Aus’ Nono is said to have held her son Kgosi, then only two years old, by the hand and strolled him proudly along as the people sang and danced and hee-lee-lee’d up and down the streets. Location history has her looking very happy, calm and satisfied at her own wedding, content to finally have Bra Speed back.
***
“Tell me your deepest, darkest secret,” I asked Ole, a favourite prelude to good conversation between the two of us. We were sitting in our backyard drinking cold Oros and eating Tennis Biscuits from the packet.
“I let Shorty look at my breasts,” she said, all blasé.
“What?!” I laughed, almost spitting out my drink.
Ole shrugged. Then she sat up and flung her legs across the chair, facing me. She was excited. “Then he let me hold his gun. His gun!” She grinned and waited for my reaction.
“What . . . with the breasts . . . ?”
“Who cares about that? Boys are stupid. His father has a gun and I wanted to see it. All this time he’s been telling me about it. I didn’t believe him, so he said, ‘Show me your breasts and I’ll let you see the gun.’ Can you believe that?” Here she slumped back into her chair. “Boys are easy.”
“What?! Why would you let him see your breasts? That’s special. That’s for someone special!”
Ole laughed at me. “Nedi! They’re just breasts. Special is for other things. Anyway, the gun was really, really amazing.”
I hadn’t been counting on this. I had been hoping she would stay on the talk about the breasts.
“Did he touch them?”
“The breasts?” she asked as if we were talking about something else. “No!”
I would have loved not to be talking about guns. I’d rather have talked about boys: boys kissing, boys seeing breasts. Then I would have told her about Kitsano. But here is the thing with Ole: it wasn’t so much that she was not interested in boys. She was very interested. In fact, I would say that she was even a bit fascinated with them, although she would never say that. She was just very competitive with them—she could do anything they could, sort of thing. And she was also very interested in guns and war stories. As a result, she liked Shorty, Kgosi’s younger brother, Bra Speed’s youngest son.
“If I had been old enough,” she said, looking wistful, “I would have joined them, waitse.”
I had heard her say this many times. I brought my glass to my mouth to take a sip and kept it there a while longer so that she wouldn’t see my face.
“That’s . . . not so wise,” I started.
She laughed. “Girls are always scared of guns.”
I cleared my throat. “You’re a girl too.”
“Not like you!”
“OK . . . ” I didn’t know what to say. The thing about it is, I never did know what to say when she started going on about guns and not being a girl like me. I was never all that interested in guns. She knew that. She was not interested in boys in the same way as I was. I knew that. It was just . . . I knew that any conversation about guns and MK would lead to Bra Speed, and that was not entirely safe ground because it would lead to Aus’ Nono and the fact that Aus’ Nono (a very close childhood friend of Ole’s mother) was in prison. Ole would say “wrongfully” and I would say “not wrongfully.” That was touchy.
I didn’t mind hearing about Bra Speed. Basi talked about him enough. I knew that he had been in MK. I knew he had been a comrade and that he had gone into hiding many, many times. I also knew that Ole had always lamented being born too late to join MK. What I didn’t want to talk about was that Bra Speed was dead because his wife had killed him. I didn’t want to talk about that—especially not on this day, when I had such interesting news myself.
I shook my head and took a deep breath.
“Umkhonto—” Ole started.
“My mother hates MK,” I told her.
There was silence between us, except for the crunch of the biscuits and the splashing of the mini fountain in the far right corner, the one Mama had installed a year earlier, after she had gone to a party in Waterkloof and admired a large pond and fountain in someone else’s yard.
I knew what Ole was thinking and she knew what I was thinking and I wished we could talk about something else. Like the fact that I had been kissed! Ohhhh, Kitsano. Kitsano, Kitsano, Kitsano . . .
But I could feel us getting close to where we would have to talk about Bra Speed and Aus’ Nono.
“Anyway!” I started, trying to change the subject.
“Eish! I would have loved that. I would have fought in those times. Do you know how many women left South Africa? How many died for the country?”
My mind wandered. I sipped, I fidgeted, I waited.
“Umkhonto,” she continued, “that’s where I would have been.”
“You could have died!” I said, my voice rising higher than I had intended.
“Bra Speed didn’t. Bra Moz didn’t.” She was referring to a friend of Bra Speed’s, one of the best-known cross-border strategists, whom everyone called Moz because of the amount of time he had spent in Mozambique. His Portuguese was apparently impeccable. I had heard this from my brother, who had loved sitting at Bra Speed’s feet, taking in everything about MK.
“Yes, but . . . ” I said cautiously. “But . . . it was so dangerous. All those men—”
“What?!” She stood up. Ole was always ready for a fight.
I thought: You would have done well as a comrade. I sunk into my chair and looked at the fountain. Steadying my voice, I told her, “More men than women survived.”This is not a fact, it’s just something I had surmised from all the stories Basi had told me.
“Haua! Haua!” She slapped her thighs angrily. “That’s not true. So many women . . . ” She wiped her forehead. “So many women! Where do I start? Mma Lebo, Aus’ Joyce . . . ” She counted them off one by one with her fingers.
I wished we could talk about Kitsano.
“Eish, Ole! Why are we talking about this? Apartheid is in the past, first of all.” I tried not to sound frustrated but I don’t think I succeeded. “And anyway . . . and anyway . . . ”
“And anyway what?”
“And anyway, what is it with guns? Someone could get killed.”
“I think every woman should know how to use a gun.”
I squinted against the sun. “We’re fourteen.” (I wasn’t. But nearly.)
“Better start now,” she said, relaxing, taking a sip of Oros and moving her finger around the rim of the glass. Then she put down the glass and leant forward, legs apart, eyes on the ground.
“I think . . . ” She cleared her throat. “I think . . . If you see what I’ve seen, you know. You just know . . . ”
I knew what she meant. Living in diEx was not like living on another continent. I knew things. I heard stories.
“You know,” I said in agreement. “Like the body?”
“The body . . . Every woman should know how to use a gun,” she repeated with more gravity.
I decided to stay away from that one. My mother had told me, “Nozipho wouldn’t be in jail with two sons who are living at home without a mother if she had never touched a gun.”
Ole, I knew, vehemently disagreed.
We both looked up when we heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps on the gravel path to the house. Finally Basi and Kgosi turned the corner and, more cheerfully than usual, Basi said, “Heita! Heita!”
He was wearing a new pair of jeans and a crisp white shirt that he mostly saved for weddings, funerals, and those occasions when my mother insisted we wear our best. Kgosi looked handsome in dark blue jeans and a plain, fresh-looking T-shirt.
The two of them moved apart and Basi held out his arm, saying “Etla!” to someone we couldn’t see yet.
From behind them she slowly stepped forward.
Fingers intertwined with Basi’s, her
hair so long and straight that it actually billowed like a lace curtain in the breeze. Like
a White girl’s hair.
She had the biggest, most beautiful eyes I had ever seen, a small and perfectly placed nose, and big, dark, shiny lips that looked like they had lipstick on but didn’t. Her white blouse looked both comfortable and sexy. Her earrings caught the sunlight and this, I think, made her eyes sparkle.
She was wearing the blue denim version of a corduroy skirt I had and I started to think that maybe it didn’t look quite so stunning on me.
Her eyes looked straight at me. So composed. I noticed that, most interestingly, she didn’t look around the way people usually did when they came into our house or yard for the first time. Our house had a shroud of mystery around it: being my father’s, being up there, and having tall walls around it. Naturally when people came in for the first time their eyes darted from corner to corner, taking it all in, fascinated. But not her. You would have thought she had been there before and yet I knew that she hadn’t. Instead, she looked right into my eyes with only a hint of a smile.
“Hello,” she said softly.
Ole and I stood up. One look at Ole and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was.
“Moipone,” Ole said and then nervously cleared her throat.
The look on Basi’s face was the same as when he had just won a rugby match. His big grin was radiant and animated. This, for reasons I couldn’t grasp, irritated me.
“This is my sister,” he said. Then, with his hand squeezing hers, he said, “Moipone.”
I cleared my throat. Unable to decide on a pose, my arms went from my back to being folded across my chest and then back down.
“Hello,” I said to Moipone’s eyes.
Ole and I were still staring when Basi, Kgosi, and Moipone turned to leave, looking like three dancers, the boys on either side of Moipone.
But then Moipone hesitated and turned around as if she had left something behind. When I followed her eyes I saw that, ha! she had noticed the fountain. She examined it curiously—the white stone statue of a child carrying a bowl, with water flowing from it—and then turned her whole body back to face me. To me! As if she was asking me for an explanation. And, understanding her gaze, I shrugged. Then she narrowed her eyes and I saw, or thought I saw, a faint smile, which passed her face so quickly that I wondered if I had imagined it.
Kgosi and Basi had also turned around, but Basi was looking only at her. Kgosi had followed her gaze and was suppressing a laugh, as I’ve seen him do before while looking at various things at our house: the glass table, the cumbersome wall-to-wall furniture, the colourful picture of a White child sitting in a flowerpot.
When they had gone I realized that I had been holding my breath the whole time.
“She’s so pretty,” I finally said, with a sigh.
Ole turned, looked me straight in the eye and said, all serious, “She’s stunning,” spitting out the “t.”
We sat down and took a moment to compose ourselves.
“I’ve never seen her before,” I said. “Who is she?”
“She’s Moipone,” said Ole and took a sip of Oros. “She lives on Kgosi’s street. She’s new. She and her mother used to live in Block C and her father works in Gauteng.”
We were quiet for what felt like a long time until I said, “I think my brother is in love.”
As if she had not heard me, Ole said, finally, “Your turn.” She reclined in her garden chair. “Tell me your deepest, darkest secret.”
“I think I’m in love,” I said.
7
MONDAY LUNCH AT SCHOOL. The three of us sat cross-legged in a circle on the grass near the tennis courts, talking about the social.
Finally.
“He put his hands . . . ” Limakatso started to say, and then she put her sandwich down and stood to demonstrate, “ . . . all the way up.”
We all broke into fits of giggles.
“Oh. My. Gosh,” I said as I tried to hold my breath.
Limakatso was running her hands up her school dress, pulling it up to show more and more of her thighs until we could see her blue panties.
“We can see your panties,” Kelelo told her.
“I know!” Limakatso sat down—well, really, she just about fell down. “So could he!”
At this we were rolling on the grass.
When she caught her breath, she said, “But the thing is, where do you put your hands?”
Another fit of laughter.
Kelelo said, bringing her hands around my waist, “I put mine around here. What did you guys do?”
“I put mine on his thighs,” I told them.
Their eyes went wide. Kelelo’s jaw dropped so that I could see specks of green from her already-swallowed salad.
“That’s so naughty!” she said.
“What about her?” I pointed to Limakatso. “He saw her panties!”
Again we fell on the grass, against each other, our legs flailing. Oh, I thought, I’m so excited to finally be talking about this. I was dreading the moment when the bell would ring. I stretched out on the grass, my head resting on my lunch bag, which I had covered with my school jersey.
“D’you know what else he did?” Limakatso said in a whisper.
“What?” Kelelo and I spoke in unison.
“He touched my boobs,” she whispered again excitedly.
I rolled to my side and looked at them. “He touched mine too!” I nearly screamed.
I rested my head on one hand and then tucked my dress between my legs with the other. The Standard One boys were running around a few metres away from us, and I knew they liked to peek out of curiosity. I liked that boys only went up to Standard One at our school. We couldn’t have talked like this if boys our age had gone there.
“No. Noooooo,” Limakatso said. “I mean, he put his hands inside my dress and actually touched my . . . ” Her voice went even lower and she pointed. “ . . . My nipples!”
“Oh my goodness,” Kelelo said, pressing one hand against her mouth. I tended to be the one who was more easily shocked but that day Kelelo and I were even. I was getting cramps in my stomach from all the laughter.
“Inside?” I asked Limakatso but I was looking at Kelelo.
“Inside.”
Two pairs of small boys’ feet suddenly stood next to our food. We looked up to see two seven- or eight-year-olds in khaki school shorts and white shirts staring down at us.
“What?” Limakatso barked at them. “What do you want?”
“Are you talking about kissing?” the taller one said.
“Go away!” all three of us screamed. “Go!”
They ran off, screeching to the rest of their group, “They’re talking about kissing! They’re talking about kissing!” and some of them started kissing their hands and making kissing noises in our direction.
We rolled our eyes.
“Boys can be so stupid,” Kelelo said.
I said, “Remember when we used to think they were gross?”
We looked at each other and giggled again.
The bell rang and brought us to our feet. In different corners of the school grounds groups of girls stood up or stopped playing and started moving towards classes. Many of us had our jerseys around our waists and our knee-high socks rolled down. Late autumn in Pretoria is like this and so is winter: it is cold when you go to school but by lunchtime you feel overdressed. The sun is so hot at midday that it may as well be early summer, and then the temperature drops again later. The teachers hated that look though. Girls with their socks rolled down and jerseys around their waists were yelled at for being untidy. So before we reached the classes everyone began straightening their hair, smoothing down their dresses, folding their jerseys neatly and pulling up their socks. I looked around at all the different figures and si
lently compared them to mine. Bigger bum, stronger legs, nicer breasts.
“I wish I had Mary’s legs,” Kelelo said as if reading my thoughts. Mary was the star hockey player.
We agreed.
“By the way,” Limakatso said as we were rounding the corner, “who is your brother going out with? I didn’t see him with anyone at the social and, well, actually—”
“Actually?”
“Actually, my sister asked.” Limakatso’s sister was at our school. Same age as my brother and, like my brother, also in matric.
We lifted our hands up, palms facing inwards, as we walked up the stairs. The prefects stood along the old red brick wall at the landing, inspecting the length of our fingernails.
“Your sister likes him?” I was surprised. Limakatso’s sister was all about books and sports. The last time I remembered her having a boyfriend she’d been in Standard Eight.
“Single file, please!” one of the prefects yelled from somewhere at the top of the stairs.
I stepped behind Limakatso.
“Matric dance is coming up. I think she wants to ask him.”
“Hmmm,” I said, intrigued. “I don’t think he has a girlfriend.”
“Shhhh,” another prefect said, glaring, her finger on her mouth.
“If he doesn’t have a girlfriend,” Limakatso whispered, excited, “then maybe . . . the two of them could even go out.”
Then I remembered Moipone and for some reason I had that same sinking feeling I had whenever Kgosi came to our house. That feeling of realizing that I had no time left with Basi.
This Book Betrays My Brother Page 5
