Читать книгу Called to Song - Kharnita Mohamed - Страница 8

The Cape doctor was blowing steely grey clouds about. Her neighbour was in his garden, pointing something out to the gardener. She raised an arm in greeting. He gave her one of his stony-faced looks before turning away. Courting his rejections had become a game to her and Rashid. They’d know the country had truly changed when he accepted their black selves in his formerly lily-white neighbourhood.

Driving through the hilly streets, with their huge houses and always-lush gardens, she wondered about the turns her life had taken. How had she gotten to this place of abundance – and abundance of rejection? Become a person who turned rejection into a game?

The mountains in the distance formed a protective circle. She wondered if moving to Durbanville had been the best choice. If she and Rashid lived in the southern suburbs or Cape Flats, where almost everyone they’d grown up with lived, perhaps they would have found a way through the trials of their marriage. A way that was not like treading on shards of glass so fine you barely knew you were bleeding. But they’d traded all that – the close-knit family, the bustle of friends and relations dropping in – for the green northern suburbs. Behind the boerewors curtain, people joked. They’d been the first black people in their street. They were not the last. Even though there were more black neighbours now, they hadn’t forged a community. So many joyless years in this place. Except for the few with Habib.

Rashid had insisted they move, couching it as a defiant political move. But perhaps it had been to avoid witnesses to the travesty of their glittering marriage.

‘This is our city now,’ he used to say. ‘We shouldn’t congregate like a bunch of sardines in the southern suburbs. Look at how wide the streets are here, how clean, how big the houses – and the costs are lower. For a cramped box on a grey, broken-asphalt street, we’d pay twice as much.’

Durbanville was the realisation of white middle-class desires. A bright, airy, green village, set apart from the squalor and poverty and despair that supported its Disneyesque charm. It was so beautiful. Would it be so enchanting if she hadn’t known the other side so intimately? The greyness of the Cape Flats, her Cape Flats, where homes had peeling paint and walls hospitable to mould. She shook her head. Habib had loved the house. And she deserved a beautiful home. Everyone does.

She was approaching Capetonians’ lodestone, Table Mountain. A waterfall of clouds was running down the square-topped mass of rock. Her breath caught. It usually did.

Table Mountain was a little like her marriage. From a distance it looked square, but if you went up on the far-too-expensive cable car and walked around on top, it was very bumpy. If you didn’t walk with careful attention, you were liable to trip and fall on the paths that hadn’t quite succeeded in domesticating a hard and rocky place.

She loved her house and hated her home. How does that happen? She’d mistaken silence for peace. She’d waited for Rashid to love her, hoping he would see her. Qabila. Not the girl he’d been forced to marry. He’d never forgiven her for sleeping with him – well, he might have forgiven her for that, but not for the pregnancy. As if that was something she chose. She’d been so young, in her Honours year in Gender Studies. He was a junior lecturer in the Physics department. Sometimes, he’d join her group of friends on campus to say hi.

He was dating her then – Thandiwe. It was quite a scandal and no one took it seriously. It was one of the things sophisticated Muslim boys did: date unsuitable girls, before marrying good Muslim girls. Except in Qabila’s case, the good, proper Muslim girl threw herself at the boy, hoping he’d see that she’d do anything for him. The ‘loose’ black Christian girl … well, as far as she knew, they only became lovers much later.

She’d recklessly given her heart and body to Rashid when she was too young to understand that the fizzing excitement doesn’t last. She would’ve done anything then to bind him to her. She didn’t know that getting someone’s attention was not the same as them attending to you lovingly. If she’d suspected, she might never have seduced him at that party. But then again, she’d been convinced that theirs was to be a grand love story. So she wrote him a part, and was surprised when he didn’t stay in character.

The night of the party, she’d put up her hair, tucking a gardenia into the bun. Standing at the mirror, she’d imagined him pulling out the flower, gallantly handing it to her and watching as the sleek curtain of hair fell down her back. She laughed now at her romantic folly. He hadn’t bothered untying her hair. She had to untangle the mangled flower when she got home. There had been very little gallantry. He’d been surprised she was a virgin, and apologised. Afterwards, when the euphoria started to fizzle and the doubts set in, that was the worst part: the apology. Not the clumsy sex, briefly painful when he shoved himself into her. The apology was what hurt the most.

Then waiting for him to call, and realising that for him it hadn’t been about romance. He’d taken what she offered, imagining that she gave herself to many men. He’d asked her why, that night – a question he’d scream at her later, during the rocky years. She’d told him it was okay, that she loved him and would do anything for him. She’d never forget the way he smiled at her then, the arrogant smile of an attractive man used to being loved without having earned it. ‘Thank you, that was lekker,’ he’d said, ‘but we’re just friends, Qabila. I have a thing with Thandi.’ She’d looked at him without understanding, and brushed it away by saying, ‘I love you, Rashid. I really love you.’ Not yet pleading. That would come later.

She’d gone home feeling the pulls and twangs of sex in her body, and disbelief at his words. The force of her love was great, she’d thought. He just needed time for it to be real, to be something he believed in. He was using Thandi to avoid real intimacy with her. She could wait.

Now, she wanted to go back and hold the young woman she had been. To tell her that love is something that cannot be had by force of will. That you need someone looking back at you with the same intensity. She should have believed him. Instead, when she realised he wasn’t going to call, she called him. He wasn’t warm or shy or overawed by the greatness of the gift she’d given him. She wanted to plead with him but could not. Her mother would have heard. What would have happened if they’d had cellphones then? Would she have been ghosted, sent a rejection by sms? Or would he have found a private place to say, ‘thanks but no thanks’? He wouldn’t have come to her house. They wouldn’t have driven to Strandfontein beach again. Not gone to the make-out spot, where respectable men took the girls they fucked before going home to sit chastely in their living rooms with their respectable wives or girlfriends. If her father had been around, would she have been allowed to run outside when he hooted? She shook the thought off. Probably not. If her father hadn’t been the kind of man her mother had to leave to survive, would she even have wanted Rashid?

They used to talk about the university on the drive to Strandfontein. She’d listen as he complained. About his Head of Department’s power games, the machinations of the notoriously bad administration. Absorbing his discontent had made her feel like she was doing something important. There were days it felt as if they were having the same conversation, over and over; just the cast of characters changed. The right to complain to each other had become intimacy. Small talk masquerading as connection. As soon as they were parked amongst the other steamed-up cars, he’d look at her and tell her she was pretty, lean over and put the seat back before climbing over onto her.

She wondered what it would be like to have another man make love to her, be her lover. Rashid was all she knew. She’d grown to hate sex with him. The quickness, the instrumental nature of it. Like a chore to be performed, a body function in need of maintenance. They hadn’t had sex in years. Well, she hadn’t.

She wanted to go back there. To that place with its salty air, where she’d given herself up to the perfunctory handling of a man she’d manufactured. Nurturing her love and fidelity to a fantasy had left so little room for other possibilities. Whole lives she could not reclaim or even imagine. She took the exit and drove back to the past, hoping to find a path to a new future.

Out of the suburbs, she drove past apartheid-era government housing projects with their peeling walls and high rates of TB. Even with their cheap bricks seeping damp and spitting out racial hatred, these houses were still better than the little one-room homes that were built now. Whole families, parents and children and grandparents, in one tiny room. Outside communal toilets or a portable toilet inside to scent those crowded dwellings. It was as if post-apartheid planners thought black people really wanted shacks, after all. As if black people don’t care for privacy, or a separation between where they cook, eat, make love, sleep and shit.

She was on Vanguard Drive now, passing an informal settlement that had grown since she’d last been through here. The haphazardly shaped shacks hugged the hilly ground. Her people were architects and builders; they’d been recycling long before it became fashionable. The place was abuzz with people, sitting outside on crates, doing their laundry, living in public view. How did they keep anything on the inside? Driving through Mitchell’s Plain, where she grew up, she nearly took the turn to Zainab’s house. But she wasn’t ready to talk.

Her marriage was like the country. A sliding scale of failure. She had the grand house, but her home was less than the shacks: meaner, colder, less comfortable. She recycled kindness and warmth, like the poor who dig through the garbage of the rich for meagre comforts. She’d lived all these years on Rashid’s discards and treated them like the finest building materials, while needing a proper house with a proper foundation and rooms that shimmered with love and laughter.

What was she thinking? How did she get to be so self-indulgent? To treat the violence of inequality as a metaphor for her life. No matter how unhappy, she’d still choose her comfortable life.

She sighed. The salty air told her she was close to the beach now. She drove through Rocklands, past the three schools, and turned off into a side road hugged by sandy dunes covered in fynbos plants. On her left, the cold grey Indian Ocean rumbled and roiled. She followed the sandy road, passed the Pavilion and drove all the way to the parking area. There were few cars. It was the middle of the working day. She couldn’t see the occupants. Perhaps they were lovers, sneaking away for an illicit romp. Or, like her, chasing ghosts. Or hiding from the poverty of their lives.

The parking area was slightly elevated, with a mean-looking cinderblock toilet. Strandfontein Pavilion loomed on the left. This cold ocean was once a schizophrenic country’s idea of a funhouse for black beachgoers; now it was frequented by those who couldn’t afford to get to Clifton or Camps Bay, or who preferred not to feel less than the debris that collected on those white-claimed shores. Those for whom this beach was part of their past, who’d been lucky enough to transition into the new South Africa, rarely visited. She and Rashid certainly never came back here after they were married; never had to confront the toilet he fucked her in because he wanted to try upright sex.

The memories rolled over her. How good it felt to have his hands on her body. How powerful to see his eyes cloud over. The laughter when a hand or foot or leg caught against the door or the gears. How dirty she would feel later. The bargains with God she made. How exciting the lying was, and how shameful. We get trapped in the contradictions, she thought; the highs are the lows. What would it be like to love without them?

He was so angry when she told him she was pregnant. She stuck away his offer – to remove the proof of their sinfulness – in a deep dark place where her nightmares were buried. She was alone when she told her mother.

There’d been no one to hold her when her mother’s flinches and Zainab’s pursed mouth made her skin feel raw. Or after she sat in her father’s new house with his skittish new wife and he told her she was a whore, just like her mother. Or when she sat with eyes downcast, her parents on either side of her, in Rashid’s family’s Lansdowne living room as his mother asked him how he could’ve been so careless with someone from Mitchell’s Plain. It was one of the few times she was grateful for her father’s meanness.

Their marriage was arranged swiftly, even though no one, not even she, wanted it. They were married a week later in her mother’s tiny living room in Portlands. Over the years, she’d become intimately acquainted with the look on Rashid’s face on their wedding night when her father told him to take care of her, because, even though she’d made a mistake, she was a good girl.

Those first few years living with his parents, first in his bedroom and then in the partitioned-off section of the house they had built for them, flayed what little pride she might have had. The insults she bore because everyone knew theirs was a must-marriage. The coy ways the chaste women – or the ones who just hadn’t been found out – would remind her of her sin. She’d been naughty, they would say, their sweetly offered malice cutting into her. Lucky that he married her. Nowadays the men don’t admit to being the father. As if he had nothing to do with it. As if she was the only person who bore the shame. People she barely knew would advise her how to plead with God for forgiveness. Being educated in the white man’s world can take one away from Allah, they’d say. Sometimes it’s better to let your child learn the Quran than to have too much education. How elated some of them were, and how oh-so-very- helpfully they’d remind her that God never forgets. The few kindly reminders that the unborn child would intercede with God on her behalf – those words never really stuck.

She recalled the rage and guilt when she lost the baby. How Mummy Kayna would wonder aloud why God had not granted them a child. Rashid started playing squash to cope, leaving her alone with Mummy Kayna and her spite. When he was there, his smiles never reached his eyes and he nodded in all the wrong places when his mother spoke. His voice would catch when she least expected it. Once he just stood and stood in front of the baby food at Pick n Pay.

She peeled back the years. There was the grey time between starting to build a career and the wonder of Habib’s birth. Boeya, Rashid’s daddy, insisted she return to finish her degree. She needed a reason to leave the house, he said. And on those drives to campus every morning and afternoon, she and Rashid wove a relationship. Not tenderness. Not enmity. A relationship they could live in, not thrive in perhaps, but live. It was too little and more than she ever expected. ‘We should try for another baby,’ he had said. Probably on someone’s advice. She wanted to keep driving to work with him, and so said she wanted to complete a Master’s, and when she was offered a job in her department, she took it. They became busy, building important lives. They got the right house and the right cars and the right furniture; they went on the right vacations and worked really hard for the right promotions. And when there was little more they could add to the shininess of their life, she was ready again. She never told him she was, just in case something went wrong. She courted him all over again so they could make a replacement, lawfully, in the eyes of God.

Habib was beautiful. With him, they walked and laughed like people whom God had forgiven and rewarded for their good behaviour. And then Habib got sick. For a while, she became a merchant, haggling over the price of a life more dear than her own. She begged and pleaded, bargained away every pleasure. Every right. Just so he could breathe a good breath. Have a good day. Be a miracle child.

The first friend who told her he saw Rashid and Thandi at a Wimpy gleefully reported the news while her child was dying. Why do we take so much pleasure, Qabila wondered, at the unravelling of others’ lives? Is it to avoid fixing our own? She ignored it – until the smell of the hospital could not be washed from her hair, and her mother’s whispered reassurances and the soothing sounds of her prayer beads were not enough to soften an unforgiving day. He’d muttered that he was tired of takeaways for dinner, pushing the fish and chips around on his plate.

‘Maybe Thandi will give you a cooked meal,’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’

She’d never forget the sound his fork made as it clattered on the plate; how still he became, hands on either side of the plate, fingers spread. Mouth compressed, his eyes took in every line of her face.

‘You think I don’t know you’re seeing her?’ she said. ‘Bringing your bad luck into our house. She probably went to a witch-doctor to get rid of complications so the two of you can fuck around. That’s what they do, go to witch-doctors. Does she have Aids? Are you bringing Aids into our home? Are you whoring around with her? While our child is fucking struggling to live? How can you do this to us? To him?’ The viciousness of her own voice surprised her. Scared her. She sounded like her father. The same cutting cruelty, the same rage.

‘What the fuck,’ he said. He got up so suddenly, everything on the table protested noisily. He walked up and down, his back turned as he crossed the room from one side to another as if he couldn’t bear to look at her. He went to stand in the doorway to face her, hands in his pockets. ‘Racist,’ he said, ‘fucking racist. I’m whoring around? What the fuck! You’re a fucking racist. How can you say that? You are the fucking whore. Do you even remember how you threw yourself at me? Opening your legs, trapping me with a baby that you couldn’t even give birth to? Desperate Qabila. If anyone’s killing our child it’s you with your lies and whoring. Racist whore.’

She froze. Looked down. Forced her limbs to unlock. Slowly got up. Her heart raced at the sight of his clenched fists, his hardened face pale where the skin was tensed. She inched backwards. She was her mother after all.

‘I can’t believe you said that. You should know better. You do know better,’ he continued. ‘I should have left. When my mother told me to leave you after the miscarriage, I fucking should have left. But no, I felt sorry for you. “Duty,” my father said, “do your duty. She is your wife now. We don’t leave our marriages, Rashid. We work at it. Don’t embarrass us.” Fuck that, I should’ve left.’

He walked out and left her with the cold fish and chips. That night and every night afterwards, he slept in the guest room furthest from their bedroom.

Their marriage’s fragile civility was ripped away in the bitter months that followed. The ferocity of their fights made their prior disagreements seem gentle; they said too much when they had so little to hold them together. Except when standing vigil for those long hours as their son lay dying. There, a brittle peace reigned that had everything to do with the little boy they loved and nothing to do with consideration for each other.

After he died and they buried him and cried and mourned separately, they must have convinced themselves they were each other’s punishment. His death had taken the fight with him. When her father died, Rashid did his duty, even though she was mostly relieved. Rashid got a new job teaching on the mountain. She stayed at the university where they had both been students, where their lives had collided. Each day they left from the same house in different cars going in different directions. Over the years, they rubbed along together with little friction and no heat. Don’t forget the milk. Did you remember to wish so-and-so for her birthday? My flight comes in at ten. Pragmatic. Prudent. Passionless.

The sightings continued. As their fortunes grew, the places Thandi and Rashid were seen in gained a star or two. Qabila never confronted him again. The shame of what she said and who she became when she had fought with him, never left. He never admitted anything. As the years ticked over, she became inured to the fear he would leave her. Then realised he never would. Stopped finding signs and omens in her furtive observations. Stopped wondering why he stayed. Whether it was from cowardice or duty, she didn’t know. He was the good guy, a martyr who married the girl he knocked up and stayed with her even though she couldn’t keep his children alive. He got to have a woman who loved him without having to earn it, and had no need to respect it.

And she, she got a kind of peace. The pain was familiar. Easier than finding new ways to hurt, risking her heart for a second time. Look at what taking a risk on a person had gotten her.

Sitting here, watching the grey ocean outlined with brown scummy foam crashing and receding in a wild but predictable way, she admitted she wanted to end their prison sentence. Maybe she would’ve done it sooner if her mother had not loved Rashid so fiercely. Been so proud of him. My son-in-law, she’d call him, face filled with wonder. He’s not like your father, she’d say when Qabila tried to find the words to explain what was wrong between them. Look at the good life he’s given you. Every marriage has troubles.

Zainab hated Rashid. Zainab with her many children and small life in Mitchell’s Plain with her doting husband. Her mother’s love had been easier than the humiliation of Zainab’s hate.

Now that her mother was gone, Qabila needed a man whose face would soften when she walked into a room. Someone she could laugh with, without paying a penance later. She wanted to be loved. Wanted to share hope.

Sitting there, amid the haunting of her past, she knew if she could’ve, she would not have chosen what her life had become. Guilt twisted her insides, because she wouldn’t have had that brief time with her sons. Murder of a different sort. That’s why she’d stayed. She wanted to flee from the thought. Her hands moved to start the car.

The first lines of the poem popped in her head. To live is to be free of the spell … She dropped her hands back into her lap and gave herself over to the soothsaying of these words that made sense without logic. They found their way into her tense muscles and rigid jawline. She’d bound herself with old cords of regret and sorrow, and yesterdays that could not be relived – but perhaps could be relieved.

Qabila’s car cut through the dancing sand as she drove home through the dark Strandfontein backroads. The roiling ocean to her right was a fitting complement. There was no resettling for her. Not yet. There was one more question she had to ask Rashid. The question that had haunted and tormented her. The question she’d never asked.

Qabila put her keys down on the little table littered with in-between things: keys, bank statements, her vermillion scarf, his gloves. She should have just lived in this narrow little corridor.

‘Where were you? I called you. You left your phone at home.’ Rashid’s voice slammed into her tender skin.

‘I went for a drive,’ she replied softly.

‘I got chicken,’ he accused.

She couldn’t help the snicker that escaped. ‘Chicken for chickens,’ she muttered.

‘What? What did you say?’ His voice boomed down the passage.

She met his eyes. Saw the anger, hurt, fear. So much fear. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘The chicken’s cold now. It’s in the kitchen.’ The evenness of his voice was at odds with what his eyes were telling her.

‘I went to Strandfontein Pavilion,’ she said, ‘to that parking lot where we used to go.’

‘What? Why would you do that? That’s mad.’ His distaste could’ve sent her flying. She felt its full force before he swivelled, starting his retreat. She sighed.

‘Do you love her?’ Qabila asked. Her voice soft with the faintest undercurrent of hurt. She watched his arm grabbing the wall to correct his stumble. For a breath, nothing moved. She stared at his back. He nodded. Slowly. Solemnly.

Although a small part of her she rarely fed had hoped otherwise, she was not surprised. Was not upset. It should have hurt. What kind of wife calmly accepts her husband’s affair? A trickle of relief softened the tension in her bones. For years, Qabila had imagined that this answer to this question would break her. Had imagined her marriage would end with screaming recriminations. Hoped, too, that after the screaming, he would say it had been a mistake and that he’d loved her all along. That he just needed to almost lose her. She smiled wryly at the foolishness of not realising that some endings start long before they are spoken. He had left her a long time ago, and she’d grown accustomed to his dutiful not-love.

‘I want a divorce,’ she said to his back.

His shoulders dropped. Four words. Four steps to lay her cheek against his back and beg him to turn. Four steps. Until he goes where she cannot follow. ‘It’s been a hard week, Qabila, a long day,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m going to bed.’

Even if she ran she would always be four steps behind. Four steps too many. She felt as if she should cry. Instead she went to the kitchen and ate cold chicken and potato wedges that stuck to the roof of her mouth. Tomorrow was soon enough to find a lawyer.