The Theory of Flight

by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

  Her life, it seemed to her, had not begun at the moment of her birth, but on the day she gave birth to her son, a beautiful, golden-haired boy.

  Perhaps because she could not find much strength in herself, Kuki had been attracted to brave people. Emil Coetzee had been a brave man. He had never been afraid to face danger and, actually, more often than not, had seemed to go in search of it. By the time Kuki met him, he had already wrestled a crocodile, dived through a waterfall, had an automobile drive over him and hunted a lion the good old-fashioned way, with an assegai, none of that monkeying around with rifles and shotguns for him. He had done all of this simply because he could.

  Emil had been twenty-five at the time. He was tall. He was muscular. He was blond. He was a daredevil. Kuki at fifteen, with her freckles, her red hair cut in an unforgiving bob, her slightly overweight body, could not see how any girl could resist falling in love with Emil. And so she fell in love with him, even though Beatrice thought Emil Coetzee was a popinjay and a buffoon, a man too enamoured with the idea he had of himself to be of any real use to anyone. Kuki knew that it was going to take some doing to get Emil Coetzee to marry her. He did not know her and she only knew him through his exploits in the paper. Added to which, he was an Afrikaner, and Kuki’s parents, whose veins ran blue with the blood of good pioneers, would never countenance Kuki’s marrying ‘one of those’.

  But although Kuki was not brave, she was very determined where Emil Coetzee was concerned. Having been born with very little beauty and no grace at all, Kuki gave herself three years to become beautiful and graceful enough for Emil. And she succeeded. Soon after her eighteenth birthday, she attended a dinner that she knew he would also be attending and had the satisfaction of turning every head when she entered the room, including Emil’s.

  Having vowed to be a bachelor for life, Emil Coetzee found himself seriously considering matrimony in his twenty-eighth year. He was an ambitious man with an ambitious plan. He had just proposed a programme for a state domestic affairs unit – one that would gather all necessary intelligence on the citizens of the country. The country was changing rapidly, the African no longer knew his place. It was no longer enough to simply have a decentralised Native Affairs Commission, with commissioners scattered countrywide. There needed to be a centralised intelligence unit and Emil Coetzee wanted to be its head. He knew the proposal was appealing. Even so, the state hesitated. They talked to him about the expense of the thing, but he knew the real reason for their hesitation. There were two reasons, actually: he was a single man, and he was an Afrikaner born and raised in South Africa. Being an Afrikaner could be passed over, but as a single man, he would never be seen as serious and settled enough to head an entire state department. In order for his proposal to succeed, he needed to be married.

  Kuki Sedgwick walked into his life at the right time.

  He remembered her as a girl who, for years, had had nothing to recommend her; she had not blossomed the way most girls did. She had had to painstakingly cultivate what for most girls came naturally. However, whereas Kuki Sedgwick had had nothing to offer him during his avowed bachelor days, during which he had only had one use for women, now she did: her name. Sedgwick – proud, proper pioneer stock. Marrying a Sedgwick would fasttrack his domestic affairs proposal. And so Emil Coetzee and Kuki Sedgwick got married.

  When Kuki accepted Emil’s proposal, she could not have known his reasons for marrying her. He told her of them during the course of their troubled marriage, whittling down her already fragile self-esteem.

  For Kuki, the only good thing that issued from her union with Emil was a beautiful, golden-haired boy.

  Kuki had known for years that her beautiful, golden-haired boy was not like most other boys. A mother knows these things. She just does. Even when she refuses to acknowledge them. She understood that her son was ‘artistic’, but she loved him anyway. Emil, however, did not, in fact, could not, understand a son who was so very different from him. A son who wrote poetry that he shared publicly and who proudly sang at eisteddfods. A son who refused to go hunting or fishing because he thought killing a living thing for mere sport was inhumane – barbaric, even. A son who, although he had Rosamond for a girlfriend, was too ‘chummy’ by half with Vida, the Coloured De Villiers boy.

  When their son was eighteen, he was called up to defend his country against the terrorists. The son, who did not believe in killing living things, had no desire to fight. It was not a war in which he believed. Kuki did not want her son to fight in the war, not because she did not think it was a war worth fighting, but because he was her only child and he was beautiful and precious. In Emil’s mind there was no doubt that his son would fight to defend his country. It would be just the thing to make him a man – to make him worth his salt. The delicate balance within the Coetzee household gave way. Words were uttered by the father that let the son know that he was deficient in some way. Words were uttered by the son that let the father know that he was deficient in every way. The mother lacked the courage to do anything other than watch as the father and the son deliberately broke each other’s hearts and left the pieces on the floor for her to pick up and mend where possible.

  Eventually, the son went to war and never came back, choosing instead to step on a landmine and be blown to pieces that not even Kuki could put back together again.

  At first, Kuki did not see how she could continue living in a world that suddenly found itself without her beautiful, golden-haired boy in it. To continue living would be a kind of betrayal, she thought. She felt that the rest of her days would have to be lived out in bed, wrapped in unrelenting emotional pain and unbearable sadness. But she did carry on living. In fact, she became active: making funeral arrangements, attending her only child’s funeral, moving out of Emil Coetzee’s house, moving into her own apartment, filing for a divorce, being (finally) granted a divorce. In all, she spent only three days in bed wrapped in unrelenting emotional pain and unbearable sadness. Instead of standing still, her life seemed to propel itself forward. Now, she actually had the courage to take initiative. Still, she could not help but think that this was the courage that could have saved her son’s life. It had come too late and in its belatedness it seemed like a mockery.

  Living alone for the first time in her life, Kuki prepared herself to welcome a crushing loneliness. Loneliness would be the perfect commemoration of her son. Loneliness was not what she welcomed, however; what she welcomed was the friendship of one Todd Carmichael. When terrorists attacked his homestead while he was in Geneva, Switzerland, trying to bring a peaceable end to the war, Todd Carmichael lost his entire family – his wife, his son, his daughter, his dog, his maid and his gardener. This friendship with Todd Carmichael was Kuki’s second betrayal, the first being leaving her mourning bed. He made her laugh, which was the third betrayal. Kuki started caring enough for Todd to care what she looked like in his eyes: she started jogging, she put herself on a series of strict diets, she tried (unsuccessfully) to kick her pack-of-Everests-a-day habit, and she put her face through numerous regimes to get rid of the wrinkles that were yet to appear. Trying to be attractive to a man was the fourth betrayal. The fifth betrayal was that she became comfortable in Todd’s presence. Todd asked her to marry him and she accepted, perhaps a little too readily, and Kuki thought this sixth betrayal to be the biggest of them all. This last betrayal – one allowing the unrelenting pain and unbearable sadness to gradually give way to the selfish and immeasurable joys of living – was so great that Kuki felt certain that she would never forgive herself. She tortured herself with images of her golden-haired boy every night, as soon as she closed her eyes, and every morning, just before she opened her eyes.

  One day Kuki woke up and could not quite readily remember the beautiful, golden-haired boy’s face and the many expressions it had held. She surreptitiously looked at his photograph on the mantelpiece so that she could remember what her son had looked like on the day he had left for war. But the picture on the mantelpiece wa
s not to be trusted. He, who had always worn his hair rather long, had a buzz cut. His face, which had always been soft and gentle, was more angular, mature and stern. In that picture he seemed to be everything he was not: proud of his country, proud to defend it, proud to be the kind of man who defended his country. In other words, proud to be his father’s son. The photograph on the mantelpiece was not a remembrance at all. The boy she had seen kissing Vida de Villiers and then looking at him with such love was not in that picture. The boy who sang with the voice of an angel at eisteddfods was not in that picture. The boy who wrote award-winning poetry was not in that picture. Her son was not in that picture, but Kuki could not bring herself to throw away the photograph. It was the last photograph that had been taken of him. And this too, this not being able to throw away the photograph of her not-quite son, this too was betrayal.

  Years after the war had ended, an army buddy – that is how the young man had identified himself, as an army buddy – had brought to Kuki what he must have thought was a gift. The young man had been on the verge of leaving the country for Canada and, while packing, had come across a photograph of the beautiful, golden-haired boy. In the photograph the golden-haired boy was leaning against a Jeep, shirtless save for the dog tags hanging from his neck, cigarette dangling dangerously from his lips, arms crossed. His fatigue trousers and military boots seemed too big for him. He looked as though he was just about to laugh or had just finished laughing.

  Kuki did not know quite what to do with the photograph. The man – and he was a man indeed, no longer a beautiful, golden-haired boy – the man in the picture did not resemble her son at all. He seemed like a younger version of Emil … and proud of it. There was an iconic photograph of Emil Coetzee, taken when he was about the same age, leaning against a car and revelling in his youthful invincibility. It was not rational, she knew, but she felt that the beautiful boy had demanded that the picture be taken because he wanted her to see the result of her lack of bravery. Though the black paint he had put on his face made him look fierce, and even though a smile lingered on his face, his blue eyes looked dead. The gift photograph let her know that, even if he had survived the war, her beautiful, golden-haired boy would never have fully returned.

  Not allowing herself to think too much about what she was doing, Kuki had taken the photograph of the son she did not recognise and thrown it into the fireplace. She had watched as the photograph contorted and the image blistered and distorted before it burnt to ashy nothingness. The burning of that photograph was the only thing she did after the death of her beautiful, golden-haired boy that did not feel like a betrayal.

  Perhaps her many betrayals would not have seemed so great had Vida de Villiers not become a vagabond. He too had loved her son. He too had lost him. He, however, had chosen not to carry on without him, choosing instead to vacate the world in his own unique way. Whenever she saw Vida on the street, wrapped in his unrelenting pain and unbearable sadness, resolutely refusing to propel his life forward, so far removed from everyone around him, even as he pushed his Scania pushcart among them, she envied him for having found a way not to betray the beautiful, golden-haired boy that he had loved. She envied him his bravery. She always stopped to look at him, fascinated by his ability to do what she could not do, and that was what she was doing when she sent a girl in a blue and white uniform flying through the air.

  VIDA

  People took to the streets for very different reasons. Vida’s reason was rather prosaic – when he was sixteen he had fallen in love with a goldenhaired boy with the voice of an angel who sang ‘The Sound of Silence’ at the eisteddfod. Upon hearing the boy’s voice, something within Vida gave way. He scoured the programme for the boy’s name – Everleigh Coetzee. During the intermission he made it a point to talk to the boy, suddenly possessing a courage he had not owned until that moment. Engulfed in a sea of admiring people, the boy had barely acknowledged him but did smile politely. The sixteen-year-old Vida had thought that all was lost. But, later that evening, he had found himself pressed against the wall, in a dark storeroom, Everleigh’s mouth on his. Tongue gently probing, eyes closed. Bliss … love … unmistakable.

  A few months later, to his utter confusion, Vida fell in love with Everleigh’s friend, Rosamond Pierce, as she stood in an ivory swimming costume on top of the diving board of the Coetzees’ swimming pool. Vida had never seen anyone look so exquisite. She dived into the pool and he watched the ripples she created, mesmerised. Before she emerged from the water, Vida knew, he just knew, that he had fallen in love for the second time.

  ‘She’s immaculate, isn’t she?’ Everleigh said. It was not really a question that needed an answer.

  When Rosamond got out of the pool, she comfortably occupied the space between them. ‘You’re right,’ she said to Everleigh, ‘he is sun-kissed perfection. Such a delight.’ She leaned forward and kissed Vida on the lips.

  Vida was confused. He had reconciled himself to the fact that he liked boys. He had come to realise that he was not alone – that there were others like him here, there and everywhere. There were names, most of them unpleasant, for people like him. These names, no matter how much they were meant to injure and vilify, gave him comfort because they acknowledged (whether they wanted to or not) the existence of someone like him. Without a name something does not, cannot, will not exist. With a name, something cannot help but exist. He was a moffie and that was that. He existed.

  But here was Rosamond presenting him with something else entirely: something without a name. It terrified him. It threatened his existence. Since he liked both boys and girls, what did that make him? He had never heard of a name for such a person. Did such a hybrid thing even exist? If it did not exist, then what did that make him: an aberration, an anomaly, an abnormality … something wrong?

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s simple,’ Everleigh said, kissing him on the shoulder, understanding, as always, what he was going through. ‘Don’t complicate it.’

  And in that moment Vida knew he was not alone.

  He felt content and fulfilled and complete.

  It was a charmed life. Everleigh was eighteen, Rosamond seventeen. They were young and felt justified in not having any care in the world save the pleasure of each other’s company. But there was a war raging. Everleigh was called up. Not long thereafter he stepped on a landmine.

  Rosamond went to seek refuge in a convent. Vida prematurely joined the army, hoping that he would die too. He did not. Instead it was his parents who died. Together. In a car crash. And just like that love ceased to exist in his life. In its place came anger. He had had no idea that life could be so devastating, God so uncaring, and the world so cruel.

  He was so filled with anger that he could not even cry. The closest he came to crying was listening to Janis Joplin’s raw and wailing voice. In that voice he could clearly hear hurt that was deep and still festering. He used her voice as a surrogate. When he was deployed to Tongaland to help patrol the border to ensure that the terrorists did not cross into or out of the country, he took his small cassette player with him and listened to Janis Joplin every chance he got. He did not care if Janis Joplin alerted the terrorists to his whereabouts; in fact, he wished she would. Tongaland was known as the ‘hot seat’ of the war because of its proximity to the border, so Vida had been convinced that that was where he would meet his end and he awaited it with a determined resolve.

  However, he found Tongaland uncommonly calm and peaceful for a war zone and the natives too hospitable for a people so heavily policed, constantly under surveillance and regularly mistreated by both the soldiers and terrorists alike. He soon learned why. The Tonga people grew and consumed two crops in abundance – marijuana and moringa. The former left them feeling peaceful and easy, the latter made them feel satisfied and content. They had found a way to live with devastation, uncaring gods and an oh-so-cruel world, and they generously shared their knowledge with Vida.

  And that was how Vida spent his war – in Tongaland, listeni
ng to Janis Joplin and feeling peaceful, easy, satisfied and content. He still felt the loss of love but numbed himself to the pain of that loss. He would never love again – of that he was determined, certain. He owed it to those he had loved and lost to never love again. To love again would make meaningless the love he had already received and the love he had already given. If he survived the war, and he really hoped that he would not, then he was determined to live a life that would make love impossible.

  One day, September 3, 1978, to be exact, standing camouflaged in the tall, yellow, almost golden elephant grass of Tongaland, a feeling came over Vida that he could not put into words. He was standing in the field alone, but he no longer felt alone. He could somehow feel the sway of the elephant grass tingle in his fingertips, the flap of a bird’s wings overhead whisper in his ear, the richness of the soil coat his tongue. He was in the presence of something that filled him with a sense of wonder. He liked the feeling, but could not put it into words. It was something that he could only experience, not name, and for that he liked it better.

  He did not feel it for long, however. Before he could comprehend what had happened, he was squinting down the barrel of an AK-47. This is it, he thought. Finally, the end. Perhaps that was what the feeling had been … a heralding … a way of knowing before the fact … an experience of wonderment before dying.

  But instead of shooting him, the man carrying the AK-47 lowered it and looked Vida straight in the eye.

  ‘My name is Golide Gumede,’ the man said. ‘You will remember me.’