BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Theory of Flight (2018)
Published in 2020 by Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1953/000441/07
The Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue,
Century City, 7441, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
© 2020 Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2020
ISBN 978-1-4859-0421-2 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4859-0461-8 (ePub)
Quote from ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire reprinted with kind permission of Monthly Review Press.
Quotes from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Copyright © 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. Renewed © 1965
by John C Hurston and Joel Hurston. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Copyright © 1995
Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Cover design by Gretchen van der Byl
Text design by Chérie Collins
Author photograph by Joanne Olivier
Set in Adobe Garamond Pro
For my loving mother
and all her formidable grace
PROLOGUE
When news of the ceasefire arrived, on December 21, 1979, Emil Coetzee was washing blood off his hands. He watched the rust-coloured water slosh up until it almost filled the white enamel basin and then he turned off the cold-water tap. It did not turn off entirely and water kept drip, drip, dripping into the basin, as though holding on to a memory. The water gurgled down the drain until it was a disappearing swirl. Next, Emil reached for the black plug that was, by some miracle, still attached to the sink. He pulled the plug up by its metal chain and pushed it in before turning on the hot-water tap and letting the scalding water rise halfway up the basin. Without having to look, he reached for the bottle of antiseptic liquid that was under the sink. As advertised, when he poured a capful of the liquid into the water it mushroomed into a cloud of purity. He submerged his hands into the water and his broken skin was thankful for all the many stings it felt. Emil was no Pontius Pilate, however, and so, next, he scrubbed his hands with a bar of lye soap until they were raw and red. As he dried them on the once-white cloth in the towel dispenser, he decided that this was to be his last day at The Organisation of Domestic Affairs.
As always, he ignored the rarely used purple pump bottle of lavender-scented lanolin lotion that was stationed between the two taps. He had always felt that whoever had left it on the sink had meant it as a cruel joke. This was definitely not the place for sweet-smelling things.
Before he left the room, Emil peered at his reflection in the tarnished mirror above the water basin; his glance was brief as it always was now, and for the first time he noticed how tired he looked. He was weary, more weary of the world than any man in his fifties ought to be. After the bombastic hubris of youth and the blundering determination of adulthood, there was supposed to be blissful self-assuredness, was there not? Or was that self-assuredness only reserved for a particular kind of man, a man that he had not become?
He looked into his eyes to see what they carried within them. Nothing. Even on a day such as this, his eyes stared back blankly as though long unseeing.
Emil took one last look at the dark, grey, concrete room with its naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling and bathed the room and its rudimentary furniture in a cold welcome. It was not much to gaze upon, to be sure, but this had been the crucible of his manhood. Emil tried to reconcile himself to this fact before he switched off the light and closed the door firmly behind him, shutting out the sound of the drip, drip, dripping tap.
Instead of taking the six flights of stairs to his office, he chose to take the elevator. He often avoided the lift and its proximity-induced forced camaraderie. However, with news of the ceasefire, he felt that the atmosphere in the lift would be sombre and subdued enough to allow people to take complete notice of one another. Emil suddenly had the perverse desire to be seen – really seen. He wanted, just this once, for others to notice the oil-coloured stains on his veldskoene and know, not just suspect, what he had been up to all these years.
When he entered the lift there were, in addition to the lift operator, two elderly ladies who were all rosewater and talcum powder, a tall man in a baby-blue safari suit and a brunette with red-wine lipstick and Farrah Fawcetted hair. Emil’s supposition had been correct: the lift was filled with a stunned and solemn silence. The silence let Emil know that he was not alone – that he was not the only one who all of a sudden felt as if he was … hanging in the balance. The war had given them everything: an identity, a purpose, a state. It had made them feel a sense of belonging that had previously eluded them. The ceasefire had taken all that away and had done so without any hesitation.
Emil knew all the people in the lift. The two elderly ladies, Prudence and Prunella Pickford, were the spinster aunts of an ever-jolly man, Lars Pickford, who worked in the Processing department on the third floor; the man in the safari suit was Samuel Levi, who worked in the Accounts department on the fifth floor; the brunette, Cecelia Chatsworth, was engaged, perhaps even recently married, judging by the ring on her finger, to Claude McCloud, who worked in the Computer department on the second floor. Emil knew some of their histories: Prudence and Prunella had raised Lars since his parents had died in a road accident when he was a baby. They brought him freshly baked goods every day for his ten o’clock tea; Samuel Levi, who only wore pastel-coloured polyester safari suits, had a penchant for being rather creative with the books and had been fired twice before being hired by The Organisation of Domestic Affairs for this particular talent; Cecelia Chatsworth, or Mrs Claude McCloud, as it were, believed that the country was surely going to the dogs and had recently resigned from her job as a teller at the CABS bank and now spent her time putting pressure on Claude to emigrate to South Africa.
Emil realised that the invitation to the McCloud wedding was probably lost in the pile of letters and correspondence that he had not bothered to open since Kuki had left him. She had always been the one to handle their considerably full social calendar and to arrange their very busy lives. Everyone in the lift, even the operator, knew that he and Kuki were separated; the City of Kings’ size made it extremely difficult not to know your neighbour and his business. Feeling justifiably snubbed, Mrs Claude McCloud was making a point of not catching Emil’s eye. She, unfortunately, made the mistake of looking at his feet. Before she could stop herself, her eyes flew up at Emil’s as she hastily got off on the second floor. He had expected his blood-stained shoes to elicit looks of horror, but Mrs Claude McCloud had given him such a pitying glance that he found himself placing his hands in his pockets, as though to hide them.
As Emil got off on the sixth floor, he nodded stiffly to the operator who, once so acknowledged, smiled in relief. The smile made Emil try to recollect the young man’s name; he had said it several times, at Emil’s prompting, when they said good morning to each other, every morning before Emil took the stairs. The name would not come to Emil. It was one of those multisyllabic African names with more consonants than sense … A name like Sibonubuhle … No … no … no … that was not him but his tiredness talking. He managed to smile back at the operator before the doors closed, and that, at least, was something.
On