‘Do you love me?’
He replied without hesitation. ‘What do you think?’
And then he sighed. Weary. Long-suffering. If his eyes hadn’t been tracing lines on the ceiling, she would have thought him a statue. She took in the tense lines of his body, stretched out on the imported blue-and-white-striped bull-denim sofa. The coffee-coloured skin she’d once wanted to burrow under. The sleek brown hair shot through with grey. She’d stopped just shy of running her hand through that hair so many times. The patrician nose, the mouth with its full lower lip she’d bitten when she was young and such things were the sum of happiness, and humiliation could be swept into a dusty corner of the heart. She took him in, line by line, this man who’d been the greater part of her past. This familiar stranger.
She leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes. ‘No. The answer has always been no.’ The steadiness of her voice surprised her.
‘Qabila.’ His voice thick with whatever he was feeling. Still not a yes or a no; not even a maybe.
All these years of not knowing, of never being able to just have the truth of it. How absurd to wonder about your husband’s feelings, but be afraid to ask. Just so she could continue to live as if the fantasy were real. So that when people asked about her husband, she could say ‘we’ and not falter. That little seedling of hope that had never been watered enough to bloom, and yet stubbornly remained alive in the fertile soil she’d provided.
Saying nothing is also an answer. For the first time, she was prepared to listen to what he was not saying, to hear the worst.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m okay.’ And she was. She truly was. It was like a story one tells oneself and then finds is true. And yet, it was no loss. There was nothing to lose.
She opened her eyes to find him a step away, looking down at her with a look of … what? Concern, fear? She couldn’t tell. She did not care. The muscle at the side of his jaw was jumping. She just looked at him. This man she’d loved painfully for all her adult life, whom she’d promised herself to, and remained faithful to despite the barrenness he’d provided. She looked at his denim-clad knees and past them at the Italian sofa and the heavy walnut coffee table with its perfect, glossy coffee table books. The woman who’d hung the nubby silk curtains had been full of instructions for taking care of the fabric. Qabila wondered what advice she’d give now – that beautiful windows are no substitute for an empty marriage? Rashid was looming over her now. He was always looming. She wondered what life without his looming would be like, for both of them. What would it be like, to not be someone who was loomed over? The idea made her giddy.
‘Why did you never leave?’ she asked.
‘Qabila. Please not now.’
How can someone do that – plead and be implacable, at the same time? ‘You’re looming, please sit down. Why did you never leave?’ Her voice was no longer steady.
‘Qabila, I don’t want to get into this with you, not now.’ Back bowed, he walked slowly back to the sofa.
‘I do, Rashid. I want to talk about it.’
‘This is not important.’
She laughed. It started short and hard, and when it hit her belly it became uncontrollable – every time she looked at his upright, tense body, it would start up again. There was nothing joyful about it.
Contempt and bitter resentment crept into his face. Guard down, his body betrayed him, told her what she needed to hear. But then, as if aware that he was giving her something real and deep, his face blanked again, the emotion leached out. She knew this face. The face that had hidden the truth from her. It could send her a smile like a doctor who’s lanced the pus from your body but is still brightly professional. She’d lived with a professional husband too long.
‘I’m going to pick up some Nando’s for dinner, so you don’t have to cook tonight.’ He offered it like a treat, a favour. Before she could reply, he walked out. The laughter fled as precipitously as it had begun. She heard Rashid’s car start up and leave.
She’d accepted their life for what it was. A pauper’s graveyard, just in the better part of town. Being entombed for one minute longer was intolerable. Qabila picked up her keys and bag. She didn’t know where she was going. She just knew she needed to go.
Chapter 4
The Cape doctor was blowing steely grey clouds about. Her neighbour was in his garden, pointing something out to the gardener. She raised an arm in greeting. He gave her one of his stony-faced looks before turning away. Courting his rejections had become a game to her and Rashid. They’d know the country had truly changed when he accepted their black selves in his formerly lily-white neighbourhood.
Driving through the hilly streets, with their huge houses and always-lush gardens, she wondered about the turns her life had taken. How had she gotten to this place of abundance – and abundance of rejection? Become a person who turned rejection into a game?
The mountains in the distance formed a protective circle. She wondered if moving to Durbanville had been the best choice. If she and Rashid lived in the southern suburbs or Cape Flats, where almost everyone they’d grown up with lived, perhaps they would have found a way through the trials of their marriage. A way that was not like treading on shards of glass so fine you barely knew you were bleeding. But they’d traded all that – the close-knit family, the bustle of friends and relations dropping in – for the green northern suburbs. Behind the boerewors curtain, people joked. They’d been the first black people in their street. They were not the last. Even though there were more black neighbours now, they hadn’t forged a community. So many joyless years in this place. Except for the few with Habib.
Rashid had insisted they move, couching it as a defiant political move. But perhaps it had been to avoid witnesses to the travesty of their glittering marriage.
‘This is our city now,’ he used to say. ‘We shouldn’t congregate like a bunch of sardines in the southern suburbs. Look at how wide the streets are here, how clean, how big the houses – and the costs are lower. For a cramped box on a grey, broken-asphalt street, we’d pay twice as much.’
Durbanville was the realisation of white middle-class desires. A bright, airy, green village, set apart from the squalor and poverty and despair that supported its Disneyesque charm. It was so beautiful. Would it be so enchanting if she hadn’t known the other side so intimately? The greyness of the Cape Flats, her Cape Flats, where homes had peeling paint and walls hospitable to mould. She shook her head. Habib had loved the house. And she deserved a beautiful home. Everyone does.
She was approaching Capetonians’ lodestone, Table Mountain. A waterfall of clouds was running down the square-topped mass of rock. Her breath caught. It usually did.
Table Mountain was a little like her marriage. From a distance it looked square, but if you went up on the far-too-expensive cable car and walked around on top, it was very bumpy. If you didn’t walk with careful attention, you were liable to trip and fall on the paths that hadn’t quite succeeded in domesticating a hard and rocky place.
She loved her house and hated her home. How does that happen? She’d mistaken silence for peace. She’d waited for Rashid to love her, hoping he would see her. Qabila. Not the girl he’d been forced to marry. He’d never forgiven her for sleeping with him – well, he might have forgiven her for that, but not for the pregnancy. As if that was something she chose. She’d been so young, in her Honours year in Gender Studies. He was a junior lecturer in the Physics department. Sometimes, he’d join her group of friends on campus to say hi.
He was dating her then – Thandiwe. It was quite a scandal and no one took it seriously. It was one of the things sophisticated Muslim boys did: date unsuitable girls, before marrying good Muslim girls. Except in Qabila’s case, the good, proper Muslim girl threw herself at the boy, hoping he’d see that she’d do anything for him. The ‘loose’ black Christian girl … well,