Читать книгу Called to Song - Kharnita Mohamed - Страница 11

She was on a small leaky rowboat in an ocean of words. The now familiar poem roiled and crashed in great big waves and gently lapped the boat. Each word was the poem entire.

To live

is to be free

of the spell

To be free

of the spell

is to claim

a spell of your own

To spell

is to bespell

and to bespell

is to unmake the world

Unspell

Bespell

Spell

Salty brine coated her face and lips. Whispered words sank into her flesh. The boat creaked the words. Water seeped and loose boards admitted the poem’s susurration. Gulls cawed the words as they swooped and dove overhead. The boat was sinking and Qabila tried to bail the waterwords out, throw them back into the ocean – but she couldn’t bail fast enough. The wet jumble kept coming to puddle at her feet. She grabbed the oars and tried to row away. Still the words crept up her legs to cover her lap. The boat was swamped and she knew she was going to drown. It was so unfair, so very very unfair. What do you want from me? she screamed, over and over and over. She screamed as the water reached her chest. Though the boat was completely submerged, she remained seated, her body melded to the boat. As the water reached her chin she let go, sobs rattling and catching in her hoarse throat. The ocean of words claimed her. She drowned in them. With every wordful of ocean she took in, her lungs filled. She surrendered.

Her hand sweeping the empty side of the bed, Qabila woke with the words thrumming in her veins. As before, she found herself mouthing them over and over. She lay on her back, chanting the words. When she was ready, she trailed out of her room and walked the house, spraying the words into the sterile rooms. When the words petered out, she dressed with care and went to meet her husband for the first time since the night of the great crying.

They’d agreed to meet at her lawyers’ offices at the Waterfront. Everyone looked up at her as she entered the conference room. The rich cream walls were hung with expensive watercolours, evoking a nostalgic Cape Town. Rashid looked different but she couldn’t fathom why. He was talking softly to a blond man in an expensive suit. Rashid greeted her warily, looking her over. Magriet, Qabila’s very expensive lawyer, introduced her to Attorney Vosloo. The country really had changed. White people working on black people’s behalf now. If you could afford it, she thought.

‘Shall we begin?’ Magriet said as Qabila sank into the chair opposite Rashid and Vosloo. The lawyers spoke and droned through procedures and possessions she didn’t care about any more. Rashid and Qabila mutely looked at each other. She felt like a photographer, approaching her subject from many angles, yet never satisfied with the image. The lawyers started talking about the arrangements for the house.

‘I don’t want the house,’ she blurted out. The room went silent.

‘What? What do you mean you don’t want the house?’ Rashid asked.

‘I don’t want it.’

‘I don’t understand. We agreed that you would keep the house,’ Rashid gave Vosloo a look that said, did I not tell you she was impossible.

‘I don’t want it. I changed my mind.’

‘Mrs Fakir, this changes the agreement … we’ll have to draw up another set of papers,’ Vosloo interrupted the exchange.

‘When did you change your mind?’ Magriet asked.

Ignoring Rashid and Vosloo’s beetled brows, which screamed inconvenient woman, she turned to Magriet. ‘This morning,’ she said. ‘I can’t live there. Its, its … its fullness traps me.’

Magriet’s squint belied the gentleness of her voice. ‘Are you sure about this?’

Qabila’d had enough. ‘Yes,’ she said, and stood up. ‘Could you please take care of this, Magriet? I’ll call you later.’ She knew she was being rude, saying goodbye over her shoulder, on her way out the door. She could hardly tell them she’d had a dream that pushed her to be freer than she dared. Waiting for the lift, she looked around in frustration for the stairs and rushed down them.

Outside, she stood at the entrance, closed her eyes, breathed the salty air and felt her muscles relax their heavy grip. Someone was at her side. Without opening her eyes, she knew it was him. She knew his smell. It had almost dissipated in the distance between them and yet the tiniest hint of him cut through the salt. For years, she’d divined the tones of his breathing, and once – a wisp of memory reminded her – she thought she knew what every breath meant. She didn’t turn to look at him. They just stood there until he broke the wordless space between them.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go for brunch?’

She looked at him then. The strange look was still there, without the divide-our-assets tension. ‘It’s the air,’ she said, ‘makes you hungry.’

He smiled the kind of smile that comes after too many long, painful nights. She offered him one of her own. ‘C’mon, let’s get something to eat,’ he said. They walked through the early-morning tourists and Cape Town’s glamourati to Tasha’s, one of their favourite brunch places.

‘How are you?’

She wanted to lie and tell him she was great. That she never cried, and she didn’t miss what they’d been. She laughed at herself instead. ‘I’m going through a divorce,’ she said. ‘And you?’

His face caught in surprise, before he nodded and said, ‘About the same.’

Qabila responded with another sad smile.

They both sighed deeply at the same time and didn’t speak until they were seated and greeted by a waitress named Mandy. She recognised Rashid from the campus in the clouds. She took their order and asked them how long they’d been married.

‘Just over seventeen years,’ Rashid told her.

‘Wow, that’s a miracle. I hope I’m as lucky as you are,’ she said as she turned to relay their order.

Qabila wanted to cry. Instead she stared out the window. Ignored the husband of seventeen years. Didn’t let a tear escape, so Mandy could hold on to her hope.

When the food arrived, she smiled at Mandy dutifully and ate dully, pushing the first few mouthfuls past the lump in her throat. They ate in silence, neither trying to hold each other with their eyes. When as much of the food had been eaten as people discarding a marriage could eat and the bill was paid and Rashid had held her chair out and they were heading to the parking lot to their cars so they could drive in opposite directions, he held her in front of the paypoint and she let him.

‘Do you want to go back?’ he breathed into her ear so softly she thought she’d imagined it.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Do you want to see my place?’

She didn’t want to. She said, ‘Yes.’

They took his car. She’d forgotten how assured his hands looked on the steering wheel. She wondered if Thandi would mind. She didn’t care. What was she doing? Did he know what he was doing? The tense silence was comfortingly familiar. Neither remarked how picturesque the misty harbour was, spread out below the mountain. Or on the narrowness of Walmer Estate’s steep streets, in comparison to the wide streets of the northern suburbs. He parked in a garage tucked under a house that seemed to be mostly made of perched, jutting squares and windows. He tried to smile reassuringly as he led her through the garage door. It did not reassure her.

The cheerful kitchen belied the house’s austere exterior. So did the living room, which overlooked the harbour. She went to the window and watched the light play over the ocean. He was pottering around behind her. Her shoulders dropped when he left the room.

She brazenly explored her surroundings. The furniture was well worn and against the wall were school certificates for a John Bergson who was most excellent at attendance and mathematics and a different sport every year. Frances Bergson seemed to prefer netball, accounting and subjects that said ‘great future businesswoman’. The last certificate was dated 2002. Where were these promising Bergsons?

Rashid had returned to the room. She gave him a brief look and went back to her investigations. There was Bergson memorabilia scattered everywhere. A beautiful family. The father bespectacled and suited at graduations, the mother soft and round with nary a stitch out of place, and the children smiling in glowing good health. Qabila could hear the kids’ plummy accents and the parents’ tighter vowels. Something about the Bergsons’ ruddy achievements and shabby luxury relaxed Qabila.

‘Who are they?’ she asked and sank down next to Rashid on the blue cat-scratched couch.

‘He teaches engineering. On sabbatical now, they’re in London for the year. Their daughter’s based there. She’s an artist, married to a Brit.’

‘And the son?’

‘In Joburg, teaches law. Do you want to see the rest of the place?’ Rashid asked, getting up.

He showed her the four bedrooms. They were intimate and empty at the same time, the way dated memories are. Qabila couldn’t help comparing this house with hers. This was what a lived-in house looked like. And even so, this house could not hold the children. The children always leave and only time capsules remain.

‘It’s a happy house,’ she said. They were standing in Frances’s room; Frances, who the parents probably hoped would never return to this bedroom to live indefinitely. If she did, it would mean her life had not worked, that she’d experienced a great loss.

Rashid laughed. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘He has a reputation.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. He just shrugged.

So many people papered over the cracks. Why was it so hard for lives to be exactly what they seem?

He was staying in the guestroom. It was strange to see his things in this new place. There was a careless abandon to how they were strewn around the room. She heard his shoes shushing across the wooden floor as he pushed them into a corner with his foot. He shrugged, an almost embarrassed smile on his face. ‘There’s a cleaning woman. She comes once a week.’

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ she said.

For the first time in a long time, he let her pause in the space where he slept. She touched his things, and left them where he’d tossed them. The relaxed and messy room went with the new look on his face. There was a vulnerability about the room, about the whole house. He lay down on the bed while she tried to excavate this new life of his, much as she had the Bergsons’ lives. His eyes followed her as she opened closets and peered in drawers. She knew she was being intrusive. That she had no right. She expected him to stop her. She wanted to stop. She didn’t know what she was looking for. A part of her couldn’t understand why he let her rummage through his life like a tourist browsing through curios, hoping, impossibly, to find something to take home that would change home forever.

He was lying back on the pillows now and looking at the ceiling. ‘Why aren’t you stopping me?’ she asked.

‘I have nothing to hide,’ he said.

She perched on the edge of the armchair that he had turned into a laundry hamper. His long body was stretched out on the peppermint-green duvet. ‘Did she not want you when you were free?’ she asked. She realised, as the question left her mouth, that’s what she’d been looking for. Not him. She’d been hoping to find Thandi. She wanted the woman who’d stalked her fears to be real. For so long, his freedom and Thandi had been linked in her mind. Yet here he was, and there were no signs of Thandi.

‘Come here,’ he said. He patted the bed, inviting her to lie down beside him.

‘Are you mad?’ Her face felt tight and hot. She could feel her muscles pulling and bunching.

His eyes went back to the ceiling before he looked at her tight face again. ‘Kanallah,’ he said. She moved a step to the bed, before the strange pull he and this house was exerting on her snapped. She turned her back on him, then hurried to the living room and expected him and his strange mood to follow her. Whatever game he was playing, she wanted to leave. He should take her back to the Waterfront.