The Architecture of Loss

by Z. P. Dala

  Moomi had learned this from a source closest to instinct. She had inherited a basket that bore sustenance and bursts of spice to the people who needed them most. She had learned the art of cooking even before she realized she was learning it. She knew the art of delicate spices, the orchestra of a world full of fresh, bright vegetables and Cape fruits, and the sensuous movement of rolling, stirring, waiting. A happy hand would bring into this world a dish that tasted only of happiness. Moomi knew how to bring joy. She sold her wares, like the women in her family had always done. Yet she sprinkled within the dishes an added condiment of joy.

  She had become a familiar figure on the streets of Cape Town. First, as a young, dimpled girl who carried gleaming bottles of special Malay chutneys and dripping cinnamon-flavored confectionary to the throngs of workers in the office buildings on Long Street. The years had altered her lithe figure, and she had rounded out, spreading outwardly in generosity and girth, while her food spread outwardly in reputation. She was beloved. Her figure arrived at lunchtime to the Koopmans–De Wet House on Strand Street, one of the oldest Cape Dutch–style buildings in Cape Town. Once a home to wealthy Dutch sisters, it was now a museum housing opulent things.

  Moomi had learned early enough not to stand too close to the entrance. There are some things that a mother teaches her child that go far beyond the kitchen. Her mother had taught her the best place to stand and ply her offerings. She stood near the sweeping entrance staircase, not too near, but close enough. She clutched her basket of food, which she had spent hours preparing as the sun rose over the city, and she silently waited for people to come and rummage through her wares, thrusting coins into her hand and leaving with the flavors they craved.

  When the husband that she loved and feared in one deep inhalation brought home a child and handed this girl to her, leaving her staring and awkward without a bare explanation, Moomi did the only thing she knew how to do: she took the little girl and fed her. She took fresh, yeasty rolls dotted with fennel seeds out of her oven that often misbehaved, and having no butter to spare, spread one with jam made from ripe tomatoes.

  “You must eat, child,” she told Afroze, who sat stunned and skittish with all that had happened to her. Afroze grabbed the delicious roll and stuffed it into her mouth, and with each bite and each sip of sweet tea laced with condensed milk, warmth began to reenter her little body.

  “Who is that man?” Afroze asked Moomi, staring at the closed door through which Ismail had rapidly left. Moomi paused, and her ample chest heaved with a deep sigh.

  “Oh, you sweet girl. He didn’t tell you anything, did he? Agh, so typical of that man.”

  “No. He only bought me a cola and a cake. And the car took a long time to come here,” Afroze murmured.

  “He is your father,” Moomi said, unable to meet the child’s large eyes.

  “I want my ma. I want my Beatrice,” Afroze said, and her bottom lip, stained with thick jam, began to quiver.

  Moomi did not know reserve. She only knew the art of comfort. An art without artifice. Another woman’s child sat in her kitchen. A woman she had never seen but had heard many stories about. Her own childless womb could easily have turned her heart to stone. But Moomi was not designed that way. She grabbed the child into a smothering embrace, feeling the tugs of deep desire. A feminine desire to protect and own.

  “Agh now, child. You are with me now. And that is all you must remember.”

  “But, where is Ma?”

  “Your ma. She is gone. That is all, now let me wipe your pretty face. You eat. You eat. Don’t think about the bad things. I am with you now.” She felt the tiny body struggle against her. The heart beat so fast and strong inside a chest that could not contain its terror and confusion. Moomi held onto the child. She never let her go. And inside the spicy warm smell of her desperate embrace, the stiff, scared body began to relax. Only once she felt a thought come rippling through the child, maybe a memory. Moomi soothed, smoothed soft hair, crooned and kissed wet cheeks. The thought slowly melted away. And it was in this smothered drowning that Afroze began to forget. Nothing mattered any longer. Not the frightening, long car journey from Brighton to Cape Town, one that had taken two days. Not the silent man who stared only at the open road and never at the huddled child. Everything became a distant goodbye inside a hot kitchen that smelled of baking bread. It was a most rapid forgetting.

  When the child was full of hot tea, fresh bread, and sweet cakes, Moomi laid her down to sleep in her own quilted bed, ignoring the thought that the man would come home and want his place. She threw a patched-up quilt and a pillow on the threadbare couch in the drafty lounge room. This is where he will sleep. Always, from now on.

  On her bed and in her arms was where her new child would sleep. It was Moomi’s only act of rebellion. The place where each would lay her head and dream of all that had happened, and all that could be. She knew that if she slept next to this child, she would be a custodian of the child’s dreams. And like a cleaning woman in a dusty town, she would follow the child into those dreams, wiping and wiping until all that remained was nothing of memory, and everything of possession. Two people who share a bed always seep into each other as they sleep, and soon, after many sleeps together, they begin to belong to each other.

  As Afroze slept a sleep that brought nothing but warmth, Moomi sat quietly at the foot of the creaky bed, well into the night. She waited for the familiar sound of a key in the lock. Ismail had come home.

  “I don’t want to know what happened, Ismail. I don’t want to know anything.”

  She had scuttled from Afroze’s curled-up form and set to the task of feeding her husband. He ate noisily. He ate as if he didn’t really care where the food had come from. Moomi, who had always found means to bring food to his table and had spent a lifetime asking no questions, decided that she would always prefer to ask no questions.

  “Eyy . . . Moomi, listen to me, here. Don’t you start on me. Don’t you start your mouth. I am tired.” Ismail didn’t look up from his plate but pointed a finger stained with thick gravy up at her face.

  “Ismail. You didn’t hear me, neh? I said I don’t want to know. Just tell me one thing—is she mine now?”

  “What nonsense you jabbering, woman? She’s not yours. She’s never going to be yours. Dream baby. Dream.” Ismail looked up from his food, chewing with exaggeration, and began to laugh loudly, knowing well enough that food fell from his mouth, half masticated and disgusting. He wanted to be as disgusting as he possibly could. He enjoyed seeing his wife look at the table strewn with his untidy, ravenous disrespect. It was his way of saying to Moomi, “You buy the food that I eat. But I will eat it how I want to.”

  “Shhh, Ismail. Quiet. The child is finally fast asleep. She was so upset, neh. She said you bought her nothing to eat but a small cake.”

  “Ja, so? So what?” Ismail challenged her, tearing into a piece of mutton, a cheap cut that Moomi had tenderized and boiled for a long time to make it palatable.

  “Ismail, you’re an animal. She is just a little girl. You brought her here without even talking to her, telling her why. Agh . . . I tell you, you is a bloody cruel man. Bloody cruel.”

  Ismail jolted up from his chair, scraping the metal feet against the cold cement floor with an ominous sound. He swung forward, pushing Moomi hard against the sink. He hovered over her, his face reeking of food, bits of bread and meat falling onto his beard, falling onto Moomi’s hair as she was pushed, doubled over, against the metal sink.

  “Woman. You shut your big ugly mouth. You know nothing about me. Nothing. I saved you, remember. You were this fat, ugly spinster, selling your chutneys and koeksisters like a slave woman in town. If I didn’t marry you, then what? What then? You would’ve died on those museum steps old and dried up like a bloody hag. So you shut your mouth. And don’t tell me what to do with my child. Not yours. Mine.”

  Moomi pushed hard against him. He chuckled, and stepped away from her.

  “Bring me wate
r. I’m going to sleep,” he said, and wiped his fingers on her clean white kitchen towel, staining it.

  “The child is sleeping with me. In my bed.”

  Ismail turned again. Sharply. His arm raised, he was about to swing it in a rapid slap.

  “Ma . . . I want Beatrice. I want my Beatrice.” The loud crying of Afroze came flying into the moment. The child’s cry stemmed the familiar action of a hard, strong blow.

  And the child’s cry brought fury to the eyes of a once-cowering wife. She squared up to him, staring him directly in his eyes.

  “Don’t,” Moomi growled. “I am going to bed. And she is sleeping next to me.”

  Ismail swore loudly. He took a few stumbling steps backward, hating the arrival of this child already on the first day. His loathing took an unnerving path. It began its ruthless course with fury against the wife he had left behind in the tiny town where he was born, and where he felt the suffocation of a grave. It exploded toward a child he barely knew as his own. And finally it found its resting place against this woman whom he had always had dominion over. He knew Moomi’s nature well, because he had spent years running through streets, studying people’s inner hearts.

  He knew weaklings, he knew targets. It was how he made his life, prospecting for an easy foil, taking what he could and slipping away unnoticed. He had married this woman, not for her beauty and certainly not for the most alien emotion called love. Ismail had married Moomi because he had studied her long before she knew he was doing it. She was to be his anchor, the one who would keep him comfortable.

  And he knew she was docile, with too good a heart to turn on him. Until this day. Now, when a child that he preferred to forget had been thrust into his new world. This child would turn the world of her furious father inside out.

  Moomi snuggled deep into the heavy quilt. It was an ugly coverlet, fashioned out of the discarded clothing of the men and women of her family. Thick brown corduroy patches from a man’s rough coat were stitched incongruently next to patches of floral cotton from a woman’s frock. Pockets became patches. Pleated lilac skirts were ripped open and flattened into harsh squares. There were times when Moomi lay under the quilt, feeling the taut muscles of Ismail nudge into her softness, when she could only look as the rise and fall of the clothing of the generations of people that had borne her thrust acceptance into her flesh, much like the man who covered her thrust into her flesh.

  Look, girly. Don’t you cry now. This is how we always did it. Be quiet and let him finish.

  Tonight, beside her lay a treasure. A softly breathing child, with eyes so large and beautiful and skin so much like milky satin that Moomi could not sleep. She kept opening her tired eyes to stare and stare at this gift. She had never felt love before. She had imagined a moment of love when the tall, wiry Ismail came to court her. But nothing in the world felt like this.

  “Oh, you’re a pretty, pretty child. My pretty, pretty child,” Moomi crooned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was no time for getting used to things. Moomi knew that a day without carrying her basket of wares into the streets of Cape Town meant a day without money wrapped in a handkerchief, tucked into her bosom. She woke Afroze from a warm bed and dragged the dazed child into the motions of her world. Soon they would become the accustomed motions of the child’s day as well. Packing the food, wrapping the freshly fried koeksisters in brown paper parcels. Two by two. Wrapping the warm rolls into pillows of paper, twisting the ends as if there was a candy inside, they placed them into a thickly laden basket of food that both woman and child could smell but would dare not eat. Eating the wares meant losing money.

  Money—warm coins from busy pockets and notes that were so crisp that they crackled like biscuits—that was all that mattered. The basket was heavy. Moomi carried it, so practiced now. But she was older. She transferred the heavy burden from hand to hand. She huffed and puffed, straining her legs to walk down the steep hills from the Bo-Kaap Malay Quarter into the city. She felt strains of pity as Afroze lagged behind, unaccustomed to walking distances. But she refused to pay for a bus. No cent could be spared.

  Afroze followed this woman, a stranger but somehow already familiar. She said nothing, asked nothing. Somewhere inside a night of sleep, with the soft breath of Moomi falling on her cheeks, she had fallen into a state of trust. No one had slept next to her before. Afroze’s forgetting continued with this simplest of acts: a child sleeping next to a mother. Moomi had willed it so. Be silent. And trust.

  Perhaps in awkwardness, or in attempts to comfort, Moomi carried on an incessant monologue. She spoke, wanting no response. The time had not come yet for an exchange, though that time would come. Moomi described each item of food to Afroze, who peered at each treasure with interest. She soaked up the descriptions of the perfect peach chutney, the way in which to break bread into chunks, rather than take an unforgiving knife to it.

  She had helped Moomi tie the strings around the little packets of homemade condensed milk cookies, even counting out loud each one that went into a package. And when the basket was full, she followed Moomi’s purposely muffled footsteps. A glance at the disarray of long arms and legs emerging from the couch in the lounge room told Afroze that silence was the best thing. The man, this person she now knew as father, lay snoring loudly in a gnarled posture. Spittle dotted his beard, and he had fallen asleep with one shoe on.

  Afroze giggled, and quickly put a hand to her mouth. Moomi returned the tiny giggle, her eyes sparkling. They both shared so much more than just a laugh as they looked at the sleeping man who had brought them to each other.

  Once outside, the cold Cape Town air sucked the wind out of both their bodies. Afroze had arrived without a winter coat. Brighton was a hot town, winter there had only asked for a light covering of the skin. But Cape Town in winter was a different animal. Moomi knew this. And she had given Afroze an old gray shawl of scratchy polyester masquerading as wool. Afroze itched and sneezed and trudged, dragging her tired body behind Moomi. But each time Moomi turned around to look, she saw Afroze moving. The child was exhausted. But she never stopped walking.

  On the steps to the museum on Strand Street, Moomi found her spot. A few feet away from her, another woman stood, similar baskets in hand, similar wares. Flower sellers mingled with fruit ladies, while those who sold crocheted doilies hung behind. An unsaid agreement between the basket ladies from the Malay Quarter wove among them like a strong thread. They only knew the similar things—the foods and cakes that they had learned to make even before they could reach the old coal stoves. So, they sold similar things, same things. Yet each woman would never compete against the other. They would never argue or fight over customers. The businessmen and office workers who could not get through their day without this tasty fare would haggle with these poor women for petty change. Trying to play one woman against the other for a tiny bargain, one that meant nothing to them. But when all the money was counted, it was this haggling that meant the world to each woman. A few cents lost was a sport to the buyer. A funny little game to play. But those few cents lost meant many things to the woman it had been denied. The women protected each other in a silent code and never undercut each other’s prices.

  Moomi placed the heavy basket on the floor. It would be at least half an hour before the first customers would arrive. The early-morning newspapermen, hot coffee in hand, craving a warm bread roll or a freshly fried donut. Moomi picked the basket back up and tucked layers of the old editions of the same newspapermens’ words underneath, hoping that the warm food would be insulated slightly against the ice-cold cement floor. Cold food meant more haggling.

  Around Afroze, a group of women formed a little curious battalion.

  “Ay, Salaamat, Moomina, what is this neh? Who is this child?” A tall, strong woman said, and poked the reddening frostbite of Afroze’s cheek.

  “Ja man, Moomi, what’s happening?”

  Moomi, once quiet, always watchful and ever smiling, came to life surrounded by the s
isterhood of women she had known all her life. Finally she could unburden. Finally she could talk to her own. She placed her hands on her hips and, shaking her head, she began a series of clicks and tsk-tsks that tightened the radius of her circle of sisters. She didn’t have to say a word. Her eyebrows arched up into her creased forehead and her pursed, fleshy lips told them all they needed to know.

  “Agh, no. That Ismail se baba, neh Moomi?”

  Ismail’s child. Ismail’s child. The whisper spread as the Cape wind began to blow harder.

  “Wait, you just wait here,” a small, pretty girl told Moomi, and with a flash of their eyes, the women secretly conveyed the message: don’t speak. Not in front of the child.

  A few minutes later, the girl appeared with a man at her side.

  “Ja Allah, Moomi, it’s bloody cold outside for this kinder, this child. Leave her with Oom Dawud. He’ll hide her inside the museum neh. What-what Oom, you take die dogter?”

  “Yey, Sis Noorien! What, you want me to lose my job what? I kan nie kinders in Wit mens museum bly nie. No. Agh. Nee, nee.”

  The old man backed away cautiously from the flashing eyes of the gaggle of women. He knew he had lost the battle, but at least he had tried anyway.

  The tall woman who had poked at Afroze’s frozen cheek stepped forward and spoke directly to the shivering man.

  “Dawud. Ek se vir jou . . . I am telling you. I am your vrou, neh, your wife. If you know what-what is good, tonight in the bed, neh, you take this baby inside the museum.”

  The women in the group began nudging one another, and a loud giggling emerged from the group. Tall, bossy Reyhana always got her way with her husband, Dawud, who was on duty as the security guard at the building.

  “Yo, missus. This is white man museum, neh. Jy weet. You know it’s trouble.” Dawud tried feebly to change the womens’ minds. But they laughed him off. “Ja, but whose kindtjie is this thin one?” He asked and scanned the group.