Rashid left her for a while and returned with food that choked her; but she ate because he asked in a voice she’d forgotten he possessed.
She didn’t dream that night. She didn’t dream that week. She didn’t have any lists. Her only purpose was to surrender to the tearing open of the long-fastened box.
Rashid joined her. They wept. When the tears lost their urgency, talked. They remembered her mother and, remembering her, they remembered him. Habib. The child they’d almost given up on having. They smiled at how he’d marvelled at worms. How funny he’d been, how brave. How fully he’d loved his favourite nurses, and how fond he’d been of cheese. How their mothers had doted on him – their little princeling. All the small things that make loving a child the biggest thing in the universe.
And with the light his life had brought, they remembered the other child. The one who never had a chance to meet them in the world. Abdullah they’d named him, slave of Allah. The pregnancy that had trapped them in this marriage. And for the first time, they dreamed him into life together: whose nose, whose eyes, whose character? What kind of loves and joys would he have had, what hates and despairs?
It was a week of great loosening. Unravelling. A grey week spent in the graveyard of their marriage, reviving their ghosts and meeting each other at the fences they had built.
They’d met in 1985. A year of turmoil, mass rallies bringing young men and women across the Cape Flats together in a bid for freedom. They’d believed they could change the world, chanting slogans and running from police and teargas and purple rain and swinging sjamboks. A year when children became the conscience of a brutal land.
Rashid had been in his last year of school at Belgravia High, where they’d burned tires and fought the machines of the South African police force with stones and shouts of defiance. She’d been in Standard Seven at Mondale High, angered by the knowledge of young people, just like her, being jailed and starved and brutalised; but not really believing things could be different.
Until an earnest young man came to her high school to inform them of the organised discontent across the country. He showed her the possibility of a country without servitude to white people, and without hatred for other oppressed black people. For the first time, she heard about the anti-apartheid struggle’s use of the word ‘black’: a reclaiming, mobilising use, including all the people the government wanted to separate into a bizarre hierarchy of ‘Indian’, ‘Coloured’, ‘black African’. He talked about jailed people she didn’t know existed; someone called Mandela, who was imprisoned on Robben Island. And young people who were eating nothing but jam and bread in prison cells across the country. She also learned songs of freedom.
While marching for freedom on the streets, they set the stage for entrapment with each other. Outside a crowded Athlone stadium, they exchanged shy smiles as their groups of friends mingled. Her school had bussed them in from Mitchell’s Plain so they could march with the UDF.
‘Do you remember how we ran to Moenier’s house after they started shooting teargas at us?’ he asked.
‘I was so scared. I didn’t know where to go.’
‘You were so pretty, man. I was worried you would get hurt. That’s why I took your hand when we had to run.’ The memory made him smile.
‘I fell in love with you that day, you were so protective. But I was just a pretty girl to you.’ She’d accepted years ago that she was interchangeable.
He waved the comment away. ‘You were a pretty girl, Qabila. You were brave to be there. I liked that.’
‘My father thought I was a fool,’ she said. ‘He slapped me so hard I fell when I told him.’ She’d never shared this, the aftermath of their adventure. Slowly, she spoke the half-forgotten memories, finally bringing them into the world: ‘Standing over me, nudging me with those shiny white-and-black brogues. Just like your mother, you can’t do anything right! You both need to learn how to behave! Mommy screamed at him to leave me alone. That it was her fault. She’d do better. He dragged my mother through the house into the closed bedroom – for backchatting, for forgetting who was the man of the house. For forgetting the rules. He really liked punishing her behind closed doors. It was terrible watching him do it. Worse when that door was closed.’
Rashid’s hand cupped his mouth, pulling the flesh around his jaw forward and then relaxing it. Over and over. She looked away, sighed deeply and shook her head. She didn’t need his pity.
After that beating, her mother wore long sleeves and dark glasses for weeks. Her father bought her a handbag. She had so many trophies to commemorate the beatings. So many. When he died, Qabila was happy. What kind of man dies and is not mourned by his child?
‘May Allah grant her Jannat ul-Firdaus, inshallah ameen. I’m glad I never knew him,’ Rashid said finally. ‘You hardly ever talk about him, about growing up. About, about all of it. If your mother hadn’t told me, I would never have known. He’s the cause of all your trust issues. You really should talk to someone about it, a professional.’
Qabila wasn’t in the mood for this. ‘We hardly talk about anything, Rashid,’ she said. ‘It’s not like you discuss your family’s skeletons.’
His eyes narrowed. The left eyebrow lifted ever so slightly. He took a deep breath and turned his face to the window, nodded slightly. ‘There was a different kind of war in our house. Cold, very formal. The endless meetings we had when Faghria came out … She was shaming the family. Destroying our reputation. The things my parents put her through, the things they said. Making her get married! How she … I don’t know how she stayed sane. They tried to break her down in every way. I was too young to fully understand. Now I do.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I love my parents, I truly do. They were trying to give her the best, to protect her in the best way they knew. It must’ve been so hard, then, to have a gay child.’
Qabila shook her head. Mummy Kayna and Boeya hadn’t spoken to Faghria in years, would probably never speak to her again. When Faghria came out after her divorce, they’d cast her out. She and her partner, Caroline, would forever be refugees in Johannesburg. If only Faghria had been at Mommy’s janaazah, rather than Mummy Kayna with her contempt.
‘We should go and visit Faghria again,’ Qabila said. ‘I miss her. I saw Caroline at a conference a few months ago. She said Faghria would love it if we came.’ Qabila shrugged, even though he was turned away from her. ‘We only ever stay with them when we’re in Joburg for work. I miss them. Faghria is my kind of people.’
Rashid turned, arms folded, looked over her head and scanned the room before giving her a narrow smile. ‘Before I forget. I phoned our departments and told them we won’t be in for the rest of the week. We don’t want them saying we’ve gone AWOL.’ His smile still didn’t reach his eyes. He sighed. Loudly. ‘My troubles don’t compare with your issues. At least Faghria is alive. Your father,’ he shook his head, ‘that man. He has really damaged you. Maybe this sadness is for the best. We can find someone to help now.’
She wanted to protest. This wasn’t some breakdown. She was mourning her mother and sons; it had nothing to do with her father. But she didn’t feel like disagreeing with him, not now. She nodded meekly and ignored the tightness in her tummy.
For that week, Qabila and Rashid ignored the outside world. Seven days of memories and half-truths as they rehashed the unmet expectations and small disappointments and big tragedies that had made them ghosts to each other. Their histories rubbed together uneasily when spoken into the space between them. Each barely recognisable in the other’s story. She could not recall when they’d ever been this tender with each other.
On the last day of tenderness, Qabila was curled up in an armchair, Rashid