Sometimes There Is a Void (73 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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Out of the blue she writes:
I am trying by all means to make our lives easy but you seem to be trying your level best to create a hostile environment around us. I am and shall continue to be nice to you as much as I can for the sake of the children
. I am happy that she undertakes to be nice to me for the sake of the children, but in reality I never see the niceness. I respond:
Although I don't know what hostile environment I created lately I apologise. It is obvious that just seeing me around fills you with anger. Throughout I have been quiet and keeping very much to myself. I have no intention of creating any hostile environment
.
I finally decide to move out. We reach a verbal agreement that she will have custody of the children and they will visit me every other weekend. That's all the visitation I need. I leave her with the Nissan while I buy myself a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I will also continue to pay the rent and all their living expenses. I pack my bags and book into a hotel for a few days, until I find a two-bedroom apartment on Pomeroy Road on the same side of town as the Ridges where Adele and the kids live. I furnish every room of my apartment and set up a workstation in my bedroom with a laptop and resume writing
The Whale Caller
. I teach only two days a week and on the other days I write the novel.
But when it's the weekend visitation with the kids I stop all the writing and spend the time with them. I take them to amusement parks and theme parks in neighbouring cities and states. It is like I am making up for the rest of the time I am not with them.
I finally complete the novel. It is the only one of my novels that
doesn't draw from specific historical events in southern Africa. It was suggested to me by a real-life incident, though; a newspaper story about two kids in the Western Cape who stoned a village drunk to death because they were bored. I created my own Bored Twins who do not in any way share a history with the original killer girls. The novel was also suggested by a story I saw on television about the whale crier of Hermanus. The television story gave me the impression that the guy, in black tails and tricorne, blew his horn and the whales came sailing towards him. On a visit to the University of Cape Town I asked my biographer Dorothy Steele to take me to Hermanus to see the magical whale crier. We spent the whole day in the town, my first visit there. I was disappointed to discover that the whale crier did not call whales at all, but tourists. He blew his kelp horn to inform tourists about the presence and location of the whales and the tourists could interpret the meaning of the staccato of his horn decoded on the sandwich board that he wore. I said to myself:
if this whale crier cannot call whales, I am going to create my own who can
. My second visit to the town was with Gugu, and here I was consolidating the geography of my novel vis-à-vis that of the town and the surrounding villages.
The names of the characters in the novel were suggested by Zenzi when I was playing with her in her room in Weltevredenpark. I asked her to think of a name, any name. And without any hesitation she said, ‘Sharisha'. That sounded like the name of a whale to me and therefore I was going to have a specific whale character called Sharisha. If Zenzi had not thought of the name there would have been no such character. My fictional whale crier would be blowing his horn for whales in general. I asked her to think of another name and she said ‘Saluni'. Mind you, these were just names that she invented. There are no such names in our culture, or in any culture that we knew of. I decided that Saluni would be the village drunk.
Now the novel is complete. It has drained me emotionally to such an extent that when I get to the final period I break down and cry. I cry for a long time.
At about that time my New York publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publish the American edition of
The Madonna of Excelsior.
It receives great reviews from all the major papers. Later it wins the second prize of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and is also selected by the American Library Association as one of the twenty-five notable books of 2005. Of course, I am absolutely ecstatic about this. Do you know how many books of all types, not just novels, are published in America every year? Thousands. If your book is chosen by a group of people whose lives are books as one of the best twenty-five out of the thousands, you have no right not to wet yourself with joy.
The next summer I go to South Africa as usual to work with the Bee People and, of course, to see my mother, Gugu, Neo, Thandi and all of Sonwabo's children. During this time I also teach my regular playwriting workshops at the Market Theatre and creative writing workshops with HIV-positive people at the Anglican Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown.
I get a message that my sister Thami is seriously ill and I go to Mafeteng to see her only to find that I am too late. She is dead. It turns out that she died of AIDS. But Gugu and I know that she really died of denial. We have experience enough of working with HIV-positive people to know that they can lead normal lives with the virus for years, as long as they protect and take care of themselves. After her Master's degree in Forced Migration at the University of the Witwatersrand, Gugu did a postgraduate diploma in the Management of HIV-AIDS at the Workplace at the Medical University of South Africa in Pretoria. Following a stint organising campaigns for Amnesty International, she now works for an organisation called Love Life which aims to educate the youth on HIV-AIDS. I, on the other hand, work with HIV-positive people in the organisation that I founded in Sophiatown. In Lesotho, where my sister lived, HIV-AIDS still carries a lot of stigma, even though it is so prevalent that every weekend in a small town like Mafeteng there are at least five funerals of its victims. We still believe that if my sister had undergone tests early on, and had then taken the necessary treatment, she would be alive today. Gugu and I test quite regularly and we advise our relatives to do so as well. Thami resisted any testing. She said that she would rather not know. When she was forced by the illness to test it was too late. She already had full-blown AIDS and she died.
At the wake, her son Dumisani, who is a missionary in Germany and the United Kingdom, gives a moving sermon, and at the funeral I take the opportunity to preach about HIV-AIDS. People are impressed that we do not hide the fact that our sister died of AIDS as families usually do. We use her death as a teaching moment. My mother is very distraught. ‘We don't expect children to die before their parents,' she keeps on saying.
Later that summer Gugu and I go for HIV tests at our doctor's office in Melville. We invite Thandi to come along. We get the results immediately. Gugu and I are both negative but Thandi is positive. She is distressed and flustered. We are there for her, and we are both good counsellors. We assure her that we'll be there every step of the way. Gugu teaches her how to take care of herself, what kind of food she should eat and what exercises she should do daily. She follows the regimen and she continues to be a very healthy woman taking care of her son to this day.
 
Back in America, Adele starts to harass me with telephone calls, accusing me of stealing the documents that prove that I own the beekeeping property in the Eastern Cape. But, strangely, she does not report the theft to the police. She is lying, of course, because there were never such documents in the first place. When I point this out to her, advising her that she can always apply for duplicates of the documents she claims I have stolen, she threatens me with death. She does not say she will kill me herself, but makes some vague prophecies about my impending demise. I take her threats seriously and report the matter to the police. Not the university police this time, since I no longer live on a university property, but to the city police. She claims that all she said was ‘your dirty heart which is full of cruelty and spite will kill you soon'.
Well, we all leave it at that.
When I go to fetch the children at the weekend, she refuses to let them come with me. She says that from now on I must give her two weeks' notice before I can have them for the weekend. She stands at the door and says I cannot come in to pick them up, nor can they come out to join me. I do not want to create a scene. I have no choice but
to go back to my apartment without them. I sit down at my computer and write her an email giving her the two-weeks' notice for the next visitation, and notices for all the subsequent fortnightly visitations for the next six months.
On the appointed day she does release the children to me but tells me that she rejects all the notices that I have given all at once because they are not two-week notices. I must give one two-week notice at a time.
When I return the kids on the Sunday evening she is very angry with me because I took them to my office and I walked on campus with them. She warns me never to do that again, otherwise I will not have the children again.
‘You have no right to stop me from seeing my children,' I say. ‘Why should I not see them when they are here in this country because of me and I am their sole support?'
‘You are not our sole support,' she says.
I don't know what she means by that. As far as I know she is not working anywhere. I discover only much later that she has propagated a story at the university and elsewhere in town that I have abandoned her and the children and they receive no financial support from me. Apparently I did this after meeting another woman since coming to Athens, Ohio. She, who used to be a staunch Catholic, has now joined a charismatic church which is known for its charitable works among the destitute. She has sold the pastors her woeful story and they begin to collect donations for her. That is why I am no longer their sole support.
Ours is a small town where gossip travels fast. She gets a lot of sympathy from the townspeople, and even from some of my colleagues in the English Department, because she is supposedly a poor African woman who resigned from a lucrative job in Johannesburg and accompanied her husband to America to support his career, uprooting the children from their school in the process, only to be abandoned by the unscrupulous husband for another woman. Worse still, the husband has allegedly deserted his children as well, leaving them without any means of support. Even East Elementary School buys into this narrative.
I discover that my children are getting free lunch at school because their mother is destitute and their father does not provide any financial support.
No wonder she does not want me to be seen with the children on campus. My frolicking around with happy children messes up her neat narrative.
She has no choice but to let me take Zenzi for her figure skating lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She is at school at those times and cannot do it herself. Those who see me with her at the Bird Arena begin to doubt at least some aspects of the narrative. But they never ask me because they want to pretend that they don't want to get involved in other people's business.
Adele makes a new rule one day when I come to fetch the children. She is sitting on the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms and is holding a broomstick. She says the kids are not going anywhere with me because I didn't give her adequate notice. From now on she wants one month's notice. I can hear Zenzi crying upstairs. She has been looking forward to spending the weekend with her daddy. But obviously her mother wants to cut me off totally from my children. Her narrative to the sympathisers of Athens must be seen to be true at all costs.
At least I will see Zenzi twice a week when I take her for ice skating. If I am lucky, I'll see Zukile standing outside and I'll wave to him. Zenzi is rehearsing for an ice show. She is one of the kids in
Charlie Brown
. I know she will do well, although she is a bit nervous about it since it is a bigger role than last year's when she was a fairy in
Neverland
.
I consult a local attorney, Claire Buzz Ball, for advice on how I can get reasonable access to my children. That's all I want. Not custody, but to spend every other weekend with them. But Buzz tells me that since the divorce proceedings are in a different jurisdiction, namely South Africa, the family court in Athens, Ohio, cannot decide on custody and visitations in the matter. He advises me to withdraw the case from South Africa and initiate a new one in Athens. Only then can the court in Athens address questions of custody. His advice makes sense. After all, the case in South Africa has stalled. Adele's lawyer, Raymond Tucker, died in a car accident and his office had transferred her file to a new
firm of lawyers. I instruct my attorneys in Johannesburg to withdraw the case immediately, and they do so.
Buzz is a sharp lawyer. He used to be a politician and a member of the State House of Representatives for the Republican Party, so he knows his way around the system. He files a Complaint for Divorce and Temporary Orders for Visitation Rights in the Court of Common Pleas Domestic Relations Division, Athens County. Again, you can see that even at this point all I want are my visitation rights and nothing more. Adele does receive these documents through certified mail and signs for them. Later she is to claim that she never received them.
On Thursday I go to the Ridges to fetch Zenzi for the final dress rehearsal. The show is on Saturday and I know she is looking forward to it. She was very excited when I took her for her costume fitting two days before. I knock at the door but there is no response. It is strange because the red Nissan is parked outside and the curtains are not closed. I wait for a while. And then I drive to the Bird Arena where the show will be held, hoping that perhaps Zenzi's mom took her there. She is not there. I go back to the Ridges and wait outside. It gets dark but still there is no sign of Zenzi, Zuki or Adele. I drive back to my apartment. I call Adele's place repeatedly, hoping that she is back with the kids from wherever she had taken them. No one answers and I leave voice messages. The voice messages become frantic as the night progresses. Early in the morning I return to the Ridges and still no one is there. By this time I am a nervous wreck. What could have happened to my children?

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