The Theory of Flight

by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

  ‘My name is Vida de Villiers,’ Vida said before he could stop himself.

  ‘You think you are telling me something I do not already know,’ the man, Golide Gumede, said with a gap-toothed smile that oddly seemed to Vida to be all too familiar.

  When the war ended, Vida made his life on the street. His hair and beard grew long from lack of care, and the people of the street christened him Jesus.

  During the day, Vida roamed the city streets and at night he slept in the alleyway behind Downings’ Bakery. For a bum, a vagrant, a vagabond, a derelict, a homeless person, a stray – whatever you chose to call people like him – the alleyway behind Downings’ Bakery on Grey Street was prime real estate. It was best during winter, when the heat from the ovens, which were turned on at 3.00 a.m., seeped through the bakery walls and made for a comfy and cosy second half of sleep. He particularly liked to rest his back against the bakery walls, letting the heat invade his body while the warm smell of baking bread enveloped him.

  For Vida, there was nothing like waking up to the warm smell of freshly baked bread. It made every day seem as if it would have infinite possibilities. The smell was like a promise, a contract even, the city’s pledge to take care of its citizens – a guarantee, almost, of its ability to do so.

  He could not believe his luck when he found the Downings’ Bakery alleyway unoccupied when he returned from the war. Granted, in 1980, with the country newly independent, there had not been many bums, vagrants, vagabonds, derelicts, homeless persons or strays – just a lot of optimism and fresh starts. But what street dwellers (and that was what Vida preferred to call bums, vagrants, vagabonds, derelicts, homeless persons and strays) there were were extremely territorial, cordoning off entire sections of the city as theirs – the privilege of having plenty because there are only a few of you.

  The original colonial street dwellers had been exclusively white; the colonial city had, after all, been exclusively white. The original colonial street dwellers were comprised of poor whites, retired prostitutes, people who would have been better served in a mental institution, and a few old-timers that time and empire had forgotten.

  The post-war period saw a considerable increase in street dwellers. Some, like Vida, had belonged to the armed forces, some had been freedom fighters or terrorists (depending on who was talking), others were civilians who had been traumatised by the war but whom the overflowing mental hospitals could not accommodate, others still had left the rural areas when the war heated up and marooned themselves in the relative safety of the city. Most of them had seen things that made them retreat into an inner world that they had absolute control over. These postcolonial newcomers learned to coexist with the colonial settlers. The post-war street dwellers were a truly multiracial lot and probably the country’s best example of post-war tolerance and reconciliation.

  During the day, they were joined by a slew (some called it an onslaught) of blind and otherwise handicapped beggars. They walked or hobbled around with Kango enamelled tin plates or mugs in their hands, shaking them in order to clink and chink the coins at the bottom. They were often led by their able-bodied children. The beggars sang or played an instrument, or both, singing or playing mostly religious songs, while their children actively asked for money, both beggar and child stopping to say ‘Thank you’ when the sound of a coin chinked onto the tin surface. It was a harmony that quickly became a part of the postcolonial city. The beggars were extremely gifted singers and musicians, one and all.

  Vida’s favourite musician was Shadrack, a man whose legs had been amputated below the knee when he was a child to stop the spread of leprosy. Shadrack travelled the city streets on his hands – he pulled himself forward in a swinging motion and crossed the streets faster than anyone Vida knew. Shadrack had fashioned cushions for his hands out of pantyhose stuffed with plastic bags, strips of fabric and cotton wool. He always had an Olivine-can guitar that he had made himself strapped to his back. Shadrack played it in a way that would have reduced Jimi Hendrix to tears. And, man, what a voice. What he could do to The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ … For Vida, there was nothing like being high on premium Tonga dagga while listening to the twang of Shadrack’s Olivine-can guitar. That made a good day phenomenal.

  The blind and otherwise handicapped beggars were not street dwellers per se, because every evening they left the city with the rush-hour throng heading westward towards the townships. They had homes, families, responsibilities. And that was what made them leave the townships every morning with the rush-hour throng heading eastward: they came to make a living.

  That was the fundamental difference between the street beggars and the street dwellers: the street dwellers did not beg. They did not need to. They were not trying to make a living, educate children or be productive members of society. Besides, they were always well provided for. The Salvation Army doled out clothing twice a year, at the beginning of winter and at the beginning of the rainy season, for anyone who wanted something new – well, something new to them. For food there were restaurants, bakeries and butcheries; if you were not actually handed a plate (usually at the service entrance), you were sure to find something in the rubbish thrown out every night after closing. A street dweller could actually eat better than your average productive citizen.

  That was in the 1980s.

  In the 1990s things began to change. Suddenly there was an onslaught – an actual onslaught and not just a slew – of a new breed of street dwellers. And they were all children. The state chose to call them ‘street kids’. The street kids came to the city to both beg and live.

  There had been a code of ethics among street dwellers and between street dwellers and street beggars. There was no camaraderie, at least not on the part of the former. You did not take to the streets because you wanted to make friends. Friends (like families) had expectations and created obligations. You took to the streets to free yourself of expectations and obligations. You took to the streets because you wanted to be left alone – or rather because you wanted the privacy that could only come from living publicly, from having people pretend not to see you. No, there was no camaraderie, but there was a code of ethics, a social contract that governed life on the street: you respected other people’s property, zones, marks, clients and customers; you neither interfered nor intervened; you lived your life however you wanted and left all else well enough alone.

  The street kids did not abide by any of these codes. They formed cliques that more often than not became gangs, got high on glue, which they pilfered from Hassamals and Esats, and then set about doing whatever they needed to get by. Everything and everyone was fair game. They had no respect – none whatsoever – for anything or anyone. Vida did not really blame them. Most were the orphaned children of parents who had died during the liberation war or because of the AIDS pandemic. Life had dealt them a particularly cruel hand. Their glass was definitely empty. If they chose to say ‘Up yours’ back to the world, so be it. But their presence definitely made being a street dweller less quiet and comfortable.

  It was because of the street kids that a lot of the old-timers were displaced. Mick, Vida’s occasional companion, was pushed out of his cushy place behind the Colcom Butchery and lost with it his steady diet of pork pies, sausages, bacon and polony. Before Mick was forced out, he and Vida had had an understanding: Mick would provide cold slices of polony and Vida would provide warm bread. There are very few things in life that come together as perfectly as warm Downings’ bread and cold Colcom polony – and together Vida and Mick would feast like kings, which was only fitting since they lived in the City of Kings.

  Those days were gone. Mick was not happy. Many of the oldtimers were not happy.

  Vida worried – and Vida did not like to worry because it felt too much like caring – about the future of things.

  The street kids’ arrival created so many disturbances that, after twelve years of living by the street code, Vida had been forced to break it. Because of the street kid
s, he found himself doing something he had vowed never to do: involving himself in the lives of those around him.

  When Joseph Pereira – one of the old-timers, a real veteran of the street – had told one of the street kids, a girl of about fifteen who had taken over his particular corner of the Main Post Office’s courtyard, to go home to her parents, she had told him to ‘Go back home to England.’ When Joseph had retorted that even though his ancestors had originally come from Portugal, his family had been in Africa for so many centuries that Portugal had long ceased to be home, the girl had replied: ‘My home can never be your home.’ She punctuated her point by putting her arm as close to his as she could without actually touching him. And Vida had had to watch the heart of a man well over seventy years old break. As consolation, Vida had offered Joseph a ride down Selbourne Avenue on his Scania pushcart. Usually Joseph jumped at the chance, but this time he just smiled sadly and put a hand on Vida’s shoulder and said: ‘I’ll see you around, my son.’ Joseph was found the next morning having hanged himself in the Main Post Office courtyard next to the ‘P’ plaque commemorating those who had died defending the British Empire in World War II. He was dressed in full military regalia. It was Vida who cut him down and waited with his body until the police came. The police reprimanded him for interfering with the scene of the crime. Vida understood their anger, but he was not sorry for intervening because he firmly believed that Joseph Pereira’s death deserved dignity, and a man whose body is left hanging for too long loses his dignity.

  Then there had been the fight between David and Goliath.

  David had become a street dweller a few years after Vida. Unlike most postcolonial street dwellers, he was not a casualty of war. His story was unique, and perhaps because it was unique, it was the most unfortunate that Vida had heard. David lived on the street because he had not been able to go overseas to finish his education. It was the simplicity of his circumstance that made it tragic. A brilliant boy, with a scholarship to attend Harvard University, but a family too poor and resourceless to get him there. A stroke of luck presented itself when the community and church rallied and came up with most of the money for his airfare. Nonetheless, at the embassy David’s lack of funds proved to be an issue – although he had a scholarship, he still needed money for living expenses, which, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were rather prohibitive, the bespectacled lady behind the desk sadly informed him … before denying him a visa. His prospects were dashed. His brilliant mind, having touched the cusp of something beautiful, disintegrated.

  From that day, David estranged himself from his surroundings and eventually took to the street. He talked to himself, kept to himself, and occupied himself by reading The Chronicle from front page to sports page every day – silently mouthing every word. He religiously completed the daily Target and did both the easy and cryptic crossword puzzles. All the street dwellers knew to leave him well enough alone. All, that is, except Goliath, the puny but dangerous and malicious leader of the most notorious gang of street kids, ‘The Survivors’.

  The Survivors were organised and they engaged in every base activity – they broke into cars to steal radios and whatever else they could get their hands on, they picked the pockets of the office workers, they snatched the purses of unsuspecting old ladies, and, for whatever reason, they liked to beat up the boys from Milton Junior School and shout obscenities at the girls from Townsend High School. Of course there had always been gangs of car thieves, pickpockets and purse-snatchers, but these gangs had tended to be amorphous. With his many years on the street, Vida had witnessed a purse snatch here, heard a car alarm go off there, occasionally seen a pocket picked, but he had never seen any gang worthy of the name. Goliath, to be sure, was the leader of a gang, and the members of his Survivors were known to all who lived on the streets.

  On the day of the fight between David and Goliath, one of the members of The Survivors snatched The Chronicle from David while he was reading it. In the blink of an eye, David had his fingers wedged on either side of the kid’s windpipe. Then there was the sound of glass breaking and Goliath was wielding a broken brown bottle of Castle Lager, jabbing the jagged edges towards David’s face. Goliath lunged. David flung the street kid against the wall. For once, they both were after the same thing: blood. Vida knew that he had no choice but to intervene. For his troubles, he got the jagged edge of a Castle Lager bottle embedded in his right shoulder, but at least the only blood that had been shed that day had been his.

  Another time Vida had tried to intervene was when he had seen a girl (she could not have been more than eleven years old) enter the car of a well-known Indian businessman who had a penchant for streetwalkers. He mostly preferred the black prostitutes (Vida liked to call them The Painted Ladies because of their pink lips, blue eyelids and dangerously long, red, tapered fingernails) who stood outside Kine 600 and Elite 400 and did especially good business after a Stallone or Norris or Seagal or Van Damme late-night double feature when testosterone levels were predictably high, along with the desire to conquer something, anything. But sometimes the Indian man liked to mix it up. He had picked up Vida once or twice. Picking up such a young girl, however, was going too far in Vida’s book. When Vida tried to remove the girl from the passenger seat, she slapped him across the face and told him that she also needed to survive on the streets and slammed the door in his face. He heard the Indian businessman chuckle and say ‘Next time, Jesus, next time’ before driving away. The next day the girl was beaten to within an inch of her life by The Painted Ladies. They took the money (twenty dollars) that she had made. The girl joined The Survivors after that and did not look happy about any of it.

  Whenever Vida intervened in such affairs that were not his own, he was reluctant to break the street code. Once, though, Vida had willingly intervened in something happening on the street – when he had seen Golide Gumede’s daughter, Imogen Zula Nyoni, fly through the air like a thing of sheer beauty … a wondrous something in the sky. She would have landed broken on the ground but instead she had landed in his Scania pushcart, her fall cushioned by the quilt his mother had made for him. He had no idea how he had managed to get to her so quickly but he had.

  She had looked up at him.

  ‘You’re Jesus, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he had said, hesitating slightly.

  ‘You don’t look like Jesus.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why they call you Jesus then?’

  ‘I think it is because of the long hair and the beard.’

  ‘And the kind eyes.’

  He had smiled down at her. She had smiled up at him.

  ‘Maybe you should cut your hair and shave off your beard.’

  ‘Maybe I should.’

  ‘Maybe you are afraid that people will stop calling you Jesus if you do.’

  He had seen her clearly then for the first time. ‘Maybe I am.’

  ‘No matter. You’ll still have the kind eyes,’ she had said.

  He had smiled down at her. She had smiled up at him.

  ‘You will remember me’ – that was what Golide Gumede had foretold. Vida looked at the gap between Imogen’s front teeth and he did remember. He remembered the feel of the sway of the elephant grass tingle in his fingertips … the presence of something that filled him with a sense of wonder … a heralding.

  And then Vida noticed Genie’s blood blooming on the quilt and at that very moment he wanted no other meaning for his life but to save her.

  MARCUS

  It was the day after Krystle’s thirteenth birthday party that Marcus discovered the truth between Genie and him.

  They were sitting under a jacaranda tree that was fully in bloom. She was making something out of its purple flowers and he hoped that whatever she was making was for him. He was lying beside her – watching, content.

  It was a lazy Sunday morning, the best kind of morning.

  He had just finished telling her that he had managed to sneak a drink at the birthday party when no
ne of the adults were looking, whisky he thought it was, when she said: ‘Did you know elephants can swim?’ He shook his head, no. ‘You’d think it impossible, wouldn’t you? But it isn’t. They float. I saw them on the Zambezi River when I went to visit my grandfather last year.’ Her voice was filled with awe. ‘Imagine that. Elephants floating as though they were as light as feathers.’

  Marcus just looked at her, aware that something was changing between them.

  ‘They are magnificent. You should see them. Promise me one day you’ll go to see them.’

  He found himself nodding his promise.

  ‘It is the most beautiful thing you will ever see.’

  Marcus doubted that very much, because at that very moment he was witnessing the most beautiful thing he had ever seen: Imogen Zula Nyoni surrounded by the bluey purple of jacaranda flowers. He doubted very much that he would ever see anything more beautiful.

  ‘The ancient river and the mighty animal in perfect harmony … a rite of passage made sacred by its sheer audacity.’ Genie, at sixteen, was able to construct such sentences because she unashamedly read and understood Shakespeare, loved Jane Austen’s novels and frequently read poetry without any prompting or provocation. ‘There is a wonder to it all … the possibility of the seemingly impossible … And there’s this feeling that you get … a knowing … You become aware of your place in the world … You understand that in the grander scheme of things you are but a speck … a tiny speck … and that that is enough. There is freedom, beauty even, in that kind of knowledge … and it is the kind of knowledge that finally quiets you. It is the kind of knowledge that allows you to fly … You have to experience it for yourself,’ she said, smiling at him, her face brilliant and beatific.

  For his part, Marcus, at seventeen, was able to appreciate her words because he loved beautiful things.

  He had at some point stopped breathing, but he could hear his heart beating strongly.