“Yes, yes.” He waved that away and sat with his head bent over.
“You’ve been there before, haven’t you?” The words came out as the thought formed in my mind.
Basi nodded without looking at me.
“Man, Nedi. It’s really rough. I mean, really, really hard over there.” He stood up slowly and went to sit at his desk, facing me. There was anger in his voice. “It’s not fair either, you know. It’s so unfair.” He furrowed his brow. “She shouldn’t be in there. It was self-defence. It’s always been self-defence. Those bastards, those . . . idiots!” He rolled his hands into fists and then bit his lips. “They don’t know . . . no one knows what she’s been through. And . . . you know . . . who are they? Who has the right to judge her, and put her in there?”
I recognized that this wasn’t a question.
“Man, when I’m a lawyer . . . ” His voice trailed off.
Basi said that a lot. It was a well-known family fact that Basi would study law at UCT, and defend “the common man.” He always stated this with conviction.
Mama used to say, “Or a doctor. You could be whatever you want, really. You got my brains.”
When people asked me what I wanted to be, I would say a writer, but never with the same amount of confidence. “Or a theatre director,” I would sometimes add.
“You have enough stories,” Mama would say with a laugh. “You’ll do either one just fine.”
Basi licked his lips and inhaled deeply through his nose.
“They have them in these cells . . . ” He shook his head as if shaking away a memory. “Anyway,” he said, sitting up straight again, “hopefully she’ll be out soon.”
I looked outside and saw the sun shining on the tin roof of the back rooms. It made me think of Silver City. The tree just outside Basi’s room, the one he had sometimes climbed down when we first moved here, now had no apricots on it. Winter was nearly here.
What I had always heard about Kgosi’s mother’s case was that she had killed her husband—her very hard-working husband who had done a lot for the country as an MK fighter. Kgosi’s mother was mad, people said. And these people included Mama. She said there had always been something wrong with her.
“I was never surprised that she married a man like that,” she once told me. “She was always fighting. It’s no wonder she married someone who was fighting all the time. If she could have, she probably would have gone off to the wild with him and carried a gun like the rest of them.” She had always been a restless woman, according to Mama.
“Anyway, the fight was funny.” This was Basi changing the subject and bringing me back to the room.
“What fight? What happened?”
“Just some guys said something to Kgosi, and I threw some punches.” He was hitting his fist on his chair and laughing. “There were two of them and three of us so—”
“Three?”
“Thibedi came and took them down with us.” Thibedi was Five Bop’s cousin and lived with Five’s parents. Basi was demonstrating, throwing punches in the air and stomping his foot on the carpet. Finally he sat down, threw his head back and laughed so loudly that I could see the roof of his mouth.
“Aaaah,” he said, lightly dabbing his still-bruised eye with his thumb. “Kgosi has done the same for me. Has some scars to show for it, too.” His laughter died down and he rubbed his back with one hand, looking at his watch with the other.
My mind was back at Kgosi’s mother.
“She shot him, right?” I had never asked outright. Basi didn’t discuss Kgosi’s family affairs. He always got angry when it came up, but he never quite shared his opinion on that.
He stood up.
“She did. And good for her, too. He would have killed her first if she hadn’t. People don’t know. Mama has no idea . . . the things I know . . . ”
I knew the conversation was over. Every time Basi came close to revealing something that only he and Kgosi knew—and that he knew I was madly curious about—he’d stop himself just when I thought I was about to finally hear it. He brushed his eyebrows with his fingers, and turned and walked out of the room. Then, as if he had remembered something, he came back and stood in the doorway.
“Hey . . . so, you’re coming to the dance at my school, I hear?”
My heart lifted. I had been thinking so much about him and Ole that my own exciting news seemed to have been pushed aside.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, indeed.”
He gave me a very pleased grin.
“Cool. He’s a nice bloke. Hey, it’s only two weeks after my big match at the other school.”
“All-White school hey?”
“Eish,” he said. “All White.”
I knew he got nervous sometimes about these matches. The racial slurs hurled at him made him uneasy and he did say the constant attacks—which had sometimes left him badly bruised and cut—scared him, but he was also “going for gold” for Craven Week. I saw him take a deep breath.
“It’ll be a great way to celebrate together.”
For some reason I wished that he hadn’t said that. I shivered unexpectedly and rubbed my arms, trying to ignore the bad feeling I suddenly had.
“Are you taking Moipone?” I said in an attempt to focus.
He grinned. “Definitely.”
***
When Papa phoned from the shop asking where we were and if I would be walking down with Basi, I said yes, even though it was a lie.
Considering the cologne and the mood Basi had been in, I didn’t quite trust that he would stick to his word. I told Papa, “He’ll be there really soon,” and could almost feel him frown on the other end of the phone. I didn’t like lying to Papa, but Basi and I understood that we lied for each other when it was necessary. We not only did this effortlessly but also with pride. We each had an invisible spear and shield in front of us, which we brought out whenever the other needed it. I thought of us as hunters in the wild: tuck your friend behind you, hold the shield, point the spear and talk down the lion. But these were easier, simpler times.
In the end I arrived at the shop about thirty minutes before Basi. When he did arrive, he marched right into the office and kept himself busy for five minutes until he was interrupted by Papa, who closed the door for a while, probably chiding Basi for being late. Again.
11
A FEW DAYS LATER Mama took us to town to buy smart outfits for the matric dance at Basi’s school. It was only three days before the big match—the one where there would be selectors picking the best boys from the team. The match that would most definitely turn my brother into a national rugby player. His school would be playing at the other school, facing them on the field for the first time. Basi was an experienced player, quite obviously one of the big stars of his team.
Despite his recent absences, our house was buzzing with excitement for the coming two big events—first the match, and then the dance two weeks later. So the trip to town was full of laughs and funny old stories. Mama was in an especially good mood; she and Basi talked about his varsity plans for a while, a topic that had come up a lot recently.
I caught bits and pieces of the conversation, but mostly I watched the world go by and fantasized about the matric dance and Kitsano. He’d gone back to Botswana for two weeks for a family wedding, and he would be back just in time for the dance.
I watched as three women climbed off a small white bakkie and then proceeded to unload bright fruit from the cab. Oranges and naartjies were almost in season. Soon there would be mounds of bright oranges displayed all along the roads. The women would be on their mats, covered in heavy blankets, shielding themselves and their babies from the cold.
The light turned green and we were off, speeding past drying leaves and yellowing grass by the roadside.
“Heh! E fedile apartheid!” Mama said as we passed workers putting up a new
road sign to change its name from Malan to Mandela. “No more! No more, no more, no more Malan!” she said vehemently and then burst into angry laughter. “I remember one day, everyone having to jump out of a taxi because,” she pointed to the rail tracks to our left, “people were being chased and shot at by police for not having passes on the train. We all ran like frightened impalas into the roads. Heh! I didn’t know where I was going. Cars just stopped, the taxi wouldn’t move, and we were all told, ‘Heh, bathong! Run!’ And off we went.” Mama leaned forward and ducked her head, putting one hand up as if she were shielding herself against the bullets at that very moment. “Iyo! Tshabang! Shianang!” She re-enacted the scene, sending Basi and me into fits of laughter. Funny how Mama could sometimes make apartheid years seem like an adventure—when she and Papa got in the mood, my brother and I could fall off our seats laughing.
So we were laughing when she parked the car, and still laughing when we walked into the women’s section of the department store, where Mama wanted to pick up a few things. Basi was walking in front of me and Mama was behind me.
A woman—a White woman—saw Basi coming towards her and clutched her bag to her chest, pulling her little girl away from the clothes she was looking at and holding her close. Basi stepped around and made a point of walking as far away from them as possible.
Mama clicked her tongue and gave the woman a dirty look. The woman pushed her little girl in the opposite direction. I turned around and watched as she hastened with her out of the shop.
I felt quite angry. I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. Basi held out his hand to me and walked me over to a different section of the shop, where there were home decorations and linens.
“We should have said something.”
Basi looked around him, raised his shoulders and feigned a shiver. “The women’s department always makes me uneasy.” He gave an easy Basi laugh and rubbed my back.
“White people will never change if we don’t . . . ” I insisted.
He shrugged, smiling calmly at me. There were no signs of him being upset.
“Come on, Nedi. We’re going to walk out and someone else will clutch their purse or lock their car door just at the sight of me. You can’t get upset about it every time.” He put his arm around me. “Makhoa will always be scared, man. Apartheid or no apartheid. How do you unlearn that?” He turned pensive. “It’s that feeling,” he said. “The feeling that they’re in the wild. That Africa is the wild and they’re hunters. We’re the lions. Be afraid,” he added but didn’t laugh this time.
By the time Mama came to meet us she also seemed to have forgotten about it.
“Five White people asked me to get them their size. I counted this time.” She held up her hand to show us. “Five! I said, ‘I don’t work here, my dear. I just buy.’” She made the money sign with her thumb and middle fingers, then laughed so hard at her own joke that she held on to her stomach and her body bent forward as she moved on ahead of us and out through the door.
***
We bought Basi a pair of black pants and a light green shirt, and spent a lot of time deciding if he should go with a black tie, a green tie, or no tie. He had led us to this shop, a new one, owned by a tall and stylish Black man. Called St Aubrey’s, it was one of the first of its kind in town, selling very smart and stylish men’s clothes. Basi knew some of the staff; I recognized one of them from his school. Basi chatted away as he picked and chose his clothes. It was very nearly the end of the day by the time I went over to another shop to buy something for myself.
I bought a little black dress, with Mama constantly saying, “I don’t know if it’s too short, Naledi. Let me look at you again.”
I was quite happy with it. Kitsano will be amazed, I kept thinking. It wasn’t short enough, to be honest.
So we were making jokes and all three of us laughing happily when we arrived at the first signs of Silver City. Basi and I had let Mama play her own music—Teddy Pendergrass—which we liked to tease her about from time to time.
Mama was snapping her fingers and moving her head to the music. Basi sang along, half-mockingly, to the raspy-voiced Teddy’s “Love T.K.O.” Along the road friends and neighbours were reconnecting after a long day. Inside the houses, I knew, supper would be cooking on stoves, women staying close enough to watch that nothing burned. The aromas of bogobe, nama, and seshabo wafted out through open windows that were letting in the last of the sun’s heat. I looked over at Mama and knew that she was content. We had had a good day in town and she was happy knowing that we would look nice and smart when the dance came.
Wow. Just over two weeks, I thought. I couldn’t see myself waiting patiently for the time to come.
There we were going along, laughing and singing and clapping until Mama said, just as we turned onto the main road, the one that separates diEx from ko motseng, “Isn’t that Ole?”
I never really knew why—maybe it’s growing up surrounded by storytellers and seeing stories divided into chapters narrated by different people—but I see life in clips sometimes. It comes, in my mind, in a series of beginnings and endings that define the laughter and the tears, the dreading and the hoping. So I have often taken moments and put them safely in a packet, carrying them around and then opening them up and reliving them when I need to. And that day, in the car, with the three of us driving home together from town, is definitely one of the good times.
Life doesn’t work like that, of course (and if it did, there wouldn’t be this story), but if you can package some of it neatly like that, then why not? Because, inevitably, what follows a good time like this is not just more singing and more laughter. That day, the minute Mama said, “Isn’t that Ole?” we were thrown off abruptly from our bliss.
Because Ole wasn’t alone. She was with Moipone. It wasn’t as if Ole was standing on a street corner idly chatting away with Moipone. Ole wasn’t just having a cigarette with a couple of boys—although that would have been scandalous and reproachful enough for Mama.
She was smoking a cigarette in one hand, while her other arm rested comfortably around Moipone.
“Eish, eish,” was what Basi said. “I’ll get off here and I’ll see you at home later.”
This, of course, infuriated Mama.
“You want to go too?” she said scornfully, turning to me. “See your friend?”
There were about two seconds there when I couldn’t understand her because my eyes were stinging and my head was pounding painfully. We had stopped at the side of the road. Basi turned around and looked at me with pleading eyes, sending me a sign that, for once, I couldn’t understand. The only thing I could do was nod, even though I wasn’t sure who I was nodding to.
Then Basi turned around and hurriedly climbed out of the car, and I followed blindly. He held my hand and we crossed the street while Mama sped off.
It is curious, looking back, that Basi pulled Moipone away so abruptly—not roughly, I must add. Just abruptly, and barely acknowledging Ole.
Ole and Moipone hadn’t been aware of us until we were right in front of them. They were absorbed in conversation and sharing a laugh.
The thing is, two girls with their arms around each other wasn’t an unusual sight. I held hands and sat on my friends’ laps all the time. Girls did that. But I knew from far away, from the second I had turned to see if it actually was Ole, I knew that this wasn’t just like me putting my arm around Limakatso or Kelelo’s waist.
Basi stepped in and pulled Moipone by the hand without saying anything. Moipone turned her head to Ole and said, “I’ll see you,” and then her steps followed Basi’s. Ole looked startled, but knowing her as well as I did (or as well as I thought I did at the time), I could see she was working hard to look unperturbed. She shoved her hands in her pockets and watched them walk away.
When Basi had Moipone at a safe distance he seemed to be trying to coax her into conversation.
He had his hands on each of her cheeks while she looked down at the ground. Then he raised Moipone’s chin with one of his hands. She looked up at him only for a few seconds and then she turned away. Ole and I watched, although she still hadn’t acknowledged that I was standing next to her.
I was not particularly surprised by this scene—it was a familiar song and dance between men and women in Kasi. I had seen it many times: the man standing very close to the woman while she kept moving away from him. People said the man had to work very hard for a woman’s attention, and the more resistance he encountered, the more honourable the woman was thought to be. When I was in primary school, when we still lived ko motseng, I remember boys twisting my wrist until it was dry and red. It was all part of the games boys and girls played, I was told. I got used to it, and the more a boy twisted my wrist the more I thought he liked me.
But Ole always said it was disgusting.
Very, very slowly, Ole turned her head to look at me. I saw her face change as she adopted a more cheerful look: I wasn’t supposed to see what she was feeling.
“My brother really likes her,” was all I could think to say.
Ole forced a smile and kicked a small stone with her scruffy boots.
“Hmmm.”
“Look at the way he looks at her,” I added, watching Basi put his arm around Moipone.
“Let’s go,” Ole said and pulled me away.
I turned to look again at Basi and there, in the middle of the street and in broad daylight, my brother was kissing his girlfriend. I chit-chatted away, willing Ole not to look back, and she didn’t, thank goodness—but just as I gave a sigh of relief as we turned the corner, she said, “Your mother would lose her mind. Basimane kissing a girl in the middle of the street like that would just kill her.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Only Ole called Basi by his full name. It always sounded formal and this time it held a hint of hostility. It wasn’t how people normally said my brother’s name. People said “Basiiiii,” like it wasn’t so much a word as a pretty song. There was that sound of praise and joy mixed with a touch of respect when my brother’s name was said. The same went for my father’s name. Come to think of it, it was true of most men, really. Even hooligans like Five Bop. Men and boys were to be adored, as a rule. But with Ole, it was as if she had missed the community meeting and hadn’t been informed of this decision.
This Book Betrays My Brother Page 9
