[2017] What We Lose Page 7

  It is an immaculate fall day, uncharacteristically warm, tempting many to come out in T-shirts. Some women wear bikinis and sunbathe on towels. We snarl to each other looking at these exhibitionists.

  In my favorite park in Brooklyn, we find a spot on the hill from which we can see the rest of the borough sloping away from us.

  It’s one of my favorite places, in part because nearly everyone here looks like me. There are mixed families all around us; all of their children look like they could be mine. Peter, I feel, notices this too, and I think it makes him uncomfortable. I try to talk to him about the baby again, but he tells me he is thirsty. He goes to the store to buy us bottled water. Next to me, a family with an Asian mother and black father play. There is an infant in a stroller and a girl of maybe five with wild curls and caramel skin who looks like my young cousin. As Peter returns to my side, I smile at her, and she approaches us, carrying a sycamore leaf that is as big as her head. Her parents look on consentingly, full of Brooklyn laissez-faire. She lays the paperlike leaf in my lap.

  “Wow, it’s beautiful,” I tell her with the animation one reserves for small children. “Thank you.”

  Peter takes the leaf from me, turns the stem between his fingers, and lets it fall to the ground.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” he says. “It’s just not the right time. For me or for us.”

  A light has been growing inside me since the park, a light that felt sure this would work out.

  “Yeah, of course,” I say. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be here with you. I have to get back to work.” He writes me a check for $700.

  I take him to the airport that evening. I get out of the driver’s seat and we hug and kiss in the loading lane. Then we say goodbye.

  We returned to Johannesburg one year after my mother died. Of the two weeks we spent there, I spent one afternoon with my grandfather. He sat in his recliner, in front of the TV, switched to the cricket game, and I halfheartedly arranged papers, went to the store to buy milk, and brought him cups of tea.

  “You don’t seem well,” he said.

  I laughed and said that I was fine.

  “My feet ache,” he said, pointing down at his blue velvet slippers. His diabetes caused his feet to swell, and they caused him great pain. I removed the slippers and found his skin dry and red. His toenails were black.

  “Papa . . .”

  “I’m in pain every day,” he said. “It’s not just my feet, it’s all over.”

  I saw his eyes fill with tears and then looked away quickly. My father had spent most of his time in Johannesburg with my grandfather, running him all over town, sitting with him, talking. They had always gotten along, but now they behaved as old friends, reunited after a long time apart. They shared a bond over my mother’s death that the rest of us couldn’t know. My grandfather’s pain was as unknowable to me as my father’s but multiplied several times over. I was afraid that if I looked into his eyes, I might see what it was like to lose a child. Instead, I excused myself to the bathroom.

  “I’ll get you some muscle rub, Da.”

  In the small room lined by eggshell tiles, unchanged since my mother bathed in there as a baby, I gazed at his neat arrangement of ointments and creams, the same bottles that he’d used since I was a child. I cried until I felt so empty that I knew no more would come, and then I went back outside.

  —

  We assembled at my family’s gravesite, at the large coloured cemetery a few minutes from my grandparents’ house. As we walked from our cars to the small plot marked by a few lines of white folding chairs, I remembered my grandmother’s funeral, held here ten years ago. My grief had been simple and remote. I had had no clue of the depth of feeling beneath my own mother’s tears; this time I finally did.

  My mother’s brother Bertie led the ceremony. He had made a small fortune and a name for himself by opening a string of gas stations in coloured townships that employed neighborhood people and quietly exploited them. He walked to the front of the group with a serious look that bordered on a smirk. He could barely contain his glee at being in front of a captive audience. He rubbed his belly with a gold ring–laden hand; his children sniffed loudly from the front row.

  Bertie took the urn holding my mother’s ashes from the pedestal nearby. He handed it to my grandfather, who laid it in a small hole next to my grandmother’s headstone.

  My cousin Lyndall squeezed my hand.

  “I hope his fat ass falls in that hole,” she whispered under her breath to me. We both laughed, and Bertie’s children—clad in designer clothes and shades, comforted by their respective spouses—shot us disapproving stares. Though we were close as children, our relationship became distant when my cousins became certifiably rich, in a way none of us could really understand; it ended completely when they married. Their wealth made them paranoid. They closed ranks against people or conflicts that challenged any one of them. The rest of us saw this happen, felt a different kind of grief for the people they had once been.

  I started to sob in huge bursts again, felt my face getting hot.

  “Are you okay?” Lyndall whispered to me.

  I felt Stephanie, my older cousin, poke me in the back. She opened her palm and revealed a small blue pill.

  “For your nerves,” Lyndall said.

  I held it in my hand.

  “Don’t think about it,” Lyndall said, and raised my hand to my mouth.

  The pill kicked in just as Bertie waddled back to his seat, and everything turned gray. I stopped crying. We waited in line to throw dirt on my mother’s ashes. I held my father’s hand. We said our final prayer and went back the way we had come.

  —

  My cousin Lyndall is beautiful and wild. She has wavy sandy-brown hair flowing down to her back that she flicks off of her neck mischievously whenever she is lying. She’s the pariah of our family because in high school, her parents caught her doing tik. They screamed and beat her and she didn’t apologize, so they sent her to rehab in Botswana for a month. She came back wilder than ever, but better at hiding it.

  Lyndall is that fatal mix of beautiful and visible brokenness that made all the guys swarm us whenever we would go out. When I first arrived, she took me out into the small rectangle of my grandfather’s backyard and handed me a joint. As we hunched under the clothesline, Lyndall held the garments away from our smoke. “Aish, if my mother smells this I’m in for it.” I chided Lyndall, still a captive to her parents’ old ways. For the millionth time, I told her she should move to America. No one as free as her should live in this country. She waved off the weed smoke.

  “This is dangerous,” Lyndall said, putting the joint between her teeth. She led me up to the roof of our grandfather’s garage just like she did when we were kids. We hoisted ourselves onto the wall, then onto the storm pipe, and up onto the tin roof.

  “Papa used to hate us doing this, hey?” Lyndall said with the joint still in her teeth, casting a cautious glance into the living room window. When we were little, our grandfather had a sixth sense for our mischief. As soon as we put a foot on the house’s whitewashed wall, he would be at the window, yelling threats at us to get down.

  A dog barked. We lay side by side, blowing smoke into the air. We could hear pots clanging in the kitchen sink, our aunties cleaning up the funeral lunch.

  “Do you remember when we were little,” Lyndall said, “when we used to pretend we were grown-up? You always wanted to be twenty years old and living in New York.”

  “I did,” I said, chuckling. “We used to practice putting on lipstick and kissing our pillows.”

  “I was going to marry a footballer,” Lyndall purred, drawing long on the joint. “I still can.”

  We laughed.

  “How you doing, really?” Lyndall asked.

  “How do you think?” I sighed. “
It feels like everything has fallen apart.”

  “Your mom and I were close in a—different kind of way.”

  My mother generally disapproved of Lyndall’s wild behavior, but there was some part of her that obviously identified with it. They called each other often to share gossip, and when Lyndall got in trouble, my mother would be the first to call and chastise her. But at the end of the conversation, they would end up laughing.

  I looked over and Lyndall was crying. She wiped her eyes on her forearm, the joint in her fingers.

  “Ahhhh!” She flicked the joint off the roof. “It’s time to get out of here and get drunk!”

  From an article on a planned high-rise in Maboneng, the fast-developing neighborhood in Johannesburg, by London-bred Ghanaian “celebritecht” David Adjaye

  “I think it will be a double take with a lot of people, because you will look at this building and think that it is in some other city, and then you will realise its in Johannesburg; it’s in Africa,” he said. The aim is to “combine an African aesthetic with a contemporary vision.”

  —

  But why do “African” and “contemporary” have to be incommensurate? Why (and to whom) is it appealing to think you are in another city besides the one, in Africa, that you are in?

  An hour later, when the sun was setting pink along the palm tree skyline, a taxi pulled up in front of our grandfather’s house and took us downtown, to the new part of Johannesburg swept up and made trendy by a succession of developers and moneyed artists.

  We were let out in front of a club with a line of anxious and bored-looking people and let right inside by a bouncer who smiled at Lyndall.

  “Thank you, baby.” Lyndall reached up and patted the bouncer on top of his bald head. He grabbed for her arm, but she kept walking inside.

  By the bar, Lyndall adjusted her top so that her small breasts, boosted to high heaven, erupted from her cowl-neck blouse. Within minutes, we were showered with free drinks. We accepted all of them; we danced with no one. Lyndall, halfway through the night, climbed atop a cocktail table and moved uninhibitedly, throwing her arms in the air, bending at the waist, and shaking her full mane of hair. It was the only moment when she was visibly having fun—the rest of the night seemed like a string of transactions.

  A man approached me. He was from Zambia and staying in Joburg to study law at the university. He had a head full of locs that looked neat and freshly twisted. He wore wire-framed glasses and a collared shirt, and looked more like he was going to the office than to a nightclub. His friends were messily hitting on dancing women, but he was reserved and polite, biding his time by the bar. He smelled like cocoa butter. He had a kind smile, and I recognized, for the first time in a while, that I was interested.

  We traded conversation, standing next to each other for a good long time.

  “You’re with her?” He pointed to my cousin, flailing sexily on top of the table.

  “She’s my cousin.” I smiled puzzlingly at him.

  “Come home with me.” He leaned into me, putting a hand around my waist just as I felt Lyndall tugging at me from the other direction.

  “It’s time for part two,” she said as she pulled me out of the club behind two men in stylish, slim-cut clothing. She led me out to a taxi and then to a hotel. From the modern, marble lobby up to the twentieth floor, to a hotel room laid with designer shopping bags, watches, electronic gadgets left about that suggested the carelessness of wealth. Lyndall could always smell money, even in the dark, in the midst of a crowded nightclub.

  The room began to spin. I scarcely registered the number of drinks I’d had because they were all free, handed to me like candy. Both men had short dreads. One sported a leather bowler hat. The other wore thick-rimmed glasses.

  The boy with the hat put one arm around my cousin. The other took a seat next to the bed, his lean shoulders hunched away from me, cutting three lines of different-colored powder on the dining table.

  “Coca-Cola; my best friend, Tik Tik; and her cousin Special K.”

  “Aye, I don’t fuck with your best friend anymore,” Lyndall said. She walked over and hoovered up the white line.

  Her head lolled back, she sniffed, and then she laughed deeply. Too drunk to sit up, I watched her from the hotel bed.

  “You should have some,” she said. “It’ll perk you up.”

  I licked my finger and dabbed some of the coke on my teeth.

  Soon, I was wired, telling stupid jokes, singing to the Kwaito music the boys had put on their iPod speakers. The musicians were them. Apparently they were here for a gig and radio spot. They were famous.

  “It’s boss, yeah?”

  “No,” I said, and flopped back down on the bed.

  “She’s not used to such strong stuff,” Lyndall said.

  I saw her take the boy with the hat by the hand and lead him into the bathroom. I heard her heels click on the bathroom linoleum, the boy’s voice echoing from behind the door, then Lyndall’s laugh, tinkling like rocks in a glass.

  I felt the boy without the hat stick his tongue in my mouth. He darted it around like he was searching for something, his hands riffling through my clothing, over my breasts, under my pants . . . Oh god, is this really happening? I heard voices from the bathroom laughing, distracted, ecstatic. I was so drunk, I had to tell myself what was going on. I was being kissed, groped, aggressively and unwanted. I told myself to kiss back. I don’t know why.

  “Wait!” I pulled away from the boy. I was too scared to tell him to stop. If he was capable of doing this, he was capable of anything.

  “What?”

  “Is there somewhere else we can go?”

  “No.”

  He took his penis out of his pants. It was semihard. He rubbed it furiously in his right hand and started groaning. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

  Just then we heard the bathroom door unlatch, and Lyndall’s voice.

  “You’re so naughty, I can tell!”

  He stuffed it back in his pants, then covered his crotch with the tail of his shirt.

  “What are you getting up to?” Lyndall’s voice was unnervingly high. I ran over to her, grabbed her by the hand, and ran out of the room. At the front desk, we called a cab.

  As we flew along the highway back toward the suburbs, only lit-up billboards and the distant lights of the city were visible. I thought about how similar Johannesburg looked to where I lived. Save for the occasional pedestrian walking on the side of the highway, we could have been in New York or Los Angeles. I thought about how every place on Earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others falling, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.

  Winnie Mandela bore a strong physical resemblance to my mother: They had the same complexion, same nose, same warm, unassuming smile. When I first heard the accusations against Mrs. Mandela, I weighed the brutality of the charges against her physical appearance. She could appear stern sometimes, as my mother could—no-nonsense, the kind of woman you wouldn’t want to encounter after sneaking home past curfew. But the dissonance between what she represented to the country (her nickname is “Mother of the Nation”) and what she is alleged to have done is almost impossible to reconcile.

  Almost impossible to reconcile if you believe that motherhood and brutality are diametrically opposed. The truth is that motherhood is stained with blood, tainted with suffering and the potential for tragedy. Why are we surprised when a mother—a real mother, someone who takes care of her children and loves them—commits atrocious crimes? These are questions I wrestle with in the days and weeks that I consider my own pregnancy.

  From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa’s report, volume two

  The Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) was the source of considerable violence and controversy between 1987 and 1989. Wh
ilst Ms Madikizela-Mandela denied this, both the liberation movement externally and the MDM [Mass Democratic Movement] internally recognized it and stated so clearly in their statements of 16 February 1989. In the face of criticism and concerns raised by senior leaders of the liberation movement both at home and in exile, as well as the outrage of the local community, it is difficult to understand why she failed to recognise the threat that the club was posing and how damaging this was to herself. Her reluctance to disband the club is inexplicable.

  Ms Madikizela-Mandela denied in her testimony that there was a close relationship between her and the youths who lived on or frequented her property. However, the testimony of former MUFC members, and of individuals who tried to dissuade her from this association, indicates that Madikizela-Mandela took a much more active interest than she has admitted. The MDM statement affirms this: Not only is Mrs Mandela associated with the team, in fact the team is her own creation.

  The effects of racial and economic oppression figure largely in the structure and functioning of Black families. Black women play integral roles in the family and frequently it is immaterial whether they are biological mothers, sisters, or members of the extended family. From the standpoint of many Black daughters it could be: my sister, my mother; my aunt, my mother; my grandmother, my mother. They are daughters all and they frequently “mother” their sisters, nieces, nephews, or cousins as well as their own children.

  Mr Sono testified that on Sunday 13 November, Mr Michael Siyakamela, Ms Madikizela-Mandela’s temporary driver, came to his house. He was told that someone wanted to see him. When he went out, he saw Lolo sitting in the back of the minibus, with Madikizela-Mandela in the front seat. Lolo’s face was swollen and bruised. Sono testified that Madikizela-Mandela informed him that Lolo was a police spy and that the MK cadres at Jerry Richardson’s house had been killed because of him. Despite his pleas to Madikizela-Mandela to release his son, Lolo was taken away. Madikizela-Mandela allegedly told him: “I am taking this dog away. The movement will see what to do to him.”