He punched me in the face.
‘Father—’
‘Stop calling me that! How many times must I tell you to stop calling me that! I’m not your father, bakithi!’
‘But you’re the one who said I’m your son.’
‘When? When did I ever say that?’
‘That day, when you came to my room and said I was your son—’
‘I have never said such a thing. I don’t remember ever saying that to you, and I wouldn’t, because you are not my son.’
‘But Father—’
‘You are never going to be my son.’
‘Father—’
‘I’m not your father and you are not my son!’
We both froze. My chest hurt. My head hurt. My eyes. Everywhere it hurt. I was hurting everywhere.
I started laughing.
‘Why are you laughing?’
After everything we’d been through!
‘Heyi, wena, what’s so funny?’
He still preferred that brat to me!
‘Why are you laughing?’
I’m the one who had coaxed him out of his shell, helped him to get to know himself. I have even kept all his secrets! I haven’t even told Mama Agnes what he did to Mrs Thornton!
‘Stop looking at me like that!’
Would he be able to live with that?
‘You have no idea, do you?’ I said. I admit I could not help myself; he had hurt me badly.
‘I want you out of here, do you hear me, I’m taking you to the police, and I want you—’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Heyi, wena mfana, who do you think you—’
‘Come closer, Father, come. Come and have a look. Come, see.’
I fumbled about until I felt the hard plastic of my Red Album beneath my covers. I pulled it out. I caressed it, I kissed it, all the while watching him. And then I opened it.
He began to whimper. His eyes ran across the pages as I flipped them. He began to back away, but I grabbed his arm.
He looked up at me. ‘What is, what’s wrong with, what are you doing with, what’s this?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Really look. Don’t you see? Can’t you see what’s been right under your nose, all this time?’
Still, he couldn’t make the connection. In spite of our matching inky skin, in spite of our noble cheekbones, I admit mine more refined than his; in spite of our lips, so distinct, so unmistakable, he just couldn’t make the connection.
‘I know you are not my father, Abednego. I only thought, I only wanted—’ I shook my head. ‘Never mind. This is my father,’ I said, finally.
He just sat there, rooted to the spot, his eyes moving from the album to me and back. I thrust my face towards him, so he could have a better look.
He began to shake his head. ‘No. No no no …’
‘Yes. Yes yes yes …’
There, I had said it. I had done what he has failed to do all along, what I have been running away from. I had claimed my patrilineage.
‘No,’ Abednego whimpered. ‘You are lying. No! You don’t even look alike!’
‘What do you mean—?’ The bastard! He sought to destabilize me, I knew, to get me to question myself. But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I recovered my poise. ‘This man is my father. I’m his son. Take a good look, because each time you see me, I want you to understand that you are seeing him.’
I don’t have the words to describe what I saw on his face. It crumpled, it just! It fell apart. I admit I had not expected this. I don’t know what I expected; how could I have known that my confession, this shame I have been hiding for so long, would be the ultimate weapon? Better than any Bell’s or Johnnie or even the ubuvimbo.
‘I don’t know where your boy is,’ I said to him, bringing my face close to his. And though it hurt me how he cowered away, though I yearned for him to cup my face, though I longed to kiss his, it was better than the disgust with which he had beheld me a few moments before as he tried to chase me away. Fear is better than rejection. ‘But I can help find him. These IT people are lying to you.’ I paused, to let this sink in. ‘How can you trust anything coming from that Reverend Pastor? After he has been eating your wife for you, all this time?’ This hurt him, I saw. ‘How can you even be sure the boy is really yours? With a wife who can’t be trusted like that?’ I leaned even closer to him. I could feel his breath warm and stale on my face. ‘And if you go to the police with these lies, I’m going to tell Mama Agnes what you did to Mrs Thornton.’ This didn’t seem to elicit the reaction I had expected. ‘I’m going to write to Farmer Thornton and tell him,’ I went on. ‘I’ll plaster you all over Facebook.’ Still, nothing. ‘I’ll call my father. My father, Black Jesus, he’ll come for you. And this time, he’ll finish you.’ This, finally, had the desired effect! The man collapsed into my arms, his eyes opened wide, staring into my face. I held him, I cooed to him, I rubbed his chest. I bent and kissed him, on the lips.
‘It was you!’ he whimpered, trying to turn his lips away from mine. ‘I thought I had imagined it, that day on my couch with the booze, the, the Johnnie Walker, when you, you, and then you, and you made me, and you called me father and you kissed me, and – it was you! Spawn of Satan! I didn’t imagine it! I, I didn’t …’
‘Sshh,’ I said.
‘I didn’t … I didn’t … I, I, I … !’
He began to sob. I hugged him. I rocked him. I tried to sing him the folksongs of his childhood. ‘It’s all right, Father. Everything is going to be just fine. I’m here for you. Come now, Father, stoppit, hush now, it’s OK …’
Christmas Day
There is no use denying it; I am truly my father’s son.
I have tried to escape it, to change it, to run away from it. It’s a relief, I admit, to acknowledge my parentage! At the same time, it dredges up painful things in me. A part of me hates my father. While another part is transfixed. He is, after all, my father! His blood, his genes, his penchants, they all run in me! What does this mean? I can never forget what he did to my mother. And then, I cannot deny the yearning in me for love, his love, a love that only a father can give!
Who can escape his patrilineage? Father has tried to escape his own white ancestors, and look where he has ended up. Even in his denial, his patrilineage has followed him, imprinting itself through his teardrop nostrils, leaking through his blood into Bukhosi’s emerald eyes.
What delight to know your roots! To be firmly rooted. To look into a face and see in it something of your own. To notice a familiar tic. To come into knowing of your father, of yourself.
It’s because of me that the boy disappeared. It is I, I made it happen. I feel so much pressure off my chest, finally admitting this!
Having a perfectly nice family of his own, he still saw fit to push me out of my filial relationship with Dumo. I, who had already lost everything, losing not only my past, but also my Uncle Fani, who had tethered me, at least, to a semblance of a present; losing in the process, also, all illusion of substantial family roots in which to build a respectable future.
It is I who found Dumo, while we were in London. I who befriended him at the Ó Dubhghaill Pub where he worked as a bartender – what he insisted I call a mixologist, one of the last enduring art forms of our epoch. Such were his airs, a hollow fastidiousness that presented itself in his neatly pressed shirts and equally prim trousers, above which was a face losing its battle with age even though it looked like it was soaked religiously in Olay’s exfoliating cream.
I was his first disciple, sitting with him in his one-bedroom flat in London listening to his dream of a Mthwakazi Republic, trying to shape its vision. With what symbols would we garnish its governing bodies? What hi-stories would it tell? Sketching drawing scribbling thinking during those days that stretched into night and then day again without our noticing. Papering the walls were hand-drawn and printed maps of various parts of Zimbabwe, fluttering goldenrod and mustard yellow in the breezy January light streaming
through the windows. Spread out across the floor before us were clandestine pictures that he, Dumo, had got from God knows where, of Pumula Mission and Mbamba Concentration Camp in Tsholotsho and Lupane where my surrogate father comes from and also the Bezha area and Bhalagwe Concentration Camp in Matopo and Kezi where Mama Agnes and my mama Zodwa Nsele Khathini come from. In these pictures were the hi-stories that had been excluded from the national symbols but had instead symbolized themselves as scars on whipped backs crippled arms blinded eyes women lying sprawled in the grass with their skirts pulled up children in unnatural positions lying as though asleep. The many dried wreaths of maize stalks spread across numerous mass graves.
It was I who helped him draft the proposals for our movement, I who helped him get funding, I who listened to his wild theories about our future. I had even seen him naked (literally; he would ask me to accompany him during the winter months to his favourite spot in a wooded area just a few kilometres outside London, where we would strip, right down until we were just as we had come into this world, our little tushes trembling in the chaffing cold, and we would fling ourselves into the snow).
I I I! I who brought Bukhosi to him, so he could find the answers his own father couldn’t give him. How was I to know they would start seeing each other outside of our tripartite meetings? That the boy, overbrimming with juvenile passions, would take to Dumo like a fanatic? It’s clear to me that it was this that Dumo had wanted all along; someone in thrall to him, malleable to his ideas, not someone like me, who questioned him, and who pushed for our Mthwakazi idea to be a new era in the lives of our people, rather than a repetition of the old.
The match lit when I, in true Ironist fashion, asked Dumo what he thought he was doing when he accepted money from a neoliberal outfit based overseas, and which it was evident would, once it came to collect all those promises of mining rights and business contracts and what-not, derail our plans for a socially democratic Mthwakazi Republic. He laughed, Dumo, that deriding laugh he had taken on especially with me of late, and told me to stop being stupid, there was a time for ideology and a time for practicality, and he had to make things work under imperfect conditions, kind of like when they first taught you at school that 1 – 2 = it can’t, and then later they told you that no, actually, it can!
‘Why are you always mocking me?’ I said, feeling, I admit, rather petulant.
‘I wouldn’t be bothering with you if I didn’t see something in you, boy,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t care for you. But you keep on fighting me, all the time it’s this and that, I mean, when will you take action? Can’t you see the value in what we’re doing? All right? Because poking holes in our plans and all of that, it’s just so easy, boy. The hardest thing is to act! When are you going to open yourself up to the possibilities before us?’
‘I am open.’
He cackled. ‘You, open? You are as tight-fisted as our ATM machines, these days. Won’t even spit out just one hundred-million-dollar note. My God! Allow yourself to be vulnerable, for once. Do this Mthwakazi thing with me!’
‘But wait a minute—’
‘Stop with that! This is your problem, Zamani, all your what-is-truth and oh-Dumo-you-sound-like-our-politicians and your wait-a-minutes! I’ve tried to teach you, boy. You can’t even be bothered to learn the Queen’s totems properly. You were the closest thing that I’ve had to a son, but I’ve had enough!’
He thought of me as his son? Although I had been the one, ever since our meeting in London, to put effort into cultivating our relationship, trying to get close to him and gain his affection, it hadn’t dawned on me that he could adopt me as his son, that anyone could adopt me as their son!
‘Lord knows I’ve tried with you. But you’re like a wall! Everything keeps bouncing back. Even the young boy, Bukhosi, agrees with me that at times it feels as though you aren’t in this thing hundred per cent.’
‘You’ve been talking about me with the boy?’
‘Look, why don’t you take some lessons from him? The boy’s heart burns with a hot flame! His passions surpass even mine. He’ll go far, that one.’
‘I believe in the movement!’ I cried to him. ‘I believe in you!’
He looked at me sadly, did Dumo, and clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘The trouble is, Zamani – I don’t know if I believe in you any more. I need people who take after me. People who will learn from me. Look at your Bukhosi.’ And then he turned his back on me. ‘I’m tired of your endless what-whats. Hayi ah.’
Those words were a scythe through the heart. The boy was pushing me out, and Dumo was letting him! Evidently, they had been meeting without me, and discussing me, making plans for the movement that involved just them two. After everything I had done for Dumo! Meanwhile, back at home, the boy was becoming more and more of a brat, openly insolent to our father, criticizing Mama Agnes’s cooking, refusing to help around the house.
Didn’t he know what he had?
It would be only a matter of time, I realized, before I would be left out in the cold, unbonded from Dumo, without any support system, no Uncle Fani tears to wipe, nothing, only a hollowness that had been growing and would continue to grow, a negation of the self, of my self; a walking lie.
But what could I do? I was quite aware of the fact that no matter how many times I proved myself, whatever acts of service I did for Dumo, I would never again be granted a seat in the inner circle. He had metaphorically and literally turned his back on me. Never get to bask in his erudition, never luxuriate in his heady speeches, in the seductive force of his ideas. And more precious than that was the sense of identity he had given me as his protégé. He had even called me his son. In the most beautiful way, that casual, everyday way a father claims his own, without even giving it thought, because it’s such an inherent part of him.
This is what Bukhosi was stealing from me. And Dumo was letting him.
At the Mthwakazi rally, the boy wore one of Dumo’s blue propaganda shirts that read: Mthwakazi – A Better Tomorrow! His smiling face printed beneath the caption. I had thought to wear that shirt, in spite of the vulgarity of having Dumo’s face on it, like some cult leader. But when I saw the boy wearing it, owning it, Dumo slapping him on the back, calling him ‘mfanami’ (‘It looks good on you, mfanami!’), I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I admit I did, before the start of the rally, slink off to the gents to cry. It had wrenched my heart, seeing them together like that.
We were expecting a moderate crowd, because it was supposed to be a secret rally, formally lodged as a pre-Christmas holiday gathering. In spite of this, the gathering was a thousand-fold strong! Word had reached our people, and they came from Bulawayo’s nooks and crannies, even all the way from Victoria Falls and Gwanda. By eleven in the morning, Stanley Hall was bursting!
The early October spring was purple with promise. Through the windows of the hall, I could see the flame-lilies raging, sunflowers sashaying, and the jacarandas had come out in full bloom and were busy sprinkling their confetti. Next to me, Bukhosi stood with his hands folded across his chest, uncharacteristically still, although his eyes kept darting about, every so often resting on me, and then looking away, and then coming back to me. At first, I pretended not to notice, until I couldn’t take it any more and turned to him, snapping, ‘What?’
He shook his head and mumbled that it was nothing. I flashed him a grim smile. He tried to smile back, but couldn’t do it, and in the end, he had to look away.
The crowd cheered as Dumo lumbered onto the stage. Bukhosi broke out of his quietude, cupped his mouth and whistled at the stage. He slapped my shoulder. Chuckled. Bum-jived my little tush. I tried to smile, but I was trembling. My legs were trembling. My hands were trembling. My heart, everything … I was a shamble of shivers. But Dumo’s voice was strong. He was warming up the crowd when the sound reached us, a low keening, swelling slowly, like a drone, rising in pitch. Police sirens.
The crowd dissolved into chaos, mothers and daughters running with their h
ands clutching their breasts, fathers and sons thrusting desperately through the air. I turned to run. But Bukhosi grabbed my hand. He wouldn’t let go, even as I tried to shake him off. He clung to me, threatening to drag me down with him. I had to lug him along as I ran.
I could smell it as we ran, The Revolution, stinking up the air like Notes of a Native Son, the notes clear and smooth and liquid black, like the last keys of Epthalia pumping to the dither of a dying heart.
Shrill in the air, ever so shrill.
And it wasn’t the smell of the sewer that reached my nostrils, no. It was something altogether more familiar, like my own shadow; the reek of sweat – so much like fear that I almost didn’t recognize the difference – good old Bulawayo sweat, like the musty scent of summer; somewhere the ntswiiii of a chicken bus, the shudder of feet; I could feel it, that pulse of a city-on-the-run.
Sweet and heady and oh-so-bloody.
Because what’s a revolution without a little blood?
Securing my own family was just that, a revolution with a little blood – Bukhosi’s blood.
I ran, I who had sold my life to Dumo’s dreams – fleeing the one who had dreamed this life I was living and made me live it. Nothing but a scribble of cloud in a clean sky, cold blue like the heart of a slave, icy where the embers once burned. My heart tried to leap out of my chest, wanting to soar, to find a ray of sun and lie stunned like a dew of hope. My face straight as death, dead as solemnity. Shimmering like a chimera between vinous puffs of wild chocolate, that cocoa-coloured wet dream dripping unfettered from the glands of the imagination.
Through the screaming crowd we ran, the boy and I, and across the road to a brambly bush growing out of the fence of McKeurtan Primary School. There we sidled into a shallow pit I had dug earlier, before the start of the rally, beneath the brush, sufficiently hidden from view.
Because it was I who had informed on Dumo.
It was I who had called our nation’s toll-free number and told them about the rally.
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