Simon

We meet in my office on a warm winter’s morning in 1997.

He is handsome – tall with blue eyes and a slightly floppy haircut and a smile that stays in his eyes just like in the movies. He has a great chin – with a cleft like a character in a Mills & Boon novel. There is something reserved in him, something lovely and kind that seems unaware of or uninterested in the coincidental way in which his mouth and his nose line up on his face. I warm to him immediately. He has none of the white saviour sanctimony I have already encountered in other experts I’ve been assigned to work with in my new job with the Australian High Commission, and so we hit it off.

He is in the country to help with the drafting of South Africa’s first national youth policy. So we talk shop, and in the context of the discussion, he asks me if I want to attend the launch of the policy in Cape Town. He’s flying back to Australia – where he’s from – the following evening but I say I’ll get back to him about it in a few days over e-mail. As we part he promises to get me a formal invite and I find myself smiling, thinking it would be nice to talk to him again.

A few days after he leaves, South Africa’s first national census results are released. It’s the first time most black people in the country have been counted and it has been a massive and important undertaking. Over a hundred thousand people have been employed as enumerators; for a year there have been television and radio ads urging people to participate and explaining the importance of the day.

In previous censuses, the townships where black people lived had been ignored. Census gazettes simply hadn’t listed townships. Millions of black people had disappeared. They had been real enough to work in white homes and businesses as domestic workers and labourers, but for purposes of planning and infrastructure, they were ghosts.

I go through the census summary closely, cross-checking it against the much larger report that had been sent to the office. There is an incredible amount of detail in there – a lot of it I think might be important for the new youth policy. I get excited when I think about the fact that South Africa is literally remaking itself. Every new policy, every bureaucratic process feels revolutionary because it is done in the name of democracy. This is not a state intent on counting us in to destroy us, it is a state that wants to know its citizens better to understand their needs. In my enthusiasm, I fax Simon a summary document that outlines what the census is telling the nation. It’s about thirty pages long although, of course, when he tells the story he will insist it was at least fifty pages and it finished the toner in his home fax machine. I stand at the machine late at night after digesting the contents of the census. I am oblivious to the fact that it is 3 a.m. in Perth and the sound of a fax machine whirring in the study has just woken up a man I like, thousands of kilometres and an ocean away.

Still, he is gracious. He sends me a warm and funny thank-you note that teases me about the fax that was so urgent it needed to be sent at 3 a.m. He makes me smile and now I am curious about him. I think about him the whole day, opening the message a few times unnecessarily and finally realising I might like him a bit.

A few weeks later he is back in the country – this time in Cape Town for the national youth policy launch. I don’t go but I like the fact that he called to say hi on his way through to Cape Town.

On his next trip, we agree to go out to lunch. I wear a maroon business suit which looks great but I am worried my forehead is breaking out in pimples. Still, I am pleased with the intimidating height of my head wrap. He pretends not to notice the spots and compliments the head wrap. I am impressed he doesn’t call it a turban. Over lunch, I wait for an awkward moment, a misstep when he says or does the wrong thing, but it never comes. He’s easy and funny and self-deprecating. There’s no pathos as there was with Jason.

He goes back and we start to send each other daily e-mails. He writes things like, ‘It was good to see you yesterday. I wondered whether you have seen Leunig’s cartoons? He expresses vulnerability so well. That whole thing I was telling you about fatal optimism … Here is a scan of one of my favourite illustrations.’

We flirt in those notes, saying more on the computer than we might face to face. Still, we are restrained. These are the days before the widespread use of laptops. I check e-mail only when I am in the office and there is something about being in the company of others when I write to him that keeps me from saying everything I want to.

He is in and out of the country all the time so it feels fun and light despite the fact that he is so clearly perfect for me. His absence helps to slow things down as well. I don’t need to see him all the time. I don’t have to think about where it is all going. I can hang out with everyone else and not have a boyfriend. We become friends. We are attracted to each other and the attraction makes the hanging out more fun but this is new territory for us both.

Then it happens. We are no longer checking each other out. We go out to dinner at a restaurant in a pretty suburb of Pretoria one evening. The place is called Giovanni’s – a converted old house that had been grand and charming and is not a favourite haunt of the diplomatic corps and international NGOs in Pretoria. It is raining and we sit on the veranda. The raindrops are big, the kind that always fall at the end of a humid day during a Highveld summer.

We order and get comfortable. I slip off my shoes and I’m barefoot under the table. We dig into a conversation about his divorce, about his two children; about heartbreak and loneliness. My feet find his and they rest on the tops of his shoes. My hands clasp his and, if I could, I would sit on his lap, curl into him as though we were alone. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt so connected to a man. Everything he says strikes me as poignant. Our fingers twist and play, and I can smell his neck and I want to sit closer to him and it is clear that we are now an us.

Of course, the feeling is one thing. The reality is another.

Simon is a decade older than me and he has kids and he is white and none of these things are part of my game plan. I raged against whiteness in college; I poured my heart into poems about beautiful black love. I am in South Africa, where we have just defeated white supremacy, and I am in love with a white boy. It makes no sense.

I want him to be black but he is not and this is South Africa where white people have collectively done some fucked-up shit to black people and he can never ever be angry enough about it to satisfy me. How could he be? He grew up on the beach in Perth, in a city on the other side of the Indian Ocean where it was always sunny. What does he know of suffering?

In my self-righteousness, in my search for a frame to suit the politics I’ve embraced in the past few years, I don’t ask what I know of suffering let alone what love has to do with suffering. I stew and I steam. I rage and, eventually, I decide it can’t work.

The conversation is hard, more so because it’s not about him, or about me, but about an ideology, an idea of myself I’d like to hold onto as the sort of radical young woman whose politics and life are pure and clean.

‘Let’s take a break,’ I say. ‘I can’t do this.’

He has seen this coming for weeks. It’s been almost a year and he’s met my sisters and he’s met Mummy once. I have not been able to introduce him yet to Baba. We have had fight after fight about racism. I’ve snapped at him for smiling too hard at the car guard and for making conversation with waiters. ‘Patronising,’ I spit out. He can’t do anything right. I am starting to dislike myself, and who I become when I am trying to perform my politics.

He is heartbroken and, in a different way, I am too.

I am alone again. Suddenly the self-righteousness that propelled me to break up feels hollow. There is nothing satisfactory about walking into a restaurant without the stares and the titters that used to accompany us. I miss him.

Still, I sustain my position. I date a bit. Nothing serious. I keep the door open to him. I don’t want him to disappear completely in spite of my words to the contrary. Something inside me is cleverer than my brain.

His messages are always muted. He doesn’t say ‘I love you’ any more but I know he wants to. Sometimes he still writes me notes the way he used to, brimming with detail – with observations about the weather and the wind and the sun. He was a man who had been a boy who had lived by the sea and these movements, the changes associated with the seasons, matter to him and carry a poignancy I simply hadn’t thought about until we met. Other times he just says, ‘How are you?’ and the brevity of these messages makes me think maybe his love is fading, makes me worry about what might happen if he got fed up and left my life completely.

Mummy asks after him often and I’m always short with her.

‘Where is that nice Simon?’ My answer is always the same. ‘I have no idea, Mummy.’ It is none of her business we are still in touch. I refuse to acknowledge her questions as a subtle signal of acceptance. In her quiet Swazi way Mummy is saying, ‘He is as different from you as he is and still you love him, and so will I. If you love him, then I will too.’

* * *

It is 1999 and Nelson Mandela is no longer the president and South Africa is still free. Freedom means many things in the new South Africa. For Zeng and me it means sleeping in on a rainy Cape morning. Sheets of rain blow past the little garden flat Zeng is renting in Woodstock. It is grey and foggy and our heads are sore – mine more than hers. We are lying on her bed.

We drank too much last night. I was so drunk I smoked cigarettes and pretended to be French. Zeng holds her liquor better – more practice. So she took care of me. It was a nice role reversal, the little sister guiding her sloppy drunk big sis to the car. She is in her second year at UCT and I’ve quit my job to pursue a second degree. Baba and Uncle Stan have been adamant I won’t progress in my career if I don’t get a postgraduate degree. So I have just started my master’s in the politics department while working a part-­time job.

My stomach is churning. I don’t know whether to sit or stand. I don’t let myself get drunk often so when it happens there is always a story. I am a hilarious drunk.

Zeng relishes the moment. She’s usually the one with a hangover so she is smug and amused. I think I might vomit. I get up and immediately I have to lie down again. I will never drink again, I groan. Zeng laughs. She is sunlight, even when I feel like death. She has no pity but I’m glad we’re together. I missed her when she moved to Cape Town. The house in Pretoria wasn’t the same without her. Mummy and Baba were rarely there – busy with their projects. So we’ve reconnected and in Cape Town she has her crew but she makes time for me. She no longer adores me – we are peers now. Something has happened to shift her, to make her capable of dispensing advice, not just of receiving my wisdom.

In spite of my sorry state, she wants to talk. I don’t want to listen but I’m too discombobulated to object. She shifts to stand next to the window because she knows cigarettes bug me. I watch the smoke curl and disappear – translucent against the grey sky. I wish vaguely that I could be more like her – unconcerned with what Mummy and Baba think and, so, able to drink and wear their sighs with a shrug. I was too scared of them to experiment with smoking as a teenager and, even now, their disapproval looms large. Even being here is – at least, in part – a function of my desire to make them proud. Zeng seems – at least, on the surface – to suffer no such desires. She is who she is and she does what she likes.

So classically ‘first’ and ‘last’ born are we that it binds us. We seem cast in stone. Mandla is still in America but she is as much a middle child as we are first and last. Often, our advice to one another emanates from this knowledge – that our birth order has determined our stance towards Mummy and Baba, but it also plays a role in how we see the world. We may be grown-up but in some ways our parents are still the planets around which we orbit. In so many of my decisions – even when I am not in direct conversation with them – I seek their approval. Mandla, on the other hand, is constantly fighting to be herself – to be recognised and heard – so she is headstrong even in her relative silence. And of course Zeng – the lovely one who lags – manages to appear as though she doesn’t care even when she does.

So today I lie in bed and it hurts my head to even breathe, but she’s cracking me up, reminding me of last night. Thinking about it in retrospect, the scene – the conversation, the smoke, the nausea – is a marker of how we are becoming women.

She is talking about the French man whose accent I imitated last night. I had blanked that out. We laugh. ‘Can I ’ave a cigarette?’ she says, reminding me of my ridiculousness. ‘Babes, you talked like that all night. To the guy’s face.’ If it didn’t hurt, I would laugh harder. ‘Shame, poor Frenchman. He didn’t know what hit him. He was cute, though.’ I’m about to roll my eyes but she changes the subject again – so quickly I feel dizzy.

‘Speaking of cute white boys, babes, can we talk about the shocking hypocrisy of breaking up with someone because he’s white?’

My cheeks flush. I am embarrassed and angry. Black Power angry.

‘How is that hypocrisy?’ I retort.

‘It’s hypocrisy because you love him.’

She is telling the truth.

‘I am not sure if I do.’

I’m lying.

‘Please, babes. You weren’t scared off by the fact that he has kids. It doesn’t bother you that he is a decade older than you. You aren’t disturbed by the existence of an ex-wife. You’re not worried about the fact that he lives in bloody Australia – Over There or Down Under or whatever they call it. You’ve got over all these pretty major things. After all that, you break up with him for no real reason? Please. You’re just worried about what people will say.’

I am quiet because I know she is right.

‘Yup. All your activist radical talk, and look, you’ve fallen in love with a white guy.’ She is not saying this unkindly. She is just stating the obvious.

I stay quiet because she is still right. My silence gives her permission to continue. I keep listening.

‘And I get it. I mean, I don’t really because I’d be psyched if anyone loved me like that. But I get it. And maybe you need to rethink the politics so they fit you better. Like maybe the theories are like pointers, like general guidelines. Then there’s how you practise them. I mean, if you took it all to its logical conclusion you’d be married to a black lesbian who is five foot nine with dreads because the only lover who can ever know what it’s like to be you is you. It’s crazy, babes.’

She is right again.

Rejecting Simon is mainly about this idea I have in my head of who I am. I’m stubbornly clinging to a political position I arrived at in the absence of love – when I was in college and charged with a righteousness that was deeply powerful and naively abstract – instead of deciding that it’s more complex than I want it to be. I’m not powerless in the face of love, but, simplistic and naive as they sounded, I can’t ignore the two core tenets of my upbringing, the big ideas that guided my life until college. The first is that race is fiction, a myth the Boers and the slavers in America made up to oppress us. Growing up, families like the Jeles and the Mfenes – where the mothers were white and the fathers were African – were testament to the absurdity of race. The second was that kindness and fairness were important. Objections to interracial love in a racist world make sense to me. I can’t reject them. In the end, though, it boils down to this: I prefer having Simon in my life to not having him. I would rather work through our disagreements and fight until we are exhausted than walk away from this man I love – who loves me more completely than any man ever has. This knowledge is more powerful than any intellectual debate. I have to learn to accept the contradictions. This is one that I will wrestle with over and over across the years; some questions are never resolved. Clichéd as it sounds, we live the questions and it is in the joy and the pain of asking them – of being asked the questions in sometimes sharp and hard ways – that we find meaning.

So, still half-drunk and vomity, I listen to my sister. Then I text him: ‘Come see me in Cape Town?’ He says yes.

* * *

Simon and I married in 2003. We have two children. Over the years, we have made our way and the making of our way has become our way – our path and our progress. We have learnt that it is not us against the world; that sometimes our fights are precisely about us and how we are in the world. His love and patience have taught me that love is a grappling, and ours is like every other love on the planet: often too hard and sometimes bitter but always available in abundance. In our hardest moments, we have still loved one another.

Simon does not talk about -isms in the same way I do. He understands them and tries his best. His views are sensible and smart and sometimes profound. He believes in God and I am sceptical about God. I have learnt not to be bothered by his faith just as he is unperturbed by the lack of mine. I have learnt to respect and admire his belief, to respect the fact that he goes to church when he wants to and that when he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t. He is freer of dogma than anyone I have met, yet he has an unshakeable sense of himself and I have come to understand that he owes a large part of his emotional stability to his belief in God.

I have learnt to appreciate his commitment to and love for the ocean. It enriches me and gives me a sense of wonder. I admire his feeling for the seas because I know that it carried him through a childhood that was sometimes lonelier than it ought to have been.

He has taught me that love is not based on sameness or difference. Through him I have discovered that love lives in its own dimension and whereas it is connected to real life – to objects and systems and elements that are solid – it is also mysterious.

I love his children. When I meet her, Gabi is coltish and scared. She is only eleven and has her father’s uncertain smile and she carries in her the same hurt in her eyes, the same determination to be okay even when she is not. Nick is laid back. He is eight when I first set eyes on him and he is wearing a necklace with a shark’s tooth on the end. He loves the sea. He is naturally cool. He wants his father to love him so he laughs at my jokes.

In time, we all grow to love one another because we decide that we will love one another. They are part of him but my love for them must be worked on. They have a mother and I am only a young woman – someone who knows nothing about children in Australia. But I love him so I decide to love them. They make it easy. Their mother is good and honest and kind and she makes it easier still. We live our way into our life. I don’t know how else to say this: our life is our life and we learn not to explain or apologise. We learn only to give in to what it is that life and love are asking of us.

Mummy and Baba love Simon. They are too kind themselves, too human and filled with the morality of their generation, to ignore the kindness in his eyes. Mummy makes him her son, and his gratitude for her love and acceptance is a joy to observe.

In the early days I have moments where I wonder whether this was the right thing to do. Sometimes, for long stretches I lose my patience because, when you are young and there is much to do, even love seems expendable. During these times I pepper him with questions and expect him to give textbook answers. He fails all my tests. Even when he sees them coming, he fails my quizzes. In time we both realise he will never pass any test designed as a trap.

He has his doubts too. His fears are about my capacity to be better behaved than I often am. He will wonder whether he should believe in me or whether he should just accept me as I am. He will wonder if he should leave and sometimes the answer is not clear because I give him so little to hold onto.

He is kinder, gentler, more thoughtful and more steadfast than anyone I know. He is my patience and in time I learn to be his temper. When he encounters meanness I take his side. I am loyal to who he is at his best and even when he is at his lowest I know who he can be and when he doesn’t remember, I do. If he is wrong we figure it out together but because so often he is too quick to blame himself I learn that he is seldom wrong in matters of the heart. Still, we have our complications.

Simon teaches me how to be in love. He teaches me that living in love means existing, over long and sometimes painful periods, as no one but yourself in the presence of another. To be yourself alone is one thing. To be yourself in a partnership is a gift.

I let him love me. I love him and my love grows fiercer and less liable to fall apart when it is tested.

Anyone who has ever loved and been loved will know what I mean when I say that I resigned myself to loving Simon. I have learnt to hold us close and that means shrugging at attempts to define us in ways that diminish what we have gone through and who we are to each other simply because others are curious about my blackness and his whiteness, as if that could ever be the most definitive thing there is to say about us.