The Eternal Audience of One

by Rémy Ngamije

  “No,” said the Black Séraphin again. The feathers of his wings were raven. His chainmail was black as obsidian and had the unnerving quality of not looking as though it was entirely real. It seemed to smoke and shift like a perpetual black flame. He turned to look around the Great Chamber: “This right thing, what is it? The White Séraphin says it with such conviction but who knows what it means? Where has his counsel been this past year when all of you have been taking us from one mistake to another, from one bed to another? Where was he then? Now that this thing has happened he appears out of nowhere and tries to get us to agree to his sanctimonious madness. This I cannot accept. If we keep this thing, who will look after it? Will it be you?” He pointed at the Late Night Séraphin who cowered in his seat. “Or will it be you?” The Ballin’ Séraphin crossed his arms and looked at a stray thread on his jersey.

  “It will be all of us,” said the White Séraphin.

  “It shall be none us,” said the Black Séraphin. “And no parents need know about any of this. Not ours, not hers.”

  The Afro Séraphin looked around the ruffling Great Chamber and sensed opinion sway away from their persuasive power. Secrecy was something on all of their minds. He looked at the White Séraphin who also sensed it. “Then let us put it to a vote,” said the Afro Séraphin.

  “There’ll be no vote,” said the Black Séraphin. “All that’ll happen is what needs to be done.”

  “And what is this thing that shall be done? Give this evil a name,” commanded the White Séraphin. “You must name what you ask for.”

  The Black Séraphin reached out his hand towards the floating pregnancy tests. They caught fire and were consumed until there was nothing of them left, not even ash. Then he looked at the White and Afro Séraphins and said, “Abortion.”

  All the Séraphins except the dark one flinched.

  “No,” said the White Séraphin. He grabbed his staff tightly in one hand and unsheathed his sword with the other. The silver blade glowed with a pale light. At the same time, the Afro Séraphin conjured up his blade, a katana as keen as a new spring. “We cannot allow this.”

  The Black Séraphin laughed. “Foolishness,” he said. In his right hand a blade materialised, dark and deadly, its edge positively screaming with sharpness, eager for something to cut, to rend something into nothing.

  The three came together in a clash of swords and staff, with the sparks of their powers spraying all over the Great Chamber. The other Séraphins scrambled to escape the arcs of lightning which lanced through the room whenever the black blade was blocked by the katana or when the staff parried a blow. Some of the younger Séraphins, too young to withstand the great forces of power on display wilted, vanishing from existence.

  Back and forth the three fought. The White would shoot balls of fire at the Black, and he, in return, would throw devastating tendrils of magic which broke the magnificent masonry of the Great Chamber when they were deflected. The Afro Séraphin, a skilled swordsman, unleashed a flurry of blurring cuts and thrusts but could not land a blow on the Black Séraphin. The fight shook the Great Chamber. Cracks raced up its tiers. Chunks of stone were blasted from the walls and they were used as projectiles by each of the fighting Séraphins, levitated and hurled at frightening speeds.

  It seemed as though the Black Séraphin would be finally overwhelmed and defeated, with his sword raised above his head, parrying the katana and the silver sword, with his other hand holding onto the White Séraphin’s staff. The two bearing down upon him sensed a victory and bore down on him with all of their strength. The Black Séraphin fell to his knees.

  The fight’s end was near. Then he smiled at them and winked out of existence.

  Behind him, the Afro Séraphin felt a presence. The Black blade bit into him with an intense hunger and chewed from his left shoulder to his navel. The White roared with anger, summoning an almighty bolt of lightning. He was about to erase the Black from present and future existence when a bloody hand protruded from his chest. The Ballin’ Séraphin retracted his hand and said, “Sorry, Whitey, but I’m with Blackie.”

  “He will remember,” said the White Séraphin as he fell to his knees, clutching at his wound.

  “You forget the power of forgetfulness,” said the Black Séraphin. He conjured up a memory of a boy on a riverside, watching a body float by. “Forgotten,” he said. The memory changed to another of a boy looking out of a Mitsubishi Pajero window at the fading hills of home. “Forgotten.” He flipped through Séraphin’s conquests. “All forgotten.” The last memory was of Soraya sitting on the couch of her apartment waiting for Séraphin to reply. “Soon to be forgotten.”

  “Then you know how this ends,” said the White.

  “Yes,” said the Black. He twirled his sword and severed the White Séraphin’s head off his shoulders.

  Soraya, sitting on the couch, the scene of so many film marathons, cuddling, and make-out sessions teared up when Séraphin turned his black gaze away from the window, the setting sun’s light behind him throwing half of his face into shadow.

  “We can’t keep it,” he said.

  Soraya’s womb was promptly evacuated of personality.

  In the immediate aftermath they tried to return to normal life, sitting at cafés and watching people, and being watched by people in return. Soraya tired of that. “Let’s go,” she said when the sideways glances at them became unbearable. The stares they were accustomed to, the ones which showed the shock and disapproval of the union between the black and the Indian now seemed more condemnatory than before.

  The two stopped going out altogether. They decided the couch was a better place anyway. It was their place. But it was also the place where the decision had been made. The series became too long, the films too dull, and the playlists too predictable. They stopped spending time on the couch. They did not speak of The Thing They Never Spoke About. The thing which made Soraya shiver whenever Séraphin undressed her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  The Thing They Never Spoke About made her push away a prying finger she would have welcomed in days past, arching her back to better direct its attentions.

  The Thing They Never Spoke About made her hold her breath and say, “Stop, no, don’t.” Then she would roll over, back turned away from him, crying.

  In the first weeks after The Thing They Never Spoke About happened, when the certainty of avoided disaster was still fresh, when the comfort of regular lectures, and the company of friends, and walking together, defiantly and determinedly, provided distraction, she said she was okay. She said in time things would return to the way they were. But when he went to her place he found Soraya sitting on the couch, looking out of the window, or caught her looking at him absentmindedly. At picnics in Llandudno, burrowing her toes into the sand and pulling her knees up to her chest, she would look out towards futures and places her passport could not take her, at things which could have been. Things, maybe, which should have been. And when later he would say, “You know we couldn’t keep it, right?”, as they lay in the darkness of the night on his bed, she would only sigh and roll over.

  The Thing They Never Spoke About also brought great confusion to the many Séraphins. In the ruined Great Chamber the Black Séraphin held sway with unshakable belief in his actions. None dared to question his lead.

  “What is done is done,” he said. His voice echoed throughout the room, up and up, but it offered no certainty, no calmness, no comfort. The surviving Séraphins scattered, all of them fleeing from the Great Chamber for fear of meeting the same fate as the White and Afro Séraphins. They kept themselves to themselves, avoiding contact with each other and the multiplication and amplification of the guilt each carried. The Black Séraphin was left to rant by himself, proclaiming his truths to his shadow.

  “What I did,” he said, “do they not see that it helped us? The thing would have changed everything. They must know this. The thing would have made us like Guillome and Ther�
�se. Surely they must regret us, how bound they are to us, to Yves, to Éric. The thing had to be done.”

  “What thing?” asked the Ballin’ Séraphin. His performance on the court had waned. He was not alert to sly passes. In days present a draining bucket easily relegated him to the bench where he found too much time to think about the thing and his role in it.

  “The thing,” said the Black Séraphin. He refused to use its name.

  “What must we do now?” asked the Ballin’ Séraphin.

  “Carry on.”

  “With Soraya?”

  The two turned to look at the sleeping figure with black hair splashed on the pillow case and the olive-skinned curve of her back which disappeared into the sheets.

  “No. She will move on,” said the Black Séraphin.

  “She’ll blame us.”

  “She already does.”

  “She’s not happy.”

  “Happiness is the absence of reality,” said the Black Séraphin. “Reality is not happy. You should know this. You’ve been prancing and dancing around Cape Town long enough. Maybe it is time you opened your eyes.”

  When Soraya broke up with Séraphin the two Séraphins watched her walk away, crying. In the headlong rush to the end of the year she randomly appeared on campus every now and then, shyly waving at him, eyes darting away, walking away from a possible greeting, a possible how-are-you-doing, a potential I-miss-you and the coffee date which might lead them to talk of The Thing They Never Spoke About. Instead, she vanished into the press of bodies at Remms, another ending, another missed start.

  Four times the Great Council of the Séraphins met and three of these meetings have been told. The fourth meeting lies in the future where all things must go before they are put in the past, like this afternoon at the Old Biscuit Mill where everyone, including the owner of the tanned hand, laughs at Séraphin talking about the foolhardiness of his first year at Remms, about a bitch named Angie, about the hard work of doing homework, and the harder work of healing the hurts, and unloved women who are poor markers of time because they melt into each other so that it is unclear where one story ends and another starts. Only Soraya is finite, a moment in time framed by love and love lost, and The Thing They Never Spoke About, which Séraphin does not speak about now either. When he finally comes to the end of his story, with everyone shaking their heads, he turns to Silmary and says, “Right, your turn.”

  She holds up her hands in apology. “No ways I’m following that with mine.”

  “I’m owed a story and I plan on collecting on it.”

  “Some other time then,” says Silmary.

  It is March and the year ripens, the days grow fatter and fuller. The young have their pick of the bunch and the calendar is so full of days that the unpicked are allowed to fall to the ground to rot and fertilise the future. There is no rush, there is no haste.

  And because there is no haste, time speeds up to make itself felt.

  XXIII

  Baby gazelles learn how to stand and walk quickly. First they raise themselves onto spindly legs like amateur stilt walkers. The weight of their bodies makes the comic action of coordinating their limbs amusing to watch if you are sitting on a couch and mouthwatering if you are a nearby carnivore. Within minutes of having the afterbirth licked off them they stumble, walk, then learn to live on the run. They know they are food for something else as soon as they come into the world. They did not write the rules, they are merely players bound by them.

  The same cannot be said for black law students at Remms Law School where, similarly, the dark-skinned brethren neither wrote the rules nor learned how to play by them. They come to the faculty as postgraduates, from science and commerce and the humanities, already alumni of the country’s top university. They believe everything, including the law, can be conquered with hard work, determination and dedication. All of these are vital ingredients for success in Remms’s law faculty as the dean announces each year in the welcoming hall. The first-year class, on the first day, and only on the first day, is black and white, Coloured and caramel, Indian and indigenous. These are the brightest, the cream cropped from the rest, the greatest among equals.

  The faculty is inundated with applications each year and the rejection statistics are recited with glee by the dean for nothing burnishes pride and prestige like the fine fabric of exclusion. All of the faces in the hall glow like brilliant candles. Their light comes from far away: from Nigeria, Kenya, and Cameroon; from Ghana, Botswana, and Mozambique; from Soweto and the Southern Suburbs, and from Camps Bay and Khayelitsha. They have been called, these lucky few. They nod along to the words of encouragement and fluff their feathers when they are saluted as future jurists. The lecture hall is pregnant with promise and generous prophecy.

  All hail the Remms law undergraduates who shall be advocates, attorneys, high court judges, supreme and constitutional court justices hereafter.

  All hail!

  The hail storm begins almost immediately.

  The foundations of South African law are labyrinthine, the jurisprudential principles behind the law are as shapeless as post-modernism, as fine as the thin mist which slinks up from the Cape Town harbour, and just as hard to bottle. The case law is as dense as the heart of a neutron star, as long as an unplanned nap sans the reward of rest. The first test is a blitzkrieg of the ego, the second is The Death Star paying a courtesy call on Alderaan. By the third test many students question their intelligence.

  Everyone struggles. But not everyone struggles the same way, or for the same duration.

  The lecturer’s speed forces some students to band together. The first test encourages the formation of a study group. Competing cliques try to enlist the friendships of top-performing students. They pass the next test, then they improve, trotting towards the dean’s list.

  While the herd moves on, stragglers scraping pass marks limp to keep up. The one thing they all have in common is they are black. They have yet to figure out what Séraphin, Yasseen and Bianca discovered after a year of floundering, cursing, and crying themselves to sleep.

  “You can’t make it through law school without Benevolent White Girls,” said Bianca. She lifted her glass of red wine and toasted Séraphin and Yasseen. “Gotta thank you for introducing them to our lives.”

  They were at a sushi restaurant in Claremont. The plan was to have supper before heading to Stadium-on-Main for some bowling and arcade games. They had not assembled together in a long time since the academic term commenced, talking only in their chat group, and only in short bursts. Remms was putting the squeeze on their leisure time. The excuse to escape the campus was welcomed by all.

  Bianca had told Andrew to bring Silmary. She said it felt nice to not be the only girl around. Silmary asked how their studies were going. Richard and Godwin grunted, Adewale said his tests were providing results, not the desired results, but results none the less. Andrew said his lecturers were boring, but, in general, he was coping. He just wanted to write his honours thesis and be done with the degree. He was toying with the idea of interning with the Western Cape’s political structures. Bianca and Séraphin, predictably, said, “Of course, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” James complained that his research was stalling. Yasseen asked him if he knew any Benevolent White Girls in his Master’s programme to help him.

  “You need BWGs,” Séraphin said, “because they know things.”

  “So many things,” Bianca said.

  “If it wasn’t for Kim, Kelly and Megan, I don’t think Bianca, Yasseen and I would be sitting here today. We’d have dropped out of law school a long time ago.”

  Kim, Kelly and Megan sat at the front of every class and at the top of every marks list. Their fingers typed with speed and understanding, bullet points capturing complex Roman-Dutch law principles succinctly, footnotes annotating difficult cases simply. Their hands stirred the confused air in tutorial rooms when they raised them to answer questions with the grace of a ballerina’s arm arching into the fourth po
sition.

  Séraphin and Yasseen met the girls at the commencement of their second year after clawing their way through their first. If the coming year went anything like the previous one they were not so sure they would make it to the middle of the term with their minds intact. They had worked flat out the previous year and barely crossed the finish line at the year-end exams. They were riddled with fears, which only intensified after they had collected their stacks of brick-thick course readers. They sat in the law faculty’s cafeteria to formulate a survival strategy or, at the very least, a coordinated panic plan. That was when Kim, Kelly and Megan walked in looking for a place to sit. The rest of the tables were fully occupied. Only Séraphin and Yasseen’s had space. Séraphin saw they wanted to sit down. “We can share if you want,” he said.

  The girls looked at each other to make sure they were going to take the collective risk together and sat down. While they ate low fat yoghurt and grapes, Séraphin and Yasseen shared a plate of greasy chips as was their lunchtime tradition. Séraphin looked at the way the girls flicked their hair, the confidence and ease with which they talked and joked. They were assured a space on the ark when the yearend floods came. Séraphin and Yasseen would have to pray they were given the memo.

  Kim had auburn hair which seemed to beg to be stroked. Kelly’s was straight and black. Megan’s hair colour tended to change depending on the season. It was blonde in this season and year of new starts. Séraphin and Yasseen tried their best not to listen to the conversation about holidays spent in homes in Plettenberg, Knysna, and Wilderness, which is to say that they listened attentively, each comparing it to their miserable time spent with their own families.