by Rémy Ngamije
The Eternal Audience of One
The Eternal Audience of One
Rémy Ngamije
First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2019.
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© Rémy Ngamije, 2019
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d-PDF ISBN 978-1-928337-95-9
ePUB ISBN 978-1-928337-96-6
mobi file ISBN 978-1-928337-97-3
Cover design by Maggie Davey
Cover artwork © Sindiso Khumalo
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Efemia Chela
Set in Sabon 10.5/14pt
Job no. 003528
See a complete list of BlackBird Books titles at
www.blackbirdbooks.africa
For my mother, Gemma Akayezu (17 June 1954 – 5 November 2016) who taught me, Amélie, Angé and Brice how to be strong.
And for my father Gilbert Habimana who continues to show us how.
We are together, always.
Part 1
Crossroads of hello and goodbye
Ukize inkuba arayiganira
To survive the thunder is to tell the tale Rwandan proverb
Prologue
A long forgotten essay:
The Last Ticket Out of Town – by Séraphin Turihamwe
WINDHOEK HAS THREE temperatures: hot, mosquito, and fucking cold. The city is allowed two or three days of mild spring weather in early September before the unrelenting heat crowds them out until May. The summers are long and sweaty, so much so that job offers can be sweetened by throwing in the promise of air-conditioning (and an overseeing committee to adjudicate on room temperature disputes because white people do not know how to share). Summer nights are stifling. Cooling breezes heed their curfews and leave the night air still and warm from the day’s lingering heat. The departing sun brings out the mosquitoes. They are organised, they are driven. If they could be employed they would be the city’s most reliable workforce. Alas, people do not have my vision. From sunset to sunrise they make enjoying a quiet evening drink on a balcony a buzzing and bloody affair. June, July, and August are bitter and cold. An ill wind clears out the gyms. Running noses are the only exercise anyone gets in the winter.
The city is called a city because the country needs one but, really, city is a big word for such a small place. But it would probably be offensive to have a capital town or a capital village so someone called it a city. The title stuck.
Life is not hard in Windhoek, but it is not easy either. The poor are either falling behind or falling pregnant. The rich refuse to send the elevator back down when they reach the top. And since cities require a sturdy foundation of tolerated inequalities, Windhoek is like many other big places in the world. It is a haven for more, but a place of less. If you are not politically connected or come from old white money, then the best thing to be is a tourist. The city and the country fawn over tourists. The country’s economy does too. That is when it is not digging itself poor.
That is Windhoek. The best thing to do in the city is arrive and leave.
The mistake you want to avoid making is trying to “make the most of it”. My parents did that. I have not forgiven them for their sense of optimism. You will notice it in many people. There is a strange national pride I cannot explain, a patriotic denial of the reality.
Beware of that optimism. It will creep up on you. It will make you notice how, in the early morning, the streets are hushed and the city’s pulse is slowed down to a slow, rhythmic, nearly non-existent thump-thump. The only people to be seen on the streets are drowsy night shift security guards, the garbage collectors hanging from the back of dumpster trucks as they do their rounds, and a few stray cats. That is when it is at its best. Windhoek has not yet prostituted itself to neon and skyscrapers so a horizon is always a short hill climb away and nature still squats on its outer extremities. The views are spectacular.
The same optimism might lead an early riser to be up before the sun to see how the approaching light gently shakes the city awake. Alarm bells ring as children and parents prepare for school; the blue collars make their way to a bus or truck stop and wait to be carried towards places of cheap labour; and the white collars take their time getting to desks and offices. As the day brightens, the cracked tarmac which lines the city’s main arteries sighs and stretches, preparing for the new day when the increasing traffic will become a viscous mess of commuters and taxis.
When it is going at full tilt, Windhoek does so at a slow hum. It pays respects to the Gregorian calendar and then some. Mondays and Tuesdays are busy. Wednesdays and Thursdays are reserved for concluding auxiliary matters. On Fridays everything shuts down with the firm understanding that the weekend is in session and nothing and nobody should upset the established order of things. The city has strict boredom and business hours and it keeps them.
The autumn days after the high summer are the best. The sky is afire with an intense passion; it burns with bright orange and red hues which tug at unprepared heartstrings before blushing into cooler pinks that tickle the clouds. The day’s fervour cools down into violent violets as evening approaches.
Windhoek has good days and it has bad days. But, ideally, you should not be here long enough to know that. If you have made the mistake of tarrying too long in the city, and forgotten to purchase the last ticket out of town, you might have to do something more challenging: actually live here.
I
BEGINNINGS ARE TRICKY because there are no countdowns to the start of a start. There is nobody to point out that this moment right here is where it all begins. Life starts in the middle and leaves people trying to piece the plot together as they go along. The only certainty is this: everything that is not the end, must be the start of something else.
So disappointment must be curbed when one sits down to this story to find the trailers have already been missed and the action is already devolving. It would be rude to walk out in a huff, squeezing past sourly retracted legs while spilling popcorn all over the other patrons, to demand a refund or ask what time the second screening starts.
Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work towards some kind of ending. Endings are tricky, too. But that is a discussion for another time.
Right now, we are concerned with starts.
It occurred to Séraphin, as he sank lower into the uncomfortable three-seater sofa in the lounge, and not for the first or last time, that family was something which had to be survived. He reckoned the public acknowledgement of such a truth would irrevocably destroy the foundation of human happiness. Stock photography would never be the same again. Married men would have to admit secret crosstown visits to young mistresses who stoked and stroked their fading and flaccid fires with carefully timed moans and encouraging sighs. The joys of motherhood, stretched wombs and tolerated infidelities would have to be vaunted over career advancement, independence, and the freedom to find lovers who did not labour under the illusion that the female clitoris was in fact located somewhere between the navel and Alpha Centauri. Brothers would have to like brothers, and sisters would have to like leering uncles.
The length of the advancing day already felt insufferable: twelve or more hours spent cooking, cleaning, and arranging furniture in preparation for the New Year’s party with the handful of Rwandan families clinging together for community in Windhoek. He took private comfort in the fact that after tonight, it would only be two weeks before he could return to his university, with its
curated diversity, its distance from family, and its perpetual air of youth in the fickle-weathered city of Cape Town. Séraphin wondered whether his desire to be distant from his family marked him as an ungrateful son. Or whether his sentiments were mirrored in other twenty-somethings who flourished in the absence of parents and siblings, whose characters were compressed and restricted by the proximity of dinnertime disagreements about religion, education, or the trajectory of a career. What he knew for certain, though, was how easy he breathed as soon as his family was behind him, when the adventure and uncertainty of Cape Town lay ahead, with Table Mountain’s flat top commandeering the horizon, a monolith which said, “Here be adventure, kid. Welcome,” every time his bus pulled in to the Cape Town Central Station.
In South Africa’s Mother City he felt cramped corners of his being relax and stretch as he filled out his skin. Avenues of his mind opened up as he envisioned the people he could meet, the meandering conversations he would have about parties, picnics, and politics. He would be with his friends once more. They would pool their arrogant youth together and cash in on capers that would be the subject of sly jokes and cellphone chat groups.
Ah. Cape Town.
Séraphin lusted after the corner cafés that charged extortionate prices for fair-trade coffee and tiny organic sandwiches; the minibus taxis that roared up and down the city’s thoroughfares calling out destinations to potential passengers and obscenities to women; the sunset concerts, bookshops, and theatre performances; the predictability of the city’s ignorant privilege; the needling complaints of the city’s populace when the weather turned and brought the windy rains of autumn and winter; and the sprawling suburbs of struggle that rarely made it into public discourse.
Ah. Cape Town.
Even thinking about breathing in Cape Town’s smoggy summer air made Séraphin smile, but it also made him anxious about how little joy he found in spending time with his brothers, mother, and father. Home, to him, was a constant source of stress, a place of conformity, foreign family roots trying to burrow into arid Namibian soil which failed to nourish him.
Eish. Windhoek.
His attempts to craft a reasonable absence from home this year had failed.
At five o’clock that morning, the hour most loved by early-bird mothers and despised by night-owl sons living under their roofs, Therése, his mother, wide awake and humming with the energy of a woman determined to impress the heck out of all the invited families, came bustling into Séraphin’s bedroom, drawing back curtains and telling him to wake up. Seeing no movement from the bed she switched her tone. “Séra! Up! Now!”
The prone figure on the bed opened an eye. It said, “Mmm.”
Therése opened the windows, leaning out to smell the crisp morning air, tasting its coolness, wistful that it would not remain like this for long. By nine o’clock sweat patches would bloom under every shirt’s armpit. “We must get started,” she said.
Therése backed away from the window and noticed Séraphin had not moved. A spark of annoyance arced through her. She clapped her hands together. A loud crack, which could have expertly spurred on a team of wagon-pulling oxen, rang in the room. It had the desired effect. Séraphin opened his eyes and said, “Yes, Mamma, just now.”
“Now is now, Séra!” He heard her walk next door to Yves’ bedroom. A few seconds later another gunshot was heard. His younger brother was receiving the same treatment. He listened for the third and final explosion that would pull Éric, his youngest brother, out of his slumber. When it came it was even louder than the preceding two. It was followed by the sound of his mother walking back down the corridor. Séraphin shot upright and swung his legs out of bed. Even if he was old, even if he was about to become a graduate for the second time, and even if he believed his mother held a smidge more affection for him than she did for his brothers, he would not risk her ire so early in the morning. Not on a day when she would be operating at her most dictatorial.
Therése came gliding back into the room. “You are up,” she said. There was no question in her voice. That was the way it would be for the rest of the day. Everything would be stated without the intonation that suggested the possibility of free will. His mother would be a monstress, and all souls unfortunate enough to claim consanguinity with her were blood-bound to do her bidding.
“I wasn’t given a choice,” Séraphin replied.
“You don’t need a choice. You need a shower, breakfast, and then you need to arrange the lounge.”
“It’s arranged. It’s always arranged. Do you know how I know this? Because nobody sits in it.” Séraphin rubbed his eyes. “I think the lounge is fine, Mamma.”
“When it is your turn to entertain,” she began, “you will learn the difference between something being good enough for the family and something being good enough to avoid gossip.”
“So, the other families deserve a better standard of presentation than we do?” Séraphin attempted to look short-sold.
“You deserve nothing, Séra,” she replied. She crossed her arms on her small chest and drew herself up to her full height, which would have been just tall enough to reach Séraphin’s chest if he were standing next to her. “What I deserve are sons to help me prepare for today and, would you know it, I have just the ones to do it: the dish washer, the carpet cleaner, the window wiper, the sweeper, the potato peeler, the fire starter, the meat roaster, and the waiters, too.”
Séraphin groaned. Again he thought about what he would be doing if he were in Cape Town. What party – or partiesy – would he be gearing up to attend? What flirting and potential crumpling of bedsheets could have ushered in the New Year?
Ah. Cape Town.
Therése, as though she was pulling an important thought out of the air, said, “And, of course, there is that one son who has to wash the walls, sweep the yard, pull weeds from the interlocks, and make sure the house looks like it was built yesterday, all in forty-degree weather.” She added, more quietly, “That’ll be the one who gets out of bed last.”
Séraphin stood up with false alacrity. “Jeez, Mamma, relax. Your favourite son is on the job!”
Therése walked out of the room in a mock huff. Secretly, she was pleased to have amused her eldest son. Lately she had been feeling distant from him and his brothers. The fierce and fearful closeness that had kept them close throughout their flight from Rwanda to their eventual settling in Namibia was dissipating. She felt as though her sons did not need her kind Rwandan words and comforting proverbs; they had developed their own fluent and unassailable English wit, picking up the language so quickly when they had been younger that even an answer posed in Kinyarwanda would elicit an English response. Now they spoke using words and phrases which seemed to contradict the meaning of what was said. Bad was good, good was not so good, and ill did not mean sick. Their Kinyarwanda was used sparingly, for politeness, and to wheedle favours from her. She made another resolution to speak only Kinyarwanda to them, as she so often did when the threat of lost culture weighed heavily on her.
Séraphin stretched. “Just two more weeks after tonight,” he said aloud.
He walked to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He leaned on the wide sink, his hands resting on opposite edges, and flexed and rolled his shoulders. His reflection looked back at him in the smudged cabinet mirror.
“Survive them,” it said.
“And then love them,” a second voice replied.
“Thank goodness, it won’t be too long now.” A third voice.
“Just two weeks and then — ” said a fourth.
“ — Cape Town. Soon,” sighed a fifth.
“Pity soon can’t be now,” Séraphin said.
“It never is, Séraphin,” said a sixth. “Now is unfortunately now.”
“Well,” Séraphin said, straightening, “let’s get this day over with.”
The morning passed in a blur of cleaning with the occasional berating from Therése about lacklustre dusting, inattentive mopping, negligent decor
arrangement, distracted potato peeling, wasteful and uneven chip slicing, and shoddy dishwashing which would, according to her, shame the entire family when the visitors arrived. Exasperated, Séraphin waited until his mother’s attention was occupied by Éric’s execrable weed pulling. When he heard the flow of Kinyarwanda exclamations and criticisms add to the heat to which his younger brother was condemned he sought the temporary solitude of the lounge.
As a rule Séraphin tried to keep his sojourns to this city to a minimum by spending as much time as he could at university in Cape Town, but even he could not lie away the duration of the campus’s December holidays this year. There were no holiday courses to take for extra but unnecessary credits, or student jobs to fill out like in previous years. With his vacation work applications having been denied by all the Cape Town law firms to which he had applied he was left with no choice after his last examinations but to return home.
The rejections had been uniform in their ardour when it came to his academic credentials. They were also firm and cool when they stated their reasons for not taking him on. They all had a winsome segment about how they could not, by law, accept a non-South African or non-permanent resident for the vacation candidate attorney position, trailed by the mandatory best wishes for all that he might do in his future endeavours. Séraphin had tried to make light of the bruising rejections by searching for an email which broke the well-established corporate rejection formula. The best one came from a young, personable director who ran a boutique law firm who had written a direct rejection which had genuinely impressed him.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Vacation work application
Hi Séraphin,
Hope you are well. No matter what you said in the interview – which was impressive, by the way – I know you applied to other law firms and I know we were not your first choice either. At best, we were a choice, but not the choice. I also know your inbox will be filled with rejection emails because the law is the law and nobody is going to risk their affirmative action rating by taking you on.
