by Z. P. Dala
Nathan looked at me intently, then smiled a conciliatory smile. He held both his hands up, his rough palms facing me. Would he leave me alone now? So easily? I had spent too much time with men like Nathan, my own comrades, who hid their sinister poison behind false smiles.
“Okay . . . okay, Doc. No need to fret. Relax. Let me show you how I make tea. I’ll even make you a cup.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something wrapped in a dirty floral cloth that looked like a pillowcase from my bed. He set the shrouded object down on the table, and it was heavy enough to make a dull thud. Slowly, Nathan began peeling away the cloth, and then I knew for certain, it was one of my pillowcases. Just as he had peeled away layers of many willing and unwilling women’s undergarments, he revealed beneath the dirty cloth, a gun.
I lurched backward. I had seen so many guns. The men and women at our meetings carried their weaponry with pride, only relinquishing them to a huge, metal trunk hidden in a false-bottomed cupboard when the messages spread that we were going to be raided. The gun did not frighten me. And yet although I had helped to hide many weapons, I had never really been able to use one, or even to hold it for longer than the seconds it took to drop it into the metal trunk.
“Touch it,” Nathan said, slowly in a calm, soft voice.
I shook my head and stood up. “Nathan, I am really tired. I need to sleep.”
His sinister voice stopped me from moving. “Doc. I said . . . touch it.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, my voice rising.
His voice remained even and measured. “Doc . . . oh, our lovely Doc, with the hands that heal the white man and his white whores. I am beginning to think that behind all that glassy, stiff facade of yours, you actually desire the white colonial master. You know, ravage you, and all that . . . You know . . . ?”
“Please, Nathan,” I huffed out in a whisper, “please stop this now. I’m going.”
“You are going nowhere. Sit!”
He lunged forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me back to the chair. This time, my foot hit hard against the sleeping Freddie, who was not sleeping because he began stroking my ankle again, his fingers lurking on the skin beneath my trousers, where my sock ended. They advanced up my calf, and I felt like insects of every variety had crawled from the Earth’s bowels and onto my skin.
Nathan placed my trembling hand on his gun. I recognized the gun. It was a heavy prize for any of the men to attain, newly arrived in a complicated bootleg network from Angola, one of the places where the military wing of the Congress was training our soldiers in preparation for the day when we might have to make a peaceful struggle into an armed one. Like a steady stream of cigars and whiskey, weapons arrived in Durban; and in a complex network of secrecy, they were distributed among the comrades. I had always declined a gun, despite many of the women telling me that I should keep a loaded gun near me. They knew things I did not. Yet.
“Sylvie, sometime you might need it, not to shoot the colonial bastard, but to shoot the bastard who walks arm-in-arm with you as we march.”
I had never really understood those words. Now I clearly did.
I touched the metal. It was warm from its cozy home within Nathan’s jacket pocket. He took my fingers and made me stroke the barrel, and crooned a poem softly.
“She walks in beauty like the night. Like . . . blah blah blah, and blah . . . what’s the words, Doc?”
I stared, dumbfounded. Too shocked to say anything. Nathan laughed. I heard Freddie chuckle too.
“So, Doc . . . you want to be a revolutionary, hey? Well, let us have a lesson. We’ll call it . . . Lessons in Weaponry 101. Okay, brave Doctor Sylvie . . . show teacher your equality. Pick up the gun and shoot me!”
I pulled against his vice grip. I was embarrassed to feel tears starting to spring from my burning eyes. He saw the start of misty tears in my eyes, and pushed even further, his voice rising.
“Shoot! Stupid woman, I said pick up the fucking gun, and shoot! Here, let teacher show you . . .”
He yanked the gun with my hands still wrapped around it, and in a manic moment, pointed it at my head. I heard a distinct click. He had released the catch. I started shaking uncontrollably.
“So . . . you see, Doc. Can you see? You shake like a leaf inside a kitchen, yet you and your girls want to join us in the war? We don’t want you girls. This one is for the men, you hear? You learn, and you learn fast. Keep to the kitchen, lie in our beds, and make us some nice brown children. That’s all. Are we clear?”
In my steaming tears, the cocked gun at my forehead, held by my own hand, I knew that I had to get power back from this menacing man. We women had always spoken very hastily about the sexist and often appalling behavior of many of our own. We had never really sat together and spoke it out in full, gory detail. Each woman came up against it, but each woman quietly looked away and dealt with the worst things, crying alone into pillows. It would be weakness. Even our ideas and plans were taken by them, presented by them to satisfied leaders, high up and far, far away. But we still held on. We still pushed our way into meetings and marches.
I sat at the table with a gun about to go off, and I saw it clearly. Many of our men were sick. They were so steeped in hatred and years of racist violence meted out on them that the abused became the abuser. And we women were soft targets. Misogyny that hid inside veins of men who spoke of equality came out to dance when the alcohol flowed, or the night had been rough. They turned on us.
I looked up, glaring at Nathan; I nearly crossed my eyes looking toward the gun imprinting my forehead. But still, I glared.
“Put it away!” I said through clenched teeth.
Nathan didn’t move.
“Put the fucking gun away, Nathan. If something happens here, you are out in the cold. Even filthy Freddie wouldn’t be able to lie to get you out.”
His fingers slowly released the grip, and the painful metal point released its dark push into my forehead. Nathan reclicked the catch and calmly placed the gun back onto the dirty cloth. He looked away, his eyes searching for anything to focus on, anything but my crazy eyes burning holes in him. His vision settled on the enamel teapot.
“Relax, Doc. All I wanted was a cup of tea . . .” he muttered.
“Make your own fucking tea. And don’t come near me again. Understood?”
He kept his gaze away, and I bolted out of the kitchen to the sound of Freddie loudly chuckling.
“’Ey, Nates man. That wildcat got you good and solid. Watch out for that one . . . she’s not like the other chickies.”
My muscles were like rigid rods as I collapsed into my bed. It took a long time for my body and mind to uncoil and relax, and I never slept. Later that day, I sought out one of the women who sporadically came to stay at the apartment, a scary tanklike woman called Lulu.
“Get me a gun,” I told her. And she understood me.
“Good, my sister. This struggle is not peaceful. More than anything, we women have to watch out for ourselves and each other. Our enemies can be the ones sleeping in our own beds,” she said and handed me a 9mm semi-automatic.
“Maybe it is time we asked our cell leader to send you for training in Angola. You need to toughen up, Sylvie.” She looked into my eyes.
My emotions flared with a combination of exhilaration and fear, and I nodded at her. I had seen many men and women receive their orders to get military training, and I had seen the wild look in their eyes.
And indeed, in the tangled emotions of danger and death, of fervent desire for freedom, passion played out among our own members. Willing women, sometimes unwilling women—it did not matter in the heat of that city. A rolling, tangled body of one, making love to itself, satiating itself in the doom of a tomorrow that might never come. Touch me now. I may not be here tomorrow.
I shook with fear at each approaching moment when I anticipated being called up to go for military training. I learned how to use the pistol, but strong fear gripped me, thinking of
life in the field. I had seen too many mauled bodies of friends and comrades to even desire the day when I would be called up. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to stand in the face of it when the day came, but the day never came. My vacillating was answered the day I lost all my nerve, and suddenly I just wanted to be comforted like any frightened young woman.
Ismail.
Anger sat so well on that man. It was created for his face. He came to us, we were the only place he could go to to hide out. He had been beaten to a pulp. He had started a fight in a restaurant on the beachfront. He was a waiter there, and he had only been one for a week before he could stand it no longer.
He was the second son of a family of poor people. And like his namesake, and like all middle children, his name was forgotten in the writing of history. There was an Isaak in the great Book, but no Ismail, and this little ablation, the surgical removal of the illegitimate son, the one borne of the servant Hajra who inspired wars and gospels from the time of Abraham had the fire of the disregarded raging in his blood. There were those who bowed to the East and sang out their calls to prayer in a mournful muezzin’s voice who demanded the right given to Ismail, that Ismail was the one Abraham, the one they called Ibrahim, almost chopped up to honor God’s rather gruesome request. But the argument for Ismail the lamb, the forgotten child, wound itself into families. Every Muslim family had a firstborn, Muhammad, and always a second born, an Ismail who was almost always their forgotten one.
This Ismail was born causing turmoil from his first breath in this world.
Ismail was conceived in rage, and was born to rage. Created with a hungry belly that never felt satiated. He wanted everything. Every sight, every sound, every conversation, every corner of this world, Ismail craved to devour.
I, who had been searching for someone or something to subdue my fear, found the strangest attraction to this wild man who had arrived on my doorstep, bleeding but laughing like a rebellious vanquisher.
“Doctor Sylvie. This boy is beaten up very badly. The Special Branch are on his tail. We can’t send him to a hospital.”
“Why do the Special Branch want him? What did he do?”
I had been spending my nights at the apartment of a comrade in the chattels of Fountain Lane. This simply furnished apartment had become a hub of secretive activity; people came and went at every hour of the day or night. There was always food bubbling on the old stove, lest a hungry revolutionary come tumbling in. The camaraderie was heady; we felt as if we were perched on the edge of the world.
By day I worked in the white man’s hospital. By nights, we comrades skulked into one another’s homes. Any home would do. We read our journals by candlelight.
We spent hours discussing Gandhi. We read smuggled verses and banned books. And we spent hours teaching one another the coded language of our Congress. When they brought the bloody mess of a man into the room, everyone looked to me. Doctor.
Ismail. Beaten like a dog because the steak he had served a sugar baron’s daughter had too much salt. He had grabbed the steak from the lily-white hands, and in plain view of the tittering lunch ladies, had licked the steak with his tongue across its girth.
“Not salty now, Madam.”
I peeled off pieces of his shredded skin. He laughed. Throughout his painful treatment, of stitching and cutting, he continued to look into my face, chuckling in amusement.
“Pretty bloody thing, aren’t you, Doc?” he said, staring at me, and did not flinch when I lanced his wounded shoulder. I did not give him a painkiller.
“Well, we have gin, but you are obviously forbidden,” I remarked as he rolled in agony at my feet, chuckling madly, and trying to grab my breasts.
“Lovely doctor . . . my mother told me how I had devoured into her breasts with such force and rage when I was born that with my newborn toothless gums I drew blood. She has hated me since. I like your breasts, Doc.”
“Shut up while I stitch your face.”
The angry Ismail. He did not leave. He was a troublemaker, that I knew. But I felt like a woman when he wrapped me in turmoil. A bush warrior, a vigilante hard on his luck but with the charm of a Lothario, and the rakishness of a man who knew how much his anger attracted women. In this upside-down world of belonging to a struggle but belonging to no one at all, a lover comes to you with many trump cards. A woman may have all the intelligence in the world; she may marry her mind to a distant dream of truth, purpose, and the fight for larger things. But maybe the men were right when they kept us away from the limelight. They knew that our weak hearts would betray all the strong words in the world.
In the stupidity that grabs you in late-night trysts, you feel grateful for the wildest of forbidden kisses. Suddenly you are a giggling girl. Suddenly what you say is not important, and you begin to dream of other things. He only knows that he must grab you quickly, for if he did it tenderly, you might just start remembering the purpose you were placed on this Earth to fulfill. What a deep disappointment to the true face of a struggle hero, the day a woman loses her heart.
“Comrade, I am sorry. I am sorry, but I love this man.”
“You stupid woman. You bloody stupid woman. You will throw away years of training, years of our hard work to land in a man’s bed? I thought I knew you, Sylvie.”
“Comrade, I am sorry.”
“We are so close, Sylvie. We have mobilized. Our struggle against this apartheid bastard has now become the struggle of this world. Sylvie, the world is listening now. Our cells are placed all over this world, they are strong. We are ready. Now is our moment, now, Sylvie.”
“Comrade, I am sorry.”
“Stupid woman. Stupid. Go! Go follow your man. Like the Indian doormat you were born to become.”
“My comrade. I am sorry.”
The sour taste of disillusionment lies heavily at the back of your tongue until it becomes so familiar that you don’t recognize that every day you are swallowing gall. Mad passion can easily be transferred. Once you are passionate about people and fighting for justice. Your heart constricts and forces out the blood of an oppressed sufferer, you see the black and you see the white. Then you change. And you change because it has to be this way.
Now you become selfish; you can only see a narrow road, and on this narrow road walks you and walks a child that is yet to be born. Now is the moment when you choose.
Gladys Mabaso. I hadn’t seen her since we both were flung into working at different hospitals. Sometimes I heard news of her, news that she had run away from her work in the hospital in a predominantly black township, and had fled willingly to Angola to receive military training. When she appeared at my window, sent by her cell leader to recruit me, I could clearly see the ravages and rage of this military training on her face and body. She moved like a dangerous cat, and an equally dangerous soldier who thirsted for blood.
Like a thief, always sulky, she rapped twice on my night window. The sleeping man did not stir. The baby inside the stretched skin sensed that there was something more important than sleep, and became the only eavesdropper. The witness to how I had fallen.
“What is this? I see that the rumors are true, Sylvie,” Gladys whispered. She looked at my large, pregnant belly like someone would regard rubbish at a roadside. She prowled like a lioness in a kitchen that she hated. She peeped through a window; she could not settle. Her boots threatened to awaken the sleeping man.
“I am sorry, Comrade.”
“Bullshit, Sylvie. You don’t lie to me, you hear? You are not happy like this.”
“I am.”
“You are throwing us away. We had a mission, a purpose. Shit, you’re an idiot.”
“And this baby, Gladys?”
“Oh bloody hell, Sylvie. We all had babies. I left a daughter and a son in their beds when my handler called me. We were on the path, Sylvie. So close. So close.”
“Are you happy with your choices?”
“I am useful. Happiness is not a word.”
“I think I want to find tha
t word.”
“Disappointment.” Gladys spat on the floor.
My hand flew to my round belly. She smirked. She paced. As she lurked, her energy sucked the life and breath from my straining lungs. She looked thin and exhausted. She looked like she was on fire. I suddenly felt envy surge through my bladder, and then water flowed down my legs, onto the floor.
“Bloody hell, Sylvie. Clean yourself up. That baby is coming.”
The belly heaved high. She realized what was happening and swore loudly. The snoring, snuffling noises of the man in the bedroom stopped. Ismail called out my name in a muffled groan. I stared in shock and panic at the wet patch at my feet.
He called again. Closer now. Gladys sprang like a street cat toward the window. She turned to look again at me, holding my low-lying tummy in both hands, my hair unkempt, my thick socks stained wet.
“Sylvie! Sylvie!” Ismail shouted as he approached, “I told you I don’t like noise when I’m sleeping. You don’t bloody ever listen, you woman.”
Gladys, both legs out of the window now, her sneering face poked back to face mine. Is this what you wanted?
“Is this what you wanted? Go. Go to your man. I thought you were different.” She shook her head and whispered, “I will see you, my comrade. You know too much already. This is not over.”
Gladys was gone. And the baby came, breaking my bones, tearing me in half, arriving into my world on the day I realized I did not want this new life. I wanted the old one.
But Afroze, you were here. You looked like you would never have any flesh. You were so thin you looked like a baby bird that was dropped out of a nest. I could not look at you; I was afraid to touch you. I could have broken you. Ismail named you. He said it was the name of an Indian film actress that he loves. I thought it was too large a name for its small body to carry. Ismail said you would grow into the name. I think he meant me.
