by Rémy Ngamije
“Did he finish with the garden?” Séraphin asked.
“No,” Therése replied with exasperation in her voice, “but we need to do other things now. Éric is busy with the chips. But you could have helped Yves, it would have looked much better.”
“Ah, Mamma, you know how allergic I am to manual labour,” he replied.
“You are lazy, Séra.” She walked back into the kitchen. He could hear the sound of glasses being placed on a tray. Séraphin reached for his phone once more. Still no messages.
“I’m not lazy, Mamma,” he called out after her. “I just don’t want my brothers to stand in my shadow, you know, so I’m getting out of their way and giving them chances to be great.”
From the kitchen his mother laughed. “If you are so concerned about your brothers’ greatness, then you will help Yves get the fire going. He looks like he’s struggling with it.”
“Tell him to use the Fire of Christ that burns within him. He was confirmed not too long ago, right? There should be enough left to light the braai.”
Séraphin waited for his mother’s response. Blasphemy was always a shortcut to good fun in the household. He could hear glasses clinking against one another as Therése carried a tray into the dining room. “Séra, I do not like those jokes. And you had better not make jokes like that later if you don’t want to scandalise us,” she said. She came into the lounge and fixed him with a look. “Today you will be polite, Séraphin. Today you will be nice.”
“I’m always nice, Mamma,” Séraphin said.
“Sometimes,” his mother said. “But you will not do that thing where you make people feel dumb around you.”
“What thing?”
“The word she is looking for is sarcastic,” Yves said, walking in, his hands black and sooty from handling charcoal. His usually light brown skin had taken on the just-burnt dark brown of someone who had been in the sun too long. He smiled at Séraphin. “Try not to be yourself today, man.”
“Et tu, Yves?” Séraphin stabbed his midsection with his cellphone.
“Yes. That is the word. Sarcastic. Don’t do that. Today you will be nice, Séra,” Therése said. She went back into the dining room and started placing the glasses on a small serving table. “And go and help your brothers,” she called out.
“I just got the fire going. It will be a while before we can braai the meat. Will you do that?” Yves asked.
“As far as I’m concerned, brother, I’m here to eat. Nothing else,” Séraphin replied, loud enough for his mother to hear. “Like most Rwandans.”
“If you don’t help, you aren’t eating,” his mother retorted. On her way back to the kitchen with her tray she paused in the lounge doorway. “What are you doing in here anyway, Séra?”
“I was talking to my girlfriend,” Séraphin lied. A look from Yves let him know he was prepared to back his play. They both waited for the anticipated reaction.
“Do not talk about such things around me,” Therése said quickly, as though she could undo what had been said.
“What things?” Yves pressed.
“Girlfriends,” Séraphin said.
“Girlfriends?” Yves’s face was confused as his tongue tasted this new word.
“You know, girls who are friends,” Séraphin replied, “and sometimes more than friends, if you know what I mean.”
Yves and Séraphin watched their mother inhale sharply, working herself into a righteous fury.
“They have,” Séraphin made a cupping motion around his chest, “abundant affection—”
“—and no lack of attention,” Yves completed the sentence by attempting to lift an impossibly heavy derrière behind him.
Séraphin cackled and swished an imaginary lock of hair. “They have long hair, the white ones. They let you touch it if you have the right accent.”
“And longer hair, the black ones,” Yves said. “But they’ll only let you touch it if you’ve paid for it,” he added with exaggerated academic airs. “Do yours ask you for such things, brother?”
“Mine are white or Coloured, Yves,” Séraphin replied. “The hardest part of my day is remembering their names. So many plain names. I can’t remember if Jane is Mary or Ashley, or if Allison is Samantha.”
“What is there to remember, eh?” Yves asked. “You call them by their name the first time, and then you call them ‘babe’ or ‘honey’ after that. No need to remember names.”
“I never thought of that. I should try it out.”
Séraphin and Yves looked at their mother who was ruffled by the indecency pouring from their mouths. Séraphin stood up from the couch and came to stand in front of her, looking down at her. He hugged her as though giving her comfort. “I’m so sorry, Mamma,” he said gently, “that you have to find out like this where our allowance is going. But, you know, concubines do not maintain themselves.”
Over his mother’s head Yves stifled laughter by covering his mouth, forgetting the soot on his hands. When he pulled them away his mouth was covered in black smudges.
“Shit,” he said.
“Enough!” their mother shouted. Séraphin felt a finger poke him sharply in the ribs. “You boys are sick with girls. It is all I hear about these days. You are going on about these … these things – ”
“What things?” Séraphin asked, ready to start the conversation carousel again.
“Séra! Yves! Stop it. We have a whole party to prepare for. Go and make yourselves useful.” Therése put some steel in her voice to get her sons moving. She looked at Yves, “That language is not welcome in this house. You can swear in your own house, not in mine.”
“Okay, okay.” Yves held up his black hands in apology.
“And you,” she said, rounding on Séraphin, “you will not bring up girls in my presence. Not again, you hear? Not after – ” She let the unfinished sentence hang in the air and Séraphin, who knew what was left unspoken, nodded. He smiled in apology at his mother, repentant until his next trespass. Yves, confused, was about to ask what was going on but a look from Séraphin cut him off. They had had their fun. Now it was time to let their mother be and get back to work.
“I’ll go and get some juice,” Séraphin said.
“Do you need money?” Therése asked. Sensing that the ribbing was over, she tried to co-ordinate a smooth transition back into party preparations.
“I have enough from yesterday’s grocery run.” Séraphin squeezed his cellphone into his pocket and strolled to the front door, which Yves had left open. Yves reminded him to get only the purest fruit juice.
“The nectar of the gods, bro,” Yves said. “Don’t shame this family by bringing anything with preservatives in it. We have standards to maintain.”
“You boys are fools,” Therése said. “You want people to judge our hospitality? You do not know how these things go. If we were back in Rwanda – ”
“– we would be dead.”
Whenever their mother began heckling them by calling up bygone times in Rwanda they instantly cut it off with the certainty that in days not too far past they would most certainly be dead and no amount of tradition, pure fruit juice, or carefully arranged lounges would save them. Neither of them noticed the pained look which flickered on their mother’s face, vanishing as Therése focused on the day’s remaining and incomplete tasks. “Yves,” she said, with more authority, “the fire. And get those dirty hands out of the lounge. Séraphin, juice!” She whisked herself into the kitchen.
“Shame,” Yves said.
“Considering I was born out of wedlock, you would expect her to be a little more chilled about—”
A metal tray banged down on a kitchen table.
“SERAPHIN! YVES!”
The front door slammed as Séraphin departed for the shops.Yves made a determined dash for the bathroom to wash his hands.
In the kitchen, Therése looked at the tray she had slammed on the table, indentations deforming the pattern of red and white roses that decorated its surface. She wondered
where she had gone wrong in nurturing her sons that they could make their terrible jokes with such impunity, that they could discuss women in front of her. She wondered where she had learned the patience to put up with them. She noticed the pot of chips bubbling away on the gas stove. Éric was nowhere to be seen.
“Merde!” Therése walked over to the pot and stirred the chips. She shouted for Éric to come to the kitchen and attend to them but her youngest did not materialise. Again, she lamented the fall of filial respect. This, she thought, is not how things would have gone in Rwanda. There children had respect. But in Namibia, quite the opposite seemed to be true. Therése’s diagnosis of the source of the moral infection which ran rampant throughout her offspring were two things: television and music videos.
It was not just the television she blamed. She blamed the high school they had attended, pricey, with its expensive ideas about how children should not be beaten. Therése blamed cellphones, the way they stole her sons’ attention. She blamed the internet and how its content was the sole subject of conversation at dinnertime, a vast wilderness of sound, pictures, and videos she could never keep up with long enough to say anything interesting or amusing to her sons. Therése blamed the friends they hung around with. One of Yves’s had even gone as far as calling her by her first name at supper once and she, unwilling to cause offence, and to diffuse the palpable silence that had descended upon the table, had laughed and passed the peas anyway. Later that evening she had pulled Yves aside and said, “Don’t bring that rude boy to supper again.” She felt guilty about it the next day and apologised for being old-fashioned and even just saying that seemed to age her twice as fast.
Mostly, though, she blamed a downed plane, radio broadcasts, the resurrection of long-held ethnic hates, Western indifference, nights of fear and days of hate which eroded carefully built futures and devoured connected clan pasts, forcing families to survive first, and then learn to live and, hopefully, love later. After all, she told herself, you only love after you have survived.
And her family, thankfully, mercifully, had survived.
II
WINDHOEK-WEST, in December, is a sprawling melange of ghost mansions, boxy business enclaves, and desolate streets wilting beneath the sun. Ordinarily, the suburb is astir with residential and minor commercial activity but at the tail-end of the year it becomes still. During the day, the pot lid hot temperatures drive whatever is left of Windhoek-West’s life into air-conditioned or fanned living rooms and sweaty siestas. At night, red pilot lights perched above garage doors and windows are all that remain to alert potential burglars that an armed response team is a short drive and rough beating away. As the city’s life migrates to the falsely tolerated cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean in tourist-swamped seaside towns, or crowded and boisterous family gatherings in Namibia’s northern and southern regions, Windhoek-West changes from a chatty, middle-class suburb and becomes a taciturn purlieu.
Besides a few families on Séraphin’s street the only people who remain behind are the dead classical composers and scientists that live a second but anonymous, mispronounced, and misspelt life on street plaques. Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Puccini, Strauss, Schubert, and Verdi; Behring, Best, Curie, Jenner, Pasteur, Roentgen, Watt – their importance is irrelevant trivia to many of the suburb’s residents. In days past, though, they were the heated subject matter inside a grey Volkswagen Jetta carrying Séraphin, Yves, and Éric to their private high school, where intimate knowledge of such personalities impressed teachers but failed to win the affections of blossoming teenage girls.
The three brothers tried to outdo each other by stating the streets’ namesakes and their achievements. Their general knowledge about such matters became a source of pride for the car’s other, silent, passenger, Guillome, who, an intellectual in exile, always worked tirelessly to ensure that his sons’ home environment was hostile to ignorance. He would deny his growing boys nothing if it was in a book, and permit them to watch television for hours on end provided they watched nature, history, and science programmes. Each evening when he came home from work he would ask, “So what have we learned about the world today?” and smile at the ignition of competition to impress him with the world’s knowledge. They would ply him with facts about star-nosed moles and Amazonian bird-eating spiders large enough that their footsteps could be heard on the forest floor. The bizarre, the carnivorous, and the creepy captivated their young minds. As they progressed through primary school, bound for high school, their vocabularies burgeoning, Séraphin and Yves had slowly opened up to current affairs, Greek mythology, the First and Second World Wars, and the construction of the modern and ancient wonders of the world. Éric remained fascinated with crawling things as his elder brothers, camped on puberty’s doorstep, moved on to other interests.
Of the three, Séraphin continued to consume the world in chunks, through books, television, and radio stations, fascinated by the world beyond the stifling Windhoek confines. He watched travel programmes with a desperate longing to see the human-saturated streets of New York, Tokyo, and Lagos, and to taste the wriggling delicacies of Asia and South America. Guillome noted, with some trepidation, how vividly Séraphin’s conversations about his future life were always in some far-off place, and always in the singular, as though he would head off into the wide world with nary a relative or friend in the world.
“And why would you go to Oslo?” Guillome asked him one night at supper. Therése had managed to get hold of some cassava flour and leaves from a friend and had cooked ugali and isombe, served with a portion of thick, saliva-draining brown beans. The boys were embroiled in their usual general knowledge feuding and Séraphin had mentioned he would someday travel to Oslo to see the fjords.
“I saw a Ford,” Yves contributed, “it was red, with a big spoiler. So you don’t have to go all the way there to see it. And I saw it first.”
“No, dummy,” Séraphin replied, “fjord – like f-yord, not the car.”
“Don’t call your brother a dummy,” Therése snapped. “Can’t you explain things to your brothers without being rude?”
“Where did you learn about fjords, Séra? At school?” Guillome asked.
Séraphin swallowed a big gob of ugali. “Boy, a book by Roald Dahl, he’s the one who wrote that other book about the smart girl, Matilda.”
“So, Séra, you want to visit the place because Roald Dahl wrote about it?”
“Yes,” Séraphin replied. “It sounds nice.” Séraphin paused to put some food on his fork and then added, “And far.”
Therése and Guillome shared a look. Séraphin was undergoing changes, spending more time in his bedroom alone and not joining in his brothers’ games. These days he expressed himself with sharp, cutting comments which worried his parents with their cruel creativity. When corrected he would fall silent, listening to the admonishment attentively. At the same time Therése noted how distant he seemed, as though he was in some interior world with its own constitution, where a different judgment was being handed down. He offered apologies if they provided a shortcut for his release from reprimands. What kept Guillome and Therése awake in their bedroom, though, talking in muted voices about the day’s activities, the next day’s plans and troubles, and their sons, were Séraphin’s silences. They were brooding, inwardly cavernous, palpable – Therése almost felt like apologising when she spoke to him when he was in this state. Guillome would calm her down by saying Séraphin was just a boy – that was how boys were sometimes. Soon, Guillome said, Séraphin would be his cheerful self again.
“Of course,” Therése prodded once more, at the supper, “you would want to go with Yves and Éric and us, no? A holiday in Norway would be fun together?”
“No,” Séraphin replied and Therése watched as her son retreated to that inner place she could not understand. He seemed to look out at the world from a great height, inspecting the world and sighing at its myriad disappointments. “I read somewhere that people are much better in memories. And memori
es don’t take up so much luggage space or need visas.”
A forkful of isombe followed his observation. Therése and Guillome had chewed in silence, she with renewed worry about her son, Guillome with mild surprise. They stayed awake late that night, lying next to each other, the night air afire with their worried whisperings, concerned about what Séraphin could have possibly meant, lamenting, as they always did when something novel and alien happened to the family, the lack of an extended family or culture to fall back on. “It’s just a phase,” Guillome said softly to his wife. “I’m sure he will grow out it.”
Séraphin did not. His mind grew fat on images and stories of places far away, and his soul longed to amble in the streets, the sideways and byways of places he had only read about in literature or seen on the television screen. His mornings would be Viennese while his afternoons would be Parisian. He would spend his nights dancing in Havana to salsa and merengue. His happiness, he thought, would be found at the end of a pen, in a seat on a plane, with the wheels forever leaving the ground, going – always going. His desire for difference he masked, as most teenage identity dilemmas are masked, with a boisterous exoskeleton of machismo, locker room talk about girls and their changing, bouncing, curvy anatomy. By the time Séraphin reached university, he was determined to be a citizen of the world. His heart was a library of longings, his mind a hive of trivia buzzing.
To get to the neighbourhood Portuguese convenience store, Séraphin had to cross Puccini Street, which made him grin at a sudden university games night memory. One of his teammates, an attractive but airy American girl named Sophie, who he had charmed with his manifold interests and hobbies, had failed to pull their team towards the finish line of a 30 Seconds game. The social gathering had morphed into a gladiatorial colosseum in which not knowing some aspect of history, geography, literature, or world politics would elicit clucks of pity and snorts of derision from the other teams. Two spaces away from the finish line, Sophie attempted to get her team to guess the names on her card.
