by Z. P. Dala
I nodded. Somewhere in the bedroom the baby mewled. I did not move my body from the hard-backed chair I had slumped in, listening to Gladys talk, listening to the sound of my own voice, heard again after such a long time of silence.
“I’ll arrange for a nursemaid. Someone we all know and trust. You have important things to do.”
It began immediately. In the rasping loud quiet of my shuffling slippers on the polished, wooden floors, I heard myself say time and time again: “Well, you did ask for a greater life. Well, you did ask.”
Beatrice arrived. Beatrice was not her real name. She took the baby away from my body, and I felt greater relief than I have ever felt. And inside my relief I hated myself for feeling it. But there was no moment for it. The baby was tended to. That would do.
Would she know I am her mother?
It does not matter now.
Just work fast, Comrade. Work fast. Our good people are breaking their bones and shattering their skins for something greater than all this, you see. The time is soon coming.
Beatrice was a trained soldier in the guise of a maternal nanny. She knew intelligence skills, which I was soon to learn. In her feeding and burping and tying of pink ribbons in the child’s hair lurked a sense of purpose that I would soon come to reprise as my own. Her strong limp, that listing to the left, the one deaf ear, told me that Beatrice, who sang songs to the baby, had lived another more sinister incarnation. We never spoke of it. When the baby slept, she taught me all she knew. She taught me the coded language of the military wing of the Congress; she taught me stern protocol within a rebellious army, where the world imagined a gaggle of rowdy terrorists.
Yet they were the deepest thinkers and philosophers of their time. Forced to study in bushes, they learned fast, and so did I. My house began its preparations. The strands of my place in the large black, yellow, and green fabric of the African National Congress became woven and they glowed like the most beautiful sun. A free sun, under whose rays everyone was equal.
My home became a safe house. And a bush hospital. I was terrified. But there was no time for fear.
The first arrived so soon. In a beautiful woven web of messages that held no words, it became my legacy: this house, this town. The place where they brought the broken ones.
I followed instructions sent to me in a code that took me days to decipher. Beatrice eventually tutted and pushed me aside from my huddled place at my mahogany desk that smelled so much like my father—the linseed oil and the lavender oil polish scent never quite covered it up. She spoke with her eyes, nodding as I learned the code. I had forgotten it so quickly, but it soon flooded back, much like love. I never really forgot how to do it. Much like love, chased it away from my memories and I beat it away with a stick, but it was me. I was it. The training came back.
The cottage had to remain, for any eye to see, a pretty little home for a young doctor and her child. The more feminine, garish, and lacy the better. Act in this play, my comrade. No one must know that in the back there is a little house, a khaya, where there are supposed to be broken tools and discarded baby toys lies a haven.
A dark home, a safe home, a place for those to collect their thoughts before being taken away for training or to hide away permanently. Inside the dirty two-roomed outbuilding with crumbling walls, a full operating theater mushroomed out of need and pain.
Slowly I began accumulating supplies smuggled to me. In my baby’s packs of diapers, in bundles of noisy toys, and in sets of dotty little dresses lay vials of morphine. In that surgery, pain was the largest dragon we would ever slay.
In their moments of intense raw pain, even the best of soldiers, men who had vowed to bare their bodies to a hailstorm of bullets for the sake of freedom, became weak and begged to be set free. Their bodies lay open, but they wore their hearts on their sleeves as they were roughly carried in at midnight, gritting their teeth, biting their very tongues and holding onto my hands as I pushed brandy down their throats and rationed their beautiful morphine dreams.
In my hurried sutures, there lay sewn-together secrets. Only I would know that in their deepest searing pain, most men would have renounced their activism. Only I knew how they cried that freedom for all was not worth this. But I would never tell their secrets, and I would always know that what happens between two people in the throes of the most burning pleasure and pain becomes very watery when the dawn comes in.
Stitched up, hobbling, they always awoke from their fevers craving to fight for our cause again. With hooded eyes they watched me, hoping I would never tell that in our dance together the night before, they had screamed otherwise. When they left me again after their days of battling demons, I would always reassure them with a light touch on their shoulders before they were huddled onto the floor of rusty vehicles, covered with burlap bags.
“Go well, Comrade,” I would say.
“Amandla!” they would whisper.
Within a thick dirty sack, a pumped fist would show through, the way a baby’s balled-up fist sometimes shows from within a womb, an imprint on a mother’s stretched skin.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Motherhood does not need the mother. This daughter grew beautifully despite me. Despite the fact that I never smothered her mornings with kisses because I was too exhausted from a long night of holding down a thrashing man, taking his superhuman beatings when I refused to stick a needle into his skin and take the pain away. The ration of morphine was small. But those in pain pay no heed to this. All they see is their own suffering, and they are killers in their souls. Their strength surprises even themselves when they lunge at me from their blood-stained cots, and through gritted teeth and eyes of menace tell me they would easily strangle me with bare hands if their pain was not quelled.
I became strong too. I handled them with all the force and anger I could muster, pushing their sewn-up bodies back to supine weakness, where I could stand over them and hold their faces close to my own, their hot breaths mingled with mine, and tell them that this was it. This was all they were going to get. I once held a man at his throat, pushing down hard. He had shattered a femur after jumping from a three-story building, hiding precious documents inside his clothes. I had no morphine to give him, but I hit him clear across his head with a rough plank. I muffled his mouth with a rag soaked in brandy and, as Beatrice held him down, I took advantage of his daze and pulled with brute force at his ankle. The bone cracked into a set. He bit so hard on that brandy-soaked cloth that he broke teeth. He had enough strength in him to hit me clear across the room.
The next morning I stumbled from his delirious bedside and into the kitchen, looking like a casualty. My daughter was seated at the kitchen table, a plump toddler of three. She was dreaming lazily and giggling at the dust motes. She looked up from her cold porridge and saw me stagger like a drunken woman into the room. My ear still rang from the blow on the side of my head. The child’s jaw dropped open, seeing me. As the years passed, I avoided the child, though I always knew where she was. Her giggles and little words fell like feathers in a house that was hard and unrelenting.
I managed to always slip from her gaze, leaving a room if she tottered in dragging a toy, or not looking up from the most mundane of tasks when she wandered around me.
But I looked at this morning child, her curly hair tousled from sleep, those little mewing sounds that exasperated me in all their benign innocence. How she found the beauty in the ugliness and managed to live in innocence made me envious. I wondered if this girl would ever know how to stab at the heart of hurt.
I wondered if something so fragile inside her little chest would one day break into pieces, leaving behind shrapnel that would become a part of her flesh. I knew that she would suffer much, because I knew her. And I knew me. She was too trusting. I was too remote.
She, like all children, did not know the bane of hate. They loved. I had once watched her put her entire soft arm into the jaws of our ferocious guard dog. A brute of an animal. A Brutus. She did not doubt even
for a second that the massive, salivating jaws would ever betray her and clamp down onto her sweet flesh. And the dog did not close his jaws. He only growled a warning, which she threw off in a child’s laugh. She withdrew the hand and kissed the dog on his head.
Seated at the kitchen table, her wide eyes stared at the bruise on my face. And as she had once kissed a mad dog, she smiled at me in unintentional affection.
“Ma,” the word spouted out of her fat lips, and she shocked herself by saying it.
I knew that she was of my own flesh, that she had never been much for movement when she lay dormant inside my body, that the moment she was born and handed to me, she would not close her eyes, and lay there staring unnervingly, deeply into me until I could stand it no longer and placed her on the bed beside me. But she had never shut her eyes, which were large and luminous like twin candles, and I had quickly turned out the lights so that I would not have to look at them. They burned even in the darkness.
“Beatrice,” I rasped, realizing that a rising panic had fluttered into me, not knowing how to stem a threatening tide of something I did not recognize. It felt like a magical pull, a rope that made me want to glide effortlessly into this baby embrace. It frightened me. It shook the hard resolve that I guarded with a brittle, shaking hand.
She lifted her hand from her porridge bowl and reached it to me, opening and closing the fist. “Twinkie twinkie witt-will star, how I wand-wer what you ARE . . .” She sang, lisping and accentuating the last word with a porridge-covered smile, and something in me started to scream.
The child was trying to comfort me with her lisped nursery rhyme.
“Bea . . . Bea . . . Beatrice . . .” I whispered. I backed away. From my own singing child. From my own sleepy girl. She was destroying me.
“Take . . . Take . . . her away. Take her away,” I gasped as the woman who did all the things for my child that I never had done, lunged past me and scooped the bewildered baby away.
“Mommy sick . . .” I heard the child say.
“Yes, Mommy sick.”
I rushed to the sink and splashed water on my face and sank down onto the kitchen floor. The navy blue sari that I wore splayed over the tiles and I gathered up the fabric and bunched it underneath me, fingering and troubling the soft chiffon until I pulled a misshapen hole in it. I could hear the child squealing in delight on the little swing set that had been set up for her in the dingy yard. My breaths slowly centered downward from that high and dangerous place that I had been sucked into. But inside this vortex the most horrible feeling in the world had taken hold of every part of me. An ache that was as sweet as it was searing, an invisible-visible weight on my soul. I felt it inside my womb. I have wronged this child.
I heard her laugh again. Another woman swung my child in the air. Another woman caught her. Another woman held her close and breathed in the buttery scents of her, murmuring in a voice that I could never have owned, the soft nothings that a child is reared on. I hated that she thrived, so firm and rosy and like a blooming tree. I hated that she did this despite me. Without me. But my hatred was for me. I had done this, and I had to run through the gamut of my own choices. That child would always thrive.
“Where Mommy?” I heard her say.
“Come to me. Mommy’s here,” another woman replied. Mommy is here.
Afroze stopped looking for me when she was four. She did not wander the house trying to catch me in corners. That early morning after her sixth birthday when I ran wildly around the house stuffing her clothes and toys and books into plastic bags because we had no time to look for suitcases, I refused to look at her. I knew she watched me in my frenzy and I knew that she did not understand any of it. When I pushed her body away from mine toward a car spewing fumes into the clear air, I finally looked at her and she was looking at me with the final look of desperation. Stop all this now, Mommy, and take me into your arms.
“Please, please take the child. Take her now. Anywhere, just drive her away from this house. Take her to the Seedat family across town. Now. Do it. Please. Here, a note. Take it. Tell them to phone her father. Now, please take her away. Now.”
Afroze heard only part of the conversation. It was the worst part.
Did she see me standing at the window watching her go? Did she hear my words, whispered over and over again as she was driven away?
“My daughter. My child. Always remember my name.”
The Special Branch came for me an hour later. Secrets were always exposed, and I had waited for this day. So many men and women, soldiers of the struggle, had passed through my home. I had bathed and fed them, I had stitched them up and sent them back into the world, I had poured medicines down their throats, I had bandaged their gaping wounds with stringy compresses that had been washed too many times.
Their names and their records lay hidden in flimsy files, locked up in the khaya. When the police looked, all they saw were rats, dirty cloths, broken implements. We hid them so well, the only records indicating that any of those people ever existed, or that they had fought for our freedom. The stink of that old building gave us a helping hand. The police wanted answers, but they were too disgusted by rats and filth to go digging for them. The piles of papers remained there, underneath debris. They were my true children. Not Afroze. Them.
They had sworn at me, professed love to me, beat me, and kissed my hands. But the game was up. As I always knew it would be.
“Run, Doctor, you still have time. I’ll tell someone to bring a car.”
“No. I will stay. Let them take me.”
“But you will go to prison, Doctor.”
“I will join my comrades then.”
Doctor Sylvie Pillay was arrested on October 26, 1977, under Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967. She was detained without trial at the Pretoria State Prison in solitary confinement, along with several other female comrades, for a period of 57 days and nights. After severe interrogation and torture, almost all of it undocumented, she refused to provide the Special Branch of the South African Police with any information on her patients or their whereabouts. She was offered opportunities to give up her comrades who were in safe houses across the land, or to divulge the location of her meticulous medical notes and files. She did not resist arrest and spent much of her time in silence. She was denied access to any reading material, and only received a Bible to read after intervention from her lawyer. This was the only real help her figurehead lawyer ever gave her.
Her mind eventually fractured, after days of torture and threats to her child’s life. She became suicidal and severely depressed, suffering hallucinations and episodes of self-injurious behavior. She was released, without trial, without record of arrest, and returned to her home under a constant and ever-looming police presence. She remained watched and harassed, all her activities and correspondence closely monitored. After a long period of dormant recovery, she was allowed to see patients again but had to confine her practice to nonwhite tuberculosis patients. She silently and reclusively spent her decades this way, and when the news of freedom came one day, she found out only accidentally. No one remembered her name.
PART THREE
IT WILL BE KNOWN
CHAPTER ONE
When a town sleeps, drugged on the potion of secrets, there comes a moment when oblivious slumber betrays itself. Anything in a cage will at some time stand up and snarl. The nature of dormant life is that somehow, even for a fraction of a moment, consciousness rises from underneath layers of mud and rears its head.
Brighton chose the weekend of Easter, every year, to open the gates and unlock the chains, letting itself loose. And then after it has spent itself, it returns to its drowse for yet another year. On the weekend that Christ was crucified, all the gods in the sky agree, just once, to a truce of festival. It is on the day of the crucifixion, a Good-Enough Friday, that the people of Brighton, in their diverse calls to the heavens, put on displays and shows that amaze, beautify, fortify, and satisfy. Good enough to last an entire year to come.
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Dawn finds Mass being held at the otherwise useless Norwegian Mission Chapel, in the midst of angels singing hymns and overenthusiastic evangelist pastors expounding loud sermons in an accent that veers strangely toward an American twang.
Waiting their turn, like patient but irascible children, the Hindu devotees of the Shiva temple across town begin meticulous ritual preparations for a festival in honor of the harvest goddess, Amman, and Muruga, the son of Lord Shiva, who is a prince of war and mountains. The brother to the amiable, jolly elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, Muruga governs force, where Ganesha presides over the softer things in life, like art and the writing of letters.
The festival, the Kavady Festival, has devotees design and decorate large chariots to be pulled with fervor and small wooden ones to be borne on the shoulders like a burden that is placed at the feet of the gods.
During this auspicious Friday, it also being a Friday, stirring their pots of meaty broths, eager Muslim brothers await the late-night call to prayer. Their adept musicians end the night with their instruments and voices in a night of Qawali singing—rapturous poems of trancelike devotion, sung in honor and praise to the Sufi saint Khwaja.
Afroze awakened with abrupt wide eyes. “Oh, I am still here.”
She had been dreaming vividly of sitting in Moomi’s kitchen, listening to the loud clinking noises of Moomi’s metal spoon clattering against the tin pot of stew bubbling on the stove, rapidly mixing her own blend of spices and chopped tomatoes in a cacophonous din, the sounds an unhappy woman creates in her kitchen.
When Afroze’s eyes sprang open, she almost exclaimed out loud, “Moomi, why so much noise?” But she quickly realized that she was lying in her childhood bed, in her mother’s house, and the sound of metal was coming from the ringing of the bells at the temple nearby. Even though she had left Brighton a six-year-old child, the memory of the Good Friday festivals remained embedded in her brain. They had been her happiest times, being carried on the shoulders of one of her mother’s lovers, or held tightly by her nanny, watching her favorite festival in all its grandeur. The Hindu festival of Kavady.
