When I came back to the house about an hour later, Sediba was not there. The guys had mowed the lawn and helped set up the big cooking pots and left. A few men and women from the neighbourhood had arrived, cleaning and making preparations until darkness fell and I was alone again.
I sat at the kitchen table in my childhood home wondering how long I would continue to feel this alone. The walls and the furniture seemed to stare back at me, as if to inquire who this stranger was and what I wanted from someone else’s home. Probably what I found most disconcerting was that I just couldn’t find traces of my mother here. Nothing about the house had her fingerprints on it. Perhaps my father had been angry too—maybe he had decided that if my mother had been too angry to be with him then he would erase all parts of her from his home. Maybe that is what killed him, I reasoned. I wanted to talk to Sediba about it. I looked for him everywhere. I woke up hoping to see him and went to sleep terrified that I may never have another minute with him. I re-arranged the times that we had been together, revised the arguments we had to make myself feel like I had done it all right, to give myself a chance to do it over and do it properly this time.
I did the same thing with my father. In my mind I had come home more, spent more time at the surgery the way he had sometimes requested. I saw myself telling him that I had someone now, even if my mind protested, I forced it to see a father who was pleased for me and accepted the man I was.
All night long I paced, going to sleep for a bit and then waking up again, wandering around the yard the way I had done in Durban. Only this time I was not dodging sleep, it was the other way round. I kept wondering when morning would come and save me from my loneliness. It was during one of these nights that I thought of Sizwe: how I sensed he knew about me, what he had said about keeping his girlfriend alive.
Maybe Sediba had needed me to tell him I loved him so that he could live here. Maybe being with me had kept him alive here. I certainly knew that when he loved me it had kept me going. All my life I had been treading water, afraid of sinking into something terrifying. I had feared when my legs would give up, when I would be crushed by my own secret. And then he came and loved me and suddenly, for months, I was surfacing, being pulled up into his scent, his skin, the look he had on his face when he was about to kiss me.
I had forced him to leave and now was wandering alone at night, looking for a way back to him.
I was grateful for tradition. Neighbours arrived at sunrise ready and eager to prepare the house, cook the food, and clean the yard.
Maimela was devastated by the loss. Every day someone came to me: an elderly lady would take my hand in hers, a man would put his hand on my shoulder, and there would be some recollection of something that my father had done or that the person had said to him. We would stand there with tissues or handkerchiefs, bringing my father back to life with our words, seeking small comfort in a memory.
I had always thought, while living in Durban, that the problem with being in a place where no one has known you as a child is that you constantly have a feeling of floating, alone, unanchored. When people don’t know or love someone in your family and when they haven’t known you as an infant—when no one knows your roots—your presence might be disconcerting for locals. They always look at you with some suspicion. In their faces you always see the question: Who are your people? What is your story?
Being at home, I felt what I had not felt in Cape Town or Durban. I felt like the neighbourhood, the dry heat, the smells and the sounds were cradling me. My always-weary body now had a bit of renewed energy, a feeling that I could have the strength to bury my father properly. People around me all pulled together to give him the send-off that we felt he deserved.
Still, there remained the nagging feeling that their love, support and respect might all fade once they found out the man I was.
I gave myself the week to think about what I would do next, because I had no intention of leaving this time. It was hardly a matter of choice: I had to take over the surgery, there was no one else to do it. Plus, I had seen things: I had come across signs pointing to where I needed to be. My father used to tell me that once you knew someone needed help you could not walk away. “It’s your duty then, when you see illness, to stay and do what you’ve studied to do.”
The local cemetery, vast and stretching as it was, was filling up. I had heard that they were opening a new one.
“There are lines to go in for a burial every weekend,” my father had told me. “As soon as people start knowing that there is some help, they will come to us, this will get better.”
So I would stay. I thought of Base and the large, dark lesions, deep purple against his brown skin. His laboured walk, his ongoing fatigue.
I had to stay.
We normally take a week to prepare for the burial. We wait for relatives who come from far away and have nights of remembrance, cooking and drinking and speaking to the ancestors. But I had arrived on the Tuesday and I planned the funeral for the Saturday, because I couldn’t keep the surgery closed too long. I understood that people didn’t stop being ill because someone had died. I remembered my father working the week of my mother’s death, going in the mornings and coming back to the house to work with the neighbours in the afternoon. As a child he had cut short our holidays to get back and keep the surgery open, because many people didn’t have the means to get on a taxi and take their loved ones to the hospital where they would have to deal with long waiting lines.
So I set to work in the mornings while all my friends took over at the house. Trunka was especially helpful. The man has the best organization skills that I have ever seen: he could run a large company, given the chance. It was easy to see how he could have turned his father’s tuck shop into the successful business that it now was. Watching him inspired me to do the same for my father’s business. I wanted to feel as proud of myself as I felt admiration for him.
Still, going into the surgery was no easy task. The first day was the hardest: I went in unsuspecting, thinking I would just go in and see a few patients and then run back home to work on the preparations for the funeral, but things got very uncomfortable very quickly. As soon as I saw the building, a corner house turned into a business, with red brick and white windowpanes, I wanted to turn back and run away. A great sadness flooded my body and taking the last few steps from the street into the place was like making my way up a mountain.
My father had opened his surgery before I was born, so he had been in it all my life. He had taken a six-room house at the far corner of a busy street that included small township businesses: a bottle store, a dry-cleaners, and two general stores, one of which was my mother’s. All the business people had known and respected each other for many years. The idea that I was now meant to be one of them was rather daunting. In my mind I was still ten years old, going into my mother’s shop to help at the till and then to the surgery to play in the waiting area, asking people if I could help with anything. I still remembered the older patients patting me on the head, telling me stories.
Now I was to be the doctor behind the closed door and I had to give people the same service that my father had given them for almost three decades.
Even unlocking the door was difficult. My father’s keys were held together by his old Chiefs key ring—Chiefs being his favourite soccer team. The waiting area had changed. Long leather sofas had replaced the fabric chairs of before. In the four corners stood potted plants on side tables along with magazines. Informative posters decorated the walls: AIDS, heart attack symptoms, prostate health, the importance of breast-feeding.
The secretary’s desk was now a long wooden table and the tiles were white as they had been before but looked new. In his office, my father had left his white coat hanging over his chair behind the desk and his stethoscope behind his door, where he had kept it when he was at work. It had gone in his leather bag when he left the office. The whole pl
ace was in pristine condition, not unlike the way I remembered it. My father had always been insistent on high standards, as he called it, in his work place.
I steeled myself when I picked up the stethoscope, willing the lump in my throat to disappear as I swung it around my neck. I could almost hear his voice, telling me, “The people deserve the best care.”
I had drifted through my work in Durban preoccupied with my own loneliness. But all parts of a person’s life need to come together and make sense for one to feel grounded. It had been only in those weeks when Sediba and I were together that I had been more present, more available to my patients but the rest of the time I had sleepwalked through my job, doing my best and being efficient but rarely enjoying myself. Part of that was because hospitals overwhelmed me. I found the pace too hectic and working alongside other doctors, while it allowed for more learning, was a challenge to someone who had spent much of his life envisioning working in one surgery with only one other person. There was always a bit of competition here and there, something I was never very good at handling.
I am also the kind of doctor who likes to see people go home. I’ve found that there is more of a sense of helplessness when patients are in a hospital bed, surrounded by other sick people. They are generally more hopeful when they can see their doctor and then go back to the comfort and familiarity of their own homes.
On that first day at the surgery I realized how much I looked forward to those moments of being alone and quiet after each patient. I swiveled in my father’s chair like a child, remembering the times when I would come and visit as a youngster and declare: “Le nna I want to sew people’s hands,” and he’d say, quite seriously, “Then you’ll have to go and learn how to do it.”
Everyone who came in my first morning wanted to talk about my father. Some cried through an exam and I had to sit back and wait before I listened to their breathing or took their blood pressure. Many of them were elderly. They had known my father when he was a young doctor himself and he was the son who had grown up right in front of them. They had loved him through it, attended his wedding to a beautiful young bride and were there to welcome their newborn son when I came. They expected the same of me. I was the grandson they used to send to the shops to buy snuff or bread. The men shook my hand and the women patted my shoulder with pride. “Tjo! You have grown!” They exclaimed. “I remember when you played marbles in front of my house.”
“You look just like your father at your age. He was so serious and always worried about us.” Mma Mathibe, the woman who sold cold drinks out of her house when I was a little boy, pinched my cheek. “Ei, ei, ei! But you are handsome. Sit! Sit down and tell me when you’re getting me a grandchild.” For a moment she was the one standing and I was the one sitting instead of the reverse, like I was the one being examined. She had left her house on bad knees and an aching back and walked the distance to the surgery for a specific reason: a duty to fulfill. She put one hand on top of another, clearing her throat. Her words were given gravity by the stern look that suddenly fell over her face. She said, “Listen, ngwanaka, just because your parents are not here doesn’t mean you don’t have someone to take you to ask for magadi, do you hear me? Any time you find yourself a nice girl, come back and tell me and we’ll take you to ask for her at her parents’ house.”
I winced at the thought of going to ask for lobola, reminded again of people’s imaginary accomplished, adored young lady who was about to waltz into my life. My armpits started to sweat. I laughed and stood up quickly, asking Mma Mathibe to roll up her sleeve as politely as if I were asking for a drink of water at her house.
She was not fooled. “I know you’re shy. You always have been, ever since you were this tall”—she stretched her arm to the side, palm up to demonstrate my little boy height. “You were just like your father. Always quiet, thinking. Your eyes looking in the distance. Well, now it’s time to stop looking in the distance, akere? You are a man now and you have come home. And we, also, we are here and we will be your parents. Akere? We were always your parents. Today, we come in because the ones who raised you are gone.”
I nodded, a tear escaping in spite of my willing it to stop. I had come home. They needed a wife for me.
Still, of all the things people said to me, the most painful to hear was, “I feel as if he’s standing right in front of me.” I had never really worried about filling my father’s shoes until I put on his coat and heard them speak to him through me, making me feel like a guest filling in for someone whose return we should all be waiting for.
I worked steadily through that first day with barely any time to eat and had to phone Trunka and ask if they minded watching over things at the house a little longer because it looked like I would take all day at the surgery, aware and regretful that I was taking him away from his own business, but he assured me he didn’t mind. He had help, he said. He had people he was paying at the tuck shop. When I walked outside for some fresh air, I was stunned to see the line of people extended outside the gates of the surgery. It was a scene reminiscent of elderly people waiting for their pension at municipal offices in the apartheid years—or voting days. Those who knew an opportunity when they saw one were walking up and down selling peanuts, chips, and water. I pulled out my phone and asked Trunka where I could find someone to employ temporarily for help at the surgery: we needed to bring in extra chairs, water, that sort of thing.
The funny thing is that in the end most of the people had come to pay their respects and were not actually in need of a medical check-up. When I left in the early evening I was exhausted. I had left the car at home so I would have to walk through the township, cross the main road, and trek up the hill—all along greeting and speaking to people about my father. I took a deep breath and put away the coat and stethoscope, straightened the papers on the desk. It was not until I was picking up my father’s bag from behind his desk that I noticed, at the far right corner of the desk near the windowsill, a picture of Aus’ Tselane. At first I thought, well, she worked with us for so long and they were so close, it made sense. But there was something in her face that kept me staring, that made me sit down. She was looking at the camera as if she and the person taking the picture shared a delightful secret.
She was in a sundress with thin straps and unlike most times her hair was not tucked under a head wrap. Tight messy curls flew freely around her head, blown by the wind. Her face was turned towards the camera, like she was looking back, sneaking a glance at someone. I sat at the desk for a long time, composing myself. I looked at the old black and white clock on the desk and picked up the phone to dial Sediba’s number—and as I had done so many times, I only got to punch in the first few numbers before I gently put the receiver back in its cradle. Leaning back on the chair, my body again felt the heavy weight of shock. I wished with every part of me to speak to him. I wondered if the place would feel even lonelier than Durban. Here I was uncovering other people’s secrets while holding on to my own with no one to speak to.
It was as if I had been looking at a crooked picture and now finally someone had straightened it. It brought a better understanding of so many things: Aus’ Tselane’s nervousness when I came back the day my father died, her need to go and mourn somewhere else, away from the scrutiny of a disapproving township, the changes in the house, and most of all, my mother’s unraveling. I hadn’t had a clue.
Everyone had lives that people they loved could never know about. My respectable township father had broken his wife’s heart right in her own house, and I hadn’t known a thing about it.
I wanted to run to Sediba’s house the way we used to run up to my flat together. I wanted to peel my clothes off and climb into his bed and tell him about my day and hear about his, the two of us cocooned in our secret. But I didn’t see him. Even as I walked from the surgery to my house I never got a glimpse of him, nor did I get a message from him. Still I kept hearing about Sediba everywhere. Whenever I
returned home someone would say, “Thank Bonolo (Sediba’s mother) for sending her son in with those potatoes.” Or, “Sediba brought the meat this morning with his father.” He was the phantom friend, coming in and out of places just after I left or right before I was to return. I became convinced that he was skillfully avoiding me and it made me feel helpless, angry, and hurt. I had thought for sure he would come and speak to me earlier but now wondered if his anger crossed out his love for me.
I went into the surgery every morning and tried hard to come back by midday. Everyone seemed to forgive me my absence at the house, saying, “No, no. People need you at the surgery. We’ll take care of the food and the house. You go and work.” I was embarrassed to see that I had become something new in their eyes: a grown and highly regarded man, one they needed to take care of the way people tend to take care of grown men. I wondered if this new man might earn a bit of understanding if they knew that he was in love with the hairdresser and not one of their girls—even if the hairdresser refused to see me.
***
So then it was not until the morning of the funeral that he came to me.
I was supposed to be getting ready but my heart was so heavy and the weight of it seemed to spread to my limbs so that I was not able to move very much. I did everything in short, almost timed spurts. I stepped out of bed then lay back down. I took a bath, came back and lay back down. It was after I had put on my underwear and a t-shirt and was lying back down that there was a knock on the door.
“I’m getting dressed!” I called out wearily. Already there was commotion outside the room. The women and men had arrived early and they were buzzing about all around me but because I had barely left my room, I couldn’t have said who was there and who was not. I had no interest in stepping out of my room again and in my mind the day seemed to stretch so far ahead of me that I was convinced it would never end. I had not even opened the curtains to let the light in, wishing they would all leave and go to the wretched cemetery without me. I even worked out a scenario in my head where the house went completely quiet, the funeral happened without me and I only got to hear about it days later.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 19
