Читать книгу Called to Song - Kharnita Mohamed - Страница 10

Rashid didn’t return to the house. His suitcases were gone. He must have packed when she was out. A few weeks later a note appeared on the fridge with an address in Walmer Estate. He’d scrawled: I’ll be staying here if you need me. Take care of yourself.

A part of her wanted to be devastated, and so she cried. She wasn’t sure afterwards whether she felt relief or pain.

And so it went for weeks. Qabila moved between the crying and her lists. She broke apart and came back together. She moved through the world of the university with a smile and with that walk that broadcast competence – the one she’d practised for so long. She raised her eyebrows in the right places and endured her colleagues’ mundane mutterings as if they were new-minted currency. She smiled in the right places, turned up in the right rooms, prepared the right words and kept her lists ticking over. As long as she mouthed the right things, none were the wiser that she spent her evenings crying.

She flew to her conference and talked about power with conviction, while back home she’d given over the dissolution of her life to lawyers. She shopped for chocolates in Zurich. Tick-ticking the recipients off the list. Hung out with her conference buddy, Nyameka. Told her she was fine, and did not let her see how much she hurt. Convincingly marvelled at the weather and crooned at the lake.

When she got home from Zurich, her friends and family rallied around her. They all seemed to know that she’d deserved better. He friend Erna couldn’t quite hide her relief that Qabila’s perfect life had cracked. Even so, a gentleness grew between them in those weeks of admitting their imperfections. Qabila had heard the hard-nosed sociologist’s stories before, but had never really felt them. She no longer had the mask of a perfect marriage with which to corrode intimacy with the struggling single woman.

Erna was a divorcee too. Her husband had been a stalwart member of the new NG Kerk and had kept her and her two children rigidly on the straight-and-narrow path to his version of heaven. Erna hadn’t known that her husband’s business partner was helping him create heaven on earth. She’d come home unexpectedly and found them so lost in each other that they hadn’t heard her arriving. As the ‘failed’ woman who had not kept her husband from ‘abomination’, she was politely shunned by the members of her church. Though they spoke to her, with slow and deliberate care, they never invited her and her children anywhere any more. Husbands were ushered away and women would make arch comments.

Erna attempted to entice Qabila into online dating adventures and offered tips on how to avoid men who made regular church appearances but kept secret dates on the side.

Qabila’s nieces dropped by often. The awkwardness of their youthful love brought an inexplicable joy. They sat with her, even though they clearly wanted to flee their discomfort with deep pain. When fear of the future pressed, she would call the youngest, Saleigha, and ask questions about engineering. And Saleigha, puzzled at first, would tell her aunt what she’d learned that week in one of her courses. About buildings and what kinds of structures are sturdy and which materials one needs. The twenty-two-year-old was excited by freedom. Unlike her two sisters, Saleigha didn’t have big dreams of marriage and was considering internships in other parts of the country.

The oldest, Ariefa, would drop by with the baby and let Qabila play and lose herself with Fahiem. Ariefa reminded Qabila of herself at that age: married too young to an ambitious man who she loved more than she loved herself. Qabila worried about the way she deferred to Riedwaan. At least Ariefa’s baby lived. When she visited, Qabila imagined how different her life might have been if her own baby had not died.

The middle child, Firdous, was getting married in a few months. Every time she came by, Qabila wanted to shoo her away. She didn’t want her bad luck to tarnish Firdous’s shining hope. And still Firdous brought it into her house. Love and hope wrapped in hesitant compassion. After the wedding, she and her fiancé were moving to Saudi Arabia to teach English. They had gotten tired of ignored job applications and jobs that offered menial pay, despite their educations. Qabila marvelled at how they imagined their life together as a team in a new and unknown world. She wanted to protect them from disappointments. And yet, Firdous seemed wiser than Qabila had been at that age.

Zainab came to visit with homilies about God and lots of fragrant Cape Malay food and memories of a time before Rashid. Qabila and her sister would imagine what their mother would have said and done, and they grieved together. For their mother, for Qabila’s marriage, for her sons. And sometimes even for their father. Their voices softened as they recalled the beautiful and the sad and terrifying. At other times, they would recall funny stories and shriek with laughter. Her sister would break off to pray in Habib’s room – just like their mother used to do. The first time had startled Qabila, but there was a rightness to it she became grateful for. It was a room ready for new prayers. New bargains with God.

There were long calls with Rashid’s sister, Faghria. More in the beginning, but less and less as loyalties grew strained. Together, they tried to understand Rashid better. How his parents’ insistence on looking perfect to outsiders had killed off his choices. ‘He was damaged,’ Faghria would say, ‘by the way my parents treated me, and then when he disappointed them. They so wanted their prince to have the big wedding and perfect family. He tried so hard to go back to being the son he thought they wanted. It wasn’t easy. I think he took it out on you. Don’t be too hard on him. He lost the children too, Qabila. Whatever he was to you, he was also their father. He loved Habib. Are you sure you want to give up? You know, he and Thandi might just be friends. He says there is nothing going on.’

It was good to talk about him, analyse him with someone who was there when he was not yet the man she married. But they both grew weary in time of batting their different versions of Rashid between them. Qabila loved her enough to let her go gracefully.

Without Rashid, she saw the frailties and strengths of the people in her life and loved them more fiercely. Being with Rashid had turned love insipid. Through the pain and loss of this love, she could feel new things happening. What was growing, she did not know. She merely surrendered to anything that felt better than the rejection she’d lived with, courted and preened for. It was a grey time nonetheless. She sucked up the love that came her way and let tiny roots find purchase in the rocky landscape of her heart.

In the meanwhile, the lawyers spoke to each other. Rashid didn’t want the house and was willing to sell her his half. He was starting over. She wanted to scream. She didn’t want him. But she didn’t want him to start over so easily. There were moments her feelings were seven things at once, and none in agreement. She sat in her dead son’s room and told him that his father did not want to live with him any more. Some days, her rage was like a pulsating volcano in her stomach, regurgitating all the should-haves and didn’t-gives and didn’t-hears and didn’t-loves, and all the ways he’d wronged her. On other days, the good days, she’d feel relief; the hopeful possibility of filling the void called Rashid. Some days, she sat there in that outdated powder-blue room and ranted at herself. Her stupidity for loving badly and giving her children a faithless father and a reckless mother. There were days she just remembered. Too tired, too spent to feel.

She kept the rhythms of her life. The only difference the freedom to wail in Habib’s room without expecting Rashid to return.

They eventually came to an agreement: she would keep the house and pay him the lowest market rate. He would choose a few pieces of furniture for his new life. They divvied up the stocks and all the little important things they’d chased and used to weight their life with meaning. Their marriage was set to end in that most soulless of reckonings, the balanced ledger. Seventeen years dissolved in four months.

The day before she was to sign the divorce agreement, she dreamed the words again.