by Chris Abani
Fourteen
It was cold when Sunil got home. Desert cold was the worst. Hot all day, with the temperature dropping by so many degrees at night that he went from sweat to shivers. The fact that the central air was on all the time probably didn’t help. He crossed the room and flicked a switch to turn on the fire.
This was his routine: set keys into the valet on the sideboard in the hall, briefcase down next to it, sift mail collected from doorman before putting it down next to the briefcase. The only variations today: a piece of candy from the bowl laid out for trick-or-treat, popped into his mouth; and tucked under his arm, the envelope containing a research file on twins from the institute, also handed over by the doorman. He meant to read it that night. Tomorrow was Saturday but he intended on interviewing the twins in the morning. No one worked a five-day week at the institute.
Sunil lived in a soft loft in one of Vegas’s modern, hip buildings. He argued to others that the incredible architecture of the place was the draw, but its location just five minutes off the Strip probably had more to do with its appeal for him. He could be near all that noise and energy, and just distant enough to remain a voyeur—all of the excitement, yet no risk.
The soft loft was one of those real estate terms for condominiums with high ceilings and an elevated but open sleeping area. Since the ’80s nobody had bought or wanted to buy a condo, so real estate brokers got creative. It was nice on the inside, noise- and weather-insulated blue glass walls on the far side. Cut stone floors, an immaculate kitchen, a den hidden behind sliding wood doors, and a second bedroom just off the front hall.
He put the file down on the marble-topped island in the middle of the kitchen and opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator, careful to leave no fingerprint smudges on the polished silver door. He took out a beer, a piece of tuna, and a cantaloupe.
On a plastic cutting board, he cut the cantaloupe neatly in half with one smooth movement. He placed one half facedown on a plate and returned it to a shelf in the fridge, then cleaned and cubed the other, enjoying the sound of the cutting.
Next he set the tuna on a wooden cutting board, noting the time on the microwave clock—11:00. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up a balanced ceramic knife that had cost too much and sliced perfect slivers of fish. The shape of the pieces, and the sound of the knife scraping the wood, reminded him of slicing plantains in Johannesburg for Dorothy to fry. Pausing in his slicing, he inspected his work, mentally checking for precision. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been this concerned about order. Perhaps it was a reaction to the memory of Jan. He put a piece of cantaloupe into his mouth and thought about her.
Their first date, Sunil came to realize later, hadn’t been a date at all, just coffee that Sunil brought with him from home and his lunch of fried fish and hard-dough bread. Even with this new experiment in integration, the black students weren’t allowed to eat in the cafeteria, so they all brought lunch from home. Once, early on, Sunil had tried to eat in the cafeteria, but one of the blacks cleaning the floors had come over to him, and barely able to make eye contact for shame, pointed to the sign on the wall above Sunil: VIR GEBRUIK DEUR BLANKES—FOR USE BY WHITE PERSONS.
He left and never returned, opting to eat under the umbrella tree outside the science building, on the only stretch of lawn where the black students were allowed to be. Every day, they spread out like a flock of blackbirds at lunch, pretending not to see one another.
That day, on a whim, Sunil asked Jan if she would like to have lunch with him.
Yes, she said, her easy assent taking him by surprise.
She followed him to the patch of grass under the tree as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He turned his jacket inside out and spread it for her to sit on. He remembered every detail fondly for days afterward: that they shared coffee out of the cap of his thermos because he hadn’t brought any cups; that she ate the hard bread and oily fish with a relish that he could still summon like a taste to his mouth; that he had no napkins so she sucked on her fingers and he felt himself swell with desire. Finally he remembered his handkerchief and handed it to her. It was pretty threadbare, but clean, and if she noticed its condition, she said nothing. She dabbed delicately around her lips with it and handed it back.
Later, he walked her back to class, and then after, naturally, easily, to her car. They stood in the gloom of the car-park lights, lingering, neither wanting to go home, it seemed.
Yet the next day, in class, it was as if none of it had happened. She was still very polite to him, but nothing more, until a week later, when they happened upon each other in Gogo’s, which was the only neutral space in the city, where all races could interact without fear or concern.
Returning to the present moment, he placed the fruit and raw fish on a stoneware plate garnished with ginger and then cleaned up.
He took the food to the living room, crossed to the sectional, and flopped in front of the fire, over which hung a large print of a William Kentridge painting, Felix in Exile. Reaching for the remote control on the coffee table, he turned down the fire and turned on some music—Chopin’s Nocturnes in E Minor. He ate quickly, barely taking in the view that spread fourteen floors below. When he was finished, he fetched the rather thick file from the sideboard, adjusted his glasses, and began to read.
There were two theories about how conjoined twins are formed—fission and fusion. Fission theory postulated that conjoined twins occur when a fertilized egg begins to split into identical twins, but is somehow interrupted during the process and develops into two partially formed individuals who are stuck together. Fusion theory argued that conjoining happens after an egg has split into two distinct but identical embryos and that the joining is a result of early cellular development in embryos in close proximity.
A human embryo in its early stages consists of three layers of cells that seek out cells of the same type and use these stem cells to build organs and the rest of the body. When identical embryos lie in close proximity, such as in the case of identical twins, these cells can have mixed signals, which cause them to attach to the cells of the same type but that are already part of the twin embryo.
Sunil rubbed his eyes and skimmed the rest, letting only the major classifications jump out at him. Craniopagus twins are joined at the head. Thoracopagus twins are joined at the upper chest, usually from clavicle to sternum. Omphalopagus twins are joined at the abdomen from their groin to their sternum, resulting in a shared liver and even parts of the digestive tract. Xiphopagus twins are joined at the sternum but only by cartilage, like the famous Chang and Eng, and only rarely share organs. Ischiopagus twins are joined at the front of the pelvis and at the lower spine, with their spines twisted at a 180-degree angle from each other. These twins can have three or four legs between them; the third leg in these tripus cases is a fusion of two legs that didn’t separate. Ischio-omphalopagus twins have spines joined in a Y shape, three legs, and a single set of genitalia; and on and on, in a seemingly unending list.
Sunil thought that it all read like a bizarre biblical genealogy, or the taxonomy of dinosaurs. He understood only too well this need to classify; that had been the backbone of apartheid.
At the back of the file he found a reference to Edward Mordake, a nineteenth-century Englishman with no recorded birth or death dates. He was unusually handsome and gifted as a scholar and musician. He had a second face growing out of the back of his head. This other face, rumored to have been female, wasn’t fully functional and couldn’t speak or eat. But it could laugh and cry and its eyes would follow people around a room. Edward claimed that this devil twin, as he called it, whispered awful things to him at night while he tried to sleep. He begged to have it removed, but no doctor would agree to the risky operation. Finally he secluded himself until he succumbed to suicide at twenty-three. This was clearly a case of parasitic twinning and Sunil wondered if Fire and Water were parasitic twins. But which was the para
site?
In spite of himself, Sunil yawned. It was late, or early, and he nodded off, sprawled on the sectional with papers and photos strewn around him.
Fifteen
The moon was high and fat. Pregnant moon, Water said under his breath, the way Selah used to, the boys in her lap, rocking in the porch swing on those late nights when they couldn’t sleep. A full moon always rises at sunset, he said to himself. Selah used to say that. Water was fifteen when he realized her death would always be inside him. Selah is tree, he whispered.
The swath of light falling through the window, however, was not from the moon but from the violet streetlamp on the hospital grounds. He swung his legs to the floor and got up slowly. Fire was snoring slightly, the sound muffled by the caul. Drawn tight, it would grow warm and then hot against Water’s side, as though he were carrying a hot water bottle.
It was light enough to make it across the room and as Water crossed to the window, Fire stirred, yawned, and then went back to sleep. Water searched the sky as if for some truth. Auguring; that had been Selah’s skill. Reading the future from the sky, by watching birds or clouds. Tracking to see if they were flying together or alone, the truth revealed in their formations. Water couldn’t sleep and lay awake for a long time gazing up at the moon, humming a lullaby, one that Selah had sung to them.
Sixteen
Sunil woke with a start. He peeled a sheet of paper from his cheek and crossed to the window. Below, the Strip was awake, like a sentient being made of neon, all pulse and wink, but it wasn’t dawn yet, probably nearer five in the morning. Sunil closed his eyes, shook his head rapidly, and opened them again. Dizzy, he watched the lights make a new pattern, like a kaleidoscope. He closed his eyes again. This time when he opened them and looked, he was so dizzy he had to put his hand on the cold metal of the window frame to keep from falling over. This was a game he’d played as a child, only the lights had been the stars, and back then he could get dizzy without feeling nauseated.
Dorothy taught him that game, said it was how the old soothsayers read the future. Izikhombi, she’d called it, bones used to divine the way, except she said they used the bones of the stars.
She was a good storyteller. Some people call that being a good liar. But that was just frivolous gossip, as Reverend Bhekithemba would say. Remove the log from your own eye first, he would add. The reverend had a soft spot for Sunil and Dorothy, which of course only made people gossip about the reverend and Dorothy. There has always been in African communities a deep suspicion of the Catholic priest’s professed celibacy. Father Bhekithemba was the priest of St. Francis, the Catholic church on the corner of Sunil’s street. But none of this, of course, changed the fact that Dorothy was a good storyteller.
She came to Soweto in 1960 to study nursing. She meant to return to her small town in the KwaZulu homeland, but no one ever leaves Soweto alive, as the saying goes.
She worked at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on Old Potchefstroom Road. Baragwanath was more of a city than a hospital, serving about a million people every day. Much of what she saw there—the misery, the pain, the loss, the despair, but also the incredible strength of the people of Soweto—shaped her. She was a good woman who did what she could. Brought home medicines for the local mothers to give to their children. Nothing serious, just the basics—vitamins, cough medicine, painkillers, fever reducers, disinfectants, and iodine for scrapes and cuts. She cut quite the figure striding through the neighborhood at dusk, dressed in her nurse’s uniform—crisp, starched white dress and bonnet, palm flat on her belly, resting on the big buckle of the purple belt that marked her rank, a black handbag draped from the crook. Sunil followed her discreetly, pretending in his mind to be her bodyguard, and if Dorothy was aware she didn’t show it. Meanwhile, Johnny Ten-Ten, sitting on the low wall of the church smoking with other teenagers in the shadow of the statue of Saint Francis, called him Mommy’s Shadow.
Between St. Francis and Sunil’s house was an open lot of land that ran down to a ditch at the back of the township. Over the years, Dorothy put the local children to work turning it into a communal garden. They grew everything there—potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, carrots, peas, and even some onions—and gave it all away to those needier than them.
It seemed like the only things Dorothy kept for herself were the truth of Sunil’s father and the three tangerine trees she planted and replanted by the side fence of their house, a fence made of rippling and rusting corrugated iron sheets.
The trees never really grew much larger than shrubs, but they wore their size well, with all the gravitas of trees. Three trees Dorothy planted and replanted every year. Three trees were all they had room for, crowded as they were by the tomatoes and curry and potatoes and onions overflowing from the communal garden just over the fence. Three trees that seemed so superfluous they could as well have been chocolate trees instead of tangerines.
They always grew to about three feet high, branches thick and low like a shrub, and heavy with the small citrus. As soon as they bore their yellow fruit, and Sunil and his mother harvested buckets of them for themselves and their neighbors, they would begin to die and Dorothy would gather seeds and cuttings that still had green signs of life in them, and replant the tangerines in the cluster of three by the fence, where the off-flow from the kitchen sink kept the dusty Soweto soil moist and fragrant with decay and rebirth.
Always three, a mystical number not intended. Planting and replanting every year until it seemed she, like the tangerines, would die of happiness. Sunil love to peel the zesty fruit and bite into the soft sweet flesh. What a freedom.
But these were still the days of terror, of tear gas in the streets. Of armored Casspirs rolling through Soweto like hyenas on the prowl. These were still the days of beatings, and of the lynching of suspected informers by locals. When police enforced pass law. When they drank from illegal shebeens and then burned them down. When they kicked in the doors of frightened Soweto families and dragged the men out to be shot in the street in the middle of the night. When the police drove by emptying rounds of ammo into the houses of the ANC leadership who crouched behind the cast-iron stoves with their children in the kitchen, the safest place in the house. When rape was a state-sanctioned form of policing. When children playing in empty lots came upon dead bodies decomposing in the heat, or half-dissolved from chemicals. When the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party recruited young men and women and trained them to be warriors.
If Dorothy had any misgivings about any of it, about Sunil training to be a freedom fighter, she didn’t show it. Maybe she suspected his heart wasn’t really in the fighting but more in becoming an impi, like the one in the story she told of his mythical father, as though he were trying somehow to make a connection with the absence that his father had become.
Maybe that was why she told stories, stories to counter, or perhaps balance, the ones the political movements were telling the children—stories of a different path, and maybe a different future. It was hard to tell, because she kept so much to herself.
She was a good storyteller and Sunil and the others gathered by the communal garden to hear her.
Have you heard about the Sorrow Tree, she asked them.
No, Nurse Dorothy, they chorused.
Deep in a mythical forest lost to time is the Sorrow Tree. Its existence was known only to the wisest of the sangomas, who kept it a close secret. Once, a very long time ago, the people who would become our ancestors went to the chief sangoma, a man so old no one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, and asked him to remove the suffering and misery from the world. He told them that he couldn’t do it but that there was a tree called the Sorrow Tree that could bear everyone’s pain for a short while. He took them on a pilgrimage deep into the forest until finally, after nearly a moon of traveling, they came upon a clearing. There stood the most beautiful tree anyone had seen. It was as wide as many townships and as tall as Mount Kilimanjaro, and yet
its limbs were thin and wispy as though made of smoke. And though the tree was so big and tall, it took only a few minutes to walk around it and even the shortest person could reach the tallest limbs.
The sangoma told the people to make a bundle of their suffering and sorrow and hang it from a limb of the tree. And although many thousands of people hung their sorrows from those delicate limbs, they barely swayed from the weight of it. At once the people felt a deep happiness come over them and they danced and sang for days. As they prepared to leave, the sangoma told them that there was a condition that he hadn’t mentioned before. They could leave none of the bundles of sorrow on the tree; otherwise the others to come would have nowhere to hang theirs. They must leave with a bundle, but not necessarily the bundle they came with. Everyone walked around the tree examining the bundles, but in the end they each settled for the bundles they had come with. It seemed that no matter how bad their lot was, they did not prefer anyone else’s to theirs. As the people left with their sorrows on their heads, their happiness faded, but they found instead a deep joy.
FAIRY TALE
What possible harm can a story do, you ask yourself as you fetch the small photo of your father from the mantelpiece. You don’t have a fireplace, so it really isn’t a mantelpiece, just a rickety shelf on a wall. There in the small cramped living room with the bare cement floor painted red by your mother because, as she says, poverty is no excuse for uncleanliness. No harm at all, you tell yourself as you nearly knock over the small plastic vase that holds the plastic flowers your father gave your mother on their first date. You have seen her dust around it carefully, every Sunday, wiping each petal with a soft cloth while she sings softly under her breath. You right the vase and dash into the kitchen, although even to you that word seems too big for this space.
