Nothing is ever all bad, not even rape.
A few weeks later, I missed my period. I had always been irregular, so I didn’t think much of it. Then coffee started to taste like metal and my sense of smell heightened to the point of pain. I could smell layers of odours everywhere, always with an underlying stink of rot. My stomach was unsettled most of the time. I didn’t throw up, but I wanted to.
I missed another period. And another.
At four months, I went to have it confirmed. The obstetrician squirted jelly on my slightly protruding abdomen and slid his sensor over it. The monitor leaped into life. For a moment, it looked like a pot of thick marmalade boiling on the stove. Then the image resolved itself into a hydrocephalic baby.
Of course, the child of such a coupling would be a monster.
The obstetrician said nothing. He moved his sensor this way and that, freezing the image occasionally to take measurements. I wondered how bad the abnormality was. Was he steeling himself to tell me the truth, or had the delivery of bad news become routine to him?
“Everything looks fine. The four chambers of the heart are present and correct. The nuchal layer is within normal limits. The spine is well developed, with no signs of spina bifida.”
“But the head. Is there anything that can be done?”
“The head is normal. What is troubling you about it?”
“It’s so big.”
“That’s normal for Baby at this age. Their heads are quite large in relation to their bodies.”
“Can you tell the sex?”
“Yes. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to know.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s a boy.”
At the next scan, I was told that the bloodwork was normal. At the next, he was lying with his head up, but that could still change, right up until the last minute. At the seven-month scan, his head was down, and his buttocks were tucked under my diaphragm. At the eight-month scan, my placenta was looking good.
I was well throughout the pregnancy. Better than well. Everyone said I was glowing. I was the picture of health. My father said I had a self-absorbed, placid look. One day when I was picking vegetables for dinner at the farm, he said I looked like a peasant. He thought I belonged to the soil, and that my child would belong to the soil too. That made me feel peaceful and grounded, as though I had atoned for the sins of the white man in South Africa. I had taken the grievous act of colonialism upon my body and atoned for it with my rape. I had refused to name my attackers because I knew it was right to stay silent. The punishment was mine to endure alone, and now I was reaping the blessings that came after.
At nine months and two days, the baby was born after a tenhour labour. He was a beautiful boy with wise, brown eyes. An old soul, everyone said. Something within me healed when I held him in my arms for the first time. Mother Nature saw to that.
It’s you, I thought. Of course it is. Everything happens for a reason. Nothing is ever all bad.
He was a peaceful, joyful child. He slept well and fed well. I nourished him with my own body and he thrived. He slept in my bed, always content, never crying. Every time he smiled at me or reached up and touched my face, my wounds healed a little more.
At eight months, he crawled. At twelve months, he walked. At thirteen months, he started to talk. Mama. Mama. There was no one for him to call Dada. Which one of them had fathered him? I had no way of knowing. Sometimes it felt as though they all had. As though their sperm had fused inside me to create this child that was an amalgam of them all. He had been born out of that terrible night. We had created him together.
His skin was brown, and his hair was curly and soft. Strangers on the street came up to tell me how beautiful he was. A modelling agency tried to scout him. He could read before he started nursery school. The teachers told me he was a prodigy, that he belonged in a programme for gifted children. Their eyes lit up when he arrived for school each morning. He brought joy wherever he went.
Today, he is the light of my life. He is the reason I wake up in the morning. The reason I have the strength to go on. He has coalesced all the meaning in my life into one focal point.
More than that, he represents the future of South Africa. Born out of violent conflict, he represents peace and reconciliation. Black anger and resentment collided with smug white neocolonialism, and he was the result. The best of both cultures. A blending of everything that is good and hopeful in this country.
* * *
That didn’t happen.
I took the morning-after pill. I took it so fast my hand was a blur of motion as I swallowed the tablets. The police were trying to take a statement and the doctor was trying to do a rape kit, but all I was interested in was how fast I could get my hands on Plan B. I didn’t know I had up to seventy-two hours to take it. I thought it literally had to be taken the morning after.
I think even if I had known, I would still have wanted to take those pills straight away. The thought of anything taking root inside my body was an abomination to me. It would have felt like a cancer, not a baby. It was a demon and I was one of the Gadarene swine. I would have done anything, anything at all, to cast it from my body.
The pills did not agree with me, especially in combination with the antiretrovirals I had to take as well. Within two hours, I was vomiting violently. The doctor told me there was every chance I had vomited up the pills. She made me take them again to ensure their effectiveness. Then she thought I’d probably had a double dose as I ran the full gamut of side-effects, from the common to the virtually unheard of. Vomiting, diarrhoea, exhaustion, migraine and stomach cramps, spotting, severe abdominal pain, and vertigo: I had them all.
It was as though whatever was trying to implant in me was resisting being cast out.
Then there was a long, tense time during which I waited for my period to start. I knew it should start within three weeks of taking the pills—if I weren’t pregnant. If anything, it should come a little earlier than normal. Mine made me wait the full three weeks. Just as I was about to phone the doctor, it started. I was safe.
If it hadn’t started, I would have had an abortion. That was clear in my mind. I never for one second considered keeping any foetus that might have resulted.
Fiction-Lucy not only fell pregnant, she kept the baby.
In John Coetzee’s book, her pregnancy was a blessing that made up for the rape. So convincingly did he describe her gravid state that many of my friends and family thought I must be pregnant, too. Total strangers agreed. When no baby came, they believed I must have had an abortion. They didn’t approve. My almost-forgotten social media accounts were flooded with people condemning me for being a baby killer.
They flung Bible verses at me. They bombarded my timelines with blood-soaked photos of abortions. I glimpsed pathetic little bodies in sterile buckets as I flicked through the images, deleting them one by one.
Then they moved on to what I deserved for having aborted my child. Images of women being gang-raped with my face Photoshopped over theirs became a daily sight—crime-scene photos of women having been brutally and bloodily murdered, now wearing my face.
Right about the time that John Coetzee was being nominated for his first major literary award, a man started taking photographs of me going about my daily life and posting them online, just to prove that he was watching me and knew where I lived. I went to the police. Thanks to their sensitivity training, they assigned a woman officer to take my statement. She gave me a lecture about how wrong it was to have aborted my baby.
I told her I hadn’t aborted any baby. She wanted to know why I wasn’t pregnant in that case. I said not all sexual encounters ended in pregnancy. She was sceptical. These were vigorous young men who had taken me, she said. Not the weak, pallid creatures I was accustomed to coupling with. This would definitely have caused pregnancy. I told her I had taken the morning-after pill, and she said that was just as bad as abortion.
* * *
Do I blame John Coetzee for creating a fictional child for me? One that I had to take the blame for aborting?
No, of course not. I am a doctoral candidate in English literature. Well, I was. I am now a deferred doctoral candidate. The external examiner wanted changes made that I have not got around to implementing.
The theoretical underpinnings of my thesis were predicated on the intertextual conversations between life and literature. Not only is there no text in my classroom—and no Fish in my text—but there is nothing outside the text either. It makes no sense to talk about the author’s intention, when the author, and his or her life, are merely texts feeding into the text that exists on the page.
My rape was nothing more than a text that John Coetzee chose to feed off for his novel. How could I blame him for that? A student of literature with my level of sophistication did not boggle for an instant at the dialectic involved. I could understand it and make peace with it for the simple reason that I was never at war with it.
* * *
Do I blame John Coetzee for creating a fictional child for me? One that I had to take the blame for aborting?
Of course I do. I blame him every day. The harassment I put up with would never have occurred if he hadn’t written about me, and if his book hadn’t become so ubiquitous. Disgrace is that rare thing—the literary novel that is also popular and widely read, even by people who don’t usually read fiction. He turned my rape into a spectacle and me into a public figure.
People thought I was fair game. That I had somehow chosen to put myself in the public eye to be commented on and criticised. An astonishing number thought I must have been paid for my role in Coetzee’s book. They still do. No amount of protesting or demurral can convince them that I haven’t profited from the book. A disturbing number of these people are related to me. They ask for handouts at family gatherings. They send me emails asking me to help put their child through university now that I am rich.
I don’t understand why Coetzee did what he did, and I will never be at peace with it.