoluted upon itself, until Lady Charlotte could bear it no longer and took herself to the local medicine woman who lived in the hills that surrounded the fast-burgeoning village.

  The lady procured for herself a thoroughly African solution to her problems and drank a hefty portion of a local potion, squeezed from the mash of a rare root that only grew in Zululand, and finally the lady found peace. With a face that had turned purple, and lips that swelled so much that they had looked like they would burst, she lay in her coffin. The Norwegian missionaries and their flock sang her funeral songs in thickly accented English.

  They buried Lady Charlotte far away, in a proper cemetery in Dundee, because the town of Brighton was too rocky to dig graves, and over her coffindraped the striped awning, which when the burial was done, was sent folded back to the missionaries, who placed it in a glass cabinet nearest the entrance to the mission, where they protected it like a treasure.

  “Well, Comrade, that is a pretty story but it means nothing now. All it means to the struggle is that you are here, and n
o one knows this small town even exists,” Gladys muttered as she sipped her diluted tea. “So he left you here. Well, the child will just have to come along for the ride. You stay here, Comrade. Listen. I am telling you that these orders come from a high place. You stay here.”

  “No, Gladys.” Again the howl began, but Gladys silenced me in her own rich growl.

  “Listen, Sylvie. Stay here. This is where we need you the most. We need a safe house. A place that the Special Branch would never even suspect existed. Look at the perfection of all that has come to pass. The struggle is strong, Comrade. We don’t exist, Sylvie. It is only our fight that is the real human being. We are just the vessels.”

  “Much like a mother, right, Gladys? Just the vessel.”

  “Yes. A mother, very much like a mother. The quiet force behind the barkings of a man. The woman lies silent and the woman does the work.”

  “I need to come back to Durban, Comrade. I hate this soundless crypt. I need to hear voices, I need to listen to the words of the wise. I am dying inside this perfect cottage. Gladys, things are happening in Durban. I hear things.”

  “Forget Durban. It is just a stage. A stupid, hot stage that allows the loud sounds that mean nothing. They stand on squares, and they hold their rallies. They are our smokescreen. The deep heart of the struggle lies in the most nondescript of places, where we can hide our comrades away until we send them for training to Lesotho, and from there to our military camp in the Soviet Union. But these dark, deep places are where the real work is done. Durban is the foil, my comrade. My sister. No one looks anywhere else because we shine the brightest light on that port.”

  “What must I do? What? What?”

  “Stay here. We need this house. Make arrangements. We will be sending our best to you. Keep them here inside your unsuspicious fairy tale. And, good that you’re a doctor, Sylvie, because they will come to you beaten and in shreds.”