The Theory of Flight

by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

  ‘Sir. We mean you no trouble—’

  ‘Then why you bring white man?’

  ‘White man?’ Valentine asks. He looks at his fellow travellers – of course, Vida. ‘Oh him? That’s not a white man. That’s—’

  ‘Jesus?’ the man asks, excitedly moving forward. ‘Jesus! It is you.’ Vida frowns at the man. ‘It is you. It really is you,’ the man says, reaching out both hands to Vida. He realises that he has a gun in one of his hands. He hesitates, looks at Valentine and then at Vida before placing the gun in his waistband. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ the little man says, disappointment plain in his voice. Valentine immediately notices that he has done away with his broken English.

  ‘Goliath?’ Vida asks.

  The brightest smile beams shockingly on the little man’s face. ‘You do remember me! I thought you would not recognise me because I’ve grown,’ Goliath says, proudly playing with a scattering of beard on his chin.

  ‘You have not grown much,’ Vida says.

  Goliath laughs long and heartily at this. ‘Such are the challenges of life,’ he says as he brings his laughter to a close.

  ‘So you’re living here now?’ Vida asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Goliath says. ‘I found that city life no longer suited. Genie is the reason why we came to settle here,’ Goliath explains. ‘She talked of this place, about the sunflowers. She made it seem so … enchanted. I had to see it for myself. I had seen sunflower seeds, you understand? Greyish, black, ugly things they are. But she made the flower so beautiful in my imagination, I had to come here and see it. And I did. Years ago. Came. Saw. Loved the place. She was right. It is a beautiful flower. I promised myself that when the time came for The Survivors to settle, we would settle here. But when we arrived, we found that war veterans had already settled here. You can see the results.’ Goliath gestures towards the mud huts standing starkly in the barren fields. ‘We are not part of that resettlement scheme. We bought this patch of land fair and square.’ He rubs his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Money. Remember how tourists loved taking our picture with our Street Dweller statue? Foreign currency. Black market. We started as small fish … then grew … eventually becoming too big for the pond. The people trading on the streets nowadays are absolutely ruthless, unprincipled and undisciplined. They are an undesirable element. They are too hungry to care. Not at all like us. A different animal altogether. Remember how we used to conduct ourselves with dignity? We had a code of ethics. But now the streets have gone to the dogs. So we decided it was time to settle. Bought the land, direct purchase from Beatrice Beit-Beauford herself. Fair and square.’

  Just then Beatrice and Kuki alight from Kuki’s car, as do the Masukus and Bhekithemba, Minenhle and Mordechai from their respective cars.

  ‘Ah … Miss Beatrice … Here she is … You can ask her about the squareness and fairness of it,’ Goliath says, looking slightly confused by Beatrice Beit-Beauford’s visit, but standing his ground all the same.

  The vacant look in Beatrice’s eyes and the benign smile on her lips let everyone know that there is no point in asking her anything.

  The front door opens hesitantly and cautiously. Men and women come forward, slowly but with determination. ‘The other Survivors,’ Goliath says, proudly motioning towards the motley crew. ‘You won’t believe who I’ve got here,’ Goliath says to The Survivors. ‘Jesus,’ he says, responding to his own question. ‘Remember Jesus?’

  ‘How could we forget Jesus?’ one of the women says as a baby hungrily suckles at her breast. Vida recognises her as the girl he once tried to save from prostituting herself to the Indian businessman.

  ‘That’s the wife and child,’ Goliath says, trying not to sound proud. He looks past Vida, expectantly. ‘Speaking of wives, where is Genie?’

  ‘We were told that she was here,’ Valentine says.

  ‘Here? She is definitely not here.’

  ‘We were told that a body was found here,’ Vida says.

  ‘A body? That was Genie?’ Goliath points towards the war veterans’ mud huts. ‘There was much ado a few days ago. They are always harvesting bones. Human remains. That is why they will not let us plough the fields. But a few days ago they claimed they had found a fresh body in the sunflower field. We didn’t believe them. And now you say this body belongs to Genie?’

  ‘We’ll have to see it for ourselves to determine that,’ Valentine says as he makes his way towards the mud huts.

  ‘You’ll need us to ease your passage,’ Goliath says, rushing to the head of the group. ‘They don’t take kindly to strangers. Although there is no love lost between us, we at least have become familiar to them.’

  On their circuitous route to the mud huts, Goliath leads them past a series of dilapidated and debilitated yellowy-grey concrete houses with stained and corrugated asbestos roofs. Over the years the compound houses have come to lean on each other and that is the only reason that they are still standing now.

  ‘Where are all the people who used to live here?’ Jestina asks.

  ‘When we came here there were no people,’ Goliath’s wife says.

  ‘How can a place have no people?’

  ‘Chased away by the war veterans, most probably,’ Goliath says.

  ‘I think it is HIV… AIDS. Once it enters a small place such as this …’ Goliath’s wife says as she lets her voice trail off. ‘You should see the number of bones and bodies the war veterans have dug up.’

  So it is just as Jestina has long suspected: on that nightmarish day, the sojas with the red berets brought more with them than just their hatred and AK-47s. She has never told anyone what had happened to her and what had happened to Mrs Hadebe, what Mr Hadebe was forced to watch … What had happened before she was ordered to put the rat poison in the Hadebes’ tea and forced to watch them drink it. Instead of speaking the unspeakable, she had chosen instead to cloak herself in shame. As they gang-raped, shot and pillaged their way through the compound, they had also, probably unbeknownst to themselves, found another way to decimate the compound. It did not have to be all of them who carried the disease. Just one – the result would have been the same.

  And now to find out that Genie too … But no. This is a thought that Jestina cannot reconcile herself to. Genie had only been nine years old at the time. The sojas could not have … but what if they had … and Genie had chosen to remain silent … to the grave.

  Tattered and torn. Tall and proud. War veterans. Carrying battle-weary AK-47s.

  ‘Are you here about the body?’ the war veterans ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Valentine replies.

  The war veterans lead the way. Past the mud huts. Over the barren fields. Through the sunflower field. The sunflower field grows of its own volition, has its own rhyme and reason.

  Finally they arrive at a cold-storage unit. They heave open its heavy door and reveal stacks and stacks of neatly arranged skeletons. The dumbfounded awe that then fills the room is akin to reverence.

  ‘They are so neatly arranged,’ Valentine says. ‘So tidy.’

  ‘We were very careful,’ the war veterans say.

  ‘They seem to be almost catalogued.’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ the war veterans say neutrally. ‘There are the bones from the war. There the bones from what happened after the war. The bones from HIV and AIDS.’

  ‘How did you differentiate the bones?’ Valentine asks, clearly fascinated.

  ‘Coins. In the seventies and eighties almost everyone died with change in their pockets. Not so in the nineties.’

  ‘This is a job well done,’ Valentine says.

  The war veterans allow themselves to feel the pride of the compliment. ‘It is all we have done since we arrived. Excavate. That is why the fields still lie fallow. But we thought it was the best way to handle so many bones. With care.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Valentine says. ‘With care.’

  ‘The body is this way,’ the war veterans say as they lead the way into the deeper and darker re
cesses of the cold-storage room.

  A streak of sunlight shining through a high, dust-covered window falls across the body of Imogen Zula Nyoni lying on a metal slab. Quieted. Unbreachable. At peace.

  A truth inescapable.

  ‘We knew who she was as soon as we saw her,’ the war veterans say. ‘We would know the daughter of Golide Gumede anywhere. We do not know how she got to the sunflower field. We just woke up in the morning and there she was … She must have been alive. At least for some time because her feet were burrowed into the soil.’

  ‘We should take comfort in the fact that she chose her own ending,’ Jestina says.

  A profound silence settles the room.

  ‘No,’ Kuki says firmly, breaking the silence. ‘No,’ Kuki repeats, backing away from Genie’s body. ‘No.’ She has no idea what she is denying or refusing. ‘She was my friend.’ Why choose to lie at a moment like this, Kuki wonders. She was never friends with Genie. Beatrice is the one who was friends with Genie, and Kuki never quite understood their friendship. ‘She is my friend,’ Kuki hears herself repeat. Why does she, Kuki Carmichael, née Sedgwick, and once upon a time Coetzee, need to have people believe that she and Genie were friends?

  As dusk descends upon the Beauford Farm and Estate, the visitors prepare to leave, with Genie’s body, which has been gently wrapped in a mosquito net and placed at the back of Valentine’s jeep.

  Marcus looks over the compound again, trying to imagine the life he would have had if his parents had not come to take him away. He cannot. Had his parents not come to take him away, he would not have had much of a life.

  Home.

  Where has it been all this time?

  Marcus thinks of the world atlas that Genie sent him, the one that is safely secreted in a suitcase in the home he has made with Esme. He sees the page that is besmirched by a handprint that is reddish-brown: blood. The handprint is small – that of a child. That of a girl child. Genie.

  It is in that moment that Marcus realises that he has been holding on to something that Genie let go of a long time ago.

  A boy shyly walks up to Marcus and hands him a photograph. ‘I found it in the ceiling,’ the boy says, not quite sure what to do with the silence around him.

  ‘We used to talk about how we would hide in the ceiling with the things and the people we loved best, if strangers we didn’t trust came to visit,’ Marcus says, his voice breaking as he looks at the photograph.

  A young Marcus and a young Genie are smiling at him from the interior of Brown Car. Both of them are missing their two front teeth. They look unbelievably happy. Marcus smiles at them through the years, but his smile is uncertain because he does not remember having the picture taken.

  Jestina Nxumalo takes the photograph from Marcus. ‘We will always remember what happened here,’ she says, as she remembers Genie climbing into the ceiling to retrieve her suitcase the day they both left the Beauford Farm and Estate. ‘But we can never truly know what happened here.’

  GENIE

  Genie chooses this particular moment, with the survivors as her witnesses, to fly away on a giant pair of silver wings … and leave her heart behind to calcify into the most precious and beautiful something that the world has ever seen.

  As the survivors watch her ascend she experiences love as the release of a promise long held.

  And then the clouds …

  VALENTINE

  Valentine watches as The Man Himself struggles to tie the knot of his bow tie. Slightly embarrassed to see The Man Himself fail for the third time, Valentine lets his eyes wander around the opulent and stately room. It is a room that evidently understands that it houses a very powerful man; its deep emerald greens and ruby mahoganies are awe-inspiring. But it is also a room that is staid, with the stale scent of decades-old smoke on everything. The only thing that has changed, really, is that instead of Emil Coetzee occupying the room, The Man Himself does. And the only original thing that The Man Himself has contributed in his entire thirty-something years of occupying this room is not even truly original: he changed the name of this particular branch of the state from The Organisation of Domestic Affairs to The Organisation (which is what most people had always referred to it as anyway). Soon after he took office, he watched with satisfaction as all the stationery was changed to reflect his contribution. And then he sat back, relaxed, and did exactly the same things that Emil Coetzee had done in that room.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone this, but I usually get the clip-on ones. Saves one all this fuss,’ The Man Himself says, bringing Valentine’s attention back to him. ‘But today is a very special occasion. I thought I should “go all out”, as they say. A funeral. Just the sort of thing that makes people think that one cares deeply about things,’ The Man Himself says, his eyes never once leaving Valentine’s. He finally manages to knot his bow tie.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Valentine says. He is very uncomfortable. He has never liked wearing suits, and this one fits him a little too snugly. He has the desperate urge to shift in his seat, readjust his jacket and loosen his collar, but he does not do any of these things because they would be a sure sign to The Man Himself that he is uncomfortable.

  The Man Himself comes to sit at the edge of the desk, next to Valentine. In his hands he carries two cigars. He offers one to Valentine.

  ‘I don’t smoke, sir. Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to smoke to smoke a cigar. You smoke a cigar to make a statement.’

  ‘Thank you all the same, sir.’

  ‘You smoke as a form of congratulations,’ The Man Himself says as he puts the cigar in Valentine’s front pocket and pats it in place. ‘And congratulations are in order, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are they, sir?’

  ‘Of course they are,’ The Man Himself says, lighting his cigar. ‘You pulled it off, Valentine.’

  ‘Pulled it off, sir?’

  ‘Come, come, Valentine. I am head of Domestic Affairs. I’m the Chief Intelligence Officer. I know.’

  ‘You know, sir? Know what?’

  ‘That Imogen put you up to all of this.’

  ‘Up to all of what, sir?’

  ‘Must say, I didn’t expect it of you … You are such a good … foot soldier. So invested in doing your job well. So what was it? You loved her, I suppose.’

  Valentine decides not to respond to that.

  ‘Hit it on the head, have I? Of course you loved her, why else would you do it?’ The Man Himself scoffs. ‘Complete waste of time your being in love with Imogen. She was completely devoted to that De Villiers chap. So what good did it do you? You’ll likely lose your job – perhaps even lose worse over this … Which, of course, is why I’ve let you get this far. So that you understand the nothingness of what you’ve done. You know, to the rest of the nation you’re just a group of crazy people intent on burying an empty box. That is all they see. The emptiness of a gesture. Was it worth it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Man Himself is taken aback by Valentine’s response, but recovers quickly. ‘And all because of love?’

  ‘Love of a kind, I suppose. But not the kind you imagine.’

  Love. Was there another word to express what Valentine felt the day he read the story of Golide Gumede in the newspaper? There was a man building an aeroplane and suddenly all things were possible. Valentine’s family laughed at the idea that an African, an albino at that, thought that he could build a plane. Valentine did not laugh. Valentine loved the idea that flight was possible for someone like him. Valentine believed.

  ‘You really thought a woman like that could love a man like you? What really saddens me, Valentine, is how absolutely unoriginal you are.’

  ‘Why did you do it, sir?’

  ‘Do what?’ The Man Himself asks, frowning. He is aware that there has been a shift in the power dynamics of the conversation, and aware, more terrifyingly, that he does not know when the shift occurred.

  ‘Was it because he was capable of flight?’

  The Man Hi
mself laughs mirthlessly. ‘I see I did not teach you well. It does not matter why. It never matters why. You do it because you can. I did it because I could. Power. That is what it gives you. That ability.’

  Valentine smiles. The Man Himself’s laughter dies abruptly. He is done playing games. ‘I did it because a man like me does not let a man like Golide Gumede build an aeroplane. I did it because power is a very delicate thing.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me why, sir. Now, I’ll tell you why I helped her. Because she was someone who had lived a life that mattered. They all had.’

  The Man Himself’s frown deepens; he is evidently waiting for Valentine to explain further.

  ‘That is all there is to it. It really is that simple. Her life mattered. She was never just a statistic. She was always more than just a tragic life. She was a precious and beautiful something. She deserved to choose her own ending.’

  Valentine reaches in his pocket and retrieves a precious and beautiful something and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Eighteen. We counted. Genie made eighteen. This is what happens to the hearts of those who believed and followed Golide Gumede. Seventeen died on the twenty-second of December in 1987. Seventeen of these were found on the Beauford Farm and Estate in a disused well. Genie made eighteen … and yet you have one more of these … a nineteenth. I suspect that you actually have two. I don’t expect you to tell me the truth, but I’ll ask anyway, what did you do to Golide Gumede and Elizabeth Nyoni?’

  ‘What does it matter, since you know I will not tell you the truth?’

  Valentine stands up and smiles. ‘Beauford Farm and Estate belongs to The Survivors. They will decide what to do with the precious and beautiful somethings.’

  The Man Himself throws his hands up in resignation. ‘I don’t understand you, Valentine. I don’t understand you. You too would stand to benefit if we took over the land. I don’t understand you at all.’

  ‘It is all right, sir. I understand you, perfectly,’ Valentine says. He walks away, making sure to close the door firmly behind him, leaving The Man Himself in the stately, staid and stale room. The seat of power.