It was good to talk about him, analyse him with someone who was there when he was not yet the man she married. But they both grew weary in time of batting their different versions of Rashid between them. Qabila loved her enough to let her go gracefully.
Without Rashid, she saw the frailties and strengths of the people in her life and loved them more fiercely. Being with Rashid had turned love insipid. Through the pain and loss of this love, she could feel new things happening. What was growing, she did not know. She merely surrendered to anything that felt better than the rejection she’d lived with, courted and preened for. It was a grey time nonetheless. She sucked up the love that came her way and let tiny roots find purchase in the rocky landscape of her heart.
In the meanwhile, the lawyers spoke to each other. Rashid didn’t want the house and was willing to sell her his half. He was starting over. She wanted to scream. She didn’t want him. But she didn’t want him to start over so easily. There were moments her feelings were seven things at once, and none in agreement. She sat in her dead son’s room and told him that his father did not want to live with him any more. Some days, her rage was like a pulsating volcano in her stomach, regurgitating all the should-haves and didn’t-gives and didn’t-hears and didn’t-loves, and all the ways he’d wronged her. On other days, the good days, she’d feel relief; the hopeful possibility of filling the void called Rashid. Some days, she sat there in that outdated powder-blue room and ranted at herself. Her stupidity for loving badly and giving her children a faithless father and a reckless mother. There were days she just remembered. Too tired, too spent to feel.
She kept the rhythms of her life. The only difference the freedom to wail in Habib’s room without expecting Rashid to return.
They eventually came to an agreement: she would keep the house and pay him the lowest market rate. He would choose a few pieces of furniture for his new life. They divvied up the stocks and all the little important things they’d chased and used to weight their life with meaning. Their marriage was set to end in that most soulless of reckonings, the balanced ledger. Seventeen years dissolved in four months.
The day before she was to sign the divorce agreement, she dreamed the words again.
Chapter 7
She was on a small leaky rowboat in an ocean of words. The now familiar poem roiled and crashed in great big waves and gently lapped the boat. Each word was the poem entire.
To live
is to be free
of the spell
To be free
of the spell
is to claim
a spell of your own
To spell
is to bespell
and to bespell
is to unmake the world
Unspell
Bespell
Spell
Salty brine coated her face and lips. Whispered words sank into her flesh. The boat creaked the words. Water seeped and loose boards admitted the poem’s susurration. Gulls cawed the words as they swooped and dove overhead. The boat was sinking and Qabila tried to bail the waterwords out, throw them back into the ocean – but she couldn’t bail fast enough. The wet jumble kept coming to puddle at her feet. She grabbed the oars and tried to row away. Still the words crept up her legs to cover her lap. The boat was swamped and she knew she was going to drown. It was so unfair, so very very unfair. What do you want from me? she screamed, over and over and over. She screamed as the water reached her chest. Though the boat was completely submerged, she remained seated, her body melded to the boat. As the water reached her chin she let go, sobs rattling and catching in her hoarse throat. The ocean of words claimed her. She drowned in them. With every wordful of ocean she took in, her lungs filled. She surrendered.
Her hand sweeping the empty side of the bed, Qabila woke with the words thrumming in her veins. As before, she found herself mouthing them over and over. She lay on her back, chanting the words. When she was ready, she trailed out of her room and walked the house, spraying the words into the sterile rooms. When the words petered out, she dressed with care and went to meet her husband for the first time since the night of the great crying.
They’d agreed to meet at her lawyers’ offices at the Waterfront. Everyone looked up at her as she entered the conference room. The rich cream walls were hung with expensive watercolours, evoking a nostalgic Cape Town. Rashid looked different but she couldn’t fathom why. He was talking softly to a blond man in an expensive suit. Rashid greeted her warily, looking her over. Magriet, Qabila’s very expensive lawyer, introduced her to Attorney Vosloo. The country really had changed. White people working on black people’s behalf now. If you could afford it, she thought.
‘Shall we begin?’ Magriet said as Qabila sank into the chair opposite Rashid and Vosloo. The lawyers spoke and droned through procedures and possessions she didn’t care about any more. Rashid and Qabila mutely looked at each other. She felt like a photographer, approaching her subject from many angles, yet never satisfied with the image. The lawyers started talking about the arrangements for the house.
‘I don’t want the house,’ she blurted out. The room went silent.
‘What? What do you mean you don’t want the house?’ Rashid asked.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘I don’t understand. We agreed that you would keep the house,’ Rashid gave Vosloo a look that said, did I not tell you she was impossible.
‘I don’t want it. I changed my mind.’
‘Mrs Fakir, this changes the agreement … we’ll have to draw up another set of papers,’ Vosloo interrupted the exchange.
‘When did you change your mind?’ Magriet asked.
Ignoring Rashid and Vosloo’s beetled brows, which screamed inconvenient woman, she turned to Magriet. ‘This morning,’ she said. ‘I can’t live there. Its, its … its fullness traps me.’
Magriet’s squint belied the gentleness of her voice. ‘Are you sure about this?’
Qabila’d had enough. ‘Yes,’ she said, and stood up. ‘Could you please take care of this, Magriet? I’ll call you later.’ She knew she was being rude, saying goodbye over her shoulder, on her way out the door. She could hardly tell them she’d had a dream that pushed her to be freer than she dared. Waiting for the lift, she looked around in frustration for the stairs and rushed down them.
Outside, she stood at the entrance, closed her eyes, breathed the salty air and felt her muscles relax their heavy grip. Someone was at her side. Without opening her eyes, she knew it was him. She knew his smell. It had almost dissipated in the distance between them and yet the tiniest hint of him cut through the salt. For years, she’d divined the tones of his breathing, and once – a wisp of memory reminded her – she thought she knew what every breath meant. She didn’t turn to look at him. They just stood there until he broke the wordless space between them.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go for brunch?’
She looked at him then. The strange look was still there, without the divide-our-assets tension. ‘It’s the air,’ she said, ‘makes you hungry.’