Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  “Tobes,” she calls. “In here. Put your clothes on, these bushes will murder you.”

  The wetlands are different now. The water has sunk back, leaving slick mud in places, and there’s new growth over the fire-cleared ground. A forest of bluegum saplings are shooting up. Soon this whole area will be shoulder-high in alien vegetation, ready for the flames again.

  “See any likely trees?”

  Toby answers with a cry. His bare foot has found something sharp. “Is it old?” he asks, handing her a delicate handle attached to a curved section of china.

  The broken cup might be from any time at all, from any moment in the last three hundred years, passed from hand to hand, brought here by land or by sea. She drops it back into the mud.

  Nineveh’s prow lifts above the bush. The shacks are out of sight, although she can smell wood-smoke. As they come closer, she sees that things have changed here. For one thing, the wall is not the ice white that she recalls. It’s smudged black and brown, as if by fire. The plaster has cracked in places, showing sections of brick. And she’d been wrong about the hole in the foundations getting fixed. The whole boardwalk has collapsed and someone’s shoved coils of razor wire into the gap under the building.

  The back gate is still locked, though. She presses her thumb to the pad, but the door refuses to click. Through the wall she can hear new sounds: a child’s shout, a car engine revving and failing, revving and failing.

  They walk along the wall to where the driveway heads off at an angle towards the road. Toby follows her silently. There’s a hole knocked in the bricks here, giving access to the main entrance. Katya hands the collection box to Toby and ducks through.

  Half the gate is gone, perhaps taken for scrap metal, and the remaining half is hanging off its hinges. Inside, someone seems to have inhabited the guardhouse: there’s coloured cloth up in the windows. Outside Unit One, a group of young men bend over the engine of an old Chevrolet, tormenting it. Some children are playing soccer in the central space, where grass grows patchily. The apartments are also clearly lived in. People lean through the windows, and a line of washing has been suspended between two of the buildings. The place is not as muddy now. Here and there people have sunk half-bricks and pieces of wood into the ground, to step on. And is that a cow?

  Katya smiles. There she’d been imagining the apartments standing empty, pining for human attention. How swiftly places change, with just a little pressure of water, time and human need.

  Over on the other side of the courtyard, a woman sees her and raises a hand. When she comes over, Katya recognises the girl from the side of the road, in a denim skirt and scarlet blouse. Some invisible line of adolescence has been crossed, it seems, since they first met. The girl has become more rounded and confident, and has the look of a young woman and not a child.

  “Got any tiles?” Katya asks.

  The girl smiles back openly – no anxious glances over her shoulder now. “We do car parts now. Do you need?”

  “No, but I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You want a dog? We’ve got a dog here.” She looks around vaguely.

  Behind Katya, Toby is scouting down the avenue.“What? Oh, no thanks. We better go, anyway.”

  “How’s the old man?”

  “He’s the same,” Katya says. “The same.”

  “He talks too much, that one,” the girl laughs. “Tell him he must come visit us. Tell him Nosisi says hello.”

  Katya smiles. Now the girl has a name. “Why, are those goggas giving you problems again?”

  She shakes her head. “No, no, we haven’t seen them at all. It’s much better now. I think they have gone forever.”

  Katya wants to say that nothing is certain. Although that is maybe not true for Nosisi: she seems to stand squarely on this ground, sure of her footing.

  “Do you remember Pascal?” Katya asks. “Is he living here?”

  Nosisi shakes her head, her face unreadable. “No, I don’t know him.”

  And Katya wonders how welcome he was here, the man from the DRC.

  Toby calls: “Look!” Behind her, he’s peering up into the crown of a living palm. Katya glances back, but the girl is already turning away, forgetting them.

  “They like it,” says Toby as she approaches. The caterpillars are marching straight up the trunk.

  They watch it together for a while, this tiny triumphal procession, unnoticed by the world. Then she touches his shoulder. “Come on, Toby, let’s go home.”

  “Okay. Is that thing coming with us?”

  “What thing?”

  The force hitting the backs of her thighs knocks her to the ground. She struggles to her haunches, enveloped in a fug of doggy breath. The creature’s licking her face, butting at her groin, burying his muzzle in her belly. His claws rake her arms.

  “Soldier?”

  He’s half the weight he was, all ribs, and there’s a frayed length of rope around his neck. In his eyes is the desperate gleam of dog pushed past the limit of endurance.

  “Wow,” says Toby cautiously, stepping back. “That dog is manky.”

  Soldier rolls over on his stomach and shows them his rude and tender nether side.

  She parks across the road from her old house and watches as Toby feeds Soldier in the back of the van: two extra-large cans of Husky and a couple of litres of water, served in old ice-cream containers. She’s going to have to find a place to wash the animal, too.

  “You sure you don’t want a lift home?” she asks.

  Toby shrugs. “It’s cool. Hey, what’s this duvet thing doing in here?”

  “What? It’s not a duvet.” Although it is, inarguably. Cream in colour, covered in teeny elephants, rumpled and showing unmistakeable signs of having been slept in. But Katya doesn’t want to discuss that.

  “Oh. Well, it’s getting mud on it.” He runs his nails down Soldier’s knobbly spine. The dog wheezes, ecstatically clawing the duvet. “Coming in?”

  “No.”

  “He wants you to come in for a cup of tea. He always says.”

  “God, please.”

  Across the road, the terrace of old houses still stands, slumped and disreputable. Next to the van looms a new, shiny four-storey apartment block, featuring overpriced studio and one-bedroom flats. It fills in the old park plot all the way to the pavement. The road feels shadowy and overhung with buildings, and still lopsided. They need to balance it out, somehow: bulldoze the other side of the road, too, and build something to match. Already there is a developer’s billboard up outside the old house.

  Turns out that Katya’s landlord, a big letting agency, also handles the new building. When it became clear that structural damage had made the old houses unlivable, the tenants were offered smaller but flasher flatlets over the road. So all the residents – Tasneem’s family, the retired couple from the end – were scooped out of their shells and poured into new accommodations across the way.

  Katya doesn’t know exactly where they all stay, though. She looks up at the square windows with their identical trim and railings, and has no idea which belongs to Tasneem, to the old couple – or even to herself. She’s never been inside.

  That’s because she’s not living there. Len is. No doubt stinking the place out with his smokes, his dirty pyjamas and the scattered crumbs from his sour meals. Canny old bird, shrewdest beast. He never was going to be eradicated that easily. But relocation, it turns out, he was amenable to. They all decided it was for the best: “I don’t want him dying on the pavement outside my front door, after all,” said Alma. Toby goes round to see him, brings him his teabags and cigarettes.

  Len got to keep the greens too, there was no getting them off him. He wears them often now, washes them seldom. One sleeve was shredded by Soldier, but Len solved that one by simply ripping the arms of the overalls away at the seams, so his stringy biceps are exposed at all times. He also tore off the breast-pocket badge. “Bloody stupid,” were his words. “And it’s not to scale.”

 
; Now she frowns at Toby. “You’re not letting that old man push you around, are you?”

  Toby just laughs. “Granddad and me, we’re good.”

  “Ja, well, you just watch out.” She tries to soften her tone. “And how about Tasneem? How’s things?”

  He shrugs. “Ah, we’re not going out any more. She was a bit – dunno, strung up? You know?” He glances at her confidentially.

  “Stuck up? Highly strung? Anyway, your mother liked her.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “Nah, it’s good. We’re good.” He stretches his long arms, fingers interlaced, and cracks his knuckles. “I’m good,” he says, and beams her a smile of radiant self-delight.

  Really, there is no way, no way at all, to discomfit this child.

  As he waves goodbye, Katya turns the van around and comes back down the street, slowing to eyeball the garage door. She regards it with grim respect: her old, unbowed enemy. If the whole neighbourhood collapsed into dust around it, that garage door would still be standing.

  As if her mind commands it, the door starts to shiver and buckle, and then pops open a few feet at the bottom. There’s a long silence; nothing else gives way. A ragged grey figure ducks out under the lip. Derek, wearing a familiar coat of oily grey tweed that she could swear once belonged to her dad. A strip of fabric wrapped around his right arm. Poison green.

  “Ahoy Derek!” Toby calls from across the road, and Derek acknowledges him with a shaky hand.

  Katya rolls down her window. “Derek. What are you doing in there?”

  He squints at her as though she’s a million miles way, pondering whether she’s worth the effort of crossing the pavement. Then he saunters over. Tilts his head. “Speak up, girlie.”

  “You know that building’s dangerous – it’s going to come down. And doesn’t that door drive you crazy, anyway? It doesn’t even have a handle.”

  He smirks in a superior manner. “Drop of oil, that’s all it needed. Drop of oil. It’s not a bad door. Got a cigarette?”

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “Cash? I’ll be needing six rand thirty-five.”

  Six rand thirty-five, huh. She wonders what that buys: a very small coffee at McDonald’s? She fetches out a ten-rand note. She’s aware of the momentousness of the occasion. This is, she believes, the first time she’s ever given Derek any money.

  He examines the note, passes it back to her through the window. “Six rand thirty-five.”

  She can’t think of a reason not to do what he says. She fishes around in the ashtray on the dashboard and comes up with the exact amount, largely in small brown coins. He counts it scrupulously.

  “Can I have a receipt?”

  “Eh?”

  “Never mind.”

  The door swings up gently behind Derek – not sticking at all – and in the gloom of the garage she makes out a figure. Sitting on a plastic crate, smoking a roll-up, dressed in green. Len touches the thumb of his smoking hand to his forehead in a salute.

  Katya nods back. She hasn’t spoken to her father for weeks. A spiteful demon tells her to show him Soldier, who is now snoozing on her duvet in the back, but she doesn’t know which of them would get the bigger fright.

  Her dad is not quite what he was. Soldier managed to do damage to the left shoulder and upper arm, and take a chunk of tissue from the calf. So Len’s got a limp, too, as well as handsome scars running down both his bare old arms: puff adder one side, dog the other. Extravagant stigmata which he’s only too happy to show to strangers: “Had to beat the bugger off!” What with Derek’s bandaged limbs, the two of them look more than ever like veterans of some particularly gruelling war.

  But Len is no longer fierce. This last battle has exhausted him, it seems, and when Katya looks at him she sees an old man, far more wounded than she will ever be. Scars form a kind of barrier between them now: out in the open, on the skin, clear for anyone to see.

  Now Len cranes his head towards her. “What you up to, my girl?”

  “Just dropping Toby off. He’s come to see you.”

  “Good boy. Been working?”

  “Yup. A swarm. Pachypasa capensis, actually.”

  “Huh. Well.” He flicks ash dismissively. “Easy, aren’t they? But what I’d like to know …” He peeks at Derek, starting to grin.

  “What, Dad?”

  “What I’d really like to know is,” – big gap-toothed smile now – “was it painless?”

  The two old men crack up. Katya rolls her eyes over the cackles. Len seems to find her hilarious these days. Could be worse. She shakes her head at them and drives on.

  Before she turns the corner, she gives the old soldiers a little serenade on her car horn:

  Rats-in-a-rat-trap. Squashed-flat!

  The further she drives, the better she feels. She likes to put distance between herself and her father. It’s necessary, she thinks, to both of them. She is like a ball of string unravelling, always connected, but lighter the further she goes. She turns left and right down familiar streets; up over Main Road, past the hospital and onto the highway. She drives, she drives. There is no rush now, no particular place to go. No permanent address.

  Katya’s sleeping in the van these days. Nights are warm. This might seem dangerous in a place like Cape Town, but actually it’s surprisingly easy. In the back of the van, nobody can see her; she parks in quiet suburban side streets. The van has bars, after all, and can be locked from the inside. And who’s going to hijack a van with cockroaches painted on it? Especially now, she thinks, with Soldier on board. It’s all she really needs. She doesn’t need to fill up more space than this. She cleans herself in shopping-centre bathrooms. It isn’t the easiest way to live, but it’s also not impossible. At least she doesn’t have to deal with the sodding garage door.

  Sleeping in the van is really not too much of an adjustment. A car smells like home to Katya, like night-time. The scent of car leather and petrol must have entered the folds of her child’s brain long ago, sleeping in her dad’s bakkie. A lullaby of sorts. The van fits her perfectly now; the hollow in the seat is the shape of her body, nobody else’s. She’s pushed the seat forward, she’s swivelled the rear-view mirror to exactly the right position. She doesn’t even let Toby drive these days: it’s too disruptive.

  What she’s realised is that people like them – like her and Len – they’re not homey. They don’t have homes, they don’t really fit in them. That whole idea she had of Nineveh, of living there in comfort and ease behind walls that would never crumble, safe within the armed guard’s circling lights: a dream, as grandiose and doomed as Mr Brand’s visions.

  The suburbs are safer, but sometimes she takes a chance and parks further out, where waking up is more of an adventure. Somewhere near the sea, or with trees. Now she drives her car up onto Tafelberg Road and stops at one of the viewpoints. It’s lonely here at night, and a little eerie – what with the memory of those unfortunate goldfish, and the rock face looming at her back, lit dead silver by the floodlights like a mountain on the moon. But it’s a beautiful view, the city spreading down to the harbour, cradled in the arm of Signal Hill. All softening in the evening light, pricked with street lamps, stained further out with puffs of sodium pallor. Directly below the road, she’s sometimes seen a group of Rastas, washing their clothes in the stream above the fancy houses. Further out, she can make out the Castle and the bare patch that used to be District Six. Far to the right, the suburbs begin, and beyond that the railway yards and warehouses.

  At this height, no people are visible. Except for the constant shuttling of cars along the threads of roads, it might be a city emptied of humans. But she knows they’re there. She wonders where Pascal’s ended up: patrolling what perimeter. She has a new habit of examining the faces of tall car guards and nightwatchmen, as she once looked for her dad in the derelict figures of street people. And Reuben, he must be out there too. She guesses he lives in a suburb she barely knows, far from the centr
e. She sees them all, tucked into pockets of the city. Mrs Brand and Nosisi and Len and Zintle, and Katya herself, and all the rest. Each one of them in a subtly different Cape Town, waving to each other, meeting occasionally in the places where such cities overlap. Zones where the world is taking form; where things get mixed up and wander from their positions. Ninevehs.

  Out there, Katya sees many such places: domains of uncertain ownership. Unfinished boulevards, the smoky glitter of settlements still to be named, the nebulae of black between the lights. Everything’s in motion, changed and changing. There is no way to keep the shape of things. One house falls, another rises. Throw a worn brick away and someone downstream will pick it up and lay it next to others in a new course in a new wall – which sooner or later will fall into ruin, giving the spiders a place to anchor their own silken architecture. Even human skin, Katya has read, is porous and infested, every second letting microscopic creatures in and out. Our own bodies are menageries. Short of total sterility, there is no controlling it.

  What conceit, to think that she could ever capture any of this with her bags and nets and boxes. Painless Pest Relocations survives, but she’s lost her faith in this job. This fruitless work of trying to keep things in their proper places.

  She climbs into the back of the van, makes sure it’s locked up tight, and tucks the duvet around herself. Soldier seems to fill a good two-thirds of the space, and she feels the dog’s comforting pressure against her side. He gives a long, wheezing sigh. Katya closes her eyes, and waits for the tides of the city to drift her away.