Silent Minaret Page 3
He wants to leap out of the car and shout, “Stop! Please, don’t anybody move. Everybody just stand still.” That will make finding him a lot easier. But who would take any notice? People would just walk through him, around him, like they’re doing right now, paying no attention to the cavity in their midst.
“I can’t park here until after six thirty this evening,” Katinka explains when they eventually pull up outside the flat. “I’ll have to drop you here, if that’s okay?”
A few seconds lapse before Kagiso registers that she is talking to him. “Sure! That’s fine, thanks.”
“I’ll pick you up for dinner at six thirty. Say hi to Frances if you see her. Tell her I’ll pop in this evening. And get some rest. You look completely fucked.”
Homelands
KAGISO IS IN LONDON TO PACK and clean Issa’s flat, but apart from the bookcase, there isn’t actually much to pack; apart from a thin layer of dust that has slipped in through the gap under the door, like the angel of death, he imagines, to cover everything. There isn’t really much to clean.
Katinka had warned him of the heat on the phone, but he was dismissive – I’m from South Africa. How hot can London get? When he returns to Issa’s abandoned flat after dinner, he opens the only window in the room. In Johannesburg, he would be able to step through it onto his balcony overlooking the pool. Here, there is only this tiny window, a droning bus terminus and an entrance to a station into which people flow like miners into the tunnelled baking bowels of the earth.
He turns away from the window and moves towards his open journal on Issa’s desk. He writes the date, Friday, 8th August 2003. And then he writes two words: disappear disappearance. But that is all he can manage, so he starts doodling instead. He turns the F of Friday into an E, which he then forces into the number 8. He extends the tail of the y into a squiggly circle all around the date. Encouraged, he moves his nib over to the two words. He slashes them into syllables. He colours in the loopy letters, except the p’s. These, he turns into two sets of searching eyes with bushy eyebrows. Their tails become noses. He adds two sad mouths, then a loop around each word transforms them into faces. The words now seem to wrap around the faces across the eyes, like blindfolds. He doesn’t like the image so he blots out the negative prefixes and tries to invert the sad mouths into happy smiles. This only achieves sinister grins. Frustrated, he draws an angry line through the sketches, clambers out of his clothes and walks into the shower.
On the eastern side of the city, Katinka is seated at her kitchen table, pen poised at the top right-hand corner of the page (she’d positioned the pen instinctively on the left at first but moved it quickly to the other side when she realised her mistake) eyes on the alphabet stuck on the wall in front of her, another of Karim’s little gifts.
Karim.
Whom she does not want to share.
Karim.
About whom she speaks to no one.
Karim.
Her secret.
Karim.
Now behind the wall.
She has pledged to learn the alphabet during the summer vacation. “If I do nothing else this summer,” she told a colleague, “then at least I will have learned a whole new code, turned the key to literacy in a whole new language.”
Now she is seated at her kitchen table, pen poised at the top right-hand corner of the page, eyes on the alphabet stuck on the wall in front of her, another of Karim’s little gifts. Karim. Whom she does not want to share. Karim. About whom she speaks to no one. Karim. Her secret.
Karim.
Now behind the wall.
She says the first letter out loud – aa – and simultaneously pulls a downward stroke on the paper: She sits back to evaluate her effort then repeats the letter a few times before moving on to the next, bá’:
Kagiso steps out of the shower knowing what to write, the words forcing at his fingertips, making them twitch. He does not shave as he had intended, does not dry himself, does not get dressed, but immediately returns to his journal to write, not like Katinka is doing, slowly, deliberately, letter for letter, but swiftly, his fingers responding nimbly, dishing out words and phrases that have stewed for decades through a keen and agile pen, beads of London water, like teardrops, weeping from his skin.
I am Kagiso Mayoyo. I grew up in Johannesburg, but I was born in Taung, Taungs as the old people say, the place of lions. I found myself thinking again tonight, far away and on the other side of the world, about my place of birth while I was in, of all places, the men’s toilet in a restaurant in Brick Lane, East London.
“East London?” I checked, confused, when Katinka announced our destination. “But I’ve only just arrived.”
“Not that East London! East London here, where I live, in the East End, mate.”
Of course, I’d realised my mistake as soon as I opened my mouth, but I went with it. It felt good to laugh again.
“And here we are, Brick Lane!” Katinka declared, introducing me to the vibrant colourful cobbled street by gesturing up it with a theatrically extended arm. “Like the Meghna River flowing through East London.”
I was amazed. Here was a London you won’t find in the postcard shops. Like the time I accompanied Issa on his illicit trip to Durban. It was as though we had arrived, not in Zululand, but somewhere on the sub-continent. In Brick Lane, where Katinka took me to eat dhal, even the street signs are in another language.
“Welcome to Londonistan,” the waiter joked when he heard we were South African and then, looking at Katinka and then at me, smiled an approving smile, “So nice to see you getting on these days, so nice to see.”
When we had placed our order, I went to the toilet. Inside the cubicle was a long chain of graffiti. It started with: Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan. To this had been added: Pakistan used to be India. The chain rolled on: Israel used to be Palestine / Lebanon used to be Syria / Eritrea used to be Ethiopia / Alsace used to be France then Germany then France / America used to be England / England used to be France. Alongside this main chain ran a parallel chain, around which someone had drawn a huge bracket which pointed to the heading, insha’allah: One day Basque will have been Spain / Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland will have been Britain / Tibet will have been China / Palestine will have been Israel / Chechnya will have been Russia. Under all of this was a somewhat unrelated contribution thrown in for good measure. It read: St George had never been to England. And in red, right at the bottom, somebody had made a final addition, which made me laugh: And what about Kashmir? Self – ule never contemplated, not even in the bog.
This bit of graffiti reminded me of Taung, my place of birth, because it used to be in the Republic of South Africa, but in 1977 it became part of the newly created Republic of Bophuthatswana under the leadership of His Excellency, President Lucas Mangope. Bophuthatswana was one of the more bizarre homelands because it had no territorial integrity. Instead, it consisted of seven different entities, pockets of Setswana-speaking islands scattered all over the central and northern regions of South Africa.
My mother and I were already living with Ma Vasinthe in Johannesburg by the time it was created, but to a child, it felt as though the whole world had changed, as though my grandmother had been packed up and moved to another planet. Despite Ma Vasinthe’s best efforts to explain, I couldn’t understand how a whole town could become part of another country just like that, and although I hardly knew her at that time, I cried for days about what had become of my grandmother.
My grandmother never acknowledged the change, or Mr Mangope’s puppet presidency, and she didn’t care who knew it. “Idiots and stooges,” she called all those who insisted on their Bophuthatswanan nationality. “The place oflions has been thrown into the puppet’s den. I’ll have nothing to do with it.”
For her dissent, she regularly had her electricity cut and her miniscule state pension withheld. When, seventeen years later, Mangope eventually fell and Bophuthatswana was reincorporated into the new South Africa, my grandmo
ther rejoiced for days, not because she was a patriot, but because she was a democrat and the collapse of the ‘imaginary homeland’ meant that she could now vote in the first democratic elections of April 1994. “I have waited a long time to see this day,” she said as she proudly took up her place in the queue that stretched for miles and miles, “and now it has finally arrived.”
Of course, literally speaking, my grandmother could not see at all, her cataracts having become inoperable.
“It’s because of my political views, isn’t it, doctor,” she confronted the young medic.
“No, not – ”
My grandmother cut him short. “But let me tell you something,” she said, waving a foreboding finger. “Opinions are expressed with this,” she pointed at her mouth, “and as you can hear, it’s in tip-top shape. Do with my eyes what you like, but we know it’s my mouth you’re really after.”
My grandmother was right to be suspicious. She had had medical treatment punitively withheld, but in this instance, her politics weren’t the reason. Even a supporter of the new republic would have been told the same: “Mrs Moyoyo, in Bophuthatswana we can’t do cataracts.”
Ma Vasinthe had offered that she come to Johannesburg to have them removed privately, but my grandmother would hear nothing of it. “Hayikhona!” she exclaimed. “Me, in Jo’burg? That crazy town! I don’t need my eyes that much.”
Ma Vasinthe did not insist. “The operation would have made little difference,” she told me. “After all the years of obscured vision, her brain will almost certainly have forgotten its ability to see.”
This memory made me want to add: ‘Bophuthatswana, Venda, Transkei, Ciskei, Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, KwaNdebele, KaNgwane all used to be South Africa’, to the graffiti chain, but I didn’t have a pen on me.
After Katinka and I had left the restaurant and were walking back to the car, taking in the cool air, I recalled the graffiti chain and was glad I had not added to it. Apart from the fact that most of its readers would probably never have heard about the homelands or the immense suffering they contained, I thought it rather pointless to insert a now-settled dispute alongside so many contemporary and unresolved ones.
Disappeared
KAGISO LOOKS UP FROM THE PAPER. In front of him, stuck to the wall above the desk, is a quotation, one of many placed in various locations around the room. This one kindles a nostalgic melancholy, a fetid brooding, like a swampy afternoon, a hot night. He can’t stop himself reading it again:
I consume the day (and myself) brooding, and making phrases and reading and thinking again, galloping mentally down twenty divergent roads at once, as apart and alone as in Barton Street in my attic. I sleep less than ever, for the quietness of night imposes thinking on me: I eat breakfast only, and refuse every possible distraction and employment and exercise.
TE Lawrence
He turns to look around the cell-like room. To someone who didn’t know him, it would seem stripped, cleared of all personal belongings, and abandoned. But to him, the room is full of Issa. It is spartan, monastic; a desk, at which he is seated, a mattress on the floor. The kitchen is a cupboard at one end of the room, the bathroom a tiny cubicle. The only thing of excess is a neat but overflowing bookcase, behind which is concealed the bedstead. The room is sweltering now, but according to Frances, it is a very cold room in the winter, “having only storage heating.” He didn’t really understand what that meant.
On the bookcase is a postcard of home, the skyline at night, taken during a thunderstorm. It rests above the five volumes of the TRC Report, a city of gold balanced on a catalogue of crimes. He remembers sending the card, in the early days, soon after Issa first came to London. He likes the picture. It captures something of the city, he thinks – its drama, its ambitions. People often mistake it for a picture of New York.
He repositions himself at the desk. Earlier that afternoon, he’d come across another picture, one he’d almost forgotten about. It disconcerted him. After having forced himself to look at it for a while, he laid it face down on the desk. Now, his eyes move slowly to the down-turned photograph. Cautiously, as if handling a dangerous device, he lifts the photograph.
It is of the two of them as boys. He remembers Ma Vasinthe taking it with her new camera, Ma Gloria watching from behind. It was springtime. She had got them to crouch on the lawn in the front garden.
“Say cheese.”
“Cheese,” he smiled, self – consciously obedient.
Paneer, Issa said, leaning on his cricket bat. In the picture his mouth is poised for p.
“Why do you always have to spoil things, Issa?” Ma Vasinthe complained. “Let’s do it again.”
But Issa was already halfway up the garden path, eager to return to his cricket match in the street.
Nearly twenty years later, Kagiso has to strain to recognise himself in the shy and withdrawn figure in the picture. But even at that age, Issa’s steely confidence, his intense good looks, were already apparent. He turns over the photograph, this time depositing it in the desk drawer before picking up his pen.
I, we, still find it difficult to accept what has happened. We seldom talk about it. What more is there to say? We’ve given all the statements, answered all the questions. We seldom look at one another for fear of detecting it, lurking, in ever searching eyes. We’ve done, it seems, what we can, provided all the red-T-shirt descriptions, followed the few ephemeral leads to their nose-breaking dead ends. Nothing. Except a pile of ‘Missing’ leaflets for distribution, which, like watches, keys, wallets and cell phones, have become part of the baggage that orbits us as we drift like off-course planets searching an endless universe. Issa, difficult, contrary, spoilt to the last, had been, it seems, the centre of our lives, the improbable silent force that held us all together. Now, sitting in his chair, at his desk, surrounded by his simple things, I am trying again to piece together his story, but there is much I don’t know; Issa had become a stranger to us during his time here. And in the years before he left, he and I, well...
Yet I have to do something with the little I do know. I can’t keep it to myself. I have to let it out. And then, it seems, let it go. For months I have scratched around in this notebook trying to make sense of things, of Issa, of me. But now, sitting in his room in London, his last known address, I am aware that before long I will have packed his scant possessions into boxes for posting back home and cleaned his room ready for its new tenant. By the time I leave London, I will have made his disappearance complete.
He shrinks away from the thought and searches the journal, like a killer returning to the sight of his crime, for the remains of the two words he had mutilated earlier.
When he finds them, he leans forward, trying to draw meaning from their rotting carcasses, like a pathologist, examining these basic components, the two words, just the two, a verb and its noun, that seem to have become a part of his family, it would seem, for good.
He reaches across for the dictionary and copies the definitions:
disappear v.intr: 1 cease to be visible; pass from sight. 2 cease to exist or be in circulation or use (trams had all but disappeared). disappearance n. 1 vanish, evaporate, vaporize, fade (away or out), evanesce. 2 die (out or off), become extinct, cease (to exist), perish (without a trace).
What to make of them? They seem a bit... far-fetched? The noun especially sounds scientific, clinical. Improbable. I can relate them to lost wallets, errant socks, missing pets, the Marie Celeste and planes over the Bermuda Triangle. Until now, I’ve only ever had to use them in that sort of context, and in relation to the disappearance of others: Steve Biko, Victor Jara, Phakamile Mabija, Che. But that was the sort of stuff Issa used to talk about.
We can match his name with other verbs and other nouns. For instance, we can say that Issa has gone to London. Even though he and I had drifted apart by then, that was still a hard sentence to get used to at first. And saying goodbye was an inner wrench, because, for a long time, there hadn’t been very many hellos. W
e missed him terribly during those first months. Funny how one misses the presence of a silent person. But after a while, we could say it. Issa has gone to London. Issa now lives in London. Issa is studying in London. Issa is doing a PhD in London. We never had difficulty with that one, especially Ma Vasinthe. Issa is doing a PhD in London. It made her proud. It made us all proud.
In the same way, we can attribute nouns to Issa: Issa’s intensity, Issa’s integrity, Issa’s intelligence, Issa’s temper, Issa’s good looks.
But, nearly four months later, we cannot reconcile Issa’s name with this verb, to disappear, and its noun, disappearance. We can’t say, “Issa has disappeared.” We can’t talk about Issa’s disappearance. To us, they are incompatible, irreconcilable; like oil and water, they just don’t mix. Like red next to green, they just don’t match, can make you sick, and if you look at them juxtaposed for long enough, can drive you crazy.
Of course, when it first became apparent that that was what had happened, we had to. We, or rather, I, had to report the event to others. So I had to make his name the subject of that dreadful verb: Issa has disappeared. I had to match it to that unlikely noun: Ma Gloria is devastated by Issa’s disappearance; Ma Gloria rarely talks, following Issa’s disappearance, or, Ma Vasinthe keeps her cell phone on all the time, following Issa’s disappearance. In fact, Ma Vasinthe has taken to clutching her cell phone, like a talisman, waiting, as though the constant contact will make it ring, make him phone. Her assistant once told me that she just apologises at the start of meetings. “But people don’t mind,” she smiled sympathetically. “They understand.”
And in the cinema, which she has developed an increased liking for, she sets it to vibrate and always sits in an aisle seat. She hates flying because then she has to switch it off. I once called her phone when I knew she was on a flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, just to check. She had switched it off but the message said, “Issa, this is your mother. I had to switch off because I’m flying from Cape Town to Jo’burg. You know that it’s only a two-hour flight. I’ll switch on again as soon as we have landed. Please leave me a message.”