One Day I Will Write About This Place (16 page)

…

Trust picks me up at the Rotunda, and we head for Tandoor. It is a sea of thumping, ganga and dub, flying droplets of sweat. We whir and stomp: furry black and peroxide caterpillars spraying sweat all over the room; rasta colored hair shells and beads clicking; the thump of reggae, bass, and very sexy black people: mocha, cappuccino, frappé skins, warm moist air, open-air rooftop, minty Zam-Buk ointment and black sweat, charcoal-­colored gums, and slow, blurry hugs with people you have never met.

It is 5:00 a.m. We are in a cab across the street from Tandoor.

The driver, a Zambian guy, is dressed in a white leather cowboy suit, with tassles and a leather Stetson, and lots of gold jewelry. We haggle and he tells us to get in. We try to get out of the cab, and from across the street we hear guns and screams. A car speeds off—­as the crowds of Saturday-night partygoers scatter behind us. Police alarms start.

We jump into the cab.

We do a tour of Hillbrow as he picks up people and drops them off. Trust starts to complain.

“Ah, bro. No problem, bro. I will drop you. I cannot lie. If you give me time, I will drop you for free. You are my brothers. Where are you from?”

And we start to chat. He was an accountant in Ndola before the copper prices fell. Do we want to hear some music?

We say yes. Spools of light whoosh past us. We are singing along.

“Like a rhinestone cowboy…”

…

He picks up two women from a street corner. Both of them are drenched in perfume and powder and cheap wigs.

He swings his head back to us, grinning wide. “I cannot lie, brothers. Johannesburg, it is a crazy place. Eh?”

We are in the Zambian man’s apartment, with the two women.

Three somber Malawian men are unpacking boxes of wooden carvings as brandy gurgles into our glasses. There are mattresses spread on the floor—­there must be fifteen or twenty people staying in this apartment. On the table there is a pile of marketing books, correspondence college manuals. Steaming plates of
nsima
and stew arrive, from the women in fishnets, Mary and Violet. We all dig our fingers into the common tray and eat. The taxi driver­–cowboy grabs Mary’s buttocks as we eat. She laughs and sits on his lap.

“We have to take care of each other! Who will take care of my sister?”

He is addressing us.

“I must watch out for my sister, and she can cook for me. This country is very dangerous. They are very violent here.”

“Who?”

“The blacks.”

Trust turns to him, eyes flashing, finger raised to protest.

“Ah. Sorry, brother. Sorry, brother. It is apartheid.”

He stands and pats Trust on the back, says, “Let’s smoke some ganja.”

“You
Kwererekweres
,” says Trust ruefully.

We go out to the balcony. Yeoville.

It is a lovely building from the 1930s, shaped like an oval cylinder, with a thin seam running around it on each floor, large oval clear-­eyed windows and oval balconies, clean lines—­but this is still a building from another age, of hooting ice cream vans and round brass doorknobs. Strings of an old clown’s tears run down the peeling walls. The night is dry and cool, and the air hurts the nostrils.

Evans is his name, he says. His red and black cowboy shirt is un­buttoned and he wears a gold chain. He has hair on his chest, another surprise, and large, very dark lips, charcoal and ashy like a heavy marijuana smoker’s. Even his teeth, which are large and very white, have sooty edges, and there’s a gap between the two front teeth. His smile warms me.

Seeds inside the joint crackle as we pass it around. Mary and Violet come, with a new guy, young, shiny, and dapper in a black suit and tie. “My young brother,” says Evans. “George. I brought him here from Zambia. He has finished his BCom at Wits, and is now working at First National Bank.” They used to live in Tembisa, but once Evans was beaten up in a shebeen for being a foreigner.

“They don’t like us,” says George. Evans’s face darkens. “They don’t like us because we remind them that they are still slaves.”

I shoot a sharp glance at Trust. He missed that—­he is looking intently at the crackling joint, his lower lip thrust forward like a cash register tray. I giggle. George grins back at me and winks, takes his jacket off. He sets up a grill, lights the coal, and brings meat from the kitchen in a bowl.

Soon, the room is spinning. Faces swell in and out; Evans’s teeth move, as he laughs up and loud. He jabs Violet’s waist—­that’s her name, Violet. She jerks her waist sideways.

“Ah,
mpslp,
” she clicks and slurps, and laughs, and that sound makes me so homesick, I hurt. Mum’s kiss sat there, that day, puckered up in one spot, its dainty legs pumping on the spot, as if this was the only way it had to keep itself together. Then it collapsed slowly, stretched, diluted and gentler, tingling for long minutes.

I am being attacked by sheets of dancing city lights. I close my eyes as panic rises. Saliva slices back, over, then under Evans’s tongue as he talks to Trust; then a hiccup as a burp reaches the back of his throat and he coughs forward suddenly, and breaks into laughter and I turn to look at him. The sky and stars start to wriggle and streak in my mind. A tongue slips past the gap in his mouth; meat falls onto a flame and squeals.

We are eating. On the balcony, the air is soft and the sky is spinning and I am starving. We all dip into one large tray of
nsima,
then dip the balls of maize meal into the tomato gravy. I can hear teeth clicking as we strip bones of meat. Am I seeing things? I close my eyes, dizzy. A red, wet moan climbs down from the roof. Then it starts to dribble—­soft wobbly carrots creep through the gaps, swollen turgid potatoes fall and splatter.

I rush to the toilet and throw up. I miss my room. It’s been so long since I walked into the world without fear. Already I have been out of my room longer than I have been in a year. I am afraid I can’t handle myself. I can’t go and hide in my room now. I stretch my mind to my bedroom at home—­I will be home tomorrow. I will be home tomorrow. I stand on the balcony away from the rest. I look at the sky, and the giant roof of dark offers spongy, confident promises—­it can take any assault and remain unchanged. Screeching giggles and screams circle faster and faster, smaller and smaller, then gurgle into a sinkhole of incoherence as early-­morning traffic rises.

It is Trust’s hand on my shoulder.

“Are you feeling better, bro?”

I nod.

“Are you also from Zambia?” I ask Mary, one of the fishnet women.

She shakes her head. “Malawi. He is just a friend. This is my house. He drops me home every day, and takes my daughter to school. I make food for him. He can’t cook, this one.”

Congo rumba music blares out of a small cassette player on the floor. Her cousin, Violet, dressed in a tight sequined dress and a cheap weave, is dancing, on her own, to the rumba. The lumps under the blankets on the floor don’t move.

The sun has started to stream in, still soft and gold. People curl out of their mattresses, grunt hello. I count at least twelve people in this apartment. Giant plastic bags are packed as curio traders start to prepare for work in the flea markets of Johannesburg. Two girls, both seven or eight years old, emerge in full school uniforms, navy blue and white pleated skirts, so short, those South African skirts, neat and innocent with matching satchels and smug white South African accents. They stand, hands shyly swinging behind backs, as they greet me, heads bowed respectfully. Evans is scratching the braids of one of them as they look at our disheveled bodies without mirth or surprise. They speak their language and help their mother set the table. Their mother, Violet, is now wrapped in a sarong, hair under a scarf, skin scrubbed to reveal twin burn marks on her cheeks. Skin lighteners. She looks like a mother now. Her night face is gone. I can’t see Mary anywhere.

A young man comes in, takes off his security guard jacket. He grabs the books from the table and disappears into one of the rooms.

As they eat Kellogg’s cereal, the girls watch television, giggling. There is an ad with an aerodynamic man dressed in a neon bodysuit. He is running after drinking a healthy power drink. “Your body remembers,” the ad says. “Your body remembers.”

“No sleep. We must work! A man should not sleep,” roars Evans.

We are in the taxi again—­and soon outside the gates of a prosperous-­looking, mostly white school. There are a few brown kids around. The boot is full of wooden carvings, and the car groans and sways, as other cars, sleeker trophies of a credit economy, whoosh away. The girls get out, are admonished to behave by their cowboy uncle. They tumble out of the car and walk, now slouching and chatting loudly, their bodies different, English-­speaking bodies. They don’t look back. They merge happily with a group of mostly white, preppy-­looking kids.

“The de-­kaff generation,” Trust says, sniffing. “They speak with, lak, white, lak, South Efficen accints.” We stop for some Chicken Licken (s’ good s’ nice) on the way back to Trust’s place in Soweto. Evans refuses to charge us any money. “We are brothers,” he says. “We have to help each other!”

My passport has a problem. It has swollen and is now a lumpy accordion—­full of watermarks, corrugated pages, and slurring visa stamps. It spent a full cycle in a washing machine. The man at security looks at it, then at me and my somewhat tattered and grimy bag, and waves me past, his head shaking.

They say those streams of puff behind planes are made by the same thing that makes steam puff from your mouth on a cold day: when two air masses that are not fully saturated with water vapor mix, the air remains at the same temperature but drinks in all the vapor it can, until it saturates and forms a kind of cloud. I wonder, sometimes, whether the substance we call reality is really an organization as formless as the puffy white lines that planes leave behind as they fly.

Since I was a child, my mother has performed an act of will on me. I present myself within her reach, annoyed at something, or upset at somebody. The first thing she does is reach forward with both her thumbs on my eyebrows and push the flesh to the side, her voice flattening my frown, then her hands run down both my cheeks, and I am a lumbar guitar; my vertebrae are fret markers.

I would not have survived my season of falling if Ciru had not always been there, just there, making sure, giving me pocket money, and wisely keeping her distance.

People pull you out of yourself, and from the day I met Trust Mdia, he has done this. Each time I have come to him, drunker and dirtier, he has taken what he has seen, ignored the beast, and spoken to the friend, so I have found myself being, with him, a considerate, eloquent person, a normal person.

…

I get the window seat, and as soon as I am settled, stuff sprawled around me, my seatmate arrives. He is tanned and wiry and surfer slouchy, with shaggy blond hair that leans down his forehead, a 180-degree combination protractor and triangle: a curly and bouncy geometry that flops about and returns to its location quite exactly. I can’t stop looking at it. Boing! The word jumps into my head. He unloads his bag on his chair, a laid-­back nylon puzzle box with strange bulges and slits and zips all over. They look carelessly placed.

He gives me a tight, measured smile and goes to work: straps scream, zips purse thoughtfully, before he unrolls the conveyor belt of symmetrical teeth, which grins lopsided, like Tourist Info, Bondi Beach, to reveal small, billabonging netted storage compartments, where carefully rolled tattered and softened jeans sit with a rolled smaller bag of various happy unguents.

He lifts his shirt, a colorful thing wrapped around his lower belly snaps open, then a flap screeches up, then a zip grins and eats his passport.

He sits down. Snap. Then arranges himself in the seat in a sort of half-­yoga position, one knee up, tourist guidebook slouching on his thigh. He pops a little capsule of chewing gum into his mouth.

The in-flight magazine describes a new thing called bungee jumping. People stand on giant cranes, on top of giant cliffs, with rubber bands around their waists, and jump and almost kiss the ground at super­speed, and are yanked back up, bouncing on the spongy world, which refuses to offer threats. The moment he is comfortable and settled into his book, I want to pee.

…

When you are lazy and locked in your room for days, fluff, in the right light, looks like thousands of starlike creatures somersaulting in the air. They swell out of nothing and somersault and burst or vanish again into nothingness, and others swell, as if something on the other side of reality is blowing the smallest bubbles in the world through holes we can’t see.

There is a moment, five minutes into the air above Johannesburg, airplane nose up and back flat, where the basics are established outside my window: giant piles of earth from the gold mines that look like plasticine playground pyramids, thousands of swimming pools, and more thousands of paper and cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, and even more thousands of matchbox homes. From the air their place in a political project is clear: tiny, tiny little squares of measured and regulated space.

An Excel spreadsheet city. Each little box is the same size. Places that could spread out to the moon are folded into the physics of this universe—­and you walk away from some highways and you are in a dense black hole called Alexandra, which has close to one million people in two square miles, but you look at the spreadsheet, and Alex is one little box, the size of twenty or so compounds in Sandton nearby. So millions of words and lives and economies have disappeared behind the clean lines. The residents of Sandton write bewildered letters to the newspapers, unable to understand the unstoppable epidemic of crime.

It is all strange to me still, this country, where every human economic activity has been tagged and measured and taxed. Everything is numbered. Anything you want to buy is within reach; it has been broken into many tiny pieces, and you can buy it, a piece at a time: a car, a house, a CD. Even Woolworth’s lamb chops are available on credit, bought by township mamas for special meals and paid off over several months with interest.